Hearthlands 0.3.0 has been released and should be available for download either now or very shortly.

NB! Savegames from 0.2.0 are not compatible with the new version.

What's new:

Economy changes

We've reworked economy a bit in order to make city progress smoother and make balance better. People now require generally less resources, but two new luxury resources have been added: clothes and boots.

Also housing progress is now 3 stages longer:

Alcohol

In addition to food your people now require alcohol. Currently there's only one type of alcohol (sider), but we'll be adding wine, beer and mead.

New resources and buildings

Two new luxury resources added: boots (can be made out of leather in shoemaker's shop) and clothers (can be made out of textile in clothier's shop). Also, tailor's shop is now called pillow maker's shop to avoid confusion.

Town hall

Town hall is now required to build tax offices. It also increases appeal in the area.

New monsters

Stone, coal, iron and gold elementals may now appear if you mined too much of the appropriate resource. They are very tough and have a bonus against buildings. After defeating an elemental you will be awarded with resources.

Trade

Trade system has been reworked. Trade limit and price change depending on your actions. Trade routes may close, and new trade routes may become available.

New shield overlays

There are 100 new overlays available to choose from when you create a new game.

As always we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so please comment and send your thoughts to info@hearthlands.com. If you become our watcher on Indie DB or Desura, that also helps a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. If you want to support the development — you can just purchase the game.

And, please, do vote for us on Steam Greenlight!

Thank you,
Sergio

In addition to stone elementals we have coal, iron and gold ones now. They are tough but for defeating them you will get respective resource.

Two luxury resources have been added (boots and clothes) to make evolving your houses smoother. Also we rebalanced the economy a lot.

Instead of "food + 3 luxury resources" scheme we have "food + alcohol + 4 luxury resources" scheme now. Currently the only type of alcohol in the game is cider, but we'll be adding beer, wine and mead.

Tax & Employment window has been expanded, so now you can set employment priorities much more precisely. Almost every building type has its own category.

Overview window has been expanded as well (nevermind alcohol, boots and clothes placeholders).

Apparently skeletons can go through the gatehouse, which makes it kind of useless. This has been fixed.

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In other news: check out three new articles about Hearthlands on GamingOnLinux (first and second) and IndieRetroNews.

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We plan to release the update with new economy, elementals and trade improvements in a couple of weeks and then get to diplomacy and/or other new mechanics.

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As always we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so please comment and send your thoughts to info@hearthlands.com. If you become our watcher on Indie DB or Desura, that also helps a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. If you want to support the development — you can just purchase the game.

And, please, do vote for us on Steam Greenlight!

Thank you,
Sergio

This week we were working mostly on trade improvements and new monsters.

Trade is now dynamic, which means that trade routes can open and close, trade limits may change and prices change as well, depending on player's actions.

Notification appears if a trade route player is using changes.

At some point during testing I noticed that one of my tax collectors never goes back to his office, which means that he never brought back any taxes he collected. When I noticed him, he already had 11000+ coins on his person (cheeky bastard!). This bug may appear only if you have more that one tax collector working in the same area and will be fixed in the next update.

To be able to build tax offices you now need a town hall.

New monster: stone elemental! He is very tough and has a Crusher ability, which gives him a 50% bonus against buildings.

As always we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so please comment and send your thoughts to info@hearthlands.com. If you become our watcher on Indie DB or Desura, that also helps a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. If you want to support the development — you can just purchase the game.

And, please, do vote for us on Steam Greenlight!

Thank you,
Sergio

The 0.2.0 update is big. In fact it is too big. It took us a long time to implement this all and in the future will try to make smaller updates more frequently instead.

It took so long partially because we needed to implement a number of mechanics that didn't exist in the game at all, like combat system, unit/monster AI and others. But once you have proper AI algorithms in place, you can add new units/combat abilities much faster.

Also, I had to spend additional one or two weeks, because I decided to rework some of the old mechanics (like pathfinding and distribution) for a better support of large cities and to make addition of units and monsters easier.

We'd like to thank everyone who supported us, gave feedback, suggested a feature, made a review and/or bought the game. Since we don't have a huge community and we're not making a fortune with the game (to say the least) every little does help a lot. Also I'm very glad that we were able to implement a lot of suggested features in this version and we'll keep doing that.

I'm very happy with the progress we make and the amount of interest people have to the game. I was waiting for the game like that for a long time, and it is cool that I'm not the only one:)

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I can't possibly mention every single change/addition that we've made, but here are the major ones:

World Map

World Map is a procedurally generated map of the whole realm which shows every city controlled by you or AI rulers.

Currently it is mostly decorative though; but later with the addition of diplomacy, war and invasions it will become a significant part of the game.

Trade

Several possible trade routes are being generated at the start of a new game. Each trade route has a resource type that can be bought or sold with a maximum amount that can be traded each year. To start buying of selling a resource you need to activate the trade route on Trade Routes screen and build at least one marketplace. Then you need to set up the market place to buy or sell this resource. Merchants will come from the edge of the map to conduct trade.

Later prices will fluctuate depending on supply and demand. Also trade routes will be able to expire or be created. This will probably be related to diplomacy as well.

Military industry

In order to produce units you need weapons and armor. Four military industry buildings have been added:

• Fletcher's shop produces bows and arrows out of planks and feathers.
• Weaponsmith's shop produces axes and spears out of iron and iron and planks accordingly.
• Armorer's shop produces leather armor and chainmails out of leather and leather and iron accordingly.
• Stables produce horses out of grain (that's right).

In order to start weapons/armor production you need to connect your military workshops to barracks with a road. You can't stockpile weapons and armor; and production of them goes automatically as long as there's demand for it in your barracks.

Barracks and units

You can build four types of barracks for each type of units: archers, axemen, spearmen and horsemen. Each barracks stations up to 8 units (one squad).

• Archers require bow and arrows and leather armor. They have ranged attack and are good against slow units.
• Axemen require axe and chainmail. They are good against armored units.
• Spearmen require spear and chainmail. They are good against mounted units.
• Horsemen require spear, leather armor and horse. They are good against ranged and low-armor units.

Each unit requires a certain amount of money to be trained as well as monthly upkeep. So it is a good idea to have positive funds if you want to create an army.

Later units will have morale depending on how well they are paid. They will probably be able to revolt if you hold back their wages for too long.

Also we want to add more unit types (or upgraded version of existing ones) and mercenaries, which are much more expensive but don't require creating the whole industry.

Squads

You can't control each unit individually; instead you can give orders to a squad of 8 units. Each squad requires barracks and will claim empty barracks if its barracks was destroyed. To select a squad you can click a unit of this squad, click the squad's emblem above the barracks or open Squads panel and select squads you need from there. Shift-clicks and control-clicks work the way you may expect them to work.

You can order a squad to go on location (left click on empty land), attack an enemy (left click on enemy unit) or return to their barracks (left click on barracks, or using the "Send home" button).

You can't control units which are engaged in battle.

If enemy gets into 12-tile range of a barracks its squad leaves the barracks and attacks the enemy automatically.

Combat system

Each unit has a number of stats: hit points, damage, armor, speed, experience points and level. Currently level only increases damage a unit inflicts and decreases damage a unit takes. Also, each unit has special traits, which are explained on a unit screen.

Non-undead units slowly regenerate their hit points. Regeneration goes much faster if a unit is it the barracks.

Fortifications

Now you can build stockade, stone walls, gatehouses and guard towers to protect your city from enemies. Each of those buildings excluding stockade requires stone. Gatehouse must be built on a road; and you can rotate it by pressing 'R'.

Graveyards and skeletons

Every map now has up to 4 graveyards on it. Graveyard may become haunted which means that it will spawn a bunch of skeletons who will try to destroy your city. To stop a graveyard from spawning skeletons you need to kill every skeleton it spawned.

Skeletons are undead, which means that they can't regenerate, but they take only 50% of damage from ranged attacks.

The idea with neutral/hostile creatures and buildings on a local map can (and will) be greatly expanded later.

Other notable changes

• Now you have a chancellor, who will inform you if something important happens.
• Buildings now take damage and can be destroyed by enemy units. Buildings regenerate their hit points automatically.
• You can now build bridges.
• You can now build roadblocks. Normally you don't need them (unlike other games), but if you have two close neighborhoods with different resource requirements you can build a roadblock to separate them.
• Buildings now show their radius (which is a circle).
• You can take screenshots by pressing F2. Screenshots are being saved in "screenshots" folder in the game folder.
• You can see the total supply of resources on Stocks panel on the right without pausing the game. The Stocks panel also shows how the amount of each resource was changing in the last 12 months.
• You can remove domestic animals with the "Demolish" tool.
• Pathfinding and distribution system were completely reworked. You no longer need to fiddle around with roads to keep a big city efficient.
• You can set a storage limit of each resource to your storage yards and marketplaces.
• Economy screen was overhauled to reflect all the changes.
• Top-level beautifications now require stone.
• You can play in "Free mode" which removes construction and unit training costs as well as unit upkeep.
• Tons of other changes which I forgot to/didn't mention, which doesn't really matter, because I can't expect anyone to read the whole thing anyway:)

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As always we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so please comment and send your thoughts to info@hearthlands.com. If you become our watcher on Indie DB or Desura, that also helps a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. If you want to support the development — you can just purchase the game.

And, please, do vote for us on Steam Greenlight!

Thank you,
Sergio

First of all, Hearthlands has been released on Desura!

Apart from that, this week we were mostly focusing on getting things done for the 0.2.0 version, which is now finished!
You will be able to download it from Humble, Desura or Groupees (depends on where did you buy it) in a few days as soon as the guys approve new builds.

Also, I'll make a summary post for the most major changes in 0.2.0 soon (there's a lot of them).

Here are some of the things we've made this week (apart from fixing, balancing and testing):

You can now choose "Free build" mode at the start of new game, which makes construction, unit training and upkeep free (suggested by Dragon's Fury).

Guard towers now shoot enemies in 12-tile radius dealing twice as more damage as an archer.

Units exit their barracks automatically if there's an enemy in range.

You can't build near enemy units and buildings (like graveyard) with the exception for the road.

New sounds added (ambient sounds for new buildings, death sounds etc.).

As always we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so please comment and send your thoughts to info@hearthlands.com. If you become our watcher on Indie DB or Desura, that also helps a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. If you want to support the development — you can just purchase the game.

And, please, do vote for us on Steam Greenlight!

Thank you,
Sergio