I know last year featured a lot of dev diaries with very little information about new features of the game. The reason for this was the lack of an announcement of the expansion and we had decided not to talk about the expansion before the announcement. All that has changed now and last week @Doomdark gave you an overview of the features we’ve added and the aim of the expansion.This week we’re going to go a bit deeper into the new council mechanics. @Groogy has written the following presentation of the council:So to the meat of this expansion and my favorite part. The empowerment of the council. As we promised we were gonna let the council in on the day to day governing of your realm becoming more than simply a privy council. Now in fact the strongest vassals in your realm will threaten with civil war if they are not given a position where they can become part of your council and in turn giving them influence on the politics of your realm. Having them on the council prevents them from joining factions and as a liege you can use this to stabilize his/her realm. The councillor will adopt a certain position, these are the colorful icons you see, and this position will dictate how they align themselves with the decisions you take but we will cover that in a later dev diary.The councillors can choose to either yay, nay or abstain from a vote. You also get a vote (always voting yes when you’re suggesting something) and your own vote decides in the case of a tie. The characters abstaining from a vote are always swayed by the distribution of diplomacy skill between the yay and nay sayers. Meaning that some highly influential members might turn the tide in a vote as they persuade the voters that have no opinion on the matter. If the council has a majority voting yes on an action, you’ll be free to take that action, but if the council votes against the action, you face the choice of either going against the council or do something else. Going against the council will make it discontent as you have broken the contract with them. Such action also incur tyranny and the council members become free to create and join factions again for a limited time.For conclave we have also changed how regencies work and the old system with a single regent deciding everything is gone. Instead, If you are in a regency, the regent is put on the council and will vote instead of you and you don’t have the option of going against a council vote.The council also have powers to vote on your laws and even propose that a vote shall be started on something they want by cashing in on a favor they might have with their liege. But we will cover the redone laws in the next dev diary as well.Next up @Moah , our newest addition to the team, will explain some of the new tools you have to influence your council members and how you as a vassal can make your liege do things for you:Hello everyone,I’m @Moah and I joined Paradox and the CK2 team recently. I’m here today to talk about Favors. As you know, in the game relationships to other characters are important, especially family. But family, friendships and rivalries are not the only kind of relationships that exist. Sometimes you just do a favor for someone, and hope that somewhere down the line, they’ll return it.And since in the CK2 timeline debts, honor and duty had such a huge impact, we’ve modelled that through a mechanic we cleverly called “favors”.As a liege (or part of the council), you can call in a favor on a council member to make them vote like you on the council for one year. This can be used to get an ok to revoke that title you want, execute someone you want to see dead and start that war that you’ve longed for, but the killjoys of the council is constantly saying no to, without the hassle of tyranny and factions. If you don’t have a favor to call in, you can request support from a council member in exchange of a favor. They can turn this down, but if they accept they’ll vote just as if you called a favor on them. The difference is that now you owe them a favor. This is one of the basic generators of favors and a way that vassals gain favors on their lieges. As a liege you can often gain a favor by fulfilling the ambition of a vassal and everyone can accept a sum of money in exchange for a favor. When dealing with powerful lords, you can expect their price to be quite high however.You can only owe someone at most one favor at a time, so if you already owe them, you’ll have to wait in requesting support again until they’ve used that favor to gain something back. Council members can also call favors on each other and a clever vassal can set up scenarios where they control how the council votes.Say you’ve accepted to support your liege on the council, or you paid the emperor of the HRE a large sum of money and you want your investment to pay off. With a favor in hand you can make them accept a marriage (some limitations apply) and gain that Non-Aggression pact you’ve been longing for.Invite to Court, Educate Child and the Embargo interactions can also use favors to force acceptance and as the liege you can use a favor to keep a character out of factions.If you have favors from your fellow vassals, you can use those to get them to join your faction (if they are valid to join the faction) and since they’re bound by the favor, they cannot freely leave the faction.If your liege owes you a favor, you can use that favor to propose a war declaration where he/she presses one of your claims. In order to do this, the council needs to vote in favor of the war declaration. The liege can deny your proposition, but doing so incurs tyranny and makes the council discontent.There are more uses of favors that will be presented along with their respective features, but these were some of the basic ones.Now @rageair will walk you through another new feature, the Realm Peace and how it will help you bring order to the realm.Previously, your level of Crown Authority decided if vassals were allowed to declare war or not. As of Conclave we’ve replaced this system with a more intuitive one - Realm Peace. With Realm Peace the ruler, in accordance with the Council, decide when wars waged between your vassals have to end. Do you need to change your Succession Law but your vassals just won’t stop fighting? Is the precarious balance of power in your realm being shifted by warmongering vassals? Enforce Realm Peace to make them stop!After pressing the Realm Peace button your vassals have 3 months before the peace takes effect, after which all wars will end with a white peace. The Peace is then enforced for 60 months before your vassals can declare any internal wars. A long cooldown ensures that you’ll only want to use this ability when it’s really important, and when playing as a vassal you won’t ever find yourself in a completely deadlocked position where you’re not able to attack at all any longer!As a vassal, you can use a favor on your liege to interact with realm peace in two ways. First, you can block your liege from using the Realm Peace or stop a pending Realm Peace from taking effect. This makes sure that you actually get time to win the war that you invested all your precious coin to hire those Swiss mercenaries to fight for you and don’t just end up with nothing gained and empty coffers.Secondly, you can ask your liege to use the Realm Peace for you. This can be pretty handy when you’re working your way to power and your rivals decide it’s time to partition your lands and join those parts into their own lands.That’s all for this week. Next week we’ll take a closer look at how council members vote, the new education system and how we’re turning feudal lords into small business owners.