I personally think this patch did iron away most of the rough edges, and I find I love the added depth. I also think it is right that if I willingly form an alliance I should be made to honor it. The AI honors it, and I have spent years taking advantage of their troops when I really needed it, it is only right that I finally kick in and put in my share, that should be part of the game. Perhaps they could make it so that you can withdraw from the war for a great loss of prestige and a negative opinion of all rulers toward you, that makes sense, but making alliances should be a big decision and one that should not be used to mainly just have the AI fight for you or not attack you when you are conquering most of the world. This adds depth and strategy to the game. I for one am tired of the AI rolling over for my steamrolling army every signal game. I think Paradox is doing a pretty damn good job here, is it perfect? Hell no. Is it better? For me I say undoubtedly yes. Thank you Paradox, I am still
still obsessed with CK2.
While that may be how it played for you, the rest of the 80% of us did not have armies the steamrolled the game and now this game is one of excess tedium to get nowhere. How do I know this is correct? Look at achievements. Too often Paradox ONLY listens to people who come here and complain about having a large empire. YOU knew your exploits and could have very easily modded them. A much bigger hit to relationship values was a much better solution for the particular issue of neglecting a call to arms. Maybe they'd even become a rival if he'd helped you in the past and you don't answer his call to arms. But now, you've taken away our CHOICES. What's worse, this auto call to arms also hurts the AI by draining their forces way more than before. Or your own wife might bring in 5k forces to stamp out some little revolt and attrition will decimate your forces.
The fact of the matter is this game is no longer fun. I don't see the whimsy and amazing stories I was once did. Fighting with the council is not making interesting things happen for fun. Instead it is an accounting roadblock like doing taxes, and trying to decide what's a deductible and what isn't.
All of these items made for the ultra elite players. There is no "common sense" to how you can benefit being on your liege council and since favors cost so much gold, if you start small that's a gigantic part of the game you can barely use for hundreds of years until 80 gold becomes disposable.
There were better ways to fix exploits, and maybe one of those should have been through mods so as not to alienate or crush the fun out of the game for the rest of us. And no, I don't think "we" the majority should have to roll back and not use the DLC our hard earned cash paid for. In a better world Paradox would not have ignored everyone else at the behest of YOU, and made a better system out of the existing one. Which pretty much everyone agrees would have been much better by the relationship hits I mentioned above.
