Greetings Queens & Kings!

We are now opening a BETA Branch available to all Steam users, to enhance Multiplayer Stability.
After the success we saw with previous Steam branches, we are hopeful that this one will help us to address issues with our Multiplayer system. This branch will stay open for a few months to help diagnose as many issues as possible.

With that in mind, we ask that if you do participate in this Steam branch that you PLEASE RE-REPORT ANY MULTIPLAYER ISSUES YOU MAY BE FACING as it will help us determine how the fixes on this particular branch are going in real time.
This Beta branch is entirely voluntary and you are under no obligation to participate if you do not wish to do so.

As always, we appreciate & value your input.

A message from our QA Team:
Our mission is always to deliver the most quality product as possible to the player. QA acts as the player representative within the development team, and works towards providing the team with as much information as they need to create a product that is as fun as possible to play.

We are aware of numerous issues, including the Out-of-Synchs, empty lobbies, incorrect version issues and with this open Steam beta we aim to improve the multiplayer situation.

As always, please report anything you find on the bug report forums and we will check it out as soon as we can. We really appreciate uploading the randomlogs which include multiplayer logs to the bug forum reports as well because this helps us immensely. Logs are available in the folder under C:\Users\<name>\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Crusader Kings III\oos.

We hope you help us in reporting any and all issues that are still pain points for you, as well as any issues that are still occurring on the open beta branch. It is important that older issues are reported again so that we know if they are still occurring on the beta branch.

Read the News on our official forums.

We are expanding two areas in the upcoming Free Patch 'Azure': childhood and lifestyle events!

► Read our Dev Diary #57 - An Eventful Summer



To see the images, please visit our forums or website.

Hello everyone!

I hope you’re enjoying the warmer days, and that you are looking forward to hearing a bit more about the free patch, Azure, that we’re releasing this summer.

Before we get into the meat of today's Dev Diary I want to clarify something regarding the Azure patch; it's being made by a smaller group of CK3 devs in a Strike Team setup, which means that not everyone on the CK3 Dev team is working on the patch. We hope that we'll still be able to address quite a few of your concerns, but we won't have time to address everything. Still, keep sending us feedback, as it helps us prioritize!

This dev diary will focus on one area of the patch and as a Content Designer I am – unsurprisingly – here to talk about events and such. More specifically I am here to talk about some new content that we’re including in Azure, and joining me in this dev diary is one of our new Content Designers: Isabella! As developers we all have areas of the game that we would like to expand upon and flesh out a bit, and two areas are now getting some love: childhood and lifestyle events.


Childhood​
Children always want to grow up fast, and no child feels this more actually than the one that just inherited the entire realm at the mature age of six. Oh woe, what can a young king do to pass the long days ahead until he can scheme and murder to his heart’s content? Play with other young rulers, of course! Azure includes a new activity for children called Meet Peers that will make childhood more interesting and full of experiences.

gathering.png

[Image of the start event for the Meet Peers activity]

Meet Peers is an activity available for children where they can gather all young rulers and courtiers in the realm to just play and forget about the dreariness of life as a child in medieval times. All participants will lose stress and increase their opinion of the host, and the children attending the playdate can find themselves in fun and educational situations!

brave.png

[Image of an event that can appear when you Meet Peers]

Of course, there may also be any number of less… wholesome consequences from bringing that many children together.

playing_rough.png

[Image of an event that can appear when you Meet Peers]

And if socializing just isn’t your thing and friends are easiest made (and killed) through schemes we’ve also reduced the age restrictions for Sway and Murder slightly. All to enable you to live out your scheming rule from as young an age as possible!


Lifestyle events​
Or, if your children just can’t wait to grow up, you could let them try their fate fighting against grown soldiers in a tournament. In this patch, we have a couple of new lifestyle events coming your way, including the Tantrum Tourney event chain for Martial Authority characters.


tantrumtourneyhighres.PNG

[Image of the starting event from the Tantrum Tourney event chain]

‘Hym repented that he came there!’ - 14th Century Romance Richard Coer de Lyon on grown dukes and lords regretting each moment as they get impaled by a lance manned by an adolescent child.

A trope of romances detailing the life of Richard the Lionheart likes to exaggerate the dates of his reign to present him as a King who was a child monarch. This seems to be done almost exclusively so he can be presented as perhaps the greatest demon of a child who ever lived. Child Richard is shown ordering all of his noblemen to fight him in a tournament - on pain of death, and beating everyone who turns up to a pulp.

Will you allow your baby’s first bloodlust to be unleashed upon your knights, who certainly did not sign up for this?

Keep your eyes peeled while your character is studying their Lifestyle! You might see a few new moments cropping up. Especially if you have war elephants… but what are you doing if you don’t already have war elephants?

The journey to PDXCON starts today with the Grand Campaign!
Enjoy the adventure from the Tribal Era to a distant future, across four Paradox Interactive games.

Join the Grand Campaign with Crusader Kings III on Twitch, starting as the Danes: Jarl Halfdan of Jórvík, 867AD!

► Crusader Kings III: 21st April 12:00-22:00 CEST, on Twitch



Join the teams of Crusader Kings III, Europa Universalis IV, Hearts of Iron IV and Stellaris for the largest event this side of PDXCON Remixed. In a tale that takes us from 867A.D to the distant future, you, the Paradox Community, will have a deciding say on events that unfold!

Acting as our ‘Senate’, you can influence how each campaign unfolds. Want to see a more military focused nation, or one that values the power of diplomacy or trade? By debating and voting inside the Senate, you can shape the course of our nation through all four grand strategy games.

You can take your seat in the senate by heading over to the discord here: Discord PDXCon

Each leg of the journey will also have a knock on effect on the next, crafting a completely unique gamestate by the time we reach our Stellaris endgame. You have the power to not only shape history, but the universe!

The Event will be broadcast live on the Paradox Interactive Twitch Channel at the times below:

The Dates:
► Crusader Kings III: 21st April 12:00-22:00 CEST
► Europa Universalis IV: 28th April 12:00-22:00 CEST
► Hearts of Iron IV: 7th May 12:00 - 22:00 CEST
► Stellaris: 15th-16th May 12:00 - 20:00 CEST

We’re looking forward to bringing hours of grand strategy gameplay to you as we forge our own story, together!

This week we have a few announcements to make: Azure Free Patch, Multiplayer stability, First Expansion & PDXCon!

► Read our Dev Diary #56 - An Azure Summer​



Greetings!

This week we have a few announcements to make! Firstly, as you saw in the last diary, we mentioned the number 1.3.X - this is the version number for an upcoming patch that we’re aiming to release around this summer (of course, the ‘X’ part will be an actual digit when it’s released, but for now we’ll just have to wait to see what it’ll be in the end!).

As you already know, we tend to name our patches using heraldic terms. The Northern Lords release had the name ‘Corvus’ for example. As we’re hoping for clear blue skies this summer, we’ve dubbed this patch ‘Azure’!

The Azure patch is a free patch, and there will not be any paid content coming out at the same time. It’ll focus on improving the stability of the game, fixing bugs, adding Quality of Life, balancing various systems, and adding some small features requested by the community. We’ll not go into many details in this diary, instead you can look forward to more info in some of the upcoming Dev Diaries!

Until then, here is a first teaser of some of the improvements that you will find in the patch:

• War Declaration Window: The war declaration UI flow will be revisited in order to better highlight your opponent’s strength and the different objectives available for a given Casus Belli
  
• Starting Men at Arms: Rulers will now start with a contingent of Men at Arms, depending on their income and culture. Default Men at Arms will also be generated when a Character is landed for the first time.

[Image of Duchess Matilda's starting MaA]

We hope to release Azure this summer, before the vacation season (the summer vacation usually starts late June and ends by the end of July) - but depending on how our plans work out, it might release during late summer.

***

Another thing we’re actively working with is improving Multiplayer stability, although this is separate from the upcoming Azure patch. We’re currently collecting as much data as we can, and it’s a process that’ll take time - at this point we’d not want to release the improvements as a patch.

Instead we’re aiming to release an Open Beta on Steam where you can get access to some of the Multiplayer stability improvements early. We highly recommend using this Open Beta when playing with your friends. This version of the game will have extra Multiplayer logging enabled, so that any remaining issues can be found more easily. As a side effect of these additional logs, the game will run a bit slower both in multiplayer and in singleplayer. If you notice the slowdown, you might want to switch back from the Open Beta for your singleplayer sessions. More specific info will be posted as the Open Beta is released.

This Open Beta will be available sometime in the near future for Steam users.

***

Now, as most of you have already figured out, the first big Expansion will be revealed during PDXCon in May! We’re looking forward to then, and to be able to share more details with you!

During the week of PDXCon we’ll have a DevDiary where we go into some detail about parts of the Expansion (we know that you’ll be hungry for more info after seeing the show!). After that diary, there will be some more Azure patch diaries before we start writing further Expansion diaries - just a heads up, so you know what to expect!

This week, all about Field recording, Sound design of the Event Images, some 1.3 patch updates, and of course, the music from Andreas Waldetoft!
► Read our Dev Diary #55 - A Sound Plan



Good afternoon, all

I’m here today with a short dev diary on some upcoming improvements to moddability. We’re not quite ready yet to make any announcements about upcoming features and so on, but we thought you might be interested in hearing about some modding improvements we've been working on.

In an upcoming patch which I will from now on call 1.3.X (due to the exact version number being unknown at this time), we’ve spent a bit of time on making the game more moddable based on requests we’ve had from the modding community. In particular we would like to thank the Modding Co-op for coming up with a curated list of requested functionality. The curation of this list made it easy for us to get a good overview of what functionality the community would like, and limited to those requests that’d benefit a lot of modders rather than just a handful. As the amount of time we could spend on modding improvements this time around was rather limited, having an already curated list to pick from was great.
From that list we picked some of the simpler requests; things that’d require relatively minimal code and would only affect mods. We will likely implement more from this list in the future, though our list for 1.3.X is unlikely to expand.

In addition to implementing some functionality based on these requests, we’ve also had some conversations with modders, and looked at some common pain points. We can’t address most of them right now, but one we noticed is that a number of mods use the DummyMale and DummyFemale characters for a lot of things they weren’t meant for. This was a result of lacking functionality, which we have now introduced in 1.3.X.
With the need for this dummy-character removed, we will be deprecating it. That means that it’ll continue to work 1.3.X which introduces the replacement functionality, but that they will be largely removed in 1.4 to ensure that script and code are more maintainable in the long-term.

Another bit of functionality that we think modders will be interested in is that of same-sex concubinage. Proper support for
it will come alongside other modding improvements in 1.3.X. Before 1.3 the gender restrictions for concubinage were possible to work around (but could cause bugs), which is no longer possible in 1.3. In 1.3.X we support it more fully, eliminating odd edge-case bugs and the like.
Further, we plan to support same-sex marriage for mods in 1.4. Due to larger technical risks surrounding it, it was not feasible to include that in 1.3.X; we need more time to test it to ensure that this support does not introduce bugs in the vanilla game. We're really looking forward to being able to support more diverse experiences with this mod support.

Mods add so much to the experience of our games, and moddability has been something we’ve considered throughout CK3’s development. As a former CK2 modder myself, it’s great to see all the things the modding community is producing.

Finally, here’s all the modding improvements we plan to release in 1.3.X:

• User Modding: Add CloseGameView data function so mods can close specific in game views.
  
• User Modding: Add GetTraitFromGroup and GetTraitGroupLevel data functions on Character.
  
• User modding: make_concubine now supports same-sex concubinage
  
• User Modding: Add GetTraitGroup( 'tag' ) and Trait.GetGroup data functions to get trait groups.
  
• User Modding: Add HasTrait and HasTraitFromGroup data functions to Character.
  
• User modding: Added data functions GetTraitsWithFlag and GetTraitsWithoutFlag
  
• User modding: Added datamodel GetTraits on TraitGroup
  
• User modding: Added effect deactivate_holy_site
  
• User modding: Added effect remove_dynasty_perk
  
• User modding: Added effect remove_innovation = innovation_key
  
• User modding: Added effect set_army_location
  
• User modding: Added effects clear_traits and copy_traits
  
• User modding: Added effects set_age and change_age
  
• User modding: Added list builder x_culture_global
  
• User modding: Added trigger has_innovation_flag
  
• User modding: Added trigger perks_in_<lifestyle>, to query how many perks exist in a given lifestyle (rather than how many a specific character has)
  
• User modding: spawn_army will now only spawn levies if scripted to do so
  
• User modding: Add GetGlobalVariable and GetGlobalList data functions for getting data saved from script.
  
• User modding: Add MakeScopeValue, MakescopeFlag, and MakeScopeBool to create scope objects out of primitive types directly since they are not automatically creatable via the MakeScope member on complex types like Character.MakeScope.
  
• User modding: Add ScriptValue data function to scope objects which will evaluate a script value just with that scope object as root.
  
• User modding: Made the Localize data function allow the key it references to also call other data functions in it like SelectLocalization does.
  
• User modding: Add AddList data function for GuiScope, it is to add_to_list what AddScope is to save_scope_as.

That’s all for today!
I’m excited to see what the modding community will do with these added pieces of functionality.

The journey to PDXCON begins: Introducing the Grand Campaign!
4 games, 4 weeks and 5 days of play!

Join the teams of Crusader Kings III, Europa Universalis IV, Hearts of Iron IV and Stellaris for the largest event this side of PDXCON Remixed. In a tale that takes us from 867A.D to the distant future, you, the Paradox Community, will have a deciding say on events that unfold!

Acting as our ‘Senate’, you can influence how each campaign unfolds. Want to see a more military focused nation, or one that values the power of diplomacy or trade? By debating and voting inside the Senate, you can shape the course of our nation through all four grand strategy games.

You can take your seat in the senate by heading over to the discord here: Discord PDXCon

Each leg of the journey will also have a knock on effect on the next, crafting a completely unique gamestate by the time we reach our Stellaris endgame. You have the power to not only shape history, but the universe!

The Event will be broadcast live on the Paradox Interactive Twitch Channel at the times below:

The Dates:
► Crusader Kings III: 21st April 12:00-22:00 CEST
► Europa Universalis IV: 28th April 12:00-22:00 CEST
► Hearts of Iron IV: 7th May 12:00 - 22:00 CEST
► Stellaris: 15th-16th May 12:00 - 20:00 CEST

We’re looking forward to bringing hours of grand strategy gameplay to you as we forge our own story, together!

This week, all about Field recording, Sound design of the Event Images, some 1.3 patch updates, and of course, the music from Andreas Waldetoft!
► Read our Dev Diary #54 - A Sound Plan

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1303183/Crusader_Kings_III_Northern_Lords/

Hello adventurers!

Today, we’re going to be taking a look at what new scripted content we’ve added for CK3: the Northern Lords, and, since it’s been out and playable for a week, I thought it’d be fun to go a little bit into some of the design rationales we had and my personal perspective on some of the feedback so far.

► Read our Dev Diary #53 - Northern Lords Content Rundown

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1303183/Crusader_Kings_III_Northern_Lords/

Hey everyone,

Update 1.3.1 is Live now!

► Read the Hotfix 1.3.1 here

Howdy all,

We are experimenting with an early access Open Beta for our upcoming fixes and releases for 1.3.1. While this Beta branch is still available, please note that it is not a final product or indicative of our ultimate goal. We are using this to assess viable options and test features, so please let us know what you think!

This branch is currently available for Steam only during this initial test for the Patch, but we are looking at the possibility of other platforms in the future.

FOR THOSE THAT OPT IN TO THIS BETA BRANCH: We do ask that you make sure that you MAKE A COPY OF YOUR SAVE FILE before you launch this Beta to ensure that there is no issue with saves. While we do not anticipate any issues with your saves, we ask that you make a back-up just in case.

Please note that for Multiplayer games: the server list is not working, but joining via server ID does work.

► Read and discuss our 1.3.1 Hotfix Patchnotes