Crusader Kings III

Really liking the culture rework!

Also, started a Norse custom ironman game last night. Managed to become self-appointed Jesus and then with my next king adopt feudalism. Then my empire imploded because technically it was two kingdoms and I have like 180 family members still living. So I went through about 5 rulers in two years.
 
Really liking the culture rework!

Also, started a Norse custom ironman game last night. Managed to become self-appointed Jesus and then with my next king adopt feudalism. Then my empire imploded because technically it was two kingdoms and I have like 180 family members still living. So I went through about 5 rulers in two years.
I see they didn't fix their succession issues, which means that for me the game is still unplayable.
 
I see they didn't fix their succession issues, which means that for me the game is still unplayable.
Oh, it makes perfect sense to me--I was King of Norway and invaded Sweden with the Invade Kingdom CB, my first ruler lasted a full 60 years before dying in battle at 76 because he didn't know when to quit.

I had 14 or 15 kids and so many grandkids it was absurd. No WONDER there has been a succession crisis after I went through 5 rulers in 2 years due to them all being old and sick and hating each other!

The problem is that when you adopt feudalism your cash intake goes down the tubes because men at arms now rely on gold, so unless you have like 8,000 gold ready to go and are able to sustain a permanent raiding economy until you can somehow fix this mess, it's not going to be pretty.
 
I did a play through starting in 936 as John “Tzimiskes” Kourkoaus’s grandfather, Theophilos, Strategos of Khaldia. Theophilos’s brother, also named Ioannes, was Domestikos of the East, Strategos of the Anatolikon, Koloneia, Melitene, and Sebastaea. Eventually Theophilos had the opportunity to form his own cadet branch of the Kourkouas family, which I named Tzimiskes of course.

Ioannes Kourkouas and his son Romanos died and were succeeded by Romanos’s son, also named Ioannes. Meanwhile our Ioannes Tzimiskes suffered the loss of his wife, Maria Skleraina in childbirth, bringing forth a healthy daughter. He then waited a few years and married an Armenian lady named Eirene, having two more daughters before finally having a son, Romanos, who is betrothed to the youngest daughter of Vasilefs Konstantinos Lekapenos, who sidestepped Konstantinos Macedon to be senior Vasilefs…

Goal is to try to have Ioannes Tzimiskes succeed Konstantinos Lekapenos or Konstantinos Macedon who is currently first in line to succeeded the son-less Lekapenos Vasilefs.

Tzimiskes waged war on his Kourkouas cousin to take the Anatolikon for his branch of the family. Goal is to retake the rest of the Kourkouas lands for the Tzimiskes branch as well.

Here is a current portrait of Ioannes Tzimiskes and his Armenian wife, Eirene.

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Here are the current Tzimiskes controlled lands

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And here is the Dev Diary about Culturde divergence and hybridization.

Essentially, you can create your own culture the same way you can create your own religion, just with different option and a cost in prestige. Kinda what I wanted and expected, so I'm pretty happy for that.

Hybridization can only happen if you have at least two different cultures in your realm that don't belong to the same heritage and have enough cultual acceptance between them to make it happen. You also need to pick at least one pillar of each culture, because otherwise it's not really a hybrid. Otherwise, you get to pick what you want. Aesthetically you can't have hybrid militaries and architecture BUT you can combine names, fashion and coat of arms. The prestige cost is dependant on cultural acceptance, but most of the time it shouldn't be too high.

Cultural divergence works along the same lines, but instead of trying to merge your culture with another, you are trying to split from your parent. You need to take at least one different pillar from your parent culture: it will be an ethos most of the time because Martial custom kinda need you to be able to pick them (can't have women leading armies if you're highly patriarcal for example) while Language and Aesthetics rarely have options, unless you are in hybrid culture, save for a few historical cases. You can pick and replace traditions the way you want if you can though. The cost of creating your own divergent culture varies depending on how much of your own culture you control. It's easier to diverge as small isolated realm than it is as a large Empire. Kinda makes sense from my POV.

Finally, the AI has been coded to use the feature as well and in a logical manner. There are even game rules to determine its behavior: if you want to go wild and see high culture divergence and hybridization like crazy you can. You can also set it to stay completely static.

Only downside is that this will be a paid feature: you will need the DLC if you want to create your own culture. But depending on the rest of the DLC, could be fair game. And I like that cultural rework even more.

Not to mention I'm really curious to see what modders will come up with.
 
The divergence and hybrid culture feature looks really cool. I wonder what cultures people might want to make?
 
The divergence and hybrid culture feature looks really cool. I wonder what cultures people might want to make?
I was actually playing a game today and yesterday where I badly wanted this exact system...see, I had started a game as the Duke of Zhenfan (not actually called that at the start, but that's the "official" name) in the Xi Xia kingdom, who starts off as a pagan (Melie) Tuyuhan duke under a Taoist Han "king" (really a governor, but the game has trouble modeling that). This was after a lot of contemplation of just who I was going to play as--see, that kingdom is hugely diverse, with pockets of Han, Tuyuhan, Uyghur, Yughur, Tangut, Shatuo, and Öngüd cultured counties, and Manicheanism, Nestorianism, Tengriism, Taoism, Melianism, and Buddhism in close proximity. Ultimately, what I decided to do was start off as the Tuyuhan, then culture-shift my dynasty to Tangut as representing the fusion of the cultures of the region into a melting pot (as well as representing the apparently OTL direction of the dynasty in question). But I would have liked this system so that I could create a custom "fusion" culture, the way that I'm planning on reforming the Melie faith to represent the absorption and melding of these faith traditions into a new religion.

(The other thing that I would love would be introducing POPs and a system more like Imperator: Rome's alongside this--whatever its other problems, it makes it much easier to represent smaller minorities and makes assimilating and converting populations much more organic than the Crusader Kings system. But of course that's never going to happen)
 
One of the ideas I had were the Firinjiyah who would be a mixture of Occitan and Andalusian. The idea here being the new culture that comes about following al-Andalus moving northward into france. Not sure on what I would take from both.

I would love for a language evolution feature as well, to use the example above. The Firinjiyah would speak Occitan but with a lot of arabic loan words and most notably the script would be the arabic script not the latin one. Which might help with learning other arabic derived languages or arabic itself. It is easier to learn a language that uses the same script as you.
 
I hope they'll have it where provinces' names change with the culture. For example, if the Seljuk turks take over Constantinople, the name of the city and province changes accordingly.
 
Bah, I kept playing that last game and it all went to hell starting about 1000 A.D. Got into a series of wars that left my armies, normally capable of easily smashing anyone in the local area, badly out of position when a pretender revolt broke out, and wasn't able to prevent their forces from uniting (my usual modus operandi) and instead got smashed. Had to surrender and got knocked from being a king to being a count (there was another war in there that I couldn't win). At first I was kind of optimistic--okay, it's only, like 1030, it's basically just like starting a whole new game but with a good starting dynasty renown and unlocked legacies!--but then it ended up being a never-ending conga line of humiliations. Every count (or duke--I did regain my capital duchy eventually) would start to rebuild, only for something to pop up and knock them back flat on their back, so that it became frustrating instead of fun.

My breaking point was reached when, first, my liege kept granting independence to populist factions in my domain (so I'd have a county unceremoniously stolen from me and have to spend ~100 prestige to get it back) and then I got wardecced by two neighboring duchies with designs on my land or my title when I had absolutely no realistic way of fighting them off. Worst, it was ironman, so I couldn't just go back in time and try again, maybe say no to some of the people whose wars I was getting involved with earlier. That game is definitely dead, anyway. Just another short-lived kingdom in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.

Probably next time I'll do a cheat game, start as the same guy and just run buck wild smashing everything in my path with insane amounts of money and prestige. Get some revenge, you know? Losing is fun, but only up to a certain point, and this game went way, way beyond that.
 
I wonder what cultures people might want to make?
This is a paradox game. People will do whatever they fancy.

Historically-minded players will go for historically plausible cultures or trying to revive/recreate ancient cultures.
Others will just do whatever they want for the lulz. Want Hindo-Norse? You'll get Hindo-Norse. Franco-Han? Yep that's gonna happen. A weird patchwork containing a different aspect of every culture group that is in the game? That will definitely happen.
A friend of mine is already planning to merge all the cultures one by one.
That might need to tweek the game rules because according to what's been shown there is a cooldown for hybridization.
Depending on how the rules work, either you will need to reduced that countdown to as much as possible, or remove the end date.

Don't let it stop your friend though. Just tell him/her that there are bonus points on my part for all also uniting the world under one pluraslistic and syncretic religion.
 
This is a paradox game. People will do whatever they fancy.

Historically-minded players will go for historically plausible cultures or trying to revive/recreate ancient cultures.
Others will just do whatever they want for the lulz. Want Hindo-Norse? You'll get Hindo-Norse. Franco-Han? Yep that's gonna happen. A weird patchwork containing a different aspect of every culture group that is in the game? That will definitely happen.
I was wondering about what cultures people here would make. 😅
 
I did a play through starting in 936 as John “Tzimiskes” Kourkoaus’s grandfather, Theophilos, Strategos of Khaldia. Theophilos’s brother, also named Ioannes, was Domestikos of the East, Strategos of the Anatolikon, Koloneia, Melitene, and Sebastaea. Eventually Theophilos had the opportunity to form his own cadet branch of the Kourkouas family, which I named Tzimiskes of course.

Ioannes Kourkouas and his son Romanos died and were succeeded by Romanos’s son, also named Ioannes. Meanwhile our Ioannes Tzimiskes suffered the loss of his wife, Maria Skleraina in childbirth, bringing forth a healthy daughter. He then waited a few years and married an Armenian lady named Eirene, having two more daughters before finally having a son, Romanos, who is betrothed to the youngest daughter of Vasilefs Konstantinos Lekapenos, who sidestepped Konstantinos Macedon to be senior Vasilefs…

Goal is to try to have Ioannes Tzimiskes succeed Konstantinos Lekapenos or Konstantinos Macedon who is currently first in line to succeeded the son-less Lekapenos Vasilefs.

Tzimiskes waged war on his Kourkouas cousin to take the Anatolikon for his branch of the family. Goal is to retake the rest of the Kourkouas lands for the Tzimiskes branch as well.

Here is a current portrait of Ioannes Tzimiskes and his Armenian wife, Eirene.

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Here are the current Tzimiskes controlled lands

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Ioannes Tzimiskes would eventually succeed Konstantinos Macedon to become Vasilefs of Rhomania. As Vasilefs for over 20 years, he pushed expansion, retaking Kilikia, Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli and Cyprus from the Abbasids. In the west, he vassalized Croatia and brought Epirus back into the empire.

He succumbed after this successful reign to cancer and pneumonia, succeeded by his eldest son, Romanos II Tzimiskes. Romanos is wed to the daughter of one of the previous Lekapenoi Vasilefs and one of their twin eldest sons is currently the designated heir.


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Ultimately, Romanos II desires to wage wars of reconquest on Bulgaria in order to bring them back into the imperial fold of Rhomania.
 
The first Summer Teaser for Royal Court.

It reveals a few cultural traditions we'll be able to take for our cultures. They are:
  • By the Sword: Essentially DEUS VULT! as it makes it easier to go for Holy Wars
  • Collective Lands: Communism as a tradition basically. You get benefits from granting land to commoners.
  • Isolationists: "Screw those damn foreigners! Let's keep to ourselves!" Litterally. You get bonus with people of your culture and maluses with others.
  • Mythical ancestors: Makes bloodlines sacred. You can't disinherit people and you get piety malus if you revoke title from House members. On the other hand, you get renown for granting titles to House members and dysnatsy members like you more.
  • Stalwart Defenders: What it says. You're defending yourself? You get bonuses for being in a defensive stance.
  • Staunch traditionnalists: So wanting to keep their traditions that people are way more stubborn than usual. Have a harder time accepting foreigners and hybridizing with others. On the other hand, you get some defensive bonuses and better contol.
Pretty interesting and makes me curious to see the rest.

Proper Dev Diaries should be coming back around August.
 
I was wondering about what cultures people here would make. 😅

Since they released a Norse flavour pack before, I think I'll take Hastein and do what he did historically, rather than send him to India - raid France, and try to gain the upper hand against Charles the Bald, since he only started raiding the English coast after the Frankish king nearly drove him out of Nantes. This means the eventual birth of a Breton-Norse hybrid culture. :p
 
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