Roadmap — what should Fiefdom get next?

[halvar20000]

This thread is where the order of things gets decided. It is pinned, it stays open, and it is the one place I look before starting the next release.

How it works

• Want something that is already listed below? Add a 👍 to the comment that proposes it. Votes are the sort order.
• Want something that is not listed? Post it as a comment here if it is small, or open its own thread in Ideas if it needs a picture or a paragraph. I will link it back here.
• Found a bug? That is an issue, not this thread — bugs skip the queue.

Fiefdom is at 1.64 and ships several times a week, so a well-voted idea does not wait long. What I cannot promise is everything: the game is one person's evenings, and a long list means picking.

Where it stands

Built: the economy (food, ale, meat, weapons chains, trade), walls, gates, towers, soldiers, siege engines, an AI lord with three difficulty settings, rival lords, a map editor, multiplayer for two to four, saves on the server, synthesised sound. The last few releases have all been about making a castle you can actually close — gates, walls that stop marching men, fire that takes timber.

Things I have thought about, in no order

None of these are promises. They are the candidates I know of; tell me which ones matter, and what is missing.

1. Scenarios with an objective — survive N waves, reach N population, hold out until a date — instead of open-ended skirmish only.
2. More lord personalities — different economic and military styles, not just harder numbers.
3. Sharing custom maps between servers, or a small gallery of community maps.
4. Performance on weaker machines — laptops, tablets, older phones. If the game is slow for you, saying what you run it on is the most useful data I can get.
5. Balance passes — anything that feels too cheap, too strong or pointless. Ale, popularity, siege engines and the hunter have all been re-tuned once; nothing is final.
6. Onboarding — the first ten minutes for someone who has never played Stronghold.

What I will not do

• Sourced or purchased art. Every sprite is generated in Blender; that is the point of the project.
• Anything that needs an account or a cloud service. It runs on your server, or on your machine, and that is where it stays.