A bit of CK I nostalgia! Why to me it was more fun than CK II

[GAGA Extrem]

The most important for me: Chose what troops ratio you have through Crown Laws!

Well, technically you do that by demesne laws. The holdings just don't have enough difference in regards to troops yet.

The impossibility of specializing (is it possible to reach level 2 in bow before getting level 1 in heavy armor?) is an annoyance of mine, as it is one more reason why different part of the map play similarly. You can't really decide to rush bows and build lots of archery buildings, since your archers will only be barely better than those of the nations which focuses on heavy armor...

Tech progress is a bit more even, but thanks to the focus option you can indeed have level 1 in bows and level 3 in siege weapons. Techrange will start to increase around 1250 (starting date for tier III techs).

+1. Nowadays, I always send my heirs to NPC-controlled tutors to make their traits a little more random.

You more or less have to anyway, since a character can only tutor two children at a time.

Then again, Vanilla PDox games in Clausewitz have always been very generous at giving the player a pretty clear idea of what is going on (and that is good, as it makes them more user friendly), while mods are what made them awesome. In fact, CK2 is exactly the same in that respect.

Hiding stuff from players is never a good idea unless that player wants it. I played a few EU3 MP games and noticed how unfair my knowledge advantage from modding was: Because I had looked and tweaked the files dozen of times I knew the trigger conditions for certain events, triggered modifiers, how to stop religious turmoil and end a peasant war - while other players didn't have a clue. Our France player suffered for 100 years from turmoil because he didn't have Ecumenism...

...anyway, your comment made me launch up CK1 again to check a few things. I will definitely change troop distribution for my mod to match the CK1 style a bit more and provide a meaningful choise between castles, cities and temples.

 

[neondt]

While wearing the nostalgia goggles, it's easy to forget that playing a small or even medium-sized vassal in CK1 was extremely boring. You just sat around watching infants die until your abysmal prestige "income" finally rose high enough to get a claim on something. Especially annoying is when your character died shortly before you got enough prestige for this, as it set you back pretty much an entire generation. On the other end of the spectrum, playing as an independent king was too easy since you could buy all the claims you wanted. Overall, I found CK1 was tedious and frustrating (except, bizzarly, when I played in Russia where things were a bit more balanced and the game moved at an engaging and challenging pace).

 

[neondt]

That is exactly the point! What you call anoying I call challenging and unpredictable, giving you the sense of surving another generation.

"Challenging" is when the game presents you with a situation where thriving requires skill, knowledge of the game, and careful planning. CK1 gave the player very little control over what they could do about their situation - you just have to pray that the random numbers gods are feeling kind enough give you enough prestige to forge a claim. In any game there has to be a balance between luck and player agency, and CK2 gets far, far closer to the right balance than CK1 did.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Why use realm duress when the game has character driven relations down to the barony tier?
If the vassals hate the king because of his traits and deeds, there will be duress alright.

Actually, the one thing that I really do miss is that map mode that showed the three tiers of a kingdom (king, dukes and counts) on one map. The current 'direct vassals' map mode is far less useful

Isn't that done by the COA on the map? I find it quite easy to distinguish the counts and dukes in a realm, at least as long as the provinces are adjected.