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Posted a new version. The biggest changes are an overhaul of the game difficulty modifiers (a wider range of more reasonable effects instead of an absurdly strong focus on army morale), and an increase in perceived Threat generation for larger realms (Defensive Pacts were exceedingly rare in Vanilla/HIP, even when a massive empire was gobbling up all of its neighbours).

My main hope with this version is that playing on Hard or Very Hard difficulty will now be a good challenge, without feeling unfair or cheesy. The difficulty overhaul however necessitated dropping compatibility with the Cultural Bonuses (HIP) mod, as it also edits static_modifiers.txt . A compatibility patch could be made if people are interested. I added a relevant guide to my first post.

Threat generation is now several times what it was in Frosty, though in observer test games it looks to be working well: Defensive Pacts now tend to form when I would rationally expect it (e.g. an already sizable kingdom suddenly doubles in size), and disappear in around 10-20 years without major offensive war, depending on realm size and strength, which seems more-or-less reasonable imo.


There has been no update on the Open Beta changelog on zijistark's site since last July, which made me think that HIP development overall is "frozen". You are right though that on the EMF git site DelnarErsike has made a couple of changes since then. Most of these are minor though. I took a look at it now and the emf git beta looks compatible with my patch, so you should be able to use them together without any issues (the one place where we edit the same file relative to Frosty3, we both fix the same issue).

It would be nice to have all improvements since Frosty3 in one place, but I think integrating changes from the git repo into this patch here might be a bad idea. It would be rude without their permission (and possibly worse). I would prefer it the other way around: like I wrote in my opening post, the HIP team has my blessing to integrate my patch into the main mod if they want.


It is not fully compatible. I only looked at "NHO Compilation (13-01-21)", which has two clashes: emf_buildings_triggers.txt and succession_laws.txt . As it is, you would lose the cultural buildings for Scots or for Old English, depending on load order, and would similarly lose either the expanded cultural succession law eligibility from NHO or my overhaul of succession law opinion modifiers and realm bonuses.

I do not want to have to make compatches for various submods I do not use myself, especially as compatibility patches would then need to be updated for every new version of every mod. But I do realize that it can be very annoying to have to choose between two mods which could in principle be compatible, but are not. So I updated the OP with a detailed section on how to make compatibility patches, using NHO as the example. I hope you find it useful (teach a man to fish...).


I have never seen long duels, so those must have disappeared before I started playing. Can you describe in detail what they were like? Are lots of people interested in this? (I make no promises here)
Hey, Svatopluk. Just wanted to mention this post that i'm citing below about spymasters rooting out vassals from HIP factions. Is this a bug in your opinion and does it need patching?
It's not a big deal, but it is quite annoying to see my spymaster offer to obligate or threaten some vassal or other because they are part of a conspiratorial faction, when in reality, they are part of the regular HIP factions. Since these factions are seen as legitimate, I think this event should only fire for non-HIP factions like Independence or Claimant or Lower CA factions.
 
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Overhauled difficulty modifiers. They now have a wider range of more measured effects instead of an absurdly strong focus on army morale.
Hey @Svatopluk and thank you for the hard work. I'm curious : at what difficulty do you play HIP with your patch ? I have always played it at normal, but I would be much interested to know how you see things. Thanx in advance. JC
 
Posted a new version in the OP, with a focus on council voting patterns, fixing a lot of bugs. Hopefully council votes will be a bit more interesting and sensible now.


Not sure if you're using the Dark Ages mod, it's one of the most famous additions for HIP. If you're using it, could you take a look at its compatibility with your patch?
It looks more-or-less compatible (just a minor clash regarding pagan reformation requirement defines), but personally I would not recommend it.

It was one of the first mods I looked at, and also the first I removed. It seems heavy-handed to me: it dominates through the sheer magnitude of the effects. For example, its Province Stability mechanic, while not particularly revolutionary, could be okay if it was just something in the background, but the buffs/debuffs from it are so strong that you have to focus on it if you want to play competently. A mod that strongarms you into focusing your attention on it can detract from the game, because "larger numbers" can overshadow potentially more interesting, more fun mechanics of the rest of the game.


Hey, Svatopluk. Just wanted to mention this post that i'm citing below about spymasters rooting out vassals from HIP factions. Is this a bug in your opinion and does it need patching?
It is debatable if it is a bug or not, but I ended up "fixing" it, because on balance I think it makes more sense for the Spymaster to prioritize going after actual conspirators.


I'm curious : at what difficulty do you play HIP with your patch ? I have always played it at normal, but I would be much interested to know how you see things.
During the "difficulty overhaul" I was gradually tweaking the modifiers while playing a campaign on Very Hard (Zoroastrian count start, fake conversion to Sunni, then destroying the Caliphate from within).

There are some important things that the AI does poorly, and which seem hard-coded (so cannot be improved much by mods): things like choosing easy targets to attack, finishing wars ASAP, proactively dealing with troublesome vassals. So it makes sense that the AI would need some advantage to keep up with a competent player.

I think that the most important part about designing difficulty is that most efficient way of facing the challenge should also be fun. For example, with the "old" Frosty3 HIP difficulty settings, a straight battle between similar armies on Very Hard would be a virtually guaranteed win for the AI vs a player due to the army morale difference. However, as long as the stronger AI realms are reluctant to attack the player and waste time and resources on long and inefficient wars against each other, a player can gobble up weaker neighbouring realms and expand with little to no opposition. Gobbling with no opposition is not very fun for me.

What would be fun then? Fighting difficult wars against an AI that can keep up.

The old morale bonus to the AI is both "cheesable" and unfun: it means little if the AI is too afraid to declare war on the player, while it discourages significant player vs AI battles. So how can we have make the AI more willing to attack the player? The AI likes to declare war when it has a larger army and sufficient money. So with my patch on Hard and above, the AI gets that: levy and income bonuses relative to the player. On the other hand, the army morale difference gets reduced so as to not discourage fun fights.

So that was my approach when trying to design a challenge for Hard+. Of course, people should be free to play the game in whichever way they enjoy: the patch purposely makes no change at all to the Normal difficulty. Moreover, if the game feels a bit harder with the bugfixes and ai improvements, and someone just wants a chill, casual game, then lower difficulties like Easy are also there as options.
 
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Posted a new version in the OP, with a focus on council voting patterns, fixing a lot of bugs. Hopefully council votes will be a bit more interesting and sensible now.



It looks more-or-less compatible (just a minor clash regarding pagan reformation requirement defines), but personally I would not recommend it.

It was one of the first mods I looked at, and also the first I removed. It seems heavy-handed to me: it dominates through the sheer magnitude of the effects. For example, its Province Stability mechanic, while not particularly revolutionary, could be okay if it was just something in the background, but the buffs/debuffs from it are so strong that you have to focus on it if you want to play competently. A mod that strongarms you into focusing your attention on it can detract from the game, because "larger numbers" can overshadow potentially more interesting, more fun mechanics of the rest of the game.
Τhanks for the new update plus the useful info! We really appreciate your work!
Ιs the new update still incompatible with ''Cultural bonuses'' like you previously mentioned or have your tweak something?
I tried to make a compatch but it wasn't working as intended, it seems I'm getting CK2 rusty. Anyways, I'll see what I can do.

Cheers and thanks again!
 
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Posted a new version in the OP, with a focus on council voting patterns, fixing a lot of bugs. Hopefully council votes will be a bit more interesting and sensible now.



It looks more-or-less compatible (just a minor clash regarding pagan reformation requirement defines), but personally I would not recommend it.

It was one of the first mods I looked at, and also the first I removed. It seems heavy-handed to me: it dominates through the sheer magnitude of the effects. For example, its Province Stability mechanic, while not particularly revolutionary, could be okay if it was just something in the background, but the buffs/debuffs from it are so strong that you have to focus on it if you want to play competently. A mod that strongarms you into focusing your attention on it can detract from the game, because "larger numbers" can overshadow potentially more interesting, more fun mechanics of the rest of the game.



It is debatable if it is a bug or not, but I ended up "fixing" it, because on balance I think it makes more sense for the Spymaster to prioritize going after actual conspirators.



During the "difficulty overhaul" I was gradually tweaking the modifiers while playing a campaign on Very Hard (Zoroastrian count start, fake conversion to Sunni, then destroying the Caliphate from within).

There are some important things that the AI does poorly, and which seem hard-coded (so cannot be improved much by mods): things like choosing easy targets to attack, finishing wars ASAP, proactively dealing with troublesome vassals. So it makes sense that the AI would need some advantage to keep up with a competent player.

I think that the most important part about designing difficulty is that most efficient way of facing the challenge should also be fun. For example, with the "old" Frosty3 HIP difficulty settings, a straight battle between similar armies on Very Hard would be a virtually guaranteed win for the AI vs a player due to the army morale difference. However, as long as the stronger AI realms are reluctant to attack the player and waste time and resources on long and inefficient wars against each other, a player can gobble up weaker neighbouring realms and expand with little to no opposition. Gobbling with no opposition is not very fun for me.

What would be fun then? Fighting difficult wars against an AI that can keep up.

The old morale bonus to the AI is both "cheesable" and unfun: it means little if the AI is too afraid to declare war on the player, while it discourages significant player vs AI battles. So how can we have make the AI more willing to attack the player? The AI likes to declare war when it has a larger army and sufficient money. So with my patch on Hard and above, the AI gets that: levy and income bonuses relative to the player. On the other hand, the army morale difference gets reduced so as to not discourage fun fights.

So that was my approach when trying to design a challenge for Hard+. Of course, people should be free to play the game in whichever way they enjoy: the patch purposely makes no change at all to the Normal difficulty. Moreover, if the game feels a bit harder with the bugfixes and ai improvements, and someone just wants a chill, casual game, then lower difficulties like Easy are also there as options.
Thanks alot for the reply and fixes!
 
Ιs the new update still incompatible with ''Cultural bonuses'' like you previously mentioned or have your tweak something?
I tried to make a compatch but it wasn't working as intended, it seems I'm getting CK2 rusty. Anyways, I'll see what I can do.

I did not tweak that, so I expect it to still be technically incompatible. But as there is only a single file ( common/static_modifiers.txt ) that clashes with "HIP SWMH Cultural Bonus" and only in one section, it should be possible to merge (step 4 in my guide) even with something like Notepad (just copy-paste my Difficulty Modifiers inside static_modifiers.txt if you want them ), as long as you can get a newly created mod to load.

If you cannot get it to work, the easy alternative is to just delete HIP_Patch/common/static_modifiers.txt . That way you would lose my difficulty modifiers but retain everything else, including the cultural bonuses from the other mod.
 
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I did not tweak that, so I expect it to still be technically incompatible. But as there is only a single file ( common/static_modifiers.txt ) that clashes with "HIP SWMH Cultural Bonus" and only in one section, it should be possible to merge (step 4 in my guide) even with something like Notepad (just copy-paste my Difficulty Modifiers inside static_modifiers.txt if you want them ), as long as you can get a newly created mod to load.

If you cannot get it to work, the easy alternative is to just delete HIP_Patch/common/static_modifiers.txt . That way you would lose my difficulty modifiers but retain everything else, including the cultural bonuses from the other mod.
Thanks! I'll re-try it for sure since I really want to use your amazing fixes and the Cultural Bonuses mod is an old time favorite!
Are you planning more updates?
Cheers!
 
@Svatopluk I just noticed that in the Ruler Designer menu i can't choose Mandaean and Zurvanist religions in the Zoroastrian group for my character. I can choose 5 out of 7 religions listed in the 00_religions.txt under the Zoroastrian group. All of the other religions in other groups are fully selectable. Is this the way it's supposed to be?

Edit - I've researched this matter further, and if anyone else is concerned I’ve discovered that these two particular religions are set as "allow_in_ruler_designer = no" by default. I don't quite understand what is the reasoning behind this decision, as they are considered mere heresies and not reformed religions. Nonetheless, I consider this matter resolved.
 

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I'am using this mod along with a whole bunch of other mods in a steam collection. The fix that stops AI from constantly changing the same law type back and forth keeps happening so obviously it got overwritten. I don't have the patience to go through all the mods and figure out which one is causing the incompatibility. How do make it so this mod loads last which should solve it? I like all the changes this mod makes and would rather just go with all the changes it adds.

EDIT: Can I just change the name of one or both of the 2 files?
 
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5. In the launcher, make sure our new compatibility patch mod is active, then launch the game and test if it works. If you can see cultural buildings for both Scots ("Scottis") and Saxons ("Angelcynn"), then it looks like the compatch for emf_buildings_triggers.txt worked.

how do i do that?
start as a scot or is there a console command?
 
Is it possible to fix the bug with crown law opinion malus affecting the entire world or would that require an actual base game update? Thank you for keeping HIP alive.
 
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Great effort OP, thanks for your contribution. I was wondering if you think you will ever come back to this? It was great to see continued development with this, as it will take a decade for Ck3 to catch up to where ck2 is at
 
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Great effort OP, thanks for your contribution. I was wondering if you think you will ever come back to this? It was great to see continued development with this, as it will take a decade for Ck3 to catch up to where ck2 is at
Plus one!
 
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I just start a new game with Buddhist ruler and notice that it is possible to appoint a female commander without changing status of woman law.
It is intended feature?