Grand Strategy Crusader Kings III

[HeroMarine]

CK3 is simpler to just play.

~ t. boomer who doesn't have time anymore and just wants to play his games

I get this but I think Ck2 is already too simple. Even with all DLCs

 

[mondblut]

They're really going full hog about the Court thing. Hopefully leads to interesting results.

Been a while.

 

[Fedora Master]

CK3 is simpler to just play.

~ t. boomer who doesn't have time anymore and just wants to play his games

I get this but I think Ck2 is already too simple. Even with all DLCs

All Paradox games are at their core extremely simplistic. Hit button to make numbers go up.
They simply obfuscate that simplicity by adding more and more equally shallow mechanics with each DLC.
I have over 1000 hours in CK2 and never ever even touched the curia mechanic. Don't need to anyway.

 

[thesecret1]

I have over 1000 hours in CK2 and never ever even touched the curia mechanic.

I tried it once or twice and it's pretty much a waste of time anyway.

Paradox keeps building its games wider and wider but never deeper – CK2 in particular is really bad with that. It's a fun game to roleplay in, but it lacks any semblance of difficulty or depth and nobody would ever play it for the gameplay.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1158310/view/2944779142875493243

Dev Diary #71 - A Coat of Arms of Your Own ️​

A free feature coming with the Update 1.5: the much requested Coat of Arms Designer for your titles, dynasty, and house!
Hello everyone and welcome to the 71st CK3 Dev Diary!

I’m Matthew, one of the Programmers on the CK3 team, and today I am going to talk to you about one of the free features in the upcoming 1.5 patch: the much requested Coat of Arms Designer!

I don’t think the idea needs much explanation, this feature lets you edit the coat of arms used for your titles, dynasty, and house in game and from within the ruler designer to create your own stunning medieval crest.

I think it's easiest if I just show you, should go without saying by now but everything here is still under development and the interface is a work in progress and stands to be tweaked, shuffled around the layout and sizes changed by art.

Spoiler

Right now here is what you will be greeted by now if you enter the customization window for the Holy Roman Empire:

In the center you get the preview screen of the coat of arms as you edit it and to the right some options of what to do.

I’ll start with the bottom right options:

• Randomise within the rule sets we use to generate coat of arms normally, great if you want to reenact this pain.
  
• As with the Ruler Designer’s DNA we let you copy and paste your coat of arms to share.
  
• Discard any changes you’ve made to your work in progress masterpiece.
  
• If you have previously edited and saved your new coat of arms then the discard button will be joined by a button to reset to the historical coat of arms if available.

The meat of the system comes in the form of customizing your coat of arms from scratch or adjusting the existing one, both share their core components but adjusted mode is more limited if you want to take a pre-existing coat of arms and just tweak it a bit.
The reason adjusted mode is separate is that some historical coat of arms are made up of a lot of emblems in an order that whilst looks pretty in game is rather cursed if you were to try and see the full layout and background usage.

So for the bulk of this I will be using custom as the example to see how you can make your own heraldry from scratch and call out differences in adjusted mode where applicable.
The coat of arms designer has three main panels: background, layout, and emblems.

Starting with the background panel you can pick from any of the background patterns as well as pick what colours should be used. For all the colouring options in the coat of arms designer we provided a palette with some pre-selected colours that are used in heraldry generally and are what we use in randomization of coat of arms but we also give you a colour picker to let you pick whatever horrifying neon colour you want.
In the adjusted mode you cannot pick a background pattern but you can change the colours.

Next up we have the layouts panel, they dictate the overall amount and positioning of the emblems in your coat of arms. This panel is disabled entirely in the adjusted mode.

To preempt this question, yes there are only a few layouts in the picture (some even duplicates) and that is because the other preset layouts are currently being worked on so there will be more than this in the released version.
Though if you have any ideas for some cool layouts do let us know! Now is the perfect time to give us some ideas whilst the presets layouts are being implemented.

The bulk of time you will spend is likely to be in the final emblems panel, this lets you pick which of the over a thousand emblem textures that you want to use as well as how you colour them.

You can select which emblem instance you want to edit or select multiple of them by shift clicking, there is also a button to select all of them or reset your selection too so you can edit in bulk easier.

Since some historical coat of arms can have a lotttt of emblems we show them in a paged setup of 10 at a time for easier editing.
I used france a lot in my testing since it has so many to make sure things always worked on a large amount of them which has now ingrained into my brain that our france coat of arms has 33 fleur de lis on it.

To try and help the contrast of the emblems we set it so that the previews have a background that is either white/black to help things stand out better.

We also have a detailed edit mode which lets you go deeper and modify the exact positions, scale, and rotation of all your emblems as well as modify what layer they are on and even add and remove them to your heart’s content! So you can really end up with a custom coat of arms to represent the majesty of your dynasty, or as I’m sure some of you will do, try and find a way to make it look phallic as quickly as you possibly can.

All of these edits also support an undo/redo system to make incremental changes easier.
Cadet Houses also get an additional option for if they want the quartering of their coat of arms enabled or not, in case you want to show your dad who’s boss.

That is a lot of words to explain this but let's be honest you all just want to see it in action so here we go:


Mini-shout out/commiserations to user “Lajos Tueur” who on Saturday released a mod to try and implement a coat of arms designer and had to fight against doing all of this very manually in the script with a hacky UI only for me to come in a few days later and release this dev diary.

That’s all for this week folks, thanks for tuning in and I hope you’re excited to make some majestic (or cursed) coat of arms for your rulers in 1.5!

 

[HeroMarine]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1158310/view/2944779142875493243

Dev Diary #71 - A Coat of Arms of Your Own ️​

A free feature coming with the Update 1.5: the much requested Coat of Arms Designer for your titles, dynasty, and house!
Hello everyone and welcome to the 71st CK3 Dev Diary!

Spoiler

hmmm

 

[Fedora Master]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1158310/view/2944779142875493243

Dev Diary #71 - A Coat of Arms of Your Own ️​

A free feature coming with the Update 1.5: the much requested Coat of Arms Designer for your titles, dynasty, and house!
Hello everyone and welcome to the 71st CK3 Dev Diary!

Spoiler

hmmm

 

[IDtenT]

They're really going full hog about the Court thing. Hopefully leads to interesting results.

Been a while.

OHHH YA BOY

Still sad they cut out this feature. This and the advisors. Miss them so hard!

Last good Civ was IV.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.crusaderkings.com/en/pc...t=post&utm_campaign=crki3_ck_20210907_cawe_dd

Dev Diary #72: Holding Court at Court in The Royal Court (in a courtly fashion)​

NEWS PC / 2021-09-07

Welcome comrades! In today’s dev diary, we’ll be taking a gander at a neat part of the upcoming expansion: Holding Court. Per the usual, I’ll preface this by saying that the court scene is a work in progress, the UI of the court scene is a work in progress, and the art generally is work in progress; we also have some missing animations and camera perspectives, so take all the images here with a grain of salt.

Spoiler

As with any medieval ruler, monarchs in The Royal Court are vain creatures. It’s not enough to control the largest or best-developed realm, you have to have the largest palace, the fanciest food, the most renowned courtiers, and so on: after all, what’s the point of taxing the masses if you have to live like a peasant anyway?

Sometimes, though, you can’t quite afford the fanciest feast, the latest fashion, or even just the shiniest artefact to spruce up your court.

When times are that hard, and you really need just _immediate_ distraction from the flaws in your life, it’s important to spend some time indulging those with lives even harder than yours. Like nearly everyone else. For times when you feel like slumming it amongst the weird and wonderful characters of your realm, you can Hold Court.

This repeatable decision lets you hear a number of requests from various characters, listening to petitioners seeking your aid and legal ruling on many subjects. They might be guests, courtiers, neighbouring rulers, vassals, spies, the odd bumbling peasant…

At present, you’ll receive three such petitioners each time, with all events delivered in the new courtly event style (though follow-up may be character events or similar).

Some choices are easy…

… some choices are hard…

… and some are just weird.

After you’ve made your ruling in each case, in addition to the effects of each turn, you’ll gain some court grandeur to bolster your overall supply. We’ve got just shy of a hundred or so of these events alone, so there should be a goodly amount of variety for most playstyles.

This system is something pretty dear to our hearts, as it models a task that would’ve been a pretty big part of the day-to-day for many rulers, and we’ve put a lot of effort into getting plenty of alternate events to keep it as varied as possible for as long as possible. We hope you find it a fun & proactive way to explore some of the smaller (and uhh, not so small) issues developing in your realm.

Small dev diary, but that’s all from me for the mo. As ever, I’ll be around in the comments for an hour or so to answer questions, but otherwise, see y’all next diary!

… Y’know what, let’s have a few more events to show off before we finish for the day.

 

[Joggerino]

Reminds me a bit of Guild 2.

 

[Eric Guier]

Arrrgh, the AI in this game has cost me at least 7 braincells by now.

My king has already the skull sign, meaning he will croak at any moment, what does my vassal do? He declares war war on my heir, who is pretty much already testing the crown for size, over my 20g income mine county.
First I was upset not being able to interfere, but then I realized: not only would he get no income from it for years because of low control, but the moment my heir takes over, he will immidiately get the county back AND make him die in prison, because the war is considered a criminal act. That's not even Bethesda level of AI coding.

But it gets worse. I had set up his sister as a genetic breeding project to create a new (dutch ) masterrace, 3 sons with intelligent+hale or better. Having only 1 county with 125 soldiers, they can't fuck it up, right? RIGHT?

WRONK!

She married her heir to my crusaderkween's daughter, formed an alliance and put all 125 soldiers, her husband and the sons on a boat down there. Two sons dead, husband maimed and about to die...
Only survivor of course is the guy who married his 1st cousin. Staying tuned for the future infertile albino dwarf masterrace...
"And that is how the Netherlands were founded dear kids."


From now on, every male dynasty member will be called "Todd" and the girls "Bethesda Bethanny Esther".

There is a "Stop Vassal War" demand you can use to stop BS like that.

 

[Eric Guier]

But Crusader Kings 3 is an historical game, so seeing that stuff bothers me. Same with the other unhistorical stuff they added to CK2. But as long as I can turn it off then it doesn't matter.

On that note, I really wish that they'd go beyond their limited supernatural on/off setting and copy TW3K's distinction between a 'romance' and a 'classic' mode to account for these myths without spoiling the experience for those who want a more veridic historical setting.

It's a game where the average knight can wipe out thousands of troops per battle. Realism is not going to happen.

I remember the devs stating that each knight represents him and his retinue, like General's Bodyguard in Medieval II, but each knight only takes up one supply limit point so that's clearly BS.

 

[Bliblablubb]

There is a "Stop Vassal War" demand you can use to stop BS like that.

Unless you have a weak hook on your vassal, all you'll get is "mmmmm, how about no?" as an answer. And you have zero options to slap him around for it. Plus the option gets greyed out after that.

But what made the whole thing such an incomprehensable clusterfuck was, that after becoming king it's now suddently a criminal act and I could imprison him. Game probably got confused because he declared through a dejure claim, which my masterrace culture does not have yet. But hey, we discovered a higher dev cap instead, not that our ~3 on average provinces even have roads to begin with...

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Red Hexapus]

I've tried it over the past year, but somehow can't get into it. Some changes are good, must most just annoy me. This is a subjective thing, but the UI feels too large and very unintuitive. Also I hate the shift from coloured map to land map when zooming in, let me keep the colours FFS :/

 

[markec]

CKII had 15 large and small expansions in period of some 6 years.

Within one year since release we got only one flavor pack for CKIII and a announced expansion that still has no release date.

At this pace CKIII will reach its full potential somewhere around 2035.

 

[Preben]

CKII had 15 large and small expansions in period of some 6 years.

Within one year since release we got only one flavor pack for CKIII and a announced expansion that still has no release date.

At this pace CKIII will reach its full potential somewhere around 2035.

CK3 already incorporates lots of stuff that were added in CK2 expansions.

In the base CK2 you could only play as Christians and couldn't even do stuff like raiding.

 

[markec]

CKII had 15 large and small expansions in period of some 6 years.

Within one year since release we got only one flavor pack for CKIII and a announced expansion that still has no release date.

At this pace CKIII will reach its full potential somewhere around 2035.

CK3 already incorporates lots of stuff that were added in CK2 expansions.

In the base CK2 you could only play as Christians and couldn't even do stuff like raiding.

Ok I stand corrected, it will reach its full potential around 2030.

 

[Kem0sabe]

I don't think I will ever enjoy it even with tons of dlc. The way war and conquest works is just too easy, the way naval transport works makes going on crusade, crossing from Iberia to north Africa, raiding and conquering in the north sea, all trivial.

If they made painting the map much harder, then the game could be great, but I suspect they never will

 

[Van-d-all]

The anniversary video is a nothing burger which pretty much only pushes PDX further down the drain of making zany games for streamers. I guess it's obvious at this point that advertisement and exposure sells shit better than actual autistic number munching gameplay they've came to be famous for, but honestly it should've been a freebie DLC they've become so good at shitting out, not a face time gallery of their sycophants. Coincidentally it's equally worthless to Civ's 30yr anniversary video. What a time to be alive.

 

[Larianshill]

CKII had 15 large and small expansions in period of some 6 years.

Royal Court is much more large and ambitious than stuff like Legacy of Rome, or even Republic.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

CKII had 15 large and small expansions in period of some 6 years.

Royal Court is much more large and ambitious than stuff like Legacy of Rome, or even Republic.

And the whole court stuff is pointless eyecandy. Only thing I'm looking forward to is the cultural rework and perhaps the character artifacts.

 

[HeroMarine]

The anniversary video is a nothing burger which pretty much only pushes PDX further down the drain of making zany games for streamers. I guess it's obvious at this point that advertisement and exposure sells shit better than actual autistic number munching gameplay they've came to be famous for, but honestly it should've been a freebie DLC they've become so good at shitting out, not a face time gallery of their sycophants. Coincidentally it's equally worthless to Civ's 30yr anniversary video. What a time to be alive.

Yeah, I was confused by the video spending 60% of its time showing no-names being retarded while telling silly but unfunny stories. Puzzling.

 

[Preben]

CKII had 15 large and small expansions in period of some 6 years.

Royal Court is much more large and ambitious than stuff like Legacy of Rome, or even Republic.

And the whole court stuff is pointless eyecandy. Only thing I'm looking forward to is the cultural rework and perhaps the character artifacts.

It's a good direction to add some meaningful state management and generally giving the players something to do other than map painting.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

CKII had 15 large and small expansions in period of some 6 years.

Royal Court is much more large and ambitious than stuff like Legacy of Rome, or even Republic.

And the whole court stuff is pointless eyecandy. Only thing I'm looking forward to is the cultural rework and perhaps the character artifacts.

It's a good direction to add some meaningful state management and generally giving the players something to do other than map painting.

I agree, but I fear that they are putting an overemphasis on the visual aspect when there are other things that could be done in order to make internal affairs more interesting. And the various court stuff could've been added as part of the base gameplay (petitions as events, court artifacts in one's inventory akin to CK2 etc etc), giving Paradox the opportunity to work on meatier stuff rather than keeping more visual artists on a payroll. But this stuff sadly sells, so of course they'll take the easy way out and sell mediocre visual stuff rather than focusing on fleshing out the mechanics proper.

And really, the whole 'hold court' stuff only detracts from the gameplay rather than expanding upon it. Click button once a year, enter minigame with a mediocre visual representation of a medieval court. But casuals will probably love it, so meh.