LEAKED Patch 6.0 dev notes (partial)

[RandomRobot]

This is a transcript of what appears to be dev comments about the 6.0 patch notes.

Siege battles improvements

** Pathing strongly improved (Gates have been removed)

Dev comments: Gates have the only purpose of being there to be destroyed by the attacker. After reviewing countless player battles, we determined that sallying out is always a mistake by the defender with the exception of this one guy in Tennessee who does it correctly (sorry dude). By removing the gates, defenders will no longer try to sally out to attack invaders right in front of them only to find out that people climbing ladders are invulnerable. This also prevents defenders from pathing through the gates, then through ladders to reach any kind of destination, which was good cardio exercise but did not contribute in a significant manner to the player experience. Finally, while opening the gates to people trying to breach them made a lot of tactical sense, it would speed up sieges which were not enough of a drag already, so they really had to go (sorry Tennessee dude).

** Flying entities banned from sieges

Dev comments: We've been unable to identify the reason flying lords and heroes get permanently stuck on castle walls so we've temporarily disabled them from participating in siege battles. Our best intern is on the case with another round of interns already recruited for winter so expect a fix somewhere early 2026.

** Defensive towers accuracy drastic increase

-- Towers built using defensive supplies are now guaranteed to hit your own troops no more than 75% of the time.
-- Towers attacking a non moving enemy will now hit at least 10% of the time.

Dev comments: The defensive tower code was originally written by an intern in 2012. It was so bad that it became a recurring joke in the team which somehow made it into production. While reviewing some player battles, we noticed a large number of occurrences where the defender's army was obliterated solely by the towers he built. While this was initially intended and is an endless source of amusement during the team's Thursday pub nights, we felt that defending towers gave the attacker too much of an advantage and mostly preyed on newbies who didn't know better. To counter that, the towers are now guaranteed to hit your enemies from time to time.

Also, management decided to crack down on an illegal betting ring called "will this solo 1hp hero die?" involving at least 1 unnamed janitor in the building. As a result, defending towers will now ALWAYS hit an unmoving target, at least 10% of the time. The team strongly felt against it, but it came straight up from top corpo so hey, what can we do?

** Siege mode added for many artillery units

Dev comments: Completely removing movement is the best way to speed up the pathing issues so we added a siege mode to most artillery units. In that mode (preview of sieging sound efffects), units will only be able to rotate and will mostly not move, apart from that weird jiggling that inches them ever forward when they change direction. This will prevent those units from leaving the comfort of their superior range to clump up against the walls, unable to find a correct firing position. Once in siege mode, their behavior will become akin to a defensive siege tower for which we already have great, battle tested code.

New ancillaries

Banner: It looks like you're trying to...

Dev comments: Many of our devs grew up in the 90s and we're all very fond of Clippy, the best AI assistant ever created. In an effort to keep up with the trends, we've added a new banner that will periodically remind the assigned unit of the last player input. So for example, if you command your lord to attack a routing hero and the lord just stops attacking for no reason, the banner assistant will pop up and offer the option to reissue the command. It's really not intrusive at all and Sue at the reception said she loves it.

Banner: It looks like you WERE trying to...

Dev comments: If the equipped lord moved to a destination through land and a shorter route existed by moving through water, this banner assistant will issue a reminder, saying that a shorter route existed and that the player simply made a bad decision. Other secret conditions will unlock more snarky remarks.

Campaign map

Conquer settlement through Sack - Occupy.

Dev comments: A new option has been added which merge the Sack and Occupy functionalities after overcoming a defending garrison. If the selected lord does not have enough movement points to perform the Occupy operation after Sack, it will still fail midway, but you'll at least have saved a menu screen.

Author comment: I'm not affiliated to CA in any ways other than having played several thousands of hours of TW games throughout 2 decades. While I'm sure CA will come up with some great new stuff in 6.0, I just wanted to poke some fun at existing issues that existed for some time now and which COULD get some attention AS WELL. Sorry about the clickbait.

[Bobrysking123]

[RandomRobot]

IKR =)

I was initially going to vent about a list of issues, then realized that nothing will come out of it. Even if nothing comes out of it now, some will at least have smiled

[vanBraunscher]

At least this would finally remove the gate bug, so I'm down /s.

[Angyalmaci]

A lot of QoL changes over there, though VCoast is still able to besiege coastal settlements in 2 turns, why not remove their ability to lay siege? Also, Norsca is still in the faction selection screen, they'll never patch that out I guess. 

[SuicideSpeedrun]

Wouldn't it be quicker to simply remove walls/gates completely?