I want to announce several things and figured I'd just drop them all into one big post. So let's start.
Strategus
These days, every spare minute I can afford currently goes into strategus. This means both the website part and the ingame part. We have the new fancy map from Thomek included, we have working geography with 16 different terrains that define speed and view distance (means you can hide in woods and other things), we have a simple yet interesting trading system (that admittedly needs live finetuning), we will have an expanded hiring system and a new vassal system that will replace the current faction system. We have a new movement/destination system, that replaces the old 'radius' thing - to attack, enter, trade etc you have to 'catch' your target. Which means you can set a fief or another player as a target and just follow him or attack him automatically when you reach him. Some other things that are planned medium-term are buildable roads by players and sea travel/trade/warfare.
Strategus ingame
Some may have spotted the scattered hints at ingame changes for strategus, but I want to collect them here too:
Terrain: Thanks to WSE, we will be able to create random terrain with parameters. This means we can create a hilly area ingame when an attack happens near hills, forests, water, etc - always with the correct underground (plains, steppe, desert, snow etc). Due to caravans and the obviously included raidings we expect a lot more battles outside fiefs. We are also considering making separate scenes for special locations, like a bridge or a mountain pass.
Also, we'll be removing the attackers flag from strategus, more or less, and replace it with a commander/batallion system. When you hire people on the website, you can assign them (for this match) permanently to a team, either as commander or as fighter. Commanders act as a mobile respawn point and will auto-regenerate health over time. However, they have a very high (and gradually increasing) respawn timer, so they will be a preferred target of the defenders side - because killing him REALLY hurts. A good commander will find a balance between being very close to the enemy, but not getting overwhelmed by them. We hope that this turns strategus away from runrunrundierespawn, runrunrundierespawn to a highly tactical game. Again, finetuning will happen after public release.
Another perfectly hidden announcement is the change of archery (that will require WSE, read below). We want to give archers a different role in strategus - to shower the enemies with arrows instead of sniping them. Which means faster drawing speed and lower precision for all bows (strategus only). While the new attacker spawn thing will probably counter archers a bit already, we also want to buff shieldwalls by giving additional shield skill to people in formations.
WSE...
So, WSE. Actually, I'm drifting away, because this needs some explanation:
... mod download...
Mod installation and download: As some may have noticed, we recently switched to fileserve as the main download host. The reason for this was simple - I was trying to raise some bucks for the NA server and wanted to see if that could generate enough money to support it. It kind of failed both ways - while there was a bit of money, it's nowhere near enough to have a substantial impact on the monthly server costs for NA. And on top of that, many people got, understandably, mad at the slow or sometimes failing download speeds. And people getting fed up or being unable to install the game altogether simply bears no relation at all to a few extra bucks. So I consider this experiment failed.
So now we're trying to turn to the exact other way. We'll host the files entirely on our own servers now, which should result in really fast download speeds. And on top of that - an cRPG launcher. This thing is pretty cool, coded by cmp - it automatically updates your cRPG folder to the latest version and just downloads the required files. And then it boots it with WSE (=for those who don't know, it's an external executable to modify warband to give it countless new cool features). So in the future, when you hear "PAAAAAAAAAAAAATCH", all you do is run a desktop link. Cool, eh? Works like a charm.
WSE
What is WSE? WSE is done by cmp and makes warband AWESOME! It adds so many new features that are not included in the original warband. If you want to read more into it, check this thread: http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?topic=151194.0
Advertisement
Therefore, we'll also be trying out a new advertisement network. It looks promising, and could bring more profit than the current one. Which could, in the end, mean that we're independant from donations and I might be able to cover the costs of the website, EU and NA with the ad income - which would be pretty cool, as you all hopefully agree. Expect to see some new ads, though :)
Schedule
So I'm getting back to where I started: Strategus. It should be close to a release in the next few days. I'm not sure if I want to do a mini-public beta test (as in, opening the new version with the old map/ownerships for 3 days so everyone can see and test the new changes - would also mean people can plan ahead on how to do things when the real game starts) or just reset quietly and then bring on the new version. Feel free to tell me what you'd like.
All in all, I am pretty pleased where everything is heading.
tl;dr: if you cba to read it, I cba to make a summary. Duh.