Hi folks, I hope you have all had a nice and relaxing holiday!
Hi, Doomdark. Been a while. Yup, it wasn't bad. I finished my game as Trebizond in 1204, did another run as the Palailogoi of Monferrato from 1305 onward (spawned 10K troops from a single county thanks to Rulership focus), then the mighty House Warendorp 1241 (achieved -1800 in debt thanks to tower, garden and family dues) and then created a custom Nestorian feudal count in the Silk-Road province on the Malabar Coast in 769 (Venice is beggars. And I sometimes even have positive prestige. Mostly between marriages.)
Meanwhile, we have gradually improved the core gameplay in patches (e.g. the technology system), but rarely in any radical way.
It's been ages now, but I actually liked the old system, even though I get much more efficiency with the new one. I liked the way you could focus ex-ante. It was natural, organic. Spending points ex-post just isn't as convincing. Earning is more exciting than spending (in real life too). And I liked the stars and half-stars. And the names. Like, 'Spiritual Art' or something, and piety not combined into one tech with prestige. 'Farming' also was more convincing than 'Castle Infrastructure'. I'm also not a bit fan of archers as LI and HA as generic cav. Swords, pikes and armour made things more interesting precisely because they crossed troop types and mixed things up a bit.
Whenever we did try to “deepen” the core gameplay in an expansion, it often turned out to be a mistake: The Retinue mechanic of Legacy of Rome should, for example, have been a part of the base game so we could have kept building upon it.
It's not too late. I don't think at this point anybody with LoR would care.
If there are still people without LoR. It's pretty much already a part of the base game by now anyway. I wonder how many people even know it's LoR and not patch matter.
Since you're reading this, I'd suggest converting retinues into something more like those private merc bands, without the ability to increase the numbers past several thousand (it's a
retinue, after all, a tail) but with some other ways of investing gold and exploiting huge retinue base (better, hand-picked recruits, more expensive equipment etc.).
In particular, CK2 suffers from a kind of inverse difficulty progression; it is hard in the beginning and easy in the mid-to-late game.
Not always. I think that depends on the style. There are sufficient ways to implode an empire if you aren't cheesing it or playing a ruthless style. It just may take as long as for the Abbassids to fall apart, if you're skilled enough.
The problem is that the game becomes much easier when you do all those things like assassinating people, fabricating claims, breeding claimants and giving a last-minute barony to the brother of the king of France the moment before you hit 'Send' on the peace offer as the HRE, and cash in on every cause of imprisonment or revocation. But I'm not sure you can help that other than by introducing BadBoy and making the Pope more outspoken about vices and misdeeds (which I really hope one day is gonna happen; real-life popes were much more active and replaced kings and emperors, these here rarely even excommunicate anyone particularly deserving).
For perspective, I tend to play them as a good rulers, do the right thing and all. As a result I often have huge opinion modifiers most of the time, almost on par with Muslim blobs, which allows me to do a lot of things. But when I keep HCA in place to avoid internal wars and outside inheritances and offer a lot of military assistance to allies and invasion victims etc., factions can really become a pain in the side, even with 25+ Chancellors and Spymasters, maxed-out retinues, PowerDemesne™ and all that jazz. There is actually still challenge. There is boredom or rather loss of attention span (more the subjective weariness and loss of interest in micromanagement than any objective cause), but the challenge is there.
Naturally, I could nuke everybody into oblivion with the available CBs, but I'm not even really tempted to do that. Most of my uses of a holy war CB are because I'm not allowed to join an Orthodox duke somewhere as a defender, or ally with an uprising. So then I declare for Ceuta but sail to Trebizond or something like that.
Reduce the “positive opinion inflation” of vassals vs their liege. (We ended up cutting many important positive opinion modifiers in half.)
Not to be a wet blanket, but I don't think you can produce a qualitative change (which seems to be what you're after) by imposing a global offset on quantitative variables. If anything of that sort, you need to address stacking. But not the ability to stack per se, as much as the greater of opportunities to earn positive than negative modifiers. (The problem with Muslim opinion is not the size but the multitude of positive modifiers.)
This said, the cap was too easily reached. Halving the modifiers is going to bring the curve back. And remove the angst of not being able to benefit from the full 150 or 200 all of the applicable modifiers sometimes add up to (or 300 or 800, but huge grants are bit too obvious).
Highlight the most powerful vassals by making them strongly desire a Council seat.
Confirmation bias maybe, but I was hoping for something like that. Have you read Conn Iggulden's
Wars of the Roses series? If not, you should. It contains everything you need to know about dukes.
Give the Council more power without reducing player agency.
Well, actually give them more agency too. Anything to trigger some interactions. Preferably with some individual, quirky, flawed personality in it. But do try to remember about some common-sense checks to avoid blatantly OOC (out-of-character) results.
(You are free to disregard the Council’s suggestions, but this will have ramifications on Factions. More on this later...)
How about making landless ones ask you for a title anyway (especially count or above, after which they can join factions), especially after some 10-20 years of service? And not necessarily go out peacefully if you sack them for asking?
Introduce Infamy and Coalitions against aggressively expanding Realms.
Others will have said that by now, but it's still worth saying: Please, don't penalize realms just for expanding. Give the risk assessment some more dimensions. And especially threat posed particularly to you (i.e. the risk-assessing AI ruler) as opposed to being some sort of True Neutral 2nd Edition Druid that fights for balance.
I'm pretty sure France and HRE should be trying to not let each other gain too much head, and some clever England or Castille or even some Duke in Italy will realize that he/she/it doesn't want that either, but if they all get ideas like balance, then things might begin to look a bit New-Ageish on the map, or at least Victorian/WW1-like.
And you do need to avoid having a global variable that ignores religion, though I'm actually looking
forward to coreligionists disliking those rulers who abuse religion to expand. Which is not unrealistic at all, the opposite even. But realistically there should be less perceived infamy for expanding into 'infidel' land than 'fidel'.
Improve the alliance mechanic to make it a more intentional choice. (A royal marriage is now simply a non-aggression pact. Alliance is the second step, but still requires a marriage.)
I'll judge it when I see it, but I'm turning a lil' bit sour here. Mediaeval rulers certainly pledged those, but doesn't 'non-aggression pact' sound just a bit too modern? Is it possible that you've spent a lot of time working on Victoria 3 these last weeks? Might want to spend some 100 hours in CK2 to counterbalance that.
Improve the diplomatic AI in order to contain “blobs” (with the help of the above Alliance and Coalition systems.)
I may be seeing things, you're probably only just using technical language, but the idea of containing blobs kinda still makes me think of a modern state's outlook on things (this time especially the decades just after WW2). Really need to watch it to not make them too Westphalian in thinking.
Bring the military AI to a whole new level.[/quotes]
Screenshot or it didn't happen.
Make it harder to quickly win wars through one or two major engagements.
But don't protract them either. AI refusing to budge before 100% most of the time plus reduced siege weights already has made wars a bit boring compared to early 1.0x.
Hence, we reduced the bloodiness of battles overall
Great!
introduced “shattered retreats” and made armies reinforce in friendly territory.)
Good, good.
Listen, I need to suggest something. It's been bothering me for roleplaying reasons. Coming back home through friendly territory
after the war. Your allies certainly wouldn't refuse you at least the opportunity to purchase supplies or lodging or whatever. Even with your erstwhile enemies you'd probably have a clause about that in the peace treaty.
(Also, as some country up north without much of a navy you should also be able to hire Ligurian Galleys from Liguria rather than some county up north to have to sail all the way down to Palestine.)
Thus, the features of Conclave and the accompanying patch are a combination of internal and external measures to make blobbing harder. This intention had ripple effects on other mechanics. For example, malcontents now tend to gang up into fewer but more powerful Factions,
Don't wanna the, urm, malcontent, I guess, but I can see how that can actually make it
easier. Multiple factions can fire off one by one in a quick chain. That actually causes a ripple effect (3 revolts + decadence + Shi'ia Rising, not like a healthy Abbassid blob isn't capable of shaking it all off anyway, at least the first 15 times). More powerful but fewer factions can fire off more sequentially and be dealt with more sequentially.
Then again, it's probably gonna be more fun that way. The usual Raised Levies Faction 1 through 5 doesn't have the charm of an offended duke.
How exactly are you going to make them more powerful without either having many vassals apparently sympathize with Duke Offended or spawning event troops for the revolt?
The former could look a bit unrealistic (it could look like anti-human bias in practice, even though it also applied vs the AI), the latter has already been done and doesn't seem to have a good solution.
For the record, offended dukes court resort to plotting instead of factions and rely on the plot power algorithm to make things more interesting.
and we reworked the Law Screen while we were adding the new Council Power laws.
I'm not going to bring it up explicitly, but you probably know what I think needs a rethink with the new law screen (which isn't bad, by the way; I liked the CK1 one a lot).
We also took this opportunity to address an unrelated weakness in the game, namely the education of children. If you have the expansion, that whole experience should now be more interesting…
Hey, there was nothing wrong with that!
That’s all for now, stay tuned for the details!
Sort of. The teasers you gave here are interesting, but my enthusiasm is quite chilled by the other thing you guys did (or rather the reasons/manner because the thing itself is okay and much needed and I'd been asking for stuff like that anyway).
