Free In-Development Demo updated!

[h3]Ladies and Lords of the Realm,[/h3]

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[h2]Demo Updated![/h2]
Now the servers have been updated and the client should update on Steam any moment now, or it can be downloaded directly from our website. The new version includes quite a lot of new content, and many changes, so I wish you a pleasant time exploring them! You can find a list of the most important changes at the end of this message. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback, so feel free to jump into our forum or Discord and share your thoughts! :)

If you can afford it, you can also support Feudums (and unlock nice perks) on Patreon, allowing me to dedicate more time and resources to the project.

[h3]The Age of Pretenders - Round 3 Start Date[/h3]
The next round of the Pretender Wars will kick off on Thursday afternoon (in UTC), giving you another chance to challenge the pretender's rule, bring order back to the realm - and claim the rewards.

You can still find a few starting tips in a new, bite-size guide here on Steam:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3353070835

[h3]What else is on the horizon?[/h3]
In the regular updates, aside from bug fixes, you can mainly expect UX and Quality of Life improvements, particularly for interfaces, feudum management features that have become somewhat cluttered, and company commands.

I'll also continue to tweak or experiment with game settings in the weekly games.

Otherwise, I am now primarily focusing on developing the major features you voted for in the latest community poll.

...And without further ado, let's see what's new!

[h2]Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Notable Gameplay Changes[/h3]

Rogues: introduced a special labor type where a portion of the unemployed population becomes Criminals. They still count as unemployed but taking resources as needed, which can temporarily cause major needs to drop below zero, affecting regular output. Rogues are independent of player policies, cannot be assigned exclusive jobs, and are excluded from labor predictions. Beware of the poachers, robbers, pirates and more!
Rulebook Overhaul! We’ve revamped the rulebook logic for laborer-related rules and settings, providing much more flexibility in adjusting or adding/removing options for each game session. This also opens up a new range of possibilities for later modifications by our modding community.
Lots of new Labourers! Over a dozen new labour options have been added, enabling even more ways to develop your territories. Some of these are only unlockable by a specific terrain or improvement. Additionally, more terrain types and improvements have got mutually exclusive job slots, adding more decision points for how you specialize your territories.
Labourer limits: You can now not only guarantee how many workers will be assigned to a specific role during a certain season of the year, but also set a maximum limit on how many can work in that role. This allows for more precise control over when and what tasks the serfs will focus on.
Battle Rewards: Warrior lords and ladies, rejoice! 👑 Defeating raiding armies and claiming victory in battles now earns you Virtue! Rewards are based on the relative strength of the opposing sides. Every member on the victorious side will receive a reward, even if their forces were eliminated or forced to retreat. The spoils are distributed proportionally to the military power of the companies at the time of joining the fray. Rewards are shown in dominion reports and in the summary provided by the Virtue badge (under the category "Events").
Battle enhancements: ⚔️ Tile Improvements and their levels can now modify battlefield roster sizes and adjust offensive and defensive modifiers for companies. These bonuses stack with terrain effects and company tactics. Battlefield width is now also specified per roster types, adding deeper strategic layers to combat.
Allied Forces: While allies could already assist each other in battles, their companies can now also provide safety 🛡️ to allied feudums (if not engaged in battle), granted they are not trespassing and in the correct tactics / stance. This requires an Alliance with diplomatic borders set to “Free Passage” or better, with tactics and unit edges allowing safety generation. Your own companies can now also boost the safety of your feudum while they are inside your borders, even if they are not in garrisons (albeit garrisons are still way more effective in this.).
Victory Prediction: An option has been added to reveal the predicted winner of the game after a certain percentage of the game time has passed. Now the leaders can't always sneak quietly to the finish line!

[h3]UX/UI Changes[/h3]

Changed the market base price calculation: The market base price is now less prone to fluctuation when there are few players, making it harder for a single player to influence it (although clever manipulation is still possible!).
The rendering engine has been updated, making the game map a bit livelier (just zoom into those water bodies!). I’ve also subtly updated the weather-related and various other visual effects. There's still plenty of room for development, but from now on, the engine isn't the bottleneck – my time is. We tried to test it more thoroughly with the help of some Vanguards, but if you encounter any graphical glitches, but it's nearly impossible to test it on everything, so please kindly report them using the in-game bug reporting tool!
The battle card has been streamlined and now includes many more hints and tooltips, including those related to the new battle enhancements.
Added new hotkeys; if the map is in focus: [tab] toggles the Guide, [enter] toggles the Chat, while [v] toggles the victory conditions (remember the old ones, like '[m] moves to the manor of the selected feudum, [h] goes to your capital.')
Positioning after battle now attempts to honor the original tile of the companies (where they were before the battle) and/or the path they were trying to follow. When a company searches for its appropriate tile (if the battle did not occur on its tile), it will do so within its own Area of Control (AoC) if it won, or within a 1 Line of SIght (LoS) radius around the battle tile if it lost (you don't have much time to look around while fleeing!😱)
Labourer tooltips now show not only the planned utilization percentage but also the specific predicted allocation for next tick (where applicable).
Note: With the current content updates, some in-game interfaces have become a bit cluttered. I am continuously working on updating these and will be addressing them through smaller patches.

[h3]Bugfixes / Optimizations[/h3]

Fixed a bug when at the end of a battle a hostile garrison would not be revealed.
Fixed a bug where the battle roster sizes could be miscalculated during regroup.
Removed an extra company report about 0 regeneration during battle.
Fixed a bug where the settings' authors were not displayed in the game list.
Fixed a bug where the command has failed while trying to enable/disable the labour on a terrain or improvement if the tile has changed since the issuance of the command.
Fixed a bug where the maximum worker percent of the user’s labour policy was not cloned correctly.
Fixed a build target group bug related to Steamworks API.
Fixed a bug where client validation for claiming was faulty for wasteground claims.
Fixed various pathfinding bugs (there is always a new edge case! Sorry about that.)
Fixed a dependency injection issue for instances.
Created a host of new debug tools for pathfinding and testing.
Various server-side improvements and changes.

Until the next update... Enjoy Feudums!

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