Hopefully the devs will get rid of the "simple English" nomenclature entirely and go back to the proper names for stuff instead.
CK2's petty kingdoms- confusing for new English language players
- Thread starter Bulan
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I agree. Petty king is not the proper name for anything, ever.
However, I don't care if they give historical figures styles or titles they never held in life. It's more important to me that the game not be filled with gotchas like "well we've decided that the word King is an extremely meaningful concept in this game, but we are also going to call some things that we have not implemented as Kings, Kings, this is unparallelled immersive historical fidelity l". It would be like if in chess the black knight was called a "bishop", but only the one on the left hand side, and the normal bishops were also called bishops, and the reasoning behind this was that some scholar in the 1500s argued that Thomas Becket was appointed bishop but by heredity should have been a knight. That would be a worse, less playable game than one where every single piece has a unique name.
However, I don't care if they give historical figures styles or titles they never held in life. It's more important to me that the game not be filled with gotchas like "well we've decided that the word King is an extremely meaningful concept in this game, but we are also going to call some things that we have not implemented as Kings, Kings, this is unparallelled immersive historical fidelity l". It would be like if in chess the black knight was called a "bishop", but only the one on the left hand side, and the normal bishops were also called bishops, and the reasoning behind this was that some scholar in the 1500s argued that Thomas Becket was appointed bishop but by heredity should have been a knight. That would be a worse, less playable game than one where every single piece has a unique name.
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When I'm playing a video game, I don't want to have to learn 500 different language's versions of all the various titles that exist in the game.
In English, the term for the kingdom of Wessex is... Kingdom of Wessex. If I'm playing as the King of Wessex I want to call him the King of Wessex, not the translation into some dead language that nobody in Britain has spoken or used for over 1000 years.
As for things like "Satrap", that actually is a term that is commonly used in English. Anyone who has read classical history (likely a pretty large proportion of the player base) would be familiar with the term.
Is it absolutely consistent? No. Does it align with common usage in the English language? Yes!
Calling the title "Petty" is an ugly fudge, but it's not a bad compromise, all things considered.
Your proposed solution replaces a fairly minor problem and replaces with a much bigger utterly bewildering problem. If you can figure out what a vojvoda, karalius or 王 is without using a dictionary go ahead. What next, for authenticity we render all the Russian names in Cyrillic so that you have to learn a whole alphabet to play in Russia?
In English, the term for the kingdom of Wessex is... Kingdom of Wessex. If I'm playing as the King of Wessex I want to call him the King of Wessex, not the translation into some dead language that nobody in Britain has spoken or used for over 1000 years.
As for things like "Satrap", that actually is a term that is commonly used in English. Anyone who has read classical history (likely a pretty large proportion of the player base) would be familiar with the term.
Is it absolutely consistent? No. Does it align with common usage in the English language? Yes!
Calling the title "Petty" is an ugly fudge, but it's not a bad compromise, all things considered.
Your proposed solution replaces a fairly minor problem and replaces with a much bigger utterly bewildering problem. If you can figure out what a vojvoda, karalius or 王 is without using a dictionary go ahead. What next, for authenticity we render all the Russian names in Cyrillic so that you have to learn a whole alphabet to play in Russia?
Nobody called the Byzantines, Byzantines, the system wasn't known as the feudal system until the 17th century, Persian is a foreign name for Iranians, we don't even know enough about the Tocharian language to guess and what they actually called themselves. The use of neologisms is not bad in itself.
Sure. A wide range of terms are at our service. We have the luxury of choice. Why pick the one neologism that conflicts with acore game concept?
because its the one professionally used and has a Wikipedia page that explains it in plain English in one sentence.
its not a hard concept to grasp and 30 seconds on google is far less then what I spend looking up guides, army builds and compositions for any paradox game let alone ck2, try getting your head round trade in eu4 and why no matter what you will never dominate Ragusa trade node because of one arcane mechanic barely mentioned that was introduced in a dlc.
I am arguing in favor of consistent game design, for a game that is approachable rather than full of traps for the unwary that do not enhance playability. And I should just suck it up because, what, devs on another game made even worse design decisions?
It's because your proposed "solution" would make the game even less approachable!
Sometimes problems don't have simple solutions. This is one of those problems.
Yes, you should. You are not the devs. I personally don't like how there making Byzantium feudal, but I have no control or effect. My option is weather or not to support them by buying it on release. which I will because im an adept enough modder so i can fix the devs mistakes in not at least porting over the ck2 mechanics.
And the County of Flanders was never called a Duchy. That doesn't mean we should suddenly rename the duke title of Flanders to Graafschap, and I fortunately don't see anyone advocating that. That would understandably be more confusing than just keeping it a duke.
You need to understand the value of gameplay and accessibility or historicity. Calling duke titles Petty King instead of some random localized title is easy to make the distinction of, whether it be from (in CK2) the ribbon around the title holder's portrait, the de jure title rankings, or any number of context clues that tell you it is a duke tier title You don't need to confused players even more by giving them non-English words for every non-English culture. Petty King is fine and is a good middle ground.
You need to understand the value of gameplay and accessibility or historicity. Calling duke titles Petty King instead of some random localized title is easy to make the distinction of, whether it be from (in CK2) the ribbon around the title holder's portrait, the de jure title rankings, or any number of context clues that tell you it is a duke tier title You don't need to confused players even more by giving them non-English words for every non-English culture. Petty King is fine and is a good middle ground.
Yes that's probably for the best. This whole thread is getting a bit out there.
Yea, I like having the native titles and all but that is my preference. Others do not care for that. I am happy to install a mod to do this sort of thing.
I also think that title localization would be better than "petty kings" whenever possible
Not because it would be simpler, but simply because it would be more immersive. There are other indicators for title level.
I don't see how it would be simpler to avoid "petty kings" and use localized titles instead. At least once you figured it out, you know petty kings are duke-tier. If titles get localized, new players would either need to learn them all, or they would need to learn how to look for title level instead of relying on its name only.
The alternative consisting in giving everyone generic titles is how it worked when CK2 was released and I don't think anyone would enjoy going back to that.
Another possibility is simply making it more obvious in the UI what is the rank of each character. CK2 had ribbons. I don't remember what CK3 uses by I guess there could also be tooltips when you hover over titles or something like that.
Not because it would be simpler, but simply because it would be more immersive. There are other indicators for title level.
I don't see how it would be simpler to avoid "petty kings" and use localized titles instead. At least once you figured it out, you know petty kings are duke-tier. If titles get localized, new players would either need to learn them all, or they would need to learn how to look for title level instead of relying on its name only.
The alternative consisting in giving everyone generic titles is how it worked when CK2 was released and I don't think anyone would enjoy going back to that.
Another possibility is simply making it more obvious in the UI what is the rank of each character. CK2 had ribbons. I don't remember what CK3 uses by I guess there could also be tooltips when you hover over titles or something like that.
Are you sure about that? Because to me it seems like konungr just means "king" in Old Norse, and konge (a Danish and Norwegian) evolved from that with the same meaning.
I mean, the three tiers are very clearly shown in De Jure view, the character portrait's border all have different colors per tier... It really never ocurred to me as a possible source of confusion.
FWIW regarding title localization, I like how CK2 has a game rule enabling/disabling title name localization (Sweden/Sviþjod), but I've never liked how some titles are localized and some aren't. More complete localization might be an appropriate solution to this if it's easy to turn on and off. I would probably turn it on, in spite of "petty king" really not bothering me.
In my opinion, the "Petty kings" thing was a nice fix that added some flavour for places like the British Isles, but it should've been temporary. Most of the Irish realms could've used tribal mechanics with dukes being called "kings" and proper kings being "high kings", and the same happens with the Norse. Anglo Saxon kingdoms, by the other hand, could've been proper kingdom tier titles (de jure or titular), while England could be formed via decision, in a similar way to the HRE.
This entire thread sounds like:
"People can confuse King and Petty King, and might actually take a second or two to figure it out.
Here is my solution: Make it a million times more confusing."
When I came into CK2 I had no idea about anything. I just googled some things or guessed what they were and it was pretty obvious once you thought about the things. You don't need to over complicate petty king, and if you want to use regional cultural titles that's just going way too deep in a rabbit hole that while would be nice... would be nice as a mod or option that can be disabled.
"People can confuse King and Petty King, and might actually take a second or two to figure it out.
Here is my solution: Make it a million times more confusing."
When I came into CK2 I had no idea about anything. I just googled some things or guessed what they were and it was pretty obvious once you thought about the things. You don't need to over complicate petty king, and if you want to use regional cultural titles that's just going way too deep in a rabbit hole that while would be nice... would be nice as a mod or option that can be disabled.
Looking at your sample they are across a biiiig time period and only half of them are actually related to confusion on the terms petty king and king, the rest are just basic game mechanics questions. I think this shows that this is not that big of an issue