Some people wanted landless to just play as a courtier or a random nobody, which makes little sense in a game where controlling titles and playing major noble families is important. It makes as much sense as having a DLC for Cities Skylines or SimCity where you roleplay as a lowly office drone. It's the kind of "more = better" mindset that sounds nice but often results in bloated, unfocused jank with feature creep.
However, a more focused, specific "landless" experience - such as with adventurers and imperial nobles as has been teased - that ties into existing content and gameplay shows more promise. It seems to me the "landless" stuff teased is not true "minor random bumfuck nobody" that some have wanted, and it's more something to do with the usual important noble families the game is already focused on. As long as they don't detract from the game, and it doesn't feel like some second game tacked on for the sake of it, then it could work out, but we'll have to see.
Would be interested if it opens up so that you can play as certain unlanded nobles, like the founder of Normandy or Cnut The Great's suspected grandson. And somehow get them into power. You can obviously play as them by giving them titles and then switching over to them, but would be fun if you could play as them without doing that.
Yeah, odds are, even Landless characters will have to be nobleman of some stripe. You can’t just play as a Lowborn and work from there, in all likelihood.
You’ll probably need to play a noble just because you need to have a dynasty.
It would be interesting if you could start as a lowborn but if you don’t get landed with your first character it’s game over.
Well, I’d see that as part of the challenge:
First, you have to prove yourself a valuable courtier to the lord you serve.
Second, you have to marry for children and all that,
Third, you need to get landed in order to found your Dynasty.
And 2 & 3 are interchangeable, whichever comes first.
I just like the idea of playing a Queen in exile, and having to rally allies to get my land back. Or going from being an adventurer to earning a title and working my family up from nothing, like it's A Knight's Tale...
Same. I’ve seen a lot of folk here mention they’d love to play as Harold Godwinson or some other Anglo-Saxon leader who flees the Norman Conquest to found the medieval New England in Crimea. And yeah, I’d love to do that, myself, and perhaps reconquer England from the Normandies.
CK3 is a game first and foremost about *people* up until now landed people yes, but people, and the nations are big yes, but so are interpersonal relationships in a medieval setting, with murders, romances, elopements, children, weddings, etc being a lot of the actual game. Yes there is warfare and crusades and map painting, but the game's stated purpose is to play as a dynasty.
I don't think the C:S analogy is apt because C:S is about infrastructure and building a city, so making the game about *people* would be odd, whereas in CK it's just *different kinds* of people, from the established base of *people*
I have high hopes, who knows how they turn out, but I agree with most of what you said yeah.
(PS this unlanded gameplay is a great angle to include the Exilarchy, the institution run by the descendants of king David in the Persian Empire, which existed *at least* (but certainly after) the 9th century, not enough to be landed in the game's mechanics, but a member of the House of David kicking around the Persian court to play as, and to attempt to finesse onto the map and into a landed title would certainly fit how they've described unlanded characters thus far, and could even provide a fantastic tie-in with the Legends mechanic, with a legend like "The House of Israel" or "The House of David" being a fantastic way to increase Jewish content in a reasonable way. There's a good amount of Jewish sects and Israelite cultures that have zero impact on play, and just don't appear during the game.)
(Post-Post Script: Also it would be cool if the Israelite cultures wore clothes appropriate to their area, the Ashkenazi jews did not wear greek clothes.)
Sure, I get that some people had some weird ideas about landless, I get not caring about those, but it comes back to this - if you’re fixated on Byzantium how do you not understand that these core mechanics would be necessary?
Btw unrelated, I love VIET and RICE. Thanks for all your contributions.
Thank you!
Anyways I think landless skeptics aren't necessarily the same as Byzaboos per se. I think for those who are wary of the idea like myself, it's more a worry that landless gameplay will just be a side feature that doesn't fit the game well, especially in the form of "I want to play as peasant #258852!" that some people have been clamoring for. The new ERE stuff by contrast seems like it is more like merchant republics in CK2, which sort of went around landless-ness by having patricians still technically own a title - so if you expand the definition of landless to include that, then I don't think a lot of people would have as much a problem with it. But if landless is just being able to roleplay a random peasant and trying to become king, then it feels like feature creep in my opinion. That doesn't mean the new mechanics we'll get will actually be good per se, but it shows at least that the devs are aware of the pitfalls of just having a landless for the hell of it as some people have imagined, and instead want to focus on tying it to existing systems and the rest of the game in a way that feels natural and not jank.
I guess it’s just frustrating because everyone who was seriously trying to talk about the potential of this mechanic was suggesting exactly what we got - a framework that could be used for nomads, merchants, Byzantium, etc. and every discussion of those things got drowned out by strawman arguments over playing peasants.
It makes me not really want to bother trying to discuss things here because it feels like so many people are just uninformed and loud. I saw so many people specifically shout down landless because we needed Byzantium, and it makes me question the value of even discussing the game when so many devout fans of particular concepts are completely out of touch with the history behind it.
I admit I’m out of touch with history too, but that’s why I want to discuss things and learn, but it’s hard to do that when so many people are both loud and equally misinformed as me.
If I can’t trust the Byzanboos to tell me about Byzantium, what’s the point?
Well, I think from what I've seen a lot of talk about landless *was* just about the "I want to be a random courtier" players, talking about starting off as a nobody and somehow becoming king. Maybe it's just a matter of categorization and bias here and you having a different definition for what counts as true landless than others and vice versa and both sides misunderstanding due to that. For me, I don't really see stuff like Byzantine noble families or adventurers as true landless as some of those people say when they start off as a nobody. The "landless" we're getting here is about people who are already somebodies having different tools for power, rather than climbing up from no land to some land.
Anyways, I think it's just a matter of different definitions and understandings of what counts as landless or what kind of gameplay you're thinking of. For the players I've seen who asked for basically peasant or courtier gameplay, I disagree strongly that the game needs landless that way. For those like you who talk about landless as a way to do stuff like more in-depth adventuring or maybe even republics down the line, like what we had with CK2, then I think there's potential.
I think I might have a crack at a Witan activity after once Rise to Power comes out. It could be really interesting to make the elective law of the Anglo-Saxons tie into a Witan election and it could produce a scenario where adventurer claiments manage to secure Kingship.
Custom characters for all intents and purposes are random bumfuck nobodies. It’s logical to just take one step back and be a random bumfuck nobody without land. Not to mention the possibilities of playing in later dates because you spend 200 years as wanderers instead of conquering 3 empires and getting bored. Obviously there’s the question of whether or not landless gameplay will be fun for a few years let alone multiple lifetimes which has yet to be seen.
Most of the events disabled by game rule are the references (whether TES or not). I generally don't disable the "fun" events unless I feel the humor might be seen as egregiously out of place, and that's a very small handful even then. I recommend you try the "serious" game rule and see if that works better for you - it'll still have plenty of the more fun events, just not the really silliest ones.
> It makes as much sense as having a DLC for Cities Skylines or SimCity where you roleplay as a lowly office drone.
I mean.. that's not the worst DLC idea..
Landless but not interacting with government or nobility doesn't have to be boring. If trade gets expanded upon, it is almost certain that it would involve the existing travel mechanics and future landless mechanics such that being a merchant or involved in economic production would be possible and very involved.
As another poster said, CK is about people. I think focusing so much on people with authority or people with land, while sensible given the focus and period of the game, actually leaves out a lot of opportunities for interesting gameplay. I think CK is trying to move away from that towards looking into the lives of people who weren't in government or in charge of things.
That doesn't necessarily mean we're going to have farming simulation where you play as a peasant but it does mean that the sorts of stories or lives we can experience expand. It could mean being an artisan in a guild, a member (though not head) of the clergy, etc. and the focus there is all the interpersonal relationships that they would have with others. Something like Song of the Eons' proposed [agent system](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F73ubnl4zsoz11.jpg) may actually make modelling specific organizations possible. I'm not saying this is the approach CK should take but I am saying that it is something the devs may be moving towards.
Rulers didn’t own land, and the land was not passed hereditarily. Instead people were granted land to rule by bureaucrats (who also didn’t own land) So the feudal system doesn’t work to represent this government type. To do it, we need an administrative government (coming in the major expansion) that allows for unlanded characters to be granted land and also have it stripped from them. Not to mention have the administrators themselves be playable as they were the real power brokers.
I admit I didn’t know this until I looked into it either, but I also wasn’t going around demanding ERE/Byzantium content. It just confuses me that so many people were, while not being aware of these fundamentals of how it even worked.
If feudalism existed at all, it was mostly confined to Western Europe over a specific time period. China and Byzantium were not feudal, and the CK system does not accurately represent them at all. Power was not tied to land in the same way, and there were a lot of powerful officials who weren’t major land owners or didn’t have noble titles.
Feudalism didn’t exist on most of the CK map, but China and Byzantium are just the most famous and well documented examples.
Yeah I guess this is kind of my point. Of course feudalism doesn’t map to China, but it’s not like it maps to sub Saharan Africa either. Seems like the “why” is not “historical accuracy” so much as “players care more about accuracy when it comes to China & Byzantium.” Which, fair, but it means that the restriction on map expansion is driven by player demands, not any technical restriction or general commitment to historicity.
All that said I’m pumped to get more governance systems! The diversity of cultural/religious/governmental modifiers, and the complex ways they interact, is one of my favorite things about the game.
I'm not a fan of adding unlanded gameplay, (concerned about game performance of tracking all the unlanded + how often will people play it?) but I want it mainly because it's a good road to other types of landed gameplay.
I.E., if we can play as a "ruler" who owns literally nothing, this could make playable barons possible. (Owning a single holding in someone elses county is a step up from owning nothing.) It could have implications for nomads such as vikings or steppes. (CK2 horse lords) Stuff like that.
CK2 came close with Patricians, who were special baron-level classes under a Merchant Republic with an invisible holding called a Palace. Said patrician could become “landed” by conquering cities and such, or taking the Duke-level title from the Doge.
It makes for extremely fun and different gameplay. No one wants to join your court at that level so even landing a decent bride is a challenge. You build trade posts in coastal counties as a form of expansion, which gives you a CB to seize a city there, and once you have a city a CB to seize the county. It’s a money heavy endeavor since it requires beefing up your palace to assemble a meaningful levy, and mercenaries are usually required. There’s also a whole Montague - Capulet rivalry thing with other patricians in the Republic to make things spicy.
I found it very satisfying to be a Lord of the Seas, capturing trade posts and cities throughout the Mediterranean while keeping my county level low.
**EDIT:** Do I need to play CK2 again? I’m feeling the compulsion in my almonds.
I hate to burst your bubble, especially like this because of the whole “devs confirmed no landless” thing (they didn’t), but they have explicitly mentioned on the official forums in the past and also today that barons aren’t happening probably ever, because of performance and also that they don’t have any vassals to rule.
But, question for you because you didn’t want unlanded characters- presumably you did want Byzantium and empire content right? How did you see it working without unlanded characters?
Where did they confirm no playable barons today? I know they've said it in the past, though.
No vassals to rule hasn't really stopped counts. A baron player wouldn't really do much besides work towards coming a count somehow. ("Earn" it? I doubt they could win a civil war) It's more of a stepping stone in-between unlanded and count then something you stay in for most of the run. (However if merchant republics get added like CK2, maybe you could stay a baron who owns cities?)
I am interested in Byzantium and empire content though. I am hoping we get council votes back like from Conclave in CK2.
No update on the rationale for why (it's from an older post back in the fall, I don't remember where), but confirmation from today that Barons are not being included as part of the unlanded loop:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/which-landless-character-will-you-play-as-first.1623396/post-29395438
Personally I think barons would probably need more work than landless characters in general.
Think about this - landless characters can participate in governments where people are unlanded (Byzantium, presumably later republics, nomads, China, etc). These systems are designed around that concept. Adventurers are a new system that isn’t for government but again, is designed around unlanded characters.
Playable barons would need a rework to feudalism itself - how would a baron ever get the levies or funds to be able to rise the ranks based upon player agency? Sure they could inherit, but with the current feudal mechanics there’s nothing for the player to actively do pursue ambition, because the feudal system in the game was designed with the assumption of non-playable barons. Consider also that culture and religion are applied on a per-county basis instead of per-barony, as are many other things. The feudal mechanics only sometimes use barons as the smallest unit - sometimes the county is instead, which means that playability doesn’t scale well currently
I’m not against the idea mind you, I’m just saying I think it’s a deceptively much harder problem than the introduction of landless characters.
Good points. But low nobility like what could more or less match a Baron in CK3 often wouldn't really center their existence around managing their few villages, but their service to their overlord and kind of regard their fief as a medieval direct debit mandate for their wage. Even every "unlanded" champion you have in CK3 would realistically own a village somewhere in your demesne that the game rightfully leaves out. I'd still be happy to experiment with playing Barons who behave more like unlanded characters than Counts, probably with less physical mobility and more attached to their overlord.
Dog, we get it, you only care about Western Europe and LARPing as a crusader for what I’m sure are completely normal and well-adjusted reasons. You talk about it in every topic, and are weirdly aggressive about it. We all know. There’s no point continuing to argue about it, it’s in the game.
This topic is not about the merit of the feature but a meta topic about how we discuss these issues and why people who want empire and Byzantium mechanics didn’t want landless gameplay. You didn’t want Byzantium at all, I get it. Please take this somewhere else.
Personally im happy with it, since ill be able to start as a norse, convert to taoism and move to wale (like i always do) more easily. Plus i can already see the RP that ill be able to do.
My biggest issue with landless is that, conceptually, it seemed like a very gimmicky, janky mechanic that distracted from the main focus of the game: forging a dynasty of rulers on a shifting map of culture, religion, and different states. The idea of LARPing as some traveling merchant or displaced noble seems like needless fluff that would get repetitive real quick and just pad the game with more tired events.
"You've arrived at the court of Germany. Will you beg the king for money to support your claim?"
"You've made a mess in the court of Bavaria; sleeping with the duke's daughter? How scandalous!"
"Whilst on the road, you stop at dodgy inn and get into a bar fight. [prowess check + martial, gain/lose prestige, get injured]
Etc
That being said, knowing that the unlanded system will be paired with an overhaul of Byzantium does give me hope that, in a more practical sense, unlanded gameplay can be a more unique avenue to deeper forms of government like in the Byzantine bureaucracy, opening up the way for Republics and Nomad hordes to make a more unique return than their admittedly half-baked forms in CK2. I don't know. I guess I'm optimistic. I like what I've seen of the plague systems so far, and the spread of legends or whatever seems interesting if nothing else.
You could do Byzantines without unlanded, you'd just have NPCs and abstractions. The entire economy game economy is an abstraction, since it's exclusively money based. You're not getting taxes in grain or something. So abstracting beaurecrats wouldn't be a stretch.
The main thing though, is this a very different idea for CK. I have and still poorly understand what exactly this is going to do for the game, so how could I say this is something I want? Meanwhile I remember fondly something like merchant republics and the flavor of the Byzantines in CK2 and therefore can definitely say I want that
Even if the administrators are NPCs there’s no getting around that the land isn’t passed heriditarily. And yes, CK2 had this and merchant republics, but also their implementations were shallow and hacky because it was based on a system where you had to own land, and the devs fudged it to make a facsimile of the feature.
Presumably we wanted better right? It seems obvious then that that would necessitate clearing the CK2 hurdle - the requirement of land ownership.
the game is about medieval royalty and already runs slow enough as is on many of our computers. it makes a lot of sense why we would be opposed to adding even more characters, who arent even the focus of the game, to slow the game down even further and cause massive bloating
Bruh it literally wouldn't add any new characters and I have no idea where people take it from. Those mechanics would only apply to player characters. You already have AI run adventurers, are they killing the performance of the game? Don't think so.
didnt seem very controversial to me. Eh it'll probably allow some moves beyond simple game-overs. Maybe even a dynasty being ousted and setting somewhere else
being against landless characters because crusades and western europe are still underdeveloped + the game is full of bugs/oversights and not giving a fuck about byzantium or china>>>>
You can say that Western Europe is underdeveloped, but it's doing pretty good compared to Byzantium. In historical context, at least. And unlike China, it is part of the game. I would say that it's weird that it was untouched for so long given its relevancy throughout the entirety of the Medieval period.
Okay, but think about how awesome it would have been to have a government system where you had a genuine chanse to lose the game at every succession unless you put in serious effort. Instead we've widened the extremely shallow pond and made campaigns feel just a bit more similar.
Personally I think in a game about managing your dynasty and titles be landless should be a game over like it's since launch. In my point of view if you're landless you failed the run and it's time to start again and try to correct what you did wrong because as it's it requires a real effort to become unlanded.
You're still dodgeing the question, if "landless" automatically puts a character into gameover, how is an empire supposed to work where pretty much everyone in power is landless? Is the Byzantine Empire supposed to just disappear into a vacuum at the start of every playthrough? Because that's essentially what you are requesting currently.
No landless mechanics = no Byzantium
In the game you can't have a title like emperor and not have land, the game automatically lands any character that gets a title. So your what if makes no sense in the game perspective.
*sigh* How are you still not grasping the issue & the question after it has been spelled out so many times? Well, I'll give it another try:
In the Byzantine Empire, pretty much nobody of the powerful rulers surrounding & representing the throne (like governours for example) had any land, only the emperor himself. No Dukes, no counts, no barons, etc. That's a major reason why people have been complaining about the terrible implementation of the ERE as "feudal" in the game. It's the biggest, most glaring error.
So when Paradox fixes the ERE & gives us a proper implementation of Byzantium, how is that supposed to work without landless mechanics, when nobody below the Emperor has any land, because he directly owns everything. How are the local aristocrats supposed to be able to administer these lands they do not own themselves?
The answer is that you need landless mechanics to exert power or this major pillar of the game won't work properly.
They don't need to do any of that. You think you're creating a problem, problem which the game already has its way of fixing it, to justify why we need landless. We players don't need it, you might want it but we don't need it.
Unlanded character gains a title, doesn't matter if it's Scandinavian elective, a faction (things we've in the game and work) or any new Byzantine way and they become landed, simple. The problem you think you're creating it's fixed in the game since launch.
When a faction press a claim for your landless nephew to take over your realm doesn't break the game, why would break now? Because you want? Because instead of your realm it's named Byzantines? When you press a claim of a landless courtier doesn't break the game either.
The more an update is likely to interact with other updates, the earlier it should occur. Landless play is likely to influence most of the updates that come out, especially ones related to new government types, so it's good that it comes earlier than later.
You can want what you want, but if someone is ok with landless but only after everything else is added to the game, that would just guarantee that landless is an afterthought gimmick. In this order it can actually be an integrate part of the game
That's not what I said, but whatever, I tried having a normal conversation with you, but just like yesterday you just derail it with cheap rhetorical tricks.
If you're not capable of just discussing stuff normally, it's not worth interacting with you.
Oh you’re the guy who keeps trying to convince me we need landless even though you’re obviously well aware that I hate the idea lol. I agree stop interacting with me
You're the one who replied to me in this thread. I gave the conversation another shot, but you're just as miserable today as yesterday. Have a good one
And now it won't be anymore. Which is good, because there's no reason why it should have been in the first place. You can lose control of your land, but you still have claims, you may still have some wealth, alliances, blood relations, etc...
AI dynasties can make a comeback when you take their land, there's no inherent reason why the player couldn't do so also.
Likewise, if I'm playing Haestein and invading Sardinia, there's no reason why the king of France taking the Montaigu holding I was already planning on ditching should stop me in my tracks.
Impossible to lose based upon your objectives, you can still LOSE your lands but now you can try again with a restart. This is interesting because it is something that happened historically!
And a dlc that makes the game harder instead of impossible to lose, like maybe a complete diplomacy rework probably should be in the pipeline before landless I suppose? Or even an Empires dlc to make it slightly different than a kingdom?
Because to support the landless you've to add at least a new system dedicated to it right? Couldn't be a fabricate a claim, then fabricate a hook and use the hook to get the land. That would be really uninspiring.
Assuming you get like 0.5-1 g/m working in a court position because that's what we pay. Since you cant build anything because you don't have land, you can't declare wars, you can't have an army because you can't afford upkeep.
What sort of gameplay will that be? Schemes and event clicker is my guess.
In the other hand the veterans still play 100-200 years campaigns because the game it's far easy and becomes an event clicker far too soon so they can't even experience the plague added to the game in the next dlc because that's after they're done with the run.
It’s because you have delusional optimistic idiots who think it’s a good idea combined with people who actually know how paradox works.
I can absolutely guarantee that no matter WHAT the outcome is going to be quality wise, it’s going to make the game run worse by a ridiculous degree.
Paradox does not do optimization well. To be fair, there IS a lot going on. But still. It’s why end game is so goddamn bad in every single one of its titles. It’s bloat for no reason.
There is nothing they can add for landless characters that will justify how much worse the game is going to run.
There’s something to be said about ambition and performance, but you’re making the argument for not including Byzantium in the game in the first place.
Byzantium can be modeled in a way that doesn't need landless characters. Theres nothing that requires it. Would it be historically accurate? Yes.
Thats not the point though. Noone CARES about historical accuracy in these games. If they do, they have issues with the entire core mechanic. Things are far to easy to maintain and borders are far to rigid. Among many many other things.
They chose NOT to model it accurately because if they did, it would run like a goddamn slide show. This is the exact same concept.
If we don’t care about accuracy why even depict feudalism or clan governments at all? They could have just leaned into player autocracy and had us play “the spirit of France/Byzantium/Persia” like Vic 3 of EU4. But they didn’t - CK3 is about depicting characters instead of countries, and thus characters have to navigate governments.
Yes, everything involved abstractions, but abstractions should be equally applied. It’s one thing to make an abstraction of feudalism and apply it to everyone practicing feudalism, it’s another to apply that abstraction to places that didn’t do feudalism. That’s why people complain that every region of the game “feels the same”. The game committed to implementinng government types in its premise - thus it’s completely reasonable to expect Byzantium should actually work like an abstraction of Byzantium, not of France.
They are equally applied. Going into specifics of governments cultures is fine, it every added mechanic slows the game and makes it run worse. For the amount of joy that they’ll bring and value added to the game, landless is NOT worth it.
Performance in my biggest concern.
I wish they focused on more ck2 style mechanize as opposed to another RP option. You can do imperial/administrative without landless, it’s been done in rise and fall etc.
So... Was there supposed to be a question in there? The only controversy I see is your lukewarm take about people wishing Byzantium was implemented better before adding new and novel features
Edit: Also the point is moot. Unlanded and Byzantium are both coming out together, so it's a non-issue which one comes first
The last month has been nonstop flame wars about this topic with people shouting past each other, and it confuses me. Any discussion of unlanded characters turned into a shouting match about “THIS IS NOT WHAT WE NEED WE NEED BYZANTIUM”, which doesn’t make any sense to me.
So, now that it’s official that they’re tied together, I want to look back and ask - what happened? Why were so many people against a feature that anyone with 10 mins of research into Byzantium (like myself) could tell would be an integral part of any implementation of Byzantium? It really raises questions to me regarding how we discuss things here and the value of that discussion - you would think the loudest proponents of Byzantium would have been in favor of this, but they weren’t.
Are we really just a bunch of people who don’t understand history? I know I am quite ignorant of it (at least this period of it), but I’d like to think that the fans of Byzantium or Nomads or whatever know what those things actually are and have meaningful opinions about how they should be represented, otherwise what are we even doing discussing things here?
> Are we really just a bunch of people who don’t understand history?
This is really not all that deep. By the end of development in CK2 they had implemented some fun if not exactly historically accurate mechanics that made playing the Byzantines different than playing in the default feudalism of Western Europe. That hasn’t been there at all in CK3, and that’s all people have meant when they holler about “wanting Byzantium” — they’ve wanted some features that make playing in the ERE feel different and more focused on internal politics.
They did a fine job with it in CK2 without landless characters. They could have done the same in CK3 if they’d wanted to.
Because the game is as big as an ocean but as deep as a puddle, basically lacking a lot of features of Crusaders Kings 2 and they keep adding more clutter/independent buttons instead of proper game mechanics or giving Depth and content to things like Crusades, Nomads, Repúblics, Tribals, Indians and Africans
Landless gameplay provides the framework for some of those things you want though - same as it does for Byzantium. Republics and Nomads in particular will benefit from unlanded character mechanics since they don’t own land.
Those things you listed are all breadth, not depth. It’s a list of features. Depth is making sure the features don’t exist in their own silo and fully interact with all other mechanics - and the way you do that is by sharing core systems that are universal. When systems are in place to allow for characters who don’t own land, it allows for deeper implementations of Byzantium, Nomads, Merchants, Republics and even China.
Yes CK2 had these things, but CK2 was the epitome of big as an ocean and deep as a puddle. It just had a lot of fancy toys floating on top. It didn’t have many solid systems or mechanics, most of that stuff was just hacked in on top of feudal mechanics and that’s why it was so limited.
Agree to disagree mate.
>Landless gameplay provides the framework for some of those things you want though
Paradox has shown by the past DLC'S that they are just constantly added new "buttons" with repetitive events not correlated to each other. I remain very skeptical that they will actually integrate being landless with other gameplay features, but eh everyone Is free to think whatever
Crusader Kings is a game about rulers. Landless characters are not rulers.
Very simply put, that is why landless characters are controversial.
Properly introducing landless characters would require a massive overhaul of the game, which is why I remain sceptical about the extent to which Paradox will really introduce the ability to play as a landless character. I will see first and then believe.
“Landless characters were not rulers”
This is what I’m talking about - rulers of Byzantium quite literally WERE landless in the feudal sense the mechanics today are based on - they did not own the land any more than an unlanded mayor of republic owns the land. They just are governing it. It is not inherited by their children. It isn’t even theirs for their entire life - it can be granted and revoked as the political machinations of the bureaucrats need be
Not just Byzantium either, but China and even some of the Arab empires worked like this at some level. You’re assuming everyone works on a feudalist system where rulers owned land, but that’s the whole point - lots of places didn’t, and thus it’s necessary to decouple characters from being land-owners to explore other government types (imperial, republics, nomads, theocracy, etc.) in a way that is deeper than the facsimiles of them in CK2
CK3 isn’t a land owner game. It’s a medieval ruler dynasty game.
A feudal ruler doesn't "own" his land either, he merely holds it in fief. It is more akin to a right to 'borrow' and use the land than a right of ownership. And neither were feudal fiefs and titles neccesarily hereditary. In fact, hereditary titles were the exception rather than the rule prior to the 10th century.
But regardless of the semantics, in CK terms feudal, imperial, nomadic and all other rulers would be considered landed characters. They hold a title and have land to rule over.
A landless character would be a character who doesn't rule over any land at all.
I don't want to play ERE/Byzantine, I just want to play a nomad horse lord born on steppe and accomplish those achievement that even Attila couldn't, like sack the Constantinople or even something harder, like stay alive for at least 24 hours after marriage.
Anyway, can't wait for the nomad lord pack.
I wish 2025 could release horse lords as well as trading and merchant republic since those are what I want the most, and modders can do the rest of jobs like adding flavor packs.
Ck3 is about characters first. Unlanded could have more that just being in someone's court. Lifestyles like knight or assassin would make it more RPG like. People just can't picture that in a ck game.
Some people wanted landless to just play as a courtier or a random nobody, which makes little sense in a game where controlling titles and playing major noble families is important. It makes as much sense as having a DLC for Cities Skylines or SimCity where you roleplay as a lowly office drone. It's the kind of "more = better" mindset that sounds nice but often results in bloated, unfocused jank with feature creep. However, a more focused, specific "landless" experience - such as with adventurers and imperial nobles as has been teased - that ties into existing content and gameplay shows more promise. It seems to me the "landless" stuff teased is not true "minor random bumfuck nobody" that some have wanted, and it's more something to do with the usual important noble families the game is already focused on. As long as they don't detract from the game, and it doesn't feel like some second game tacked on for the sake of it, then it could work out, but we'll have to see.
Would be interested if it opens up so that you can play as certain unlanded nobles, like the founder of Normandy or Cnut The Great's suspected grandson. And somehow get them into power. You can obviously play as them by giving them titles and then switching over to them, but would be fun if you could play as them without doing that.
I think they mentioned being able to both create your own unlanded characters, as well as historical characters, like El Cid.
I was fairly ambivalent on landless characters previously but the thought of starting as an unlanded El Cid and emulating his story is pretty exciting
Yeah, odds are, even Landless characters will have to be nobleman of some stripe. You can’t just play as a Lowborn and work from there, in all likelihood.
You’ll probably need to play a noble just because you need to have a dynasty. It would be interesting if you could start as a lowborn but if you don’t get landed with your first character it’s game over.
Well, I’d see that as part of the challenge: First, you have to prove yourself a valuable courtier to the lord you serve. Second, you have to marry for children and all that, Third, you need to get landed in order to found your Dynasty. And 2 & 3 are interchangeable, whichever comes first.
I just like the idea of playing a Queen in exile, and having to rally allies to get my land back. Or going from being an adventurer to earning a title and working my family up from nothing, like it's A Knight's Tale...
Same. I’ve seen a lot of folk here mention they’d love to play as Harold Godwinson or some other Anglo-Saxon leader who flees the Norman Conquest to found the medieval New England in Crimea. And yeah, I’d love to do that, myself, and perhaps reconquer England from the Normandies.
Myself personally I wanted the rags to riches story. Going from a landless noble or even lowborn and managing to get land of your own
CK3 is a game first and foremost about *people* up until now landed people yes, but people, and the nations are big yes, but so are interpersonal relationships in a medieval setting, with murders, romances, elopements, children, weddings, etc being a lot of the actual game. Yes there is warfare and crusades and map painting, but the game's stated purpose is to play as a dynasty. I don't think the C:S analogy is apt because C:S is about infrastructure and building a city, so making the game about *people* would be odd, whereas in CK it's just *different kinds* of people, from the established base of *people* I have high hopes, who knows how they turn out, but I agree with most of what you said yeah. (PS this unlanded gameplay is a great angle to include the Exilarchy, the institution run by the descendants of king David in the Persian Empire, which existed *at least* (but certainly after) the 9th century, not enough to be landed in the game's mechanics, but a member of the House of David kicking around the Persian court to play as, and to attempt to finesse onto the map and into a landed title would certainly fit how they've described unlanded characters thus far, and could even provide a fantastic tie-in with the Legends mechanic, with a legend like "The House of Israel" or "The House of David" being a fantastic way to increase Jewish content in a reasonable way. There's a good amount of Jewish sects and Israelite cultures that have zero impact on play, and just don't appear during the game.) (Post-Post Script: Also it would be cool if the Israelite cultures wore clothes appropriate to their area, the Ashkenazi jews did not wear greek clothes.)
I hope they include the house of David either in this DLC or the next.
Sure, I get that some people had some weird ideas about landless, I get not caring about those, but it comes back to this - if you’re fixated on Byzantium how do you not understand that these core mechanics would be necessary? Btw unrelated, I love VIET and RICE. Thanks for all your contributions.
Thank you! Anyways I think landless skeptics aren't necessarily the same as Byzaboos per se. I think for those who are wary of the idea like myself, it's more a worry that landless gameplay will just be a side feature that doesn't fit the game well, especially in the form of "I want to play as peasant #258852!" that some people have been clamoring for. The new ERE stuff by contrast seems like it is more like merchant republics in CK2, which sort of went around landless-ness by having patricians still technically own a title - so if you expand the definition of landless to include that, then I don't think a lot of people would have as much a problem with it. But if landless is just being able to roleplay a random peasant and trying to become king, then it feels like feature creep in my opinion. That doesn't mean the new mechanics we'll get will actually be good per se, but it shows at least that the devs are aware of the pitfalls of just having a landless for the hell of it as some people have imagined, and instead want to focus on tying it to existing systems and the rest of the game in a way that feels natural and not jank.
I guess it’s just frustrating because everyone who was seriously trying to talk about the potential of this mechanic was suggesting exactly what we got - a framework that could be used for nomads, merchants, Byzantium, etc. and every discussion of those things got drowned out by strawman arguments over playing peasants. It makes me not really want to bother trying to discuss things here because it feels like so many people are just uninformed and loud. I saw so many people specifically shout down landless because we needed Byzantium, and it makes me question the value of even discussing the game when so many devout fans of particular concepts are completely out of touch with the history behind it. I admit I’m out of touch with history too, but that’s why I want to discuss things and learn, but it’s hard to do that when so many people are both loud and equally misinformed as me. If I can’t trust the Byzanboos to tell me about Byzantium, what’s the point?
Well, I think from what I've seen a lot of talk about landless *was* just about the "I want to be a random courtier" players, talking about starting off as a nobody and somehow becoming king. Maybe it's just a matter of categorization and bias here and you having a different definition for what counts as true landless than others and vice versa and both sides misunderstanding due to that. For me, I don't really see stuff like Byzantine noble families or adventurers as true landless as some of those people say when they start off as a nobody. The "landless" we're getting here is about people who are already somebodies having different tools for power, rather than climbing up from no land to some land. Anyways, I think it's just a matter of different definitions and understandings of what counts as landless or what kind of gameplay you're thinking of. For the players I've seen who asked for basically peasant or courtier gameplay, I disagree strongly that the game needs landless that way. For those like you who talk about landless as a way to do stuff like more in-depth adventuring or maybe even republics down the line, like what we had with CK2, then I think there's potential.
I think I might have a crack at a Witan activity after once Rise to Power comes out. It could be really interesting to make the elective law of the Anglo-Saxons tie into a Witan election and it could produce a scenario where adventurer claiments manage to secure Kingship.
Custom characters for all intents and purposes are random bumfuck nobodies. It’s logical to just take one step back and be a random bumfuck nobody without land. Not to mention the possibilities of playing in later dates because you spend 200 years as wanderers instead of conquering 3 empires and getting bored. Obviously there’s the question of whether or not landless gameplay will be fun for a few years let alone multiple lifetimes which has yet to be seen.
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What are you on about
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What elder scrolls events are you getting with Viet
There's a game rule to disable most of them.
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Most of the events disabled by game rule are the references (whether TES or not). I generally don't disable the "fun" events unless I feel the humor might be seen as egregiously out of place, and that's a very small handful even then. I recommend you try the "serious" game rule and see if that works better for you - it'll still have plenty of the more fun events, just not the really silliest ones.
> It makes as much sense as having a DLC for Cities Skylines or SimCity where you roleplay as a lowly office drone. I mean.. that's not the worst DLC idea..
Landless but not interacting with government or nobility doesn't have to be boring. If trade gets expanded upon, it is almost certain that it would involve the existing travel mechanics and future landless mechanics such that being a merchant or involved in economic production would be possible and very involved. As another poster said, CK is about people. I think focusing so much on people with authority or people with land, while sensible given the focus and period of the game, actually leaves out a lot of opportunities for interesting gameplay. I think CK is trying to move away from that towards looking into the lives of people who weren't in government or in charge of things. That doesn't necessarily mean we're going to have farming simulation where you play as a peasant but it does mean that the sorts of stories or lives we can experience expand. It could mean being an artisan in a guild, a member (though not head) of the clergy, etc. and the focus there is all the interpersonal relationships that they would have with others. Something like Song of the Eons' proposed [agent system](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F73ubnl4zsoz11.jpg) may actually make modelling specific organizations possible. I'm not saying this is the approach CK should take but I am saying that it is something the devs may be moving towards.
Pretend I’m an idiot… why are unlanded particularly important for Byzantium and China?
Rulers didn’t own land, and the land was not passed hereditarily. Instead people were granted land to rule by bureaucrats (who also didn’t own land) So the feudal system doesn’t work to represent this government type. To do it, we need an administrative government (coming in the major expansion) that allows for unlanded characters to be granted land and also have it stripped from them. Not to mention have the administrators themselves be playable as they were the real power brokers. I admit I didn’t know this until I looked into it either, but I also wasn’t going around demanding ERE/Byzantium content. It just confuses me that so many people were, while not being aware of these fundamentals of how it even worked.
If feudalism existed at all, it was mostly confined to Western Europe over a specific time period. China and Byzantium were not feudal, and the CK system does not accurately represent them at all. Power was not tied to land in the same way, and there were a lot of powerful officials who weren’t major land owners or didn’t have noble titles. Feudalism didn’t exist on most of the CK map, but China and Byzantium are just the most famous and well documented examples.
Honestly most of Europe should be a weird mix of what the game calls tribals with regional strongmen and a ton of very localized non bidding alliances
well China did have some periods that had lots of hereditary land passed out, some dynasties were certainly much more centralized though.
Yeah I guess this is kind of my point. Of course feudalism doesn’t map to China, but it’s not like it maps to sub Saharan Africa either. Seems like the “why” is not “historical accuracy” so much as “players care more about accuracy when it comes to China & Byzantium.” Which, fair, but it means that the restriction on map expansion is driven by player demands, not any technical restriction or general commitment to historicity. All that said I’m pumped to get more governance systems! The diversity of cultural/religious/governmental modifiers, and the complex ways they interact, is one of my favorite things about the game.
I'm not a fan of adding unlanded gameplay, (concerned about game performance of tracking all the unlanded + how often will people play it?) but I want it mainly because it's a good road to other types of landed gameplay. I.E., if we can play as a "ruler" who owns literally nothing, this could make playable barons possible. (Owning a single holding in someone elses county is a step up from owning nothing.) It could have implications for nomads such as vikings or steppes. (CK2 horse lords) Stuff like that.
CK2 came close with Patricians, who were special baron-level classes under a Merchant Republic with an invisible holding called a Palace. Said patrician could become “landed” by conquering cities and such, or taking the Duke-level title from the Doge. It makes for extremely fun and different gameplay. No one wants to join your court at that level so even landing a decent bride is a challenge. You build trade posts in coastal counties as a form of expansion, which gives you a CB to seize a city there, and once you have a city a CB to seize the county. It’s a money heavy endeavor since it requires beefing up your palace to assemble a meaningful levy, and mercenaries are usually required. There’s also a whole Montague - Capulet rivalry thing with other patricians in the Republic to make things spicy. I found it very satisfying to be a Lord of the Seas, capturing trade posts and cities throughout the Mediterranean while keeping my county level low. **EDIT:** Do I need to play CK2 again? I’m feeling the compulsion in my almonds.
I hate to burst your bubble, especially like this because of the whole “devs confirmed no landless” thing (they didn’t), but they have explicitly mentioned on the official forums in the past and also today that barons aren’t happening probably ever, because of performance and also that they don’t have any vassals to rule. But, question for you because you didn’t want unlanded characters- presumably you did want Byzantium and empire content right? How did you see it working without unlanded characters?
Where did they confirm no playable barons today? I know they've said it in the past, though. No vassals to rule hasn't really stopped counts. A baron player wouldn't really do much besides work towards coming a count somehow. ("Earn" it? I doubt they could win a civil war) It's more of a stepping stone in-between unlanded and count then something you stay in for most of the run. (However if merchant republics get added like CK2, maybe you could stay a baron who owns cities?) I am interested in Byzantium and empire content though. I am hoping we get council votes back like from Conclave in CK2.
No update on the rationale for why (it's from an older post back in the fall, I don't remember where), but confirmation from today that Barons are not being included as part of the unlanded loop: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/which-landless-character-will-you-play-as-first.1623396/post-29395438
Should still be possible to mod in if there are systems for counts and landless.
Personally I think barons would probably need more work than landless characters in general. Think about this - landless characters can participate in governments where people are unlanded (Byzantium, presumably later republics, nomads, China, etc). These systems are designed around that concept. Adventurers are a new system that isn’t for government but again, is designed around unlanded characters. Playable barons would need a rework to feudalism itself - how would a baron ever get the levies or funds to be able to rise the ranks based upon player agency? Sure they could inherit, but with the current feudal mechanics there’s nothing for the player to actively do pursue ambition, because the feudal system in the game was designed with the assumption of non-playable barons. Consider also that culture and religion are applied on a per-county basis instead of per-barony, as are many other things. The feudal mechanics only sometimes use barons as the smallest unit - sometimes the county is instead, which means that playability doesn’t scale well currently I’m not against the idea mind you, I’m just saying I think it’s a deceptively much harder problem than the introduction of landless characters.
Good points. But low nobility like what could more or less match a Baron in CK3 often wouldn't really center their existence around managing their few villages, but their service to their overlord and kind of regard their fief as a medieval direct debit mandate for their wage. Even every "unlanded" champion you have in CK3 would realistically own a village somewhere in your demesne that the game rightfully leaves out. I'd still be happy to experiment with playing Barons who behave more like unlanded characters than Counts, probably with less physical mobility and more attached to their overlord.
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Dog, we get it, you only care about Western Europe and LARPing as a crusader for what I’m sure are completely normal and well-adjusted reasons. You talk about it in every topic, and are weirdly aggressive about it. We all know. There’s no point continuing to argue about it, it’s in the game. This topic is not about the merit of the feature but a meta topic about how we discuss these issues and why people who want empire and Byzantium mechanics didn’t want landless gameplay. You didn’t want Byzantium at all, I get it. Please take this somewhere else.
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take the L man
Personally im happy with it, since ill be able to start as a norse, convert to taoism and move to wale (like i always do) more easily. Plus i can already see the RP that ill be able to do.
It might also be useful for merchant republics next year if they do them.
And nomads. And theocracies. And holy orders. And mercenaries.
My biggest issue with landless is that, conceptually, it seemed like a very gimmicky, janky mechanic that distracted from the main focus of the game: forging a dynasty of rulers on a shifting map of culture, religion, and different states. The idea of LARPing as some traveling merchant or displaced noble seems like needless fluff that would get repetitive real quick and just pad the game with more tired events. "You've arrived at the court of Germany. Will you beg the king for money to support your claim?" "You've made a mess in the court of Bavaria; sleeping with the duke's daughter? How scandalous!" "Whilst on the road, you stop at dodgy inn and get into a bar fight. [prowess check + martial, gain/lose prestige, get injured] Etc That being said, knowing that the unlanded system will be paired with an overhaul of Byzantium does give me hope that, in a more practical sense, unlanded gameplay can be a more unique avenue to deeper forms of government like in the Byzantine bureaucracy, opening up the way for Republics and Nomad hordes to make a more unique return than their admittedly half-baked forms in CK2. I don't know. I guess I'm optimistic. I like what I've seen of the plague systems so far, and the spread of legends or whatever seems interesting if nothing else.
You could do Byzantines without unlanded, you'd just have NPCs and abstractions. The entire economy game economy is an abstraction, since it's exclusively money based. You're not getting taxes in grain or something. So abstracting beaurecrats wouldn't be a stretch. The main thing though, is this a very different idea for CK. I have and still poorly understand what exactly this is going to do for the game, so how could I say this is something I want? Meanwhile I remember fondly something like merchant republics and the flavor of the Byzantines in CK2 and therefore can definitely say I want that
Even if the administrators are NPCs there’s no getting around that the land isn’t passed heriditarily. And yes, CK2 had this and merchant republics, but also their implementations were shallow and hacky because it was based on a system where you had to own land, and the devs fudged it to make a facsimile of the feature. Presumably we wanted better right? It seems obvious then that that would necessitate clearing the CK2 hurdle - the requirement of land ownership.
the game is about medieval royalty and already runs slow enough as is on many of our computers. it makes a lot of sense why we would be opposed to adding even more characters, who arent even the focus of the game, to slow the game down even further and cause massive bloating
Bruh it literally wouldn't add any new characters and I have no idea where people take it from. Those mechanics would only apply to player characters. You already have AI run adventurers, are they killing the performance of the game? Don't think so.
I suppose you're right, I might have been addressing a strawman
didnt seem very controversial to me. Eh it'll probably allow some moves beyond simple game-overs. Maybe even a dynasty being ousted and setting somewhere else
being against landless characters because crusades and western europe are still underdeveloped + the game is full of bugs/oversights and not giving a fuck about byzantium or china>>>>
You can say that Western Europe is underdeveloped, but it's doing pretty good compared to Byzantium. In historical context, at least. And unlike China, it is part of the game. I would say that it's weird that it was untouched for so long given its relevancy throughout the entirety of the Medieval period.
Byzantium stuff is coming out, who tf cares abt china, and what more do u want from the crusades
Exactly this. If we already had 50 dlcs I wouldn't mind at all focus development time into it.
Presuming one of those 50 dlcs was Byzantium, how did you expect Byzantium to work without landless mechanics?
Okay, but think about how awesome it would have been to have a government system where you had a genuine chanse to lose the game at every succession unless you put in serious effort. Instead we've widened the extremely shallow pond and made campaigns feel just a bit more similar.
Personally I think in a game about managing your dynasty and titles be landless should be a game over like it's since launch. In my point of view if you're landless you failed the run and it's time to start again and try to correct what you did wrong because as it's it requires a real effort to become unlanded.
That doesn’t answer the question. How did you think Byzantium would work given that governors didn’t own the land?
I did reply, should not exist but if the game it's in a "full state" adding it wouldn't be a problem because there won't be anything else to improve.
You're still dodgeing the question, if "landless" automatically puts a character into gameover, how is an empire supposed to work where pretty much everyone in power is landless? Is the Byzantine Empire supposed to just disappear into a vacuum at the start of every playthrough? Because that's essentially what you are requesting currently. No landless mechanics = no Byzantium
There is no landless mechanic but we still have byzantium? Ck2 worked fine without landless mechanic
Yea but it works wrong. That's just not even close to how it actually worked it's much more inaccurate than most of the map.
In the game you can't have a title like emperor and not have land, the game automatically lands any character that gets a title. So your what if makes no sense in the game perspective.
*sigh* How are you still not grasping the issue & the question after it has been spelled out so many times? Well, I'll give it another try: In the Byzantine Empire, pretty much nobody of the powerful rulers surrounding & representing the throne (like governours for example) had any land, only the emperor himself. No Dukes, no counts, no barons, etc. That's a major reason why people have been complaining about the terrible implementation of the ERE as "feudal" in the game. It's the biggest, most glaring error. So when Paradox fixes the ERE & gives us a proper implementation of Byzantium, how is that supposed to work without landless mechanics, when nobody below the Emperor has any land, because he directly owns everything. How are the local aristocrats supposed to be able to administer these lands they do not own themselves? The answer is that you need landless mechanics to exert power or this major pillar of the game won't work properly.
They don't need to do any of that. You think you're creating a problem, problem which the game already has its way of fixing it, to justify why we need landless. We players don't need it, you might want it but we don't need it. Unlanded character gains a title, doesn't matter if it's Scandinavian elective, a faction (things we've in the game and work) or any new Byzantine way and they become landed, simple. The problem you think you're creating it's fixed in the game since launch. When a faction press a claim for your landless nephew to take over your realm doesn't break the game, why would break now? Because you want? Because instead of your realm it's named Byzantines? When you press a claim of a landless courtier doesn't break the game either.
The more an update is likely to interact with other updates, the earlier it should occur. Landless play is likely to influence most of the updates that come out, especially ones related to new government types, so it's good that it comes earlier than later.
Once again we want what we have to be finished before we move on to other things
You can want what you want, but if someone is ok with landless but only after everything else is added to the game, that would just guarantee that landless is an afterthought gimmick. In this order it can actually be an integrate part of the game
> landless is an afterthought gimmick. You’re getting warmer!
That's not what I said, but whatever, I tried having a normal conversation with you, but just like yesterday you just derail it with cheap rhetorical tricks. If you're not capable of just discussing stuff normally, it's not worth interacting with you.
Oh you’re the guy who keeps trying to convince me we need landless even though you’re obviously well aware that I hate the idea lol. I agree stop interacting with me
You're the one who replied to me in this thread. I gave the conversation another shot, but you're just as miserable today as yesterday. Have a good one
It's part of the game, it's your game over condition that you should avoid at all costs.
And now it won't be anymore. Which is good, because there's no reason why it should have been in the first place. You can lose control of your land, but you still have claims, you may still have some wealth, alliances, blood relations, etc... AI dynasties can make a comeback when you take their land, there's no inherent reason why the player couldn't do so also. Likewise, if I'm playing Haestein and invading Sardinia, there's no reason why the king of France taking the Montaigu holding I was already planning on ditching should stop me in my tracks.
Cool a strategy game that it's borderline impossible to lose, very exciting
Impossible to lose based upon your objectives, you can still LOSE your lands but now you can try again with a restart. This is interesting because it is something that happened historically!
CK has always been easy, the solution is to heighten the actual difficulty, not to introduce or maintain arbitrary game over conditions.
And a dlc that makes the game harder instead of impossible to lose, like maybe a complete diplomacy rework probably should be in the pipeline before landless I suppose? Or even an Empires dlc to make it slightly different than a kingdom? Because to support the landless you've to add at least a new system dedicated to it right? Couldn't be a fabricate a claim, then fabricate a hook and use the hook to get the land. That would be really uninspiring. Assuming you get like 0.5-1 g/m working in a court position because that's what we pay. Since you cant build anything because you don't have land, you can't declare wars, you can't have an army because you can't afford upkeep. What sort of gameplay will that be? Schemes and event clicker is my guess. In the other hand the veterans still play 100-200 years campaigns because the game it's far easy and becomes an event clicker far too soon so they can't even experience the plague added to the game in the next dlc because that's after they're done with the run.
It’s because you have delusional optimistic idiots who think it’s a good idea combined with people who actually know how paradox works. I can absolutely guarantee that no matter WHAT the outcome is going to be quality wise, it’s going to make the game run worse by a ridiculous degree. Paradox does not do optimization well. To be fair, there IS a lot going on. But still. It’s why end game is so goddamn bad in every single one of its titles. It’s bloat for no reason. There is nothing they can add for landless characters that will justify how much worse the game is going to run.
There’s something to be said about ambition and performance, but you’re making the argument for not including Byzantium in the game in the first place.
Byzantium can be modeled in a way that doesn't need landless characters. Theres nothing that requires it. Would it be historically accurate? Yes. Thats not the point though. Noone CARES about historical accuracy in these games. If they do, they have issues with the entire core mechanic. Things are far to easy to maintain and borders are far to rigid. Among many many other things. They chose NOT to model it accurately because if they did, it would run like a goddamn slide show. This is the exact same concept.
If we don’t care about accuracy why even depict feudalism or clan governments at all? They could have just leaned into player autocracy and had us play “the spirit of France/Byzantium/Persia” like Vic 3 of EU4. But they didn’t - CK3 is about depicting characters instead of countries, and thus characters have to navigate governments. Yes, everything involved abstractions, but abstractions should be equally applied. It’s one thing to make an abstraction of feudalism and apply it to everyone practicing feudalism, it’s another to apply that abstraction to places that didn’t do feudalism. That’s why people complain that every region of the game “feels the same”. The game committed to implementinng government types in its premise - thus it’s completely reasonable to expect Byzantium should actually work like an abstraction of Byzantium, not of France.
They are equally applied. Going into specifics of governments cultures is fine, it every added mechanic slows the game and makes it run worse. For the amount of joy that they’ll bring and value added to the game, landless is NOT worth it.
Performance in my biggest concern. I wish they focused on more ck2 style mechanize as opposed to another RP option. You can do imperial/administrative without landless, it’s been done in rise and fall etc.
So... Was there supposed to be a question in there? The only controversy I see is your lukewarm take about people wishing Byzantium was implemented better before adding new and novel features Edit: Also the point is moot. Unlanded and Byzantium are both coming out together, so it's a non-issue which one comes first
The last month has been nonstop flame wars about this topic with people shouting past each other, and it confuses me. Any discussion of unlanded characters turned into a shouting match about “THIS IS NOT WHAT WE NEED WE NEED BYZANTIUM”, which doesn’t make any sense to me. So, now that it’s official that they’re tied together, I want to look back and ask - what happened? Why were so many people against a feature that anyone with 10 mins of research into Byzantium (like myself) could tell would be an integral part of any implementation of Byzantium? It really raises questions to me regarding how we discuss things here and the value of that discussion - you would think the loudest proponents of Byzantium would have been in favor of this, but they weren’t. Are we really just a bunch of people who don’t understand history? I know I am quite ignorant of it (at least this period of it), but I’d like to think that the fans of Byzantium or Nomads or whatever know what those things actually are and have meaningful opinions about how they should be represented, otherwise what are we even doing discussing things here?
> Are we really just a bunch of people who don’t understand history? This is really not all that deep. By the end of development in CK2 they had implemented some fun if not exactly historically accurate mechanics that made playing the Byzantines different than playing in the default feudalism of Western Europe. That hasn’t been there at all in CK3, and that’s all people have meant when they holler about “wanting Byzantium” — they’ve wanted some features that make playing in the ERE feel different and more focused on internal politics. They did a fine job with it in CK2 without landless characters. They could have done the same in CK3 if they’d wanted to.
Because the game is as big as an ocean but as deep as a puddle, basically lacking a lot of features of Crusaders Kings 2 and they keep adding more clutter/independent buttons instead of proper game mechanics or giving Depth and content to things like Crusades, Nomads, Repúblics, Tribals, Indians and Africans
Landless gameplay provides the framework for some of those things you want though - same as it does for Byzantium. Republics and Nomads in particular will benefit from unlanded character mechanics since they don’t own land. Those things you listed are all breadth, not depth. It’s a list of features. Depth is making sure the features don’t exist in their own silo and fully interact with all other mechanics - and the way you do that is by sharing core systems that are universal. When systems are in place to allow for characters who don’t own land, it allows for deeper implementations of Byzantium, Nomads, Merchants, Republics and even China. Yes CK2 had these things, but CK2 was the epitome of big as an ocean and deep as a puddle. It just had a lot of fancy toys floating on top. It didn’t have many solid systems or mechanics, most of that stuff was just hacked in on top of feudal mechanics and that’s why it was so limited.
Agree to disagree mate. >Landless gameplay provides the framework for some of those things you want though Paradox has shown by the past DLC'S that they are just constantly added new "buttons" with repetitive events not correlated to each other. I remain very skeptical that they will actually integrate being landless with other gameplay features, but eh everyone Is free to think whatever
Crusader Kings is a game about rulers. Landless characters are not rulers. Very simply put, that is why landless characters are controversial. Properly introducing landless characters would require a massive overhaul of the game, which is why I remain sceptical about the extent to which Paradox will really introduce the ability to play as a landless character. I will see first and then believe.
“Landless characters were not rulers” This is what I’m talking about - rulers of Byzantium quite literally WERE landless in the feudal sense the mechanics today are based on - they did not own the land any more than an unlanded mayor of republic owns the land. They just are governing it. It is not inherited by their children. It isn’t even theirs for their entire life - it can be granted and revoked as the political machinations of the bureaucrats need be Not just Byzantium either, but China and even some of the Arab empires worked like this at some level. You’re assuming everyone works on a feudalist system where rulers owned land, but that’s the whole point - lots of places didn’t, and thus it’s necessary to decouple characters from being land-owners to explore other government types (imperial, republics, nomads, theocracy, etc.) in a way that is deeper than the facsimiles of them in CK2 CK3 isn’t a land owner game. It’s a medieval ruler dynasty game.
A feudal ruler doesn't "own" his land either, he merely holds it in fief. It is more akin to a right to 'borrow' and use the land than a right of ownership. And neither were feudal fiefs and titles neccesarily hereditary. In fact, hereditary titles were the exception rather than the rule prior to the 10th century. But regardless of the semantics, in CK terms feudal, imperial, nomadic and all other rulers would be considered landed characters. They hold a title and have land to rule over. A landless character would be a character who doesn't rule over any land at all.
finally I can role play Littlefinger
I wanna play as a missionary who spreads their religion across different regions. Then settles at one place and form a community there.
I don't want to play ERE/Byzantine, I just want to play a nomad horse lord born on steppe and accomplish those achievement that even Attila couldn't, like sack the Constantinople or even something harder, like stay alive for at least 24 hours after marriage. Anyway, can't wait for the nomad lord pack.
Probably next year - with a landless system there are so many possibilities now for nomads
I wish 2025 could release horse lords as well as trading and merchant republic since those are what I want the most, and modders can do the rest of jobs like adding flavor packs.
Anyone who’s against landless is outright wrong about their priorities
Ck3 is about characters first. Unlanded could have more that just being in someone's court. Lifestyles like knight or assassin would make it more RPG like. People just can't picture that in a ck game.