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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!

court_01.jpg


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.

court_03.jpg


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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Hirdman instead of knights for Germanics maybe as that is already a honorary title in CK2 aswell as Ishads for Nomads (Even tho they are not playable i think) and many more diverse names it would be weird if they kept calling them knights everywhere in-game
 
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.

Should be straight forward enough I think. Since they already have a system in place for summarizing what's notable about a character, it would probably be easy enough to add a notification that includes this information when a guest arrives.
 
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.

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!
Nothing much to add here save but: Awesome!

Very much looking forward to this. As noted above, this will only add to the stories CK3 will produce, with characters having some history to them, rather than so many seeming to just appear out of thin air.
 
Will we be able to press a courtier's claim and have them be our vassal without having to give them a barony or something first to make them our vassal? I've always felt that was a weird, not purposeful mechanic

This is probably intended.


After all this changes in making characters matter a lot more, I could even see players playing with a character without land, trying to find ways to get titles, ploting in secret, travelling form courts to courts.
 
Is there a mechanism for culling excess courtiers globally, or slowing their creation as the game runs long?

One of the goals with wanderers is to make use of those excess courtiers. They will leave their court and try to go someplace where they're more needed. We generally only generate new characters when there are no wanderers available. Some wanderers are eventually killed off if they find no place to go.

Will married characters and characters with children travel alone, or with their family? Or both, according to their backstory?

Characters tend to travel with their spouse and underage children, unless they are separated by some unfortunate incident.

Only 7 courtiers? Either it's a court from a low-ranking noble in a backwater county, or I'm going to feel lonely playing CK3.

EDIT: From 2nd picture I take courtiers are being payed monthly yearly by their liege now?

You will usually have more than 7 courtiers and guests. The fewer courtiers you have, the more guests come to visit. If you want to recruit every guest that comes along, you are free to do so - you can create quite a big court if you want to. The biggest challenge in keeping a really big court is giving everyone a good reason to stay!

Recruiting courtiers is a one-time cost.
 
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The biggest challenge in keeping a really big court is giving everyone a good reason to stay!
Will wanderers flock more to higher tier titles? I feel like the Byzantine emperor, for instance, ought to have a higher median court size than, say, one of his count-level vassals. Of course, the count could take efforts to get a large court, but by default, the emperor should likely have more wanderers, since the emperor likely would be perceived as having more to offer (wealth, power to press claims, etc.)
 
Will we be able to press a courtier's claim and have them be our vassal without having to give them a barony or something first to make them our vassal? I've always felt that was a weird, not purposeful mechanic
I hope not and that CK3 will be able to handle being a vasall of multiple realms. If not I rather have characters renounce their ownership of a barony to prevent thus cheese.

If they become your vasall should depend on opinion, traits, distance, de jure claims, difference in title rank, etc.
Ideally the claimant should make promises before you press a claim what he will do if you are successful with swearing fealty just being one option (and deciteful characters might go back on their promises or downgrade them if they think they can get away with it)
 
Housecarls for vikings? Maybe something else.

Beserker would fit more I think, since we are talking about champion character here. Of course I am speaking of real beserker here, so just the guy who get to wear bear pelt as sign of champion status. Housecarls is more of a personal guards unit at the level of nobility we are playing, which the berserker is likely part of.
 
Recruiting courtiers is a one-time cost.

The 'pushing claims' player in me is really worried at the price tag of 110 just to recruit someone. I know the numbers aren't final, and I also know it was arguably too easy in CK2 to just lure claimaints over with 15 gold and maybe a favor.

But having it cost 110 is going to have repercussions. I could easily see it just adding to the decision making process, the "thought budgeting" so to speak of the player having to factor that in, will we have enough money to bring him over here AND fund the war?

I could see it adding a compelling factor to the decision making, but at 110 I do think it's become tilted too much towards it being too costly.
 
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

THIS would be pretty neat, maybe with traits, modifiers or nicknames based on how far they've been travelling?
 
The 'pushing claims' player in me is really worried at the price tag of 110 just to recruit someone. I know the numbers aren't final, and I also know it was arguably too easy in CK2 to just lure claimaints over with 15 gold and maybe a favor.
There were still some hard restrictions. They couldn't be married, they could not be councilors, they cannot live with close kin. A small bribe and favour made it easy to get certain ideal concubines and a few claimants here or there, but otherwise the AI was too good about landing, marrying or keeping their claimants close to home for me to swamp Europe with an invasion of stray cousins.
 
Characters might also find themselves on the road by being banished or losing all their land.
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?
 
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

Most of the time, they will move to an adjacent area. However, in certain situations they magically teleport across the map!

I think "dismiss" would just turn them into a wanderer, right?

Indeed, dismissing someone turns them into a wanderer.
 
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