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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!
 
I am, like many other people I think, perfectly fine with China in CK2 but I've two conditions:
- I think that everyone agree with that, the game needs a fantastic optimization or upgrade before that to happen.
- India is already poorly done, with badly modeled governement forms, religions and even borders (not that they don't have the correct borders - but many lands were just not feudal, and some of the "counties" in CK2 India had simply no rulers, and some didn't even have people ! They were jungles !). And many people asking for China probably don't even play in India... So if we are to get China, we need proper mechanisms for laws, governments and religions. And even combat. And a full set of new events (again, the indian-specific events are ridiculously few).

I would prefer an overhaul of what is already in game. A proper trait system (and not pick-only-the-good-ones), more culture-specific events, a proper law/doctrines system (currently even the relations with the Pope are roughly done through one or two laws and a few events... Many of us probably know that the papal influence was more than that) with parliaments and councils, things like that. Something that really brings life to CK2.

That's a legitimate concern. I myself am quite worried about historical accuracy. It's not so much that the info isn't there, it's just all untranslated in Chinese. So I'd be fine if they just left it for CK3 or at least until they have enough preparation to release it. China was relatively centralized compared to the rest of the world. Then again it's hilarious how angry people get just reading about China on these forums.
 
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Love all the ideas here but I have 2 questions. Firstly will the mongols have an event/decision which improves the lucrativity of the silk road by reestablishing it in the east? Without china the silk road would still be attractive to control however it wouldn't be event close to what it was historically. Second I would like to know if there will be some events to represent the Norman conquests and William 'the bastard'. These never seem to happen in normal gameplay and it is rather disappointing as nether norman or english culture ever appear in my games unless I personally set about recreating history.
 
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Love all the ideas here but I have 2 questions. Firstly will the mongols have an event/decision which improves the lucrativity of the silk road by reestablishing it in the east? Without china the silk road would still be attractive to control however it wouldn't be event close to what it was historically. Second I would like to know if there will be some events to represent the Norman conquests and William 'the bastard'. These never seem to happen in normal gameplay and it is rather disappointing as nether norman or english culture ever appear in my games unless I personally set about recreating history.

Have to wait untill next week, topics are cultures, maps and events.

Hopefully the English melting pot event will have looser restrictions.
 
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Love all the ideas here but I have 2 questions. Firstly will the mongols have an event/decision which improves the lucrativity of the silk road by reestablishing it in the east? Without china the silk road would still be attractive to control however it wouldn't be event close to what it was historically. Second I would like to know if there will be some events to represent the Norman conquests and William 'the bastard'. These never seem to happen in normal gameplay and it is rather disappointing as nether norman or english culture ever appear in my games unless I personally set about recreating history.
There's no non-railroading way to have a William the Bastard like character appear and attack England. Charlemagne already added too much railroading, doing something like this would be ridiculous.
 
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Have to wait untill next week, topics are cultures, maps and events.

Hopefully the English melting pot event will have looser restrictions.
The English Melting pot should be activated if french/norman + anglosaxon no matter the year.
 
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Really?

The norse seem to over run England pretty consistnently in those two starts as is.

If anything hopefully letting vikings settle will help england survive.
It probably won't mainly because there is no King of England at these starts, and they said most adventurers won't settle for anything short of a duchy, so Scotland will be ok, but Ireland and England might still have some trouble

This new system will likely change the dynamic a bit, I think Norse invasions will be a bit stronger, but British rulers might have some more reasonable outs as well, hopefully pacifying viking to a degree by incorporating them into the realm, although you might have to deal with wrong culture wrong religion vassals for a while instead
 
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I assume the widukind rebellion will now be handled by an adventurer? It was always as much raiding as rebellion.
 
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It probably won't mainly because there is no King of England at these starts, and they said most adventurers won't settle for anything short of a duchy, so Scotland will be ok, but Ireland and England might still have some trouble

This new system will likely change the dynamic a bit, I think Norse invasions will be a bit stronger, but British rulers might have some more reasonable outs as well, hopefully pacifying viking to a degree by incorporating them into the realm, although you might have to deal with wrong culture wrong religion vassals for a while instead
Ambitious adventurers won't settle for less than a duchy. And the problem isn't really that norse adventurers conquer England the problem is that they stay norse.
 
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Ambitious adventurers won't settle for less than a duchy. And the problem isn't really that norse adventurers conquer England the problem is that they stay norse.
I mean it would be interesting if they became a new culture the way most Norse cultures become something else but what would u suggest? I feel like if they just went Anglo Saxon than we would sort of end being unable to tell who people were descended from without tearing through family tree, which is something I hate about cultural conversion in this game.

I have seen Norwegian Norsemen invade Arabia, but if they turn Sunni and Bedouin would I even have realized they were suppose to be Nordic once?
 
I mean it would be interesting if they became a new culture the way most Norse cultures become something else but what would u suggest? I feel like if they just went Anglo Saxon than we would sort of end being unable to tell who people were descended from without tearing through family tree, which is something I hate about cultural conversion in this game.

I have seen Norwegian Norsemen invade Arabia, but if they turn Sunni and Bedouin would I even have realized they were suppose to be Nordic once?
Yeah. Their ethnicity.
 
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There's no non-railroading way to have a William the Bastard like character appear and attack England. Charlemagne already added too much railroading, doing something like this would be ridiculous.

Well, it happened partially accidentally to me in my current game :
- Charlemagne start
- I started as norse from swijod, wanted to build something like rus and normandy
- raided and started to attack england, ireland, scotland, picked a few couties here and there, got thrown out of england
- I grabbed normandy, established a duke there (the karlings converted to islam sometime later), then...
- I got distracted trying to establish a Rus bridgehead, tribal was really hard to break over there
- I got distracted further by a botched series of successions, during which through gavelking inheritance I lost the control of normandy early on
- I got further distracted by an opportunity to "reform norse religion"
- I eventually noticed that england had a king of my familly, a descendant of the duke of normandy (which had been recovered by the muslism Karlings by then)
- several hundred years later england is still controlled by "my blood" (and I finally managed to break the "muslism france")
 
Can we also have the "Fur Road" between Scandinavia and the Samanid and Byzantine Empires as well as the Abbasid Caliphate? The Russian River System would be great for this. Vast amounts of Fur, Slaves and Silver traveled these routes during the Viking Age and it would be great to see that in game right along side the Silk Road.
This plz PDS, we need to represent glorious Rus' trade somehow:

800px-Varangian_routes.png
 
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I would love to be able to start my game as a raiding adventurer, then getting a foreign ruler to settle me with land, any chance of that happening in the future?

It would also be cool that if you were depressed and an adventurer as a ruler that you could abandon your rulership to adventure more.
 
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I mean it would be interesting if they became a new culture the way most Norse cultures become something else but what would u suggest? I feel like if they just went Anglo Saxon than we would sort of end being unable to tell who people were descended from without tearing through family tree, which is something I hate about cultural conversion in this game.

I have seen Norwegian Norsemen invade Arabia, but if they turn Sunni and Bedouin would I even have realized they were suppose to be Nordic once?

But they did become anglosaxon. The vikings were suckers for adopting the local cultures.
 
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There is a major part of the Silk Road missing, where is the part of the route that ran along the Gangetic Plain and ended in Bengal?

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Please Paradox, add it to the game. It played a major part in Indian trade system even after the end of the Silk Road with the Mongol Empire, and it formed the basis of the Mughal-Safavid imperial trade later on. A major reason for huge prosperity of some cities like Kalinga, Tamralipti and the many others northwards in the Gangetic Plain like Lahore, Delhi, Kanyakubja, Pataliputra, Tamralipti, Mathura, Agra, Varanasi and others, was the Silk Road that ran throughout the northern part of India (southern provinces traded by sea).

Not to mention that Buddhism was spread westwards to Afghanistan and then ultimately China by the same road running through the Gangetic Plain.

The rest of the game seems awesome, I am extremely eager for it. But please add this small and historical thing.
 
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