Shieldwall Overhaul: The Population Update
Hi all,
Sorry about the wait. Our team took a bit of a break, which turned into a fair bit of a break, then into a lot of a break, due to the pandemic. When you're chained to your desk for 6-8 hours for work and school, you don't exactly feel like modding afterwards. However, now that things have settled down and we've had time to relax, we have resumed active development of the mod. When we had left off, we were actually quite close to releasing a major update, so we've spent the last two weeks finishing it.
Population Update Highlights
- Four fully fledged population mechanics: Peasantry, Nobles, Clergy and Foreign Warriors. These population types have faction wide effects.
- Population is used directly in the recruitment UI to purchase units.
- Fully reworked military technology tree for all factions.
- Dozens of new events, with more being added as we finish them.
Peasant Population
- Peasants are the backbone of the Kingdom. They are used to recruit most basic units, such as Fyrd.
- A thriving Peasant population will provide increases to your commerce income.
- Promote the growth of peasant population by maintaining a food surplus.
- When you conquer lands, you gain access to the peasants living there, minus the ones you killed in the process.
- Peasants can be lost through recruitment and through riot events.
- Certain buildings, such as the Market Town settlement chain, can increase your available peasantry.
Noble Population
- Nobles are both soldiers and administrators of your Kingdom.
- Almost all elite units require noble population.
- However, nobles also play an important role in maintaining order in your Kingdom. When Nobles become outnumbered by more than 10:1 by the Peasants, you will suffer increased Banditry and reduced Public Order.
- Noble population growth depends on many of the same things as peasants, but has additional mechanics.
- Allegiance is particularly important for noble population: you only gain nobles from a region in proportion to your allegiance in that region. When capturing new regions, spread your allegiance quickly to gain the support of the local noble families.
- The fastest way to increase your noble population rapidly is to build estates.
Clergy
- Clergy represent the monks and priests of your Kingdom.
- They are trained at religious and educational buildings and provide a powerful bonus to faction research rate.
- Upgrading Monasteries and Abbeys will create more room for additional clergy.
- For Christian kings, Clergy also provide a faction wide increase to public order.
- However, for Pagan kings, Clergy will spread dissent (and worse, Christianity) among the nobles and thereby increase the public order penalties of having low allegiance.
- Pagans must therefore balance their desire for advanced technology with the risks of relying upon the church.
Foreign Warriors
- Foreign Warriors represent Vikings who have decided to make the British Isles their home.
- Foreign Warriors make their homes in special settlement chains: Foreign Villages (found in minor settlements throughout the map), Danelaw Boroughs (found in major settlements in, well, the Danelaw), and Longphorts (found on the coasts of Ireland and on the Isle of Man)
- The presence of Foreign Warriors in your Kingdom is unsettling to the Peasantry, creating problems with Public Order.
- If public order is not managed, this will eventually result in violence in your Kingdom between the two cultures.
- However, Foreign Warriors are also used to recruit Foreign Warrior units, including things ranging from Vikingar (available to non-viking factions as mercenary units) to Butsecarl and Beserkers.
- Foreign Warrior units offer a way to acquire more powerful soldiers without using noble population.
- Viking factions experience reduced public order penalties and a benefit to allegiance for maintaining a strong population of foreign warriors, but this comes at the cost of diplomatic penalties with factions that are native to the Isles.
Technolgy Tree
- While we decided to keep Thrones' original format for the Civil Technologies, we fully reworked the military tree into, well, a tree.
- The technology seperated from the tree at the bottom is unlocked after a short Fame victory and provides access to foreign mercenaries.
- Unit unlocks, general bodyguard upgrades, building unlocks, and improvements to your soldiers are available throughout the tree.
- We plan to continue honing the balance of the tree and possibly adding more unique effects as we continue to develop the mod.
Followers
- Followers no longer act as glorified skills giving flat bonuses.
- Instead, followers change the events which your characters can experience.
- For example, a character with the Henchmen follower will be able to use that follower to put down riots, or to gain extra benefits from raiding.
- Priests and Gothi followers can provide blessings to the region or army controlled by their character, but are mutually exclusive.
- Quartermasters can set up supply lines when your army visits friendly settlements.
- We are continuing to add more follower events in small updates.
Buildings
- A ton of work was put into polishing up buildings for their role in powering the population mechanic, but we've also made other changes.
- First of all, we've added several new chains including the Archery Range, Training Field, Danelaw Borough, Foreign Settlement, and Pagan Hof.
- We've also added a few new landmarks, including The Island Monastery at Lindisfarne, and, as a lategame unlockable, Oxford University.
- Food and gold balance has continued to tighten up: when Kinjo launched this mod it was called Petty Kingdoms, so we've spent some time making sure you feel petty.
Future Plans
- The main reason this update took so long is that we threw out CA's Lua scripts (well, except the Campaign Manager :P) when we started work. This meant we rewrote the lua behind every single scripted feature in thrones... which is a lot of the features in thrones.
- Sadly, we couldn't reimplement everything and we wanted to put our work out there, so we are still continuing to work on things like: faction specific mechanics, decrees and campaign historical events.
- On the bright side, however, now that all the hand-breaking work has been done, we are at a place where we can very rapidly create and implement content that connects seemlessly into all the scripted systems we've designed.
- Since we posted the update on Steam on Saturday, we've already released two small updates adding new traits and re-enabling the Tribute mechanic for the Viking Sea Kings. We hope to continue releasing tiny content updates like this for some time before we put our heads down to work on new unlocked factions.
Some Preview Images of Campaign Features
Re: Shieldwall Overhaul: The Population Update
Wow! Finally someone implemented pop mechanics like I always dreamt about.
Re: Shieldwall Overhaul: The Population Update
I keep my fingers crossed you, Guys, would make this mod with those fancy mechanics! Pop system is awesome.
Re: Shieldwall Overhaul: The Population Update
I really don't know why CA do not risk more to explore this kind of mechanics.
