Council Power Faction -- Still Too Desirable to AI

[Pigeoncount]

Having played for the first time in a long while, I've noticed Conclave's favorite faction "Increase Council Authority", is still going strong as ever. I have had this faction hit 100% relative power within a few months in-game time, completely composed of vassals with positive opinions. The only reason that the faction didn't fire was because the leader was constantly interrupted by rebellions, of his own vassals demanding increased council authority.

That's right, it's Increase Council Authority factions all the way down. If baronies had any AI, I'm sure you would see your counts overthrown on a yearly basis for the cause of council authority.

As someone who wants more political intrigue out of this game, I really do want factions like this. But this faction doesn't make sense. Your vassals shouldn't rush to give the reins of the realm to the council as their number one priority.

And it's not that I can't play around it, it's not hard. But what is hard is consistently seeing a faction, even when no one in the realm has a negative opinion towards you, reach boiling pot so often and so frequently, when it just simply makes no sense.

My proposition: The council's "Content/Discontent" feature is extended to the whole realm, basically. Factions are illegal by default. Unless the AI has a negative opinion towards you, stands to directly gain from a faction, or wants to support an ally, they also won't join factions. Additionally, you need to do something to upset discontent the vassals to be able to allow factionalism. For example, on inheritance, vassals are discontent by default and will engage in factionalism. If you're merely sitting around, the realm is secure and prospering, the vassals cannot legally faction. They can still start ones, but it is grounds for arrest (which can cause vassals to become discontent if you arrest them). Finally, vassals should not form factions unless they believe it has a chance for success (no more factions consisting of Steve Nobody, supporting his claim to Dirtsville, with only his two soldiers in all his holding backing him up.)

However, this will work differently from normal council discontent. For example, trying to declare a war will poll all vassals opinion on the war. The council will still vote, and councilors will only be disgruntled if overruled. However, vassals, who are not on the council, will simply become discontent if your political maneuverings interfere with their opinions. And now you have to worry about malcontents a lot more. A malcontent will basically become discontent if you do anything and is not on the council, and will probably join a faction.

Also, the only vassals who should feel a desire to increase council authority are freaking councilors or powerful vassals. This will basically disable this faction if you have a content council. However, a discontent council will rush this one's power up quickly.

Just a few random ideas on how to improve this feature. Please don't leave this feature hanging when this game reaches the end of its life.

 

[dragoon9105]

It's a nice idea, but people tend to confuse, annoying and tedious with difficulty. Putting down 8 Council Power revolts on a single ruler isn't hard, its tedious. Same with having one like clockwork whenever the ruler dies. In fact since you can predict Council revolts always happening on succession it's basically just gold farming which is the opposite of difficulty. If the revolts actually had a remote chance of winning most of the time they'd need to be more rare, ironically since they dont thats why its whackamole since people arent constantly getting overthrown and complaining about it.

Same complaints people had with the original factions back when, and with the old rebel system as well. They werent changed until people really started to get sick of them and started to find creative ways to break the system so they just stopped (Mass Theocracy vassals for the old faction system, Just ignoring rebels entirely for the old rebel system).

Having Factions be smarter and have more teeth but be much more rare like you suggest would be fantastic. Since while a Feudalistic system did indeed have internal conflicts, I dont think the Kingdom of France had a stalinist purge every time the crown peacefully changed hands.

 

[Baldwin XI]

What strikes me in my ordeals with the Council Power civil wars is that they are started (after the 2-year council discontent-on-succession has expired) by non-powerful vassals. For example, why on earth would a minor duke care about how much power the kingly advisors have on the Imperial council, considering that there's next to no chance they'll ever sit on it? Why would they risk life, limb and land on a civil war that they'll almost certainly lose? I can see them piling on with major vassals during periods of discontent (though having powerful council-power factions form on EVERY SINGLE SUCCESSION is not just unrealistic, it's straight-up aggravating and kills game enjoyment). But in periods of peace on the council and kingdom, it really makes no sense for these minor vassals to do this, for no other reason than incomprehensible, unprovoked spite.

 

[Madae]

I don't really have too much of a problem with it, but it could use work. I can give in to the demands, and then buy favors to change it back 5 years later. Not that I want it to be harder, I just think it's funny how it works.

 

[Frank327]

As long as my council is content I generally don't have big problems with these factions. I have to say though, my suspicion is that the calculation for the relative strength of a faction is wrong, especially in tribal realms. Factions that are above 100% and challenge you often have fewer troops than you can muster simply by raising all levies and calling tribal vassals to war. Because of that, it gets tedious crushing all these revolts where normally you'd have fewer revolts (because they'd need more troops) but the revolts would be scarier.

It's another reason why I don't ever join factions in the HRE. If they fire, I still need to attach all of my troops to the faction army to even stand a chance of winning the faction war. And that's at numbers close to 200% strength. I think the numbers are calculated in such a way that every faction member puts all of their levy into the army when in reality every faction member that's not the leader just sits on the sidelines doing nothing providing a fraction of their max levy.

 

[TehJumpingJawa]

I honestly don't see why any feudal vassals should support increased council power.
Most feudal vassals should aspire to rule the kingdom themselves; for this they need to acquire counties, not council power.

Bishops, Mayors & Doges though, they should absolutely be interested in council empowerment.

 

[Nameless_Ensign]

They werent changed until people really started to get sick of them and started to find creative ways to break the system so they just stopped (Mass Theocracy vassals for the old faction system, Just ignoring rebels entirely for the old rebel system).

I remember this. North Korea mode, spamming Republican vassals, Duke-only vassals in an Empire, and then just not playing when CARRION FOR THE VULTURES REVOLT happened.

 

[Thrake]

I honestly don't see why any feudal vassals should support increased council power.
Most feudal vassals should aspire to rule the kingdom themselves; for this they need to acquire counties, not council power.

Bishops, Mayors & Doges though, they should absolutely be interested in council empowerment.

Strong concil is vital for any vassal. Without council a ruler can revoke anyone, for a reason or for no reason. If the council has a say, at worse he'll agree to the revokation; at best it blocks it. Same for execution, imprisonment,... The stronger the council, the stronger the vassals. Why a vassal would not want strong vassals? Would you vote in favor of a law that would remove you the right to vote?

A strong council is the only way to keep a decentralized realm. I would join that faction anytime, even if I'm a measly count. Well, I wouldn't anytime if the faction isn't strong enough because AI is dumb enough to launch a civil war against all odds, but I'd join one that stands a good chance anytime.

 

[FrosT37]

I like it, it allows for easier realm management.

Yesterday, they tried to press that faction on me. They lost. I revoked all their titles and made a nice cleanup of the realm.

If the realm was already cleaned up, I think I would just keep the most powerful vassals imprisoned.

 

[RoverGrover]

I think part of the problem is actually something that I don't see discussed often. It isn't so much vassals being angry so much as the reasons... I think the game does a poor job with taxes, historically one of the largest reasons for conflict within a government. If they made more of your income come from your realm rather than demense, and then made the tax rate affect the lesser lords incomes as well, then I think we'd see a much more legitimate series of conflicts than 9000 increase council power fights. Combine this with higher upkeep for standing troops and I think we'd start to see more legitimate conflicts that more accurately resemble historical ones.

Just a thought

 

[Hector of Troy]

And it's not that I can't play around it, it's not hard. But what is hard is consistently seeing a faction, even when no one in the realm has a negative opinion towards you, reach boiling pot so often and so frequently, when it just simply makes no sense.

That's why I insist the pre-ROI and pre-Conclave faction system made more sense. Vassals would join factions based on how much they loved/hated their king. Culture, Religion, gifts, marriages, blood... they would all matter. It was practical and easy to understand.

I have to say though, my suspicion is that the calculation for the relative strength of a faction is wrong, especially in tribal realms. Factions that are above 100% and challenge you often have fewer troops than you can muster simply by raising all levies and calling tribal vassals to war. Because of that, it gets tedious crushing all these revolts where normally you'd have fewer revolts (because they'd need more troops) but the revolts would be scarier.

It's a nice idea, but people tend to confuse, annoying and tedious with difficulty. Putting down 8 Council Power revolts on a single ruler isn't hard, its tedious. Same with having one like clockwork whenever the ruler dies. In fact since you can predict Council revolts always happening on succession it's basically just gold farming which is the opposite of difficulty. If the revolts actually had a remote chance of winning most of the time they'd need to be more rare, ironically since they dont thats why its whackamole since people arent constantly getting overthrown and complaining about it.

According to developers, this is working as intended. Since they believe players cannot ever be frustrated by losing rebellions, factions will only revolt to bother, never to win.

 

[Iron Chariots]

It's a nice idea, but people tend to confuse, annoying and tedious with difficulty. Putting down 8 Council Power revolts on a single ruler isn't hard, its tedious. Same with having one like clockwork whenever the ruler dies. In fact since you can predict Council revolts always happening on succession it's basically just gold farming which is the opposite of difficulty. If the revolts actually had a remote chance of winning most of the time they'd need to be more rare, ironically since they dont thats why its whackamole since people arent constantly getting overthrown and complaining about it.

Same complaints people had with the original factions back when, and with the old rebel system as well. They werent changed until people really started to get sick of them and started to find creative ways to break the system so they just stopped (Mass Theocracy vassals for the old faction system, Just ignoring rebels entirely for the old rebel system).

Having Factions be smarter and have more teeth but be much more rare like you suggest would be fantastic. Since while a Feudalistic system did indeed have internal conflicts, I dont think the Kingdom of France had a stalinist purge every time the crown peacefully changed hands.

How the hell are you getting 8 council power revolts on a single ruler? I've just finished up a game where I played a few hundred years and only had to fight one (maybe two? I don't recall) factions the entire campaign.

Conclave makes it stupidly easy to stop factions... the only time you even need to worry is upon succession, and even there, NAPs and just getting key vassals' opinions up is enough to get you through. It's not too hard to keep your most powerful vassals above 60 opinion, after all.

 

[Kumicho]

I honestly don't have a problem with my Council... It's *supposed* to add more of a challenge to your playthrough, and it works pretty well. If you have the council enabled (ie, war declaration power), just put any strong vassals on the Council and you don't have to worry about any revolts period.

If you neuter the Council, however, there's always going to be a greater risk for your vassals to try to get power back to them. Power is a zero-sum game, and when the ruler gets more, the vassals have less. The Increase Council Power has a higher threshold for approval (think it's 70 instead of 50?), and now that gifts are more important, you can just pay people to leave the faction.

I don't know, it just seems like a reasonable way of increasing the risk of revolt as you get bigger and bigger?

 

[TehJumpingJawa]

Strong concil is vital for any vassal. Without council a ruler can revoke anyone, for a reason or for no reason. If the council has a say, at worse he'll agree to the revokation; at best it blocks it. Same for execution, imprisonment,... The stronger the council, the stronger the vassals. Why a vassal would not want strong vassals? Would you vote in favor of a law that would remove you the right to vote?

A strong council is the only way to keep a decentralized realm. I would join that faction anytime, even if I'm a measly count. Well, I wouldn't anytime if the faction isn't strong enough because AI is dumb enough to launch a civil war against all odds, but I'd join one that stands a good chance anytime.

As a player, you do that?!

As a vassal, I just appropriate land until I'm stronger than my liege, and then overthrow him.
Strengthening the council doesn't just weaken the liege, it weakens the title itself, so when you do finally take power, you inherit a hamstrung title,

Also a weak title/liege is bad for vassals, as it invites invasion from heathen neighbours.
Overthrowing a King without weakening the realm in the mean time is the ideal, and a strong council is completely counter to that.

It's not like vassals couldn't keep their liege in check prior to Conclave's council mechanics; there's still the tyranny cost of unjustified revocation/imprisonment etc protecting the vassals as a collective.

 

[Hyle]

The one thing that genuinely needs changing is the current block on switching sides during wars. And that works both ways- as King, you should be able to bribe opponents back to you in the middle of a war, particularly with the promise of land or marriage (or favours, etc etc). Or the promise of reducing taxes, or anything else that might bring people back to the fold- at the cost of prestige, perhaps.

Likewise, if the rebellion is sieging my castle and likely to win, I should have some way to surrender and join them, even if there's a massive prestige loss. History's full of turncoats and traitors, and I want to be one of them.

 

[Frank327]

As a player, you do that?!

As a vassal, I just appropriate land until I'm stronger than my liege, and then overthrow him.
Strengthening the council doesn't just weaken the liege, it weakens the title itself, so when you do finally take power, you inherit a hamstrung title,

Also a weak title/liege is bad for vassals, as it invites invasion from heathen neighbours.
Overthrowing a King without weakening the realm in the mean time is the ideal, and a strong council is completely counter to that.

It's not like vassals couldn't keep their liege in check prioer to Conclave's council mechanics; there's still the tyranny cost of unjustified revocation/imprisonment etc protecting the vassals as a collective.

So let's say you're trying to gain power in the realm through a war, the liege notices, is threatened and enforces realm peace. What do you do against that? And yes, the AI does this.

You've got a few nice duchies, the king/emperor feels threatened, fabricates a claim to one of the duchies and just revokes it. Kinda sucks that he doesn't need the council to approve it right?

You've got a claim to some good land neighbouring the realm but your liege doesn't want to press your claim, wouldn't it be nice if a favour would make him start that war and use his troops to get what's yours?

What it boils down to is that as long as you're a vassal having a strong council means you can share in the power that the complete realm provides without being threatened too much by it. Of course once you take the title it's a nuisance but I can understand vassals not thinking about that.

 

[kmh42]

This feature is fine. You just have to adapt. I am serious! This is one of the difficult features of conclave for new or inexperienced players. I understand why so many people are annoyed or have problems with it but for me it is nice because it make the game a little bit challenging. After excepting this it actually very easy to get rid of this faction. How? Manage you vassals with NAP, Spymaster, imprisoning, spying and find the right balance between fewer strong and many week vassals that suits you.

 

[Naughtius Maximus]

I have no idea why you even have this type of issue. Without conclave the same exact thing happens with crown authority.

The vassals mindlessly faction for that and you get the equivalent of 3-4 civil wars per ruler.

Increase council power is much better than lower crown authority precisely because at war council they faction less for this, and you lock powerful vassals in the council to prevent them from factioning rather than waste kids on NA pacts. Wasting kids is problematic as well since they usually generate claims. Few generations down the line and bam, title claimant malus.

 

[kmh42]

Wasting kids is problematic as well since they usually generate claims. Few generations down the line and bam, title claimant malus.

That's why you never marry with their first borns.

 

[dragoon9105]

Its not difficult though is the thing, it is for the first time you encounter it I suppose until you realize it can be horribly abused. With the bare minimum in council laws (War Dec only) you can just stack a bunch of loyalists on the council and always make sure Council Power revolts hit at 100-150% which is 40-50% of the 'true' realm power, and easily beat by a single mercenary addition. Ransoms then make it so you'll often double your investment if not more when you factor in siege gold, additional ransoms and prestige if your tribal. Sometimes piety too.

Council Power revolts have inadvertantly led to opening up a NK-Lite playstile where every 10 years you manipulate the council in such a way to your vassals get juuuust enough power to revolt, revolt, lose, get ransomed, and in 10 years do it all over again. If you ever need stability for a long period of time, you can just revoke and give it to new folks who'll love you until they die. You can optimize even further by giving giving consistently 'problematic' duke vassals that hate you titular King titles or better viceroyalties. Republics in particular are also fantastic for abuse since they have nice easily assaulted holdings for warscore and siege gold. For Tribals its arguably even better to do this (Though harder to set up) since you also get prestige and sometimes piety, which translates directly into more and importantly, cheap soldiers to spam in your wars of conquest.

What makes this possible, Vassals favoring Council Power factions too heavily to try and force conclave mechanics and the new combat system which makes combat losses in battle miniscule, so you never really lose anything besides time which is much less valuable ever since Defensive pacts got implemented since you've got plenty of time between threat cooldowns to trick your vassals into revolting so you can fill your coffers.