Birthright News

Not compatible with old save game versions

This version upgrades to UE5.1.1 and take several steps towards the end game Kings & Queens.

[h3]Spouses & Families[/h3]

The Family system has been updated both technically to handle massive relationship data to introducing Lineage UI. Finding a Spouse among Lords is revamped together with how Children are generated in Families

Number of Children, starting bonus Stats and Marriage Cost all depend on how well the Spouse Tarot Backgrounds match. Each of the 3 cards could be a Normal Match (both have same card) and a Perfect Match (also flipped the same).
More matches gives higher bonus to children.

Race on Children are random from both parents Race, matching the Portrait.

You can now open a Find Spouse UI by Right Click any family character and choose "Find Spouse" in the context menu.



This will show all the matches current Lords have for this Character. Keep in mind that Lords in Prison and similar are not offering any marriage until free.

Titles are everything in the Kingdom. And few Lords will make any offer unless you are at least a Lord in title. Building your first House (any level) will now grant you the first Lord Title. This is much lower in Rank than a Settlement Lord Title but gives you a foot in for marriages.
So don't expect a Council Member in the Citadel to offer you a marriage just because you built a House on the country side.

Alliances can influence strongly though and make Title Rank matter less when Lords decide on offering marriage.

[h3]Lineage Family Tree[/h3]

A new section in Family Panel called Lineage Tree is now added that renders the full Lineage of Player Character.



[h3]World Map[/h3]

AI now have a complete Private Strategy based on their Tarot Backgrounds and other factors such as army size, money, income, recruitment, reputations, world turmoil state etc.
They will now also take personal decisions to go Siege someone they really dislike.

Combat is now completely streamlined between SP & MP how it start and update result afterwards. This means SP now also shows the Ongoing Battle Marker on the World Map when AI vs AI is happening. Players and AI use this to coordinate and join different sides.

Because of this AI in SP can now make much better decisions when choosing side in battle.

[h3]Combat[/h3]

All Attacks are now using Draw-Hold-Release mechanics. This means it's easier to aim and time the attacks, while also being a important part for coming features to combat.

Attacks are also stopped on hit and bounced back, except killing blows. This change the speed and tempo of close combat.

AI has been updated with more complex movement patterns in close combat, and how they reason around attack directions. Unit Officers will use even more formation tactics.

Units are now limited to Officer + 11 Soldiers. And 4 Units per Lord/Army.

Characters with Hit Thru Attacks, such as a Trolls or Minotaurs, will give one hit per character on each swing to not one shot everyone under certain conditions.

Soldiers Health Bar Nameplates are now either Red for enemies or Blue for friendlies. Using Faction Colors became too messy in bigger fights and more confusing than anything.

[h3]Last Words[/h3]

There are too many bug fixes and adjustments to list but a big big thanks to Amarum as always for debugging and finding things :) And Zetchas Cain for helping with Combat!

This Patch has tons of fixes and balancing after the UE5 upgrade. Combat been changed using UE's own Ability system for better result in Multiplayer, tweaked animation speeds and re balanced all weapons/armor and HP calculations.
Portraits and illustrations has been changed to computer generated ones, something we will continue to delve into.

[h3]Combat[/h3]

We now use the Ability system in UE5. And it seems to work very well both for SP and MP. This is a better system to work with and opens up much better support for future improvements.
It also solved the Client prediction needed for Players in Multiplayer combat.

Most weapons work the same, if they had a High Mode before they do now too. In the future High Mode will be used for making Combos.

Weapons and Armor have all been re balanced (special thanks to Zethcas Cane) and HP calculations are lowered. Early game Bandits/Undeads/Wolfs are now much less dangerous and the starting weapon is enough to handle them using Parry/Block.
This makes Early Game much easier to get into while equipment have better spread and make more impact when upgrading.

[h3]Titles[/h3]

This is a fundamental feature for the upcoming Kings & Queens patch. But is released now and in full effect.

The new Title system is the foundation of what access a character has in the World. And Long titles are now full length of all combined Titles in increasing Rank.
Long Title example: "Lord of Hollybrook, Warden of The North and Keeper of the Seals"

Rank is a Titles measurement of how high status it holds. All Titles with higher or equal Rank to Wardens now grants their children the Prince/Princess Title. This will give better chance for more and stronger children and status.

Each Region now has their own Capital and the owner is granted the Warden Title for that Region.

Access in UI or for AI is controlled thru Rights that each Titles grant the character. So a Settlement Lord can access more Management and collect taxes because of the Title, and each Settlement can have one appointed Chamberlain that also has certain access to help maintain Settlements.

This system will be heavily used in future Kings & Queens patch to control High Society relationships, invitations and access to marriages/alliances/banquettes.

[h3]Portraits and Illustrations[/h3]

All Portraits and Illustrations are now replaced with computer generated images :)
Yes they are not perfect but the amount we can get is staggering, and we thought it gives much better feeling and ambiance being able to match regions.
This will be improved on over time, and more additions.

This also introduced defined Races that correspond to each region. Having Children with a Nord will most probably give that look and so forth. Race has no other meaning than looks in the game and will most probably never affect anything else.
Gender will have an effect though in the game.

Finally the project is converted to Unreal Engine 5. This has been a monumental task and we are super happy it's done and over with :)
Moving forward we can now focus on new features and content with shiny new tools.

Most things should be the same, while everything has changed under the hood. The physics and collision system is completely new, static meshes are converted to Nanite meshes, completely new destruction system etc (check UE5 if interested in all cool stuff).

However Lumen is currently not enabled due to targeting more like 30fps, but we will eventually enable it due to UE improving this for games.

[h3]Collision, Physics and Destruction[/h3]

This is a completely new system in UE5 which has a major impact on Birthright's combat. The melee weapon collision is rewritten using the new system.

Basically for Birthright this is just goodness compared to the previous Nvidia PhysX system we used. It's also built with Multiplayer in mind, so Dedicated Servers will now run a fixed update rate on physics, making it possible to sync clients much easier compared to variable update rate.

The new destruction system (Chaos) is incredible much better than the Nvidia system previously used. We already made simple tests using Catapults and destructible Walls and dynamic NavMesh etc seems to work fine. So a future Siege Patch will be planned now.

[h3]Optimizations[/h3]

After conversion was done we did some deep analyzing and monitoring performance. And for combat the biggest bottleneck is Animations.
Therefore we started remaking Animation logic according to the new Multi Threaded model that UE5 supports. This enables using a Proxy object to copy data between threads and run necessary update logic on a thread rather than the main thread. We will continuously make improvements around Animations coming patches due to this. But already there is a good improvement in performance.

[h3]Nanite Meshes & Virtual Textures[/h3]

Most Static Meshes are converted to Nanite for performance and removing the need for LODs. And UE5.1 already released support for Foilage being Nanite Meshes too. This will be updated in coming patches.

And all Textures are now UE5's Virtual Textures making things more video memory optimized while even and crisp over longer distances.

Big thanks to Amarum for testing during development!

[h3]Settlement Sickness and Prosperity[/h3]

Now it has much better simulation with natural Population Sickness. Morning Events tagged with Sickness will also create an outbreak.

The total Extensions Prosperity bonus in a Settlement will act as a buffer so when Prosperity falls below, it will help pull it up again over time.

Health Extensions such as Alchemy or Hospitalis is now healing their Passive % each morning. Acting like a buffer for large outbreaks in the population. Making sure the Settlement recover in a timely manner.

Having a large population will protect you more from daily natural sickness, but outbreaks will be more severe.

AI will now more often build Health Extensions in their Settlements, regardless of Tarot Cards backgrounds.

[h3]Fixed Reserves spawning[/h3]

Thanks to FranzMauser on Discord found many performance issues and bugs with Reserve spawning not following the Max Soldiers settings.

Now both sides should be kept more properly to their starting Spawn Ratio. And no side should start tipping over because they die much less often.

Also fixed a bug where you could end up in infinite spawns each tick until all Reserves were spawned, making it extremely performance heavy as a result, or crashing the computer from the pressure.

This affects both Battles and Sieges where you have more total soldiers than your Max Soldiers settings.

[h3]Houses, Hillside Gardens and Terrain updates[/h3]

Hillside has now become the Asian side drawing heavily from Japanese culture. This new Kamura Family have settled in the NW. This area will develop with their own Extensions for producing Silk and Tea.

House Brewmere has been moved to Westmark and become a Minor House only holding 1 Settlement at start.

Old Forest is now it's own Terrain type.

Added over 30 new Music tunes and equal amount of Ambient tracks spread over all the Terrain types on World Map.

Added a Faction Panel (default L) where you can read about each Major House (will add Minor Houses later).

Big thanks to Arconde for working on Houses backgrounds and ideas!

[h3]Other fixes and changes[/h3]

• Settlement Army Transfer UI now has Pagination and Filtering to be performant handling large armies (Thanks to FranzMauser for pointing this out)
  
• Fixed several Desert maps start points
  
• Equip/Unequip weapons and armor with Status Effects should now work properly updating Stats
  
• Weapon onHit Status Effects is added generally. Polearms now having a Pierce effect (20% chance of Bleed) and Hammers/Maces have a Blunt effect (150% Durability Damage)
  
• Fixed using Enter to submit Amount in markets
  
• AI will now properly declare War on Player when taking a Settlement from them
  
• Settlement Extension Blacklist have been updated and fixed bug where still some started with forbidden Extensions
  
• Audio Volume Settings now properly apply when starting the game
  
• Horses idle sound in combat should now be more retained when having many horses
  
• Fixed keyboard bindings for Units while Mounted
  
• Family Panel should now explain what it is if opened without having a family
  
• Multiplayer fixed several replication issues and several Players joining Battles should now have a proper Spawn Ratio (before joined Players got 0 ratio)
  
• Multiplayer fixed damage/hit Events to not show between several Players
  
• Settlement Events changed from each Settlement drawing every morning, to now only draw one time per day when any Player visit Settlement. Still they do draw themselves each morning to check if they got special Events such as Sickness, but won't start the quest for it. This makes for much better distribution for the Player not getting duplicate quests as often
  

As always Big Thanks for testing and balancing to Amarum

Had to push the planned Kings & Queens patch and instead did some Battle/Combat rework, new Units, new Formation system, completely modular Characters, and the new Horse model that also support advanced things such as Pegasus variations.

[h3]Modular Characters[/h3]

Finally Humans are fully Modular as per Equipment items for Armor/Clothes. This also prepare for K&Q patch. And introduce several new Armor items and new equipment sets for Recruited soldier types.

Horse asset is completely changed to the final version we need. This makes it easier to commit to working more on Mounted Combat and needed melee animations. Dismemberment is still not added to horses but will soon come, where axes will have bonus damage to Horse legs.

[h3]Units[/h3]

New system where any World Character can appoint Officers that control their own Units of Soldiers (Max 12 as default config).
Players build their own Units in the Character Panel (new Tab). And currently are free to make as many as they can (any Soldier already in a Unit can't join another). Unit Name is auto-generated but can be changed for customization.

In Combat the Lord has control of the Army and Officers, but not directly Unit Soldiers. Instead the Lord can "select Unit 1" and command to attack from the side or take Hold Formation on a hillside.

When commanding Charge to Unit Officers they instead start Advancing, where the Officer now tries to carry out the Lords command.
The Lord can place a Banner as Target Point used by the Officer to try advance toward enemy using a Path. Currently the placed visual Banner is the Lords, but in the future it could be special banners equipped on the Officer that can be found in Dungeons. These special Banners will give AoE Status Effects to nearby soldiers.

When giving Hold to Unit Officers they will hold the position, but if heavy fighting occurs the Officer might charge.

Officer/Soldier AI decision is based on Character Stats and Skills.

In the future we will add even more advanced Officer AI using more complex Environmental Query Data to make for example decisions based on Terrain. And we are very open to any kind of feedback and ideas how Units could be used :)

[h3]New Formation system[/h3]

New system that is performant and easy to work with. External tools can visually create Formation structures and exported as local relative positions.
This makes it very easy to manually create any kind of Formation and we added several new ones like Circle, Square, Column etc.

A new Radial Menu is added for selecting Formation. Both Charge and Hold command buttons can now be held to open menu and select what kind of Formation.
If charge or hold are clicked they will use the current Formation you have with your Army.

Be aware that Unit Officers have their own Formations and you can set each Units preferred Formation, but Officers might change it during combat if deemed necessary.

Soldiers holding Formations, they might break out of it depending on what happens, but can most often be called back by the Formation Leader.

AI Lords/Officers will now actively use Formations as a strategy, while also disengaging to gather up the lines again.

[h3]Combat[/h3]

New movement speed added, Sprint, that use Stamina in combat. It is between Walk and Run but can be used while holding weapons. (Players default keybinding is holding shift).

Player HUD now shows hit/recieve floating damage numbers around middle.

Armor is changed to be % based instead of fixed damage reduction. Normal Plate now has around 75% Armor reduction.

Many changes to combat AI making the pace of combat a lot different.

AI Leaders will now actively use Formations to their advantage.

New Death animations for Humans based on direction of death.

Armor breaking in combat will now naturally be visible with new modular character, but also added a breaking Sound.

[h3]Other[/h3]

* Many Rings and Necklaces now have Status Effects and can be found in Dungeons.
* Several important fixes to Character Panel thanks to Amarums extensive testing!
* Faction Lords have been boosted in Stats, got new Titles and sometimes new names. This is part of the updated Family history that Arconde has worked on, more to come in next minor patch.
* All 4 Attack Directions now have key bindings so Player can choose more freely how to play in combat.
* Unequip Armor is finally here thanks to Modular Character, now you can finally play naked (almost)
* Most Weapon items have been re-balanced, and one Legendary got the first visual effect, more to come on visual effects on weapons (based on Status Effects).
* Granaries should now work correctly collecting nearby Fields.
* Settlement Extensions Gold income per day is rebalanced.
* Old Merchant during Weekly Event should be tradable.
* Settlement Population has been capped depending on City/Castle/Village.
* Dedicated Servers fixed small freeze when other Players start combat (2 game instances will be started when starting a Server, one is only handling all the new game instances created for combat).
* Player can now kick Followers, adding them to the Missing state and they might re-appear in the World at a later time.
* Added Time Controls in Single Player mode with key bindings.
* Inventories added Sorting and Searching, along with Pagination (mouse scroll while turn pages too), making them handle infinite large inventories.
* World Map sound is now using the Player character rather than Camera for the "Ear". This makes many sounds be more natural in direction since Camera can be far away from the actual Player position.

Big Thanks for help goes to Amarum & Arconde


[h3]Next Patch[/h3]

Now we will finally start with Kings & Queens Patch. Basically a big update on World AI and new features such as Contracts, Castle Events, Ruler UI and logic (global world Tax too).

End Game needs fancy Clothes produced to get into Feasts and other Gatherings of Lords and High Society in The Citadel. Attending will give Reputation with Host and Settlement.