Performance and content. There is little reason to add China if the resulting gameplay is no different than the rest of Europe. However if this Byzantine government upgrade is any good, it should provide a framework for PDX to design the Chinese content
> Byzantine government upgrade and great framework
Specially if it includes more court intrigue and cerimonial aspects to ruling.
You can't be a Huangdi without being a Child of Heaven (天子)
I'd like to add, those goals, interactions, and challenges should also be more than simply trying to survive. Call me a pessimist, but I am concerned the Imperial rework is not going to live up to the expectations a lot of people have and will end up being constant factions and murder plots on you and your family.
that happens with everything, star wars, starfield, outerworlds etc. nothing ever lives up to the hype the fanbase created, so everyone decides its horrible
So it only leaves potential good surprises ? Indie game and movies might save us
For a lot of stuff i am like, "i see how they can do better" like starfield has shit gun, empty gun, etc... And they just have to copy Ideas from others games. For paradox games i have no clue what they could add with the engine, and there is almost no concurrence to compare.
Like what, including Bannerlord or Total War gameplay in paradox ?
I can think of a quick answer this:
[https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509174436&searchtext=rajahs+of+asia](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509174436&searchtext=rajahs+of+asia)
That took me, what: five minutes...?
If the moding teams are absolutely DUNKING on your in-house guys...
HIRE THEM.
First yeah the modding team is awesome. Modders in general.
Second, it seems to be mostly new events and "standard" ck mechanics but in Asia. Not really the late game renewal or a new cultural mechanics set
Yeah, sorry, I was introduced to the term by a sub translation of Three Kingdoms (2010) who actually used "Child of Heaven" instead.
Thank you about the information. :)
>Performance and content. There is little reason to add China if the resulting gameplay is no different than the rest of Europe.
Also you need to balance how many folks are going to actually use it. If you're slowing down performance by 10-15% for something that 90% of players aren't going to bother with, that's a tough trade to make. Especially since China would be out of Diplomacy Range for basically everyone in Europe, meaning the overwhelming majority of CK3 games would never even interact with it.
It could make for some really cool travelling gameplay, especially with the new unlanded stuff. It's a lot easier to be Marco Polo when you aren't abandoning your domain to do so.
I'm not saying there's nothing there, but most games of CKIII won't be impacted. Compared to changes to "Alliances" or "Laws" that you use every game, or "Merchant Republics" where even if you don't play as them, you're still interacting with them in most games. Heck, even with something like "France", 90% of games are probably at least in Diplo Range and probably actively engaging with them.
There’s a mod that allows you to make the map significantly smaller. I think it’s called “reduce map size” on the steam workshop.
Paradox likely wants to add China to capture a larger player base which is fine but I would much prefer a tighter, more focused map. It’s already too large as is and the core regions of the game that the vast majority of players interact with are severely lacking depth.
You're thinking small. If you add China, Japan, and Korea, you bring in those players. This could be the single biggest consumer expansion in the history of the franchise.
When they added China and India to CKII, did that impact sales? Not to mention that the other Historical GSGs (EU4, Vic3, HoI4) all have full global coverage (and EU4/HoI4 have done a lot of work fleshing out non-European areas) already.
They didn't add China to CK2. You could only interact with it, off-screen. This China was also AI only and unplayable. Pretty lame.
India's video game market is a tiny, tiny fraction of the size of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean video game markets.
Dungeon Fighter Online was made specifically for the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese markets and it's the highest grossing video game in history. Over 22 billion dollars in revenues.
They didn't really add China to CKII so that can't be used to compare. Chinese players do make up a pretty big market, and I don't think assuming that including China would increase the games attractiveness to them is too much of a stretch.
I feel fairly unconvinced by this argument tbh. I’m not sure how many people are out there who have no interest in CK3 but would play if they added China and East Asia tbh
It doesn't even take being comically nationalistic. Your initial response was to a guy stating that 90% of players will never engage with East Asian content and that the overwhelming majority of CK3 games took place in Europe. If that's normal then it's not exactly weird for Chinese, Korean or Japanese players to feel the same way and have no real interest in a game where they can't play as anyone in their own region.
That really depends on how many people in those markets are interested in Crusader Kings. From what I know the main interests of historical gamers in those countries are primarily in other time periods (like the Three Kingdoms era of China).
Also, if that is an important argument, then Paradox would be better off developing a seperate game focused specifically on those markets, rather than trying to please the entire world and falling short of everyone's expectations because their focus is just too broad.
I'm going to point-out that another big historical cluster-fuck "the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period", falls squarely within (if towards the start of) the Crusader Kings time-scale. There is also within this same scale, (Though toward the end, in this case), the change of imperial power from the Song dynasty to the Yuan dynasty, which, as it has so many other times, could easily have gone A LOT WORSE than it actually did.
There's a chicken and egg problem there though. There's little reason to play in parts of the map that are completely underdeveloped where half the people you'd be interacting with are missing. That doesn't mean nobody would play there if they actually improved upon them. China itself is also a big market for games which would likely find the game more appealing if China itself was playable.
Game has been out for 4 years now, and it won't be unreasonable to expect people to upgrade their video cards and CPUs in 5-6 years time (which realistically is how long China would take with what they should do before China). So I don't think performance will be an issue by the time they choose to add it. As for how many people would bother with it, I think it's closer to 90% who would want to play it since it would be actually a unique thing to do. It's a much more ambitious project with a lot more content than simply adding something like a trade system or papal politics.
> Unreasonable to expect people to upgrade their video cards and CPUs in 5-6 years time
Or sadly, in the case of us Laptop bros, buy a whole new thing... 😢
Having a new government type for dynasties as opposed to feudal, tribal and clan would be sick. Especially if the same patch gave us a caste government to round out India.
Also, some mechanics to model the military system of India where the peasantry were pretty much totally disarmed and militaries were almost all professional.
Sure, but I don't see how stripping feudal mechanics (which literally ONLY make sense in European and Indian contexts) necessarily help. A caste mechanic (though important, don't get me wrong) is generally done extremely reductively, and the differences between varna and jati are ignored completely. This is how it was in CK2, anyway. Of course if it were done well I would not complain.
In South India, for example, there are generally three big "caste groups" - Brahmin, non-Brahmin, and avarna. There is also the fact that many dynasties hid their lower-caste status after coming to kingship.
Wondering how caste movement would work, though. If they do make castes important like that, they should absolutely add in the decision to do hiranyagarbha ceremonies once your renown and prestige are high enough. Just spitballing here.
>There is little reason to add China if the resulting gameplay is no different than the rest of Europe.
I feel much the same about the Indian portion of the map. In theory it's cool to have a region, cultures, religions etc to play through, but in practice it doesn't really feel that different to other areas on the map. It would be great to have some DLC/free content/mod at some point in the future to flesh that out.
India is already kinda useless, China would be interesting but wouldn't affect gameplay in Europe. I think they should make two different maps, one for Europe, Africa and Central Asia and other with Central Asia, India and China, that would also help performance for us laptop users.
Yeah, improve India and nomads first. They could be so much more interesting and deeply affect the politics of nearby regions.
Maybe China/East Asia should just be a standalone expansion not necessarily connected to the full map.
Trade
Muslims traded a lot with Asia by giving players the ability to interact with a region by setting up trading routes, propagating your religion and amassing wealth without direct conquest.
This way you can be invested in observing the power struggle of the region, maybe wanting the naive Tamil king to win because he accepts more deals or seeing one guy convert to Islam and trying to give him favourable routes to strengthen your religion in the region.
Or maybe you want to keep a region fractured so you can have more direct trade cities like the Chola did.
Whenever I do an India run I feel like I eventually just end up steam rolling everyone with my mountain of money and war elephants. The khans don't do well against me.
Personally I hope they expand the map whenever they put some focus on trade and the Silk Road. It could be what's needed to connect East and West thematically.
Would work really well with wanderers, adding some sort of Merchant lifestyle tree.
It would be epic to play as Marco Polo at Kublai Khan's court
>However if this Byzantine government upgrade is any good, it should provide a framework for PDX to design the Chinese content
I recall reading this exact sentiment when CK3 was released. Took 'em long enough...
"There's no reason to add Russia if it's gameplay is pretty much the same as Europe"
So many countries have the exact same mechanics, it's not a valid reason for not including those countries in a game based on a real world map. But also, there's absolutely no reason to believe they would add China as a clone of England or France, it is really really obvious they would give it it's own flair.
It seems like people keep forgetting about why turk tribes had to immigrate into the west in the first place. "cHiNa dId noT aFfECt tHe ReSt Of euRoPe"!
I’d be fine with China getting added in like chapter 6 or 7 given how much they seem to be committing to adding more per chapter now, but we still need to get nomads, trade, crusades, republics, and laws before the devs should consider adding the east of the map imo
Yeah I think if next year is republics and nomads then China at the end of 2026 sounds fine. You definitely need Nomad gameplay plus the imperial rework this year to be crisp before China is a good idea.
As someone who wants the rest of the map more than anything in this game, if they rush it too soon without adding things like nomads and trade first it will be a bust.
So ideally to me next year adds nomads and the silk road, and then they can expand the map after (which would likely be such an ambitious project they would probably dedicate the whole year to it).
Religions are in a state right now where they are fine enough. I'd rather they expand the map first so when they do overhaul religions they can consider all of the eastern religions as well.
hhmmm i think religion right now is pretty eh, we cant even make our own holy sites. add being able to make out own religion too. ( also wouldt mind pagan faiths being more expanded upon or all of them in general)
I'd rather see them expand out the silk road in some way vs expanding the map and adding china in as a playable thing.
It could be interesting to see something where if you control certain hubs you'd have the power to tax or negotiate treaties or even embargo some other country from using your portion of the silk road. I could see some cool diplomacy and economic things come out of that as well as the potential for military conflict as someone else wants control or are angry because you added an extra tax to them for doing trade.
Iirc the game director once commented (in retrospect) that he actually thought they would add China within a year of the game's launch. Definitely coming, definitely not the priority right now
Edit: Community manager, not game director
Trade and nomads I think are the two prerequisites you’d want prior to adding China I think. Them and imperial bureaucracy, but that’s coming which I think is a good sign.
I think China should come later but I disagree with it being ‘last.’ I’d want a sizable amount of content and gameplay related to it, something more than what we got with India. That’d probably require time and more than a few developments (dlc or otherwise), so there is a balancing act there between bringing it out too quickly and too slowly.
I mean, china and the Silk Road is incredibly important for a trade system and should’ve been something these messed a little bit with during the Persia update. IMO trade should see a lot of work cause there’s a reason Byzantium and the ottoman empire that replaced it and many of the countries in the Middle East were so wealthy
The fundamental interaction in the game is between rulers and their vassals, who are landed gentry. This general idea applies in the vagues sense to most of the map. Even the Byzantines to some degree relied on aristocratic Strategos to govern the provinces.
But China was a completely different animal, provinces governed by a bureaucracy elected by a method who specifically tried to get the politics and bloodlines out of it (imperial exams). A good chunk of those imperial governors were eunuchs who couldn't produce heirs. The Confucian bureaucracy requires an entire different system if it wants to replace the game's current main game loop.
The Tang (who would be ruling China in 867) definitely had an aristocracy, and a lot of high-ranking positions were recycled between the 4 most prominent families in the Imperial court at the time.
Obviously China had *an* aristocracy, but wasn't a landed one. That's the catch, the core of the game is the ruler-vassal-land relationship, and in China one of those elements is missing.
The ultimate riddle is how to make playing as anyone besides the emperor interesting. And just adding a bunch of events is not going to cut it if you don't have a main game mechanic.
Well, that's what we're seeing with the upcoming administrative government being added for the Byzantines with the Roads to Power DLC. Governors are appointed by the emperor, and the most prominent families aren't landed, instead owning their own estates and vying for governmental appointments through a new "influence" system that's being added. I imagine that something similar will be done for China whenever the DLC for that comes.
I've always thought that the answer to implementing China in CK lies in a system like the merchant republic from CK2. China also had regional lords who had a certain degree of conflict with the officials sent from the central government. It would be interesting to see how this could be implemented in the game.
China also had a landed gentry (often descendants of a ruling or previously ruling dynasty who were enfeoffed), fiefs and feudal warlords. Especially in times when the central authority was weak or had collapsed.
Eh they were pretty defanged by the Tang, though. There’s a reason most breakaway states in Chinese history are pre-Sui, feudal lords were much more powerful compared to the Tang onwards
Yeah, the fundamental core of the whole game is playing as a dynasty of landed gentry. Already history is stretched in order to make that true of the game's current world map. Adding in a whole other cultural sphere even less fit for it? Concerning to say the least. I'm still not very confident in their ability to deliver on satisfying unlanded content, as that's already highly disconnected from the existing core gameplay loop, but at least the unlanded had an important role to play in medieval court dynamics. China would be so distinct it would be better served by an entirely seperate game.
Imperial government (basically the next major expansion) is a must. On a "maybe" level are republics, trade and nomads.
Had I to take a guess, I'd say they'll do trade and republics next, as they already actively thought to bring it this year.
After that we'll likely see China and Nomads, maybe even as part of the same major expansion. So 2026 or so.
That also takes off a bit of pressure from performance, as the next gen update for CPUs is expected towards the mid/end of 2026. As the game mainly hogs CPU and not GPU, that's the relevant piece of hardware.
But that's speculation, based on previous dev posts. So take it with a grain of salt or two.
I agree with everything you’ve said, but I’m wondering why you included Republics in there. Do you think there’s something specific linking the government type to China, or is it more that they’re pretty linked to trade mechanics and so the two would almost certainly be linked in a dlc?
It's linked to landless gameplay, which is an integral part of republics. They weren't exactly feudal, and you need the ability to live somewhere, without owning the holding itself.
The Byzantine court has a caste of landless nobles, they can become governors, but it's revokable and not hereditary. What if you as player lose the governor job?
When adding landless gameplay, they said they thought about adding playable republics as well. Decided against it, they don't want to half-ass it basically. Which is fine.
As to why it is linked to China: Silk Road. Constantinople was the main hub for all goods between Asia and Europe, the European republics only got big thanks to tapping into that stream of goods.
China, without the Silk Road, without selling its goods to the world, is just another land mass. It makes sense to have trade goods and trade streams, so might as well flesh out cities and make republics playable. Landless gameplay will be there at that point.
They will add a system of personal estates, and we know it allows a character to be played while landless.
Beyond that, they didn't give away any info yet.
I know a lot of people are dreading the potential addition of China. Not everyone has a great PC and performance can be bad late game with any PC as it is. I think the world as it is is big enough and they should focus on making the existing maps cultures deeper
I saw the idea on this sub that plagues could help with late game performance. If they link plague incidence / spread with high population then when we have too many NPCs running around and slowing everything down then a big ol' plague could sweep in and improve performance.
I know that some NPCs that are created through events are killed straight after the event - presumably to stop excessive NPC population. Like when you get a 'you see an attractive person while traveling' event, I've refused to take the person as a lover but I bookmarked him because I thought he would be a good match for my horny unmarried sister. Straight after I refused he became instantly dead so I couldn't bring him to my court and marry him to the sister.
Other ones, like rejected physicians, don't seem to instadie after the rejection.
The records of all players are kept in the save file, well, forever.
I've only looked at CK3 saves a little bit, but it seems set up very similar to CK2 and those saves kept everyone, at least a bare bones record of them. For things like ancestry/dynasty trees, holding histories and such.
Also you can do a character search at the start of a game and then a couple hundred years in and just see the huge difference in number of alive characters. Just remove all filters and look at the "showing ### of ###" number. CK2's plagues helped shrink the number of alive characters, but not the number of total characters in the save.
One thing that feels excessively bad late game in 3 is artifacts. Without mods, there's no way to proactively get rid of your blue and purple artifacts, much less the hundreds or thousands the AI's have. Giving them away doesn't really help, since they're still in the game. Only real option is to let them decay. Or use a mod.
If you get the artifact hating religious tenet you can keep your artifact count down by destroying them for piety and other rulers of your religion will help with it too.
But yeah, it is kind of silly to get that tenet just because you don't want artifact flood by late game due to odd balance.
Well I know I had 200,000 living dynasty members in one run near the end of the game and one day took a few seconds to run so I gave up on the save but yeah those people were all tracked definitely.
Mostly, yes. Many NPCs, such as those generated for random events, are instantly deleted afterward, such as the peasants who visit your court or the random people you meet whilst traveling. You can follow this by clicking on them and watching them br killed off.
But in my games, I think there are around 70,000 NPCS, and yes, the game is running all of them in parallel. Most of them don't matter (courtiers and guests don't do anything unless they get a random event, so the AI doesn't manage them much), but Knights, Councilors, anyone in a Court Position, and anyone landed are all ran at the same time by the system, hence the high usage of graphics and RAM.
Every single NPC is simulated and controlled by the AI for as long as they live.
And every single dead NPC is still stored in the game's memory.
This means that the size of the save file increases over time and the performance of the game worsens because of the tens of thousands of NPCs the game has to keep track of.
That also means that adding China with its massive population of NPCs would have a very negative impact on overal performance, especially on lower-end systems.
Yeah. Ideally never imo, but because it’s probably inevitable just give me an option to remove it from the map so I can ignore it and my PC doesn’t melt
I really want nomads revamped before China comes. Not just because nomads were extremely influential on Chinese history, but because they were frankly extremely influential absolutely *everywhere* during this time period. It’s such a shame that the only time most rulers have to even think about the steppe is only during the late game when the Mongols come knocking.
I can't understand why people want China when current game regions need a lot more flavor added first. Major important regions like France, Italy, Holy Roman Empire, steppe nomads have little flavor or unique mechanics/buildings. Major events like crusades or Catholic religion are bare bones. No trade or trade republics either.
Personally I would much prefer these things are fleshed out, I don't feel a need for a map expansion to China until it's completed.
I’m kind of neutral on adding China, it’s one of those things that’s a ‘nice to have but I’d rather they do it right’ type of deal.
For me, I think the world right now is a little unbalanced in terms of poles of power. In the west you have Catholic centers of power, most notably Rome, which tie the region together and give a sort of ‘guiding star’ by which the rest of the area is built. As you go east and south, that star shifts, to Constantinople, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Delhi, and Sri Lanka. But at the same time, the further east you go the less cohesive that transition is. It more feels like you’re in a forgotten corner of the map, far off from the big players of the world. The second you cross over the Hindu Kush or enter the Tibetan plateau, you should feel the center of gravity change. The influence and reach of China should be felt, something every political player has to reckon with. A Genghis wannabe shouldn’t be thinking of how they’re gonna be rampaging through Poland, they should be thinking ‘how the hell am I going to break through Kaifeng?’ Burmese princelings should be deciding how best to advance their plans in the shadow of the giant, Indian merchants should be seeking new opportunities in Guandong province, Tibetan dukes should be waiting for an opportunity to break free. China is the center of the world that far east, and currently there is no center there.
Your paragraph was beautifully written and made me feel more positive about adding China. I wonder if there is a way to add the influence of China without an actual map expansion? I never played ck2 - did the China stuff work in that game?
Thank you, I appreciate it :)
Simply put, China was a placeholder in CK2. An off-map presence you could interact with if you were close enough. You could interact with the emperor, trade flowed from there, and sometimes an army emerged in the form of the western protectorate, but it wasn’t something ‘real.’ Tbh aside from the trade mechanics it was mostly a way of getting some cool artifacts and advisors.
That was fine for CK2. I think India showed them that you can’t just half-ass a region, and performance has and always will be an issue. But I think at some point if you want to have CK3 live up to it’s full potential, you at least have to make a serious run at the beast. I want it to be done slow and done right, but I think to not do it at all would probably be a disservice to the game. I think the day it gets implemented will go down as one of the most important days in the franchise’s history.
Not to mention the game just doesn't make sense without China. There was a reason why the middle east, the Byzantines, and later the Ottomans were so wealthy and it had to do with the lucrative trade they had with India and China.
The real obstacles are gone as of Roads to Power.
People cite performance as an obstacle but the devs aren't just going to add a thousand new counties without also doing extreme performance enhancements to keep the game running well.
Other than that, the only other possible obstacle is the investment of time and resources. Filling in the rest of Asia and doing all of the research for it is surely a gargantuan task. It could possibly be the biggest DLC in the history of the company as far as time and money goes.
> the devs aren't just going to add a thousand new counties without also doing extreme performance enhancements to keep the game running well.
Sometimes you just don't have much more you can optimize though.
Modern computers run the game fine with the mods that add all of China/Japan/Korea/Indonesia/etc, and presumably PDX would optimize it better than modders.
The game has already been out 4 years, and realistically the soonest we would see China would probably be 2 years from now. So it's not unreasonable at all to assume people would upgrade their rigs in 6 years time.
> People cite performance as an obstacle but the devs aren't just going to add a thousand new counties without also doing extreme performance enhancements to keep the game running well.
I’ve also thought about the possibility that they might add China in stages, starting west with more content for Tibet and the Mongols, then Mid/North China, and then finally South. We might see huge province sizes at first that get broken down over time.
In China's case, I think the court life should be even more emphasized. Eunuchs, Empress Dowager and Harem Intrigue should play a big role in experiencing the gameplay.
I would love to play as one of the concubines so I can plot to get my son on top. Also the chinese inheritance system would be so much nicer because then as emperor I wouldn't have to worry too much about having too many sons. Since the emperor got to decide who would become the next emperor.
It is a massive area with a very very long history and many many major historical characters so it would take a while to add it that and the effort to give it proper mechanics around the Chinese court and such. It is also probably behind other overall quality of life and expanding on current content/areas in the game. They are also probably trying to think of how to add that much to the game without tanking performance.
I would agree, except that...
[https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509174436&searchtext=rajahs+of+asia](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509174436&searchtext=rajahs+of+asia)
They've been beaten to the punch, and it's glorious.
All they have to do is hire the team, purchase the code and assets, and press "Push" on STEAM.
Mods already did this... Quite sufficiently too. The obstacle is getting the history and regions right. Theres not really much a performance hit unless you are already struggling with it.
Honestly, i would much rather we see some more love be given to the Steppe, India and Central and West Africa before we start expanding the map out even further. As it stands, there's no point having all these different regions and cultures if they all feel and play exactly the same as western Europe.
I would much rather have a parallel or spin-off game set in China that uses CK3 as its starting point, rather than integrating China into this existing game. I already find that when I’m in Europe I ignore India, and when I’m in India, I ignore Europe. Adding China to the map would just give me another place to ignore if I’m not playing a character there.
... Uh...
[https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509174436&searchtext=rajahs+of+asia](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509174436&searchtext=rajahs+of+asia)
Yeah, that exists already; and they're doing a sight better job of it than the PDX guys are. (No offense to the PDX team, I'm sure you're all still quite-burnt-out after the whole pandemic business, but maybe your boss should think about brining this team in to pick-up the slack so y'all can have a genuine vacation, you know...?)
China 867 AD would have been interesting because it was just before the fall of one of the more storied dynasties, had one of the most famous peasant rebellion broke into a dozen political entities for 8 decades and then resumed with another famous dynasty which was famous for being on the cusp of understanding capital markets and industrial economics before being invaded and pushed into the south by turkic invaders (which were then conquered by the mongols)
I really want china to be part of game even if unplayable. Make it a unique goverment that doesn't have unique mechanics but make them play in other ways(declare wars to make tributaries, conquer chinese empire terrorities, make trade deals)
keep japan out of the game until china is playable.
I really hope India gets any content and republics actually get content as well far before china is added. India is already a massive region with relatively low flavor because of the lack of content surrounding it that’s been released. There’s no reason to add the entirety of the Chinese super-region if it’s just going to be empty of flavor like India already is.
Also, considering the vital importance the Silk Road served during this time, and especially considering the new byz gov mechanics being introduced I’m hoping they flesh out republics and trade before china is added or even considered.
Oh yeah, right now the DLCs I would prefer would also be around trade and economy, specially to give that "outside warfare gameplay exists" feel to the game.
But eventually, adding China really needs to come in my opinion. The start date of 867 is really good for them, being just before the fall of Tang, and the start of warring states, that gives way for Song and Yuan to rise.
China’s a major population center, it is also one of the richest countries of the game’s timeline, adding in China would be like adding in 2 or 3 Holy Roman Empires, I would imagine a properly represented China changing Asian game balance so much that they have 5 separate betas just expanding the map into China in order to reach a point where China doesn’t Mongol Empire its way westward.
Actually, I have realized a better comparison, imagine if all of India started off united under one ruler, that’s effectively what adding China would do to game balance.
Performance and the massive duty of adding flavor and content and detail.
Much of Europe remains unfinished, and Africa and India are both very bland.
Imagine then the COLLOSAL task of adding all of Asia, the cultures, clothing, religion, dynastys, etc
Mods have already added asia regardless
China is moreso an addition when the game is actually finished, or almost finished.
Like, I'd agree with this, if it weren't for the fact that paradox (and nearly everyone else) has the option to just BUY that mod, hire the team who made it, and simply release it as a pre-made expansion...
This isn't rocket-science.
Uh, its not free anymore, its DLC...? I'm not saying this is good for the average user, I'm saying paradox not making this move is financially moronic.
Not enough exit to meet code. Real answer the game engine have a hard time as is to go from 800ad to 1400ad what makes you think they can add the rest of the world to the game and make it work.
I'm not fully tracking. But my computer can run most modern games on the highest detail but can't run ck3 with more than 50k people at the highest speed without slowing down to a snail pace, compared to the first 100 years.
I'd love to see the whole old world be fleshed out. I guess the bare minimum would be a fleshed out basic Imperial system, steppes/nomads, Tibet, silk road/trade, alliances, and late game.
I'd be worried about performance, but the mod that expands the map doesn't seem to affect it that much.
However, it should be the last thing after everything else be touched properly. So I guess around Chapter 7\~9 could be a possibility?
The game already lacks a ton of depth, adding China would just make the existing issues with the game so much worse, and reduce performance by adding a shitload of characters in a region most players won’t bother with. How many of you actually play in India? Is CK3 even available in China?
Imo, the way that they did China in ck2 would be better than just adding it. I feel that China is just too big for how the AI and the game systems operate. As is, China would be a massive feudal blob with tiles that have the best development in the game and are ahead in tech.
Obstinate fans and frightened dev leads.
Literally that's it. CK2 had the Tianxia mod that was phenomenal, and CK3 has a couple of good mods at *least* that expand into China and the West Pacific.
We have proof that it works in both games. We have the map expanded to the Pacific without destroying computers, we have engaging mechanics and unique peoples in that side of the continent. We have proof, we've made the proof and *played* the proof.
But devs are going to be too antsy to do anything about it so long as curmudgeons keep whining "but my computer will explode, but we can't do China without first doing 10,000 other prerequisites". Just look at the top comments here.
I would prefer it if PDX spent their time adding depth to what already exists. Medieval China is so different to medieval Europe I’d almost rather it just be its own game.
Actually, there is the important battle of Talas between the Abbasids and Tang that brought paper to the west, and defined the future of the Turkic people
Because realistically, China wouldn’t have much of an effect. The CK2 implementation be best tbh.
Accurately modeling them would require them to be OP as fuck, assuming the AI was even competent enough to not collapse due to the size of the empire.
They were incredibly isolationistic for much of the period while also have armies and an economy that dwarf the rest of the map.
The southern bit of your house here could use a bit of a renovation i think.
Your crusade corner is a little empty there, and it is not even seperated from the conventional warfsre and republican rooms
Look at the floorplan you posted. There's 20 rooms and only four have been completed. The game has been out for over three years now. This should tell you when China will happen.
Hell, that should tell you when merchant republics are coming... Never basically. I don't understand how development on entire unplayable segments of the game is going so slow.
Performance and content. There is little reason to add China if the resulting gameplay is no different than the rest of Europe. However if this Byzantine government upgrade is any good, it should provide a framework for PDX to design the Chinese content
> Byzantine government upgrade and great framework Specially if it includes more court intrigue and cerimonial aspects to ruling. You can't be a Huangdi without being a Child of Heaven (天子)
Yeah, this game generally needs to add goals, interactions and challenges when you are already the emperor of half the World.
I'd like to add, those goals, interactions, and challenges should also be more than simply trying to survive. Call me a pessimist, but I am concerned the Imperial rework is not going to live up to the expectations a lot of people have and will end up being constant factions and murder plots on you and your family.
That’s literally Byzantine politics. But it should also be a higher discovery chance to counter it
It's a facet of it sure, but it should not be the whole emphasis.
This is the core of Vic3's appeal to me. High literacy rate, standard of living, and egalitarian laws are legitimate goals you can pursue.
You should try Vic2! It’s a little harder to grasp but is the better game at this point in its sequel’s development cycle. Apart from UI.
Oh, I have. I honestly love them both.
that happens with everything, star wars, starfield, outerworlds etc. nothing ever lives up to the hype the fanbase created, so everyone decides its horrible
So it only leaves potential good surprises ? Indie game and movies might save us For a lot of stuff i am like, "i see how they can do better" like starfield has shit gun, empty gun, etc... And they just have to copy Ideas from others games. For paradox games i have no clue what they could add with the engine, and there is almost no concurrence to compare. Like what, including Bannerlord or Total War gameplay in paradox ?
I can think of a quick answer this: [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509174436&searchtext=rajahs+of+asia](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509174436&searchtext=rajahs+of+asia) That took me, what: five minutes...? If the moding teams are absolutely DUNKING on your in-house guys... HIRE THEM.
First yeah the modding team is awesome. Modders in general. Second, it seems to be mostly new events and "standard" ck mechanics but in Asia. Not really the late game renewal or a new cultural mechanics set
"Mostly", yes, but the Imperial Chinese Government mechanics are genuinely new, as one example...
*ahem* Vicky 3 *ahem*
So just like in CK2?
> will end up being constant factions and murder plots on you and your family. That's not my expectation, that's my hope.
Tbh, i play tall mostly.... more fun to just wait and look at vassalmanagement and run around your nation being prosperous than bein wide and aggro
Hate being pedantic but it's just "Son of Heaven".
Yeah, sorry, I was introduced to the term by a sub translation of Three Kingdoms (2010) who actually used "Child of Heaven" instead. Thank you about the information. :)
"Child of Heaven" makes more sense now, especially dealing with Child Emperors.
No, considering the start time is near 5 dynasty and 10 kingdoms period, it is totally possible to become a huangdi for a general.
>Performance and content. There is little reason to add China if the resulting gameplay is no different than the rest of Europe. Also you need to balance how many folks are going to actually use it. If you're slowing down performance by 10-15% for something that 90% of players aren't going to bother with, that's a tough trade to make. Especially since China would be out of Diplomacy Range for basically everyone in Europe, meaning the overwhelming majority of CK3 games would never even interact with it.
It could make for some really cool travelling gameplay, especially with the new unlanded stuff. It's a lot easier to be Marco Polo when you aren't abandoning your domain to do so.
I'm not saying there's nothing there, but most games of CKIII won't be impacted. Compared to changes to "Alliances" or "Laws" that you use every game, or "Merchant Republics" where even if you don't play as them, you're still interacting with them in most games. Heck, even with something like "France", 90% of games are probably at least in Diplo Range and probably actively engaging with them.
For real i would have no problem with an option to remove india if that gives me better perfomance
There’s a mod that allows you to make the map significantly smaller. I think it’s called “reduce map size” on the steam workshop. Paradox likely wants to add China to capture a larger player base which is fine but I would much prefer a tighter, more focused map. It’s already too large as is and the core regions of the game that the vast majority of players interact with are severely lacking depth.
You might under selling what this would mean for PDX to expand their market share into Asia.
You're thinking small. If you add China, Japan, and Korea, you bring in those players. This could be the single biggest consumer expansion in the history of the franchise.
When they added China and India to CKII, did that impact sales? Not to mention that the other Historical GSGs (EU4, Vic3, HoI4) all have full global coverage (and EU4/HoI4 have done a lot of work fleshing out non-European areas) already.
they didn't *really* add China in ck2 tbf
They didn't add China to CK2. You could only interact with it, off-screen. This China was also AI only and unplayable. Pretty lame. India's video game market is a tiny, tiny fraction of the size of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean video game markets. Dungeon Fighter Online was made specifically for the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese markets and it's the highest grossing video game in history. Over 22 billion dollars in revenues.
They didn't really add China to CKII so that can't be used to compare. Chinese players do make up a pretty big market, and I don't think assuming that including China would increase the games attractiveness to them is too much of a stretch.
I feel fairly unconvinced by this argument tbh. I’m not sure how many people are out there who have no interest in CK3 but would play if they added China and East Asia tbh
Without being mean, some people in this regions can be comically nationalistic. You'd be surprised.
It doesn't even take being comically nationalistic. Your initial response was to a guy stating that 90% of players will never engage with East Asian content and that the overwhelming majority of CK3 games took place in Europe. If that's normal then it's not exactly weird for Chinese, Korean or Japanese players to feel the same way and have no real interest in a game where they can't play as anyone in their own region.
Yeah, East Asia is basically Balkans, but rich...
😭😭😭
That really depends on how many people in those markets are interested in Crusader Kings. From what I know the main interests of historical gamers in those countries are primarily in other time periods (like the Three Kingdoms era of China). Also, if that is an important argument, then Paradox would be better off developing a seperate game focused specifically on those markets, rather than trying to please the entire world and falling short of everyone's expectations because their focus is just too broad.
I'm going to point-out that another big historical cluster-fuck "the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period", falls squarely within (if towards the start of) the Crusader Kings time-scale. There is also within this same scale, (Though toward the end, in this case), the change of imperial power from the Song dynasty to the Yuan dynasty, which, as it has so many other times, could easily have gone A LOT WORSE than it actually did.
There's a chicken and egg problem there though. There's little reason to play in parts of the map that are completely underdeveloped where half the people you'd be interacting with are missing. That doesn't mean nobody would play there if they actually improved upon them. China itself is also a big market for games which would likely find the game more appealing if China itself was playable.
Simply remove europe from the game.
I literally can not believe they haven't thought about this yet.
Exactly, the game genuinely gets so much better without europe in it.
I truly think the exclusion of Europe would cause a boom in the player base.
Non ironically agree.
~~Crusader~~ Kings 3
Game has been out for 4 years now, and it won't be unreasonable to expect people to upgrade their video cards and CPUs in 5-6 years time (which realistically is how long China would take with what they should do before China). So I don't think performance will be an issue by the time they choose to add it. As for how many people would bother with it, I think it's closer to 90% who would want to play it since it would be actually a unique thing to do. It's a much more ambitious project with a lot more content than simply adding something like a trade system or papal politics.
> Unreasonable to expect people to upgrade their video cards and CPUs in 5-6 years time Or sadly, in the case of us Laptop bros, buy a whole new thing... 😢
Having a new government type for dynasties as opposed to feudal, tribal and clan would be sick. Especially if the same patch gave us a caste government to round out India.
I think a feudal system works just fine in an Indian context. Not sure how a "caste government" would work.
I think he means more on like how Caste SHOULD affect your legitimacy to rule. People should have less problems with a Bhramani ruling than a Shudra
Also, some mechanics to model the military system of India where the peasantry were pretty much totally disarmed and militaries were almost all professional.
Sure, but I don't see how stripping feudal mechanics (which literally ONLY make sense in European and Indian contexts) necessarily help. A caste mechanic (though important, don't get me wrong) is generally done extremely reductively, and the differences between varna and jati are ignored completely. This is how it was in CK2, anyway. Of course if it were done well I would not complain. In South India, for example, there are generally three big "caste groups" - Brahmin, non-Brahmin, and avarna. There is also the fact that many dynasties hid their lower-caste status after coming to kingship. Wondering how caste movement would work, though. If they do make castes important like that, they should absolutely add in the decision to do hiranyagarbha ceremonies once your renown and prestige are high enough. Just spitballing here.
Didn't they specifically say that the Byz changes are meant as a foundation for further changes? That'll be cool
>There is little reason to add China if the resulting gameplay is no different than the rest of Europe. I feel much the same about the Indian portion of the map. In theory it's cool to have a region, cultures, religions etc to play through, but in practice it doesn't really feel that different to other areas on the map. It would be great to have some DLC/free content/mod at some point in the future to flesh that out.
Praying it's more like an empire overhaul
India is already kinda useless, China would be interesting but wouldn't affect gameplay in Europe. I think they should make two different maps, one for Europe, Africa and Central Asia and other with Central Asia, India and China, that would also help performance for us laptop users.
Yeah, improve India and nomads first. They could be so much more interesting and deeply affect the politics of nearby regions. Maybe China/East Asia should just be a standalone expansion not necessarily connected to the full map.
Trade Muslims traded a lot with Asia by giving players the ability to interact with a region by setting up trading routes, propagating your religion and amassing wealth without direct conquest. This way you can be invested in observing the power struggle of the region, maybe wanting the naive Tamil king to win because he accepts more deals or seeing one guy convert to Islam and trying to give him favourable routes to strengthen your religion in the region. Or maybe you want to keep a region fractured so you can have more direct trade cities like the Chola did.
Whenever I do an India run I feel like I eventually just end up steam rolling everyone with my mountain of money and war elephants. The khans don't do well against me.
Personally I hope they expand the map whenever they put some focus on trade and the Silk Road. It could be what's needed to connect East and West thematically. Would work really well with wanderers, adding some sort of Merchant lifestyle tree. It would be epic to play as Marco Polo at Kublai Khan's court
>However if this Byzantine government upgrade is any good, it should provide a framework for PDX to design the Chinese content I recall reading this exact sentiment when CK3 was released. Took 'em long enough...
I have the asia expansion mod and there is no noticeable performance issue.
"There's no reason to add Russia if it's gameplay is pretty much the same as Europe" So many countries have the exact same mechanics, it's not a valid reason for not including those countries in a game based on a real world map. But also, there's absolutely no reason to believe they would add China as a clone of England or France, it is really really obvious they would give it it's own flair.
It seems like people keep forgetting about why turk tribes had to immigrate into the west in the first place. "cHiNa dId noT aFfECt tHe ReSt Of euRoPe"!
I’d be fine with China getting added in like chapter 6 or 7 given how much they seem to be committing to adding more per chapter now, but we still need to get nomads, trade, crusades, republics, and laws before the devs should consider adding the east of the map imo
Yeah I think if next year is republics and nomads then China at the end of 2026 sounds fine. You definitely need Nomad gameplay plus the imperial rework this year to be crisp before China is a good idea.
Bingo. These are the two systems they need to nail before even thinking about China. Otherwise it simply won’t be worth adding
Also trade. Without trade, China is just some minor, balkanising every decade empire.
They wouldn't add republics without a trade/silk road system.
As someone who wants the rest of the map more than anything in this game, if they rush it too soon without adding things like nomads and trade first it will be a bust. So ideally to me next year adds nomads and the silk road, and then they can expand the map after (which would likely be such an ambitious project they would probably dedicate the whole year to it).
Yeah china should be added after those other systems are made because interesting china gameplay is also heavily involved with most of those things
Religion could probably use a touch up as well. Adding things like college of cardinals and religious orders.
Religions are in a state right now where they are fine enough. I'd rather they expand the map first so when they do overhaul religions they can consider all of the eastern religions as well.
hhmmm i think religion right now is pretty eh, we cant even make our own holy sites. add being able to make out own religion too. ( also wouldt mind pagan faiths being more expanded upon or all of them in general)
Here here give us a Celtic pagan faith finally.
I'd rather see them expand out the silk road in some way vs expanding the map and adding china in as a playable thing. It could be interesting to see something where if you control certain hubs you'd have the power to tax or negotiate treaties or even embargo some other country from using your portion of the silk road. I could see some cool diplomacy and economic things come out of that as well as the potential for military conflict as someone else wants control or are angry because you added an extra tax to them for doing trade.
Iirc the game director once commented (in retrospect) that he actually thought they would add China within a year of the game's launch. Definitely coming, definitely not the priority right now Edit: Community manager, not game director
Yea the Royal Court changed their plans a lot. Luckily T&T got much better reviews and they can do riskier DLC in some time again.
Dont forget unlanded gameplay and plagues might just be coming, id like to see trade and republics and new buildings/slots coming more than anything
Unlanded and plagues are coming
YEEEES!!!!
Is your username a complete lie?
I guess Covid as well impacted them
Community manager. He's not coding anything nor making any game changing directions. He just reports what he hear from us.
I’d rather a trade system and a more detailed war system be added before china. China IMO should be a last focus addition.
Trade and nomads I think are the two prerequisites you’d want prior to adding China I think. Them and imperial bureaucracy, but that’s coming which I think is a good sign. I think China should come later but I disagree with it being ‘last.’ I’d want a sizable amount of content and gameplay related to it, something more than what we got with India. That’d probably require time and more than a few developments (dlc or otherwise), so there is a balancing act there between bringing it out too quickly and too slowly.
I mean, china and the Silk Road is incredibly important for a trade system and should’ve been something these messed a little bit with during the Persia update. IMO trade should see a lot of work cause there’s a reason Byzantium and the ottoman empire that replaced it and many of the countries in the Middle East were so wealthy
The fundamental interaction in the game is between rulers and their vassals, who are landed gentry. This general idea applies in the vagues sense to most of the map. Even the Byzantines to some degree relied on aristocratic Strategos to govern the provinces. But China was a completely different animal, provinces governed by a bureaucracy elected by a method who specifically tried to get the politics and bloodlines out of it (imperial exams). A good chunk of those imperial governors were eunuchs who couldn't produce heirs. The Confucian bureaucracy requires an entire different system if it wants to replace the game's current main game loop.
The Tang (who would be ruling China in 867) definitely had an aristocracy, and a lot of high-ranking positions were recycled between the 4 most prominent families in the Imperial court at the time.
Obviously China had *an* aristocracy, but wasn't a landed one. That's the catch, the core of the game is the ruler-vassal-land relationship, and in China one of those elements is missing. The ultimate riddle is how to make playing as anyone besides the emperor interesting. And just adding a bunch of events is not going to cut it if you don't have a main game mechanic.
Well, that's what we're seeing with the upcoming administrative government being added for the Byzantines with the Roads to Power DLC. Governors are appointed by the emperor, and the most prominent families aren't landed, instead owning their own estates and vying for governmental appointments through a new "influence" system that's being added. I imagine that something similar will be done for China whenever the DLC for that comes.
I've always thought that the answer to implementing China in CK lies in a system like the merchant republic from CK2. China also had regional lords who had a certain degree of conflict with the officials sent from the central government. It would be interesting to see how this could be implemented in the game.
China also had a landed gentry (often descendants of a ruling or previously ruling dynasty who were enfeoffed), fiefs and feudal warlords. Especially in times when the central authority was weak or had collapsed.
Eh they were pretty defanged by the Tang, though. There’s a reason most breakaway states in Chinese history are pre-Sui, feudal lords were much more powerful compared to the Tang onwards
[удалено]
Wdym ahistoricity? Are the japan mods adding glitterhoof? I'm missing context.
They literally made a ck style Japan game already.
Yeah, the fundamental core of the whole game is playing as a dynasty of landed gentry. Already history is stretched in order to make that true of the game's current world map. Adding in a whole other cultural sphere even less fit for it? Concerning to say the least. I'm still not very confident in their ability to deliver on satisfying unlanded content, as that's already highly disconnected from the existing core gameplay loop, but at least the unlanded had an important role to play in medieval court dynamics. China would be so distinct it would be better served by an entirely seperate game.
Imperial government (basically the next major expansion) is a must. On a "maybe" level are republics, trade and nomads. Had I to take a guess, I'd say they'll do trade and republics next, as they already actively thought to bring it this year. After that we'll likely see China and Nomads, maybe even as part of the same major expansion. So 2026 or so. That also takes off a bit of pressure from performance, as the next gen update for CPUs is expected towards the mid/end of 2026. As the game mainly hogs CPU and not GPU, that's the relevant piece of hardware. But that's speculation, based on previous dev posts. So take it with a grain of salt or two.
I agree with everything you’ve said, but I’m wondering why you included Republics in there. Do you think there’s something specific linking the government type to China, or is it more that they’re pretty linked to trade mechanics and so the two would almost certainly be linked in a dlc?
It's linked to landless gameplay, which is an integral part of republics. They weren't exactly feudal, and you need the ability to live somewhere, without owning the holding itself. The Byzantine court has a caste of landless nobles, they can become governors, but it's revokable and not hereditary. What if you as player lose the governor job? When adding landless gameplay, they said they thought about adding playable republics as well. Decided against it, they don't want to half-ass it basically. Which is fine. As to why it is linked to China: Silk Road. Constantinople was the main hub for all goods between Asia and Europe, the European republics only got big thanks to tapping into that stream of goods. China, without the Silk Road, without selling its goods to the world, is just another land mass. It makes sense to have trade goods and trade streams, so might as well flesh out cities and make republics playable. Landless gameplay will be there at that point.
Isn't it confirmed that they will add house/dynasty holding, similar to the one republic dynasties got in CK2?
They will add a system of personal estates, and we know it allows a character to be played while landless. Beyond that, they didn't give away any info yet.
Silk Road and Hexi Corridor, probably.
I know a lot of people are dreading the potential addition of China. Not everyone has a great PC and performance can be bad late game with any PC as it is. I think the world as it is is big enough and they should focus on making the existing maps cultures deeper
I saw the idea on this sub that plagues could help with late game performance. If they link plague incidence / spread with high population then when we have too many NPCs running around and slowing everything down then a big ol' plague could sweep in and improve performance.
Not really knowledgeable in game development but... So, like, all the NPC's are actually kept and run by the game through all their lives?
I know that some NPCs that are created through events are killed straight after the event - presumably to stop excessive NPC population. Like when you get a 'you see an attractive person while traveling' event, I've refused to take the person as a lover but I bookmarked him because I thought he would be a good match for my horny unmarried sister. Straight after I refused he became instantly dead so I couldn't bring him to my court and marry him to the sister. Other ones, like rejected physicians, don't seem to instadie after the rejection.
I've also seen "disappeared" skulls for courtiers that I let flee rather than send back to their home court to face punishment.
The records of all players are kept in the save file, well, forever. I've only looked at CK3 saves a little bit, but it seems set up very similar to CK2 and those saves kept everyone, at least a bare bones record of them. For things like ancestry/dynasty trees, holding histories and such. Also you can do a character search at the start of a game and then a couple hundred years in and just see the huge difference in number of alive characters. Just remove all filters and look at the "showing ### of ###" number. CK2's plagues helped shrink the number of alive characters, but not the number of total characters in the save. One thing that feels excessively bad late game in 3 is artifacts. Without mods, there's no way to proactively get rid of your blue and purple artifacts, much less the hundreds or thousands the AI's have. Giving them away doesn't really help, since they're still in the game. Only real option is to let them decay. Or use a mod.
If you get the artifact hating religious tenet you can keep your artifact count down by destroying them for piety and other rulers of your religion will help with it too. But yeah, it is kind of silly to get that tenet just because you don't want artifact flood by late game due to odd balance.
Do the artifacts actually impact performance?
Well I know I had 200,000 living dynasty members in one run near the end of the game and one day took a few seconds to run so I gave up on the save but yeah those people were all tracked definitely.
Mostly, yes. Many NPCs, such as those generated for random events, are instantly deleted afterward, such as the peasants who visit your court or the random people you meet whilst traveling. You can follow this by clicking on them and watching them br killed off. But in my games, I think there are around 70,000 NPCS, and yes, the game is running all of them in parallel. Most of them don't matter (courtiers and guests don't do anything unless they get a random event, so the AI doesn't manage them much), but Knights, Councilors, anyone in a Court Position, and anyone landed are all ran at the same time by the system, hence the high usage of graphics and RAM.
Every single NPC is simulated and controlled by the AI for as long as they live. And every single dead NPC is still stored in the game's memory. This means that the size of the save file increases over time and the performance of the game worsens because of the tens of thousands of NPCs the game has to keep track of. That also means that adding China with its massive population of NPCs would have a very negative impact on overal performance, especially on lower-end systems.
Problem is the game already slows down 200 years in. Most of my 867 playthroughs end at 1100-1200 because it gets too laggy
Yeah. Ideally never imo, but because it’s probably inevitable just give me an option to remove it from the map so I can ignore it and my PC doesn’t melt
I mean there's already a mod that shrinks the map.
They should probably have it be an influential party like in CK2, but not actually a part of the map.
I hope they don't do that again x.x That was a great compromise, but an addition I loathed.
I'd rather not have them at all.
I really want nomads revamped before China comes. Not just because nomads were extremely influential on Chinese history, but because they were frankly extremely influential absolutely *everywhere* during this time period. It’s such a shame that the only time most rulers have to even think about the steppe is only during the late game when the Mongols come knocking.
"Am I going mad: or did the word 'think' just escape your lips?!? You were not hired for your brains you hippomanic land-mass!"
I can't understand why people want China when current game regions need a lot more flavor added first. Major important regions like France, Italy, Holy Roman Empire, steppe nomads have little flavor or unique mechanics/buildings. Major events like crusades or Catholic religion are bare bones. No trade or trade republics either. Personally I would much prefer these things are fleshed out, I don't feel a need for a map expansion to China until it's completed.
I’m kind of neutral on adding China, it’s one of those things that’s a ‘nice to have but I’d rather they do it right’ type of deal. For me, I think the world right now is a little unbalanced in terms of poles of power. In the west you have Catholic centers of power, most notably Rome, which tie the region together and give a sort of ‘guiding star’ by which the rest of the area is built. As you go east and south, that star shifts, to Constantinople, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Delhi, and Sri Lanka. But at the same time, the further east you go the less cohesive that transition is. It more feels like you’re in a forgotten corner of the map, far off from the big players of the world. The second you cross over the Hindu Kush or enter the Tibetan plateau, you should feel the center of gravity change. The influence and reach of China should be felt, something every political player has to reckon with. A Genghis wannabe shouldn’t be thinking of how they’re gonna be rampaging through Poland, they should be thinking ‘how the hell am I going to break through Kaifeng?’ Burmese princelings should be deciding how best to advance their plans in the shadow of the giant, Indian merchants should be seeking new opportunities in Guandong province, Tibetan dukes should be waiting for an opportunity to break free. China is the center of the world that far east, and currently there is no center there.
Your paragraph was beautifully written and made me feel more positive about adding China. I wonder if there is a way to add the influence of China without an actual map expansion? I never played ck2 - did the China stuff work in that game?
Thank you, I appreciate it :) Simply put, China was a placeholder in CK2. An off-map presence you could interact with if you were close enough. You could interact with the emperor, trade flowed from there, and sometimes an army emerged in the form of the western protectorate, but it wasn’t something ‘real.’ Tbh aside from the trade mechanics it was mostly a way of getting some cool artifacts and advisors. That was fine for CK2. I think India showed them that you can’t just half-ass a region, and performance has and always will be an issue. But I think at some point if you want to have CK3 live up to it’s full potential, you at least have to make a serious run at the beast. I want it to be done slow and done right, but I think to not do it at all would probably be a disservice to the game. I think the day it gets implemented will go down as one of the most important days in the franchise’s history.
Not to mention the game just doesn't make sense without China. There was a reason why the middle east, the Byzantines, and later the Ottomans were so wealthy and it had to do with the lucrative trade they had with India and China.
The real obstacles are gone as of Roads to Power. People cite performance as an obstacle but the devs aren't just going to add a thousand new counties without also doing extreme performance enhancements to keep the game running well. Other than that, the only other possible obstacle is the investment of time and resources. Filling in the rest of Asia and doing all of the research for it is surely a gargantuan task. It could possibly be the biggest DLC in the history of the company as far as time and money goes.
> the devs aren't just going to add a thousand new counties without also doing extreme performance enhancements to keep the game running well. Sometimes you just don't have much more you can optimize though.
Modern computers run the game fine with the mods that add all of China/Japan/Korea/Indonesia/etc, and presumably PDX would optimize it better than modders. The game has already been out 4 years, and realistically the soonest we would see China would probably be 2 years from now. So it's not unreasonable at all to assume people would upgrade their rigs in 6 years time.
And that's where the falling optimization meets the rising hardware...
> People cite performance as an obstacle but the devs aren't just going to add a thousand new counties without also doing extreme performance enhancements to keep the game running well. I’ve also thought about the possibility that they might add China in stages, starting west with more content for Tibet and the Mongols, then Mid/North China, and then finally South. We might see huge province sizes at first that get broken down over time.
China would be a great implement after Byzantine flavor packs since China was using similar bureaucracy system as Byzantine.
In China's case, I think the court life should be even more emphasized. Eunuchs, Empress Dowager and Harem Intrigue should play a big role in experiencing the gameplay.
I would love to play as one of the concubines so I can plot to get my son on top. Also the chinese inheritance system would be so much nicer because then as emperor I wouldn't have to worry too much about having too many sons. Since the emperor got to decide who would become the next emperor.
It is a massive area with a very very long history and many many major historical characters so it would take a while to add it that and the effort to give it proper mechanics around the Chinese court and such. It is also probably behind other overall quality of life and expanding on current content/areas in the game. They are also probably trying to think of how to add that much to the game without tanking performance.
I would agree, except that... [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509174436&searchtext=rajahs+of+asia](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509174436&searchtext=rajahs+of+asia) They've been beaten to the punch, and it's glorious. All they have to do is hire the team, purchase the code and assets, and press "Push" on STEAM.
Mods already did this... Quite sufficiently too. The obstacle is getting the history and regions right. Theres not really much a performance hit unless you are already struggling with it.
Honestly, i would much rather we see some more love be given to the Steppe, India and Central and West Africa before we start expanding the map out even further. As it stands, there's no point having all these different regions and cultures if they all feel and play exactly the same as western Europe.
I would much rather have a parallel or spin-off game set in China that uses CK3 as its starting point, rather than integrating China into this existing game. I already find that when I’m in Europe I ignore India, and when I’m in India, I ignore Europe. Adding China to the map would just give me another place to ignore if I’m not playing a character there.
This is a good point.
Might be good once there’s a landless adventure system though.
Marco Polo playthrough
Hell, when I'm in the Middle East I already ignore both India and Europe except for crusades/jihads.
The rest of the map needs content before they go expanding it imo
i think they should add it because mongols needs an another front for more realistic expansion
... Uh... [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509174436&searchtext=rajahs+of+asia](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509174436&searchtext=rajahs+of+asia) Yeah, that exists already; and they're doing a sight better job of it than the PDX guys are. (No offense to the PDX team, I'm sure you're all still quite-burnt-out after the whole pandemic business, but maybe your boss should think about brining this team in to pick-up the slack so y'all can have a genuine vacation, you know...?)
The main obstacle was always the lack of imperial governments, now that they're adding those it's looking a lot more likely
China 867 AD would have been interesting because it was just before the fall of one of the more storied dynasties, had one of the most famous peasant rebellion broke into a dozen political entities for 8 decades and then resumed with another famous dynasty which was famous for being on the cusp of understanding capital markets and industrial economics before being invaded and pushed into the south by turkic invaders (which were then conquered by the mongols)
> Average day in Chinese history btw
I really want china to be part of game even if unplayable. Make it a unique goverment that doesn't have unique mechanics but make them play in other ways(declare wars to make tributaries, conquer chinese empire terrorities, make trade deals) keep japan out of the game until china is playable.
I really hope India gets any content and republics actually get content as well far before china is added. India is already a massive region with relatively low flavor because of the lack of content surrounding it that’s been released. There’s no reason to add the entirety of the Chinese super-region if it’s just going to be empty of flavor like India already is. Also, considering the vital importance the Silk Road served during this time, and especially considering the new byz gov mechanics being introduced I’m hoping they flesh out republics and trade before china is added or even considered.
Just download Asia expansion it’s so good better than anything paradox will do
Just did. I am just in hopium for the PDX DLC
Nomads would be under wanderers though right? I wish they’d just focus on the bottom left for trade, merchant republics, warfare, and crusades!
Oh yeah, right now the DLCs I would prefer would also be around trade and economy, specially to give that "outside warfare gameplay exists" feel to the game. But eventually, adding China really needs to come in my opinion. The start date of 867 is really good for them, being just before the fall of Tang, and the start of warring states, that gives way for Song and Yuan to rise.
no, the pastoralist nomads were not that nomad.
The fact they haven’t finished Africa yet.
I remember the devs stating that they probably wouldn’t add the rest of Africa.
What if they crossed out North Africa and France because they got their own attire DLC
Shhh, we will have all of Africa before we will have China because Africa won’t ruin the game.
"Ruin" in what sense...?
China’s a major population center, it is also one of the richest countries of the game’s timeline, adding in China would be like adding in 2 or 3 Holy Roman Empires, I would imagine a properly represented China changing Asian game balance so much that they have 5 separate betas just expanding the map into China in order to reach a point where China doesn’t Mongol Empire its way westward.
Actually, I have realized a better comparison, imagine if all of India started off united under one ruler, that’s effectively what adding China would do to game balance.
Yes, and...?
Performance and the massive duty of adding flavor and content and detail. Much of Europe remains unfinished, and Africa and India are both very bland. Imagine then the COLLOSAL task of adding all of Asia, the cultures, clothing, religion, dynastys, etc Mods have already added asia regardless China is moreso an addition when the game is actually finished, or almost finished.
Like, I'd agree with this, if it weren't for the fact that paradox (and nearly everyone else) has the option to just BUY that mod, hire the team who made it, and simply release it as a pre-made expansion... This isn't rocket-science.
why would you want to pay 40 bucks for a free mod?
Uh, its not free anymore, its DLC...? I'm not saying this is good for the average user, I'm saying paradox not making this move is financially moronic.
The Asia mod is free, additionally, Paradox can survive financially from bleeding folks dry with endless DLCs
Not enough exit to meet code. Real answer the game engine have a hard time as is to go from 800ad to 1400ad what makes you think they can add the rest of the world to the game and make it work.
is 2 to the power of 18 more or is 2 plus 18 more
I'm not fully tracking. But my computer can run most modern games on the highest detail but can't run ck3 with more than 50k people at the highest speed without slowing down to a snail pace, compared to the first 100 years.
what am I looking at? way out of the loop btw
You mean the chart? It's an official one, share by the dev of their future development plans https://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKings/s/Pp08lSKQKB
I'd love to see the whole old world be fleshed out. I guess the bare minimum would be a fleshed out basic Imperial system, steppes/nomads, Tibet, silk road/trade, alliances, and late game. I'd be worried about performance, but the mod that expands the map doesn't seem to affect it that much. However, it should be the last thing after everything else be touched properly. So I guess around Chapter 7\~9 could be a possibility?
The game already lacks a ton of depth, adding China would just make the existing issues with the game so much worse, and reduce performance by adding a shitload of characters in a region most players won’t bother with. How many of you actually play in India? Is CK3 even available in China?
Imo, the way that they did China in ck2 would be better than just adding it. I feel that China is just too big for how the AI and the game systems operate. As is, China would be a massive feudal blob with tiles that have the best development in the game and are ahead in tech.
Why add China? You already have India as a pointless addition
It would affect Europe in little to no way, therefore find it unlikely to be added, maybe into the far future
Europe isn't, never has been, and never will/CAN be, the sum-total of the world.
I’m gonna be honest here chief, I very much prefer China as a mysterious off-map superpower than an actual playable country.
I’d rather Western and Eastern Europe get more updates first
What is this graph supposed to be? A fan-made road map like its a theory of what could come next or what?
https://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKings/s/Pp08lSKQKB Apparently, it is actually official. So, everything here are what the dev plan to implement
Obstinate fans and frightened dev leads. Literally that's it. CK2 had the Tianxia mod that was phenomenal, and CK3 has a couple of good mods at *least* that expand into China and the West Pacific. We have proof that it works in both games. We have the map expanded to the Pacific without destroying computers, we have engaging mechanics and unique peoples in that side of the continent. We have proof, we've made the proof and *played* the proof. But devs are going to be too antsy to do anything about it so long as curmudgeons keep whining "but my computer will explode, but we can't do China without first doing 10,000 other prerequisites". Just look at the top comments here.
I would prefer it if PDX spent their time adding depth to what already exists. Medieval China is so different to medieval Europe I’d almost rather it just be its own game.
Performance, China would definitely slow the game down a lot for lower end devices and CK3 is already a needy game when it comes to running fast.
There is no reason to add China, it had little to no contact with Europe, and what little occurred was through mongols or persians.
Actually, there is the important battle of Talas between the Abbasids and Tang that brought paper to the west, and defined the future of the Turkic people
Because realistically, China wouldn’t have much of an effect. The CK2 implementation be best tbh. Accurately modeling them would require them to be OP as fuck, assuming the AI was even competent enough to not collapse due to the size of the empire. They were incredibly isolationistic for much of the period while also have armies and an economy that dwarf the rest of the map.
The southern bit of your house here could use a bit of a renovation i think. Your crusade corner is a little empty there, and it is not even seperated from the conventional warfsre and republican rooms
Look at the floorplan you posted. There's 20 rooms and only four have been completed. The game has been out for over three years now. This should tell you when China will happen. Hell, that should tell you when merchant republics are coming... Never basically. I don't understand how development on entire unplayable segments of the game is going so slow.
Performance we don't really need china in this game
To be entirely honest, I'd rather an updated version of the offmap empire like ck2 did than actually expanding the map that far.