Crusader Kings III

[Barrister]

Or, if the current ruler is a pious one, he would no doubt be familiar with the parable of the prodigal son.

[Jacob]

Yes, but grief does funny things to people.  Your current ruler has just lost two children, leaving only one left.  Perhaps your ruler is more likely to try and "rehabilitate" the murderer, rather than risking his last surviving heir?

Nah, there are another five or six in the mix - and some grandkids too. It's just that those three were the ones with the best stats.

[Valmy]

The Persian one has my attention. That is the kind of stuff I want to see CKIII do.

[Solmyr]

I will also get it as I buy most of the content for CK3, EU4, Stellaris and Vic3 anyway...

Same. 

Incidentally, with all these crowns added in clothing packs, I'd like some system to design your own crown (especially if you create your own kingdom or empire).

[Zanza]

Just noticed the season 2 pass is 27% off on Steam so I bought it. 

[Syt]

So far I'm carefully optimistic about the upcoming patch/expansion.

Travel System:
- Getting rid of some of the "instant teleportation" or "existing in the void" (e.g. when on pilgrimage which gives some events, but is very abstract) is a great move, IMO. Reworking feasts, hunts, pilgrimages (and adding tourneys) this way is a great idea.
- Having buildings etc. influence how safe or not it is to travel somewhere adds more consideration of what you build where, and maybe even build something in a vassal holding to make passage through it easier/safer.
- Tours as a means to have more interesting interactions with your vassals or neighbors is also a good idea.
- I hope this can lead to situations like with Richard the Lionheart being captured by the Austrians when returning from the Holy Land, and having to be ransomed (the ransom financed the Vienna city walls at the time IIRC).

Regency:
- Looks a lot more involved, with more interactions for both regent and liege, making it more interesting to be a vassal-come-regent, as "grey eminence", so to speak, or to live out your Prince John fantasies.
- Having a power balance mechanic in place is a good idea, and the option to scapegoat each other for bad shit happening.
- With traveling becoming more important, i.e. rulers being away from home, I hope this will be a fairly important mechanic.

Building rework:
- Hopefully will make building decisions a bit more interesting while slowing down development a bit (starting in 869 you can see the map covered in max castles by 1300 or so).


My concerns are all about balancing and repetitiveness.

- Traveling, it seems, will be something you will engage in often (as it should be for the time period). You will probably figure out "standard" routes quickly, and I hope it will not become too tedious to plan your travels (route, escorts, etc.). Maybe it would be good if you could have some "saved" routes. E.g. if as King of France I regularly go hunting in a certain place, or hold feasts in a certain place, maybe the game could "remember" my last settings for those journeys, so that I can tweak them if necessary, but don't have to set them from scratch all the time.

- Events, as usual, will be difficult to create in a way that stays fresh, but I think that's a problem for all games with events (like Stellaris etc.). If you have events that highly rely on specific triggers, you may not see some of them very often, making the ones you do see more repetitive. Make them generic enough so that frequent(ish) repetition is plausible, then they become bland. Make the "story" of the events themself too unique, then it becomes silly if they happen multiple times in a century. I think having event options locked behind triggers/stats/character traits, or varying effects based on those things is a good idea to keep frequent events a bit more interesting, but ultimately, events will inevitably become repetitive in some way, IMO. I'm just glad that the current design team have said they consciously avoid some of the silliness of CK2 (having limbs regrow because you really, really, believe in the power of Satan), though they have added some in other areas (stealing clothes, smelly castle being my personal bug bears that happen too often). Maybe a way forward would be to have various event structures, but the narrative gets filled in a bit mad libs style, so that while the mechanics of the event stay the same, but it's using a library of texts that quasi-procedurally create the narratve of the event.

- Vassal interactions during travels: this will be interesting to balance. In vanilla, handling your vassals in later game is often not a huge challenge. Giving the player more tools to deal with them has the potential of making it even more trivial. At the same time, if they make handling vassals harder, and put the new interaction that would counter that into DLC only, it would be crap for the people who don't have the DLC. Curious how they will square that circle.

- State of the code at release. I fully expect that there's going to be some really annoying bugs or balance issues at release - this is a Paradox game, after all. I hope it won't be too bad, or take too long to fix, but I expect it will suck or be broken for a bit.    I will surely backup my mods and put them in the Documents/mods folder, so I can revert to the previous version and use them, if necessary.

[Jacob]

Just noticed the season 2 pass is 27% off on Steam so I bought it. 

Me too, after seeing your post.

[Syt]

Watched OPB's review of the latest Dev Diary. Admittedly looking forward to it a bit too much at this point.

[Tamas]

I stopped watcjjng it when he was talking about how you didn't have a way to interact with characters outside your realm. Clearly he forgot the ridiculous pen pal and other events that can trigger with completely random characters.

[Syt]

True, but having a more organic way for such interactons (traveling, more elaborate feasts/hunts, tournaments/competitions etc.) adds an additional layer of realism/immersion IMHO.

[Tamas]

True, but having a more organic way for such interactons (traveling, more elaborate feasts/hunts, tournaments/competitions etc.) adds an additional layer of realism/immersion IMHO.

Hopefully yes. In any case at least it should trigger me to return to CK3 for a week of binge-playing before setting it aside again. 

[Jacob]

I'm binge playing right now and enjoying it 

[chipwich]

AGOT mod is coming out today. Im not sure what to expect but I hope it will tide me over until T&T.

[Syt]

New system: "Accolades":

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/dev-diary-125-the-most-valiant-of-them-all.1579721/

Basically, you can create up to 5 renowned titles for Knights in your court. The Knights must be unlanded, lowborn, or at most Barony level vassals. Each title comes with two attributes that give bonus to ... well it seems a bunch of things. Army modifiers, bonus to trait gain, prestige bonus etc. etc. Titles can gain glory (e.g. winning battles, I guess), increasing the power of the bonuses (levels 1-6). They can also lose glory, though, esp. on succession of an accolade from one knight to the next, more so if the "heir" is less suited to the role (Accolade attributes require certain stats or traits), or if you have to change one of the two attributes to "fit" the new guy.

Sounds great on paper, and makes knights actually a bit more interesting to work with or (since you can give an accolade to your heir) something to do for your offspring while they wait for you to die (e.g. send them on tournaments, I suppose).

[Jacob]

If you're into total conversions, this one for Middle Earth looks quite decent: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2291024373