Dev Diary #113 - Community Choice Event Pack

[Silens]

Villains & Vagabonds

Though I strongly protest that I'm neither villain nor a tyrant. I just provide my subjects with the strong hand they all need, whether they want it or not. This definitely needs more events.

 

[TripleAgent]

That's my recollection too. Just being completely locked out of half (more?) of the game systems - sometimes for a decade-and-a-half until your child character becomes an adult - and knowing that, at any point, you might just get a pop-up that's like "you've been stabbed to death by your uncle/regent/pissy councillor" with no ability to interact with the systems to even try to manage/prevent that.

It seems a lot of people around here have a completely different take though - and remember CK2 regencies fondly. I'd love to know what they were doing that made them fun (that's a genuine question for anyone reading this).

Regencies can be annoying, yes, but I liked them for a few reasons. For starters, it adds an extra wrinkle of challenge to be subject to the whim of your regent/council (I REALLY also miss the ability to have council votes on important issues), and I also think it's great from an RP perspective; if I'm playing a 3 year old newly crowned monarch, I shouldn't be in full control of the realm, the regent should have major influence/power. As it stands, it often feels like your monarch is the only figure that guides your country, I like the idea of that element of chaos or uncertainty that you might not be able to do what you want because of your pesky regent.

 

[AWittyName]

That's my recollection too. Just being completely locked out of half (more?) of the game systems - sometimes for a decade-and-a-half until your child character becomes an adult - and knowing that, at any point, you might just get a pop-up that's like "you've been stabbed to death by your uncle/regent/pissy councillor" with no ability to interact with the systems to even try to manage/prevent that.

It seems a lot of people around here have a completely different take though - and remember CK2 regencies fondly. I'd love to know what they were doing that made them fun (that's a genuine question for anyone reading this).

I think it was consquence more than anything - I agree that being in regency absolutely sucks, but at the same time, there has been some amount of push for more things that can pose obstacles to the player

imo, the best way to tackle regencies is to have ways to be able to mitigate the damage (I,E, if my now-dead ruler has an infant, and later incapable son and a brother of ruling age, some way to peacefully swap rulership over without murder could be cool) and make them more engaging via events and systems vs just "no wars and my regent is a conniving thief who I'm going to imprison, revoke titles from, and execute later for giving themselves 3 titles"

 

[Telenil]

Villains & Vagabonds for me. There are plenty of mechanics about seduction already, and while a child-oriented DLC is interesting, I think the "ruling" part of medieval ruler could use more depth.

 

[4matic]

I would LOVE to see more spousal interaction and see the consort becoming an important character instead of a breeding mare/bull or stat stick.

However if that comes attached to even more lust events I'd prefer the status quo because it already feels like a swingers club simulator.

It's disheartening seeing the vast majority of feedback saying we want less ahistorical fornification and devs are considering adding more.

 

[SeraphAscending]

It's disheartening seeing the vast majority of feedback saying we want less ahistorical fortification and devs are considering adding more.

At what point has anyone from the devs stated that there will be more ahistorical fornication?

First of all, people are horny. Always have been, always will be. Fornication happened a lot. Lots of nobility that could afford it had as many partners as they could get (and get away with).
The vatican had a brothel district at one point.

The only difference in everyday life was often everyone pretending it doesn't happen. Because you wouldn't admit such a fault about your family and if you have significant authority to give a lot of pushback to anyone who accuses your family, you can make their life hell - even if they are the same rank as you. The authority is an implicit deterrant for anyone to mess with you and your family in that way.
It doesn't matter if it's public knowledge if no one is able to voice it without huge risk to themselves.

But also, the pitch states it will also focus on married life.
What my interpretation of Love & Lust is with this pitch is more meaningful and in-depth romantic and sexual relationships.
Making the Lovers and Soulmates you have matter more and have them less be just breeding stock or for RP reasons, because you really wanted to piss of the emperor by nailing his wife.

I'm certain they'd also have a look at the too-frequent, unrealistic fornication of happily married chaste characters, while they are working on this DLC, too.

 

[4matic]

At what point has anyone from the devs stated that there will be more ahistorical fornication?

First of all, people are horny. Always have been, always will be. Fornication happened a lot. Lots of nobility that could afford it had as many partners as they could get (and get away with).
The vatican had a brothel district at one point.

The only difference in everyday life was often everyone pretending it doesn't happen. Because you wouldn't admit such a fault about your family and if you have significant authority to give a lot of pushback to anyone who accuses your family, you can make their life hell - even if they are the same rank as you. The authority is an implicit deterrant for anyone to mess with you and your family in that way.
It doesn't matter if it's public knowledge if no one is able to voice it without huge risk to themselves.

But also, the pitch states it will also focus on married life.
What my interpretation of Love & Lust is with this pitch is more meaningful and in-depth romantic and sexual relationships.
Making the Lovers and Soulmates you have matter more and have them less be just breeding stock or for RP reasons, because you really wanted to piss of the emperor by nailing his wife.

I'm certain they'd also have a look at the too-frequent, unrealistic fornication of happily married chaste characters, while they are working on this DLC, too.

Unrealistic fornification is what I have an issue with. It was common for nobles to have extramarital affairs with women of a lower strata, but nobles would not be constantly be bedding each other's wives. It was bad for business, and would be difficult to pull off without being caught.

Given the changes we've seen to seduction since the ck2 royal court update, is it really a stretch to think the lust events proposed will only serve to expand unrealistic fortification?

 

[BrotherJonathan]

In fairness to both sides, there is no real hard evidence that any sort of excessive fornication bug actually exists. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence but no one seems to have actually found bugged code or anything like that.

 

[fodazd]

In fairness to both sides, there is no real hard evidence that any sort of excessive fornication bug actually exists. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence but no one seems to have actually found bugged code or anything like that.

I have found a *lot* of bugged code.

 

[4matic]

In fairness to both sides, there is no real hard evidence that any sort of excessive fornication bug actually exists. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence but no one seems to have actually found bugged code or anything like that.

The new lover events in the friends and foe package do not check whether the target character is chaste, soulmate and etc before firing. This makes otherwise loyal characters end up being unfaithful.

The main source of excessive and unrealistic fornification is the ai using the shotgun approach with the seduction scheme. It's not a bug it's just designed that way.

The only situations I think would make sense for an ai to seduce the wife of a ruler would be if that person was a childhood crush, or the wife of a rival. If these scandals are less frequent, make more sense and have a more meaningful scandal it will create more interesting storylines.

 

[BrotherJonathan]

The new lover events in the friends and foe package do not check whether the target character is chaste, soulmate and etc before firing. This makes otherwise loyal characters end up being unfaithful.

The main source of excessive and unrealistic fornification is the ai using the shotgun approach with the seduction scheme. It's not a bug it's just designed that way.

The only situations I think would make sense for an ai to seduce the wife of a ruler would be if that person was a childhood crush, or the wife of a rival. If these scandals are less frequent, make more sense and have a more meaningful scandal it will create more interesting storylines.

Sounds kind of like this bug that existed for a while in CKII where Byzantine characters would randomly blind or castrate prisoners or courtiers for no real reason.

 

[heliostellar]

Maybe I should explain halfbaked .. Royal courts , that is really halfbaked ..

100% disagree. I actually love Royal Court now, and I really didn't think I would. I posted on here about what a weird choice it was, but I've come to look forward to achieving kinghood so that I can get my royal court.

 

[BrotherJonathan]

I have an idea for how to get dread to work on the player.
If you take an action against a character with high dread, you get Stress. Stress gain would be reduced by certain traits (Brave, Wrathful) and increased by others (Craven).

 

[Bezborg]

BRING BACK GREAT WORKS

 

[SeraphAscending]

Given the changes we've seen to seduction since the ck2 royal court update, is it really a stretch to think the lust events proposed will only serve to expand unrealistic fortification?

I mean, the dev response to the concerns about Love & Lust was literally a hint at the pitch regarding the focus on married life. So i think it will be fine.

 

[Barsoom]

Ward and warden.

 

[SeekTruthFromFx]

Opening up the choice of Event Pack to a forum vote is a great idea. It increases the chances that players will enjoy the pack. It will hopefully encourage people who get their CK3 news from elsewhere (e.g. Reddit & Steam) to join the forum, which will improve their experience. It might be less fun for you (devs), since some of you don't get to work on your favourite area right away, but you are being paid for us to have fun, right?

I have voted for Wards & Wardens. Bringing up children is a fun and wholesome part of CK3. Every player will see this content because of the dynastic nature of the game. I wondered whether a regency mechanic is beyond the scope of an Event Pack, but I'm pleased to see the devs haven't poured cold water on that possibility, which would be a bonus, especially if we saw Regents either exploiting their position or gaining Prestige and Piety by being faithful to their ruler's interests.

I would be least likely to buy Villains & Vagabonds. I shy away from bad guys (as much as a role-playing game allows) because I think it's weird to find torture entertaining. There's all too much of that in real life.

I'm also a bit concerned by the suggestion that there might be a new honour system to counterbalance dread. The game already has systems that cover honour in the eyes of others (Prestige) and in the eyes of God (Piety). If anyone thinks honour is something different from those two, then I think they need to read up on how honour/shame dynamics work (the average north European will not have much experience of this, so don't trust your instincts!).

I also worry that Lovers & Lust will just turn into Libido & Lechery, which is already rampant in the current version of the game. And being a spouse isn't just about sex. It's about sharing your problems and having a wider family network. Having a spouse does very little to reduce Stress at the moment and I doubt that L&L would explore that side of marriage.

Close enought? I think a Gothic style expansion with this architecture.

This bridge looks bit celtic...

Gothic? Celtic?! The bridge looks Romanesque to me, but maybe there are technical details that I'm ignorant of.

Voted for LL. It is wild to me how little content features our spouse in a game that is focused on a following a family through the ages.

Good point.

Doesn't look good for a win, but I have one small but essential QOL request that I hope can be implemented regardless: LET US ATTEMPT TO BEFRIEND OUR LOVERS AND (ESPECIALLY!) SOULMATES. PLEASE! I truly don't understand why becoming soulmates with someone blocks an intentional attempt to befriend them, especially because you can go in the reverse order no problem (friend to soulmate). Thanks!

This doesn't make sense to me (with a couple of caveats to follow). The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary defines soulmate as "a person that you have a special friendship with because you understand each other’s feelings and interests". So a soulmate is a special case of a friend, of a more intense kind. Relabelling a soulmate as a friend is a loss of affection and love. It shouldn't be possible to be an in-game Friend and Soulmate to the same person, any more than it should be possible to be a Wife and a Concubine to the same man.

First caveat: If you mean we should be able to downgrade a Soulmate to a Friend, that makes sense, but this should cause enormous amounts of Stress and have a high chance of the Soulmate becoming your Rival. Every time I've seen this in real life it's ended badly.

Second caveat: I suppose it's possible that you are thinking Soulmates have some kind of metaphysical bond. I'm not aware of that being a thing in medieval Christendom or East Asia and I don't think that's what the game is representing.

That said, if the event pack is the same quality as the last one, I'm not sure I'd buy it. There is a regular problem in the game's events where they don't properly check their targets or the basic circumstances (e.g. not checking if your current spouse was the spouse when you had an affair, if the target is a child), or even just outright bugs, e.g. with events describing supposed interaction between two people having same person in both "positions". If we are talking about the full game with many features, where events are only a small part of the whole, the issues in them is one thing. But when Paradox decides to take money for content that is 100% events, their usual level of quality is just not enough.
I can see that in many cases there is talented writing and good ideas behind it,but basically if you are not putting sufficient QA resources into checking these kind of things, it often doesn't matter how good the design was in theory - in the issues are common enough, they smear the whole impression. And this is even more important for DLCs where you take comparable money for a smaller amount of content, which should be easier to test.

I understand your frustration. The devs need to be realistic about their strategy. No dev is going to think of every possible combination of circumstances in advance when you have a game as complicated as CK3. It also seems the internal QA process can't catch them all either (though no doubt it catches a lot of bugs players never see). So they need frequent iterations of the public builds/open betas so players can feed back and the bugs created by the fixes can be found. Stellaris' Custodian initiative and HoI4's War Effort show the way to go.

My speculation about the DLC image shown (my ideas are pie-in-the-sky idealist, but let me have my hope hahah):

As other have mentioned, a revamp of how we use the map, turning it into a quasi-Mount and Blade situation where we can move ourselves for pilgrimages, hunts, feasts (and maybe in the future trade too, etc). Would be great for making this map we're always looking at feel more alive outside of warfare. Could also make for interesting mechanics about ambushes and kidnappings, etc.

Making the map more interactive with revamped buildings/holdings. For example, a bridge across a river which the owner of the county controls and can deny access for other rulers unless they pay a fee etc. Or a castle in a mountain pass which bars access for any army wanting to cross the pass unless they pay the owner/negotiate with them. This would go a long way to make the terrain in the game feel more interesting and alive, especially when this sort of thing happened all the time IRL: a water strait being controlled thus blocking sea trade through it, or a mountain pass being controlled thus forcing armies to march around whole mountain ranges, etc, etc.

I love these ideas and I hope we get something like them. It's realistic, entertaining, and means the beautiful CK3 map plays a bigger role in gameplay. But you'd have to be very careful not kill performance.

 

[Osariik]

But first, here’s a small teaser of something coming in the expansion:
View attachment 939130

Maybe it'll be that bridges can be built?

 

[Osariik]

I can't wait to see whatever this future content hold regardless of what it is.

 

[unmerged(772555)]

Regional pack is much more actual, and desirable i think. I hardly imagine the player, who start new game just because of three new event types.