Happy new year, everyone!
The first news is actually a small announcement. We will put up a team list for you guys so you can see who your glorious idols are.

Now, let's get straight to the action - I have some interesting news for you fresh from our slave pit (or the "dev forums" as non-initiates call it):

Let's talk about emblems. Our very own heraldry expert Solo has started work on a way to get his astounding heraldry onto the very shields of your knights! This is one of the most impressing visual changes I saw yet for this game, and it will be something for you guys to look forward to in screenies (Wait, is that a new one? Nah, already seen it.) :)
Here's an early peek for you:




The next news item I'd like to talk about is the start of working on the traits&ancillaries system. I won't go into too much detail here, but there's a few things we have in mind for this, hopefully making the character building aspect far more interesting than it is in the vanilla game.
One of these ideas is that characters shouldn't have a huge number of traits (while that can be nice, you can hardly affect how they gain these traits, and it will degenerate into a generic meh-they-get-tons-of-these-whatever-I-do-why-should-I-bother-to-check-them-feeling) which should ensure you can both have a tighter grip on what happens to your character, and will make you more attached to them.
We're also planning to devise a system that will give you disadvantages if you don't care for your characters (a bit like the feels unappreciated traits of MTW2 but far more interesting) - which might also be dependant on your campaign difficulty setting, but that's not set in stone yet.
Furthermore, we will of course implement a far more advanced Title System. This will include office titles, possible negative effects of having titles, or not awarding them at all, and a whole lot of other shenanigans.

All these steps will hopefully add a whole new layer of immersion to the game, and please people who like to roleplay with their faction's family.


Another thing that has been going on in the last week was work on the factions. We'll try to make our factions as unique as possible while still maintaining historical accuracy. This is, of course, a balance act that can never satisfy everybody, but I'm confident that we'll have some very cool stuff there to show you in the future.
I'm not the best person to talk about this, though, as I don't follow all the conversation between our history buffs in detail ;)


The last paragraph for today is, again, associated to the PTPV:
I thought of a few more tweaks for the script, which I will probably incorporate some time this week and after some testing, you should get version 0.5 fresh out of the press.
The two main changes will be an ability to see what a title would add to your character in the advisor text, and an automatic popping up of the same advisor in case you don't have a ruler associated with the province.


Well, this is it for today. I hope you enjoyed the read, and we will be back with you next week with more news from the slave pit!

So long
alpaca