Fall of an Empire news & patch notes

Hello all,

The new Provinces and Modding update is now live. It's the biggest update in the game by far, with roughly a third of the whole game's work gone into it. My goal with this update was to make the game moddable, more fun and more replayable, and fix up the main annoyances that players were having. To do so I took the step of entirely redoing the UI from scratch - literally every single screen and UI component has been done from scratch, which also makes it entirely moddable.

I've also added the ability to play as other provinces - this is something a lot of people have been asking for, so now you're able to play as any province in the Empire and work your way up to Emperor, playing your way up the power blocs from the other side and building up a force of allies to fight a civil war.

There have been a ton of other changes - such as a new battle screen with more control for the player, a redone tutorial, localisation fixes, visual improvements, bug fixes and a ton of new systems and interactions for you to work with.

I've released a new demo for the game as well, so that new potential players get the chance to see what they think of the game before buying it. With this you'll get to play 20 years in the game - only the Tutorial and as the Western Rebels in the main game - to see what you think of it.

I've also released the Lords of Sicily mod campaign (a sample to show off how the game can be modded), and activated the Steam workshop, so you'll be able to upload your own mods there and share them with others.

For the next week or so I'll probably and trying to fix up anything that pops up. From there I'll start work on the upcoming two DLCs - the one which allows you to play as a barbarian faction, and then the historically-based Majorian DLC, which will be a really major update.

A full list of the changes is shown below.

Hope you enjoy the update!

Joe

Highlights

• The game has been rebuilt around mod support. Content packs can extend gameplay scripts, data, assets, campaigns, localisation and the interface.

• Added the World Editor for creating complete campaigns, including factions, characters, settlements, terrain, rivers, roads and military routes.

• The campaign interface has been rebuilt in TypeScript, JavaScript, TSX and CSS, making it much easier for mods to add their own screens and interface elements.

• Added in-game Steam Workshop browsing and uploads.

• The campaign interface has been completely rebuilt, including every major screen, sidebar, menu, tooltip, notification and map label.

• The Tutorial has been extensively reworked. It now covers provincial government, rebellion, sieges, naval transport and the conquest of Kyrnos.

• Provincial rulers have new political options, including governor missions, Bureaucratic Throughput, imperial adoption, succession approval, Senate membership and preparations for rebellion.

• Battles now include melee, ranged and siege roles, terrain height, battlefield obstacles, formation withdrawal and dedicated siege ships.

• The campaign map has been rebuilt with new terrain, rivers, roads, forests, farmland, army routes and starting campaign data.

• Campaign loading is faster, and major sources of stuttering during simulation, military movement and AI decisions have been reduced.

• Steam achievements now have an in-game screen.

Modding, World Editor and Steam Workshop

• The game has been rebuilt around content packs, allowing mods to extend gameplay scripts, data, assets, campaigns, localisation and the interface.

• Rebuilt the campaign interface in TypeScript, JavaScript, TSX and CSS. Mods can use the same technologies to add their own interface elements.

• Mods can add complete campaign maps.

• Mods can add screens, sidebars, top-bar buttons, tooltips and labels over the campaign map.

• Mods can add encyclopedia entries and rules for character titles.

• Mods can add government types, diplomacy options, war goals, court positions and governor missions.

• Added an in-game Steam Workshop browser.

• Locally created mods can be uploaded to Steam Workshop from the game.

• Workshop downloads are kept separate from locally created mods.

• Mods are loaded from the Saved/Mods folder, where players have write access.

• The game detects content packs that use the same identifier.

• Saves now explain when a required content pack is missing.

• Rebuilt the World Editor around project-based campaign creation.

• The World Editor can edit factions, characters, settlements, geography, terrain, rivers, roads and placed campaign objects.

• The World Editor can export terrain, rivers, roads, army routes, sea routes, landing sites and faction-selection data.

• World Editor builds display the matching game version.

• The modding kit includes built-in AngelScript types and a summary of each exported content pack.

Interface Rebuild

• Replaced the old campaign interface with a completely new one.

• Rebuilt the main menu, pause menu, settings, save browser and campaign-selection screens.

• Rebuilt the campaign HUD, resource bar, speed controls, map modes, notifications and warnings.

• Rebuilt the faction, economy, diplomacy, military, character, religion, power-bloc, battle, ledger and encyclopedia screens.

• Rebuilt the settlement, military, character, faction and power-bloc sidebars.

• Rebuilt the construction queue and formation-template screens.

• Rebuilt the family tree and Previous Rulers screens.

• Rebuilt the victory, defeat and campaign-ending screens.

• Rebuilt the windows used to appoint courtiers, clergy, heirs, commanders, governors, diplomats and spies.

• Links now open the relevant character, faction, settlement, military or management screen directly.

• Replaced the old flat panels with painted frames, buttons, tabs, warnings and interaction cards.

• Reworked character portraits with cultural backgrounds, headgear, improved lighting and clearer relationship information.

• Added more unit portraits throughout the military and settlement interfaces.

• Added a Steam achievements screen showing requirements and progress.

• Existing achievements now unlock through Steam.

• Added faction heraldry to the ledger.

• Added map modes to the faction-selection screen.

• Added a separate setting for the size of labels and icons shown over the campaign map.

• Added confirmation before overwriting a save.

• Added keybind search.

• Candidate-selection windows can be dragged.

• Notification history is now available through the ledger.

Tutorial Overhaul

• Extensively reworked the existing Tutorial campaign.

• Reworked the opening in Histria and its political situation.

• Reworked the loyalist rebellion and Kyrnos storylines.

• Expanded the military campaign to cover army movement, sieges, settlement capture, naval transport, landings and further conquests.

• Expanded the Tutorial's court, council, governor and provincial-government objectives.

• Added clearer objectives, clickable event links, automatic map focus and interface highlights.

• Added new mission artwork.

• Updated the Tutorial map, factions, characters, settlements, army routes and starting forces.

• Extended several deadlines and streamlined the later stages of the campaign.

Provincial Government and Imperial Politics

• Added Bureaucratic Throughput. Edicts, interactions, appointments and provincial administration use Bureaucratic Capacity, and exceeding that capacity applies penalties.

• Administrative actions can be rushed, but doing so causes temporary Bureaucratic Overload.

• Added breakdowns showing Bureaucratic Capacity, current workload, overload and the cost of creating provinces.

• Added governor missions.

• Governors can be ordered to pacify a province, suppress unrest, root out corruption, stabilise revenue, rebuild the treasury, recruit staff or secure the provincial capital.

• Military governor missions can order a governor to capture a settlement, blockade a port or support a campaign.

• Added a Governors tab for managing regional governors.

• Added automatic governor assignment.

• AI factions now fill vacant governorships.

• Governors can be recalled from the Governors screen.

• Character sidebars list every region governed by that character.

• Political pressure can now affect governor recalls, court politics and preparations for rebellion.

• Added Invite to Rebellion. Governors and commanders can be recruited before a revolt and may bring their provinces, regions or forces with them.

• Added Join Rebellion, allowing a provincial ruler to enter an active civil war on the rebel side.

• Added Take Over Occupied Province. During a civil war, a fully occupied province can be brought under your control and given a new governor.

• Added Request Succession Approval for provincial rulers seeking imperial recognition of an heir.

• Added Request Adoption, allowing eligible provincial rulers to ask for adoption into the imperial family.

• Added Request Senate Seat.

• Added Undermine Rival, which can affect appointments, governor recalls, power-bloc disputes and rebellion negotiations.

• Added Study Statecraft, allowing a ruler to improve Governance through a character interaction.

• Newly created provinces can become player-controlled when the campaign allows it.

• Reworked government types and succession rules.

• Reworked the presentation of provincial and imperial governments.

• Appointment contests now update each day.

• Imperial appointment contests are available only to eligible provincial subjects.

• Regional actions now include settlements held by subjects.

• Provinces can no longer raise levies instantly.

• Fixed provinces being created or released while their territory was occupied.

• Fixed newly created provinces sometimes having no capital.

Battles and Military

• Formations now have melee, ranged or siege roles in battle.

• Added battlefield obstacles that affect movement and positioning.

• Added hills and slopes to battlefields, with effects on movement and combat.

• Formations can now withdraw across the battlefield.

• Added naval siege formations.

• Added the Artillery Galley, Bombard Trireme and Siege Quinquereme.

• Formation templates now receive names based on the units they contain.

• Added naval patrol orders and orders for forces to recover.

• Reworked the Military screen and chain of command.

• Reworked formation-template creation and editing.

• Reworked formation placement, movement, targeting, morale and retreat during battle.

• Reworked battle controls, formation statistics, attack lines and hover information.

• Reworked the appearance of land and naval formations.

• Reworked sieges and blockades.

• Reworked military movement around roads, hostile settlements, coastlines and mountains.

• Reworked army embarkation, docking, disembarkation and naval transport.

• Battle results now retain more detailed formation and unit losses.

• After-action reports now show clearer participants, locations and links.

• Saved battles now preserve formation morale, retreats, targets, waypoints, terrain height and obstacles.

• A battle runs in real time while its Battle screen is open.

• Battles that are not being watched follow the current campaign speed.

• Removed the old half-speed formation movement.

• Battles now end when one side successfully retreats.

• Siege formations must stop and deploy before firing.

• Moving siege equipment is now separate from firing it.

• Naval battles use smaller ship groups and larger battlefields.

• Battle stances are available only to suitable land formations.

• Improved formation movement through narrow gaps.

• Ranged formations now keep their distance from the full area occupied by an enemy formation.

• Manually selected formation targets remain selected until cleared.

• Replenishing a force requires the necessary gold and resources.

• Armies cannot cross mountains marked as impassable.

• Navies follow valid sea routes and avoid islands and shallow coastal terrain.

• Garrisoned armies can now receive AI orders.

• AI factions now use naval blockades and naval raiding expeditions.

• Armies make better use of roads and route around hostile settlements.

• Levy reserves are now included when comparing military strength.

• Updated ranged-unit attack ranges and naval unit artwork.

• Added clearer unit-type icons.

• Selected armies now display their faction's heraldry.

• Army and navy map labels now react when hovered.

• Hostile forces are more clearly marked.

• Formation templates with duplicate names are automatically numbered.

• Naval formation templates are hidden at settlements without ports.

• Military-unit tooltips now include culture and religion.

• Hovering over a battle formation now shows its statistics.

• Fixed armies failing to reinforce an active battle.

Campaign Map Rebuild

• Rebuilt the Grand Campaign's terrain, geography, factions, settlements and army routes.

• Campaigns can now provide their own terrain, rivers, roads, forests, farmland, snow, sand, rock and swamps.

• Reworked fog of war.

• Province colours and borders now follow the shape of the terrain.

• Reworked shoreline waves.

• Campaigns can now apply different colour and lighting effects to parts of the map.

• Updated settlement positions and regional geography throughout the Grand Campaign.

• Updated campaign previews and the faction-selection map.

• Updated faction rosters, leaders, governors, families, bishops and religious assignments.

• Corrected settlement ownership across the Grand Campaign.

• Added missing resource-producing settlements.

• Minor factions now take their colour from their home region.

• Expanded province, region, land and domain tooltips.

• Province tooltips now show political standing, threats and geographic information.

• Region, land and domain tooltips now show their subdivisions and population.

Map Labels

• Rebuilt the labels and icons shown over settlements, ports, armies, navies, battles and convoys.

• Map labels stay centred while the camera moves or zoom changes.

• Settlement labels now show ownership, occupation, sieges and construction progress more clearly.

• Army and navy labels show faction, strength and hostility more clearly.

• Convoy labels retain their cargo and route information.

• Added a separate setting for map-label size.

• Distant convoys travelling along the same route are grouped together.

Diplomacy and Power Blocs

• Rebuilt diplomacy and peace negotiations as full screens.

• Reworked settlement selection during peace negotiations.

• Diplomatic proposals are now divided into offers, requests and mutual agreements.

• Mutual treaties are shown and judged as agreements between both factions.

• Tribute treaties now last ten years.

• Direct participants in a war can negotiate peace.

• Active peace offers can be accepted from their notification.

• Foreign intrigue requires spies with enough Cunning.

• Spy candidates now come from the intended target faction.

• Independent courts can invite characters to join them.

• Patronage cannot be offered to a character who already has a patron.

• Rebuilt the Power Blocs screen and sidebar.

• Power-bloc demands now show their objective, deadline, member influence and possible escalation.

• Reworked power-bloc interactions and their results.

• Reworked internal affairs involving provinces, foederati and governors.

• Defeated rebellions now end sooner.

• The Rephsian Empire now survives correctly after a rebel victory.

• Rebel factions receive more varied names.

• Custom faction and rebel-leader names are preserved during uprisings.

• A power bloc now dissolves when its final member leaves.

• Fixed patronage interactions accepting invalid targets.

• Fixed destroyed factions remaining available for interactions.

Economy, Resources and Construction

• Added monthly resource histories showing production, consumption and changes to the stockpile.

• Added a detailed resource window showing current sources, uses, shortages and past values.

• Construction queues can now be reordered exactly.

• Buildings can now be downgraded directly.

• Settlement labels now show construction progress.

• Rebuilt the Economy screen.

• Reworked the presentation of the treasury, income, expenses, resources, food, trade and settlement economies.

• Reworked the existing controls for automatic resource buying and selling.

• Income and expense breakdowns now include military command, replenishment and construction costs.

• Reworked the realm-wide construction queue.

• Building, unit and formation tooltips now show their complete resource requirements.

• Dismantling, downgrading and queue actions are now directly available from settlement building lists.

• Settlement headers now show whether a settlement is a capital, occupied, under siege or blockaded.

• Reworked city layouts and the placement of visible buildings.

• Reworked convoy and trade-route information.

• Court luxury now appears as a faction expense.

• The faction sidebar now shows levy strength.

• Building tooltips distinguish the current level's effects from the next level's effects.

• The construction queue now distinguishes active work from waiting projects.

Characters, Court and Religion

• Added quick interaction menus to character portraits.

• Characters can now receive temporary bonuses and penalties to their statistics.

• Characters without an office or military command can now receive a title based on their circumstances.

• Rebuilt the character browser, character sidebar and family tree.

• Character lists now show titles, liege realms, current activity, family and faction information.

• Reworked court appointments and candidate suitability.

• Commander, governor, bishop, diplomat and spy appointments now use a shared candidate screen.

• Reworked heir selection and its political consequences.

• Reworked the way character-interaction results are shown.

• Rebuilt the clergy and religion screens.

• Religious conversion now shows its costs, benefits and unrest more clearly.

• Character and government titles now use forms appropriate to their culture.

• Character lists can be opened for foreign factions.

• Hovering over a character statistic now shows the effects that changed it.

• Trait tooltips now explain their effects.

• Improved the presentation of spouses and other relationships.

• Constitution now affects how likely a character is to die.

• Corrected several character birth dates, family relationships and starting appointments.

• Fixed rulers being killed when they were meant to be deposed.

Events and Campaign Presentation

• Rebuilt event windows with campaign artwork, effect icons and clearer choices.

• Unavailable event choices now explain why they cannot be selected.

• Event effects have expanded tooltips and concept icons.

• Event text can link directly to characters, factions, settlements and militaries.

• Event chains can show previous entries from the same story.

• Added different starting events for playable factions.

• Events can now include more context when a character dies or a ruler is succeeded.

• Improved ruler names, pronouns and grammar for faction and character names in events.

• Improved generated names and reduced repeated alliteration.

• Rare scripted events now occur less often.

• Events now perform better checks for eligibility and threats.

• Enemy at the Gates events now require a real, active threat.

• Improved the presentation of successful and failed interactions.

• Added clearer campaign victory and defeat summaries.

Performance

• Reduced stuttering while starting a new campaign or loading a save.

• Terrain and cities now load with fewer long pauses.

• Reduced daily and monthly simulation stuttering.

• Reduced stuttering from character updates, military routes, rebellions, power blocs, religion and disease.

• Reduced stuttering while AI factions review their military and political plans.

• Reduced the cost of Senate interactions.

• Reduced stuttering when changing map modes.

• Reduced pauses when opening formation templates, peace negotiations, military sidebars and construction queues.

• The map now updates only the provinces that have changed.

• Improved fog-of-war performance and reduced visual artefacts.

• Reduced foliage density on Medium quality.

• Improved interface performance and input responsiveness.

• Improved road-route calculations.

Localisation

• Localised the rebuilt menus, screens, sidebars, tooltips and shared controls.

• Localised the new government, building, achievement and interaction text.

• Government names can now change with culture.

• Campaign titles and descriptions now follow the selected language.

• Character names and scripted text now follow the selected language.

• Improved support for regional language variants.

• Added Traditional Chinese character-name data.

• Improved the display of Latin-script text in translated languages.

• Updated translated encyclopedia articles.

• Updated German, Polish, Russian, Turkish and Brazilian Portuguese text.

Hi all, got a new patch for you that should fix some issues in the beta.

New Features

• Native world glances - World-map glances are now composited natively by the engine through an offscreen atlas renderer instead of the web layer. They are smoother, flicker-free, cheaper to draw, and stay stuck to their location with no lag. Glances also load their detail on hover and stay centred and stable while you zoom.

• Modder world glances - Mods can now register their own native world glances through the atlas renderer, with content-pack WebUI assets mapped automatically. The Sicily pack has been migrated to the new renderer.

• Military command actions - Armies now have right-click context actions for issuing orders, and military commanders can be promoted straight from the command UI.

• Settlement building management - You can now demolish and downgrade settlement buildings, reorder the build queue to an exact position, cancel construction with a right-click, and act on buildings from their tooltips.

• Detailed battle results - Battles now record and report a full per-unit result, so after-action reports show what actually happened to each formation.

• Integrate civil-war provinces - A new diplomatic action lets you integrate provinces occupied during a civil war.

• Invitations from independent courts - Independent courts can now extend court invitations.

• Faction icons in the ledger - The ledger now shows faction roundels.

• Save overwrite confirmation - Overwriting an existing save now asks first.

Modding & Tools

• Native world-glance extension support for mods (see above), with automatic mapping and emission of content-pack WebUI asset paths.

• Mods can define character title rules.

• SDK export now ships predefined AngelScript type definitions and build summaries for content packs.

Performance & Stability

• Smoother world map - Native glance compositing removes the old glance flicker and input leaks, keeps input working without duplicate rendering, and costs less than the previous web-composited path.

• Smoother campaign turns - Daily and monthly campaign processing does less work per frame and per tick, and Senate interaction queries are lighter - fewer hitches on day and month changes. This should look like dips down to 20fps from game simulation (basically regardless of your specs) should be fixed.

• Leaner UI updates - Convoy render instances are reused, only changed province data is pushed to the map, glance snapshot payloads are smaller, and bridge and build-queue update churn is reduced.

• Rendering - CEF paint uploads are simplified, and medium-quality runtime foliage density is reduced.

Gameplay Changes

• Strengthened the Kyrnos economy.

• Provinces can no longer raise instant levies.

• Army routes are blocked across steep mountains, and naval movement is kept to valid sea routes.

• Terrain attrition is now sourced from campaign data.

• Appointment contests now refresh each day.

• Conquered rebellions resolve sooner, and the Rephsian Empire is preserved after a rebel victory (if you're playing as the Western Rebels, you become the Rephsian Empire after winning).

• Garrisoned armies can now receive AI orders, preventing them from keeping all their armies idle.

UI & Quality of Life

• Organic frames on the faction-selection screen and treaty options, and framed warning notices in place of flat boxes.

• Character lists now show the full liege realm and each character's actual title.

• Distinct military unit-type icons, and military glances highlight on hover.

• Localised building resource names, clearer separation of building level bonuses, and the coin icon for building gold spoils.

• The build queue allows dragging, and the construction cancellation hint has moved to the tooltip footer.

• Balanced ledger resource columns with correct paging of filtered rows.

• Settings state syncs after apply, and faction-selection scrollbar dragging is restored.

Bug Fixes

Military & AI

• Naval movement stays on valid sea routes and the land grid stays visible after saving a project.

• Culled armies no longer show selection rings, and walking animations are smoother and quicker.

• Battle attacks now render from their launch events.

Characters & Portraits

• Character fertility is stable again.

• Corrected character birth dates and spouse portrait rendering, and synced campaign leader and governor families.

• Rebel leader names are preserved during uprisings.

Tutorial

• Spotlight character sidebars now open, spotlight links keep their spacing, the council contest must be entered, military commands initialise correctly, and HUD assets are restored.

Saves & Menu

• Fixed campaign saving, and campaign load failures are now shown on the main menu.

• Main-menu bridge reads are preserved when changing modes.

Localisation

• Localised authored display labels and building resource names, translated new building and WebUI text, restored complete WebUI text entries, and now validate localisation before version bumps.

UI

• WebUI clicks no longer complete a map selection, and scenario startup bridge errors are fixed.

• Rebellious diplomacy status styling is corrected and data map overlays are preserved at close zoom.

• Water upgrades and the max port stay visible, the treasury refreshes after gold cheats, and the painted progress-bar texture is preserved.

• The selected display resolution is preserved and the fullscreen backbuffer resizes when applying a resolution.

Cheers,

Joe

Hi all,

Great news! The beta for the new version (2.0) is now live. It will be running until the update is actually released on the 14th.

This one is absolutely huge. The biggest things are the totally redone UI, the ability to play as a province and the fact that the game has been rebuilt from the ground up to allow for modding. An absolute ton of other stuff too (revamped battles with full player control, a bureaucracy system, so many more things I can't actually remember them all).

To enter the beta, right-click on the game in Steam and click Properties, then go to Game Versions and Betas and choose "beta".

Naturally, since this update has so many changes it will be bound to have a lot of bugs. Please let me know if you run into them, and I'll see what I can do before the update is formally released.

The modding tools have been released as part of the update too. In your game's files, under ModdingTools, you have access to the World Editor that allows you to create your own campaigns. I'm also working on setting up Steam Workshop (you'll get a free campaign to show off the modding features: the Aghlabid invasion of Sicily in 827) and some documentation on how UI and Angelscript modding works for FOAE, I'll let you all know when this is ready.

Take these screenshots below as an example of what the game looks like now.

Thank you!

Joe

Hello all! The beta for the next Fall of an Empire update will be going live on July 2, with the full update planned for July 14.

This is a very large update - by my reckoning about 1/3 to 1/2 of the entire work up to release. The biggest changes are probably the ability to play as a province, the new modding features and the new interface. Almost every major screen has been rebuilt or heavily changed: the main menu, the HUD, sidebars, diplomacy, peace talks, the economy screen, court management, religion, military command, battle reports, events, notifications, tooltips and world glances. It also now runs through the custom UI runtime built for the game, which unfortunately has added quite some time on to the development process.

There is also a lot more happening in the campaign itself. Governments have been expanded, governors matter more, provinces now show more useful information, peace deals are easier to handle, and battles have more structure around command, formations and reports. The tutorial has had a lot of work too, especially around making events and guidance appear properly in the new UI.

The update also includes the first content pack, Lords of Sicily. That campaign has its own map data, factions, unit rosters, portraits, artwork, encyclopedia content and scenario systems. Alongside that I have been working on the mod/content-pack side of the game, so mods can add scripts, data, assets, scenarios and even their own UI pieces.

The map has changed a lot under the surface as well. Terrain, rivers, transport routes, campaign previews, settlement data and map-mode visuals have all been rebuilt or replaced in places. A lot of this is the sort of thing that is not obvious in one screenshot, but it affects how the game loads, how the campaign map looks, and how future scenarios can be modded.

The July 2 beta is mainly there so people can try all of this before the full release and help catch the awkward stuff that only shows up once more people are playing normally. The full update is planned for July 14. I will post more about the beta when it goes live!

Cheers,

Joe

Hi all,

I've just pushed a small patch that should solve the issue of being unable to complete the tutorial due to Marcellus being made a bishop.

That's all for this current patch - at the same time I've been extremely busy with the big new update. Unfortunately I had some negotiations fall through for a library I wanted to use to run the new UI on, so I've been working on making a totally new HTML renderer - quite a large task, especially when it needs to have good performance in a game.

This has blown out the development time for the update by a lot but I'm hoping that it should be ready for a beta soon. The upcoming patch is absolutely massive, a thousand commits compared to three thousand for the entire rest of the game's development, so expect to see a lot of changes.

Cheers,

Joe

Hi all,

Today I want to talk about the main feature in the upcoming update: the ability to play as provinces, and the mechanics they get.

Provinces are very different to independent factions - almost the exact opposite, since they’re on the other side of most systems.

Province gameplay is centred around building your way up and attaining power. The main track here is the appointment to offices: you can be a member of the imperial court - such as the magister militum - a subordinate there, a leader of an army or a navy. To do so, you’ll need to win a race against other applicants for the role. Your skill will matter here, but naturally since this is a late Rome-inspired game what matters more is the emperor’s opinion of you and your perceived loyalty. Commanding a military makes you a commander of that military, plus ones below it in the hierarchy.

You’re also playing on the other side of the power bloc system, meaning that you’re able to use them as a tool rather than worry about managing them. You can join existing power blocs (depending on your own character (for instance, you can’t join the Legions power bloc without holding a command), or you can convince someone to make one for your own goals. Being in this power bloc and managing it gives you

Unlike an emperor, who is tasked with goals by his subjects, a provincial governor is tasked by the emperor himself. Through the campaign you will be tasked with goals like developing your province or attacking a settlement that are time-limited. Failing to meet these goals will reduce your standing with the emperor and his establishment.

There are five different levels of recall status, which are updated every couple of months to ensure that you’re given fair warning that the emperor wants to be rid of you. The final level will see the emperor looking to recall you to the capital - ending your campaign - unless you refuse, starting a civil war (upon winning you will become emperor yourself). If leading a power bloc you can also use this as a shield, which may or may not save you.

Conversely, with a high standing with the emperor you can attempt to take power through peaceful means. A high standing means you have the option of trying to be adopted and declared successor on the ruler’s (natural... or unnatural) death.

When playing as a province you won’t be able to build your own armies, only command ones that you’ve been assigned to. You’ll be able to perform actions in your settlements, build them up and assign governors to regions as usual, but apart from that you’ll be working mainly in the shadows. Got a more powerful rival governor? Discredit him or have him assassinated.

In other news, I’ve been creating a sample campaign to show off the modding capabilities of the game. This is something a bit different (so as to show off what is moddable, I’ve made plenty of changes) - the Aghlabid invasion of Byzantine Sicily in the 9th century.In this, you’ll take control of either the Theme of Sicily or the Aghlabid expeditionary force, and you’ll get a ton of custom features not available in the base game: a new map, custom government types, units, buildings, cultures and religions, date system (uses real world dates instead of fantasy 28-day months), new UI like a panel that shows the custom features and their current status. The Aghlabids can’t recruit troops (they need to get them shipped from the mainland). The Theme needs to prevent instability, which will result in settlements flipping to the usurper Eugenius.

This campaign, along with the main campaign will be released with the mod editor, as an example of how to set up totally new campaigns and modes.

Hello all,

Apologies for the delay since the last dev diary, I've been very busy with getting the work done for this new update, which is going to be absolutely massive. It's got three big features: the new UI, the ability to play as any Rephsian faction, and the modding tools. I've been making some really good progress with all three of them: the new UI is looking good, and there has been a lot added and updated to make the game way easier to understand and more fun, the ability to play as multiple factions is also looking great and doesn't have too much left to do. Hopefully I will be able to get a beta out this week or next at the latest, so that you will all be able to check it out yourselves. Today I want to talk about the modding tools and how they work. They're really quite in-depth, so should hopefully make it much easier to author your own campaigns and content for the game. Firstly the reason behind these tools: I initially attempted to make the game moddable through some custom Unreal tooling, but that's not at all conducive to letting players do anything - as it would require a build of Unreal Engine + the Angelscript patch + some custom features I added, you're looking at a 200GB editor and hours of compilation time, which will lock out all but the most dedicated modders. Currently the only things that are moddable are the Angelscript classes, which makes it pretty limited in what you can do, so I definitely wanted to expand that. The new UI system will be a big improvement (considering that this game is 95% UI) due to being Typescript + React + web tech based (surprisingly performant), it will allow modders to just write new classes and add new assets to do basically anything, especially when combined with Angelscript - all kinds of new systems, custom campaigns and so on. But I also wanted to go further than that, by creating tools that will let you author your own campaigns without having to dig into code and data tables to be able to do so. The solution I came up with is going to be called the World Editor. It lets you basically set up everything that a campaign would need: the landscape, heightmap, rivers, settlements, provinces, precalculated navigation data, cultures, characters, factions: everything. The World Editor's province view, with settlements, ports, and geography editing available in one place. The whole creation process should be pretty easy and should be able to be done entirely within the World Editor. First off you will add in your heightmap: this could be e.g. a map of Europe, Middle Earth, your own creation: anything. You can even use the inbuilt tools to make it from scratch. At close zoom, the editor can show the height layer, river network, settlements, and ports together. Then rivers, and landscape layers: forests, rocky terrain, deserts and so on. These will all affect in-game systems as well. The surface layer view, where terrain types can be painted and reviewed before export. After that you can place all the settlements and build provinces around them, then set factions for those settlements, pops and characters. Province and settlement editing in context, including ownership, corruption, province IDs, and map position. When you're ready to go, you can generate and edit the navigation data and some normal maps (adds a lot to the visual appeal) and export it, it will appear in the main menu. Generated land and sea routing data, including the editable sea grid used for movement and pathfinding. Looking forward to getting this beta out! Next up will be looking at the other two systems that will be included in the update.

Hi all, this an update that's a got a bit more background work going on that should help for the next patch which will include the new UI, and ability to play as other characters. The main event here is migrating the game to UE5.7 from 4.27, which has allowed some noticeable visual improvements as shown below - you can see a much better-looking ocean and better lighting on the forests, and the image itself looks sharper and doesn't have the blurry effect the game had on UE4. It also includes a bunch of bugfixes and balance changes.

New Features

Economy Automation

There is a new auto-buy option that fills stockpile shortages before army supplies are handed out. That should stop armies taking attrition just because the faction was briefly missing a resource at the wrong moment.

Auto-sell thresholds and auto-buy settings are saved properly, and trade value now refreshes with monthly income so the ledger stays in sync.

Cities, Coastlines & Map Visuals

Cities should look better and sit more naturally on the map. They now support parks with tree placement, settlement placement snaps more cleanly to the landscape, and city layouts are smaller but denser, so they take up less space while still looking busy.

Walls and palisades have also been cleaned up, including fixes for visible wall gaps and bad scaling. An inner sanctum has been added for larger cities.

The coast gets shoreline waves, kelp, and better ocean materials. Missing Kyrnos assets have been fixed, city walls have been darkened, and army/navy command radius visuals should be clearer.

Custom Military Names

Custom army and navy names are now saved and restored properly. If you rename a formation, it should still be there when you load the campaign again.

Performance & Stability

This update should make the game much less CPU-bound, especially in bigger campaigns.

A lot of repeated work has been cut out of the UI, map modes, settlement glances, income updates, pop unrest, convoys, fog of war, characters, and power blocs. The building browser also spreads out its setup work instead of trying to create everything in one hit, so opening it should feel less harsh.

The result should be fewer frame spikes when moving around the map, less stutter when opening heavy screens, and better performance once the world is full of settlements, characters, armies, navies, and convoys.

Navigation & AI

Sea navigation is now stricter about what is actually water. Sea paths are checked against the map, and the game can build a safer route when a path would otherwise cut across land.

Armies and navies also check whether merge and blockade orders can actually be reached before accepting them. That should mean fewer units getting stuck trying to carry out an impossible order.

UI & Quality of Life

• Income breakdowns now separate replenishment and construction costs instead of blending them together

• Policy changes refresh income and expense numbers immediately

• Commander auto-assignment costs are now charged correctly and split cleanly in expense displays

• Auto-assignment can now create new army commanders when needed

• The family tree mouse wheel zoom is much faster

• Fullscreen resolution switching has been fixed

Balance & Gameplay Changes

• All buildings have been rebalanced so that upgrading never means losing ability

• Succession now enforces male-only dynastic heirs consistently across heir designation, sidebar selection, effective heir checks, and ruler death

• Player succession now looks for real same-dynasty candidates instead of falling back to unrelated courtiers or generated characters

• Designating an heir is now the reliable way to avoid a succession crisis

• Game-over checks use dynasty IDs instead of surnames

• Auto-buy can protect army supply from temporary stockpile gaps

• Pop unrest calculations have been sped up

Bug Fixes

Military & AI

• Fixed being unable to update templates after reloading a save

• Fixed merge and blockade orders being issued when the target could not be reached

• Fixed AI paths cutting across invalid land routes

• Fixed navy distance-based visibility and mesh animation overhead

• Fixed supply loading ignoring military resource capacity

• Fixed formation template panels using a stale player faction reference

• Fixed auto-assigned commanders not always charging appointment costs correctly

• Fixed peacetime AI garrisons being reassigned too aggressively

• Fixed AI war planning waiting too long after settlement captures

• Fixed battle hint timing issues pausing the game

Economy & Settlements

• Fixed packaged tributary income

• Fixed building modifiers and several tax breakdown issues

• Fixed income modifier clamps and displayed income totals

• Fixed resource processing tooltips looking up the wrong resources

• Fixed policy application not forcing income and expense recalculation immediately

• Fixed construction blocking lookups missing the right building in some cases

• Fixed religion share refreshes leaving stale clergy eligible lands

• Fixed city mesh pool updates so they are faster

• Fixed city generation running too early during load

• Fixed generated settlement walls leaving visible gaps

• Fixed settlement inner sanctum layout issues

Characters, Succession & Game Over

• Fixed generated characters losing enforced identity data

• Fixed succession after failed executions

• Fixed designated heirs not being tracked correctly before ruler death

• Fixed succession crisis classification after a designated heir takes over

• Fixed dynasty extinction checks using surnames instead of dynasty IDs

• Fixed the game over screen not dismissing when loading a game

• Blocked autosaves, manual saves, and loads after game over or while the player ruler is already dead

• Fixed Rephsian and Histria character dynasty data

• Fixed court subordinates failing to populate when the office holder was not set to auto-assign

UI

• Fixed first-open screen hitches

• Fixed hidden settlement glance layers still doing unnecessary work

• Fixed settlement sidebars refreshing inactive tabs

• Fixed building browser z-ordering, desaturation, and animation edge cases

• Fixed family tree zoom being far too slow

• Fixed gold change broadcasts firing when the value had not actually changed, which was slowing the game down

• Fixed income breakdown rows for construction and replenishment

Hi all,

Just a small patch for today that fixes up a few bugs and does some minor rebalancing while I work on the next major update (which seems to continually grow - I am not immune to scope creep). I'm hoping to get it out by the start of May. It will include the new UI, ability to play as other characters, and modding tools.

Originally I wanted to have all the modding tools available and ready to go before the next patch, but instead I'm going to bundle them in with it. The biggest problem is that currently the UI, landscape, province borders, rivers and settlements require the Unreal Editor to work with, but that means shipping a massive editor - probably about 100GB - due to engine modifications, and also requires a lot of legal wrangling and work to be able to create a new editor for each release.

Instead, my plan is to make more things dynamically loaded at the start of the game (such as the landscape, rivers and province borders) and create a small, non-Unreal program that will let you visually edit these. The new UI system is also going to save a ton of headaches, since it will be fully (and very easily) moddable.

I'm going to do a dev diary on the new UI soon - lots to cover there.

For this update:

Features

- Experience bar shows active XP sources and role-based XP awards. Rebalanced what counts toward experience.

- Allow declaring siblings, grandchildren, nieces/nephews as heir

- Added starting bishops (+ fix clergy auto-assign)

Fixes

- Game no longer crashes due to other programs using too much memory

- Settlement effect textures no longer keep growing and using up VRAM

- LLM event context no longer freed mid-request

- Religion share shown in Clergy tab

- HUD faction assigned before binding settlement warning events on load

- Court positions no longer auto-fill/vacate against player intent

- Warning events rebind when HUD constructs before player faction

Balance

- Trinitism given anti-hierarchy debuffs to match its description

Thank you,

Joe

v1.245 Patch Notes Hi all, this is a big new update, adding new event models and a proper pop system. Settlements now use a proper pop system, power blocs have been rebuilt into active political factions with their own interactions, armies can be merged and retrained far more cleanly, and the events now react to births, deaths, executions, spies, and rebellions. New Features Unified Pop System

Settlements no longer treat population, culture, and religion as mostly separate top-level values. They now track actual pops defined by both culture and religion, and growth, unrest, conversion, and assimilation all happen at that level. The settlement sidebar now shows a sortable demographics table with detailed breakdowns, religious diversity has been expanded across the map, and rebellions now emerge from the most aggrieved group instead of abstract unrest. Power Blocs & Senate

Power blocs now feel more like real political constituencies instead of passive modifiers. The old Senatorial Aristocracy has been reworked into the Senate, blocs now have 12 distinct interactions tailored to their interests, and interactions can have proper durations with visible progress. That means actions like holding triumphs, granting tax exemptions, dispatching imperial aid, offering sinecures, commissioning audits, packing or purging the Senate, and convening ecumenical councils are now part of day-to-day rule. Characters can be given the Senator trait, which grants them the ability to participate in the Senate. The Ecumenical Council has also moved into clergy politics and now resolves through narrative events. Dynasties & Reactive Events

Dynasty tracking has been rebuilt around a proper dynasty system (previously it was based on surnames which was a bit of a mess), historical rulers are tracked across all factions with regnal lineages, and the Faction Overview now has a Previous Rulers panel. Important campaign moments now trigger reactive events too - births, family deaths, executions, discovered spies, and rebellions all use events to properly notify the player. Military

You can now merge armies and navies directly from the military sidebar, and Ctrl+right-click merging can spin the result into a new formation template. Formations can also upgrade or downgrade unit lines with full retraining support, saved retraining progress, visible tier buttons, and proper tooltip costs. Military units now track their source culture, so auxiliary troops behave more cleanly when recruited, disbanded, and shown in tooltips. There is also a new barbarian auxiliary recruitment system, ports support right-click dock and blockade orders, and bishoprics map mode can show land borders.

Local LLM & Event Generation

The local LLMs have had some improvements for stability and have been replaced with new models based on Qwen 3.5. Models now load asynchronously after startup, the settings UI shows loading progress and VRAM requirements, unsupported hardware is handled more clearly, GPU crashes are caught more safely, and there are new Frequent and Very Frequent event settings for players who want a busier narrative game. I've also added the Large model which is now available as an optional download. UI & Quality of Life

• Modifier indicator widgets with proper source breakdown tooltips, now integrated into the faction overview/policies panel

• Two-column layout for the power blocs screen

• Sortable settlement pop rows and richer tooltips for growth, unrest, assimilation, conversion, and imprisonment

• Steam Deck detection with performance-friendly defaults, larger UI scale, a 30 FPS cap, and automatic on-screen keyboard support

• Character finder now shows all characters by default

• Camera recentres on settlements when cycling with the arrow buttons

• Character tooltips now show where prisoners are being held

• Natural and manufactured resources are distinguished more clearly in the UI

• Cloud save deletion for Steam and Epic

• Vietnamese language support

  Content & Modding

• Character and scenario setup has been moved to human-readable JSON instead of CSV/DataTables

• Scenario JSON can now define the player faction, preserve custom courtiers, and persist province region colours

• Added historical dead rulers and regnal histories across all factions

• Added new faction/settlement data and starting characters for Lupara and Umessia

• Barbarian factions can now sign diplomatic treaties and fight wars with each other

  Balance Changes

• Religion conversion now uses per-pop dynamics with resistance and persecution instead of flat settlement-level pressure

• Conversion pressure now needs at least a 5% religious share before it starts to matter

• Per-pop unrest now slows cultural assimilation

• Relocate Population is now a timed interaction with a gold cost instead of an instant free action

• Rebellions now emerge from the angriest demographic group, making local demographic tensions much more important

• Occupying an enemy capital now gives additional war score

• Tutorial army cap enforcement has been fixed to prevent them building massive armies

  Bug Fixes

  Military

• Fixed navy command radius visuals being scaled incorrectly

• Fixed subordinate list indentation and scaling issues in the military hierarchy UI

• Fixed negative faction effectiveness causing broken battle damage values

• Fixed recruitment drawing population from cached totals instead of the actual pop array

• Fixed click-to-merge, retraining, and formation UI edge cases

• Tutorial borders regenerate correctly

Characters & Politics

• Dead bishops and court position holders now vacate their offices immediately

• Prisoners are now handled correctly in war goals and peace deals, and are freed properly when captured settlements change hands

• Designated heirs are now respected in non-vassal succession

• Faction destruction no longer leaves characters in broken states

• Marriage selection is restricted to eligible realm characters and no longer disappears for valid relatives

• Power bloc owner/autonomous rebellion state now serialises properly

• JSON-defined courtiers are preserved during scenario rehydration Western Rebels naming issues fixed

UI

• Inapplicable interactions are now hidden instead of just greyed out

• Interactions that need an initiator no longer appear when no valid initiator exists

• Modifier indicator tooltips refresh correctly after assignments

• Duration and Instant are shown correctly on interaction buttons and tooltips

• XML rich text no longer wraps trailing punctuation onto a new line

• Treasury deficit warning now points at the correct icon

• Province creation UI no longer mishandles capital selection

• Character finder defaults and filters behave properly

Technical

• Fixed a dangling event image crash and reduced false memory watchdog triggers

• Local LLM event timing now applies frequency multipliers correctly

• Scenario initialisation no longer depends on the old Initializer actor setup

Next up will be the patch that allows you to play as multiple characters, which I'm making good progress on. Along with that will be a total overhaul of the game's UI to make it much more obvious what's going on and avoid a ton of issues that players have reported. Below is a mockup similar to how it will look.

Hi all, some updates on the latest patch: it’s getting close to release and should be out in the next couple of days. The patch ended up growing quite a bit from what was planned: originally it was just meant to be a refresh of the event models, but it grew to include a new population system that separates cultures and religions, new UI features like a history of your faction’s rulers, custom interactions for power blocs, data changes to make modding easier and a ton of bug fixes and balance changes.

This week I’m going to talk about a feature that's been one of the most requested since the game was first announced: the ability to play as other factions, not just the Empire itself.

The Empire is made up of over twenty provinces, each with its own culture, its own governor, and its own ambitions. It's time to let you play from the other side of the imperial hierarchy.

When you start a new game, you'll be able to pick any faction belonging to the Rephsian culture group. In the future you will be able to play as barbarian factions, but since their gameplay is so different to Rephsian it won’t be out for a while until I come up with a version that is properly playable.

These factions split into two very different experiences depending on their relationship with the Empire. There is one additional independent Rephsian faction at the start of the game: the Western Rebels under Aulus Tiberian. Playing as an independent faction works much like the existing game: you control your armies, manage your settlements, conduct diplomacy, and pursue your own goals. The difference is scale: you begin at war with the Empire, outnumbered and outspent, but with a compact and defensible position in Oretania. If you conquer the rest of the Empire you will be recognised as the rightful ruler and the game will continue as usual.

Things get a bit more novel with the ability to play as a province. Most Rephsian factions are provinces of the Empire: Sarmachia, Allobroscia, Lupara, Rasenia, Montania, etc. Unlike in the tutorial, which is quite simplified to help teach the game’s mechanics, the full game’s province system will be quite a bit more in-depth.

When playing as one of these provinces, you’ll be focused more on your subterfuge and social connections: legions aren’t controlled directly by a provincial governor, you’ll be reliant on your small personal retinue when dealing with other provinces, but a full legion will absolutely outclass you.

As emperor, the patronage system is something you manage from above: you watch your courtiers form networks and occasionally intervene. As the ultimate ruler you cannot be a client of anyone else - but as a provincial governor you could be the Emperor’s client, to ingratiate yourself into his inner circle.

When you make your bid for the throne, the armies that fight for you must come from commanders you've already turned to your side. This means identifying vulnerable commanders through espionage: ones with low loyalty, ones the emperor has mistreated - who you will be able to make your patrons and convince to join your power bloc.

When you're ready to make your move, there are three ways to seize the throne:

Adoption and succession. Build such trust with the emperor that he adopts you as his heir. On his death you will take over control.

Bloc rebellion. Rise to leadership of your power bloc, escalate its demands, and trigger a rebellion with yourself as the rebel emperor.

Acclamation. During a major crisis, if your fame far exceeds the emperor's and you have military backing, the army or the senate can acclaim you emperor. This is the organic way: you're so important that it happens naturally.

Recall is the biggest threat for a governor. Based on the Emperor’s opinion of you and your performance as a provincial governor, your standing with him will be shown in the UI.

If you've performed poorly, you'll see your standing shift from Favoured to Neutral to Under Scrutiny to Recall Imminent, at which point you’ll need to call in your favours to get back in the good books. Otherwise, you can always rebel when the emperor comes to recall you - but this is naturally fraught if you don’t have enough power to defend yourself.

This is a big addition and it's still in development. I think that it will take at least a couple more weeks after the next update before it’s finished and ready to go.

Thank you,

Joe

v1.244 Patch Notes

The biggest update yet. Military command has been rebuilt from the ground up, character loyalty replaced with a proper compliance system, organised religions get bishops, and there are now victory conditions. Plus a mountain of diplomacy, economy, and UI work.

Of course since there are so many changes for this update there are bound to be some bugs - please let me know if you run into any and I'll fix them up ASAP. I also didn't get around to finishing the Qwen 3.5-based event models and modding tools, but those should be ready to go in a few days.

New Features

Compliance

Loyalty and opinion have been merged into a single Compliance score (-50 to +50) that governs how willing a character is to follow your orders. It pulls from their personal loyalty, what they think of you, patronage ties, whether your reputation leans toward honour or dread, power bloc happiness, and situational modifiers like being a new ruler or imprisoned. Characters range from Eager to Defiant, and defiant leaders will act on it - refusing orders, undermining you, or outright rebelling. The full breakdown shows up in the loyalty map mode tooltip.

Military Command Overhaul

You can now delegate command of armies to subordinate generals through a proper hierarchy. A dynamic cap on top-level commands means you can't micromanage everything yourself - you'll need to trust your generals. Delegated commands follow one of four doctrines: Concentrate (stay close, reinforce battles), Screen (fan out toward threats), Garrison (hold nearby settlements), or Independent (pursue their own targets). Commanders' personality traits affect how well they follow orders - an ambitious general might ignore a recall, a timid one won't engage unless cornered. The map shows the hierarchy with new line visuals: striped lines for delegated commands, colour-coded by range.

Rank tooltips break down per-level buffs and effective radius. Armies and fleets are now named by culture and commander rank with a 3-tier naming system, and you can merge armies together. Level 2 and 3 commands have monthly gold upkeep.

Clergy & Bishops

Organised religions now have a clergy system. Whichever faction has the most followers of a faith becomes its leading faction and gets to appoint bishops across the map. A new Clergy tab on the Faction Overview screen lets you see all eligible lands, assign or dismiss bishops, check religion share, or auto-fill every vacant seat. Bishops feed into the event system too, so they'll show up in narrative events.

Victory Conditions

Three tiers of victory give the campaign actual goals:

• Default - survive to year 1000

• Extended - survive to year 1100 and hold all six core domains, directly or through subjects

• Ultimate - hold all eight domains and convert your entire realm to your state religion

A victory sidebar tracks your progress with dynamic condition rows for each tier.

Diplomacy & Politics

• Counter-Offers - you can now propose and receive counter-offers during war and peacetime negotiations instead of just accepting or rejecting

• Seize Territory - forcibly take provinces from your subjects, at the risk of rebellion

• Transfer Territory - move provinces between subjects

• Vassal Subversion - destabilise enemy subjects to trigger civil wars from within

• War Ransoms - pay and demand ransoms for prisoners during active wars

• Dynamic Faction Names - factions now display context-aware names with their government type

• 10 new ambient diplomatic opinion modifiers make faction relationships more varied

• Merchant Rights - new treaty type for luxury trade bonuses, replacing the old Trade Agreement (now called Supply Agreement)

• Tax Rate Policy - controls vassal tribute with per-vassal adjustments

• Marriage proposals are now restricted to factions within your diplomatic network

• The hard AI war cap has been replaced with a time-based declaration cooldown

Characters

• All character stats recentered around 0 with a -15 to +15 range, so positive and negative values actually mean something

• Characters form opinions of each other based on traits, plus 10 new opinion modifiers covering age, reputation, power blocs, ruler culture, imprisonment, commander status, and patronage

• New interactions gated by your ruler's honour or dread reputation

• Cunning-gated intrigue interactions can be initiated through proxies

• Patrons and clients now get passive bonuses, with new "ask patron" interactions

• You can recruit fresh courtiers from the character selector, which now has faction, culture, and religion filters

• You'll be notified when dynasty members die

• Minor character notifications are muted by default to cut down on noise

Military

• Raiding Overhaul - proper naval raiding with settlement-hopping and hostile territory engagement. AI factions actually raid now, sacking settlements and generating pillage notifications and refugee unrest

• AI Military Overhaul - the AI military planner has been rebuilt to use autonomous commands, evaluate wars and peace properly, handle overseas transport, and manage levies

• Battle Pacing - battles are significantly slower with a float-based morale system and reduced pursuit casualties, so morale actually matters before one side is wiped out

• Manual Formation Control - you can now set formations, issue flanking orders, and use waypoint movement during battles

• Overcrowding Attrition - too many friendly armies in the same area causes attrition

• Military tooltips show current/max strength, army queue widgets show population cost, and navy tooltips show carry capacity

Economy

• Auto-Sell - set resources to automatically sell when your stockpile exceeds a threshold

• Resource Decay - all resources decay over time, so you can't just hoard forever

• Trade Income - rebalanced to be comparable to taxation, making trade routes worth investing in

• Corruption - now scales with distance-to-capital and compliance tier, with a detailed breakdown tooltip

• Empire Build Queue - a new panel groups queued buildings across your realm

• New settlement interaction system for governor, bishop, and general actions

• 12 settlement modifiers are now visible in the UI

UI & Quality of Life

• Sortable table widget used across the economy screen, clergy panel, and diplomacy screen

• Diplomacy screen split into internal and external faction rows

• Settlement sidebar reorganised with tabs

• Camera tilt with PageUp/PageDown

• Separate brightness and gamma settings

• Observer mode to watch the map without playing

• Province tooltips consolidated into rich text with live religion/culture conversion rates and pressure sources

• Religion and culture pie chart tooltips show conversion rate and where the pressure is coming from

• Relationship tooltips show mechanical details with glossary links

• Building effects show inline icons and glossary links

• Disease map mode shows starvation as striped overlays

• Opinion modifier rows have dual positive/negative bars, sorted by value

• Greyed-out interactions now tell you why they're unavailable

• Inline concept icons scale to match surrounding font size

• Option to continue playing after the tutorial ends

• Debug short IDs and SetDate cheat for testing

Content

• 15 new encyclopedia pages covering provinces, foederati, governors, court, espionage, sieges, and more

• Religious buildings with dedicated icons

• Kyrnian culture for the Kyrnos province

• Traditional Chinese, Ukrainian, and Romanian language support

• New event artwork and a "meeting" loading screen

• Power blocs are now first-class entities in the event system

• Histria tutorial factions have named court characters that show up in events

• Tutorial expanded with command hierarchy, bishoprics, Kyrnos leader capture, unrest management, and rebellion delay

Modding

• Cultures and religions no longer need Blueprint classes - AngelScript-only definitions make them much easier to mod

Balance Changes

• Compliance recentered around 0 with doubled loyalty/opinion weights for more meaningful character dynamics

• Character stats rescaled to -15 to +15 - you can tell at a glance whether someone is competent

• Corruption reduction from buildings cut by 3x

• Distance-to-capital has a stronger effect on unrest

• Peasant rebellions happen less often (per-faction cooldown) and only field tier 1-2 units

• Barbarian factions get direct gold income and tribal economy modifiers so they're more competitive

• Battles are much slower - morale actually matters before armies get wiped

• Trade income brought up to par with taxation

• Resource decay prevents infinite stockpile accumulation in long campaigns

• AI factions now have internal power blocs

• Rephsian AI expansion restricted to historically appropriate domains

• New rulers start with a -15 compliance malus that fades over 5 years, making succession a real danger

• Imprisoned rulers impose -20 compliance on all subjects

• Removed automatic heir designation - succession is contested

Bug Fixes

Military

• AI raiding levies no longer consumed by garrison assignments

• AI re-calls levies after armies are wiped out mid-war

• AI makes peace after fully occupying an enemy faction

• AI armies actually advance toward enemies during wartime instead of idling

• AI peace deals no longer create border gore

• AI naval transport and overseas war planning fixed

• Navy pathfinding no longer cuts through land on stitch segments

• Armies garrisoned in the capital no longer join rebellions

• Army movement speed no longer reduced when zoomed out

• Army/fleet names fixed for levies, foederati, event-spawned forces, and missing regions

• Navy naming no longer produces redundant or broken names

• Command radius plane matches actual buff radius

• Doctrines cascade correctly through the full command hierarchy

• Hierarchy lines refresh immediately when doctrines change

• Command hierarchy no longer assigns children outside buff radius

• Enemy army radii no longer visible when zoomed in

• Embarkation landing sites check ocean connectivity

Diplomacy & Politics

• Peace negotiation strength bar uses full faction strength

• Treaty option tooltips show correct values and formatting

• You can grant and request passage rights in the same treaty

• Annex faction goal shows actual war score cost

• New vassals join their liege's existing wars

• Vassals released when their liege faction is destroyed

• Subject leaders properly recognised for compliance

• Settlement selection for seize/transfer respects faction ownership and rebellion state

UI

• Settlement sidebar no longer redraws every day tick

• Sidebars no longer get stuck closed after animation race conditions

• Event widgets no longer overlap

• Province tooltip flicker eliminated

• Rich text double-buffered to prevent flicker on updates

• Building browser zoom fits all buildings; shift-click shows multiple categories

• Building browser gold check uses the player faction

• Economy screen resource amounts use darker, more readable colours

• Settlement finder unrest sort no longer freezes

• Foederati and templates populate correctly in military overview

• Character stat tooltips explain unknown stats and how to reveal them

• Glossary links navigate to the correct encyclopedia entry

• Court appointee portrait opens the character sidebar

• Confirmation dialogs no longer show raw localisation keys

• Province tooltip hidden over water

• Map mode buttons no longer deselect unexpectedly

• Bishopric map mode labels update on religion switch with better colour differentiation

Performance

• Daily and monthly tick performance optimised

• Multiple hot paths identified and fixed via CSV profiling

• Military overview command hierarchy built synchronously to avoid hitches

• Peace negotiation refresh hitch reduced

• GetAllActorsOfClass replaced with cached registries throughout

• Character sidebar opening hitch eliminated

• Fog of war updates faster and works while paused

Other

• Default anti-aliasing changed to FXAA to avoid TAA ghosting

• Saved anti-aliasing and graphics settings apply correctly on startup

• Camera Z tracking smoothed at all zoom levels to eliminate mountain jitter

• Temporary traits now expire correctly

• Settlements no longer produce wrong resources

• Fog of war respects the disabled flag

• Building upgrades that were actually downgrades from their predecessors fixed

• Dead characters removed from patron/client lists

• Religious persecution opinion restricted to characters within the realm

• Master of Diplomacy court bonus and court combat bonuses now actually do something

• Various crash fixes from player reports

• Instant build cheat skips all costs correctly

• Building max level enforced in encyclopedia placement mode

• Screens are per-faction when switching in observer mode

Hi all,

Now that most of the biggest issues with the game have been fixed (mainly stability and performance-related), I'm going to start working on fleshing out some more features in the next update. This one is definitely going to take a few more days than the previous few, since it's adding quite a bit more (also includes a ton of balance and bug fixes).

First off: I'm expanding the religion system so that you can appoint Bishops to each Land where your religion is at least 10% (even outside your borders) if you've got the highest population of that religion in the world. These bishops will be able to perform various actions with the player and will make up the Clergy power bloc (rather than random characters filling up these roles) - the Patriarch will have to be a Bishop as well. Clergy-related goals will also be tweaked to work with this new system.

I'm adding the ability to manually control battles: you will be able to select one of your battle formations, right-click and drag to move them around and attack the enemy in the flank. Battles will still be controlled by the AI until you take charge of a formation, so you won't need to manually handle every battle in the world.

I'll also add an optional set of victory conditions - similar to Total War, the game will have multiple win conditions that are progressively more difficult, focused around holding on to the Empire as long as possible. Different factions will have different goals (when they are added).

The patronage system is getting expanded: currently I think it's a bit lacking and doesn't have very much gameplay relevance, so I'm going to add a ton of stuff to make it more interesting. You'll be getting demands for favours from your clients and will be able to use them to get favours yourself. It'll also work with the Power Bloc system: your patronage networks will affect the blocs, and you will be able to push them to do certain actions.

Difficulty levels will also be added. These will affect various stats, making the AI more difficult to play against and weakening your own faction.

Trade is getting redone. In addition to the base resources produced, you'll also get income generated from merchants paying tolls and levies based on resource production, and from agreements to allow merchants from other factions. This will make it so that trade and tax income is comparable, and make the trade-focused buildings more viable.

I will also be updating the events model with a larger 9B version (as free DLC due to the size), as well as two smaller replacements for the current models based on Qwen 3.5 which should result in higher-quality random events and less issues where logical errors occur in the outputs.

This week I'll also be setting up Steam Workshop and continuing work on the mod kit to make it easier for the game to be modded. This will be what I'm working on after the next patch's release.

In the patch after that, I will be adding in the ability to play as a Dux of a province: since you can already play as a province of the Empire in the tutorial, this won't be too much of a change, it will mostly be focused around disabling certain features, adding the ability to join and influence power blocs and start rebellions to take your rightful place as Emperor.

Now on to the future of the game's development: a lot of people have asked for the ability to play as other, minor characters in the Empire, the ability to play as barbarian factions and for a campaign based on real life. Of course, these are all secondary to making sure the game is as fully fleshed out and fun as it can be, so I don't want to announce any dates yet.

The first three expansions will be:

- Barbarian factions: Choose a barbarian faction to play as. Turn into a migratory horde with no settlements. Conquer territory from the Empire. Create fusion cultures with dynamic naming for characters, settlements and factions. Adopt Rephsian traditions as feudalism begins to form.

- Custom start: Start the game as a minor character you design, a Magister Militum of the army or a complete nobody and rise up through the ranks to the position of Emperor.

- Majorian: With a whole new, historical map of Europe play as Emperor Majorian, the Eastern Empire, the Sassanids or any barbarian ruler of the time.

Of course, these are just preliminary ideas on what could be included: it's hard to say what's actually fun until you've designed and played it.

Thank you,

Joe

Hi all, I've got a new update for you.

New Features

Diplomacy & Politics

• Pay Ransom -- new interaction to pay gold to retrieve imprisoned courtiers from foreign factions

• Diplomatic Marriage & Reassert Authority -- added to peacetime negotiation options, giving more tools during diplomacy

• Province Build Focus -- set build focus directives on vassal provinces to guide AI construction priorities

Military

• Unit Encyclopedia -- full encyclopedia entries for all army and navy unit types

• Instant Embark -- armies automatically board navies when both are garrisoned in the same settlement

UI & Quality of Life

• Pinned Items -- bookmark settlements, characters, and armies to a persistent bar at the top of the screen for quick access

• Rename Militaries, Settlements & Children -- rename your armies, vassal settlements, and player dynasty children

• Disease Info -- settlement sidebar now shows active diseases and their effects

• Redesigned Building Browser -- tabbed category filter replaces the old list, with tutorial hints for new players

• Building Icons on Economy Map -- economy map mode now shows building icons and highlights built structures

• Smooth Camera Panning -- camera edge-panning now uses eased movement for a smoother feel

• Clickable Governor Map -- governor map mode is now interactive; clicking highlights all provinces under the same governor

• Settlement Sidebar -- now displays region, land area, and domain information

• Monthly Income Breakdown -- all gold changes are tracked in the monthly income snapshot with handpicked colour-coded graph segments

• Diplomacy Hints -- province tooltips show diplomacy status for foreign factions

• Unit Tooltips -- now show tier, speed, and build time

• Open Save Folder -- button on the load game screen to open the save games folder in Explorer

• Domain Name Display -- regional power blocs now show their domain's name

• Family tree and patronage terminology updated throughout the UI

• Encyclopedia hint and building tooltips now explain the click-to-build mechanic

Balance Changes

• Cities can now grow beyond 100,000 population with diminishing returns

• Naval Transport -- replaced abstract unit weight system with manpower-based capacity, making naval logistics more intuitive

• Kyrnos Rebellion Navy -- the Kyrnos rebellion now spawns with a navy, making the tutorial island conflict more dynamic

• Cultural integration now restricted to cultures within other culture groups, preventing same-group integration

• Removed wood resource cost from Shipyard

• Removed gold resource cost from Sacred Cairn

• Initial units in new formations now cost gold

• Disloyal governors only cause unrest when they also personally dislike the ruler

Bug Fixes

Military

• Fixed armies attempting instant embark in the same frame as ungarrisoning

• Armies no longer get stuck in settlements or at sea

• Spawned armies now snap to the landscape surface, preventing the stuck-in-ground bug

• Armies and navies deselect immediately when they rebel

• Siege action only appears on settlements at war with the player

• Formation templates sync correctly and handle missing target settlements for replenishment

• AI war blocs no longer force automatic white peace

Diplomacy & Politics

• Dynasty extinction now correctly triggers game over when the player ruler dies without a same-dynasty heir

• Patronage status no longer shown for dead characters

• Garrisons are expelled on peace treaty rather than destroyed

UI

• Edicts display as disabled rather than hidden before the throne is claimed

• Automation checkbox states refresh properly after loading a save

• Popup widgets no longer play close animation when reopened

• Imperator trait gain and loss notifications now use custom event text

• Melancholy trait renamed to Despondent to avoid confusion with the Melancholic personality

• Encyclopedia respects the current language setting and supports Escape to close from the main menu

• AI-generated event text no longer uses faux-subtlety patterns

Other

• Landing site markers replaced with instanced mesh rendering, reducing draw calls during naval operations

• Fixed crash-causing issues: dangling pointers, null faction references, and out-of-memory edge cases

• Deterministic new game initialisation for consistent world generation

• Prevented bulk-syncing locally saved achievements to Steam on startup

• Sea routes generate per-level meshes instead of a single shared asset

• City bell ambient sounds reduced in volume and frequency

• Improved save game error logging with specific failure reasons

• New event artwork for several interactions

Thank you,

Joe

This update focuses heavily on eliminating stutters and freezes, especially in longer campaigns, and also doubles the size of the tutorial campaign to explain more.

Stutter Removal

• Monthly income no longer causes a frame spike -- the game previously processes every faction's maintenance, income, and upkeep in a single frame at the start of each month. This work is now spread across multiple frames so there is no visible hitch on the monthly tick

• Opening a battle for the first time no longer freezes the game -- the battle screen and all its widgets used to be created on demand when the first battle starts, causing a noticeable pause. The screen is now pre-built during the loading screen and reused for every subsequent battle

• Navy route calculations no longer freeze the game -- plotting a sea route previously runs a pathfinding query on the main thread that can stall for over 300ms (roughly 5 lost frames at 60fps). This now runs asynchronously in the background while the game continues

• Opening any screen for the first time is now instant -- all major UI screens (diplomacy, military overview, character finder, etc.) are pre-constructed and warmed up during the loading screen, so the first time you open them there is no stutter

• AI military decisions no longer cause late-game hitches -- the AI's pathfinding, tactical assignment, garrisoning, and naval landing queries are optimised and spread across frames so that large empires with many armies do not cause periodic freezes

• Military path updates are now spread across frames -- armies previously recalculate all their paths in a single burst, causing brief freezes in campaigns with many active armies. Paths now update incrementally each frame

• First-tick stutter after loading removed -- several startup tasks (court validation, daily maintenance) that previously run on the very first in-game tick now run during the loading screen instead

• Sea navigation precomputed -- the connections between sea navigation points are previously calculated at runtime every time a ship needs to move. These are now baked at editor time, making every naval pathfinding query faster from the start

Battle Performance

• Large battles no longer drop frames -- the battle tick system is overhauled with cached combat values, faster dead-unit removal, and short-circuited effectiveness checks. Battles involving hundreds of units are now significantly smoother

• Formation change cascades eliminated -- when multiple formations update at once (e.g. at the start of a battle), each change triggers a full UI rebuild. These broadcasts are now batched and flushed once, preventing the stacking frame drops

• Battle collision and targeting optimised -- collision cache invalidation is now deferred rather than immediate, and ineffective attack checks bail out early instead of running full calculations

UI & Interaction Performance

• Mouse hover and UI hit-testing optimised -- the per-frame cost of moving the mouse over the map and UI elements is reduced, which adds up to meaningful savings across an entire play session

• Character Finder opens faster -- the character list no longer rebuilds from scratch when the default view is already populated

• Military Overview no longer causes a hitch when opened -- stale data handling and the rebuild process are optimised

Memory & Stability

• Memory watchdog improved -- the system that monitors memory usage now uses a dynamic threshold and tracks growth rate, catching memory leaks earlier before they cause a crash rather than only reacting when a fixed limit is hit

• Memory watchdog crash diagnostics added

New Features

Encyclopedia

• In-game encyclopedia -- a searchable knowledge base accessible from the HUD that covers game mechanics, combat, economy, diplomacy, and more. Articles are rendered from Markdown with a sidebar, search, and clickable cross-references between entries

• Link tooltips and navigation -- clicking links within encyclopedia articles navigates directly to the relevant entry, and hovering shows a preview

• Combat stats documented -- dedicated encyclopedia entries, glossary definitions, and screen hints now explain what every combat stat does and how battles resolve, so players no longer need to guess what "Shock" or "Pursuit" mean

Glossary & Tooltips

• Interactive glossary terms -- highlighted words throughout the game's tooltips now show an inline definition popup when hovered, explaining game concepts without leaving the current screen. These appear across building tooltips, power bloc descriptions, military panels, and warning messages

• Nested tooltips -- glossary popups and entity links can now appear inside other tooltips. Hovering a term inside a tooltip opens a second tooltip on top, so you can explore related concepts without closing anything or navigating away

• Clickable entity links -- references to characters, settlements, factions, and power blocs in tooltips and warnings are now clickable, taking you directly to that entity's screen

• All locked buildings now display a reason explaining why they are unavailable, rather than silently being greyed out

Tutorial

• Post-victory objectives -- the tutorial now continues after the player's first military victory, guiding them into mid-game mechanics like diplomacy, power blocs and the Imperial Court

• Battle tutorial briefing -- a briefing screen now appears before the player's first battle, explaining the battle system and what each phase does so new players are not dropped into combat blind

• Tutorial campaign events rewritten -- the introductory campaign events are reworked with improved pacing and clearer guidance through the early game

• Tutorial sequence-breaking improved so players who complete objectives ahead of the tutorial are not blocked by it

Diplomacy & Politics

• Prisoner ransom system -- captured characters can now be ransomed back to their faction, with price based on their rank and importance

• Attempt Escape -- imprisoned characters can attempt to escape captivity, with success based on their skills

• Call to War -- a new diplomacy interaction to summon allies and subjects into an ongoing conflict

• Grant Subsidy -- send resources to a subject faction using a gift selector, helping them build up or recover from war

• Provinces now build buildings in their settlements using their own gold

• Abandon Foederati and Abandon Province -- new interactions for releasing unwanted foederati obligations or giving up distant provinces that are too costly to hold

• Province vassals rebel when surrendered -- if the player cedes a disloyal vassal's unoccupied territory in a peace deal, that vassal now rebels rather than quietly accepting the loss of their homeland

• Disloyal governors rebel when replaced -- replacing a governor who is already disloyal now triggers a rebellion, matching the existing behaviour when imprisoning disloyal characters

• Power bloc de-escalation -- power blocs that have escalated their demands now de-escalate when faction happiness recovers

• Power bloc type descriptions now shown in the sidebar, so players can understand what each bloc wants at a glance

Military

• Imperator trait -- Rephsian rulers who hold subjects now receive the Imperator trait, reflecting their imperial authority and providing associated bonuses. Characters without the trait are titled Dux instead

• Auto-assigned battle actions -- battle actions are now automatically assigned based on the commanding general's traits, so players no longer need to manually pick actions for every battle (but can edit them)

• Battle-damaged army warning -- armies that have recently taken heavy losses now show a warning icon on the map, making it easy to spot which forces need time to recover

• Command radius visible when garrisoned -- the command radius overlay now appears for garrisoned armies, not just armies on the map

• Unit tooltips overhauled with a cleaner rich text grid layout for combat stats

Map & Visuals

• Construction stripes on settlements in Economy map mode show at a glance which settlements are actively building, with tooltips showing what is in the queue

• Rioting settlements highlighted with stripes and a warning tooltip so players can spot unrest on the map without clicking every settlement

• Province tooltips added for Trade, Corruption, and Region Governor map modes, showing relevant province-level data on hover

• Religion conversion modal added with stage images showing conversion progress through distinct visual phases

UI & Quality of Life

• Display settings confirmation dialog -- changing resolution or display mode now shows a confirmation dialog with a countdown timer, automatically reverting if the player does not confirm (preventing being locked out by a bad resolution change)

• Auto-assign governors -- a checkbox on the diplomacy screen that automatically assigns governors to provinces that lack one

• Event frequency setting -- a new slider in Settings > Events controls how often LLM events appear

• Dismiss button in Imperial Court -- court members can now be dismissed (leaving the position empty), with clearer indication of which positions are subordinate to others

• "Not produced" label -- resources that a settlement does not produce now show "Not produced" instead of a confusing 0

• Culture and religion filters added to the Character Finder for narrowing down large character lists

• Console command output (for cheats) now routes to the in-game console, not just the log file

Balance Changes

• Default resource buy/sell ratio adjusted to 2:1 rather than 20:1 (it changes based on buy/sell)

• Negative income dampened when in debt to prevent unrecoverable economic death spirals where debt generates more debt

• Aristocracy stability goal now scales with war score and war type, so aristocrats are less demanding during small wars

• Several building upgrades that are statistical downgrades from their parent buildings are corrected

• Dyeworks production rates reduced significantly (are far too high relative to other production buildings)

• Foederati vassalage reluctance doubled in treaty negotiations -- foederati are harder to vassalise through diplomacy

• Migration distance halved and foederati territory blocked from migration

• One-time gold tribute capped by the sender's actual treasury (no more promising gold you do not have)

Localisation

• Encyclopedia articles translated across all supported languages with proper noun glossaries

• All languages retranslated with consistent proper noun glossaries for place names, faction names, and character titles

• Korean retranslated with consistent speech levels throughout

• Korean and Chinese translation prompts improved for more natural-sounding output

Bug Fixes

Crashes & Saves

• Fixed 4 crash types identified from player crash reports

• Fixed faction auto-destruction during save loading causing missing factions

• Fixed army embarkation state not persisting across save/load (armies forget they are on ships)

Military

• Fixed battle war score not being recorded when the losing side retreats, which can make wars impossible to end

• Fixed navy paths not updating while the game is paused

• Fixed "cannot garrison - under siege" tooltip incorrectly appearing on enemy settlements instead of friendly ones

Economy

• Fixed treasury display flickering during monthly income processing

• Fixed economy map mode not updating when the building queue changes

• Fixed duplicate build queue change notifications causing unnecessary UI rebuilds

• Fixed settlement renames not persisting

• Fixed max-level and sibling building exclusivity not enforced in the build queue

• Fixed building tooltip hover inadvertently adding garrison units and fortification to the settlement

Diplomacy & Politics

• Fixed power bloc happiness changes not broadcasting after interactions, which can leave the UI showing stale happiness values

• Fixed rebels not being treated as defeated when all their settlements are occupied by a foreign power

UI

• Fixed same-faction imprisonment edge cases

• Fixed Steam achievements not syncing

• Fixed battle notification not navigating to the battle when clicked

• Fixed governor portrait becoming unclickable after certain interactions

  Thank you and I hope you enjoy the update!

  Joe

Hi all, I just pushed the first post-release patch for the game.

New Features

Military

• Delete and attach formation templates -- templates can now be deleted (with confirmation), and unassigned militaries can attach an existing template or create a new one directly from the sidebar

• Strength tooltip on the military sidebar explains formation status (no formation, over/under target, at target)

• Units now provisioned with 3 months of resources when added to an army, preventing immediate attrition

Power Blocs

• Rich text and clickable links in power bloc demands and goal descriptions -- references to the Imperial Court now link directly to the relevant tab

• Weak power blocs (below 25% of player military power) can no longer issue demands

• Foederati and Personal power blocs form after game start

Map & Visuals

• Map labels now have borders for improved readability

• Hover indicator on settlement glances hints that they are clickable

• Descriptive location text for armies and navies not near a settlement

UI & Quality of Life

• Auto-Resume setting -- the game now stays paused after dismissing events and diplomatic notifications by default; a toggle in Settings > Gameplay restores the old behaviour

• Blocked cursor and tooltips for besieged and blockaded settlements, preventing invalid actions

• Per-tab hints added to the diplomacy screen

• Edict UI improved: countdown shows remaining days, gold cost deducted on enactment, clicking a new edict cancels the active one

• Camera speed settings moved from Gameplay to Controls tab

• Current language name shown alongside flag in the main menu

• Vacant court position warning now opens the Imperial Court tab

• Garrisoned army widgets now stack vertically instead of horizontally

• Notification widgets now have tooltips

Console & Modding

• 14 new console cheats covering military, characters, diplomacy, settlements, economy, and map

Balance Changes

• Increased war enthusiasm penalty to prevent trivial early peace deals

• Capped Kyrnos to 2 armies and Vituria to 4 armies maximum

Localisation

• War names, rank names, and court position titles now fully localised

• Event grammar and character info localisation updated for CJK languages and Russian

• CJK text wrapping enabled in rich text tooltips

• Settings controls, notifications, DLSS, FPS, and model names localised

• Resource tooltip "/mo" suffix localised

• Stat names in event effects localised

• Replaced "wild ass" with "torsion engine" in Onager unit description to avoid literal animal translation in Chinese

• Proper noun glossary added to the translation pipeline for consistent translations of proper nouns

Bug Fixes

Crashes & Saves

• Fixed time freeze at high FPS after day 262,144 by changing date from float to double precision

• Fixed use-after-free crash in tutorial event system from dangling reference during broadcast

• Fixed crash from GC-collected retreated armies leaving dangling pointers in battle result arrays

• Fixed crash from stale culture references in GetFormattedName

• Fixed crash from stale entity references in link-building functions

• Fixed crash from null faction in tax breakdown map legend

• Fixed army formation state not restoring correctly on save/load (build queues, settlements, resource stockpiles)

• Fixed sieges not restoring correctly when loading from main menu

Military

• Fixed army movement speed and walk animation mismatch

• Fixed garrisoned army attachments remaining visible after leaving

• Fixed barricade meshes persisting after siege surrender

• Fixed map mode and selection not clearing after army creation

Diplomacy & Wars

• Fixed stale occupation on vassal settlements blocking building permanently after vassalisation

• Fixed annexable territory highlights showing during rebellion wars

• Fixed map not refreshing when vassal status changes

Tutorials

• Rewrote tutorial polling to fix stuck campaigns and save-load issues, with sequence-breaking for players who complete objectives ahead of the tutorial

Power Blocs & Politics

• Fixed spotlight event handling in HUD

Economy

• Fixed build queue crash when OnBuildComplete was called before removing the completed item

• Fixed tooltip hover inadvertently demolishing all buildings when hovering Fortress/Hermitage

UI

• Fixed missing icons from soft reference assets not loading correctly

• Fixed sieges not restoring correctly when loading from main menu

Performance

• Optimised sea pathfinding

• Optimised battle tick performance

• Throttled court validation to every 7 days to reduce frame hitches

• Reduced lag when starting battles

• Prevented freezing when editing military templates

Settings

• Fixed Steam achievement platform init deferring until EOS login completes

Hi all! This one's going to be short, because I'd rather you spend the time playing the game than reading about it.

Fall of an Empire is now live.

I'll be continuing to update the game with patches and new content going forward, and these dev diaries will keep coming as things develop. For now, go and play the game. The barbarians aren't going to crush themselves.

Thank you,

Joe

Hi all,

Good news! Everything is now sorted and the game is clear to release on Steam.

Fall of an Empire will be live Tuesday the third of March at 10am PDT.

That is also:

• Wednesday 5am AEDT

• Tuesday 1pm US Eastern

• Tuesday 7pm Central European time

Thank you,

Joe

Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond my control, it appears that Fall of an Empire's Steam release may be delayed from the expected 26/2/26 at 12pm AEST.

I am hoping to provide you with more details in regard to a new release date on Steam as soon as possible.

For more information please see the game's website.

Thank you,

Joe Gibbs

Hello all! This week we're going to look at two of the systems that have been the most interesting to develop: the dynamic event system, and the modding framework that lets you create your own content for Fall of an Empire.

You'll be familiar with event pop-ups if you've played a grand strategy game before: a bit of flavour text, a scenario, and a set of options for the player to choose between. Fall of an Empire has these too but rather than being entirely hand-written, many of the game's events are generated dynamically by a local langauge model that runs alongside the game. This is, of course, optional: the models that generate these events are quite large (2, 4 and 8GB - the 8GB model will be an optional separate download).

How it works: The game keeps a library of event topics - high-level scenarios like "a governor is skimming taxes", "an allied faction requests military aid", or "your heir's education needs guidance". Every month or so, the system picks a topic that fits the current state of your empire. It then gathers context from the game world: which characters are involved, what settlements are relevant, what factions are at war, and so on. All of this gets fed to the model, which writes the actual event text and options.

An example of one of the generated events.

The result is that events feel specific to your playthrough. If you're at war with the Himmelsvolci and your treasury is running out, you might get an event about a desperate general requesting funds for a siege - naming real characters, real settlements and real armies from your game. If your heir is being educated by a clever courtier, the events about their upbringing will reflect both that courtier's personality and your heir's developing traits.

Events can also chain together. If you choose to investigate a corrupt governor rather than punish them immediately, a follow-up event will appear weeks later with the results of that investigation, written with full knowledge of what happened before. The AI keeps summaries of previous events in the chain so that continuity is maintained across the whole story.

Each option in an event has consequences: gold gained or lost, changes to character stats and traits, shifts in loyalty, unrest in settlements, character deaths. Options are decided by traits, so a merciful emperor will see different choices than a cruel one. To keep the model from going off the rails, the system uses a grammar that constrains the model's output. It can only reference characters, factions and settlements that actually exist in your game, and it can only apply effects from a defined set. So you'll never get an event that mentions a character who doesn't exist or gives you a million gold by accident.

Alongside all of this, there are also hand-written scripted events for the most important moments: great famines, barbarian hordes, plagues, crises of succession. These follow the same presentation and effect system.

I've also wanted to make Fall of an Empire moddable as it can be. The game's content is built on a system of auto-discovery: rather than registering each trait, building, unit or interaction in some central list, the game simply searches for all classes that extend a base type and makes them available. This means that adding new content is as simple as dropping a script file into the right folder.

Mods live in a Mods/ directory. Each mod is a folder with a mod.json file describing it, and then whatever content the modder wants to add: AngelScript files for gameplay logic, DataTables for icons and data, and optionally a PAK file for packaged assets like textures and sounds.

Here's what you can create:

Traits - new character modifiers with stat effects, inheritance chances, gain/loss conditions and conflicts with other traits. Want to add a "Paranoid" trait that boosts cunning but tanks loyalty? A few lines of AngelScript will do it.

Buildings - new settlement structures with resource costs, economic effects, and level-up progression. Each building can have custom logic for what happens when it's built or destroyed.

Units - new military unit types with their own damage profiles, recruitment costs, and special abilities. These can be tied to specific cultures, so a Tarhanic steppe mod could add new cavalry types that only Tarhanic factions can recruit.

Interactions - new diplomatic actions, spy operations, personal schemes, and political manoeuvres. Each interaction has its own success chance calculation, cost, requirements, and effects.

Policies and Edicts - new governance options for factions. Policies are sliders that the player can adjust over time; edicts are one-off decrees.

Cultures and Religions - entirely new cultural and religious groups, complete with their own naming conventions, stat bonuses, and gameplay modifiers.

Scripted Events - hand-authored event chains with branching narratives, context requirements, and mechanical consequences. These use the same system as the base game's events.

Event Topics - new scenarios for the event system. Modders can add their own topic prompts to the DataTable, and the model will generate events from them using whatever context the topic requires.

The icon system is also fully moddable. Icons are stored in DataTables that get merged at runtime - the base game loads its tables first, then each mod's tables are layered on top in load order. Later mods can override earlier ones, so compatibility patches are straightforward.

In addition to these I'm also working on improving it some more so that you'll be able to use an Unreal plugin that includes all the game's systems and tools, so you'll be able to produce entirely new campaigns and scenarios and edit the UI as much as you want. This should be ready to go a couple of weeks after release.

All user-facing text goes through the localisation system, so mods can be translated into any of the game's nineteen supported languages.

I've included an example mod in the game's files that demonstrates a custom trait, building, diplomacy interaction, and scripted event. It should serve as a good starting point for anyone who wants to get their hands dirty.

The modding documentation - covering content types, interactions, events, assets and packaging - will be available on the game's website.

Thank you for reading! Next up is the game's launch which is coming up quickly!

Hello all! Welcome back for the next dev diary, in which we'll be looking at settlements, buildings, and the economic engine that keeps your empire running (or, if you're not careful, brings it to its knees).

Settlements are the beating heart of the Empire. Every province on the map has at least one, and each one is a living place with its own population, culture, religion, and economy. Settlements range from tiny villages to sprawling cities - as the population grows, so does the settlement's output and importance.

Each settlement has a mixed population. Each settlement tracks the cultural makeup of its people as a set of shares - so you might have a city that's 60% Rephsian and 40% Hervati. The same applies to religion: a settlement might be half Borgutian (the state faith of the Rephsian Empire) and half pagan. This matters a great deal, because a population that doesn't share your culture or religion is harder to govern. Foreign populations reduce your tax income by up to half and cut resource production significantly. They also generate unrest, which if left unchecked can spiral into rebellion. Over time, culture and religion will shift towards the ruling faction's own, but this is a slow process.

Buildings are where the player exerts the most direct control over their settlements. Each settlement has a build queue, and the player can construct buildings that provide economic bonuses, unlock military recruitment, improve defences, or help manage the population.

What makes the building system interesting is the development chains. Buildings upgrade and branch. A Church can be developed into either a Basilica or a Monastery, but not both: this is a permanent choice unless the player wants to demolish it and start again. A Blacksmith can become an Armoury, a Metal Foundry. A Palisade can be upgraded into Stone Walls, which can then become a Fortress - but converting a settlement into a Fortress removes all other buildings, turning it into a purely military installation. These choices matter and can't be easily undone.The full building browser for Rephsians

Many advanced buildings are gated behind population thresholds. You need at least a thousand people for a Church, two and a half thousand for a Market, and fifteen thousand for a Cathedral. The great Rephsian Walls - the highest tier of fortification in the game - require a population of a hundred thousand and can only be built in the capital.

Each of the game's culture groups also has its own set of unique buildings. The Neutarnic peoples can build Ringforts and Mead Halls. The Shabarim have their Cothon and Sacred Band Barracks, and so on for each group.

The economy in Fall of an Empire is built on resources. There are over two dozen resource types, divided into three categories: food (grain, fish, meat), strategic goods (iron, wood, stone, horses, weapons, armour), and luxuries (wine, silk, precious metals, fine clothes). Each settlement produces resources based on its geography (a coastal settlement might produce fish and salt, while a mountain settlement produces iron and stone).

Production isn't static. It varies by season, scales with population, and is affected by the governor's competence, buildings, and the cultural makeup of the settlement. A settlement with a large foreign population will produce less, and one under naval blockade will see its output halved.The Economy screen, that shows the full overview of the Empire's resource production.

Some resources are processed from others. A Metal Foundry takes in iron and produces fittings, for instance. These processing chains add a layer of planning: you need to ensure that settlements producing raw materials can get to settlements that can process them.Various resources produced throughout the Empire

Gold is the lifeblood of the empire. Each settlement generates tax income based on its population, modified by the governor's skill, the local culture and religion, corruption, and various building effects. A well-governed, culturally integrated city with a Market and a Forum will generate far more gold than a recently conquered, corrupt frontier town full of unhappy foreigners.

On the other side of the ledger, settlements have expenses. Building upkeep, charity for the poor, and garrison maintenance all eat into your income. Charity is particularly important - cutting it saves gold, but dramatically increases unrest among the common people.

Unrest is the threat that can undo even a most successful military campaign. It's driven by a long list of factors: overcrowding, corruption, absent governors, foreign culture, wrong religion, recent sieges, war weariness, and more. Buildings like Churches and Basilicas help keep unrest down, as does appointing a governor with high Authority. But if unrest climbs too high, the settlement risks rebellion, which can tear entire provinces away from your control if they become too powerful.Breaking out of a besieged capital

When war comes to a settlement, the siege system comes into play. An attacking army first establishes a blockade, cutting trade and reducing income. Then the siege proper begins - the attacker's siege power is pitted against the settlement's fortifications (walls, garrison, and defensive buildings). The settlement's food stockpile determines how long it can hold out. The attacker can wait for starvation, or attempt a costly assault once they've made enough progress. The defender, meanwhile, can attempt a breakout if they think they have the strength. A navy can also blockade a settlement, capturing convoys going to it and weakening it before an army can capture.

If a settlement falls, the attacker can choose to pillage it for immediate resources, or sack it for even greater plunder at the cost of devastating the population. Either way, a captured settlement will take a long time to recover.

That's all for this week. Next time we'll be looking at the dynamic event system and modding. Thank you for reading!

Hello again and welcome to this week’s diary, where we’re taking a look at diplomacy, wars, and espionage.

As emperor, you're dealing with a world full of factions that all have their own agendas. Some want to trade with you. Some want to settle on your land. And some want to burn it all down.

Relations and treaties

Every faction in the game has an opinion of you, ranging from -100 to +100. This opinion is made up of a stack of individual modifiers - things like shared religion, cultural similarity, trade agreements, and whether you broke your last treaty with them. These modifiers decay over time, so old grudges do eventually fade, though some take longer than others.

Relations between factions fall into a few broad categories: war, hostile, neutral, friendly, allied, and subject. Where you stand with another faction determines what diplomatic options are available to you. You can propose military alliances, defensive pacts, non-aggression treaties, trade agreements, royal marriages, and tribute arrangements. Each of these creates a formal treaty that lasts for a set duration, breaking one comes with serious consequences to your reputation.

The foederatiThe Himmelsvolci, a foederati of the Empire.

One of the most distinctive diplomatic tools available to the emperor is the ability to invite barbarian tribes to settle within the Empire as foederati - allied peoples who live on imperial land in exchange for military service.

To invite a tribe, you need to select up to five settlements near their territory where they'll be allowed to settle. The local governors won't be thrilled about this (you'll take a relations hit with them) - and the culture of those settlements will begin to shift towards the newcomers. But in exchange, you gain a protectorate that can provide troops and serve as a buffer against other barbarian threats.

You can also relocate foederati to new settlements if their current position is no longer strategically useful. And if you're feeling ambitious, you can attempt to culturally integrate them into Rephsian society or convert them to the state religion - though these are long, expensive, and difficult processes that can badly damage relations if they fail.

Wars

Surrendering territory to a barbarian faction.

When diplomacy fails, there's always war! Declaring war drags in allies on both sides. Your military allies join your offensive, the defender's allies rally to their side, and all subjects fight alongside their overlord. Wars can quickly become sprawling multi-faction conflicts.

Wars are tracked through a war score system that ranges from -100 to +100. You earn war score by winning battles, capturing prisoners, occupying enemy settlements, and maintaining naval blockades. Occupation is particularly important: holding enemy territory generates a steady trickle of war score over time, and if you manage to fully occupy an enemy faction, the war score snaps to maximum in your favour.The aftermath of surrendering territory.

When you've built up enough war score, you can start making demands through peace negotiations. There are several types of war goals you can pursue: one-time tribute payments, ongoing tribute, annexing specific settlements, replacing the enemy's ruler, imposing a non-aggression pact, releasing their subjects, or demanding they become your subject. Each goal costs a certain amount of war score to enforce, and you can combine multiple goals in a single peace offer - as long as you've earned enough score to back them up.A rebellion in progress.

Sieges

To actually take enemy territory, your armies need to besiege settlements. Siege power comes from your units - each has a siege value that's reduced if the unit is damaged. If your total siege power is enough to overcome the settlement's fortifications, you'll establish a full siege. Otherwise, you'll only manage a blockade, which is slower but still drains the settlement's food and morale over time.

Sieges take time. Fortified settlements can hold out for a long while, so you'll need to plan your campaigns carefully. A friendly army arriving to relieve the siege will break it, and you'll have lost time and possibly soldiers for nothing.

Espionage

Beyond open diplomacy and outright war, there's a third option: espionage. You can assign a spy to any foreign faction, and over time they'll build up a spy network. Network strength grows based on your spy's Cunning stat, and the stronger the network, the more powerful operations you can attempt. By embedding the spy you’ll also get access to the faction’s fog of war, so you can see what army movements they’re planning in their territory.

There are four espionage operations available. Spreading disinformation is the easiest - you pick a third faction and your spy damages the relationship between your target and that faction. It's a useful way to break up alliances or prevent two enemies from cooperating against you. Sabotaging the economy lets you drain a portion of the target's gold reserves. Sabotaging defences weakens the fortifications in several of their settlements - very useful as a prelude to invasion.

Every operation carries risk. Failure damages your spy network and can hurt your diplomatic relations. And your spy has a monthly chance of being discovered (that incraeses with every operation they attempt). A skilled spy with high Cunning can operate for years undetected, but a clumsy one will be caught quickly. When a spy is discovered, your network is destroyed, relations take a serious hit, and you'll need to start over from scratch with a new agent.

That’s about it for these systems, thanks for giving it a read! Next week will be buildings, settlements, and the economy - and in other news I got some good optimisations done so that the game is currently running at a pretty smooth 60fps on 4K, which will be good when playing with the event model enabled.

Welcome back to the dev diaries! This week we're going to be looking at two closely linked systems: the Imperial Court and the Empire's policies. These are really the highest level of how you govern your realm as Emperor - and as you'll see, governing a crumbling empire is never as simple as just making the right decision.

Let's start with the court. Playing as Theodosius V you have five key offices that you fill with characters from your realm.

The Magister Militum is your supreme commander of the land forces. A character with high Tactics in this role will boost the effectiveness of every army in the Empire. The Magister Nauticum does the same for your fleets. Then there's the Master of Diplomacy, whose Cunning skill helps with the treaties and barbarian neighbours you'll need to navigate. The Master of Economy oversees the imperial treasury - a character with strong Governance here means more gold in your coffers (and you will always need more gold). Finally the Master of Religion (whose title depends on your religion) manages the Empire's various faiths, and a character with high Authority in the role will help keep religious tensions in check across your settlements. Given that only about half the Empire actually follows the state religion of Apsodenian Borgutianism, this can be a very important appointment.

Each of these positions also has room for up to five subordinates, who chip in about a third of what a main officeholder would. So even if your Magister Militum is a bit mediocre, surrounding him with talented subordinates can make up for it.

Appointing someone to court is a politial decision. Characters gain fame from holding office, and the act of bringing someone to court creates patronage obligations that bind you together. The Foederati Council - one of the political factions within the Empire - may also push you to appoint barbarian leaders to positions traditionally held by Rephsians. Give them what they want and your Rephsian courtiers won't be happy; refuse and the foederati grow more restless.

If you can't find anyone suitable among your existing courtiers and subjects, you can spend gold to promote a new courtier - essentially sponsoring someone from the provinces to come and serve at your court. Different types of courtier come with different strengths, so this is a useful way to fill gaps.

The Empire has seven policy areas, each representing a strategic choice about the direction of your rule. Each one is a trade-off, and where you set them will depend entirely on the situation you're facing and the fires you're trying to put out. The most straightforward is the Tax Rate. Crank it up and you'll collect significantly more gold - up to one and a half times your normal revenue - but your governors will resent the burden, and their loyalty will suffer. Lower it and they'll be happier, but your treasury will suffer instead.

Religious Toleration is probably the most consequential policy in the game. At the intolerant end, Borgutianism spreads aggressively and heretical movements are suppressed - but religious minorities in your provinces cause far more unrest. At the tolerant end, unrest from religious diversity is halved, but your state religion stops spreading entirely and heresies start popping up everywhere. The middle ground tries to balance both, but satisfies no one completely. The Religious power bloc has very strong opinions about where this should sit.

Imperial Bureaucracy controls how centralised your administration is. More centralisation means more tax revenue but alienated governors who resent losing their autonomy. More decentralisation means less money but more loyal provincial administrators.

Public Games is the bread and circuses of Rephsis. Funding public entertainment costs gold - quite a lot of it at the higher levels - but it keeps the populace content, boosts governor loyalty, and dampens religious tensions.

Imperial Agents are your network of informants and inspectors across the provinces. Expanding the network brings in more tax revenue (they're very good at finding people who aren't paying their share) but makes your governors uncomfortable. Scaling the agents back means less oversight but better relations with your provincial leaders.

Military Stance determines whether you invest more heavily in land or naval forces. Prioritising one comes at the expense of the other, and the right choice depends on where your enemies are. If the Neutarnic tribes are pouring over your northern frontier, you probably want strong armies, but if raiders from Neutarnia Ultima are harassing your coasts, a powerful navy is the priority.

And then there's Frontier Strategy, which is one of my favourites. At one end you have the limes - a system of static border fortifications. This is safe and predictable: your governors like it, because their provinces are well-protected. But your field armies become much less effective, because they're spread out in garrisons rather than concentrated as a fighting force. At the other end is the comitatenses approach - mobile field armies. This makes your armies more powerful in battle, but provinces near the frontier are exposed to more raids, and governors won't thank you for the risk.

You don't adjust these policies directly, though. Instead you issue Edicts - imperial decrees that shift a policy one step at a time. Policy changes in a vast empire don't happen overnight, and each edict takes time to go into effect. More importantly, many policy changes cause short-term unrest across the Empire. Governors and their populations don't appreciate sudden shifts in how they're governed - every settlement takes a small stability hit and your governors' opinion of you drops. Shifting three policies at once in the middle of a war could trigger rebellions across half your provinces (ideal when you're already fighting on one front!).

This is where the systems really come together with the power blocs - the political factions within your Empire. Each power bloc has preferred policy positions. The Military Establishment wants strong armies and an aggressive frontier strategy. The Religious authorities want Borgutianism enforced, and so on. When your policies don't, their happiness drops - and if they stay unhappy long enough, they'll rebel against you.

Your policies apply to your provinces as well. When you change a policy, it cascades down through your entire hierarchy of subject provinces and foederati. Your subjects can see your policies but can't change them. A loyal provincical ruler on your northern frontier might stay loyal for years - until you shift to a naval military stance and pull all the investment away from his border. The governance decisions you make for the Empire affect everyone under your rule, and not everyone will agree with them.

That's it for this week! Next time we'll be looking at the military system and how battles play out. Thank you for reading.

Hello all! This week we're going to be looking at one of the most important systems in Fall of an Empire: the military. Armies are the backbone of your power - without them, you cannot defend your borders, crush rebellions, or bring wayward provincial governors to heel. But maintaining a military is expensive, and fielding the wrong troops in the wrong place can be disastrous.Viewing and creating a new army template

Let's start with how armies are actually built. In the game, your militaries are ordered around formations. A formation might specify that you want three cohorts of heavy infantry units, two of cavalry, and siege units. Once you've designed and raised this formation, your settlements will automatically begin producing the units and sending them to form up into an army. This means that raising a new force takes time, and if your settlements are spread across the empire, your reinforcements will trickle in over days or weeks as they march from their home provinces. It also means that if a settlement is under siege or cut off by enemies, it can't contribute to your war effort. You’ll need to make sure that your settlements meet the requirements: certain units can only be fielded from upgraded buildings or special Fortresses (which entirely convert the settlement into a militarised one).

Creating a formation from a settlement

Units themselves come in several broad categories: infantry, ranged, cavalry, siege, and special units. Infantry form the backbone of most armies: they're relatively cheap, they hold the line, and they die in large numbers so that your more expensive troops don't have to. Ranged units attack the enemy from a distance but crumble if cavalry reaches them. Cavalry are fast and deadly on the charge, but expensive to maintain and useless in a prolonged melee. Siege units are essential for taking fortified settlements - without them, you'll be stuck outside the walls for months. And special units cover everything from religious figures who bolster morale to elite units who can turn the tide of a battle.

Each unit type has three damage values - pierce, crush, and slash - and three corresponding armour values. A unit that deals primarily slash damage will struggle against heavily armoured opponents with high slash armour, while pierce damage from spears and arrows cuts through lighter troops. This means that army composition matters: a force of nothing but heavy infantry will be tough to kill, but slow and vulnerable to massed archery. A cavalry-heavy army can run circles around infantry, but will suffer badly if caught by spearmen.

Different cultures field very different units. The Rephsian legions can call upon the Legio Comitatenses (no relation to any historical military units whatsoever) - professional heavy infantry in the old imperial tradition - as well as the Equites Clibanarii, armoured cavalry who can smash through enemy formations. The Neutarnic barbarians prefer shield walls and tribal levies, fighting on foot with axes and spears in tight-packed formations. The Tamasheq of the southern deserts field swift cavalry and light archers adapted to the heat. And the steppe peoples of Tarhania fight almost entirely from horseback.

This brings us to battles themselves. When two armies meet, combat takes place in a kind of simulated two-dimensional space. Rather than resolving everything in a single dice roll, your units form up into groups of the same unit type that move and fight together. These groups then manoeuvre across the battlefield, seeking advantageous positions and trying to engage enemy formations on favourable terms. Infantry formations will try to pin down enemies, cavalry will attempt to flank and charge, and ranged formations will seek positions from which they can rain missiles without being engaged in melee.A battle in progress: this UI will see a refresh before release.

You have some control over this process. You can assign targets to your formations, ordering your cavalry to ignore the enemy infantry and sweep around to attack their archers. You can set your formations' stances - aggressive for more damage at the cost of taking more, defensive for the opposite, or simply ordering them to hold position and let the enemy come to them. You can also trigger special abilities if your commander has the tactical skill for it: ordering a testudo formation to weather a storm of arrows, for instance.

Commanders matter a great deal. Each army is led by a character (it can be leaderless, but will suffer a lot from the lack of leadership), and that character's statistics affect everything from movement speed to combat effectiveness. A general with high Tactics will unlock more battlefield abilities and make better decisions in the automated parts of combat. A general with high Authority can command more troops and provides larger bonuses to the formations under their command. And the military hierarchy itself provides bonuses - a Dux commanding multiple Prefects, each commanding multiple Legates, creates a chain of command where each level provides morale and combat bonuses to those below them.

Armies also gain veterancy over time. A newly raised formation of conscripts will fight poorly compared to a hardened force that has survived multiple campaigns. This veterancy is precious - losing a veteran army means losing years of accumulated experience. It's often better to retreat and preserve an experienced force than to fight to the death and have to raise raw recruits to replace them.

Of course, armies need to eat. Every month, your soldiers consume food and other resources from your faction's stockpiles. If the supplies run out, your army will begin to suffer attrition. This is where the convoy system from the economy becomes the most useful: if rebels or barbarians cut your supply lines, an army can starve to death on the march home. Armies can carry their own stockpiles to an extent, but for prolonged campaigns deep in enemy territory, you need to plan your logistics carefully.

The army sidebar: note the resources and morale.

The terrain itself can be deadly too. Armies marching through snow in winter will suffer cold attrition. In summer, the deserts will parch and exhaust your troops. Certain unit types are adapted to these conditions - desert cavalry don't suffer in the heat, and northern barbarians are hardier in the cold - which is another reason to consider the composition of your forces carefully (in this case, foederati can be very powerful).

For the barbarian factions and the foederati, the military works somewhat differently. Rather than maintaining standing professional armies like the Rephsians, these cultures rely on tribal levies - warriors called up from the population when war demands it. The levy system scales with population, so a small tribe can only field a small warband, while a large and prosperous one can raise a formidable host. But levies have their costs: calling up their warriors means they're not working their farms, and a defeated levy that suffers heavy casualties will take time to recover. The foederati themselves occupy an interesting middle position. As barbarian tribes settled within the Empire, they owe military service to their Rephsian overlord - you. When war comes, you can call up foederati forces to fight alongside your legions. These barbarian auxiliaries bring their own fighting styles and unit types to your armies, often providing capabilities that Rephsian units lack. But the foederati don't always appreciate being called up, and demanding too much military service will strain your relationship with them. Push them too hard, and they may decide that rebellion is preferable to endless war in your name.Three armies in battle, next to a pillaged settlement.

Finally, there are sieges. A fortified settlement cannot simply be walked into - you need to besiege it. This is where siege units are the most useful. Each unit contributes siege power, and the total siege power of your army determines how quickly you can reduce the fortifications and assault the walls. A well-fortified city with strong walls might hold out for months against an army without proper siege equipment, but fall in weeks to a force with rams and catapults. During a siege, the settlement's garrison will defend against any assault, so you need to be confident your forces can defeat the defenders before you order the attack (or just wait until they surrender).

Thank you (again) for reading! Next week we'll be looking at the imperial court and policies.

Hello all, this week we'll be looking at the character system and the power blocs that make up the imperial court.

Fall of an Empire revolves around its characters. Unlike many strategy games where you interact with faceless factions, here you're dealing with individuals with their own personalities, ambitions and grudges. These are the people who run the Empire's provinces, command its armies, and scheme in its palaces. Managing them is just as important as defending your borders.

Each character has seven statistics that determine their capabilities. Tactics reflects their military ability - how well they can command an army in battle and execute manoeuvres.

Authority is their charisma and presence; a character with high authority can command more troops and is more likely to be followed.Statistics in the character sidebar

Cunning measures their ability to deceive and manipulate others.

Governance determines how well they can run a province or a settlement - higher governance means more efficient tax collection and faster development.

Loyalty is how likely they are to follow your orders rather than pursuing their own agenda.

Constitution (a hidden stat) affects their health and disease resistance - very important considering that the game has a plague and disease system which could strike down even a younger character.

Finally, Fame represents their reputation and renown, earned through victories in battle, in-game events and successful governance. Fame can also be inherited, though at a reduced rate (for example, the children of famous generals start with some recognition of their own).

Beyond these statistics, characters also have traits that further modify their abilities and behaviour. An Ambitious character gains cunning but loses loyalty (they're always looking for ways to advance themselves). A Militant character is an excellent tactician but struggles with civil administration. Some traits are permanent once gained; others are temporary (such as diseases or injuries). For example a character who takes a blow to the head in battle might gain the Head Injury trait, affecting their capabilities until they recover after a few years.

Characters can fill various roles within (and outside) the Empire. They might be ruling a faction as its leader, commanding an army or navy, governing a settlement, serving in the imperial court, or working as a diplomat or spy in a foreign land. Each role comes with its own responsibilities and opportunities. A provincial governor who rules well will increase your income and keep the populace content but one who rules poorly might spark rebellions.Interacting with a character via actions

Relationships between characters matter enormously. Characters form Patronage Networks - a powerful noble might have several client characters who owe their positions to him, and in turn he might be the client of an even more powerful figure. Characters can become friends or enemies, and these relationships affect their willingness to cooperate. Marriages between powerful families can create alliances between those families. Each relationship comes with an opinion value that can shift over time as favours are given and slights come up.

Now, beyond individual characters, the Empire contains several power blocs - organised factions that represent different interests at court. Managing these blocs is one of the core challenges of ruling. If you let them grow too unhappy they'll rebel, keep them content and they'll provide bonuses.Power blocs in the game (some of this UI will be changed)

There are three institutional blocs that always exist: the Senatorial Aristocracy, the Legions, and the Bureaucracy. The Senatorial Aristocracy represents the old noble families - they want proper appointments (that is, putting high-born Rephsians into positions of power rather than foreigners or commoners), stability, and preservation of noble privileges.

The Legions represent the military establishment: they want strong armies, opportunities for glory, and a respected commander to lead them. When they're furious, they might proclaim a rival Emperor and plunge the realm into civil war.

The Bureaucracy represents the administrative class: they want a healthy treasury, competent officials, and peace so they can do their work. A happy bureaucracy improves your income and governance but an unhappy one might engage in passive resistance and tax strikes.

Beyond these permanent blocs, others can form dynamically. Religious blocs appear for any faith with significant presence at court - the state religion will always have one, but minority faiths might form their own if enough courtiers follow them. Personal factions form around powerful individuals who have the fame and authority to challenge the throne - a successful general, for instance, might attract followers who see him as a potential Emperor.

Regional interest blocs represent the concerns of neglected provinces - if you leave a region without troops or governors for too long, its people will form a bloc demanding attention. The New Men represent commoners who've risen through merit rather than birth - they clash with the aristocracy over appointments. Finally, the Foederati Council represents the interests of your barbarian allies within your territory, if you have any.

Each character naturally gravitates toward certain blocs based on their traits and background. An Imperious nobleman of high fame will fit right in with the Senatorial Aristocracy, a Militant general will align with the Legions and a low-born administrator with the Administrative trait might join the New Men. Characters can only belong to one bloc at a time, and the bloc they choose affects how they view your decisions.Looking at the player's family tree

Thank you for reading! Next week we'll be looking at the combat and battle system of the game.

Hello all! Welcome back to the third dev diary for Fall of an Empire. As promised last week, today we'll be looking at the resource and economy system - one of the core pillars of the game.

In many strategy games, resources are abstracted away into a simple income number that ticks up each turn. Gold flows into your treasury from nowhere in particular, and you spend it on things without much thought about where it's actually coming from. Fall of an Empire takes a different approach: resources are physical things that exist in the world, are produced in specific places, and must be transported to where they're needed.

Resources in the game fall into five categories. Food is the most fundamental - your people need to eat, and your armies need to eat even more. Raw Materials include things like timber, iron ore and stone: the building blocks of industry. Manufactured Goods are what your craftsmen produce from those raw materials: weapons, armour, cloth, tools. Luxury Goods are the silks, spices, wine and other fineries that keep your nobles happy (and your tax revenues high). Finally, Strategic Resources are rare materials needed for military purposes - things like weapons and horses.

Every settlement in the game has an economy. Farms in the countryside produce grain, mines extract ore, and so on. But a settlement also consumes resources: the common people eat food, the upper classes need luxuries, and any garrison stationed there needs to be equipped and fed. The balance between production and consumption determines whether a settlement has a surplus to export or a deficit that needs to be filled.Above: the resources map mode, showing all the resource production for various settlements.

This is where convoys come in. When a settlement has excess resources, it can send them to other settlements that need them. These aren't abstract transfers - convoys are actual entities on the map, moving along roads and sea routes, carrying various goods. That means it can be intercepted.

Rebels, barbarians, and enemy armies can all attack your convoys. A successful raid might see your precious supplies carried off to feed a barbarian warband instead of your troops. This means that protecting your supply lines becomes a strategic concern. You might have the richest provinces in the world, but if you can't get those resources to where they're needed, they're worthless.

The priority system determines where resources go when there isn't enough for everyone. Armies in the field generally take priority - you don't want your soldiers starving while on campaign. But this can create its own problems: strip too many resources away from your settlements and unrest will rise as people go hungry and workshops sit idle.

An army carries a stockpile of food and equipment, which it consumes as it marches and fights. When that stockpile runs low, the army needs to be resupplied - either by receiving convoys from nearby friendly settlements, by capturing enemy convoys, or by foraging from the land (which tends to make the locals rather unhappy). An army that runs out of supplies entirely will suffer attrition: men deserting, dying of hunger.

The economy overview. This will get a bit of a refresh before release.

Sieges add more complexity. A besieged settlement is cut off from outside supply - no convoys can reach it. The defender must survive on whatever stockpiles they've accumulated, while the attacker must maintain their own supply lines to keep their besieging army fed. A well-stocked fortress can hold out for months; a poorly prepared one might fall in weeks simply because the garrison ran out of food.

This all means that the map itself becomes more strategically important. Controlling key road junctions means you protect your own convoys while threatening enemy supply lines. Coastal settlements with good harbours can receive supplies by sea, making them harder to starve out. Mountain passes are important chokepoints and roads can be upgraded at certain locations so your troops and convoys can get somewhere faster.

The economy is about more than keeping your armies supplied, of course. Settlements need resources to construct buildings, which in turn can increase production or provide other benefits. A prosperous economy generates more tax revenue, which you'll need to pay your soldiers and administrators. Lack of food causes unrest and kills your citizens. And keeping the luxury goods flowing to your nobles helps maintain their loyalty - or at least makes their disloyalty slightly less likely.

Thank you for reading! Next week we'll be diving into the character system and how the people of your empire scheme, plot and occasionally remain loyal.

Hello all! Today it’s time for the second dev diary, in which we’ll be looking at the world and of the game and its cultures.An overview of the game's factions

The world of Fall of an Empire is divided chiefly into two parts: the northern continent Cassa, and the southern continent Sattaria. These lands and the central sea are dominated by the ancient Rephsian Empire, founded a thousand years before the game’s start. Centred on the eternal city of Rephsis, the Empire expanded over the centuries to become the greatest civilisation the world has ever known. The imperial language and culture has dominated the two continents.

The cultures of the game

In the beginning, the tribes around the capital banded together and began to slowly conquer territory. The first kings of Rephsis and the royal Senate (originally the chiefs of each tribe, now a rubber-stamp assembly made up of nobles from the provinces) worked in tandem, and the Rephsian legions with their military commanders took territory after territory. When Rephsis had conquered the plains and peninsula of Sarmachia, it looked over the mountains and sea and looked for more territory to claim. The title of King became merged with the title of Emperor, originally the word of for the commander of an army.

Three hundred years into Rephsian rule, a man from the steppe, Borgutius, came to the Empire. With his followers he preached a new, martial religion of the one true God against the pagan deities of Rephsis. Borgutius and his disciples were mocked by the people - until his band grew, and marched on the capital. After conquering it, he ruled for a month - until he was betrayed by a sect of his followers, who handed him over to the force that had come to relieve the city.

Hypocritically it was this more pacifist sect that took over Borgutius’s legacy: with him and his followers dead a new religion came into being, one that believed in submission before God and a natural order ruled by the nobility, with a strict and regimented social system. Naturally this appealed to the patrician class, most of whom converted over the next three hundred years. It took longer for this religion to reach the commoners - even in 784 only half the Empire’s population is made up of followers of Apsodenian Borgutianism.Religions of the Empire

However, over the last few centuries the Empire has become weak - constant rebellion, soft emperors unfit for campaign and religious strife have meant that barbarian tribes have found it easy pickings for looting and plundering. The last emperor, Lucius XI - called Vetus for his long reign - ruled more than fifty years, and in this time seeing three tribes take up residence within the Empire.

At the start of Fall of an Empire, you, Theodosius V, have finally overthrown Lucius Vetus. It’s finally time for you to end these humiliating centuries that the Empire has endured.The game's Domains

The world is split into these various Domains - high-level abstract regions. Of these there are ones that make up the Empire: Rephsia (the empire’s core), Septentria (the northeastern frontier), the peninsula of Oretania, Carnovia - a large and fertile, mostly flat land, and the mountainous, semi-arid Tamarsia and riverine Sarghania in the southern continent of Sattaria.

Beyond the Empire: in Sattaria there is the desert domain Amarghan, but in Cassa there are the steppes of Tarhania to the east, and the forests of Neutarnia and Svarania to the north: home to three groups of foederati in the Empire. West of Neutarnia is the peninsula of Neutarnia Ultima - home to raiders who have recently become more active. And in the frozen north is mysterious Boralia. Not much is known of this land.Core territory of the Himmelsvolci

Within the empire, these three foederati are Himmelsvolci, who make their home in the land of Savania. Here they rule over a mostly Rephsian population.

The territory of the Hervati

Near the capital are the Hervati - the most recent arrivals - and who are traitorously rebelling against your rule.

In Tamarsia the Angharati rule over the Rephsianised Cavalite people and are threatened by the Tamasheq desert-dwellers.

The Western Rebels in Oretania

In Oretania the Western Rebels have risen up against you under the upstart rule of Aulus Tiberian, a general and loyalist of Lucius Vetus who now has named himself Emperor. To crush them is your destiny!

There are a lot more factions in the game - both within and outside the Empire - but to go through them all will take a book, so I will have to leave you with them here. Next week we’ll be looking at the resource and economy system.

Hi all! It’s been quite a while since the last dev diary - and in that time the game has changed significantly. So from here on out until release, I’ll be writing a new dev diary each week explaining how the various systems in Fall of an Empire interact, and how the game actually works.

First off: an explanation of what the game is and what it aims to accomplish.

Fall of an Empire is a character-focused grand strategy game, not unlike Crusader Kings or some entries in the Total War series. The player rules as Flavius Theodosius Histrius, emperor of Rephsis, a large and ancient realm that has been weakened by strife and mismanagement (it’s totally legally distinct and has no relation to any historical civilisations whatsoever). The ability to play as other characters will be something that I’ll look at introducing in the future, but for now the gameplay systems are tuned for an emperor.

The gameplay is focused around managing internal and external threats: characters control provinces, barbarian tribes, armies or navies. In a bureaucratic imperial system like in the game, the main thing that matters is holding military and political offices - but at any point the balance could shift entirely as one faction falls out of favour and another rises. The game involves a lot of scheming, politicking and treachery, and models a kind of network of patronage where most political characters are either the patron or client of another character.

You’ll need to build up your armies from a diverse roster of units (including foederati from barbarian factions), and send them to fight against your enemies. Battles in the game take place in a kind of simulated 2D space, where units join up into formations and then move around the battlefield to outmaneuver each other - the player also has some input here, and can choose where formations are going to attack.

The resource system is also very important. Settlements within the game produce and consume resources: the common people eat food, the upper class use up luxury goods such as silks and spices, and the army uses swords and clothes. Rather than having these resources move abstractly to your coffers, they’re carried by convoys that move across the map and that can be captured by rebels and barbarians: therefore you need to ensure that your supply lines are protected if you want to keep your troops fed.

The game doesn’t have a defined win condition. Instead, it’s about surviving as long as possible against the threats to your reign. As the game continues these threats will increase: more wars, plagues, invasions and so on will continue to grow and become more pronounced. To lose, the player will either lose control of the Empire or die heirless.

Finally, a big feature that I’ve been working on is a system of creating dynamic event chains with a language model. This will make it so that all events that occur will be tailored to the character's age, relations, stats and traits: they can be accurate and mention things that aren't closely related to the event and still avoid vagueness at the same time,

Thank you for reading! Next week we’ll be looking at the world map and factions.