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Dev Diary #101 - Saints and Ancestors

Hello there! Another week, another Dev Diary!


This week we are going to take a look at the Saints, their potential Pagan counterparts, and how they will work in Holy Fury.


Saints & Ancestors 01.png



After the death of a pious Christian character, there is a chance for the Pope/Patriarch/local bishop to decide to beatify them. This is how they’re shown to be truly pious Christians. There will be an announcement sent out to the dynasty as well as the ones in the realm of the character. A beatified character gets a special trait, and a chance to later on be canonized.


Saints & Ancestors 02.png


Saints & Ancestors 03.png


If they do indeed go on to become Saints, another announcement message will be sent out to all Christians of the same faith, as well as their dynasty members. The character in question will be given a special nickname, a miracle will be associated with him/her (this is mostly for flavour) and they will be given a special bloodline. Note, any Christian with a religious head can become canonized, not only Catholics.


Saints & Ancestors 04.png



The Saint will have their burial site made public, usually in their capital or another nearby province in the form of a Province Modifier. This gives a permanent benefit for whoever holds the Burial Site, as well as some new flavor events that might happen. Any church holdings in the province will be able to create a small shrine to the local Saint. As well, if any raiders were to drop by the province, they might loot and ruin the burial site for some extra gold and prestige.


Saints & Ancestors 05.png


Saints & Ancestors 06.png


A new icon and menu have been added to the religion screen for Christians, where they can check all the Saints that have been created for their faith throughout the game. We figured it would be a handy way of keeping track of everything.


Saints & Ancestors 07.png
Saints & Ancestors 08.png



For those enjoying pilgrimages and traveling, we have added a new option and event chain to travel to a Saint’s burial site. It will find 4 relevant burial sites of Saints created throughout the game. If there isn’t 4 existing in the game yet, there will be up to 3 placeholders filling those spots. Hopefully it will be an interesting change of pace from the regular pilgrimages.


Saints & Ancestors 09.png
Saints & Ancestors 10.png


Saints & Ancestors 12.png


If the Catholics are led by a particularly terrible Pope, you might even see the cases of “Impious Saints” as we call them. In the worst case scenarios, this can end up with all of Catholicism embroiled in a massive war, fighting for the piety of the Holy See. The impious Saint in question will get a Bloodline as well, but it doesn’t quite bring as many benefits as most other bloodlines do.


Saints & Ancestors 13.png
Saints & Ancestors 14.png


For those of you who don’t care particularly much about Catholics, or Christians in general, we have added a new Reformation doctrine where one can take on the benefits of Saints into your pagan faith. Instead of caring about such silly things as “Piety”, “Humbleness” or other supposed positive traits, the Venerated Ancestors will be based on things your religion cares about. So if you reform your religion to be a warlike one, one is more likely to become a Venerated Ancestor if you do things that are warlike.


Saints & Ancestors 15.png



For those of you preferring to lead religions yourself, you will occasionally be given the choice of people the religion will venerate as a worthy ancestor. The dynasty of the character in question will, of course, be very appreciative of their family member being venerated as an Ancestor.

Saints & Ancestors 16.png



For the characters receiving that honor, there is a whole slew of new special bloodlines attached to them, as well some special nicknames.


Hopefully you enjoyed this little peek into the upcoming feature for CK2, and we are excited to hear your thoughts on it. Until next time!
 
Hello there! Another week, another Dev Diary!


This week we are going to take a look at the Saints, their potential Pagan counterparts, and how they will work in Holy Fury.


View attachment 405685


After the death of a pious Christian character, there is a chance for the Pope/Patriarch/local bishop to decide to beatify them. This is how they’re shown to be truly pious Christians. There will be an announcement sent out to the dynasty as well as the ones in the realm of the character. A beatified character gets a special trait, and a chance to later on be canonized.


View attachment 405686

View attachment 405687

If they do indeed go on to become Saints, another announcement message will be sent out to all Christians of the same faith, as well as their dynasty members. The character in question will be given a special nickname, a miracle will be associated with him/her (this is mostly for flavour) and they will be given a special bloodline. Note, any Christian with a religious head can become canonized, not only Catholics.


View attachment 405688


The Saint will have their burial site made public, usually in their capital or another nearby province in the form of a Province Modifier. This gives a permanent benefit for whoever holds the Burial Site, as well as some new flavor events that might happen. Any church holdings in the province will be able to create a small shrine to the local Saint. As well, if any raiders were to drop by the province, they might loot and ruin the burial site for some extra gold and prestige.


View attachment 405689

View attachment 405690

A new icon and menu have been added to the religion screen for Christians, where they can check all the Saints that have been created for their faith throughout the game. We figured it would be a handy way of keeping track of everything.


View attachment 405691 View attachment 405692


For those enjoying pilgrimages and traveling, we have added a new option and event chain to travel to a Saint’s burial site. It will find 4 relevant burial sites of Saints created throughout the game. If there isn’t 4 existing in the game yet, there will be up to 3 placeholders filling those spots. Hopefully it will be an interesting change of pace from the regular pilgrimages.


View attachment 405693 View attachment 405694

View attachment 405699

If the Catholics are led by a particularly terrible Pope, you might even see the cases of “Impious Saints” as we call them. In the worst case scenarios, this can end up with all of Catholicism embroiled in a massive war, fighting for the piety of the Holy See. The impious Saint in question will get a Bloodline as well, but it doesn’t quite bring as many benefits as most other bloodlines do.


View attachment 405700 View attachment 405701

For those of you who don’t care particularly much about Catholics, or Christians in general, we have added a new Reformation doctrine where one can take on the benefits of Saints into your pagan faith. Instead of caring about such silly things as “Piety”, “Humbleness” or other supposed positive traits, the Venerated Ancestors will be based on things your religion cares about. So if you reform your religion to be a warlike one, one is more likely to become a Venerated Ancestor if you do things that are warlike.


View attachment 405702


For those of you preferring to lead religions yourself, you will occasionally be given the choice of people the religion will venerate as a worthy ancestor. The dynasty of the character in question will, of course, be very appreciative of their family member being venerated as an Ancestor.

View attachment 405703


For the characters receiving that honor, there is a whole slew of new special bloodlines attached to them, as well some special nicknames.


Hopefully you enjoyed this little peek into the upcoming feature for CK2, and we are excited to hear your thoughts on it. Until next time!
This is shaping up to be quite an interesting little expansion.
 
Priest are not the one with the more piety in the game, it's usually the large realm's leaders.
If you go with the religious orders, you have a great chance of having no sin and get quite a lot of good trait. From your vassals and holy wars, you would get tons of piety.
To see with the result in game but I'm pretty sure, bishop won't be the top group to become saint.

Large AI lords rarely join the monastic orders even if it would have greatly benefited them to do so.

I fear that by year 1400, half the leaders have 1 or 2 bloodlines at least while this should be rare and thus loose it's meanning.

after 500-600 years I think you should expect 70% count and above to have a bloodline. If memory serves me, bloodlines are agnatic so might be hard to stack them. So how it goes to Matilde in dev diary if she had only female heirs I don't know! :D
 
Stat stacking is also an issue. It already is with artifacts and now also bloodlines. After a while you almost never have to suffer through a bad ruler anymore. Even mediocre ones can become awesome.
Time-limiting the effect of bloodlines thus isn't a bad idea

Realistically having a new saint every 5 years isn't unreasonable. But for the game that would be way too much. So there should be some average so that it only happens let's say every 10-15 years maybe. There can be some variance so it's not like clockwork.

Also the Pope canonizing saints wasn't much of a thing until the 11th century. Before that saints were extremely rare. It seems even though local bishops could declare saints in earlier times, most of those aren't counted as official saints these days.
Sainthood for characters could be gated behind an event and only be unlocked in 1020 or something when a Pope starts a new tradition. That alone would cut down on bloodlines.
 
Stat stacking is also an issue. It already is with artifacts and now also bloodlines. After a while you almost never have to suffer through a bad ruler anymore. Even mediocre ones can become awesome.
Time-limiting the effect of bloodlines thus isn't a bad idea

Realistically having a new saint every 5 years isn't unrealistic. But for the game that would be way too much. So there should be some average so that it only happens let's say every 10-15 years maybe. There can be some variance so it's not like clockwork.

Snow Crystal has said on reddit that there's a mechanic that reduces or increases the likelyhood of new canonisations if there have been too many/not enough of them so far, and that it should average at 15-20 per game (I'm assuming that's per religion). If that figure is for a 1066 to 1453 game, that'd give us a new saint every 20 to 25 years on average.

That might mean the less prominent religions/heresies, like nestorian or monophysite will have a very high percentage of their believers achieving sainthood though, compared to the more widespread religions.
 
Release date pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease!!!

Yes, or at the very least give us a release date for the release date!

Or if you're not ready to make such an announcement, could you give us a date for when you will be?

Not even a release date just a vague, maybe next month or maybe not.

For the love of Odin they've been cooking it since at least May or before.
 
Jumping into a conversation to ask a question on a basically unrelated topic is pretty rude. And to many English speakers (though by no means all, of course) calling someone 'sir' in an otherwise casual exchange, especially more than once, is a sign of increasing the formality and seriousness of the discussion - almost a sort of challenge.

nd

As an english speaker it was a perfectly politely framed question. And if we are going to start caring about every last comment being strictly on topic we are going to have a hard time.
 
Stat stacking is also an issue. It already is with artifacts and now also bloodlines. After a while you almost never have to suffer through a bad ruler anymore. Even mediocre ones can become awesome.
Time-limiting the effect of bloodlines thus isn't a bad idea

Realistically having a new saint every 5 years isn't unreasonable. But for the game that would be way too much. So there should be some average so that it only happens let's say every 10-15 years maybe. There can be some variance so it's not like clockwork.

Also the Pope canonizing saints wasn't much of a thing until the 11th century. Before that saints were extremely rare. It seems even though local bishops could declare saints in earlier times, most of those aren't counted as official saints these days.
Sainthood for characters could be gated behind an event and only be unlocked in 1020 or something when a Pope starts a new tradition. That alone would cut down on bloodlines.

Maybe we should wait for the thing to come out and play it before we rush to conclusions, eh?

And as much as I might think this game stretches things from post 1000 earlier into the dark ages.

Artificially limiting content to a certain date isn't worth it for what is really a theory crafted opinion on balance.
 
after 500-600 years I think you should expect 70% count and above to have a bloodline. If memory serves me, bloodlines are agnatic so might be hard to stack them. So how it goes to Matilde in dev diary if she had only female heirs I don't know! :D

How it is transmitted depends on the bloodlines, some will be agnatic, some will be all, some might be not bastard (?)

If I compare the legendary one, I can see : male indicator, a female one with a ring behind (? - married women ? ), and a blood drop (of the dynasty ?)
index.php

On the fighter one, I see the same
index.php

One in this DD has a child with a red "x" that I would expect to mean "no bastard" (?)
I have yet to see one that is passed through women, but wouldn't be surprised if there were some. I would love to have some shield-maiden bloodlines
 
It seems like there are a lot of ways to get bloodlines. Do they stack or are you stuck with the first one you get?
 
I really like that sainthood isn't limited to Catholics, but it's available to most Christians. I was a bit worried at first that it would be restricted to them.

Do I understand correctly that while each branch of Christianity keep tracks of its own saints, it's also true that the saintly bloodline is respected by all Christians? The one of Matilda includes a bonus to "Christian church opinion", just catholic, or will orthodox respect you too?

Great job as always. I think i speak for all in saying you have your fan base really intrigued.
 
Realistically having a new saint every 5 years isn't unrealistic.

Given that a quick web search indicates that there were more than 10000 saints throughout history, I'd say one every 5 years *is* unrealistic. That doesn't say anything about game balance of course.

Also the Pope canonizing saints wasn't much of a thing until the 11th century. Before that saints were extremely rare.
Really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_list_of_saints_in_the_8th_century , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_list_of_saints_in_the_9th_century and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_list_of_saints_in_the_10th_century seem to list plenty.

It seems even though local bishops could declare saints in earlier times, most of those aren't counted as official saints these days.
I don't think it matters which of them are official *today*. The game ends in 1450.

As a further annecdote, the village I grew up in has a bunch of "local" saints from the 7th century (I believe they're all still official, but I'm not entirely sure. Several of them definitely are) (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heiligen_van_Wintershoven . Sorry about the non-English page, they're not necessarily internationally relevant enough to get translations).
 
Every singe thing, even the smallest are getting me so excited for this expansion for months now. This truly might end up being the best DLC the devs have ever made, i just hope it launches smoothly too without any major bugs.