Let it be Treason.
New Game Start
> Prison finished and implemented. Interaction with other prisoners. Gamble, pick fist fights,
trade illicit goods, run errands.
> Several event lines with NPCs in the prison as a means of escape.
> Further event line to help you find the noble who put you there in the first place.

Status: Prison is completely overhauled. AI is improved, inmates will pick fights, guards search cells. You can interact with multiple unique NPCs, some of which reveal themselves only under certain circumstances. There are three event lines to choose from in your escape, or you can break out of prison your own way. Each event line will lead into further unfolding quests - and you can only pick one of them.

Bunch of Random Encounters.
> Around 20 random encounters littered throughout the game world. Fair balance between
generic and 'special' encounters.
>> The Legless Armless Bounty Hunters!
>> Gar, the Whistletamer!
>> Sassi the Dog!
>> and much more!

Status: The more generic encounters are done, along with a couple of in-depth ones. Encounters are structured in such a way that I will be able to use them as plot hooks for dynamic quests later on. Had to change the legless bounty hunter to an armless one, as the movement speed of a legless hunter was so slow that they'd be removed from the game world. Currently experimenting with overrides on random nests. If everything works, it'll supercharge the potential of random encounters.

Preliminary override tests are done and seem not to work the way I had hoped. Unfortunate, but mostly means I'll have to hand-place random encounter nests in specific biomes. Not a major concern as most of the random encounters use homeless spawns, anyway.

Counter-Assaults.
> Factions will sometimes trigger fast assaults against invading armies when they reach a city.

Status: Super easy to implement. Logic is already done, this is just a few lines of dialogue. Will expand in the Total War update to allow generals the option of launching their own assault after defending a city.

Balance.
> Am looking at improved tactics of assaulting faction. The crux of the problem is that an assault will define most inhabitants of a city as hostile, so civs will be attacked alongside soldiers. I'm testing alternate approaches to the assault logic which should make the attackers focus more on soldiers, mercs, and shop guards. The crazy generals will still murder everybody, the others won't. I hope.

>>> My current approach here is to persuade the defenders to be more aggressive, and the attackers to just mosy about in town looking for a fight, but not picking one. It needs more tests, but should prevent every successful assault from being a slaughter.

> Will re-jig the pit fights to make them more fluid and easier to understand how to progress. You'll have the option of fighting each squad one-at-a-time or as a group. The Champion will be a part of one of these squads, meaning you won't have to take some dumb item to him to fight. Will also alter some dialogues to communicate everything more clearly.
> Minor shakeup to assaults structure. Will skew use of unique NPCs towards defences rather than assaults, and make defences much more common. That way, most assaults won't have consequences for the attackers and the defenders will usually have a fighting chance. Also deals with a pathfinding issue related to unique NPCs, and makes it harder for the player to effectively win a war by hanging around after a battle and scooping up downed leaders. Knockout punch assaults will still be possible, but rare.
> Will alter text of assaults so that you can differentiate between assaults against NPC towns and against your own outposts.
> Major nerf to frequency and power of assaults all-round to make long-term sustainability a thing and let you play the game normally, even if you're hanging around the same town.
> Increases to movement speed of unloaded assaults and improvements to timing. Reinforcement assaults currently arrive far too late, so will instead use ambient spawns (i.e. squads that already exist in the game world), as they're often close by.
> Checked out the prices of loot you get from faction armies and found it's still way too high. Loot obtained this way is hugely nerfed, and its quality slightly reduced compared to store-bought or crafted stuff. Only applies to the loot you'll find on the characters taking part in assaults. Some items are downright worthless, most sell for pennies on the dollar. You'll never get rich scouring a battlefield for loot, but if you're desperate you can make enough cats to feed a couple of people.
> Nerfs to the quality of gear carried by faction armies. Elites will have standard gear, and rarely good quality, but never any better. The rest will have shoddy-standard gear. This is intended to make playing with smaller squads (or solo) more viable, as you can earn a substantial equipment advantage, and to prevent you from cheesing high-quality gear early on. The stuff you loot from assault NPCs is also slightly lower in quality than everything else - 'standard' samurai armour pulled off an assault soldier won't be as good as something you buy in a store. The change to quality is only minor atm, I might make it more substantial if people feel that's the way to go. All-in-all, means it's a good leg-up for the early game, but that's about it. The rarer assaults (like rescues, black ops or whatever) you'll see with the next update will have access to cooler gear, but it'll still be heavily price-locked.

>>> The next update will see me investigating harsher penalties for looters that get caught, as well as encouraging NPCs, such as Empire Peasants, to take advantage and loot stuff for themselves. In various other places (that aren't currently unlocked in the mod) I've got the AI to actually loot and upgrade their armour from time-to-time, so it'd be fun to see an Empire Peasant walking around in paladin armour and play around with the dialogue that accompanies it if they get caught.

Status: Have changed faction assault text. NPC assaults are now orange (if led be a generic NPC) or red (if led by a unique general). Have worked in pit fighter rebalance. Still need to alter assault structure, though I'm testing a method of making future edits much easier to implement. Currently, the trigger dialogue is 500 lines. If the tests work, I can reduce it by around 70%, making it far easier to alter and expand.

That restructure doesn't work. Grr. Still, it's only really gonna make changes take a bit longer to implement.

Have restructured balance. Assaults are no longer insanely powerful.

Massive nerf to the prices of loot obtained from armies. Minor nerf to the quality of the gear they use.

Bug Fixes.
> Have identified the cause of the animation issue. Some compatibility patches are already listed in the description.
> Will check Dymas' dialogue issues. Apparently some dialogues weren't triggering for some players. Out of the three leaders of Erebus (Dymas, Scratchpad, Miska), Dymas is the most WIP and will be expanded in future.
> Will move war fortresses that cause pathfinding conflicts. This one is my bad; I forgot to check each fortress individually. Will also delete two or three obsolete fortresses.
> Will fix wrong towns being targeted. Currently, I've heard of raids at World's End. Is caused by resident Empire guards there. Whoops. Fix will be temporary until the overrides update, but should work fine.
> Improvements to retreat AI to get assaults to stop attacking cities faster. Also redundancy in case they get stuck doing nothing there. It's tricky to get the AI to pull back when they're in the thick of the fighting, though, so this will need further tweaks and improvements.

Status: WIP. Will do all this last. Slowly fixing errors, though.

Mark of the Veteran.
New Game Start
> More assaults and interaction with the bandits who harass the settlement.
> Krone's retired squadmates can be tracked down and persuaded to help out. They'll either follow you back to the fishing village or trigger an assault where they show up to help.

Moved to gamma update. Want to focus solely on faction wars for this one.

Rescue Assaults.
> Factions will sometimes trigger special assaults to rescue their captured generals. These can be either elite squads of specialists or surprise attacks that spawn in the town.

Status: Have implemented and tested for Empire. They'll send fast, small units of specialists who make a beeline for the captives and free them. Captives can join the liberating squads and escape with them.

Wandering Spawns.
> As the wars progress, factions will deploy wandering patrols and armies. Some have short ranges, others will travel between cities, harassing them.

Status: Wandering spawns use both existing squads and new army squads that are used for raids. Will usually be deployed from captured fortresses.

Fortress Captures.
> As a preliminary to town captures, the new fortresses you've seen and some existing ones (like Holy Nation Military Bases) can be captured after assaults.
> This is so I can test the takeovers without affecting towns.

Status: WIP. Simple enough for its purpose here to be easily implemented.

Ambient Raids.
> Homeless spawns, including wandering spawns, can be used for raids. Unlike normal raids, these raids will prioritise using units that are spawned in the game world, meaning they are highly unpredictable and can come from anywhere.

Status: Have tested base logic and it works well. I'm considering giving the triggers to the wandering spawns, and having them trigger randomly (rarely) or after defeating a squad belonging to their enemy (like a samurai patrol). This means you might find wandering spawns who decide to assault a town after beating a squad in the field.

Lightning Assaults.
> When a faction spots a major opportunity and has the means, it can launch a lightning assault. Lightning assaults make a beeline for the faction HQ (Admag, Blister Hill, Heng), or choose a different, tactically-vital target.
> Lightning assaults are very powerful, and always countered with a defending army, unless the faction has no available generals to defend with.

Status: Have tested extensively. This method was for a time going to be the 'main' assault method, however it becomes janky when used for a lot of targets. So, keeping these for only a few select targets. AI still needs polish for this, but works well enough. The big, crazy, epic assaults will all be in this category, and you'll always see multiple unique NPCs with these. Essentially, the big-ass, overpowered assaults you've seen thus far will fall into this category.

Name Shakeup.
> All assaults will be named properly to give you an idea of what's going on. You'll be shown assaults who's leading assaults so you can go after specific characters if you want.
> I'm toying with the idea of having assaults only display their true nature if you're allied to the faction (or at least if you're not enemies with them). Might do, might not, as it is a bit of a headache to implement.
>> Essentially it's just a matter of duplicating the assault logic and adding it to the trigger system, but that is already bloated and doubling the number of lines is pretty annoying.
>> After looking into it, this may be something I implement later, but it's a minor detail that I don't feel is worth the effort for now.

Mr. Unknowable, Debug Hotshot.
> New debug character. You can visit this guy if you accidentally reset your faction relations (because the new game starts won't work then). You will also be able to turn faction wars off, if you'd prefer that. It won't be free, though.
> Mr. Unknowable will have the option of enabling and disabling faction city takeovers once the override update launches.
> You will thus have the option of playing with no faction wars, with battles but no takeovers, and with the full experience.
> Also realised I can implement fast/slow wars. Fast wars will be on by default, flipping the switch will slow the pace down around half.

Status: Mostly done. Won't do fast/slow wars until the generals and overrides update.

Randomised and Improved Trigger Dialogue.
> Assaults are triggered through ambient dialogue. The decision tree will be randomised so that, even though most NPCs will have access to it, only very few will actually use it. Moreover, the randomisation will help each playthrough to feel unique.
> I'm considering adding hidden, dedicated trigger characters to each city. These characters will be responsible for around 50% of triggered assaults, and will use more complicated trees to ensure that assaults aren't constantly triggered against the same city. Essentially, they'll act as moderators.
> Might instead use locking and unlocking dialogue system. Or something. Needs testing.

Couple more random encounters and recruitables.
> Yay!

Mark of the Veteran.
New Game Start
> More assaults and interaction with the bandits who harass the settlement.
> Krone's retired squadmates can be tracked down and persuaded to help out. They'll either follow you back to the fishing village or trigger an assault where they show up to help.

No Rest for the Wicked.
New Game Start
> Cystra's holdout will be added to the world, along with a breadcrumb trail to follow. You'll slowly pick up clues to help you make sense of that diary and what you were doing in the first place. Cystra's crew will grow over time and he'll become more bold in his vendetta with you once he finds out you're still alive.

Moved to dynamic quest update.

Mr. Unknowable, Debug Hotshot.
> New debug character. You can visit this guy if you accidentally reset your faction relations (because the new game starts won't work then). You will also be able to turn faction wars off, if you'd prefer that. It won't be free, though.
> Mr. Unknowable will have the option of enabling and disabling faction city takeovers once the override update launches.
> You will thus have the option of playing with no faction wars, with battles but no takeovers, and with the full experience.

Moved to beta update as it's nearly finished already.

Variable Aggression.
> Everybody has seen an assault by now. The assault rate at launch was inflated to act as a showcase for what's coming, but also to cover for the lack of counter-assaults, rescue assaults, wandering spawns, and lightning assaults. The trigger rate of standard assaults will slow right down in future for a longer and protracted war. This can give the player more agency to affect things, too, assuming you work for it.
> Factions will go between full-on aggression and peaceful periods, where they don't launch assaults at all.

Holy Nation Merc Job.
> I figure here I'll eventually get around to it.
> I'm interested in ways of expanding the merc contract for the major factions. Right now, you'll get paid for defeating their enemies and healing their soliders, and earn small increments in relations. I'm gathering ideas on how to build on this.

War Tacticians.
> You can find an Empire war tactician in some cities. Currently, they give you very broad and slightly informative dialogue on the state of the wars.
> These characters will be added in various forms to the Holy Nation and Shek Kingdom.
> There might be new dialogue events with existing (unique) NPCs about the war.
> I'm looking into ways of making these characters more interesting and useful.

War Ambience.
> Guards, citizens and bar patrons will comment on the state of various wars, battles, and so on.
> Military caravans will be added to wandering spawns.
> You'll begin to see deserters, refugees and outlaws as stability worsens and the death toll rises.

Description coming soon!

Description coming soon!