After incorporating lots of your feedback, the Grand Buildings Update is now out for everyone! 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 (or post on the forums here).
Thanks to all the beta testers, we really appreciate your efforts. And another super special thanks to our translators – a bunch more languages have been added!
Here’s what’s new:
You can now build cathedrals, which are very expensive and provide happiness in a large radius. Cathedrals can also strike awe into invading vikings who get near and convert them to peasants. If this happens you’ll notice a bolt of lightning hitting the viking army.
Great libraries are also available to build. They too are very expensive but provide a lot of happiness in a large radius. They also increase the maximum happiness of small libraries within their radius. And perhaps most importantly you can research upgrades to your kingdom from the great library.
When towns reach a certain size the peasants will start wanting a place to bathe. So once you’ve got a noria and aqueducts set up, pipe some water over to a town center and build a bathhouse! Bathhouses aren’t as expensive as the new cathedral and great library, but provide lots of happiness in a pretty big area.
Now when you click to show/hide the happiness visuals, you’ll see the happiness of each tile displayed from red to green.
We’ve also reworked the happiness radius and overlay system to feel a little more natural. The happiness provided by wells, churches, libraries, etc is now a gradient.This means a house right next to a tavern will get more happiness from that tavern than a house far away from the same tavern. The overlay visuals now show this as well. While placing or clicking on a happiness building you can see the coverage gradient that type of building provides.
Dragons are now more of a threat. They do more damage and escalate their attacks over time. We’ve added some new burning behaviors and you’ll find them much more of a threat to contend with. Since this makes the game a bit harder, please let us know your thoughts on the tuning here.
- 7 new languages (Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian)
- Added health bars to ogres, dragons, player and viking armies
- Rubble has a button that will rebuild what was once there. (Only works on rubble created after this update)
- Added info to show when the next dragon and viking attacks will arrive. This can be turned on and off in the settings.
- Taxes collected depend on working tax collectors
- Forester is now a prerequisite for charcoal maker
- Performance optimizations
- Lots of small tweaks and other fixes
It’s coming along! Here’s a work-in-progress snapshot: https://streamable.com/86ler
One request that comes up a lot is AI controlled rivals. This would be a big change with lots of new code, design, and possibly art, so our next focus will be investigating how feasible this is and what we can do. If it does turns out to be feasible, it would end up being one of our larger updates, so there could be smaller updates in the meantime, but we’ll keep you posted.
As always, direct chat on discord is the fastest way to get in touch with us: https://discord.gg/kingdomsandcastles
Until next time,
-Pete & Michael