Vikings Crusader Kings 3
Argimiro Krishnamoorthy
Crusader Kings II: The Old Gods has just been announced , and will add playable pagans and Zoroastrians to Paradox's grand medieval strategy sandbox. It's fair to say I was just a tiny bit out of my mind excited. Some notable new features include an extension of the timeline back to 867 A.D., and (sadly unplayable) landless adventurers who set out with their bands of warriors to found new kingdoms in true Viking fashion. I got to raid the brain-villages of Chris King, one of the expansion's designers. Read on to share in the knowledge I plundered.
One tidbit I picked up not included in this interview: 867 will be a stand-alone start date. Unlike the rest of CK2's timeline, you won't be able to advance the clock day by day between 867 and 1066. This, unfortunately, means you won't be able to play as some of the intervening figures such as Brian Boru, the legendary Irish king who founded the house I played as in the first Crusader Kings Chronicle .
At the moment, we've been focusing in on the Norse pagans. So as a Norse pagan, you can now erect a runestone in your honor, we have these little things like that. And you can also go a-viking. So you can set yourself up for a big invasion of somewhere.
And then we're going to try to go through all the other pagans and see what we can do with them. So we've kind of been talking about giving, like, the Baltic pagans maybe defensive bonuses or these kinds of things. But we're going to look at each pagan [religion] in turn and say, what can we do to bring them out and make them interesting?
Yes. Well, Norse is our first one. We've actually changed the cultures. So Scandinavia is now "Norse" culture at game start [in 867]. There's no Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians. And then they will split up into the three.
Yeah, the Aztecs will be playable. So I think you can actually tag into them when the Sunset Invasion arrives if you want to. If you decide you want a cruising mid-late game, you can always take over that invasion.
The engine doesn't really support that. So I don't think we can make landless characters playable. I mean, we had to to actually create special settlements for the republican families, with the palace thing. Which was their core settlement, so they would always be landed.
Yes. Well, there's two parts to it. If you decide I'm going to call an invasion, and then you get your vikings turning up...if you then refuse to declare war, you've got, like, a two year window to do it, then you will get big penalties.
And Prestige is a key thing. So, because these invasions are your biggest way of getting troops over land, I can be the poorest count in Norway. But if I have a high enough Prestige, I can declare invasions for one of my pagan neighbors, in fact, summon Vikings, and basically kick them in. So you have to make sure you have a lot of Prestige so you can counter-invade and things like this.
The other part is, obviously, that if you go looting, you're going to get money. And money still translates into building upgrades and all these kinds of things. It builds up your core demesne, allows you to buy titles...so, money is still power, even in the Viking Era.
Well, that's definitely going to be a kind of tweaking/balancing thing. We definitely think it should destroy improvements. You know, but it's going to be a question of balance, how much damage they should do. Should they be able to burn down whole holdings? Or should they set back your improvements in holdings? That's going to be something we'll play around with.
Yeah, I played the King of Scotland, and the Great Heathen Army was obviously beating up the English. Which was pleasing for me. But then there's one scripted invasion [after 867] we have, which is the Great Summer Army, which came a year after the Great Heathen Army. And he should pick East Anglia, but he actually has a random chance of picking another county.
The Jomsvikings were a legendary company of mercenaries dedicated to the worship of Norse deities such as Odin and Thor. They are analogous to Christian military orders such as the Teutonic Order or the Livonian Order that exist in game.
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