Lords and Villeins News

Greetings, Lords and Ladies,

We are happy to tell you that the patch you've been testing in beta branch has just gone public! That means the update has become a part of the main game and is available to everyone. Big thanks to our community who helped us by playing the update and shared your feedback. And thanks to also those who have been patiently waiting for the update.

If you wish to keep helping with the testing of Lords and Villeins and other games, feel free to join our Champions program if you have not done so yet! All you have to do is get in touch with Fulqrum Publishing by sending an e-mail to [email protected].

Here we are posting the updated change log so you can see what is getting updated on the main stage. And if you missed our article for our future plans, make sure to read it here!.

[h2]The Initial Change Log:[/h2]

[h3]New Features[/h3]

• Ability to customize difficulty
  
• Ability to customize map creation in various degrees of detail
  
• Ability to customize starting families
  
• Ability to store difficulty and map presets as templates
  
• Added new mountain ore distribution presets
  
• Added new tropical climate, with a warm climate all-year round!
  
• Ability to prioritize blueprints
  
• New "Islands" preset and tweaked existing presets
  
• Added x8 speed (Speed IV)
  
• Added new x32 speed that is available between 10PM and 6AM
  

[h3]Improvements[/h3]

• Refactoring of mouse hover tooltip elements to provide more unified experience
  
• Consolidated UI of priority screen and accounting report with extra bells and whistles.
  
• New construction queue view in the accounting report
  
• New blueprint context menu after clicking on it
  
• Harsh weather module has been converted to harsh weather climate setting
  
• Redesign of the new game menu screen flow
  
• Removal tools are now permanently visible in HUD. This option can be turned off in the settings.
  
• Updated Unity version to LFS 2021.3.17f1
  
• Replaced old UI switches with new ON/OFF switches
  
• Population book now displays specific age with a tooltip about when adulthood and elderly age is reached
  
• Implemented algorithm for dynamic loading of scrollview content. This will be later expanded on all UI screens to greatly improve their performance.
  

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

• Fixed multiple bugs with noble marriages
  
• Fixed alchemy not making stamina potions
  
• Fixed alchemist workshop recommending Oven instead of Blast Furnace
  
• Fixed starting resources not being added to generated families
  
• UI Screens are now capped to scale down to fit within screen height if the UI scaling extends beyond the screen border
  
• Fixed number of broken hover effects
  
• Fixed issue with updating UI scaler when screen resolution changes
  
• Fixed issue with animated UI elements for resources not being positioned correctly when UI scaling is changed
  
• Fixed issue with river and sea type not being recognized in created maps
  
• Added mechanism for hover tooltips to be restricted by screen border and automatically reposition
  
• Number of other minor bugfixes
  

[h2]Changes Made Thanks To Our Awesome Community Testers[/h2]

• Fixing incorrect prompt for blueprints saying the family does not have resources even when it does.
  
• Updated algorithm for selecting blueprints for construction and implemented caching. This should slightly boost performance and make behavior more aligned with the priority number assigned to each blueprint.
  
• Fixed the critical error causing frequent freezing
  
• Fixed hover element in population book when changing equipment
  
• Replaced old toggles with new labeled switches in the royalty report screen
  
• Fixed a minor UI issues with a switch in zone context menu starting in on state when it was initialized in the off state
  
• Fixed issue with prioritizing blueprints for construction when higher priority structure that has missing resources would block all other blueprints that are lower in queue but otherwise possible
  
• Blueprint context menu no longer appears when the blueprints layer is not visible
  
• Fixed issue with probability for old people to join clergy being sometimes set to 100% after a reload
  
• Fixed issue with hover element in priority queue on Supply % if the blueprint had no cost
  
• Fixed bug with favor point cost for requested custom families being deducted twice
  
• Fixed bug with population book locking the game when "New Family" request window pops up while the population book is open
  
• Updated algorithm for choosing spawn points and departure points at the edge of the map. The game will now prevent spawns of any animals and NPCs if there is no valid entry point, and the game will automatically update to the nearest clay-terrain type terrain if the original spawnpoints are blocked
  
• Fixed a bug with time to execute task difficulty multiplier working invertedly
  
• Fixed a crash in accounting report screen when a zone is updated in the background
  

Greetings, Lords and Ladies,

As you may have noticed, we have a patch in the oven that's currently available for you to test just before we release it publicly. More details, including ways of how to join the testing, can be found by clicking this link.

Thanks to your participation and feedback, we have been able to locate and address some of the issues already, meaning the beta patch is getting updated right now. Below you can find all the things that we've done so far. Since the list of changes is substantial, we decided to extend the public beta for a few more days. If we don't identify any other major issues, we will be releasing the patch publicly and updating the main build of the game soon. We want to share extensive appreciation and love to everyone of you for participating in the beta. By playing the game and sharing feedback, you are helping us to improve and polish Lords and Villeins above and beyond.

We are extremely grateful for your help! Feel free to join the testing by following the link above and don't forget to join our Discord as well.

[h3]Change Log:[/h3]

• Fixing incorrect prompt for blueprints saying the family does not have resources even when it does.
  
• Updated algorithm for selecting blueprints for construction and implemented caching. This should slightly boost performance and make behavior more aligned with the priority number assigned to each blueprint.
  
• Fixed the critical error causing frequent freezing
  
• Fixed hover element in population book when changing equipment
  
• Replaced old toggles with new labeled switches in the royalty report screen
  
• Fixed a minor UI issues with a switch in zone context menu starting in on state when it was initialized in the off state
  
• Fixed issue with prioritizing blueprints for construction when higher priority structure that has missing resources would block all other blueprints that are lower in queue but otherwise possible
  
• Blueprint context menu no longer appears when the blueprints layer is not visible
  
• Fixed issue with probability for old people to join clergy being sometimes set to 100% after a reload
  
• Fixed issue with hover element in priority queue on Supply % if the blueprint had no cost
  
• Fixed bug with favor point cost for requested custom families being deducted twice
  
• Fixed bug with population book locking the game when "New Family" request window pops up while the population book is open
  
• Updated algorithm for choosing spawn points and departure points at the edge of the map. The game will now prevent spawns of any animals and NPCs if there is no valid entry point, and the game will automatically update to the nearest clay-terrain type terrain if the original spawnpoints are blocked
  
• Fixed a bug with time to execute task difficulty multiplier working invertedly
  
• Fixed a crash in accounting report screen when a zone is updated in the background
  

Dear Lords and Ladies,

Recently, we have delivered in Public Beta our first post-release free update, aimed at the Customization of gameplay. But let's not stop there! Right now, we have two additional updates in the works for you, so let's look at what they are going to bring!


In this update, our main focus is on the nobles. In their initial design, we thought of them as another class of peasants with few extra privileges and perks. In reality, we were receiving feedback often mentioning that the nobles are not delivering on their expectation, as they don't impact the gameplay enough. We realized two things here - first that calling the noble professions "noble" was a poor choice of a name. Second that the expectation of nobles having an impact is a core part of the appeal of Lords and Villeins and we need to deliver something more significant here.

[h2]Introducing Artisans[/h2]
On the surface, Artisans are simply a new name for what you grew to recognize in our game as nobles. All noble professions are now artisan professions, families that are capable of performing them are part of the artisan social class and just like nobles before, they come with increased demands on a standard of living and retain many of their freedoms, such as their ability to leave the settlement. Only a few things will be removed from them, those that should be exclusively reserved for those of true noble heritage. They include:

• Chapel is no longer used by artisans. They share the church with everybody else
  
• Tavern as a zone will be removed. Artisans will arrive through the inn, and wine and higher-quality meals will be served at the inn as well.
  
• Donations to clergy no longer reflect noble families. The clergy simply expects the player to donate a calculated amount of valuables over a period of time, to maintain their relationship.
  
• Artisans are visiting the church with everyone else, instead of the chapel.
  
• Theater is now visited by everyone, including peasants.
  
• Artisans now live in households much like peasants. Villa is no longer used to be occupied by artisans and will serve a different purpose.
  
• Artisans can not be proposed to (see later why).

As part of the Artisan overhaul, we will also take a look at the alchemist, ropemaking, and glassmaking professions, to give them more use in the economy.

[h2]Nobles are gone, say hello to nobles[/h2]
With the change to artisans, we believe the game will get more clarity on what the intended purpose of these professions is and how they should interact with the game. However, we don't want to just remove a bunch of content from the game to address your criticism. So we are also adding a new class of Nobles.

These new noble families are generated at the start of the game. You can see them in the population book, but they are not present on the map. In fact, they live in their own settlements, in their own manor, ruling over their own land and their growth is simulated by the game. The potential for diplomacy now grows!

• Use a villa to build a guest house at your manor! Then invite a noble family to spend time there. They will visit your settlement, spend money buying expensive goods, consume your meals, and use the Chapel to participate in Sunday Mass. After two weeks they will leave, and improve their relationship with you as their express gratitude for your hospitality.
  
• Having low relationships with nobles now may cause a loss of relationships with royals. When the relationship is low, there is a chance every day, that they will use their favor to damage your reputation with the royals!
  
• When the relationship is high, the player can propose marriage to a member of a noble family. This game mechanic works in the same way as it did previously, but it is limited to the new type of Noble families instead.
  
• New game mechanics of quests will cause noble families to give optional opportunities to deliver shipments of goods and material, to earn money, and royal favor, and improve their relationship.

[h2]Royal Tax Redesign[/h2]
A common criticism of royal taxation was that it is not rewarding and too restrictive. Narratively, this setup made a lot of sense to us. Since the players are one to collect taxes from their peasants, it seems like a good fit that players themselves are taxed and expected to pay them to the royals. Not for an extra reward, but simply as a baseline expectation, since that's the rule of the society they immerse themselves in.

Over time however, this narrative element does not justify the restrictiveness of this challenge. The difficulty is also often unpredictable and either too easy or too hard to respond to. So we will be turning taxation into a more optional and reward-based system.

First, we will start calculating combat power for regiments. This is simply a combination of attack and defense properties of all soldiers in it, reflecting their equipment, age, stats, and training.

Second, the royal taxation will only demand a generic target - resources of the player's choosing, which add up to a certain market value, and regiments composed of any kind of soldiers, that add up to a certain combat power.

And lastly, much like nobles, royals will introduce their own quests - optional deliveries of specific resources and material, for an additional bonus favor.

Both taxes and quests can be sent away as deliveries at any time during the year, and as long as the target values have been delivered within the year, the taxes are considered successful.

[h2]New Ways To Control The Economy[/h2]
We will also improve your ability to control the economy. This is a collection of tools and quality of life improvements, that should give you more control over the flow of goods and correct behavior of your villagers.

• Adjust demand generated by families for the material they need to produce goods (i.e. manage their material reserves)
  
• Limit stock of resources which triggers villagers to sell excess goods, with an option to stop producing excess goods if they reach the threshold.
  
• Manage cooking strategies for families (i.e. limit used ingredients and stock targets).
  
• Enact embargo on caravan resources to prevent caravans from buying or villagers from purchasing that specific resource from caravans.
  
• Force families to produce an unprofitable resource.
  
• Enact policy to prevent Inns to sell beds and meals to local villagers.

[h2]General Improvements[/h2]
And finally, we will finalize a small number of performance optimizations and quality-of-life UI upgrades, as promised in our previous articles:

• The prioritization UI will be redesigned to visualize its impact in better ways.
  
• Add information in the animal limitations UI to communicate values about breeding strategies.
  
• Allow copy and paste of storing priorities between different zones.
  
• Intelligence Reports will be updated to provide more guidance on how to solve the issues.
  
• New "color drop" tool (also switchable with key bind), that will let you select the object for construction by clicking on it on the map.
  
• Accounting finance page will also list quantities sold and purchased.

In this update, we will focus on redesigning the tutorial experience. Common criticism stems from its length and that it only explains features on the surface - it tells players where to click, with very little explanation on when and how these tools should be utilized best. To cover these topics in the tutorial, we would only end up making it longer, so we decided on a new approach - a campaign mode.

In this campaign mode, we will take you through a set of designed scenarios. Each with a defined starting point, focusing on a new system or game module in bigger detail. As a baseline, this only breaks down the existing tutorial into multiple chapters, that you can play through. We will also incorporate small elements of storytelling, and add new challenges and quests, that aim to make the introduction and learning of the game even more friendly.

This campaign mode can be further expanded in the future, with challenge maps or even community mods!

That's it for the updates we have currently planned for the near future. We do not have any specific release dates ready to share at this moment, but they are fully prioritized by our team. And that's not all! We will continue working on Lords and Villeins even beyond these updates, and reveal more of our plans later when we are ready to announce them.

Thank you for supporting us throughout our journey and continuously enjoying our game, sharing your feedback, and allowing us to keep making Lords and Villeins better. We appreciate every one of you! If you want to support our work further, please share your excitement with your friends, and help our community to grow - even just leaving a review here on Steam helps a lot!

If you would like to help us more and in turn get a very early look on our future updates, consider joining the Champions program with Fulqrum Publishing. You would be among the very first people to get to test future Lords and Villeins updates as well as other games from our publisher if you'd like, and impact their development much more with your early feedback. Just send an e-mail to [email protected] to find out more.

Great news Lords and Ladies!

The awaited Customization patch is finally released - but a little differently than we've done previously, so please keep reading! We apologize for the delay, as our team faced complications with the development and transitioning into a new chapter for Lords and Villeins.

The patch is now ready. However, the customizable difficulty that it brings with it, introduces an extensive level of variability of game play. This makes testing and verifying issues in a simulation based game like ours even more complex. While we did our best to identify and fix any problems prior to release, in this case we decided to take extra precautions and launch the patch initially in public beta only.

In order to join, simply right click on the game in your library, select Properties, Betas and find the "customization_update" branch. We can't wait to hear your feedback, please come share your thoughts about the update to the discussions or our Discord server!

And don't worry, this is not the end for Lords and Villeins. We will continue improving the game, and are already hard at work on the next patch - details of this update will be revealed in the next few days!

[h2]New Features[/h2]

• Ability to customize difficulty
  
• Ability to customize map creation in various degrees of detail
  
• Ability to customize starting families
  
• Ability to store difficulty and map presets as templates
  
• Added new mountain ore distribution presets
  
• Added new tropical climate, with a warm climate all-year round!
  
• Ability to prioritize blueprints
  
• New "Islands" preset and tweaked existing presets
  
• Added x8 speed (Speed IV)
  
• Added new x32 speed that is available between 10PM and 6AM
  

[h2]Improvements[/h2]

• Refactoring of mouse hover tooltip elements to provide more unified experience
  
• Consolidated UI of priority screen and accounting report with extra bells and whistles.
  
• New construction queue view in the accounting report
  
• New blueprint context menu after clicking on it
  
• Harsh weather module has been converted to harsh weather climate setting
  
• Redesign of the new game menu screen flow
  
• Removal tools are now permanently visible in HUD. This option can be turned off in the settings.
  
• Updated Unity version to LFS 2021.3.17f1
  
• Replaced old UI switches with new ON/OFF switches
  
• Population book now displays specific age with a tooltip about when adulthood and elderly age is reached
  
• Implemented algorithm for dynamic loading of scrollview content. This will be later expanded on all UI screens to greatly improve their performance.
  

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]

• Fixed multiple bugs with noble marriages
  
• Fixed alchemy not making stamina potions
  
• Fixed alchemist workshop recommending Oven instead of Blast Furnace
  
• Fixed starting resources not being added to generated families
  
• UI Screens are now capped to scale down to fit within screen height if the UI scaling extends beyond the screen border
  
• Fixed number of broken hover effects
  
• Fixed issue with updating UI scaler when screen resolution changes
  
• Fixed issue with animated UI elements for resources not being positioned correctly when UI scaling is changed
  
• Fixed issue with river and sea type not being recognized in created maps
  
• Added mechanism for hover tooltips to be restricted by screen border and automatically reposition
  
• Number of other minor bugfixes
  

Dear lords and ladies,

we are doing our best to deliver the newest patch to you as soon as possible. While things are taking some time to develop properly, we are getting closer to a possible release, so we would like to share with you more details on what the next patch will bring!

[h2]Customize New Game[/h2]
We are expanding on customizability in many big ways! Timers, sliders, modifiers, and just about anything you can come up with. Let's have a look at the new "New Game" experience!



In the first step, you are now given the ability to customize the passage of time. The day length changes the real-time to game time ratio, which becomes especially empowering in combination with the time to execute tasks multiplier available in the next step!



While there are no new game modules, we are enabling the creative mode and some other extra modules immediately, without the need to unlock the related achievements. The screen was also redesigned to make the functionality of modules more clear to new players.



You can choose from a variety of presets, lock your difficulty so they can not be changed during the gameplay, and store your difficulty presets as templates, or even share them with friends using a simple code!



The world editor is expanded with a number of new options. Using the sliders, you can craft just about any map you can imagine! With this, we are also adding a new preset for a tropical or very cold climate, and multiple presets for the distribution of rare ores in the mountains. Much like with difficulty, you will be able to store and recover templates and share import settings with friends with a simple code.



And finally, you can customize both the size and professions of up to three families to start the game with.

[h2]Consolidated UI[/h2]
We have consolidated three UI screens into one, far more powerful and convenient screen! Priority screen and market presence UI have been merged with the accounting report, and can now freely be switched between the views using the tabs on the left side. This is in addition to a new context selector on the right, which can filter the data in any of the selected views.



[h2]Manage Construction Priorities[/h2]
As part of the accounting report screen, there is also a new construction tab. Here, you can observe all blueprints currently under construction, and manage their priorities. The prioritizing switch will push the selected object to a new maximum priority class. Items in this class are still prioritized by the AI to some extent but are guaranteed to be before everything that is not marked in this way. We may expand this in the future to a more granular management system, however, we chose to opt out of it for now, as it would require a more significant overhaul of the priority system.



Similar options can also be accessed by simply clicking on a blueprint on the map. Here, you will also receive a hint informing you about the current blocker for the specific blueprint not being built. This should make pinpointing construction issues much easier!



And among other things, we are also adding Speed IV, which is an x8 game speed multiplier (previously the highest Speed III allowed to increase the game speed by x4), revisiting some balancing issues, and fixing a number of bugs.

[h2]What's next?[/h2]
In our previous content update preview article, we mentioned several things, that are not listed here. Namely, UI to manage cooking, stockpile strategies, copy-pasting storage priorities, intelligence report screen improvements, simplifying clergy donations, a tool to select and place construction on the map, discount slider for surcharges, rework of the prioritization screen, and other smaller improvements.

A lot of our time during the last two months was also spent learning more about what our players would like, figuring out our future plans, and planning and designing solutions for the current problems. As a result, our development on the update was slowed down.

In the end, we decided to prioritize and deliver a portion of the content to you now. We are hoping to deliver this first part in early February, but bear with us, since we are still in the testing stages. As for the rest of our plans, we are still not ready to share more, but stay tuned for more information soon!

Thank you for your patience and support!