Hi everyone!

As you may already know, artifacts are making a triumphant return in Royal Court. The artifacts themselves will be familiar to those of you who have used them in CK2, but how you actually get your hands on them will be slightly different.
As such, I won’t talk much about the artifacts themselves for now, but I’ll be going over one of the major ways of how you will acquire artifacts.

► Read our Dev Diary #68 - Inspiration Never Dies​​

💡 To see the images, please visit our forums or website.
💡 Enjoy the FAQ Royal Court and read all there is to learn about our upcoming Expansion




Characters throughout the world can gain what we call an inspiration. Inspirations come about as a character is seeking to create something extraordinary, resulting in the character wanting to pursue the means of realizing their inspiration. They may want to write a great tome of knowledge, weave a tapestry, or forge a magnificent crown! There are many different kinds of inspirations, all resulting in various types of artifacts upon completion. An inspiration can be broad, such as someone wanting to merely forge a weapon, or very specific like a character wanting to forge a sword.

[Image of a character with an active inspiration]​

Inspirations only occur for landless characters. We want to extend the immersion of guests and courtiers by making them valuable to you even if you have no desire to push their claims, or use their skills as a councillor. Inspired characters will travel the world, from court to court, seeking a wealthy monarch to sponsor them and their creation. Realms with a high grandeur will be able to attract inspired characters more frequently than those with low grandeur. Granting them a higher chance at receiving skilled craftsmen that will be able to forge an artifact to meet your expectations.

Once an inspired character arrives at your court, you can choose to sponsor them by giving them the gold they ask for. A skilled character will demand larger amounts of gold, but will also yield better results in creating an artifact. Most of the time at least. No one is infallible after all. The skill that is relevant depends on the type of artifact they want to make. For example, a weapon and the quality it gets is dependent on the character’s Martial and Prowess skill. Writing a book, on the other hand, scales with Learning.

[Image of the Fund Inspiration interaction]​

After funding an inspiration, it will take some time for the character to create the artifact. During the creation progress various situations can happen, such as the character asking for better materials to work with. Below you’ll find such an example, in which my inspired character finds excellent material at the local market. Approve their request and pay for the material, and you’ll increase the overall quality of the artifact they’ll produce.

[Image of an inspiration event: Highest Quality]​

An inspiration gains progress similar to that of a scheme. You’ll gain progress depending on a chance each month, making the actual time it takes to complete vary. Once the inspiration reaches full progress, the character will approach you to present their creation.

[Image of an inspiration being completed]​

Mind you, this is not the only way in which you can get an artifact. Inspirations exist to serve as the most significant means of doing so, since they will generally grant you artifacts of a higher quality. You can still get artifacts by other means, such as getting them in events. I hope you enjoyed this brief look into how an artifact can come about. Stay tuned for more information regarding the Royal Court!

Anatomy of a Game: The Script System 📜
Today we are sharing more details about the Script System and how it works to let our Content Designers & modding community create their wonderful events and mechanics!
► Read more on our forums

Greetings!

The team is slowly coming back together after a well deserved summer vacation.

Today, let’s have a look at what we’ve been doing to the culture setup and some small scale map tweaks. Most of the work we’ve spent on cultures has naturally gone into the cultural overhaul itself, but we have made some general improvements as well, most notably over in India and southern Europe.

► Read our Dev Diary #67 - A View to a Map​

💡 To see the images, please visit our forums or website.
💡 Enjoy the FAQ Royal Court and read all there is to learn about our upcoming Expansion




Starting with a small culture addition in southern Europe, and that some of you keen eyed readers noticed back in a previous dev diary, we’ve added back a fan favorite from CK2; Carantanian. The culture is quite extensive on game start and covers most of south-eastern Bavaria. From a historical point of view, the culture is of a west slavic origin, but as they got cut off from their ancestral brethren in the Carpathian Basin, they became gradually closer to the south slavic peoples. We represent this by Carantanian having a West Slavic Heritage, but speaking a South Slavic Language.

[Image of Carantanian culture]​

Next, I’ll hand it over to our local India expert, @Trin Tragula, to talk about (you guessed it) India!

Indian Culture Changes
The culture rework has been a good opportunity to rework the cultures in India a bit. The current setup here is one we inherited from Crusader Kings 2 and it was in some ways not entirely appropriate for our era. To better reflect the diversity of the subcontinent we have added two new cultures, changed the old ones a bit and also added a great number of potential culture names for when the large starting cultures diverge.

First of all we have gotten rid of Hindustani culture, and two new cultures have been broken away from what it used to cover in the south. The core part of the culture covers the Gangetic plain, and is now known as Kannauji after the Imperial city of Kannauj (Kanyakubja) which was the main prize of the region and often gave its name to it.

Hindustani itself is still around in a way, as a possible name for a cultural hybrid between an Iranian or Turkic culture with one of the north indian cultures.

[Image of the cultures in northern India]​

Starting in the central parts of India the newly added Gond culture has been carved out of areas that were previously Hindustani, Marathi or Oriya. In 1066 most Gond counties are under the control of the Cedi kingdom and many of these counties are now also tribal at start. This culture covers a region that was in an odd place in the old setup, at the border of several cultures but not quite belonging to either of them.

[Image of the Gond culture]​

Covering the Malwa plateau as well as some of the adjacent regions that were previously considered Hindustani. This new culture shares a language with the Rajasthani and Gujarati cultures, Gurjar Apabhramsa. The existing Rajput culture has been renamed to Rajasthani (since Rajput as a cultural distinction does not really fit our start date) and Assamese is now known as Kamrupi.

[Image of the Malvi culture]​

Indian History and Title Improvements
While looking over the subcontinent it was also clear that in some areas the title setup was also better suited for the early modern era, rather than the medieval era around Crusader Kings III start dates. A number of baronies have been renamed and reorganized into new counties, and a number of new vassals have been scripted in, especially for the 1066 start.
The starting presumptions about who controlled what in 1066 have also been revisited to bring things better in line with history and create a more interesting start. There are now more starting characters, both independent and vassals, and most kings will no longer start above their domain limit.

Some things like the crisis of the Chola empire should also be a bit better represented in the initial setup, with strong and somewhat unruly Pandya vassals, a much stronger Lankan revolt and the Chera Raja now independent (with his historical vassals to support him). You can now also play as the future king, Kulottunga.
There are also other, minor changes, such as revisiting the extent of cultures like Kashmiri, and Telugu, and assigning a number of tribal counties in the eastern-central part of the subcontinent.

[Image of the Sinhalese rebellion in 1066]​

That concludes today’s dev diary. Until next time!

Anatomy of a Game, episode 3! We are sharing more details about some optimisations we have done for 1.5 "Royal Court" 💡
► Read more on our forums

Another set of traditions today for the future Royal Court expansion: Charitable, Parochialism, Ting-Meet, Tribal Unity and Warriors of the Dry! 👑
► Read more on our forums

Commands, States, Synchronization of CK3: our second entry in the Anatomy of a Game series! 💡
► Read more on our forums

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the third summer teaser, please have a look at the Events images on our forums!

This time around, we figured we would show you something quite different. As you may know already, minor titles will be returning alongside the upcoming expansion, Royal Court, allowing you to appoint a Court Jester, a Seneschal, and more!

As you might expect, we’ll be adding a number of new events that make use of these appointed characters, but we are no strangers to also updating existing content if need be!
We generally want features to be visible wherever it makes sense, and updating content can be a part of making old events have new and interesting options or additional variety and flavour.

► Read Summer Teaser #3

What happens when you launch up the game?
What actually goes on in a single day of gameplay?
Our dev team details the Anatomy of Crusader Kings 3! 💡
► Read more on our forums

Hello everyone,

Have a look at the following traditions coming with Royal Court: Communal, Courtly, Egalitarian, and Stoic! These add up to the past three we have shared last week: Bellicose, Inventive, and Spiritual.
► Read Summer Teaser #2

Hello everyone,

As promised, here is the first of what we like to call “summer teasers” for our upcoming expansion Royal Court.
Today, a few traditions that you’ll be able to pick up with the upcoming overhaul for cultures!
► Read Summer Teaser #1