Note that initially, this patch will be in beta, meaning you need to manually check it out in the steam thing, "properties / betas" something. It will remain in beta until all fires are put out.



I spend some extra time on this video, probably 2, and the editing makes me appear surprisingly coherent. I hope you like it, because the ordeal was very frustrating.

Like usual, I don't really know what I've been doing. I should see a doctor about that, as some reviewers have insinuated. But you'll find the patchnotes I've scribbled down during the journey at the bottom.

What I do know is that this is the last batch of the Early Access period. Let me explain a bit what that means here as well, so that there's little confusion.

To me EA is a label that means:
"Some things are missing, or are a bit broken. Features will be added and removed and experimented with based on your input. As an EA player, you are a beta-tester". EA is like a pre-order for a game with some perks,

Now though, the fundamental systems are in place. They work. The balance is there, even though it will require possibly years to perfect. The only place-holder feature remaining is nobles. It is time. New systems will be added, but they will not be controversial. Things like Ports, sieges, pets, races, rooms, campaigns etc. are things that add to the game and have no negative side effects.
However, these things are plans, they are not promises. If you buy SoS after EA, you should be happy with its current state.

The 1.0 patch will be the fist patch of this nature. For instance, there will be:

• water wheels to boost industry
  
• Farmstead to boost agriculture
  
• More monuments
  
• More and prettier roads
  
• Park room
  
• Police building
  
• Medical research fascility
  
• New compact pasture variation.
  
• Meaningful fortifications.

Note that there's just additions here, without fundamental changes to gameplay. What will change is:
Nobility overhaul, throne room overhaul

Some things I want you to be aware of:

• Price might increase 25 -> 30$, although I haven't decided.
  
• I might team up with a publisher for launch
  
• There most probably will be sales.

This is not to mess with any of you. No $3.99 hat DLCs. It's simply to reach a wider audience, and yes, to make money. If I make more money, not only will I be happy, but I could also scale up the game and increase development pace without personally break myself.

• New event mechanics & new and refined events.
  
• Better and more error resistant saving
  
• Baths consume coal at a predictable rate
  
• Changing room materials do not crash saves
  
• new and improved bonuses and stats for regions
  
• new and improved road and path generation for the world.
  
• new mechanics for world pathing and trade partners.
  
• More state is saved when a room is copied or broken. Such as radius, and logistics settings.
  
• Stage & Arenas now have fixed sizes, but come in different shapes.
  
• Some visual candy for the woodcutter. Increased storage for them.
  
• Mines and refiners have differently sized output storage, bigger in general.
  
• Pastures do not get penalised for their surrounding fence, which will make indoor pastures better.
  
• new sprites for dirt and blood for portraits
  
• new tutorial cut scenes
  
• new titles icons
  
• Barber is more space efficient.
  
• Hospitals need fabric to function, and give 10% recovery. Opiates is optional and gives an extra 40% recovery.
  
• The import depot is now a potential pull source.
  
• New list for room construction projects.
  
• You can now easily swap punishments for captives, they will not go into exile. Also fixed some general weirdness with punishment rates.
  
• Pools now need direct canal access and will suck water out of the system.
  
• Woodcutters, farms, orchards and pastures now operate on base fertility, and will instead get an additive boost from sweet water.
  
• The old boost to knowledge from libraries is scrapped. Instead Libraries have their own separate tech point system.
  
• The tech tree has been remade visually with some new helpful information.
  
• The tech tree has been remade and rebalanced, quite a bit of thought has been put into it: All industries now have the same possible maximum boost at the same cost, making it viable to specialise in whatever.
  
• All industries have different times to shine, mimicking human evolutions. Farms are best at first, then comes mines, refiners and finally workshops that are best late game. In have all the same value.
  
• Army supply depot has been remade. It no longer stores supplies, but instead loads carts depending on demand, and leaves for the edge of the map. Considerable logistics is needed for large armies.
  
• Rooms no longer breaks when they are fully degraded. This is because I can now track monument degrade.
  
• Awe, harmony, etc. is scrapped. Instead all monuments have their own aura. This is so that monuments can be expanded upon.
  
• Some rooms like markets lets subjects register their surroundings.
  
• Pools work the same way as roads in terms of fulfilment.
  
• Improved rendering speed significantly, which will also increase game speed.
  
• New improved work assignments. Plebs will automatically change workplace based on their building preference. There's also the possibility to assign individual rooms to specific races. This is not an absolute tool, more of a hint, but it's working pretty well.
  
• Refactored the region development code. City hall is built with government points, generated by nobles.
  
• Excess world workforce generates denari.
  
• Growable taxes are only shipped on their harvest day.
  
• Admins are repurposed. An admin combats mid/late game overhead that will come creeping. Overhead increases exponentially.
  
• The old noble offices no longer exist. Instead, when you've appointed a noble, you assign them to an office manually. These offices are split between different industries and regional management. The former boosts a limited amount of workers. The latter will result in Gov Points that are used to upgrade regions.
  
• Export depots have spoilage
  
• Events for regions
  
• Ores generate differently on the city map. You get 100% deposits, but only enough for 30 workers without world deposits. This is to make self-sustaining early games possible.
  
• Consumption of edible goods added to the UI.
  
• New world battle mechanics. Better and more stable engine, with more options, such as defending a city with an army on top, assist you allies, and more.
  
• Got rid of the false virus flag.
  
• Enhanced the tutorial.
  
• REgion buildings rebalanced and fixed.
  
• Organization in regions is gone.
  
• Added 'Worth' to regions. It's a function of mineral deposits, fertility and area. It is used by the AI to estimate how much they want the region.
  
• Showing your net worth in the treasury UI.
  
• Showing a factions net worth in their UI.
  
• net worth includes worth of your population as slaves. Each pop is worth their upbringing time x the cheapest food in Syx x 2. This was bugged before with the average price of food, which could be very high.
  
• Fixed broken power calculations, which were a cause of raider and AI strangeness.
  
• Retirement fulfilment based on your total amount of retires.
  
• Threat is renamed into Rivalry, and is not counted towards your trade.
  
• You get penalised bad for failing to protect your vassals.
  
• Vassal tribute slightly decreased. Their armies will attack your enemies though.
  
• You get a trespassing penalty from moving armies in un-allied territory.
  
• If you have an army in a distant faction's territory, they are allowed to declare war on you.
  
• Factions that are at war with you, yet can't reach you, will continue to be at war with you until you make peace.
  
• When signing peace, you sign a peace with all factions you are at war with.
  
• Peace deals are less powerful. To get some cash from it, you seriously need to threaten the AI by having armies in their territory.
  
• Factions must break off their agreements until neutral before they can declare war.
  
• Wars decrease the opinion of your allies over time, along with city loyalty and region loyalty.
  
• Neutral factions will station their armies by your border.
  
• Raiders may cross through any other faction to attack you.
  
• Raiders will demand more unique and varied things.
  
• Raiders will on occasion destroy a trade partner instead of you.
  
• Minimum opinion is needed for trade, pact and ally. This is so you know what opinion is expected to upkeep your stance.
  
• Factions with low opinion, that can not attack themselves will "poison" all other factions against you. Given enough time, war will break out.
  
• Factions that can't reach you, but wants to kill you, can give their armies to a neighbour at war. They can not start wars though, other than "poisoning" your neighbours.
  
• Increased flattery from emissaries.
  
• Fortifications have different and better ways of being destroyed. Enemies can scale the walls if the outer tiles are broken. This means the thickness of walls is only used to station troops on.
  
• Drastically decreased the strength of every structure that is not fortifications, to emphasise their important.
  
• I have a hugely genius plan to improve the importance of fortifications for 1.0. Just wanted to mention that.
  
• It could also be possible to shift the map when you are invaded to the invasion spot. That is, move all buildings away from the invasion spot, which would allow you to make better use of archers and artillery (think about that will you)
  
• Friendly fire from archers reduced.
  
• Trees only block 50% of projectiles, and are no longer a real obstacle.
  
• Fertility changes. Fertility now goes from 0.5-1.2 in bonus. Irrigation goes from 0.5-1.0. So irrigation is mandatory for all maps. You get free irrigation close to natural water places.
  
• Annoying sudden confusion of divs in formation fix.
  
• Div movement 'stuttering' fix.
  
• Defenders on walls get "high ground" advantage in melee combat. This is x2 on grand fortifications. This should give the defender a clear advantage.
  
• Pathing for divisions improved
  
• Intanglement for divisions improved
  
• New setting for ranged units where they will not move to attack targets
  
• UI for battle improved.

Hello. Just want to quickly address a new issue that has popped up. The windows defender warning.

This is a peculiar thing. It started happening long after I had patched V67 for the last time.
I managed to find the offensive files in the game .jar, and remove those, and I thought the problem was solved.

But now it seems to have found something else to complain about.

The particular files it's nagging about is the framework "lwjgl", which is all about rendering things to the screen. This exact copy of it is also in V66, which to my knowledge passes the defender tests. With the files being identical, I can only surmise that this must be something about dates and modification dates.

My own personal theory, which is probably not correct, is that there are variations of SoS floating about on the internet, and some of them contains a virus/malware. The defender then sees all SoS copies of this and that modification date as threats.

I can only say that I have not uploaded anything dangerous. This I can prove with the fact that this started happening long after I had patched V67. (I have patched since to remove the offending malware warning. It was useless files in any case).

So, I'm at the mercy of the whims of windows defender here. Since I have no knowledge of the matter, all I can do is pray. And you can help me out by reporting the file to Microsoft. There should be a button somewhere when you get the warning.

I am 99.99% sure this is a false flag thing. I can't say 100%, because I'm not all knowing in the matter. I'm also not overly worried, since this only affects V67 beta, and I'll look into it seriously for V68.

Also, make sure you let steam verify the installation. Might be that you haven't gotten the latest version, and that this version is fine.

If you have any information about this, of things I can try to do, please let me know.

/Jake

Greetings friends!

Finally some progress from your beloved developer (now with some company).

This patch is special in that it's save-game compatible with V66. However, it will not move to stable, and it will not be translated, as I want to make more of these patches. Note that you can't load a V67 save in V66 though, so keep backups.

It revolves around what is already in the game and making it better and live up to its potential. Some highlights are maintenance, raiders and events.

You can access the game by selecting it as a beta in the steam-thing (V67).

I will now go back to coding V68. This patch should be relatively bug and issue free, although I've probably made a few oopsies here and there that I will fix in the coming days.



Here are the patchnotes. It's not all of my work though, and it might not make sense or have correct spelling.

• I've remade the priorities (priorities visible in the property tab) to make a more dependable schedule for subjects.
  
• All activities a subject can do have a need to them, which can be tempered with through mods and events.
  
• There are now essential services, such as food. And non essential, of which 2 is selected each day and consumed.
  
• A proximity stat that is tracked for each citizen. Is added to production calculations. Measures the time they're doing other things than actually working while working, such as hauling goods. Good for optimising industries.
  
• Onx pasture produce more cotton
  
• Special amount setting for warehouses, lets you use one crate with a specific capacity. Needed for the new maintenance overhaul.
  
• Both the new setting and pull orders are now copied when pasting a warehouse.
  
• Fulfilment formula made a lot easier for early game, and harder for late.
  
• Maintenance is now a science instead of something flimsy. There are strict rules, and as such the cost can be estimated. I've added the estimates to the UI where they are needed. Maintenance will now be a much bigger factor in your economy.
  
• Retirement age made more important, and set it to start at half. It will slowly make its way to whatever you set as the target, so you hopefully can't cheese it.
  
• Services fulfilment rebalanced. More diminishing returns.
  
• Some changes to fishery deep sea access.
  
• Upgrades available for monuments with fulfillment in regards to it.
  
• Torch have upgrades.
  
• New upgrade placer tool.
  
• Better saved blueprint UI and functionality.
  
• Guard post has upgrades
  
• Light removes snow
  
• Encyclopedia has been redone. Some functionality added.
  
• Nursery UI facelift
  
• Tourism fixes. Increased amount and money from tourism. Added more races.
  
• Added diplomatic penalty for disallowing tourists.
  
• Changed disease. Disease can be avoided with near infinite tech upgrades late game. Will later be replaced by a medical research facility.
  
• Crimes should also increase as you grow indefinitely, but has tech to offset it. Will later be replaced by police buildings.
  
• New revolutionary event mechanics. Makes it easy to add many events, and have them affect the game. Over 100 events added.
  
• Fixes of Dondorian and Cretonain portraits.
  
• New biographies for subjects, deeply tied to traits, and custom for races.
  
• The wishes of subjects are much more colourful and race specific.
  
• Religion conversion now works for both shrines and temples.
  
• Many more rooms now have more upgrade stages, and the upgrades are expensive to maintain.
  
• Pastures now have useless cubs for 6 days. Slaughter all output is increased though.
  
• Transports have radius, increased capacity, and can be loaded when they're away.
  
• Food and drink production increase, but higher food/drink rations possible. You only get this bonus if rations are > 1. Rations can now be fractions.
  
• Removed water need for baths. (I'm not sure what I/you want. Either water should play a substantial role in city planning, or just for agriculture)
  
• New raider mechanics
  
• - a fixed number of raider groups are pre-spawned and known from the start.
  
• - these come in different powers
  
• - only a span of raiders are interested in you at any given stage of the game.
  
• - This span are the ones that can pose a challenge to you, and the ones that think you are worthwhile.
  
• - The system is self-balancing, sort of like a ladder that you climb with your wealth. If the raids are too hard, they will grab your stuff and bump you down the ladder. If it's too easy, you'll climb the ladder.
  
• - start difficulty determines the offset of the span you are currently in.
  
• - raiders can be killed, either by attacking them manually, or defeating them in an invasion.
  
• - you get a bounty for killing raiders.
  
• - a killed-off raider can be respawned. If all raiders are killed, a new raider will spawn every 10 years, so that's the max rate. Don't want it to feel endless, but also don't want to completely kill the system.
  
• - raiders will spawn like in V66, or at the edge of your realm as a rebel army.
  
• Made some changes to borderless window creation. Let me know if I broke / fixed something.
  
• Added army supply consumption to tooltips.
  
• Better room ordering in lists.
  
• Room name based on amount of room, not iteration of room.
  
• Special floors for rooms override by race. For instance Garthimi have their organic floors for them. This can be implemented for every race.
  
• Auto immigration only counts adults.
  
• Nurseries have local limits.
  
• Toggle for automatic roads underneath benches etc.
  
• Better on-hover on the world map.
  
• Culvert overlay
  
• Room build overview tweaks
  
• Archery speed tech
  
• Cobblestone repainted
  
• Better search for bottom panel
  
• Indicator for planning mode
  
• Historic data for available technology points
  
• Extra cost when constructing room more prominent.
  
• Indoor pastures gate placement improved.
  
• Some indoctrination/education changes.
  
• Saved bluprints work on unfinished rooms.
  
• Auto immigration has numerical input.
  
• Minimum treasury setting for imports
  
• Room problem overlay
  
• Tilapi happy in slaver and cannibal
  
• Janitor overlay show all combined radiuses.
  
• Indoor pastures get boost in mountains.
  
• Warehouses start with 100% radius.
  
• toggle all select for pull orders
  
• Fill tool improvements
  
• Woodcutter items can be placed on trees.
  
• Moved tooltip when managing equipment of divisions.
  
• reconstructing rooms and cancelling rebuilds them instantly.
  
• Hotspots left click to navigate, right to edit.
  
• Overlays remove the hard shadows in mountains.
  
• Resolution UI problems.
  
• Trade price added to resource tooltip.
  
• minimap settings are saved.
  
• Added equipped tool consumption to resource tooltip.
  
• Made minimap entity coloring a bit better.
  
• Race filter for minimap
  
• A bit less forest generated on the world map.
  
• Mural of the main menu completed.
  
• Service proximity is now impossible to get to 100%. But the upside is you can always find a better layout for your city.
  
• Much more accurate workload values.
  
• Temporary loyalty boost when invaded or when there is an epidemic.
  
• Experience bonuses for industries rebalanced.
  
• All industries construction materials have been balanced to be uniform, and prevent early upgrades (through the maintenance cost).
  
• New icons here and there.
  
• Trade tariff increased.
  
• Inflation increased.
  
• the two above might decrease again once I fix more world mechanics.
  
• Roundness change. Now both roundness and squareness exist. Humans like both, so you need a good 50:50 ratio for it. This is not registered in rooms.
  
• New Revolutionary trading system. Lets you export machinery with the same profits as grain if your trade partners are big enough. Also affects wood prices when trading furniture.
  
• Accidents more rare, and more severe.
  
• Livestock is now a recipe in all pastures, and can be traded normally.
  
• some logistics QoL
  
• Fixed world fortifications
  
• snow and ice removed when the weather setting is off.
  
• 
  
• Contributions
  
• Roberto Díaz Pérez - more and better place types.
  
• Vanir - lots of the above
  
• Krastor - lots of the visuals above

Esteemed Despots,

What a ride, and what a toll on my delicate nerves. A beta release + the influx of a huge number of new players, a poor logistics implementation, etc. That was a bad combination. But now it's over, the bugs have been squashed, strange choices remedied, oddities swept in under the carpet. Stable V66 is now released, praise be the Astari.

that means that the default branch on steam will be updated to V66, and your V65 saves will not work. To continue playing those, you must manually check out V65 as a beta in the steam client.

As always, I planned for V66 to be perfect, however under scrutiny, many issues has been revealed. That means that I will continue to patch the game with a few more mini-versions. The gamechanger here is that I will not break saves, I will just rebalance things. And the patches will be smaller, more frequent and narrower in scope. The rough plan is this:

• Make maintenance great again and make sure upgrades to buildings is not a one-time cost for the player.
  
• Make services more costly if maintenance isn't enough, especially the late game ones.
  
• General love to fulfilment modifiers and race diversity.
  
• Admin to replace organization. Still focus on < 12 region kingdoms. Law and health rework in order to make this the primary late-game pushback, but still give you tools to mitigate them.
  
• Further work on the difficulty progression, by making early game more forgiving, and increase difficulty at higher populations.

After a lot of work, I feel that the basic diplomacy is stable. That means I can add layers to it, to make it more fun, immersive and engaging. I want “stories” generated through your journey, and make your AI counterparts feel alive. There's also a problem with opinion and the threat modifier. The plan is to sort of hide this modifier, so that you'll be under the impression that they love you, but as you grow, you'll be targeted for backstabbing. Also make the traits of the rulers more impactful, so that you'll use diplomacy more. I can also work with adaptive difficulty, trying to figure out how much pushback to give you for the best experience.

Fix movement, friendly fire, etc. Balance the actual fighting. I'm still bent on making battles be about breaking the enemy, not killing them as in most Hollywood inspired games. My best total war experience comes from a mod called “Rome total realism”, which had just that. I don't want it to be about your clicking skills, I want it to be about your tactical planning skills.

I'm sure there will be 1-2 more of these mini-versions.

I also have a guy helping me in my effort and to organize stuff. His username is Vanir, and so far, he's doing one heck of a job. Right now he's scouring suggestions from all corners of the world, which will all be considered. And he's a machine when it comes to testing. I'll also put him on balancing, we will see if he's up to snuff.

As you see, 1.0 is still a bit illusive, but I'm thinking it should probably be Q1 of 2025. A reminder is that 1.0 will contain the major feature of proper nobilities and their rooms, the throne room, and professional soldiers parading the streets. The main idea behind nobles is to tap into that “story telling” mechanics that are in other games. I'm still debating with myself and others, if we really want this, or if it will just be an annoyance, as you try to optimize your city. We will see. I've also saved a bunch of low-hanging fruit in terms of content.

Final note, I want to thank everyone for testing the beta, which is 98% of all players. Just please be thoughtful that in the beta of and EA title, made by a solo fool in his garage, there is bound to be bugs, strange features and balance issues. If you find something that annoys you, chances are it's not intended to be that way. But I have no idea of knowing unless you let me know how you feel.

The time has come. It is time for a new of my world-renowned dev-log videos. I've got so much to say, yet so little time, and so much confusion.

Beta is now released. You check out the beta manually from the steam client, or your other store's clients. This beta is in a good state, but there might still be bugs I need to fix, and rebalancing, so it might be a bumpy ride. It will also be updated, sometimes several times per day. So if you're not into that, wait for the official stable release, else, I am very grateful to you who give it a shot.

You got the patch notes in the previous announcements, so instead I'll talk a bit about this nice little marketing push I've received.

As you know there was a 20% sale, and a huge video by Seeth - the youtuber. SoS made it to the top 20 worldwide on Steam, and #4 on another store who's name shall not be mentioned. This increased sales indeed. I basically made 6 months normal revenue in 24h. I'm not gloating, I just think some of you might be genuinely interested. It didn't stay in the top very long though, sadly. I planned on releasing V66 along with it, to create extra buzz, but there were too many bugs. I was defeated.

All in all, I'm very happy with it, and I might do sales in the future, since the response has only been positive. And I'm confident 1.0 will be a good.

It's about time I divert my attention from my codebase, and try and explain myself as best I can.

First of all, I want to inform you that the game will be on sale the first time ever (and maybe last), from today to April 29th. Personally, I would have loved to skip sales all together, but SoS strangely isn't the top seller of the decade, so I want to try this once and see what it brings. The reason I chose to do so now, is that I have some good things happening all at once. Firstly, the renowned youtuber Sseth is releasing a SoS video today, and the digital stores promised to give me some extra exposure. We will see what it brings, I'll keep you posted.



Secondly, I'm not very active in the steam forums, as you might have noticed. This is simply because it eats a lot of my time, and I need to focus when I'm making new patches. I will be back when V66 is done, if you promise to be nice. The steam boards have degenerated a bit, I think we can all agree, as is expected as the game grows. The good old days are in the past.
If you want nearly daily rambles, I cordially invite you to the discord, where I post progress more regularly, and open to chats.
Discord Link

Thirdly, about V66. V66 is very special to me. It is most probably the patch before 1.0, and it's focused on polish and stability. I have not drastically altered anything. And I've made a special save thing, so maybe it will even be compatible with 1.0. Focus has been on mid-late game, mainly about getting the AI factions to behave, and present challenges from 1k population. I've been good with patch notes this time, so I'll include them here. In a perfect world, I would release the beta today, but I'm trying to come up with all kinds of distractions to keep me from playtesting, which I'm not too fond of, not sure why. But it should be released within a week, along with one of my astounding video logs.

What 1.0 means is that the game is in a state I'm happy with. It does not mean that development will stop, just focus will be shifted more towards polish and stability and balance. No new ground-breaking that breaks all saves. From 1.0 and forward, all saves and mods will be compatible. And when I'm done doing that, maybe 6 months from then, I will probably start working on an expansion pack.

Forgive my misspellings and other deficiencies.

• Campaign engine.
  
• The tutorial converted into a campaign.
  
• Selectable scripts when generating random game.
  
• Different "scenario" options. A scenario is a save that you can distribute with mods. Battles for instance.
  
• Trait system remade and reworked to work both or royals and subjects.
  
• Military equipment has efficiency based on race, added as a modding request. I've added some malus to the Argonosh.
  
• All kinds of racism is now connected in the world and your city, and other factions.
  
• Save resilience. Saves should now be able to be opened with different mod configurations, if the mods are not too exotic. Custom maps also have a good chance to work all the way to 1.0 as well.
  
• 14 new sountracks. The soundtrack is now complete.
  
• A nifty little property saver that saves for instance wall-type in room construction to your profile. Can be used to save many such QoL, suggestions are welcome.
  
• New menu background
  
• New Titles: The Undefeated, The Incompetent, The Merciful, The Merciless, The Wise, The Bureaucrat, The Clumsy, The Gourmand, The Entertainer, The Drunkard, The Caretaker, The Pleasurer, The Uniter

• Admin and knowledge now have sticky production, meaning values will not swing back and forth during the day.
  
• Accidents are back. Also some panic when accidents occur.
  
• Pimped the Embassy. Made it more space efficient. It now needs jewellery and fabric, although it's optional as the admin.
  
• Sick and injured people no longer counts as workforce, enabling you to control work priorities properly.
  
• Soldier fulfilment based on total number of soldiers, not per race.
  
• Grave mourners now stand beside the grave.
  
• Market rooms keep their settings when copied.
  
• Pasture output tiles capacity increased.
  
• Overtime now has significant penalty to happiness.
  
• Water pumps can now only be placed on ground water. You must plan for the canals.
  
• Data for resources and credits are now per day instead of per season.
  
• Resource piles have much greater capacity, reducing their amount and potential lag if the map becomes filled with them.
  
• Rooms listed in construction order
  
• removed entrance check when building rooms, allowing you to build in mountains.
  
• Saved blueprint now moved to the construction screen of individual rooms. Saved blueprints made more robust.
  
• Made some small changes to the bottom menu. I know you don't like this, but it's for the better. Some small changes might occur next patch, but after, I'm done.
  
• Food preference improved. You'll get a slight value when there is one out of many.
  
• Service overlays now better.
  
• Entertainment buildings keep better count of available services.
  
• Services such as food stall and restaurant now count to fulfilment by themselves. Restaurants are on average used ever 8th food stall day.
  
• Tree regrowth rate halved, and woodcutter production boosted.
  
• Auto employ removed from crafting buildings.
  
• More road types, and they look better.
  
• Road access remade. Now remade into preference, which works the same as the building materials.
  
• Hospitals now offer fulfilment to citizens.
  
• Multiple drink types. I only have two. Tavern has been pimped, and has an upgrade. Drink preference works just as food preference.
  
• Massage parlour added. What happens in there is up to everyone's imagination. In practise, it is just another service, but reduces health slightly.
  
• New room "stockade" is a holding place for prisoners. It is dirt cheap, and it is not a punishment. Prisons are now purely a punishment.
  
• Law is remade, so it starts at full fulfilment, then climbs down as crime starts appearing.
  
• Added escape events to stockades and prisons.
  
• Work priorities and the assignment mechanics got some love, and now work better, even when priority is 0.
  
• -Logistics remake-
  
• Two new major things to know about. Fetch and deliver orders. These are set per room. They are similar to the old "empty to" functionality.
  
• The warehouse have 4 available fetch orders. In addition, it also has a toggle for "regular fetch", and a true store function. It also has a limit that decides how much other storage fetchers may fetch from it.
  
• The hauler has the same things, but only two fetch orders.
  
• The old fetch mechanics is thus retired. Warehouses will only grab stuff from the ground and from production rooms, if no fetch orders are issued.
  
• Logistics are nerfed a bit. They have less radius, and less carry capacity. The carry capacity is based on race and can be upgraded. Garthimi sucks, Dondorian and Cretonian excel.
  
• Transports have 4 delivery orders available. Their capacity is now 60, and they will depart more regularity. Their speed is slower than a regular pleb, but they obviously carry a lot more. They are good for moving big numbers of resources. For few numbers, a warehouse will do.
  
• Export depots and military supply depots work similarly to warehouses, in that they grab resources on the ground, and also have pull orders.
  
• The "export when over" is thus scrapped and replaced by the power of the pull orders.
  
• The army supply works like a warehouse with 2 fetch orders available.
  
• Exposure tweaks. You must now provide wells and hearths all over the city, as everyone will become cold and hot. Clothes will only decrease the frequency of getting cold/hot, thus making the city more efficient.
  
• Divisions when sent out to an army will take some time to return.
  
• Option to send out divisions even if they're not fully trained.
  
• Raids pimped up. They no longer spawn an army, they attack directly. You have a chance to fight them on the field.
  
• Raid chance is reworked. Now based on riches (resources, slaves and credits) and your military power. Also your military reputation.
  
• Raids no longer scale as you defeat them until you're faced with impossible odds. Instead they are randomized each time.
  
• Raiders have a captain and a name.
  
• There are a number of unconditional raids added that you can't avoid.
  
• Roundness is now an addative value.
  
• Made some visual changes to walls.
  
• Some 20+ techs added and tech tree restructured.
  
• Refined how slave submission works.

• Generation now tries to base the size of the region on capacity, meaning larger, infertile regions.
  
• Roads made a bit more pronounced.
  
• Some color and sprite changes.
  
• Editor. To share maps you make, make a mod and put the save from the editor into custom folder.
  
• Havens now have lower requirements in order to join you. More will join if you exceed the requirements though.
  
• Build points removed. World buildings rebalanced.
  
• "Organisation" a new world thing and is based on how much workforce you have allocated. Replaces distance, although distance is still there.
  
• Organisation lets you either expand though upgrades or through region amounts.
  
• Building buildings now has a new flow. Loyalty and health is based on the population target, not current population. Enables you to know exactly what to build.
  
• Building buildings is done in bulk that lets you experiment with different configurations without spending money.
  
• Prosecution in you capitol also affects regional happiness.
  
• Representation of species in your capitol affects regional happiness.
  
• Representation of nobles in your capitol affects regional happiness.
  
• Prices have been fixed all over, and is now derived from the prices of goods. For instance slaves cost their food and upkeep during breeding, and mercenaries their equipment and training.
  
• Region generation improved.
  
• Battle stats for armies and factions. Military reputation based on your prowess. Affects AI factions and in-city stats.
  
• Mercenary rework. Scales with your size, and have a long cooldown when disbanded, and low replenishment. Also correctly prices, more than it will cost you to train your own.
  
• Raid stance added for army. Allows you to get slaves and resources.
  
• Artillery is now an army supply.
  
• Only rations and clothes are mandatory, drinks improve morale.

• Opinion "threat" now reworked. Based on population vs Ai's population, meaning small states will hate you more/faster. Some additional stats added.
  
• UI of opinion enhanced.
  
• Reworked emmisaries. Now a diplomatic point system. Points allocated will stick to the court when someone dies. Better UI for this.
  
• New "sabotage" diplomacy option in order to get a faction to attack you without getting a betrayal penalty.
  
• Betrayal added. If you act like a jerk, you will be severely punished by all factions.
  
• Factions will not attack you simple because they do not like you. They will make sure they can beat you in auto resolve.
  
• Factions with low opinion will secretly convince other factions to attack you with time.
  
• New diplomatic options available:
  
• Alliance -> a military alliance, you will share enemies. You can get a cheap alliance by helping someone out that is at war.
  
• Colleague -> a non aggression pact. Promise to not attack each other.
  
• Vassal -> become, or make a vassal. A vassal pays a yearly tribute to its overlord, and is protected by it. As an overlord, you can pick what kind of tribute you want, and as a vassal, you'll pay 15% of your shit each year.
  
• Protector -> above reversed
  
• Join Federation -> Unite. Pay a hefty sum to have a faction join yours without bloodshed.
  
• New trait system for royalties. Shapes a unique personality that has a large impact on your relations. Hopefully this will prompt you to assassinate more.
  
• All factions now has an army. These armies grows slightly as you expand.
  
• Initial generation of factions makes sure you will have nice progression. The neighbouring factions are immune to events, and will stay there until you're ready to expand.
  
• Slave trade.
  
• War diplomacy fixes.
  
• The betray system hopefully fixes exploits, such as selling a region and then attacking it shortly after.
  
• Opinion has less impact on trade prices.

• Reworked the sound engine.
  
• Added multiple new sounds in theory, but I haven't added much of the actual sounds.
  
• Sounds that you can be added by modding:
  
• -Room ambiance
  
• -Room on click
  
• Furthermore, there will be a variety of sounds coming from the subjects themselves, but I'm saving these until after 1.0, as it will not affect saves.
  

• Some changes to scripts. Now there are selectable scripts, and forced scripts. Forced scripts can be adding ui tools or whatnot, selectable is a traditional script. Scripts are selected on a new random game.
  

It is here!

This version can now be checked out as beta in the steam client. Right click the game and there should be something like "betas" or "properties -> betas".



Patchnotes:

• WORLD
  
• Overall the world has been overhauled to 1.0 status. Lots of smaller adjustments.
  
• Armies are now reinforced by garrisons and other armies nearby in an intelligent way.
  
• Better auto resolve based on damage types.
  
• Better army composition for the AI.
  
• Most UI reworked. Made sure it fits on a 1200x720 screen.
  
• Improvements to FOW and minimap FOW and highlighting.
  
• Lots of new functionality around trade.
  
• Improved world buildings on the map. Each race have specific ones.
  
• Improved neighbour factions spawning
  
• Mineral deposits rework. All deposits available in any region and in any city. The amount of deposits dictate the efficiency of the mines. Settlement will be generated with the same quantity of ores. The ore nodes will increase quality of the nodes.
  
• Epidemic events on the world map.
  
• NPC factions communication events.
  
• All UI and mechanics concerning army management and recruitment polished.
  
• The world construction has been completely revamped with new mechanics and buildings to choose from.
  
• 
  
• CITY
  
• Generating initial roads according to the world roads.
  
• Generating small rivers according to the world map.
  
• Equally large mineral patches will be generated (about 1500 workers each) on every city. The richness of the spots is determined by what world location you pick.
  
• new Main UI
  
• Historic data for equipment wear and initial equip.
  
• Full control over house assignments.
  
• Brawls still happen now and then (prevented by segregation of hateful species with the new home settings). Big brawls are now an event that happens with low fulfilment.
  
• Army recruitment UI redone. Bulk edit of divisions, and reordering. More info on whats going on.
  
• Strangeness regarding training of different battle types fixed. A recruit can train at any facility for basic training, and will then start specialising.
  
• Warehouses are now upgradable for more space and less degrade. Visually a bit more exciting.
  
• Overtime command now gives flat bonuses. The actual work hours are not affected, they just work more efficiently.
  
• Work time is now "elastic" in order to let the peeps travel farther away services without affecting production. When a peep has been away in the arena, he will work extra shifts afterwards to compensate.
  
• Arenas now have workers istead of using prisoners. Death in the arena is an optional punishment form.
  
• Arenas are now renamed "fighting pits" and are available early. The size option does not affect quality.
  
• A new Grand arena building is available late game.
  
• Eatery renamed food stall, and look much prettier. Canteens -> restaurants, and I've increased coal consumption and work time for it! The idea here is that while it's theoretically possible to give everyone restaurant access, you shouldn't, you should use in conjunction with food stalls.
  
• Roundness and squareness now replaced with only roundness, and it's not tied to rooms, it's tied to the walls of your whole city, including mountains. Added roundness liking to Garthimi.
  
• Hearths no longer require wood to be brought to them. Instead they cost a lot of wood to contruct and maintain.
  
• Added some terrain decorations.
  
• Made the mineral deposits a bit more visually appealing.
  
• Shrines to all gods added. Shrines is your everyday religious fix. Shrine have a tiny radius. Temples can serve more people and have a much wider radius.
  
• All services are now a bit more tolerable for being full. A subject will try to find a vacant service several times before they mark it as unavailable.
  
• Made some changes to the workload calculator, hopefully giving you more accurate results.
  
• Entry points to your city is now fixed and mirror how your city is connected to roads on the world map. You must keep these points open, or receive negative consequences.
  
• Invasions can happen even if the entry points are closed. Invasions will find a suitable area to spawn on. They will not spawn on places that can't be reached from the world map, like in a mountain, but they are not tied to entry points, so you can't just fortify those. More will be done, I plan on keeping track of where enemies attack, and your fortifications in the area, so that they don't walk into kill boxes. If you go all in on fortifications and artillery, I plan to have them simply besiege you until you die.
  
• Mountains are now "soft" around the edges, so that you can initially tunnel quicker, however tunnelling will be slower the farther into the mountain you dig.
  
• Clearing other terrain stuff can be a bit slower, but yields more resources.
  
• Fixed so that you can always get 1 of each race through immigration, unless you're prosecuting them.
  
• Added more hate and racism :). This will make sure the world map is less diverse, with more regions oppressing other races. I also increased the importance of the "other" fulfilment thing, as well as gave x2 expectancy to your non-starting race.
  
• The liking of other species is now an absolute value 0-1. If A likes B with 0.5, they will only tolerate having 0.5 of that species relative to their own population.
  
• Workshops and refiners now have fixed amount of workers that are guaranteed to have something to do if raw materials exist.
  
• Daily production/consumption UI for rooms.
  
• Tools are now tied to the rooms they are used in, and not equipped.
  
• Pastures have an efficiency item, and get a small boost from sweet water access.
  
• Consumption of resources when producing also apply to bonuses, meaning when you boost something by x2, its consumption is also boosted by x2.
  
• Lowered all raw material production rates. (It's not harder, just more balanced).
  
• Animals on the map are now hunted manually.
  
• Hunter rooms are now a perpetual source of meat, though limited to very few employees.
  
• New building type added. The "hut". What's special about this is that it's free, but take a long time to build. Amevias like it.
  
• A new food panel, that gives you daily production and detailed info about food.
  
• Smallest housing option removed. The other houses have had their capacity increased by 125%
  
• Nurseries now unlock with you population. Maximum children is based on the population of the race in question.
  
• 
  
• 
  
• WATER
  
• Water table scrapped
  
• Instead there is ground water in both sweet and salty variants. You can terraform these areas as you're used to. These areas cover the generated natural water on the map + 8 tiles surrounding it.
  
• New water pumping system. You now need to build water pumps to generate water pressure that you can channel into canals. The pumps stack their pressure. these are manned by workers, although you'll need less as you upgrade them. You get the best result by placing the pumps close to sweet ground water.
  
• Every map is generated with at least 1 small body of water.
  
• To channel water through as structure you can use a drain.
  
• The canals emit sweet water, and increases fertility.
  
• Where there is sweet water access you can place different kinds of pools. These are moddable, I've added moats, ponds and pools to vanilla.
  
• Wells no longer emit sweet water, but can be placed anywhere.
  
• Bathhouses need access to sweet water to function optimally. Their pools look a bit better.
  
• Deep water can now not be completely removed. you can create a pathway through it, and place roads on that, and it will mimic a bridge. You can also remove the pathway.
  
• Skinny dipping access gets you a small fulfillment bonus.
  
• Fish amounts on the map is scrapped.
  
• Instead, you get a fixed, 1 worker/64 tiles in your fisheries.
  
• But, you get a lot of fish from new "deep water fishing spots" that will litter the edge of the sweet water tiles that's adjacent to deep water. These will send out boats to sea to fish.
  
• Salt water gets more of these tiles, since it has crap fertility.
  
• Just wood needed for fishery, they now have an upgrade.
  
• Indoor farms get a small boost to fertility from sweet water access.
  
• 
  
• BUGS
  
• All bugs reported fixed. Noteworthy:
  
• The Cannibal now produces resources as it should.
  
• Fixed broken camps (Cantor, Argonosh).
  
• 
  
• BATTLE
  
• Military Training and Training rooms now moddable. Each room has its own training stat and bonus. Each stat has its own set of bonuses. Divisions will be populated in a smart manner, best candidate first.
  
• Added new damage and armour types. Blunt, Pierce, slash
  
• New division power calculations + advanced auto resolve calculations.
  
• Added new battle equipment: short sword, long sword, warhammer, plate armour, leather armour and shields.
  
• I've rebuilt and rebalanced everything regarding battles. It is now much better, but far from perfect. It is important that you give me test cases where the AI is acting weirdly. Save before a battle, and if possible before the oddities occur.
  
• 
  
• MISC
  
• 4 new sound tracks
  
• new day-night cycle, kinder to the eyes.
  
• New lock and unlock mechanics for everything, which makes the possibilities of the tech tree much more interesting and increases modability. For modders, full syntax examples should be in the tech files. Also works on titles and player levels and world buildings.
  
• Improved fonts, especially for non-latin languages.
  
• Visually improved main menu.
  
• New icons for everything. Improved icon rendering.
  
• Increased maximum resource types from 64 to 128. It can be increased further without hassle, but I think 128 will be enough for modders.
  
• New and improved titles, totalling 20. Titles have a 1:1 relationship to steam achievements.
  
• Steam achievements are now automatically updated when starting and exiting the game.
  
• Timed super screenshots
  
• Launcher is now translatable, with a new look, and a live language select.
  
• Quarter speed added by double tapping 1x speed
  
• Fixed the "non shading" option.
  
• 
  
• MODDING
  
• First off, I've ruined a lot for current mods, and I apologise for this. I will most probably not do such a big change as this again, it is close to 1.0.
  
• The biggest thing is the new bonus system and unlock. It is much more versatile and broader, but has a different syntax.
  
• Added optional flag "AI_BUILDS" to world buildings.
  
• Made world generation heightmaps able to have any size (256px is the current world size) for better precision.
  
• Added default liking for other species.
  
• Better moddability for ranged weapons.
  
• Moddable damage and armour types
  
• All projectiles are now moddable, one can mod the damage done, velocity, etc. Added max arch angle as well (for muskets and cannons).
  
• Services are now tied to needs, and needs are moddable. This means that you can add a service and tie it any existing or new need you come up with. A physician can be reskinned and repurposed to deal with some other need for instance, very similar to industries, where you can change input/output.
  
• Water pool buildings available to be modded.
  
• Moddable city map size
  
• 
  
• NOTES
  
• Brawls can not be a crime in the game. A crime needs an intent, while brawls are a sporadic thing, and will not work in the current law system. We will have to live with them going unpunished.
  
• Fishing boats can indeed bump around in an ugly fashion in your fisheries if you build these in weird shapes. Please let me know.

My dear despots. Apologies for the radio silence. I have not checked the steam boards for a month, because I've been spending all my time on programming, and while doing so I've become more and more anxious about coming here. Of course I've been available on email and on the discord.

I'm now half-way through the next update V65, code name “water”. In reality it is more about polish, getting as many mechanics into a 1.0 state as possible.

So far each update has been about adding some new mechanics, while trying to maintain the game in some kind of playable state, but spending as little time as possible on balance and polish. Now, focus has shifted to refinement and making the mechanics that are in, good as a whole. I am happy with the raw potential the game now has.

I have now finished up the overworld mechanics into a state that I wished would have been in V64. But there was no time, (and it's always good to let things mature and collect feedback). UI reconstruction has been the focus, so that you can truly use all the mechanics present regarding AI faction management and building your realm. Manual trade agreements have been re-added. Trade in general has been the secret to expansion for very long, mostly because it's a semi-exploit. I'm now deferring trade to a later stage, and the game will play like a classic colony sim for the first part. I've completely remade the world buildings to make it more interesting and have a sense of progression. There are now many more “Special” buildings that upgrade your kingdom as a whole, meaning the more regions you have, the more specialization, and the greater the kingdom as a whole. The AI aggressiveness will of course scale according to that.

The AI also communicates with you. From time to time they will send proposals, such as trade agreements, but also requests and gifts. For instance, a disgruntled king might demand of you to give up a region or face their armies.

As for the city-builder, I'm now getting started on that part, and I have big changes in mind. For instance, I will separate services such as wells and baths, so that they will use both. Wells will have a small radius while the bath will have a huge one. That will force you to build a city centre as the city grows, and allow final results to look more organic. I will also separate the entertainment building such as the arena into “fighting pits” and Colosseum. Fighting pits you will have to spread out everywhere in your city, while a single Colosseum covers mostly your whole city. Similar to this, I'm planning shrines vs temples. Food stalls (replacing eatery) vs restaurants (replacing canteen). I also want a new building “bazaar” with all equipment and furniture for you citizens. Housing will have more precise settings, allowing you to easily set up districts that do not burn down in brawls.

As for the balance, I want a streamlined experience that lets you set your own pace and difficulty. If you want a cosy little city-builder, then you can have it by expanding carefully and slowly, and if you want a challenge worthy of 100s of hours, then you must expand and face the challenges.

As for the water, I'll keep it simple. A bridge will be needed to clear deep water. You will be able to remove/add shallow water around the natural bodies of water. For irrigation, you will need a water pump, and connect canals to it. It will in other words cost you some manpower. Water table will be scrapped, but settling close to water will be equally important.

Visually, I'm happy to announce that I've gotten help from a very talented artist, and all the icons of the game have ben redrawn to perfection.

I will also dive into battle balance this time around, and make sure its well balanced. Speaking of which, I've added a very moddable equipment system with different kinds of damage and protection. I have added slash, blunt and pierce damage types, with equipment to go with it. I will leave “magic” to the modding community.

release of the game is approaching. Apart from the 1.0 quality of existing features, I still have the following to add:

• nobles (will include a whole set of posh buildings)
  
• military (fix AI issues on the battlefield) Perhaps add commanders to divisions, more training options, royal guard)
  
• Tutorial
  
• Campaign
  
• Zombies
  
• Atrifacts
  
• Sound overhaul

There are a pile of suggestions on top of this, and I know many of you might be waiting for this or for that. Boats and harbours for instance. Thing is, I do agree that the game would be better with boats, but the amount of work needed for this does not outweigh the benefit currently. Depending on how long I will work on the game, it might still make it into the pipeline.

With 1.0, I envision a certain degree of quality. It's not the end of the game at all, but it's a shift in my work, and I'll have to be more careful not to break things, and keep the balance of the game. Raw progress will be slower.

My plan on building and maintaining momentum for 1.0 release is you guys. I want to make the community come alive, have moderators, events, competitions, and most importantly modders. Taking advantage of you modders have been the plan from the start, as you create the best stuff. Vanilla will be as good as I can make it, but mods will make it excel. I hope to work more closely with you and guide you through the process, and hopefully present you with rewards and opportunities. I plan on opening up the entire code base for you to play around with, make changes, and finally release mods from it.

If you would be interested of helping me with the community, please let me know!


When the big 1.0 release might be, I do not know yet. It's always been 4 years now, but I do see the horizon within a year.

Oh, where to begin, it's been so long, and I've forgotten what I've done, and lost the patch-notes in a game of poker. But basically, it's been all about the world map, and adding a sort of 4X experience to go along with the city builder. We now have proper generation, proper factions that are alive, proper everything world related on steroids!
No video this time, my mic broke. But here's the thumbnail:





Here's a neighbouring king, and his heirs. He will like you differently depending on his characteristics, and your history together. You can interact with him through diplomacy.



You can also send emissaries to keep him and his heirs happy. If he makes a fuss, assassination is an option.



You now have much greater control over your realm, with proper buildings, shamelessly ripped from the total war franchise (before they had the good sense of streamlining it).



I've also added a few things to the city building experience, features, fixes and quality of life. Orchards for instance.



There's still a bit missing that I didn't have time to add to the World. Most notably anything regarding armies. That's on the to-do list for the next version.

Next up, I want to do another polish update, focusing on the city map. I have a lot of plans, you can see them here: Trello

Overall, I'm exited, we're closing in on 1.0. I have only nobles left as a major feature, and of course a mountain of polish and balance.

EA 64 has to be checked out manually in steam for now, as a “beta”. I'm very curious about the balance late game, and how the AI conducts diplomacy and decides to take you on, so let me know, I'll be here, and on the Discord

The previous version is now available as the demo, for those of you who are still waiting for a sale or whatnot, so have a look at that.

Now go forth and conquer the world!

Hi everybody!

I just want to say, that you never have to worry about the state of the game. It's going to be finished, I've got enough funds to keep at it now for another decade, and I've already been at it for about a decade, so it would be a bit silly for me to stop now.

I'm working on the game every day, sacrificing PR and community management for the sake of coding, that's why I'm not super active on the forum ATM.

Work on V64 has been a bit frustrating and slow, and it's going to be the longest wait you've ever had to endure, so I made a little video on the current state of it. Excuse the quality and the cohesion of my scattered thoughts.