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Dev Diary #93 - Venetian Guile

Dev Diary #93 - Venetian Guile


Hello there!

We’re closing in on the end of July, and we are on to the fourth of the five Dev Diaries we are doing over summer. For this week, we are going to take a look at three of the five Special Crusades we are doing for Holy Fury. First of we are going to take a look at the reworked Shepherds’ Crusade, then on to the Children’s Crusade some of you might have seen in the PDXCon stream, and then finally to the Fourth Crusade events.

As always, keep in mind that things might be changed before the release of Holy Fury. For the Shepherds’ Crusade to be enabled you will have to own Sons of Abraham, and for the two other you will need the Holy Fury DLC.

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The Shepherds’ Crusade has been broken for quite a while, so we have ripped out the old events entirely, and rewritten the whole chain. With Holy Fury, a Shepherds’ Crusade has a chance to start a couple of years after a failed normal Crusade. It will start somewhere in Catholic Europe, and will usually target either a Kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula, or Jerusalem.

As the Shepherds’ Crusade army moves across the map towards its location, it will start picking up soldiers along the way, potentially getting into conflict with the local lords, trying to kick out the Jews, or ask local Lords for aid in their Crusade.

Who knows, once in a blue moon they might actually manage to win!

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The Children’s Crusade is a special one-time event chain that can happen at any point after the Pope has announced the need to reclaim the Holy Land.

If Jerusalem is held by infidels, a landless child in Europe might decide to pick up arms and start his own little Crusade, gathering fellow Catholics and traveling all the way to the Holy Land.

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The Children’s Crusade will move from court to court, demanding troops and resources from local rulers, and gathering zealous commanders and disgruntled underage courtiers along the way.

As a ruler hosting the Children’s Crusade, you will be able to support or hinder their efforts, increasing the amount of troops and morale that they will receive once they reach Jerusalem, forcing their travel to a premature end, or, if you are feeling particularly virtuous, deciding to become their sponsor.

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Becoming a sponsor allows a ruler to follow this special Crusade more closely, to invest in it on multiple occasions during its travel, and actively join the Children as allies in the war against the infidels if they manage to reach the Holy Land.

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Once the Children reach their target, they will spawn an army whose strength, size and composition will change depending on how their travel went and declare war to the current holder of Jerusalem. In the unlikely chance that they succeed, the leader of the Crusade will take over, and convert and vassalize all the rulers in the area.

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As some of you saw, one of our pictures for the Steam page for Holy Fury, was the Crusade for Orthodox Thrace. In other words, a set of Fourth Crusade events. These events have a chance to happen at every Crusade, if the Byzantine Empire is alive and doing well, holding the core lands of Constantinople.

A set of narrative events will happen, where a claimant for the Byzantine Throne will leave the court of the Emperor, and find a Catholic Merchant Lord to support their claims. With enough gold and the potential for plunder ahead, the Catholics will be swayed to change the course for Constantinople.

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If the Catholics could come around, and actually win the Crusade against the Byzantines, there will not be a normal distribution of titles, but rather a special Fourth Crusade one.

First of, the Byzantine Empire will be no more. The old Emperor will relocate to any land outside of Thrace, if they had any, and get a temporary titular Empire title. The winner of the Crusade will receive the Latin Empire, taking the lands of Thrace, and a special bloodline.

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The old direct vassals of the Byzantine Empire will be freed. Any ruler of Trebizond might be given the Kingdom of Trebizond title, and there might also be another ruler taking up the King tier title, to simulate the Despotate of Epirus.

After the fall of the old Empire, a new decision will open up for Christians of the Byzantine Culture group, to restore the old Byzantine Empire. If you hold all of the core lands around Constantinople, and have a lot of prestige, you can restore the Empire and start recreating the Byzantium of old. Well… At least if you can remove those pesky Latins from the rightful Greek lands of Thrace.

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And of course, rules has been added for all the different kind of Crusades, so people are free to enable or disable them as they want.

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That was all for this week! I hope you enjoyed reading about the rise and fall of- Wait… That’s wrong. The fall and rise of Byzantium, there we go!

Next week we will be talking about the Northern Crusade, and the Reconquista of Iberia. So I hope I’ll see of you for the final rogue Dev Diary of the summer!
 
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Good changes. I love it.
But also I'm afraid. No more byzantine province, no buff orthodox religion. Seljuk is still a big blob, Sunni and Shia caliph declare jihad for anatolia, and now 4th crusade.
AI byzantine could endure?

Byzantines always blob and endure in my play throughs. These won't happen all at the same time infact some of them won't happen. You can make a parallel to Muslims too. Mongols, AI terrible at handling Decadence, Crusades, Crusade Buff, Byzantine empire neighbors.
 
Good changes. I love it.
But also I'm afraid. No more byzantine province, no buff orthodox religion. Seljuk is still a big blob, Sunni and Shia caliph declare jihad for anatolia, and now 4th crusade.
AI byzantine could endure?

Did historical ERE endure?
 
Good changes. I love it.
But also I'm afraid. No more byzantine province, no buff orthodox religion. Seljuk is still a big blob, Sunni and Shia caliph declare jihad for anatolia, and now 4th crusade.
AI byzantine could endure?

As always, keep in mind that things might be changed before the release of Holy Fury.

There has been some more provinces added in Georgia, as part of the Steppe map update. Hopefully we will have time to add some more in Greece and Anatolia as well, but not making any promises here.
 
Can the Fourth Crusade still happen if the Byzantines are Catholic?
 
Simply fantastic. I really like the 4th Crusade events! Will the leaders of the 4th crusade be excommunicated (as they historically were)?

Regarding the Albigensian crusade, although it could be handled in-game as a crusade against heretics using the current system, some special events would be helpful (say triggered by any crusade against heretics) to simulate the blatant land grabbing undertaken by the crusaders against neighboring Catholics. You would also need an event giving neighboring Catholic kings the chance to join the war against the crusaders (simulating the intervention by the King of Aragon). Finally, should the crusaders win, an event should cause an uprising led by the displaced lords to regain their land.
 
The Latin empire should be able to form the byzantine empire too. They didn't call themselves the Latin empire after all. They should have a decision after they have conquered all other Byzantine successors to become the Byzantine empire.
 
This expansion just gets better and better. Really excited! Cant wait to create the Latin Empire!

Reading all of this features and expanded maps makes me wonder if this is ck2 last hurrah? If it is what a hurrah that would be! But secretely hoping that well get even more content in the future.
 
Given that the 'Mend the Schism' decision is still tied to the Byzantine Empire last I checked, will the ruler of the Latin Empire be able to do the same should they conquer the correct territories? It's a little frustrating that this isn't available.

* to Catholic leaders.

I'm really stoked for Holy Fury, though.
 
Now that more focus is being paid to crusades, could we *please* be allowed to board our co-belligerents' ships? That has always been a huge source of frustration
 
The Latin empire should be able to form the byzantine empire too. They didn't call themselves the Latin empire after all. They should have a decision after they have conquered all other Byzantine successors to become the Byzantine empire.

And the Byzantine Empire didn’t call themselves the Byzantines. They called themselves the Romans.

It’s already been stated by the dev team that they generally use English historiography when naming states. Not what the states actually called themselves.
 
Good changes. I love it.
But also I'm afraid. No more byzantine province, no buff orthodox religion. Seljuk is still a big blob, Sunni and Shia caliph declare jihad for anatolia, and now 4th crusade.
AI byzantine could endure?

Isn't that just absolutely great? If anything, he need more aggressive bolghars and iconoclasm to truly experience what it is like to be a Basileus. But I'm curious to see how the AI will handle it as well.
 
It's just me that dropped a tear as to how beutiful the artwork and the text is for those events of the childrem's crusade?
 
Totally Awesome!

Just one question: it will be possible to form the Latin Empire in the "old way"?
 
This is strongly influencing my decision to go for an early 1200's start date to play out a true Fourth Crusade scenario...
 
I think there needs to be a way for Crusading armies to temporarily turn hostile and raid the land they're walking through. Because in reality I think they often did that and caused a lot of problems for the local population and rulers. Also, historically it was a Byzantine plea for help that caused the Crusades and they expected the Crusaders to return the land they conquered to the Byzantine Empire. However, they did not do this in most if not all cases. Will this reality be modeled in the game?
 
The last part should be modeled by the dynamic crusader kingdoms. Any land occupied by the crusaders outside of the main crusade target will split off into smaller independent kingdoms ruled by some of the crusader participants.