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CK3 Dev Diary #08 - Courts, Guests, and Wanderers

Hello everyone!

To most of you I’m a new “face”, so let me introduce myself. I was a Content Designer on CK2 for Reaper’s Due, Monks & Mystics and Jade Dragon, where my most important contribution was essential cat content (yes, I also wrote the Spymaster Mittens event chain, and yes, the cat portrait in CK2’s animal kingdom is based on my real-life furbaby). Since JD, I’ve been on the excellent CK3 team and we can’t wait for you to see everything we’ve worked on! Sadly, I don’t have any cat news for you today, but I have something that is nearly as exciting: the Court, Guests, and Wanderers.

The courts of CK3 are very similar to those in CK2. The Court consists of your landless subjects, such as some of your Family, Knights, and Councillors. However, you will generally have fewer Courtiers than in CK2. Courtiers who don’t have any duties or other reasons for staying will eventually decide to leave in pursuit of other opportunities. Fear not – they will let you know before they go. Courtiers leaving might feel like a bad thing, but I promise, it’s actually a part of a really neat feature (more on that further down). In addition to enabling the neat feature, this also means your remaining Courtiers will be more relevant to you than before. No more random strangers at the dinner table!

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Your Court will still be a bustling place, full of new acquaintances. In addition to the Courtiers, the core members of your court, you will also have Guests paying you visits. These individuals will interact with your Courtiers and appear in events. Guests stay for a few years before they leave. If you want a Guest to stick around, you can recruit them. Just remember to give them a reason to stay! Giving them a spot on the council or a shiny title never fails, but seducing them also does the trick.

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Guests look for opportunities and will be more likely to visit if they think you might recruit them. For example, Claimants will seek you out if you are strong enough to press their Claims, and suitors might appear if you or your adult children are unmarried. The interface will give you a handy overview to easily identify Guests with special Skills, Traits and Claims. You also have some influence over the type of Guests you attract. There are Invitation Decisions you can take to increase the chance of having good Knights and Claimants visiting, and there is a Dynasty Perk to increase the likelihood of useful Guests.

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But where do all these Guests come from? You see, when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much… Oh, you meant “where are they before they appear in my court”? Well, characters without a permanent home wander around on the map, and visit Courts along the way. This is where characters leaving your court comes in - they will become Wanderers! For example, a son or daughter who is too far down in the line of succession to inherit might become a Wanderer to find a new Liege to press their Claims. Characters might also find themselves on the road by being banished or losing all their land.

All of this means that your guests often have interesting backstories. Many of them have families and relationships, and they keep developing during their journeys. If you check in on a family member who is out wandering, you might find that they have married or picked up some new skills (or a juicy secret…) since they left your Court. Perhaps they’ve even become a Mercenary Captain or the head of a Holy Order!

In the world of CK3, your ruler is the main character, but it is our hope that courtiers, guests, and wanderers will become a great supporting cast. I’m looking forward to hearing about all the little subplots you will discover.

That is all for this Development Diary my friends. Take care and we’ll see you in 2020!
 
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I don't know if i'm a fan of the new courtiers migration system as a wanderers with claims(or not), now we could have a bigger ethnicity salad than in ck2, like a lot of muslims, indians, pagans in european court or vice-versa. Unhistorical absurds like that could happen more easily and make the game a big mess. The AI will have a criteria for this things?
 
Another topic that has gone unnoticed until now... @Virvatuli ! What did you do to upset your wife, H'edda, so much? :eek:
 
The economy isn't balanced yet, so no numbers are final :) It might be interesting to know that claimants will be significantly more costly to recruit compared to other guests.

If you were to push their claim, wouldn't they want to join your court? Just saying it wouldn't make much sense to want something and not join someone who will give you that thing.
 
Oh, I see; then the -1.2/yr is the "Opinion of you" subtracted from the initial +50 from recruiting her?
That'd be a nice change from CK2 where opinion modifiers disappear overnight.

Indeed, a lot of opinions in CK3 start out at a certain value and then diminish over time.

Banished characters without titles and characters you ask to leave your court won't reappear in your court, will they? In other words, will characters that become wanderers be able to remember which courts they are not welcome in? The idea of heresiarchs and apostates wandering back to my court after I told them they weren't welcome in my court is irritating.

If wanderers do remember which courts they aren't welcome in, what happens in the extremely unlikely case that they are rejected by every court in the game?

Characters will not visit the court they were just in. There is a chance that they might come back later, but the chance is greatly reduced if the ruler of the court dislikes them (or they dislike the ruler!) or if the ruler consider them to be a criminal. Wanderers want a warm welcome after their long journey!

If they were rejected by every court in the game, the poor character would wander aimlessly until we found them and killed them. It's a tough life on the road!
 
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I don't know if i'm a fan of the new courtiers migration system as a wanderers with claims(or not), now we could have a bigger ethnicity salad than in ck2, like a lot of muslims, indians, pagans in european court or vice-versa. Unhistorical absurds like that could happen more easily and make the game a big mess. The AI will have a criteria for this things?
More absurd than being able to invite someone from Khazar to join your court in France with a simple click at no cost?
 
Close family members will be more hesitant to leave. Daughters in realms with male only or male preference inheritance laws will stay in your court, as will sons in realms with female only or female preference inheritance. Unless they're very brave and decisive, because then they might decide to go on an adventure anyway!
Do that actually make sense? Would not daughters if not by law allowed to inherit want to move to other realms in hope that they would somehow ignore the laws and push the claim anyway? Sure they maybe not get a claim at all in the first place but I think CK2 rule give claims to all Children of the titleholder but inheritance law do limit when you can push the claim.
 
Sadly, I don’t have any cat news for you today, but I have something that is nearly as exciting: the Court, Guests, and Wanderers.
BOOO! Less courts, more cats!
 
More absurd than being able to invite someone from Khazar to join your court in France with a simple click at no cost?
In one of my ck2 playthrough a muslim became king of denmark by an claim from the adventurer trait =). No problems if the game have a criteria when the player wanted to invite someone, the problem starts when the AI wants to push his claims or something like that without a plausible reason to make sense, like culture/faith for example.
 
Do that actually make sense? Would not daughters if not by law allowed to inherit want to move to other realms in hope that they would somehow ignore the laws and push the claim anyway? Sure they maybe not get a claim at all in the first place but I think CK2 rule give claims to all Children of the titleholder but inheritance law do limit when you can push the claim.
In countries where only men inherit its on the other hand rather likely that women have a low status and thus not have the ressources to move somewhere else or are even not allowed to without a man on their side. That would't stop all of them, but most.
 
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I'm disappointed with this change. I'm interested in the historical/role-playing side of CK (as opposed to the min-maxing playstyle) and fewer courtiers means fewer stories. I guess that it's been done for performance reasons, which is a noble aim and something that we all benefit from. But characters are the core gameplay of the CK series; what else could be so important that it justifies culling a whole category of characters?!?

P.S. Welcome to the forums, @Virtuvali. I'm sorry to be so negative on your first post; I really enjoyed a lot of M&M and TRD content so I'm sure you've lots of good stuff in store for us!

Our hope and intention is not that there will be fewer stories, but more relevant ones. The same kind of things will still be able to happen, it will just be more likely to involve characaters that are close and meaningful to you, and/or hold a lot of power in the world.

Thanks for the welcome and your feedback! :) I'm really glad you liked M&M and TRD, had some great fun working on those DLCs together with the rest of the CK2 team. I won't say exactly what, but some of the features I worked on during those DLCs was stuff I got to implement for CK3, which was really cool, like I've come full circle :)
 
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I like the new courtier mechanics, but I feel a bit concerned by those very european looking north africans (and not just how they look, but also the "knight"). I know it's work-in-progress and all, but I mean, why showing characters from that part of the map if they don't at least have proper localization or cultural outfits?
I'm also a bit disappointed to see a "Miknasid" here. This is a european nomenclature. The proper berber name would be Imeknasen, or at least an arabization of that name. I'm really not looking forward for another raw of -id muslim dynasties, that's a bit immersion breaking to me, especially when CK can have way better naming conventions... al-Abbas is better than Abbasid, and I don't think it's that hard to implement.

Guests can stay for a few years WITHOUT a reason?
That isn't exactly surprising - they are still nobility (or closely related to it), and it wasn't rare to have such guests in medieval courts. They could just hang on doing poetry, being a friendly envoy from a neighbouring county, or... well, being courtiers. At least as long as they had the favour of the local ruler.
 
OK, obligatory question then :) :
Will we be able to play as Wanderers?

No, it will not be possible.

Guests can stay for a few years WITHOUT a reason?

I know it's for gameplay but it sounds so damn funny.

Wanderers do get weary on the road, and long for some relaxation and companionship once in a while :)

I assume it'll be culturally and religiously appropriate. I mean, it makes sense for (say) a Jewish courtier to show up practically anywhere on the map, but rather less sense for a Pious Sunni to seek a position at the court of a Catholic. I'm not saying it never happened, of course, but it should be a rare exception rather than the norm.

Wanderers will not visits courts if the ruler's faith is hostile to their faith. Wouldn't be a fun visit!
 
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In countries where only men inherit its on the other hand rather likely that women have a low status and thus not have the ressources to move somewhere else or are even not allowed to without a man on their side. That would't stop all of them, but most.
However we are talking about a title inheritance law which is not the exact same thing as inheritance law on the local level.
 
You mentioned visitors having interesting histories behind them. Will we finally be able to actually look at that history by viewing a character's backstory in the world? It felt kind of silly that you had basically nothing to investigate how a character arrived at your court, even though if you asked them i'm sure they would happily tell you lol
 
Will wanderers move through adjacent realms or teleport randomly? I'm saying that it would be easier for central European realms to attract wanderers than fringe realms in Scandinavia. Could be an interesting aspect of the game
It should not be that a Scandinavian realm should attract fewer wanderer's necessarily, but rather that wanderers should have a religious and cultureal preference. So as an Anglo-Saxon king Duke I am not inundated with Occitan wanderers, but as a King, I might see some since I am as a higher tier more attractive to a different culture but same religion wanderer.

In other words, a lord of a single culture De Jure domain should have a court that is only of that culture (including wanderers), but a Lord of a multiculture De Jure domain should see some members of his/her court from the different cultures of his domain. but Lords should rarely get wanderers form far away cultures unless they are both of the same religion and or the Lord is very powerfull/prestigious.
 
Will wanderers move through adjacent realms or teleport randomly? I'm saying that it would be easier for central European realms to attract wanderers than fringe realms in Scandinavia. Could be an interesting aspect of the game
Scandinavia is not just distant but it is also poor and weak which would make it less attractive since it would likely not be able to press claims or provide much.