Thanks for everyone's patience and feedback on the mod so far. Thrones doesn't have the most players, but we're very happy with the number of people expressing their enjoyment of our work, and very grateful for all the detailed feedback on the mod. We're working away on a major update; some weeks quickly and others very slowly, but rest assured we all intend to keep supporting this mod with content and improvements. We want to keep future content to the same standard of design, challenging ourselves to make the best experience we can within the Thrones engine, so we're working at our own pace to iterate on what didn't work from our release and initial update.

To give some background on our coming update, it consists, so far, largely of heavy reworks to existing systems. Some of this is fully internal -we're running on 100% new Lua code in our test versions- but many of it comes with bugfixes and improvements to each mechanic that you will actually get to see. Sadly, this also means manually re-implementing lots of things that were already working to keep them up to standard. I won't get into any technical details, but the big reason behind the rewrites is to make it easier to add mechanics and connect them to existing ones without turning the code into a mess. It took a lot of work to reimplement everything we wanted, and it isn't quite done, but it will be much easier to maintain and expand upon the mod without breaking anything once its all done.

During this process, we decided not to lock any factions, but we will probably be disabling some of the faction mechanics for the Welsh, Gaels and Sea Kings to allow us to get the update out of the door faster. We intend to either adjust or replace all of these mechanics anyway in time, so re-implementing them as they were in vanilla would be wasted work. This, however, will leave the factions playable, and we're hoping to create a series of smaller updates touching up these already playable factions while giving our content team lots of time to start on the next faction. And don't worry about Slaves, they happened to fit into what we were working on, so they'll be staying.

Ceasar has already teased some great work on the military technology trees. These have been under development for quite a while and are a big area we've received feedback on the mod, so we're going to be introducing these trees for every single faction. We took heavy inspiration from the pacing that Shogun 2 achieved with its units, and are focusing on giving armies a clear progression and making techs important without locking the majority of your options for a majority of the game and stifling army diversity. To support that, we're also working on some new lategame exclusive units.

In Shieldwall's original release, we cut unit upgrades entirely because we wanted to focus on giving each faction a distinctive core roster, and we felt that the unit upgrades in vanilla added little to that goal. We won't be returning an upgrade to every single unit, but we will be introducing some lategame variants to rosters over coming updates. Some of these will be new units to unlock, while others will upgrade existing parts of the roster. We will use these to reflect the changing tactics of warfare as the Saxons adapted to the strengths of the Vikings and adopted many of their techniques. We'll be adding these alongside updates as we go, with Saxons and the GVA being the first to recieve them.

We've also completely redone how population works. While still fundamentally sourced from your owned regions, manpower is now a resource appearing on the top of the screen and which you will directly interact with during recruitment. A big area we got feedback on was regarding making population easier to understand and use. DETrooper, a brilliant UI modder who brought tons of unique mechanics to the MK1212 mod, helped out providing hex editing that has enabled us to produce much better custom UI elements than we could previously. You can preview the new population UI for recruitment here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNpBbSGKDUM&feature=youtu.be to get an idea of how the user experience has changed.

As you can see, population is now listed as a faction resource, and the population cost of every unit is displayed clearly alongside its gold cost on the recruitment card. Further, all pending population costs are now tallied on the recruitment panel, making it easier to manage your manpower. Manpower is immediately subtracted from your faction when recruitment occurs, and you won't be able to recruit if you don't have the men to do so.

We're still working heavily on the campaign, and we're getting further down the overambitious checklist we built for ourselves. We'll be posting a couple more updates before release as we finish work on foreign warriors, viking raiders, and new historical events.