Roads to Power & Free 1.13.0 "Basileus" Update - Available Now

Hello everybody! Today we're releasing our Major Expansion for the year and the centerpiece of Chapter 3: Roads to Power. We're also releasing Update 1.13.0 "Basileus" alongside this expansion.

Check out the release trailer below, and then a partial changelog under that. The full changelog is well beyond the limits of what we can fit into a Steam announcement, so check out our forums for a more comprehensive list of changes coming in today's update!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

► Read the full 1.13.0 changelog on our forums!

Expansion Features (Paid)

Added Administrative Government: A new government heavily inspired by the Byzantine Empire which introduces a completely new playstyle focused around the bureaucracy of a large realm.
- Noble Families: Families are ranked and put into three categories depending on their overarching rating; Noble Families, Powerful Families, and Dominant Families, unlocking actions and various benefits as your family increases in importance.
- Family Attribute: Set an attribute for your Noble Family, giving you a small bonus to all members of your house.
- Influence: A new resource representing your political capital.
  - Earn it by scheming, landing your family members, being a successful governor, and, most importantly, constructing buildings in your estate.
  - Spend it on making your family members governors, or asking the emperor for various favors.
- New Succession Law: Appointment - Spend your influence to put yourself and the members of your family first in the line of succession of the many provinces throughout the realm.
- New Succession Law: Acclamation - Vie for control of the throne and become emperor. While skills, suitability, and family status is important, influence is the deciding factor in whether you will succeed in putting yourself, or someone else, on the throne.
- Has access to Estates: A domicile type owned and controlled by the head of a noble family.
  - Upgrades and buildings provide valuable gold and influence income, and can be tailored to suit your own needs and playstyle.
- Governors: Administrative vassals act as governors, making use of several new features:
  - Governor Efficiency: Based on a governor’s skill, they may increase or decrease the amount of taxes holdings provide, and the effectiveness of their Imperial Armies.
  - Governance Issues: On-map interactive pieces on content, issues appear for governors to solve or somehow address, gaining valuable resources and Governor Trait experience.
  - Governor Trait: A trait that represents a governor’s overall skill at governing. Experience is primarily gained by successfully solving Governance Issues, but older content has also been updated to provide experience whenever it makes sense, such as successfully reducing the impact of Plague outbreaks.
- 14 Political Schemes: A new category of schemes custom tailored to Administrative gameplay - Such as teaching others to become better governors, or raiding the Estate of another family.
- Imperial Armies: Recruit and maintain Men-at-Arms for titles.
  - All governors can maintain a provincial army by recruiting any available Men-at-Arms for their provincial title.
  - The liege has a unique access to armies, and can freely seize control of any available provincial army by spending influence.
  - Other governors may request provincial armies from their fellow vassals, assuming they have a valid reason and enough influence.
  - The efficiency of Men-at-Arms is affected by the respective governors Governor Efficiency.
- New obligation types: Have your vassals govern their provinces in the way you want with six new obligation types, Balanced, Civilian, Military, Frontier, Navy, and Imperial.
- Imperial Bureaucracy: A new law that replaces crown authority - Instead of individual levels of crown authority, the top liege of an Administrative realm sets the law level and all Administrative vassals will follow suit.
- State Faith: Decoupled from the ruler, a state faith is the primary faith of a given realm, making it easier to convert vassals to the state faith, but more difficult to convert them away from it.
- Reactive event content to the current state of the empire, the status of the emperor, and the nature of your governorate.
- Confirm Governorship: An Administrative version of Pay Homage sees the Emperor bestow his grace upon Appointments.
- Petition Emperor: Administrative vassals have new options for Petitions, including Gold, Family Governorship Appointments, and a bonus to House succession score.
New Byzantine Throne Room - A spectacular throne room is made available for the Byzantine Empire (or any would-be conquerors of Constantinople!), including:
- Marble floors and walls.
- Stunning mosaics.
- Mechanical roaring lions with slamming tails.
Added historical artifacts for Byzantium: hydraulic organ, (half of the) statue of the four tetrarchs, and statue of a Roman woman.
New Dynasty Legacy: Bureaucracy - A new legacy with a focus on Administrative gameplay, unlocking new buildings for the Estate, improving Governor Efficiency, improving political schemes, and more.
Added new Chariot Race activity.
- Host a Chariot Race to gain Legitimacy and Popular Opinion.
- Place bets on your favorite team, and favored charioteer, in an attempt to win large amounts of wealth.
- Interact with other nobles and governors, gaining influence, opinion, and more.
- Make skilled individuals compete for you by appointing them to the Champion Charioteer Court Position, providing you with influence.
Added an exclusive Map Table, that reflects the marbled luxury of Byzantium.
New Men-at-Arms:
- Ayrudzi - Light cavalry unit available to Armenians.
- Conrois - Heavy cavalry unit available to Normans.
- Akritai - Skirmisher unit available to Greeks.
- Ballistrai - Archer unit available to Greeks.
- Skoutatoi - Spearmen unit available to Greeks.
- Varangian Guards - Heavy infantry uniquely available as special Men-at-Arms recruitable only as title troops for the Byzantine Empire.
New Greek Cultural Traditions: These have a heavy focus on Greek flavor, adding new Men-at-Arms, decisions, Court Positions, and more, as well as having several tie-ins with the new Administrative government type.
- Imperial Tagmata
- Roman Ceremonies
- Palace Politics
- Cultivated Sophistication
New Norman Cultural Tradition: Audacious Cadets.
New Armenian Cultural Tradition: Indomitable Azatani.
Flavor Content: a stable of misc events, mainly for Greeks but some available also for neighboring cultures. Traits like Beardless Eunuch (with genuine hairlessness!) and Despoiler of Byzantium. New interactions and decisions such as:
- Castrate Kin
- Offer Eunuch
- Prepare Greek Fire
- Found the Varangian Guard
- Re-Establish the Theodosian Borders
- Refound the Pandidakterion
- Hold a Triumph
- Reinstate the Grain Dole
- Restore Greece
- Ask for Support - seek military aid from the Catholics of Western Europe.
- Evangelize the Pagans
- Restore the Byzantine Empire
- Establish Silk Production
- Commission Icon
- Commission Silk Regalia
Splintered Crusade/Frankokratia: Catholic rulers can break their Crusade in two and redirect attackers in an assault against Byzantium. This unique war can destroy the Byzantine Empire, and begin a turbulent era as the new Latin Empire fights with Byzantine successor kingdoms.
- Crusader and Byzantine flavor events.
- Dynamic story cycle has multiple semi-historical outcomes and provides choices for both Byzantine vassals and victorious Crusaders.
- New decisions for Latins and Greeks to switch de jure kingdom ownership back and forth.
- Seize Imperial Duchy casus belli available to all rulers in former Byzantine lands: it provides special troops on attacker victory.
Many new character assets to give the Byzantine Empire a distinct look:
- 26 unique new variants of byzantine clothing for both male and female characters
- 8 unique new variants of byzantine cloaks for both male and female characters
- 22 unique new variants of byzantine headgears for both male and female characters
- 12 unique new hairstyles for both male and female characters
- 4 new beards for male characters
Added 7 New Artifacts:
- Statue of the Four Tetrarchs
- Statue of Constantine
- Statue of A Roman Woman
- Tree Automata
- Hydraulic Organ
- Byzantine Icons
- Throne of Solomon (Byzantine)
Added 11 new music tracks
- 01 – Roads to Power - Main Theme
- 02 – Easter Prayers
- 03 – Knowledge from the Past
- 04 – Divine Mercy
- 05 – Greek Fire
- 06 – Ectenia
- 07 – Constantinople at Sunrise
- 08 – In the Name of the Lord
- 09 – A Journey to Adventure
- 10 – Awaiting Nightfall
- 11 – The Winds of Fortune
Added Co-Emperors
- Sufficiently powerful entrenched regents can, if their liege's title or culture would allow a co-emperor, forcibly appoint themselves as co-emperor.
- Co-emperors and their senior emperors can now publicly scapegoat each other to the rest of the realm, sacrificing their relationship for influence.
- Co-emperors may request (or coerce) a private despotate out of their senior emperor at a certain scales of power level.
- Co-emperors may be blinded, castrated, disfigured, maimed, or killed to remove them from office — they may likewise do this to their senior emperor to steal control of the empire.
- Rulers able to have co-emperors can now (generally) dissolve powerful factions against them by appointing the faction leader as their co-emperor.
- Administrative emperors with Roman Ceremonies may now raise one of their children as a nominal co-emperor, graduating to a full co-emperor on their majority.
- Added Request Imperial Expedition interaction for co-emperors, allowing them access to a powerful cb to expand the realm's borders (_if_ their senior emperor is willing to risk it).
Added Landless Adventurers, a new government focused on informal groups of characters (from small bands of scholars to large mercenary companies), allowing players to traverse the map and use the medieval world as a backdrop for smaller, character-focused roleplay.
- Contracts: adventurers cannot easily obtain significant fixed incomes, so they have to earn their gold and prestige from serving landed rulers via contracts. These can consist of mercenary work, decisions, event chains, and one-off events.
  - Added 26 basic contracts.
  - Added 4 dedicated warfare contracts for starting different types of wars + the mechanics for getting hired as a mercenary in an on-going war.
  - Added 8 types of transport contracts.
  - Added 11 misc/reactive contracts.
- Provisions: a new resource that adventurers require to travel across the map. As they travel, they deplete provisions (with the amount going up for some terrain types, as well as with the amount of Men-at-Arms they have).
- Has access to Camps: a domicile type owned by the leader of each adventuring party. Buildings and upgrades focus on the culture and specialities of the group you’ve gathered, providing powerful bonuses representing your position as a powerful (yet scorned) outsider.
- Several bespoke buildings are made available by your Camp Purpose
- Switch between six Camp Purposes representing different types of adventurers, each with different unlocks and a little added flavor:
  - Travel the world as a Wanderer
  - Kill for money as a Sword-for-Hire
  - Teach as a Scholar
  - Sojourn to far-off lands as an Explorer
  - Commit many crimes as a Freebooter
  - Regain a lost throne as a Legitimist
- Gallowsbait: adventurers that indulge in criminal acts will find that society no longer affords them the same respect a landed ruler would get. Petty crimes level up their gallowsbait trait, slowly making the world hate them.
- All landed-specific lifestyle perks have been redesigned for adventurers, effectively giving them a (mostly) entirely new set of lifestyle perks to choose from.
  - The functionality for changing perk bonuses according to government is available for future vanilla use cases, as well as modding.
- Many ways to become an adventurer:
  - A selection of historical adventurers can be picked from the ruler selection screen.
  - Adventurers can be custom made in the ruler designer.
  - Rulers that would otherwise game over due to losing all their land may become adventurers.
  - Various ways for minor rulers or unlanded characters to spontaneously become adventurers during gameplay.
- Historical characters may appear in gameplay and become adventurers that players can switch to.
- Many new interactions for adventurers to interact with the world around them, from requesting support to buying land to leaving wars.
- Unlocked Iberian Struggle ‘Offer Contract Assistance’ interaction for landless adventurers.
- Added adventurer-specific Casus Bellis, unlocked by reaching higher Prestige Levels.
- Added the Seize Realm scheme unlocked when reaching a very high level of Prestige, allowing you to seize an entire realm (while significantly destabilizing it).
- A new micro-activity, the camp revel, that replaces feasting for adventurers.
- Added special Men-at-Arms refill mechanics for adventurers.
  - They pay no maintenance on their armies, but do not refill them naturally. Instead, they have a brace of interactions that they can take to refill them in exchange for currency costs.
  - Successfully sieging holdings also returns a small amount of troops, enough for their armies to recoup most siege losses (and maybe a little extra) most of the time.
- Added 28 camp officers, the adventurer equivalent of court positions (which they generally replace), most of which are unlocked by different domicile upgrades.
- Added Visit Settlement decision, allowing adventurers to explore the holdings they pass through.
- Added 7 new major decisions for landless adventurers:
  - Become a Great Conqueror
  - The [Your Faith Here] Path
  - The Travels of [Your Name]
  - Found a Holding
  - The Knight of the Swan
  - Champion Your Culture
  - Levy the Outcasts
- Added various minor decisions alongside, including a small one for going fishing.
- Added story content for:
  - Hereward the Wake
  - Hassan Sabbah
  - Wallada bint al-Mustakfi
  - El Cid
- Added an interaction for expelling adventurers from your realm.

Free Features