CK2 Dev Diary #16: Man's inhumanity to man

[Darkrenown]

Hello and welcome back to another DD about The Reaper's Due! Ha! I can finally use the name! If all is going to plan you should be reading this while I am on my third, and sadly final, week of vacation, so I may or may not show up to answer questions. For this DD we are getting back to the core values of The Reaper's Due: Death and Suffering!

Being a prisoner is never a fun experience, and frankly, with The Reaper's Due it only gets worse. We have added several fairly unpleasant ways to interact with your captives:

• Humiliate. The prisoner is degraded in some fashion; such as being tarred and feathered, or forced to do a “walk of shame”. This also causes them to lose prestige and be generally looked down on.
• Torture. The prisoner is caused a certain amount of pain; such as being whipped, or stretched on the rack. May cause them to become Stressed or even Depressed, and can cause you to lose the Kind trait.
• Mutilate. Only available to rulers with certain traits, such as Cruel or Impaler, this causes the permanent loss of a body part. May lead to you becoming Cruel if you are not already, and can cause them to gain Stressed or even Lunatic.
• Bad poetry. Rulers with the Poet trait may deploy their very worst poems against a prisoner. While a comparatively mild punishment, it nonetheless has a slight chance to drive them mad.
• Consume. Rulers who are either Possessed or Lunatic and also have the Cannibal modifier may simply eat their prisoners. If you haven’t disabled fantasy content, this may lead to you “gaining the power” of your victim.

All of these options, besides Consume, release the victim afterwards as they are considered to be their punishment, and while you choose the category you do not choose the exact method. Needless to say, your former prisoner will not think kindly of you after any of these punishments, and in the more extreme cases their close family may also be outraged.

Of course, sometimes a mere punishment is not enough and you simply have to Execute your prisoner. Well, we have added content for this eventuality too! You still simply press the Execute button, as before, but the actual execution method employed is chosen from a list based on your location/culture/religion/traits as well as the imprison reason you have on your prisoner, their religion/gender/traits, and things. Different execution methods come with different death reasons, and as you may have heard in an earlier DD, different death sounds. We have 31 execution methods, including Hanging, Crushing, Sawing, and Bear. It’s all in an easily moddable file too, just in case modders think we have been insufficiently creative.

I should also mention that with the 2.6 patch it is no longer possible to escape from House arrest unless someone with the Intrigue focus breaks you out, so if for some reason you want to be nice to your prisoners they are no longer virtually guaranteed to escape.

Since Death is a big theme for The Reaper's Due, we have also added several reactions events to the death of your lovers, friends, and rivals. For the first two, these can result in things like you turning to drink, finding a new friend, taking comfort in the arms of another, or finding a keepsake of them. For the latter, you may miss having a rival and start a new feud, resolve to become a better person, or if you are a particular type of person you might sneak out and desecrate their corpse. We don’t judge!

That’s all for now. Next week I’ll be back at work and writing these “live” again, so I’ll decide the topic closer to the time. It's quite possible the subject will be cats though.

 

[Servancour]

Scheduled post will actually be "posted" on the same date as you made it... That seems useful...

Bumping for visibility.

 

[Servancour]

Do we get to pick which body part(s) we remove from the prisoner, or is it random?

The outcome will be random.

 

[Darkrenown]

"My dearest Solene, my good genius"

Is this the bad poetry? Seems to be a bit of an awkward sentence.

It's the trait based compliment/insult system. In general it's pretty neat, but not all the combinations flow so well.

Have you changed the prison bars icon into a button that jumps you from the prisoner to the jailer? I've been hoping for that ever since the skull icon was turned into a button that could jump you to someone's murderer.

I know that was on our list of possible improvements, but I am not certain if it was added or not.

So it's not just Ramsey Bolton, it's also Vargo Hoat simulator 2016. Can sufficiently Strong/Brave characters beat the bear?

Nope, they are all fatal. Could have been funny to have them beat the bear and then get shot, I suppose, but we need the death reasons to be reasonably short.

What about wanting revenge or creating a rivalry if a character takes out one of your close family or friends?

There's a fairly big relations penalty to with the family of those you torture.

Can we throw dirty Germanic pagans into a pit full of snakes?

Snakepit is one of the executions, yes.

 

[Darkrenown]

>It’s all in an easily moddable file too, just in case modders think we have been insufficiently creative.

ARE YOU GRINDING MY JIMMIES? you STOLE this idea from modders. They have done this way before you announced this DLC. Doubt? check it ou then:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=635776529&searchtext=execution
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=503399786&searchtext=execution

You should leave content like this to modders, you should improve game mechanics and such. Why haven't you made a combat overhaul yet? naval combat, no? no of course not. UNBELIEVABLE Paradox, wanting to extract as much money as possible. If mods like HIP or AGOT dont use content added in this DLC, i'm pretty sure most wont buy your bulldefecation. You should be INNOVATING not COPYING.

It's always funny when someone links some mod as proof we stole it. Believe it or not, it's actually possible for multiple people to have similar ideas independently, and torture in the middle ages is hardly a one-off revelation. I note the 2nd mod you link there "steals" our original concepts of blinding and castrating people which were added way back in Legacy of Rome though. Do you suggest that any time we have an idea we should search the mod database and if any mod, no matter how obscure, has done something similar we should scrap the idea?

 

[Darkrenown]

Lovely. All of this is absolutely lovely.

1. Do those elegant, new ways to treat ladies and gentlemens comes as separate buttons next to release, banish/ransom, execute or as right click diplomatic menu options?
2. Are there chances for a way to deal with multiple prisoners in the same way (mass ransom, etc.)?
3. Are there any game mechanics profits from e.g. humiliating/mutilating people other than shortening their lifespan?
4. Do you guys consider making a system for dreadful characters who being totally asymphatetic have a lot of respect because of fear?

1. Right click
2. no
3. Well Humiliating someone lowers their general opinion for a while, but these are mostly done for their own sake.
4. It's an interesting idea, often brought up, but really it would need the whole opinion system to be built around it rather than something to tack on.

Will it be possible to fashion a drinking cup out of my enemies' skulls, for use at feasts?

I think it's possible for Nomads actually!

 

[Darkrenown]

Is this disabling of fantasy content to be an addition to the game options? Will it affect anything other than features introduced by The Reaper's Due?

Yes, see this DD for other game rule stuff:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/ck2-dev-diary-the-rules-of-the-game.923570/

The problem with this DLC is that it's adding content from modders, that it's free, to the base game as a buying product, this means we are paying for something we already have.

In my opinion the community should open it's voice against this kind of act. The DLC as far as i know will overhaul diseases and death. The disease part i dont have a problem being sold because it's a new (or overhaul of the) mechanic, and that is fine. About the executions i think it should not be sold, but it should be added in the new patch, just like "Agressive Expansion" was added when conclave came out. That being because we already have it in a free form. It does not make sense to put a price tag in something it is already free, and what about the modders? do a work for free and we will sell it to OUR customers? The modding community is HUGE in paradox games, if it was not for them there would be way less sales: CK2 would be cut in half if not for AGOT.

Let me give you some ideas of things you should be doing:

>Combat overhaul. Take this game for example, and implement something like that in CK:http://www.clickjogos.com.br/Jogos-online/Acao-e-Aventura/1066/ (I will do a entire post about how this would/could work in the game, but it will take some time)
>Naval combat, ever thought about this?
>Better diplomacy, CK focuses on people, so why not make interaction with people a more important and fun part of the game? Economy (i think this DLC is going to improve this, but i'll list it anyway): Population, Manpower, food (to feed the population/army when raised), Troops designer (the base would be the current troops types we already have, but now you can customize a division to fit in a certain way of fighting, example: Base: Pikemen, could be changed to: spearman [more attack values at fighting infantry]/Halberdiers [better at fighting HC and SP]/ Pikeman [better at fighting Light Cav and HI]) you should take the best you have from other games and try to assimilate in a way that will benefit the game play of the game in it's own way!
>More in depth life of characters.

Those are some aspects i think the developers should actually worry about. i'll have to get out now, but i will do a post about how these things should/could be IMO.

Once again, we are not adding content from modders, we are adding our own content that is coincidentally similar in theme to a small mod.
Technically modders could have added every single event, every decision, all the province setup, the entire character database etc. - should we have added none of it and shipped the game as a bare-code base for modders to flesh out? I assume you don't think so, so where do you draw the line? Every DLC and most patches have added more of this content, is this the DLC we should have stopped doing it for, or if not, when?
I would also add to this point that while modders can add excellent content, they mostly can't do all the extra bits we can, such as add new UI elements, sound effects, trait icons and event pictures, or affect the underlying code - death reasons used to be hardcoded, now we have added a bunch more and the system has been made moddable so modders can add even more.

And yet it doesn't. The majority of the replies seem pleased with what we've added. Perhaps this signals that your personal opinions aren't the opinions of the playerbase? We've also done several other mostly script DLCs, such as Legacy of Rome, Sunset Invasion, Way of Life, and Sons of Abraham, which have mostly been well-received and sold well. If people like and buy this kind of thing, I'm not sure why we should stop making it. Of course, it might not be what you personally want, and that's fine, it is optional content after all.

Yes, most of your suggestions have been thought of, although making battles controlled like in your linked game is not something we want so if that's what you meant I would advise against making a detailed post about it. You must also understand that not everyone who works on the game is a programmer, Content Designers can't make Naval combat or new Diplomacy instead of making Execution methods, at best you would have some more events or decisions.