Legitimacy is badly implemented. How do we fix it?

[cosmeIII]

So, I'm sure most fans of the game agree that legitimacy as a concept is very cool but was terribly implemented. There are mods on the workshop trying to touch up the numbers and the most popular of all time when you search "legitimacy" straight up removes the feature from the game.

Let me explain what I dislike about this mechanic:

• It's overreliant on activities for its increases. Don't get me wrong, activities are cool, but you shouldn't be spamming them for a boost in legitimacy. The more you spam activities, the more stale they become as you try to click through all the incessant events that constantly interrupt the overworld gameplay.
• Legends seem to me like a hyped up activity with a thing that spreads on the map. Just like activities, it's cool to use it every once in a while when you have an awesome ruler or had an awesome ruler, but relying on it to increase your legitimacy is boring.
• The maluses to legitimacy are too harsh. After years working to get decent legitimacy, you get hit by a -250 legitimacy event (WTF?) because of a lvl 1 plague, or by a -200 for marrying a lowborn. Not so bad when we're talking lvl 4 or 5 legitimacy requirements, but straight up murders you if you're in the lower levels. Just as the levels are 'scaled', these legitimacy hits should be scaled too.
• Coming off of the last one, the weird scaling values of legitimacy feel out of place and the higher levels seem almost unreachable if you start off low.
• Since it's difficult to increase your legitimacy, you wind up focusing all your efforts on it or just ignoring it entirely. I mostly do the second.

There should be so much more tied to regular gameplay to achieve the 'required' legitimacy

• Time spent ruling should let it slowly creep up no matter what.
• How many former rulers of your main title were of your dynasty when you inherit.
• Building buildings, increasing development and good popular opinion.
• Commanding armies in wars, fighting in battles.
• High prestige and piety tiers making it creep up as well.

Then if you want to reach higher levels, sure, you should be forced to go out of your way to increase it in your lifetime.

What do you people think about the mechanic and how it can be fixed? "Scrap it" sadly isn't a solution in this case, though I do think it would be good for the system to be completely scrapped and reworked into something more fun to interact with, this wouldn't be done until much, much farther down the pipeline.

 

[InsidiousMage]

The main problem with legitimacy is that it is very, very poorly explained in-game. You could fix so many of the mechanics problems by simply explaining how it works! That's it, just better explain how the mechanic works.

My other big issue is that you lose you legitimacy when you inherit, even as your first born heir. That's just feels wrong to me as inheriting a title that your family has held for generations should increase your legitimacy on succession.

 

[Anonymous01]

I just ignore it because . . . have you ever been deposed due to low legitimacy? Me either.

That said, I can see what the developers were thinking by tying legitimacy to activities: tournaments, funerals, weddings represent bread and circuses for the populace.

The problem is: there is no populace in this game. AND activities are nothing but oversized events windows.

 

[William the Merry]

So, I'm sure most fans of the game agree that legitimacy as a concept is very cool but was terribly implemented. There are mods on the workshop trying to touch up the numbers and the most popular of all time when you search "legitimacy" straight up removes the feature from the game.

Let me explain what I dislike about this mechanic:

• It's overreliant on activities for its increases. Don't get me wrong, activities are cool, but you shouldn't be spamming them for a boost in legitimacy. The more you spam activities, the more stale they become as you try to click through all the incessant events that constantly interrupt the overworld gameplay.

Fully agreed, activities should be one of the last sources of legitimacy

• Legends seem to me like a hyped up activity with a thing that spreads on the map. Just like activities, it's cool to use it every once in a while when you have an awesome ruler or had an awesome ruler, but relying on it to increase your legitimacy is boring.
• The maluses to legitimacy are too harsh. After years working to get decent legitimacy, you get hit by a -250 legitimacy event (WTF?) because of a lvl 1 plague, or by a -200 for marrying a lowborn. Not so bad when we're talking lvl 4 or 5 legitimacy requirements, but straight up murders you if you're in the lower levels. Just as the levels are 'scaled', these legitimacy hits should be scaled too.

I think it should work that way, so an illegitimate ruler struggles to gain any whilst a truly legitimate lord can make a few mistakes before people think hes in the wrong

• Coming off of the last one, the weird scaling values of legitimacy feel out of place and the higher levels seem almost unreachable if you start off low.

Should an upstart peasant be able to become fully recognisable as the true ruler over a single reign?

• Since it's difficult to increase your legitimacy, you wind up focusing all your efforts on it or just ignoring it entirely. I mostly do the second.

There should be so much more tied to regular gameplay to achieve the 'required' legitimacy

• Time spent ruling should let it slowly creep up no matter what.
• How many former rulers of your main title were of your dynasty when you inherit.

And in direct line too, so cousin of a king is less than son of king

• Building buildings, increasing development and good popular opinion.
• Commanding armies in wars, fighting in battles.

Losing battles does majorly screw legitimacy, but winning battles should give more even if you get some for winning the war too

• High prestige and piety tiers making it creep up as well.

Piety deffo, less prestige because its meant to makeup for prestige overflow

Then if you want to reach higher levels, sure, you should be forced to go out of your way to increase it in your lifetime.

What do you people think about the mechanic and how it can be fixed? "Scrap it" sadly isn't a solution in this case, though I do think it would be good for the system to be completely scrapped and reworked into something more fun to interact with, this wouldn't be done until much, much farther down the pipeline.

Yeah hopefully we'll get a good update

 

[Veldmaarschalk]

Sadly at this point, and it is still early days for this feature, it is a feature that barely has an effect on your game. After a certain point all your rulers will start with a high enough legitimacy. f.e. as the Byzantine emperor I adopeted a child (with no family or background) with the imbecile trait and made him my heir. So to me having him inherit would have him start with very low legitimacy, but I can't remember anymore with what amout he started, but I noticed nothing spectacular going wrong with my empire.

And then there is also the balance, holding a funeral gives you more legitimacy then winning a war f.e.

And finally what I am missing is coronations, if there is one thing that gave rulers legitimacy then it was being crowned with the blessing of God (or any other deity). It is a pity they added funerals instead of coronations IMHO.

 

[Von Lauenburg]

• Time spent ruling should let it slowly creep up no matter what.
• How many former rulers of your main title were of your dynasty when you inherit.
• Building buildings, increasing development and good popular opinion.
• Commanding armies in wars, fighting in battles.
• High prestige and piety tiers making it creep up as well.

These are all great suggestions (I would also add lifestyle perks and base legacies), but they have one thing in common, one very important drawback: they would give you more sources of prestige_№2 in the base game, unlike everything related to activites and legends, holding court, etc.

What do you people think about the mechanic and how it can be fixed? "Scrap it" sadly isn't a solution in this case, though I do think it would be good for the system to be completely scrapped and reworked into something more fun to interact with, this wouldn't be done until much, much farther down the pipeline.

How do you fix something that serves its purpose? I think we might see more of those in the future, depending on the overall reception of Chapter 3.

 

[Greifental]

My other big issue is that you lose you legitimacy when you inherit, even as your first born heir. That's just feels wrong to me as inheriting a title that your family has held for generations should increase your legitimacy on succession.

That's because the mechanic is badly named. To me it seems to be more like a personal rulership measure ( e.g. "God sends you a plague? You must be a bad ruler!", "You do a great tournament? What a glorious king!", "You honor your ancestor with a great funeral? How pious!" etc.) than how legitimate your claim on the title or your rule actually is.

 

[apollo1989vieten]

Paying to fix realm after a plague should maybe increase legitimacy somewhat.

Could someone post the code how repair costs after plague are calculated?

 

[anbeck]

• Time spent ruling should let it slowly creep up no matter what.

This is a big one for me. When LotD launched, I wanted to play tall as a one-county Count or maybe a small Duke. However, I gave up on this eventually because if you play tall you do not get legitimacy from offensive wars, and if you play as a count, you don't have the money to hold activities all the time or finance legends, nor do you have access to the Hold Court button. True, counts are not that affected by legitimacy, but it still seemed weird.

The issue I had was that I brought peace and prosperity to the realm, which lasted for generations - but that none of that was recognized!

The least I want is something like a "X days without incident" counter: this measures how long a ruler has protected a specific county from raids, sieges, battles, revolts, and how you dealt with plagues so on. It is reduced (or even resets) whenever control or development of that county are negatively affected, because this reflects negatively on whomever rules over that county. A ticking counter tending towards a medium-range equilibrium would stabilise legitimacy at a reasonable level even without spamming activities and going to war. I know there are some edge cases (what if you are a count and your county is sieged down during your liege's war?), but nothing that cannot be solved.

A second counter could look at how your dynasty is respected in the specific county. This is different from the dynasty renown: other dynasties care about your dynasty's renown, but peasants and townsfolk probably care more about what happened in their specific county - and both might be different, if you just got hold of some land.
This is people thinking: "Huh, Ugo di Canossa just married a lowborn character - but I can forgive him a bit for that, because Lucca really took off since the Canossas took over!" This would act as limiting individual deeds within a window set by the whole dynasty: if your dynasty is remembered negatively in a county, spamming activities cannot undo that as easily. Conversely, one misstep by Ugo does not undo everything the Canossas did in the eyes of the locals.

But yeah, these would require county-/title-specific legitimacy values, which are not on the table, it seems. In the end, I do not care how it is implemented - I just want to be recognized for bringing peace and prosperity to my small realm.

 

[Diskianterezh]

On paper, Legitimacy seems to be a very interesting mechanic, even one that saves you from redundant gameplay:

What was the problem? A succession of rulers with no internal asperity, vassals too compliant and accepting a new emperor without batting an eye. These are just some of the game's problems, which make for an overly smooth and boring experience.
Legitimacy provides answers in itself, allowing the emulation of a beginning of variation between rulers: a glorious and prosperous reign is no longer necessarily followed by a thousand glorious and prosperous reigns, a new emperor has to prove himself, and certain events can be the shell that derails a reign that is off to a good start.

The problem with legitimacy is that, as well as duplicating Grandeur in certain aspects, interaction is limited by random events (epidemics cannot be controlled) or a proliferation of repetitive activities.
Some actions are more interesting than others, like organising an expensive and extravagant grand tour of the entire empire to appease the vassals: perfect! It's interactive, not very repetitive (the events can be repeated but the grand tour itself is rare) and involves a cost in terms of involvement and money that emulates the investment required to manage an empire. Any time devoted to internal politics rather than blobbing is a success. However the major activities are DLC only - so it's impossible to build a mechanic on that alone. But above all, these actions are global and too abstract: we spam 'general' activities, tournaments, tours, hunts, funerals, legends ... and then we start again.

Legitimacy needs to be more closely linked to the people in the kingdom: the very people who decide whether you are a good leader.
At the moment, characters only participate in a required global level of legitimacy, a level reached by an abstract number at the level of the country - there are indeed activities that can increase or decrease legitimacy at the global level (lavish funerals, crushed revolts), and you have to have them - but the actions to manage legitimacy must also be taken from character to character.

A powerful vassal feels honoured by my presence at his wedding: he considers me more legitimate --> I've spent time and money taking care of this character, and that stabilises my kingdom.
A vassal far from the centre of my empire wonders why he is part of this empire --> I can go and see him to remind him of my presence (time, money), but I can also grant him extensive rights of autonomy (negotiation, administrative and economic concessions).
A vassal preferred my brother as heir and spends time with him whereas I neglect him for my foreign wars --> I lose legitimacy in his eyes, my brother gains legitimacy because he spends time and money.
An epidemic breaks out in the kingdom, the vassal king in charge of this part of the empire struggles to contain it --> he loses legitimacy in the eyes of his own vassals --> he asks for my help --> helping him will gain me legitimacy in his eyes, but also in the eyes of the rest of the country.

The fact of ending up with a very low level of legitimacy, far too low to reach the desired level "in time", is not a problem in itself: as has been said, a peasant can't proclaim himself emperor and be accepted in a few years. But the game must allow this peasant not just to wait for the inevitable revolt, but to act beforehand:
Is my legitimacy too weak? Ok. How can I improve things urgently and avoid a general revolt?
These powerful vassals need to be cajoled, and if necessary granted special rights - even if it means taking them back in 10 years when things are better.
Does this distant vassal undermine the legitimacy required by his different culture and religion? Let him regain his independence, and I'll reintegrate him when things get better.

 

[Silens]

Title-specific legitimacy is the solution, the answer to "how do we fix this?" The devs can adjust values and triggers and stuff, but unless legitimacy is a measure of how suited a ruler is to hold a certain title, in a title-specific capacity, it will only be legitimacy by name alone.

As it stands, CK3's legitimacy doesn't measure the thing it ought to measure, namely how legitimate your claim to a title is. It's more of an indicator of how good or bad as a ruler you're seen.

Since we already have piety, renown, prestige, court grandeur, public opinion, vassal opinion, etc., do we really need the pseudo-legitimacy on top of it? Seems redundant, while it doesn't do the thing it is supposed to do.

If making it title-specific is too hard or impossible, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to remove the mechanic entirely and move on. Same as Stellaris with its Cohesion, they tested it, didn't work out, so they removed it.

However, if I had to provide a band-aid solution within the confines of the current system, I'd make it behave like court grandeur: you have a scale from 0 to 100, and different values contribute or detract from the baseline: piety lvl, dynasty rank, court lvl, public opinion, long rule, and so on.

The scale would always move slowly towards the baseline, while events and activities would move the scale directly. A bonus above the baseline would slowly wear off, a penalty putting you under the baseline would also not last permanently.

Although, even then I'd think that legitimacy is the wrong word for it. As long as it doesn't tell you how legitimate your claim/hold on a specific title is, it's not legitimacy.

 

[William the Merry]

That's because the mechanic is badly named. To me it seems to be more like a personal rulership measure ( e.g. "God sends you a plague? You must be a bad ruler!", "You do a great tournament? What a glorious king!", "You honor your ancestor with a great funeral? How pious!" etc.) than how legitimate your claim on the title or your rule actually is.

How legitimate your rule is rather than how legitimate your claim is seems to be how it works in my mind

 

[EricArthur]

Sadly at this point, and it is still early days for this feature, it is a feature that barely has an effect on your game. After a certain point all your rulers will start with a high enough legitimacy. f.e. as the Byzantine emperor I adopeted a child (with no family or background) with the imbecile trait and made him my heir. So to me having him inherit would have him start with very low legitimacy, but I can't remember anymore with what amout he started, but I noticed nothing spectacular going wrong with my empire.

And then there is also the balance, holding a funeral gives you more legitimacy then winning a war f.e.

And finally what I am missing is coronations, if there is one thing that gave rulers legitimacy then it was being crowned with the blessing of God (or any other deity). It is a pity they added funerals instead of coronations IMHO.

Coronations not being implemented to tie in with both the legitimacy system and the travel mechanic is a huge oversight and I actually expected that to be patched in. I simulate them by forcing my new king to do a grand tour or in the case of a Holy Roman Emperor, a pilgrimage to Rome. We even have crown artifacts and regalia...

It may be slightly eurocentric but an important part of the map is Europe and in Europe, an uncrowned king was no king. Henry IV did not travel to Canossa out of piety or the goodness of his heart and not even just because he got excommunicated; the pope refused to crown him emperor and an uncrowned emperor is no emperor.

 

[William the Merry]

Coronations not being implemented to tie in with both the legitimacy system and the travel mechanic is a huge oversight and I actually expected that to be patched in. I simulate them by forcing my new king to do a grand tour or in the case of a Holy Roman Emperor, a pilgrimage to Rome. We even have crown artifacts and regalia...

It may be slightly eurocentric but an important part of the map is Europe and in Europe, an uncrowned king was no king. Henry IV did not travel to Canossa out of piety or the goodness of his heart and not even just because he got excommunicated; the pope refused to crown him emperor and an uncrowned emperor is no emperor.

Even if eurocentric, it can be a mechanic only for european christians

 

[Silens]

How legitimate your rule is rather than how legitimate your claim is seems to be how it works in my mind

"Legitimate" is the wrong word for that. Legitimacy describes how lawful and just it is for someone to be the ruler over a specific title, not how good or bad they are as a ruler in general.

You may be a tyrannical imbecile, but still the rightful/lawful ruler of a kingdom. It comes from the Latin word "legitimus", meaning "lawful". If PDX wants a measure of ruler popularity, or tell you if the people think you're doing a good job or not, they should call it something different.

The rightful king of Spain is not automatically the rightful king of Italy, the rightful king of Jerusalem is not automatically the rightful king of Delhi.

That's why coronations and the Pope were so important, they provided much needed legitimacy. It was easier for rightful heirs to assume the crown, and also quite easy for members of the same dynasty to usurp a title (if the vassals wanted to get rid of their king), as they had a rightful claim derived from the dynasty. But it was way harder for upstarts dethroning the previous dynasty.

That's how the Merovingian dynasty lost their rule to the Karlings, who as a dynasty had the position of Maior domus. The Karlings amassed power in the service of the Merovingians and then deposed the Merovingians, but still lacked legitimacy to justify changing the ruling dynasty. For a time they even ruled with a powerless figurehead Merovingian king, then completely without a king. They couldn't just usurp the title with the click of a button. They were the de facto power, they ruled, but they weren't the rightful rulers.

Pepin the Short had to get the support of many vassals, even get the Pope on his side, to give him the much needed legitimacy "by the Grace of God". And even then people only slowly adjusted to the change.

It's not just a lump sum value you gain by doing a hunt and a feast and voila, you're now the equally rightful king to England, Andalusia, Alexandria and Epirus. That's not how legitimacy works, even when I agree that gameplay and fun require some concessions. But calling it legitimacy? That's misleading and wrong.

 

[guiskj]

I'm still here waiting for Language to have any consistent meaning for Characters...

I was hoping that the burst in popularity of games like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld would have influenced the CK3 team to lean more heavily into depth of systems rather than breadth. Travel was such a well (if not perfect, but quite good) integrated mechanic that it really made me excited about Legitimacy, even when we learned it wasn't going to be title-specific. Alas, it seems like we got another mechanic akin to Language.

 

[apollo1989vieten]

I'm still here waiting for Language to have any consistent meaning for Characters...

I was hoping that the burst in popularity of games like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld would have influenced the CK3 team to lean more heavily into depth of systems rather than breadth. Travel was such a well (if not perfect, but quite good) integrated mechanic that it really made me excited about Legitimacy, even when we learned it wasn't going to be title-specific. Alas, it seems like we got another mechanic akin to Language.

For the Catholic world, learning Latin was important in scholarship. Yet learning it at a University visit does nothing. There is also the whole questionable idea of needing to know “classical” Arabic to understand the Quran.

 

[SauronGorthaur]

Scrap it and make it per-title value, as well as work for non-landed characters. Without that there's no salvaging it in regards to what legitimacy is supposed to do and to represent, as well as any potential interactions it may have with future updates that logically would benefit from the concept (like laws overhaul). Especially since the provided excuse for it being done the way it was done is bogus, as it was justified with tooltip readability. And there's nothing readable about a bunch of "minor increase to X, minor decrease to Y" that require you to go through at least 2 different UI elements to get a proper synopsis for a given modifier.

 

[jacobsighs]

1. Add passive legitimacy gain.
2. House renown should mean something. Older houses should have more passive legitimacy gain.
3. Remove "short reign" penalty and keep the legitimacy loss on inheritance.

Anything that makes you lose legitimacy should also make you gain legitimacy if the situation is reversed.

• Lost battles make you lose legitimacy <-> wins should make you gain some
• Marriages with lowborns make you lose legitimacy <-> marriages with equal rank no effect <-> marriages with higher rank make you gain some

Legitimacy should be actually explained somewhere. How do I gain legitimacy? The game tells me winning wars, but 9/10 wars I fight seem to do nothing. I've seen the pop-up "legitimacy gained" after a war, but my stat was unchanged.

This update has made me unable to enjoy the game, but for this thread I will stay on topic.

 

[Tensar]

legitimacy shouldn't give buff (just reduce time rule penality)