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CK2 - Dev Diary #121 - Court Improvements

Hello! In this dev diary we will present some changes we have made to the court system. Court Management is an important part of the CK2 experience, and currently there are several code pruning mechanisms that curtail court size, making characters die more frequently when the court grows too big. Now court management has been made more interesting by, for example, lowering the aggressive pruning for player courts, creating expenses/benefits associated with a Large Court, court flavored events using the characters of the court, etc. The intention of these changes is to make the system more interactive and interesting.


ck2_15.png

The court limit as shown in the interface.


Your court will now have a size limit depending on your tier, presented in the interface (see picture above). It’s possible to influence this limit by, for example, investing in majesty tech. We have also removed prisoners from the court-tab to make the shown courtiers more relevant.


ck2_18.png

Example of expenses for a big court (can be turned off through a game rule).


To bring life to the courts, we have added some maintenance events that will give your courtiers more of a life behind the scenes, making them more interesting and fun characters by giving them nicknames, modifiers, and skills.

ck2_16.png

Give a courtier a nickname.


We’ve also made sure that any courtier “randomly” picked for generic content is more likely to be someone with good (or at least interesting) skills, a cool minor title, an interesting relationship, etc. This is done by using a scripted score value that takes into account traits, opinions, and modifiers.


We hope that you’ll have fun with this small new feature, and thank you for reading!
 
With this incoming, can we have some further control over when characters can enter your court, either as game rules or ingame decisions? I've noticed that when you revoke land from your vassals, their courtiers often end up in your court, as do the spouses of prisoners whose liege loses all their titles. I've had my court balloon by hundreds of characters in a span of a few years due to these unwanted visitors, and I usually don't even notice they're there until they start getting up to some mischief, like plotting the death of my heirs. -_-

EDIT: Don't ask me what's going on with my account. I relinked my Steam account and something went awry, I guess. >_>
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Yes, yes, yes! Love this, so glad it's happening, very excited for this feature! Love stuff that will make my court actually matter a bit more and give some of those random characters a bit of ... well ... character.
 
Could we please get the option to "sell into slavery" orphaned or abandoned children in our court?

It would be a nice way to make a little extra money while keeping the court neat and trim.
 
Children should not count towards the court limit as a full person, because there is no simple way to ask them to leave court. Also they don't cost as much to maintain.

Maybe making children count as a fraction of a courtier (say 1/4), or having a separate extra capacity for children, would make sense without lifting limits on children entirely.
indeed, and this could add the need to assign/hire some sort of caretaker for the children to boost the capacity for children, as well as events for them growing up.
 
not a fan as someone who plans on conquering the world I like to foster dynasties from the beginning of the game to make sure they have children to carry on even if I can't grant them land right away, this usually leads to a massive court and I do not like the idea of limiting it. I also like the culling mechanic for acquiring money, find a courtier thats stolen 100 gold from their leige, invite them to court, usually with a bribe, if your court is already large they tend to die right away and you end up with a massive payoff to your bribe investment.

EDIT: I see theres a game rule, but, as all things are with this game, I bet if it's set to "off" it will disable achievments
 
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Csn you please work on some better court page instead of the plain small list... something more fancy and if you want to enlarge court gameplay which i would love to see, maybe you can add some intrige or faction related events (people at the court may or may not be rulers but they all want power and probably have an opinion about factions) and of course more day to day life activities... (btw giving a nickname is not the most impressive event.... just saying)
 
Please introduce some way to spawn lowborn people. Because there's no way to spawn them, "Lowborn" is currently the most valuable house in the game aside from your own, and that's silly.
 
Any chance we might see the additon of a Holdinggfx parameter in cultures for modding's sake, It would be really cool to be able to tweak which cultures get which architectures on their icons without having to go always find and fiddle with the right .gfx file.
 
Speaking of modding, do you intend to revisit Great Works to get the converting feature you thought about working or give modders the ability to downgrade or completely destroy them?
The conversion feature is not likely to happen any time soon I think. It needs design (both gameplay and UX), programming and content support so it would take away too much resources from our other priorities.

Adding more script support for Great Works has been on the programming TODO-list for this patch and we have done some work on it. Unfortunately, a lot of mod support is likely to be missing in the upcoming patch as well, as we have been prioritizing bugfixes over modding support. I hope to get some time to rectify this before the patch, but I can make no promises.
 
kewl
but does it affect health and fertility if turned off?

Does disabling the limit prevent achievements?

The game rule does not affect the health and fertility modifiers.
It also doesn't affect achievements. The reason for this is that the rule only restores the previous functionality and that it doesn't change the difficulty too much.
 
The game rule does not affect the health and fertility modifiers.
It also doesn't affect achievements. The reason for this is that the rule only restores the previous functionality and that it doesn't change the difficulty too much.

If it does not affect the health and fertility modifiers, then what does it do exactly? Just disable court expenses?

In any case, could we please have a game rule that completely disables the health and fertility modifiers?
 
This is beautiful. I absolutely want this as soon as plausible.
 
I notice the game rule is a flat yes/no. Can we have a double capacity option as well that doubles the base number. So for example, kings would get 48 as a base.

I also want to second the opinion that this should not be affected by majesty, but rather by Noble Customs or City Customs based on gov't type.
 
The game rule does not affect the health and fertility modifiers.
It also doesn't affect achievements. The reason for this is that the rule only restores the previous functionality and that it doesn't change the difficulty too much.

Oh, you answered the achievement question. That's too bad, as it means I can't use another unnecessarily large picture to answer...
 
I dont know if someone asked, or it had been stated earlier (I could not find it though) - Are these changes coming in a patch, or in a future DLC? And if it is a patch, is there then any time for when we can expect it?
I really dont want to start a new game up, if something is just around the corner.
 
Oh, you answered the achievement question. That's too bad, as it means I can't use another unnecessarily large picture to answer...
You can always use unnecessarily large pictures to answer questions, especially if they reveal details about future plans *hint-hint* :D
 
Will the penalty for asking courtiers to leave be removed?
I agree!

Its MY court. At least paradox should make it where NO ONE can join my court without my permission. I am tired of every possessed, excommunicated, heretic, lunatic, dimwitted, looser jerk in the world appearing at my court with ZERO notice. Then I have to waste my prestige (I forget it might be piety) telling them to leave. I NEVER said they could stay in the first place. As it stands now dealing with these is tedious and boring.
 
Also I really like the fact that refugees randomly come to court, I know some people don't but if we could just leave that as is that would be great.

I do think it shouldn't cost 5 prestige to ask people to leave, but that's not really that big a deal.

I think one thing that still needs to be addressed is parents leaving court but leaving their children behind.

I do NOT like people showing up WITHOUT NOTICE or PERMISSION and sucking at my royal teat. I like it even less when they leave their slack witted ugly spawn behind and I am stuck feeding and educating it. Dealing with all these free loaders makes a larger realm boring and tedious and is NOT fun