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Dev Diary #158 - Wandering Nobles

Hello there!

It’s been a while since I wrote one of these, so I figured I could give a short presentation of myself. I’m @Snow Crystal , one of the two Design Leads on CK3, and I have been around at Paradox on different projects since CK2’s Holy Fury (my first DLC). It’s my pleasure to present our last entry in Chapter 3, namely, the Wandering Nobles DLC.

Vision​

As we set out to create this piece of content, our primary goal was to see if we could spend more time with the traveling system from Tours & Tournament. It was a system that was generally well-liked internally and externally, and we knew we would most likely be used a fair bit by adventurers (though exactly how that game loop would turn out was unclear at the time). We wanted to continue experimenting with it and see if we could add more content to it in different ways.

Since I have seen some confusion about this, one thing to clarify is that the Wandering Nobles is not a Landless Adventurer DLC. It was made primarily for landed gameplay, and though much of it is also available to landless characters, they are not the pack's focus. In other words, this DLC will not have unique landless features, new contracts, or anything locked to the adventurer playstyle.

Even though I will not go into detail about events, a plethora of new events are spread throughout the different features that will be detailed here, as well as a slew of new travel events. In this event pack, we tied them all into things the player will choose to engage with, see activities, lifestyle, and travel, rather than having them appear seemingly at random.

Lifestyle​


Besides the traveling focus, what you can find in the pack is our first new lifestyle since the game's release. This avenue of content has remained almost untouched since the game was first released, except for adventurer-specific perks in Roads to Power, which we wanted to try and experiment with. It is set up like all other lifestyles in the game, with 27 perks split across 3 lifestyle trees, 3 focuses, 3 traits, and landless perk variants where needed.

One essential philosophy of the new lifestyle tree is that we wanted it to be a tree where you had to engage with it rather than having it simply engage with you. In other words, there are fewer passive bonuses, and most bonuses are gained by engaging in travel or activities. In that sense, we tried to go for impactful effects and bonuses from the perks, but at an opportunity and gold cost. We will talk at length about the lifestyle trees and perks next week, but I wanted to give you a small look at what it looks like.

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Activities​

In the DLC, we have included three activities, each associated with (and unlocked by) one of the new lifestyle trees. They are intended to be about the size of the University Visit we introduced in Wards & Wardens, giving landed rulers more opportunities to travel through your realm or abroad. Two of the new activities are set in your realm, whereas one takes you outside your borders.

When we created these new activities, one of our philosophies was that we wanted them to be deeply tied to each of the lifestyle trees, synergizing in different ways and playing into the strengths of the lifestyle tree. That way, investing in the lifestyle tree opens up an activity that lets you continue to build down that route.

The first activity we will examine is Inspection, where you can choose to travel to a specific part of your realm to ensure that it is well-run. You will be able to decide what parts of realm management you would like to focus on, and if you travel to a border county, you might even get vassalization acceptance from neighboring rulers or claims on their lands.

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Our second activity, the Monument Expedition, involves traveling to a distant city to see its sights. This allows you to visit specific places with Points of Interest, which you’d previously have to drop by as you pilgrimage elsewhere.

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The final activity, the Hike, is one where you can temporarily leave behind the stress of court life and seek the calm of nature. Shy characters, you poor souls who would desperately try to lose stress through feasts, I see you.

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Battle Points of Interest​

As a travel-focused pack, we wanted to include something new for the players to see as they traveled around the map. One I had wanted to include for a while was points of interest focused on battles. These new points of interest will come in two forms: dynamically created ones as particular battles happen on the map and historical ones set up from the start of the game.

For the historical ones, we have some that can be seen in all our bookmarks and others that can only be seen in later bookmarks, like two related to the fight over England in 1066.

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A Toast for Your Travels​

One minor addition to this patch is a new building and court position, primarily for Catholics but accessible by anyone with a new cultural tradition. The building can only be built in Catholic churches by default, but in any city for those who choose to get the cultural tradition. It is intentionally made to have a fair number of county-wide bonuses rather than holding specific ones and opening the new Court Brewmaster Court Position for whoever is in charge of the county.

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Until Next Time​

That was all for this week. I hope you enjoyed this first look at Wandering Nobles. We will look in-depth at the activities and lifestyle perks next week. Until then, I figured I’d show some of the new art we have in the DLC to tide you over.

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Brewing is for Catholics, but can be made available for others with an appropriate tradition. Is this something that can be made available by tenet as well?

Catholicism is a religion, not a culture, so I feel like its mechanics should be gated by tenets.

Also, what does the "Excellent-aptitude Court Positions" note on Expeditions mean? Does it give you good courtiers or new positions? The way it's worded makes it sound like you get new court positions.

Final note: I'm sure this is just a minor oversight, and is already on your to-do list, but didn't Harold Godwinson win at Stamford Bridge?

The brewing thing ignores the Latin part that relied on wine, which is like majority of population in the timeframe
 
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I feel like a 100% chance for the commander trait for an activity can be a tad too powerful though.
Absolutely.
 
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It was done now, because we chose to focus more on the travel system, and we wanted to experiment with trying to make a new lifestyle for the game. It's our way of checking if people have an interest in more different lifestyles in the game, because if they do then there's a decent chance we will look at making more of them.
I strongly support fleshing out the travel system, I think it adds a layer of historical accuracy few similiar games can match. So, more content for this is always welcome. However, In my mind the focus should be on tying already existing content and mechanics into this system.

For example, if I'm traveling from England to Rome and am currently in France, it should not be possible for me to challenge some fornicator in Iceland to a duell which takes place on the same day IN ICELAND, after which I'm just continuing on my travels. Same goes for a myriad events taking place in my realm. There already are some steps to ensure immersion and logic, like not being able to Hold Court while away. So, although I will always like to get more content related to travel, I would really prefer a focus on improving the overall mechanic.
This game focuses heavily on immersion, and as such immersion breaking things like this should be of the highest priority (I know you are already fixing stuff left and right, but this is just something that bugs me since the release of T&T)
 
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Is there a way to be a lone wanderer visiting foreign courts and even becoming a courtier?
 
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I also have a concern about trait inflation in a sense of this traits all taking space in trait bar; you can overflow it pretty quickly with congenial, commander and lifestyle traits.

Maybe they can add a traits tab that opens up a window of all the traits side by side (instead of scrolling down).
 
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For the points of interest, can you give us the total amount?
 
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Rather than having to manage it, occasionally gaining bad traits you now have yet another 'remove stress' button. New features invalidating existing game mechanics is an occurring problem within CK3 and I fear the new activity may add to it.

I mean generally speaking I don't mind nullifying some gameplay mechanics as long as the tradeoff is balanced. If casual players want to invest their skill points down this path in exchange for not having to micromanage stress, which would in theory allow them to pick event outcomes that normally would cuase a lot of stress to that character (due to opposition outcomes vs traits)...I don't see the problem with that. I mean depending on how many points need to be invested to unlock these "perks", the trade-off is losing out on other (aurguably) OP lifestyle tree paths and perks in exchange for more game freedom...I don't see this as a problem. *shrug*

On that note - any option that a player wants to take that arguably gimps them to the benefit of making some mechanic less tedious or easier, seems fine to me.

You don't have to utilize it if you don't like it, but I hate people trying to control or gatekeep other people's play styles and preferences.

At first I thought these lifestyle trees seemed dumb (still not entirely convinced) but if implemented in an endearing way, I don't see the problem catering to other play styles, even if the core base of players disagrees or doesn't gain much from it.

Variety is the spice of life, and of mead, my friends.
 
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I mean generally speaking I don't mind nullifying some gameplay mechanics as long as the tradeoff is balanced. If casual players want to invest their skill points down this path in exchange for not having to micromanage stress, which would in theory allow them to pick event outcomes that normally would cuase a lot of stress to that character (due to opposition outcomes vs traits)...I don't see the problem with that. I mean depending on how many points need to be invested to unlock these "perks", the trade-off is losing out on other (aurguably) OP lifestyle tree paths and perks in exchange for more game freedom...I don't see this as a problem. *shrug*

On that note - any option that a player wants to take that arguably gimps them to the benefit of making some mechanic less tedious or easier, seems fine to me.

You don't have to utilize it if you don't like it, but I hate people trying to control or gatekeep other people's play styles and preferences.

At first I thought these lifestyle trees seemed dumb (still not entirely convinced) but if implemented in an endearing way, I don't see the problem catering to other play styles, even if the core base of players disagrees or doesn't gain much from it.

Variety is the spice of life, and of mead, my friends.
Agreed. As the devs said, there IS a downside to these abilities, namely that you have to spend points on these instead of buffing Martial, Stewardship, Diplomacy, etc.
 
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For the points of interest, can you give us the total amount?
There are not many for this release. I wanted to see if people liked them before I started devoting a lot of time to adding a bunch of them. Off the top of my head, I want to say 11 sort of spread out around the world.
- Battle of Yarmuk
- Battle of Aror
- Battle of Tours
- Battle of Talas
- Battle of Lechfeld
- Battle of Svolder
- Battle of Dandanaqan
- Battle of Civitate
- Battle of Stamford Bridge
- Battle of Hastings
- Battle of Manzikert
If people think they are cool or add something to the game, I will try to add more of them with future releases next year or perhaps even for the 1.14.1 patch.
 
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I understand that the game is not about landless adventures, but now in this type of gameplay there is a slight boredom (move, go to the castle, look for quests, visit the tavern, easily complete the task, repeat)

The DLC still looks interesting, but the expectation was that this boredom would be fixed by adding personal sub-quests, new serious events and goals for landless characters. But it is still interesting to play and see the DLC with your own eyes
 
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Probably too late to get noticed, but I would suggest that gaining commander traits should be a percentage thing, like visiting the battle site should have a 25% chance of giving the trait or something.
 
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One concern I'd like to ask about is, since this is the moment we talk about travels, can we please tackle PoI proliferation and its clearly expectable pitfalls now?
The first problem is that travel should, at least in theory, be about getting to memorable places; the benefits of simply getting on the road, talking to other people and learning from the experience, ought to be modeled by the 'Traveler' trait bonuses.
When every second Barony gives an extra bonus on top, it quickly becomes a matter of farming, the real elephant in the room; the more PoI are added (dynamic or not), the more traveling becomes optimum/meta and micromanagey, creating a gameplay loop that I don't think serves the game well (one wants the free xp, but traveling also locks from partaking in certain activities, with AIs falling further behind regardless).
I like more PoI, but I feel if more are to be added, they should fire from a pool of specific events that often give various benefits rather than outright give lifestyle exp. It does not matter that one's Lifestyledex will be less complete in % terms, when it comprises more and more perks that suit well what the player intends to tackle.
 
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Just to make sure, visiting the battle sites of Hastings and Stamford Bridge will only be available in 1178? Since they haven't happened yet in the start 1066.
 
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Just to make sure, visiting the battle sites of Hastings and Stamford Bridge will only be available in 1178? Since they haven't happened yet in the start 1066.
That is correct. Some are available only in 1178, some are available in 1066 and 1178, and some are available in all three start dates, based on when they happened historically.
 
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That is correct. Some are available only in 1178, some are available in 1066 and 1178, and some are available in all three start dates, based on when they happened historically.

Will battles that have important characters killed have more weight when creating a dynamic battle site?
 
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What are the 3 options for the brew master?

With all the court positions, the scrolling takes longer. Maybe new sub tabs to categorize types of court position?

Something like:

Personal/Administrative/Security
 
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