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CK3 Dev Diary #64 - Cultures Are Forever
Salutations!

Before we begin, first things first. We are working on an additional patch to fix some of the issues introduced in 1.4. The patch is still being worked on, but if everything goes as planned, we should be able to get it out sometime next week or so. We’ll let you know once the patch is ready.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about something I’m quite excited to share with you all. As you probably know already, we’ve talked a bit about how we are revisiting cultures for the next expansion: Royal Court. Unlike faiths, which got a lot of attention prior to release as we made them quite dynamic and customizable, cultures can feel a bit static, and aren't anywhere near as interesting as faiths. That is all about to change!

We are revising cultures as you know them. Most exciting is perhaps the possibility to create new cultures! Both for simulating historical events and to create plausible and interesting alt-history scenarios. But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, let’s start by looking at the foundation of a culture and the different components they are made of. This is what the new culture screen will look like.

01_culture_window.jpg

[Image of the new and updated culture interface]

Cultural Pillars

A culture has five main Cultural Pillars. These are Ethos, Heritage, Language, Martial Custom, and finally Aesthetics. Of these, the Ethos is perhaps the most significant, but all of them play a particular role in how a culture plays and how cultures view each other.

Ethos
Each ethos is framed around a particular theme that somehow ties into a fairly broad definition of what a culture is. A culture’s ethos not only provides effects and bonuses for having it, it also ties into how easy or difficult it is to acquire certain traditions (more on this further down). There are seven in total:
  • Bellicose
  • Communal
  • Courtly
  • Egalitarian
  • Inventive
  • Spiritual
  • Stoic

Here are a few examples of what they may look like in-game:

02_ethos_bellicose.jpg

[Image of the Bellicose ethos]

03_ethos_spiritual.jpg

[Image of the Spiritual ethos]

04_ethos_inventive.jpg

[Image of the Inventive ethos]

Heritage
A culture's heritage can be compared to the culture groups that you may be used to in the existing system. Heritages will roughly match said culture groups. You’ll see an Iberian Heritage for cultures like Basque and Castilian, or Turkic Heritage for Turkic cultures, such as Oghuz and Cuman. In terms of gameplay, the most outstanding effect of a shared heritage is the impact it has on Cultural Acceptance.

Language
Each culture has a designated language. Languages vary greatly across the map and between cultures. Some languages, such as Arabic, are spoken by quite a few cultures. Other languages are spoken by no more than two or three cultures, or in some cases, cultures even have their own unique language. An example of these would be Basque, who really don't have any closely related languages and it wouldn’t make too much sense to group them together with their neighbors. The vast majority of cultures share a language though, as a sort of “language group” rather than a specific language.

Characters can always speak the associated language of their culture. They are, however, also able to learn multiple languages over their lifetime. Knowing multiple languages has its benefits, as speaking the same language as another character of a different culture, and county, will reduce the opinion penalty that character, or county, has towards you. Knowing the native language (i.e. the language of their culture) of your vassals is therefore fairly beneficial as a means of increasing their opinion of you.

Noble Martial Custom
The martial custom decides which gender you may appoint as knights and commanders. As you’d expect, you can either appoint men, women, or both. We always felt that having the gender doctrine on faiths decide which characters can and cannot participate in battles felt off. The doctrine is about the right to rule and the holding of titles, more so than anything else. Just because you want the Equal doctrine to allow female rulers, doesn’t mean that women would automatically lead your armies or join you as knights. Revising cultures gave us the ample opportunity to move the functionality from faiths over to cultures. Which also means that you’ll have additional options in shaping your realm.

Aesthetics
This pillar is really a collection of several smaller properties for what a culture “looks” like. It decides what type of clothes characters wear, the coat of arms style for dynasties, what architecture holdings use, and the type of armor the units on the map wear.

This is also the pillar that contains what naming practices the culture uses. Mainly what character names to use, if they use a dynasty prefix, etc. The naming practice will also be used to change title and holding names, which used to be set per culture, so as to not have titles change names if you create a new culture.

For all of you modders out there; all of these can be set individually per culture. Allowing you to mix and match the different aesthetics to your heart’s content.

Traditions

Traditions are the meat of the cultural overhaul, and provide that extra layer of variety and immersion that can have a significant impact on gameplay. An important aspect of traditions is that they give us a clear means of visualizing and explaining existing mechanics that previously just “was a thing” and never explained. Take Anglo-Saxon as an example. They have access to the Saxon Elective succession for no apparent reason other than “they do”. Instead, they now have a tradition that grants them the succession law, making it clear as to why they have it. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, traditions serve as the perfect means of giving a culture additional flavour or gameplay bonuses that add a greater degree of variety across the map.

A culture can have no more than five traditions in total, but this number will increase as you enter a new era. Most cultures will start the game with around three or four, which leaves plenty of room for you to shape your culture as you play the game. As the cultural head, you’ll have the ability to establish new traditions.

Not all traditions will be available everywhere. We have both regional traditions, as well as traditions that are available depending on your heritage. The vast majority of them can be established regardless of circumstances, but might require certain conditions, such as ‘Hill Dwellers’ having the requirement that your culture must be present in a county with hills.

Traditions cost prestige to adopt. Which will be the largest hurdle for you to overcome if you want a specific tradition. The prestige cost is dependent on your ethos. Certain traditions will be more expensive than others, if you don’t have a matching ethos. Similarly, a tradition will increase in cost if your culture, or in some cases the cultural head, doesn’t fulfill a specific and thematic requirement. An example would be a tradition named ‘Only the Strong’, which is more expensive if you as the cultural head don't have at least six knights with at least 12 prowess. The increased cost is meant to act as a softer limit and make it slightly more difficult to establish certain traditions (depending on your circumstances), but not as much as to make it impossible to do so, should you want to go and unlock a particular tradition.

Instead of explaining traditions in detail, I’ll just show you a few examples of what traditions may look like, as well as the type of effects you can expect from them.

05_tradition_swordsforhire.jpg

[Image of the Swords for Hire tradition]

06_tradition_chivalry.jpg

[Image of the Chivalry tradition]

07_tradition_esteemedhospitality.jpg

[Image of the Esteemed Hospitality tradition]

08_tradition_seafarers.jpg

[Image of the Seafarers tradition]

09_tradition_landofthebow.jpg

[Image of the Land of the Bow tradition]

Cultural Acceptance

Cultural acceptance can be described as how well intermingled two cultures are, and how accepting they are of each other. Which means that given enough time, cultures will dislike each other less, and culture converting everything within your realm is no longer the only solution to combat cultural differences.

The opinion penalty of being of a different culture used to be a static value. Now, it will depend on the cultural acceptance between your culture and the target culture. Each culture has an acceptance value of another culture, visualized as a percentage. Depending on the amount of acceptance, the “different culture” opinion penalty will gradually be reduced. At 0% acceptance, you’ll have the full opinion penalty. At 100%, the penalty is removed altogether. Acceptance goes both ways. So if the French have a 20% acceptance towards Normans, the same will be true from the Norman perspective.

There are two ways for acceptance to change. The first is an acceptance baseline. Which increases if two cultures share similarities with one another. There are a number of different modifiers that can increase the baseline. Such as cultures that share the same religion or faith, ethos, or language. The most impactful modifier, however, is heritage. If two cultures share the same heritage, they have a significant bonus to their baseline.

If acceptance is above the baseline, it will slowly decay over time towards the targeted value. Being below the baseline on the other hand, will not make the acceptance increase. A bad relation between cultures won’t disappear overnight.

Secondly, acceptance very much changes depending on the circumstances. Don’t expect two cultures that never interact with one another to gain acceptance. If cultures exist within the same realm though, it will increase over time. This applies to both counties of another culture within your realm, as well as vassals. Acceptance is also reactive. Taking certain actions towards characters of a different culture will have consequences on your acceptance, such as declaring war or revoking titles. This generally scales on size. While the difference isn’t huge, revoking a single county from a small culture will decrease your acceptance more than if you would revoke a county from a much larger culture. At the end of the day, if you want to maintain a high acceptance and keep your Occitan vassals in France happy, you are at least gonna have to try and be nice to them.

10_cultural_acceptance.jpg

[Image of what the cultural acceptance between two cultures may look like]

There we go. That’s what a culture will look like in the near future. Oh! Before I forget; Best of all? The cultural rework is free, and will accompany the free update that launches alongside the Royal Court expansion!

Until next time!
 
This new system seems perfect for cultures like Estonian which was archaeologically indistinguishable from Eastern Scandinavia for centuries because of very strong contacts/connections and having the same way of life like seafaring/raiding/trading etc already since the Bronze Age.
Currently just the language defines the "culture group". With the new system, Estonian and Norse would be very similar in most regards with just the language being different. I don't know if this is useful information for anyone but it is highly likely that a large part of Estonians (and people in coastal Finland who had migrated there by sea from Estonia in the Iron Age) spoke Norse as a 2nd language and also many Eastern Scandinavians spoke a Finnic language, most likely some form of Estonian as it was the dominant and most numerous Finnic culture. The archaeological picture being indistinguishable for centuries (without an indication of Scandinavian colonisation/aggression) gives us the impression of this bilingualism.
 
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This would probably also change how I play the Khazars or Ethiopian Jews when I go back to them someday. Previously, I would tend to drop Sephardi or Ashkenazi characters as my feudal vassals, while my tribal lands became Khazar. But any character with a different culture from me would quickly assimilate to the local culture. Maybe now, they’ll develop some kind of fusion or melting-pot.
 
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Is there a limit on how many languages someone can learn? You could have one language from the father, one from the mother, one from where the character resides in, and one from religious education (such as Latin, Greek, or Arabic). Languages within the same family language should be easier to learn.
 
There are a number of different modifiers that can increase the baseline. Such as cultures that share the same religion or faith, ethos, or language
What does it mean for a culture to have a religion? Is it based on whatever happens to be the majority religion in that culture?

Also, how does forming a hybrid culture affect regnal titles? What is a Turko-Persian emperor called for instance?
 
For "growing up speaking languages", perhaps the child should have a strong chance of learning the language of *both* their parents and their tutor? After all it'd be hard for their tutor to teach them anything if they don't share a language.

Perhaps it should even be a requirement that the tutor speaks *a* language in common with the child (and thus presumably their controlling parent) to start with?

I think it shouldn't be a guarantee of learning both parents' languages and your guardian. The reason being is that you can send your child to be tutored in another court for their entire childhood. If you do, there's no reason they should necessarily learn the language(s) of their parents. They should definitely learn the language of their guardian, though. Also, if a parent dies early in the childhood, the chance of learning that parent's language should drop based on how long the parent was alive during the childhood. I'd really like a more dynamic way of learning languages and not just automatically learn the languages of your parents and guardian regardless of your situation.

Perhaps if a guardian knows the language(s) of the parents in addition to their own language, they can teach the child all of those languages (only those and not additional languages the guardian may know). If the guardian only knows their own language, they cannot teach the parents' language(s) to the child. For the child to learn their parents' language(s) during childhood, they'll need to spend a certain amount of time in their parent's court or their parents' language(s) need to be spoken by a decent number of people in the court where the child is being raised by the guardian.

Just throwing out options. The idea being that it would be better to have the way you learn languages vary based on circumstance rather than just getting a "default" set of languages. It could even be a matter of learning a language being similar to experience points - for every year you're with your parents growing up, you get X points toward learning their language. For every year you're with your guardian, you get X points to learn their language. With enough points, you become proficient in the language (i.e. you gain the language). This can be set up so that your first perhaps 2-3 years of life you have no languages. After that, you gain one language and that language is either your parent's language if you're at home the entire time or your guardian's language if you're with them the entire time. If you're at home part of that time and with the guardian part of that time, then it'll be wherever you are at the greatest length of time. In terms of what parent's language to learn if they have different languages, have it be the ruler whose court you are in. After that, you gain "experience" in other languages based on proximity to them over a period of time. Long enough and you learn the language. As an adult, you can also use schemes to learn languages by asking people to teach them to you. It may take multiple schemes for a given language before you gain enough "experience" to learn it. And you might even have events during the scheme (or at the end of it) where you might gain or lose "experience" because of something happening. Even as an adult, you can still learn language through proximity if you gain enough "experience."

Oh geez, I wish I would have asked this earlier to when the Dev Diary was released, but hopefully I can still get an answer:

What determines what languages your ruler can learn?

I ask this specifically because I have a roleplay scenario where I play myself married to my girlfriend (who is Taiwanese) so I always just slapped her down with Chinese culture in the middle of the Netherlands with me where my ancestors are from.

Is it regionally proximity based? If I can only learn the languages of surrounded regions, does that mean I won't be able to learn my partners language? Or is it more character focused? so long as you have a character willing to tutor you. You can learn their language (I.E. I can force my wife to become my tutor and teach me a useless language in my region to make her happy) I would love to know. Thank you

I believe I read that you can learn languages from specific people and not just your neighbors, so you can invite someone with another language to court and learn from them (perhaps not even having to invite them). I could be wrong in how I remember that, but I'm pretty sure that I saw that.
 
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Currently just the language defines the "culture group".
This is not fully true - just look at Basque, Vlach, or the whole Byzantine culture group. Estonians were similar to Finns in more than language, it might even be somewhat anachronistic to have them split in 867 - which does not undermine your point of the important similarities between them and Norse.
 
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This is not fully true - just look at Basque, Vlach, or the whole Byzantine culture group. Estonians were similar to Finns in more than language, it might even be somewhat anachronistic to have them split in 867 - which does not undermine your point of the important similarities between them and Norse.
There's a saying that fits perfectly here: "The exception proves the rule." In the majority of cases, cultures and culture groups are strongly language oriented in the pre-expansion CK.

"Estonians were similar to Finns" sounds quite odd if you know the context. Estonians are proto-Finnics and the expansion of Finnic languages started from Northern-Estonia. In the CK time frame, Iron Age Estonian seafarers had settled southern and south-western Finland, while most of Finland was still Sami. The Estonians outnumbered the (Finnic/Estonian) Finns by about 5 times.

Finns being a separate "culture" in the game is more based on the situation in 2020 than the actual reality in the 9th century. It can be a separate culture and it could be a part of Estonian, I don't mind either way, both are kind of correct in a way.
The point is that most of Estonia and southern & south-western Finland were all an integral part of the Norse world. Similarities between Estonians/Finns aren't even important here because as I said, Finland had recently been settled by Iron Age Estonian seafarers. In the CK time frame, Finns weren't notably different from the dominant Finnic culture, the Estonians, yet.
The population of Finnic Finns (excluding Sami inhabitants of Finland) in the 9th century was most likely no more than 10 000. For comparison, the population of entire modern-day Finland (including the Sami) in 1100AD was about ~30 000. That's why we know a lot about Estonians being vikings and raiders for many centuries even before the Viking age as they were quite numerous (about 100K people in the late Viking age) but the Finns aren't really known for it because they were a very small group back then (but they were seafarers and had the same way of life as the Estonians and the Scandinavians) and the migration wave from Estonia to Finland lasted until the 13th century.
 
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Finns being a separate "culture" in the game is more based on the situation in 2020 than the actual reality in the 9th century. It can be a separate culture and it could be a part of Estonian, I don't mind either way, both are kind of correct in a way.
Well, yeah, that's what I was leading to - except I am not certain it would be reasonable to call the barely-split proto-Finnic culture "Estonian", as you do. I would more readily use "Estonian" for Seto (who definitely were split by that time) and "Finnish" for the Finnish-Estonian.
 
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Well, yeah, that's what I was leading to - except I am not certain it would be reasonable to call the barely-split proto-Finnic culture "Estonian", as you do. I would more readily use "Estonian" for Seto (who definitely were split by that time) and "Finnish" for the Finnish-Estonian.

lol what?
1. proto-Finnic arose in Estonia and spread out of Estonia in several waves. Of course they were not "Estonian", there were different tribes but they were just from the geographical area of Estonia in the same way that Proto-Germanics are Scandinavian.
2. The Seto are definitely not a good example of "Estonian". They're outliers in many ways as they were geographically (impassable bogs & forests) from Estonian tribes since the Bronze Age, this geographical separation still shows in their genes. The "Seto" were more similar (and had connections) to Finnic people living east of lake Peipus than to Estonians. Saying that the Seto are a good example of Estonians is like saying that Karelians are a good example of Finns but the Seto are just even more different.
 
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Onto the things I dislike then. First of all, I already mentioned in both previous two dev diaries for the Royal Court is that, as much as like what I'm seeing, I don't see how the amount of content it's going to have justifies the 50% price of the DLC compared to DLCs of previous PDX titles, even big ones like Emperor (which still cost 20 dollars unlike the 30 for CKIII's DLCs). Or, more specifically, how it fulfills the criteria of Paradox's own justification of the price increase.

And that was when the only piece of the announced content that was specified to be a part of the free patch was the return of the minor titles. Now it's been confirmed that the big culture overhaul is going to be free content too. And sure, we will still have cultural divergence and hybridization in the DLC. But those are only going us to allow to swap the building blocks of the new culture system around. The mean of the new culture system is going to be a part of the free patch, while divergence and hybridization are just the sauce. Side dish at best.

And contrary to what certain ivory aficionados of the gallant persuasion tried to push as the truth in response to this being pointed out, the aforementioned justification for the price increase of the DLCs by Paradox itself clearly stated that it's because of the increased size of the DLC content itself. With no mention of the free patch content playing into that as well. Even though in that very same post about the new pricing structure for CKIII, just one paragraph earlier no less, Paradox itself made a clear delineation between DLCs (further separated between flavor packs and major expansions) and free patches. Besides, the free patch is quite telling here. The free patch content simply cannot justify the price increase of the DLCs (even if it's the free patch accompanying that exact DLC), because at that point it ceases to be truly free.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm against free patch content. Just the opposite. Given how Paradox works, DLC content is rarely ever updated in later DLCs or linked to their own systems, no matter how much it'd make sense for them to be linked. But free content can be further updated by DLCs because, well, it's free. But that's beside the point here. Paradox promised the 50% DLC price hike will be justified by increase in content and the DLC content just shrunk significantly thanks to this confirmation.

And I was willing to give Paradox the benefit of the doubt here, thinking that there will be hefty amount of artwork to go with the new mechanics. But third Royal Court dev diary in a row they themselves dispelled the validity of giving them that benefit. First they announced that they will be creating just four visual styles for the courts (corresponding to the four general areas that start as feudal/clan, despite the fact that all other areas are supposed to turn feudal/clan anyway), even though we are still months away from the release which would give them ample time to create the necessary artwork. And now they confirmed the whole shtick with culture aesthetic is not going to translate to anything in regards to holding graphics.

Moving on to something I also already addressed in reply to the previous Royal Court dev diary, i.e. cultural ethea. Particularly with how they correlate to the topic of the previous dev diary, i.e. court types. The issue here is that the court type is, by the sounds of it, going to be a pretty important decision. Except thanks to how it interacts with ethea, it's a heavily limited choice.

And like I said in the previous diary, in general choice is good for games. But not when done like this. There are seven ethea and five court types, with each ethos giving access to multiple court types. But not all of them. My guess is two or maybe three at best. The problem here is that the ethos of your culture is locked into place from the get go.

So let's say you want to play as a Swedish character because that time you decided to try surströmming made you develop Stockholm syndrome towards the Swedish culture. Giving Paradox's penchant for nationalistic chest-thumping and memes, I'm going to guess that the ethos of Swedish culture is going to be bellicose because vikings. Which, in turn, is probably going to give you access to martial and intrigue courts.

Now, what happens if you want to have a stewardship court instead? You're simply out of luck. In both this and the previous dev diary Paradox explicitly stated that your only choice to change the ethos of your culture is to use either cultural divergence or hybridization. Which means creating a culture that's explicitly not Swedish. Completely defeating the point of wanting to play as a specifically Swedish character in the first place. As such, if you want to remain Swedish it means your choice is limited in the aforementioned bad way.
I pretty much agree with your statement about the ethos/court style interaction. It feels wrong not being able to have a certain kind of court because your culture doesn't allow it. If your character is into stewardship, he should be able to create a steward court. His individuality should be more important than the preferences of his cultural background. Especially in a role playing game where you play as individual characters as opposed to playing a vague blob on a map.

But I have a different perspective on the monetisation issue. Does it look like the amount of paid content is going to be underwhelming for a 30$ expansion when you compare it to a 20$ expansion of CK2 at the moment? Yes, a bit. But my payment of 30$ funded the culture overhaul anyways, regardless if it's released for free or not. It would not exist were it not for us paying for the expansion pass/DLCs. My attitude to this resembles that of a patron. I like the concept of this game so much that I want to give Paradox money so they can create and improve this game so I can enjoy playing it.
But yeah, maybe this is a strange attitude. And I wouldn't have this attitude for any game, only those which are uniquely interesting in my eyes.
 
lol what?
1. proto-Finnic arose in Estonia and spread out of Estonia in several waves. Of course they were not "Estonian", there were different tribes but they were just from the geographical area of Estonia in the same way that Proto-Germanics are Scandinavian.
2. The Seto are definitely not a good example of "Estonian". They're outliers in many ways as they were geographically (impassable bogs & forests) from Estonian tribes since the Bronze Age, this geographical separation still shows in their genes. The "Seto" were more similar (and had connections) to Finnic people living east of lake Peipus than to Estonians. Saying that the Seto are a good example of Estonians is like saying that Karelians are a good example of Finns but the Seto are just even more different.
I like to re-use names from vanilla to signify the distinctions that actually make sense. So...
1. So? Calling proto-Finnic Estonians because they happened to frequent Estonia before they frequented Finland is like calling proto-Italic people something other than Italic because they obviously originated north of Alps. Using the vanilla Finnish for both vanilla Finnish and vanilla Estonian is likewise more fitting.
2. Yes! Seto were, by linguistic data, the first to split from the proto-Finnic branch, before all the Karelian/Finnish/Estonian split. They are not a good example of present-day Estonians, but they are good place to put the distinction and actually re-use the "Estonian" label freed by point 1.
 
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I think it shouldn't be a guarantee of learning both parents' languages and your guardian. The reason being is that you can send your child to be tutored in another court for their entire childhood. If you do, there's no reason they should necessarily learn the language(s) of their parents. They should definitely learn the language of their guardian, though. Also, if a parent dies early in the childhood, the chance of learning that parent's language should drop based on how long the parent was alive during the childhood. I'd really like a more dynamic way of learning languages and not just automatically learn the languages of your parents and guardian regardless of your situation.

Perhaps if a guardian knows the language(s) of the parents in addition to their own language, they can teach the child all of those languages (only those and not additional languages the guardian may know). If the guardian only knows their own language, they cannot teach the parents' language(s) to the child. For the child to learn their parents' language(s) during childhood, they'll need to spend a certain amount of time in their parent's court or their parents' language(s) need to be spoken by a decent number of people in the court where the child is being raised by the guardian.

Just throwing out options. The idea being that it would be better to have the way you learn languages vary based on circumstance rather than just getting a "default" set of languages. It could even be a matter of learning a language being similar to experience points - for every year you're with your parents growing up, you get X points toward learning their language. For every year you're with your guardian, you get X points to learn their language. With enough points, you become proficient in the language (i.e. you gain the language). This can be set up so that your first perhaps 2-3 years of life you have no languages. After that, you gain one language and that language is either your parent's language if you're at home the entire time or your guardian's language if you're with them the entire time. If you're at home part of that time and with the guardian part of that time, then it'll be wherever you are at the greatest length of time. In terms of what parent's language to learn if they have different languages, have it be the ruler whose court you are in. After that, you gain "experience" in other languages based on proximity to them over a period of time. Long enough and you learn the language. As an adult, you can also use schemes to learn languages by asking people to teach them to you. It may take multiple schemes for a given language before you gain enough "experience" to learn it. And you might even have events during the scheme (or at the end of it) where you might gain or lose "experience" because of something happening. Even as an adult, you can still learn language through proximity if you gain enough "experience."



I believe I read that you can learn languages from specific people and not just your neighbors, so you can invite someone with another language to court and learn from them (perhaps not even having to invite them). I could be wrong in how I remember that, but I'm pretty sure that I saw that.
I'm broadly along side that.

I was thinking that usually you'd learn the primary language of your dominant parent as you age up to about 6, before being sent to your tutor and *possibly* picking up their language (and they need to be able to speak your language to even be able to tutor you... after all, if you've grown up in a court that only speaks Norse, and you're sent to a tutor who speaks Italian, your tutoring won't be that effective...). However if, as is reasonably usual for my playthroughs the tutor is in the court of the ruler-parent (or is the ruler parent), then learning the non-dominant parent's language if different could be a possibility.

But yeah, your expansion of the concept makes sense, even if it's a little more complicated than I was thinking.
 
@Servancour Would it be possible through modding to have a Tradition unlock a Court Type?

Also small suggestion taken from the Victoria III DD, it would be nice to have one or two reserved posts under the DD to centralise your answers to questions rather than to have them dispersed all across the thread. Thank you!
 
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@Servancour Would it be possible through modding to have a Tradition unlock a Court Type?

Also small suggestion taken from the Victoria III DD, it would be nice to have one or two reserved posts under the DD to centralise your answers to questions rather than to have them dispersed all across the thread. Thank you!
It sometimes takes a while, but answers in DD comments are usually added to the FAQ post.
This is the one for the Royal Court : https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...er-diaries-q-a-important-information.1475394/
 
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I pretty much agree with your statement about the ethos/court style interaction. It feels wrong not being able to have a certain kind of court because your culture doesn't allow it. If your character is into stewardship, he should be able to create a steward court. His individuality should be more important than the preferences of his cultural background. Especially in a role playing game where you play as individual characters as opposed to playing a vague blob on a map.

But I have a different perspective on the monetisation issue. Does it look like the amount of paid content is going to be underwhelming for a 30$ expansion when you compare it to a 20$ expansion of CK2 at the moment? Yes, a bit. But my payment of 30$ funded the culture overhaul anyways, regardless if it's released for free or not. It would not exist were it not for us paying for the expansion pass/DLCs. My attitude to this resembles that of a patron. I like the concept of this game so much that I want to give Paradox money so they can create and improve this game so I can enjoy playing it.
But yeah, maybe this is a strange attitude. And I wouldn't have this attitude for any game, only those which are uniquely interesting in my eyes.
Yes, of course the free patch content isn't charity work. But there is quite a significant difference, at least to me, between "free patch content gets funded by the DLCs" (which I have no problems with) and "the 50% increase in DLC price is justified by the free patch content". Especially since there are multiple significant problems with the latter.

  1. As I already pointed out, that runs contrary to Paradox's own statements on the issue. According to them the price increase is (or at least is supposed to be) justified by the increased scope of the expansion content itself.
  2. It's not like CKIII is the first game where PDX started releasing free patch content alongside (and sometimes even between) DLCs. Holy Fury, Emperor and Leviathan, despite being significantly larger DLCs than their contemporaries still cost the same and still had free patch content.
    1. Royal Court isn't even going to have an unusual amount of free patch content. Right now the stated free patch content is the culture overhaul and minor titles. Just two things. And while the culture overhaul is a pretty hefty change, so were other pieces of free content in the past, like the revamp of crusades in the free patch accompanying Holy Fury. Not to mention some of the map changes for their past titles, which were always part of the free patch.
 
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I like to re-use names from vanilla to signify the distinctions that actually make sense. So...
1. So? Calling proto-Finnic Estonians because they happened to frequent Estonia before they frequented Finland is like calling proto-Italic people something other than Italic because they obviously originated north of Alps. Using the vanilla Finnish for both vanilla Finnish and vanilla Estonian is likewise more fitting.
2. Yes! Seto were, by linguistic data, the first to split from the proto-Finnic branch, before all the Karelian/Finnish/Estonian split. They are not a good example of present-day Estonians, but they are good place to put the distinction and actually re-use the "Estonian" label freed by point 1.
You have some very radical and alternative views, I can tell you that.

Germanics didn't originate in Germany just because they're called "Germanic". In the same sense, Finnics did not originate from Finland just because they're called "Finnic". Germanics arose in Southern-Scandinavia. Finnics arose in Northern-Estonia from where they expanded in all directions, reaching as far west as central Scandinavia and as far north as Finland.

Calling the Estonians "Finnish" in CK start dates would make as much sense as calling the Norse culture, "Icelandic". Both Finnish and Icelandic are very small numbered and rather insignificant cultures compared to the dominant North-Germanic culture, Norse and dominant Finnic culture which was Estonian.

I mean, this discussion doesn't really seem to have a point as you cannot grasp even the basics of population movements and ethnic history of Northern-Europe while I studied it in university.
I recommend reading about Finnic cultures if you're trying to be serious here. I legit think that you might be trolling us here if you say that the "Estonian" culture should be located around Pskov while the actual Estonian culture in Estonia should be called "Finnish". I'm just done.
 
I like to re-use names from vanilla to signify the distinctions that actually make sense. So...
1. So? Calling proto-Finnic Estonians because they happened to frequent Estonia before they frequented Finland is like calling proto-Italic people something other than Italic because they obviously originated north of Alps. Using the vanilla Finnish for both vanilla Finnish and vanilla Estonian is likewise more fitting.
2. Yes! Seto were, by linguistic data, the first to split from the proto-Finnic branch, before all the Karelian/Finnish/Estonian split. They are not a good example of present-day Estonians, but they are good place to put the distinction and actually re-use the "Estonian" label freed by point 1.
There's an easy solution to this: in the 867 start, make the cultures Seto and Proto-Finnic, with options for Proto-Finnic characters to become Estonian or Finnish based on where they live and other modifiers over time.

I'm not knowledgeable to know how groups like the Livonians come into play here, but presumably they can be involved too

At least according to Wikipedia, Karelians weren't viewed as separate before the 1000s, and Estonians before the 1100s. No idea how accurate this is, but presumably that's around when this split could occur, I suppose
 
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This is also the pillar that contains what naming practices the culture uses. Mainly what character names to use, if they use a dynasty prefix, etc. The naming practice will also be used to change title and holding names, which used to be set per culture, so as to not have titles change names if you create a new culture.
Wouldn't this fit Language rather than Aesthetics?

edit: nevermind, it was replied in the thread and detailed in the 65th dev diary.
 
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I mean, this discussion doesn't really seem to have a point as you cannot grasp even the basics of population movements and ethnic history of Northern-Europe while I studied it in university.
I have grasped it, as we do not have a single factual disagreement. As far as I can see, we both agree on the following scenario of what actually happened. There was a Pan-Proto-Finnic group (itself probably deriving from an earlier split with Sami), living around modern-day Estonia. Then Seto split (their being first is robustly confirmed by linguistic data). Then the rest started colonizing nearby areas such as Karelia and Finland.

The only disagreement we do have is whether to call this remaining group (ancestral to Finns, modern-day Estonians, and Karelians) "Estonian" in-game - and, aside from their being in Estonia (which is not enough as I indicated by the Italic example and you support by the well-known Germanic example - again, judging by that, we both know that's a non-argument), there is no particular reason to call them that.
 
I'm broadly along side that.

I was thinking that usually you'd learn the primary language of your dominant parent as you age up to about 6, before being sent to your tutor and *possibly* picking up their language (and they need to be able to speak your language to even be able to tutor you... after all, if you've grown up in a court that only speaks Norse, and you're sent to a tutor who speaks Italian, your tutoring won't be that effective...). However if, as is reasonably usual for my playthroughs the tutor is in the court of the ruler-parent (or is the ruler parent), then learning the non-dominant parent's language if different could be a possibility.

But yeah, your expansion of the concept makes sense, even if it's a little more complicated than I was thinking.

Yeah, basically where I was going. My thinking though is that sometimes a child has a guardian set up right away rather than at 6. But I'm actually not certain if they leave immediately or wait until 6 before they leave if the guardian is in another court. I'd have to test that (or someone else can if they want). If the child remains in the parent's court until 6, then absolutely they should always learn the parent's language. If they can leave the court right away, then they wouldn't necessarily learn the parent's language if they spend their entire childhood in a different court.