Hi everyone,

Since the last status update we've focused on these three elements: adding new boarding locations with frigate, developing strategic control for land battles and content's optimization.

1. Frigate.

Frigates are pretty big ships, ancestors of cruisers. For boarding fights with frigates we added a multideck element, though in a simpler form, to really highlight the size of a new ship. We intentionally removed its more realistically looking version and an access to the captain's cabin, so that it wouldn't hurt fights dynamic.

By the way, we noticed that when you go for boarding from larger ships, there can sometimes be jamming near the jump ropes. We did some changes in AI, so this situation should get better.



2. Strategic control in land battles.

This is a pretty ambitious task we are still working on. However, we'll add the first working version in the upcoming update.

The general idea is to make the player a commander and let him control his army. It begs comparison with Total War series, but it's important to keep in mind one distinct difference: in TW players hire full troops, when in M&B series players work with individual units. This puts some restrictions on functioning of AI, army formations and even pathfinding. We'll see what we'll end up with, but for now land battles seem to have become a bit more fun.



3. Content optimization.

Though it's more of a content cleanup. During the development the game got an incredible amount of unused scripts, textures, models, locations and so on. Much of this content was left from 'With Fire & Sword', that we had to give up for gamedesign reasons. Some things we were just too afraid to touch, as Mount & Blade engine could always need them to work properly.

It's a very dull job that can't be delayed any longer. City screen loading times and some cases of game crashes clearly show the engine reached its limit. So for the upcoming update we won't be really focusing on new content, but will instead remove the old one.

That's it for now. We hope the update arrives pretty soon, it's very interesting to hear your opinion on new land battles.