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CK2 - Dev Diary #121 - Court Improvements

Hello! In this dev diary we will present some changes we have made to the court system. Court Management is an important part of the CK2 experience, and currently there are several code pruning mechanisms that curtail court size, making characters die more frequently when the court grows too big. Now court management has been made more interesting by, for example, lowering the aggressive pruning for player courts, creating expenses/benefits associated with a Large Court, court flavored events using the characters of the court, etc. The intention of these changes is to make the system more interactive and interesting.


ck2_15.png

The court limit as shown in the interface.


Your court will now have a size limit depending on your tier, presented in the interface (see picture above). It’s possible to influence this limit by, for example, investing in majesty tech. We have also removed prisoners from the court-tab to make the shown courtiers more relevant.


ck2_18.png

Example of expenses for a big court (can be turned off through a game rule).


To bring life to the courts, we have added some maintenance events that will give your courtiers more of a life behind the scenes, making them more interesting and fun characters by giving them nicknames, modifiers, and skills.

ck2_16.png

Give a courtier a nickname.


We’ve also made sure that any courtier “randomly” picked for generic content is more likely to be someone with good (or at least interesting) skills, a cool minor title, an interesting relationship, etc. This is done by using a scripted score value that takes into account traits, opinions, and modifiers.


We hope that you’ll have fun with this small new feature, and thank you for reading!
 
Do prisoners count into Court Size?
Prisoners no longer count towards the number of courtiers, and their portraits do not appear in the list of courtiers. You can of course still find them in the usual Prisoners tab (under the Intrigue menu).

Nice. I'm not sure if I understand the last point correctly. I assume that it means that:
if an event calls for a random courtier the event is more likely to pick a courtier thaat has some unique feature (that it already had before, not one that the event itself gives).
So for example, events are more likely to target a Crusader-commander-court physician in my court than a complete nobody.
Am I correct?

Yes, a lot of existing content has had their "random courtier" selections updated, in an attempt to achieve exactly that. :)
 
Children should not count towards the court limit as a full person, because there is no simple way to ask them to leave court. Also they don't cost as much to maintain.

Maybe making children count as a fraction of a courtier, or having a separate extra capacity for children, would make sense without lifting limits on children entirely.

you can have children be educated abroad, can't you?
 
Could you also do some improvements in the court UI? As it stands right now it's just a long list of people that you need to scroll to see the one you need, please make it more organized likr the family and relations tabs
 
I think one thing that still needs to be addressed is parents leaving court but leaving their children behind.
Yes! This is super-frustrating.

For instance, if you win a Crusade and select someone from your court as the new Crusader king (and play as them), it's super-frustrating that not only does the new king leave their kids behind (so you lose control of their marriage), they are often outside of your diplomatic range as well, so you can't even invite them to come join you as adults).
 
Prisoners no longer count towards the number of courtiers, and their portraits do not appear in the list of courtiers. You can of course still find them in the usual Prisoners tab (under the Intrigue menu).



Yes, a lot of existing content has had their "random courtier" selections updated, in an attempt to achieve exactly that. :)

Excellent, prisoners cluttering up my court was a pain especially as a ruler who can raid
 
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Prisoners no longer count towards the number of courtiers, and their portraits do not appear in the list of courtiers. You can of course still find them in the usual Prisoners tab (under the Intrigue menu).



Yes, a lot of existing content has had their "random courtier" selections updated, in an attempt to achieve exactly that. :)

Is there a chance the Intrigue/prisoner tab gets an update as well? I mean, the "ransom all" window is great - but these days I don't want to ransom them all because I need those 6 Karling princess in my prison for you know... their blood

The tab should be split into dungeon, oubliette, house arrest so I don't accidently release prisoners I need



or maybe just add a filter for this
 
Not until they are 6. And this is a lot of unfun micromanagement.

you know what's really unfun micromanagement? When you dynasty controls a whole empire (like every county) and you have to find a good spouse for every god damn female offspring because the AI keeps marrying their neighbour-cousins for prestige or whatever and you would end up in a bordergored patchwork empire where every imbred morron fights over this and that claim... or even worse - lose those titles to non-dynastic heirs

God I wish the dynasty head had an option to disapprove betrothals
 
Wouldn't it be better to separate prisoners from other courtiers, and have different capacity limits (and expenses) for prison and for courts?

There will not be any update to the interface itself, but I agree that there are areas related to this we can still improve upon. Thank you for sharing your thoughts -- it is likely that we will iterate on this system now that we have started, and it's mostly a matter of code resources atm. :)

If there is to be an additional charge for court members, can we PLEASE remove any fertility malus that courtier might have in a large or over crowded court.

If I recall correctly a court of 30 or 40 people incurs a penalty on the fertility of certain characters in the court, perhaps if they are lowborn?

Digging around in these systems has shown some more quirks to it than we originally anticipated. I would personally like to see this addressed, but I'm afraid we can't promise it for this patch.

Maybe making children count as a fraction of a courtier (say 1/4), or having a separate extra capacity for children, would make sense without lifting limits on children entirely.

We actually considered something like this, but there are some design challenges when it comes to displaying things clearly in the UI as well (the number wouldn't match up with the courtiers shown, etc). We might be able to iterate on it in the future though!
 
you know what's really unfun micromanagement? When you dynasty controls a whole empire (like every county) and you have to find a good spouse for every god damn female offspring because the AI keeps marrying their neighbour-cousins for prestige or whatever and you would end up in a bordergored patchwork empire where every imbred morron fights over this and that claim... or even worse - lose those titles to non-dynastic heirs

God I wish the dynasty head had an option to disapprove betrothals

Can't help you with that. But at least it would be better if you didn't have to personally supervise where each and every little brat in your court goes to school on top of it all.
 
Can't help you with that. But at least it would be better if you didn't have to personally supervise where each and every little brat in your court goes to schooling on top of it all.

Well of course you can, just betroth with your bastards or find spouses they accept
It's just an awful lot of work - every 3 years at least you have to open the character finder, check for "my dynasty", "unmarried", "female" and do the magic - as I said: micromanagement
 
Prisoners no longer count towards the number of courtiers, and their portraits do not appear in the list of courtiers. You can of course still find them in the usual Prisoners tab (under the Intrigue menu).

The number of prisoners should definitely have a size limit, and a health penalty imposed when it exceeds that. Dying of disease in an overcrowded dungeon sounds much more sensible than in a large court.
 
Something that might need to be looked at in the future:
If you ask a character to join your court, their wife and kids will also join your court.
If you ask a character to leave your court, their wife will leave, but the kids refuse to go anywhere. Am I right in guessing this is actually a bug?
 
The number of prisoners should definitely have a size limit, and a health penalty imposed when it exceeds that. Dying of disease in an overcrowded dungeon sounds much more sensible than in a large court.

I dunno, while it sounds about right, i would make killing off all those heirs (you own and others) to easy... no need to execude or sacrife them if they keep dying like flies in the dungeons
 
If there is to be an additional charge for court members, can we PLEASE remove any fertility malus that courtier might have in a large or over crowded court.

If I recall correctly a court of 30 or 40 people incurs a penalty on the fertility of certain characters in the court, perhaps if they are lowborn?

I question what makes this malus needed or compelling, especially in light of added expenses now.
The main reason for this, I believe, is performance related, much like the aggressive pruning. Every character adds a significant calculation load (for events, interactions, etc.), so reducing their number helps reduce lag. One thing to keep in mind when talking about "optimization" is that it increasingly comes with tradeoffs like this.
 
Nice things all around!
More events is always nice.

Would personally love to see more events regarding characters with minor titles, like Master of the Horse, High Almoner, Cupbearer and so on.
 
We actually considered something like this, but there are some design challenges when it comes to displaying things clearly in the UI as well (the number wouldn't match up with the courtiers shown, etc). We might be able to iterate on it in the future though!

Shouldn't this be easy to fix? Just don't call it "court size", call it "court capacity" and then make adults worth 1 and children worth 1/4.