Adding naval warfare in time for Crusader Kings 3’s Silk and Silver expansion would have blown Paradox’s “schedule out of [the] water”

Naval warfare won’t be coming to Crusader Kings 3 with the big merchant republics expansion Paradox are set to roll out towards the end of this year. The studio say that they want to make sure they do sea battles justice, and so didn’t want to shoehorn them into a DLC which already comes with “a fair amount of risk”, while also blowing up their planned development timeline.

They’ve said as much at the end of a deep dive into the Silk and Silver expansion, the second of two major add-ons announced as part of the medieval strategy game’s fifth chapter of DLC earlier this week.

“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,” a Silk and Silver game designer going by the handle Snow Crystal wrote. “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 [the] 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 [we] can do as well as possible. There will be trading across the water, but we will not engage in naval warfare.”

So, not a ‘no boat battles forever’, but a ‘no boat battles at the same time we’re putting out a substantial economy rework and rebalancing so you can play as a rich trading family with money coming out of their eyeballs’. It makes sense, as much as CK3’s endless amount of DLC can seem a bit unnecessary at times, well-done naval warfare’s certainly something I could see myself paying for as its own expansion, provided the price is right. Maybe throw in some piratey roleplaying aspects alongside it, either as a threat coastal kings have to deal with or something you can do as an adventurer when not sitting on your throne of choice.

For now, if you’re after sprawling medieval sea battles, Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord’s War Sails expansion came out last year and delivers plenty of exactly that.