Notoris 2 : Warlords | Dev Update

June ended up being one of the biggest months for the project so far. Everything continues to feel like its connecting together more and more with each addition.

Here's what I worked on this month.

Officer Assist System

The biggest focus was finishing the new Assist assignment.

AI officers now understand how to assign, prioritize, and complete Assist tasks correctly, while players get a dedicated results screen that breaks down exactly what their officer accomplished. I also added relationship scaling so officers with high rapport work together more effectively.

To support this, I expanded the underlying cdir event system with new Assist events across buildings like Farms, Markets, Forges, Barracks, Taverns, Gates, and more. This opens the door for much more flavor and bonus outcomes for officer assignments moving forward.

New Combat System Upgrades

Wyatt spent much of the month with heavy upgrades to the tactics system (again) to support what will likely be the final major combat feature. This update reinforces one of Notoris 2's core design pillars: relationships between officers should matter both on and off the battlefield.

Three new cooperative tactics were added:

• Joint Attack allows you and an adjacent melee ally to strike the same enemy together.

• Aid lets a ranged officer coordinate with an adjacent melee ally, allowing both to attack the same target.

• Relationship Trigger Assist is a new dynamic combat trigger where nearby allies may automatically follow up an attack against a shared enemy. The chance of triggering depends on the relationship between the two officers, making friendships and rivalries influence battles in a meaningful way.

This system makes combat feel more strategic while giving long term relationship building another tangible gameplay payoff.

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Hire Assignments

I implemented an entirely new Hire Officer assignment that allows both the player and AI to recruit officers from across the map into their faction.

This is one of the most important additions to the campaign layer. One of the biggest appeals of ROTK games has always been building your dream roster, and I wanted to capture that same "gotta recruit them all" feeling.

Recruitment is also a major strategic decision. Every officer you convince to join your faction directly increases your economic, political, and military capabilities, making diplomacy and recruitment just as valuable as winning battles.

Proposal System Improvements

I continued expanding the proposal system with a lot of QoL improvements.

Proposal result panels now display much more detailed information for military actions, transfers, transport and hire missions, troop recruitment, and weapon production.

There was also a lot of AI work behind the scenes so officers vote more intelligently and carry out long-distance proposals correctly.

AI Improvements

A huge amount of time went into making the AI behave more naturally.

Some of the larger improvements include:

• Better military decision making and tactical targeting usage

• Smarter Quick Defend behavior

• Improved movement logic for officers and caravans

• Better assignment generation for idle officers

• More reliable retreat behavior

• Numerous combat, targeting, and pathfinding fixes

Most of these changes aren't flashy, but they make the AI behave more intelligently.

New Game Setup

The new campaign setup screen received another large iteration.

It now displays much more information about each starting officer, including additional stats, traits, nicknames, biographies, recommended characters, estimated difficulty, and starting locations on the campaign map. This is still a work in progress as the actual world map is not finished yet, so I can’t put any time into polishing the map display here yet.

Steam post image

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Item System

One of the biggest additions this month was laying the foundation for the new equipment system.

Highlights include:

• Added equippable weapons, armor, mounts, manuals, and trinkets.

• AI officers now automatically equip better gear when available.

• Captured officers now lose their equipped items to their captor.

• Items can grant new tactics or modify character stats through the data-driven DEM system.

• Added dozens of new equipment pieces to the game.

• Implemented Wandering Merchant events where players can purchase rare items.

• Added Search events that allow officers to discover equipment while performing search actions.

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New Content

Content creation continued alongside programming.

This month included:

• 9 new officer portraits

• 9 new officers and spawn events

• 1 faction dilemma events

• Western map expansion planning + start

• Early victory condition logic

• Added Drill Action to raise troop Morale in town

• Added Ability to unlock tactics through DEM system

• Added Troop and Race Aptitudes to DEM System

• New header font

• Units can now move through allies

• Units now only face cardinal directions post move/attacking

  • Added Rotate option on Radial Wheel

• Armies no longer can attack officer grid entities in preparation for diplomacy envoys

• Relationship values now drift toward 0 and have caps

• Show current assignment for all characters in char panel UI

• Show full town info on MultiPurpose panel for all enemy/neutral towns (until meaningful spy gameplay is added)

Polish

As usual, there were plenty of smaller improvements throughout the month.

Some highlights include weapon outlines on armies, improved troop visuals, morale and Drill mechanics, assignment UI improvements, AP recovery animations, relationship balancing, performance improvements, localization work, and a long list of bug fixes.

Overall, June was about connecting more and more systems together and building on the importance of officer relationships. The Assist system is now feature complete, the proposal system is becoming much more powerful, equipment has officially entered the game, and the campaign setup continues to improve.

Next month I'll be focusing on Diplomacy as well as enlisting some help with Audio.