The fight engine is finally ready! Thank you for your patience, and apologies for the two-week delay. You can continue where you left off: if you completed all steps of the tutorial quest in the previous version, you’ll find the battle sign in Winemaker's Haven:

Just a quick refresher before you head into battle: check if you have hired troops, and equip your character with clothes and weapons—unless you want him to fight with his fists. Also make sure you have at least 1000 arrows in your inventory, otherwise you will most likely run out:

The same goes for your heroes as well: you need to equip them with weapons and clothes from your own inventory. Go home, click on the hero’s picture to access the interaction menu, and give them proper equipment if you plan to use them in battle:

Hopefully, while the battle system takes a little time to get used to, it should become easy to understand after a few turns. Buck gives you useful advice on the left side of your screen once you enter the battlemap:

Let me know what you think, and as always, I’m more than happy to hear your improvement ideas. This fight system is huge, with lots of strategic options and customization opportunities. It has essentially become a game within the game—around 40% of the entire code currently belongs to the fight engine.

Future improvement plans:

-Decrease passage refresh (flickering effect) when using your own units through code improvements

-Special weapon effects: area damage, charge (double damage when used offensively), slow (enemy cannot move if hit next turn)

-Battle traits for units: healer, general (friendly units around them gain a damage bonus), berserker (they keep fighting until either they or the enemy dies)

-Improved enemy tactics: hunting low-HP units, long-range shooters focusing fire, withdrawing damaged units to shelters to heal, choosing optimal terrain, bypassing single units to target bosses, moving away from unfavorable terrain

-Better balance: weapon stats are currently intuitive; I plan to set up a simulation model in Excel to better balance damage, strike chance, and unit HP

-New battle modes: survival (defend a castle in the center of the map for X turns), diplomacy (bosses can switch sides mid-battle)

-Battlemap events: in larger maps you will be able to find new heroes and items by exploring specific marked hexes

-Sound effects: hits and misses will produce audio feedback

-Option to skip enemy movement animations for faster battles

-Autobattle (animated or not, based on your choice), possibly with advanced options like disabling hero recruitment (so you don’t risk losing them)

As for the game’s future, development continues, but in a different format than before:

-New versions will have longer gaps between them and will focus on content updates (new quests, characters, battles using existing modules). This gives me time to develop new systems in the background and release them only once they are ready, instead of delaying updates by focusing solely on unfinished modules.

-Serious bugs will receive dedicated bugfix updates, so you can keep playing without waiting for the next major release.

-Focus will shift toward new content rather than constant refinements: I will not rework existing parts unless they malfunction. Instead, I will dedicate one update roughly every six months entirely to improving existing modules and functionalities.

-Art and illustrations will mostly be created with DAZ3D and Campaign Cartographer for the final release. Any other images (stock backgrounds, AI images, free PNGs) are placeholders and will be replaced later during rework updates.

-Weekly dev news will be discontinued. Since I develop this game after work and daily responsibilities, I cannot promise a steady stream of exciting weekly content, and I want to avoid dull devlogs. Instead, devlogs will become part of the release cycle, with fixed dates so you can follow development reliably.

Regarding the release schedule, here is what the near future looks like:

Devlog: 12/14/2025

2026 Development Plan: 12/31/2025

v0.0.6 Release: 01/02/2026

Thank you for sticking around and playing my game. Good luck with your first battle, and don't forget to save frequently!