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Dev Diary #158 - Wandering Nobles

Hello there!

It’s been a while since I wrote one of these, so I figured I could give a short presentation of myself. I’m @Snow Crystal , one of the two Design Leads on CK3, and I have been around at Paradox on different projects since CK2’s Holy Fury (my first DLC). It’s my pleasure to present our last entry in Chapter 3, namely, the Wandering Nobles DLC.

Vision​

As we set out to create this piece of content, our primary goal was to see if we could spend more time with the traveling system from Tours & Tournament. It was a system that was generally well-liked internally and externally, and we knew we would most likely be used a fair bit by adventurers (though exactly how that game loop would turn out was unclear at the time). We wanted to continue experimenting with it and see if we could add more content to it in different ways.

Since I have seen some confusion about this, one thing to clarify is that the Wandering Nobles is not a Landless Adventurer DLC. It was made primarily for landed gameplay, and though much of it is also available to landless characters, they are not the pack's focus. In other words, this DLC will not have unique landless features, new contracts, or anything locked to the adventurer playstyle.

Even though I will not go into detail about events, a plethora of new events are spread throughout the different features that will be detailed here, as well as a slew of new travel events. In this event pack, we tied them all into things the player will choose to engage with, see activities, lifestyle, and travel, rather than having them appear seemingly at random.

Lifestyle​


Besides the traveling focus, what you can find in the pack is our first new lifestyle since the game's release. This avenue of content has remained almost untouched since the game was first released, except for adventurer-specific perks in Roads to Power, which we wanted to try and experiment with. It is set up like all other lifestyles in the game, with 27 perks split across 3 lifestyle trees, 3 focuses, 3 traits, and landless perk variants where needed.

One essential philosophy of the new lifestyle tree is that we wanted it to be a tree where you had to engage with it rather than having it simply engage with you. In other words, there are fewer passive bonuses, and most bonuses are gained by engaging in travel or activities. In that sense, we tried to go for impactful effects and bonuses from the perks, but at an opportunity and gold cost. We will talk at length about the lifestyle trees and perks next week, but I wanted to give you a small look at what it looks like.

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Activities​

In the DLC, we have included three activities, each associated with (and unlocked by) one of the new lifestyle trees. They are intended to be about the size of the University Visit we introduced in Wards & Wardens, giving landed rulers more opportunities to travel through your realm or abroad. Two of the new activities are set in your realm, whereas one takes you outside your borders.

When we created these new activities, one of our philosophies was that we wanted them to be deeply tied to each of the lifestyle trees, synergizing in different ways and playing into the strengths of the lifestyle tree. That way, investing in the lifestyle tree opens up an activity that lets you continue to build down that route.

The first activity we will examine is Inspection, where you can choose to travel to a specific part of your realm to ensure that it is well-run. You will be able to decide what parts of realm management you would like to focus on, and if you travel to a border county, you might even get vassalization acceptance from neighboring rulers or claims on their lands.

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Our second activity, the Monument Expedition, involves traveling to a distant city to see its sights. This allows you to visit specific places with Points of Interest, which you’d previously have to drop by as you pilgrimage elsewhere.

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The final activity, the Hike, is one where you can temporarily leave behind the stress of court life and seek the calm of nature. Shy characters, you poor souls who would desperately try to lose stress through feasts, I see you.

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Battle Points of Interest​

As a travel-focused pack, we wanted to include something new for the players to see as they traveled around the map. One I had wanted to include for a while was points of interest focused on battles. These new points of interest will come in two forms: dynamically created ones as particular battles happen on the map and historical ones set up from the start of the game.

For the historical ones, we have some that can be seen in all our bookmarks and others that can only be seen in later bookmarks, like two related to the fight over England in 1066.

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A Toast for Your Travels​

One minor addition to this patch is a new building and court position, primarily for Catholics but accessible by anyone with a new cultural tradition. The building can only be built in Catholic churches by default, but in any city for those who choose to get the cultural tradition. It is intentionally made to have a fair number of county-wide bonuses rather than holding specific ones and opening the new Court Brewmaster Court Position for whoever is in charge of the county.

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Until Next Time​

That was all for this week. I hope you enjoyed this first look at Wandering Nobles. We will look in-depth at the activities and lifestyle perks next week. Until then, I figured I’d show some of the new art we have in the DLC to tide you over.

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I don't think we have added anything that will massively break saves, but I cannot promise anything here. When we move between these major versions, it's always a bit of a toss up. But I would say it is most likely going to be fine, with some minor issues. Basically, we have made two changes, that might mess it up a bit; a new artifact slot, and some very minor map changes.

Thanks! Sorry one more question, as this is first DLC with new lifestyles added. Do you guys have any ideas of future lifestyles you might want to add and what they might be? Aware it might just be speculative at this stage.
 
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Not something I can promise or will happen in this event pack, but I can note it down.


Because... that's just not what they are? First of, it's very easy to say "why didn't you just <X>?", but at the end of the day it boils down to resources. It wasn't done in T&T because that wasn't a part of the scope, it wasn't planned for, and nobody pushed for doing it.

It was done now, because we chose to focus more on the travel system, and we wanted to experiment with trying to make a new lifestyle for the game. It's our way of checking if people have an interest in more different lifestyles in the game, because if they do then there's a decent chance we will look at making more of them.

Thank you! It would make it so much more enjoyable to move your camp as an explorer
 
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It is too bad not to use this DLC to introduce a proper itinerant court mechanism

I think we both know that it is something that could only work with something like nomad courts within the mechanics of CK3. Grand tour is the closest we get to that within feudal government I think.
 
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Thanks! Sorry one more question, as this is first DLC with new lifestyles added. Do you guys have any ideas of future lifestyles you might want to add and what they might be? Aware it might just be speculative at this stage.
I mean... At this point that would just be mere speculation and ideas, but it would probably fall into one of two categories:
  • Feature-based
  • Narrative
Feature-based would be like the new lifestyle, based around a feature in some way. Narrative would be around some kind of specific narrative or idea, e.g. being a robber baron for example.
 
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I quite like the pack so far. Simple, small in scope, with something that can be helpful/flavourful throughout an entire playthrough.

I do have a couple requests for future packs similar to this one:
  • Minor versions of Grand Activities
    • Regular weddings, maybe as an intent for a Feast
    • Local Tournaments, as a way to interact more with your court and knights
 
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As others have mentioned, would be nice if legitimacy received some attention in these activities.

This also goes for older DLC features. Hostages, accolades.
Imho travelling lifestyle was a good opportunity to add a path focused on legends and flesh out this feature a bit.
P.S.
Disease prevention also sounds like something certain rulers could focus on.
 
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Forgive me if I missed this, but it would be awesome if the traits that you could join by seeing a historical battle site, were likely to be the ones that were pivotal to that battle.

I imagine this could be easier to do for historical battles, but even dynamic battles could have a greater chance to award a commander trait that the victorious (or even the losing) commander possessed.


Edit to add: Unrelated, but it appears that the green banner on this page advertising Wandering Nobles (under the article) is misspelled - "Nobels" instead of "Nobles." See attached screenshot.
 

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I'm loving all these new features, but I have one request for the dynamic battle POI's: the scope of the war should matter. A war over artifacts or one county is not important enough to warrant a famous battle site. On the other hand, a decisive battle in a war over a kingdom should be eligible (assuming it meets the other requirements).
 
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I love all of this!!! I have been traveling the world every time and I would love to see more descriptions of every place I visit like you do when visiting Rome, Constantinople, or Bagdad!

I have a request tho. Can we have the Love and Lust event pack DLC we missed against Wards and Wardens back in DD 113 after this one hits the stores? I want to have my dating sim inside CK3 and match characters in my court and my sons and daughters with people they would love and not only tolerate, and maybe even deepen and spice up having multiple lovers, and the Polyamory and Carnal Exaltation tenets be more immersive and crazy (long live free love and hardcore parties, maybe your lover and your spouse could get along really really well XD ), and have, of course, the chance to fall in love with your wife and let love flourish to a really cute and intimate level.

We already have the children DLC, let's have the marriage DLC, we can have a functional family with our descendants, let's do the same with our spouses! :3
 
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I have two concerns, one general and one specific.

First, I strongly question the design decision of adding **three** full lifestyle trees. Lifestyle trees take up alot of time to go through, so I’m skeptical the opportunity costs are really going to be adequately met for all three of these trees. Further, I do wonder if the need to split this into three lifestyle trees may otherwise spread out/dilute the features of the overall wandering gameplay too much: surely it’d be better to have one full, or two smaller, lifestyle trees with much more impactful bonuses? Mind you, these are all critiques I’d levy at the existing lifestyle trees too, so its not just these new ones, but this just makes me even more concerned: we already have more lifestyles then we need, with bonuses needlessly spread out and several lifestyle trees just being blatantly inferior due to this, so doubling down on this approach without reassessing strikes me as unwise.

Second:
Hello there!

When we created these new activities, one of our philosophies was that we wanted them to be deeply tied to each of the lifestyle trees, synergizing in different ways and playing into the strengths of the lifestyle tree. That way, investing in the lifestyle tree opens up an activity that lets you continue to build down that route.

So if I read this correctly, there is a tree that relates strongly to the inspection activity. Thematically, I have no issue with this or the inspection activity: its good to give the player more ways to actually act like a ruler afterall, and I fully approve of the design decision to differentiate this from grand tours. My concern instead is that there appears to be alot of thematic overlap between this tree and the existing Administrator tree. Outside of an administrative realm, the mindset of a player/ruler engaging in the inspection tree is (probably) that of one trying to directly administer their feudal realm, so should they really be separated like this? Or would it make more sense for the two trees to be combined and then have the mechanical/thematic differences between administering a realm from court and in person be reflected by branches instead (much like how Gallant is neatly split between being a noble knight and being an *effective* knight)?

I realize it’s not something practical to do so on release for development reasons, but something to consider going forward at least.
 
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I like that we'll have to actively do things in order to gain the most benefit from these trees. I feel like right now a lot of the skills/perks we can gain are basically just passive buffs that we don't have to really do much to earn or maximize.
 
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Considering that generic holy site buildings aren't eligible for monument expeditions, does this mean that more areas of the map are going to have more historical buildings that haven't before, like the Tarim Basin or sub-Saharan Africa?
 
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I don't know if it's been asked but will the monastic tenet give a slight buff to breweries or unlock them? I don't know if its too niche or whatnot but could be neat to see.
 
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For these new DLC activities, will any of them give Legitimacy?

That's been a normal trend for DLC activities so far (besides Tours, which I believe were (/ still are?) a bug), but I could see an exception made for hiking.
 
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Certanly too late in development now but i seriously consider there be a mini rework on how points of interest work, by that i mean a couple things like :

Make Universities be buildable anywhere , Why im i limited to build them in strictly historical places when i am sitting here in my 100 dev province ? like ok maybe not let the player build in all and every province i recognize that is op but besides cool alt hist it provides places that historically didn't have one with oportunities given the player works for it.

Make religious buildings like grand temple be used universally, If i am a berber muslin and conquered the koln cathedral chances are i wouldn't just let it sit still, with my ruler not collecting taxes from it and being akward, it would either be converted into a mosque, which can use a system close to the hagia sofia currently for balance , or destroyed/sacked something that ironically is the origin of a lot of importat churches/holy sites , like an old pagan ritual spot being demolished and a church is built directly on top. In either case i think it is ridiculous to limit them on a historical usage only basis, Why is ONLY the hagia sofia like that ? up until recently for example it (hagia sofia) was only usable by orthodox and muslins.... i becoming muslin in scannavia should not limit my enjoyement of the region you know ?

Since the topic of the recent dlcs have been traveling and distances an apropriate addition would be more interactable roads. What would they do ? for starters i would make the income from taxes a diminishing return that takes into account yours and your subject captal distance, no more vassal in tibet paying in full taxes anymore.
Roads would be a realistic and reasonable moneysink that besides improving taxes or commerce if that update were to come would improve development, troop movement speed and travel safety, like yes i know crossing the alps will never be as safe as a plain but if the monarch threw some money at it , it might help right ?

Change a holding's type, given that all counties have to have at least one churche, one castle and one city , when it fits of course, i belive the player and maybe the ai should be able to change any aditional buildings type spending their monetary value ofc, it is reasonable thinking of the princible that a lot of cities were born inside fortress and simple grew out of them, A noble with influcence could just clain a bourg as theirs and build a fortification nerby ,or a city is born out of a holy place/sanctuary or the local bishp gained influence and essentially controls the place etc. This is my rationale as to why it should be permissible

Warfare, this one might make some player uneasy so i would understand a on and off option, it would essentially be the plumder buttom in ck2, but incorporated into warfare. How ? if i lead an army and siege a place it lower the places control and get a little gold to signify i sacking the place, This is too light, the era was plagued by wars that erased villages from the map and slaughters , at the very least there should be a chance of a random building being destroyed or downgraded if it is sieged, giving a porcentage of it's value to the would be sacker, it would enrich warfare making it so it's meaninfull to actually defend your buildings instead of rushing enemies captial and would give much more malue to buildings that increase fort level since rn they kinda suck.
Imagine these mechanichs existing at the same time as the mongols ? actual cities getting destroyed, and the ones that stand have had a lot of their buildings deleted. it would armonize very well with great conquerors/scurges.
 
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with the brewery getting county bonuses rather then holding bonuses, that reminded me that it would be really nice if hospitals worked the same way, instead of having to crowd your castles with them, they could be more accuratly be the domain of churches / mosques and cities. also an extra building slot by base or innovation would not go amiss given the amount that there is in the game now
 
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I'm especially excited about battle points of interest! I have always wanted to see/create clear chronologies based on the wars my characters/held titles have participated in, but the game currently offers nothing beyond memories indicating start and end dates and simple results, which fade after death, and the active war UI, which disappears after each war ends.

In the spirit of recording previous wars and battles, has the team considered implementing a war ledger, possibly bound to individual characters or landed titles? It would be amazing to look back at a timeline of all the conflicts different duchies, kingdoms, and empires have participated in, who won them, what major battles were fought, what their casus belli were, and then travel to the sites of those battles via the new activity.

For instance, my character might visit the site of a battle and be able to look up the war it took place in, start and end dates, casus belli, the war result, lists of attacker and defender primary titles, etc..
 
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Not as is right now. It's a very minor addition I added for fun, so it wasn't meant to be a "proper Catholicism feature", by any means.

Respectfully, I do not agree with the idea of setting the precedent of unlocking a building simply for having faith XYZ.
It goes against the design philosophy of tying religious features to tenets and doctrines in a modular way.

On one hand, it does not make sense that you can build breweries if you are a catholic, but not if you are one of its heresies.
On the other hand, there are some balance concerns.
Even if you consider this useful building as a minor addition for fun, I noticed that CK developers tend to add more of these minor additions for Catholics. Overtime, this tends to make the Catholics very powerful because these minor additions add up.

For example, Holy Fury of CKII added a lot of features for Catholics, and Catholics became super powerful.
I think part of the reason that the "Holy Fury Crusade" mechanics were linked to tenets and doctrines in CK3 instead was to address this issue.

Hence, please consider linking the availability of the brewery buildings to tenets instead of just being Catholics.
 
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