Greetings fellow gods,

It's been a while since we've had an update, but the wait is finally over. The time has come to explore the forbidden whispers promising immortal life, tackle the new challenge growing in the snow biome, and enslave the world for profit.

Conquest

Starting from settlement level 2, we can now launch an assault on any NPC settlement to claim it for our state, giving us access to its production and caravan management. As with other battles, we may join in and support our troops or let them handle it while we commit ourselves to different tasks. The world is also prettier with higher resolution tiles.

Necromancy

Claim the souls of the living, raise an army of the dead, construct meat golems, explode skeletons, achieve immortality, and resurrect your previous character to roll with you until the end of times.

The Undead

New danger grows at the edge of the world. The Necrotyrant raises his army to challenge the gods. Will you find a way to deal with this immortal threat?

Polish Language Support

I've been told I'm not allowed to claim I love my country if I don't support my mother's tongue in my creation, so I had to right that wrong. Soulash 2 now supports the Polish language for the game, and will soon support it in the in-game Modding Tools. The language support was integrated into modding. It allows community-made translations that enable only partial file updates of text, not other configurations, making it much easier to maintain as the game grows. I've added support for the European alphabet to my engine, but I'll have to add support for characters from Asian languages separately later.

Changelog

Added

- New skill: Necromancy.
- New unique civilization of Skeletons led by Necrotyrant in the snow biome that can be playable as part of the playthrough rather than game start selection.
- NPC factions can start war for two new reasons: Conquest (taking control of a settlement with military occupation) and Soul Harvest (gathering the lingering souls of the living).
- NPC state factions may now conquer other settlements and occupy them with military units.
- Added an option to send armies to conquer other settlements starting from level 2 settlements.
- New, higher-resolution world map tileset.
- 1 new special location in the snow biome.
- Support for the Polish language.

Changed

- State factions take wealth taxes from settlements at the rate of 0.1% per day.
- Right-clicking can recall a military recruit unit to its respective family on the Settlement Screen.
- Increased dimensions of the settlement selection on the Settlement Management screen.
- Fire Barrage magic scaling reduced to 150% from 250%.
- Buffed Reptilion Bog Knives and Ursan Berserkers.
- Minimum lifesteal amount is 1 health if damage is above 1.
- NPC tooltips in the Settlement Screen show occupations.

Fixed

- Fixed the tooltip of bottom world tiles going out of screen bounds.
- Fixed On Destruction animation trigger to use string instead of integer ID.
- Friendly Mage can now train Pyromancy to a decent level.
- Fixed occasional duplicate player character tile.
- Creating a second character in a world no longer starts at heir selection when a character has no children.
- Special Locations icons on the world map are taken adequately from the locations tilesheet rather than the overlay.

Modding

- Translations support within mods that allows partial file edits with only fields related to names and descriptions.
- For translations, entity name fields and affixes have feminine and neuter form fields.
- The new configurable structure "control_action" in character.json allows the acquisition of companions in the same way as Tame.
- Two new passive effects, "on_kill_create_item" and "on_kill_persona_create_item," that create an item for the player when any being or persona (from a settlement) is killed.
- New properties in character.json disable settling new settlements by a race, restricting the number of settlements, and disabling caravan trading.
- New properties in character.json defining aggression in settlements per race.
- New property in character.json defining allowed casus belli per race.
- New race property "collapse_on_leader_death" makes the entire settlement fall into ruin on the death of a leader.
- Birth cost for race configuration now supports a specific resource, not just a type.
- The reworked Resurrector component adds a delay in years, after which a character may resurrect in their home settlement. The component no longer applies to items.
- Production Actions can now be used to change the entity of a player character and swap components: Persona, Humanoid, Resurrector, Fighter, Movement, and learn abilities from Ability User.
- Skills component now supports min and max values to support any value for NPC characters that are part of special locations.


Previous worlds should work with the new update and support conquest, but it's recommended to start a new one for Necromancy and Liches, as the changes relate to world generation and introduce a new civilization.

This was the biggest update during the Early Access and was the most difficult to tackle, mostly because I took on too many large topics simultaneously. The Conquest update, while already delivered in parts as we had the battle system before, is still opening for further development, just like Settlement Management was when it came out last year. There are multiple features I still wish to develop related to this new system, with some that we've already discussed before, like having options to support armies with our blacksmithing, allowing crafting to serve as a good way to earn money, but that's not all.

In the upcoming weekly or biweekly updates, you can expect features like rebellions and 5th-tier special locations meant to be tackled with armies. Opening our settlements to conquest will also come soon, alongside a rework of the underlying inheritance system. Conquest also opened up empire management, as we may maintain many settlements now during the endgame, and that will require more clarity in UI and options to maintain supply lines. In the next few months, you can expect that to be the development direction, alongside improvements to building, settlement management, and trading. Once those options are available and I can adjust things based on your feedback, we'll move towards the next major milestone on the roadmap - world events.

Thank you for your patience and support. I hope you have lots of fun. Please let me know about your experience with the new features on our Discord.

Have fun,
Artur