Hi all! I’m PinkAxelotl. Today, we’re taking a look at our vision for Merchants in Silk and Silver. Who are they, what is the experience they provide, which are the relationships that matters to them the most, and what specific systems are used to support their gameplay?

For the purposes of this Development Diary, the term “Merchant” only includes the new landless Merchant government. We won’t delve into details about their administrative-focused counterparts, i.e. Patricians or Republics. That’s a topic for another time.

Let’s get an important disclaimer out of the way: We’re right in the thick of development and all of this is subject to change.

By introducing Merchants we have an unique opportunity to provide a new playstyle that covers a previously untapped historical fantasy around trade and wealth-based power dynamics. Fight other Merchant families over important Trade Goods, win the favor of your Patron, and most importantly – keep caravans moving.

The focus of the Merchant experience is that of the family Company. This means that we’re not creating a peddler fantasy. You have family members and Associates (Courtiers) working the caravans on behalf of the Company.

Merchant gameplay is a constant trade-off between Gold and Prestige. As a Merchant, you are highly capable at Trade, but constantly hindered by not being a noble. Throughout this document, you will see that this interplay between Prestige and Gold pervades all mechanics we introduce for this playstyle.

So who exactly can be a Merchant? We’ve added the option to “Create your own Merchant” on game start, which can be done anywhere in the world. You will also be able to become a Merchant via a Decision when playing as a Duke or Count, as long as your Culture allows it. Patricians and Adventurers will also be able to take this Decision.

As you progress your Company, you might eventually want to settle down somewhere. The problem of getting to the very top is that everyone wants a piece of the pie. Being the biggest Merchant should not mean that no one challenges you. Rather the opposite. Acquiring land and “settling down” in the traditional sense should be an appealing way to mitigate risks and “tie down” assets. You can accomplish this by either purchasing land from your Patron, or choosing to either join or form a Republic.

Building Trade Expertise in a Primary Good of your choosing and acquiring Monopolies are integral to a Merchant’s Company progression (i.e. becoming the wine salesman of Italy). These have been covered extensively in the latest Silk & Silver Dev Diary on Trade, so for brevity’s sake we will move right along.

Your Monopolies and Trade Expertise tells the world what you are, while your Company Size is all about who you are as a Company.

\[Available Company Sizes]

Your Acumen represents the amount of gold your company has accumulated through Trade. For progression, it is used to gate the different Company Sizes, which you can spend Prestige to unlock (the first being an “Aspiring Business” and the last being “Trade Empire”).

For all intents and purposes, you can view these as your Company status. If you have a Trade Empire, most interactions will be easier for you to accomplish successfully, especially if you are looking to acquire a Trade Monopoly.

The different Size tiers boost a Company’s Competitiveness, which helps handle trade competition. They also unlock Merchant Charters from increasingly higher-tiered characters (i.e. dukes at tier 2, kings at tier 3, and so on). We will cover these Charters later in the document.

We can’t talk about Merchant fantasies without covering Company Purposes. Right from the get-go, we knew we wanted to put a lot of emphasis on the role-playing possibilities of playing as a Merchant, to fill the day-to-day activities of being the head of a Company, so that you’re not simply sitting around waiting for gold to trickle in. This is especially important for balancing against the number-heavy Trade feature.

\[Company Purpose Overview]

Company Purposes are different paths to pursue. Will you become a skilled craftsperson, lend gold at exuberant rates, trade in weapons, or reach for distant riches?

The different Purposes are:

• Reputable: Default starting Purpose, increasing family and Patron opinion.

• Artisan: Focus on Artifacts and Inspiration.

• Creditor: Lend gold and get strong hooks.

• War Profiteer: Sponsor wars with either Men at Arms or Mercenaries.

• Caravaneer: Get strong cultural bonuses and unlock Luxury Contracts.

You can pursue many of these actions regardless of what Purpose you have. We’re not limiting the amount of tools you have to engage with while playing as a Merchant character. The goal of these Purposes is to allow you to be significantly better at a particular playstyle, not limiting you to one.

As you will have noticed, all Purposes reference Opportunities and Contracts, and so let’s get into those next.

\[Reputable Company Purpose]

\[Artisan Company Purpose]

\[Creditor Company Purpose]

\[War Profiteer Company Purpose]

\[Caravaneer Company Purpose]

Similar to landless Adventurers, Merchants have access to a variety of contracts. The purpose of Merchant Contracts is primarily to either gain Prestige or Trade bonuses.

\[Promote Goods Trade Opportunity]

When taking on a Contract, you will be required to do a bit of legwork to improve the markets along your Trade Route, travelling far abroad to secure luxury goods, and build your Prestige to eventually be able to compete with the big traders.

\[Luxury Contract Event]

Our current list of Merchant Contract Types are:

• Trade Opportunities:

  • Used to maintain existing Trade Routes. When going on a Trade Opportunity, you travel to a market for a variety of purposes, such as increasing the sell price of specific trade goods, and promoting your business so as to make the market more attractive.

  • Trade Opportunities are also an avenue into fighting competing Merchant Families in your markets.

• Unity Contracts:

  • These are urgent situations that require your immediate attention. You must address irregularities in your business dealings, or run the risk of losing face. Most often one of your family members has been accused of misconduct. Can you assuage every party involved?

• Luxury Contracts

• Undertake expeditions abroad and bring home wealth that significantly bolster your reputation. But the higher reward, the higher the risk. Will you be able to capture and reliably move live exotic animals back home?

• Luxury Contracts unlock Domicile Artifacts and are the only way of acquiring them.

Trade Opportunities trigger schemes that you have to complete. To make these more active and engaging, we’re adding a button that allows you to gain Advantages at an increased risk.

On top of that, we are adding an option for you to chain Trade Opportunities, so that you don’t need to go home in-between. Or, you can choose to send a dedicated Associate to handle the situation in your place.

\[Push for Advantages button]

As a Merchant, your Company Palace (Domicile) is your base of operations. All your Trade Routes start here. A bigger and better Palace increases the max number of Trade Routes you can set up as well, which makes upgrading your Palace integral to progressing your Company.

\[Wuhsha’s Domicile at Game Start]

One noteworthy characteristic of the Palace is that this Domicile type is fully integrated into the city where you are located. This means that if you upgrade a domicile building, you are investing in the holding at large. The main and external buildings cost Prestige in addition to Gold, since you are technically constructing in a landed ruler’s realm.

\[Domicile Artifacts]

With very few steady Prestige incomes, your Palace is also a place you can show off the exotic artifacts you’ve obtained through Luxury Contracts. These can be assigned to your Palace’s own artifact inventory.

A Merchant’s family members are key to components in managing Trade successfully. Family members will be responsible for managing specific trade routes, and have abilities that directly improve the market abilities of that route. As the House Head, you decide how far to push your family, and whether or not the individual interests must be sacrificed for the sake of the Company, which is where House Unity comes in.

You can assign either Family or Associates to oversee and manage Trade Routes. These characters will handle the menial tasks associated with the buying and selling of goods, so that you can focus on the bigger picture for the Company.

The Trader tasks are:

• Manage Competition: Raises Competitiveness

• Negotiate Deals: Improves Acumen gain

• Oversee Caravans: Gives Trade Capacity

\[Trader assigned to Trade Route]

As the Merchant government is heavily family-oriented, we also made the decision to implement House Unity for it. This offers a lot of opportunities for the tension and cohesion of family members.

Merchant House Unity has a distinct trade off: High House Unity is all about blood ties and presenting like a Noble Family (i.e. high focus on Prestige, at the cost of a competitive trade edge). Meanwhile, low House Unity centers around profit and getting skilled characters involved in the Trade, no matter the blood ties (i.e. high focus on Competitiveness, at the cost of Prestige).

\[Cooperative House Unity - second highest level]

\[Concerted House Unity - highest level]

\[Fractious House Unity - second lowest level]

\[Divided House Unity - lowest level]

To manage your business, you are wholly dependent on your Patron, who is the holder of the County where your Palace is located. This character allows you to conduct trade in their land, with the expectation that you will supply the needs of their holding. The relationship between you is a new tributary type, where you become their Beneficiary.

You have a special interaction that targets your Patron, from which you can ask for a range of favors, including marrying into low nobility. Engaging with your Patron is the primary way to spend gold to get Prestige. And Prestige, as we’ve learnt, is how to improve your Trade.

If you schmooze your Patron well enough, you can also request a Charter from them. This opens up a whole new level of Decisions for you, where you can either use the Charter in defiance of your Patron to vastly boost your Prestige, or reinvest some of your gold into your Patron’s lands to develop buildings and increase Prosperity. The latter of which will boost the trade output of your local market. Win win.

\[Charter gained]

Any Patron can only have one active Charter at a time, while having a number of Beneficiaries vying for it at the same time.

Working with or against your Patron has its own risks/rewards. Use the Charter to support them, and you might eventually be rewarded. Use the Charter against them, and you might eventually be punished, at the risk of imprisonment and the destruction of the artifact.

\[Abuse Charter Authority Event]

House Relations play an important part in keeping track of a Merchant’s main competition. As soon as you start creating Trade Routes, your relationship with merchants in those markets will start to deteriorate. Obtaining a Monopoly that another merchant is vying for also deteriorates the relationship. Basically, if you are competing over the same resources, the relationship between your Houses will become increasingly fraught.

You can use the Charter and Trade Opportunities to put a real dent in the Competitiveness of your competitors, along with all the regular scheming and plotting of the regular Crusader Kings 3 experience.

Here you have the Merchant experience: one where familial duty is posed against company profit, where a lowborn character might hope to rise above their station by building a lasting trade empire.

Hello everyone! We have a small update today to address some issues reported to us by the community. Check the changelog below for more information.

• Fixed an issue preventing players from manually inviting agents to schemes

• Fixed an issue causing epidemics and natural disasters to be less lethal than intended

Happy Tuesday! Mikael here with another By God Alone update. Last time we walked through Ecclesiastical Titles and Rites and while we shone a light on clerical gameplay and faith mechanics, we did not really touch on how a secular character - who you as the player, most often control - can harness said clerical mechanics.

So let's go there!

The year is 1075. You are the King of West Francia, and one of your grouchiest dukes - the one you've stubbornly refused a council seat for decades - has become too big for his britches. He has virtually stopped pretending he isn't preparing a revolt, and you would like him stripped of his vassal oaths before it gets there. The Papacy, however, has made it clear that complaints from secular kings about which of their unruly dukes is or isn't in good standing with God are not, presently, one of Rome's priorities.

Mercifully, you do have a Court Chaplain. Who happens to be the Archbishop! Who, by the strength of a Hook your spymaster fabricated last spring, owes you a favor large enough to impose an Excommunication order all on his own, which would in turn permit you to revoke his title without causing an upset with your other vassals. The duke, after all, falls under the Archbishop's spiritual jurisdiction as well. A brief letter to Rome (on your behalf), and your uppity duke has learned what can happen if he goes against his King's will.

This week is about Puppets - the system by which you, the secular ruler, get clerical levers to move on your behalf - and Playable Theocracies, the answer to the question "what if I just played the clergyman myself?".

Standard caveat: all of this is work in progress, nothing you see here is final, and we'd love your feedback.

A Puppet is a real character, who behaves in accordance with how NPCs typically act in Crusader Kings III. However, by virtue of your hold over them you can also make them act according to your ideas of what they should do. In By God Alone, we are introducing two puppet types which relate specifically to organized religions. The system itself is open both to future expansion and to modders, and is not fundamentally tied to religious matters as such.

When puppets take action at their master's command, the game reads this action as originating from the puppet. Costs and consequences are levied on them, not on you. For the modders out there, this does involve some minimal setup per action (e.g. Character interaction, Decision, Great Project) to ensure the initiator is distinguished from the one actually executing it, but the system is designed to be as designer- and modder-friendly as possible.

In By God Alone, your Court Chaplain is your persistent puppet candidate. To make them Compliant requires meeting some condition, the most obvious one being having a Hook on them, but a variety of other conditions can also be leveraged to ensure compliance: having a very high Level of Devotion yourself, having them as your friend (or… lover), if they sufficiently fear you, or if you are family. Having your dynasty deeply embroiled with the church machinery can be a powerful move.

\[Screenshot of a very WIP Puppet panel showing your Court Chaplain's available actions]

Currently, you can work through your puppeted Court Chaplain to do the following:

• Found a Rite - the secular ruler's only legal route into the Rite system you saw last time. Now you know who's holding the pen.

• Plan and Construct a Grand Cathedral as a Great Project, funded out of the Church Treasury rather than your purse.

• Mass-convert neighboring pagans through a Great Project.

• Excommunicate a character in the same Archdiocese, with the request lodged under his name rather than yours.

• Request a new Ecclesiastical Title, splitting their current region in two

• Request an Elevation to the See for your Puppet, i.e. make them an Archbishop or Patriarch.

• Turn him into the Head of Faith of a Faith that doesn't currently have one (such as 867+ Chalcedonian Christianity).

Virtually every new action we're making available to theocratic characters, we're also making available through the puppet system. We're not looking to duplicate actions you can normally do yourself, though - the actions you can take through your Puppet is typically limited to that which you do not have direct control over.

The other Puppet type we're adding is the Pope. If you somehow manage to elevate your Puppet to this position, or declare your Puppet the true (anti)pope and depose the pretender, you will have the Pope himself under your thumb via the same system. More on this (and Antipopes) later!

There is, of course, a more elegant solution to the problem of an uncooperative Court Chaplain (if his Superior won't accede to your demands of replacing him). Which is to be your own clergyman.

Theocratic characters - Prince-Bishops; landed Archbishops, Patriarchs, and Cardinals; and even the Pope himself - are now playable. Theocratic government has been in the codebase since launch, but the title-holders have always been NPCs whose succession went into a black box. With By God Alone you can play them, inherit through them in the limited sense theocrats inherit, or continue your dynasty's story through them rather than around them.

There's been a lot of speculation over the years around how theocracies could be made playable, and even if they should be made playable, given they don't follow dynastic inheritance. Well, Crusader Kings III has evolved a lot over the years, with landless play, administrative realms, and Choose Your Destiny type features already transforming what the core play experience looks like. So it's time to rip off the band-aid and give you a new type of player succession, along organizational rather than dynastic lines.

Simply, when playing a theocracy, if you die without a member of your dynasty set to inherit your title, you will instead resume playing the next clergyman in line for your title.

However, while clerical dynasty building was certainly something both the Christian Church and secular rulers tried to crack down on throughout history, it was not unheard of. With the faith's evolution over centuries of tumult modelled in By God Alone, particularly in the early start date both getting your cake and eating it too is far from impossible, as I'll outline below.

But before we go too far, let's talk about what you can actually do as a theocratic ruler. Within Christianity this is done within the confines of a new government type, Ecclesiastical Government - similar to but not identical to Theocratic Government. Succession is appointment-based: when a theocrat dies, the next holder is selected from local clergy, with weights based on how good of a Christian they are (or appear to be) and how well they have served the faith.

A theocratic ruler:

• Has a Treasury (which belongs to the Church, and works similarly to Treasury in admin realms), as distinct from their Gold

• Has a personal clerical domicile, they can build up to better see to the needs of their flock

• Appoints subordinates (bishops) within their own ecclesiastical hierarchy

• Often serves as the Court Chaplain of local secular rulers

• Cannot start wars against Christian rulers, but can gain land from Christian rulers by exploiting their inheritance laws

• Maintains their own Church Authority law-group, the theocratic parallel to a feudal lord's Crown Authority. Raising it costs Piety but unlocks abilities, most notably the legal precondition for establishing a theocratic dynasty. Letting it slip exposes you to a new Humiliation CB that Christian neighbors with higher authority or Piety can declare (at considerable consequences, of course)

• They remain a political actor. They can still rise, fall, and be schemed against

What you don't get is automatic direct dynastic continuity through children, the way a feudal duke does. Most theocrats are ostensibly sworn to celibacy, and the canonical succession model is appointment to a related-or-promising clergy character rather than to your bloodline. We've leaned into this rather than around it: the dynasty-building loop for a theocrat is about ensuring the next holder of your See is also of your house, by mentoring and elevating eligible nephews and protégés in time for them to be on the appointment shortlist when you die.

\[Screenshot of the Designate Theocratic Heir interaction, which becomes available if you have a dynasty (like Prince-Bishop Heinrish of Trent here) or once you've established a theocratic dynasty by raising your Church Authority]

The extreme case is the Holy Father himself.

As Pope, you sit on top of the central Church Treasury, funded by tithes from every Catholic church in Christendom, and quite possibly the largest single pot of gold in the game - at least when the Church is healthy. You hold the levers a secular player can only influence through their Puppets:

• You appoint (and pay) Cardinals, and give them Orders

• You call Ecumenical Councils and decide what they are about

• You Excommunicate rulers who displease you, with all the secondary consequences that cascade through the political map

• You approve Holy Sites for Catholicism

• You issue Papal Bulls, powerful edicts underwritten by Rome. These include the ability to launch a targeted crusade, declaring a Rite heretical, or declaring a certain Tenet permitted or forbidden.

\[Screenshot of the orders that can be given to Cardinals - by the Pope, or by a secular ruler who's Puppeted them]

Of course, every secular Christian ruler is, at some level, trying to influence you. Christian Kings and Emperors will line up at the Apostolic Palace to request some favor or another. It's up to you to decide who to hear, and whose wishes align with the will of God. Note that we will no longer direct every request for divine grace through the Pope - many concerns can be handled by the Church's local representatives (e.g. Archbishops), to avoid spamming a player whenever some local count thinks their half-brother is an affront to God

Speaking of the Apostolic Palace, this will be a new Throne Room which you will see (and have to maintain) both when playing as the Pope, and when visiting Rome to ask the Papacy to grace you in various ways. Visuals will be coming later, I promise!

With the ability to play as the Pope, it also makes the question of who becomes the next Pope that much more relevant.

While there were certainly times in the history of Catholicism when it took quite a long time for a Pope to get elected (the record held by the election of Pope Gregory X in 1271, after over 1000 days of divisive debates resulting in the locals locking the cardinals up and restricting their access to food and shelter until they came to an agreement, thus establishing the conclave tradition we know today), CK3 isn't really paced for tactical plotting over a short period of days or weeks. As such, the College is always considered to be deliberating over who will take the seat next, and cardinals can be influenced at any time.

There are always three candidates for the seat, selected based on the following criteria:

• The obvious choice (Cardinal most entrenched in the Church power structure)

• The pious choice (Cardinal with the highest level of Devotion)

• The powerful choice (Rite Head with the largest flock)

Of these selected candidates, cardinals will select their preferred option based on typical parameters like opinion, but also how their teachings align with the cardinal's traits. Every papal candidate has the opportunity to switch one Core Tenet as they rise to the seat, and if this change sits well with a particular cardinal, they're more likely to align with that candidate. Spiritual Fulfillment thereby becomes the driving force of the evolution of the Christian faith.

\[WIP screenshot of the College of Cardinals electoral process. The preferred tenets here are a bit samey, the intent is that post-balancing these will offer a more enticing buffet of possibilities.]

Oh, and should you manage to get elected, you may of course select what Christendom will henceforth know you as.

\[Screenshot of an event where you get to select your own pontifical name after having been elected Pope]

The Puppet system is faith-agnostic at the framework level. The same compliance check would carry over to any organized religion with a realm priest. However, a lot of the new actions we're making for By God Alone are specifically geared towards Christianity - manipulating the Archdiocese titles, asking for a Cardinalate, building Cathedrals. As such, the applicability of non-Christian realm priest puppets will be a bit lower.

Playable Theocracies are the more broadly applicable half. The pre-existing Theocracy government type covers clergy-as-ruler arrangements outside Christianity. What does not generalize is the centralized Christian institutional spine: the Curia, the College of Cardinals, the Papal Bull, the Ecclesiastical Title hierarchy. Those remain Christian-only because that's primarily what the expansion is modelling.

See you next time!

Greetings!

I’ll be following up on the overall vision dev diary with a deeper dive into our design for the Trade System. We’re starting our feature-specific dev diaries with Trade because, as you’ll see, it is connected to nearly every other feature we’re developing for Silk & Silver. But before we get into it, remember that all screenshots are work-in-progress and we are in the middle of development. Everything is subject to change.

Trade is a new layer that not only provides a new mechanic primarily used by Mercantile Governments, but more importantly, makes economic play more strategic for all characters and connects buildings on the map to actual gameplay. It’s where the other features in Silk & Silver meet and clash, where mercantile empires and trade leagues are born.

When you start your first Trade Route in Silk & Silver, the economic engines of the medieval world will already be turning. Your job is to muscle your way in and carve out your niche.

Before we get into how Trade plays out moment-to-moment, let's lay out all the levers we will have at our disposal. The Trade system is built from a handful of core concepts: Markets, Goods, Categories, Routes, and Monopolies. Each has a clear function, but they interact constantly. We'll take each in turn.

The world is filled with over 900 Trade Markets, one for each de jure duchy on the map. Each Market is located in the capital barony of its de jure duchy and serves all of its constituent holdings inside that duchy area. These are defined on game start and do not move.

Trade Markets track the overall Trade Good Productions and Needs of their constituent holdings. They are the mercantile hub of the area. Holding the de jure duchy capital where the Market is located provides you with some bonuses like being able to hand out Monopolies (discussed below).

At time of writing, there are over 40 types of Trade Goods scripted in the game. These are entirely defined by script, so yes, modders, you can go wild.

Trade Goods are primarily produced in Resource Production Districts and their associated Buildings. We track Production via modifiers on provinces. The system is designed to be quite flexible to allow for content and other systems to affect production, buy/sell price, and other factors.

When a building needs grain to feed its workers, it doesn't really care whether it gets grain, millet, or rice. What it really wants is cereals. Cue Trade Categories.

Trade Categories group related goods together so the system can express needs at the right level of abstraction. Some categories are simple: Salt is a single-good category. Others, like Cereals or Meats, can be filled by any of several substitutable goods. This becomes important in two places: when buildings broadcast what they want, and when monopolies claim an entire slice of the market, but more on those below.

• Max Routes — how many routes you can run simultaneously.

• Max Markets per Route — how many stops a single route can string together.

• Range — how far from your home market a route can reach.

• Capacity — how much a single route can carry in terms of Trade Good quantity.

• Competitiveness — how aggressively the route claims its share when contested. (Big enough topic that we'll come back to it below.)

Most of these grow as you invest in the trader assigned to the Route, your Domicile buildings, and your route history. Specialization and commitment compound.

Every Trade Route designates one of its goods as the route's Primary Good. This is the route's specialty, the thing it gets better at over time. Trading a Primary Good earns Trade Expertise in that good's category, and as a category levels up, the merchant gains stacking bonuses to how well they trade goods in that category.

A merchant who's mongered cheese for forty years isn't just a simple cheese trader. They're the Cheesemonger of Europe, and the system is built to reward exactly that kind of patience. Pick a good, stick with it, and let the years compound.

Trade Expertise lives on the merchant's title rather than directly on the character, so progression survives succession. Your heir inherits the family's hard-won reputation and resumes the work.

Acumen represents a Merchant's business savvy. It grows month by month based on the profit they actually pull in, not the volume they move or how many routes they run. At higher levels, Acumen unlocks personal bonuses that lift every Trade Route the Merchant owns. The intent is a subtle pressure to stay profitable and reward sharp deals.

The quotidian tasks of a Trade Route are managed by a Trader. Traders are characters you assign from your Associates or family members. A Trader's skills shape what their route is good at, affecting things like Competitiveness, for example. A well-rounded Merchant Company means you can maximize the effectiveness of all your Trade Routes

When more than one merchant tries to sell salt in the same market, who wins? Cue Competitiveness. Each route's share of a market's trade is determined by its Competitiveness relative to the Competitiveness of other Trade Routes trading that same good.

You don't get exclusivity without a Monopoly (discussed below). Instead, you get a slice proportional to your Competitiveness score. That makes Competitiveness the single most contested stat in the system. Investing in your Competitiveness is a key way to garner success as a Merchant and ensure that you are able to buy and sell up to your maximum potential.

A Monopoly is the ultimate version of Competitiveness. Where Competitiveness lets you compete for a share, a Monopoly locks the market down entirely. Other traders simply cannot move that category of goods through a market you have monopolized.

Monopolies are granted by the holder of the market's capital, and they can be granted to a specific merchant, to a republic, or to an entire Trade League whose members all share the privilege. Two types exist:

• Normal monopolies respect local needs and claim the entire surplus.

• Exploitative monopolies pull goods from local demand too, enriching the monopoly holder at the expense of the markets.

Both of these types can be on a single Category, or extended over an entire Market, making it a complete market monopoly.

Trade connects Trade Markets and balances their surplus productions with needed goods. Once a month, every market in the world calculates what it produces and what its buildings need. Routes then look at those balances and propose trades: buy up some surplus from one market, sell it for a tidy profit (if you have a Mercantile government) in a market with a deficit. The system resolves all of these proposals, adjusts balances across all the markets, settles the profit accumulated, and marks which Buildings' Needs are fulfilled.

Needs come from buildings. Many buildings require certain trade good types or categories: grain, leather, iron, dyes, etc. That demand is rolled into its market's monthly Needs.

Production comes from Resource Production Districts and their associated Buildings.

When Production exceeds Need, the market has a Surplus available to export. When Need exceeds Production, the market has a Deficit waiting to be filled. Buildings sit at the heart of the new economy and your decisions about which buildings to construct directly shape how markets behave and, consequently, what the trade landscape looks like from game to game.

If you're playing a settled ruler with land to manage, Trade is mostly something that happens to you. You don't profit from trade routes, and you can't really go toe-to-toe with merchants for market share. What you can do is run what we're currently calling Acquisition Routes (the name is still in flux): routes that exist purely to move goods into your lands so your buildings get what they need.

These are incredibly limited, though, and you'll rely on Merchants to fulfill the vast majority of your Needs. They're the ones who'll actually fill your markets at scale. So you build relationships: invite merchants to your court, grant them concessions, contract them to fulfill a certain Need, etc. How you interact with them is entirely up to you, but remember that the carrot usually works better than the stick.

If you're a Merchant or a Republic, Trade is your whole world. You run Profit Routes with the goal of buying low in surplus markets, selling high in deficit markets, and most importantly, profiting. You compete with market rivals, lobby for Monopolies, level up Trader skills, build Acumen, and stitch together a network of Markets that compounds over generations.

Setting up a route is the central action of mercantile gameplay. You pick a chain of markets you want to connect, choose which goods you'll move, designate one as your Primary Good (the route's specialty, and the category for which you'll earn experience in), and assign a Trader to run it. The route then becomes a persistent thing in the world, visible on the map, generating gold (only for mercantile characters), aging, leveling, and over time perhaps even paving roads as it goes.

Routes require a certain level of commitment. You can edit them, sure, but you can't shuffle them around entirely or replace a route so completely that it becomes the Route of Theseus. A route's defining characteristics matter.

Once a route is running, it's largely self-driving. Each month, every active route ticks: it buys from its source markets, sells in its destination markets, settles the books, and credits your treasury. You don't need to micromanage, though you very well can and should if you want to squeeze every last piece of gold out of the economy.

Wars, plagues, building changes, and competitor pressure all shift the numbers month-to-month. A perspicacious merchant will notice when a profitable route starts slipping and intervene before it breaks; one who doesn't may simply wonder why their income is quietly eroding as the months pass by.

Trade Posts are the long arm of a Republic. A Republic ruler can establish Trade Posts in county capitals across the world. Trade Posts host their own buildings (which benefit the Republic owner, not the local ruler) and let a Republic project economic power into territories it doesn't actually control. You'll hear more about these in a future dev diary.

Trade leaves marks on the map. Where routes run consistently between two Markets year after year, roads emerge: first as worn paths, then proper roads, climbing through tiers as the routes hold their course. Each tier moves armies a bit faster, makes travel a bit safer, and adds a variety of modifiers along the way. Stop trading, and the road decays. We'll dig into roads further in a future dev diary.

One question we know we'll get is: How will the AI handle all this? This, along with economy balancing, is something we are seriously iterating on as we develop the expansion. Merchant and Republic AI characters create routes, pick goods, assign Traders, lobby for monopolies, and compete with you for market share. Currently, the new system feels populated: markets aren't empty until you show up to trade in them; they're already busy, and your job is to muscle in.

We're still tuning, and will continue to do so until release. The AI doesn't yet do everything we want it to, and we'll keep iterating through the rest of the production cycle. But the foundation, i.e. AI characters being real participants in the economic world instead of background scenery, is in.

Other areas we have a keen eye on are ensuring the AI has competitive strategies for determining building chains to construct and, on the flip side, that AI Merchants make smart trades without min/maxing like some players might.

That's the vision. Trade in Silk & Silver is the layer where buildings, characters, geography, and politics all push against each other. It's a system that wants you to build empires of cheese, medicaments, salami, and silk; one that rewards specialization and patience; and one that makes the world feel populated with economic competitors and allies.

We've left out some detail here on purpose. A more technical dev diary will follow closer to release where we'll dig into the mechanics, modifiers, script, etc. For now, we wanted to give you the shape of the system and a sense of how it'll feel to play. See you in the comments.

Hello everyone! We’re releasing a small bugfix update today to address some outstanding issues since the release of 1.19 “Scribe.” Check the changelog below for more information!

• Fixed an issue where the Legendary Hunt Story Cycle would not start despite starting a legendary hunt.

• The Iberian Dominance ending can no longer be repeated infinitely for unlimited renown.

• purchase_land_interaction now only allows duchy targets when the seller completely controls that duchy.

• Custom title names are no longer reset to default in Title History after a ruler’s death.

• AI characters can now upgrade their knight accolades.

• Rites of Passage no longer refunds gold or prestige when cancelled.

• Fixed an issue preventing “The Song of El Cid” Story Cycle from being finished.

• Administrative rulers from the Renewed Caliphate ending now correctly get the Subjugation CB.

• Characters at their concubine limit can now offer concubines to other characters.

• Fixed an issue where the side buttons in the Character Panel wouldn't display correctly after loading a multiplayer save.

• Japan now shows the correct title and government type when selecting a starting character.

• Characters in a travel entourage now reset to their original location if their travel plan is cancelled.

• Your infidelity will no longer be broadcasted to everyone as it happens. It’s the Middle Ages, not a Coldplay concert.

  • Note: Pregnancies that began in 1.19.0.4 will still trigger this!

• Fixed bug where using the "Purchase Land" interaction as Landless would not distribute the land properly to the purchaser

Happy Tuesday! Mikael here again with another update on the development of By God Alone. Last week we talked[forum.paradoxplaza.com] a lot about Rites, and this week we're going to talk about their finer details - how they start, how they spread, how they go wrong, where the line is between local devotion and outright heresy. We're going to keep that promise, but we're also going to come at it sideways, because Rites in CK3 are not free-floating ideas. They are things specific characters do in specific places, and the places matter as much as the theology.

To illustrate this, let's see how the mission of Cyril and Methodius plays out in the expansion, since many of you are likely familiar with this story.

The year is 869. King Rastislav of Moravia - your current character, possibly - has spent the last couple of years in a peculiar kind of correspondence. A pair of brothers, Cyril and Methodius, arrived in his court at the end of the previous decade and taught the Holy Scriptures in his language, which was a novelty. They translated scripture into Church Slavonic, which had also not particularly been done. The work was good. The local clergy noticed. The clergy in Salzburg, several days' ride west, also noticed, and were not pleased.

Cyril and Methodius travelled to Rome to settle the matter. Cyril died there, but Methodius came home with the Pope's blessing and a tightly defined parcel of permission: a Slavic liturgy, in the local tongue, recognized but contained. It is a real thing. It is also, structurally, a divergent variant of Christianity.

\[Screenshot of the Moravian Mission story cycle]

That story plays out, more or less in that shape, in any 867 campaign in our current build. At the end of it (if you played your cards right) Methodius creates a new Rite, which enters the religious geography of Europe. The Slavic Rite is Christian, but carries Anachoresis, Dulia, and Adaptive as its starting Core Tenets. Scandalously, the Rite also permits priests to get married (which, while not unheard-of within mainline Chalcedonian Christianity, was at least frowned upon at this time).

The Slavic Rite may be a pre-scripted storyline, but it leverages a more generalized system, which is what we'll talk about today.

As mentioned above, Rites are not random ideas floating about in the air; they live on the map, on counties and provinces, and are informed by a new title layer we've added called Ecclesiastical Titles (the generic term, for the modders out there, is "[c]clerical_region_titles[/c]" which can be leveraged to create analogous mechanics for your total conversion mod or whatever). In the West they're known as Archdioceses, in the East as Patriarchates. They sit underneath the secular map — your Kingdom of West Francia contains several Archdioceses, the Archbishop of Reims holds one of them, his counties overlap parts of your domain and parts of Lotharingia, and his ecclesiastical authority does not particularly respect either of your realm borders.

These titles broadly follow the ancient Roman administrative borders the medieval Church inherited and then proceeded to argue about for centuries. However, they are shaped differently in each of the 867, 1066, and 1178 start dates to reflect the evolution of the church's reach over these eras. Where a Christian Kingdom emerges that doesn't host one - which might happen more than you might think, especially over a long campaign - a new Ecclesiastical Title can be created by the Head of Faith. Up-and-coming local clergy, especially ones backed by powerful secular rulers and perhaps a Cathedral of the latest architectural fashion, can also petition the Papacy for his own See, or request the merger of their See and a neighboring one if its Archbishop is sufficiently hapless.

\[Screenshot of the 867 Ecclesiastical Regions]

\[Screenshot of the 1066 Ecclesiastical Regions, notably more widespread and fragmented in some places]

The Archbishop or Patriarch holding one of these is an actual person with an actual job. He has subordinate Bishops to oversee. He sees to the faithfulness and souls of local Christian rulers. He starts and administers Church-related Great Projects in his region. He ensures everyone in the region follows the right teachings. When his See vacates, the next holder is selected from local clergy by a Clerical Appointment score - we're still tuning the factors, so I'm not going to walk you through the formula, but the principle is that the next Archbishop of Reims is somebody you can scout before he gets there and have some influence over. The Head of Faith can also override the local process, parachuting in a preferred Cardinal over the heads of an aggrieved local clergy. That happens sometimes. God works in mysterious ways.

An important aspect of tending to your flock is to make sure they have an impressive house to worship in. Currently in CK3, some important cathedrals exist in fixed locations on the map as Great Buildings. In By God Alone, most Grand Cathedrals will be constructed - and reconstructed, when a new, more impressive, architectural style emerges - dynamically via Great Projects. As such they can be placed anywhere, but most commonly, they will appear in the designated Seats of Archdioceses.

\[Screenshot of the Grand Cathedral Great Project] 

Construction is roughly thirty in-game years at the default rate - a lifetime in CK3 terms, or even potentially a multi-generational endeavour - and is funded by the holding Archbishop and contributed to by anyone in the region who feels strongly enough about it: local lieges, the top liege, vassals, allies, the Head of Faith if he likes you. Once a Grand Cathedral is built, it is a piece of geography you cannot ignore. It also serves as a Domicile for the clergy holding it, and as such can be expanded upon over time.

\[Screenshot of a Cathedral Complex Domicile] 

Cathedrals, and other Great Buildings designated as religious sites, can be turned into Holy Sites. This requires the Head of Faith to bless the site as such, and also demands it contain a holy relic of some kind.

\[In-game render of different Grand Cathedral models]

I'll save the proper Holy Sites diary for another week since it's still being iterated on, but the point I want to land today is that a Cathedral elevates the Archbishop who holds it. The occupant of a wealthy, well-built metropolitan See is someone the Pope listens to. The administrator of a poor See run out of an unconsecrated chapel with no relics is not. Most of the political weight that you, the player, eventually want an Archbishop of yours to throw around in council comes from making him the kind of man whose Cathedral is famous enough, leading to a larger flock of followers and pilgrims.

Cathedrals are costly to construct, and while patronage was a major source of that wealth, much of it falls on the Church to fund. So how does the Archbishop get his funding?

As we have mentioned previously, the new Ecclesiastical government type has access to a Treasury fueled by taxes (tithes) collected by local Bishops, which flows up through the Church hierarchy to be used to promote the faith. This is driven by the Ecclesiastical Lease, which is the contract under which Christian temple holdings are leased to clergy. In addition to gold being funneled up through the vassal-realm priest structure as usual, we now also get a slice of money that flows through the organization through the treasury system; Bishops to Archbishops, Archbishops to Pope, typically.

Of course, a character can be both an Archbishop and the Court Chaplain of a King or Emperor. This gives them two sources of income, one gold-based and one treasury-based. It also gives the King in question a good reason to ensure their Court Chaplain is on their side and owes them lots of favors.

The Ecclesiastical Treasury can be used for a lot of things: title creation, holding construction, mercenary contracts, Holy Order endowments, calling Ecumenical Councils, contributing to a Cathedral somewhere far from Rome. It can also be squirreled away by a less-than-scrupulous metropolitan who needs a little cash infusion for throwing a grand feast. None of us are truly free from sin.

A powerful secular ruler with theocratic vassals can also violate the contract relationship. The Levy the Tithes Decision makes every clerical vassal in your realm pay you a one-shot tribute, at the cost of a large amount of Piety. We expect some kings to do this occasionally. We expect the Pope to react when they do.

So: wealthy Archbishops on a map that doesn't match anyone's realm, sending the Pope a monthly check on top of running their own buildings. What does any of that have to do with what they teach?

A Rite is the answer. Cyril and Methodius founded one. Any clergy character in the right circumstances can found one - a Patriarch, an Archbishop, the Head of a Holy Order (and, as we hinted last time and will detail next time, you have Puppets you can work through to do this as a secular Christian ruler.) The flow is similar to the old Create Faith UI: the founder picks Tenets to elevate or demote and Doctrines to swap. Each individual change carries its own Piety cost, modulated by the parent Faith's Fervor - a modest Rite that nudges one or two Permitted Tenets up to Core is cheap, an aggressive Rite that promotes an anathema teaching is not. The UI shows you a predicted Divergence number alongside each candidate change before you confirm. You (or your Puppet) should never be doing this blindly.

\[Screenshot of the Rites of Chalcedonian Christianity in 867. The vertical lines indicate Divergence; the Carolingians may have their own liturgy, and it's very powerful even compared to the influence of Rome, but at least they don't diverge too much in their teachings - for now. Those Insular Irish however…]

\[Screenshot of the Rite panel, where we can see why Insularism diverges to the extent it does]

The Tenets and Doctrines you get to pick from are the ones known to you (or your clergy puppet, as the case may be). You can't just make up a new theological idea you've never been exposed to before, after all. As per our last dev diary, this means Studying other faiths or learning about them in some other way, like travelling far and wide, inviting foreign guests, etcetera. A well-travelled Merchant family[forum.paradoxplaza.com] for example might well prove a wealth of foreign knowledge and might originate some very strange ideas if they are put in a position where they can found their own Rite. If you truly want to be a religious innovator, you can also aim to become a Herald through becoming a renowned theologian, which gives you access to Tenets nobody has even heard of before.

What the Slavic Rite actually did, when Methodius founded it, is concrete and embedded into the game. It promoted Anachoresis - the Eastern, contemplative, Desert-Fathers ideal - where the Roman Rite has Apostolic Succession, the institutional and hierarchical posture of top-down clergy authority. It kept Dulia alongside, because the Slavs were not theologically distant from Rome on the topic of saints. Yet it permits clerical marriage where the Roman Rite does not. This makes their clergy married men, embedded in their villages, whose moral and political incentives are different from those of a celibate Roman priest.

Counties follow Rites, not just Faiths. This makes them "convertible", at faster rates if the Rites are of the same Faith, and metropolitans (Archbishops, Patriarchs) will always do this within their Ecclesiastical Regions. A powerful Archbishop who founds a new Rite will quite rapidly ensure his followers adhere to the right liturgy.

Characters can also try to convince one another to switch to their Rite. This means neighboring metropolitans might try to convince one another to unify their teachings, which could make a divergent rite quite a power center over time. This increases the pressure on secular rulers to ensure their local metropolitan teaches what they prefer, and gives you a lever to try to promote your own rite across Christendom.

Every Tenet has a status in any given Rite - Core, Permitted, Known, or Prohibited - and each status carries a weight in the calculation of Divergence. Two Rites that both treat Apostolic Succession as Core agree. Two Rites where one has it Core and the other Prohibited disagree, sharply. Add up the per-Tenet contributions across the whole list of Tenets and Doctrines and you have a Divergence score from one Rite to its Faith's mainline.

At 50 points of Divergence and above, the Rite crosses into what the game flags as potentially heretical territory: a different bucket in the Church's politics, a distinct ragged border on the religious map, and - if a Pope is in a position and a mood to do something about it - the prospect of a Papal Bull naming the Rite a Heresy outright. The Rite's Head is then offered a chance to submit and rejoin the mainline. If they choose not to, they will become their own Faith, with the consequence of being labeled a heresy of its parent. While this means the total Divergence across the parent faith has decreased, which is good for the Pope, having a heretical faith to contend with is not typically good for a stable status quo.

Should you try to create a Rite with an immediate Divergence score above 100 - for example by suggesting all these teachings of the Roman Rite are fine and all, but we should have Lay Clergy and a Temporal Head of Faith, because that's what God's word truly intended - there's not a pressing need for a lead-up period, you'll just be declared a heretical faith outright. Good luck!

Most of what you've learned about today works the same regardless of if you're Christian or not. Most faiths have been split up by Rite, and some faiths have become Rites where we think it better reflects history. For example, Islam has been reshaped around the major historical branches and schools of law: Sunni, Shia, Kharijite, and the early community of Sadr al-Islam are now subdivided into Rites such as Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali, Ismaili, Imami, Zayidi, Ibadi, and others. This lets characters and provinces better reflect regional and historical differences, from North African Malikis to Persian Hanafis and the varied Shia communities of the medieval world. Some groups, such as Druze and Quranism, remain distinct faiths where that better fits their historical role.

\[Screenshot of revised Islamic setup in 867]

Obviously, Grand Cathedrals don't exist outside Christianity, but the ability to request your local Great Building be designated a Holy Site, and in general the new dynamic nature of Holy Sites, is universal.

Rites can be created, divergences punished, and heresies formed in other Faiths as well.

The key distinction between Christianity and other religions in By God Alone with respect to the above is the administrative institution of the Church, split up into regions based on ancient Roman provinces. Everything else that's Christian-only flows from this: the special titles and interactions of these characters, the way they automatically spread the influence of their Rite, the way the money flows through the organization, etcetera. 

In the next dev diary for By God Alone, we're going to be talking about Puppets and Playable Theocracies, where we'll start to understand how you as a secular ruler can act through clergy without necessarily playing them (but also what to expect if you choose to do so). We will also get into the different types of clergy you could play: Prince-Bishops, Archbishops, Cardinals, and the Big Man himself.

In the meantime: may your Archbishop be loyal, your Cathedral construction not get stuck in development hell, and your Divergence be precisely high enough to be interesting without being embarrassing.

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to our first official dev diary for our upcoming expansion By God Alone! In our sneak preview[forum.paradoxplaza.com], we gave you the grand tour from the mountaintop. This week, we're going to zoom in on one particular slice of the new expansion features, where your character starts having an actual relationship with their faith. This is the foundation upon which many of the features we'll discuss in later dev diaries are built.

We will look over our revisions to Tenets, Spiritual Fulfillment, Personal Tenets, and the new Study Faith scheme. Along the way, I'll walk you through the reworked Faith UI, which is where most of this comes together. As always, everything here is under active development and subject to change, and we'll be reading your feedback carefully. Let's dig in!

The one-liner in our last diary was that the right to rule flows from God, which is true for the expansion overall. This week's catchphrase is more personal: your faith is something you practice, not something you have.

In live CK3, religion is essentially a label with a handful of modifiers and restrictions hanging off it. You inherit your religious doctrines and core tenets at birth, and unless you convert or found a new Faith outright, your spiritual life is a static block of stats that never changes. What we want to replace that with is something that behaves a lot more like the real thing - a daily practice with personal convictions, moral tension, and plenty of room to drift over the course of a lifetime.

Imagine a newly-minted archbishop who adopts Scholasticism and starts nudging the Tenets of his Rite, year by year, until the theology of an entire region has quietly drifted toward something his grandfather would not have recognized. Or a Lustful, Greedy duke who nevertheless drags himself through decades of fasting and self-denial because he knows, on some level, that his predilections are going to earn him nothing but eternal anguish in the end. Or a count who quietly practices a forbidden teaching and lives in daily terror of his local Archbishop. These are the kinds of stories we want the religion system to naturally produce.

To make any of this work, we have to start with Tenets, the building blocks of every faith's identity. We're doing a comprehensive pass on them, with over two dozen new ones coming with By God Alone, targeting primarily the various Christian traditions. We're talking about things like Peace of God, Apostolic Succession, Transubstantiation, Hesychasm, Scholasticism, Simony, and Mortification of the Flesh.

\[Illustration of 26 new Tenet icons. Feel free to guess in the comments what they represent!]

Every Tenet now has two distinct effects: a faith-wide effect applied to followers of the Faith (actually Rite, but more on that next time) when the Tenet is being actively promoted (this is the old behavior, mostly preserved), and a personal effect applied only to characters who adopt the Tenet as a personal conviction.

As a concrete example, picking Peace of God as a personal tenet lowers your knight limit (you're not supposed to be keeping a huge martial retinue if you're really serious about this) but gives you cheaper ally calls and sturdier alliances - the politics of the reluctant warrior. Adopting Transubstantiation unlocks extra social benefits from feasts. Dulia lets you select a patron saint of your own. Ora et Labora gives you the Gardener trait. Each personal tenet is a small vow with an impact both on how you play and your Spiritual Fulfillment.

Tenets also now have a status within a faith: Core, Permitted, Prohibited, or just Known. If a Tenet is not known the faith is genuinely unaware that a Tenet exists, and therefore can neither teach it nor forbid it. This status also exists on characters, so you can "know" something (and even adopt it as a personal tenet!) even if your faith doesn't. Tenets become Known to the faith via characters and their actions; for example, by an Archbishop founding a new divergent Rite and actively preaching a tenet, or someone bringing up a foreign practice they learned about in an Ecumenical Council. Once a Tenet is Known, they can be promoted to Permitted, Prohibited, or Core through Ecumenical Councils or by the Head of Faith declaring them such (in Catholicism, via a Papal Bull).

Adopting Permitted and Core Tenets as your character's core conviction is safe. Adopting one Known to you but not to your Faith is trickier, since it could be declared anathema at any time if the Church finds out. Prohibited tenets must be practiced in secret - and anyone who catches you at it walks away with a very juicy blackmail Hook.

\[Screenshot: the tenet tooltip, showing the faith-wide effect on top and the "When selected as personal tenet" block below.]

While the new Tenets are limited to Christians, we are also going over old Tenets to ensure they all have personal effects and are appropriately balanced. Adopting personal tenets is not limited to Christians after all, and neither is…

Spiritual Fulfillment is a new character metric, running from -100 to +100, that tracks how closely the life you actually live matches the life your faith asks you to lead, and how this impacts your spiritual well-being. It is entirely internal: other characters cannot intrinsically intuit how you're faring on your spiritual journey - unless you tell them of course.

\[Screenshot: the Take Confession Decision is available to all Christians regardless of Spiritual Fulfillment level, but has different effects depending on how good you are with God.]

Here I want to take a second to correct something I wrote last time: "Think of it as the spiritual counterpart to Stress, except instead of measuring how close you are to a mental breakdown, it measures how close you are to either sainthood or damnation." That is not entirely accurate, so to be extra precise: it measures how close you feel you are to being blessed in the Lord versus being slated for eternal damnation - or, in another belief system, your karmic balance, or how in tune you are to the Great Spirit. Naturally, this inner spiritual turmoil rubs off on how you behave towards people around you as well to some degree, but it is not something others judge you for - any penance necessary is all yours to administer upon yourself. This in turn has an effect on Stress, as well as other conditions, described below.

This is in contrast to Piety, which measures how much the rest of your faith respects you as a figure of religious standing. You could very well choose an event option that yields Piety for your external display while dropping your Spiritual Fulfillment because it doesn't correspond with what your Faith (or, more precisely, your chosen Rite) believes to be right living. More commonly, an option that adds Stress because it conflicts with your Traits, but also adds Spiritual Fulfillment because it's the virtuous thing to do.

For Christian characters, Fulfillment steps through seven named tiers, each with its own unlocks. At the very bottom is Doomed (-95 and below), where stress gain is cranked up substantially but the gloves are also off: murder schemes do not generate stress, hostile schemes against clergy are similarly worry-free, and you can fabricate hooks on your own Court Chaplain. The worst place to be spiritually, but in some ways the most liberating place politically. Above that sits Forsaken (-65), which still gives you free rein to plot against your clergy, but eases off the stress-gain multiplier. Troubled (-30) retains only the Chaplain-hook permission - you're still sinning, but now you're noticing. Penitent (0) is the neutral midpoint, with nothing unlocked and nothing penalized; you're at peace with yourself, if not with God. Absolved (+30) starts charging you extra Fulfillment for hostile schemes against clergy and lets you run Befriend on your Chaplain. Settled (+65) boosts your stress drain, extends Befriend to your Head of Rite, and opens up the new Act of Devotion decision. And finally, at In Grace (+95), you get the full kit: further improved stress reduction, and access to the Mentor in Spiritual Fulfillment decision which lets you guide other characters through their own spiritual journeys.

What we're hoping this produces is exactly the kind of dilemma we've been talking about. A Generous, Pious ruler who climbs to In Grace feels great and has tools other characters don't, but has also made it costlier to scheme against the Church. A Doomed or Forsaken ruler has more levers to pull and stronger nerves for pulling them, but suffer more for going against their nature. Low Fulfillment isn't a failure state - it's just a different playstyle, and depending on your character's personality it might even be the more coherent one.

Non-Christian faiths use a simpler three-tier fallback that swings Stress gain one way or the other but doesn't unlock bespoke content.

\[Screenshot: the Spiritual Fulfillment bar on the Personal Faith window, showing the current level icon and a tooltip listing the unlocked mechanics.]

So how does Fulfillment actually move? Three ways: your Personal Faith (the specific set of Tenets you've chosen to champion), certain religious actions like going on Pilgrimages and taking Confessions, and the choices you make in events.

Each personal adoption pushes your Fulfillment up or down depending on how well it aligns with your personality traits, and Tenets that reward a Virtue you actually have are weighted twice as heavily. A Generous character adopting Philanthropia gets a big positive swing. A Lustful character adopting Mortification of the Flesh is choosing the virtuous path in spite of their sinful nature, and the system is sympathetic to that - the Stress is real, but so is the Fulfillment. Event options that match the Virtues or Sins of a relevant Tenet of your Rite come with their own small Fulfillment swings, up or down, depending on whether you lived up to the vow in the moment. In addition to all the new interactions with the Church, this is what permits you to actually practice your faith throughout each character's lifetime.

The cost of revoking one of these vows you've made depends on what you're overriding. Dropping a Permitted Tenet for another one comes with a cost, because your Church is fine with both and you're just making a legitimate choice. Dropping a Core or Prohibited Tenet costs Stress instead, because you're going against the grain of either the institution or your own conscience. 

Your personal convictions also have a quiet way of leaking out into the world. A Tenet you practice openly - what isn't Prohibited in your Faith - becomes available to close family automatically, and may also spread to members of your court and other relations you have. If they like what they see they may even adopt it themselves. AI characters are also more likely to start new Rites (again with these Rites - next time, I promise) incorporating convictions they hold dear. The personal and the institutional are never fully walled off from each other, which is the whole point.

The other big way to change your personal faith is, of course, to learn someone else's. Study Faith is a new Learning-based scheme, targeted at another character whose Faith isn't yours. Each phase takes some amount of time, with success chance driven by your Learning skill, Piety, and the usual roster of traits and perks you'd expect (Theologian, Erudite, Mystic, Scholar, Open-Minded, plus the Intellect trio).

While the scheme is running, a stream of events colors the experience. For example, a young heir picks up the material unreasonably fast; a court tutor spots what you're up to and offers to help; a priest of your own faith challenges you to a public disputation (you can duel him instead if you'd rather not argue); a rival sabotages your notes; the target turns out to be a closet non-believer, or worse, a practitioner of some ancient rite hiding in plain sight. Each of these nudges your progress one way or the other and, more importantly, gives the study phase its own narrative texture.

On completion of a phase, Study Faith does one of three things depending on how you finish and what's available. You might learn Tenets, such that those practiced by the target's Rite (sigh) becomes Known to you personally. You might also learn Doctrines, typically a prerequisite for the more structural changes you might want to make later on. Or you might choose to convert spontaneously, an option offered at the end of a successful study. There is no up-front Piety cost to convert - instead how smooth the transition feels depends on how much of the target's faith you've already absorbed. The more of its Core and Permitted Tenets you know, and the more of its Doctrines you already practice, the gentler the landing in terms of Piety and Levels of Devotion lost in the process. It's easier to convert to a Faith that's similar-enough to your previous one, after all.

Study Faith replaces the previous conversion path. You can still be subject to demands to convert by your liege, demand others convert, or convert in response to being Holy Warred, but if they choose to do so, they will go through the new system and suffer consequences for it depending on how well they can pick up the new teachings. You may even counter-offer with a demand to learn more about it first.

\[Screenshot: mid-scheme, an event where you're caught in the act of reading another faith's religious scriptures, potentially making you suspect of heresy by fellow Christians.]

Hello! This is Ellie. It’s been a while. Last time we spoke, I want to recall updating you all on my recent sojourn into the Lost Realms. While I don’t have any further updates to share on the matter, I will still caution you all against entering into any bargains with any fae creatures, no matter how honeyed their words may be. This is especially true during the approaching time of the summer solstice, during which, as we all know, the gauntlet separating this world from the ones beyond grows weaker.

For those of you who are unacquainted with me and my work, I ply my trade in the mysterious and often dangerous realm of User Experience. I’m a UX Designer on CK3, and I’ve been hard at work making sure that we’re delivering the ~experience~ that we all want to play. One thing we’re doing, as you might have guessed, is redesigning the Faith View. We’ll probably show more of this later, but for now I wanted to highlight Personal Faith specifically!

Your Personal Faith consists of a couple of elements. First and foremost, we have the Spiritual Fulfillment bar! This tracks how, well... spiritually fulfilled you are. We just talked about it. Internally, we called this the sin-o-meter for a really long time. I think that name still has a certain charm to it. Anyway, there’s also some more stuff in here, like the personal tenets you subscribe to, as well as which Tenets and Doctrines you’ve learned about.

\[Screenshot of a mockup of the Personal Faith window]

The above is a screenshot of a mockup of how we want it to look! Here’s what it actually looks like in-game right now.

\[In-game screenshot depicting the Personal Faith window]

As you can see, we still have some ways to go, but all the bones are there! The little numbers indicate how much Spiritual Fulfillment you’d gain by adopting that specific Tenet as a Personal Tenet. Your Faith might also have opinions about which Tenets you’re allowed to practice, and which ones might be considered heretical...

That’s it from me! I know you might be curious to see the redesigned Faith View, but it’s still cooking. We’re really excited about how it’s shaping up, and we hope you’ll like it. Anyway, see you later, gamers!

Hail and well met pilgrims, this is TheFrankeleyn. I know you all, but you’re yet to make my acquaintance. I am a designer on CK3 and would like to tell you about our work on Last Rites.
Last Rites is a Decision you can take to put your soul in order while on death’s door. This was a high-stakes affair in our period, and many a monarch worked hard to ‘die well’.

Just think, much of the stakes of Hamlet are in relation to when and how people die, have they ‘had their shriving time’ or were they ‘Cut off, even in the blossoms of their sin, Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled, No reck’ning made, but sent to their account with all their imperfections on their head.’  

This decision, and its ensuing event chain, will allow you to confess your sins, be anointed by a priest, take the eucharist, and then provide the opportunity to donate funds or lease lands to a Holy Order or the Church. This will aid in your being remembered well, standing your heir in good stead. Mechanically this translates to your heir getting delicious modifiers, based on the institution you supported, for the early years of their reign.  

The event chain will also reflect the likely cause of your imminent death, your believed proximity to salvation or damnation based on your level of spiritual fulfillment, and who sees fit to be at your bedside to send you across the threshold. Are you surrounded by loved ones and ministering angels, or has your life of sin conjured up visions of demons there to claim your soul for a bath in hellfire?

\[Screenshot: mid-event chain, where you reflect on your relative sense of salvation or damnation and what sins may have brought you there.]

Next week we'll dig into Rites proper (yes!) - how they spread along Ecclesiastical Title borders, how Divergence accumulates, and what it takes to turn a Rite into a full-blown heresy. If today's diary was about the view from inside one character's head, next week's is about the view from orbit.

As always, we'd love to hear what you think. Until then!

Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.

Hello everyone! We're pushing a small hotfix update today to tackle some outstanding issues with the 1.19 "Scribe" Update that was released on Monday. Check the changelog below for more information.

• Fixed an issue causing out-of-sync errors in cross-platform multiplayer.

• Fixed an issue causing certain trait-related events (such as Lunatic and Depressed) to fire too frequently.

• Resolved an issue with some High Medieval Attire clothing not displaying correctly when using the color picker.

• Fixed a typo in the Sword of Japan Steam achievement description.

• Fixed an issue where UI elements could go out of bounds in the Story Cycle panel.

• The Court Visuals UI panel is now fixed in place and can no longer be moved.

• Minor French localization fixes.

Hello there,

Today I have the honor of telling you a little bit about what is coming in this year’s major expansion, Silk & Silver. I talked a little bit about it in the announcement video, but this is the moment to put it all out here in a bit more detail for your enjoyment. Strap in, because we have a whole lot of different things to go through!

Unlike this beautiful illustration we got from one of our artists, there will be a number of unfinished things pictured in this thread, as the expansion is still in the middle of its development. Keep that in mind as you read through the dev diary.

In the High Middle Ages, Flanders imported high-quality wool from England and transformed it into fine clothing sought after across Europe. Silk came from the Far East through the Silk Roads. You saw the rise of numerous republics and free cities, signaling the emergence of a new class. The burghers, the merchants, not people who had the right background or dynastic blood, but the ones who knew how to make money and use it well. 

For Silk & Silver, we wanted to really showcase the period's growth, as it was, in many ways, a very transformative time in history. Small villages and hamlets would become flourishing cities, and already notable cities would grow into historical metropolises. From the 11th to the 14th centuries, Paris grew from 20,000 to 30,000 people to over 200,000, and we want this to be something one could experience in the game in some capacity.

So what were our goals going into this expansion?

• Rework the economy of the entire game

• Make trade, merchants, and republics an integral part of the economic simulation of the game

• Distinguish between different cities and areas of the map, e.g., Paris is not the same as any other French city

• Make the map visualize the growth and change of the world over time

These are the main pillars of this DLC and the accompanying patch:

• Merchants

• Republics

• Trade

• Economy Rework

Before we look at anything else, we will start by taking a look at trade. As an entirely new feature that connects everything else in the expansion, it’s good to get everyone on the same page with what it is and what it isn’t, before we move on to the other features.

Trade is a new feature that allows merchants and republics to move trade goods around the world to meet demand in different markets. At its core, it is about finding areas that produce a trade good and supplying it to areas that need it. It will primarily be done by mercantile governments (merchants & republics), but landed rulers may be able to move goods within their lands to a lesser extent. 

Every duchy in the world counts as its own separate market, and every province will have a new set of buildings (this will be discussed later) that will produce or require trade goods for its market, meaning we have just over 900 separate markets in the world of CK3 come Silk & Silver. For trade goods produced within a market, they will be available for local consumption before they are available for purchase by foreign traders. 

As for trade goods, they are special goods created in provinces across the whole world. You will build farms, mines, or workshops that will create, grow, or mine different types of trade goods that can, in turn, be used or repurposed in other buildings. Every county now has a new type of slot focused on crafting/making these trade goods, which we call the “resource district” (more about districts later). 

I won’t give you a full list of all our new trade goods right now, but you can see a selection below (we have just short of 50 trade goods in total).

These trade goods will then, in turn, be consumed by new “building needs”. A need is effectively an optional modifier on a building that will only be active if it is regularly supplied with the trade good (or goods) it needs. For example, a fishing hut may produce more fish if it is regularly supplied with salt, and a port may produce more taxes if it is supplied with wood for its ships. For landed rulers, this means trade goods will be necessary to make the most of their lands, whereas for mercantile rulers, it means an opportunity to profit from bringing goods over. 

When establishing a trade route, you have a fair number of limitations that decide what you can do with a trade route:

• Number of trade goods on the route

• Number of markets on the route

• Length of the route

• How many goods can be moved on the route in total

• How competitive the route is

As a newly minted merchant setting up your first trade route, you are fairly limited in both scope and potential for what you can do with your trade route. You will find some key goods you can work with in your vicinity, and then trade relatively close by (think up to a couple of markets away at most).

At first, it will be a small trickle of gold that comes in regularly as you are still finding your footing, before your trade company and family become better known for your mercantile endeavors. As you continue trading a specific trade good, your family will slowly become better at handling it and will gain some boons for that trade route, as well as gain experience with that good in general (improving the sell price for that good and other small boons). 

As your company and family continue to grow their power and prestige, they will slowly be able to dominate the trade of specific trade goods and specific areas, gaining monopolies and squeezing out the competition. 

In the expansion, we have two new playable government forms, the republics and the merchants. The two of them share some similarities, as both are based on the trade system in some ways, but they also have distinct differences. To make it simple, the merchants are landless, whereas the republic and its patricians are focused on the competition for a landed title (the republic city).

They both focus on building their family-owned company and share a domicile. For the domicile this time around, it is a big focus of ours to make it really feel like you are settled in a city and part of it, rather than creating your own little villa area like the administrative government types do. It is a key component in the progression of the mercantile governments, as they can improve their trade capabilities with many of their domicile buildings.

The new merchant government form is inspired by the many important mercantile families that existed throughout the medieval world, and these were not necessarily tied to a specific piece of land or state. Think of the Jewish families in Cairo that traded goods far and wide, or the trade guilds of southern India.

While as a merchant, you do not own land, unlike your republic peers, you are still situated in and around a city. You are a landless character with a domicile in your home city and the local ruler as your patron. It will be possible to change the location of your domicile, but it is not supposed to be a regular occurrence, as it is going to be the heart of your little budding trade empire. All trade routes you establish as a merchant will use the domicile location as their starting point. 

One thing to mention is that merchants are essential for the new trade system to work. In many ways, they are the roots of the new system that connects everything in the world. They are the main caretakers and providers who fulfill needs across all markets. In other words, they are important enough for landed rulers to engage with at times to ensure that their provinces are actually getting the goods they need, and they give merchants some power in relation to their landed patrons. 

Merchants have a gameplay loop focused on making gold, which can be turned into prestige. Prestige, in turn, will open up opportunities for improving how much gold you can make. As merchants, similar to their landless adventure peers, aren’t blue-blooded, they have a bit of a harder time making prestige than regular landed rulers, and they need it to be taken seriously if they are to engage with the nobility for trade deals and the like. 

In their day-to-day, the merchants have a couple of things to focus on. They have new “trade opportunity” contracts they can engage with, which will allow them to oversee their trade routes, temporarily improve their trade capability, and gain luxury artifacts to add to their domicile. 

The merchant starts off as a small-time trader in their local area, and as they improve their trade capabilities, they will have the opportunity to increase their Company Size, a set of laws that reflect how well-known your trade company is worldwide. You go from being an unknown to becoming a prominent merchant family, something akin to the famous banking families of Italy and the HRE of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

In addition, the merchant companies offer several purposes to choose from, so you can decide which kind of interactions you excel at and what kind of focus you want. You can be a creditor, a war profiteer, or perhaps a caravaneer who has an easier time engaging in longer trade routes. These exist for the company as a whole, but also as a trait for merchant characters to improve over time, if they so wish. 

And I am not here to tell you how to spend your mercantile wealth, be that investing it into domicile artifacts, controlling the markets, bending the local rulers to your will, or investing it in the land you live in and becoming a republic. Say, speaking of republics…

The republics of Silk & Silver are inspired by their namesakes from the Middle Ages, but unlike Crusader Kings 2, we are not limiting ourselves only to the maritime republics of Genoa, Venice, Amalfi, and Pisa. We are going for the whole spectrum, from the many republics of Italy to the free cities of the Holy Roman Empire to the Hanseatic League in the Baltic Sea. The goal is to serve you no matter where you are: in Florence, Venice, or even in the Commune of Rome. 

The people of the republic are all focused on holding the city in which they are settled, and they have regular elections to determine just that. We have the doges and podestas who hold temporary leadership titles, and the patricians who vie for power and authority beneath them. 

Whereas merchants are fulfilling needs across all markets, republics tend to create a small nucleus of trade focused around their capital, which stretches outwards. And as the republic grows stronger, this trade power becomes larger and larger. In addition, since republican rulers also have land, they can create synergies between what they want to trade and what is happening in the republic at any given time.

For the republics, we have added a new system we call “assembly”, which is a law-focused voting mechanic. Basically, it allows anyone in the republic to propose laws for a vote, and then gives every member of the assembly time to vote. And this includes laws on who is even allowed to vote in the assembly in the first place, be that all the patricians, patricians and city vassals, or perhaps just your council. 

For us, the goal was to simulate a real-life situation in which many of these republics originally started as quite communal and often ended up as signorias, effectively ruled by a single lord. So you will see the republics start out with many laws that favor all the patricians, but you will have opportunities to limit your opponents over time.

Unlike their landless peers, the people of the republic have access to trade leagues and trade posts. Trade posts will be small districts that can be built in other people’s lands, where you can effectively impact your ability to trade in that province, and you can nudge things you are interested in. They are inspired by the factories and the kontors of the late Middle Ages, basically. 

Trade leagues, on the other hand, are effectively confederations of republics that come together to form a stronger trade group and protect one another. Think the Hanseatic League or the Swiss Confederation. They protect one another and improve the trade capabilities of all league members. Think of the Hanseatic cities coming together to form a strong trade bloc that can effectively bully all of Scandinavia into submission. 

This part of the dev diary will most likely be the most immediately visible thing for anyone who opens the game after we release this DLC and its accompanying patch. All of the changes discussed in this section of the dev diary will be coming free with the patch, as they are essential for the rebalancing of the game’s economy. 

Before anything else, we should discuss buildings and districts. I have already mentioned districts a couple of times throughout the dev diary, so it is time for a clarification. We often found it weird that, as a ruler, you would build a brewery or a windmill. It always felt a bit underwhelming, and with few building slots, it was hard to dig deeper into the system, as there wasn’t a lot of room to add anything.

As part of our rework, we have removed every single regular building in the game (note, we have mostly kept all the special buildings that existed, but they will all see tweaks to their effects). Instead of having building slots, we will now have district slots instead, with districts in them. A district is effectively a thematic folder for buildings, where you will build a district (which will have some effects by itself), and then you will be able to build buildings within the district afterward. Instead of building an e.g., a smithy, you will be able to build a district for artisans that you can then fill with different buildings like a smithy.

The goal is that a district is an investment, whereas the buildings are more easily switched and cheaper to replace if need be, and they will be flavorful and thematic. So you will see districts focused on the military, markets, urban life, or even on keeping the city small so it can remain an effective rural location. Speaking of size…

Development was always meant to symbolize both how wealthy an area is and how many people live there. It could lead to some weird results, where one would be conflated with the other, and vice versa. So, for Silk & Silver, we are splitting development into two: “Settlement Size” and “Prosperity”. 

Prosperity is a measure of how rich and prosperous a county is, and it will affect how likely traders are to drop by (as they will make more money there), as well as multiplying the amount of tax obtained from the county.

Settlement Size is a measure of how many people live in the city in the barony (a county capital will differ from other holdings, for example). We will use a  1-10 scale to track size in a somewhat abstract way. Size will directly affect how many district slots are available in the province, so you will, for example, see a whole lot more districts in Constantinople than you would in, e.g., the capital of Sweden. But in turn, we have added new rural districts that will benefit from smaller sizes, while counties with larger settlements face challenges to both county control and popular opinion within the county. 

County control will no longer always max out at 100, as it used to before. We will now have a new baseline system, where different things will add to the baseline control you can have, to showcase that different counties and districts work differently. 

Your capital will always have relatively high control, as this is where you are situated and live, but your other titles will need a bit of… encouragement to actually pay taxes and the like. You will be able to gain control from stationing Men-at-Arms, building castles and fortifications in the area, from different eras, and most likely, some more districts will give bonuses to control as well.
Since this system works a bit like, e.g., Court Grandeur, you can gain effects that temporarily increase it beyond the baseline. For example, let us say your current baseline is 40; that is now the number control will always trickle towards. Then you can gain effects that could bump up your current control to 60 or 80, but it would then trickle down towards 40 again, as that is only a temporary boon to the area. 

The goal is that it will take a bit more investment to ensure that a county is worthwhile conquering, and that holding more land in itself is not useful if the people who live there aren’t incentivized to give you any taxes. 

For Popular Opinion, we are using the same baseline changes we have for control, but instead, it is now a bar from -100 to 100. Similarly to control, it means you can now gain a temporary popular opinion that will bump the current opinion up or down, but it will trickle back towards what the popular opinion is at any given time. 

Unlike before, there will now also be positive effects from having a positive level of popular support. Higher levels of popular opinion will have a direct effect on control in an area, which means that you will, in turn, gain more from the county as a whole. 

Below is an early mock-up of how we plan to make the county view going forward.

All of the things mentioned above will, of course, have a large impact on the economy. In addition to these sweeping changes, we will also take a look at every single part of the game where we interact with the economy in the game. Meaning that we will go over all the costs and all gold gains in the game.

The goal is to significantly slow the snowballing economy in the game and make the player and AI economies more in line, so it is not as easy to overpower all your neighbors. As part of this rebalancing effort, we are exploring splitting modifiers. Instead of getting a general income bonus, you may gain “maritime income” bonuses instead. Instead of gaining a bonus to building speed in general, you would get a bonus to military district building speed instead, etc. Our goal is to minimize the places where we have been very liberal in handing out modifiers to players before, and to flavorize them into smaller boons instead.

The goal and hope are that, with more interesting levers to pull, we can do more interesting things with less, and in turn affect the snowball effect across the game with plenty of tweaks all over. 

As a fun little side note, here’s a picture from one of our whiteboard sessions, trying to make a good visual map of what affects what. I am sorry for our terrible handwriting. But not sorry enough not to share the picture. Note that these are, of course, not the only things interacting with these different values, but it is rather about how these specific values interact with each other. 

While it is not the main focus of the DLC, we also want to take the opportunity to add some flavor to the Italian region. It is home to many historical republics and at the heart of the mercantile transformation I described earlier in the diary.

The Guelphs & Ghibellines conflict was a conflict between the Kaiser and his supporters on one side, and the Pope and his supporters on the other. It is related to the investiture crisis, but it also spun into a bit of a local conflict in Italy on its own about how much power the Kaiser should have over the area. This latter bit is what we are focused on for Silk & Silver.

We are representing the conflict through one (kinda two) new situations situated around Northern Italy. At the 1066 start date, it hasn’t properly started yet, so you have a prelude situation that will slowly grow into the proper one, whereas in 1178, it is already in full swing. 

I am not going to go too deep into how it works just yet, so here’s a picture for now.

Just so they are mentioned, we are also looking into some other pieces of content for Italy in this DLC. 

• A new Carnival activity

• Redrawing the Italian map (welcome back, Amalfi)

• Looking into Italian cultures cultural traditions, and historical setup

A work-in-progress picture for the carnival.

Now, I want to be clear that Italy is one of the things we are looking at in the DLC, but unlike All Under Heaven, which focused solely on fleshing out regional flavor and mechanics, it is not a main focus here.

This update will be focused quite a bit on mechanics, on trade, and in doing so will also touch Italy, but this is not for Italy what All Under Heaven was for East Asia, and it is also not what Roads to Power was for Byzantium (where the main government mechanics were all centered on one empire).

Since this will be a topic both asked about and discussed, if we do not bring it up ourselves, I will rip off this band-aid sooner rather than later. There will be no naval warfare or naval battles in this DLC. We know this is a topic people care about and relate to the republics strongly, but between a whole lot of balancing and a whole lot of new systems that we are adding to the game, we chose not to spend time and energy on trying to pack in another large feature that we would not be able to give it enough love and time to do well. 

To put it lightly, even the most minimal of minimum viable product implementations of naval warfare would blow our schedule out of water, and there are a lot of other changes in the expansion that carry a fair amount of risk, which we want to make sure can do as well as possible. 

There will be trading across the water, but we will not engage in naval warfare. 

Thank you for taking the time to read everything. I know we have covered a fair amount of topics, and not necessarily in great detail. Moving forward, we will alternate dev diaries for By God Alone and Silk & Silver, so you’ll hear more from us in the Silk & Silver team in a couple of weeks.
We hope you are as excited about this expansion as we are about bringing it to life. Please leave comments and questions below, and I will do my best to answer them. Though I want to stress that we won’t go into detail on everything quite yet, even in the responses, as there’s still a lot of work left to do.