CK3 Dev Diary #19: Factions and Civil Wars

[Baron von Shoes]

Hello kings and queens, dukes and duchesses! I am back with another Dev Diary, and today we’re going to be talking about Factions and Civil Wars in Crusader Kings III!

Much like in CK2, vassals who are unhappy with the current state of affairs in the realm will create a Faction that other vassals can then join. Factions that grow large enough will eventually deliver an ultimatum to their liege, demanding certain concessions in exchange for continued peace.

Anatomy of a Faction

[A screenshot showing a Claimant Faction with Faction Members, Discontent, and Military Power displayed]

All Factions have a Military Power rating, which is a ratio between the combined military strength of all members and the military strength of their liege. Factions also have a Discontent score, which gauges how close the Faction is to sending their ultimatum.

Factions will begin accruing Discontent once their Military Power goes over a certain threshold, typically 80%. Stronger Factions acquire Discontent rapidly in an attempt to seize the moment, while weaker Factions hem and haw a little in the hopes that more supporters will join their cause. Either way, once Discontent reaches 100% the Faction will soon deliver their ultimatum; at that point, their liege must either accept their demands or fight all joined faction members in a civil war.

Civil Wars

[A screenshot of the map showing several Faction Members at war with their liege, who is the player]

Unlike in CK2, when a civil war is declared faction members do not form a new temporary realm. While they nominally remain vassals of their liege, they will immediately stop providing taxes and levies to them, and their liege will lose access to certain powers (such as imprisonment).

During a civil war the faction members turn hostile to both their liege and all non-faction vassals, though they will focus on fighting their liege. The exact war goal varies depending on the Faction type, but both sides earn war score by defeating hostile armies and sieging down hostile provinces.

Once one side emerges triumphant, they will enforce their demands. A victorious Faction will enforce their ultimatum with some additional concessions thrown in, while a victorious liege will imprison all faction members and gain title revocation reasons against them. If a white peace is agreed to, things largely go back to the way they were, though the liege gains an imprisonment reason against all the rebels. Actually imprisoning the rebels is another matter entirely, as a failed imprisonment attempt can trigger another rebellion.

Types of Factions
There are currently 5 distinct types of Factions, each of which has its own goals.

• The Independence Faction, seeking to gain independence from their liege.
• Claimant Factions, seeking to replace their liege with a new one.
• The Liberty Faction, seeking to reduce Crown Authority in the realm.
• Populist Factions, seeking to form a new realm of their religion and culture.
• The Peasant Faction, seeking to pay fewer taxes to their liege.

Vassals only join The Independence Faction if they feel like they do not belong in their liege’s realm. This can be due to a variety of reasons, but it generally boils down to a combination of three major factors: not being a de jure vassal of their liege, not sharing their liege’s culture [group], and their religious hostility towards their liege (more on that in a future Dev Diary!). As a result, Independence Factions tend to be ‘clumpy’, forming distinct regional blocs within a realm.

[A screenshot of an ongoing Independence Faction War against the HRE, showing the clustering of rebels within Italy]

Claimant Factions, on the other hand, are all about opinion. Vassals who personally dislike their liege while still feeling like they belong to their liege’s realm will favor this type of Faction. Of course, Claimant Factions are also an area where opportunistic vassals can push to acquire titles for themselves or their relatives!

The Liberty Faction is the place for vassals who are almost happy with the current state of affairs. They want to lower either the realm’s crown authority laws or their obligations to their liege, and are typically the easiest Faction to manage.

Populist and Peasant Factions are special in that they are not created by unhappy vassals. Instead, they are created by unhappy counties.

[A screenshot of the Faction Tab showing an active Kurdish Apostolic Populist Faction and a Peasant Rabble Faction]

Much like vassals, counties have an opinion of their holder which is influenced by culture, religion, events, and war. When the opinion of a county drops too low, they will join one of these two factions. Like the other factions, if these factions gain enough Discontent, they will send an ultimatum, and will revolt if the ultimatum is refused. This completely replaces the random province revolt chance that existed in CK2 — gone are the days of “Duke McPeasantFace has declared the 19th Orthodox Uprising on you.”

Populist Factions are the more dangerous type of county faction and form when counties wish to be governed by a ruler of their own culture and/or religion. While Populist Factions are created by and primarily consist of counties, sympathetic vassals in your realm may also pledge loyalty to their cause. A successful Populist revolt will cause all member counties and vassals to break away and form a new realm!

While an Independence Faction causes all members split off into their own separate realms, a Populist Faction will create a single realm with all members united under one ruler. That ruler will always share the Faction’s culture and religion, and as a hero of the liberation war they will almost always be a competent commander. In addition, a successful Populist Faction will automatically usurp or create an appropriate title for their leader to hold, which can even generate new Kingdom-tier titles in certain circumstances!

[A screenshot of the Kingdom of Jüterbog, split off of the HRE by a successful Polabian Popular Revolt]

All of this taken together means that any realm formed by Popular Revolt will end up being a formidable foe that likely has several De Jure claims on its neighbors. This can substantially alter the balance of power in your region — even if you weren't the initial faction target!

On the other hand, Peasant Rabble are the simplest and least dangerous type of Faction. Unlike all other Factions, there is no minimum Military Power requirement for the Peasant Rabble to revolt, and its Discontent will always tick upwards at a constant rate. When the Rabble inevitably revolt, they will almost certainly be weaker than the liege they are targeting — but don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security! Every time the Rabble’s forces occupy a county, all of that county’s levies will immediately join them. What started as a minor uprising can quickly balloon out of control if left unchecked! Luckily their only demands are to pay reduced taxes and provide fewer levies to their liege, which is an annoying if manageable setback.

Faction Management

So as a ruler, how do you manage all of these Factions? Well, there are several ways!

For starters, any alliances you have made with your vassals will prevent them from joining a Faction against you. This makes arranged marriages within your realm valuable even if you don’t benefit as much militarily as you would from a foreign marriage.

Adding to this, any vassals you have a hook on will be unable to join a Faction against you, whether that hook is due to them owing you a favor or due to blackmail.

You can also attempt to intimidate vassals away from their Faction, as a high Dread will lower their willingness to be in one. If the threat of imprisonment and torture doesn’t work, actual imprisonment will — vassals in your dungeons can not be part of any Faction. Just be careful, as an unjust imprisonment attempt may provoke a powerful Faction into revolting early, regardless of their Discontent!

[A screenshot warning the player that imprisoning this vassal may trigger a Faction Revolt]

Finally, if all else fails you can actually address the grievances your vassals have with you. Vassals who are happy enough will never join any kind of faction, which means improving their opinion of you and fixing structural issues in your realm will ensure that nobody challenges your rule!

That is all for this week, but I have an extra special treat in store you next time when we finally begin diving into how religion works in Crusader Kings III!

Blooper Reel: The Extremely Popular Revolt
Very early on in CK3's development, I started looking into ways to make Popular Revolts more challenging. No matter how large a revolt got, their forces would always be spread out across all of their member counties, making it trivial to pick off their armies one at a time.

To help remedy this, instead of letting each county spawn its own army I made it so each duchy would spawn a single army based on the combined military power of all faction counties inside of it. However, I made a mistake — instead of adding up the military power of all counties in a duchy, I accidentally added up the military power of all counties in the world... per duchy.

It turns out that no matter how many knights you have or how good of a commander you are, 8.8 million angry peasants will overwhelm you in battle every time.

 

[blackninja9939]

Aren't hooks becoming too much of a universal cure for every problem a ruler could have? Why should hooks prevent someone from joining a faction?

Hooks do take some effort generally to get if you want them on a specific person, and it makes a good amount of sense to me at least that a vassal is not gonna want to piss you off by joining a faction if you blackmail them about all those murders they committed and threaten to reveal it to the world...

 

[Baron von Shoes]

Can a Duke or Count join a peasant revolt against their leige. To use it too their own advantage.

Landed vassals who share a Faith with a Populist Faction may join it. If the Populist Revolt succeeds, they will become part of the new realm which is split off of their former leige's realm.
Landed characters can never join the Peasant Rabble faction.

Are populist/peasant faction's military power based on province development or something else?

County military power is based off of how many levies it provides to its holder, which is indirectly influenced by development.

While this does seem to be a more streamlined, less awkward system than what was present in CK2, it is a bit disappointing to see that factions are still only single-issue entities and that they remain completely oppositional as well. Feels like a lot of interesting opportunities have been missed out here...

We actually played around with this early in development, but it became clear that it was an unwieldy beast which quickly exceeded the resources we had for the system. Potentially an idea we can revisit in a future patch, though!

Is Blooper Reel possible to reproduce in CK3?

The bug has long since been fixed, but it is possible to mod back in

some question :

About populist and peasant faction :

Do you have to deal only with counties you have directly ? Meaning counties rules by vassals can't join a faction against you ?

If no, do vassal who rules counties which have joined a faction will automaticaly join this faction too ? If no what happen if the faction win and your vassal didn't joined this faction, does he lose his counties ?

And last, do vassals who didn't pleged the faction will join you to defeat a civil war or just lurking at you like in CK2 ?

Populist Factions always target the top liege in a realm, regardless of who personally holds the county. Peasant Rabble always target the actual holder of the county.

Vassals join and leave factions independent of counties. It is possible for 100% of a vassal's holdings to be part of a Populist Faction without the vassal themselves being in the Faction, and visa versa. Indeed, this is likely if the vassal and the counties have differing cultures/religions.

Non-faction vassals will not help you directly in civil wars, but will continue providing levies and taxes to you as normal.

 

[Baron von Shoes]

But is this really all there is to be said about managing the factions? Surely the fixing of structural issues part you've mentioned has some actual mechanic behind it for adressing specific demands? Because just getting your opinion up seems very lame in contrast to how much better the rest looks than ck2.

Also second and more important question: Can you actually lower the discontent? If it's simply going up at different paces, then its a modifiable timer. I absolutely don't want to have to put up with a rebellion timer just ticking constantly in the background.

Claimant Factions and Liberty Factions are primarily governed by opinion, but keeping your vassals even moderately happy (around +30 opinion currently, numbers subject to change) will keep them out of both of those factions. If you don't want to play a benevolent ruler, a high dread value is just as effective at keeping them in line.

By contrast, opinion and dread have only a minor impact on Independence Factions and Populist Factions. Those two are more concerned about structural problems with your realm, and can generally be fixed by re-arranging your liege <-> vassal hierarchy to achieve the following objectives:

• Ensure you are the Rightful Liege of all of your direct vassals (by creating or usurping the appropriate Duchy/Kingdom/Empire title, or transferring them to someone who holds it).
  
• Ensure your direct vassals share your religion and culture. This is less important if your religion is more tolerant, such as when playing in India.
• Ensure the holders of individual counties share a culture and/or faith with those counties.

EDIT: I forgot to answer your second question. Discontent is mostly out of your control, but it won't be ticking up all of the time; only Factions whose military power rivals your own can gain Discontent, and if you manage to reduce the power of the faction back below 80% discontent will start going down instead.

In addition, several events you can receive (especially within the Stewardship - Duty Focus) give you the option to reduce discontent in active Factions, or 'persuade' Faction members to leave them for a minimum of 10 years.

 

[Baron von Shoes]

In the dev diary you said that the populist (By the way, why aren't they called nationalists or something along those lines? At least they seem to be all about that...) faction's new realm get a fancy generated character. Is that always the case? I think that if the faction has any landed character as a member, it would be much more interesting to have him (or the most powerful one) to become the ruler, since its a 'familiar face'.

Nationalism as a concept didn't really exist yet in our time period, and the Populist Faction is somewhat different in that regard. It's not necessarily about unifying all [culture] peoples into a single realm, but rather about a group of disgruntled peasants being unhappy with foreign or infidel rulership and deciding to do something about it. They don't particularly care about making a single unified realm for all [culture] or [religion] peoples, they just want to change their own situation.

We initially toyed with letting landed characters become leaders of the Populist Faction (and the eventual rulers of the splinter-realm) but that ended up causing a myriad of problems as landed characters make/break alliances, join/leave factions, gain/lose hooks, and ultimately create way more edge cases than we could reasonably account for. However, if an existing unlanded claimant is floating around in the character pool somewhere (for example, a displaced King of Castille if the Umayyads manage to subjugate all of Spain) they will become the Populist Leader instead of having the game generate a new one.

What is the stance of populist factions against other realms, and would it possible to interact with them if you are ruler of their religion and culture?
A very illogical and frustrating situation in CK2 was to invade the Umayyads in Spain as the Kingdom of Asturias, be winning the fight against all odds, and suddenly have a visigothic catholic rebellion against the Umayyads spawn on top of your armies and destroy them. So at least, if it is not possible to interact with them, could they be not hostile towards every single entity in the world?

I completely understand what you're saying, but unfortunately the realities of our warfare system require all parties in competing wars to be hostile to each other. Otherwise you can end up in the extremely frustrating situation where as Asturias you have occupied half of the Umayyad's territory, the Catholic rebellion has occupied the other half, and neither of you can earn enough war score to actually win the war.

Can I use a hook to persuade a fellow vassal to join my faction?

Absolutely!

 

[Baron von Shoes]

But does it? Even though it's in a form of a faction now, what will prevent it from forming again and again? Will there be some kind of "exhaustion" in counties to prevent endless rebellions?

Crushing a Peasant or Populist Revolt will give all counties in the faction a substantial opinion boost of their holder for 10 years (subject to change, balance, and of course modding) which heavily disincentivizes them from creating or joining new factions. This gives you time to address whatever problems were making the counties unhappy in the first place (including converting their culture or religion to yours, if that is how you want to solve it).

Hmm, I might have missed something, but I couldn't see anything saying that multiple populist factions are possible. Does that mean that, if there's a populist Muslim faction around, no populist Christian faction can form (assuming you're Norse or whatever)? Or can they "replace" one another?

Multiple Claimant and Populist Factions can exist at a time, though the AI generally prefers to join existing ones if the faction's goals are similar enough to their own.

There can only ever be one Independence, Liberty, and Peasant Rabble Faction at a time.

 

[Baron von Shoes]

Can new rulers join in the ongoing rebellion? Or if I keep being tyrannical towards my non-rebelling vassals during the rebellion will they just start a second rebellion?

Second rebellion. That said, since Factions will only revolt if they think they have a good chance of beating you in battle, having two Factions revolting at once is generally a bad idea...

 

[Baron von Shoes]

So, succesfull pupulist can create always not existed or random realm, or also curretly established for example king of France hold Duchy of Normandy as secondary and normandy populist want his own, local ruler ?

Populist Factions prefer to usurp an appropriate existing title if possible. For example, if the Umayyads conquers all of Spain and then lose to a Castillian Catholic Revolt, the new King will take the title of the King of Castille, either usurping it from the Umayyads (if they hold it) or creating it (if it has been destroyed). Only if that is not possible will they generate a new dynamic revolt title, which will be named after the most powerful county in the faction.

 

[Baron von Shoes]

Will foreign powers have the ability to influence a faction or civil war? The Encourage Dissent council task in CK2 was pretty limited to a single county, and I can only give so many gifts to rebels while they stockpile it for their ransom. Or maybe have your spymaster be able to find out rebel factions and their dissent, so you have the perfect time to strike.
One famous example was how Philippe Augustus encouraged Hal and Richard's rebellions against Henry II (while Geoffrey died from an injury during a tournament on one such diplomatic missions), I disliked watching independence rebellions get put down by a rival that I'd like to see humbled.

Not currently, but that is an excellent idea. Probably won't make it in for release, but hopefully we can add it in a future patch?

 

[Baron von Shoes]

Good dev diary.

Is there any trigger that addresses the Discontent of a faction?

Something like :

faction_xpto = {

    discontent = x

}

Yes, very close to that but it is called 'faction_discontent'. We also have triggers for 'faction_power' and 'faction_power_threshold'.

 

[Baron von Shoes]

So, I noticed something, one of populist revolts says "Kurdish Apostalic" does that mean that there are more branches of religions than CK2?

Tune in next week to find out

A few things.
So how does a vassal or vassals leaving a faction with over 80% military affect growing discontent?

If a claimant is placed on the throne, will members of the faction that placed them there like the ruler more and be liked by them more? I think that'd be a good idea.

Can people not of the populist faction's religion/ethnicity join it and then become part of the new realm? Eg. can Matilda of Tuscany join the Juterbog revolt and if she does will her part of Italy become part of the new realm? Also, can the player become the new ruler of the new state (if they have sufficient martial) and how is the new ruler decided?

Finally (I think I'm forgetting something) you wrote counties join factions based on disliking their holder (rather than the realm head). If you're the realm head it seems you then have no control over these rebellions happening because they are caused by your vassals being unlikable screw ups, so will you as a realm head have any ability to deal with growing discontent with your vassals by their counties or no? ie. to prevent these rebellions before they happen.

Edit: Remembered what I forgot. If unlawful imprisonment can force a faction to go to war immediately, surely that's a very powerful tool of the player (or ai) because you can use it to destroy otherwise too powerful factions before they get too big for you to deal with. It seems to be a very good thing rather than a bad thing.

Further edit: Can you join rebellions that are ongoing in your realm? Both when they begin if you're not in the faction or/and after some time has passed.

If a vassal leaving a faction drops it below 80% military power, discontent will stop growing and begin shrinking instead.

Claimants and the faction members who put them on the throne gain mutual opinion bonuses of each other. In addition, all of the faction members will gain a favor hook on their new liege, which the AI often uses to reduce their feudal obligations if possible.

As the ruler of a realm, you are ultimately responsible for the actions of your vassals. If one of your vassals abuses their power and greatly upsets the populace, you face the decision of either being forced to revoke their titles to place someone more competent in charge, or dealing with the inevitable fallout when the populace revolts.

Imprisonment as a way to force an early revolt can be a powerful tool, absolutely. Unjust imprisonments will cause you to gain Tyranny however, so make sure the trade-off is worth it before you do!

You can not join a faction after the rebellion has already begun.

Lets say I am a vassal and my liege has a hook on me for some reason or the other. If he tries to use it to stop me from supporting a faction can I choose to ignore the hook under great penalty? I think it would be a fun story to say that you decided the good of the realm was worth the personal cost to you. The excesses of your liege became too much to ignore and you could no longer sit by and decided to do something about it even if it ruined you.

Currently no, you can not ignore the hook just because you really don't want to have it. In general you really want to avoid people getting hooks on you, especially if they are your liege.

It would be pretty simple to mod in a decision that lets you remove a hook in exchange for substantial prestige penalties or something, though.

 

[Baron von Shoes]

I'm confused. I thought the peasants of one of your vassals would declare their revolt against your vassal? So why would I really care about them? Or do they declare against the top liege?

Ah, populist revolts always declare against the top liege. I thought you were talking about them (but I guess you meant the actual peasants).

Peasant rabble declares only against the holder, but if they win your vassal (and indirectly you) will receive reduced tax and levies for a period of time. So you could be charitable and help them out, but there's no real reason you need to.