Hi Everyone,

It's time for another big update! As we mentioned in our last development post, the AI rivals will need a lot of big tech changes and well be rolling some of those out early as we finish them. The first early tech change were launching for this update is a big rework of the map generation.

If you've got questions, ideas, bug reports, come chat with us on discord: https://discord.gg/kingdomsandcastles, or email us at contact@lionshieldstudios.com.

Here's the details:

New Map Generation

We've reworked map generation algorithm. Now distinct landmasses will be farther apart (no more landmasses separated by just 4 tiles). Additionally maps have a chance to spawn with shallow water rivers. Map island shapes should in general be more interesting. All landmasses are guaranteed to be above a certain tile count and wolves also wont spawn on small landmasses. Finally, maps got a bit bigger! The number of build-able tiles increased by 20-30% per map size.

Wooden Gates

These will match up better with wooden walls, and are cheaper than stone gates.

Stone Bridges

These bridges fit together with stone roads and provide the same movement bonus. They are impassable by ship so be careful you dont box in your transport ships. Viking ships can't pass through them or destroy them.

Fire Brigade

You can augment the automatic volunteer peasant firefighters with actual firefighters who hang out at the Fire Brigade building until needed. These professional firefighters run very quickly and put out fires much quicker than normal peasants. With the right Fire Brigade placement, youll now be able to put out fires that would have destroyed buildings when the peasant volunteers were too far away to arrive in time.

Twitch Integration

If you'd like, you can turn on streamer mode in the settings. A twitch icon will appear on the side of the screen, enter your username there, start streaming and viewers can vote on what befalls your kingdom: bonuses, disasters, and other events!

Tax Tweaks

The tax rate used to go from 1 to 3. Now it can do half increments (so 0.5, 1, 1.5, etc). As a stylistic choice weve changed the display to show a percentage so if you had a tax rate set at 3, itll now show as 30%, but all the internal math will remain the same. This will allow you finer grain control over taxation vs. your kingdoms happiness.

Windmill Bonus Tweak
Windmill bonuses no longer stack with adjacent windmills and instead each does a flat +3 per tile. It turns out with overlapping bonuses a really strange formation of farms and windmills is optimal (long rows of windmills with a row of farms in between). We wanted to make it so you don't have pack windmills in a line to get optimal food output.


Other Improvements/Fixes

• For older mac users who werent able to see trees, you can now turn on Mac Compatibility Mode in the settings to address that.
  
• Optimization pass
  
• Dragons are less punishing in terms of how many people they kill (especially large dragons)
  
• Stockpiles are treated as stone roads regarding peasant walk speed
  
• Added dirt under the stone roads so they match up with regular roads/gardens better
  
• Baker bakes faster (10s per bread from 15s)
  
• Right click now also deselects tower range UI
  
• Previously viking ships would phase through drawbridges, now the drawbridges go up when any ship comes through
  
• Display charcoal maker yearly output
  
• Reduced costs on castle blocks
  
• Tweak castle tower ballista/archer ranges
  
• Reservoirs can be built anywhere (ignores road territory)
  
• Fix issue where vikings spawned in creative mode wouldnt always leave on their ships properly
  
• Fix mason not repairing walls
  
• Fix case where peasants could end up in deep water
  
• Fix case where doctors could end up in deep water/floating in air
  
• Fix garden not receiving adjaceny bonuses if under aqueduct
  
• Fix armies not able to stand in town squares
  
• Fix not being able to build castle blocks on top of a gate that had a garden underneath
  
• Fix issue where delivery workers could carry their goods with them if they switched jobs
  
• Other small fixes/tweaks