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Caeserion

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Nov 21, 2016
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Characters should have a character history tab. This is similar to the Chronicle from CK2 but (1) this is per character not dynasty and (2) this is viewable to everyone

Basic life events that should be recorded with the date and wherever relevant the location as well:
Birth, parents
Gained/Created a title
Appointed to/Fired from Council
Made/Removed as Knight
Guardian identity
Declaration of war, result of war
Relationship formation
Marriage
Taking of consorts/concubines
Birth of children whether legitimately or illegitimately
Pilgrimage
Ward identity
Death of children
Reformation of/creation of faith
Major decisions (reformed empire, unified territory, dismantled papacy)
Mutilation details
Imprisonment details
Laws changed
Death, cause of death

Schemes which are secrets should be hidden for alive characters (because you don't want to give too much information to player) unless they are already revealed. This has no gameplay benefit save for helping players build better stories because you need information for that. And to be clear, this should be available for every character, not just landed or characters with dynasties. I get that it can quickly lead to save bloat but perhaps there can be periodic clearing of character histories outside of player lineage every 100yrs. It should also be a expandable tab, like title history is for titles. The other alternative is to clear out the histories of characters who did nothing, they just floated from realm to realm or were generated for an event and then died in it.

For example, if William the Conqueror had a character history the entry would go like this:

Born March 3rd 1028 as a bastard to Robert and Herleva
Became Duke of Normandy on 3rd July 1035
Under the training of Archbishop Robert of Rouen he became a Brilliant Commander and took over the rule of his realm in 1044
Became friends with King Henry I of France
Married Matilda of Flanders on <date>
Launched an invasion of England on 6th January 1066
Became King of England on 25th December 1066
Fathered x on <date> with his wife Matilda
Became rivals with <name> on <date> after <name> executed William's half-brother Odo
His son Richard died on 1081
Died in 1087, was succeeded by his son King William II in England
 
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Characters should have a character history tab. This is similar to the Chronicle from CK2 but (1) this is per character not dynasty and (2) this is viewable to everyone

Basic life events that should be recorded with the date and wherever relevant the location as well:
Birth, parents
Gained/Created a title
Appointed to/Fired from Council
Made/Removed as Knight
Guardian identity
Declaration of war, result of war
Relationship formation
Marriage
Taking of consorts/concubines
Birth of children whether legitimately or illegitimately
Pilgrimage
Ward identity
Death of children
Reformation of/creation of faith
Major decisions (reformed empire, unified territory, dismantled papacy)
Mutilation details
Imprisonment details
Laws changed
Death, cause of death

Schemes which are secrets should be hidden for alive characters (because you don't want to give too much information to player) unless they are already revealed. This has no gameplay benefit save for helping players build better stories because you need information for that. And to be clear, this should be available for every character, not just landed or characters with dynasties. I get that it can quickly lead to save bloat but perhaps there can be periodic clearing of character histories outside of player lineage every 100yrs. It should also be a expandable tab, like title history is for titles. The other alternative is to clear out the histories of characters who did nothing, they just floated from realm to realm or were generated for an event and then died in it.

For example, if William the Conqueror had a character history the entry would go like this:

Born March 3rd 1028 as a bastard to Robert and Herleva
Became Duke of Normandy on 3rd July 1035
Under the training of Archbishop Robert of Rouen he became a Brilliant Commander and took over the rule of his realm in 1044
Became friends with King Henry I of France
Married Matilda of Flanders on <date>
Launched an invasion of England on 6th January 1066
Became King of England on 25th December 1066
Fathered x on <date> with his wife Matilda
Became rivals with <name> on <date> after <name> executed William's half-brother Odo
His son Richard died on 1081
Died in 1087, was succeeded by his son King William II in England
Excellent idea!
I think it would be fantastic if these summaries also tried to be presented in a style which made them feel a bit like someone wrote them rather than making it feel like a generated list of events.
 
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Excellent idea!
I think it would be fantastic if these summaries also tried to be presented in a style which made them feel a bit like someone wrote them rather than making it feel like a generated list of events.
Also would help flesh out the death screen from the generic "He was a cool dude" death screens currently generated. Helps tell your dynasty's story at the end of the game as well
 
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Vietnamese last names might be fine since there's a small number of them but modern name lists are just not valid at all for character names or dynasty names in game.

You need to point to some historical name sources.

People's names have changed pretty much universally since 867-1440.
I think you may have replied to the wrong thread
 
Yes please. This information is already stored in the savefile, bloating it and making my hard drive swell. Let's use it!

This will be great for AARs to, if they're still a thing.

I especially like that you added "mutilation details".
 
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Not bad at all, but it should be implemented with caution: you would know too much,
The only thing it really tells you is the date at which stuff happened. Schemes are hidden (unless they are revealed) so you can't find out about them. Right now the system is you check a character and see he ended up with the one-handed trait and you don't know how or when, or you see he took a wife/concubine and is her soulmate but you don't know when it happened. The information you get is hardly relevant for gameplay, its mostly for RP and storytelling.
This will be great for AARs to, if they're still a thing.
That's exactly what I had in mind when thinking this up lol
 
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I think it would be cool if you could commission these for yourself, relatives, etc. for a gold cost and gain a small amount of renown. And then you can see the detailed history of any character who has letters patent.
 
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I think it would be cool if you could commission these for yourself, relatives, etc. for a gold cost and gain a small amount of renown. And then you can see the detailed history of any character who has letters patent.
I don't see it as existing in-game, it's more a log for the player(s) to read. It's so you can understand the life of that random cousin who unexpectedly became your heir, or how the Capets became Caliphs, or other wacky stuff. It's also useful for AAR writers as it saves a lot of extra detail for characters which fan be used in stories.

It's also automatic and exists for everyone so commissioning it and restricting it doesn't make sense. If you mean you want characters to have a personal story (like a viking saga) about them then that's a separate suggestion and you should make that!
 
So, I just did some quick off the cuff math for this...

Figured around 13,000 rulers in the game at any one time, based on the character finder stats for rulers ( 25288 ) and multiplying by ~50% since that is about where the scrollbar was when barony rank leaders started showing up.

Took your list of events to track from the initial post ( 19 ), multiplied that by 80 characters per line times the 13000 rulers and got 19.7 million characters of data just for 1 event of each type for one set of rulers. So, 19 MB of data if only one of each event occurs for one lifetime of each ruler.

As an alternative, I took your little blurb about William, saved it to a file, and it was 633 bytes. Multiply that by the 13000 rulers at any one time, and you still get 8MB of data. And that portion of text is EXTREMELY tame, with only 1 child, 1 marriage, 1 war, etc.


Needless to say, multiple events for each ruler will occur, and there will definitely be multiple sets of rulers throughout the game, so this idea, while a great one and extremely interesting from a character perspective, would create a massive data footprint if not limited somehow in scope.

Edit: bah, ignore my idiocy, I misread the filtered value, it's a total of ~25,000 people in the game, not rulers. I still think that data bloat would be ridiculous though, considering that just to save the current state of the game at any point is already 60-80MB as text.
 
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I don't see it as existing in-game, it's more a log for the player(s) to read. It's so you can understand the life of that random cousin who unexpectedly became your heir, or how the Capets became Caliphs, or other wacky stuff. It's also useful for AAR writers as it saves a lot of extra detail for characters which fan be used in stories.

It's also automatic and exists for everyone so commissioning it and restricting it doesn't make sense. If you mean you want characters to have a personal story (like a viking saga) about them then that's a separate suggestion and you should make that!
Just based on the size of the data that I commented about, there is no way this would be able to be stored as a log, but would need to be stored as a database of events that occurred, thus cutting down on the amount of data stored drastically, since in many cases multiple characters are involved in the same event and could be condensed into one entry per event rather than one entry per event per character.

Therefore a tool ( external tool/new internal UI/whatever ) would also need to be created that would create your character history from that database of events, so the idea of commissioning the history of someone isn't that far off.
 
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Sounds like a nice help for roleplaying, but yes the savegame and memory bloat is a very real issue. Do you think the feature would still be useful if it didn't include certain characters (such as not storing anything for Rulers etc)
 
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I subscribe to all of the above in this thread.
I even created a similar thread without knowing about this topic.

My suggestions were as follows:
I want to be able to read something like an overview of each character's actions in the form of some kind of short essay.
What kind of person the character was, what his childhood was like, what he strived for. Who he fought and when, and why he chose to initiate those wars. Who did he antagonize and for what reasons. With whom he befriended and made alliances. For what reasons these alliances broke up and friends quarreled. To read the history of the most important events that happened to the character. How his relations with his vassals and other characters of the game were built. What was his motivation?
So that there would be some kind of personal portrait. A dynamically generated historical overview of a character's personality.
In the current version of the game you have a bunch of vassals, and what they have with each other you can only find out by scraps of information or by careful observation of them.
You can only guess why the character decided to form a claim to the county and start a war. Although the reasons exist and they are programmed by the game and depend on his personal attributes and other circumstances, but you do not know which ones.
In the current version of the game, you know almost nothing about the lives of the dead characters, their alliances, wars, motives for action and events in their lives.
You also know nothing about those states that have ceased to exist, such as discontinued alliances, discontinued friendship states, and enmity states.

Similarly, it is necessary to add a dynamically generated historical overview of the main events that took place in this or that country, with an indication of the reasons for the events, the actors and their motivations. To be able to read an essay on the life and events of each title (barony, earldom, duchy, kingdom, empire).
In the current version of the game you can't read that any title was a point of contention between groups of nobles and there were several bloody wars over it. In the course of these wars several thousands of people died and famous representatives of the nobility fell in battle as knights. The king of one country was captured and beheaded.
If the developers could add such reviews, it would greatly enhance the immersiveness of the game.

Dear Mrop, replied that "Tracking everything is sadly not technically feasible, it would require a lot of memory and massive save files if every happening was stored for every character/country/county in the game. Therefore, "storing everything about everyone" is not a very constructive suggestion. If there are specific happenings to specific characters or titles you would prefer to be stored, that would be something that could actually be possible to do."

I agree with him.
I propose to write a hierarchy of priority data that would need to be tracked by the game.
The developers, based on the collective opinion of the community, could decide what is worth adding to the game, and how cheap it is in terms of resources.

My hierarchy of priorities is as follows:

1. A button from the character window to the history of the titles that the character gained and lost.
The transition history itself is already in the game. It won't waste a lot of resources. But the existing way of displaying in the game concerns only a particular title. You have to spend a lot of time surfing the interface to see the transition history for each specific character.
The form of displaying this information could be similar to the list of wars, alliances and truces that opens at the bottom of the left character panel.

2. History of military victories and defeats of the characters.
The detailed number of troops and the nature of the battle can not be saved. It is enough only political results, such as who got which title, whether the faction was defeated or not, etc.
In my opinion, this information, combined with the transition of titles, significantly characterizes the historical contribution of the character's personality.

3.It is necessary to retain for the dead characters their monikers. Because it characterizes their personality, how they are remembered.
 
I actually don't necessarily think we need a LOT of detail stored here, but just enough to be able to form a picture of a character when we take over as them:

- Who their Guardian(s) was growing up, if any
- For a rival, the date their rivalry began and what spurred it
- For a friend, the date their friendship began, and what started it
- Anyone who has tortured them, and when
- Anyone who imprisoned them for longer than a year (and how they were imprisoned)
- If they are currently injured / maimed, how did it happen? (Happy for this to be wiped if/when the injury goes away)

That alone would add a TON of flavour and allow us to get an understanding of who someone is and their relationship to the story, without adding a ton of bloat to the savefile.

EDIT: So an example "Notable Events" tab might contain:

- Raised and educated by <character> (if this is multiple, they could be listed, or just the most recent)
- Became rivals with <character> after a murder attempt on <date>
- Became friends with <character> at a feast on <date>
- Was imprisoned for 2 years by <character> for <imprisonment reason> (the reason might be "captured in battle", "fornication", "caught attempting murder", or whatever)
- Was tortured by <character> on <date>
- Received current injuries in the Battle of <battle>

EDIT 2: You could also probably save some more space by removing this information if the relevant character is no longer alive. So Guardian, Rival, Friend, Imprisoner, Torturer... all of these could just be deleted from the log if the relevant character has died.
 
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Sounds like a nice help for roleplaying, but yes the savegame and memory bloat is a very real issue. Do you think the feature would still be useful if it didn't include certain characters (such as not storing anything for Rulers etc)
Yeah I don't have an answer for the memory increase, all I can do is suggest it and hope devs have a way to get around it. I'd personally be ok with larger save files, no idea if there's a downside. My games go pretty slowly anyway so if there is a decrease in game speed I wouldn't notice but I understand why it would be a dealbreaker for many. Not sure about not storing things for certain types of characters since the point of it is to track the journeys of people so for example if you reward a loyal knight or councillor with land and the tracking only begins after you've lost a lot of info already. And since the majority of people you interact with are landed it doesn't make sense to not track them.
I actually don't necessarily think we need a LOT of detail stored here, but just enough to be able to form a picture of a character when we take over as them:

- Who their Guardian(s) was growing up, if any
- For a rival, the date their rivalry began and what spurred it
- For a friend, the date their friendship began, and what started it
- Anyone who has tortured them, and when
- Anyone who imprisoned them for longer than a year (and how they were imprisoned)
- If they are currently injured / maimed, how did it happen? (Happy for this to be wiped if/when the injury goes away)

That alone would add a TON of flavour and allow us to get an understanding of who someone is and their relationship to the story, without adding a ton of bloat to the savefile.

EDIT: So an example "Notable Events" tab might contain:

- Raised and educated by <character> (if this is multiple, they could be listed, or just the most recent)
- Became rivals with <character> after a murder attempt on <date>
- Became friends with <character> at a feast on <date>
- Was imprisoned for 2 years by <character> for <imprisonment reason> (the reason might be "captured in battle", "fornication", "caught attempting murder", or whatever)
- Was tortured by <character> on <date>
- Received current injuries in the Battle of <battle>

EDIT 2: You could also probably save some more space by removing this information if the relevant character is no longer alive. So Guardian, Rival, Friend, Imprisoner, Torturer... all of these could just be deleted from the log if the relevant character has died.
Yeah this is what I mostly see it as. Important dates (marriage, concubinage, minor title gain) and relationships.
 
First of all, big thanks to you @Mrop for being for your recent activity in the suggestion forum. It's much appreciated. In another recent suggestion thread on a similar topic (where you eventually redirected people to post in this one as it was older and had more votes) you wrote this:
Tracking everything is sadly not technically feasible, it would require a lot of memory and massive save files if every happening was stored for every character/country/county in the game. Therefore, "storing everything about everyone" is not a very constructive suggestion. If there are specific happenings to specific characters or titles you would prefer to be stored, that would be something that could actually be possible to do.
Which is where my suggestion comes in, which I've posted before in yet another similar suggestion: you could combat the bloat by limiting the data storing to pinned characters.

Now, I acknowledge that this has a downside in that it requires players to be proactive about the whole storing business. What I mean by that is that if a player notices a successful character that achieved some weird outcome, they wouldn't be able to see the proposed history, because they haven't pinned them upfront. As such players would have to spot interesting characters early on if they were interested in storing information about them.

But I still think it's the better solution that the alternatives. Storing data about everyone, as you said, is just not feasible. And the third major solution that I can think of is the game using some internal logic to determine which characters count as interesting. Which, if it guesses wrong, also creates bloat (though obviously much less than storing information about all characters indiscriminately).

So, focusing on the character-pinning, I also have some other points I'd like to address. First of all, is that players use pins for different reasons. If someone pins a character as a "I will murder this character", perhaps they wouldn't want to store information about them. As such, the first point of my proposed pinning mini-expansion is to create different types of pins, one that would trigger data-storing and one that would not.

Moving on - this is going to steer a bit off the topic of data collection but ties to the topic of pins - is a suggestion by another poster I saw somewhere a few weeks back, which is the ability to write short notes to the pins. Sometimes when you take a break from a campaign and when you return you may not always remember why you even pinned someone. So the ability to add notes like "murder target" (or, if we can write a bit more, "murder target because X reason") or "good marriage prospect" would be a nice addition.

Finally, I'd like to expand the pin system to titles and dynasties as well, which ties back to the main topic here. Because sometimes players may be more interested in a specific title rather than a particular character that has it. And that includes both general tracking as well as the desire to store information. And if the character that has that title loses it, under current system, you'd still be notified about them - even if they lost all titles in that war and are now landless - rather than the character who conquered it. Which, if you linked data storage to pins, would also apply to data storage.

The same applies to dynasties. Perhaps you're a fan of the Umayyads, as a random example and as such you'd like to store information about them. Though obviously it would need to be limited in some way, otherwise we enter bloat territory again. Perhaps it would warrant storage of different kind of information than a character/title pin altogether and would instead be limited to things like creation of new houses, houses dying out, changes in the dominant house, a short list of dynasty/house heads and a list of titles the dynasty amassed.

And while I'm on this topic, title and dynastic pins would also warrant different messages than character pins. For dynastic ones the messages would inform you about pretty much the things I already listed as alternative storage information for them in the paragraph above. So creation of new houses and the like. And when it comes to titles, perhaps messages about the wars their rulers are involved in as well as the title passing to another dynasty.
 
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@Mrop sorry to tag you but I had a question about the 'tracking everything' bit. Isn't most of the information already tracked? For example currently in-game you cannot see when a certain character made friends with another character or was mutilated by someone but the save file does store the information of when the opinion modifier of these events went into effect, and when the opinion modifier goes away. So isn't it a matter of pulling the information from the save file and displaying it? And while some things aren't stored (battlefield injuries, pilgrimage start/end, marriage date) these things do have other associated flags and opinion modifiers associated so would it not be possible to check for these flags and then calculate backwards to get the date? Pilgrimage for example has a cooldown timer expiry date so by checking for that and then just subtracting 5 (or whatever it is) you get the date they went on the pilgrimage.

If the worry is save file bloat/game slowdown caused by constantly checking and saving the data, maybe make it an action? A diplomatic action that says "Check character history" and then it takes a few seconds to run the script for that character and pull the relevant information and display it properly and once you have done this the script is active for that character till they die, updating the information as events happen to them. The history generated this way can be removed upon character death.

This method solves a couple of problems; since you're not checking every character you're not slowing down the game by too much and since the history is generated and saved for specific characters via player action, the player ultimately has control over how much data is being stored separately. If its too much, its the players fault. Also the player is now not faced with a whole lot of information from the start, which can get overwhelming at times. Additionally, before clicking the action the player can be warned that excessive use of this will result in slowdowns and save bloat and other issues.

For funsies, here's a very badly drawn version of what the thing would look like.
1622846891797.png
 
I think that even if most things are tracked, I suspect many things lack the date and the location on which it happened. Some thing may also be cleared when a character dies or is cleaned out completely. How much extra savegame bloat this is, I cannot really say. I think having a priority of various happenings or characters is also useful when it comes to presenting the information or choosing which ones to implement. If something is easy to track, but not that interesting, it could overwhelm more interesting entries in the history that would require more data to be stored.
 
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