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Developer Diary Archives

New Expansion Will Hit Stores February 2

Your chancellor wants you to press his claim on a neighboring county. Your marshal is a bit of an incompetent. And no one thinks you should execute your uncle, like you had planned to – even though he’s a nasty rebel. Difficult problems with easy solutions? Not quite.

Crusader Kings II: Conclave, the newest expansion for Paradox Development Studio’s celebrated medieval grand-strategy game, will bring out the politician, diplomat or tyrant in you as your royal council demands to be heard – and the loudest voices demand a seat at the table. Paradox is happy to announce that this new expansion will be on February 2, 2016.

Conclave adds greater depth to ruling your realm with a host of new laws and council interactions. Will you placate your vassals by giving them a say in matters of war and peace? Will you raise the status of women in your kingdom by recognizing their right to inherit lands and title? Can you find a place on council for that one duke who has too many armies to ignore, but no talent for anything?

Read the announcement and see new screenshots...

Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Developer Diary Archives

New Expansion Will Hit Stores February 2

Your chancellor wants you to press his claim on a neighboring county. Your marshal is a bit of an incompetent. And no one thinks you should execute your uncle, like you had planned to – even though he’s a nasty rebel. Difficult problems with easy solutions? Not quite.

Crusader Kings II: Conclave, the newest expansion for Paradox Development Studio’s celebrated medieval grand-strategy game, will bring out the politician, diplomat or tyrant in you as your royal council demands to be heard – and the loudest voices demand a seat at the table. Paradox is happy to announce that this new expansion will be on February 2, 2016.

Conclave adds greater depth to ruling your realm with a host of new laws and council interactions. Will you placate your vassals by giving them a say in matters of war and peace? Will you raise the status of women in your kingdom by recognizing their right to inherit lands and title? Can you find a place on council for that one duke who has too many armies to ignore, but no talent for anything?

Read the announcement and see new screenshots...

Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Developer Diary Archives

Greetings!

I know last year featured a lot of dev diaries with very little information about new features of the game. The reason for this was the lack of an announcement of the expansion and we had decided not to talk about the expansion before the announcement. All that has changed now and last week Doomdark gave you an overview of the features we’ve added and the aim of the expansion.

This week we’re going to go a bit deeper into the new council mechanics.

Groogy has written the following presentation of the council:

So to the meat of this expansion and my favorite part. The empowerment of the council. As we promised we were gonna let the council in on the day to day governing of your realm becoming more than simply a privy council. Now in fact the strongest vassals in your realm will threaten with civil war if they are not given a position where they can become part of your council and in turn giving them influence on the politics of your realm. Having them on the council prevents them from joining factions and as a liege you can use this to stabilize his/her realm. The councillor will adopt a certain position, these are the colorful icons you see, and this position will dictate how they align themselves with the decisions you take but we will cover that in a later dev diary.



Since King Alfonso is a paranoid guy and constantly in hiding, his realm is mostly ruled by his council...

The councillors can choose to either yay, nay or abstain from a vote. You also get a vote (always voting yes when you’re suggesting something) and your own vote decides in the case of a tie. The characters abstaining from a vote are always swayed by the distribution of diplomacy skill between the yay and nay sayers. Meaning that some highly influential members might turn the tide in a vote as they persuade the voters that have no opinion on the matter. If the council has a majority voting yes on an action, you’ll be free to take that action, but if the council votes against the action, you face the choice of either going against the council or do something else. Going against the council will make it discontent as you have broken the contract with them. Such action also incur tyranny and the council members become free to create and join factions again for a limited time.

For conclave we have also changed how regencies work and the old system with a single regent deciding everything is gone. Instead, If you are in a regency, the regent is put on the council and will vote instead of you and you don’t have the option of going against a council vote.




The council also have powers to vote on your laws and even propose that a vote shall be started on something they want by cashing in on a favor they might have with their liege. But we will cover the redone laws in the next dev diary as well.

Next up Moah, our newest addition to the team, will explain some of the new tools you have to influence your council members and how you as a vassal can make your liege do things for you:

Hello everyone,

I’m Moah and I joined Paradox and the CK2 team recently. I’m here today to talk about Favors. As you know, in the game relationships to other characters are important, especially family. But family, friendships and rivalries are not the only kind of relationships that exist. Sometimes you just do a favor for someone, and hope that somewhere down the line, they’ll return it.

And since in the CK2 timeline debts, honor and duty had such a huge impact, we’ve modelled that through a mechanic we cleverly called “favors”.


Getting Support on the Council

As a liege (or part of the council), you can call in a favor on a council member to make them vote like you on the council for one year. This can be used to get an ok to revoke that title you want, execute someone you want to see dead and start that war that you’ve longed for, but the killjoys of the council is constantly saying no to, without the hassle of tyranny and factions. If you don’t have a favor to call in, you can request support from a council member in exchange of a favor. They can turn this down, but if they accept they’ll vote just as if you called a favor on them. The difference is that now you owe them a favor. This is one of the basic generators of favors and a way that vassals gain favors on their lieges. As a liege you can often gain a favor by fulfilling the ambition of a vassal and everyone can accept a sum of money in exchange for a favor. When dealing with powerful lords, you can expect their price to be quite high however.

You can only owe someone at most one favor at a time, so if you already owe them, you’ll have to wait in requesting support again until they’ve used that favor to gain something back. Council members can also call favors on each other and a clever vassal can set up scenarios where they control how the council votes.


Continue reading, there is more that couldn't fit in a single Steam post, so click here!

Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Developer Diary Archives

Greetings!

I know last year featured a lot of dev diaries with very little information about new features of the game. The reason for this was the lack of an announcement of the expansion and we had decided not to talk about the expansion before the announcement. All that has changed now and last week Doomdark gave you an overview of the features we’ve added and the aim of the expansion.

This week we’re going to go a bit deeper into the new council mechanics.

Groogy has written the following presentation of the council:

So to the meat of this expansion and my favorite part. The empowerment of the council. As we promised we were gonna let the council in on the day to day governing of your realm becoming more than simply a privy council. Now in fact the strongest vassals in your realm will threaten with civil war if they are not given a position where they can become part of your council and in turn giving them influence on the politics of your realm. Having them on the council prevents them from joining factions and as a liege you can use this to stabilize his/her realm. The councillor will adopt a certain position, these are the colorful icons you see, and this position will dictate how they align themselves with the decisions you take but we will cover that in a later dev diary.



Since King Alfonso is a paranoid guy and constantly in hiding, his realm is mostly ruled by his council...

The councillors can choose to either yay, nay or abstain from a vote. You also get a vote (always voting yes when you’re suggesting something) and your own vote decides in the case of a tie. The characters abstaining from a vote are always swayed by the distribution of diplomacy skill between the yay and nay sayers. Meaning that some highly influential members might turn the tide in a vote as they persuade the voters that have no opinion on the matter. If the council has a majority voting yes on an action, you’ll be free to take that action, but if the council votes against the action, you face the choice of either going against the council or do something else. Going against the council will make it discontent as you have broken the contract with them. Such action also incur tyranny and the council members become free to create and join factions again for a limited time.

For conclave we have also changed how regencies work and the old system with a single regent deciding everything is gone. Instead, If you are in a regency, the regent is put on the council and will vote instead of you and you don’t have the option of going against a council vote.




The council also have powers to vote on your laws and even propose that a vote shall be started on something they want by cashing in on a favor they might have with their liege. But we will cover the redone laws in the next dev diary as well.

Next up Moah, our newest addition to the team, will explain some of the new tools you have to influence your council members and how you as a vassal can make your liege do things for you:

Hello everyone,

I’m Moah and I joined Paradox and the CK2 team recently. I’m here today to talk about Favors. As you know, in the game relationships to other characters are important, especially family. But family, friendships and rivalries are not the only kind of relationships that exist. Sometimes you just do a favor for someone, and hope that somewhere down the line, they’ll return it.

And since in the CK2 timeline debts, honor and duty had such a huge impact, we’ve modelled that through a mechanic we cleverly called “favors”.


Getting Support on the Council

As a liege (or part of the council), you can call in a favor on a council member to make them vote like you on the council for one year. This can be used to get an ok to revoke that title you want, execute someone you want to see dead and start that war that you’ve longed for, but the killjoys of the council is constantly saying no to, without the hassle of tyranny and factions. If you don’t have a favor to call in, you can request support from a council member in exchange of a favor. They can turn this down, but if they accept they’ll vote just as if you called a favor on them. The difference is that now you owe them a favor. This is one of the basic generators of favors and a way that vassals gain favors on their lieges. As a liege you can often gain a favor by fulfilling the ambition of a vassal and everyone can accept a sum of money in exchange for a favor. When dealing with powerful lords, you can expect their price to be quite high however.

You can only owe someone at most one favor at a time, so if you already owe them, you’ll have to wait in requesting support again until they’ve used that favor to gain something back. Council members can also call favors on each other and a clever vassal can set up scenarios where they control how the council votes.


Continue reading, there is more that couldn't fit in a single Steam post, so click here!

Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Developer Diary Archives

Hi folks, I hope you have all had a nice and relaxing holiday! However, just in case you didn’t, let me take the edge off your existential angst with some soothing talk about the next expansion for Crusader Kings II; a little thing we eventually decided to call Conclave...

As you know, most of CK2’s expansions have “widened” the gameplay by unlocking new regions of the map and making various religions playable. You can now start the game in widely different cultural spheres for a great variety of different experiences; “Fifty Shades of Dark”, if you will. Meanwhile, we have gradually improved the core gameplay in patches (e.g. the technology system), but rarely in any radical way. Whenever we did try to “deepen” the core gameplay in an expansion, it often turned out to be a mistake: The Retinue mechanic of Legacy of Rome should, for example, have been a part of the base game so we could have kept building upon it.

Even so, it is high time that we addressed some of the major shortcomings of the strategy game that underpins the RPG experience. In particular, CK2 suffers from a kind of inverse difficulty progression; it is hard in the beginning and easy in the mid-to-late game. This is a great shame, because one of the main points of the whole feudal hierarchy mechanic - the need to rely on vassals - was to make it hard to maintain stable large Realms. So, my first and foremost intention with Conclave was to increase the challenge of the mid-to-late game. This was the general plan of action:

• Reduce the “positive opinion inflation” of vassals vs their liege. (We ended up cutting many important positive opinion modifiers in half.)
  
• Highlight the most powerful vassals by making them strongly desire a Council seat.
  
• Give the Council more power without reducing player agency. (You are free to disregard the Council’s suggestions, but this will have ramifications on Factions. More on this later...)
  
• Introduce Infamy and Coalitions against aggressively expanding Realms.
  
• Improve the alliance mechanic to make it a more intentional choice. (A royal marriage is now simply a non-aggression pact. Alliance is the second step, but still requires a marriage.)
  
• Improve the diplomatic AI in order to contain “blobs” (with the help of the above Alliance and Coalition systems.)
  
• Bring the military AI to a whole new level.
  
• Make it harder to quickly win wars through one or two major engagements. (Hence, we reduced the bloodiness of battles overall, introduced “shattered retreats” and made armies reinforce in friendly territory.)

Thus, the features of Conclave and the accompanying patch are a combination of internal and external measures to make blobbing harder. This intention had ripple effects on other mechanics. For example, malcontents now tend to gang up into fewer but more powerful Factions, and we reworked the Law Screen while we were adding the new Council Power laws.



We also took this opportunity to address an unrelated weakness in the game, namely the education of children. If you have the expansion, that whole experience should now be more interesting…

That’s all for now, stay tuned for the details!

Henrik Fåhraeus

Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Developer Diary Archives

Hi folks, I hope you have all had a nice and relaxing holiday! However, just in case you didn’t, let me take the edge off your existential angst with some soothing talk about the next expansion for Crusader Kings II; a little thing we eventually decided to call Conclave...

As you know, most of CK2’s expansions have “widened” the gameplay by unlocking new regions of the map and making various religions playable. You can now start the game in widely different cultural spheres for a great variety of different experiences; “Fifty Shades of Dark”, if you will. Meanwhile, we have gradually improved the core gameplay in patches (e.g. the technology system), but rarely in any radical way. Whenever we did try to “deepen” the core gameplay in an expansion, it often turned out to be a mistake: The Retinue mechanic of Legacy of Rome should, for example, have been a part of the base game so we could have kept building upon it.

Even so, it is high time that we addressed some of the major shortcomings of the strategy game that underpins the RPG experience. In particular, CK2 suffers from a kind of inverse difficulty progression; it is hard in the beginning and easy in the mid-to-late game. This is a great shame, because one of the main points of the whole feudal hierarchy mechanic - the need to rely on vassals - was to make it hard to maintain stable large Realms. So, my first and foremost intention with Conclave was to increase the challenge of the mid-to-late game. This was the general plan of action:

• Reduce the “positive opinion inflation” of vassals vs their liege. (We ended up cutting many important positive opinion modifiers in half.)
  
• Highlight the most powerful vassals by making them strongly desire a Council seat.
  
• Give the Council more power without reducing player agency. (You are free to disregard the Council’s suggestions, but this will have ramifications on Factions. More on this later...)
  
• Introduce Infamy and Coalitions against aggressively expanding Realms.
  
• Improve the alliance mechanic to make it a more intentional choice. (A royal marriage is now simply a non-aggression pact. Alliance is the second step, but still requires a marriage.)
  
• Improve the diplomatic AI in order to contain “blobs” (with the help of the above Alliance and Coalition systems.)
  
• Bring the military AI to a whole new level.
  
• Make it harder to quickly win wars through one or two major engagements. (Hence, we reduced the bloodiness of battles overall, introduced “shattered retreats” and made armies reinforce in friendly territory.)

Thus, the features of Conclave and the accompanying patch are a combination of internal and external measures to make blobbing harder. This intention had ripple effects on other mechanics. For example, malcontents now tend to gang up into fewer but more powerful Factions, and we reworked the Law Screen while we were adding the new Council Power laws.



We also took this opportunity to address an unrelated weakness in the game, namely the education of children. If you have the expansion, that whole experience should now be more interesting…

That’s all for now, stay tuned for the details!

Henrik Fåhraeus

Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Developer Diary Archives

Your Council Would Like a Word With You
New Crusader Kings II Expansion “Conclave” Coming Soon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_n_qy53Isk

The new year will bring new goodies from Paradox Development Studio and the team behind Crusader Kings II, Paradox’s best-selling and critically beloved medieval grand strategy game.

Conclave, the newest expansion for the game, will give your vassals some bite to go along with your bark, as the council that governs your realm will now demand some say in how you rule. Powerful dukes, regardless of competence, will require a seat at the table, and those left on the outside will be more likely to plot against you.

Keep your council happy, and the mighty vassals will resist the pull of faction and civil war. Dismiss their interests, though, and you may find yourself trying to hold together a council at war with itself.

Balance councillor skill and power to keep your dynasty safe and strong. Ignore powerful underlings at your peril, or simply buy their loyalty with favors. Conclave makes the royal council a force unto itself.

Other features of Conclave will include:

- Councils can now vote on changes to realm laws – or you can try to limit their power and influence
- Revised education system for royal children, with new traits and events designed for childhood
- New diplomatic system that prioritizes marital alliances and non-aggression pacts, as well as the possibility of coalitions
- Improved military combat model with a greater emphasis on morale, as well as new rules for mercenary companies
- And many more smaller changes including the usual tweaks to how the AI prioritizes its decisions.

So the choice will be yours; do you dare to challenge your vassals on their council at the risk of challenging them on the battlefield? Can you move your nation towards greater centralization and power without your advisors realizing how much they are losing in the deal?

Crusader Kings II appreciates the subtlety of court intrigue. Conclave will give you new avenues to test that skill.

Conclave will be available in early 2016.

Official Crusader Kings II forums
Official announcement