Hey everyone!

It's time for another patch for Northgard and another step towards v1.0!

On the menu today, we have:

Player Profile:

We have added a new Profile section in the main menu where you will find some statistics about the games you've played. These stats come with their obligatory Steam achievements of course, so have fun unlocking them! Please note that we will only start recording your stats from this patch on so previous victories will not appear.

Your rank will also be shown in multiplayer mode so you'll know if you're going into a match with other experienced players or not.

Strategic Map:

We've added a new set of buttons to the mini-map.

One allows you to toggle the display mode between resources (the default) and strategy, which will show all players' visible warband units and defense towers, allowing you to understand enemy positions and movements when things are heating up.

Other UI changes:

We made additional changes to the user interface:

• Fixed a bug that was preventing people from clicking buttons on the end of game replay screen.
• On military buildings (Training Camp, etc.) you can now toggle a "rally to Warchief" option. This means that once trained, the warrior will move directly to the current Warchief position.
• Victory progress: we've put the fame score for other players/AI back however now their victory progress will only start showing when they reach 75%. You can still view current progress through the victory progress screen.
• You can no longer see the icon of unmet clans on the victory progress screen.
• You can now select your entire warband with a single click using the new button that has been added to your unit list.

DirectX Beta:

A fair few of you have reported some serious crashes or were simply not able to start the game at all. Based on your feedback it seems this was due to some faulty OpenGL drivers, and some graphics card manufacturers which didn't push updates to address this.

Over the past few weeks we've been working on a DirectX version designed specifically to solve these problems. This is now available to test through a beta branch of the game.

In order to test out the new version, right click on Northgard in your steam games library, then go to Properties, select the Beta tab and choose the DirectX Beta version. Wait the game to update and start it.

If DirectX Beta does not show in the beta list, restart steam to update it.

You can tell which version you are running by looking at the version (DirectX or OpenGL) showing at the bottom right of the title screen.

Please report any issue you might have with this version, depending on the feedback we might make it the default in our next patch.

Anti-Cheating:

We have received our first reports of some people cheating in game. Please keep in mind that Northgard is not using dedicated servers so we can't guarantee a 100% cheating free experience.

That being said, we have put in place some measures to prevent the most obvious ways of cheating, we hope that this will be enough to discourage the cheaters, although as you know, there's one in every crowd…

AI Improvements:

We have started working more seriously on AI, with the goal of having a very strong and challenging AI in Hard Mode. We only started a few days ago but we will keep you posted on how things are going.

Other changes:

We made numerous other changes and little fixes, here are the most important ones:

• Prevented axe throwers and hunters from continuing to fire when a target is out of range (no more axes going across an entire tile!)
• Fixed display of some global bonuses in attack/defense if you are not host in multiplayer (the bonus was previously correctly applied, but not displayed properly).
• Added new dedicated skins to the buildings for training axe throwers and shield bearers.
• Fixed bug where sometimes you could not place a field on fertile land.
• Sailors Lore production is back to +1 instead of +1.5.
• Circle of Stones Lore bonus is now +30% instead of +50%.
• Amount of food traded to have the Giants join you has been reduced by 20%.
• Ship Building wisdom is now +30% instead of +50%.
• Coinage is now +20% instead of +30%.
• Gear Upgrade and Young and Proud are now maxed to +25% bonus.
• Young and Proud now replaces Sharp Weapons instead of Defensive Strategy.
• End nerf-fest.