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The arduous duty great privilege of writing this week's Dev Diary has fallen to me, and in a desperate but vain attempt to fill Doomdark's shoes, I am here to talk a bit about the various options that are open to pagans when waging war.

View attachment CKII_ToG_DD_03_Prepared_Invasion.jpg

Prepared Invasions
Norse Pagans, or Vikings as they are known to the common man, have the unique ability to launch Prepared Invasions against non-pagans. This undertaking can only be done by small to middling Viking realms, and the target of your invasion can't be too small or too big (it needs to have between 9 and 40 holdings).

The way this works is that you declare your intention to invade a particular realm. This will cost you a lot of prestige (which can be gained through looting, as explained in the previous Dev Diary), and you'll have two years to prepare before going to war. During this time warriors from across the Norse lands will flock to your banner, hungry for loot and plunder. Needless to say, if you fail to declare war before these two years are up, you will lose face.

View attachment CKII_ToG_DD_03_King_Ambition.jpg

Subjugation
Pagans won't shy away from fighting each other, and all pagan rulers may make use of the new Subjugation casus belli. This lets them attack other pagans within a specified target kingdom, but it can only be used every ten years unless your ruler has the new ”Become King” ambition. If you are the victor of a Subjugation war, you will vassalize all lords within the target kingdom.

Pagan Conquest
Pagans can always declare war for control over a single neighboring county, and in addition to this, Norse Pagans may also go to war for any coastal county.

Tribal Invasion
This casus belli can only be used by independent Altaic (Turkish and Mongol) and Magyar pagan rulers, and it targets entire kingdoms in what amounts to massive horde invasions. You may have been on the receiving end of these before, but now you'll finally get a chance to unleash them yourself as you ride in from the steppes to carve out an empire.

View attachment CKII_ToG_DD_03_Peace_Too_Long.jpg


And finally, a few more items that have a significant impact on pagans and how they wage war:

Non-pagans suffer from a significantly smaller supply limit when in pagan territory, which limits their ability to march massive armies towards the heathen homelands at the start of the game. This penalty will eventually be removed as you progress through the Military Organization technologies.

As was touched upon in the last Dev Diary, Norse and Tengri pagans lose prestige if they have been at peace for too long. The Suomenusko, Romuva and Slavic pagans are less focused on offensive warfare and do not have this penalty. In addition, their warriors enjoy several defensive bonuses, especially when fighting in provinces with their own religion.

That's all for now!
 
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Well looks like a really bad face rash is going through scandinavia, other than that the beards and headgear look damn good can't wait.
 
Does this mean that within 10ish years all the scandinavian kingdoms will be formed, or is there a mechanic that makes pagan kingdoms especially unstable?
According to the live stream, unreformed Norse pagan ruler can only have gravelkind succession, so the Scandinavian kingdoms will tend to fall apart once per generation...
 
Seriously? :laugh:

Already implemented in the Game of Thrones mod, which has "saltwives" for the Viking-analog culture. These "brides" are listed as concubines, which makes me think the concubinage coding is already present (possibly as of Sword of Islam?)
 
the new facepack graphics look good. meh about the other stuff though; i suppose will be good for some mods, like for the game of thrones mod for raiding dothraki, wildlings etc.

a bit of an underwhelming dd really but i look forward to the next one in two weeks nonetheless!

I agree about the facepack. Big improvement over the last two, judging by the screenshots shown here. The faces do look like they could use a bit more texturing, though. They seem a little unrealistically "smooth" to me. I really like the new hairstyles and clothes, though.

Edit: Maybe "texture" isn't the right word. If you compare the portraits in the first screenshot, Aethelred just seems to have a slightly more natural skin pigmentation compared to the player character to me.
 
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Already implemented in the Game of Thrones mod, which has "saltwives" for the Viking-analog culture. These "brides" are listed as concubines, which makes me think the concubinage coding is already present (possibly as of Sword of Islam?)

That is really cool. I want this expansion now!!
 
Though also increasing tech growth a bit is also a possibility, but I don't think having that as a genetic trait would make much sense.

Unless the earlier Rurikoviches had a genetic predisposition towards Windmills.
Edit: Wait... by Odin's Eye! It'd the Paradox Platypus!
 
All of this looks gamey and overpowered. I hope it can be modded.
 
I don't see anything new, just (from left to right) Martial education, Attractive, Gregarious, Ambitious, Just and Deceitful.

Look closer (and at the discussion down the page). It's not attractive - its looks like a light bulb, not a diamond.