Patches
Service Release 2
Introduction
Service Release 2 was the second unofficial patch to be released for the game. It built on the foundations set by its predecessor and as the knowledge of the file formats was quite rudimentary when the first unofficial patch was released, there were many more bugs that could be squished once more knowledge of the file structures had been acquired.
This patch was released on March 27, 2005 and supported English, Dutch, German and Polish versions of the game.
Development
The development of Service Release 2 started shortly after the Patch Pack had been released. As more work was put into decoding the file formats, new possibilities to fix remaining bugs in the game appeared.
The first concrete information about the patch was spilled in early December. The Knight was asking the community for help in developing the patch; more specifically how to address the issue with fish always running out during early stages of the game. Two choices were offered: to increase the amount of fish in the map itself, or make it so that the fisherman would catch two fish per trip. Even though the community's preference was option number one (to increase the amount of fish on the map), the team decided to go with option number two as scripting additional fish to each map by hand would have been a tedious process.
Soon The Knight held yet another similar poll, but this time the question was the amount of coal. The question was whether coal mines should produce 2 pieces of coal each time the miner when mining. This was brought up because in most missions you would run out of coal but still have plenty of gold and/or iron ore left that you couldn't use. Once again the community was pretty unanimously against raising the amount of coal that you could produce in a mission. As such, the original value of one coal per mining trip was left intact.
In late December some information regarding fixes that would be included in the patch were spilled. Simultaneously The Knight asked the community to highlight missions that had problems that should be fixed. While not many mission bugs were brought forth, there was another question raised that started a debate. That was whether the armor rating of siege equipment should be altered. The vote was quite unanimous at setting the armor rating at 25%. Curiously though, the final release of the patch actually increases the armor rating of siege equipment to 50%. Why exactly this happened is not known.
A short note was also posted revealing that there were plans to support the Hungarian edition of the game with this patch. In January a pretty much complete log of changes the patch was going to bring about was posted. As the patch was still in development, the list was posted as tentative but it ended up being pretty true to the final release.
News were posted in early February that some translation help was needed in order to be able to finish the Hungarian version of the patch. Apparently the translation part of the patch was eventually solved, but other technical difficulties in adopting the patch to the Hungarian version of the game eventually led to it not seeing a release.
In late February the new patch finally entered beta testing. Unfortunately some pretty severe bugs were found from the patch and as such the actual release of the patch was delayed. As The Barbarian was busy with personal matters at the time, it would take about a month for these issues to be resolved.
The final version of Service Release 2 was released on March 27, 2005. It was initially only available in German and Dutch, but a Polish version was released on April 10, 2005. As the English translation had now been allowed to be released by ZuXXeZ, an updated English translation was also released on April 8, 2005. The Hungarian version of the patch was unfortunately never released due to technical problems.
However, the development of the patch did not end here. Out of the blue, it was announced on November 5, 2005 that the game would start appearing on store shelves in the USA as a value game. Not wanting to make people feel like they were left out, The Knight and The Barbarian started working on an English version of the patch. They did some pretty fast work and the English version of the patch was released on December 10, 2005.
A pretty surprising move on the part of ZuXXeZ was that they actually posted news about the patch and made it available through the official website. To further build on this dependency, future releases of the game were actually all pre-patched to version 1.58 SR2. That's not half bad for a fan created patch.
List of Changes
General Fixes
- The carpenter will now once again properly sound off when clicked or killed
- The graphical display of wares now works correctly in the siege workshop
- The fisherman now has an actual description (
)
General Changes
- The fisherman will now catch two fish per trip but he will stay idle between the trips at his hut for a longer time
- Ballistae and catapults have had their armor rating increased to 50%
- All buildings have had their line of sight increased
- The scout has had its line of sight amount doubled
Graphical Changes
- The militia parchment graphic now properly shows two swords
Text Changes
- The briefing texts are now truer to the narration that accompanies them
- Added a missing mention that you can build the fisherman's hut during the tutorial ()
Mission Changes
Town Tutorial
- Altered starting terrain so that there's less dirt making it easier to plow farms
- You now have more food at the start of the mission but less gold
- The blue enemy now has a stronger base
The Shattered Kingdom
- Mission 5 has been made more difficult as you now loose if your allied lance carriers are lost
- Mission 5 had one group of enemy knights that didn't attack the proper position
- Mission 7 now has 120 more groups of fish in the waters
- Mission 18 has been made easier by making the AI start training recruits significantly much later
- Mission 18 has had one enemy sawmill slightly moved since it wouldn't appear due to unsuitable terrain
- Mission 18 now has 57 more groups of fish in the waters
The Peasants Rebellion
- Mission 3 now has proper victory and defeat conditions
- Mission 3 now has a new message that gets sent to you during the mission
- Mission 4 now has a new message that gets sent to you during the mission
- Mission 8 has been completely reworked to make it significantly more difficult
- Mission 14 now allows building of watchtowers
Miscellaneous Changes
- The game icon has been replaced by a new custom made icon
New Bugs
- You can now build gold mines, iron mines, coal mines, stables and watchtowers in the town tutorial
- There are some misplaced enemy troops and animals in the town tutorial
- Some of the hotkeys reported for the soldier commands are false ()
- The briefings for mission 6 and mission 8 of The Shattered Kingdom campaign are swapped ()
- There are some typographical errors in the improved The Peasants Rebellion campaign briefings ()
- The new message in the fourth mission of The Peasants Rebellion campaign uses a placeholder message ()
Footnotes: This patch does not include some of the changes made in the 1.53 Polish patch, so you should install it before installing this patch if you intend to use it.
Furthermore there was supposed to be a Hungarian version of the patch, but unfortunately it was never completed due to technical difficulties.
Screenshots
Credits
| Coordination: Attila “The Knight” Arnold Programming: “The Barbarian” Graphical Editing: Attila “The Knight” Arnold “The Barbarian” Mission Editing: Attila “The Knight” Arnold “The Barbarian” |
German Scripts: |
Downloads
Below you can download Service Release 2 as it was originally released back in 2005. In addition all the English translation patches that were made for it are also available here.
Service Release 2 1.58.314/338
This is the second and final patch to be completed following the cooperation of The Knight and The Barbarian. This is really some quite impressive work and offers many awesome improvements for the game.
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English Language Pack 2
This is the first release of the English translation for the patch and it was released before the game was officially available in English. The translation may not be perfect, but it gets the point across pretty well.
[ Download ]
English Language Pack 3
The second release of the translation. It uses the scripts from the official translation as base for the new campaign. Sadly the translation quality is somewhat lacking here as well.
[ Download ]
English Language Pack 4
The final release of the translation for the patch. It tries to fix some of the errors in the language that were present in the previous translation.
[ Download ]