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CK3: Tours and Tournaments - The Vision

Greetings!

Come one, come all! The grand tournament awaits your attendance - your steeds have been readied and your entourage assembled for the journey ahead! It’s time to show the world your graciousness as host and worth in the arena… but to get there, we’re better off routing our journey around the treacherous mountain passes of Stipon, as I hear they’ve been crawling with highwaymen since your, ahem, dalliance with Duke Andronikos’ wife during his son's wedding. Then there’s the matter of your unruly vassals: perhaps it’s time for a royal tour?

The life of a ruler was always active - there were many things to attend to, and most courts at the time were itinerant, roaming from place to place constantly. Tours and Tournaments aims to give rulers plenty of things to do, especially during times of peace, by introducing new systems of Travel and Grand Activities!

As mentioned in the Floorplan Dev Diary, we want to reinforce the connection between character and map - after all, the game is played on a beautiful medieval map, and no longer will the only time your ruler leaves the safety of their capital be when you’re at war. There’s an entire world out there to explore, filled with both great opportunities and adventurous obstacles.

By assembling an entourage, selecting options for your travel, and hiring a caravan master, you are ready to set out on the road and travel to activities across the world. The Travel system is an integral part of activities, with both the host and guests traveling to reach them - creating a stronger feeling of place as you see your route being plotted and your character moving directly on the map.
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[Image: The Duke of Bohemia setting out on a Tour]

So what are these activities you can travel to, you ask? There’s plenty - firstly we’ve updated and revamped Feasts, Hunts, and Pilgrimages completely - the bread-and-butter of activities. There’s now a reason to hunt in a specific forest within your domain, as a ferocious wolf or legendary stag might have been spotted there - or a reason to hold a feast in a holding with leisure palaces, as you might need to impress a particularly unruly vassal. Pilgrimages will now be epic journeys, potentially taking years if you’re going far - making it necessary for a regent to rule in your stead. All activities have dedicated interfaces with easily-accessible information and beautiful art to set the scene.

Of course, there are Grand activities that are even more impactful - each of them different in their own magnificent way! They have Options and Intents which affect rewards and what type of content you might encounter. Our aim is to make each activity have a clear purpose and be interesting in its own right, therefore we chose to make Grand Tournaments, Grand Tours, and Grand Weddings - three vastly different activities with vastly different executions and purposes!
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[Image: Example of Activity Types, initial step]

Grand Tournaments are where you go to test your mettle: spectacles to be announced far and wide, with rewards ranging from precious trinkets to fabulous prizes! Grand Tournaments aren’t only for martially-inclined characters - while there are contests such as melees and jousts, there are also more cerebral ones such as recitals or erudite board games. You can join your knights in slippery wrestling, eagle-eyed archery, dangerous horse racing, and vicious team melees - all clad in gleaming armor brandishing your coat of arms for the masses to see! Participating and winning in these contests will see your characters and knights grow in skill and receive prizes; living the life of a frequent tournament-goer is a valid path to take. Exploring the tournament Locale and choosing the right Intents might help you out in other ways as well, be it finding friends or dispatching rivals. If you’re in need of renown, hosting tournaments yourself will grow your standing significantly, as rulers from foreign realms come flocking to the fateful grounds, eager to compete!
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[Image: Snapshot of part of the Tournament UI. Tournaments, unlike other Grand Activities, have an extra special interface - more on that in the Tournaments Dev Diary]

Grand Tours see you assemble your entire court and set out to visit vassals in your realm - an activity commonly undertaken by medieval rulers. This is a way to assert your overlordship, while also enjoying the hospitality your vassals have to offer. There are various paths to take: Intimidation, Majesty, or Taxation, all affecting the rewards and opinions of your vassals. At its core, Tours are a tool for realm stability - and something a newly-ascended ruler should undertake quite early to avoid factions and revolts. You also get to choose between ways of approaching your vassals individually; you might want to tour the grounds, observe a cultural festival, or simply have a private dinner hosted for you.

Grand Weddings allow you to marry above your station… if you’re willing to pay the cost! They also provide ample opportunity for diplomatic shenanigans, such as impressing neighboring rulers into becoming vassals, forming hard-to-get alliances, or creating favorable matches for your children. Of course, these spectacles come with everything you’d expect out of a medieval ceremony - revelries, drama, and even a bedding ritual at the end. Or you can invite a group of mercenaries to color the halls crimson with the blood of the other House, should you desire it.
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[Image: Planning a Grand Wedding]

As some of you managed to cleverly figure out, there’s also a brand-new regency system where we’ve made sure that it’s both interesting to have and to be a regent. Loyal regents help you by dutifully fulfilling their Mandates, and being the regent of your liege gives you opportunities to (with varying degrees of bloodshed) seize the throne for yourself, should you be doing a “good” job.

There’s also a myriad of other changes which we’ll go into in future dev diaries - smaller systemic updates to buildings, knights, vassal opinions, and so on - all to support a more interesting and living map, where your choices matter more.

So take to the road, ruler - great opportunities await!

Tours and Tournaments will be released in late spring, and until the release we will have weekly Dev Diaries.

Don’t forget to wishlist:
Wishlist on Steam
Microsoft Store

Watch the trailer here!
 
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Yeah, struggles were supposed to be moddable too but I've seen nothing in terms of mods expanding them to other areas except for the Struggle for Britannia mod that is now defunct and hasn't been updated since September. I've been holding out on some talented modder doing something with the system if PDX won't, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
Striggle mechanics is not flexible. It is limited to a certain area, list of cultures and religions. And it has to be defined statically and loaded with the rest of the game. It would be great mechanics if struggles were created and started dynamically, in place, when game founds that a certain region has too many competitors.
 
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One small note on pilgrimages I hope they do not go too mad on the timescales. In the 12th century it only took a well connected servant of the King about 3 weeks to get to Rome from England. Dover>Calais, on foot via France through the Alps down through Romagna. Now I imagine plenty of things could go wrong or you could try do it cheaply and it could take a couple months. Hopefully there is plenty of room for distractions, 'quests', illness and getting lost or imprisoned. But if I need to see the Pope in a hurry and nothign goes wrong, a month or so seems legit, not half a year. Going to the Holy Land....now that should be a real spin of the wheel.
 
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This is exactly the kind of additional content I want for this game. A character based game should have role playing systems like this. I'm especially looking forward to seeing how these new systems interact with the house rivalry mechanic. And the tours look fun too. Might have to play lower than 4 speed for once, XD
 
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This is exactly the kind of additional content I want for this game. A character based game should have role playing systems like this. I'm especially looking forward to seeing how these new systems interact with the house rivalry mechanic. And the tours look fun too. Might have to play lower than 4 speed for once, XD
I profoundly look forward to the day when speeds 2 or 3 are a reasonable, normal, and realistic speed to play the entire game at, and I feel no need to go higher. This is one step closer to the dream.
 
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Well there’s another 2 years of development gone. Maybe we will get something meaningful in 2025…
It is amazing! 2 years and they added a throne room some flavor things (viking stones) and now a bunch of things no one needs. Meanwhile, the late game is a disaster and lacking on all fronts. Challenge, war, economy, character building, religions, significant events as ruler of a great empire, ... all more pressing matters
 
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Firstly, I very much hope that the regency mechanic will be in the update that accompanies T&T. That's in line with the policy that big systems should be part of the core game so that modders and future DLC can build on them.

T&T will then add flavour for regencies while your ruler is away travelling and W&W will add flavour for regencies while your ruler is under-age. Those are separate things within the same category, but there's likely to be very little overlap between the events.
But I was expecting the regency mechanic in Wards and Wardens, it was precisely due to the fact that there could be a regency mechanic that this topic seemed interesting to me. Now I actually get one mechanic split into two DLCs. Instead of dedicating the small amount of mechanical changes in Tours and Tournaments to fixing important gaps in the game (such as the new laws), the developers split one mechanic into several additions.
 
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  • Functional crusades that actually make sense as opposed to sending all your armies to faff around on the Sinai peninsula until they're out of supply and wiped.
  • Actual pushback from strong councils when they disagree with the actions of the monarch.
  • A papacy that actually matters
  • Muslim rulers that are actually interesting and distinct to play
  • Government law/types that actually affect playstyle.
And 2 of those could possibly included in here in some way or would be helped greatly by mechanics described:

-Crusades having a presence on the map like tours would be a huge improvement over any CK2 system and allow things such as them actually gathering somewhere instead of coming in piecemeal.
-Regents are also a huge part of councils and their inclusion could mean we could possibly see at least some council expansion in the patch, while regent interactions are similarly also close to council ones.

The other 3 are less likely to be included, but would still profit from some of the systems (if Muslims have different flavour for the included mechanics that would also be a factor to help them, the papal conclave profits from mechanics letting people actually travel and laws are involved in all aspects).

I see no need to be negative yet when we've so far only seen some basic outlines of the dlc and do not know what will be included in the patch or even the details of the expansion (something like crusades could easily be a special tour we don't know about yet).
 
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Now I actually get one mechanic split into two DLCs

Regencies are part of the free update, so it's not, as you say, "split into two DLCs". The free update includes old decisions (hunting, pilgrimage and feasts), but applies the new event mechanic to (similar to wedding planning).

Edit: There's a third focus in the free update, which is "major changes to vassal relations and domain management". For me, that is the dark horse of the entire update.
 
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And 2 of those could possibly included in here in some way or would be helped greatly by mechanics described:

-Crusades having a presence on the map like tours would be a huge improvement over any CK2 system and allow things such as them actually gathering somewhere instead of coming in piecemeal.
-Regents are also a huge part of councils and their inclusion could mean we could possibly see at least some council expansion in the patch, while regent interactions are similarly also close to council ones.

The other 3 are less likely to be included, but would still profit from some of the systems (if Muslims have different flavour for the included mechanics that would also be a factor to help them, the papal conclave profits from mechanics letting people actually travel and laws are involved in all aspects).

I see no need to be negative yet when we've so far only seen some basic outlines of the dlc and do not know what will be included in the patch or even the details of the expansion (something like crusades could easily be a special tour we don't know about yet).
You stating that things like crusades could be a special tour is just you coping to have the DLC be better than it actually is. If something like crusaders or coronations were included they would have added them to the trailer and announced them to hype up the DLC. I like what I'm seeing but I'm tired of more promises.
 
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One of the devs previously explained that the FoI development was too far advanced by the time RC was nearing completion to be able to incorporate the RC mechanics/systems. If I find the post I’ll edit it in.
Finally found it!
I think finding time to add more content to one of the older systems is better done in the Flavour Packs, but with parallel development it is also difficult to do. Take Fate of Iberia and the Royal Court. They were released about 3-4 months apart, and that is not a lot of time for Fate of Iberia to adapt the features we added later in the development of RoCo. I cannot remember quite when FoI got access to all the stable features of RoCo, but adding content that uses the RoCo features would need to have time to implement, test and verify that it would all work.
Will also edit it into my previous post, but making this new one so I can use the multi-quote system, which doesn’t work with edits.
 
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The bit that most catches my interest is the taxation tour. It’s existence implies that harder to reach vassals won’t be paying all their taxes, indirectly nerfing sprawling realms.
 
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In Grand Marriages, the right to bed with the bride will be really important for the ancestral tradition of the Kingdom.
I wish we get right of the first night to create more dramatic weddings. It would be yet another way to worsen relationships with liege or vassals or get gold from liege (if liege is willing to pay for it).
 
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The bit that most catches my interest is the taxation tour. It’s existence implies that harder to reach vassals won’t be paying all their taxes, indirectly nerfing sprawling realms.

Also - what that implies for the tour system.

A lot of people are assuming it's going to be a UI that just generates events - like the Royal Court - but it seems to me just as possible that this is an example of ways in which it will interact with other systems in interesting ways.
 
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Regencies are part of the free update, so it's not, as you say, "split into two DLCs". The free update includes old decisions (hunting, pilgrimage and feasts), but applies the new event mechanic to (similar to wedding planning).

Edit: There's a third focus in the free update, which is "major changes to vassal relations and domain management". For me, that is the dark horse of the entire update.
It doesn't really matter if the regency is a free upgrade or not. The regency was to be part of the Wards and Wardens. Then it would be a good flavor pack - mechanics and roleplay together. And about the statement that they say the players themselves voted this way for Wards and Wardens. I may be wrong, but I think so. Since I live in an authoritarian country, I have seen election manipulation happen. In this case, the other two variants Love&Lust and Villains&Vagabonds could be bogus candidates, as Wards and Wardens looks like the most interesting of the lot, especially given the expectation of a regency in it. Again, I may be wrong, but I admit that the choice that the players made may not actually be them.
 
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Okay, 2 1/2 years after release I finally have to admit to myself, that the CK3 devs focus entirely on roleplayers, and adding fluff to the game, instead of deepening it to make it more of a strategy game. Well, I guess that's nice for the roleplayers, which I am not one of. I think I'll just stop following this game sadly, so I can't get more disappointed. Doesn't seem to be aimed at people like me.
 
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