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Hi all! I am Karolus Magnus, programmer at Crusader Kings II. Now is finally the time for my first dev diary! Today I will be talking about the Silk Road and Raiding Adventurers.

With Horse Lords we are adding in an addition to the trade system which is the major trade route of the Silk Road that stretched all the way from Cathay to the Italian States. It does not require you to be a Patrician or Republic however to utilize this system. As long as you own the provinces yourself you are allowed to build Trade Posts along the trade route no matter what government form you are. You can upgrade these trade posts to make the Silk Road worth even more.

dd_trade_post.jpg

However the Silk Road is much more dangerous to deal with than normal coastal trade posts as it relies on safe passage through land. If a war breaks out and a part of the trade route is caught in the conflict, the trade will be cut from that province and onwards for that branch. The trade will instead go through any other branch and result in them receiving more of the trade than they normally would. The Silk route can be viewed from the Economic mapmode but also in more detail from the Trade zone mapmode.

dd_trade_route.jpg

Next feature is Raiding Adventurers. This system was made to better represent the Normans in Northern France and Sicily in how they settled in foreign land. It is also used for nomads who lose their home. The Germanic raiding adventurers spawn with ships, but even nomads who do not get ships can travel far, as these raiders unlike others can raid in any province (except the provinces of the one who conquered your home lands).

Raiding adventurers will use the money they gain from raiding to recruit more troops, and when they have grown to a certain level, they will try to become landed. A ruler can offer to settle these raiding adventurers, giving them coastal or border provinces. They might however refuse to be settled if they do not like the lands that you are offering. Ambitious raiding adventurers will usually not be settled unless they are given a duchy. If no such offer is made however, they will eventually start a war on one of the rulers they have raided, targeting a duchy.

dd_settle.jpg


The same Settle Adventurer interaction can be used to settle the dynamic mercenaries we already covered, if you have managed to make them your friend. Settled raiding adventurers will become Feudal or Iqta depending on their religion, and also be disinherited from the nomad realm from which they came from.

One of the benefits of settling a raiding adventurer is that the provinces that are given away will be blocked from raided again in the near future.

dd_settled.jpg

Raiding adventurers that do not spawn from being conquered as well as dynamic mercenaries will get the Adventurer trait that makes the character much more ambitious and military capable. So even if they give you several benefits to settle, they can become dangerous for your future generations.

dd_adventurer.jpg


That's all for this week! Next week we are going to go through map and culture revisions and new events!
 
Great additions!
Honestly, with these mechanics, I see almost no reason why they wouldn't be able to do a Dark Ages expansion covering the barbarian breakup of the Roman Empire.
Yeah. Their only stated reason why not to is "the rise of Islam is too hard to do." If they made a Fall of Rome DLC then all of the medieval era would be finally represented!! It could come with an overhaul of the technology system :)
What the new mechanics prove, is that a standalone Dark Ages game could be made, or that CK2 could be changed so that there are two different timelines in one. Honestly, the same game covering 1066 - 1337 with playable bookmarks and 476 - 769 with playable bookmarks is not viable, for many reasons. While you can keep the both playable, the end period and later bookmarks will inevitably be inaccurate. So either we wait on a PDS game covering the timeframe and rely on mods for the time being, or we choose: playable endgame? good mechanics for the endgame? or broken endgame and semi-functional dark ages? With these mechanics, the only things it does is to open up for new modding possibilities around the period, which I'm very happy for!
 
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Thanks to @Karolus Magnus for answering the questions so far. Another one I have:

Groogy has said that adventurers won't be playable in vanilla, but is this moddable? As of now, you can mod your way into playing landless characters, although it's buggy (if the title you use has a capital defined in landed_titles, that will count as your capital, otherwise, ANY/ALL (i.e. nowhere) will count as capital. I assume from your earlier comments that this is totally gone and that any character who own no province will be using its current location for troop-spawning, diplo-range, etc. Is this right? Or is it dependent on some property of the titles the adventurers use? I.e. is it having the location=capital when landless tied with unplayability? It is specially crucial for me since I've been working in a landless mod for a while now

I did some further investigation and I was wrong with the diplo range. That has not been changed. But the troop-spawning effect has been improved so if the location is invalid when spawning a unit, it will try to find another unit owned by the same character on the map and spawn them there.

We have unfortunately not added any mod support for playing as landless characters, adventurers included.
 
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We have unfortunately not added any mod support for playing as landless characters, adventurers included.
Sorry, I'm a little confused, didn't Doomdark state in the first Horse Lords Dev Diary that Nomads can indeed be playable landless under certain circumstances? Unless I read this wrong:
Should a horde lose its last province, the tribe will still exist, and may use its remaining armies to conquer another land in which to settle.
 
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Sorry, I'm a little confused, didn't Doomdark state in the first Horse Lords Dev Diary that Nomads can indeed be playable landless under certain circumstances? Unless I read this wrong:

From what I get from dev responses, AI characters will go landless (like adventurers) instead of becoming courtiers from someone else. For characters, I guess if you loss your last land you jump to playing your heir if he is landless, or else you get a Game Over.

I did some further investigation and I was wrong with the diplo range. That has not been changed. But the troop-spawning effect has been improved so if the location is invalid when spawning a unit, it will try to find another unit owned by the same character on the map and spawn them there.

We have unfortunately not added any mod support for playing as landless characters, adventurers included.

That's sad, but I hope for a change in the future, if we're lucky. Anyway, if you haven't changed the diplo range, how will it work for characters without provinces?
 
From what I get from dev responses, AI characters will go landless (like adventurers) instead of becoming courtiers from someone else. For characters, I guess if you loss your last land you jump to playing your heir if he is landless, or else you get a Game Over.
You jump to playing your heir if he is landed, if not you get a game over, but your character stays ingame as an adventurer AI. Or that is at least how I understood it.
 
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From what I get from dev responses, AI characters will go landless (like adventurers) instead of becoming courtiers from someone else. For characters, I guess if you loss your last land you jump to playing your heir if he is landless, or else you get a Game Over.
That'd be a little sad, but from what I've read in the first Horse Lord diary, taking aside the Adventurers, the Khagan himself seemed like he would continue to be in charge even after being made landless, as long as he still had troops, so it gave me the idea that, as a nomad, you'd still have no game over in that circumstance and could still continue to play to gain land back, as a landless character.
 
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Sorry I was a bit unclear about that. They will get the Kingdom of Hungary if settled in the Carpathian basin only. What I meant was that even if a nomad should in some cases get a duchy when becoming feudal, they will always get the kingdom if it is in the Carpathian basin.

Not all provinces change culture. But some do. The capital will change culture, and a number of provinces depending on your civilian population will as well.

This clarification is a taste of the next DD with regards to culture isn't it. Again, thank you for taking the time to reply and clarify @Karolus Magnus. We might have disagreements in the details but the big-picture and over-all vision is only known by your team and is conveyed to us.
 
Great additions!


What the new mechanics prove, is that a standalone Dark Ages game could be made, or that CK2 could be changed so that there are two different timelines in one. Honestly, the same game covering 1066 - 1337 with playable bookmarks and 476 - 769 with playable bookmarks is not viable, for many reasons. While you can keep the both playable, the end period and later bookmarks will inevitably be inaccurate. So either we wait on a PDS game covering the timeframe and rely on mods for the time being, or we choose: playable endgame? good mechanics for the endgame? or broken endgame and semi-functional dark ages? With these mechanics, the only things it does is to open up for new modding possibilities around the period, which I'm very happy for!

don't mean to be awkward but why is it not feasible to go from 476 to say 1453? You say the game will end up inaccurate but doesn't every game? The whole point in playing is to change history and so long as events are in there that did actually happen are fired when appropiate then it would be awesome no?
 
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Because we can't possibly make every alternate scenario as complex as the historical ones. And no its not about changing history for everyone. It's also about understanding it, and living it.
 
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So if you lose your last piece of land/pasture, your game is over? A bit disappointed to be true, if this is true, because I understood otherwise from an earlier dev diary. In that case it would have been almost a new campaign for me! Imagine that you pack all your horses, cattle, tents, women and children etc. on the go and try to find another homeland somewhere else, until the last of your fighting men dies.

But it will still be nice to see AI doing it, I guess, even if we can't experience it by ourselves.
 
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I did some further investigation and I was wrong with the diplo range. That has not been changed. But the troop-spawning effect has been improved so if the location is invalid when spawning a unit, it will try to find another unit owned by the same character on the map and spawn them there.

We have unfortunately not added any mod support for playing as landless characters, adventurers included.
Groogy mentioned in another thread it's possible for the player to abandon their last province and become completely nomadic. Is this still the case?
 
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Because we can't possibly make every alternate scenario as complex as the historical ones. And no its not about changing history for everyone. It's also about understanding it, and living it.
I doubt you could make them as complex as historical ones even if you wanted to but there are plenty of mods out there that do the later stuff, could this not be joined to your earlier stuff so to make a mega mod? What I meant by changing history is that you have some understanding of what you are changing.
 
They will. In fact all nomads that settle will get event troops depending on how many empty holdings they abandon in this process.
Oh that's the opposite of what I was hoping for. I hope you guys balance it well so they're not OP like settled Hungary.
 
don't mean to be awkward but why is it not feasible to go from 476 to say 1453? You say the game will end up inaccurate but doesn't every game? The whole point in playing is to change history and so long as events are in there that did actually happen are fired when appropiate then it would be awesome no?
The things is that with those 1000 years, it will be impossible to have the kind of events that fired in 476 modelled in the same way as those that fired in 1066. I'm not talking about how things evolve (and even that will not be accurate as the tools that the rulers and people of the time had won't be accessible due to using the 1066-system), I'm talking about the base mechanic present before you even unpause the game. The core.
 
So the biggest thing that's got me worried is that there's no indication that cities will exist in nomadic lands. This is hilariously immersion-breaking in the current tribal setup, so it seemed an obvious priority to be fixed in this expansion.
Keeps like Sarkel could perhaps be taken care of by the fort system, but for major cities of the time like Itil, Bolghar, Kashgar and so many others to just not exist is absurd.
All major nomadic confederations built cities to house merchants and artisans and consolidate their power, and I don't feel the unique capital mechanics will be an equivalent.
A dev comment on this would do a great deal for my peace of mind, or my expectations.
Greatly looking forward to this expansion either way.
 
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