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The arduous duty great privilege of writing this week's Dev Diary has fallen to me, and in a desperate but vain attempt to fill Doomdark's shoes, I am here to talk a bit about the various options that are open to pagans when waging war.

View attachment CKII_ToG_DD_03_Prepared_Invasion.jpg

Prepared Invasions
Norse Pagans, or Vikings as they are known to the common man, have the unique ability to launch Prepared Invasions against non-pagans. This undertaking can only be done by small to middling Viking realms, and the target of your invasion can't be too small or too big (it needs to have between 9 and 40 holdings).

The way this works is that you declare your intention to invade a particular realm. This will cost you a lot of prestige (which can be gained through looting, as explained in the previous Dev Diary), and you'll have two years to prepare before going to war. During this time warriors from across the Norse lands will flock to your banner, hungry for loot and plunder. Needless to say, if you fail to declare war before these two years are up, you will lose face.

View attachment CKII_ToG_DD_03_King_Ambition.jpg

Subjugation
Pagans won't shy away from fighting each other, and all pagan rulers may make use of the new Subjugation casus belli. This lets them attack other pagans within a specified target kingdom, but it can only be used every ten years unless your ruler has the new ”Become King” ambition. If you are the victor of a Subjugation war, you will vassalize all lords within the target kingdom.

Pagan Conquest
Pagans can always declare war for control over a single neighboring county, and in addition to this, Norse Pagans may also go to war for any coastal county.

Tribal Invasion
This casus belli can only be used by independent Altaic (Turkish and Mongol) and Magyar pagan rulers, and it targets entire kingdoms in what amounts to massive horde invasions. You may have been on the receiving end of these before, but now you'll finally get a chance to unleash them yourself as you ride in from the steppes to carve out an empire.

View attachment CKII_ToG_DD_03_Peace_Too_Long.jpg


And finally, a few more items that have a significant impact on pagans and how they wage war:

Non-pagans suffer from a significantly smaller supply limit when in pagan territory, which limits their ability to march massive armies towards the heathen homelands at the start of the game. This penalty will eventually be removed as you progress through the Military Organization technologies.

As was touched upon in the last Dev Diary, Norse and Tengri pagans lose prestige if they have been at peace for too long. The Suomenusko, Romuva and Slavic pagans are less focused on offensive warfare and do not have this penalty. In addition, their warriors enjoy several defensive bonuses, especially when fighting in provinces with their own religion.

That's all for now!
 
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the new facepack graphics look good. meh about the other stuff though; i suppose will be good for some mods, like for the game of thrones mod for raiding dothraki, wildlings etc.

a bit of an underwhelming dd really but i look forward to the next one in two weeks nonetheless!
 
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the new facepack graphics look good. meh about the other stuff though; i suppose will be good for some mods, like for the game of thrones mod for raiding dothraki, wildlings etc.
The most obvious one would be the ironborn. I don't dislike their current system, but this would make more sense.
On the info itself, there is nothing amazingly new, but I quite like the new face pack. So far, looks better to me than the last few:)

EDIT: I meant the raiding system, not so much the new casus belli.
 
Now maybe we have something to keep republics in line.
 
Nice, but its shame we dont get any info that wasnt in life feed video.
Hmm, does Rurik has some new trait? It looks as lighbulb, maybe its "bright" (similar to quick or genius?)
 
The most obvious one would be the ironborn. I don't dislike their current system, but this would make more sense.
On the info itself, there is nothing amazingly new, but I quite like the new face pack. So far, looks better to me than the last few:)

EDIT: I meant the raiding system, not so much the new casus belli.

yes but the other new cb's could also be used as well im sure.


Another thing people may miss is if we finally get more control over attrition rates, all armies who go above the wall could be severely punished with attrition. whilst the wildling armies do fine!
 
yes but the other new cb's could also be used as well im sure.


Another thing people may miss is if we finally get more control over attrition rates, all armies who go above the wall could be severely punished with attrition. whilst the wildling armies do fine!

The attrition thing is indeed a nice addition, it might finally stop/curb Byzantine steppe blobbing, for example.
 
I do believe I see West Francia there, and from the look of the name over the Grey Blob, East Francia as well. What's even more encouraging is their Kingdom status (well, at least West Francia...).
 
The attrition thing is indeed a nice addition, it might finally stop/curb Byzantine steppe blobbing, for example.

i wouldnt get your hopes up though; i wouldnt be surprised if the devs only allowed it to be moddable in relation to the set up of the old gods i.e. for pagan lands. extensive moddability just always seems to be out of reach... lol

but heres hoping.
 
Subjugation and Prepared Invasions sound awesome!
the new COA frame and wood decor looks awesome!
the new facepacks look awesome!
I can't wait to get my grubby hands on it! :laugh:

still, it does bring up a question though - how will these "warriors from across the Norse lands will flock to your banner, hungry for loot and plunder" be represented? A steadily growing scripted army without maintenance and/or attrition? Or a DOW-onset free scripted semi-random army?
 
East and West Francia! :D

Looking good as ever. I particularly like the beards, and the Slavic defensive bonuses- that should help in 1066 too.

Any chance of a DD focusing on the Zarathustrans? :) :) :)
 
I do believe I see West Francia there, and from the look of the name over the Grey Blob, East Francia as well. What's even more encouraging is their Kingdom status (well, at least West Francia...).

Old news, but yes. Having the ability to make petty kings/emperors and change the name of a kingdom by command means pretty much anything goes.
 
Why between 9 and 40 holdings?

This really seems pretty gamey, right? Clearly it's so the vikings can invade the smaller saxon kingdoms in Britain but not France. But the limit feels arbitrary. If your not getting the results you want, something else needs to be adjusted. How many 40 holding nations are there? Few. A 40 holding limit just seems weird, and after the very start of the game it will make this feature pointless because there won't be any kingdoms that small left.
 
still, it does bring up a question though - how will these "warriors from across the Norse lands will flock to your banner, hungry for loot and plunder" be represented? A steadily growing scripted army without maintenance and/or attrition? Or a DOW-onset free scripted semi-random army?

Events will occur continuously where you are granted troops and ships for the invasion as warriors trickle in.
 
Old news, but yes. Having the ability to make petty kings/emperors and change the name of a kingdom by command means pretty much anything goes.

Sorry, guess I haven't been keeping up, but I don't recall seeing the Grey Blob being anything but the HRE (and therefore empire tier). Mind you we don't see it's CoA on the map, so I guess it still could be. At any rate, East Francia being just a kingdom (I assume a renamed de jure France?) bodes well for places like Brittany not getting overrun.