Deconstructing Crusader Kings III: Royal Court Strategy

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Nicou   No comments   Crusader Kings III, Deconstruction 28 July 2022

Deconstructing Crusader Kings III: Royal Court Strategy

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Hey everyone, Lenny here!
My goal with CM Adventures is to share as much experience as I can with professionals & players, in order to hone each others’ skills while improving the understanding of Community Management. You can learn more about the project & myself in the Introduction to CM Adventures.

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Summary:

 

I – Think Tank

Crusader Kings III is all about your noble house’s legacy, in a spiral of love, fight, scheme, and claims. Death is only the beginning as you guide your dynasty’s bloodline in a rich simulation of the Middle Ages. I have worked for three years with Paradox Interactive to strategise CK3 on social Media, and Royal Court was the first Expansion for the game, which means I wanted to deliver the highest quality possible for this DLC.

The Core Community Team consisted of 4 people at that time, plus employees from other teams such as Press, Production, Art, and Live for the obvious management/press/marketing assets needs. We had no Social tools such as Hootsuite (If only!), and everything was done with careful planning by copy-pasting our copies from Asana, a calendar tool.
I was responsible for the Social Media strategy, supporting the Marketing efforts to sell the Expansion.

Let’s review together the strategy our team had put in place to release Crusader Kings III: Royal Court on PC.

CK3’s first Expansion is called “Royal Court”.
A Royal Court is a place in your realm were your Ruler can interact with its subjects to:

  1. Rule your realm
  2. Discuss many matters with your peers, vassals, and peasants
  3. Show your power via artifacts, banners, and other displays

As the Royal Courts are ranked on the map, you can see which the other Rulers’s might & potential.

► This gave me the idea to create a competition in which selected Rulers could participate: a World Tourney.
► Players would directly vote for their favourite Rulers in a series of duels, prior to Launch. The community would drive the content they want to see.
► Coupled with other activations (Content that fosters players to engage with your posts), the Campaign would remain engaging in the long run.

►► This is it: Rank, Rule, Discuss, Show! The campaign on social Media would embrace the Core features of our next Expansion.

 

💡 For the objectives:

  • Increase brand awareness
  • Generate sales
  • Grow the brand’s audience
  • Boost community engagement
  • Drive traffic to our website & Steam page, then to our Discord and other socials
  • Target audience is mature, medieval, simulation, roleplay, and strategy
  • I want to get a high Reach & Engagement Rate, but also a great community sentiment.
    • Sadly I won’t have any metrics & sentiment levels to share for this article, but I was extremely happy with them.
  • We used Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and Discord mainly. Tik Tok came later with the next campaigns after Royal Court, and it was very successful.

Back to Summary

 

II – Ok, but how?

So, I want to create a tournament bracket but I need to be careful as the duels need to be as fair as possible.
If players find the votes to be obvious, it won’t be very engaging. I want tension, and drama!

Let’s start the process:

  • Notepad, that’s where I draft all my ideas “on paper”
  • Photofiltre, for quick montages
  • Photoshop, for a more advanced visual draft
  • Music. I need music to work tirelessly! Metal, K-Pop, or your own playlist. Or just… no music. Tsss.

▲ The first problem I encountered is that Crusader Kings III proposes so many characters, so selecting the most interesting ones would be long and difficult.
I first used the CK3 Wiki “Interesting Characters” to prepare a list of characters.
💡 Use the resources available to you.

▲ Second problem, there are two starting dates in-game. I need to separate the characters from 867 & 1066 to make it fairer.

▲ And third topic, I want a tournament that is open to characters from different origins, backgrounds, genders, and other specificities.

💡 Always save your psd files and its versions so you can come back to it whenever you want.

 

Then it’s time to open Asana, my calendar management.

Here, I will open slots for the content I would like to push: A title, a date, details, drafts, …
This helps the team understand how we are going to strategise the content for Royal Court, they could provide comments at this stage, and I could present my content to other teams to synergise our plans. Usually, I follow the main Marketing plan, and then I weave around to produce content that will appeal to the player base: I need to touch their passion, to make them feel understood and listened to, I want players to think “Yeah! Now that’s a cool brand!”.

 

The World Tourney is the core of my campaign on social Media.
But I need more content to keep the whole plan entertaining and very regular… And a budget of course, but this has already been cleared.

  • Content Creators
    • Selected Modders, their mods for the DLC will need testing and support so I need to discuss with the teams at Paradox to open a branch for them on Steam.
    • YouTubers & Livestreamers, CK3 has plenty of amazing creators! This is a job for the Influencer Manager.
  • Official videos
    • Trailers, created by different teams to capture the content and tailor it to the marketing needs
    • Featured, to showcase selected features of the DLC while promoting a content creator. By doing this, Paradox Interactive shows that they care about their players and trust them to present official content.
  • Press Release, from the Press Relations teams in the US & Europe mainly. Key relations are important again, but this wasn’t my team’s focus here.
  • Community Content
    • Activations: There are many posts needed to fill the gaps between the marketing beats. More details below.

Back to Summary

 

III – Bring it on

Now that I have short-listed the characters and placed them on the bracket, my first asset is ready.

I need more content to support the core:

Back to Summary

 

IV – The World Tourney

A new hashtag #CK3WorldTourney was created for the tournament, so it’s easier to follow the feed on socials for the month-long tournament.
I will not share the full campaign for the World Tourney, as it would be spammy and the article is already longer that I expected ^-^
Only Twitter posts will be shared as it’s easier to preview here.

 

Characters fought for their different statistics in-game, their history, and how famous they were.
I had different types of duels, have a look at #CK3WorldTourney for more details.

  • 867 Round 1 → 1066 Round 1
  • 867 Round 2 → 1066 Round 2
  • 867 Semi-Finals → 1066 Semi-Finals
  • Finals

Players had a new duel every day on Facebook, Twitter, and Discord.

The count were made by platforms, so it could be that different platforms voted different characters.
💡 Selecting three socials was a great choice, because we would not have any tie.

Back to Summary

 

V – The Winner Content

Now that the community has voted for their queen Matilda of Tuscany, we can continue our campaign knowing that players will be more interested in our content: after all, they have voted for it.
We had our vision for the campaign of course, but it adds flavour to the plan.

 

▲ Feb 3 – Matilda of Tuscany won the World Tourney
We are now entering a new phase of the campaign where she takes over CK3’s social Media

  • New avatar
  • New banners
  • We are dropping the usual King tone, to temporarily replace it for Matilda’s, queen of Italy. From now on, we need to interact as the cheeky Queen Matilda di Canossa.
  • Matilda will personally showcase Royal Court’s new features

5 days left before release + call to action, and always the hashtag #CK3

The Influencer Manager worked with Surreal_Belief to propose a first video of Royal Court’s features.
Paradox has an habit of contracting Content Creators to produce high level content that will appeal to the player base.
💡 It’s much better to host the video natively on each platforms, as it fosters the algorithm and allow it to be more broadly seen.

Kings and General was also contracted to produce this time a video about History while reaching a greater number of players via the content creator on YouTube.

And that’s already more than enough for a first day post World Tourney. The campaign is now accelerating to reach its end goal: the Release of the expansion.

 

▲ Feb 4

We’re starting each days forward with the countdown, and its call to action

A new feature showcase from Surreal_Beliefs.
The team used to work with multiple content creators for these pre-release campaigns, but for this time we only worked with one close to the community.

Matilda of Tuscany is back with more content.
💡 Note that during these days we are always interacting with players as if we were Matilda. We had little gif-reactions prepared, Italian quotes reviewed by one of our Italian employee for accuracy, and more 1-1 unique interactions.

And one more tweet frm Matilda.

Early Access for selected Livestreamers, managed by Community & Influencers teams.
💡 Keep it focus on players who have been playing regulary + the usual friendly streamers you like to interact with + those interested by the opportunity if they meet certain criteria.
💡 Also: Don’t focus only on English speaking creators! Embrace your community and be multi-lingual for this.

 

▲ Feb 5

I have told you earlier that we had created a special playable Branch of CK3: Royal Court for a selected list of modders.
This opportunity empowered our modders (under NDA) with special permissions to test the game and provide us with their feedback while developing new mods for the game.
We had one of our programmer (Matthew, in photo below) & myself working closely with the modders to smooth the communications between the two parts.

 

▲ Feb 6

 

▲ Feb 7
Last post before the real deal tomorrow.
Important keywords first, emoji, hashtag, call to action link

💡 Calm your socials, prepare for the day ahead. Let the hype grows by itself, players need to discuss what they have seen so far.

Back to Summary

 

VI – Push Release

This is D-Day, it’s happening!
Release times are usually around 6pm on Steam. But first we have plenty of content to release.

 

▲ 12pm – Matilda di Canossa bids farewell

Her job is done, the winner of the World Tourney says goodbye to the community.
Here, we share a few teasers and we also update the social Media avatars & banners to prepare for the Royal Court day.

 

▲ 1pm – Marketing discount, Midweek Madness

Players are waiting for the Patch Notes; But first, discounts: You get CK3, You get CK3! Everybody gets CK3!

 

▲ 2:30pm – The Changelog, with the usual tuesday Dev Diary (example, DD #84)

  • An asset featuring the topic: Royal Court, with the Dev Diary’s title and #number
  • A title in bold to attract the eye back to the text. Mind that even if it makes the “text” clearer for standard users, it is composed of mathematical symbols which screen-readers can’t read.
  • A matching Emoji
  • Two lines body to give more details
  •   ► Shortened & UTMed LINK
    • Space, space, alt+16 ►, space, link
    • This is my go to to attract the users’ eyes to the Call to Action link.
    • Paradox Interactive use bit.ly to shorten links
    • All the main links are UTMed, which means they have been processed to give a longer link than the original, allowing the teams to analyse metrics with more details

 

▲ 4pm – Quadriptych (fancy name, right?)

It was the perfect slot to announce our Release Livestream while featuring the four new Court Types.

 

▲ 5:59pm – Poking

But first, a little tease to poke the community that Royal Court is coming. “GIB!”
💡 Shortcut for more emojis: WINDOWS + .

 

▲ 6pm – Release
💡 I sometimes don’t push on :00 times, so I leave space for other scheduled posts from other brands, then my post will be at the top of the feed at :02.

Here I post the main Updates in a “No Man’s Sky” format, which means I present the main features in the body of the post, with selected emojis. NMS have done this format first, afaik.
This is now a famous format for releases: Announcement, coloured emojis, features & details, and my own touch with a ► LINK

Release Announcement at 5pm CEST, and a follow-up trailer-video at 7pm to support the US timezone.

Back to Summary

 

VII – What Now?

Crusader Kings III: Royal Court is now out!
Cool! Cool cool… what now?

Now that we are back on track:

  • If you haven’t done so yet, do a big tour of all your socials: It’s Metrics time!
    • Collect the number of fans before & after the campaign
    • Check the Engagement Rate overall, and for each of your posts, so you will know next time what you can do to enhance your posts
    • Reporting during the whole campaign, on a weekly basis. Then once release: a 24h Report, and even a 48h if necessary, then go back to a weekly report.
  • Engage with players if they post questions, fun bits, or even criticism.
    • Critics are part of the game, embrace them and keep it real.
    • Ignore trolls, spams, toxic comments
  • Use the defined tone, here we are a fun King, so get back to those royal & silly replies
  • Customer Support issue? Listen, reply, escalate, follow-up. Don’t use the fun tone and help the player!
  • Share fan creations
  • Keep up with your standard schedule & posts
  • And prepare the future marketing beats with your team

In four weeks, The campaign earned Crusader Kings III thousands of new fans on each of CK3’s social Media: Facebook (67k), Twitter (66k), Instagram (1.4k), Reddit (36k), Discord (14k) and lately Tik Tok that grew tremendously with the Console announcement & Fate of Iberia DLC up to 32k fans.
Sadly I don’t have any Engagement Rate metrics as I don’t have access to the analytics anymore, heh! :p

I hope this first article was interesting, and that you learned a few things. Thanks for reading and see you soon!

Back to Summary