Dev Diary #123 – Hastiluding for Glory

[PDS_Noodle]

I would be remiss if I didn't point out here the case of Robert, Count of Clermont, whose son founded the Bourbon dynasty we know today. In his youth he became mentally-incapacited for the rest of his life when his head was violently smashed by a mace blow during a tournament.

While death should be rare but possible, so should be injuries that would render a character absolutely mentally or physically incapable. Tournaments were battle drills for noble, so while the instruments was dulled it were expected it was never meant to be injury-proof - some could get injured, even severely injured.

Like, for example, being knocked from your saddle by a quintain whilst training in the Tournament grounds and gaining the Incapable trait?

Just as an offhand thought.

 

[PDS_Noodle]

Will cultures or cultural heritage impact the availability of certain events?

Are there any interesting interactions with cultural traditions and tournaments that you particularly like?

Yes. So, for example, if you're not of European cultural heritage, you won't have access to Melees.

My favourite interaction is how one of the French CulTrads lets you unlock a contest slot an entire era earlier than normal!

 

[PDS_Noodle]

A typo in the event Archery: Sabotage
View attachment 966341
should be relieved

Good catch! I believe that's actually fixed. Maybe not for release but at some point after that!

You'll have to forgive us our sins. There's a lot of event content in Tours & Tournaments!

 

[PDXOxycoon]

During the months between contests, are we viewing the regular map or the full screen tournament view?

You aren't constrained to only viewing the tournament view. You can view the rest of the map in the interim if you wish. If you want to snap interact with a locale as soon as you can, you may want to stay in the locale window, but if you're fine with just getting the automatically picked event, it'll pop you in to the window for that event and out again afterwards.

 

[PDXOxycoon]

fun activity for the family: by tapping the up arrow on the keyboard to access previously used console commands, you can play this command repeatedly at high speed by rapidly alternating the up arrow+enter keys. this takes your ears directly to hell

Isn't it magnificent?! Placeholder pink as audio!

 

[PDXOxycoon]

Does this hook into lifestyle traits at all? If I go into the chivalry tree, do I get better at jousting and whatnot?

The Chivalry tree has been updated to affect the Hastiluder trait.

Spoiler: Chivalry updates

There are also some other changes coming to the Chivalry tree related to Accolades, but I'm going to leave those for the dev diary covering those.

 

[PDS_Noodle]

I might need a memory refresh if this has been talked about in a previous dev diary, but this bugged me yesterday when I saw it:
View attachment 966544He's a master Hastiluder with Blademaster. Remind me again, if Hastiluder - Foot exists now, what is the purpose of Blademaster? I thought the whole point of Blademaster was to emulate someone that was a particularly skilled combat duelist, which sounds like the exact same thing Hastiluder - Foot covers.

That being said, I do notice that Blademaster isn't tiered (as it was previously) in this photo, so I'm guessing some thought was put into shifting Blademaster's purpose a bit. I'm also curious about the wagon wheel trait. Is there a trait you can get for travelling around a lot?

You've got a reasonable point in that there's _some_ overlap with some aspects of the two traits, but to clear it up:

Blademaster is a trait representing a character's ability with, well, a blade. They're a weaponry expert and duellist.

Hastiluder - specifically its Foot track - represents more a person's ability in all forms of foot combat. That might include being handy with a sword, or it might be punching someone in the face, or it might be wrestling them to the ground. It's less specialised than Blademaster in that respect. Hastiluder also tends to represent a character's training rather than anything else, since you gain it by practicing in Tournaments.

Blademaster is actually tiered, as it was before, just that our boy Marty there hasn't levelled it up. Here's what it looks like levelled, as per usual:

 

[PDS_Noodle]

First, love love love this! I'm so glad this has turned out to be a properly big DLC like so many feared it wouldn't be.

Second, and the reason I am posting: as a casual Nile Unification enjoyer, I hope that the Land of the Bow cultural tradition has been suitably integrated to do something with Archery tournament events, even if just a buff to character competence.

Any bow CulTrads should at very least give you discounts to holding Archery contests in Tournaments. That way - along with a lil AI nudging - you should see more characters with particular CulTrads gaining relevant Hastiluder trait XP for those CulTrads. For example, Mongols should be gaining more in Horse, Welsh in Bow, Occitanians in fannying about Wit, et cetera.

An oversight in the brace yourself event, a vambrace is a type of armor worn on the outside of the forearm. A bracer is worn on the inside of the forearm to protect an archer from their own bowstring. So in this context, a bracer is the correct item, not a vambrace.

An eagle eyed spot! Clearly a long day when I wrote that. I'll see if I can find the time to get that changed later on.

Will there be more "open activities" in the future besides Grand Tournaments?

Are there any plans to add something like "Champagne fairs" for example?

At the moment, no. But it's neat that we have the capability, so don't rule it out.

I didn't think of that, but yes. You are definitely correct.
The easiest way is probably to simply add a modded trait that makes you martial gender no matter what you are or whether culture/faiths normally allow for such a switch.

Only the visual representation of it might be difficult unless you're an artist. Clothing, etc. is gender locked, right? Is that a technical thing, because of different 3D base models or is it just an arbitrary limitation set by the devs?

Def not an arbitrary thing, a technical restriction. If it were as simple as flicking a switch we'd have done it, but it requires some... technical artsy stuff I am simply too designer to understand.

This is early armor?

View attachment 966560

He keeps it forever or just when participating in tournament? (He has a regent + we can see that his location matches with tournament's location so that's probably the case in the screenshot)

Well that's some armour for 1250ish, so not really early, no. In this case he's wearing it because he's off Tourneying!

 

[PDS_Noodle]

Is it possible it gets implemented or is it too big a hurdle and too low a priority to allow for that?
Not expecting a promise here - would just like to know if it is even in the realm of possibilities.

I'm no expert so don't take my word as gospel, but for both the reasons you mentioned and others beside it I wouldn't expect it to happen any time soon.

 

[PDXOxycoon]

Only the visual representation of it might be difficult unless you're an artist. Clothing, etc. is gender locked, right? Is that a technical thing, because of different 3D base models or is it just an arbitrary limitation set by the devs?

Is it possible it gets implemented or is it too big a hurdle and too low a priority to allow for that?
Not expecting a promise here - would just like to know if it is even in the realm of possibilities.

I believe this comes down to the need to fix the meshes and fix the skeletons for the clothes. Certainly doable, but also not something we just enable.

I hope we can diversify the clothing options in the future, but need to find the artist hours to go through and fix the clothes for the various body types and so on. There was a discussion about enabling some clothes in the barbershop with a big, fancy button saying: "Here be dragons!" due to the unpredictable clipping that will occur, but I do not believe it is not something we are looking at for the release.

 

[PDXOxycoon]

How come Archery provides health? I'd think Horse would be the trait for that.

Have you seen just how buff medieval archers were?! Estimates put their hunting bows at a draw weight of ~23 kg, and their war bows at ~50 kg. Sources conflict on how heavy the English longbows could be, from between 50 kg all the way up to ~84 kg at full draw.

For comparison modern Olympic bows have a draw weight of the hunting bows.

Speculation from me, mind you, as I'm not the one diving into the sources too often I just make sand think The health benefits of having a physically strong body are undeniable though.

 

[PDXOxycoon]

Footnote to the above: English longbowmen, having trained since their youth to be able to draw such absurdly heavy self bows, had observable skeletal changes as a result (uneven arm length, bone spurs, etc.)

That is true. I'm not knowledgeable enough about the bowmen of medieval history, anatomy and medicine to say whether or not one could say it's a net benefit.

 

[PDXOxycoon]

As someone who host the Tournament can you set an artifact you have as a prize?

The artifact prizes are created specifically for the Tournaments.

 

[PDXOxycoon]

Can you update the artifacts system？It’s hard to manage the artifacts at the late of the game. I have too many artifacts,I hope they can be sort by quality,durability,type and skill .

We are adding functionality to destroy artifacts in ToTo. Improving the UX is not something that is planned for ToTo, and I sadly cannot make any promises as to when we will have the time to get on that. I feel your pain though, there are a lot of artifacts hanging around late game.

 

[PDXOxycoon]

Are all participants in the tournament pre-existing characters that are already in the world, or are new characters created when you set-up a tournament?

We try to grab relevant characters from the character pools to populate the Tournaments in addition to the characters going there. Due to this you may see the same blacksmith over several Tournaments in the same rough region, if I recall. Noodle will have to correct me on this one if I remember my details wrong.

 

[PDS_Noodle]

Now this is the great addition to the game.
It raises some questions and ideas, though.
1. The shown above traits "brave" and "craven" (as well as a number of other traits) are actually a two-tier traits (neg and pos tiers). It would be interesting to have them as one gradual trait with the ability to change by certain actions or lifestyle activities, so a craven person surviving 50 or so battles as a knight or a commander should be less craven and more brave, and a shy person surviving 50 or so feasts may become less shy (numbers are for demonstrating the idea).
2. Is it possible to use new progress XP traits in compatibility block (with pos for some numbers of XP and neg for another numbers of XP)?
3. What about trait alias or trait pointer? There is a huge number of conditions in the game that check "hastrait ...". Sometimes it is good to say that tourney_participant with foot > 90 is the same as Famous Champion. The scripted "something = yes" is not used in all cases of "hastrait ...", so it would be good to have not only compatibility block, but also synonym block.

1. Super interesting idea. I don't necessarily think it would be an improvement on what we have but I really love the lateral thinking and it really illustrates the cool stuff we can now theoretically do.
2. Yes! Very easily. You can use a has_trait_xp check as you would any other triggers, and then you can input in specific tracks as well.
3. Also yes. In Tournaments we quite often use both has_trait for Hastiluder but then also check for a specific type of XP. For example, a big old tourney knight turning up in the Melee would be a really impressive feat to beat if he had 90 XP in Foot and Horse, but somewhat less of one if he had 90 XP in Wit and Bow. So we check for the former, not the latter.

Glad you're as excited about this as I am!

 

[PDXOxycoon]

Can you redesign your culture so that women ARE a martial gender?

This depends on whether or not you have The Royal Court. If you have the Royal Court culture determines this. If you don't have The Royal Court Faith determines this.

We already have options to allow them to have rights, powers, and serve as knights. I'm worried that your "martial gender" rule applies to all situations, even if a society has reformed to allow female warriors.

Martial Gender and the ability to serve as knights are one and the same, not counting the Shieldmaiden and Shieldswain traits.

 

[PDXOxycoon]

But there are some exceptions from this rule, for example cultural traditions that allows women to become knights if they have high prowess. I think it's important to let this women to participate in tournaments. After all they are considered qualified for real battles.

Martial gender envelops all aspects that for any reason would make a character able to be a knight. The very same logic applies to whether a character can compete in a martial competition, baring certain circumstances.