- Update Size: ~330MB -

The time is upon us, my Liege! Autumn has arrived and with it comes the eagerly-awaited Crusader DE Autumn Update! So dust off your armour, sharpen your steel and charge into the fray!

Battle this bloodthirsty and bitter Lord of the marshes in Custom Skirmish, or challenge his tyranny in the badlands of the Upper Nile in the new Economic Campaign, The Realm of the Crocodile.

In this Update’s Map Pack, we have added three new maps for you to besiege and battle across:

• On an island split into two halves, band together or descend into Skirmish chaos across the 600x map - Castaways

  

• Fight for control over a limited space in the PvP-style 500x Balanced Skirmish Map - Temple Island

  

• Enjoy rich resources and lush land in the 700x Freebuild map - The Thirsty Trail

  

With this update comes improved CPU Sieging Behaviour! For Multiplayer and Custom Skirmishes, this can be enabled in the advanced options section. In the Classic Trails (and in Sands of Time when the “Remove time requirements for Sands of Time trails” setting is enabled) this new behaviour is enabled when hard and very hard settings are used.

So you can Skirmish exactly the way you want, we have added a bunch of hotly requested new Advanced Settings to Custom Skirmish and Multiplayer. Pre-Built Enemy CPU Castles on match start, Uncapped Peasants, Faster Peasant Spawning, Optimised Fletchers, Rebalanced Horse Archers, and more! 

Want to experience the Campaigns with more of a challenge, or looking to make things a little easier? Difficulty Levels have been added to most Historical Campaign Missions, the Classic Trails, as well as all Sands of Time Missions. To access the Sands of Time difficulty levels, you need enable the “Remove time requirements for Sands of Time trails” setting

Want to leave your fate in the hands of the dice in a truly randomised challenge? Look no further! We have added the hotly requested Randomised Setup to Custom Skirmish. You can modify parameters to set the level of randomisation to your liking, for example, limiting the possible map pool to only Official maps, or enabling Random Advanced Options to let RNG decide which troops and buildings you’ll have access to.

You have been asking, and we have listened: We have added a brand new Coat of Arms editor, available in the settings. This new system will allow you to show the world exactly what type of Lord you are, pledge your allegiance to your favourite Crusader CPU Lords (we see you, Rat fans!), or just look very, very cool.

You can now easily set up Co-Op only games in Multiplayer, where both you and another player are automatically set to be allied against all CPU Lords. This comes with access to all the Advanced Multiplayer Settings and Maps, allowing for a heavily customisable Co-Op experience. When browsing the multiplayer lobbies, look out for the new icon representing Co-Op MP Games!

We have continued to work at improving multiplayer, and in this update we have found and fixed a cause of crashes that would occur after resyncs. We have also found and fixed a cause of continuous resyncs which would trigger at the start of a game.

Please note that you will only see Multiplayer lobbies of other players on the exact same version of the game as you. People make sure you're on the latest version if you'd like to play Multiplayer.

Hungry for more? Here are all full list of changes coming!

• The Marshal and Emperor Frederick will now purchase weapons in Custom Skirmish, Multiplayer, the Historical Campaigns new to Crusader Definitive Edition, and all Sands of Time missions

• Added Stance behaviour to the Bedouin Healer Unit: they will now move towards people slightly outside of range on their own. In Defensive Stance they will move a couple of tiles, and in Aggressive Stance they will move several tiles.

• The Healer can also now heal CPU or player Allies. This will occur by default in Co-Op, and is available as an optional setting in Multiplayer and Custom Skirmish.

• Added ability for the Co-Op host to swap the starting positions in Co-Op

• Added disabling use of Moat, as a Buildings setting in the Multiplayer Advanced Settings

• Added “Attack Here” hotkey

• Added an option in Freebuild mode, enabling Defeat upon your Lord dying.

• Added a notification pip to the "talk to allies" button, to show when you have received an ally request

• Added a new “add random CPU Lord” button when selecting CPU Lords in Custom Skirmish and Multiplayer 

• Added a notification of when you have hit the unit cap, but try to make more troops

• Added buttons allowing you to hide Co-Op trail progress with other Players & CPU Lords

• Added more rollover descriptions to settings in the Advanced Options in Multiplayer Lobbies

• Added a setting to mute all text from other players, at all points in the game

• Added a popup to confirm you want to disband your troops, to avoid accidentally disbanding your entire army at critical moments. This popup can be disabled if unwanted.

• Added a notification when trying to select a military building during peacetime

• New Map Editor hotkey added: The "Editor Show Connections" hotkey defaults to alt-C, and shows connection zones on the tile map. This allows the map creator to easily see what's connected and what's not.

• Engineers will now making a digging SFX when digging moats

• The Abbot no longer destroys his Cathedral when panicking

• Changes to how moat and walkable vegetation (shrubs/cacti) interacts: In game, moat placement will not remove it, but the pre-moat will go over them. When moat is dug, it will remove walkable veg. In the Map Editor, moat placement will remove walkable veg.

• Updated the UI of Weapons Buildings, to make it very clear that you can shift+click to change the weapon production output across ALL buildings of that type at once (if you didn’t know, now you know!)

• Enabling the “Remove time requirements for Sands of Time trails” setting now also allows cheat keys to be used during Sands of Time (note that this setting also disables leaderboard placement/functionality!)

• Updated the campaign map illustrations for the Historical Campaign “Saladin’s Conquest”, to better represent the factions involved

• Updated Objectives of Skirmish-Style Historical Campaign Missions

• Added a sound effect when adding gold in Freebuild

• Tweaked the Freebuild Setup Panel

• In a previous update, we fixed a visual Bug when placing rocks over walls - however, this bug could be used by Map Designers to create some very cool visual effects! This is now back in, in a slightly different way: if you hold shift as you place the rock, it will create the 'bug' visual effect

• Fixed an issue with the order in which the CPU Lords would sell goods, which would then negatively affect their economy

• Fixed a bug where the bodies of dead Units would be left on the ground after they were killed, which in some cases caused crashes

• Fixed a bug where more troops could be hired than intended in non-extreme games, surpassing the Unit Cap

• Fixed a bug where loading a save made just a few seconds after a mission started, would trigger a defeat

• Fixed an issue where, when commanding troops, the FPS would drop significantly and the troops would slow down

• Fixed bug that would cause the game to close when inviting a friend who does not have the game open to a multiplayer match.

• Fixed visual for Fire Ballista destruction in multiplayer

• Fixed a gap in the UI of the main HUD

• Fixed a bug in the Map Editor that made it look as though certain very steep slopes were traversable by troops, when they were actually not routable

• Fixed a bug causing Co-Op Mission 5 to crash

• Fixed a bug where The Kings Crusade Mission 5, “Jaffa Recaptured”, would sometimes not end

• In Mission 59 of the Classic Trails, the Abbot's Castle would be blocked in when his moat was completed. This has now been fixed.

• One of the Lionheart’s Castles was missing Ballista, this has now been fixed

• The Classic Trail Completion Video was not affected by the volume settings. This is now fixed.

• Fixed a bug where clicking continue on a final mission on Skirmish Masters wouldn’t play the Trail Completion Video

• Fixes across multiple Localisations

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3024040/Stronghold_Crusader_Definitive_Edition/

This update took a long time and was difficult for various reasons, but it was necessary before the release of the mobile version of the game. Now I am starting to seriously prepare the game for release on mobile platforms. But this does not mean the end for the Steam version of the game. There are plans for episodes 5 and 6, another new mode, and a goal. But that will be after the release of the mobile version.

• Crafting items

• Items and coins appear on the field

• 7 items for crafting

• 2 new scrolls

• All items and scrolls have 4 qualities

• Redesigned inventory

• Redesigned scroll activation panel

• 3 new achievements, 1 redesigned

We’re hard at work on the next Quality of Life Update, coming in just a couple of weeks. As usual, it will first appear in the Experimental Branch. This update follows our roadmap and and brings new side quests for already beloved characters.

It will also introduce a new character who will send you on some very slippery side quests. Literally.

We’ve got a lot cooking before the year wraps up. Three updates are on the way, including one loud DLC packed with fresh content and some serious groove. The first round of testing is done, and we’re already collecting feedback from volunteers. Once we fine-tune everything and run another test, the DLC will hit the stage.

Work on the console versions is in full swing, and we’ve done a lot of optimization to make the game run smoother. The good news is that these improvements will also come to PC.

At the same time we’re polishing the everyday experience, improving performance and making it easier to label and organize your items so your workspace feels more efficient and comfortable.

We’re gradually replacing older wall art with new hand-made graffiti. Some AI-generated pieces have already been replaced, and more are coming soon. Check out the screenshots below.

Pictures speak louder than patch notes.

So… what do you think you’re seeing?

Our friends at LifT Games have just released a new Leaf Blower Co. demo as part of Steam Next Fest. It includes two brand new bonus levels. One of them has a cozy Halloween atmosphere, and the other is a special Cash Cleaner Simulator crossover, where you can blow around real cash.

Jump in, support the developers, and take a fresh look at the Cash Cleaner world from a completely new perspective.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3720140/Leaf_Blower_Co_Demo/

We read every message you send us and appreciate all the support and ideas you share. They help us make each update better.

The Cash Cleaner Simulator Team 💸

The terrain shader was also preemptively handling terrain splat maps. Since we don't use those in the demo we can just remove them resulting in meaningful performance improvements.

Two lessons here:

1. Don't do too much preemptive abstraction

2. Don't learn how to write shaders in prod.

• Updated the Unity Engine version due to a known security vulnerability. You can learn more about this in Unity's post here: https://unity.com/security/sept-2025-01/remediation

• Minor content changes

1860 One Lustrous Aim

In the last dev diary, I referenced the trilogy of biographies on Garibaldi written by George

Trevelyan as having inspired me to name the 1859 campaign as I did. Perhaps it’s fitting –

Garibaldi in that war played a small but important role as the commander of the Cacciatori delle

Alpi, a campaign that rates a brief mention by Trevelyan but little more. In 1860, by contrast,

Garibaldi is the defining figure in the story of Italy’s unification, a story Trevelyan spends most of

two books recounting. In so doing (and in doing so well) he inspired not only a name but the

creation of this campaign.

In studying military campaigns I generally tend against the idea that the personality of a commander

will be a dominant factor in determining said campaign’s outcome – the so-called Great Man

Theory of history. Particularly when researching potential games, it is factors such as terrain,

available infrastructure, the size, strength and available supplies of each army, which I look most

closely at.

Yet if there was ever an argument for the Great Man Theory, it exists in the person of Giuseppe

Garibaldi. The Thousand could not have sailed without him, nor could it have succeeded had it lost

him. This was a campaign that defied every military maxim ever written, from the fact that

Garibaldi’s Thousand defeated a hundred times their number, to his success in a land of fortresses

while commanding so little artillery, to his crossing of the Straits of Messina without possessing a

navy, and in face of the formidable Bourbon fleet at that.

Before reading Trevelyan, I had never considered Garibaldi’s Expedition a possible setting for a

campaign, but his telling of the story was so compelling that I soon added it to the shortlist of

campaign options for this expansion. I began creating the map the very next day.

Trevelyan remained my main source while researching the campaign – very unusually so given it is

a biography rather than a history of the war – but this too seems fitting. The expedition is

Garibaldi’s story, and I wanted the campaign to reflect that. In naming this campaign, I turned

again to Trevelyan, who quotes ‘The Centenary of Garibaldi’ by George Meredith twice in his work

– once at the beginning of the second book, to introduce Garibaldi as an exile following the fall of

Rome in 1849 but already a man perceived as the future unifier of Italy; and again to open his

chapter on the Battle of the Volturno, the epic climax of the Expedition (and a battle which gives

rise to a unique victory condition offered in this campaign).

“We who have seen Italia in the throes,

Half risen but to be hurled to ground, and now

Like a ripe field of wheat where once drove plough

All bounteous as she is fair, we think of those

Who blew the breath of life into her frame:

Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi: Three:

Her Brain, her Soul, her Sword; and set her free

From ruinous discords, with one lustrous aim.”

The “one lustrous aim”, to which Garibaldi devoted his life, is the unification of Italy and thus the

subject of the campaign itself. I can think of no better epitaph.

1866 Whirlwind of Flame

Another biographer who I need to give a shout-out to is the late Jonathan Steinberg, whose work I

first encountered when a lecture he gave about Bismarck appeared in my Youtube feed about the

time I began planning out the campaign for the Austro-Prussian War.

Steinberg began that lecture with a quote from Bismarck, to an astonished Benjamin Disraeli, in

1862, in which he outlines his plans to reorganise the Prussian army, provoke a war with Austria

and use this to subdue the north German states. Steinberg then labels the unification of Germany

the “greatest diplomatic and political achievement, by any leader in the last two centuries, for

Bismarck accomplished all this without commanding a single soldier, without dominating a vast

parliamentary majority, without the support of a mass movement, without any previous experience

of government, without the charisma of a great orator and in the face of national revulsion at his

name and his reputation”. He finishes his introduction by asking a single question: “how did he do

it?”

Steinberg spends the remainder of the lecture attempting to answer that question by exploring

aspects of Bismarck’s personality, but one possible answer I think he overlooks is just how

effectively the Austro-Prussian War was conducted. From its conception through every action of

the war on the Prussian side, this was a masterpiece of strategic planning carried out with a ruthless

efficiency, illustrated best by another name given to the conflict: The Seven Weeks War. Seven

weeks is already a remarkably short length of time for a war to be fought and won, but what’s even

more remarkable is that the war’s decisive battle at Koniggratz was fought just half way through

week three.

In choosing a name for this campaign, I wanted something that would reflect both the speed and the

decisiveness with which the Austro-Prussian War was fought and won. The poem I chose is titled

“Cavalry Charge – Koniggratz” by John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, with the campaign’s

namesake taken from a line in the poem’s seventh stanza. In three words it reflects on both the

political revolution Bismarck initiated – thirty-nine German states at the beginning of the war were

reduced to around half a dozen, the experience of the soldiers that participated, and the shock that

the rest of Europe must have experienced watching these events from the sidelines.

As I designed the map, I listened to every one of Steinberg’s Bismarck lectures that I could find,

while his book ‘Bismarck: A Life’ arrived shortly before I finished making the campaign. Though

it lacks the sort of short, evocative phrasing that makes for good campaign titles, it is not the poem’s

seventh stanza but the sixth that offers an answer to Steinberg’s question:

“Their order was perfect and splendid,

And his voice, that at first held them in,

Had rung down their ranks for the onset,

As though it were fate they should win.”

1877 Feel Not the Red Rains Fall

Concert of Europe aims to tell a single tale. The five campaigns, while each self-contained and

intriguing in their own right, have all been chosen for their parts in this story. Each chapter was

brought on by the events of its predecessor, and laid the unlikely path to its successor.

The story is that of Europe’s reaction, three decades long, to the revolutions of 1848. First it was

one of those revolutions, and the Tsar’s efforts to crush it, that gave Russia the confidence to

embark on a war, known to us as Crimea but begun in the Balkans. It was Sardinia’s contribution to

the Crimean War that won them the support of Napoleon III and allowed them to embark on war

with Austria. It was Magenta and Solferino that sparked a wave of nationalism in Italy, creating the

conditions that would enable Garibaldi’s expedition to succeed. It was a Prussian alliance with the

now-unified Italy that split Austria’s forces, enabling Bismarck to shatter them at Koniggratz. So

how does this story end? It ends where it began, in the Balkans. This is the seat of Europe’s last

19th-century war, and where Bismarck asserted Germany’s new place in the diplomatic world at the

Congress of Berlin.

The poem in this case is “A Watch in the Night”, its author Algernon Charles Swinburne. This

poem is my favourite of the five I have quoted, partly because there are many ways to read it. The

line I have chosen for the campaign title alone can be read to refer to the rains that troubled the

armies during this war – a campaign in which the weather steadily worsened, beginning in early

summer and ending in March. The “red rains” can evoke images of blood, whether from the

atrocities denounced by Gladstone in 1876 which caused the war, or the tens of thousands who

perished during the conflict. “Feel not” can echo Gladstone’s frustrations about Britain’s neutrality

at the beginning of the war, or it can welcome Bismarck’s efforts to restore Europe’s peace at its

end.

I have chosen this poem not just for its reflection on a war that, at the time of writing (1868) had not

yet been fought, but for how it represents this period of history as a whole. The fourth stanza

describes men “mowed us as sheaves for the grave” – an increasingly common image as weaponry

improved – but also notes that “freely to freedom we gave”, which encapsulates the aspirations of

those who took part in the Springtime of Nations.

The poem also reflects on the fate of nations by 1878: England (“warm, no season to weep”),

entering its period of global hegemony and splendid isolation; France (“crowned, there is no more

France”) shattered by the defeat of 1870; Italy (“a light too strong for a star”) and Germany (“long

has it lulled me with dreams”) emerging as united nations for the first time. The final stanza reads

as follows:

“Liberty, what of the night?

I feel not the red rains fall,

Hear not the tempest at all,

Nor thunder in heaven any more.

All the distance is white

With the soundless feet of the sun.

Night, with the woes that it wore,

Night is over and done.”

With this the story closes. I hope it is one you enjoy playing as much as I enjoyed creating.

MateEngine 2.4.6

Dance Player Updates

• Added automatic MMD-to-VRM facial expression conversion for avatars without MMD Blendshapes. Models must include standard VRM Blendshapes; otherwise, no facial expressions will appear.

• Added the ability to favorite songs in the Dance Mods list.

• Added a Favorite Filter: click the heart icon to display only favorited songs.

• Added Song Search to quickly find songs by title.

• Improved visuals with smoother fade-in and fade-out transitions.

• Added Sync Dances: when multiple MateEngine instances run (via Instance Feature), all avatars can dance simultaneously. This is experimental and may have up to a 0.5-second offset between instances due to timing limits.

Changes

• Dance Trails can now be toggled on or off in the main settings menu via the icon with three balls. This also affects trails in the native Dance Feature.

Fixes

• Fixed mixed VRM and MMD facial expressions during dances that caused morph glitches and clipping.

• Fixed an issue where the last item in the Mod List was blocked by UI buttons, preventing deletion when the list was long.

• Stability fixes.

• Some other minor fixes.

Hello, Bravelanders!

What could be better than a warm blanket, a cup of hot coffee and soft chair by the fireplace? Of course, a new event in Braveland. The most stubborn and courageous will get new prizes and gifts!

The King announces a tournament. Whoever wins the duels using the Northerners faction will have a chance to add a Dryad to their army!

Necromancers goal is to deploy new armies on the old mounds. Hop into the game and complete this new event. It will only last a few days, so hurry up. Have a good game!

Bart is going to livestream the new 2.0 version of the BioMenace Remastered demo, and then share a very first sneak peek at part of the brand new episode 4!

Plus, there might be a chance to win a Steam key for the full game!

Stream will be live here on Steam and on YouTube:

We would like to remind you about the ongoing discount on Fly Corp and the American Dream DLC! You can now purchase it at a significant 40% discount! Features of the DLC include unique scenarios, VIP clients, marketing campaigns, and monthly game modes.

We wish you a cozy Fall and long evenings with your favorite game!