Hi everyone!
I’m Tobias Bodlund, Scripter on the Crusader Kings II team, and I’d like to wish you all welcome to the Way of Life dev diary.
With this being a rather small expansion compared to most and release being less than one week away now, we will only have this one dev diary for Way of Life. So sit back and enjoy!
The scope for this expansion is not about opening a new period in history or new areas to conquer - rather, it’s about going deeper into the characters’ personal pursuits and how they navigate (or manipulate) relationships with other characters.
When designing this expansion, we also wanted to allow the players to choose to some degree what direction their characters will take on a personal level, without therefore locking them into a certain area of the game.
The way we decided to do this is through a new concept called Focus. Focuses are the core concept of the Way of Life expansion. When you start your game, you will be able to choose a focus for your character, and this focus will affect the availability and frequency of certain types of events associated with that focus, as well as unlock certain decisions and actions that you can perform towards other characters.
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There are also direct bonuses that apply to your character just from choosing a focus. Every focus is conceptually tied to a character attribute (two for each attribute), and the most common bonus is an increase in those attributes.
These are the focuses you can choose from:
- Family - engage with your family and make sure that they get along.
- Carousing - allows you to invite people to private parties, good for making new friends and generally having a good time.
- War - taking an interest in war, it allows you to fight duels, among other things.
- Hunting - opens up new hunting-related events, and is now a requirement for some hunting decisions.
- Rulership - ruling your realm, dealing with administration.
- Business - dealing with mayors, founding a trade route, building things.
- Intrigue - allows you to spy on people, slander them, and liberate imprisoned or abducted family members.
- Seduction - set your target and strive to make them yours.
- Scholarship - pursue your chosen path of research.
- Theology - required for pilgrimages, opens up various new religious events (including for pagans) as well as affecting the frequency of other religious events.
Some of the focuses have conditions that must be fulfilled before you can choose them. For example, you can’t choose the seduction focus if you are celibate, or the hunting focus if you are Jain.
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Only rulers can have focuses (and AI rulers will of course also use them). After five years, you will be able to switch to another focus if you so wish. Note, however, that some of the longer event chains may interrupt if you choose to abandon that focus (effectively turning your back on whatever path you were pursuing).
We’ve also added a number of interesting things to the free patch that accompanies this expansion.
Firstly, diplomacy and other actions that directly affect other characters are now accessed through right-clicking the character portrait of the person you want to interact with. This places actions such as legitimizing bastards, straightening up your decadent relatives etc in the same place as diplomacy in the interface (and the new Way of Life actions involving things such as seduction, carousing and spying are also placed here, if you own the expansion).
Modders will be pleased at several powerful new scripting features that we’ve added. One is the new type of decision that we are introducing. They are scripted as “targetted_decision” and can be used to target another character, with fully scriptable triggers and effects. This has been used to create the new actions involving seduction etc in the expansion - but it also effectively allows modders to script almost any kind of character interaction that they need.
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Another new modding feature is the possibility to save event targets in a temporary custom scope. Any scope (character, province, title) can be saved in this way, only expiring with end of the current chain of events. This should simplify scripting of some more complex chains of events. Naturally, these custom scopes can also be used in the event texts.
Event texts, yes… it is now also possible to set several texts for any event, with triggers to select the appropriate one. This works very similarly to triggered event options. It works for both event titles and the event description. This means you can handle several alternate cases with only one event, where previously you’d need to create a different event for each case if you wanted the text to differ for different cultures, for example.
That's it about the major new modding features. As usual, the free patch will also contain a large number of minor bugfixes as well as improvements to performance and gameplay.
Full patch notes will be published this Friday, and the release date for Way of Life is December 16.
