Lords and Villeins News

Thank you all that voted for us to be nominated for IndieDB's Indie of the Year! Thanks to your votes, we are now nominated in the selection of the top 100 games as a representative in the realistic simulation category.

Let's not stop there! Cast your votes again, and help us become the player's choice for Indie of the Year! To vote, simply visit the IndieDB site and click vote next to Lords and Villeins! Time for voting ends on the 20th of December!

[h2]Plans For The Next Update[/h2]
If you are wondering what is next for Lords and Villeins, we are now laser-focused on the next update. While it will not bring new content to the game, there are many things to look forward to! So let's look at them one by one.

[h3]Customize...everything?[/h3]
We are expanding the options for customizing your gameplay. And there is a lot to look forward to! Let's have a look at our UI mockups (work in progress!).

First, you will be able to customize time-related options. Would you like seasons to change faster? People aging slower? And what about the length of a day in real-time minutes? These options will have a strong impact on the gameplay, so expect some combinations to be a little wacky! Seasons length will also impact the frequency of Sunday Service and Town Hall meetings.



Next, you can customize the difficulty. We have exposed almost any value that made sense. We are also making it simple for you to store your settings in form of a code that you can share with the community! You will be able to modify these settings on existing save files or during the game. On new maps, you can enable the lock difficulty option and be forced to stick with your settings throughout the whole game.



We are expanding the options to create your own map and make your own biomes! The sliders for water, sand, grass, and forest represent cutoffs for the height levels of the generated heightmap. The highest layer is always filled with mountains, so by pushing the forest to the top, you can get rid of them completely! You can also select a secondary terrain type and the intensity with which it will be generated over the base layer, or if it will cut through mountains. And finally, you will be able to choose presets of mountain ore compositions, if your map has rivers or sea sides, and what kind of climate it should be.

Yes! We are expanding climate presets as well! These will adjust the temperature curve over the year, and will allow you to experience tropical weather, as well as a very harsh winter! Just like difficulty presets, you will be able to store unique codes for your settings and share them with your friends!



[h3]Improving UI[/h3]
We have learned a lot about how our players engage with our game and we are revisiting several UI screens to further improve the user experience. There are not a lot of details we can share at this moment, but the specific problems we are looking to address are:

• In the priority UI, we will likely replace numbers with sliders, and add a dynamic colorful bar, that will visualize the resulting ratios.
  
• Separate removal tools to a dedicated and more easily readable section of the HUD.
  
• Expand the market presence UI in a similar fashion to the accounting report UI. Allowing filtering between families, as well as providing an overview tab to better track the current state of the whole market.
  
• Expand animal limitations UI to communicate values about breeding strategies with given amounts.
  
• 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 keybind), 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.
  
• Update zone tenure UI to better present taxing strategies.
  
• Discount slider in the trading tab will also allow for % based surcharge.
  
• Better communicate and guide players to find out why construction is not happening.
  
• Better communicate and guide players to find out why cooking is not happening.
  

We are also adding some new general game settings as well:

• Turn off camera panning when a new family arrives.
  
• Turn off the visualization of weather effects (rain will be visualized only by darker lighting).
  

[h3]Gameplay Improvements[/h3]
And finally, these are additional community suggestions, that we want to look at:

• 8x time speed (Speed IV) will be added.
  
• Allow players to manage to stockpile limitations for families.
  
• Prevent villagers from violating the production ratios when they can not obtain sufficient material (i.e. tailor spending additional yarn to make more silk, to remain occupied since they lack wool).
  
• Improvements to caravan purchasing behavior to alleviate oversupply more efficiently.
  
• Simplifying the clergy donation system and making it more transparent.
  
• We are considering minor ways to earn more favor throughout gameplay and the ability to spend it on an emergency supply of resources.
  

[h3]Bugfixes and Balancing[/h3]
As with each update, we will take a further look at balancing and fixing additional bugs. On this front, we are monitoring mainly these problems:

• Profitability of certain professions.
  
• Royal taxation is too aggressive and random.
  
• Combat is sometimes creating odd outcomes and equipment does not seem to be impactful enough.
  
• Villagers getting stuck between walls.
  
• Occasional pathfinding issues.
  

We are aiming to release another update during January. The update is currently in the early stages of development, so while this list is our current plan, things are open to change and it is possible we would break up these changes into multiple updates as a way to take the extra time needed to fulfill them, while also being able to deliver improvements to you more regularly.

Our priorities may also change, as we discover new problems, perhaps more severe or more important to the community, so we will be updating you further as we get closer to the release. Is there something you would like to see addressed that was not mentioned? Let us know in the comments!

Thank you for supporting us and sharing your sentiment for Lords and Villeins! If you wish to see this game grow even further, please consider telling about it your friends, wishlist it if and if you own the game, please leave a review! All of it helps us be discovered by more players and support us to deliver more content to you!

We wish you all peaceful holidays in the company of your loved ones, with many hours of joyful gaming!

We greet you, Lords and Ladies,

It came to our attention that voting on IndieDB's Indie of the Year 2022 has just started - the first round of voting is live until December 10, and you can select as many games as you feel deserve to be included in the Top100 list.

While we realize that Lords and Villeins is not perfect and thanks to your feedback and suggestions, we are still working on making the game even better, we do hope that you will consider us for that honor. Just follow this link to the Lords and Villeins IndieDB page and click on "vote now", it's that easy. Last year, while our game was still in early access, we managed to get to the top 100 selected games!



We have recently released a patch fixing many bugs, and we will have more information on upcoming updates for you soon, please stay tuned!

For those of you, who like to bond with other community members on Discord, you are very welcome to join ours. You can also follow us on Twitter for more details and don't forget to follow our publisher on their Social Media as well!

Greetings Lords and Ladies,

through the changes introduced in 1.0.2, two critical issues have slipped through our testing process and impacted a small number of our players. Because of the potential severity of these issues, we have immediately issued a fix and are deploying it to you now. We apologize to anyone impacted, and thank you for reporting these problems to us!

[h3]Changelog:[/h3]

• Fixes a critical bug which could happen to players that changed keybindings in version 1.00
  
• Servant cooks will now use ingredients taxed by royals if they are marked as usable.
  

More noticeable updates are on their way and we will be publishing them in the upcomming weeks. Thank you for playing and see you soon!

Most honorable lords and ladies!

the first wave of bugfixes is just being deployed to your lands. We have been working hard to resolve the most immediate issues and address some smaller problems, so we can improve the quality of the game while you wait for a bigger patch. Our efforts are not ending here!

In the following patch, we aim to fix more issues, but also spend time on improving the UI and adding quality-of-life features requested by our players, including more options to customize difficulty, a better way to manage priorities of villagers, more UI stats and balancing improvements, so stay tuned for the next patch in the following weeks! We are doing our best to deliver these updates to you as soon as possible.

In the meantime, here is a list of changes delivered with 1.0.2!

[h2]Major Bugs:[/h2]

• Updated Unity version to Unity 2021.3.14f1 to solve a number of native crashes caused by the engine
  
• Sickness no longer impacts mood, happiness, and health before the sickness incubates (it will only spread to others during this time)
  
• Chance to die from sickness was incorrectly multiplied by three because it was not recognizing villagers sleeping in bed
  
• Expelling a family will automatically remove all related notifications
  
• Fixed crash in the finance book related to when a family died or left
  
• Fixed crash in the population book related to villagers dying
  
• Fixed a backward compatibility crash for older save files
  
• Fixed incorrect order of calls when objects are removed. This led to a number of crashes in the UI and other parts of the game
  
• Fixed camera clipping issue that miscalculated cursor position due to a rounding error
  
• Fixed serialization issue with tax data that allowed evaluating taxation multiple times if save file was made on the same day
  
• Fixed a crash during loading which would happen when the player has no soldier regiments
  
• Fixed incorrect music being queued on startup
  

[h2]Minor Bugs:[/h2]

• Fixed notification for marketplace closed being displaced incorrectly around the public celebration days
  
• Unsafe Marketplace and Unsafe Tourism are now triggered only when a caravan member dies out of hunger, combat, or temperature (previously old age death would also trigger this debuff)
  
• Increased character limit and changed validation method on the settlement name
  
• Fixed Select keybinding action to allow rebinds
  
• Requesting a custom family is now updating favor points immediately after spending them
  
• Setting the Caravan price and switching to the local market and selecting Sell action will no longer switch to the "Free" price type
  
• Sicknesses will now correctly show in the HUD counter after they end the incubation period
  
• Unsafe Settlement, Unsafe Tourism, and Family Left Or Was Expelled debuffs now reset their timers with the most recent event
  
• Fixed incorrect loading of states for Promotion quests during the tutorial
  
• Fixed incorrect loading of a cooking quest during the tutorial
  
• Fixed performance-related texturing issue in the zone tenure UI
  
• Fixed crash when the database of unique last names would exhaust itself
  
• Fixed possible crash with a villager moving on the edge of a map
  
• Market Presence UI now automatically closes if it is displaying information about the family that left or died
  
• Fixed crash related to a Market Presence UI when closed after family left or died
  
• Fixed achievement "A Noble cause"
  
• Fixed "Settle them All" and "They Are All Here" achievement
  
• Fixed issue with guards attempting to occupy guard postmarked for removal
  

[h2]QOL Changes:[/h2]

• Removed redundant alternative key bindings
  
• Nonstackable settlement debuffs now display the remaining time
  

[h2]Balancing changes:[/h2]

• Sheep can now spawn in the wilderness and be tamed
  
• Redesigned drafting mechanism for animals brought by caravans to ensure more variety
  
• Increased inventory capacity of the caravan to bring a higher variety of resources, caravans will also appear slightly more frequently
  
• Increased yields of stones from stone mountains
  
• During the tutorial, the emergency supply of normal meals was reduced, but the player will now also receive a regular supply of good meals
  

Greetings, esteemed Lords and Ladies,

While we are hard at work to deliver you the next hotfix patch and introduce further quality of life improvements and work on your suggestions, we are turning to you now with a humble request. The year 2022 is nearing its end, and in this time of contemplation, it is up to you, the players, to decide which games get nominated for the Steam Awards!

Please consider Lords and Villeins for the "Innovative Gameplay" category. Lords and Villeins was truly an ambitious project for our team, as we strived to innovate with in-depth immersive and detailed simulation of a thriving medieval settlement. We keep striving to make it more polished, balanced and the best version it can be, but we are already very proud of our achievement and are so thankful for your feedback and support, that got us this far. If you believe as we do, that our contribution to the genre was innovative, all you have to do is check the box on top of this article. We will be really grateful for your support!

Voting is possible until November 29 and during the same period you can buy the game for 15% off, as Lords and Villeins is a part of the Autumn Sale.

Also don't forget that Lords and Villeins is a part of a bundle along with its soundtrack, meaning you can combine the discounts. That's a hell of a bargain, isn't it?

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/28876/Lords_and_Bards_bundle/

Many more games from Fulqrum Publishing, such as the recent titles Forgive Me Father or The Pegasus Expedition, are discounted as well, you can find all of them on our sale page.