Player trading was limited, until now, to direct trading between two online players. With the introduction of trade orders, players can now place orders for buying or selling goods, which can be filled by others in time.

The market interface itself was changed a bit, with new buttons related to player to player trading being added.



Players can place (or fulfill) buy or sell orders from the new market order interface.



Trading of modified weapons is also possible, by using the special weapons trading interface.



Trading can happen remotely, for example items can be requested in a player castle and supplied by another player in another castle, making the trade completely safe for both parties, but severe taxes must be paid. Alternatively, the trade can happen on PVP open maps, for much lower taxes with higher risk.

This should give more advanced players a way to dispose of their items while at the same time allowing newer players access to better gear.

For more information, please read the marketplace wiki page.


It is now possible to trade crystal with other players. Direct trades are not allowed (and not possible) since crystal cannot be moved to an inventory. However, players can place buy/sell orders for crystal and can also sell/buy to/from such orders.

The amount of bonus free crystal has been decreased and will be given in 3 steps.
900 crystal (9$ worth) will be given when the first account is created. This account will also receive an extra 2500 crystal when the Desert Storm castle is conquered and 4000 when the Proof of Valor : Knight quest is completed.
Players that have already created multiple accounts will retain their large crystal stores and will be able to sell to others (for gold). They will also be eligible to receive bonus crystal on the first new account they create (as if it would be their first).
Subsequent accounts will not receive bonuses.


Troops can now be visibly selected in the barracks, blacksmith, inventory and transfer windows. Using the right mouse button instead of the left one on a troop, while another one is selected, will have similar effects as if a drag and drop happened. This is useful for lords with large armies and many groups of soldiers.

Some graphics improvements were made for the fog of war, for lower graphic settings.

Minimap icon display order is now set to allow important things to be always visible (like lords and quest markers).

The battle report window has been rearranged to be easier to use and understand.

In this patch, NPC armies have received a leader. This leader will now have skills, depending on how far the player has progressed, of the command/heroic + adventure types. There are some significant consequences to this new feature.
Because the leaders of these NPC entities will give them boosts coming from passive skills, the enemies will be much tougher.
Furthermore, it will be much harder for the player to build an "immune" soldier type, equipped with armor, that will not take damage at all from NPCs. With the skills coming into play, even swords might be able to penetrate armor.
The leader HP, damage, and defensive stats will be based on the members of its group. So if the player finds a high damage group dressed in leather, it is very likely that the leader will also have high damage and be dressed in leather.
Note: NPCs on the main maps will not have leaders, making them much easier to kill now. Also the player that chooses the easiest difficulty for quests will also face leaderless armies. Just a bit of difficulty will add the leader with no skill points and then the harder the difficulty setting the more skills the leader will have.
To compensate for this, the size of the enemy packs has been dramatically reduced, especially on the later tier enemies, and the AI will now be forced to follow similar rules regarding how many groups it can have on the field and how big of a group.
If the group has a huge number of soldiers, but the enemy leader is not skilled enough to deploy them all, then the AI will deploy them in waves, just as a player would.
For this reason, a player that is aggressive on the field may reach the enemy reinforcement lines and attack, even kill them, as they are being deployed. It is very possible that the fight is won without killing everything, if the player manages to clear the battlefield without giving its opponent the chance to deploy backup.
The AI has been improved and will now perform, if possible, flaking attacks.
Archers will now move around the field and kite, or get closer if they are out of range.
NPC lords/leaders will be generally defensive, and not rush into combat, but they will still engage targets if given the chance.
Because of the buffs the heroic leaders give to their armies, it is generally a good idea, sometimes even a necessity, to first kill the enemy lords, even at a high price, to remove these buffs.
Having to deal with fewer but tougher enemies means less drops. Some changes were done to counter this:
For some quests, in particular the ones that require a quest item to start or are part of a chain, will drop significantly more resources. The only exception to this rule is the "Secure the area" quest from the Knight Mission Outpost or from Gargyle, which have high resource drops even if they are not part of a chain.
Most quests will now also contain crates of weapons/armor which are relevant for that level of player development, easing the burden of building weapons.
When a lord reaches the entrance of a quest area (or leaves a quest area and interacts with the entrance again), if the area contains no enemies then an option to "autopickup" the resources inside will be given in the entrance interaction window. If used, the lord will begin the process of collecting all the loot in the area, of all types. The length of this process depends on how large the map is (not the number of resources), and how much of the area was explored. If the entire map was explored already, the process might only last a few seconds, usually around 10, even for very large maps. If however the map was not explored, the process can last much longer, 20-30 minutes or more.
If the process is interrupted, no resources are collected and the process must be restarted as if nothing happened.
This feature allows the player to focus on killing enemies on quest areas and ignore resources, since it will only take around 10 seconds to autopickup once all enemies are killed and the player leaves the area.
Also, "Collect resources" areas that are available from all quest givers can now be farmed by secondary lords that are sent to the entry points of those areas and just ordered to collect the resources.
When the timer reaches 0, all resources will be collected. If the lord inventory overflows, the resources will not be collected but will not be consumed. The lord may deposit the loot in a castle and return for more.
The above mentioned timers will be displayed for the player. If a lord/army is currently picking up resources, an icon will be displayed on the army button on the top bar and a small colored frame will show the progress of the action. If an army is selected, the exact completion time will be displayed on on the main play area.
This feature was also applied to army movement, so the player knows how long a move will take and, can now cancel the move order.
Some problems regarding multi army engagements, or armies joining late, have been discovered and resolved.
Several player experience features were introduced:
As players evolve, conquer more castles and are comfortable with their conquests, they have a tendency to demolish buildings in their home castles (the one on the starting island and on the barbarian island), to reduce season times. This was not intended behavior, as those two castles are designed to act as a backup in case more advanced outposts are overrun by enemy players.
To fix this, the castle season time will now be based on the minimum value of Storm's Howl, Desert Storm and All other castles. So, when the player starts developing Desert Storm, for example, doing this will not make the seasons longer, and once the castle becomes better then Storm's Howl the Storm Howl time will no longer be added. A player with, let's say, a fully developed Desert Storm, will have a 7-10 minute season timer, and a player with a Knight Keep that is fully developed will have a timer of 10-15 minutes (depending on how workers are assigned and building types).
All castles will now show a warning when the blacksmith, mage tower or barracks will be close to their maximum storage of goods, recruits and mana respectively. The player will no longer have to check the castles frequently for overflowing buildings.
All buildings that require workers will now have the allocation bar size match the maximum number of people that can be allocated in that building, ignoring population restraints. If there are not enough people to allocate at a moment in time, then a part of that allocation bar will be blacked out. This gives the player an idea on how close to capacity the building is working.
Lord to lord and lord to castle trade windows have received a couple more buttons with implicit filters. It is possible now for the player to click a button to store all resources (and nothing else) or store soldier weapons (and nothing else), ammo or lord equipment. The "Store all" button is still there and works in the same way, but this is more convenient if, let's say, a player wants to store resources in some castle and weapons in another.
To make the experience more immersive, the decision was taken in the past to only show the map once all the characters on it were instantiated and armed. This had the unfortunate consequence of leading to high "loading" times for players running the game on older machines. In this update, the loading screen will open after all the player characters are loaded and armed, with the NPCs being displayed after the player is presented with the map screen. This will significantly shorten the loading times on the Knight domain and Knight estate maps, but may lead to "invisible" npcs for the first couple of seconds, until they are properly instantiated. This is only a temporary solution.
Quest giver shops will now give arrows in exchange for bows and some experience. The type of arrow and bow involved depend on the quest giver, with higher tier quest givers working with better arrows and bows.
Also, the trade slider will now scale with how many items the player might trade (capped at 1000) based on the favor value. However, if the player is lacking some other resource, part of the slider will be blacked out so that the player clearly sees how far the slider can be dragged. The player can still drag the slider on the black area so that it sees what resource is limiting the trade, so this is purely an informative change.
Resources will now be picked up when the army begins to enter the grid of the resource, not once it reaches the middle of it. This makes the process feel more natural.
Armies will now begin to move immediately on the client, without waiting for server approval. This makes the experience better for players with high latency connections.
Almost all unit buffs of all types (including passive skills) will now be shown next to the unit details panel in battle. The only notable exception to this is the "Antimagic" skill for heroes.
All army leaders, player or otherwise will now have a round unit marker instead of the hexagonal one, making them more obvious on the field.

Players can now become friends in game by using the chat window. Clicking on a player listed in the chat channel will show the options available.
A lord can now ask a friend for help for completing a quest, by entering a quest area and then using the new "Ask for help" option. This can happen straight away, without having to meet on the PVP maps or waiting for later content.
If the friend accepts the request, its lord will be moved to the quest area entrance, and you can proceed from there, either by fighting the monsters individually or...together.

Armies can now merge under a leader. The group leader will have the authority to move the group and engage enemies. It will also be able to remove any army from the group. Any army can also leave on its own at any time. If an group of armies will engage an enemy, they will each deploy and control their own troops. To facilitate own/allied/enemy troops visibility on the field, the marker for each unit was redesigned yet again, with blue markers showing allied troops, green markers showing around your own troops and red markers showing around enemy troops. The experience will e distributed according to the contribution each army has made during the fight.


Having multiple lords can now be very helpful. A player can merge all its lords into a single army to deploy massive amounts of troops on the field or can hold them as backup.

Once a fight begins, it is possible that others "join in" on either side, to either help the attacker or the defender. The process can be repeated over and over, leading to potentially huge battles.

Each commander applies its specific bonuses only to its own troops, of course, but buffs can be cast on friendlies as well.


Players to choose to train their lords as mages can now fully play as a mage. A multitude of magic skills have been added to the skill tree.

The mage "features" will be:

• the ability to apply heavy magic type damage, which ignores armor and evasion
  
• units commanded by mages will receive massive, self regenerating shields
  
• units commanded by mages will be able to clone themselves, sending minions of potentially greater power against the enemy, without risking the life of the soldiers themselves

Choosing this type of training will add penalties to heroic and command skill training, so, it will not be possible to have a hero-wizard or command-wizard.

Overall, the mage career is designed to provide an easy start for players into the world of Lords of the Shattered Kingdom, giving the player time to understand the concepts of combat without risking the life of the lord and without a great need to build weapons and equip soldiers. The only issue will be generating spell scrolls in enough numbers.


The old lists of skills to be trained were removed, together with the three buttons leading to them. Instead, a single button remains which opens the new skill tree interface.
The new screen now shows the 4 skill groups available in game.
Selecting a skill to be trained is now done from this interface just by clicking on the skill. If other skills are required, they will be trained first and a queue will be formed.
Training a skill to a certain level will now require all previous skills to be trained to at least that level.

Adventure skills are listed on the top right corner. These skills are "generic" and can be trained by all the lords without penalty and without incurring any training penalties. Some of the old command skills have been moved here, like the "Logistics" and "Vast armies" skills.

Additionally, there are some new skills:

• Personal Baggage, will increase the number of slots in a lord inventory by 12. The starting number of slots for new lords was decreased. All old lords will receive this skill pre-trained at level 3 when the upgrade is deployed.
  
• Big chests, will increase the amount of resources/ammo (not equipment) that a lord may hold in a single slot. All old lords will receive this skill pre-trained at level 3 when the upgrade is deployed.
  
• Diplomat, this skill will increase the amount of resources, weapons and favor received when completing quests.
  
• Looter, will make quest areas will generate bigger resource piles, for quests accepted by the lord.
  
• Treasure hunter, will make resource piles drop closer to the maximum value of resources. For example, at level 5, if a player picks up a pile of 10-50 gems, it is about 50% likely 50 gems will be picked up from the map.
  
• Large camp, this is basically an advanced logistics skill, allowing for even more reinforcements to follow the army.
  
• Armory, this will allow the lord to carry more weapons into a single slot at any given time.

Command skills have been re-shuffled to give them more meaning and more focus. Penalties to magic experience were added and penalties to heroic experience were made more frequent and severe.
Command lords are still the ones able to wield the biggest forces in the game, making them a very difficult opponent to defeat, but they consume vast amount of resources. Starting the game with a command lord is very very difficult, so they can be worn out fast.
Only 2 new skills were added, and 3 others were changed:

• Armor improvements, basic skill that adds flat HP for soldiers
  
• Weapon training, basic skill that adds flat damage to all weapons.
  
• The Army command skill was changed to also give +2 extra groups of soldiers as reserves (similar to Vast armies, but more effective).
  
• The Military Encampment skill now gives + 15 soldiers per level, instead of the +5 it used to.
  
• Shooting practice now also gives +1 damage and +10% armor penetration per level, making command lords very effective archer users.

Hero lords will still rely on their own strength and equipment to fight of enemies. Their troops will be able to use mixed gear with powerful augmentations.
Easy to start and strong in PVE, the hero class received one new skill and has had a few altered:

• Antimagic, each level will reduce the magic damage taken by the lord by 40%, and troops by 20%. This is multiplicative, not additive, so at level 2, the damage reduction for the lord will be 64% not 80%. At level 5, the lord will have a resitance of about 97% and the troops of about 69%, making this class next to impregnable to enemy magic damage.
  
• Reflexes, bonus reduced from +2 to +1.
  
• Heroic might, effect doubled from +1 damage to +2.
  
• Heroic defenses was reworked to provide more hitpoints depending on the hp, evasion, armor values of used gear.
  
• Heroic protection was reworked to amplify the effect oh hp, evasion and armor values provided by the gear used on soldiers. Together with Heroic defenses, this will make units under the command of a hero have vast amounts of hitpoints.

Mages will be the class that is easiest to play when starting the game. The player will only need to focus on having an ample supply of spell scrolls by assigning workers to mage towers. having 2 mage towers in the starting castle will help.
With enough scrolls, the mage lord will be able to blast its enemies with spells or summon clones that will swamp and destroy them. The old skills remain open and not penalized for all classes. They give the same bonuses as before.
Losing the lord will remove almost all class specific benefits from the player, but then again, there is no need to actually have the lord on the field at all.
In addition, some new class specific skills were added:

• Magic barrier, this is the cornerstone skill for the mage class. All units will receive an automatic and self regenerating shield when deployed. This is cast automatically, so the units are protected even before they get the chance to move, and this also does not need a spell scroll. As opposed to the Shield spell, Magic barrier is weaker but each unit is protected, not only the first one in the stack, effectively increasing the HP of a unit dramatically. When learning this skill, all heroic and command experience received by incurring or taking damage will converted to magic experience.
  
• Wisdom, will increase the number of scrolls that the lord can carry. This is further influenced by the mana required to summon a scroll, making starting scrolls "lighter" and advanced scrolls "heavier".
  
• Inspiration, will increase the number of slots that a lord has to put magic scrolls in.
  
• Robe mastery, will provide spell power based on the "Accuracy" attribute of cloth armor worn by the lord.
  
• Archmage, will increase the number of wizards that may assist the lord during the fight. This will now be capped at 20 with no skill, and training this skill will help increase that limit all the way to 120.
  
• Multicast, will give the lord the ability to consume multiple spell scrolls in order to increase its effective spell power when casting a spell. Without this, most buffs will be basically powerless.
  
• Magic pets, will add flat Spell power to a lord.
  
• Arcane magic, will auto-cast a weaker version of the Shield spell to the current unit whenever Smite or Shield is cast.
  
• Sorcery, will grant a small chance that no spell scrolls are used when a spell is cast.
  
• Wizardry, will limit the consumption of spell power when casting a spell, effectively allowing the lord to cast multiple spells in the same round.
  
• Magic clones, is a staple skill for mages. It will increase the number of clones on the field by 2 for each level and also give a small chance that no spell power is used during the summoning, allowing multiple casts on the same round. Initially, only 1 clone is allowed.
  
• Minions, will allow larger groups of cloned soldiers to be summoned. The initial limit is 20 soldiers per clone.

Only one spell was added, the Magic clone spell, with its "Improved", "Strong" and "Deadly" variants.

This spell is mage class specific. All human soldiers, with the exception of dagger warriors, will be allowed to cast this spell and create a duplicate of themselves. The duplicate will not inherit any buffs of the original, will have 0 armor, 0 evasion and 0 accuracy, will not be affected by any command or heroic skills but will potentially be more numerous. From a group of, let's say, only one soldier, a powerful mage will be able to create a group of 400 cloned soldiers. These clones will move right after the caster, without waiting a round, and before the caster on the next round. Because of their low accuracy/evasion/armor, buffs will have much higher effect on them. Additionally, clones of archers will not use any arrows at all, and will not require the lord to have any in its inventory.
At highest skill level, a mage can summon 11 such 400 man clones on a field, with the ability to resummon if some are killed, making mages ideal fighters in PVE in the late game.
Stronger soldiers will require more spellpower to create a large group of clones. The special, and more advanced variants of the spell, Strong clones and Deadly clones will alter the HP or the Damage of the clones to make them even more fierce.


With the new mage career available, giving mages potentially huge spellpower, the Smite spell has been "capped" at a maximum damage close to 14000 per cast. The damage done by the spell will grow very fast as spellpower is increased, but as the output reaches 7000 the benefits will start to diminish greatelly. Training Magic Expertise and Smite Expertise will alleviate somewhat this effect and will allow for the spell to reach its full potential.


The power of the buffs is now reduced if cast on stronger units. End-game level soldiers will benefit less from buffs, unless the spell caster is very proficient, with high spell power and a good mastery of the spell.
The duration of the buffs is now limited by the total HP pool of the unit they are cast upon, and increased by high spell power and expertise levels.
Debuffs work in a same way, so, hero and command lords will not be able to cripple an enemy with the maim spell, not so severely anyway.


The resource presence on the quest maps has been drastically reduced. It will be harder for the player to procure raw materials just by running regular quests. There are some exceptions. Quests that require an item to start, like "Improve weapons" for example, will still produce large amounts of resources.
Instead, the player will have to focus on collecting the resources that are present on its own maps (starting map and the barbarian lands), or on any of the PVP maps. Resources on the open PVP maps are still abundant.
Training the appropriate gathering skills from the Adventure skill group will greatly enhance the process of raw material collection.

Resources will no longer be collected from a range, but the player will have to move on top of them to collect. However, the game will generate paths ignoring resource collision, allowing the player to move and collect all resources along a path, or completely ignore the resource piles if they are deemed "too low" to bother with.


The level of the buildings was scaled by a factor of 5. Blacksmith level 1 for example is now blacksmith level 5. This was done to ease transitions between building levels, as owning a blacksmith level 2 was to great of a jump from a level 1 blacksmith and required a lot of resource stockpiling. The upgrade will now gradually happen over a period of time. The total construction time has only slightly been increased, but the construction price is now substantially higher.

The blacksmith received an interface similar to the blacksmith, to allow customization of a soldier directly within the blacksmith.

Worker costs for the barracks, blacksmith and mage tower have been changed and substantially increased. Furthermore, working the building at full capacity, or close to that level, will make the workers cost extra, putting a strain on the economy. Wise allocation of the workforce, with the ability to "sprint" some extra resources in times of high demand, will now be a very important factor.
Due to this change, gold has become an even more sought after commodity.


The option to send plunder to "City hall" has been removed. Instead, plunder will be used directly from the building, if present, to construct upgrades, or from the city hall. Plunder can be manually sent only to houses, to generate taxes, or to the blacksmith, to instantly be able to build weapons.

The new leveling formula for buildings will allow higher amounts of plunder to be sent to the buildings, and the conversion rate of plunder into gold has been enhanced. However, houses will generate almost no taxes if no plunder is sent to them. Empires that battle and bring home large amounts of plunder to distribute to the population will have more of the precious gold available.


Human enemies will now have a chance to drop some of their equipment after they are defeated. The equipment will be available for looting after the battle, as items. Lower tier items will drop more frequently, allowing starting players that play well to use only the dropped items, as well as providing high level players with the opportunity to loot items which are otherwise not available via quest giver shop, quests or blacksmith.
This is also meant to counter somewhat the reduction in raw materials available.


All quest giver huts will now have a new "Gather resources" option. As the player runs quests and kills enemies, the area around the quest giver will see an increase in security. The player may choose to trade some of that security for a special hidden area that only contains resources of the type chosen by the player. There are no monsters, just resources. Furthermore, to help the collection process, and allow players that want to be away from the keyboard a bit but not turn off the game, entering such an area will display a counter of collected resources and an estimate of total value. Clicking on the estimate will make the lord automatically run around and collect the resources from the map. When all resources are collected, the lord returns to the starting point.

If a player desires a PVE challenge, in the same "Gather resources" tab of a quest giver hut, there is now the option to secure the area. The player can then select a difficulty ranging from 50% of a regular quest from that quest giver up to... 100 times harder. Even for high level, endgame, players the starting quest giver hut can provide an impossible mission if the setting is turned up too high.
Managing to completely clear the hidden area of all enemies will provide a nifty security boost as well as large amounts of quest giver favor.

In these special regions, the size of the resources piles and the strength of the enemies will increase as the player ventures further from the starting point.

There is no penalty for canceling any of these missions, so feel free to take them and play around with the settings.


Balistas now ignore enemy armor and evasion completely, but do benefit from their own accuracy. The chance of them hitting has been increased, but the whole process is still luck based and no damage estimation is provided by the game.

Catapults have been changed in a similar way, but their chance to hit is dramatically lower then for the balistas. They will be overall less effective in combat against regular units, but will still do better against large groups of enemies.

This is just an intermediate step. Further iterations of the game will see the siege weapons receive special abilities that will have them perform the classic roles in combat, as area of effect / artillery weapons.


Shopping for high level items will now be less tedious, as all trades will now require only one base item, favor and some gold. If the player wants, let's say, 200 top tier "Cloth armor", they need to start with 200 basic "Cloth armor", and of course plenty of gold, and then visit the 4 appropriate quest giver huts to upgrade the items 4 times.
Coupled with the "Secure the area" option under the new "Gather resources" tab, the player will be able to farm favor and then do the desired upgrades without working through low level content and without calculating how many initial items are actually needed for the desired number end items. The price of the upgrades however has been increased.

Some low level trades have been added to high level quest givers, for those players that wish to focus on the Knight Domain and Knight Estate maps.


As the game progresses, the amount of free crystal given out to starting player will decrease. The value has been changed to 7500, which is still 75$ worth of premium currency, or 75 months of free premium account benefits in game.
This number shows our commitment to still add more content and proceed to develop the game further.

The new guides are quickly available here:

1. Creating your main character
   
2. First steps and first quest

If stuck, these guides should help new players get unstuck and going fast.

They also explain the basic elements of the game, so, go check them out!

The graphics in the city view have been changed substantially.

More vegetation was added (grass mainly) and the distance at which the grass was visible has also been increased. Also the randomness of the size of the vegetation was changed.

Additionally, a second light was added to the scene to create a global illumination effect and increase overall illumination of (previously dark) objects.

The fog distance was also shortened.


It was noticed that new players have a hard time getting the lord out of the castle for the first time. Basically, the “Sortie army” icon is not visible enough.

Players did however notice the lord button on the top of the screen and the “Back to map” button on the bottom of the city view. However, clicking on any of those did not actually sortie the lord, so additional action (double clicking on the lord button on the top bar) was needed.

To counter this issue, the top bar button is now changed and it will always sortie/focus the lord even on the first/single click.
Additionally, the “Back to map” button will now open a dialogue if there are lords garrisoned to give the player an additional chance to sortie one of them.

This will have the unfortunate effect that, when a player wants to just quickly check the status of a lord, clicking on the lord icon in the top bar will also switch to the map the lord is on and/or sortie it.

We will study the impact this has on the players and reevaluate the issue if needed.


A very rare summon portal crash with disconnect from server has been spotted and fixed. Only happened when summoning portal from certain areas of large maps into smaller maps.

The warning that another player is looking for your lord inside a quest area is now visible and interractable again.