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CRUSADER KINGS

I consider Paradox Interactive "Crusader Kings 2" to be one of the greatest strategy games/dynastic simulators ever made.

I'm basically just taking some of the concepts from CK2, simplifying them, and throwing them into a Starcraft map. The world is broken up into dozens of duchies. Soldiers aren't constructed but are instead raised from your holdings (depending on how upgraded they are); duchies and counties can be upgraded to provide more income or soldiers, and during war players can generally only take one duchy (if in a holy war, or claimed) or county away from someone else. Basically there's no "one-shot-kill" warfare.

Aside from personal ambition to expand one's kingdom and wealth in Europe, one of the driving forces in the game will be religious conflict between Islam, Christianity, and Paganism; the Pope will call Crusades in Italy, Jerusalem, and Spain, and the Muslims will lay siege to the Eastern reaches of the Byzantine Empire.

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GAME TYPE

This is a diplomacy map; it will have a maximum of seven players. There'll be a few key differences to other diplos: there is much greater focus on economic expansion rather than on military expansion. Because of the nature of the era, technology advances will be minimal. There will also be no (or limited) naval combat. It will be a very melee heavy map with an attempt to create some rock-paper-scissors mechanics amongst unit types. Rivers and mountains will be featured in the game but will be reduced in scale so as to account for the lack of ranged units, to prevent annoying bottlenecks from happening in combat.

There are "Major Nations" but their presence in a game isn't required; the map will attempt to adjust for their absence. Similarly the game is very open-ended; there will be very few scripted sequences except for major historical events and religious wars.

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CORE FEATURES

• Selectable starting date between 1066 (post-Hastings England) and 1337 (Hundred Year's War).
  
  
• 20+ Selectable nations; from the majors like France, England, and the HRE to small kingdoms like Sicily, Croatia, and Ireland.
  
  
• Upgradeable structures; individual Duchies will comprise four to five different structures that can be upgraded individually, up to level 5, to provide different bonuses; increased archers, increased cavalry, increased income, longer siege times, etc.
  
  Each county can also either be a Town or Castle (economic vs military bonuses) and can be upgraded to increase its yield.
  
  
• Complex diplomacy: the ability to marry rulers, and build up this marriage into a military alliance. Spend money to fabricate claims on your rival's titles. Spend money to attempt to assassinate rival rulers, or to sabotage their reputation with their vassals.
  
  
• Warscore: functionality that can determine a victor in an alliance war, or force the enemy to accept demands in a total victory. I'll base it mainly on the size of opposing forces' armies and whether a war target has been conquered or not.
  
  
• Siege: In order to conquer enemy territory in war, you have to hold your men in the province and "siege" all of its holdings. Occupation shifts warscore in your favor.
  
  
• Crusades: the Christians and Muslims will occasionally call Crusades or Jihads on one another and participation is voluntary -- but the rewards are great. In religious wars, defenders will get bonuses in troop levies, higher vassal opinions, and access to religious orders that will fight for free.
  
  
• Army Upkeep: raised soldiers will substantially drain your treasury. Wars in Europe will be expensive ventures. Getting into "debt" will negatively impact you (levies spawn with reduced health, mercenaries will abandon you, revolts will become common).
  
  
• Mercenaries: the ability to raise fresh mercenary soldiers for a considerable cost to supplement your levies. They spawn instantly in your capital province.
  
  
• No map-protection: I hate it. I'll construct two versions of the map; a compressed and uncompressed one. The uncompressed one will feature all of my triggers and documentation for the map in case a new mapmaker is curious about a triggering system or something. The compressed version will be the one intended for use on Battle.net
  

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POSSIBLE/LOW PRIORITY FEATURES

• Rulers:
  
  
• Laws:, which primarily affect the income and troop levies in a realm, at the cost of money or opinion.
  
  
• Selectable game-mode: on top of the selectable starting date; essentially a "Hardcore" diplomacy versus a "Normal" diplomacy. The difference would be in the pacing of the game and expanded or protracted diplomacy options.
  
  
• Demesne: distinction between territory controlled by the crown (you) and territory controlled by your vassals. Soldiers raised by vassals will not cost you upkeep, but will come at a gradual cost in opinion. Your personal soldiers will cost money to field.
  
  
• Tutorial: I plan to include a very comprehensive dropship-menu based help system that should explain all facets of the map. This is low-priority because I won't bother with it until all essential game systems are in place.
  
  
• Assaults: the option to assault a castle and bypass a lengthy siege.
  
  
• Additional starting years: I might also consider adding 1145 to the timeline to represent the Second Crusade.
  
  
• Vassal opinion: a simple vassal opinion feature, that determines their willingness to provide their full levy and income to you. I'll try to think through a "general" opinion feature and a "specific" one on a per-duchy basis.
  
  
• Vassal revolts: a low enough opinion will begin to exponentially increase the potential for a vassal revolt, wherein a duchy will revolt against your rule and attack you. There might be potential for other vassals to join in the civil war. A revolt might either result in independence or to lower an unpopular law.
  
  

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PLAYABLE NATIONS

Collapse Box

• Kingdom of France
  
• Kingdom of England
  
• Kingdom of Scotland
  
• Kingdom of Ireland
  
• Kingdom of Denmark
  
• Spanish Kingdoms (combined for balance purposes)
  
• Holy Roman Empire
  
• Byzantine Empire
  
• Kingdom of Hungary
  
• Kingdom of Poland
  
• Kingdom of Norway
  
• Kingdom of Sweden
  
• Kingdom of Sicily/Duchy of Apulia
  
• Kingdom of Lithuania
  
• Republic of Genoa
  
• Republic of Venice
  
• Cumanian-Kipchak Confederation
  
• The Golden Horde
  
• Grand Duchy of Novgorod
  
• Grand Duchy of Muscovy
  
• Almoravid Sultanate
  
• Fatimid Caliphate
  
• Seljuk Sultanate
  
• Zoghbadid Emirate
  
• Mali Empire
  
• Kingdom of Ghana
  
• Kingdom of Songhai
  
• Empire of Abyssinia
  
• Kingdom of Alodia-Makuria
  
• Ilkhanate
  
• Kingdom of Jerusalem
  
• Kingdom of Naples (?)
  
• The Latin Empire (?)
  
• Grand Duchy of Rostov (?)
  
• Bahrid Sultanate (?)
  
• Marinid Sultanate (?)
  

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SCREENSHOTS

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PROGRESS

• IDEAS (80%)
  
• TERRAIN (85%)
  
• UNIT PLACEMENT (90%)
  
• TRIGGERS (35%)
  

UPDATES

• 09/03/2012
  Initial post
  
• 12/09/2012
  Added economy and County/Duchy upgrade triggers after long hiatus due to school.
  
• 1/29/2019
  Rebuilt triggering system from ground-up, implemented EUD triggers to modify unit attacks and building graphics. Implemented income, county upgrades, and troop levy system.
  
• 2/10/2019
  Implemented debt and manpower regeneration system. Beginning work on simple diplomacy options and computer AI.
  
• 2/11/2019
  Expanded map area; included Red Sea Coast and West Africa, and consolidated user interface.
  
• 2/18/2019
  Populated Middle East and Ghana/Songhai.
  
• 4/5/2019
  Continued improving terrain, implemented EUD upgrade and spawn system on Duchy level.
  
• 6/11/2019
  Revised nation selection system; made it into a mini-map so that selection and diplomacy is more intuitive. Implemented Duchy full range of Duchy upgrades.
  
• 6/17/2019
  Rebuilt diplomacy menu to contain more diplomatic actions: usurp titles, raise relations, "scheme", divorce, etc.
  
• 6/19/2019
  Small terrain changes and built rudimentary triggers for Duchy sieges. Improved "feel".
  

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Made with the Map Production template.

Post has been edited 13 time(s), last time on Jun 18 2019, 10:45 pm by Brusilov.

None.

Wow I haven't seen such an accurate recreation of Europe in SC terrain before!

This looks really, really impressive.

looks awesome , those religion and people status remember me civilization, another great game.

would be awesome a comp AI to play against, but that seems too much X).
good luck on your project

Thanks, guys.

Oh_Man; I'm guessing that you don't play Hearts of Iron 3 TGS or Napoleon Total War much?

Kusari; well, if I do implement vassal revolts there will essentially be an AI to play against. Enemy and revolting vassal AI will function much like a normal player; they'll raise soldiers around their duchies based on their upgrades when at war and I might figure out some scripting to get them to somewhat intelligently attack and siege your duchies. It's a given that there'll be randomizer triggers to randomly upgrade CPU holdings around the game world, so that their economic development parallels with that of normal players and thus doesn't make each new conquest an "undeveloped wasteland".

Well, except for territories held by Pagans, that is.

Lul nope I mostly play RPGs. *cough* Click my banner!

So I dropped this for a long time on account of university and Starcraft dying; but now that it's been reinvigorated a bit with Remastered and has official EUD support, I've actually resumed work on it again. And by "resumed" I basically mean rebuilt -- I'm a lot smarter now than I was seven years ago.

Just wow! It's nice to see these come backs! Make sure you download the latest version of SCMD, much have changed over time!

Looks relleh gud and impresive. Looking forward to seeing this map done + any updates. :3

Lol I see I was plugging my RPG in 2012, well it's done now.

Now it's your turn to make it to the finish line!

Lots of exciting stuff is possible with EUDs; I look forward to seeing it.

I'm making nice progress so far. I've implemented an expenses system that charges money to your treasury based off of how many soldiers you have raised, and adds to your debt (gas) if you zero out your treasury. In the future I'll add stiff penalties to incurring debt (soldiers will begin going home, mercenaries will abandon you, your castles will last less time under siege, etc). Sending your soldiers home will gradually reduce your debt and make you cash-positive again.

I've also implemented a manpower system and manpower regeneration system. Taking casualties in the field will deplete your manpower pool, so that you won't be able to raise as many soldiers again. Manpower will gradually regenerate based on your holdings.

I'm also testing out a very basic "AI". You can use diplomacy options on the CPU just like you can with a player, and going to war with a CPU country will cause them to raise soldiers (based on their holdings within the area you're going to war with). I'll set them up to perform some basic actions depending on the balance of forces in the war region (attack or defend). For now this is mostly for playtesting; I won't iron out all these scripts until it's in beta.

Looks awesome! Hope you're able to complete it. All the systems sound really good, diplo's tend to be stale because they lack the intricacies to bring out the diplomacy aspect, so this has all those bases covered. I'm working on a map with similar stuff so I'll love to see how this all plays out in game. Good luck!

Well unfortunately due to EUD original unit limits, my map is already maxing. I'm having trouble getting around this problem and posted a help-request here. Hopefully someone sees it and can provide some advice, otherwise I'm going to begin having to reduce the scope of the map (e.g. removing some upgradeability from duchies) or reducing the density of duchies altogether.

I hit the same problem for my map, my solution is to store upgrade data for provinces as hp/energy/kills for the building and read that with EUDs. By using double numbers I can assign a value for each upgrade, so 1 for farms, 2 for mines, 4 for ports, 8 for roads, etc. Since any numbers preceding a particular value can't add up to that value, you can read it backwards to ascertain the upgrade status. So if you have upgrade 1 and 4, total value is 5 and you want farm income; checks for 8, no value, checks for 4, positive value, subtracts 4, checks for 2, no value, checks for 1, postive value, subtracts 1 execute action. Subbtracted values will need to be stored in a reciprocal counter of course so the data isn't lost. You can re-add back to original counter once the check is complete. In my setup for higher level upgrades it switches to the odds. The highest value upgrade can also be calculated fairly quickly since it's only 1 check and you don't need to subtract, so for mine roads would be that value since movement costs supply. That's my idea at least, hope it helps. If you find a better way of doing it let me know!

@Elewyn: That's a really clever solution. I may use a simplified variation of that, and just make the hitpoints a 5 digit number, and store the upgrades on the final three digits (since those are the only ones I require for unit spawns) and then read exact values. I already run a lot of binary counters per-player on a ten-second loop to calculate income and expenses, so I wouldn't want to stress the system too much. I just need to ensure that I can pre-place the units and read their data from the Unit Index, since at current I replace all buildings at start.