Kingdoms and Castles News

Hi Everyone,

Hope you're all having a good summer!

Here's a little preview of what we're currently working on for our upcoming updates:


We are running various design tests on how trading and diplomacy will work with the other kingdoms. At the same time we're continuing progress on the city building AI. The AI can now build and sustain a city of hundreds, including building food storage, happiness buildings, and defensive walls:

There's still much to do here but the foundation is solid and it's been very cool to see all the work on the city building AI come together to allow it to build thriving cities.


We will be adding the much requested fish food source. Eating fish will tie into a new villager 'health' mechanic. You'll be able to build Fishing Huts that will send boats out to catch them and Fish Mongers to store/distribute them:



We have also been digging very heavily into optimizations. We're currently testing some optimizations that improved the framerate on our test case city (a completely built out map with 100,000+ total resource stored) from 18fps to 25fps which is about a 30% performance boost (although results will vary based on system specs, city size and composition). We'll be continuing to go as far as we can down this road to try and get more gains.

Until next time,
-Pete & Michael

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Hi Everyone,

Today we've got an update for you themed around Warfare! We've implemented lots of new system and features - all in support of our future AI Rivals update.

Any bugs, issues, or have any feedback? Let us know on discord or email [email protected]. Big thanks as always to all our beta testers and translators! Here's what’s new:


We have streamlined the military system. Barracks now produce a full 1 tile fully functional 16 footman unit complete with a general with one click (rather than the old way of having to separately train a general, then individually train and recruit units at the barracks). This should feel a little more like an RTS. If you have an old save with bigger armies it will be split up into individual units and we have removed the 3 unit cap. Additionally:

• Left click and drag will select multiple units, shift and ctrl click work as well.
  
• Chamber of War no longer recruits generals, instead it can activate a ‘Hazard Pay’ bonus which doubles all unit damage in exchange for higher soldier wages while active.
  
• Units can walk on walls and towers (more on this below)
  
• Units can be queued up at a barracks/archer school (like in an RTS)
  
• Units can be disbanded
  
• Partial strength units can ‘recuperate’ at the barracks to return to full strength
  
• Military units now need to be paid wages (previously only tower emplacements were paid wages) and will disband themselves if they aren’t paid for a few years.
  

We’ve added an archer school building that works just like the barracks except it produces archer units. They can attack enemies with their ranged attack but are very weak when engaged hand-to-hand. They also gain the same range bonus when stationed on walls that normal archer towers get. And on that note…


You can now build castle stairs which allow units access to walking on your castle walls and towers. We’ve completely revamped the pathfinding tech to make this work and set up little doors automatically when a tower meets a wall. One set of stairs will allow access to any contiguous piece of wall, but you’ll probably want multiple sets of stairs for quick access.


You can now build troop transport ships and use them to move your armies across deep water and on to other landmasses. Each ship can carry three units. To load units, select them and order them to move to a transport ship. To unload, select the transport ship and right click anywhere on land.


Viking thieves move faster and don’t start fires, but if they make it to your treasure room they will steal 100g. Make sure to kill them before they escape back to their ship to reclaim the gold!


Viking raids can now launch on multiple fronts and they can also leave on any viking boat, not just the boat that brought them. Viking boats are more reactive to picking up escaping vikings. Viking raid escalation tweaked to better adapt to player skill.

Note: if you are using an old save the next few raids will be weak until it catches up with your progress.


You can now click and drag to place multiple roads, farms, orchards, aqueduct, castle blocks, cemeteries, and piers. You'll be able to place up to 100 buildings per drag placement.


You can now click and drag to order peasants to chop multiple tiles of wood, rebuild large areas of rubble, or demolish lots of buildings at once.


We have flipped left and right mouse click. Instead of moving the camera on left click, now left click is used for select and drag select. Right click and drag moves the camera and issues troop orders. Middle click and drag is still camera rotate. If you hold down the alt key, the controls will revert back to functioning like the old version.

Note: If you’d prefer the old method permanently, you can toggle ‘legacy mouse controls’ in the options menu. In legacy mode click and drag selecting and placement require holding the alt key to start the drag.

• Rebuild now works as expected on castle towers and tiles with aqueducts
  
• Aqueducts can be built over hovels
  
• Fixed gates not visually closing when vikings were nearby
  
• Map generation tweaked to better guarantee viable amounts of stone and iron
  
• Fixed some load/save exploits with the witch
  
• Fixed cemetery orientation getting lost after a load/save
  
• Fixed generals not attacking ogres
  
• Reduced gravekeeper walk speed from 2x to 1.5x
  
• Military units get same speed bonuses on roads that villagers do
  
• Roads can be placed anywhere and do not need to be connected to other roads
  
• Other small fixes
  

Hope you enjoy! Remember, you can:

• Follow our developer page on Steam
• Chat with us on discord
• Follow on twitter

Until next time,
-Pete & Michael

Hi Everyone,

This update is taking a little longer than our previous updates because we're adding a bit more new stuff than usual (thanks for being patient!). We're getting close! Here's another preview of some of the upcoming new stuff.


Last time we preview the 'click+drag' placement of roads. We are also adding a rectangle mode for click+drag placement to work with fields, orchards, cemeteries, and piers. Here's what it looks like:



We're adding a new viking unit which walks faster than normal vikings and instead of starting fires, they try to find your treasure rooms and steal your gold. If you can kill them before they get away you'll be able to recover the gold:


We'll post again when the update is ready for testing and feedback. In the meantime you can:

• Follow our developer page on Steam
• Chat with us on discord
• Follow on twitter (https://twitter.com/LionShieldGames)
  

Until next time,
-Pete & Michael

Hi Everyone,

We wanted share some of the progress we’re making on the next update, we've got some pretty interesting changes coming up.


As mentioned earlier, we're upgrading core parts of the game to better support AI rival kingdoms and we want to release these upgrades as they become ready. For example, in the last update (Infrastructure II) we upgraded the map generation. In this coming update, we'll be upgrading how armies work. You'll be able to click+drag select them, load them on transport ships, send those ships to a new landmass and unload them (ship art is not final):



We're also introducing click and drag placement for placing certain building types like roads, aqueducts, and castle walls. It especially makes creative mode more fun. Here's a preview of where that's at:

We'll also be extending this to support click+drag for other stuff like designating tiles for chopping.

Lots more interesting stuff in store as well, we'll make another announcement later on when this update is ready for beta testing and feedback!

Until next time,
-Pete & Michael