Lords and Villeins News

Dear Lords and Ladies!

The long awaited moment is nearly upon us. Lords and Villeins will be leaving Early Access! So mark your calendars and be prepared, the game's full version comes out on November 10!

Watch the release date announcement trailer here:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Full release is a no small thing and we took extra time to bring you amazing content in a polished state! As you may have noticed, the game dons brand-new artwork and logo, to show how far it came during Early Access, but the most important things to come are the new features and content.

[h2]What Can You Look Forward To[/h2]

• Assembling The High Council and holding Town Hall hearings
  
• New public celebration event
  
• New ability to perform risky tax evasions
  
• New Opposition Group system that can result in noble coups and peasant uprisings
  
• Personal spy with abilities to gather intelligence and assassinate rivals
  
• Gameplay modules to heavily customise game experience
  
• Overhauled trading system that significantly improves interaction with markets
  
• New underground resources with mineshafts to mine them
  
• Ability to manage storage priorities and new tools to optimise logistics
  
• Full localisation to German, French, Russian, Czech, and Simplified Chinese
  
• Steam Achievements
  
• Performance optimization and fully overhauled user interface and balancing
  

We have covered these features extensively in our previous articles, so if you want to know more, make sure you did not miss them here and here!

We're almost there! Thank you very much for your ongoing support, for your helpful feedback and most importantly for playing Lords and Villeins! Extended thanks also go to our beta testers, who were providing great feedback throughout the whole Early Access, and our publisher who continues to support us on our journey.

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!

See you soon!

Previously we took a closer look at features that were outlined in our original roadmap, but in 1.0 we are going above and beyond just that! One of the main reasons we went into early access was to collect feedback and suggestions from our community and this update would not be complete without implementing the most requested features and improvements our players have been asking for!


Throughout early access, we have learned about the variety of playstyles our players approached the game with. As we were adding more and more systems, the complexity of the game grew and also became more challenging to understand for newcomers.

In 1.0, we expanded our tutorial significantly, to cover many of the features added past the initial launch, and we are also adding game modules. When you will be launching a new game, you will be able to toggle systems that you would like to keep active!



The modules that you will have available are:

• Resource Tax - if you like to hoard all of your wealth for yourself, you can now put a stop to those pesky royal taxes.
  
• Soldier Requests - without this module, royalty will stop requesting soldiers for war. When both resource and soldier tax are disabled, you will be receiving favor automatically every year.
  
• Clergy Donations - clergy will not mandate financial donations to keep your relationship stable. Nobles will also be relieved from those donations and they will never leave the settlement due to their inability to pay.
  
• Criminal Acts - without this module, villagers will grow their empathy and stop committing crimes.
  
• Sickness - there is no place for sickness in this dark world. Remove this module and villagers will never get sick!
  
• Oppositions - do you like to be cruel and face no consequences? Without this module, oppositions will never bother you.
  
• Construction Tiers - if you're not a fan of the new construction system involving tiers and specialized professions, you can now keep playing with the original system where every villager builds for themselves!
  
• Dynamic Terrain - dynamic terrain is a new feature added in 1.0, which lets you deforest areas fully, or create forests where there previously have been none, simply by planting or removing trees. This module also recovers sand on shorelines and turns grass into the clay where villagers walk over it too often (or back to grass when they stop).
  
• Permanent Paths - tied to the dynamic terrain module, you can customize if the paths that you create manually will have a chance to recover automatically into grass over time.
  

There are also some other modules, that we have not uncovered here. How to get them and what they are you will have to discover for yourself when the update launches!

We have also introduced the ability to preview the generated map, so you no longer have to reload the game multiple times to find a map you like! Even more - we have exposed the random seed, which you can share with your friends to make sure they get the same map as you!


In 1.0 you will now have the option to choose who is the royal in charge! We completely redesigned the king's portrait and added the option of a queen! While this change is mostly cosmetic, we wanted to give our players more options to tell the stories they want. We have also overhauled the main menu experience, going with a more modern design.




The current system of trading was very limiting. You could only set a specific amount to sell, which meant that you must constantly update the number as your situation changes. You also had no way to automate purchasing from caravans, so often the only way to get what you needed was manually inspecting every new caravan that comes in. The UI experience overall was quite slow and cumbersome, so we decided to make a big change to address all of this and we are fully replacing the Sell tab with a new Trade tab.



On the left page, you can freely select between any resource available in the game, while on the right page you can manage the intended behavior. For this purpose, we distinguish between three different markets:

• Locals consist of any family in your village, peasant or noble.
  
• Caravans consist of any traveling caravan visiting your settlement.
  
• Butchers consist of local families with assigned butchery. This market is only applicable to animals and it is concerned with selling animal corpses or old animals that can be butchered for meat.
  

On each of those markets, you can decide to be either purchasing or selling a selected resource. You can select a stock-management strategy as well:

• All will buy or sell anything that is offered / owned.
  
• Until limit will buy or sell until a certain stock amount is reached.
  
• Until taxed is the same as until limit where the limit is the amount taxed by the royals, or 0 if it is not taxed at all.
  
• Specific is the current system, where you manually enter a number to be sold / purchased.
  

And finally, you can choose a pricing strategy either for free, one that competes with locals, one that competes with caravans, or a completely custom one. As players were often updating the price to slightly undercut the market, we also added the option to set a % discount, so this strategy can now be automated.

Each of these settings is applied to only a selected market. For example, you can both set to purchase all from caravans and sell it back to the locals for a fixed price. This way you can build a stock of goods expected to be needed later at a time when villagers themselves would not be buying them.


If we would have to pick a feature that was by far the most requested throughout early access, templates would certainly be one of the first things to think of. As it is quite a big feature to add, we never had the time to do it before, but now it is finally here!

The way they work is very simple. Click on any existing zone to access a new option to create a template. You can decide, if you want the zone tiles also be part of the template, or if you just want to store the structures (which can be useful if for example, you want to use the same construction in different zones).



After that, you simply name the template, and it will now appear in a new template build menu! All of these templates are stored in your save data folder, so they are shared between games and you can even share them with your friends (or come to our Discord and share them with the community!).

Any template can be freely rotated, and even placed over existing structures, which will mark them for removal. This way you can create several tiers of the same house and upgrade them with one click!




A common issue with any long-lasting settlements was that eventually they ran out of mountains to mine, and players had to rotate out a whole section of the economy, as it was not able to sustain itself. We have now added an underground layer of resources, which you can display with a new underground resource view.



To mine the underground resources, all you have to do is place a new structure - Mineshaft. Mineshafts will regularly increase their storage with resources mined from the underground and then relocated by other miners into nearby ground storage. Each mineshaft can cover a small surrounding while mining in a cyclical outwards-facing direction. We have also created unique bedrock texture variants, to hint if there are any special ores in each location.

By default, villagers will first mine the mountains on the ground, before entering the mineshaft. But you can also mark each mineshaft to be prioritized to change this. Beware that mining from mineshafts requires a regular supply of ropes!




When thinking about priorities for our villagers, certain tasks like cooking or cleaning, or harvesting are very important, so they would get a high priority. This also meant that they would be done often and by everyone in the family so we often had to limit the number of people doing them. This was often sufficient, but you would see people swapping when they got interrupted even if for a short while (for example when occupying a storefront). This approach also did not work with activities where we wanted to scale the number of people with the size of the family in a natural way.

To solve this, we added an AI role system. Families now (secretly) distribute roles between villagers, and each individual will prioritize slightly differently depending on the roles that were assigned to them. So, each family will try to have a dedicated chef, a person to clean, a person to do shopping, a person to manage the storefront, and so on. Other villagers can still help with for example cooking when necessary, but they will now do it only when their other responsibilities are finished.

[h2]Passive Private Storefronts[/h2]
We have also improved the behavior of storefronts built outside of marketplaces. Villagers will manage them passively, meaning they will only occupy them when a customer is approaching them. This frees up much of their time to do other work around the house and made especially small families of two to three people a lot more viable.



To optimize the flow of goods in the economy, our AI was always following a simple rule - always empty your pockets to the closest available storage as soon as possible. While optimal in many scenarios, sometimes it was difficult to deal with logistical challenges without having a way to direct this behavior better. So we are adding a system of storage priorities.

In each zone, you will now be able to mark which resources are preferred to be stored within that zone. To maintain efficiency, whenever villagers will be producing new resources, they will still store them in the nearest storage, but other family members will then regularly relocate them.





We saw that the randomness of receiving new professions is sometimes too disruptive. Especially for carpenters or architects, obtaining them in a timely manner could be quite challenging. We have redesigned the favor system and introduced custom family requests. At an increased cost of favor, you will be able to customize the family that you will receive. You will also start with a certain amount of favor to request a single family of your choice before the first taxation happens.




Finally, we have also done a lot of work to let you customize the user experience:

• More Languages - with the launch of 1.0, you will be able to play the game in English, German, French, Czech, Russian and Simplified Chinese.
  
• New Fonts - we have removed the older fonts and replaced them with several options. Depending on the language selected, you can select from up to 5 different fonts. We made sure to offer both stylized and clean and readable options.
  
• Status Monitor - we replaced many notifications with a status indicator. You can now observe in real-time how many people are hungry, cold, low on money, or sick. We are also making more information accessible about people in your demesne and active debuffs about your settlement, like rumors that the place is not safe to visit.
  
• Savegame Screenshots - the save and load game screen has been extended with screenshots of your camera at the time of saving to help you orient which saves is the one you are looking for.
  
• Capture Settlement - in the main menu you will have access to a new button, that will capture the whole settlement in full resolution and store it in your user folder. This way you can share images of your full settlement in high detail, or even create a timelapse!
  

With 1.0, we also focused on bugfixes, performance optimizations, and balancing to make sure that the full release is the most stable, smooth, and enjoyable version of Lords and Villeins we have ever delivered to you! To note a few major things - we have implemented UI caching, so the population and warehouse book open much faster without an unpleasant stutter, we reduced performance overload for AI, so you can build larger settlements without experiencing reduced framerate, and rebalanced prices of goods, yields of activities and need satisfaction to create more engaging gameplay.

[h2]Steam Achievements[/h2]
For players on the Steam platform, we will also be introducing achievements! They will appear in the library in the future as we get closer to the release, so we are able to fully test them before the launch of the update. So if you notice achievements on Steam, please beware, that they are in preparation for the launch and are not available yet in the game.

We can't wait to have you try the game with all of these changes when the game goes live! We will be carefully listening for your feedback and ready to address any bugs and issues that arise. Stay tuned for the release date, which we will announce very soon!

As announced recently, soon we are getting to the release of the 1.0! Many of you have been asking what content can you look forward to, and if this means the end of the development for Lords and Villeins. Let's start by addressing that first.

The short answer is: no! We will continue to support this game after the release, fix any missing bugs and release balancing updates for as long as we can, to ensure that our players have a smooth and enjoyable experience with the content we will have on release.

What about additional content? Right now, we are not ready to set any expectations. Since Lords and Villeins is our first game, any future plans to grow it beyond what we've promised in the beginning, are mainly going to depend on the success of the full release.

Official mod support, Steamworks integration, shipyards, trade deals with neighboring towns, and mercenary quests are just some of the current ideas that really speak to us and we are very enthusiastic about the potential to work on them. Rather than promise something we can't deliver on, we stay reserved in setting expectations about the future. If you like our game, and you want to make sure this kind of content will be possible, the best way to do it is to tell about our game to your friends and help us reach as big of an audience as we can! Our community has always been a huge influence to get us where we are today and we are tremendously grateful for it. Thanks to you we have the opportunity to do what we love!

Now, before we get ahead of ourselves too much, let's focus on what is next. The 1.0 version has three main focal points: high council with public hearings, UI with quality of life features, and bugfixes with balancing overhaul. Let's have a look at the first pillar today!

[h3]Assemble The Council And Rule![/h3]
When the new patch goes live, you will be able to find a new page in the demesne section of your population book - The High Council.



With it, you can recruit your personal advisors and officers to guide you in your effort to rule the land. Each position is designated with unique responsibilities and unlocks abilities to manage your demesne. Many of them you've already had access to from previous updates but by connecting them to the council we want to give them more narrative weight to support you in creating interesting stories.

• Master Of Affairs - also known as the right hand of the ruler. They preside with the head of the ruling family during public hearings and recruit the intelligence officer to gather vital information and perform some secret activities.
  
• Master Of Law - with a lawmaker in place, you can hire an executioner and perform public executions.
  
• Marshal - having a marshal is the first step to start training your soldiers and sending them to the war. This position can only be assigned from the ranks of your soldiers, and the more experienced the marshal is, the faster will be training of everyone else!
  
• Master Of Coin - having someone in charge of your treasury grants you the ability to perform tax evasion. Royalty requested something you want to keep? Take the risk and with some clever bookkeeping, nobody will think there was anything wrong.
  
• Bishop and Minister - previously these positions were assigned automatically, but with the high council you now get the option to curate which of the monks will get the honor.
  

High Council is not just a storytelling flavor. It becomes especially valuable when you want to boost relationships with noble families. Offering them a position at the high council will ensure they remain in your favor and are going to support you in the future. That being said, this decision is not to be taken lightly as removing them from the council has an even more devastating effect on your relationship.

To make ruling even more impactful, people in most of these positions will spend their time walking to the villagers they oversee and motivate them, which can have either positive or negative impact on their mood.

[h3]Majestic Town Hall For Public Hearings[/h3]
Alongside the high council, we have crafted 20+ unique events, that each family and villager are sensitive to and will bring them up to your attention if they become pressing enough. Once you build a Town Hall - a new zone required for the ability to establish your high council - the head of the ruling family together with the Master of Affairs will hold public hearings once a week, the day before the Sunday Service.


During this event, many villagers will gather in the town hall in the audience, and few of them will approach you with a personal request. Naturally, accepting or refusing will have an impact on the relationship with their family.


[h3]Information Is Power[/h3]
Your intelligence officer can be recruited from the ranks of your soldiers, and they are your personal informant and hitman in one. They can perform two main tasks: gather intelligence, and assassinate targets.

In our next post, we will talk about the various improvements to the UI, including the new status monitor HUD, which reveals more information about the causes of bad mood and happiness of your villagers. This is the first way you will be getting more clarity in the situation. To add a little bit of authenticity. we chose for certain things to remain hidden, and Intelligence reports will be your main way to reveal this information.

Pick a family that you want to learn about, and order your intelligence officer to investigate them. For few days, they will follow the family around and finally, prepare a report for you.



In it, you can learn about needs that are serious issue for someone in the family, romantic relationships that may eventually lead to marriages, if there are any families they have a lasting conflict with, wealth status, standing with the clergy, or even their involvement in the revolutionary groups!

[h3]Rule Responsibly Or Face The Consequences[/h3]
An uprising is a new epic event, which can be triggered if your ruling is far too exploitative, villagers are seriously unhappy and all of your efforts to cull the revolution failed. Let's have a look at how this system works!

• Whenever villagers are unhappy, they have a chance to become inclined to join an opposition. First villager to do so will become its founder, and every other villager will join it, if they interact with existing members after they became inclined.
  
• This means the opposition grows organically, within families and to people they interact with, but it also takes some time to grow.
  
• With increased members will grow the hierarchical structure within the organization, adding new levels of leadership each time a certain amount of villagers join.
  
• Your goal is to discover the founder and deal with them swiftly, to dismantle the opposition and prevent it from growing further. Though oppositions are like a snake. Cut down its head and new one will soon take its place. As long as the root cause is true, opposition will remain a challenge.
  

This system is playing out both on the side of peasants, but also nobles - each having their own organization with their own hierarchy. Once a certain percentage of your villagers become part of the opposition, the final event can be triggered.

For peasants, this takes the form of violent uprising. All villagers will gather and march toward the ruling family. If you've been paying your guards well, they will protect you, or join the villagers in their hunt. If you manage to kill enough villagers, the uprising will fail and you may continue your rule, though at a very high cost of losing many innocent lives.

Nobles are far more cunning with their resolution. Beware if a large number of noblemen are suddenly joining your town hall. This can only mean one thing - a unique encounter, in which you are simply given a choice - step down peacefully and go to exile, or fight for your life, person to person with other nobles in the room.

So how do you discover the founder? This is where your intelligence officer comes in handy. The intelligence report will contain information on any involvement in the uprising and give you a lead to another implicated family, higher in the hierarchy. As you continue investigating, you are bound to discover the founding family. Then the only mystery left is the specific person in it. Use your observation skills to get the right answer and then act fast. Throw them in prison, execute them, exile them, or do as you wish!

Disposing of the wrong person may bring you even more trouble, as every execution and exile increases the chances of villagers joining the opposition. So perhaps, you would like to resort to a secretive assassination. This will be performed by your intelligence officer and if successful, your target will be disposed without anyone having the slightest suspicion of your involvement.

You can also prevent the outcome of the revolution by improving the relationships and happiness of everyone who has already joined. When the time to act comes, they may have a change of heart and the uprising event will be over before it fully begins, with its morale seriously hindered and their memberships dwindling.

It should be emphasized, that our goal is to balance this system so that it takes serious efforts and a decent amount of time before any such event occurs, given it's devastating consequences! We have also included notifications that warn players about growing rumors, so they can react and have a chance to turn the situation around.

[h3]Word On Customization[/h3]
We have learned from the feedback in previous updates, that having the ability to customize your game is very important to our players. You may be wondering with these new features, if the game you've signed up for in the past, is still going to be the same you fell in love with. That is not the case! Oppositions will be completely optional, and you can turn them off at the start of a new game, together with many other systems introduced in the previous updates. We will share more about this in our next post, where we will have a look at an overhauled trading experience, zone templates, underground mining, dynamic terrain, new fonts, other customizability features and a significant update to the UI, so stay tuned for more, including the release date announcement!

If you would like to participate in a closed beta and try these features early, please join our Discord for a chance to be invited! We apologize for not extending this option to players outside of the Discord, as we are not set for an efficient way of gathering feedback and bug reports outside of the server, but don't worry, the new update will be soon in your hands either way!

Greetings everyone,

We are almost there - the full version of Lords and Villeins is heading towards the release! All of the upcoming changes, as well as the release date, will be announced soon, so stay tuned for more details. With that, we have also decided to adjust the price of the game, so that it better reflects its finished state.

Lords and Villeins launched into Early Access back in 2019. We did early access to invite feedback from our community and improve the game with it. Thanks to all of you who adopted the game early, who were with us during this time and your generous feedback, we were able to improve and reach beyond our limits to create an awesome game. During this time, we released three major updates, each adding several new game systems and enhancements, as well as visual updates and new content to play with. The value of the game grew significantly over the years, and we felt that the original price no longer accurately reflects the hard work that we have put into it.

We will be raising the price for the game starting today, September 22, and moving forward you will be able to buy the game for 24,99 EUR / 24,99 USD / 21,99 GBP, which will also be the final price of the full version of the game. If you hurry, you can still get it for the Early Access price, but there's not much time left!

Thank you all for the feedback you keep providing, not only here on Steam, but on our Discord as well (please come join us, there is room for all of you). We can’t wait to deliver you the new update and fully realize the vision that we set for ourselves all those years ago.

We greet you, Lords and Ladies,

Thank you all for attending our Q&A livestream, we were really happy to answer your questions and to get inspiration from your feedback!

If for any reason you were not able to watch us live, a recording is available on YouTube, so feel free to head there and check it out!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Don't forget to join our Discord server where we continuously discuss Lords & Villeins and its development!