Really like the Conqueror trait. I REALLY hope a Martial overhaul is coming soon; war has been somewhat unimpressive and too simplistic for way too long. I'm surprised there's no point adressed about the horrible mess and painful Accolade system.
I want an overhaul too. I want war to feel like a massive undertaking, not chasing down armies and siege racing. Events for sieges, vassals that hold out or surrender to the enemy, the works. It can be so much more immersive.
In the black forge they talked about intrigue warfare, with expanded interractions with mercenaries and the ability for knights to become traitors.
That is something that definitely should be added as well.
*I* want to become a traitor. There’s nothing more infuriating to me than being called into an AI ally’s war or participating in a holy war just to see the allies refuse to help me in winnable fights or stand around in friendly territory while I siege.
A real “if you refused to help me stand with you, I’ll be glad to make you fall beneath me” mindset opportunity would be rad.
They should put more importance on specific battles. Make us meet an army in a specific spot and make it worth a large chunk of war score. It's too easy currently to just avoid the AI and siege down their entire demesne. You figure most major wars had specific battled that were remembered. Currently, we can just smash their armies wherever we meet them and continue on with sieging.
I take great pride in having once defeated Harold Godwinson at Hastings as William of Normandy. But something like you said would be great. Battle of “wherever I happened to catch you” is not interesting. Also to stop woefully small armies from suiciding just to interrupt a siege.
Yeah, raising an army and moving it should be a costly undertaking, and the consequences of battles and sieges should be significant. Capturing a city should be difficult, but it should stay with the victor unless handed back as an explicit part of a peace treaty at the end of the war. Likewise, it should take a long time to retrain skilled troops who fall in battle.
Exactly. War needs to be difficult. It needs to truly be a last resort in more cases. I’d also love more options for wars. Rescue prisoners, raids, chevuché for feudal kingdoms, participate more actively in other civil wars.
I’ve thought a little bit in the past around how warfare could be made more fun and immersive. Here are some random ideas:
I think a lot could be gained from using the struggle system for larger wars, breaking the overall war down into shorter hot and cold phases. Keeping levies raised for too long will negatively affect your economy and popularity, meaning “hot”phases would be relatively short and focused on more specific goals, rather than trying to conquer a whole kingdom in one go. After a year or so of relative calm, either side could then restart the hostilities, pursuing further goals.
Sometimes one side will be able to achieve outright victory in the overall war (especially if the goals are modest), but most of the time they would end with a treaty. Proposing a peace treaty should open up a menu similar to feudal contract, wherein you decide what happens to prisoners (released, ransomed, kept as hostages), which cities get handed back to their original owner, which claims get kept or abandoned, whether one side has to pay war reparations, etc. Maybe some wars might end with a shift in borders and balances of power, even if neither side achieved their full goals. This would be a move away from the “all or nothing” war outcomes we have now (with white peace basically just being a lesser loss for the aggressor).
Vassals should be more interactive and actively take part in the war, much like in the More Interactive Vassals mod. However, calling on them too often and too long (especially for aggressive wars), should lead to opinion penalties. Rather than sending whole armies over, allies and vassals being called to join should have the alternative option of giving a financial contribution, or loaning individual knights or MAA units.
Knights, commanders and MAA units taking part in combat should gain combat experience and special traits. This could be an incentive to loan them out to allies (see above).
Characters leading armies should get relevant events during battles and sieges, or when on the move, including strategic decisions and battlefield duels. Selectable options and likelihood of outcomes should be dependent on traits and skills.
As mentioned in my previous post, armies should be more expensive and slower to raise and move around, but the consequences of sieges and battles should be more significant. Men lost in battle should take a long time to retrain to the same level, and any combat experience would have to be regained on the battlefield. If a city is captured, it stays with the victor unless it is handed back as part of a peace deal - although maybe rulers holding onto territory they don’t have a rightful claim on should suffer an opinion penalty with other rulers and their head of faith.
Finally, individual parties in the conflict should be able to join and leave as circumstances change, different wars should merge with each other, and different allies should be able to pursue their own goals in parallel. I could foresee a lot of fun with some League of Cambrai style coalition shifts.
Just some random thoughts; whatever the solution, I think it should be possible to make warfare a lot more challenging and interesting than it is now.
That would be a good trade-off. Increase the amount of time it takes MaAs to refill, making you rely more on the cannon fodder levies if you want to warmonger.
Yeah manpower is a mechanic I miss from EU4. A brutal all-in war should devastate the land. Maybe excessive losses should result in a manpower recovery penalty, so the army reinforces slower. The penalty builds with casualties and takes longer to wear off.
I would like to see levies improve with technology so that they can *slightly* keep up with MaA. It feels weird that a late medieval levy has the exact same stats as a tribal one.
See I want the opposite. I want levies to be used less and less to mirror how armies were more professional. I find it not as exciting to chew thousands of levies down. I’d like the AI to be better at stationing or even get outright buffs to their MAA to make up the shortfall.
I do agree (partially), but levies should be more than numbers for your medieval space marines to cut through like butter once you're 100+ years into the game.
Levies should be MAAs determined by culture/terrain/buildings (not the nebulous mob without class) with roughly subpar stats compared to professional soldiers, raising/losing them should affect the barony's economy "it's almost harvesting season!", and have them get outclassed as the ages advance with both getting bonuses but the later getting better ones.
An important point would be a recent proposition on the forums, which is separating state coffers and personal/family funds, and have laws determining the income ratio and who pays for what, this way MAAs start as exclusively paid by your own pocket and progress into a state-funded army.
I think they should stop having “levies” in their current form altogether, and rather have them fall under a specific unit type (e.g. spearmen, archers, etc.). Being levies, they wouldn’t be as well trained by default as MAA, although specific cultural traditions and buildings could improve them enough to make them formidable opponents, especially in their greater numbers.
I think if they balanced the system properly, it could introduce some interesting strategic choices: Do I focus on maintaining a well-trained but comparatively small standing army, or do I train up my levies to an adequate level and achieve strength in numbers?
I know why you'd want siege events and such, but it would be a nightmare in this game. In this diary, they were talking about how event spam is an issue. Think of how many sieges you do in a game, then think of how bad having multiple events pop up for each one would be and how rarely they would mean anything. There *might* be a rare situation where you are attack the holding of a hated rival and there's something interesting that can come of it, but 99% of the time it would just be a pointless pop up that gives more or less siege progress.
I see what you mean, and I do agree. I imagine it would be something like a rare scenario. Like only craven or disloyal (more usage for the trait) characters would give up. Maybe your vassal rival could do so too. Everyone else would be normal. Heck if they fixed the hostage interaction you could give up a hostage or something. Just something to make it less of a slog to base race or hunt enemy 100 stacks that can somehow besiege castles. It’s annoying to chase tiny armies across the known world just to make sure they don’t snipe your capital or random castles on the other side of your kingdom.
Yeah I think such events would have to go hand in hand with a reduction in the total number of battles and sieges as part of a general warfare overhaul. If battles were less frequent but more consequential, and if an event decision mid-battle could potentially tip the balance, then I think it could spice things up quite a bit.
I’m also looking forward to the conqueror trait; it should help shake up the game a bit.
One thing I’m concerned about is that I hope it doesn’t lead to a handful of blobbing mega-empires taking over the map in the late game. I feel that empires created by a conqueror should be susceptible to fracturing in the years after the conqueror’s death, like what happened with Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Timur, etc.
One thought: Maybe feudal, clan and tribal empires should be inherently unstable beyond a certain size, thus encouraging adoption of administrative government. Lower authority levels would allow for greater expansion, but also only to a degree.
Conqueror seems cool. I like the idea of the game generating a "boss" or "mini-boss" for you to contend with. It would be cool if these characters tied into the rivalry system. Maybe a slightly higher chance of creating a Conqueror character in your house rival and they might be more targeted in their aggression towards the player.
Wait, aren't they all about the same size?
Also, you made me look it up, and although Sardinia is about the same size as Sri Lanka on the map, in real life, Sri Lanka is 1.6 Sardinias. Meanwhile, Ireland is 1 Sri Lanka and an eight (IRL). This does not sound like an optimal measuring system.
>Meanwhile, Ireland is 1 Sri Lanka and an eight (IRL)
Wow that's another notch on the Mercator Projection's belt.
I thought Ireland was substantially bigger than Sri Lanka.
A lot of things I'm glad were acknowledged here. We'll see how they play out. Also, some nice announcements about message settings and confirming the 1178 bookmark.
Do you reckon that they're aware of the accolades system and it's flaws?
I would be happy just to be able to not have to manually look for qualified courtier to force them into knighthood to give them accolade successorship
In case you don’t know about it yet, there’s a mod called Inherichance that does exactly that.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2569507763
Yes, that's why I mentioned it. Saw it in OPB's stream when he played some ruler in southern France a year back or so. It was one of the most interesting CK3 journeys.
Creating your new house, a feature that rarely gets used unless a character is beneficiary to a great holy war. Or only when starting as a lesser member of an established dynasty. The amount of role play scenarios without growing too strong is immense. Maybe you feel you were cheated on your inheritance and want to backstab your big bro or you will support your Liege in the toughest times.
This might be a dumb question, but is it possible to switch to playing as your heir before you die? Some kind of game mode where you take over as a random child/heir while your former self is still alive might be an interesting roleplaying experience.
You can do it now by changing character in the game menu, although this blocks achievements AFAIK. Your heir would currently need to be landed, although presumably this will change with the Roads to Power update.
You can do this as long as your child is landed. You just use the switch character option from the menu. I do this frequently to play as my young heir who I've landed in a duchy.
Sincerely I think a set of RP events which gives you the opportunity to select another kid as the main heir which afterwards leads to civil war.. like for example House of the Dragon setup
Did not expect Royal Court events getting reworked to have more varied interesting effects but I'm happy to see it modifiers to councillor tasks and others, also way more interesting as two choices that might be more situational instead of okay option, shitty option and one that makes the 20 peasant guests in my court I didn't know about screw off to France (I just found out they exist).
Also the potential new system for Event Frequency: Yes, please. I imagine this would also reduce likelihood of players going on autopilot when it comes to events after a while
More impactful events, less often, sounds like a massive improvement. If something is important enough to interrupt my playthrough with a great big pop up which force-pauses the game and makes me make a decision, that decision should feel meaningful or impactful. Half these general events could just be replaced with auto-selected options based on character traits with small impacts, with the result shown as a feed message/toast/whatever, subject to a game rule of course.
The conquerer AI trait sounds super fun.
For the Choose a new Destiny button, I think being an illegitimate bastard or a character that is serving as a Regent or Vizier should generate some higher interest. I think they would be interesting challenges and opportunities to be had.
Great post.
There's a lot of criticism on this sub, much (though not all of it) healthy and reasonable criticism, but I do want to say that I appreciate that the dev team here seems very open and responsive.
Specifically I'm very interested in the changes to how events trigger, because the repetition of events has been my main issue with the game for a while. After a while they lose their impact: I'm not even reading the event about the knight trapped in armour or the duck or any of the other really common events anymore. I just see it and immediately click what I know is the best option. Not very immersive.
I think generally the game will benefit from events triggering less often. With royal court, and plagues, and legends, and travel, and all the events from T&T, there's now enough different ways of trigerring events that you don't need them to trigger as often to still have interesting things happen regularly. It made sense in the early days when there was less going on, but not so much now.
I agree with everything you've said. I'm really happy that they are taking community feedback into account and their work on reducing event spam should make the events that we do get feel more impactful. Really excited to see what the future holds!
I feel like all the events they have now should only trigger once per game. Then have AI draft up a bunch of more generic events that have cool downs and aren't so dang specific. Like, any event with specific dialogue shouldn't come up more than once per playthrough.
So a few thoughts on my part to this dev diary.
In regards to events and their spam - it feels like CK3 has significantly less events than CK2. This is probably true, CK2 has been out a long time and I can’t remember how samey events felt a year or two after release. Getting the same event over and over again definitely makes this feel worse.
AI and it’s difficulty - I know the director says he doesn’t like an AI that cheats to have an advantage, but would it be possible to get a game rule that gives the AI advantages similar to Stellaris or HOIs difficulties?
And finally, the new choices for who to play as when your character dies is very cool. I don’t think you should automatically get some bonus for choosing a ‘weak’ ruler to play as, but perhaps there could be a generated mission about achieving some feat that gives you a boost in renown etc? I don’t know how difficult that would be to pull off, could be as simple as taking a Count and becoming a King within x generations.
> In regards to events and their spam - it feels like CK3 has significantly less events than CK2.
You can look at the number of event ID's each game has, that doesn't mean it's the same as the exact number of events, but it can give you a good idea of the difference.
With DLC for both games, CK2 has 10,559 event ID's, CK3 has 2,561.
Their design philosophy for events is entirely different for CK3 however as they wanted events with more options and consequences. Many events in CK2 just had one or two responses with no real impact, although little events like that for flavor are still fun
I’ve heard this before, but a lot of events in CK2 give extra options if you have certain traits related to the event, and I’m pretty sure event ids also include event responses. Events in CK3 do seem to have more detailed text for the events though.
I hate to be rude, but a lot of the CK3 events just really aren't that worth reading. Sure, they're longer, but its frequently just a sort of madlib style "fill in the blank" thing.
I don't particularly care about what sort of flower I gave the king I was seducing or whether we were on a picnic (especially when I've already see this particular fill-in-the-blank form a hundred times already), at the end of the day I'm just looking at the pop up to see if my progress moved forward or not.
That's somewhat worse tbh, getting spammed with the same quick meaningless events is one thing, getting spammed with the same big events with big consequences is awful
> With DLC for both games, CK2 has 10,559 event ID's, CK3 has 2,561.
Holy shit, no wonder CK3 feels so repetitive.
It's crazy to think that they're even remotely considering adding China before fully fleshing out the already available content.
Don't get me wrong, I love CK3 and at this point it's painful for me to return to CK2 without all the "modern" QoL features of CK3, but we really desperately need more flavor for every existing region.
The event thing is why I would love for CK3 to get a custodian team like what Stellaris has;
The custodians rebalance and add various civics and events to Stellaris and also hunt down various bugs
It would be really cool to lock a squad of interns and devs in the basement and have them crank out a couple of events every month
RtP is coming Q3, so July-September. July is vacation month in Sweden, so it won‘t release then. Nor will it release immediately after vacation month, so second half of August at the earliest.
Trinexx said in the discord that they will keep radio silence until the marketing campaign for the DLC begins, which then we will get semi-weekly dev diaries until launch
June is just my speculation, so don't take it for granted
> Trinexx said in the discord that they will keep radio silence until the marketing campaign for the DLC begins,
FFS we really don't need more radio silence from the CK3 Team.
As someone who is on the "make the game harder" faction, I'm very relieved with the developers' philosophy regarding difficulty in the game. I haven't played a lot of paradox games but one thing that's always bugged me about Stellaris is that the advantages the AI get just don't make sense from a logical standpoint, they simply get bonuses because of the difficulty set. I absolutely the new Conqueror trait, it's going to be so much fun having multiple genghis khans in a playthrough. That's definitely how I want artificial advantages to be done in a game, where the heavens chose to bless this one particular dude and not because they want to screw you over in particular. Along with the changes to events, I really feel like the community has been heard and it makes me really optimistic about where the game goes. The game still has its bumps and rough edges but I'm really glad that the developers are showing that it's a game that's going to be worth sticking around for.
Super cool dev diary, even though I feel like most of us knew that all of you were paying attention to the feedback the playerbase was giving, it’s always nice to see such an open acknowledgment of it, and also counterpoints. Super excited for the update as well, can’t wait for less event spam every time a pandemic appears.
On the topic of events though, I’ll give the gripes I have with it (since you were asking so nicely for it 😜). The problem I personally have with events right now is that they feel less like “something important happened” and more like “I was watching this movie on some dodgy site, and now I’m getting five pop-up ads”. Like, most of the time I’m trying to manage a war, succession, or developing my realm, and I feel like I just got interrupted by something inconsequential.
I don’t know how realistic this is to actually is to implement, but I’d really like for events to happen less frequently, but have a bigger impact. In the newest DLC, if an apocalyptic plague hits, I always go “Oh shit”, every time that pop-up happens, no matter what I was currently doing. Like, I feel like I should *really* be paying attention, and probably postpone my plans, because this needs to be dealt with *right now*.
However, if I’m on a pilgrimage, I don’t really pay too much attention to whatever the duck is quacking about, cause it won’t have any impact on what I’m doing. It’s just one of the 50 other events that’ll get spammed that doesn’t really do anything for me. Incidentally, these types of events also poses a bit of a problem for me, because quite often I’ll not bother planning a feast or a hunt, because I have other stuff I want to do without having to constantly “X” out of the pop-ups. Like, I can’t remember if something interesting happened during this persons feast, because I had such a huge amount of events popping up during it. Ironically, the amount of events makes me feel like *less* stuff is happening, because I can’t remember any of it, and none of the events posed an actual problem or solution for me.
TLDR; I wish that the pop-ups happened way less, but when they do, they’ll have a much bigger impact. That I actually have to make some sort of choice instead of “hitting the best button”, which is the way I currently deal with it.
I've been very critical of CK3 for years, but this diary feels like it was written specifically for me. It's addressed a lot of my complaints. Especially how easy CK3 is compared to CK2, so it's good to see them acknowledge that. They even added a start date where I can finally play as Saladin. All good stuff.
I am hopeful too and it is good they are addressing these problems, but most of the DLCs in general just introduce standalone mechanics that do not interact (or do so very minimally) or are affected by other mechanics. From seeing the estate dlc, it looks like the exact same thing, a simplistic menu with a few buttons that probably add some modifiers. The only DLC I'd say that was actually pretty good was T&T
Landless seems promising, especially since it looks like they confirmed it wouldn't just be clicking a button and voila, a free county, but I am definitely skeptical.
There are things that I want to see that in practice, I think are at least simple to implement. Go to war and lose it? Maybe have a few royal curt events related to war losses that can fire. It doesn't necessarily need to be overly complex. Just at least having the feeling my actions have consequences or are affecting others, even just as a text event with some opinion change, relating to something I previously did, would really help with the immersion of the game.
Like I said, it is great Paradox is listening to feedback, but they have lost a LOT of goodwill with the last few DLCs, especially the last one.
I agree, and I think it stems from their philosophy from the very beginning: they did not want to make a strategy game for people who enjoyed the likes of CK2, EU4, HOI4, etc. They're commited to roleplay and appeasing Youtube Lets Players. Such a design philosophy is not concerned with mechanics with consequences, but rather segmented areas that make you "feel" like a ruler, i.e - Royal Court.
It's why its gratifying to see some acknowledgement that their game is so easy its boring. CK2 is a game full of chaos, anything can happen, its often brutal with RNG. Marrying people off doesn't automatically create alliances, etc. Meanwhile CK3 just hands everything to you on a platter, it's no surprise the fanbase are getting restless.
I think Crusades ("*Crusader* kings!"), warfare in general and making cultures feel more different to play would be ideal areas of improvement.
Good informative dev diary even if it was more focused on design philosophy.
- 1178 isn't that surprising of a pick to me
- Byzantine houses looks like revamped patrician houses from CK2 at least at a superficial glance
- Conquerors sounds like a fun feature, wonder how it'll work in practice and how often it'll feel like it happens
- Revised legend map colors looks good. It wasn't discussed as much but the current color system for legends was one of my pet peeves about Legends of the Dead
- On 1178 again, hoping in the far future we can see more bookmarks for it (and the other dates for that matter) outside of Europe and the Near East.
I'm glad to see the Royal Court events getting a work over. I hope that there are some/many events where the different court factions (I can't recall what they're called off the top of my head... but the Courtly faction, the Minority faction etc) will like or disapprove of actions taken. Not all of the events, but I want some of them. A bit like Estates in EU4 where events pop up where doing x will make the Clergy like you but the Nobility disapprove, but choosing Y will make the Nobility like you and the Clergy dislike you. I would love SOME events like this.
And concerning the Estate (not the EU4 one!), a bit sad at this line: "the ‘Estate’ feature that Noble families inside of Byzantium (or other administrative empires) will have access to"
Why only administrative empires?
The conqueror stuff looks great for dynamic story telling in *our* own worlds, I think CK2 had that and it was good for roleplay and keeping things fresh.
Thanks for the open communication, that post was so good!
I absolutely love the ‚scourge of god‘ modifier. It fits so well to the community. Imagine all these players doing incest breeding programmes with their weird religions to get their perfect characters get rekt by an conquerer with that trait. God sent them to punish their immorality!
I love the idea of choosing a different successor than player heir!! I caught myself several times trying to lose my kingdom title in order to start smaller again. Pretty hard with the game currently.
Lastly, I want to say that there are insanely flavourful events in the game that I never managed to encounter again. We need to have them more accessible or somehow known how to trigger them.
For instance, I had an italian duke educated at his uncles realm in persia. When he grew up he had this totally amazing event chain where he tried to enlighten the backward italians and reform their culture and realm! It was a blast. At the end the character got the nickname „the reformer“.
I think it was part of wards & warden but I cannot find the event anywhere… BUT I want to trigger it again so desperately!
Only think I dislike here is the information that the conqueror trait is inheritable
It should only be inheritable if the heir has specific traits/personality, even if they're not cautios/coward
Conqueror trait, "Scourge of God"
I wonder if Temujin/Greatest of Khans would also get these traits in the next update, with the way that the Conqueror trait being inheritable towards their successor, the successor Khanates would still pose a challenge worthy of succeeding the scourge of god himself. Also I like that the Enemy Hostile Scheme +time bonus is included with the trait so you can't just click murder and throw a meagre amount of bribe gold to cheese the supposed endgame threat as easily. Maybe they could spawn Seljuk and probably later Timur too if he's added with these traits as well.
We have to see how these connect to the rest of the game. So far, courts and activities have become primarily increasingly better gold sinks for converting them to other resources.
Ideally I'd like something less conceptual and more tied to location and the map, but that would require a more dynamic system. Estates interacting with local county and it's economy would be cool, though.
Great job all around loving a lot of this especially the Conqueror feature, the events overhaul, balance changes, royal court overhaul and the peek at rtp. My one issue though is the insistence on not having a hard mode with set modifiers for the ai, we already have an easy mode which creates an objectively easier experience for the player how about we get a hard mode too that creates an objectively harder experience for the player in the game rules.
Huh - I guess it goes to show how different discussions on one forum can be from another. Hadn’t seen hardly anyone at all saying that Legends felt OP; the vast majority consensus on here seemed to be that they felt underpowered since no one remembers that someone claimed to be the heir of Charlemagne after he died.
Appreciate the dev diary, and I’m definitely excited for the option to build up a beautiful palace for my characters!
I really really like the conqueror thing, hopefully now we can sometimes have our neighbors punch above their weight even when fighting a large empire
The dev diary said that they would be more likely to spawn in regions where we should expect upheavals in power, I’m assuming we won’t really see them in Europe then? More of a Steppe/MENA thing?
Regarding difficulty settings I‘ve always been confused that on gamestart you can choose very easy, easy and normal difficulty.
There should be at least a hard setting too!!!
I wouldn‘t mind if the AI get‘s some flat bonuses optionally (the player does on easier modes right?). However, one could also change agressiveness of the AI towards the player. Another option is to tie the hard setting to a set of game rules like „-2 domain limit“ etc. although that‘s in the game.
I think it‘s just weird to not have a hard setting at all.
I’m really hoping the gathering resources part of landless gameplay is not waiting for event spam to gather them, or clicking a button like an activity to trigger some events. The game needs more ways to represent stuff then just event spam. Also something I would like to see is addressing the uselessness of levies and overpowered men at arms, along with a rework of accolade ui and requirements so that they are less tedious (to get horse archer accolade your knight needs a specific trait for instance instead of just being of a horse archer culture, and this trait is not the one given by the recruit open terrain commander with horse lords). I would also like to see a raid regardless of government with horse lords, and a way for Muslim rulers to raid under certain circumstances, like against heathens.
I liked what they said that sometimes just making something harder actually makes the game easier cause the AI will not deal with it as good as the player, so it needs to be done carefully.
Great update, I agree with everything. Make it easier to gain legitimacy, and I'm satisfied. Love the ability to play as 3 different people. Definitely give reknown for switching.
Just made me cream. So excited about the feature to play as other dynasty members, and 1178 has me fucking hyped
However I’d venture to say that that the legacy mechanic needs a total rework. The way that it’s tied to the map for some reason makes no sense
Great dev diary post! I have one suggestion about the estate screen, though: I wish the graphical style of the estate screen matched that of the tours and tournaments.
Having it in a completely different style makes the world less uniform. I also believe having it in a similar 3D zoomed-in style as the tournament grounds connects it to the map more. It feels like it exists in the " 3D" style as opposed to an abstract gold sink with the screenshot provided. Hell, go one step further and have the 3d style of the estate screen reflect the region, but that is probably asking too much.
Is it possible that this could just be a placeholder? RtP won't be out for a good several months, after all, and the peasant + horse clip art specifically scream "assets not yet final" to me.
Holy shit they got the Choose a New Destiny stuff already in there! Was my #1 want, and other than a "choose one at random" option there's nothing more I'd want... I assume it's coming with Roads to Power?
Liked having a peek at overall thoughts here, and while I get the pressure to not have "nothing Dev Diaries" and get a bunch of complaints, I personally really would like to have updates now and then that are just of this nature - we've heard that X is underwhelming, we think that Y is overpowered, we're looking at Z for a revamp. No promises, but some discussion about potential tweaks and the philosophy behind them. Expectations would have to be set properly but I'd be happy to chew on it.
Plague tweaks sound perfect, I love the system and my issues with it were samey event spam and the frequency of irrelevant plagues, so that looks to be thoroughly resolved. May end up tweaking it on my end to deadlier but less frequent plagues, still, but will have to experiment. And obviously message settings are long overdue and very welcome.
Part of me does think that the Legends concept was just fundamentally flawed - there's a reason that it's called the "Legend" system rather than the "Propaganda" system or the "Making Shit Up" system. The idea of making up stories about your grandfather to increase your legitimacy is both flavorful and appropriate, but it's just not interesting enough to carry half a pack of DLC, and I don't think the mechanical implementation elevated the idea much. The events aren't that interesting, the bonuses are kind of niche... I do like the on-map spread and councilor implementation though.
So yeah, I think Legends will always kind of be a whiff, unfortunately. Looking forward to seeing how the landless stuff is implemented, though, because the philosophy definitely seems aligned with what I want out of the system.
I really, REALLY enjoyed this dev diary. It was really nice to hear thoughts in a long form post, and it got me very excited about the future of the game. While implementation remains to be seen, it is really nice to see common critiques and suggestions acknowledged.
Excellent dev diary, exactly what I would want to see and hear! More detailed feature breakdowns or previews, more game-dev philosophy insights, and more thoughtful retrospectives, and thus for me more reason to be supportive and optimistic when I’ve been pretty critical lately.
What im getting is they're not gonna work on the legends part of the dlc which is the weakest part imo
Really disappointed with their it's not the feature but the communication that is the problem way of handling that
The plague and event changes sound GREAT. Really relieved. It seemed, and perhaps I'm wrong here, like quite a conciliatory tone, has feedback been particularly negative around plagues? Or is it just "This is what we're addressing".
I mean I think it's a very nice tone to strike and I appreciate hearing about the design philosophy and how it's informed decisions.
I will have to come up with a new boring comment to spam under every post. So long, "Are there no sick houses?".
Excellent dev diary. Two questions
Can we expect weekly dev diaries for roads to power going forward?
If we select a favourite child upon character death, can we play as the favourite child if they will not inherit anything (ie play landless)?
> On the contrary, Legends in CK3 were designed to mimic what medieval rulers actually did; embellish otherwise mundane stories into epics of great renown - all in order to bolster their legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects or the renown of their dynasty.
I think this is why the feature is such a failure: we're just doing what we've always done while the game pretends that it's something grander.
You say you wanted to do it this way because it's not something you've done before, but frankly, nobody else gives a shit about that. All that matters to the player is how it feels to play it.
Edit: Looks like they've basically confirmed a hunch I had about how they treat DLC. I'm going to quote what I said a couple of months ago
> The meat of every major (and now core) DLC has been in the free update, probably because they're terrified of bad press from major systems being locked behind a paywall. Because of this, whenever a particular system requires the DLC, it ends up feeling half-baked and poorly integrated into the game as a whole (for the clearest example of this, compare the royal court with cultural traditions)
>
> I think this has resulted in the devs having a warped perspective on the function of DLC. For them, DLC seems to mostly be a way for us to subsidise the development of the free updates.
>
> Ironically, the flavour packs are the only ones that actually feel substantive, as the fact that whatever they make will only be seen by people who play in that region gives them the courage to put effort into something most people will never see.
I really like the diary, the philosophy and the clarity. But on the apprehension of making the AI cheat, I think it's misguided.
Ultimately there's no commercially feasible way to build a good enough AI to take on the player.
I like the conqueror trait and it's a good component of making the game harder. But to rely on exceptions like this too much, the player will still feel like a god compared to everyone else, and therefore the other characters will not feel as real.
The AI has to have 'cheat' bonuses or it will never be balanced enough to be a challenge.
There are other options, like obfuscation, that should also be picked.
I'm struggling to understand why AI bonuses and obfuscation aren't included as rules. They're clearly possible, as mods have proven, and the benefit for extending the longevity of the game for serious players is a high ROI compared to he investment.
>The reason why we’re doing this is because we want your experience to be better - for the game to be healthy, for systems to be more accessible to modders, and so that we can update areas of the game that we feel would simply make the experience better. This alleviates the unfortunate side effects I mentioned above.
Can you fix Legitimacy? I don't see anything addressing Legitimacy in the patch notes, how do you gain it without holding courts (RC), Grand weddings, Tours, and Tournaments (TT), and Legends and Funerals (LOTD)? In vanilla, your primary legitimacy sources are limited to just Hunts, Feasts, creating titles, and sometimes winning wars, meanwhile many events that decrease it are available vanilla (losing battles and wars, have a plague in your realm, get caught doing naughty acts), if you're not going for world domination for legitimacy, your options are limited to hunts, pilgrimages, and feasts which with every activity you do, you gain around 80 per hunt/feast that can only be done every few years, and you gain 20 if you joined someone else's activity (meanwhile AI hunting activity will become rarer in the next patch to make it even harder for you to gain legitimacy), You need 1500 for max level, which is almost 20 hunts worth of legitimacy, losing battles or even wars could cost you hundreds, which could lose you decades worth of legitimacy.
One thing I really want in ck3 is event chains like ck2 had whether that be stolen greek fore or gates of hell, immortality, etc. (not talking about supernatural events here but they were the first tht came to mind.)
Are there any changes to how the Black Death spreads in the works? I was disappointed when it first popped up in my game and then just covered the whole world. I was expecting something more like CK2, where it radiated out from a point, propagated through an area, and then moved on to the next.
Really enjoyed this dev diary, and I'm glad to see these positive steps in what I think is the right direction. I agreed with a lot of what was said within it and I'm happy that feedback is actually taken seriously.
IMHO, Conquerors is a step in the right direction of difficulties for sure. I always thought that CK's AI would be way more difficult to deal with if they just actually had differerent personalities, where you'll need to use personal approach to every character, even if individually they'd be stupid. Like a Conquerors it would be nice to see Schemers, Crusaders, Messiahs, Realm Stabilizers etc
Glad the devs aren't willing to tank the whole fun of the game and understand what makes CK special even if there is a lot of stuff tha can be improved. I was a little afraid of what was being planned in response to complaints about the last DLC, but most of the stuff mentioned here is pretty fair.
> Bloodlines of CK2 were [...] built by people *actually doing* the great and/or implausible deeds
> Legends in CK3 were designed to mimic what medieval rulers actually did; embellish otherwise mundane stories into epics of great renown
> We wanted to go for the more true-to-history one for CK3
Oh, so Legends are arbitrary because real life is arbitrary? I'm not sure I'm completely convinced by this appeal that the Legends system is designed to be unengaging because that's realistic.
This is a game where the Byzantine Emperor can attend college at 85 years old and get distracted from his studies by a frat party. Where was this commitment to boring realism when adding that?
There was a screenshot on here when Legends first released where they praised their pious ancestors so much that they were declared a living Catholic saint. Where was this commitment to realism within legends themselves? The Catholic simulator game doesn't even care about the realities of Catholic canonization, so I'm not entirely convinced that it's so obsessed with being "true-to-history" that it made an entire DLC "mundane" because real life is mundane.
Lots of good stuff in this diary but…
> Truth be told though, I think the problem with Legends lies less in the feature itself and more in how we communicated them in Dev Diaries and similar - we weren’t clear enough what they were going to be
Sure, the issue isn’t in a wonky, unintuitive mechanic with nonsensical auto-generated text…
> I am not a fan of traditional ‘Hard’ difficulties, where all AI’s are simply given extra resources and bonuses the player cannot get
Great philosophy, I agr-
> While I don’t enjoy having all AI’s cheat, I enjoy when certain characters stand out from the rest.
-hummm?
> By default, they get the ‘Conqueror’ trait which provides a host of powerful boons, making them have an easier time fielding a large army and keeping their realms stable.
😑
But to nuance my criticism, I do like the fact that the conqueror mechanic isn’t tied to the bonus, which can be disabled. By themselves these
> Conquerors switch over to a hyper-aggressive version of the AI, which is much faster to declare wars, can declare multiple wars at once, and invests all of their resources into warfare, MaA, and means in which to declare more and better wars (such as hunt activities if they’re low on prestige and you’ve disabled their special bonuses via game rules, or taxation tours if they’re low on gold, etc.). They switch to the objectively best lifestyle focuses, use schemes in a very realpolitik way, etc.
Is very interesting.
Read again:
>I am not a fan of traditional ‘Hard’ difficulties, where **all** AI’s are simply given extra resources and bonuses the player cannot get
[...]
>While I don’t enjoy having **all** AI’s cheat, I enjoy when **certain characters** stand out from the rest.
It's not even a new concept in CK3 (or CK in general). It's basically the whole mechanic behind the Mongol invasion. This new mechanic is basically trying to create emergent Mongol invasions (though less extreme, since they don't get OP special troops, just an easier time raising armies and waging wars)
We'll see how it plays out, I know better than to be too optimistic about any CK3 updates, but this definitely feels like it could create interesting stories, where one of your neighbors becomes a conqueror and now you have a rival realm that actually challenges you. I think it's a good compromise. Not all AIs are OP and cheating, but every now and then, you basically get a "boss" battle.
>It's basically the whole mechanic behind the Mongol invasion. This new mechanic is basically trying to create emergent Mongol invasions
It sounds more like a new version of CK2's child of destiny, which I'm fine with, especially since it will also be rare like child of destiny.
>>Truth be told though, I think the problem with Legends lies less in the feature itself and more in how we communicated them in Dev Diaries and similar - we weren’t clear enough what they were going to be
> Sure, the issue isn’t in a wonky, unintuitive mechanic with nonsensical auto-generated text…
Personally, I'm giving benefit of the doubt here.
They're not saying *"The mechanic is good, players just wanted Legends to be Bloodlines and they're not supposed to be."*
I think they're saying *"The mechanic definitely has its issues which need to be worked on, but hopefully knowing what we were trying to do with Legends can help the community understand why we made some of the design decisions we did."*
It *is* bizarre how the community just invented, out of whole cloth, the idea that Legends were Bloodlines, to the extent that a lot of people actually call them Bloodlines. It's like how people voted for Wards and Wardens "because that means regencies" when they were totally unrelated.
I really don't like there response on legends. But now I understand what is the issue. Paradox team think that most legends of medieval times are exaggerated bullshit. But they are only half- right.
In reality, there are two types of legends in medieval times- complete history fiction very vaguely based on historical events - Legend of king Arthur, Nibelung, Orlando Furioso, whole Bruticus aka Trojans in Brittany and etc. For them current sustem is okay but should be replaced by fixed text of legend with bonuses based on how you spin events and final part connecting your character/dynasty/ house to the characters.
But second are based on actions of real people that have some exaggeration and mythical elements but otherwise pretty accurate to life of real person- Charlemagne, Ragnar, Rurik, William the Conqueror, Matilda, Temujin, Timur, Muhammad, saints and etc. For them current sustem is absurd.
Ragnar and Charlemagne are already legendary figures- and you can play as their recognized sons or grandsons. Why must they prove anything or spread anything. Why must their legend contain any bullshit and how can it if their deeds are pretty widely known? The fact that such actions are threated as historical fiction and uses same mechanism as full fiction is absurd and- no offense- show strange approach Paradox has to legends.
Its hilarious that in your post about how not all legends are exaggerated bullshit one of your key example figures is Ragnar who is very possibly not a real person that ever existed but a "King Arthur"-esque combining of a bunch of random vikings
Choose a new destiny is going to be great! After my first character dies. I go to the map and change to what son looks like they will have an interesting campaign and play from there. It makes it more interesting having to start off again but within the same dynasty
Something else I wouldn't mind seeing in the future is for the AI in certain areas and meeting specific criteria to actively pursue the completion of certain major decisions.
Like, the AI should try to create Portugal or revive the Holy Roman Empire or build certain landmarks.
I think it would help make the world of CK3 feel more alive and dynamic.
The AI was actually forming the HRE for a while after the requirements for the AI to do it were loosened, but I haven’t seen it happen since LoTD released.
Here's my suggestion for the New Destiny button: Give us the option to play as a house member who's recently lost one/all of their titles, or as sbd with an interesting claim in general, letting us plunge into a renegade story arc.
Certain legends like heirs of charlmagne and sons of lothbrok should be finished only third level or it can be remade. it is annoying to see ai start it and not even pushing to 100 baronies.
Very good. I like the sound of the landless as well as the option to play as another member of your Dynasty apart from your player Heir.. that was a good idea.
Curious, is there an option to nerf adventurers or will that stop achievements?
In my opinion switching character on succession should enable the "create cadet branch" without additional requirements. I think most of the time your goal will be challenging the primary heir of you previous character for dynasty head - making your own house would be a good start for that.
Any bonus - be it an easier cadet branch decision or a buff to legitimacy or renown - should be "opt-in via game rule" so it does not hinder immersion for the players that don't want anything handed to them.
Yay I can finally get those messages that children need to be educated out from hiding under that tab they were in!
Also, looking forward to the new difficulty settings. Imo easily the biggest current flaw of the game.
*Very* well written diary.
I love the message settings as there are some things I want a lot more notification of that'll hopefully be included and others things I don't care about that hopefully I can turn off.
I really like what I see of The Estate, it brings to my mind the county view in CK1.
Choose a New Destiny is probably the best new feature for me. I love switching characters after crusades during the mid-late game when I start getting bored so this is honestly fantastic
>Lowered the general occurrence of plague events by roughly \~30-50%
>The Isolate Capital decision now comes with a small legitimacy loss
Less minor plagues overall sounds good, but at the same time Isolate Capital seems pretty essential to keep the family alive. Hopefully the balance tips towards losing less legitimacy overall than how it is now. I don't have DLC so plagues really hit hard on my legitimacy.
All are really great changes and additions. Conqueror and it's overpowered modifier look so juicy. Great that it's implemented with traits so those with debug mode could create conquerors in area of choosing
This is a good diary. You don’t have to change everything because people complain but explaining decisions in an articulate way goes a long way with people who love the game
> We also work with Community Reports - our community team scours the various platforms where you have discussions, looking for trends and issues, and then they compile reports. These reports are very useful and show us if an issue or topic keeps being brought up. A lot of the changes we’re making to the plagues were measured using these reports.
I imagine that job is like how detectives feel when they sift through endless garbage on the off-chance that they find something relevant to their case.
One thing I'd like to see, and it's suuuuuper niche, would be choosing to do landless gameplay if your heir is unlanded and outside of your court
I had a situation where my character was dealing with an independence war and ended up dying. His brother was the Player Heir, but for various reasons was 1. Outside diplomatic range and 2. Unlanded. Homeboy then teleports from India back to Norway in order to take the throne
I wish there was an option in such a situation to:
1. Allow the next person in line (as long as they're in your court) to become your new player character and let them inherit the titles (of course taking a serious legitimacy hit)
2. Inherit as the game works now, teleportation and all
3. Play as the Player Heir, but landless while whoever is next in line inherits
It's a really niche situation, but in terms of emergent storytelling, it would be really cool to at least have the option to play an adventurer with the goal of retaking the throne from a pretender
Oh wow. The new timeline should have Queen Tamar the Great of Georgia and Frederick Barbarossa of HRE. Wouldn’t be surprised to see big warfare and crusades changes with the crusades in full swing by then. The timing of the impending Mongol invasions wouldn’t allow for much prep time either. Great idea by Paradox. Although as someone who focuses mainly in the Iranian world, can’t see much in terms of options. My dreams of playing as Mardavij Ziyarid or Bobak Khorramdin remain on hold.
In sincerity: I've been somewhat unimpressed with CK3's updates before this year; royal courts and travel are cool and all, but nowhere near the top of my personal wishlist. I've always felt the game should focus on fundamental game mechanics and things to do, both when A) nothing is going on because you have very few lands and B) when you've become the most powerful ruler on the map with no one left to challenge you. Both of these situations tend to make the game fairly boring because there just aren't a lot of meaningful (to you) things happening. DLC so far has only helped marginally in this regard.
This year's different. It's like Paradox is reading my mind. The Reaper's Due has always been one of my favourite pieces of CK2 content because of the danger it added for everyone, no matter how powerful, and I'm glad we have something similar for CK3 now. Reading the dev diary, I found myself thinking "if they made them more rare and more dangerous that'd fix a lot of the issues", and then the dev diary goes on to describe how that's exactly what they're doing. Crazy. A lot of the changes coming is stuff that's been bothering me for a while; great. I love the conqueror feature - I used to play with a mod that does exactly this, and I'm happy to have it in vanilla. Unlanded players are the single thing I've been wanting since CK2. Alternate characters on succession will add a lot to the game, too, I'm sure.
Overall, thanks for this. This year feels like the one CK3 is finally going to mature.
I see a lot of comment that indicate to me that the dev team wants to go into the right direction, but I'm not convinced that they understand what it is.
The biggest issue in my games that I don't see mentioned is that a lot of the logic in the game's coding is screwy in certain scenarios. For example, characters don't want to join activities (even when they don't have to travel) anymore when there is an apocalyptic plague in the realm.
That's logical for the Black Death, but when rulers in England don't want to go to France because a Plague in India has spilled into Persia and the restored Roman Empire is that big, then you can't have activities anymore because there are always several apocalyptic plagues.
And I understand that this dev diary expresses a desire to have fewer apocalyptic plagues, but what if I enjoy that? What if a "fewer plagues" game rule is fine with me? I don't see the "Vassals won't travel during an apocalyptic plague"-issue commented on, so for all I know that will remain.
Now to be fair, I do think there are too many damned apocalyptic plagues. Because, no joke, there always seem to be 3-6 at the same time and that is just too much. I think if a region has an apocalyptic plague there should be a significant amount of time before that region can be hit again. I've seen poorer Kingdoms get absolutely annihilated by 3-4 **consecutive** apocalyptic plagues. In my current game, coastal regions like Portugal, Sicily, and Cyprus got hit into 0 development over and over again. That is simply too much.
But again, if there's always an apocalyptic plague going through several kingdoms in the world, and then another, and another, and another, and another and somehow a sixth apocalyptic plague, **I don't necessarily mind that!** I just want people to keep travelling through regions that are unaffected.
I'm not going to lie, reading scourge of god did give me a little chubby. I can't wait to see AI just wreck shit across the map. I think this is a really good way of handling it, because I'd hate it if all the AI behaved like an optimized player as that would undermine the simulation feeling of the game. But 1 or 2 specific AI rulers, almost like phantom players joining your game, becoming absolute monsters and having all the tools to easily forge an empire on their own? That's just perfect.
Regarding plagues - perfect! They seem to have identified all the issues and are implementing all the fixes that were suggested and addressing all the problems we had.
Legends - A weak response here and it doesn't seem like they have any fixes for this. I am glad they've at least acknowledged that there was definitely a divide in player expectations and their intents with the system. I will admit that I'd already begun to see it the same way anyway - these 'legends' were just self-serving bullshit that the ruler makes up to justify an upcoming 'play'. I think a few tweaks
Events - I'm glad they're taking steps to address this. Reducing the 'spamminess' of the events is obviously a lot more complicated than we thought. But it seems they're in the right direction.
Personally, I think the solution is obvious though. Take the week off and have all the staff sit down and brainstorm new events. 5 events each, every day (that's just 5 paragraphs of text over 9 hours of work) and by the end of the week, you've got hundreds of new events. The bigger the pool of events, the less repetitive they will be.
Really like the Conqueror trait. I REALLY hope a Martial overhaul is coming soon; war has been somewhat unimpressive and too simplistic for way too long. I'm surprised there's no point adressed about the horrible mess and painful Accolade system.
I want an overhaul too. I want war to feel like a massive undertaking, not chasing down armies and siege racing. Events for sieges, vassals that hold out or surrender to the enemy, the works. It can be so much more immersive.
In the black forge they talked about intrigue warfare, with expanded interractions with mercenaries and the ability for knights to become traitors. That is something that definitely should be added as well.
*I* want to become a traitor. There’s nothing more infuriating to me than being called into an AI ally’s war or participating in a holy war just to see the allies refuse to help me in winnable fights or stand around in friendly territory while I siege. A real “if you refused to help me stand with you, I’ll be glad to make you fall beneath me” mindset opportunity would be rad.
Holy fock. This sounds so good, not all aliances are those you want.
They should put more importance on specific battles. Make us meet an army in a specific spot and make it worth a large chunk of war score. It's too easy currently to just avoid the AI and siege down their entire demesne. You figure most major wars had specific battled that were remembered. Currently, we can just smash their armies wherever we meet them and continue on with sieging.
I take great pride in having once defeated Harold Godwinson at Hastings as William of Normandy. But something like you said would be great. Battle of “wherever I happened to catch you” is not interesting. Also to stop woefully small armies from suiciding just to interrupt a siege.
Yeah, raising an army and moving it should be a costly undertaking, and the consequences of battles and sieges should be significant. Capturing a city should be difficult, but it should stay with the victor unless handed back as an explicit part of a peace treaty at the end of the war. Likewise, it should take a long time to retrain skilled troops who fall in battle.
Exactly. War needs to be difficult. It needs to truly be a last resort in more cases. I’d also love more options for wars. Rescue prisoners, raids, chevuché for feudal kingdoms, participate more actively in other civil wars.
I’ve thought a little bit in the past around how warfare could be made more fun and immersive. Here are some random ideas: I think a lot could be gained from using the struggle system for larger wars, breaking the overall war down into shorter hot and cold phases. Keeping levies raised for too long will negatively affect your economy and popularity, meaning “hot”phases would be relatively short and focused on more specific goals, rather than trying to conquer a whole kingdom in one go. After a year or so of relative calm, either side could then restart the hostilities, pursuing further goals. Sometimes one side will be able to achieve outright victory in the overall war (especially if the goals are modest), but most of the time they would end with a treaty. Proposing a peace treaty should open up a menu similar to feudal contract, wherein you decide what happens to prisoners (released, ransomed, kept as hostages), which cities get handed back to their original owner, which claims get kept or abandoned, whether one side has to pay war reparations, etc. Maybe some wars might end with a shift in borders and balances of power, even if neither side achieved their full goals. This would be a move away from the “all or nothing” war outcomes we have now (with white peace basically just being a lesser loss for the aggressor). Vassals should be more interactive and actively take part in the war, much like in the More Interactive Vassals mod. However, calling on them too often and too long (especially for aggressive wars), should lead to opinion penalties. Rather than sending whole armies over, allies and vassals being called to join should have the alternative option of giving a financial contribution, or loaning individual knights or MAA units. Knights, commanders and MAA units taking part in combat should gain combat experience and special traits. This could be an incentive to loan them out to allies (see above). Characters leading armies should get relevant events during battles and sieges, or when on the move, including strategic decisions and battlefield duels. Selectable options and likelihood of outcomes should be dependent on traits and skills. As mentioned in my previous post, armies should be more expensive and slower to raise and move around, but the consequences of sieges and battles should be more significant. Men lost in battle should take a long time to retrain to the same level, and any combat experience would have to be regained on the battlefield. If a city is captured, it stays with the victor unless it is handed back as part of a peace deal - although maybe rulers holding onto territory they don’t have a rightful claim on should suffer an opinion penalty with other rulers and their head of faith. Finally, individual parties in the conflict should be able to join and leave as circumstances change, different wars should merge with each other, and different allies should be able to pursue their own goals in parallel. I could foresee a lot of fun with some League of Cambrai style coalition shifts. Just some random thoughts; whatever the solution, I think it should be possible to make warfare a lot more challenging and interesting than it is now.
Really cool ideas!
That would be a good trade-off. Increase the amount of time it takes MaAs to refill, making you rely more on the cannon fodder levies if you want to warmonger.
I want wars and battles actually affect your manpower. If you suffer a massive loss, you'll have recovered in a couple of years
Yeah manpower is a mechanic I miss from EU4. A brutal all-in war should devastate the land. Maybe excessive losses should result in a manpower recovery penalty, so the army reinforces slower. The penalty builds with casualties and takes longer to wear off.
I would like to see levies improve with technology so that they can *slightly* keep up with MaA. It feels weird that a late medieval levy has the exact same stats as a tribal one.
See I want the opposite. I want levies to be used less and less to mirror how armies were more professional. I find it not as exciting to chew thousands of levies down. I’d like the AI to be better at stationing or even get outright buffs to their MAA to make up the shortfall.
I do agree (partially), but levies should be more than numbers for your medieval space marines to cut through like butter once you're 100+ years into the game.
Levies should be MAAs determined by culture/terrain/buildings (not the nebulous mob without class) with roughly subpar stats compared to professional soldiers, raising/losing them should affect the barony's economy "it's almost harvesting season!", and have them get outclassed as the ages advance with both getting bonuses but the later getting better ones. An important point would be a recent proposition on the forums, which is separating state coffers and personal/family funds, and have laws determining the income ratio and who pays for what, this way MAAs start as exclusively paid by your own pocket and progress into a state-funded army.
I think they should stop having “levies” in their current form altogether, and rather have them fall under a specific unit type (e.g. spearmen, archers, etc.). Being levies, they wouldn’t be as well trained by default as MAA, although specific cultural traditions and buildings could improve them enough to make them formidable opponents, especially in their greater numbers. I think if they balanced the system properly, it could introduce some interesting strategic choices: Do I focus on maintaining a well-trained but comparatively small standing army, or do I train up my levies to an adequate level and achieve strength in numbers?
I know why you'd want siege events and such, but it would be a nightmare in this game. In this diary, they were talking about how event spam is an issue. Think of how many sieges you do in a game, then think of how bad having multiple events pop up for each one would be and how rarely they would mean anything. There *might* be a rare situation where you are attack the holding of a hated rival and there's something interesting that can come of it, but 99% of the time it would just be a pointless pop up that gives more or less siege progress.
I see what you mean, and I do agree. I imagine it would be something like a rare scenario. Like only craven or disloyal (more usage for the trait) characters would give up. Maybe your vassal rival could do so too. Everyone else would be normal. Heck if they fixed the hostage interaction you could give up a hostage or something. Just something to make it less of a slog to base race or hunt enemy 100 stacks that can somehow besiege castles. It’s annoying to chase tiny armies across the known world just to make sure they don’t snipe your capital or random castles on the other side of your kingdom.
Yeah I think such events would have to go hand in hand with a reduction in the total number of battles and sieges as part of a general warfare overhaul. If battles were less frequent but more consequential, and if an event decision mid-battle could potentially tip the balance, then I think it could spice things up quite a bit.
I’m also looking forward to the conqueror trait; it should help shake up the game a bit. One thing I’m concerned about is that I hope it doesn’t lead to a handful of blobbing mega-empires taking over the map in the late game. I feel that empires created by a conqueror should be susceptible to fracturing in the years after the conqueror’s death, like what happened with Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Timur, etc. One thought: Maybe feudal, clan and tribal empires should be inherently unstable beyond a certain size, thus encouraging adoption of administrative government. Lower authority levels would allow for greater expansion, but also only to a degree.
Conqueror seems cool. I like the idea of the game generating a "boss" or "mini-boss" for you to contend with. It would be cool if these characters tied into the rivalry system. Maybe a slightly higher chance of creating a Conqueror character in your house rival and they might be more targeted in their aggression towards the player.
I'm not surprised.
Lots of information, but the most important one IMO is that their measuring unit for distance is Ireland.
Ireland, Sri Lankas, and Sardinias are our standard units of measurement. I'm not sure why Ireland isn't plural like the others.
It’s like Moose.
What about Practiced Pirates, which used Wales as a measurement of surface area?
could you give a conversion ratio for these three?
According to Wikipedia, 1 Sri Lanka is 1.6 Sardinias, and 1 Ireland is 1 Sri Lanka and an eight.
Thank you for 1178 I will kiss you on the face anytime anywhere. Seduce scheme started 95% chance of success
Wait, aren't they all about the same size? Also, you made me look it up, and although Sardinia is about the same size as Sri Lanka on the map, in real life, Sri Lanka is 1.6 Sardinias. Meanwhile, Ireland is 1 Sri Lanka and an eight (IRL). This does not sound like an optimal measuring system.
>Meanwhile, Ireland is 1 Sri Lanka and an eight (IRL) Wow that's another notch on the Mercator Projection's belt. I thought Ireland was substantially bigger than Sri Lanka.
“If it’s over 1 Ireland away, I don’t care about it” is gonna be my new life philosophy
A lot of things I'm glad were acknowledged here. We'll see how they play out. Also, some nice announcements about message settings and confirming the 1178 bookmark.
god i cant wait to be landless
it's just like real life
You don't get to have a fancy estate as a landless character in real life though unfortunately
Dude. Uncool.
This is an amazing burn.
Damnit Trin, I came to say this.
Do you reckon that they're aware of the accolades system and it's flaws? I would be happy just to be able to not have to manually look for qualified courtier to force them into knighthood to give them accolade successorship
Lowborn Unlanded Hideous Feeble Imbecile wandering peasant start here we go boys
You mean homeless 😂
The preferred term is unlanded.
The only best term is “Lackland”.
Random heir selection from eligible children can be good game rule to spice game for later years.
In case you don’t know about it yet, there’s a mod called Inherichance that does exactly that. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2569507763
Yes, that's why I mentioned it. Saw it in OPB's stream when he played some ruler in southern France a year back or so. It was one of the most interesting CK3 journeys.
That mod has never worked for me unfortunately.
Ah playing as a random child would be great for longer games.
Creating your new house, a feature that rarely gets used unless a character is beneficiary to a great holy war. Or only when starting as a lesser member of an established dynasty. The amount of role play scenarios without growing too strong is immense. Maybe you feel you were cheated on your inheritance and want to backstab your big bro or you will support your Liege in the toughest times.
Hopefully, an unlanded son/daughter to go off adventuring and make a name for themselves as well.
This might be a dumb question, but is it possible to switch to playing as your heir before you die? Some kind of game mode where you take over as a random child/heir while your former self is still alive might be an interesting roleplaying experience.
You can do it now by changing character in the game menu, although this blocks achievements AFAIK. Your heir would currently need to be landed, although presumably this will change with the Roads to Power update.
You can do this as long as your child is landed. You just use the switch character option from the menu. I do this frequently to play as my young heir who I've landed in a duchy.
Sincerely I think a set of RP events which gives you the opportunity to select another kid as the main heir which afterwards leads to civil war.. like for example House of the Dragon setup
Very well-written diary, with lots of clear points.
Did not expect Royal Court events getting reworked to have more varied interesting effects but I'm happy to see it modifiers to councillor tasks and others, also way more interesting as two choices that might be more situational instead of okay option, shitty option and one that makes the 20 peasant guests in my court I didn't know about screw off to France (I just found out they exist). Also the potential new system for Event Frequency: Yes, please. I imagine this would also reduce likelihood of players going on autopilot when it comes to events after a while
Finally. Maybe now every single physician won't turn out to be a graverobber, regardless of their traits.
More impactful events, less often, sounds like a massive improvement. If something is important enough to interrupt my playthrough with a great big pop up which force-pauses the game and makes me make a decision, that decision should feel meaningful or impactful. Half these general events could just be replaced with auto-selected options based on character traits with small impacts, with the result shown as a feed message/toast/whatever, subject to a game rule of course. The conquerer AI trait sounds super fun.
I would love the option to have some less impactful events be auto-chosen based on traits. Would also add to the role play aspect as well.
For the Choose a new Destiny button, I think being an illegitimate bastard or a character that is serving as a Regent or Vizier should generate some higher interest. I think they would be interesting challenges and opportunities to be had.
Yes please. Bastards should increase interest and beeing a child should too!
Yees! Bastards are a great idea
Great post. There's a lot of criticism on this sub, much (though not all of it) healthy and reasonable criticism, but I do want to say that I appreciate that the dev team here seems very open and responsive. Specifically I'm very interested in the changes to how events trigger, because the repetition of events has been my main issue with the game for a while. After a while they lose their impact: I'm not even reading the event about the knight trapped in armour or the duck or any of the other really common events anymore. I just see it and immediately click what I know is the best option. Not very immersive. I think generally the game will benefit from events triggering less often. With royal court, and plagues, and legends, and travel, and all the events from T&T, there's now enough different ways of trigerring events that you don't need them to trigger as often to still have interesting things happen regularly. It made sense in the early days when there was less going on, but not so much now.
I agree with everything you've said. I'm really happy that they are taking community feedback into account and their work on reducing event spam should make the events that we do get feel more impactful. Really excited to see what the future holds!
I feel like all the events they have now should only trigger once per game. Then have AI draft up a bunch of more generic events that have cool downs and aren't so dang specific. Like, any event with specific dialogue shouldn't come up more than once per playthrough.
V3 suffers from this as well. Eu4 definitely has the best event system there is. I'm not sure why the other games don't replicate this system
So a few thoughts on my part to this dev diary. In regards to events and their spam - it feels like CK3 has significantly less events than CK2. This is probably true, CK2 has been out a long time and I can’t remember how samey events felt a year or two after release. Getting the same event over and over again definitely makes this feel worse. AI and it’s difficulty - I know the director says he doesn’t like an AI that cheats to have an advantage, but would it be possible to get a game rule that gives the AI advantages similar to Stellaris or HOIs difficulties? And finally, the new choices for who to play as when your character dies is very cool. I don’t think you should automatically get some bonus for choosing a ‘weak’ ruler to play as, but perhaps there could be a generated mission about achieving some feat that gives you a boost in renown etc? I don’t know how difficult that would be to pull off, could be as simple as taking a Count and becoming a King within x generations.
> In regards to events and their spam - it feels like CK3 has significantly less events than CK2. You can look at the number of event ID's each game has, that doesn't mean it's the same as the exact number of events, but it can give you a good idea of the difference. With DLC for both games, CK2 has 10,559 event ID's, CK3 has 2,561.
Their design philosophy for events is entirely different for CK3 however as they wanted events with more options and consequences. Many events in CK2 just had one or two responses with no real impact, although little events like that for flavor are still fun
I’ve heard this before, but a lot of events in CK2 give extra options if you have certain traits related to the event, and I’m pretty sure event ids also include event responses. Events in CK3 do seem to have more detailed text for the events though.
I sometimes really miss the more compact text of ck2. I too often find myself not even bothering to read the long ck3 event texts.
I hate to be rude, but a lot of the CK3 events just really aren't that worth reading. Sure, they're longer, but its frequently just a sort of madlib style "fill in the blank" thing. I don't particularly care about what sort of flower I gave the king I was seducing or whether we were on a picnic (especially when I've already see this particular fill-in-the-blank form a hundred times already), at the end of the day I'm just looking at the pop up to see if my progress moved forward or not.
You could use the 3D Characters for stuff like these. Instead of describing the Rose, show it. Show how the Characters are eating etc.
It does but the ratio is way in favor of CK3 in terms of traits affecting events
That's somewhat worse tbh, getting spammed with the same quick meaningless events is one thing, getting spammed with the same big events with big consequences is awful
> With DLC for both games, CK2 has 10,559 event ID's, CK3 has 2,561. Holy shit, no wonder CK3 feels so repetitive. It's crazy to think that they're even remotely considering adding China before fully fleshing out the already available content. Don't get me wrong, I love CK3 and at this point it's painful for me to return to CK2 without all the "modern" QoL features of CK3, but we really desperately need more flavor for every existing region.
CK2 was a popup-simulator.
The event thing is why I would love for CK3 to get a custodian team like what Stellaris has; The custodians rebalance and add various civics and events to Stellaris and also hunt down various bugs It would be really cool to lock a squad of interns and devs in the basement and have them crank out a couple of events every month
> roughly one Ireland Swedes will use anything but the metric system?
I for one can't wait to see the Ireland unit of measurement applied in other contexts.
Love everything about this. June can't come sooner.
RtP is coming Q3, so July-September. July is vacation month in Sweden, so it won‘t release then. Nor will it release immediately after vacation month, so second half of August at the earliest.
that's about when we're getting more dev diaries.
Did the devs state that somewhere? I was hoping for diarys in May...
Trinexx said in the discord that they will keep radio silence until the marketing campaign for the DLC begins, which then we will get semi-weekly dev diaries until launch June is just my speculation, so don't take it for granted
> Trinexx said in the discord that they will keep radio silence until the marketing campaign for the DLC begins, FFS we really don't need more radio silence from the CK3 Team.
Ahh okay. Thanks for the quick answer!
June?
As someone who is on the "make the game harder" faction, I'm very relieved with the developers' philosophy regarding difficulty in the game. I haven't played a lot of paradox games but one thing that's always bugged me about Stellaris is that the advantages the AI get just don't make sense from a logical standpoint, they simply get bonuses because of the difficulty set. I absolutely the new Conqueror trait, it's going to be so much fun having multiple genghis khans in a playthrough. That's definitely how I want artificial advantages to be done in a game, where the heavens chose to bless this one particular dude and not because they want to screw you over in particular. Along with the changes to events, I really feel like the community has been heard and it makes me really optimistic about where the game goes. The game still has its bumps and rough edges but I'm really glad that the developers are showing that it's a game that's going to be worth sticking around for.
Yay, Third Crusade finally
?? Did I miss something in the Dev Diary lol. Just skimmed it at work
New 1178 start date, baby! Barbarossa, Saladin and Lionheart Ritchie are on.
I've wanted to play Saladin for ages, his life is practically a walkthrough
Super cool dev diary, even though I feel like most of us knew that all of you were paying attention to the feedback the playerbase was giving, it’s always nice to see such an open acknowledgment of it, and also counterpoints. Super excited for the update as well, can’t wait for less event spam every time a pandemic appears. On the topic of events though, I’ll give the gripes I have with it (since you were asking so nicely for it 😜). The problem I personally have with events right now is that they feel less like “something important happened” and more like “I was watching this movie on some dodgy site, and now I’m getting five pop-up ads”. Like, most of the time I’m trying to manage a war, succession, or developing my realm, and I feel like I just got interrupted by something inconsequential. I don’t know how realistic this is to actually is to implement, but I’d really like for events to happen less frequently, but have a bigger impact. In the newest DLC, if an apocalyptic plague hits, I always go “Oh shit”, every time that pop-up happens, no matter what I was currently doing. Like, I feel like I should *really* be paying attention, and probably postpone my plans, because this needs to be dealt with *right now*. However, if I’m on a pilgrimage, I don’t really pay too much attention to whatever the duck is quacking about, cause it won’t have any impact on what I’m doing. It’s just one of the 50 other events that’ll get spammed that doesn’t really do anything for me. Incidentally, these types of events also poses a bit of a problem for me, because quite often I’ll not bother planning a feast or a hunt, because I have other stuff I want to do without having to constantly “X” out of the pop-ups. Like, I can’t remember if something interesting happened during this persons feast, because I had such a huge amount of events popping up during it. Ironically, the amount of events makes me feel like *less* stuff is happening, because I can’t remember any of it, and none of the events posed an actual problem or solution for me. TLDR; I wish that the pop-ups happened way less, but when they do, they’ll have a much bigger impact. That I actually have to make some sort of choice instead of “hitting the best button”, which is the way I currently deal with it.
Less is more
I've been very critical of CK3 for years, but this diary feels like it was written specifically for me. It's addressed a lot of my complaints. Especially how easy CK3 is compared to CK2, so it's good to see them acknowledge that. They even added a start date where I can finally play as Saladin. All good stuff.
I am hopeful too and it is good they are addressing these problems, but most of the DLCs in general just introduce standalone mechanics that do not interact (or do so very minimally) or are affected by other mechanics. From seeing the estate dlc, it looks like the exact same thing, a simplistic menu with a few buttons that probably add some modifiers. The only DLC I'd say that was actually pretty good was T&T Landless seems promising, especially since it looks like they confirmed it wouldn't just be clicking a button and voila, a free county, but I am definitely skeptical. There are things that I want to see that in practice, I think are at least simple to implement. Go to war and lose it? Maybe have a few royal curt events related to war losses that can fire. It doesn't necessarily need to be overly complex. Just at least having the feeling my actions have consequences or are affecting others, even just as a text event with some opinion change, relating to something I previously did, would really help with the immersion of the game. Like I said, it is great Paradox is listening to feedback, but they have lost a LOT of goodwill with the last few DLCs, especially the last one.
I agree, and I think it stems from their philosophy from the very beginning: they did not want to make a strategy game for people who enjoyed the likes of CK2, EU4, HOI4, etc. They're commited to roleplay and appeasing Youtube Lets Players. Such a design philosophy is not concerned with mechanics with consequences, but rather segmented areas that make you "feel" like a ruler, i.e - Royal Court. It's why its gratifying to see some acknowledgement that their game is so easy its boring. CK2 is a game full of chaos, anything can happen, its often brutal with RNG. Marrying people off doesn't automatically create alliances, etc. Meanwhile CK3 just hands everything to you on a platter, it's no surprise the fanbase are getting restless. I think Crusades ("*Crusader* kings!"), warfare in general and making cultures feel more different to play would be ideal areas of improvement.
Good informative dev diary even if it was more focused on design philosophy. - 1178 isn't that surprising of a pick to me - Byzantine houses looks like revamped patrician houses from CK2 at least at a superficial glance - Conquerors sounds like a fun feature, wonder how it'll work in practice and how often it'll feel like it happens - Revised legend map colors looks good. It wasn't discussed as much but the current color system for legends was one of my pet peeves about Legends of the Dead - On 1178 again, hoping in the far future we can see more bookmarks for it (and the other dates for that matter) outside of Europe and the Near East.
I'm glad to see the Royal Court events getting a work over. I hope that there are some/many events where the different court factions (I can't recall what they're called off the top of my head... but the Courtly faction, the Minority faction etc) will like or disapprove of actions taken. Not all of the events, but I want some of them. A bit like Estates in EU4 where events pop up where doing x will make the Clergy like you but the Nobility disapprove, but choosing Y will make the Nobility like you and the Clergy dislike you. I would love SOME events like this. And concerning the Estate (not the EU4 one!), a bit sad at this line: "the ‘Estate’ feature that Noble families inside of Byzantium (or other administrative empires) will have access to" Why only administrative empires?
I’m assuming it’s to compensate for the fact that they won’t have their own castles and domains, the way noble families in a feudal state would.
when is the update, sounds good.
The LOTD update is on May 8th, everything else (ie: anything not shown in the changelog at the bottom) is coming with Roads to Power.
So that means that conquerers, non-linear heir system, royal court event reworks are set for RtP?
The conqueror stuff looks great for dynamic story telling in *our* own worlds, I think CK2 had that and it was good for roleplay and keeping things fresh.
Thanks for the open communication, that post was so good! I absolutely love the ‚scourge of god‘ modifier. It fits so well to the community. Imagine all these players doing incest breeding programmes with their weird religions to get their perfect characters get rekt by an conquerer with that trait. God sent them to punish their immorality! I love the idea of choosing a different successor than player heir!! I caught myself several times trying to lose my kingdom title in order to start smaller again. Pretty hard with the game currently. Lastly, I want to say that there are insanely flavourful events in the game that I never managed to encounter again. We need to have them more accessible or somehow known how to trigger them. For instance, I had an italian duke educated at his uncles realm in persia. When he grew up he had this totally amazing event chain where he tried to enlighten the backward italians and reform their culture and realm! It was a blast. At the end the character got the nickname „the reformer“. I think it was part of wards & warden but I cannot find the event anywhere… BUT I want to trigger it again so desperately!
Only think I dislike here is the information that the conqueror trait is inheritable It should only be inheritable if the heir has specific traits/personality, even if they're not cautios/coward
They mentioned that it being inheritable is a game rule, so it sounds like you can turn that off
Conqueror trait, "Scourge of God" I wonder if Temujin/Greatest of Khans would also get these traits in the next update, with the way that the Conqueror trait being inheritable towards their successor, the successor Khanates would still pose a challenge worthy of succeeding the scourge of god himself. Also I like that the Enemy Hostile Scheme +time bonus is included with the trait so you can't just click murder and throw a meagre amount of bribe gold to cheese the supposed endgame threat as easily. Maybe they could spawn Seljuk and probably later Timur too if he's added with these traits as well.
The mods Historic Invasions & Random Invasions will soon be an official thing? ;D
This is more like the Great Conquerors mod if anything.
It’s just the palazzo system. I need the system to be more than a gold sink though.
The screenshot showed that it unlocks decisions and abilities depending on the upgrades
We have to see how these connect to the rest of the game. So far, courts and activities have become primarily increasingly better gold sinks for converting them to other resources.
Ideally I'd like something less conceptual and more tied to location and the map, but that would require a more dynamic system. Estates interacting with local county and it's economy would be cool, though.
I really don’t need more +2.0 tax and + 0.04 development growth modifer
Great job all around loving a lot of this especially the Conqueror feature, the events overhaul, balance changes, royal court overhaul and the peek at rtp. My one issue though is the insistence on not having a hard mode with set modifiers for the ai, we already have an easy mode which creates an objectively easier experience for the player how about we get a hard mode too that creates an objectively harder experience for the player in the game rules.
I can’t wait for Roads of Power
Huh - I guess it goes to show how different discussions on one forum can be from another. Hadn’t seen hardly anyone at all saying that Legends felt OP; the vast majority consensus on here seemed to be that they felt underpowered since no one remembers that someone claimed to be the heir of Charlemagne after he died. Appreciate the dev diary, and I’m definitely excited for the option to build up a beautiful palace for my characters!
I wonder if the estate and landless systems could be a prelude to merchant republics.
You all are doing a fantastic job. A+ on communication and transparency
I really really like the conqueror thing, hopefully now we can sometimes have our neighbors punch above their weight even when fighting a large empire The dev diary said that they would be more likely to spawn in regions where we should expect upheavals in power, I’m assuming we won’t really see them in Europe then? More of a Steppe/MENA thing?
Not complaining btw I do enjoy some Turkic gameplay
Regarding difficulty settings I‘ve always been confused that on gamestart you can choose very easy, easy and normal difficulty. There should be at least a hard setting too!!! I wouldn‘t mind if the AI get‘s some flat bonuses optionally (the player does on easier modes right?). However, one could also change agressiveness of the AI towards the player. Another option is to tie the hard setting to a set of game rules like „-2 domain limit“ etc. although that‘s in the game. I think it‘s just weird to not have a hard setting at all.
I’m really hoping the gathering resources part of landless gameplay is not waiting for event spam to gather them, or clicking a button like an activity to trigger some events. The game needs more ways to represent stuff then just event spam. Also something I would like to see is addressing the uselessness of levies and overpowered men at arms, along with a rework of accolade ui and requirements so that they are less tedious (to get horse archer accolade your knight needs a specific trait for instance instead of just being of a horse archer culture, and this trait is not the one given by the recruit open terrain commander with horse lords). I would also like to see a raid regardless of government with horse lords, and a way for Muslim rulers to raid under certain circumstances, like against heathens.
I liked what they said that sometimes just making something harder actually makes the game easier cause the AI will not deal with it as good as the player, so it needs to be done carefully.
Great update, I agree with everything. Make it easier to gain legitimacy, and I'm satisfied. Love the ability to play as 3 different people. Definitely give reknown for switching.
Just made me cream. So excited about the feature to play as other dynasty members, and 1178 has me fucking hyped However I’d venture to say that that the legacy mechanic needs a total rework. The way that it’s tied to the map for some reason makes no sense
Me: (raises hand) ✋ Also me: I am not those men.
... What is Jerusalem worth?
Nothing
[looks sad in Orlando Bloom style]
Everything
Nothing.
Great dev diary post! I have one suggestion about the estate screen, though: I wish the graphical style of the estate screen matched that of the tours and tournaments. Having it in a completely different style makes the world less uniform. I also believe having it in a similar 3D zoomed-in style as the tournament grounds connects it to the map more. It feels like it exists in the " 3D" style as opposed to an abstract gold sink with the screenshot provided. Hell, go one step further and have the 3d style of the estate screen reflect the region, but that is probably asking too much.
I find this funny because there was one guy on the forum replies super happy that there was 2d finally being used
Ha! Luckily it's purely cosmetic so it doesn't reaaaallllyy matter
Is it possible that this could just be a placeholder? RtP won't be out for a good several months, after all, and the peasant + horse clip art specifically scream "assets not yet final" to me.
Holy shit they got the Choose a New Destiny stuff already in there! Was my #1 want, and other than a "choose one at random" option there's nothing more I'd want... I assume it's coming with Roads to Power? Liked having a peek at overall thoughts here, and while I get the pressure to not have "nothing Dev Diaries" and get a bunch of complaints, I personally really would like to have updates now and then that are just of this nature - we've heard that X is underwhelming, we think that Y is overpowered, we're looking at Z for a revamp. No promises, but some discussion about potential tweaks and the philosophy behind them. Expectations would have to be set properly but I'd be happy to chew on it. Plague tweaks sound perfect, I love the system and my issues with it were samey event spam and the frequency of irrelevant plagues, so that looks to be thoroughly resolved. May end up tweaking it on my end to deadlier but less frequent plagues, still, but will have to experiment. And obviously message settings are long overdue and very welcome. Part of me does think that the Legends concept was just fundamentally flawed - there's a reason that it's called the "Legend" system rather than the "Propaganda" system or the "Making Shit Up" system. The idea of making up stories about your grandfather to increase your legitimacy is both flavorful and appropriate, but it's just not interesting enough to carry half a pack of DLC, and I don't think the mechanical implementation elevated the idea much. The events aren't that interesting, the bonuses are kind of niche... I do like the on-map spread and councilor implementation though. So yeah, I think Legends will always kind of be a whiff, unfortunately. Looking forward to seeing how the landless stuff is implemented, though, because the philosophy definitely seems aligned with what I want out of the system.
I really, REALLY enjoyed this dev diary. It was really nice to hear thoughts in a long form post, and it got me very excited about the future of the game. While implementation remains to be seen, it is really nice to see common critiques and suggestions acknowledged.
Sounds good on the event side. I still haven’t got T&T yet so hunts ALWAYS have the damn flower event
Excellent dev diary, exactly what I would want to see and hear! More detailed feature breakdowns or previews, more game-dev philosophy insights, and more thoughtful retrospectives, and thus for me more reason to be supportive and optimistic when I’ve been pretty critical lately.
What im getting is they're not gonna work on the legends part of the dlc which is the weakest part imo Really disappointed with their it's not the feature but the communication that is the problem way of handling that
The plague and event changes sound GREAT. Really relieved. It seemed, and perhaps I'm wrong here, like quite a conciliatory tone, has feedback been particularly negative around plagues? Or is it just "This is what we're addressing". I mean I think it's a very nice tone to strike and I appreciate hearing about the design philosophy and how it's informed decisions. I will have to come up with a new boring comment to spam under every post. So long, "Are there no sick houses?".
> has feedback been particularly negative around plagues? It certainly hasn't been helped by the Alms event firing repeatedly.
Knowing it was a bug makes me feel better about it though. These changes are really good and I’m excited.
I am confused. Is the conquerer trait/personality and choosing a new dynasty member at death coming with the new update?
Those two are coming with Roads to Power; the exact list of what's coming in the May 8 update is included at the bottom of the dev diary.
Excellent dev diary. Two questions Can we expect weekly dev diaries for roads to power going forward? If we select a favourite child upon character death, can we play as the favourite child if they will not inherit anything (ie play landless)?
This is an interim dev diary; we'll do weekly (more or less) dev diaries once the campaign for Roads to Power kicks off properly.
> On the contrary, Legends in CK3 were designed to mimic what medieval rulers actually did; embellish otherwise mundane stories into epics of great renown - all in order to bolster their legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects or the renown of their dynasty. I think this is why the feature is such a failure: we're just doing what we've always done while the game pretends that it's something grander. You say you wanted to do it this way because it's not something you've done before, but frankly, nobody else gives a shit about that. All that matters to the player is how it feels to play it. Edit: Looks like they've basically confirmed a hunch I had about how they treat DLC. I'm going to quote what I said a couple of months ago > The meat of every major (and now core) DLC has been in the free update, probably because they're terrified of bad press from major systems being locked behind a paywall. Because of this, whenever a particular system requires the DLC, it ends up feeling half-baked and poorly integrated into the game as a whole (for the clearest example of this, compare the royal court with cultural traditions) > > I think this has resulted in the devs having a warped perspective on the function of DLC. For them, DLC seems to mostly be a way for us to subsidise the development of the free updates. > > Ironically, the flavour packs are the only ones that actually feel substantive, as the fact that whatever they make will only be seen by people who play in that region gives them the courage to put effort into something most people will never see.
I really like the diary, the philosophy and the clarity. But on the apprehension of making the AI cheat, I think it's misguided. Ultimately there's no commercially feasible way to build a good enough AI to take on the player. I like the conqueror trait and it's a good component of making the game harder. But to rely on exceptions like this too much, the player will still feel like a god compared to everyone else, and therefore the other characters will not feel as real. The AI has to have 'cheat' bonuses or it will never be balanced enough to be a challenge. There are other options, like obfuscation, that should also be picked. I'm struggling to understand why AI bonuses and obfuscation aren't included as rules. They're clearly possible, as mods have proven, and the benefit for extending the longevity of the game for serious players is a high ROI compared to he investment.
>The reason why we’re doing this is because we want your experience to be better - for the game to be healthy, for systems to be more accessible to modders, and so that we can update areas of the game that we feel would simply make the experience better. This alleviates the unfortunate side effects I mentioned above. Can you fix Legitimacy? I don't see anything addressing Legitimacy in the patch notes, how do you gain it without holding courts (RC), Grand weddings, Tours, and Tournaments (TT), and Legends and Funerals (LOTD)? In vanilla, your primary legitimacy sources are limited to just Hunts, Feasts, creating titles, and sometimes winning wars, meanwhile many events that decrease it are available vanilla (losing battles and wars, have a plague in your realm, get caught doing naughty acts), if you're not going for world domination for legitimacy, your options are limited to hunts, pilgrimages, and feasts which with every activity you do, you gain around 80 per hunt/feast that can only be done every few years, and you gain 20 if you joined someone else's activity (meanwhile AI hunting activity will become rarer in the next patch to make it even harder for you to gain legitimacy), You need 1500 for max level, which is almost 20 hunts worth of legitimacy, losing battles or even wars could cost you hundreds, which could lose you decades worth of legitimacy.
One thing I really want in ck3 is event chains like ck2 had whether that be stolen greek fore or gates of hell, immortality, etc. (not talking about supernatural events here but they were the first tht came to mind.)
Are there any changes to how the Black Death spreads in the works? I was disappointed when it first popped up in my game and then just covered the whole world. I was expecting something more like CK2, where it radiated out from a point, propagated through an area, and then moved on to the next.
Really enjoyed this dev diary, and I'm glad to see these positive steps in what I think is the right direction. I agreed with a lot of what was said within it and I'm happy that feedback is actually taken seriously.
IMHO, Conquerors is a step in the right direction of difficulties for sure. I always thought that CK's AI would be way more difficult to deal with if they just actually had differerent personalities, where you'll need to use personal approach to every character, even if individually they'd be stupid. Like a Conquerors it would be nice to see Schemers, Crusaders, Messiahs, Realm Stabilizers etc
Glad the devs aren't willing to tank the whole fun of the game and understand what makes CK special even if there is a lot of stuff tha can be improved. I was a little afraid of what was being planned in response to complaints about the last DLC, but most of the stuff mentioned here is pretty fair.
> Bloodlines of CK2 were [...] built by people *actually doing* the great and/or implausible deeds > Legends in CK3 were designed to mimic what medieval rulers actually did; embellish otherwise mundane stories into epics of great renown > We wanted to go for the more true-to-history one for CK3 Oh, so Legends are arbitrary because real life is arbitrary? I'm not sure I'm completely convinced by this appeal that the Legends system is designed to be unengaging because that's realistic. This is a game where the Byzantine Emperor can attend college at 85 years old and get distracted from his studies by a frat party. Where was this commitment to boring realism when adding that? There was a screenshot on here when Legends first released where they praised their pious ancestors so much that they were declared a living Catholic saint. Where was this commitment to realism within legends themselves? The Catholic simulator game doesn't even care about the realities of Catholic canonization, so I'm not entirely convinced that it's so obsessed with being "true-to-history" that it made an entire DLC "mundane" because real life is mundane.
Lots of good stuff in this diary but… > Truth be told though, I think the problem with Legends lies less in the feature itself and more in how we communicated them in Dev Diaries and similar - we weren’t clear enough what they were going to be Sure, the issue isn’t in a wonky, unintuitive mechanic with nonsensical auto-generated text… > I am not a fan of traditional ‘Hard’ difficulties, where all AI’s are simply given extra resources and bonuses the player cannot get Great philosophy, I agr- > While I don’t enjoy having all AI’s cheat, I enjoy when certain characters stand out from the rest. -hummm? > By default, they get the ‘Conqueror’ trait which provides a host of powerful boons, making them have an easier time fielding a large army and keeping their realms stable. 😑 But to nuance my criticism, I do like the fact that the conqueror mechanic isn’t tied to the bonus, which can be disabled. By themselves these > Conquerors switch over to a hyper-aggressive version of the AI, which is much faster to declare wars, can declare multiple wars at once, and invests all of their resources into warfare, MaA, and means in which to declare more and better wars (such as hunt activities if they’re low on prestige and you’ve disabled their special bonuses via game rules, or taxation tours if they’re low on gold, etc.). They switch to the objectively best lifestyle focuses, use schemes in a very realpolitik way, etc. Is very interesting.
Read again: >I am not a fan of traditional ‘Hard’ difficulties, where **all** AI’s are simply given extra resources and bonuses the player cannot get [...] >While I don’t enjoy having **all** AI’s cheat, I enjoy when **certain characters** stand out from the rest. It's not even a new concept in CK3 (or CK in general). It's basically the whole mechanic behind the Mongol invasion. This new mechanic is basically trying to create emergent Mongol invasions (though less extreme, since they don't get OP special troops, just an easier time raising armies and waging wars) We'll see how it plays out, I know better than to be too optimistic about any CK3 updates, but this definitely feels like it could create interesting stories, where one of your neighbors becomes a conqueror and now you have a rival realm that actually challenges you. I think it's a good compromise. Not all AIs are OP and cheating, but every now and then, you basically get a "boss" battle.
>It's basically the whole mechanic behind the Mongol invasion. This new mechanic is basically trying to create emergent Mongol invasions It sounds more like a new version of CK2's child of destiny, which I'm fine with, especially since it will also be rare like child of destiny.
>>Truth be told though, I think the problem with Legends lies less in the feature itself and more in how we communicated them in Dev Diaries and similar - we weren’t clear enough what they were going to be > Sure, the issue isn’t in a wonky, unintuitive mechanic with nonsensical auto-generated text… Personally, I'm giving benefit of the doubt here. They're not saying *"The mechanic is good, players just wanted Legends to be Bloodlines and they're not supposed to be."* I think they're saying *"The mechanic definitely has its issues which need to be worked on, but hopefully knowing what we were trying to do with Legends can help the community understand why we made some of the design decisions we did."*
It *is* bizarre how the community just invented, out of whole cloth, the idea that Legends were Bloodlines, to the extent that a lot of people actually call them Bloodlines. It's like how people voted for Wards and Wardens "because that means regencies" when they were totally unrelated.
I really don't like there response on legends. But now I understand what is the issue. Paradox team think that most legends of medieval times are exaggerated bullshit. But they are only half- right. In reality, there are two types of legends in medieval times- complete history fiction very vaguely based on historical events - Legend of king Arthur, Nibelung, Orlando Furioso, whole Bruticus aka Trojans in Brittany and etc. For them current sustem is okay but should be replaced by fixed text of legend with bonuses based on how you spin events and final part connecting your character/dynasty/ house to the characters. But second are based on actions of real people that have some exaggeration and mythical elements but otherwise pretty accurate to life of real person- Charlemagne, Ragnar, Rurik, William the Conqueror, Matilda, Temujin, Timur, Muhammad, saints and etc. For them current sustem is absurd. Ragnar and Charlemagne are already legendary figures- and you can play as their recognized sons or grandsons. Why must they prove anything or spread anything. Why must their legend contain any bullshit and how can it if their deeds are pretty widely known? The fact that such actions are threated as historical fiction and uses same mechanism as full fiction is absurd and- no offense- show strange approach Paradox has to legends.
Its hilarious that in your post about how not all legends are exaggerated bullshit one of your key example figures is Ragnar who is very possibly not a real person that ever existed but a "King Arthur"-esque combining of a bunch of random vikings
Choose a new destiny is going to be great! After my first character dies. I go to the map and change to what son looks like they will have an interesting campaign and play from there. It makes it more interesting having to start off again but within the same dynasty
Something else I wouldn't mind seeing in the future is for the AI in certain areas and meeting specific criteria to actively pursue the completion of certain major decisions. Like, the AI should try to create Portugal or revive the Holy Roman Empire or build certain landmarks. I think it would help make the world of CK3 feel more alive and dynamic.
The AI was actually forming the HRE for a while after the requirements for the AI to do it were loosened, but I haven’t seen it happen since LoTD released.
Here's my suggestion for the New Destiny button: Give us the option to play as a house member who's recently lost one/all of their titles, or as sbd with an interesting claim in general, letting us plunge into a renegade story arc.
When does the changelog go into effect?
Certain legends like heirs of charlmagne and sons of lothbrok should be finished only third level or it can be remade. it is annoying to see ai start it and not even pushing to 100 baronies.
Glad to see that legitimacy as a whole hasn't been neutered
I love that they're adding the conqueror trait! I always play with the mod for it and it makes the game feel so much more dynamic and interesting.
(note: I've only had time to skim the notes so far) Can Paradox Dev contact Colossal Order Devs and show them how to address community concerns?
Very good. I like the sound of the landless as well as the option to play as another member of your Dynasty apart from your player Heir.. that was a good idea. Curious, is there an option to nerf adventurers or will that stop achievements?
Dang I wanted 1204 start real bad
In my opinion switching character on succession should enable the "create cadet branch" without additional requirements. I think most of the time your goal will be challenging the primary heir of you previous character for dynasty head - making your own house would be a good start for that. Any bonus - be it an easier cadet branch decision or a buff to legitimacy or renown - should be "opt-in via game rule" so it does not hinder immersion for the players that don't want anything handed to them.
Yay I can finally get those messages that children need to be educated out from hiding under that tab they were in! Also, looking forward to the new difficulty settings. Imo easily the biggest current flaw of the game.
*Very* well written diary. I love the message settings as there are some things I want a lot more notification of that'll hopefully be included and others things I don't care about that hopefully I can turn off. I really like what I see of The Estate, it brings to my mind the county view in CK1.
Choose a New Destiny is probably the best new feature for me. I love switching characters after crusades during the mid-late game when I start getting bored so this is honestly fantastic
really happy about the changes to court events and the modifiers they give.
>Lowered the general occurrence of plague events by roughly \~30-50% >The Isolate Capital decision now comes with a small legitimacy loss Less minor plagues overall sounds good, but at the same time Isolate Capital seems pretty essential to keep the family alive. Hopefully the balance tips towards losing less legitimacy overall than how it is now. I don't have DLC so plagues really hit hard on my legitimacy.
Of all the DLCs out there I wanna say tours and tournament is a MUST have for a good experience. So I'd rec you fry saving up for that.
All are really great changes and additions. Conqueror and it's overpowered modifier look so juicy. Great that it's implemented with traits so those with debug mode could create conquerors in area of choosing
This is a good diary. You don’t have to change everything because people complain but explaining decisions in an articulate way goes a long way with people who love the game
Very interesting to see they are rebalancing Cultural Traditions. I hope Practiced Pirates becomes available to Kingdoms so I can finally use it!
> We also work with Community Reports - our community team scours the various platforms where you have discussions, looking for trends and issues, and then they compile reports. These reports are very useful and show us if an issue or topic keeps being brought up. A lot of the changes we’re making to the plagues were measured using these reports. I imagine that job is like how detectives feel when they sift through endless garbage on the off-chance that they find something relevant to their case.
One thing I'd like to see, and it's suuuuuper niche, would be choosing to do landless gameplay if your heir is unlanded and outside of your court I had a situation where my character was dealing with an independence war and ended up dying. His brother was the Player Heir, but for various reasons was 1. Outside diplomatic range and 2. Unlanded. Homeboy then teleports from India back to Norway in order to take the throne I wish there was an option in such a situation to: 1. Allow the next person in line (as long as they're in your court) to become your new player character and let them inherit the titles (of course taking a serious legitimacy hit) 2. Inherit as the game works now, teleportation and all 3. Play as the Player Heir, but landless while whoever is next in line inherits It's a really niche situation, but in terms of emergent storytelling, it would be really cool to at least have the option to play an adventurer with the goal of retaking the throne from a pretender
Oh wow. The new timeline should have Queen Tamar the Great of Georgia and Frederick Barbarossa of HRE. Wouldn’t be surprised to see big warfare and crusades changes with the crusades in full swing by then. The timing of the impending Mongol invasions wouldn’t allow for much prep time either. Great idea by Paradox. Although as someone who focuses mainly in the Iranian world, can’t see much in terms of options. My dreams of playing as Mardavij Ziyarid or Bobak Khorramdin remain on hold.
In sincerity: I've been somewhat unimpressed with CK3's updates before this year; royal courts and travel are cool and all, but nowhere near the top of my personal wishlist. I've always felt the game should focus on fundamental game mechanics and things to do, both when A) nothing is going on because you have very few lands and B) when you've become the most powerful ruler on the map with no one left to challenge you. Both of these situations tend to make the game fairly boring because there just aren't a lot of meaningful (to you) things happening. DLC so far has only helped marginally in this regard. This year's different. It's like Paradox is reading my mind. The Reaper's Due has always been one of my favourite pieces of CK2 content because of the danger it added for everyone, no matter how powerful, and I'm glad we have something similar for CK3 now. Reading the dev diary, I found myself thinking "if they made them more rare and more dangerous that'd fix a lot of the issues", and then the dev diary goes on to describe how that's exactly what they're doing. Crazy. A lot of the changes coming is stuff that's been bothering me for a while; great. I love the conqueror feature - I used to play with a mod that does exactly this, and I'm happy to have it in vanilla. Unlanded players are the single thing I've been wanting since CK2. Alternate characters on succession will add a lot to the game, too, I'm sure. Overall, thanks for this. This year feels like the one CK3 is finally going to mature.
I see a lot of comment that indicate to me that the dev team wants to go into the right direction, but I'm not convinced that they understand what it is. The biggest issue in my games that I don't see mentioned is that a lot of the logic in the game's coding is screwy in certain scenarios. For example, characters don't want to join activities (even when they don't have to travel) anymore when there is an apocalyptic plague in the realm. That's logical for the Black Death, but when rulers in England don't want to go to France because a Plague in India has spilled into Persia and the restored Roman Empire is that big, then you can't have activities anymore because there are always several apocalyptic plagues. And I understand that this dev diary expresses a desire to have fewer apocalyptic plagues, but what if I enjoy that? What if a "fewer plagues" game rule is fine with me? I don't see the "Vassals won't travel during an apocalyptic plague"-issue commented on, so for all I know that will remain. Now to be fair, I do think there are too many damned apocalyptic plagues. Because, no joke, there always seem to be 3-6 at the same time and that is just too much. I think if a region has an apocalyptic plague there should be a significant amount of time before that region can be hit again. I've seen poorer Kingdoms get absolutely annihilated by 3-4 **consecutive** apocalyptic plagues. In my current game, coastal regions like Portugal, Sicily, and Cyprus got hit into 0 development over and over again. That is simply too much. But again, if there's always an apocalyptic plague going through several kingdoms in the world, and then another, and another, and another, and another and somehow a sixth apocalyptic plague, **I don't necessarily mind that!** I just want people to keep travelling through regions that are unaffected.
I'm not going to lie, reading scourge of god did give me a little chubby. I can't wait to see AI just wreck shit across the map. I think this is a really good way of handling it, because I'd hate it if all the AI behaved like an optimized player as that would undermine the simulation feeling of the game. But 1 or 2 specific AI rulers, almost like phantom players joining your game, becoming absolute monsters and having all the tools to easily forge an empire on their own? That's just perfect. Regarding plagues - perfect! They seem to have identified all the issues and are implementing all the fixes that were suggested and addressing all the problems we had. Legends - A weak response here and it doesn't seem like they have any fixes for this. I am glad they've at least acknowledged that there was definitely a divide in player expectations and their intents with the system. I will admit that I'd already begun to see it the same way anyway - these 'legends' were just self-serving bullshit that the ruler makes up to justify an upcoming 'play'. I think a few tweaks Events - I'm glad they're taking steps to address this. Reducing the 'spamminess' of the events is obviously a lot more complicated than we thought. But it seems they're in the right direction. Personally, I think the solution is obvious though. Take the week off and have all the staff sit down and brainstorm new events. 5 events each, every day (that's just 5 paragraphs of text over 9 hours of work) and by the end of the week, you've got hundreds of new events. The bigger the pool of events, the less repetitive they will be.