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Anybody else think the culture/tech game play is a bit too dull?

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I think it’s an interesting system but it has flaws. I don’t like that if you want to play a smarty pants scholar duke you will have zero impact on your culture’s advancement because your moron same-culture liege has more counties than you.
 
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Upping the number techs would help alot. That would give player choice and provide more variety for how you want your culture to develop. And it would allow multiple techs to be gateways to different buildings or armies, instead of 1 tech to open everything.

Also I like how some techs are tied to regions, but there are far too few of them now. Additional regional techs sound like something that would fit perfectly with regional DLCs.
 
The general idea is that you can invade a kingdom, culture shift its developed land, and give titles to the local culture in undeveloped provinces. Over time, your culture becomes increasingly dominant technologically. I quite like the mechanic. I think it could be explored much more deeply in future dlc.

One issue is that it is quite hard to recruit people from a culture you take over, in order to give them titles. But overall, I love the idea of having your culture take over the centres of power in a region and then you have this big pastoral countryside you don't culture shift.
 
The innovation system was actually the only thing where I went "Oh no! :(" when I read about it in the dev diary. My impression has improved a bit since then, though only a bit.

I dislike the strong connection between culture and innovations. Just by educating your heir in another culture then overnight at the point of succession everything changes. Like your men get off their longboats, then the next morning they go outside and all the longboats are gone. They're stuck with the old ships that are four times the cost and only 80% the speed.

"What happened to the longboats!?"
"The old king died, and his heir was educated by a French governess."
"Oh, it's all making sense now!"

I also dislike the fact that there is no step-by-step progression (other than advancing ages).

What I do enjoy are the regional innovations, though. In my current game I culture-converted over 40 provinces in Africa just so I could get access to war camels. :D I think that aspect is fun, because it leaves you something to do with tech even after you have all the "normal" innovations discovered. :)
 
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Agree with most points, plus it makes playing with some cultures very hard. I like to play with Turks going into Anatolia but because of deadbeat Turkish provinces in Central Asia my tech growth is horrible. I don't get why I should be affected by provinces thousands of kilometers away.
 
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Black_Shade said:
The tech system in CK2 was not good. It's leagues ahead of CK3, though.
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I'm sorry, what? You could very easily play an entire CK2 run without looking at the technology screen once.

Black_Shade said:
And if you're behind in tech, you just switch cultures to someone who isn't, which is ridiculous.
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Speak for yourself. Some people actually prefer to do this thing called roleplaying.
 
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It only works when you have a relatively homogeneous area and your culture is mostly under your control but otherwise broken when you're ruling an area of mostly different cultures or when you are switching cultures.

And the AI is completely botched in those scenarios. See the Saka rulers in 867: there's no Saka provinces in game (likely a mistake), but the rulers doesn't convert province cultures, so the Saka states are stuck without a culture head and doomed to be behind everyone.
 
The issue that I have is that the locked cultural techs are included as part of the requirements in order for you to move to the next technological age. So in theory you only need 50% of the techs in order to progress, but since 4 or 5 of them are inaccessible to you, you end up developing the exact same tech as everyone else.

I don't know, it just doesn't feel as though the realms are as unique as they were in CKII. Granted that was because the AI sucked in tech development but I'd love to see some type of real differentiation in tech. Something where if you sacrificed in one area (say, military) you could tech up in another (say, economics). But then we'd run in to the issue of the AI not knowing how to do long-term planning again and have it be too easy for the player to dominate.
 
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Maziga said:
I'm sorry, what? You could very easily play an entire CK2 run without looking at the technology screen once.
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You literally just described the CK3 system, which has even less reason for engagement than CK2, because you’ll auto finish the techs in each era 100 years ahead of time. Worse, even if by some chance you did open the innovation screen in CK3, 95% of the playable characters in the map could literally do absolutely nothing, because only the cultural head can make a choice. You also seem to be not getting the point that I think the CK2 system is terrible. The fact that the CK2 system is even comparable, let alone better (which it is) is not a good thing! Honestly, the system in CK3 is one of the worst ideas and mechanics I’ve ever seen implemented in a game. It’s that bad.
 
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CK3:
- 95% of characters can't do anything about tech.
- The 5% of characters that can choose their tech still can't meaningfully affect the tech rate beyond getting the first bonus in scholar lifestyle.
- Average development is impossible to meaningfully affect unless you do gamey strats like limiting culture spread, which is the opposite of what the goal of the game should be (everyone wanted to spread their culture).
- If you tech too quickly you end up hitting arbitrary date roadblocks that stop you from advancing to the next era.
- Regional techs are pretty cool.

CK2:
- Every Duke can generate their own tech points
- You can tech to anything, at any time
- No limit to how quickly you can accrue tech points, unlike CK3 where fascination is capped at 100%. Make a 50 learning god? You can get a lot out of that. You could also get tech points from other stats than learning.
- No era date limits on tech, if you want something sooner you just need to pay the ahead of time cost, which is a strategic decision.
- Probably the worst part about CK2 was the whole spread system, which was painfully slow.

It can be noted that both games had the issue of "just move your capital to a high tech area and you gain all of their tech"
 
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Sonny65 said:
I love the idea that tech is attached to culture, but gameplay-wise all player can do is to wait, no matter you are culture head or not.

Also, it punished players who play wide rather than tall by correlate growth with development, which further discourages player's involvement.
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My biggest issue is that the game randomly decides which Innovation receives the Exposure bonus and from where. Like what? Croatians have one county next to Russia and I'm getting the Exposure bonus from Russia from that one county meanwhile a whole swath of my kingdom borders the Byzantine Greeks and I have no Exposure bonus to all their techs -- including the tech I'm getting the Russian bonus from which means I'd receive more of a bonus on that innovation if the game decided to give me the bonus from Greek culture! Why is this random? Even if we wanted to keep the Exposure bonus limited to one Innovation (arguable itself), it's trivial to code the Exposure bonus coming from the greatest source and not just be sloppily handled randomly as it is now. Is Exposure now a fixed value or does it depend on amount of Exposure as the CK3 wiki says?

I actually have no idea what is going on right here:

1600268945035.png


1. Why is Confederate Partition even an Innovation? It's the base succession law.
2. Why am I getting an Exposure bonus from Russian? There is one Croatian country which kinda borders Russia (green blob at top) across an impassable mountain range.
3. We do not share religion with the Russians and I don't even know why religion is even a factor.

AGAHHHHHHH WHAT IS GOING ON
 
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Less2 said:
CK3:
- 95% of characters can't do anything about tech.
- The 5% of characters that can choose their tech still can't meaningfully affect the tech rate beyond getting the first bonus in scholar lifestyle.
- Average development is impossible to meaningfully affect unless you do gamey strats like limiting culture spread, which is the opposite of what the goal of the game should be (everyone wanted to spread their culture).
- If you tech too quickly you end up hitting arbitrary date roadblocks that stop you from advancing to the next era.
- Regional techs are pretty cool.

CK2:
- Every Duke can generate their own tech points
- You can tech to anything, at any time
- No limit to how quickly you can accrue tech points, unlike CK3 where fascination is capped at 100%. Make a 50 learning god? You can get a lot out of that. You could also get tech points from other stats than learning.
- No era date limits on tech, if you want something sooner you just need to pay the ahead of time cost, which is a strategic decision.
- Probably the worst part about CK2 was the whole spread system, which was painfully slow.

It can be noted that both games had the issue of "just move your capital to a high tech area and you gain all of their tech"
Click to expand...

Painting the map with your culture's colour is far more gamey than not
 
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I get that they were trying to solve a tall vs. wide thing, but I really don't like the idea that because you teach poor African villagers to speak French, suddenly all the French have trouble figuring out how to do science good.

Tech being attached to development is definitely a good thing, and I understand you don't want it to scale madly based on blobbing, but it should be weighted to the development of the top 5-10 provinces of that culture or something, not dragged down arbitrarily.

Exposure can be a lot more interesting than it is. As it is at he moment, it might as well just be a random innovation gets a bonus unless you just happen to have every innovation already discovered. It doesn't do anything to effectively speed up a culture that is exposed to a much higher tech one. Surrounded by neighbors with a dozen innovations you don't have? Next to a single county with only one other innovation you don't have yet. Same thing as far as tech growth is concerned.

Learning needs to matter more than it does, and somehow needs to have a purpose if you aren't the cultural head.
 
Cymsdale said:
I get that they were trying to solve a tall vs. wide thing, but I really don't like the idea that because you teach poor African villagers to speak French,
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It is not really like that. It is more that, if your culture is spread across a massive disparate geography, it takes longer for them to learn stuff since everyone is riding horses and sailing in crappy boats.

More stuff to affect development growth wpuld help.
 
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