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Crusader Kings III News

đź“… PDXCON Remixed - Friday 21 May

PDXCON Remixed brings the fun and excitement of Paradox's annual PDXCON event into a digital setting, including fan-favorite features including the PDXCON Announcement Show where a new game from Paradox Development Studio will be revealed for the first time in a 72 hours non-stop Broadcast!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Highlights:
  • Be first in the world to see the New Game from Paradox Development Studio
  • Meet our development teams and ask them your burning questions
  • Join workshops and meet-ups with fellow Paradox fans
  • Participate in challenges and win prizes
  • And much more…


#PDXCON - Crusader Kings III, Friday 21 May 📢
👑 Thy Name is CK3: Whose vanity character is the best? Who will reign supreme when in-game representations of the developers clash? Join us for an event where our team fights to the death, in the only way our legal team would allow! ⚔️
📜 Trials & Tribulations: Designing & building CK3 was a long and sometimes difficult process. Hear the stories of development from the team, and learn just how much cunning & strategy went into making ParadoxInteractive's hit title!👑
â–ş Join us on Twitch ParadoxInteractive!



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Dev Diary #60 - The cost of Warfare ⚔️

Today we are going to cover improvements around Warfare for the 1.4 Azure free patch: Enhanced Declare War window, Dynamic Mercenary Cost & Garrison, Factions Update!

â–ş Read our Dev Diary #60 - The cost of Warfare



đź’ˇ To see the images, please visit our forums or website.


Hello everyone!

I’m back with more info about what’s coming in the 1.4 Azure patch! Today we are going to cover improvements around Warfare. We prepared a few more things in addition to the starting Men-at-Arms. I hope you will find them interesting!


​Declare War Window 1.4​​
In addition to the Quality of Life improvements we presented last week, we also revisited the war declaration interface.

[Image of the new Declare War window]

[Image of the new Declare War window]​

As you can see, the information has been restructured and it should be easier now to:
  • Compare your strength with your target
  • Estimate if your opponents will have the funds to hire mercenaries
  • Select an available objective


Dynamic Mercenary Cost​
When it comes to Mercenaries, we adjusted how their cost is calculated. The price of a company is now affected by a few parameters:
  • The primary title
  • The size of the Realm
  • The current Innovation Era


The dynamic price will make it easier for lower tier realms to rely on Mercenaries and fight back their bigger neighbours. And it will be harder for extremely rich emperors to deny access to mercenaries by hiring all of them for a small sum. After all, why would the Count of Ulster be expected to pay the same price as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire - if you're a mercenary captain and you see that your client clearly is rich, you might just increase your prices...


​Dynamic Garrison​​
Your upcoming war will have a quite different pace. From now on, the garrison will be depleted at the end of a successful siege. It means that a freshly captured territory will be defenseless for a while, making recapturing it faster. After a siege, the garrison will recover over months or years, and the speed can be increased by improving the Holdings.

It will thus be easier to counter-attack and recover territories you lost recently, or to continue a war which was invalidated if you have another valid casus belli. This change will encourage you to defend your wargoals and the strategic territory with your armies.


​Factions update​​
In order to make your life harder when you start conquering the world, we tweaked the logic behind the creation of factions, and they should be more threatening now.

One of the big changes is their ability to synchronise their declaration. The power they need before pushing their demand is now dynamic and reacts to the state of the other factions. If a faction is threatening you, or is already at war with a ruler, it will be easier for another faction to push their demands. It should create more challenging situations, and you might want to concede to some factions to avoid struggling with too many opponents.

[Image: The faction is not strong enough to push their demands despite a lowered threshold due to existing factions]

[Image: After one of the other factions declared war, the faction is now strong enough and will push their demand while their ruler is fighting the others.]​

In addition to that, characters will be more inclined to join an Independence Faction if they own enough territories outside of the de jure area of the primary title of their Liege. Again, fast conquest will be more challenging, and consolidating your Realm will be more important.


And that’s it for today’s Dev Diary! But, before leaving you, a quick reminder: The PDXCON will be held this week-end! You can join us on our dedicated Discord Server! There will be a lot of nice streams and announcements; stay tuned for some news about Crusader Kings III !

Have a nice week, and see you soon!

Dev Diary #59 - Fantastic presets and where to save them đź’ˇ

Some of the Quality of Life improvements coming with the Azure free patch: Raise only Men-at-Arms, Game Rules Presets, and Character Search Presets!

â–ş Read our Dev Diary #59 - Fantastic presets and where to save them



đź’ˇ To see the images, please visit our forums or website.

Hello friends,

Isn't it satisfying when things just work smoothly? If you agree then this Dev Diary will be right down your alley. I’m one of the jolly UX designers working on CK3 and today I’m very excited to give you a sneak peek of some of the quality of life improvements we have in store for the Azure free patch.

We wanted to focus on some of the requests you've brought up, so we’ve worked to find organic ways to implement these in the game. While we can’t address all at once in a single patch, we still wanted to make some meaningful adjustments that will improve your time spent as medieval rulers, master strategists, and efficient trackers. Keep on reading to understand this last one.

Today I’ll be covering Raise Men-at-Arms, Game Rules Presets, and Character Search Presets.


Raise only Men-at-Arms
We had already mentioned that now you will be able to start your games with contingent Men-at-Arms regiments, but these troops have another nifty trick under their sleeves. Now you will be able to raise only Men-at-Arms, allowing you to subdue your enemies without having to bother your levies. Quite a power move, right?

We know it’s dangerous to go adventuring alone, so raising Men-at-Arms will also raise your knights along with them. This ensures that you have a perfectly capable army to take on different challenges.

This is how it works; you will find a button that allows you to raise only Men at Arms in your Military menu, clearly labeled “Raise all Men-at-Arms”. This button will also be present when selecting Rally Points. Hopefully, this will give you more freedom when planning the perfect military strategy.


[Image of the Raise all Men-at-Arms action]
​
Game Rules presets
We all have different playstyles and sometimes it’s nice to spice things up by changing up the rules a bit. Sometimes we want to ask the Mongols to hold their horses and stay at home by turning off the Mongol Invasions, or maybe you want to see if you can withstand yearly visits from your friendly neighbors, the Norse invaders. To allow you to quickly change the rules, now you can save rules presets.

To create your Game Rules presets, all you need to do is set the specific combination of rules that you want, and then click the save button at the top of the window. Doing this will open up a secondary window that lets you name, and save your presets. Loading the presets is very straightforward, all you need to do is to select the desired preset from the dropdown menu at the top of the window.

[Image of the Game Rules Presets being saved] ​

Character Search presets
I said that the Azure patch will improve your tracking skills, and this is thanks to the introduction of Character Search Presets. Much like Game Rules Presets, the idea is to allow you to save different combinations of search filters into presets you can easily select.

You can save and load presets by using the 2 new buttons you’ll find at the top of the search filters window. That means that if you find yourself constantly searching for a specific mix of traits or any other search criteria, then keeping tabs on them will be much easier.

[Image of the new Character Search Preset buttons]
​
While this feature is very useful to streamline the process of recurrent searches with the same criteria, it still comes with some limitations, we are not able to save the dynamic objects in the filter (Dynasty, House and Custom Faith).

That’s all for today, I sincerely hope these quality of life improvements help you try other gameplay styles and that character search presets will make it easier for you to find that special someone somewhere in this fantastic medieval world.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for future updates on the Azure patch. Until next time!

🛠️ Open Beta Branch: Multiplayer Stability Phase II - Now available!

Hey everyone,

Last week we have released an Open Beta branch on Steam, marked as "open_beta - 1.3.2 Multiplayer Improvements".
Many of you participated in the initiative, and we have collected a great amount of insights coupled with your very valuable feedback.

Thanks to these data, we are now exploring an option to improve the Networking.
This change applied only to this open beta branch on Steam will increase Save Game Transfer Speed for all players participating in a multiplayer game.
This improvement is now available. We are eager to read what you think of this change and hear your thoughts.
If you are timed out from the server when trying to join a multiplayer game, please let us know.

Note that we are still working on tweaking the Multiplayer experience for CK3 in this given branch, and so players could encountered a known issue preventing players from seeing any game in the MP lobby or kicking them back to the main menu from the loading screen.

We wanted to thank you for taking the time to raise your report to our teams, and for participating in the open beta! :)

You can access it by right-clicking Crusader Kings III in your Steam library, selecting Properties, entering the 'Betas' tab and selecting "open_beta - 1.3.2 multiplayer improvements" from the list.



We do ask that if you do participate in this Steam branch that you PLEASE RE-REPORT ANY MULTIPLAYER ISSUES YOU MAY BE FACING - provided they reoccur for you on this build, of course - as it will help us determine how the fixes on this particular branch are going in real time. This Beta branch is entirely voluntary and you are under no obligation to participate if you do not wish to do so.

This Crusader Kings 3 player just got into an axe fight with the pope and won

We don't know why it happened - surely there were decades' worth of bad blood between the two men - but a Crusader Kings III player recently fought the pope in single combat and emerged victorious. We've seen some strange things in the latest version of Paradox's medieval grand strategy game, but we have to admit this is the first time we've witnessed the pontiff personally get into an axe fight.


"I just fought the Pope in single combat," writes redditor -Slackz- in the Crusader Kings subreddit. As proof, -Slackz- supplied a screenshot. Sure enough, an event window has popped up showing his ruler, a young and scrawny Norse leader named Fylkir Hakon, squaring off against the wiry-framed Pope Stephanus. Both men scowl at each other in a wooded scene, bared to the waist because if you're going to fight a guy, you take off your shirt.


While it seems pretty clear -Slackz- is running a mod or two, complex duels are now a permanent fixture in Crusader Kings III, thanks to a new system added in the 1.3 'Corvus' update that makes battles of honour much more interesting.


Read the rest of the story...


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