The Public Beta for the first update for Thrones of Britannia is now live. Restart Steam and then go to the game in your library, right click and go to properties > Betas and from the dropdown select ‘Patch 1’ to opt into the beta and get access to the changes listed below.

Please note, there are text changes in this beta update that are not yet localised into other languages. It’s best played in English for now. Also, remember that it is in beta. We wanted to allow access to the changes as quickly as possible, so it has had some but not a full sweep of testing. We will monitor, test and refine it over the next few weeks. 

Headline Changes

The main focus of this update is to respond to player feedback by creating a better balance in terms of difficulty and to serve up more challenge. We have tried to leave no stone unturned in this exercise, so the patch includes many granular level changes. You can see all of them laid out in detail here but below is a summary:

• Increased cost of buildings, in particular higher tier buildings
• Food costs for higher tier buildings increased, and more food cost for some Market income buildings added
• Adjusted some bonuses from Market income buildings to tone down how much income some late game provinces could get
• Estates now cost -100 gold for each one not held by your King
• All tax levels now give public order penalties, halved public order hit from occupying settlements from -10 to -5
• Changed Victory Conditions for many factions to improve variety of play styles and fix some instances of too-early victories
• Reduced some bonuses from technologies so they are less overpowered, in particular the +15 melee skill technologies are now +6 bonuses as the previous value was a huge increase for many unit types
• Reduced upkeep and recruitment cost reduction bonuses from traits from -50% to -25%
• Adjusted AI bonuses from difficulty levels
• Change to Supplies so armies start with a lower value and some bonuses from buildings reduced and Supplies lost in enemy territory increased so Supplies has more of an impact
• Changed when different negative faction food penalties are applied so harsher penalties apply earlier, and changed the effects to have more impact
• Made changes to War Fervour so only changes to score in last turn shown, and impact of War Fervour technology changed as well
• Some unit balance adjustments made, in particular to Berserkers
• Made changes to increased the length of melee combat so battle line will be closer to the length we want to see
• Changed spotting values so units in trees can hide better

The beta also includes a number of quality of life improvements to the UI, some Art improvements and bug fixes.

UI Improvements

Campaign

• Divorce Wife/Seek Wife buttons added to character details panel
• Hold Feast button added on Kings character details panel next to Influence value
• Lower Influence and Secure Loyalty buttons added to character details panel for non-king characters next to Influence and Loyalty values respectively
• Strip Estates button added to Estates tab
• All political actions now have a confirm button before they happen
• New zoom-to button added to building browser for unique buildings so you can see where they can be constructed
• Added Academy button to top-left panel
• Scrolling down now moves right in horizontal lists
• Adjusted tooltip display for unlocks X building chain icon on technology panel
• Trait gained event now uses correct text colouring in trait descriptions
• Added character details button to character info panel in bottom left of campaign screen
• Added ability to cycle through your characters through the character details panel via arrows, and added an icon to show whether a character is general/governor/statesman
• Improved settlement renaming UI so it is clearer when you’ve changed the name

Battle

• Adjusted unit stat display to better mirror order and stats shown in Warhammer, speed added to display. This does mean that the shield stat has been removed from missile units stat display as only enough space for 10 stats to be shown

Other

• Academy button now links direct to video part of the Thrones of Britannia page on the Total War Academy website

Art Improvements

• Added new rocks to battlefields that units can move over, replaced many static rocks with these new rocks so movement across battlefields should overall be smoother
• Beech and birch trees now sway in the wind
• Updated campaign lighting so characters look better when camera is rotated
• Reduced number of poppies that can appear on battlefields
• Added shields to the back of all Huscarl units who don’t wear cloaks

Bug Fixes

Campaign

• Fix for some garrison units not having correct upgrades
• We’ve kindly asked the aliens to put Stonehenge back where they found it, it’s now in its correct position on both campaign and battlemap
• No longer possible to get to End Turn button with building browser open
• Closing governor details panel no longer closes settlement details panel
• Can no longer click through the Garrison details panel onto the map behind it
• Province details panel no longer shows incorrect public order if player only owns minor settlements
• Fix for crash when declining an attack when reinforcing the AI against rebels
• Technologies now unlock properly if unique variants of building types are conquered
• Added fail safes for missions that rely on a mission succeeding before triggering the next one
• Added in extra data to ensure boiling oil always works for gates in campaign battles
• Loyalty added to characters by Estates now calculated correctly, was only adding first value of +2, now adds it properly for each Estate owned

Battle

• Correct name of campaign in multiplayer battle list
• We’ve kindly asked the aliens to put Stonehenge back where they found it, it’s now in its correct position on both campaign and battlemap
• Fix for siege towers getting stuck on sheds along the walls of Bornais
• Fix for hard collision blocking half the bridge on one bridge tile
• Removed trees from in front of the walls on the Dun Foither map, as these were causing docking issues
• Removed forest AI hint lines from some tiles where there weren’t forests
• Added forest AI hint lines to some tiles that were missing them
• Added defensive hill AI hint lines to several forest tiles
• Fix for several road linking issues on battlefields that resulted in dead-end roads
• Adjusted terrain under barricades to make sure none float
• Tweaked narrow path on Dun Foither to improve pathfinding
• Fix for floating walls on the Tintagol map
• Fix for collision on river crossing map of Cocuedi (as it appears in the custom battle preset list) by raising terrain, allows troops to move over the bridge better
• Fix for some 2 handed axe standing idle animations showing soldiers without weapons
• Fix for longbow pull-back animation so the animation is now smooth
• Fix for LOD models for short bows so they’re less low-detail close up

Other

• Fixed icon shown on the LCD screen of the Logitech G19 keyboard

Feedback & future updates

This beta will be tested, updated and refined with additional bug fixes and balance changes before being pushed out to all players. This means your feedback is really important.

We’ve setup a Public Test Environment Beta Feedback forum for Thrones here:

Please post any feedback you have there so we can use it to inform our process and make further improvements.