Hello everyone! We want to, first of all, thank you all for your patience and bearing with us through this period. We know we have been rather quiet on the announcement front, but that is because we have both been hard at work improving the game and incorporating all the feedback we have received. We are in the final testing phase as we are ironing out and fixing some bugs with the game in preparation for our 1.0 release. While we do not have a firm date yet, we are aiming to release the game before the end of the year.

In the meantime, we wanted to post a list of the changes and updates we have made to the game to let you know what we have been up to over the past 6 months. We hope you are as excited to play the game as we are and, as always, if you have any suggestions or run into any problems, please let us know!

Yours truly,

Zzensan and VanguardMaster

• Added playable Orc faction to campaign mode: 3 orc subspecies, 14 units (including a monster unit)
  
• Added Orc faction to battle mode
  
• Added new battle terrain system for selecting battle maps so that battle maps reflect player surroundings based on campaign map location
  
• Added 6 new player commanders to choose from
  
• Added 4 new units to the Kingdom of Arran roster, including a mortar artillery unit
  
• Added 3 new units to the Crusade roster, including new spell casters
  
• Added 30+ new attack, death, and hit animations to all units during battles

• Added ESC menu to battles, allowing the player to pause the battle and forfeit battle
  
• Added 2 new city assault battle maps
  
• Added 3 new field battle maps
  
• Added new battle maps to battle mode
  
• Optimized AI pathing during battles
  
• Added battle AI logic to surround and envelop enemies
  
• Optimized unit LODs and textures during battles to improve performance
  
• Reworked unit collision boxes to better represent the size of each unit
  
• Reworked all unit models and added 15+ new weapons and shields
  
• Added status effects during battle such as on fire, poison, bleeding, and healing
  
• Added new VFX to magical spells and artillery such as new fireball, mortar, magic arrows, etc
  
• Added new light and heavy attacks to all units
  
• Added special attacks and abilities to 12 units
  
• Ranged units will now switch to melee attacks when enemies get too close
  
• Rebalanced all unit attributes during battles such as health, damage, movement speed, attack speed, range, etc
  
• Increased maximum battle cap from 1000 troops to 1500 troops on the battlefield at one time
  

• Changed gameplay focus from kingdom and city management to army management. Player faction cities will be AI controlled while the player focuses on recruiting troops to army and helping their faction conquer cities and expand its influence
  
• Added new player camp mechanic to the campaign map where the player can recruit troops and unlock commanders
  
• Significantly improved campaign AI logic for improved targeting and recruitment of armies
  
• Added win/lose condition to campaign gameplay. If the player conquers all cities, they will win the campaign, whereas if the player faction loses all cities and and the player loses their army, they will lose the campaign
  
• Overhauled player economy to switch it from resource based to gold based. Various ways of getting gold have been added
  
• Added mechanic where player gains passive tax income from cities owned by their faction
  
• Killing bandit parties will now give gold to the player and resources to the closest allied city thus helping the player faction recruit armies faster
  
• Overhauled bandit parties size on campaign map and and balanced bandit units in battles
  
• Overhauled garrison parties and increased their size by up to 150%
  
• Increased campaign movement speed by 50%

• Overhauled battle UI
  
• Greatly improved campaign map UI: added city names, army labels showing faction and size of army, added colours to city and army labels to indicate allegiance (blue = player, green=ally, red=enemy)
  

• Fixed crash when loading save
  
• Fixed bug where commander would not load into the battle map
  
• Fixed bug where commander was not saved after battles and needed to be recruited again
  
• Fixed bug where some units were unable to hit enemies in front of them
  
• Fixed villager caravans getting attacked by enemy parties
  
• Fixed crossbowmen using the wrong ammunition for their crossbows
  
• Fixed crash when attempting to load too many units in the battle at once
  
• Fixed visual bug in Settings menu when selecting resolution
  
• Fixed bug where troops were disappearing from player army when AI fought battles