Update log
Full Crusader Kings III update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Hello and welcome to this first development diary about the upcoming All Under Heaven DLC, and its associated update! I am Trin Tragula, one of the design leads on Crusader Kings III and today I get to talk about East Asia in the middle ages!
Extracted changes
- Maps
- Gameplay
This diary is going to be a high level one, where we look at the vision for the entire expansion and all we aim to do in it. It will be followed by many more detailed diaries for the features and the individual regions of the expansion.
[A first look at the world of Crusader Kings with everything between the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean. Like everything else in this diary the map is work in progress and subject to change; this includes coloring of the map itself, which is something we are experimenting a bit with right now. Don’t hesitate to tell us what you think of it!]
Apart from being Grand Strategy Games, the Paradox games have, for me personally, always also been a way to discover the entire world in a given time period, something that is both a game and a travel guide to the past. With this update, CK will finally get rid of the last artificial barriers to that kind of experience, as the map will no longer arbitrarily end in Burma and Tibet. This lets us shine a spotlight on some of the most interesting states of the time period, such as Tang and Song China, Heian Japan, Angkor, and many others.
With All Under Heaven, we want to not just add the missing parts of the map but also fill it with the living world of the past. The goal is that the new part of the map should feel like an integral part of the game. This means new governments with their own features, but it also means things like special buildings, new cultural traditions, and visual variety. East Asia will have its own look, with event illustrations, clothes, ethnicities, holdings, throne rooms, artifacts, and much more.
As a final word of this introduction: this is also a work in progress. This is a vision and an overview of what we are making, but development is an iterative process and so this diary is also an opportunity for you to give your input on the things we are looking to add. More details are also forthcoming for each and every thing here in the coming diaries but there is nothing stopping you from telling us already if there are things you think we should include or change. This goes for art, features, and even the map itself.
China
A central focus of an East Asian expansion, by virtue of its sheer size as well as the reach and impact of its influence and culture, has to be China. While it was in a very different situation in 867, 1066 and 1178 respectively, China remains both a state that others emulated and a political constant in all of these dates.
We will talk a lot more about China and its features in future diaries, but here is a short overview of what we have planned and how we see its purpose.
Hegemony - A New Title Tier
Since China is a de jure realm that is more expansive than any one of the empires we currently have in the game, we are adding a new title tier for it - a Hegemony. In all our start dates, China is the only existing Hegemony, but others can be created using the decisions we have for uniting India or Rome. For now, there is no generic way to create these super-empires, and beyond China there are no de-jure ones. Instead, we reserve its use for special cases with bespoke rules and justifications.
Celestial Government & Merit
China was a bureaucratic state, and though it differed a bit
Source