Birthright News

[h3]Combat Changes[/h3]

The previous way of handling Armor and Armor Penetration along with the balancing made it more step-wise meaning it often came down to Equipment vs Equipment.
Some items would feel like you grew a lot in power while others hardly at all.

Now there are several changes made how to calculate Damage and Armor/Penetration. Effectively making it more linear with stats counting a bit more than before.
Armor is generally 15% higher while Armor Penetration has been nerfed with about 50% on 1-hand/ranged weapons, and only about 15% on 2-hand weapons.

Stat contribution is now: 0.5 * Primary Stat + 0.25 * Secondary Stat
Melee/Ranged has Strength/Dexterity switched.

Sieges finally has Checkpoints that can be overtaken by Attackers over time if no Defender enters the area.

• Wolves has been buffed a bit but are still fairly easy early game.
  
• Troll hits now makes a Power skill check to determine if Target falls to the ground.
  
• Combat AI now has a different flow using Formations vs Charge.
  
• Combat AI also use more variation in Formations depending on their own category (infantry/ranged/polearm/mounted).
  

[h3]General[/h3]

Player death has always been a dear thing for us, but maybe not for all Players ;)
So over time in this project it has been slightly nerfed bit by bit until you could barely even die in Skirmishes.
Now with Spouses being easier than ever to get for Family we have removed most of these simplifications. But you can always change Hardcore settings in Options.

The 3 Game Modes now work as follows:
Hardcore - Default setting. Player dies in Skirmishes and Dungeons but not in Battles/Sieges.
Softcore - As Hardcore but Death only occur if Player has a Family and inheritance.
No Death - Softest of the softest.

There are still some Stories/Missions that will start Skirmishes where you can't die by design. But they should be at an absolute minimum now.

Other additions

• Increased starting coins effectively removing the worst outcomes where you are severely punished early game with almost nothing in the pockets.
  
• Stables Extension now gives the option for Characters with Horse to change horseshoes for a fee, granting a small speed buff.
  
• Church Extension now offer Player healing for free and Followers for a donation (Soldiers are not healed and mostly useful early game before you are set with healing items for the army).
  
• Combat HUD added mounted horse and Health bar.
  
• Settlement UI changed with Extensions in the middle more in focus and sorted the same way in Village/Castle/City (Tavern first).
  
• Added several new Event Sounds on World Map.
  

Minor fixes

• Fixed several spawn points in combat and a severe spawn issue in places where terrain and static meshes overlapped.
  
• Fixed several sounds in combat and on world map.
  
• Fixed repeating Faction Lord missions.
  
• Fixed mission failed/success UI cleanup in Multiplayer.
  
• Fixed filtering bug in Character Panel when you had soldiers with level up.
  
• Fixed your own children could show up as Spouses (We are not taking it that far yet ;)).
  
• Fixed children inheriting Titles correctly depending on Family Primogeniture.
  
• Fixed a bug in AI vs AI Battles cleanup.
  
• Fixed Desert Castle Road texture gone missing.
  
• Fixed transferring large search result of Spouses in Multiplayer to Client.
  
• Fixed World HUD showing regional name rather than Terrain Type.
  

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