Version 1.3 is about the ground the company crosses. A march is now measured
before it is ordered — how far it is to walk, how much of it is road, the lands
and towns it passes, the hostiles beside it, and whether the food outlasts it —
and the map can be read inwards as well as outwards: the regions the campaign
holds, how much of each has been walked, and which towns lie near which. In
battle, the enemy is heard coming rather than only heard arriving. Saves remain
compatible with 1.2.
Every march is measured
Ordering the company to a town twenty tiles off said one word and then nothing
until it arrived. Every travel order now carries its route: how far it is to
walk, how much of that is road, the rivers it crosses, the named lands it passes
through in the order it enters them, the towns it goes by, roughly how long it
takes, and the nearest known hostile the line of march runs past. If the larder
gives out before the road does, it says so.
G answers the same question at any point of a march — where the company is
going, how far is left, how long. Shift+G, or Shift+Enter on a list row,
measures a trip without ordering it, which is the question worth asking before
spending two game days on the answer. The time is spoken as an estimate.
The tile figure says "to walk", because a road bending around a lake is a third
longer than the straight line every list row counts.
The regions you have explored, on Shift+Z
Shift+Z opens the campaign's named areas as a list. A row names the area, then
places it — the company's own region says where inside it, the rest give distance
and bearing — then what it is known to hold, then how much of it has been
explored and which way the rest of it lies. Fog of war had no readout at all
before this, and it is the one thing a sighted player takes off the map at a
glance.
V or Enter opens a region's known settlements and locations as a sub-list,
where Enter travels. Page Down/Page Up switch between land and sea. A region
without a single explored tile is not listed, and the places counted are the ones
B would already list.
Which towns lie near which, on N
Everything the mod said about the map was measured from where the company is
standing, and so it was true only until the next march. N, on any row of B or
Shift+B, anchors the list on the focused place instead: the settlements nearest
to it, each with a compass bearing and the length of the real road between
them. Two towns with no land route between them say so.
N again on a neighbour moves the list onto that town, which is how a chain of
towns is followed across the map without moving the company; Escape walks back
out one town at a time. The anchor need not be a town — N on a bandit camp
answers "which town is that near". Only discovered settlements are listed, and
the road is counted only where the company has been.
A settlement says how it stands with you
A town's details used to read out two unlabelled "Relations: Friendly" lines,
because vanilla leaves whose standing it is to the banner drawn beside it. They
now name the faction, say whether it is the people living there or the house that
rules them, and carry the same 0 to 100 figure the factions screen shows. The one
word also rides on the row itself in B and in the neighbours list, since the
standing is what decides whether the gate opens at all.
The details header also names what is being inspected and counts its rows;
several keystrokes down a sub-list, "Details" answered neither whose nor how
many.
Tracks name who left them
Shift+F reported a number that summed sprites, so one party crossing three hexes
and three parties crossing one both said "3 tracks to the northeast" — a figure
nothing could be decided on, when the identity decides everything. It now groups
the tracks by party and reports the directions each was found in. The Lookout
still decides whether you hear the exact party or only its family.
Attacking a party you are allied with, on Ctrl+Enter
Robbing the caravan of a faction on good terms with you was a mouse-only action.
Ctrl held with Enter now orders it, and the cue names whose goodwill is being
spent — it is the one order on this map that cannot be taken back. It is refused
while a contract runs, exactly as the mouse is.
The map's own objectives are listed
B has a fourth category: what the map is pointing at. It holds the destination
of the active contract, whatever kind of place that is, and the party being
escorted.
Company status names the ground's price in rations
The company eats more in the mountains and more again in the desert, and the days
of food remaining ignore it. The ground now gets a row of its own, and only when
it costs more.
The formation is walked as a field
The battle order was a single list of 27 slots, and a slot said where it was
before it said who was standing there. It is a field now, oriented as the ground
it turns into: the front line on the company's right, the back line and the
reserve to its left, nine positions running north to south in each. Q, W,
E, A, S and D are the same six hex neighbours the tile cursor walks in
battle, and a step off the edge is refused rather than half-taken.
A slot says who stands in it, his level and what he carries in both hands, on his
head and on his body, before it says where that is; the line is named only when
the cursor crosses into another one. Up/Down still walk all 27 slots in order.
While the character screen is open it also swallows Q, W, E and S, so the
world map behind it can never pan.
The armed skill answers first
With a skill armed, the hit chance was the last thing the tile readout said,
after the ground, the unit, its health, its morale and its bearing — the one
number the skill was armed to ask about, arriving after everything the player was
going to interrupt through. It leads now, and it leads alone: "valid target" in
front of a percentage added nothing to the percentage. A target that cannot be
hit still says so, and says it first.
The enemy is heard coming
The game logs what a unit does when it gets there and nothing about crossing half
the field to do it, so a line of brigands closing in was silent until it struck.
Every unit you do not command now reports its own move as it ends: "Brigand
Raider with Short Sword moves 3 tiles toward Hans." The count is the ground
gained, so a charge stopped after two tiles by a spear wall reports two. The name
is the nearest unit on the other side, with toward or away from according to
whether the move closed or opened that distance.
Units hidden from you neither report nor are named, and the lines share the combat
log's queue, so any cursor key clears a backlog when a whole warband moves at
once.
Fixed
Shift+T took the game down with it instead of reading the state of the camp.
Installing over 1.2
Run install.bat from this release; it replaces the files installed by 1.2.
Saved games are never touched, and uninstall.bat still leaves the game as it
came.