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.

 

[Nobody987]

Shattered retreat mechanic for sure
Great stuff!

 

[ColZimin]

But they would still run away, right? So, their precision might decrease, but it would be slightly tedious nonetheless.

If they make it similar enough to EUIV, you won't need 100% war score to sue for peace. In that system I frequently negotiate a peace at less than 50%, just grabbing a few provinces at a time.

Hopefully they will stop running away with inhuman percision after you have broken their morale.

Agreed, although I'm not a fan of how armies will flee across half the damn continent in EUIV. I rather like being able to follow them to the next county and just putting the boot in.

 

[Pro]

If they make it similar enough to EUIV, you won't need 100% war score to sue for peace. In that system I frequently negotiate a peace at less than 50%, just grabbing a few provinces at a time.

EU warscore and CK warscore aren't at all compareable. Because you're much more limited in what you can demand in CK they can be a lot more generous with warscore. In EU 100% warscore typically means entirely occupying a country. In CK2 it often means winning two big battles and occupying a few provinces.

Edit: Oh, and if it is shattered retreat, can we please, please get a "chase that army" order. Otherwise the extra micro is excrusiating.

 

[Fe1000]

Finally there wont be CK2 armies pursuing one another across 2 provinces till one army is fully exterminated.

 

[Pro]

Yeah, basically shattered retreat means that a defeated army gets transported into hyperspace and can't be interacted with until they reach their destination, 200 kilometers away.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[Choombi]

Let's not start that argument again, shall we?
we have already discussed that and reached the conclusion that an argument between two people unwilling to change their opinion leads to flame war.

I'm not exactly sure what the anti blob mechanic should be but there need to be more and stronger ones, I have suggested factions to destroy the top title of a realm but im not really sure what is a good solution, still its silly that an eras like EU4 and Vicky 2 which were the age of imperialism makes it harder to take, hold and use land around the world than this game

Well, for one i think that kingdom and empire de jure titles should occasionally get destroyed on succession if they control too little of their dejure area( hello opm kingdom of scotland...seriously, i saw it twice), but that doesn't help much with the dreaded three.

Hey, it's paradox's job to come up with ideas, what are we paying you for?

 

[Aoki4444]

Yey, thanks for another DD!

 

[SehnVretor]

I was hoping for more information about Pacts.

They have stated that they would not go into new patch or DLC features in the first few dev diaries, so I don't want to sound disrespectful, but your 'hope' seems to have been unwarranted to begin with.

If it makes chasing down rebels less tedious its a good quality of life improvement.

I did not know the retreat mechanic of EUIV was known as 'shattered retreat' (yet I do know the mechanic, as I do play EUIV) before I read it here (if I understand it correctly), but I wonder: how would such a mechanic make chasing down rebels less tedious?

 

[ninoallen]

Improved War DLC CONFIRMED!!!!!!!!!

 

[Korashy]

Also if this is shattered retreat, what is stopping the exact same thing that happened in EU IV, you follow and wipe? In EUIV this was fixed with fort zone of control, I don't see that happening here.

 

[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 ).

 

[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

 

[Ethanol]

I also feel strongly about personal narratives, the games that I manage to play for hundreds of years are always the ones where I can build my own narrative with fun facts and events. There is something just awesome with how after 300 hours of play the game still manages to surprise you with events you never saw coming.

But yeah since the last patches performance has been increasingly problematic (I don't have top level hardware).

Anyway it's nice to see your vision for the game, I also appreicate the effort of writing a DD even though it is too early to start showing new features

 

[Lord Finnish]

...with great performance...

Not gonna hold my breath for this one.

 

[blackchoas]

1. Flesh out the late game
   
   
   I want some late game mechanics, I want interesting events that trigger via date, i want to start a 867 campaign and have other reasons to not quit besides getting the achievment for it.
   
2. Anti Blobbing mechanics.
   
   
   Ever notice how the big players, like HRE, Byzantines, Abassids etc. are more successful than they were in RL in 99% of cases? and in contrast, it seems that bigger you are right now, the bigger you'll get later, and being near one of those big states is a death sentence, as far as i know, when a big player like france or hre sought to expand on expence of a small state, Milan, for example, the other big players would rush to help that little state, like guarantee in eu4, we need something like that.

​

Couldn't agree more, the game doesn't feel like it changes enough from 800 to 1000 to 1300, the game is 7 centuries but all 7 centuries feel the same

I'm not exactly sure what the anti blob mechanic should be but there need to be more and stronger ones, I have suggested factions to destroy the top title of a realm but im not really sure what is a good solution, still its silly that an eras like EU4 and Vicky 2 which were the age of imperialism makes it harder to take, hold and use land around the world than this game

 

[Happy Neyka]

Totally with you on this one - its characters, interaction between them and their personal life. I think more of this in the game the more interesting it is.

 

[WeissRaben]

I'm not making promises of any kind. Ck2 is a game with a long tail and I'm running projects on a tight schedule. It's all about priorities.
But in a perfect world in which I could do anything I wanted with the game, I'd probably put a couple of weeks into optimizing it and fix a few bugs rather than add more stuff.

With all due respect, maaaaybes and foot dragging don't work anymore. The vase is shattered on the ground, and it's either fixing it or picking a broom and throwing it in the trash. Stop selling DLC with grossly understated requirements, or have them actually work at more than one day per second 50 years into the game on machines that still run Vanilla like oil.

 

[Keizer Harm]

With all due respect, maaaaybes and foot dragging don't work anymore. The vase is shattered on the ground, and it's either fixing it or picking a broom and throwing it in the trash. Stop selling DLC with grossly understated requirements, or have them actually work at more than one day per second 50 years into the game on machines that still run Vanilla like oil.

I hope you realise that they have the hardest job in the world. There were quite a few pissed forumers because there were no DD's in the summer, and now they have produced some and there's people complaining that they are creating DLC's when they should be bugfixing and optimisation. It's only a very small team, you know.