Feudums - 2025 Recap & Early 2026 Direction

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Hoi everyone,

First of all: happy 2026! I hope this year brings all of us plenty of pleasant, innovative indie strategy (or other) games.

A few of you suggested (and you were right) that it’s time for a short recap of the last year, plus a look at what’s coming next. While plans rarely survive first contact with reality, but at least this gives us something solid to adapt from.

Recap: 2025

Unfortunately, indie game development didn’t get any easier last year — quite the opposite. A non-trivial part of my time went into making sure neither my kids nor I starve... but development never stopped. We’ve survived worse.

Over the year, 6 larger updates and many patches went live.

These mostly prepared the community-voted major feature group (siege + advanced occupation mechanics and some vassalage basics), while also adding a lot of concrete improvements, including:

For the warlords

• Added some new military units and a fully reworked military edges system, with roughly double the unique traits and new synergies!

• Implemented terrain categories that fundamentally affect combat values, enabling more tactical depth.

• Enhanced traversability rules, making previously impassable terrain crossable with the right units, promoting new strategies

• Expanded rules for winter troop movement further stress the seasonal nature of warfare.

• Tile improvements and terrain now affect battles through not only flat modifiers, but they also alter battlefield widths per battle roster, promoting new tactics and more situational army builds.

• Expanded virtue rewards for winning battles (e.g. separate rewards for repelling raiders)

• Military companies can now claim regions that are not adjacent to your own territories.

For economic masterminds

• Fully reworked early-game pacing

• New labourers, continuous tweaking of existing economic rules and dynamics based on your feedback

• Redesigned population dynamics (major needs, food rations, morale, stability)

• Added charts to visualize feudum inputs and outputs, and a wider variety of economic reports.

• Added the ability to cycle through past reports of any kind, making it much easier to track what happened while you were away.

• Custom labour policies can finally be saved and reused across feudums — even across games (if the rulebook matches)

For schemers and social nobles

• private messaging alongside public in-game channels (plus reporting — thankfully rarely needed so far) enables better scheming - or tactical discussions.

• Added a gossips & rumours system, so you can learn about important events even outside your influence range. Fair warning: gossip can be inaccurate!

• Alliance victory conditions now scale with member count, allowing small but tight alliances to compete with large ones

For quality-of-life enjoyers

• Added various accessibility options (toggle flashing effects, depth of field, etc.)

• Dozens of new animations, from WYSIWYG workers to chimney smoke and tower flags, plus updated weather effects

• Multiple visual enhancements across the map and its UI.

• Dozens of UX improvements (e.g. items in a command queue hovers their target, proper cycle-navigation for wasteground tiles, etc)

• clearer and more informative tooltips, context-sensitive map highlights, and redesigned problematic commands (such as claiming, manage units, manage company, labour assignment)

• 200+ bug fixes

...and plenty of other improvements and additions (you can find the past year's changelog at the end of the post).

What Comes Next

Given the current circumstances,