CK3 Dev Diary #60 - The Cost of Warfare

[The_Old_Shrike]

The treasuries weren't shown before.

But they were shown in the character page?

 

[lozikk]

The treasuries weren't shown before.

...in the declare war window. You could always see them on the character page

 

[Cymsdale]

But they were shown in the character page?

But if you save them a single click it's EZ-MODE!

 

[The_Old_Shrike]

But if you save them a single click it's EZ-MODE!

Turns out, real QoL upgrades are the ones which make the game SHALLOW AND TOO EZ. How casual, I don't need to cliick through pages and back just to know if the other guy can call mercs.

 

[SauronGorthaur]

Very nice dev diary. Probably the best one this year. However, while I like the dev diary itself, there's one further answer that I find problematic. Which is this one:

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

Now, on paper, this is a good change. It makes sense as it fits both thematically and gameplay-wise. However, given how easy it is to keep your vassals happy, this change undermines the other change to factions covered in the OP. Obviously it's more of a problem with opinion itself than with the proposed changes to factions, but it should be mentioned nonetheless. Just like it should also be mentioned how AI is worse at managing opinions with its vassals, often due to stupid reasons like tyrannically revoking titles from other vassals, which means these changes combined will negatively affect the AI, giving the player yet another advantage over it.

 

[vandevere]

Very nice dev diary. Probably the best one this year. However, while I like the dev diary itself, there's one further answer that I find problematic. Which is this one:


Now, on paper, this is a good change. It makes sense as it fits both thematically and gameplay-wise. However, given how easy it is to keep your vassals happy, this change undermines the other change to factions covered in the OP. Obviously it's more of a problem with opinion itself than with the proposed changes to factions, but it should be mentioned nonetheless. Just like it should also be mentioned how AI is worse at managing opinions with its vassals, often due to stupid reasons like tyrannically revoking titles from other vassals, which means these changes combined will negatively affect the AI, giving the player yet another advantage over it.

The problem is the amount of hamstringing you would need would be so absolutely horrendous that only masochists would be interested in playing. I mean you would have to bash opinion into the Basement so hard it would be impossible for anyone to manage their vassals, costs would need to be sky high, with minimal to no reward, for virtually anything the player tries to do...

 

[SauronGorthaur]

The problem is the amount of hamstringing you would need would be so absolutely horrendous that only masochists would be interested in playing. I mean you would have to bash opinion into the Basement so hard it would be impossible for anyone to manage their vassals, costs would need to be sky high, with minimal to no reward, for virtually anything the player tries to do...

I'll go out on a limb here but I'd say there does exist a wiggle room between the current opinion setup where it's rather easy to make most of your vassals have a high opinion of you and an opinion setup that's "so absolutely horrendous that only masochists would be interested in playing".

 

[vandevere]

I'll go out on a limb here but I'd say there does exist a wiggle room between the current opinion setup where it's rather easy to make most of your vassals have a high opinion of you and an opinion setup that's "so absolutely horrendous that only masochists would be interested in playing".

That "Wiggle Room" could very easily be more Robust Game Rules that would allow everyone to nerf/buff the game how they want it...

 

[SauronGorthaur]

That "Wiggle Room" could very easily be more Robust Game Rules that would allow everyone to nerf/buff the game how they want it...

In my current game my empire stretches from Atlantic to the Ural Mountains. Yet the amount of landed characters within my realm that are below the 80 opinion cutoff is minuscule. Whooping 7 years after my current character became the ruler, meaning I still have short reign penalty. And that's on top of said character being both impatient and arbitrary, giving -10 penalty to all direct vassals. And another -10 penalty to direct vassals from high crown authority. I haven't even swayed anyone in that time, as I'm currently focusing on converting my house members to witches.

Now, you may think that this is super duper challenging as it is and that adjusting the default would turn CK3 into a game for masochists, but I find this to be a rather ridiculous notion.

 

[Tuo]

Tributaries are basically a different kind of vassal contract. If they do add them, it should work within that system.
They were essentially a pay to win feature of ck2 DLC though, should be better thought out.

Definitely not, not unless they expand the vassal contract system beyond feudal government. It would be very awkward if Muslim and tribal rulers could not extort tribute from their neighbors. And it's not as simple as just adding only that part for them - in that case, there would be no point to handling it as part of the feudal contract system, as such implementation would prevent any meaningful interaction between the parts. Feudal contracts are an integral part of the feudal government type - it determines levies, tax, and vassal relations. Clan and tribal governments have their own (simpler) rulesets in place - and these rulesets are hardly compatible. Adding tributaries as part of the feudal contract system would necessitate a whole another tributary system for clan and tribal governments. And this is without going into any potential new playable government types that may be implemented in the future.

 

[luigi_L]

That "Wiggle Room" could very easily be more Robust Game Rules that would allow everyone to nerf/buff the game how they want it...

I last played on very hard difficulty, a feature of the More Game Rules mod, which gives the player -25 opinion with vassals (among others things). I also played with Sud's Gameplay Overhaul, which (among other things) increases the likelihood of rebellions, especially with foreign vassal. Even with these changes, I manage just fine, so I can confirm there's much room for additional difficulty—I certainly enjoy the game more this way.

 

[JackMcManus]

Hello everyone!

I’m back with more info about what’s coming in the 1.4 Azure patch! Today we are going to cover improvements around Warfare. We prepared a few more things in addition to the starting Men-at-Arms. I hope you will find them interesting!

Declare War Window 1.4​

In addition to the Quality of Life improvements we presented last week, we also revisited the war declaration interface.

[Image of the new Declare War window]​

As you can see, the information has been restructured and it should be easier now to:

• Compare your strength with your target
• Estimate if your opponents will have the funds to hire mercenaries
• Select an available objective

Dynamic Mercenary Cost​

When it comes to Mercenaries, we adjusted how their cost is calculated. The price of a company is now affected by a few parameters:

• The primary title
• The size of the Realm
• The current Innovation Era

The dynamic price will make it easier for lower tier realms to rely on Mercenaries and fight back their bigger neighbours. And it will be harder for extremely rich emperors to deny access to mercenaries by hiring all of them for a small sum. After all, why would the Count of Ulster be expected to pay the same price as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire - if you're a mercenary captain and you see that your client clearly is rich, you might just increase your prices...

Dynamic Garrison​

Your upcoming war will have a quite different pace. From now on, the garrison will be depleted at the end of a successful siege. It means that a freshly captured territory will be defenseless for a while, making recapturing it faster. After a siege, the garrison will recover over months or years, and the speed can be increased by improving the Holdings.

It will thus be easier to counter-attack and recover territories you lost recently, or to continue a war which was invalidated if you have another valid casus belli. This change will encourage you to defend your wargoals and the strategic territory with your armies.

Factions update​

In order to make your life harder when you start conquering the world, we tweaked the logic behind the creation of factions, and they should be more threatening now.

One of the big changes is their ability to synchronise their declaration. The power they need before pushing their demand is now dynamic and reacts to the state of the other factions. If a faction is threatening you, or is already at war with a ruler, it will be easier for another faction to push their demands. It should create more challenging situations, and you might want to concede to some factions to avoid struggling with too many opponents.

[Image: The faction is not strong enough to push their demands despite a lowered threshold due to existing factions]

[Image: After one of the other factions declared war, the faction is now strong enough and will push their demand while their ruler is fighting the others.]​

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. Again, fast conquest will be more challenging, and consolidating your Realm will be more important.

And that’s it for today’s Dev Diary! But, before leaving you, a quick reminder: The PDX Con will be held this week-end! You can join us on our dedicated Discord Server! There will be a lot of nice streams and announcements; stay tuned for some news about Crusader Kings III !

Have a nice week, and see you soon!

Changes look solid!
Any plan to add prisoners after a battle? (i know it's not a feature that was in the previous titles but could be something new)

 

[vandevere]

I last played on very hard difficulty, a feature of the More Game Rules mod, which gives the player -25 opinion with vassals (among others things). I also played with Sud's Gameplay Overhaul, which (among other things) increases the likelihood of rebellions, especially with foreign vassal. Even with these changes, I manage just fine, so I can confirm there's much room for additional difficulty—I certainly enjoy the game more this way.

That's fine. I'm just saying that not everyone plays CK2 Or 3 for the same reasons. Yes, some play to WC, and then complain because the Game's "Too easy". Others, like myself, tend to stay put in one place as mush as possible, barring unexpected inheritances and such.

Global nerfs tend to be ham-fisted, and very often harm the wrong targets. Game Rules tend to avoid that particular problem, and also allow the player to enjoy the Game however he/she sees fit.

I am not against difficult games per se. It's just that, not all of us WC...not all of us Powergame...not all of us want punishingly hard games.

Game Rules make it possible for everyone to have the Game they want, instead of forcing a uniform top-down experience on everyone...

 

[Jarolleon]

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

I'd say blobbing should be rewarding if done right, but yes it's too easy now.

Also I don't know about the merc scaling. Sure merc captains may think they can rip off the rich guy, but the rich guy has more options. Like bribing a bunch of courtiers to help murder the enemy's children before the war starts in order to break all his alliances. Depends on how extreme it is I guess. If it scales linearly with realm size then the bordergore will be hilarious. At least we won't have eternally stable Byzantium anymore.

If demand is low, one needs to lower their prices. Empires aren't always at war, but mercenaries do need to eat.


I wouldn't mind a game rule that disabled precise numbers, approximations keep things a little more ... surprising and exciting. I quite like the idea of basing their accuracy on your ruler's attributes: the higher their diplomacy/marshal/stewardship/intrigue/learning, the better your knowledge of other rulers' prestige/army/treasury/dread/piety—all of which could matter in warfare.

Also why don't merc captains get to keep the money that they are paid? I keep capturing them and I can't ransom them because despite being paid hundreds of gold every war they have no money at all .

Maybe merc captains should spend gold on maintaining troops when raised & unraised, equivalent to the MAA cost, and start shrinking if they run low on gold. & have the price increase depending on how many times they've been hired in the past 20 years or so. If they make enough money they may add MAA regiments.

 

[SauronGorthaur]

That's fine. I'm just saying that not everyone plays CK2 Or 3 for the same reasons. Yes, some play to WC, and then complain because the Game's "Too easy". Others, like myself, tend to stay put in one place as mush as possible, barring unexpected inheritances and such.

Global nerfs tend to be ham-fisted, and very often harm the wrong targets. Game Rules tend to avoid that particular problem, and also allow the player to enjoy the Game however he/she sees fit.

I am not against difficult games per se. It's just that, not all of us WC...not all of us Powergame...not all of us want punishingly hard games.

Game Rules make it possible for everyone to have the Game they want, instead of forcing a uniform top-down experience on everyone...

Phrasing complaints that the game is too easy as some natural consequence of playing WC makes no sense. If anything it'd be the other way around. Without the quotation marks. Also, what on Earth does WC (or power-gaming) have to do with the topic of how opinion modifiers are out of control?

And rules have the flaw of the default rule becoming what the game gets balanced around during later development, with the other rules becoming an afterthought. So even if Paradox adds rules to govern this issue, the current state of things should not become the default rule. Because, I'm sorry to say this, if someone struggles with keeping vassals happy on the regular it's not because they're not power-gaming or because the game is already borderline punishingly hard, it's because they are doing something really, really wrong (like raking in tyranny or ignoring at war/at peace penalties). And the game should not be balanced around that.

 

[Orinsul]

Really until armies are automatable ala Imperator, is no improving warfare. grounds game to a halt for micro management hell, or just console imprison to escape the dead boring of chasing armies around provinces.

 

[Blodhevn]

Everything that hurts blobbing is good for the game

Crusader Kings is a game about familiar drama and religious conflict more than a game about painting the map!

i totally agree, but at the moment that part of the game is lacking(dynasty & family drama). there need to be more "flesh" in my opinion.

im hoping for some dynasty focused events/family focused mechanics such as revenge events or Casus belli to rescue imprisoned family/at the very least allow ransoming your own house members.

preferably interlocked with their trait system that gives unique choices. some roleplay incentive, Like when you get a pop-up that your cousin was killed, it is just that, a pop-up. but if you as a king,count or w/e got that missive, you would have a reaction. it should play on the opinion you had of your cousin and your traits. like a wrathful person could get a unique CB(which could grant renown? bonus upon victory if enemy house was more famous/powerful), if you were callous you wouldnt give a sht. Vengeful - special murder scheme with bonus sucess chance etc.

 

[Ekcrbe]

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.

This is my biggest concern. I'm not sure if I'm getting a weird sample of results because I don't see it talked about much. Already, I've started several games and put them down after several decades not because it's too easy to grow (although it is), but because so quickly the entire rest of the map turns into a shattered world and just conquering county by county gets boring. There's a Byzantium, and maybe one of the HRE/East Francia, France, or England, but nothing else. There would be a Mongol Empire if I could last that long in a game. It feels like there's nothing compelling left to do because there are so few other large realms to interact with, no other dynasties having interesting stories.

I guess it's not so much the collapse of realms that bothers me as the fact that I almost never see an AI put anything back together. The preposterous shattered bits of former kingdoms that don't disintegrate entirely have made me turn on complete exclave independence, but that also only makes the issue worse.

 

[Tiax]

This is my biggest concern. I'm not sure if I'm getting a weird sample of results because I don't see it talked about much. Already, I've started several games and put them down after several decades not because it's too easy to grow (although it is), but because so quickly the entire rest of the map turns into a shattered world and just conquering county by county gets boring. There's a Byzantium, and maybe one of the HRE/East Francia, France, or England, but nothing else. There would be a Mongol Empire if I could last that long in a game. It feels like there's nothing compelling left to do because there are so few other large realms to interact with, no other dynasties having interesting stories.

I guess it's not so much the collapse of realms that bothers me as the fact that I almost never see an AI put anything back together. The preposterous shattered bits of former kingdoms that don't disintegrate entirely have made me turn on complete exclave independence, but that also only makes the issue worse.

Totally agree. A random mishmash of disconnected counties is not terribly interesting to interact with. I want to see the largest blobs collapse, but I want to see them collapse into something interesting, and I want new powers to arise from the ashes. Instead it feels like the game tends inexorably to chaos, and after a hundred years or two, there's nothing left. I want to build a rivalry with my neighbors over the course of generations, but if all my neighbors are stuck in an endless cycle of collapse, there's no one to be my rival.

The AI tends to take forever to wage a single war because it mills around and abandons sieges. This makes it almost impossible for the AI to re-unify a shattered region. Even the Mongol invasion is completely hamstrung - Genghis Khan can barely get out of Siberia before he dies, because he has to re-raise his army for every little conquest and struggles to efficiently conduct sieges and battles.

 

[Ekcrbe]

The AI tends to take forever to wage a single war because it mills around and abandons sieges. This makes it almost impossible for the AI to re-unify a shattered region.

This in particular is kind of confounding, because I think the military AI is in some ways markedly improved over what I'm used to (that being EU4)—it engages in battles with the player when it has good prospects, tries to find defensible terrain when it doesn't, and generally acts plausibly warlike. But then it does so many of the bad things I expect—taking unnecessary attrition, abandoning sieges to walk around and start new ones, not using its siege weapons properly, and so on.

I'm not an AI programmer (or any kind of programmer, for that matter), but I feel like the AI could benefit so much from some kind of war plan subroutine that would prioritize objectives before a war declaration and then coordinate their execution. As far as I understand, the AI mostly just evaluates the actions of each army based on the game state of the holdings and enemies in its vicinity. This directionlessness really shows its weakness in situations like these, where you need a local hegemon to move quickly in establishing its influence in a region instead of dawdling around.