DevDiary 34 - Update 1.4 - Catholicism and Diplomacy

THQN Brad · June 27, 2023

Hello friends and welcome to DevDiary 34 for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! Our next update is coming live tomorrow, so we are excited to share with you the new features and changes we’ve prepared.

Two of the aspects we’d like to build upon most are Diplomacy and Religion, as they are essential for the game and we have plenty of ideas of what we can add or improve there. Since this is a major endeavor, we’ve decided to split it into several updates and for this one we started with Catholicism – the most widespread religion in the game.

One of the biggest triumphs for Catholic kingdoms is having a royal court cleric becoming the Pope. As it was, that already provided huge bonuses, but most of them are passive and remained in the “background” for players – automatic conversion of loyalty and religion of provinces, fame, books and religion production, diplomatic benefits due to other kingdoms’ reluctance to meddle with the Pope’s home kingdom, culture, influence…

Still, what seems most fun to players are the actions one can perform while the Pope is in their court. Thus, in this update we’ve added “Arrange Peace Talks”, providing a serious diplomatic power in the Catholic world. It allows forcing a Catholic kingdom to offer white peace to its enemy, through the Pope’s influence. Another new action is “Ask for Absolution”, valuable when a friendly kingdom is excommunicated.

We added plenty of new opinion and relation changes, related to crusades, Papacy and Catholic clerics, which makes playing and interacting with Catholic kingdoms more immersive and adds more depth to players’ decisions. Some of those changes aimed to balance powerful strategies like having a cardinal too early in the game, donating gold to the Papacy to easily increase the relations with it (as if it was a standard kingdom) and exiling clerics just to receive and accept a new one later one.

The main focus of the diplomacy changes we’ve introduced is also giving more control in the hands of the players to refine their strategy. “Form vassal” is an important new action specific to kings, enabling them to separate an unloyal province they do not want as part of their kingdom and “convert” it to a newly formed vassal kingdom. As in some cases hard to control new lands can be more of a burden than an advantage, this action introduces a viable strategy to still benefit from conquering them.

Another new action comes for the Diplomat class – “Bolster influence”. It works similarly to clerics’ “Bolster culture” and can be helpful for things like quick expansion, strengthening diplomatic relations and ultimately for claiming the Emperor of the World title.

A new diplomat puppet spy’s opportunity gives a new way to handle annoying defensive pacts and invasion plans against your kingdom, which can sometimes even turn your friends into foes.

There are many other smaller improvements, like new UI indications for influence and truce duration, relation, opinions and crown authority changes making interactions more immersive and removing some unpleasant results of situations like ending up in truce with kingdoms due to the leader of your alliance signing peace with the enemies.

Besides Diplomacy and Religion, there are other very significant changes as well. We’ve vastly increased the availability of special units, spicing up the gameplay when playing with more kingdoms and when new territories are conquered. Merchants also received a new action – “Entice mercenaries”, enabling players with strong economies to rely less on mercenaries appearing in their lands and to instead call some to aid them from foreign lands.

Finally, we’d like to mention the addition of a “Search” feature in the “Royal Library”, which we hope to aid newcomers but also to be useful for advanced players that want to know every nook and cranny of the game. The help module already had hyperlinks and convenient ways for players to jump into currently important topics from tooltips and interface elements, but it is now much easier to directly and independently find information on topics one is interested in.

We’re excited for all of you to jump in and explore these new changes to the game. Please feel free to post any of your thoughts or feedback once the patch has released. Also, for a full list of all changes, please refer to the Patch notes that will be posted with the release. Happy conquering!

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Lisotte · June 27, 2023

Cool to see another update! I'm especially happy to see that special units are going to be more available, it will lead to fewer 4 spearmen 4 bowmen armies for me...

I hope some of the network problems were addressed as well in this patch? The last major patch did address some, but my friends still had problems playing multiplayer since then. I guess if there were hotfixes since then I missed them. Still, pretty cool to hear 🙂

Superpfirsich · June 27, 2023

Love seeing the Update. Im a big fan of making special units more available and the Ability to form Vassals.

redsimon · June 27, 2023

All of this sounds great!

Now what would be cool if you could form vassals and then switch over to play the new vassal realm.

Med8r · June 28, 2023

Great news! I'm loving each playthrough so far, and anything to spice up religions further is a welcome addition.

One thing I'd love to see is a place in the game where we can view the "formable nations" and what their requirements are. The more difficult ones (like Russia) create major goals for my playthroughs, and it would be nice not to have to rely on outside sources to give me what I need to plan future conquests.

Keep up the great work! You're giving big franchises a run for their money.

Yavor · June 28, 2023

Thank you for this, Dear Devs! Ah, on the road again... 🙂

James94 · June 30, 2023

In my just created

I had provided suggestion/idea in a form of multi-part Question and additional suggestions/ideas.

James94 · June 30, 2023

4 minutes ago, James94 said:

In my just created

I had provided suggestion/idea in a form of multi-part Question and additional suggestions/ideas.

Part of it towards the middle of the beginning area I had thought of because in Paradox Interactive's Crusader Kings 3 there were mods created to replace real world campaign maps with fictional worlds maps and my thought is what if there could be a way for players to have possibly both the fictional worlds campaign maps within the real world campaign maps. And undoubtedly possibly more room to create more additional quasi-real worlds campaign maps and fictional worlds campaign maps and hybridization between quasi-real worlds and fictional worlds campaign maps in addition/within the previously just stated.

James94 · June 30, 2023

On 6/27/2023 at 11:19 AM, Superpfirsich said:

Love seeing the Update. Im a big fan of making special units more available and the Ability to form Vassals.

multi lower and higher tier levels of lieges and vassals(https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/658223-crusader-kings-3-title-rank-and-granting-titles#:~:text=There are five ranks of,Duchess%3A Two or more counties

Which could possibly have smaller than that even with such related type of ruler over a single village.
Which could possibly have smaller than Baronies with such related type of ruler over a single town etc.
Baronies – Baron/Baroness: A single barony/bishopric/arguably sub-city/etc
(This should be the Counties) There should be a in between Baronies and Counties with such related type of ruler for group of regular Cities and sub-cities etc
(should be something in between slightly-bit bigger/larger than counties) There should be another in between with such type of ruler over regional Metropolis(major) City etc.
Counties(should be something more likely bit bigger/larger than counties) – Count/Countess: Two or more baronies/bishoprics/(technically Should be Metropolis (major) Cities/etc
Duchies – Duke/Duchess: Two or more counties
Kingdoms – King/Queen: Two or more duchies
Empires – Emperor/Empress: Two or more kingdoms
Which could have Empire of earth Empires(kind of like the Mongolian Empire of what became sub empires Great Khan over Khans of what became sub empires) - Emperor of Earth Emperors/Empress of Earth Empresses: merging of two or more individual Empires.

) which mean need to have multi lower and higher tier levels of sub-territories and such. that could possibly end up being for player possible game play choice/choices extremely higher levels of lieges and vassals variations of tier levels of dieties and sub-dieties. I understand not everyone necessarily enjoys playing with (possibly involving the various theme forms of the various genres of what is viewed as fictional and possibly mixtures of themes of what is viewed as quasi-realistic in various time period/era setting with various theme forms of the various genres of what is viewed as fictional) with and/or possibly instead of what is considered as the real however I thought that the following would make sense as vassal/liege governing tier levels above the already stated prior. https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Divine_rank http://sorcereroftea.com/11-different-types-of-gods-in-mythology/

https://kardashev.fandom.com/wiki/Kardashev_Scale_Wiki

https://kardashev.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Kardashev_Scale

https://fictional-battle-omniverse.fandom.com/wiki/Cosmic_Beings

Edited June 30, 2023 by James94

James94 · June 30, 2023

For example part of the reason why I have mentioned Alternative history Middle Ages version/versions of the Explorations and Colonization eras if they would like to play in such a way. Was because Mongolian Empire had during the middle ages when it first invaded Eastern Europe and could have had had gone further west in Europe during tthe Middle Ages and when the Mongolian Empire invaded the Middle East and could have gone further West like into Africa and so on the West all the way to old world far west and on the East all the way to the old world Far East could have ended up being far more connected during the Middle Ages.

And Vikings on their own with their individual discovery and exploration of the New world(North America at least but in controversial historical views possibly as far as Central America and South America) and the more less controversial historical views views mainly discovering North America closest to Iceland and Green land the Vikings could have discovered explored further into North America, Central America, and South America and during the Middle Ages replacing Christopher Columbus as the officially accepted discoverers of the Americas(New World). Therefore launching the age/era/time period and ages/eras/time periods Explorations and Colonization
and Imperialism during the Medieval/Middle Ages time period instead of our timeline's Christopher Columbus's own age/era/time period. (edited)

James94 · June 30, 2023

Plus during the Middle Ages on the other side of the Old world from Middle Ages Europe and the Middle East Japan technically had their own distinct version of Feudalism, Feudalism vassal and leige hiarechy system, and Knighthood just replacing Knights with Samurai, Japanese Warlords, and individual Shoguns on top just below the Emperor of Japan. And China during the Warlords intermediate Chinese civil war periods in between each specific individual Imperial Chinese Dynasty age/era/time period also sort of but necessarily as much as Japan and definitely not as much as Middle Ages Europe had their own version/form of Feudalism and Feudalism vassal and leige hiarechy system. so I was told what I had mentioned doesn't have anything to do with the game.

I have to agree to disagree since I personally view there are enough potential possible connections and similarities to possibly some way make it work. With this one at least. Plus with the fantasy and science fiction even if there are plenty of those simply because they don't think the mythologies of those time periods have any sort of basis of truth/accuracy to them so they end up not necessarily simply disliking fantasy and science fiction mixed in what they personally view as real down to earth. That doesn't necessarily quite mean that during those time periods/eras/age that the people populating at those times would agree since plenty of people living then did believe the mythologies so honestly for the sake of argument it doesn't feel right to keep mythology that is connected to fantasy, science fiction, and some sort mixture/hybridization of both distinctly separate from what is currently considered to be real/having foundation in accuracy simply because of those who have strong and high antagonism bias against such mythology and even genres.

Alfonso XIII · July 1, 2023

Update looking great; hope I get some time to check it in depth and get back to you.

For the time being, it seems a few of the improvements I wanted were included (see my suggestions thread), albeit of course in different ways.

One small error I noticed is that when enticing mercenaries, there's an error in the text: instead of using the name of the specific Mercenary Leader, you use a generic "Mercenaries", which results in "Mercenaries's" (sic).

Alfonso XIII · July 1, 2023

Oh, another thing - after the update my audio went to stereo and I could have sworn that it was multichannel 5.1 before (I have a 5.1 system). Maybe I'm just imagining things, but this is worth checking out...

ReptilePZ · July 3, 2023

Excellent update, it's very nice to see how well these changes are integrated into the existing systems without feeling cumbersome or unintuitive.

One observation that I have as someone in the middle of a Teutonic campaign with a mission of... spreading the love of Christ to all the lands - forming a vassal only allows for the original religion of the destroyed kingdom to be applied (even after a successful conversion of the province) and, as you might imagine, this will not do in a campaign such as mine, rendering this option useless in that (admittedly, very specific) scenario.

Keep up the great work, reallly appreciate these updates!

Edited July 3, 2023 by ReptilePZ

CITI4D · March 12

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