We have set up a wiki pages with common questions and answers about them.
POD Wiki: Fiefdoms
Release when?
Can't make any promises yet. As usual, we will first release the feature to the Patron build for testing.
Will my computer explode?
Short answer, no.
Long answer: Performance is on the forefront of our minds and we're taking many steps to ensure the game only runs calculations when they're absolutely necessary. Some details to consider:
- Full city maps are only generated when the player first opens the map of that particular city. Before that, they're in low-maintenance mode.
- The vast majority of district holders aren't real characters. We only generate real characters if doing so would meaningfully enhance gameplay (and most of the time, it doesn't). Otherwise, district holders are implemented as interface flags, which show up as "Unaffiliated Nosferatu Coterie" and the like.
- District holders that do exist as real characters have neutered AI. There are government flags we can set to prevent AI characters from considering decisions, marriage, and other performance-heavy features.
- Most of the AI decisionmaking in Fiefdoms will be driven by hidden maintenance events, which are very light on performance. POD already runs some maintenance events on every living character (roughly 30,000 give or take) and it's only marginally slower than vanilla.
Will this work in multiplayer?
Most likely not. At the very least, two players shouldn't be able to open the same Fiefdom window at the same time because they would otherwise mess up each other's interfaces.
Making Fiefdoms account for multiple players would've made the scripts 10 times more complicated, when it's already (with no false modesty) one of the most complicated systems ever done in a CK3 mod. So for example, exploration progress and fog of war are tracked globally, instead of per character.
A CK3 developer once confirmed that random numbers polled from GUI are the #1 cause of multiplayer desync and in order to generate a Fiefdom, the game has to generate about ~500 random numbers in a row.
In any case, there will be a game rule to turn off Fiefdoms altogether if they prove to be too disruptive in multiplayer.
Gameplay
Note that Fiefdoms are still in development and all of this could be subject to change.
Which cities have Fiefdoms?
Any duchy capital with at least 3 development.
Can all splats use Fiefdoms?
Yes.
Will there be hunter districts in the Vampire bookmark? What about other splats?
Yes and yes. You will be able to interact with district holders from splats that otherwise aren't present in your bookmark. This includes some as-of-yet unreleased splats! Though that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to spawn as real characters.
Overseers
Note that Fiefdoms are still in development and all of this could be subject to change.
Will landless District rulers be playable?
Yes, and they will get the new Overseer government type. Adventurers can't hold Districts since ruling over your turf is a full-time job, you can't just leave and expect to stay in control.
Full disclosure, this is going to be the part of Fiefdoms that'll take us the longest to complete, and we'll probably release the feature with AI-only overseers at first. Overseers will have the same issues that vanilla Adventurers have: fewer stakes and fewer threats and fewer sources of excitement than landed rulers. Excitement would have to come from contracts, and the vanilla contracts are kinda boring (and unusable for stationary characters, anyway), so we wouldn't want to release them unless we have a bunch of interesting contracts and other things to fill out their gameplay loop.
