Update log
Full Crusader Kings III update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Hello all!
Extracted changes
- Events
- Gameplay
It's been a few weeks since we spoke but it feels like longer, what with all of you having been busy traveling, touring, tournamenting and the rest! It is time for us, nonetheless, to leave behind that world for now and take a look ahead at what we have coming up next.
Vision
Our first Event Pack, Friends & Foes, gave us something of a chance to experiment. Since then, we’ve had the chance to take a look at exactly what direction we want to start moving in with these packs, and build on what worked.
One area that we hit upon was diversity of content and how the player experienced the game. Events are the ink that we daub on to the fabric of the narrative, but it’s how, what and why these events happen that govern their efficacy. Introducing new avenues for that content to reach the player is a great thing, provided it’s done in an unobtrusive way.
With that in mind, we’re going to outline a few of the new features that you’ll find in Wards & Wardens (the event-pack that you voted for last January) and its accompanying patch - both available on August 22nd. Some of them we’ll talk about more in the future, so don’t expect anything too exhaustive here, but let’s start off with…
Captivating features
Hostages aren’t quite what you’d think of when you hear the term. Rather than forced holding of a person to ransom, hostageship in the Middle Ages was a political and legal status that was absolutely widespread.
Put simply, hostages were generally given, not taken. They were, essentially, transactional guarantees. In this case, we’ve zeroed in on the most common reason for hostages to be exchanged: as a means to guarantee a peace treaty.
In Wards & Wardens, hostages are a new type of relation somewhere between a prisoner and a foreign court guest. They reside at your court as a guest would, but cannot leave of their own accord, nor can they become knights. They are generally - though not always - children, and have found themselves in such a predicament due to their liege exchanging them away as a guarantee of non-hostility following a war, or exchanged via interaction during peacetime. Such an arrangement not only eases the mediation process, but also gives both sides some peace of mind.
Hostages are essentially living non-aggression pacts. Harming a hostage is a significant diplomatic incident, but it’s also a way to deter your former enemies from getting any more bright ideas about exactly to whom that border county belongs. Any ruler that you have a hostage from will suffer significant debuffs and penalties should they try and attack you - and any wardens attacking home courts also suffer similar debuffs - so hostages present one of the strongest forms of deterrent possible.
The hostages themselves are kept in line via something else new and shiny:
In Perpetuity
We have two types of Hook extant in the game already: Strong and Weak. The latter are the type of hooks you’d get if you were to, for example, manipulate a person in some way. They are single-use, and can be refused at cost. Strong hooks, on the other hand, can be used multiple times and in a range of scenarios, but are also much rarer.
Perpetual Hooks are a new sort of hook, which wardens can get on hostages who they treat well, and represent something of a middle ground. They are refuseable like Weak hooks,
Source