Norland Roadmap - Second Half of 2025
[p]Hello everyone, this is Dmitry.[/p][p]Today I’ll tell you about our new roadmap for the next six months – meaning fall 2025 and winter 2025. We have completed most of the previous roadmap (features with usurpers and conspiracies are currently being tested). Some things we didn’t implement because we decided those features should be expanded based on new mechanics (for example, character traits). On the other hand, we added some extra things – like the initial political mechanics. Map generation is currently in progress, and the results are looking good.
[/p][p]Be that as it may, now, a year after release, the game is beginning to take on the shape we intended in terms of combining mechanics, but it’s still rather poor on the content side. I’d say it’s about 25% of what I want to see for version 1.0. Early Access will likely last at least a couple more years from this point.
[/p][p]That said, the next half-year will be dedicated to broadening the game, improving the mid- and late-game experience, and making progress more interesting, long-term, and tangible.
[/p][p]The theme of the next roadmap will be the expansion of the economy and character and AI systems, which should bring greater gameplay variety and replayability.[/p][p][/p][p]![]()
[/p][h2]Economy Expansion[/h2][p]I’d like to start discussing planned content with a picture – here’s what the production and resource scheme we’re aiming for will look like. (Right away, I want to say, I don’t know how many buildings and resources we’ll manage to add in six months – this map is a long-term goal, and the timeline is unclear).[/p][p][/p][p]![]()
[/p][p]Source in big resolution
The dark blue buildings and yellow resources are what’s not in the game yet. This would roughly double the current economy. Later, we’ll add unique resources, alchemy, a bit of magic, and so on, but that’s the base. And before adding lots of new buildings and resources, we need to solve some growth problems.
The problem is, we can’t scale the economy painlessly. Like real medieval cities, whose size was limited by the lack of sewage (and thus frequent epidemics and fires), our city population is curbed by CPU performance, since our residents have complex AI. So instead of expanding horizontally, we’ll expand vertically – through complexity and social evolution.
[/p][h3]Hygiene and Bathhouse[/h3][p]First, population growth will be moderated more naturally through the hygiene and bathhouse system. There will be infection and epidemic mechanics (like typhus), with risks increasing as population density rises. Bathhouses will help reduce infections, but at the cost of soap and firewood, forcing you to balance city size with upkeep costs.
[/p][h3]Villages and barons[/h3][p]Second, you’ll be able to hand over villages to your lords (turning them into barons with independent income – tying into politics). In such villages, you lose part of the tribute (which goes into the baron’s pocket), but you can build low-level structures like fields, mines, lumber mills, and even breweries. This lets you focus the city on more advanced, profitable production chains.
[/p][h3]Craftsmen[/h3][p]Third, we plan to introduce a new social stratum – craftsmen. These are professionals who are more efficient than peasants or prisoners at complex production (like blacksmiths). But they only live in high-comfort houses and demand payment in gold (and they’re poor workers in the fields).
[/p][h2]Knowledge System Reform[/h2][p]Finally, there’s the issue of expanding the knowledge system. The more new knowledge we add, the more has to be passed on to future generations. To solve this, we’ll implement a long-awaited applied knowledge system for workers. For example, if a mill operates for 10 days, the knowledge of flour production and mill construction becomes “rooted” in the people – now everyone knows it, and it’s automatically passed to new lords. (We might also make it so if the mill sits unused too long, the knowledge becomes fragile again, existing only in lords’ minds).
[/p][p]This will not only reduce micromanagement when transferring knowledge but also make oral knowledge transfer more meaningful, since you’ll choose what to pass on (as the total pool of knowledge a lord has will be smaller). I’m also considering improving knowledge research via a “phenomena” system – I’ll talk about that later, but overall, I’m coming to the idea of a rather interesting combination of the current system of knowledge and its carriers with a more classical technology tree.
[/p][h2]New Buildings[/h2][p]As for new buildings, soon we’ll add a stone quarry, a bow workshop, clay extraction, a lumber mill (different from woodcutters), and so on – we want a more organic building system. Right now, most buildings require just wood, iron, and tools. We’d like to add clay, wooden planks, stone, and even tiles for higher-level buildings (and later cloth as well). This way, development will feel more organic and closer to the classic city-building experience.
[/p][h2]Trade Reform[/h2][p]Trade routes will come in a future iteration, but for now, we’d like to make caravan trade more realistic. There will be two types of caravans – the Holy Caravan, which mostly deals in luxury goods and books, and small traders who circulate between local towns and barbarian settlements. Barbarians will sell luxuries (like furs and spices) and captives, but buy tools, medicine, and weapons. The Holy Caravan, in turn, will be interested in local luxuries and captives, but won’t care about your turnips.
[/p][h2]Climate and Seasons[/h2][p]This is a major feature we’ve been putting off because of the huge content workload (which, as you’ve noticed, we’ve started reworking). For autumn we’d need leafless trees, for winter snow cover (including snow mechanics) and heating, and so on.
[/p][p]Still, with local map generation, we’d like to implement a first iteration of this feature, focusing on gameplay (less on visuals). Different regions will then have different growth modifiers and food sources. The temperate zone will work roughly as it does now, but in the north there will be vegetables, trees, more hunting game, berries, and herbs, while in the south there will be grains and more iron. This will make local map trading more relevant.
[/p][p]For seasonal changes, we want to try adding a cold season, when certain crops grow slower but deer migration increases, while in the south it’s a drought season. Visually this won’t differ too much, but gameplay-wise it’ll be livelier.
[/p][h2]Barbarians[/h2][p]These will be hostile pagan settlements. Barbarians are sources of luxuries and captives, but they can also be destroyed in the name of the Church – which hurts local trade but improves your relations with the Matriarch (and we’ll seriously weaken the option to improve relations by destroying bandit camps).
[/p][h2]Character Traits[/h2][p]Now, about character traits.[/p][p]We had planned to implement this earlier (as with many other things!), but didn’t take into account that our actors actually have two behavioral environments – as lords on the local map and as rulers on the global map. It would make sense if traits affected their strategy when acting as rulers – but at other times it wouldn’t be noticeable.
[/p][p]So, in the current concept, character traits will form complex group systems, including a stat system that modifies different aspects of character behavior – personal, political, strategic. This is a large topic I’ll talk about later. For now, I’ll just note that we’ll start with “weaknesses” – pressure points of characters that can be exploited for political control.
[/p][h2]Global map improvements[/h2][p]Alongside improved ruler behavior, we want to try adding a system of cultural regions to the map. You’ll start in your cultural region, e.g. the land of the Varns, made up of 5 provinces. Unifying these provinces will be relatively simple – the people are generally willing to unite under a strong ruler of their culture. But then your new kingdom will contact the Tanaya, who will strongly resist the Varns taking their lands, providing more organized opposition that grows as you expand. Then there’s the land of the Kaidens, with whom you had no previous contact – and they simply hate you because of old grudges.
[/p][p]So, conquest on the global map will go from easier to harder, with unique challenges at each stage.
[/p][h2]And so on.[/h2][p]Of course, this is far from everything we plan to do (as with the previous roadmap, we ended up adding many things outside of it). For example, in the upcoming update you’ll get an improved relations menu, developer mode, and public policy – none of which were in the last roadmap. [/p][p]
We also really want to further develop tactics and the combat system, city planning, politics, game starting options, traits, cultures, social mechanics (such as submission and intimidation), religious policy, and so on. All of this will be added as opportunities allow.
[/p][p]Thanks for reading through such a long post. And don’t forget to leave a review on the Steam page – you know we love that.[/p]
[/p][p]Be that as it may, now, a year after release, the game is beginning to take on the shape we intended in terms of combining mechanics, but it’s still rather poor on the content side. I’d say it’s about 25% of what I want to see for version 1.0. Early Access will likely last at least a couple more years from this point.
[/p][p]That said, the next half-year will be dedicated to broadening the game, improving the mid- and late-game experience, and making progress more interesting, long-term, and tangible.
[/p][p]The theme of the next roadmap will be the expansion of the economy and character and AI systems, which should bring greater gameplay variety and replayability.[/p][p][/p][p]
The dark blue buildings and yellow resources are what’s not in the game yet. This would roughly double the current economy. Later, we’ll add unique resources, alchemy, a bit of magic, and so on, but that’s the base. And before adding lots of new buildings and resources, we need to solve some growth problems.
The problem is, we can’t scale the economy painlessly. Like real medieval cities, whose size was limited by the lack of sewage (and thus frequent epidemics and fires), our city population is curbed by CPU performance, since our residents have complex AI. So instead of expanding horizontally, we’ll expand vertically – through complexity and social evolution.
[/p][h3]Hygiene and Bathhouse[/h3][p]First, population growth will be moderated more naturally through the hygiene and bathhouse system. There will be infection and epidemic mechanics (like typhus), with risks increasing as population density rises. Bathhouses will help reduce infections, but at the cost of soap and firewood, forcing you to balance city size with upkeep costs.
[/p][h3]Villages and barons[/h3][p]Second, you’ll be able to hand over villages to your lords (turning them into barons with independent income – tying into politics). In such villages, you lose part of the tribute (which goes into the baron’s pocket), but you can build low-level structures like fields, mines, lumber mills, and even breweries. This lets you focus the city on more advanced, profitable production chains.
[/p][h3]Craftsmen[/h3][p]Third, we plan to introduce a new social stratum – craftsmen. These are professionals who are more efficient than peasants or prisoners at complex production (like blacksmiths). But they only live in high-comfort houses and demand payment in gold (and they’re poor workers in the fields).
[/p][h2]Knowledge System Reform[/h2][p]Finally, there’s the issue of expanding the knowledge system. The more new knowledge we add, the more has to be passed on to future generations. To solve this, we’ll implement a long-awaited applied knowledge system for workers. For example, if a mill operates for 10 days, the knowledge of flour production and mill construction becomes “rooted” in the people – now everyone knows it, and it’s automatically passed to new lords. (We might also make it so if the mill sits unused too long, the knowledge becomes fragile again, existing only in lords’ minds).
[/p][p]This will not only reduce micromanagement when transferring knowledge but also make oral knowledge transfer more meaningful, since you’ll choose what to pass on (as the total pool of knowledge a lord has will be smaller). I’m also considering improving knowledge research via a “phenomena” system – I’ll talk about that later, but overall, I’m coming to the idea of a rather interesting combination of the current system of knowledge and its carriers with a more classical technology tree.
[/p][h2]New Buildings[/h2][p]As for new buildings, soon we’ll add a stone quarry, a bow workshop, clay extraction, a lumber mill (different from woodcutters), and so on – we want a more organic building system. Right now, most buildings require just wood, iron, and tools. We’d like to add clay, wooden planks, stone, and even tiles for higher-level buildings (and later cloth as well). This way, development will feel more organic and closer to the classic city-building experience.
[/p][h2]Trade Reform[/h2][p]Trade routes will come in a future iteration, but for now, we’d like to make caravan trade more realistic. There will be two types of caravans – the Holy Caravan, which mostly deals in luxury goods and books, and small traders who circulate between local towns and barbarian settlements. Barbarians will sell luxuries (like furs and spices) and captives, but buy tools, medicine, and weapons. The Holy Caravan, in turn, will be interested in local luxuries and captives, but won’t care about your turnips.
[/p][h2]Climate and Seasons[/h2][p]This is a major feature we’ve been putting off because of the huge content workload (which, as you’ve noticed, we’ve started reworking). For autumn we’d need leafless trees, for winter snow cover (including snow mechanics) and heating, and so on.
[/p][p]Still, with local map generation, we’d like to implement a first iteration of this feature, focusing on gameplay (less on visuals). Different regions will then have different growth modifiers and food sources. The temperate zone will work roughly as it does now, but in the north there will be vegetables, trees, more hunting game, berries, and herbs, while in the south there will be grains and more iron. This will make local map trading more relevant.
[/p][p]For seasonal changes, we want to try adding a cold season, when certain crops grow slower but deer migration increases, while in the south it’s a drought season. Visually this won’t differ too much, but gameplay-wise it’ll be livelier.
[/p][h2]Barbarians[/h2][p]These will be hostile pagan settlements. Barbarians are sources of luxuries and captives, but they can also be destroyed in the name of the Church – which hurts local trade but improves your relations with the Matriarch (and we’ll seriously weaken the option to improve relations by destroying bandit camps).
[/p][h2]Character Traits[/h2][p]Now, about character traits.[/p][p]We had planned to implement this earlier (as with many other things!), but didn’t take into account that our actors actually have two behavioral environments – as lords on the local map and as rulers on the global map. It would make sense if traits affected their strategy when acting as rulers – but at other times it wouldn’t be noticeable.
[/p][p]So, in the current concept, character traits will form complex group systems, including a stat system that modifies different aspects of character behavior – personal, political, strategic. This is a large topic I’ll talk about later. For now, I’ll just note that we’ll start with “weaknesses” – pressure points of characters that can be exploited for political control.
[/p][h2]Global map improvements[/h2][p]Alongside improved ruler behavior, we want to try adding a system of cultural regions to the map. You’ll start in your cultural region, e.g. the land of the Varns, made up of 5 provinces. Unifying these provinces will be relatively simple – the people are generally willing to unite under a strong ruler of their culture. But then your new kingdom will contact the Tanaya, who will strongly resist the Varns taking their lands, providing more organized opposition that grows as you expand. Then there’s the land of the Kaidens, with whom you had no previous contact – and they simply hate you because of old grudges.
[/p][p]So, conquest on the global map will go from easier to harder, with unique challenges at each stage.
[/p][h2]And so on.[/h2][p]Of course, this is far from everything we plan to do (as with the previous roadmap, we ended up adding many things outside of it). For example, in the upcoming update you’ll get an improved relations menu, developer mode, and public policy – none of which were in the last roadmap. [/p][p]
We also really want to further develop tactics and the combat system, city planning, politics, game starting options, traits, cultures, social mechanics (such as submission and intimidation), religious policy, and so on. All of this will be added as opportunities allow.
[/p][p]Thanks for reading through such a long post. And don’t forget to leave a review on the Steam page – you know we love that.[/p]