Greetings!
This Dev Diary is about the upcoming free update, which we’ve dubbed 1.15.0 ‘Crown’! Similarly to free updates of the past, the Crown update will be pretty big - it has reworked systems, new features, and a myriad of bugfixes and balance changes.
All of the changes that I’ll go over stem from the fact that we spend a lot of time updating, tweaking, and bugfixing existing systems and features as part of our parallel development track setup - depending on the status of an individual track, people from that track are assigned to what we call ‘Realm Maintenance’, where we focus on improving areas of the game that we either feel aren’t good enough, or that you in the community are asking for us to change. Usually a lot of Realm Maintenance time happens at the start of a new development track, as there are few bugs in newly developed content during, for example, the concepting or pre-production phases. During Realm Maintenance we have Improvement Days where we add as many smaller improvements and quality of life changes as we can, and some time is also used to polish promising projects from the Black Forge Jam (an internal sort-of game jam where we experiment with new CK3 features). The Crown update contains over 4 months worth of Realm Maintenance, including 200+ bugfixes.
I won’t have time to go over everything in detail, so I’ll focus on a few highlights!
Court Position Rework
Last year we teased a Court Position rework, and since then we’ve refined it and added even more improvements. In short; the rework aims to make Court Positions more interesting and engaging, adding tools, adjusting costs, improving quality-of-life, and making the UI less of a hassle to use. The intent is for Court Positions to be more widely used by giving them new effects and tasks that allow you to deal with many different situations.
[Image - The new layout]
The new layout allows you to see more positions at once, and presents them in a more immersive way. All of the information is still there, of course: most of what you don’t need to see at all times has just moved into the tooltip. What you need to know at a glance is still visible.
[Image - Unavailable Court Positions]
At the bottom of the list we’ve added a new foldable category that reveals all positions that you could potentially have. It’ll exclude anything you cannot possibly get, such as Adventurer Officers for landed characters and vice-versa. The tooltips will tell you what you can do in order to get them.
[Image - Court Position automation]
Now when it’s more important than ever to keep certain positions filled, we’ve added the option of choosing to fill the position automatically. This comes in three flavors, depending on your preference: an event giving you the option to choose between a few good candidates in your court, auto-assign the highest aptitude courtier, or auto-assign with an event notifying you if there are no candidates. This can be toggled per Court Position, and different positions can have different settings.
[Image - Seneschal Tooltip]
A lot of court positions were never used because it was hard to justify spending gold on their salaries, so we decided to transfer part of the costs into prestige, and we also lowered salaries across the board (the salary pictured in the screenshot is from the late medieval era, roughly 150 years in from 1066). Prestige is a resource most players are more willing to part with, but as there up until now has existed very few ‘prestige income sinks’ you need to be careful so you don’t spend it all…
All of the new tasks have costs; some of them prestige, some gold, and some even cost piety. It's these tasks where the brunt of the cost will come from, but they are naturally opt-in, and you can use them to handle tricky situations, toggling them on/off as you see fit.
Most positions now also come with an interesting effect for the holder of the position, such as the 20% stewardship experience pictured above. This also means that we’ve opened up a lot more positions to be held by vassals, which is interesting because:
[Image - Request Court Position]
You can now request Court Positions from your liege, allowing you to reap some of the benefits that they convey, such as Royal Architect now reducing your build time/build cost, or the Court Poet now reducing your stress gain, general opinion, and diplomacy lifestyle xp.
[Image - Grant Court Position]
You can also grant court positions directly via a character interaction now, making it easier to, for example, appease angry vassals with ceremonial positions.
[Image - A handful of the new tasks]
There are way too many new Court Position Tasks for me to go through them in detail, but above is a small sample of what you’re going to see. Most Court Positions now have three tasks to choose from, with a few having one or two - these tasks cover a wide variety of things you might want, from Wet Nurses instilling virtues into your children, to your Antiquarian searching for rumors about locations of rare Artifacts, to your High Almoner promoting the opinion of Zealous Vassals, among many, many more things.
Many of the things you can now do didn't have any tools before; such as reducing the stress of characters other than yourself (which can be achieved via the Entertain Courtiers task for the Jester). You can also use various positions and tasks to slowly increase your Legitimacy; the Seneschal gives a small passive trickle, the Court Poet can give you Legitimacy % Gain Modifiers as part of the Write Poetry Task, and the Court Musicians Bolster Legitimacy Task (the Court Musician is now available to Duke-tier characters and no longer requires Royal Court to have!). It’s worth noting that all tasks that increase stat points, such as ‘Exercise with Ruler’, are balanced in such a way that you cannot gain skills unless the holder of the position is better at the skill than you are.
We’ve also taken this opportunity to move the entire Hunt Sighting system into these tasks. If you want hunt sightings to improve the success chance of your hunts, you now choose what your Master of the Hunt should focus on finding - this makes the system less random and gives you more agency.
There’s more that I’ve not talked about, to see the full extent of changes I refer to the full changelog here on our official forums!
Automated Armies
Another feature we teased last year was the addition of Automated Armies, an opt-in feature where the AI takes control of your armies and fights wars for you. The intent behind this feature is to allow you to focus on other things while engaged in trivial wars, and to allow players unfamiliar or uninterested in warfare to enjoy the game more. If you are an experienced player we still recommend that you control your armies yourself, but give it a spin if you’re just cleaning up those three counts bordering your empire!
[Image - Automated Armies Settings]
Now, there are two crucial parts to this feature working well: seeing what the AI is thinking, and for the AI to play well. There’s nothing that differentiates Automated Armies from how the AI normally plays, so improving one improves the other. Both of these areas will be covered in the two sections below:
AI Ally Info
Sometimes you have an ally in a war that you have no idea what they are thinking - perhaps they’re just standing there, moving erratically, or being generally unhelpful. Quite often this is because of something that you’re not aware of; perhaps they are resupplying their armies, perhaps they are guarding a siege, etc. To make it more transparent what an army is doing, we’ve added icons with descriptions that explicitly tell you what the AI is up to.
[Image - Exposed Ally Thinking]
This is also applied to your own armies if they’re automated, giving you an overview of what they’re doing.
[Image - Exposed automation thinking]
In the above screenshot, the right army is actively besieging while the left one is guarding the siege while standing in a province with enough supply limit to support it.
There are a multitude of different states for the AI to show; moving, attacking, moving to siege, supporting the player, etc. Hopefully this’ll clear up most uncertainties regarding why they’re doing things that might otherwise appear inexplicable.
Warfare AI Fixing/Updates
We’ve been working a lot with warfare AI in an effort to make it better. We’re not promising miracles, but we have spent over two months of programmer time in an effort to nail down bugs, improve sub-par behavior, and change behavior that, while intended, didn’t feel ‘right’.
This includes a lot of cases where the AI would be indecisive, passive, or ‘dance’ between provinces, which was often caused by various competing systems trying to avoid attrition, match supply limits to stack sizes, and edge-case bugs. These fixes in combination with the exposed AI ally logic above results in much more clear warfare where it’s easier to understand what the AI is up to.
We’ve also taught the AI about War Score, making them pursue what would give them score, rather than arbitrarily choosing actions based on a set of circumstances that were always fixed. For example; when you’re fighting a war as a player, you’re less likely to pursue battles if you know that the siege you’re currently about to finish would win you the war, and you’re also less likely to pursue battles if you’re already capped on battle warscore (usually war score for battles is capped at +50% for most CB’s). They’re now also much more likely to siege using stacks with Siege Weapons, and will try to shuffle their siege stacks around in such a way that their ongoing sieges aren’t broken.
Now, there are going to be edge cases where unwanted behavior still happens, and we’ll keep fixing bugs as we find them. Hopefully you won't notice as much strange AI behavior any more.
An area of the game where the ‘normal’ war AI does not perform as well is during Crusades, so we decided to take a suggestion from the community and give these Great Holy Wars some special treatment. The ‘one size fits all’ philosophy out the window, the AI now has a set of special procedures they follow during these grand-scale wars in particular.
Firstly there’s a set of smaller tweaks; the AI cares less about attrition and supply until they’ve made some headway, and they will try to ‘boat hop’ less often (take short sea paths). When you’re going from well-supplied Europe by boat disembarking into low-supply drylands with an army of potentially hundreds of thousands of men there’s no way you can find enough supply for all of them - the AI now knows this, and when they start assaulting the war target they will temporarily ignore attrition until they’ve gotten enough of a beachhead that they can support the size of their units, this makes the initial phase of a crusade more likely to succeed as the attacking AI won’t desperately shuffle their troops around to find supply. By ‘boat hopping’ less they will prefer land routes to their targets, avoiding the -30 advantage penalty.
Now for the meat of the changes; the attacker in a GHW will first find a ‘Gathering Area’, and then move their armies to a ‘Staging Area’.
[Image - AI armies gathering in Roma before sailing to Jerusalem]
For the first stage of a Great Holy War the attacking AI will find a good-supply area where they can gather their forces. As stacks of units are raised across a large part of the world they need some time to gather, and should do so in a safe place. In this example we have a crusade against Jerusalem, so Roma with its surrounding counties is deemed both safe and close enough to the target to be designated the Gathering Area. You will see an icon on allied AI units with a text that says where they intend to gather, so that you can follow them there. They will gather for several months before setting off to the next step of the journey: the Staging Area.
[Image - AI armies staging in Issus after having gathered in Roma]
The Staging Area is the closest friendly or neutral area to the war target, in this example it’s in Byzantium. The attacking forces will make their way there before starting their assault, which means that they will arrive as a much more unified force. This also means that they won’t immediately attack from the water, avoiding disembarkment penalties and ensuring that their stacks have an acceptable degree of supply. Instead they will most likely march in via land, taking a modicum of attrition along the way, but ultimately mustering a more successful assault.
Now, the testing that we’ve done reveals that the attackers are usually more successful, but can still lose. Though now when they lose it’s less because they frustratingly trickle in across several years with disembarkment penalties and no supply, and more because the defenders have a homeland advantage - as it should be.
Character Interaction UI Update
The character interaction menu has received a facelift, with the intent of cleaning it up and making interactions more intuitive.
[Image - Cleaned-up interaction menu]
Several categories have been removed and merged into other categories to keep the overall number down. We’ve added colors to these categories so it’s easier to glance at the one you need.
You can now easily see if a scheme is personal, hostile, or political - with the predicted scheme difficulty shown next to it, making it easier to see what you could be pursuing without having to delve into each interaction.
[Image - Favorite button]
As we’ve moved several interactions to no longer be common and only shown in sub-menus, we’ve added a way for you to select ‘favorite’ interactions. Favorite interactions will be shown in their own category at the top of the interaction menu, allowing you to see what you think is important first.
[Image - Favorites in action]
Wherever it makes sense we’ve now added a quick-interaction button that contains a collection of relevant interactions for that context. These buttons have been added in various places, such as for your head of faith, on your Administrative liege, or on administrative governors in the theme view. If you’re a modder you can easily make more custom contexts.
[Image - Head of Faith custom interaction category]
Right-click to Raise Armies
[Image - UI for raising armies anywhere]
You can now right-click to raise your armies in a specific area, so you no longer have to move a rally point there first. This simplifies the act of raising armies and prevents the mistake where you can accidentally raise your armies on the wrong side of your empire just because you moved your rally point there during your last war… It’s not impossible that we’ll remove and replace the rally point system entirely in the future.
[image - Tooltip for Raise Armies]
Administrative Government Additions
[Image - Eparch]
Going hand-in-hand with the Court Position rework, a new Court Position has been added for independent rulers of Administrative realms: the Eparch. The Eparch focuses on improving your capital in various ways; the tasks are expensive, but the effects are significant! Being the Eparch is also very attractive for vassals, as they get a significant influence boost…
[Image - Eparch Tasks]
Going hand-in-hand with the Eparch is the new Capital Magistracy building, which improves the aptitude of the Eparch among other things. It can only be built in the capital of an Administrative realm.
[Image - A tier 1 Capital Magistracy building]
Not everything will be easier for Administrative realms - we also thought that it was way too easy for them to hold on to their lands, even when engaged in civil wars or otherwise weakened. We’ve added a new CB that can only be used on Administrative realms, ‘Seize Peripheral Duchy’, that allows you to take any duchy that is outside of the empire's De Jure for a very low prestige cost. This CB has 3x the Siege and battle warscore for the attacker, and a significantly faster ticking warscore, making it the perfect way to reclaim lands from an otherwise preoccupied empire.
[Image - The Seize Peripheral Duchy CB]
Alongside this we’ve also reworked the "Order Mass Arrests" decision to be a character interaction. You can now use this on all noble families, and not just powerful families, as long as their estate is located in the capital. We’ve also tweaked the options for when you restore the Roman Empire, such as offering a path to become Hellenic without activating Roman Hard More, as well as making said mode more enjoyable by tweaking event frequencies and removing parts of it that made little sense (such as increased diseases).
Clan Government Tweaks
The Clan government is one that is both fairly underplayed (according to telemetry) and that the AI struggles in playing well (often underperforming significantly). This prompted us to look into doing something to make them more interesting and less frustrating to play - when managing Tax Jurisdictions it’s a constant battle to find competent Tax Collectors. All you have at your disposal are your unlanded courtiers and a decision with a fairly long cooldown, which leads to a frustrating time as you often end up in a combination of not having anyone to assign, and if you do have someone, they’re more often than not terrible. The various tax decrees also felt underwhelming with the vast majority of players simply opting for the Zakat (luxury tax) one as it increased your gold income.
All of this has prompted a host of changes to the feature.
[Image - Updated Tax Jurisdiction UI]
Alongside a general facelift of the UI, we’ve opened up the possibility for Vassals to be Tax Collectors - this makes it significantly easier to find tax collectors, and to find good ones. Similarly to how we handle Court Positions, landed tax collectors get a penalty to their aptitude, but on average it’s much easier to find good tax collectors because of this change.
Clan rulers now also don’t have to worry about being allied to ALL their vassals, as only powerful vassals will expect to be allied to their liege. This makes you able to focus on pleasing a select few characters in the realm without having to suffer a permanent -20 opinion with every vassal. You also no longer gain a legitimacy penalty for marrying lowborn characters as secondary wives (and to pre-empt exploits we’ve also made it so that switching to a lowborn spouse as your primary spouse triggers the lowborn marriage penalties). This means that as long as your main spouse is highborn, the remaining ones can be lowborn. The AI has been updated to always try to set the spouse with the best stats as their primary one, as long as that doesn’t trigger the lowborn spouse marriage penalties.
[Image - Updated tax decrees]
All Tax Decrees have been updated to have more interesting and modern effects, including systems that have been added since Tax Decrees were added, like Legitimacy, Danger, and Plague Resistance, and enabling systems that are logically connected to the decree, like raiding for Ghazi.
These changes match the Clan realm's more volatile nature, providing bonuses that are more relevant and interesting to choose between. They should now more closely be able to match the power that Feudal realms can muster with their Vassal Contracts.
Tiered Commander Traits
All commander traits are now tiered traits that are leveled up by taking actions related to the trait.
[Image - A levelled Logistician trait]
Commander traits now start out less impactful, with effects weaker than they currently are. Through war, battles, and siege, you can now level them up - potentially reaching heights that were not previously possible. A fully levelled Military Engineer reduces siege phase times by 40%, a fully levelled Flexible Leader reduces enemy defensive bonuses by 80%, and so on.
To level the traits you need to do whatever makes sense: to level up Aggressive Attacker you win offensive battles, to level up Military Engineer you complete sieges, and so on. The higher the commander's Martial skill, the faster they will level up their traits. This also means that a commander with a high-level commander trait can be extremely valuable, as replacing their accumulated knowledge of warfare is not a trivial task.
Barbershop Fixes/Updates
The Barbershop has been updated with several new categories, and items have been re-shuffled to allow for a greater degree of customization. Many items previously not accessible has been added, such as some Byzantine and Jain clothing, and you are now allowed to freely change eye items, face items, crests, veils, and special crowns.
[Image - New barbershop categories]
We’ve made extra care to address pain points such as not being able to remove glasses or veils, while simultaneously allowing you to create combinations you weren’t able to before. More customization is better customization!
[Image - New Crests, Veils, & Special Crowns category]
Use responsibly!
[Image - a distinctly cursed barbershop creation]
Minor/Misc Changes
AI Promote Culture Tweaks
Late-game culture maps are often quite boring, with the culture map gradually becoming more and more populated by small divergences. This is fine in the case where these divergences lead to interesting new cultures expanding their presence on the map, but often it is not so. We’ve tweaked the AI to be more inclined to promote their cultures under certain circumstances.
Central Germanic heritage cultures within the HRE will now want to promote culture in Sorbian-culture counties, very small cultures will want to grow (if they are below 10 counties), 'Imperious' cultures (cultures with a powerful culture head, realm of 30+ counties and King+ tier) will want to grow to a decent size (35 counties, about the size of French at 1066 start), smaller (<5 counties) divergent/hybrid cultures with no existing culture head are more likely to be promoted by other cultures (with the intent of reducing the amount of small and orphaned cultures by the end of the game). This makes the culture map more dynamic and existing, with interesting results every game.
[Image - Saxon slowly being promoted in Polabian lands]
Game Rule Updates
We’ve added several new options to the Realm Stability Game Rule, based on community feedback - and a few extra for good measure! You can now set stability to only affect AI’s, and there’s an additional setting that avoids changing the frequency of peasant and populist factions as those could become too frequent or infrequent depending on your setting.
[Image - New Realm Stability settings]
For those that enjoy the occasional Scourge of the Gods Conqueror but think that 5% is too much we’ve added an additional rule; Low Random, with a 0.5% chance of it happening.
[Image - Conqueror Low Random setting]
New Message Setting Options
The message settings window now has a history log of all feed messages, so you can browse through them at a later time.
[Image - Message Settings log]
We’ve also added two community-requested message settings: scheme advantages and non-dynastic courtiers coming of age.
[Image - Scheme Advantage message setting]
[Image - Non-dynastic courtier coming of age]
Guardian Status in Courtiers UI
There are now new indicator texts and filter options for finding children without guardians in your court. This is present both in the right-hand-side Court window and in the character view.
[Image - Guardian indicators]
New Major Decisions
Two new major decisions have also made their way into this update, both focusing on forming new empires - Beth Narain for rulers of Syriac heritage, and the Empire of Hindustan.
[Image - Beth Narain creation decision]
When adding new decisions for creating new empire titles in Crusader Kings there are two different things we look for. One could be an interesting alternative history empire for a historical group or region, like Beth Nahrain, another is to look for what great empires existed during the historical timeline but which currently cannot be formed in the game.
[Image - Hindustan creation decision]
The Islamic Conquest of India is not something that happens in every game, but when it happens we rarely ever get something like the actual Delhi Sultanate. The new decision lets a muslim ruler who controls a fair chunk of the north, move his capital to Delhi or Lahore, while creating a new empire title that incorporates any held line in the 3 Indian Empires. If you have Roads to Power it will also give you the Administrative government, though one with a hereditary succession instead of acclamation.
Commanded by Ruler Banner
[Image - ‘Commander by Ruler’ banner]
You can now see if the enemy war leader is in an army, as they’ll be marked with a crown banner stating ‘Commanded by Ruler’.
That’s it for this Dev Diary! The 1.15.0 ‘Crown’ update will soon be in your hands, and we hope that it’ll be to your liking! You can find the full changelog here on our official forums!