CK3 Dev Diary #60 - The Cost of Warfare

[merulaalba]

Any change that makes conquering the world more difficult is more than welcome.

The medieval period was not the time of WC. Holding a large kingdom or empire should be a challenge, not fun

 

[kviiri]

I like how the dev team is focusing on core mechanics of the game. Thank you for the steady improvements.

 

[guiskj]

The medieval period was not the time of WC. Holding a large kingdom or empire should be a challenge, not fun

How about "Holding a large kingdom or empire should be a challenge & fun"?

 

[Pdx_Meedoc]

Would be nice if we could refill garrison from our armies, so it's not all constant flip-flopping. Maybe unlock it with a martial perk? (I assume it's too late to for this patch)
Good mechanic, in general.

It won't be available in the patch but it's on our list of future improvement!

Brilliant changes all round.

Is there CK3 announcements planned for this weekend?

Yes, there will be

Question: This new UI shows possible recruitment of Holy Orders troops too? They are really sneaky right now, and you could lose a war if you don't consider them.

It will not, but I'll make sure to add that to our improve list!

In addition to that, characters will be more inclined to join an Independence Faction if they own enough territories outside of the de jure area of the primary title of their Liege

Im all for it but Please fix the problem when someone have 90-100 opinion of me they whil whil still Join the revolt...

I didn't mention it but now characters will never join a faction if they have a high opinion of their Liege.

I do not know whether I like the mercenary scaling. It's one step closer towards making gold insignificant (AKA medieval moneyless society). When the cost of everything scales up with any growth, there is no point in growing at all. It was especially irritating in late CK2: 'oh, now I make 3x more money, awesome! nevermind, now almost everything costs 3x more too...'. It was even more irritating to guess which values are scaled, which are not, and what is the scaling algorithm. At moments I felt that it would be better to express prices in terms of '% of yearly income', instead of actual gold.

CK3 in its current state does a lot less price scaling - and its a great decision IMO. Naturally, it causes all the 'fat get fatter faster than the poor'. But I think the right way of counteracting those issues is to present incraesing challenges as a result of realm growth, not implicitly flattening all income.

Still, it's only mercenaries right now and it might work well. I'm just afraid that they will soon follow with MAA cost, building cost, etc. Hope not!

It depends on the scaling is done. Is there a flat % added based on title tier or realm size, or do the mercenaries send in accountants to go over your books and charge you more based on having better stewardship and building bonuses?

Dev diary implies it's the first kind. CK2 made the mistake of abusing the second kind.

We do not plan to modulate the cost of MAA or building in a similar fashion in the future. We actually did a test for the men-at-arms and it was not satisfying and was thus reverted.

We indeed increase the price by having a multiplier affected by the realm size and the tier title. We do not look at the actual treasury or any other variables. I suppose it's worth mentioning that the impact of the realm size is non-linear but use a square root function.

Cheers,

 

[EmeraldThanatos]

Any change that makes conquering the world more difficult is more than welcome.

The medieval period was not the time of WC. Holding a large kingdom or empire should be a challenge, not fun

While I agree that it should be more difficult, I find the idea that holing a large realm should not be fun completely absurd.

 

[Cymsdale]

This is an A+ dev diary. Exactly the thing I like to see. More of this forever please.

I like how easily the devs are willing to tweak their UI for the better. Far fewer clicks needed in war declaration to see the information you need and set the objective. It would have been very easily for most developers to say 'meh, current is good enough' but these devs went the extra mile and show a understanding how how players play.

I don't use mercs much so don't have strong opinions about these but they do have a strong aspect of 'rich get richer' to them. I think CK2 leaned too heavily on 'scale costs of everything to your size', but in this particular case it makes a lot of sense.

Dynamic garrisons are how I assumed garrisons worked already. It'll be nice to quickly retake a castle when you attack the occupier merely days after the siege is lost, because it was frustrating to have to spend so long taking it when you barely missed it (and it makes sense that it would now stay vulnerable after your goof too).

Love love LOVE the faction changes. Factions are not nearly dangerous enough in current version. Finally the "Make Internal Stability Hard" faction of the forum is being listened to!

 

[Agamidae]

It will thus be easier to counter-attack and recover territories you lost recently

Would be nice if we could refill garrison from our armies, so it's not all constant flip-flopping. Maybe unlock it with a martial perk? (I assume it's too late to for this patch)
Good mechanic, in general.

 

[Prpht]

I do not know whether I like the mercenary scaling. It's one step closer towards making gold insignificant (AKA medieval moneyless society). When the cost of everything scales up with any growth, there is no point in growing at all. It was especially irritating in late CK2: 'oh, now I make 3x more money, awesome! nevermind, now almost everything costs 3x more too...'. It was even more irritating to guess which values are scaled, which are not, and what is the scaling algorithm. At moments I felt that it would be better to express prices in terms of '% of yearly income', instead of actual gold.

CK3 in its current state does a lot less price scaling - and its a great decision IMO. Naturally, it causes all the 'fat get fatter faster than the poor'. But I think the right way of counteracting those issues is to present incraesing challenges as a result of realm growth, not implicitly flattening all income.

Still, it's only mercenaries right now and it might work well. I'm just afraid that they will soon follow with MAA cost, building cost, etc. Hope not!

 

[Hedler]

I hope this makes Empires less stable.

 

[Cymsdale]

How would you know your enemies exact number of troops and treasury? Feels like a difficulty nerf.

It's not a nerf because this information was always available. You just had to click more to find it.

 

[A. Blackthorn]

I hope some news improving the Crusading Systems in the PDX Con. The custom crusading kingdoms was a very interesting mechanic discarded by CK3 and would be nice if that system could have a comeback.

 

[Cymsdale]

While I agree that it should be more difficult, I find the idea that holing a large realm should not be fun completely absurd.

I think he had awkward wording. The game should of course be fun, and the fun should come from being challenging.

 

[PDX_Pariah]

Brilliant changes all round.

Is there CK3 announcements planned for this weekend?

Yup!

Schedule can be found HERE!

 

[johnsd]

Looking good! I especially like the change to factions.

 

[Tiax]

I know I've posted a lot of concerns already, but I have one more:

One of the most frustrating mechanics is that, when you are playing as a vassal, your liege can concede to the demands of a populist faction and give away some or all of your land without giving you the opportunity to fight it. Because the liege never goes to war, you can't help defend your territory, and potentially face an immediate game over, or at least the loss of a large part of your lands. Will this new way of calculating faction strength lead to an increase of the frequency of this? Is this mechanic something Paradox has on their radar as needing a second look?

I understand there should be a danger of having angry peasants sweep away your land, but the experience of just having your territory suddenly disappear with no opportunity to fight it is not a fun one (or realistic).

In general, the faction system has a lot of problems beyond how easy or hard it is for them to form. While I totally agree that factions should be more of a threat than they are, changing the frequency with which they fire without fixing their other underlying problems risks increasing the frequency of bad gameplay experiences.

On the subject of independence factions, compare the real world outcome of the collapse of the Seljuk empire with the outcome in game (see attached screenshots). In real life, the result of the collapse is a set of coherent realms. There are big ones and small ones, but each is its own clear state. The result in game is a mess - the Seljuq realm is left with over a dozen disconnected islands, and the independent realms are often a disconnected mess as well. This means that the AI will spend decades or centuries fiddling about trying to unify these realms - and probably failing. There will never again be coherent nations in this region, and a player in, for example, Byzantium, will never have rivals.

The reason that the real world looks so different is that independence-minded rulers don't just take whatever piecemeal holdings they have and strike out on their own - they seize what they can. If you're the ruler of Khorasan in the Seljuq empire, and there's a random county or two within Khorasan that aren't on board with your independence plan, you wouldn't just leave them as Seljuq enclaves - you'd claim them as part of your war.

To say it another way, the biggest thing that factions need is a path to achieving sensible goals and good gameplay experiences, not merely an adjustment to their frequency or strength calculations. Taking a system that leads to frustrating, unrealistic outcomes and turning up the dial on it is a dangerous change. Having blobs collapse is important, but it's equally important that they collapse into something that player an engaging experience (and is realistic, as well).

I know this dev diary is only one part of the changes that are coming in the patch, but I hope we'll see improvements to how factions function in a future diary.

 

[Pdx_Meedoc]

I like that this is coming back. What's the opinion threshold?

The current threshold is set to 80.

What's the secret attachment? Why must you toy with us?

My bad! The preview correctly displayed the picture... It should be fixed now! And sorry to disappoint you, there is nothing fancy behind this attachment... It's a simple image of a square root function...

 

[Cymsdale]

Your upcoming war will have a quite different pace. From now on, the garrison will be depleted at the end of a successful siege.

Wait, it wasn't doing this already?! That explains a lot actually...

(I had just assumed the refill rate was too fast.)

 

[Herennius]

You are basically eliminating the fog of war and the uncertainty element, did you think Kings going for a crusade had excel spreadsheets at their disposals with all the infos they needed about the enemy?
How can people upvote and be fine with this foolishness?

Because these changes don't provide any new information - they just present you everything you already can access by countless clicks at one glance. Which is an improvement. If a espionage system would be beneficial for CK3 is a completely different (and valid) topic to discuss though.

 

[Tiax]

Here is a screenshot from an observer game in which the Seljuks (now the Shahid cadet branch) have collapsed. The majority of those little OPMS that are peppering the territory are the results of populist factions - the khan gives into the populist demands, and bunch of new characters are created from nothing and given independent provinces, as we can see from the title history:

Note that this didn't happen because of some great defeat suffered by the Seljuks - there was no Byzantine invasion (the Byzantines and Seljuks never fight each other, of course). All that happened is that the Seljuks got an alliance with Zhetysu, and were called into a minor border skirmish over a single county up in Siberia. The Seljuks walked their entire army there, died to attrition, and went thousands of gold in debt, and then surrendered to multiple rounds of populist factions.

This is obviously terrible, and has been this way since the game launched. How will the AI manage to handle the new faction mechanics detailed in this dev diary if it is so inept at the current system? Or should we just expect to see the entire world be populated by randomly generated OPM counts from here on out?