CK2Plus - Suggestion Thread

[TheDarkMaster]

I've been playing around with my broken up version of the castle fort upgrades that make up the difference between a tribe and a castle. I just finished upgraded one to a castle for the first time in my run. I do like this a lot, it gives me stuff to spend my money on that I can actually afford with some regularity. Especially once I saw how expensive most of the new castle buildings are. However, I can already guess that there's going to be a problem in that it would be quite tedious to upgrade a tribe to a castle that you can easily afford. This set has eleven buildings and it's already tedious just going through four when you have absolutely no problems affording the upgrades.

Honestly, I think the option to just straight up build a castle or city without needing to go through the tribe stage really should be included. After a certain point, players aren't going to want to spend all the time it takes to go through all the necessary upgrades for each new castle or city. A castle or city can mostly take care of itself so you can just build them and turn them over to a new vassal, a tribe isn't just fine on its own. Especially since you can't build another holding in the province until the tribe has been upgraded, you need to fully upgrade that one first.

Alternatively, a special 'skip' building could maybe be added to the tribe? It seems a bit pointless though, better to just skip straight to the holding building once you can afford to do it regularly. Upgrading tribes individually would still be preferable while your income is still below a certain point. But once you're making like 20+ gold a month, you'd never want to take the time to upgrade a tribe's buildings one-by-one and babysit it to make sure the next one is being built once one finishes.

 

[schwarherz]

I've been playing around with my broken up version of the castle fort upgrades that make up the difference between a tribe and a castle. I just finished upgraded one to a castle for the first time in my run. I do like this a lot, it gives me stuff to spend my money on that I can actually afford with some regularity. Especially once I saw how expensive most of the new castle buildings are. However, I can already guess that there's going to be a problem in that it would be quite tedious to upgrade a tribe to a castle that you can easily afford. This set has eleven buildings and it's already tedious just going through four when you have absolutely no problems affording the upgrades.

Honestly, I think the option to just straight up build a castle or city without needing to go through the tribe stage really should be included. After a certain point, players aren't going to want to spend all the time it takes to go through all the necessary upgrades for each new castle or city. A castle or city can mostly take care of itself so you can just build them and turn them over to a new vassal, a tribe isn't just fine on its own. Especially since you can't build another holding in the province until the tribe has been upgraded, you need to fully upgrade that one first.

Alternatively, a special 'skip' building could maybe be added to the tribe? It seems a bit pointless though, better to just skip straight to the holding building once you can afford to do it regularly. Upgrading tribes individually would still be preferable while your income is still below a certain point. But once you're making like 20+ gold a month, you'd never want to take the time to upgrade a tribe's buildings one-by-one and babysit it to make sure the next one is being built once one finishes.

Taking a long time to upgrade was rather the point. Right now that's why it's in beta, we're seeing if it's TOO tedious to upgrade or if it generally improves gameplay. We don't have a way to disable the mechanic via Game rule like with other things. It's absolutely possible that it may never see the light of a full release or that only the buildings revamp will survive. The only part of the system I'm 100% certain is being kept is the restructuring of the government requirements because that's more of a bug prevention thing

 

[BrokenSky]

One thing I noticed (I don't now if this actually belongs in the bug thread or here, but since we're already discussing it here I'll post it here) was in Beta1, you can't build village gathering point -> city buildings in the capital unless you could become a merchant republic. Obviously this makes sense for the first village, but it means you can't build your first city in the capital ever. In Beta 2 it looks like you can build cities in your capital, but only if you first reform out of tribal; you can still build cities everywhere else though.

Wouldn't it make more sense to allow you to build cities in your capital if it already has a temple and a castle (or is AI, or is coastal + you can become a merchant republic etc.) rather than requiring you to reform before you can build cities specifically in your capital (even though you can build them anywhere else as a second holding)?

 

[TheDarkMaster]

Taking a long time to upgrade was rather the point. Right now that's why it's in beta, we're seeing if it's TOO tedious to upgrade or if it generally improves gameplay. We don't have a way to disable the mechanic via Game rule like with other things. It's absolutely possible that it may never see the light of a full release or that only the buildings revamp will survive. The only part of the system I'm 100% certain is being kept is the restructuring of the government requirements because that's more of a bug prevention thing

The length of time it takes to build them is completely fine. Even in my version I made sure all the holding upgrade buildings combined build time the same as the normal holding building time. It's having to go to the holding repeatedly to click the 'build next level' button that would be tedious, especially if you don't personally hold the holding and thus don't get informed when a building has finished.

 

[TheDarkMaster]

I think this is my last suggestion for buildings. That's the effectively free 1 cost buildings, they really should go. Unless you need them to make holdings in different areas distinct, they simply don't play well with the AI or raiding mechanics. When you raid a province, it picks a building to wreck at random from the list and awards money based on the cost of the building destroyed, which sometimes leads to laughably small amounts with nothing the player can do about it. On top of that, they interfere with holdings being destroyed when they have no buildings left, since you've effectively got a couple completely free buildings on each holding that are constantly replaced. The only reason that holdings can potentially be destroyed by raiding is if the AI happens to not rebuild those free buildings between raids. Now, the AI does have a tendency to not build those buildings due to the priorities not being quite right. Even if it did, the AI only checks to see if it should build a building every so often and if it decides it should build one then, and only then, does it look at what buildings it can build.

So they interfere with the raiding system, occasionally being destroyed instead of proper buildings for very little loot, on top of making raiding destroying holdings effectively impossible. The AI doesn't understand how to deal with them and is currently setup to ignore them in favor of other upgrades first. Plus they effectively don't give any meaningful addition to the holdings that couldn't just be included in the base holding anyway. I shouldn't have to take the time to add on two free buildings with each new tribe/temple I make.

Similarly I think the converted version of the upgrade buildings you need to make to turn a tribe into a castle or city should be dropped. Those are intrinsically a part of the holding you changed your tribe into and should be included as part of the base holding rather than being a separate building. It's safe to assume that a castle has a fortified stone fort at the very least and a city has some sort of guild or town hall.

 

[jere8184]

My suggestion is adding a "vassal opinion" rule set which tweaks the opinion modifiers that are relevant between a ruler and a vassal. When activated it would make maintaining a high opinion with your vassals harder, therefore players who find vassals to be too passive can enjoy a more difficult experience.

 

[vukica]

My suggestion is adding a "vassal opinion" rule set which tweaks the opinion modifiers that are relevant between a ruler and a vassal. When activated it would make maintaining a high opinion with your vassals harder, therefore players who find vassals to be too passive can enjoy a more difficult experience.

Not technically possible.

 

[jere8184]

Not technically possible.

oh, that's unfortunate. All I really have left to say then is that I personally feel that vassals are too forgiving in their opinion of their liege.

 

[TheDarkMaster]

You can have a trait or opinion modifier be assigned if a rule is set, like -20 opinion of liege. You can't change the actual opinion modifiers or traits based on rules, just trigger extra ones.

 

[UrsusAtlanticus]

The locations of the baronies of Rimini and Ancona are inverted in your map, Rimini is actually located north of Ancona. Is it intentional or a mistake? I'd move the barony of Ancona in the current Marche county and rename it Ancona county if it's needed for the title of the merchant republic, while I'd move the Rimini barony in the current Ancona county and rename it Rimini.

I have some suggestions for Campania as well, Gaeta in the Charlemagne bookmark should be part of the Byzantine Empire under the Theme of Neapolis (Ducatus Neapolitanus), Gaeta had never been conquered by the Longobards and it became de facto independent in the 9th century under Docibilis I. Also I believe it's unlikely for the Spartanos dynasty to become orthodox after two centuries of de facto independence from the Byzantine Empire and sometimes very close relations to the Papacy. Their culture (or at least the culture of the county) should probably be switched as well, at some point in the early 9th century Greek stopped being used in currency inscriptions as well.

 

[Kota88]

Khwarzim, Hausa, Dardaju, and Kanem aren't apart of any vanilla dejure empire so I was wondering if maybe Khwarzim could be added to persia and the rest added to Mali or maybe a new empire?

 

[Aerkhanite]

The locations of the baronies of Rimini and Ancona are inverted in your map, Rimini is actually located north of Ancona. Is it intentional or a mistake? I'd move the barony of Ancona in the current Marche county and rename it Ancona county if it's needed for the title of the merchant republic, while I'd move the Rimini barony in the current Ancona county and rename it Rimini.

I have some suggestions for Campania as well, Gaeta in the Charlemagne bookmark should be part of the Byzantine Empire under the Theme of Neapolis (Ducatus Neapolitanus), Gaeta had never been conquered by the Longobards and it became de facto independent in the 9th century under Docibilis I. Also I believe it's unlikely for the Spartanos dynasty to become orthodox after two centuries of de facto independence from the Byzantine Empire and sometimes very close relations to the Papacy. Their culture (or at least the culture of the county) should probably be switched as well, at some point in the early 9th century Greek stopped being used in currency inscriptions as well.

Make a list of all mistakes and inconsistencies and I'll see to it.

Edit: If you have more, that is.

 

[Tatterhood]

I've been playing nomads recently, and one thing I found really frustrating was the way Plus's "leave a tribe behind" mechanic interacts with the "clans want more land" stuff. A "nomadic province" is be defined (in hard code, I think) as one with exactly zero or one holding, which means that the nomadic capital + a tribe doesn't qualify. A consequence of this is that if my capital is in a province without a tribe, but the vassal khans have all decided to move their capitals to provinces with tribes, the result is that they all want to have one more province than I do.

This is really a vanilla issue, since it can happen if you have provinces with temples for instance, but it's much more common in Plus. A simple workaround is to relax the conditions on the "absorb tribe" decision so that the AI can do it in their capital province provided that the tribe is the only non-capital holding. (This is what I did in my personal submod when I started getting annoyed.) There may be a better way to handle it, or maybe this is considered a non-issue, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

 

[LaurenceC96]

Should Harald Hardrada get a weak claim on the kingdom of Denmark and Svend Estrid on Norway? This would represent the wars between the two of them for their respective kingdoms. Obviously there was the treaty in 1065 between the two where they agreed to unconditional status quo but this was only between the two kings and on either ones death it would then mean that the other king could potentially reignite this conflict such as Svend planned against Olaf III after Harald died in 1066.

 

[BrokenSky]

A simple workaround is to relax the conditions on the "absorb tribe" decision so that the AI can do it in their capital province provided that the tribe is the only non-capital holding. (This is what I did in my personal submod when I started getting annoyed.) There may be a better way to handle it, or maybe this is considered a non-issue, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

Wouldn't this exacerbate the whole "nomads really easily destroy cultures" problem though? Would it be possible to make AIs want fewer provinces instead?

 

[mattrhearn]

Should Harald Hardrada get a weak claim on the kingdom of Denmark and Svend Estrid on Norway? This would represent the wars between the two of them for their respective kingdoms. Obviously there was the treaty in 1065 between the two where they agreed to unconditional status quo but this was only between the two kings and on either ones death it would then mean that the other king could potentially reignite this conflict such as Svend planned against Olaf III after Harald died in 1066.

I could certainly see Historical Harald Hardrada (say it five times fast) or his successors seeking to reclaim the motherland as Danish rulers of Britain had he come out on top in 1066.

 

[Tatterhood]

Wouldn't this exacerbate the whole "nomads really easily destroy cultures" problem though? Would it be possible to make AIs want fewer provinces instead?

That's precisely why I suggested that my workaround may not be the best one. It just the easiest thing I could come up with. I don't know how huge of a difference it actually makes; the AI doesn't arbitrarily move its capital so it is most likely to occur when a clan is split or else when someone moves their capital to newly conquered land. But, certainly, it can't possibly help that situation.

You can change the number of provinces that each clan wants, but you can't change the general fact that they want all clans to have the same number of "nomadic provinces", regardless of what that number is. The issue mostly occurs when some clans put their capital in a province with a tribe and some don't, so they consider it to be distributed unevenly when it really isn't. For instance, as the khagan I may have five provinces to my vassal's four, which should be acceptable, except the vassal thinks he only has three because he put his capital in the one with a tribe despite the other two being empty. So he demands, essentially, that the five-four split must go his way instead.

I did notice when looking through the defines that you actually can change the number of holdings for a province to count as nomadic. Setting it to 2 instead of 1 would solve the issue (or at least, would make the issue no worse than vanilla) but may have other ramifications.

FWIW one idea I had for a more elaborate version of my original workaround would be to give nomads the ability to relocate tribes into empty provinces, and then set the AI to always relocate tribes out of their capital province if possible. This would mean that you're not actually reducing the number of provinces of that culture in the world, and would solve the issue unless the vassal has a holding in every one of their provinces. (In which case, fine, maybe it's okay to want one more.) I guess this would only make sense if the tribe has no buildings, which is fine since that will be the case if the tribe was just generated, and otherwise you can pillage it.

 

[vukica]

My best idea about fixing nomads is to remove nomads...

 

[Tatterhood]

My best idea about fixing nomads is to remove nomads...

A possible "blunt instrument" fix would be to leave a tribe in all nomadic provinces even when the culture/religion match (so the "Absorb Tribe" button goes away entirely) and then set the number of holdings for a nomadic province to 2. I guess you'd want to slightly increase the bonus per empty holding to compensate for having fewer of them in general.

I'm not sure what other issues there are with nomads, but this would eliminate my issue (or rather make it exactly equivalent to vanilla in that respect) while reducing the ability to destroy cultures etc.

 

[BrokenSky]

A possible "blunt instrument" fix would be to leave a tribe in all nomadic provinces even when the culture/religion match (so the "Absorb Tribe" button goes away entirely) and then set the number of holdings for a nomadic province to 2. I guess you'd want to slightly increase the bonus per empty holding to compensate for having fewer of them in general.

I'm not sure what other issues there are with nomads, but this would eliminate my issue (or rather make it exactly equivalent to vanilla in that respect) while reducing the ability to destroy cultures etc.

But then it would cause nomadic agitation in any tribal province which changed hands (this is already a problem in 'feudal->tribal' mode where theocracies can sometime end up with only a temple holding and spawn random nomads in western europe if the province is conquered?).

Though personally I wouldn't be sad to see Nomad agitation go.