CK2Plus - Balance improvements, more kingdoms and empires, more ambitions and plots

[Wizzington]

The question is then, why didn't it happen in real life, and what game mechanics are available to simulate those forces?

Anyone with more insight into eastern European dealings of this time cares to chime in?

Wars are a lot more decisive in CK2 than they generally were in real life. The Russians generally didn't have the military capabilities to launch full-scale conquests of each others' domains. Total conquest wars were exceptionally rare, which you can't really simulate in CK2 without making the game insufferably dull.

 

[Wizzington]

So ... giving them more counties/duchies while at the same time making each of them provide only very little manpower could "fix" that in this area without unbalancing much of anything, right? Or am I missing something here?

Nope, they'd still conquer each other in a single war using the 'press all claims' CB. The only way to make the unification process more gradual would be to get rid of 'press all claims' and even that would just delay the forming of Rus by ~50 years.

 

[Wizzington]

Maybe I'm just having bad luck, but it seems like its taking a terribly long time for my court chaplain to convert a province's religion. My capital picked up a heretic religion and I've had my 18 learning court chaplain there leading an inquisition for years without any luck (I think he has about an 8% chance to convert a province per year). I know that provinces can be converted back, but usually it seems to be independent of what I have my court chaplain doing. This is on a game that I'm finishing up on CK2plus 1.00.

Bad luck. In my Sicily game it took me 70 years to convert Palermo, in my current game I converted 3 provinces in 5 years.

 

[Wizzington]

Small suggestion for the next version : Could we have an icon ( like "local levy" icon on the character screen ) for loan that will tell us the due time so that we can be ready for payment at that time ?

That's a good idea. Done.

 

[Wizzington]

In other news, I found a more elegant way to get rid of the claims I wanted to get rid of so 1.02 will have no broken family trees or title histories.

 

[Wizzington]

It seems nearly all of the dukes do, which somehow seems wrong and too easy. Was this intentional, and if so, what was the logic?

I uncommented Paradox's historical inheritance laws, which are certainly more historical than everyone being Gavelkind.

 

[Wizzington]

Playing with the most recent version, I'm occasionally seeing desired traits (quick, genius, attractive, strong, etc) disappearing off of characters in the weeks and months after they're born. Is this intended, and if so, what causes it?

There is a genetics event that fires which has a chance of clearing out genetics traits and then uses its own logic to determine genetics traits. It's to lower the overall frequency of genetics traits since it's extremely high in vanilla. Wait with checking out kids' genetics until a little bit after birth.

 

[Wizzington]

Losing piety for waging Holy Wars might be a bit silly, but the way the game world develops and the general balance of religious wars is so vastly improved that I am absolutely not switching back. It also works with the general way you spend piety on religious actions - you might as well wonder why you become less pious for launching an invasion of a country sanctioned by the Pope, yet nobody is questioning that because they're used to it.

 

[Wizzington]

This mod looks very promising, but does it work? I mean, is the latest version playable, without bugs or weird things people complain about? Or is it somehow stable enough to give me a better experience of CK2?

All in all, is this mod any good?
I especially would like to see a weaker HRE and Byzantine empire, that not always crush any small rebellion, but will somehow disintegrate into smaller states... Does this mod help on this?

Naturally I would be biased, but I don't think CK2+ is bugger than vanilla. I try to take care to fix any bugs that crop up. Play it and see for yourself.

 

[Wizzington]

Its your mod and all, but you're kinda sorta acting a teensy bit like Paradox devs here. Which is to say that it seems like you think the choice is between some drastic, sweeping (and game breaking) change and reversing things back to the way they were....

Where's the middle ground? If the current state of things is completely broken (and it is), but you think the general change is necessary for game balance, test a few alternatives. Why not try keeping the piety cost, but reward 75% of the cost back for winning the war? Or 90%? Or whatever. It still costs piety to wage these wars, and some careful consideration is required, but rulers aren't kept quite as constantly in negative piety numbers, which is what makes the change so silly.

And incidentally, most of us didn't question piety costs for invasion sanctions because asking the Pope for his blessing on attacking other Christians should quite obviously carry a penalty. Apples and oranges.

Rewarding 90% of the cost back would result in the same situation as vanilla. When was the last time you declared a Holy War that you lost? Even the AI usually wins theirs unless they are declaring on a player. The objective is to slow down expansion and this would put it at 90% of vanilla pace.

I don't really think it's apples and oranges. Was William the Conqueror regarded as impious for conquering England? If not, why should Invasions cost piety? Ultimately, this is a game and I need to do what works best from a gameplay perspective.

Someone mentioned Balansegang and I will take a look at what he did for Holy Wars, but short of another solution that achieves my slowdown goal, I will be sticking with piety costs.

 

[Wizzington]

Don't you think 100 piety for Holy War is not really too much ? You could still easily have few hundred piety points.

I really don't think so. Hell, if you conquer a decent-sized Duchy you get a good deal of that back just from handing out the newly conquered temples.

I'll give you an example from my current game: I am Norse Scandinavia (started as the Duke of Uppland), and unified my entire De Jure Empire by 1150 using Holy Wars, while also having enough piety to form my empire. I did not have rulers with exceptional piety growth, mostly average. I gave a bit of land to my holy order at one point for extra piety, other than that it all came from monthly growth or ambitions. I don't think that suggests 100 piety is too high a cost for conquering a whole Duchy.

 

[Wizzington]

Here's an idea: what if we kept the piety costs for holy wars (maybe lowered the value slightly), but added a way to make piety out of these conflicts: whenever you convert a province to your religion, you get some piety. This would mean that kings who use holy wars as an excuse for land grabs would always be low on piety, but ones that actually use them to spread their faith actively would stay balanced! Additionally, you'd only get the piety bonus if you are in direct control of the province, so just conquering them and passing them off to dukes won't work.


Being able to wage holy war every decade or so seems perfectly reasonable to me. The fact a lot of the pagans are OPMs does make it annoying though.

Also, there is a "buy indulgence for sins" option that can get you a lot of piety, so 100 really isn't that much.

EDIT: By the way, I think making Religious Defense more likely to pop up would slow down holy war expansion immensely. Declaring war on a pagan OPM is easy, doing so on all of the Romuva at once? Not so much! Yet for some reason, Religious Defense wars are rarely ever started in my games.

You get 25 piety for converting a province, 10 when a vassal does it. If you really want to wage perpetual war all you have to do is give 1-2 counties to a Bishop every time you conquer a Duchy.

Problem with making the Religious Defense the way you say is that the AI wouldn't understand it, and would launch suicidal wars.

 

[Wizzington]

Hi Wiz,

It seems my question got flooded over.

Can you help tell me which files control inheritance of genetic traits and/or how they work? This is something I've tried to figure out for awhile and I'm actually much more interested in this than the holy war debate....

events/newevents.txt, the events there control all my changes to genetics.

 

[Wizzington]

I don't really have an opinion on the issue but is the logic behind the piety cost for holy wars is that you want to limit the amount of holy wars? (so the AI or player doesn't go on a crazy invasion spree?)

Thanks

Yep, essentially. I also think it fits into the general establishment of piety/prestige as resources you spend.

 

[Wizzington]

I took a look at Balansegang and while I think he made a pretty good ruleset for Holy Wars, it is also extremely complicated and would require some serious manual-digging for a new player to understand when they could wage Holy War. Not to mention that the AI wouldn't understand it at all. The whole reason I abandoned the 'you can only wage Holy War on Pagans if your demesne borders them' is because its unintuitiveness confused a LOT of people.

EDIT: Similarily I am abandoning the 'must have prestige on hand to fabricate claims' in 1.02 because its also confusing so many people, and instead making it so you simply have to have positive prestige (similar to Holy Wars). Whenever possible I try to keep the features of the mod easy for a new player to grasp.

 

[Wizzington]

Also on the topic of integrating mods, I'm holding off on any mod integration until after 1.05 since it will be a major patch. After that I will start considering if there's any mods that need integration.

 

[Wizzington]

Hey,

Not sure if this is an issue with this mod or a vanilla problem, but... I'm suspicious it's the mod.

Basically, the issue is, a title claim can't be inherited by a successor. A prince of Sweden (son of deceased king) is in my court, matrilineally married to my daughter. He has an inheritable claim on the kingdom of Sweden and he has a son from this marriage (no other children). So I have him killed, hoping the son would get the claim and I could then press that... no dice, he doesn't get it for some reason. I tried aging him to adulthood, thinking maybe that was the issue, but no; also tried giving the prince a landed title (barony), but it still didn't work.

Am I missing something here, is this a mod issue or a vanilla problem? At any rate, could someone tell me which file defines such things so I can maybe check myself?

This is hardcoded. Nothing in the mod can affect it.

 

[Wizzington]

Hey Wiz, did you see the Dev diary patch 1.05? The Vanilla now give you the death cause of the character. Maybe it's time for delete the death cause mod?

I'll decide that after the patch, but most likely yes.

 

[Wizzington]

I was talking with someone ~on another forum~ about how many baronies end up having absolutely no infrastructure built even a couple hundred years into the game and we wondered whether this might be because owners of a single barony are blowing all of their income on feasts, hunts, festivals, or purchasing indulgences? I'm not sure if that's the case, but if so (and if the lack of building up is even considered a problem), maybe it can be fixed by either scaling those costs for barons or disallowing them from doing those actions?

Barons can't hold feasts and are set to very rarely do the others, and only if they have saved up considerable cash.

 

[Wizzington]

Does it just take them an incredibly long time to save up enough to begin upgrading, then? Are they letting their family die out and losing their family fortune?

Don't know, to be honest. I'd have to observe.

EDIT: Figured it out. They're blowing the money on indulgences. Will fix.