Hi again!
Last week I asked about what you wanted to see in future Dev Diaries and I’ll answer one of the questions you asked in this week’s DD. What would I like to add/change in CK2?
I’ll start off telling you what I like with CK2.
What sets CK2 apart from me are the numerous stories it produces. When I play it at work (yeah, that’s something I try to do when I’m not too stressed out), I often feel the urge to tell people on the team what happened to my characters. Like when I’ve sent out my first born son to join the Varangian guard and he comes back a homosexual and suddenly I’m playing a Norse Viking, the King of Sweden who has a lover bodyguard. There are very few computer games that allow for that gaming experience.
The other component that I think makes most PDS games fantastic is multiplayer. Sure it’s not the smoothest multiplayer experience you can have, but it’s one of the most rewarding. Just the scope of battling through hours and hours of gameplay, forming and breaking alliances, planning, plotting, make it fantastic, be it in Sengoku, March of the Eagles, Europa Universalis or Crusader Kings. CK2 adds the personal touch and story building upon that. In our current office multiplayer, we had one player seducing two popes (pope and antipope), giving them and another player the lover’s pox while another player became emperor of the HRE (we were all playing inside it). The new emperor was unfit to rule and soon we had revolts eating us up from the inside and France wanting a piece of the cake from the outside. A faction to remove our emperor formed and soon Magnus ‘the cruel’ was no longer the emperor and I got the opportunity (read punishment) of trying to bring order to the realm. I struggled for a couple of months, trying to patch together something resembling an army of what was left and slowly beating back some of our enemies. Magnus ‘the cruel’ had other plans though and managed to ambush and capture me during my travels. I was immediately beheaded and a new emperor rose to the throne. Several years later we managed to catch and kill Magnus and restore order to the empire. About the same time Dirk ‘the devil’, a former rebel of the empire, became our new emperor.
To me this is great entertainment. It’s more than just the game.
What I really want more of in CK is stuff that make our characters more important and more alive. I don’t feel strongly for any particular part of the map, religion or government, I just want more interesting characters and more ways to interact with them and for them to interact with you. As a project lead I also have a burning desire to focus on quality making sure we deliver bug free product with great performance. Those are difficult goals for a game that was ambitious to start with and then has been extended for over 2½ years.

A little teaser info that will be discussed more in future DDs.

 

[Nameless_Ensign]

when an army loses it will "shattered retreat" and when an army is shattered it will keep retreating and no engage in battle until it reaches the point it is retreating to often half way across the country

....why are people acting like this is a good change? Do you guys seriously have trouble walking to the provinces they are retreating to with a small force of Calvary? It doesn't have to be big, after a huge battle the enemies' morale will be shot to hell.

 

[Rostan]

I hope shattered retreat does not morph into the ridiculous EUIV "retreat some 2000 km after a defeat" system.

 

[Korashy]

After a devastating defeat most armi

I hope shattered retreat does not morph into the ridiculous EUIV "retreat some 2000 km after a defeat" system.

And if it does, they better model desertion, there is no way that army wouldn't melt away after having just been devastated and having to retreat with a lot of gear/supplies left behind while potentially being harried and running/marching for their lives.

 

[keytium]

....why are people acting like this is a good change? Do you guys seriously have trouble walking to the provinces they are retreating to with a small force of Calvary? It doesn't have to be big, after a huge battle the enemies' morale will be shot to hell.

Can't speak for everyone, but yes, yes I do have a problem with that. I understand it is easy enough to do, but damn if it isn't frustratingly repetitive.

 

[blackchoas]

....why are people acting like this is a good change? Do you guys seriously have trouble walking to the provinces they are retreating to with a small force of Calvary? It doesn't have to be big, after a huge battle the enemies' morale will be shot to hell.

its a good change because the current system is stupid, it makes it pretty much impossible to recover from a single defeat unless your enemy feels like letting you re raise the entire army from scratch like a year later

People think this is a good change because it will be harder to just crush armies, not because they think it will become easier. This is a good change because its a step toward a better game design than the current system

 

[brobman22]

Are people just assuming its actually shattered retreat and treating it as fact or have the devs stated somewhere that it is shattered retreat.

 

[Slayen]

Are people just assuming its actually shattered retreat and treating it as fact or have the devs stated somewhere that it is shattered retreat.

As per usual, it's a forums tendency to speculate like mad over some small detail. There is nothing official.

 

[brobman22]

As per usual, it's a forums tendency to speculate like mad over some small detail. There is nothing official.

Oh ok well I think if it is shattered retreat then the expansion might be a bigger overhaul of how war works taking the pact screenshot in the last DD into account but im probably wrong.

 

[blackchoas]

Are people just assuming its actually shattered retreat and treating it as fact or have the devs stated somewhere that it is shattered retreat.

were just assuming its shattered retreat, but the only thing new in the image is the retreating symbol on the armies so even if it isn't shattered retreat they are clearly telling us that they are changing something with the way armies retreat from combat and to be fair pretty much anything would be an improvement over the CK2 ping pong that we currently have to do

 

[brobman22]

were just assuming its shattered retreat, but the only thing new in the image is the retreating symbol on the armies so even if it isn't shattered retreat they are clearly telling us that they are changing something with the way armies retreat from combat and to be fair pretty much anything would be an improvement over the CK2 ping pong that we currently have to do

im not saying people shouldn't do that but I just say people talking as if it was fact so I got confused.

 

[Korashy]

People think this is a good change because it will be harder to just crush armies, not because they think it will become easier. This is a good change because its a step toward a better game design than the current system

It shouldn't be harder to just crush armies. Most armies that got decisively beat didn't recover, they routed and a new army was raised. Some elements of the old army might be present in the new one, but when you give a peasant pressed into service a chance, he'll go home.

What they could do that would make sense is this: On shattering, the army is split into it's multiple parts (basically the divisions that already exist based on holding/county etc), each of those tiny armies then marches to their home county/city/church/castle whatever, and dissolved. Part of those troops will be immediately able to be raised again as levies.

 

[v1989]

I think it is simply retreating armies without morale to the nearest fort.

 

[Zolotaya]

Thank you Birken. The insight you show us will help us understand where your initiatives originate from. The Role Playing aspect of CK2 is an aspect which I feel is the weakest deployed vs-a-vie implementation.

Your screen-tease is interesting as well.

The other pillars of CK2's mission statement are more my interest so I do hope we see nothing but WoL types of dlc left.

 

[Will Steel]

My only hope is that armies don't march halfway across the world in shattered retreats. It is ridiculous in EU4 where an army defeated on one border marches thousands of miles to a fort in some remote corner on the other side of your empire.

 

[TheDungen]

This is good and all, but does this mean you are going to improve the chronicle? That feature was overhyped a lot and it is mainly about the 'story' thing being talked about in this dev diary, yet it turned out to be really underwhelming when Charlemagne was released.

Yeah the chronicle really needs a rework, It should note events and you choices in them, and wars and who won lost and what was lost and gained rather than every single battle, it could perhaps register the x battles which contributed the most to warscore, but it making a note every time you drive of some raiders is just annoying.

 

[blackchoas]

Thank you Birken. The insight you show us will help us understand where your initiatives originate from. The Role Playing aspect of CK2 is an aspect which I feel is the weakest deployed vs-a-vie implementation.

Your screen-tease is interesting as well.

The other pillars of CK2's mission statement are more my interest so I do hope we see nothing but WoL types of dlc left.

I'm pretty sure they have stated that there will not be anymore dlcs like WOL assuming ur talking about it as a small dlc, since they say that realistically smaller dlcs for $5-$10 aren't economically viable or not as viable compared to others since really the work that goesn't into them isnt actually that much different

If your talking about more rpg and personal driven dlcs that we could still see more of

 

[Pro]

The other pillars of CK2's mission statement are more my interest so I do hope we see nothing but WoL types of dlc left.

I don't think the idea behind WoL was bad, it was just poorly implemented. The game doesn't really succeed in making you care about the foci, besides some weird ones like seduction.

 

[Axe99]

Cheers for the DD . I'd definitely be interested in more depth of character in CK2 - while all the stories that pop up are possible, they don't feel 'alive' to me - it feels more like lots of one-dimensional probability interactions over time, rather than the multi-dimensional with lots of things going into the equation interactions that actual character interactions are made up of. For this reason, I don't actually get particularly attached to any of my CK2 characters (probably the reason the CK series doesn't draw me in as much as other PDS titles), because at the end of the day, it's a bit too easy to see past the headings to the collection of relatively one-dimensional characteristics that make up a character sitting underneath.

If there was a way of having the different characteristics interrelate with each other more, and interrelate with interactions more, it would likely go a long way to making the characters in CK2 feel more than lines in a spreadsheet (which I know they don't to many, but I'm sure more character depth wouldn't be a bad thing even to players that are already drawn in ).

 

[Nyrael]

....why are people acting like this is a good change? Do you guys seriously have trouble walking to the provinces they are retreating to with a small force of Calvary? It doesn't have to be big, after a huge battle the enemies' morale will be shot to hell.

You are talking like Shattered Retreat would be the one and only change in the upcoming expansion. Right now, we don't know if PDS didn't do something to stop you from using that tactic.

 

[Yetinator]

Everyone seems to be looking at the shattered retreat possibility.

The one thing I noticed is that Asturias de Santillana is highlighted on the map. It might be nothing (two seperate wars, two seperate wargoals), but my first thought was that Castille had holy warred for Aragon, called in his Jimena buddy Navarra, and the defender/player (emir of zaragoza? I can't quite remember the 1066 start) had set the county of Asturias de Santillana as a counter wargoal.

Of course it could just be a claim war for Asturias de Santillana and Navarra has declared the holy war.

Or the player has the province of Asturias de Santillana selected but the hidden UI just makes it look the same as the highlighted wargoal on the map.

Anyways that's my opinion /shrug