The Reaper’s Due promises to bring all sorts of death, disease, and general horribleness to Crusader Kings II’s recreation of medieval Europe, and a developer diary just ahead of the expansion’s release later this week details exactly what to expect.
The developers started by looking at diseases, obviously including the infamous Black Death, which can devastate the map of your campaign just as it devastated Europe centuries ago. In contrast to the limited effects of epidemics in the original game, diseases here will require you to take precautions to protect yourself, and deal with the accusations of your people, maybe choosing a scapegoat to put the disease’s ravages on.
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Hospitals form a new type of holding, operating like a trade post to improve the health of your people. More mild illnesses will affect even you yourself, requiring you to hire a court physician to keep yourself alive--assuming that the medieval medicine doesn’t just want to drill a hole in your head.
A free update will also let you customize game rules, and some optimization fixes will have the game running much smoother, and have save games taking up far less space. Both the Reaper’s Due and the free patch will be available on August 25.