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CK2 Dev Diary #98 - Catholicism what? Constantinople where? Charlemagne who?

Greetings!

Today I’d like to cover one of the largest features of Holy Fury - a feature we’ve internally dubbed the ‘Alternate Start’ system!

This system consists of two separate sub-features, the Shattered World system and the Random World system. Each of these two systems are aimed towards different players - Shattered World is perfect for those who want a level playing field, while Random World will appeal to those of you that wish to explore an unfamiliar, yet fleshed out world complete with its own history and quirks.

These two features are accessed from either the Era Picker directly, or when choosing bookmarks through Custom Setup. You are free to choose any date to start, and the date you choose can even affect how a setup might look like. Choosing the 867 start date while using the default settings of Random World will tend to produce many more pagans and tribal realms, for example.

EraButtons.png

CustomSelectors.png


The Shattered World system allows you to break the world up into its constituent parts, be it Counties, Duchies or a mix of the two. It provides a balanced start, and allows for a sprawling new world to rise from the tiny disparate realms that start out within it.

ShatteredWorldSettings.png


To provide exactly the type of challenge that you seek, there are numerous parameters that control anything from Holding Slots to Technology.
For those seeking to recreate the world as it was, the Historical settings (which are selected by default) are what you want.
If you desire an entirely level playing field, you can set all provinces to have exactly 3 holding slots, for everyone to be Feudal, for technology to be the same everywhere, for Primogeniture to be the default succession law, and for each character to be exactly 30 years old with three children, OR…
If you just want a crazy game full of surprises, you could set all the parameters to Random or even Full Random. Who knows, maybe you’ll find yourself inhabiting an Iceland that has four 7-slot provinces, as a 65 year old matriarch following a religion based entirely around human sacrifice!
Naturally you’re free to mix and match these settings to your liking, perhaps you’d like a modicum of craziness in your otherwise balanced game? Hopefully you’ll find the settings to you liking!

Some players believe that there’s not enough challenge when starting out in a Shattered World (cough, @Meneth ) so for those of you that desire an opposition that is more than your match, we’ve got a setting for you! The ‘Great Conquerors’ setting allow you to spawn up to twelve special characters evenly across the map. These characters will wield special weapons, carry legendary blood in their veins and use especially powerful CB’s to rapidly conquer land much in the same way you would expect a player to. Naturally you can also choose to not have any Great Conquerors in your game, though I recommend starting with at least four of them!
GreatConqueror.png


Another setting that we have available for those who don’t want to wait around for too long until they can go to war is the ‘Consolidation Casus Belli’ setting. This setting unlocks a generic county conquest CB for everyone, without any particular cost. You can choose to have this CB active for 25 years, 100 years or indefinitely - and you can naturally choose to not have it active at all if you so wish. To avoid confusion, while this CB is active, the Border Dispute CB from Jade Dragon will be temporarily disabled (but return as the Consolidation CB becomes unavailable).

Now, on to the feature of the two which I find the most interesting - Random World!

This feature is truly a treasure trove for those of us who love exploring new and exciting worlds, while still preserving the familiarity of a game which we know and enjoy. With the parameters at hand you can tailor a world that tries to closely mimic the world we know, or you can choose to let it deviate fully!

In Random World you can choose to randomize almost everything; placements, names, functions and graphics of religions, cultures, titles, characters, governments and much more! While Shattered World and Random World do share a subset of settings, Random World undeniably has access to a more granular setup. If you want your game to be analogous to history you can choose to enable features such as ‘Holy Roman Empire’ or ‘Byzantine Empire’, for example - these settings will ensure that, somewhere in the world, something akin to those elements will exist. It won’t necessarily be too familiar though, there might indeed exist a large Elective Empire similar to the HRE - but they might just be located in Africa, adhering to a religion that promotes indiscriminate human sacrifice...

Random World Settings.png


As I mentioned before, at the core of a Random World lies a few main things; a dynamic religion, culture, de jure and ruler setup. Let's start with religion!

Religion is a very central aspect of the game, and thus it wouldn’t be overly exciting to generate a random world where the existing default religions are randomly placed (even though you can choose to do that, and having a Bön pagan Scandinavia or a Catholic India is undeniably fun - no question about that). Depending on the settings you choose, religions will be more or less altered - you can randomize the spread, features, naming and icon of religions. There’s even a way for you to preview religions before starting the game, and if you wish you can even customize their features right there and then!
Random World Religious Customization.png


The culture system is a bit more simplistic simply by the fact that cultures don’t generally have many gameplay features to speak of - in this system it’s mainly about the naming and spread of cultures.
Example Culture Spread.png


The De Jure setup randomization is a fairly sophisticated system. We’ve put a lot of thought and effort in making the resulting borders be as sensible as possible. We’ve for example taken extra care to ensure that the De Jure doesn’t jump wildly between islands, or seem generally disconnected or ‘snakey’. It generally provides an appropriate challenge when you wish to form a Kingdom or Empire!
Random World De Jure Kingdoms.png


The spread and placement of Governments can also be randomized. After all, why should nomads be limited to the steppe, and what’s saying that Europe should be high-tech and fully feudalized? I can tell you that it’s quite an experience playing a Nomad in Italy!
Random World Governments.png


Technology will naturally be randomized as well. The ‘baseline’ will depend on the year you choose to create your Random World in, the earlier, the less technology overall.

Now, here’s a few examples of Random Worlds, using an assortment of different settings!

This random World is generated with a generous amount of Dukes and Kings - this means that there are going to exist many more unified realms upon generation. A plethora of smaller kingdoms surround the centerpiece - an HRE inspired realm following a religion focused wholly on self-fulfilment without any formal leadership.
Random World Example 1.png


This world keeps most everything ‘historical’, except for the government and De Jure setup. The French nomads are of particular interest.
Random World Example 2 - Historical Cultures and Religions.png


This Random World I had to share for one very specific reason. At its core, it’s a nice and interesting world with several scattered kingdoms, and a major empire in North Africa keeping the peace. If you haven’t figured it out by your own yet - the random names are by-and-large based upon names from cultural namelists and dynasties, which in certain cases result in very fun names.
Example3.png


Persia has a very distinct religion, with very fitting features to boot.
memelard.png


And here’s one final Random World - a large Sacrosanct Empire looms in northern Russia and the polar circle, blocking the western tribes off from reaching the civilized east. In Europe many different faiths vie for dominance, from the unyielding and adventurous Dulanites in the Spanish region to the warmongering but syncretic Cult of Jahaira in the German region and beyond.
Example4.png


Worth noting is that I’ve not been able to cover all of the various settings that these features will have. There’s plenty of granularity, and you’ll be able to control most things in minute detail should you wish to do so. I encourage you to experiment with the settings! You never know what you might find...

We hope that these features will provide you with hours of entertainment, and that you get to generate the world that you wish to play in the most!
 

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Looks excellent! Can't wait to mess around with the Shattered/Random world features. It seems kind of like a lite-fantasy world generator for CK2, which I honestly couldn't get much more hyped for if I tried.
 

But what will an enatic republic's trade post limit be based on? Ulanded females presumably.

I wonder if a reformed tribal takes neither agnatic nor enatic clans and goes republic, will it default to standard male driven republic or republic of equals?

Perhaps the equality doctrine is involved. Though to be honest when you start to think of a republic where both men and women fill all the roles of the current republics, you start to think man wouldn't that be OP?
 
Welp, RIP my mod.

(Not that I'm mad; having your mod replaced by better features built into the game engine that accomplish the same end goal much faster is pretty much the ideal gaming experience in my opinion.)
 
I love you guys!

(Now pretty please, can we have this for EUIV and a save converter between the two that takes this into account? Pretty pretty please, with a cherry on top?)
 
You are overdoing impassable mountains in Hispania. Armies moved between those provinces all the time.
 
Like many others I really hoped that we could have a random world mod - I really want to do a "Wet Mars" world. Still, Random and Shattered worlds are truly amazing - 100% approve.

I think that the one thing that entire community agree upon is the fact that this will most definitely be the greatest DLC yet, by a very long shot.

Well done PDX !
 
What are the randomization option for trade routes? Can you turn them off? Can you create random trade routes? Will new special trade provinces like with the Mali gold mines be spawned?
 
Also, to everybody who wants a random map: I agree this would be a neat add to the base game, but you can also use the CK2 Generator, assuming it still works with this new version (since it creates an entirely custom map as a mod, I doubt most changes would cause problems, but some might). It does a similar sort of thing to random world (not as well, and it can be pretty slow to generate), but also can generate a custom map with custom geography (randomized or you can even draw your own map). I could see it being used very well in tandem with the new random world system - use CK2 generator to create the geographic map, then use random world to create the rulers, de jure, religions, and so on.
 
I’m looking forward to this feature. A couple of questions though:

Can you customize the world to have real religions alongside the fictional religions? This seems to be the case with culture, but it would also be nice to have for religion.

Are you able to specify the locations of different religions, cultures, and governments? For example, I’ll probably still want Catholicism to be in Europe if I use real religions, while I definitely want the nomads to be in the steppe, not in, say, Britain.

Will we be able to customize preexisting religions as well as fictional ones in the random generator?

I just thought of this as well; will Hellenic be unlocked with the random world generator? I’m not one of the people who want it in the base game for some reason, but it could be nice to see show up in random worlds.