Hello everyone! Today's dev diary is written by two separate authors, and covers the art and music of Khans of the Steppe. There's a good bit to cover, so let's dive right into it.

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Art & References
Salve,Lucas Ribeiro here, 2D Art Lead at CKIII. I’m here to share with you our efforts to bring to life the beautiful open splendor of the steppes and the blood-stained battlefields of the east through our humble artwork. Loading Screen
To start off, let’s talk about our new loading screen. We began by sketching out some ideas and running them through the team to get impressions. There was not much debate on what the theme was here, mostly how to represent it.From these 4, we picked the one with the charging band of warriors against the stormy sky. We felt that this composition had a lot of dynamism and looked unique compared to the other loading screens we’ve created so far. The juxtaposition of the riding band of warriors against the stormy skies suggests the strong connection between natu... Read more

Hi! This expansion is adding quite a few new systems, and today we’re here to talk about the modability and underlying tech of some of them. Tributaries One of the more impactful features we’re adding is tributaries. So we’re on the same page when it comes to terminology: a suzerain is to a tributary what a liege is to a vassal.Previously, a vassal had a collection of individual contracts defined on their government type which made up their complete “vassal contract”. This included things such as “feudal_government_taxes” added on the “feudal_government”, which determined how much a vassal with the feudal government would pay to their liege.However, with the addition of tributaries this has changed slightly. Firstly, pretty much everything related to “vassal contracts” have been renamed to “subject contracts”. To enable re-use of these contract lists and usage outside of governments, we’ve added a new database called “subject contract groups” which includes the typical list of individu... Read more

We've now resolved the issue with yesterday's 1.15.0.1 update, so we're deploying Update 1.15.0.2 as planned. The changelog is effectively the same as 1.15.0.1, so you'll be familiar with the changes if you read yesterday's changelog.

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Update 1.15.0.2 Changelog Game Balance

• Reduced the frequency of the 'Instill Virtue' Court Position task.
  
• The ‘Instill Virtue’ Court Position task can only affect children 6 years or older now.

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue that caused congenital traits to not show up in the character list of the Arrange Marriage window
  
• Fixed an issue with a toast message saying "DESCRIPTION" instead of the actual description.
  
• Fixed an issue with the ‘Instill Virtue’ Court Position task where it would affect the Wet Nurse herself, if her employer was a child ruler, rather than the child in question.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Wet Nurse was using the children’s aptitude as a Wet Nurse rather than her own for the ‘Instill Virtue’ task. Creative, if nothing else.
  
• Fixed an issue w...

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Hello everyone. Earlier today we released Update 1.15.0.1, which introduced a user interface issue that wasn't caught during certification and approval of the update. Considering the severity of this issue, we have decided to rollback the public version of Crusader Kings III to 1.15.0 until this issue is resolved. What are the next steps for us?

• Immediate Rollback. Effective immediately, we are reverting to the previous version of the game to maintain playability for as many players as possible
  
• Ongoing Investigation and Resolution. Our Release and QA teams are actively working to resolve this issue, and working on an express pipeline to ensure an update is ready as soon as humanly possible.
  
• Deployment of 1.15.0.2. Once we have certified a new update, we will deploy it immediately to Steam.
  
• Preventative Measures. Afterward, we'll be looking into our testing procedures to prevent issues like this from occurring in the future.

We understand this is frustrating and inconvenient to many of ... Read more

Hello everyone! We're releasing a small update today to address some issues reported to us since the release of the 1.15 "Crown" Update. Please check the changelog below for more information!

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Update 1.15.0.1 Changelog
Game Balance

• Reduced the frequency of the 'Instill Virtue' Court Position task.
  
• The ‘Instill Virtue’ Court Position task can only affect children 6 years or older now.

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue that caused congenital traits to not show up in the character list of the Arrange Marriage window
  
• Fixed an issue with a toast message saying "DESCRIPTION" instead of the actual description.
  
• Fixed an issue with the ‘Instill Virtue’ Court Position task where it would affect the Wet Nurse herself, if her employer was a child ruler, rather than the child in question.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Wet Nurse was using the children’s aptitude as a Wet Nurse rather than her own for the ‘Instill Virtue’ task. Creative, if nothing else.
  
• Fixed an issue where you could try to make a county the cap...

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Өглөөний мэнд!Today we will be covering most of the nomadic flavor that we've introduced with this update, so without further ado… The Greatest of Khans Great are the plump princes in their southern fortresses, great are the chieftains of the grass sea… but great-EST? Only one is greatest. CHINGGIS KHAAN, Universal Ruler, Khan of Khans, biggest and baddest boi… well, actually, Genghis is only the greatest and the baddest baddie sometimes. In some other playthroughs, the Greatest of Khans will arise organically. Heck, the Greatest one could even be you.
[It’s quite the trait.]The key point is that there is only one GREATEST. Once someone has become Greatest of Khans, no ruler ever can again. It’s the highest point of nomadic achievement, and an absolute game-changer! So yeah, should you or an AI ruler achieve this highest of titles in time… the Mongol Invasion won’t happen. That perilous time of nomadic conquest under a single, mighty ruler has basically just come early. Conversely, if T... Read more

Өглөөний мэнд!Today we'll be covering some of the extra mechanics that Nomads use. We’ve already talked about the main features in our first Khans of the Steppe Development Diary, so make sure you take a look at that one first – and apologies if I repeat myself.We shall now get into the details.

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Dominance
As we have mentioned in previous Development Diaries, Nomads have their own mechanics and, when it comes to how they rule, one of the most important is their Dominance level.Before I dive into the specifics of each level, it's important to note that Nomads have a fixed Minimum and Maximum Domain and Vassal Limit per Dominance level. These numbers can be increased only through Dominance and Yurt Buildings, and no skills or lifestyle perks affect it. We have also changed the Lifestyle Trees to better work with Nomadic mechanics, but more on that later.Dominance represents a Nomadic ruler's perceived power. It can be increased by a prestige cost once the character reaches the necessary H... Read more

Hello there!Welcome back to the first official dev diary for our Core Expansion this year, Khans of the Steppe. For those who did not see it, we first talked about the DLC back last month with Dev Diary #162 - Steppe by Steppe, so I recommend reading that first.Today we will discuss Tributaries, Confederations, and Raid Intents. All three topics were mentioned in the previous Dev Diary, but we will discuss them at length in this one, so let’s settle in like a migrating nomad and get started. Follow-up from Previous Dev Diary The team has gone through an intense iteration period based on both feedback collected internally and the comments received from our previous Dev Diary. Many changes have been thus made, and we are sure we are not done with it yet. However, here's a small list of some of the most significant tweaks done based on your feedback:

• A new, "base" Tributary type has been made available for non-Nomads.
  
• Concerns about the Nomadic economy have been addressed by adding a mont...

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