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Hey all!

So today I felt that I was going to spoil some of the bigger stuff we are working on with the new patch, I thought Birken was a bit too mean keeping you guys on edge for so long. As several of you have noted we now have a Pacts tab in the character screen and I am going to tell you guys what it is all about.

So why it was changed is because we decided that we wanted to rewrite a bit how alliances worked in Crusader Kings making it much more predictable who will be in your war. No, as some of you tried to guess we have not made it no longer required to marry other rulers to forge an alliance, that is still a very big part of the core gameplay in the game. What we have done is that we have divided it up in two steps, Non-Aggression Pacts and Alliances.


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Now now, don’t fetch your pitchforks yet! The idea we have is to make the marriage much more focused on its strategical nature than just finding your “soulmate” with impressive tracts of land.

Now when you first marry off your daughter or son you will be figuratively negotiating an agreement with the other ruler to come to terms over your issues with each other, resulting in a Non-Aggression Pact between your two mighty realms. This can later can be improved into a proper Alliance. This is an action done separately after the marriage as been finalized. You don’t have to wait until your family members have grown up however as betrothals also counts when formalizing these pacts.

This does mean that you do not have a Non-Aggression Pact with your close kins but they can still be made into allies without a marriage. Meaning you no longer get the penalties of attacking close kin unless you choose to make your them your ally.

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Picture has been censored to not reveal undisclosed features

With these changes the AI has also been changed a bit to be more capable in recognizing Realpolitik instead of purely going on opinions. It is not much but the AI is now capable of properly identifying threats and will try to form Non-Aggression pacts with these, or if they refuse, ally someone else with a common interest to contain the threat. The idea is also that the AI no longer wants to aid these threats, but instead only preserve the status quo and keep them off their back. They will refuse to ally these threats most of the time in order to not help them become stronger.

Since we now have a distinct action you can perform to ally someone we have also changed how they relate to wars to make it less of a guessing game.

Allies for both sides will be shown in the Declare War screen showing who will join the war on what side. Also important to know with these changes is that allies are now required to honor their alliance, meaning they can not refuse a call to arms. So now you know exactly who you can count on when the war starts. However if your ally is starting an offensive war against someone you have a Non-Aggression Pact with you have to stand out.

All of this is in the Free Patch that will be coming with the next expansion.
 
I meant that the rulers usually did not convert to the religion of their in-laws in most of the CK2 period.
No of course not. What I meant was that the whole "Must not marry an infidel thing is stupid because there was always the option of one of the to be spouses converting to the religion of the court that he/she would be living in after the marriage. Most such scenarios I know of is with pagans marrying into christian households and getting baptised.
 
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I love how the king as has a non-agression pact with his wife. Baby don't hurt me, no more.
 
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With these changes the AI has also been changed a bit to be more capable in recognizing Realpolitik instead of purely going on opinions. It is not much but the AI is now capable of properly identifying threats and will try to form Non-Aggression pacts with these, or if they refuse, ally someone else with a common interest to contain the threat.

While this sounds great I'm worried that the AI will take it's newfound alliance and say "hey, why dont I wage a war of aggression on my smaller neighbor who is no threat with my new alliance to back me up?"

It would be nice if alliances didn't allow for a call to arms in offensive wars against a realm with fewer holdings is what I'm getting at here.
 
Yeah, think about it, if your friends, then you're probably past hating each other based on religious views.

We can make marriage alliance regardless of faiths if we're friends? I have wanted this patch for so long...
 
I'm really hoping the requirements to form a NAP or an alliance are moddable.
 
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Not having alliances with close kin is going to make the pre-1066 starts a lot more interesting. Especially the Viking age might see some fun times with the Karlings not backing each other up all of the time. It might become quite a bit easier to start a Karling blob wipe-out game now... Looking forward to that!
 
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Marriage requirement and the process from N-A pact is good. I was worried that alliances would result in every ruler allied to his neighbours from day one which would make playing OPMs and such really painful.
 
While marriages are getting looked at, could we also see the AI be less eager to marry every child at age 16?
 
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Not having alliances with close kin is going to make the pre-1066 starts a lot more interesting. Especially the Viking age might see some fun times with the Karlings not backing each other up all of the time. It might become quite a bit easier to start a Karling blob wipe-out game now... Looking forward to that!

Yeah, that was one thing I'm wondering (worried?) about as well. I'm also a bit concerned about my inter-realm nature, since I usually land every dynasty member I can so that they can come to each other's defense (or offense). :-\
 
While marriages are getting looked at, could we also see the AI be less eager to marry every child at age 16?
That's an artificial restriction though, there's no reason for them not to do it. Unless you mean they should wait for better spouses - I agree with that. I'm sick of my relatives all marrying women 10 years older than them and a bunch of lowborns, it's not fun and it makes everything weird.
 
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Marriage requirement and the process from N-A pact is good. I was worried that alliances would result in every ruler allied to his neighbours from day one which would make playing OPMs and such really painful.
Agreed, that wouldn't be good. However, being able to establish the basis for an alliance via event would be useful. Even being able to mod in forming NAPs with friends without needing to marry would be appreciated. It would be more controlled and rare than the AI doing it willy-nilly, and it would open up so many options for mods.
 
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Another thought I just had. If you get a NAP upon betrothal, would that not be open to abuse? I could see switching around your betrothals to avoid conflict very easily. That and it's meaningless if you break the betrothal- they'll still accept the second time around. Unless of course betrothals will carry some weight, the same as allies not participating.
 
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Will this be moddable? I'd really love to see, for example, CotC have you be able to make alliances with people of your political ideology, so that Strugatsky and, say, a neo-socialist Witch Head nebula could become allies against the despicable fascist brood of Jion and Novvy Edem.
 
It's looks like a great improvement to the alliance system. Mostly the allies tab listed a bunch of people in red, meaning that they would not join a war, so you wondered what they were there for.
 
this looks interesting, assuming the AI is working correctly having them or most of them focused on balancing power in favor of preserving the status quo will be good for the game
 
Yeah, think about it, if your friends, then you're probably past hating each other based on religious views.

Just because you are friends doesn't change the teachings of your religions.

If your friends knows your religion doesn't approve of intermarriage between faiths, he would remind you of your beliefs, not let you just toss them aside.
 
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Just because you are friends doesn't change the teachings of your religions.

If your friends knows your religion doesn't approve of intermarriage between faiths, he would remind you of your beliefs, not let you just toss them aside.

What is this post about ? As if rulers had cared about such restrictions if the marriage/alliance was important. I guess they will still refuse if zealous.