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The Witch-King

Lord of the Nazgul and PDS Senior Content Designer
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Apr 16, 2001
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Hi everyone!

I’m Tobias Bodlund, Scripter on the Crusader Kings II team, and I’d like to wish you all welcome to the Way of Life dev diary.

With this being a rather small expansion compared to most and release being less than one week away now, we will only have this one dev diary for Way of Life. So sit back and enjoy!

The scope for this expansion is not about opening a new period in history or new areas to conquer - rather, it’s about going deeper into the characters’ personal pursuits and how they navigate (or manipulate) relationships with other characters.

When designing this expansion, we also wanted to allow the players to choose to some degree what direction their characters will take on a personal level, without therefore locking them into a certain area of the game.

The way we decided to do this is through a new concept called Focus. Focuses are the core concept of the Way of Life expansion. When you start your game, you will be able to choose a focus for your character, and this focus will affect the availability and frequency of certain types of events associated with that focus, as well as unlock certain decisions and actions that you can perform towards other characters.

carloman_the_hunter.png

There are also direct bonuses that apply to your character just from choosing a focus. Every focus is conceptually tied to a character attribute (two for each attribute), and the most common bonus is an increase in those attributes.

These are the focuses you can choose from:
  • Family - engage with your family and make sure that they get along.
  • Carousing - allows you to invite people to private parties, good for making new friends and generally having a good time.
  • War - taking an interest in war, it allows you to fight duels, among other things.
  • Hunting - opens up new hunting-related events, and is now a requirement for some hunting decisions.
  • Rulership - ruling your realm, dealing with administration.
  • Business - dealing with mayors, founding a trade route, building things.
  • Intrigue - allows you to spy on people, slander them, and liberate imprisoned or abducted family members.
  • Seduction - set your target and strive to make them yours.
  • Scholarship - pursue your chosen path of research.
  • Theology - required for pilgrimages, opens up various new religious events (including for pagans) as well as affecting the frequency of other religious events.
Some of the focuses have conditions that must be fulfilled before you can choose them. For example, you can’t choose the seduction focus if you are celibate, or the hunting focus if you are Jain.

finnish_theologian_2.png

Only rulers can have focuses (and AI rulers will of course also use them). After five years, you will be able to switch to another focus if you so wish. Note, however, that some of the longer event chains may interrupt if you choose to abandon that focus (effectively turning your back on whatever path you were pursuing).

We’ve also added a number of interesting things to the free patch that accompanies this expansion.

Firstly, diplomacy and other actions that directly affect other characters are now accessed through right-clicking the character portrait of the person you want to interact with. This places actions such as legitimizing bastards, straightening up your decadent relatives etc in the same place as diplomacy in the interface (and the new Way of Life actions involving things such as seduction, carousing and spying are also placed here, if you own the expansion).

Modders will be pleased at several powerful new scripting features that we’ve added. One is the new type of decision that we are introducing. They are scripted as “targetted_decision” and can be used to target another character, with fully scriptable triggers and effects. This has been used to create the new actions involving seduction etc in the expansion - but it also effectively allows modders to script almost any kind of character interaction that they need.

chaplain_puppy.png

Another new modding feature is the possibility to save event targets in a temporary custom scope. Any scope (character, province, title) can be saved in this way, only expiring with end of the current chain of events. This should simplify scripting of some more complex chains of events. Naturally, these custom scopes can also be used in the event texts.

Event texts, yes… it is now also possible to set several texts for any event, with triggers to select the appropriate one. This works very similarly to triggered event options. It works for both event titles and the event description. This means you can handle several alternate cases with only one event, where previously you’d need to create a different event for each case if you wanted the text to differ for different cultures, for example.

That's it about the major new modding features. As usual, the free patch will also contain a large number of minor bugfixes as well as improvements to performance and gameplay.

Full patch notes will be published this Friday, and the release date for Way of Life is December 16.

Check out all CK2: Way of Life live streaming videos here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqRhPbyFDQWgpHHd9_whB9rMA8a42ozrp

[video=youtube;pntRkvu_aR0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pntRkvu_aR0[/video]

PS. The expansion CK2: Way of Life has released, get it here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/329010/
 
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Very interesting! I have a few questions:
- what are the possible paths of research for the scholarship path? Can we get an example?
- what are the effects of succesfully slandering another character (for the intrigue path)?
- did you feature ForzaA in the first screenshot on purpose, to tease us?

1. Don't stop looking at the the sky! (the truth is out there)
2. People might believe it and start disliking the target.
3. Yes.

Will there be events that let us cancel foci early?

No.

Is the Hajj of muslim rulers also linked to the Theology focus ?

No.
 
So who at PDS is a The X-Files fan, Tobias...?

:)

Whatever tape you found in that VCR, it isn't mine.

This looks really nice. Will it be possible to mod new focuses in ?

Yes.

So wait, we can't go on pilgrimages any-more without Way of Life, even if we own Sons of Abraham?

Or are they coding in an exception? Hiding one expansion feature in another's really odd.

You can always go on a Christian pilgrimage if you own Sons of Abraham.

If you own Way of Life, some things, including some content from other DLCs that you might own, will now also be tied to (or sometimes just weighted towards) a certain Focus.

For example, you will notice that AI characters with the Carousing Focus are much more likely to accept invitations to feasts. And if your Indian liege has the Hunting Focus, expect to be invited to tiger hunts more frequently.

And if you have WoL and not SoA theology will be useless? :D

You will get religious-themed events, plus bonuses to church opinion etc.

But I would prefer diplomatic actions to be available for all and be buffed with additional events if you have the focus.

As a warlike person I should still be able to do intrigue (like abduction, rescue a family member) but I do not have a great network... etc etc

The Focus system is supposed to involve a tradeoff, where you forsake some things in order to gain others. So some of the available actions are a perk of that Focus. Basically, if you want to always be able to do all the intrigue stuff, you should stay Focused on intrigue.

The idea with the five-year cooldown is that your character is committing to a way of life. Now, having your wife kidnapped by Vikings might force you to abandon your life of pleasant debauchery (Carousing) and start getting your head into the methods of skullduggery and intrigue, this is true. And you can do this, unless you very recently abandoned your old Focus to switch to Carousing, in which case you'll have to wait a little. You can't wake up as a new person every morning.

Didn't they mention that certain lifestyle traits would be rewarded when you "completed" foci?

Yes. And there will be new lifestyle traits in addition to the old ones. The old traits Celibate, Falconer and Poet are now normal traits, however, and not lifestyles.

Speaking of which, I hope existing interaction with the spouse (earrings, buzzards, 'as if I were seeing her for the first time' etc.) won't be restricted only to characters with the Family focus. Could you please confirm this won't (or will, I guess) be the case, Tobias?

Don't worry, you can still interact with your family even without the Family Focus. You just open up more possibilities if you choose it.

Are there new traits to accompany the events ? I noticed one of the pictures mentions a hunting dog.

A whole bunch of new traits and character and province modifiers, yes.

Is there an entire event chain connected to the puppy, and which focus do I need to spend my time neglecting my realm and playing with my virtual dog?

Hunting. And yes, there is a chain of events tied to it.

Can we reform the faith without selecting the theology focus?

Yes.

Will the Intrigue focus provide us with a better assassination plot system?

Some of the new events will affect plots.
 
"Theology - required for pilgrimages, opens up various new religious events (including for pagans) as well as affecting the frequency of other religious events."

Hellenic events, please.

No
 
Groogy, Celtic religion when? Are we really gonna have to wait for the Fall of Rome bookmark to get some delicious headhunting in?

I'll do Roman and Celtic expansion if I am allowed to add in some anachronistic stuff into the game that will happen in every game you play, especially if you are Roman and playing Byzantine. :cool:
Like the Papacy being a secret order of Ninjas..... Ruled by their Headmaster the sloth! Which would be an excellent explanation of the Schism.

tumblr_mi68taCJOu1qi28muo1_1280.jpg
 
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I like the way you think.

Imagine the death message from that: "Strangled by a sloth"
Its just too perfect to not be in the game!

Edit: I kinda want to do this now...
 
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If you do a Fall of Rome/Justinian expansion, Groogy, I will pay you all the moneys. All of them. I don't care about the details.
Then Ninja Sloth Pope it is! And the Patriarchy are secret bears. Not strange why the west and east couldn't see eye to eye on religious matters.
It will all be included in the expansion for free!
 
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I am still waiting for my secret bears DLC! I want my bears damnit!

Ok, here's a secret about bears:

A rather elusive bear will be appearing in Way of Life. Catch it if you can!
 
Is this DLC activated for other players in MP matches if the host has it or only for those who bought it?

Pretty sure all DLC's of the Host are always activated for every player in the game unless some bug has been introduced.