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Snow Crystal

Design Lead - Crusader Kings 3
Paradox Staff
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Jan 22, 2018
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  • Crusader Kings II
  • Hearts of Iron IV: Death or Dishonor
  • Hearts of Iron IV: Expansion Pass
  • Crusader Kings II: Holy Fury
  • Imperator: Rome
  • Imperator: Rome - Magna Graecia
  • Stellaris
  • Crusader Kings III: Royal Edition
Hello there! I hope everyone’s summer is going well, and that you are as excited for this week’s Dev Diary as I am to write it!


As I mentioned last time, this week we are going to take a look at the area around the Alps, as well as take a look at Italy. For our first preview, we will take a look at the western Alps, around the Kingdom of Burgundy, southern Germany and northern Italy.


Keep in mind that not all the changes are finalized, so there might be more updates before everything goes live. All the pictures will be taken from 1066 and with De Jure map modes, so things might look somewhat different in other bookmarks.

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So the first change we will be talking about is the changes to the County of Burgundy. We have cut it up, and made it into its own Duchy (of Franche Comté). The old Duchy of Upper Burgundy has lost its headway into the Swiss heartlands as well, moving the county of Schwyz (old Grisons), Zurichgau (old Schwyz) and Thurgau (old St. Gallen) into the new Duchy of Upper Swabia. In the later starting date, they will be part of the Duchy of Switzerland instead of Upper Swabia, a change that can happen throughout a game as well.

The county of Vaud has been added to the game, to the old Duchy of Upper Burgundy, cut out of certain parts of Geneva and Neuchatel. The final noticeable change on this side of the Alps, is that we have added Aosta to the mountains between Savoy and Italy.

For that part of the Alps, we wanted to make smaller changes, cut up some of the larger provinces and fix a lot of the barony errors and some of the county errors (see Schwyz further up the text). It was important for us to try and fix a lot of these minor issues, as it felt weird seeing some areas so misplaced on the map.

On the other side of the Alps, we have cut up some of the larger provinces. Monferrato has been cut up to make room for Ivrea, Lombardy has been cut up to make room for Milano, Como and Leventina, and Genoa has been cut up to make room for Noli.

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We can start out in Italy, where we left off from the previous picture. Trent has been turned into its own minor Duchy, opening up Brenner Pass between Bozen and Innsbruck. Innsbruck and Tirol has moved a bit westwards, to make room for Pongau as part of the new Duchy of Salzburg. In Bavaria, we have added the county of Regensburg, as it was the capital of the Duchy for quite a while, and we wanted to see that reflected in the game. Passau has also been moved into the Duchy.

To the east, Austria has gotten quite the rework. We have added Traungau, Steyr Freistadt, Krems and Melk as Counties, moved Znojmo into Bohemia and Passau, as previously mentioned, into Bavaria, and Styria has been moved south into its own Duchy. The Duchy of Carinthia has been cut up into Carinthia and Carniola, and the Duchy of Friuli has been added around Aquileia.

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So for our last location, we have central Italy. I figure I will talk about the mountains first, as we have added parts of the Apennines throughout Italy. We’ve felt this has increased the tactical value of Italy somewhat, as the choices you make for movement and county conquering feels a bit more valuable, and we also felt it cut up the county more nicely, particularly considering the new Kingdom we added in central Italy (this will be discussed further down).

We have added Perugia into the Duchy of Spoleto, moving the whole Duchy a bit further north. Rimini has been added to the Duchy of Ancona, turned the two county Duchy into a three county one, to lessen the amount of chokepoints post-mountainfication.For the old county of Aprutium, we have turned it into the Duchy of Abruzzo and moved it into the Kingdom of Sicily. And we have taken parts of the old County of Firenze, and added the county of Arezzo, to make sure Firenze doesn’t stick its fingers into everyone else, as it has had a tendency to do.

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So for what I assume will be the most controversial change to the region, the two new Kingdoms added.

For Carinthia, it felt weird giving even more land to a Kingdom that is meant to reflect the historical Stem-Duchy of Bavaria, when we have the Principality of Carantania, the March of Carinthia and later on the Duchy of Carinthia as inspiration that could take the same role. We have made sure, as this is quite the small Kingdom with a lot of land held by the same person in some bookmarked starts, that the AI won’t create the Kingdom right away, so it should be more of a player goal than an AI goal.

And… For Romagna, we wanted to cut Italy into its more historical pieces, without adding a Kingdom called “the Papal States” that was only for an unplayable Theocracy. This was done for several reason: having the Pope try to seek out central Italy as he did throughout history, having the old East Roman areas be more difficult to hold onto for the Kingdom of Italy in the first bookmarks, and to lessen the massive size of the Kingdom of Italy.

So I hope the Dev Diary didn’t get too wordy this time around, and that people can learn to love the changes made to the region! Next time around, we will have a (probably smaller) Dev Diary about the changes made to Holy Orders in Holy Fury!

PS. For those of you with an interest in the Habsburg jaw and the Archduchy of Austria, we have something special for you as well! (A special decision to create the Archduchy.)

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With both the updates being released alongside Holy Fury and Dharma having map updates, I imagine we should be expect a delay in the converter being updated?

(Unless there's a way I can offer to help updating it? :p)
 
Is this a new game mechanic that allows provinces to drift into different duchies? Or does that already happen somehow? Or am I misunderstanding this statement?

I'll just quote myself from Reddit, in case other people on the forums wonder as well:
It's a Switzerland related decision. We usually avoid drifting things in and out of duchies, as it can cause some issues with geographical regions etc, so it isn't a new mechanic, but rather an exception to the normal rule.
 
Very nice! I take it that with Romagna's addition it'll now take all four Italy-based kingdoms to form de jure Italia now? That does make things a bit more logical; last time I had to nab Burgundy to throw it into the mix.

Funny you should ask, I've actually changed it this morning. You need to hold 80% of the land, and if any of the three southern Kingdoms (Sicily, Naples and Trinacria) exists and isn't titular nor De Jure of the Empire of Italia, you need to hold those as well. In other words, in most bookmarks you would need to hold Sicily, and in the later start dates you would need to hold Naples and Trinacria. When you create the Empire, the three Kingdom titles, if you hold any of them, will be moved into the Empire as well.
 
With the changes to the Kingdoms that make up the dejue Empire of Italia, will Venice be affected at all?

I have been playing a lot of Venice in 769 starts lately, and I much prefer being part of the Byzantine Empire than Italia. I believe that Venice used to be de jure part of the Byzantine a while back. Are the Venetians moving empires?

They are not, as far as I have planned at least. As far as I know, the reason they were originally moved were because the Byzantines had a tendency to attack them early on, ripping apart the Merchant Republic and the player in the process.
 
Is this really a good reason? Because it felt weird?

So this text was actually longer when I originally wrote it, but I cut out parts and pieces to not make it too wordy, with among other things a small snippet of text on this change. But I guess I could expand a little bit on why I did what I did, at least for the sake of clarity, if not agreement.

The Carinthia/Bavaria issue really is an issue on the tier system in the game in general. There are certainly places where there are no "logical Kingdoms" to take its place. There are times when it makes sense to have a County the size of a Duchy, or a Duchy the size of a County, and it just goes to show how much more random things happened in real life, than what we can make happen in a game that needs structured rules.

Bavaria wasn't a Kingdom (though you could make an exception for its time under Louis the German), but a Stem-Duchy. It never expanded down to the Adriatic Sea and there were more logical historical fits as the Duchy of Carinthia, the Principality of Carantania and the March of Carinthia. To have the Kingdom of Bavaria stretch across the whole area doesn't fit historically as far as I can see, and was most likely an early adjustment because they felt any other Kingdom in the area would have had too few provinces to make fit.

With the addition of more provinces around the Gulf of Venice, I think it makes more sense to move the region out of the Stem-Duchy of Bavaria, and into its own Kingdom, for the sake of balance, keeping to history as well as we can with our structural limitations and for the sake of gameplay.