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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.

court_02.jpg


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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Great ideas ! I hope there will be more events and mechanisms to make the courts feel more "alive" than in CK2, for example with a courtier grace/disgrace gauge, and why not an equivalent to the factions system but at an inter-courtiers level, all of these ideas leading to a better feeling of court influence struggle.

It would actually make a lot of sense that a "court faction" may have a stronger influence on a weak suzerain than political factions or powerful vassals. This influence would depend on the grace/disgrace level of the court faction, the intrigue level of its members, the hooks the faction have on the ruler and on other factions and that other factions have on it, etc...
 
I presume this will change the way of plots is calculated. Less people in court will weaken the chances of assassinating someone, unless the percentages for gaining plot members change.

Also, no more keeping dynasty members at court, such as family, for years whilst you use them for marriages & titles as you see fit. Going to be annoying trying to marry of your daughter to a eligible title holder, then find she has left to marry a rival, who will then have claim on you.
 
I just remembered a great game as Mali that i once had before the map changes and new addeded provinces in Africa.
It may be possible I had 200+ Courtiers and it was amazing! Although I see the issues that come with so big courts. I hope that wandering mechanic is like some sort of traveling court like mercenaries in CK2 (But just Families or maybe good friends moving around together to a destination or something else (*Jerusalem*).
 
It may be possible I had 200+ Courtiers and it was amazing! Although I see the issues that come with so big courts.

A system of "court factions" would allow to have big courts with a mechanics more organic than in CK2. I can picture a system in which important courtiers (councilors, members of the ruler's family, courtiers belonging to a renown dynasty...) would use their fame/intrigue level/hooks to get others to support them, increasing their influence and why not having an impact on the ruler's decisions
 
When courtiers warn us they're leaving, can we have an option to offer something for them to stay longer? A (landless) title, money, a marriage... I wouldn't like to see the warning and having no choice on what to do than simply watch them go. :eek:

I agree, I hope the appearance of titles like Knight in combination with this new courtier system implies that we have options to keep people we consider valuable (for roleplaying or other reasons) in our court; i.e. a small court by default, a (moderately) large court if we choose to play that way. Sounds like it'll be an easy thing to mod (just add a new honorary title and ensure it meets the requirements to prevent a character from leaving), but some consideration in the base game would be cool.
 
This sounds in general like nice stuff to me.

I do wonder if we still have the mechanic of being able to google search for the perfect people and then easily recruit them if they are free and you don't have a terrible rep? It's one of the things that really bother me with CK2 as talented people feels so easy to detect and snipe.
 
It looks like we're going to see a drastically reduced number of characters now - a lot of the details released so far hint at this, including the sidelining of barons.
 
I'm pretty sure that is some kind of way to schedule when a post is published...

It's possible, but PDS Devs rarely do it. It is extra work (and a lot of it: Dev Diaries aren't that easy to plan and write as they may seem, and making around 4 Diaries in one week is a pain in the BLEEP) and before Holidays people prefer to focus on actual development anyway. Not to mention you can't exactly give Q&A to forum questions. All that means the Devs will rather go with "Fans will survive" route than force themselves to write the Diaries.
 
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).
An excellent pedigree :D

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!
Aw yis, hopefully that means less cleaning out my court periodically. Good bye random widows, refugees and random assassins-to-be, without me having to send them all to a monastary.

I'm pretty sure that is some kind of way to schedule when a post is published...
But the dev replies. Do you really want 3 weeks of dev diaries that are just scheduled posts without the juicy dev replies hidden within?
 
Housecarls for vikings? Maybe something else.
Housecarls would be more anglo-saxon (old saxon) rather than Nordic maybe actual vikings for vikings?
 
Reposting a comment I made on Reddit:

I hope that wanderers announce their intentions when they come to your court. Having a wanderer just show up because he has a claim and you playing for 5 years and they leave without you ever noticing because you never bothered to check would suck. Since courtiers will be fewer in number now, when new ones arrive they could introduce themselves and state why they came, whether as a claimant asking you to press it, as as suitor, looking for a job, knighthood etc.