Octopus Overlords

A new dev diary and video regarding a feature of the upcoming Roads to Power DLC, Landless Adventurers. Caution, both the article and video are very long, and they are only part I!

Dev Diary #151 - Landless Adventurers (Part I)

Welcome comrades! Wokeg here: I hope everyone enjoyed their window into how the other half lives with the Administrative Government Dev Diaries, because today we’re gonna be going back down into the mud with our favourite homeless wanderers — Landless Adventurers.

As usual, everything shown here today is a work in progress. Values are likely to be changed, features are final but details are not, all that good stuff. In particular, some of the adventurer contract rewards are currently a smidge high right now, so we’ll be taking those down a bit (specifically gold and prestige) pending further playtesting before release.

Like the Administrative Government Dev Diaries, this will be a two-part dev diary. In part 1, we’ll go over the basic design and core gameplay loop, and then in the next diary, we’ll go into more detail about the individual nuts and bolts that make up this system.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Tue Aug 06, 2024 11:08 am

Not a clue...

jztemple2 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 06, 2024 2:17 pm

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Tue Aug 06, 2024 11:08 am

Not a clue...

NOMAD?

Correct.

Dev Diary #152 - Landless Adventurers (Part 2)

Welcomes back, comrades, to Landless Adventurers Part 2! I’m Wokeg, and last week, we went over the general core gameplay (what we expect you to be doing, where your resources come from, and what you spend them on). This week, we’re gonna be doing uhhh… literally everything else.

Just like last time, everything shown here is a work in progress. Features won’t shift massively but values (and occasionally modifiers or parameters) potentially will. Costs, gains, and some requirements in particular are all undergoing active adjustment at present.

This is going to be quite a disjointed dev diary, so please bear with me whilst I skip around the whole damned feature like a wanderer running from town to town, desperately fleeing the Black Death.

Free "Many Roads to Power" Comic Book - Available now!

Our free tie-in comic made in collaboration with Dead Good Comics, Many Roads to Power,
is now available! Read about the rise of Basil I “the Macedonian" to the throne of Byzantium, and then write your own conclusion to the story when our next Major Expansion, Roads to Power,
releases on September 24.

This comic is available for free to all owners of Crusader Kings III via Steam, and available to anyone whether they own the game or not via our website.

Crusader Kings III: Roads to Power DLC is available now, along with the free 1.13.0 "Basileus" update. Click the link for mucho details.

What does my gaming Sherpa say? Yay or nay?

hepcat wrote: ↑Sun Sep 29, 2024 11:56 am What does my gaming Sherpa say? Yay or nay?

Haven't gotten Roads to Power yet as there are already fixes and balancing updates being posted; I'd prefer them to polish it a bit first. I might pick it up this week. Steam reviews have been pretty much positive.

jztemple2 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 29, 2024 1:47 pm

hepcat wrote: ↑Sun Sep 29, 2024 11:56 am What does my gaming Sherpa say? Yay or nay?

Haven't gotten Roads to Power yet as there are already fixes and balancing updates being posted; I'd prefer them to polish it a bit first. I might pick it up this week. Steam reviews have been pretty much positive.

So I picked up Roads to Power yesterday and have been checking it out. It is definitely a different game than the regular CK3. As various reviews have noted, it is much more of an RPG. But let's look at some images and some examples. First of all, I select my character, a wanderer named Robert. As the description states, Robert is the head of a band of mercenaries. That is not the only role for an adventurer, there are several others, but we're sticking with Robert for now:


Here's another look at Robert. He has no spouse, four siblings who aren't around, and is currently in Constantinople.


There is some minor tutorial lessons as you get started, but for the most part you learn as you play. I'm going to skip a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff for now and instead go into the gameplay. For each wanderer type, in Robert's case the leader of a mercenary band, there will be available in the area a number of contracts. Some require military prowess, but others might require Robert's Stewardship skill, or maybe Intrigue. It does mean that there are going to be contracts you suck at and ones you'll do much better on.

So in the next post I'll give an example of how to get and execute a contract.

Welcome back! Here's a sample of a contract and its execution. As I said, contracts can be of many different types. In this one, I'm asked by Count Victor to travel to a certain county with low control and Fight Corruption. You can read the image for the potential rewards:


The next image is the next step in accepting a contract. You can read the details, but it boils down to taking the contract but not moving my camp to the location, taking the contract and moving my camp there, or not taking the contract. Moving the camp means you won't have to make a return journey but eats up provisions which you might not have a lot of. I chose to just travel there without moving my camp.


Here I prepare for my travel. Again, I won't go into the nuts and bolts right now, but if someone is curious, post a question.


Here's my route. It's a little hard to see, but near the bottom center you can see my camp symbol and the double yellow dashed track that winds its way north and east. You character will actually traverse this path and may (probably will) run into different events...


... Like this event, where I run into a woman who is willing to teach me another language.


More in the next post.

And then there is a disturbance in my little caravan, as seen below.


For some unknown reason I decided to let them fight to the death to end their argument


Oh well, stuff happens. After several other events, I arrive at my destination where I immediately am faced with a choice of either kick some ass or thrown in with the rebels. I decide to kick ass to get the rebels back in line.


And here's the final outcome. I've brought two counties back under of the Khan and now I'm taking my reward.


That's one type of contract, here's another. I'm trying to "beg" something from Count Ioan, for which I'll get paid by the person who is having me try to get the something. As you can see in the image, this is one of those contracts to which you can add agents to improve the chance of success. Also as you let time go by the chance of success also increases. There are also other modifiers plus pop up events that may speed up the wait or increase your success chance. As some point you can try to execute the scheme; if you wait too long the contract will expire. There is a lot of complexity to this mode of contract.


There is a lot, lot more to Roads to Power I haven't even touched on, like expanding your camp, calling on patrons for favors, even changing your wanderer type. You can even chose to put down roots and become a titled ruler which will transition you into the regular CK3 gameplay.

The expansion is definitely worth what they are asking for it. And so far I'm having a good time.

This is truly a great franchise, but man - I never get anywhere close to what I envision for myself. When I heard about this DLC, I thought it was a great idea - and a great way to leverage the world and 'relationship' detail they have put into that game... and maybe as a wonderer, I won't feel as lame when my dreams don't really materialize.

One of the things to remember is that the Roads To Power DLC adds a whole lot more than just landless wanderers, there's a new government type, a new succession law, governors, a bunch of changes for the Byzantine Empire plus a number of other things. I chose to do the wanderer for this playthrough, but I'm considering doing something Byzantine for my next.

I'm skipping the Byzantine content at the moment, because the wanderer stuff is just so different.

However, my first attempt (a young Scottish fellow with an eye toward owning some land of his own) ended three years in when he caught the plague and recovered. I could have sworn he then had a trait signifying immunity from the plague. So when an event popped with a nice positive result but I'd catch the plague - I thought, well. No harm here! ... Wrong. Plague again, and death soon after.

Time to start a French swashbuckling type.

Baroquen wrote: ↑Thu Oct 03, 2024 6:45 pm I'm skipping the Byzantine content at the moment, because the wanderer stuff is just so different.

However, my first attempt (a young Scottish fellow with an eye toward owning some land of his own) ended three years in when he caught the plague and recovered. I could have sworn he then had a trait signifying immunity from the plague. So when an event popped with a nice positive result but I'd catch the plague - I thought, well. No harm here! ... Wrong. Plague again, and death soon after.

Time to start a French swashbuckling type.

Do you have the Legends of the Dead DLC active?

Thanks for the updated impressions!

I still haven’t picked up Legends of the Dead as it seems to be universally hated by so many. But I want Roads to Power after your description of wanderers!

jztemple2 wrote: ↑Thu Oct 03, 2024 9:21 pm
Do you have the Legends of the Dead DLC active?

I do. And now I see that all of the plagues are part of it. Might disable it next time.

In my second playthrough, plagues and consumption took my adventurer's wife, several of his baby mamas, and 4 of his kids. Unbalanced or not, that's not really the story I'm looking for each character.

I saw a discussion online about how, since landless adventurers can now possibly become Counts, it would be more realistic for them first to become Barons. Apparently there have been players waiting for playable Barons for a long time, and some feel that a landless person "jumping up" to Count is unfair.

The counterpoint is that making Barons into full entities making individual decisions and choices about their baronies would increase the game's required processing absurdly. The game would slow to realtime.

But couldn't they implement Barons in a way that's only pretending you have the barony -

I mean, it's not like the game has simulated everyone below the Barons (whom you can now pretend to be) - but you can now play "one of them". Making a wrapper around a Baron title - I would think - could be done without actually turning on the entire Baron/Barony layer of the game like they have the Counts.

Yeah, I suppose they could fudge it that way.

It seems like something that could exist as a very elaborate event-chain for an adventurer-player rather than a truly new level in the game. Someone will probably mod that in eventually.

Dev Diary #158 - Wandering Nobles

It’s been a while since I wrote one of these, so I figured I could give a short presentation of myself. I’m Joachim, one of the two Design Leads on CK3, and I have been around at Paradox on different projects since CK2’s Holy Fury (my first DLC). It’s my pleasure to present our last entry in Chapter 3, namely, the Wandering Nobles DLC.

Since I have seen some confusion about this, one thing to clarify is that the Wandering Nobles is not a Landless Adventurer DLC. It was made primarily for landed gameplay, and though much of it is also available to landless characters, they are not the pack's focus. In other words, this DLC will not have unique landless features, new contracts, or anything locked to the adventurer playstyle.