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!
