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Grand Strategy Crusader Kings III

lophiaspis

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 24, 2012
Messages
379
And that whole shitty Perk Tree will be mandatory for every character under optimal play. Sounds more and more like RTW2. I guess this game will be 3/5 or so, not as awful as Imperator but to think it can ever compare to CK2 is absurd. A pointless exercise from an increasingly clueless company.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,149
It doesn't look that different from the way lifestyles work now, its just being presented to the player differently. I still kind of agree that presenting the player in-game with this sort of structured flowchart of how to develop a character feels out of place, that should be something you look on the wikis to find. The in-game presentation is better off being more vague.
 

Fedora Master

Arcane
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Edgy
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Jun 28, 2017
Messages
27,804
It's way too gamey, in the same way today's CK2 is. The entire point of traits and lifestyle choices is that you can't predict what they'll lead to. It takes away the role play aspect of being an imperfect person. Of course the player should have some control over the development of their character but not in the way a skill tree offers it.
 

thesecret1

Arcane
Joined
Jun 30, 2019
Messages
5,675
Removing some of the randomness would make sense if they actually geared towards being simulationist and presented an actually difficult, deep game that keeps the player on his toes. But CK2 was anything but that - it was about RPing through history, where the game randomly shitting on you with an event was a welcome diversion to incorporate into the roleplay. I could get behind this system if they added it to a radically different game, but the trend with paradox is to make every subsequent game even more brainless and shallow, so I can't really see that happening.

It feels like they're focusing on the wrong thing entirely, tbh. The character side of things was mostly fine as it was in CK2, the big issue was that there was fuck all to do 80% of the time due to the realm part being so shallow. That's where I'd like to see additional mechanics and overhauls, not somewhere that already works
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
The key difference is - is CK's character "your guy" like an RPG protagonist that you sculpt through points? Or is he a semi-autonomous actor in the sadistic entropy of history that you guide through thick and thin? And to me the entire point of CK1/2, even down to the awkward way in which important decisions would arrive as semi-randomised popups, was that you're not in full control of your guy.

Of course, in practice, so many players would have used various tricks to mould the perfect heir with munchkin stats, assassinate the rest of Gavelkind siblings every generation, etc. - and now it will I suppose be easier to do that.

As above post says the attention should instead be on fleshing out different aspects of realm management and medieval courtly life into a more involved process - e.g. I'd be happy for Tournaments and other ceremonies to get a better interface with more control.

Edit: I have no idea who "nikt" is but I am honoured to have received one of his 129 Golden Cucks, a rare prize he grants on a chosen few
 
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Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
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Space Hell
Well, Idid not like that much the concept of wait 15 years and get random education and stick to it. At least here you can improve on that and if you are shitty misguided warrior then you can become great warrior through practice. In CKII you will stick with misguided warrior forrever with some very rare event advancing your education 1 level up.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,149
What is a RPG?
Rpg-7.jpg


Dunno about RPGs but I know you can get a handgun in CK2.
 

Hace El Oso

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 5, 2020
Messages
3,114
Location
Bogotá
Same infantile misconception of the Church and Christianity as a finger-wagging schoolmarm as always. Just make a GoT knockoff game and leave behind the history you all clearly hate so much, Paradox.
 

Consul

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 28, 2014
Messages
186
Location
Europe
The perk tree is a bad idea for this type of a game. Too gamey and in the end you will be left with only a few cookie cutter builds that you can choose from, which will get boring after a while. They either have to make it so each point spend in a perk tree gives you a small, almost insignificant bonus, or that choosing a lifestyle gives you a massive boost to one of the stats. Neither option is good. In CK2 you only got max 3 points in one stat from choosing a liefestyle and a chance of getting events associated with it, the liefestyle wasn't something that solely defined your character. Now I can imagine that 90% of the time you will have to take the martial focus (and won't change it because of the exp you already accumulated), because the game is still about getting more land. You will be only left with the option of being good in one area that you chose on your own instead of many. This means that the disparity between the lifestyle chosen stat and other stats will be huge. Unless it make it so individual perk points give you little benefit, which is boring. The exp gathering is also a bad idea as I mentioned earlier, it forces you to never change a liefestyle once it's chosen. This is what happens when you mindlessly copy ideas from other games and want to implement them in your own without thinking things through.
 

LizardWizard

Cipher
Joined
Feb 14, 2014
Messages
991
The exp gathering is also a bad idea as I mentioned earlier, it forces you to never change a liefestyle once it's chosen. This is what happens when you mindlessly copy ideas from other games and want to implement them in your own without thinking things through.

Uh no it doesn't. If your education is strong in one area you can max a tree out or rush to specific perk and adopt a new lifestyle when the need arises.

And your logic exists in CK2. Select Rulership turn brain off and maybe you get the administrator trait within a decade or three.
 
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Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
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Messages
6,216
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Space Hell
Exp based skills are better than CKII's hey, you are Brilliant Strategist, here, take a random event that will give you Gardener. At least now I can specialize and if my ruler will spend his whole life fighting, he will have high martial, not top diplomatic and stewardship - in CKII you could have top diplomat ruler literally live decades in constant war and still at best gain +1 martial.
What I like most is stress levels - binarry Stressed or no Stressed was too taxing and chore to deal with, constantly carousing in attempts to remove it.
 

Consul

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 28, 2014
Messages
186
Location
Europe
The exp gathering is also a bad idea as I mentioned earlier, it forces you to never change a liefestyle once it's chosen. This is what happens when you mindlessly copy ideas from other games and want to implement them in your own without thinking things through.

Uh no it doesn't. If your education is strong in one area you can max a tree out or rush to specific perk and adopt a new lifestyle when the need arises.

Fair enough, I still don't like the system for other reasons I mentioned.

And your logic exists in CK2. Select Rulership turn brain off and maybe you get the administrator trait within a decade or three.

It doesn't work like that in CK2, you choose if you want to sacrifice time to get the administrator trait (which is determined randomly iirc) or if you want to get bonuses from other lifestyles, which would benefit you more depending on the situation you are in. There is no long term benefit in or reason to sticking to only one lifestyle all the way, unless it's the martial focus. I think that the CK2 lifestyles could use some improvement, but not by the way of introducing skill trees.

Exp based skills are better than CKII's hey, you are Brilliant Strategist, here, take a random event that will give you Gardener. At least now I can specialize and if my ruler will spend his whole life fighting, he will have high martial, not top diplomatic and stewardship - in CKII you could have top diplomat ruler literally live decades in constant war and still at best gain +1 martial.
What I like most is stress levels - binarry Stressed or no Stressed was too taxing and chore to deal with, constantly carousing in attempts to remove it.

Making it so that every ruler becomes good at the thing he focuses on is boring and not reflective of the fact that in real life each person has different capabilities. I'm not saying that no growth should be possible, but the quality of your ruler should largely be set in stone (like it is in CK2) by the time he is 16 years old and gains an educational trait. Still, improving an educational trait should be possible, but only by one or two tiers if you are very lucky. It's a shame that in CK2 you can only improve martial and stewardship associated educational traits. You can get much more through traits gained from battles than +1 martial. If your lifestyle stat is below 5 or 6 you can also get an event that increases it by +1 or +2.
 

LizardWizard

Cipher
Joined
Feb 14, 2014
Messages
991
Making it so that every ruler becomes good at the thing he focuses on is boring

Ruler stats, education and traits will determine how efficiently they progress. You're also ignoring that there will be plenty of event chains/traits associated with each focus path (like experiments, alchemy etc) and such which will certainly be influenced by the character's inherent ability.

but the quality of your ruler should largely be set in stone (like it is in CK2) by the time he is 16 years old and gains an educational trait.

Now that is boring and not reflective of the fact in real life spending decades of your time in a specific area will net results even for people of limited ability. In CK3 a half-retarded inbred ruler will still be shit at ruling relative to the rest of the in-game world.
 

Zeriel

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2012
Messages
13,378
And that whole shitty Perk Tree will be mandatory for every character under optimal play. Sounds more and more like RTW2. I guess this game will be 3/5 or so, not as awful as Imperator but to think it can ever compare to CK2 is absurd. A pointless exercise from an increasingly clueless company.

The irony is the incredibly negative backlash to Imperator forced them to cave and do what players (largely) want, which may lead to the surreal situation where Imperator will end up the better game than CK3.
 

Got bored and left

Guest
Vassals and succession and stuff.

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Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Magne “Meneth” Skjæran. You might know me from the CK2 dev diaries or the Paradox Wikis, but for the last couple of years I’ve been working on CK3 as a programmer. Today we’re going to cover a number of topics closely related to government types: governments themselves, vassal management, laws, and raiding.

Let’s start off with a familiar concept from CK2: governments. For the player, we have three playable governments: Feudal, Tribal, and Clan, which each have some significant differences in how they play.

The Feudal government type is based on European feudalism, and is heavily based around the idea of obligations: you owe service to your liege, and your liege owes you protection in return. It is the most common government form in the game. Feudal realms play pretty similarly to CK2, focusing on claims and inheritance more so than the other government forms.

A new addition in CK3 is Feudal Contracts. Every feudal vassal (except barons) has an individual contract with you, rather than obligations being set realm-wide. These contracts have three levels; Low, Medium, and High, with Medium being the default. High will provide more levies and tax at the cost of an opinion hit, while Low provides less but improves opinion. Higher levels are usually better (though perhaps not if you’re at risk of your vassals revolting), but cannot be imposed unilaterally.

You’ll need to have a hook on your vassal in order to increase their obligations unless you’re fine with all your vassals considering you a tyrant, but you can always lower them. As a result this means you can significantly increase your power if you’re able to obtain hooks on your vassals; perhaps a bit of judicious blackmail might be in order?

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[Modifying a Feudal Contract]

Furthermore we have the Clan government form. This government is the rough equivalent of the Iqta government in CK2, though in CK3 it does have a more Feudal bent than it did previously.

The Clan government type is used by most Muslim realms. This government puts more emphasis on the family rather than the realm, with most vassals being members of your dynasty. Obligations are heavily based on opinion rather than being contractual, with happy vassals providing significantly more taxes and levies than unhappy ones. A happy family is a powerful family.

Clan governments also have access to the Clan Invasion casus belli, which can be used once in a lifetime at the highest level of Fame to invade a kingdom, providing a powerful boon for a well-established clan ruler.

Finally we have Tribal realms. Much like in CK2 these have their own Tribal holding type, providing more troops but less tax. Additionally, most tribals are able to go on raids, which you can read more about below. Tribal realms are unaffected by development, and cause non-tribal realms to have lower supply limits in their lands, making them a tougher nut to crack, but reducing their influence as the years drag on. Tribal realms also pay for men at arms using prestige rather than gold, allowing smaller realms to punch above their weight.

Tribal rulers base their obligations on levels of Fame rather than on contracts or opinion; the more famous your ruler is, the more troops and money your vassals will be willing to provide for your pursuits.

Finally, Tribal rulers have a once-in-a-lifetime Subjugation casus belli, allowing them to forcibly vassalize an entire realm.

As the game goes on, you can eventually reform out of Tribalism, becoming a Clan or Feudal realm instead.

index.php

[The vassal management tab]

To get an easy overview of your realm, we in CK3 have the Realm screen. Let’s start with the Vassals tab of this screen where all your vassals are shown. This gives you a clear overview of where your levies and taxes come from, who might be a threat to you, and allows you to renegotiate feudal contracts.

This is also where you change your crown authority (or tribal authority), which I’ll talk more about later in this dev diary.

Lastly, the screen shows your Powerful Vassals. Much like in CK2’s Conclave DLC, your realm will have some powerful vassals; these expect to be seated on the council, and will make their displeasure known if that is not the case.

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[The Domain Tab]

Then we have the Domain tab. This lets you easily inspect your domain, showing where you’re earning money and levies, and where you can build more buildings. It also shows the level of development and control in the counties you personally hold, letting you easily tell where you can make improvements.

Finally we have the Succession tab. Due to being a bit of a work in progress, I’m afraid I can’t show you a picture of it right now. Here you can change your succession laws, see your heir(s), and check what titles, if any, you will lose when you die. If you hold any elective titles, you’ll be able to easily get to the election screen from here.

Now with all these mentions of laws, let’s go through what laws exist. We’ve trimmed down the number of laws from CK2 as much of what used to be law is handled on a more individual level now, but some still remains.

Like in CK2, we have crown authority for Feudal and Clan realms, and tribal authority for Tribal realms. Higher levels of authority unlock mechanics like imprisonment (for tribals, the others start with it), title revocation, restrictions on internal wars, and heir designation. However, increasing these levels will make your vassals unhappy. Tribal authority is significantly less powerful than crown authority, representing how Tribal governments over time gradually got supplanted by Feudal and Clan governments.

index.php

[Changing succession law]

Then there’s succession laws. To no one’s surprise, Gavelkind is making a return, though we’ve renamed it to Partition to make it more obvious what it actually means. This is the default succession form of most realms in both 867 and 1066.

For added fun, there’s now three variants of Partition. We’ve got regular Partition, which functions like Gavelkind in CK2; your realm gets split roughly equally between your heirs, and any heirs that end up a lower tier than your primary heir becomes a vassal.

However, many realms start with a worse form, especially in 867. This is Confederate Partition, which will also create titles of your primary title’s tier if possible. So if you as Norway have conquered all of Sweden but destroyed the kingdom itself, it will get recreated on your death so that your second heir becomes an independent ruler. Tribals are typically locked to this succession type, with some exceptions.

Finally we have an improved version of Partition: High Partition. Under High Partition your primary heir will always get at least half your titles, so it doesn’t matter if you’ve got 2 or 10 kids; your primary heir will get the same amount of land.

We’ve also done a lot of tweaks to the internal logic of who gets what titles, which tends to lead to far nicer splits than in CK2; border gore will of course still happen, but to a lesser degree than before.

Then we have the other succession forms. There’s Oldest Child Succession (replacing Primogeniture), Youngest Child Succession (replacing Ultimogeniture), and House Seniority. A notable difference from CK2’s Seniority Succession is that under House Seniority, the oldest eligible member of your house inherits, not of your entire dynasty.

We also have a number of variants on elective succession, ranging from Feudal Elective, to Princely Elective (HRE succession), and a handful of cultural variants. Each of these have different restrictions on who can vote, who can be elected, and how the AI will select who to vote for.

Additionally, we’ve got a full suite of gender laws, corresponding to the gender laws in CK2. These are: Male Only, Male Preference, Equal, Female Preference, and Female Only.

Finally, we have raiding. If you’re a Norwegian like me, sometimes you feel your Viking blood coursing through your veins, the noise of it drowning out everything else. Times like this, there’s only one solution: go on a raid.

Fans of Pagan gameplay in CK2 will be glad to hear that not only have we implemented raiding in CK3 as well, we’ve made some improvements to it to make it more fun to play with, and less unfun to be on the receiving end of.

The core system is very similar to CK2. If you’re a Pagan or Tribal ruler, you have the ability to raid other rulers’ lands. To do so you raise a raid army, and march or sail over to your target. Only the Norse can raid across sea; other raid armies will simply be unable to embark.

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[Raising a raid army]

Once at your target your army will start looting the barony they’re in. This is a pretty quick process, but during it your army will be unable to move, preventing you from running away from any counter-raiding force. This change makes it a lot simpler to deal with raiders if you’ve got enough men and can raise them quickly enough, as the AI won’t just immediately run away.

index.php

[A raid in progress]

While in CK2 raiding was done on a county level, in CK3 it is on a barony level. Another difference is that in CK3 raiding no longer uses the siege mechanics directly, but rather a similar system where things like siege engines do not have an impact since you’re raiding the countryside, not a heavily fortified castle.

Another significant change is that if you beat a raid army, you receive all the gold they’re carrying. This means that even if you cannot respond instantly to a raid, it is still very much worth it to beat up the raiders. Like in CK2, you also become immune to raiding by that enemy for several years.

Just like in CK2, a raid army is limited in how much loot it can carry based on the army size. Loot is deposited once the army is back in friendly lands, after which you might either disband or go raiding once more.

On the quality of life side, we now show on the map what provinces have already been raided when you have a raid army selected. This makes it easy to see what places to avoid. Hovering over a province will also tell you how much loot raiding it would provide.

index.php

[Northern England in its natural state]

That’s all for today, folks. Tune in next week to learn more about how war functions in Crusader Kings 3.
 

Shadenuat

Arcane
Joined
Dec 9, 2011
Messages
11,955
Location
Russia
its nice they're removing latin and all those agnatic cognatic wtf purple hair viconia doesn't understand, she needs "MALE PREFERED" to know where enemy lies, it's not like latin in medieval game makes all kinds of sense or adds to immersion or anything
 

Endemic

Arcane
Joined
Jul 16, 2012
Messages
4,321
To be fair, terms like "primogeniture" aren't in common use. The solution to that would be to improve the UI and in-game help\tutorials, rather than remove any vaguely complicated words.
 

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