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Hello folks!

It's Thursday, and you all know what that means... pea soup, pancakes and warm Punsch! Also, a Crusader Kings II dev diary. Today's topic is Plots. Like in EU:Rome, characters can have a specific ambition in life. It can be innocuous things like getting married, getting rich, or having a nice glass of warm Punsch, but sometimes it can be more sinister, like having your wife fall down the stairs. These nasty ambitions are called Plots, and they are hidden from other characters unless they are in on it (or have been made aware of it.) Those of you who have played Sengoku will recognize the general concept, although it works slightly differently in Crusader Kings II. You pick an available plot, then you can start inviting other characters into it. If the plot is military in nature, like gaining control of a title, the plot gains power from rulers commanding a military force. If it's an intrigue plot, you should rather invite those who are close to the target of the plot. Plot power is just a percentage, and will unlock new events and decisions the further along it is. At 100% plot power, the plot is likely to succeed.

The problem is that Spymasters (the council position) can discover plots, depending on their intrigue skill vs the plotter's intrigue skill. Unless they too are in on it, they will report to their liege, who can then choose to take action. If you are lucky, he might just demand that you cease and desist. However, since he has evidence of your scheming, he is allowed to imprison you without repercussions (normally, other characters will perceive you as a tyrant when you throw people in the dungeon.) Being imprisoned automatically ends the plot, by the way.

CrusaderKing2_DevDiary_111006.png

These are some of the more interesting plots:
  • Change the Succession Law
  • Take a landed title from your Liege
  • Have a character killed

Over the last week we've been balancing the succession law plots, because everyone and their uncle were plotting to institute Elective Monarchy. (In 1453, all kingdoms had ended up with this law.) Of course, it does make perfect sense for vassals to pick this plot, because it gives them a chance of getting elected themselves. However, it wasn't very nice of the Duke of Aquitaine to start a civil war over this right when King Philippe was trying to take Normandy back from William the Conqueror... So, we tweaked the likelihood of others joining in the plot and tightened up the conditions for taking it.

That's all for now!
 
Oh, it was more of a variety problem than a quality one, so you did nothing wrong ;)

And will the plots be moddable? I mean, can we mod in new plots with different effects compared to the vanilla ones?

This was quoted by Gars over in the Sengoku boards on that:

In theory you can add more plots (they're not very hard to script). The problem comes when inviting others to join. This part was tough to do in script and was instead done hard coded, which means if you script a plot and invite someone, they will most likely say no (basically they can't evaluate it). You could potentially script your way around this, doing invites through decisions and events instead.

So while they have 4 months to change the mechanics of modding it, who knows how much it will change, so overall I guess from that it could be doable, but very very difficult to do unless you're good with scripting in general.
 
Well Gars, it seems for CK II you're going to have way more Plots than just "Military Centric" ones that are currently in Sengoku, but since that's the focus of Sengoku (War) I guess that's all you needed, heh. Overall I think that user just simply meant there will be more variety in the plots available for CK II than to what's currently available in Sengoku, and I'm sure he meant no offense ;).

I've never played Sengoku (doesn't seem to be ported yet), but it looks to me like every single plot planned for CK2 is military.

Elective law? Starts a war.

Usurpation? Unless it's completely different from the CK1 mechanic it only gives you a claim. If a successful plot gives you the title without a war I'd say it's broken, because it would suck to have your realm break up just because a couple of your vassals did the Medieval equivalent of a joint Press Release.

Assassination? If you have to plot to do it presumably you're targeting another political leader, which means a guy with thousands of troops. Which means you started a war.

Remember this is a game about the Middle Ages. These people thought it was a great idea to turn vast portions of the country over to guys whose job was to be the King's Army, decided that it was anti-freedom to deny said soldiers the right to fight each-other whenever they felt like starting something, added a bunch of lawyers to the mix with arcane rules nobody bothered to write down but everybody thought they understood, and neglected to create a powerful national court system to adjudicate the resulting disputes without resorting to peasant-rape.

So just as every serious American dispute results in lawsuits, any serious Medieval dispute ended in a) war, or b) somebody wimping out and refusing to fight for his rights.

And can you think of anything truly deserving of a Plot mechanic that wouldn't result in a serious dispute?

Nick
 
oh so because you think the middle ages were a time of barbarism and evil lets ignore all the evidence and just make it about bloodshed because thats how american movies portray it?
Pretty much all count/duke level conflicts would be resolved through courts and parliaments. And Kings constantly had decisions forced on them by what you would call press conferences! There are so many examples that none stand out enough to be worth remembering because they were the rule not the exception.
There were very strict legal systems in the middle ages, most conflicts were resolved without war, court, church, guild, common, roman, imperial etc hundreds of laws! and hundreds of courts. The famous examples are wars because they were examples, things work smoothly are not common knowledge five hundred years later, you remember the wars because they were the things going dramatically wrong.
History is about wars and kings, most of the world isnt. Wars and Kings are tiny things outnumbered by pretty much everything else. The world isnt just wars and kings because thats all you know about it.

If there wasnt a place for this mechanic the developers wouldnt have made it!!!!!! and just because you are alive now does not make now a more civilised era.
Remember this is a game about the middle ages, a hugely complex civilisation that you know very little about and if you spent your whole life studying you would still no very little about it, because its too big to know! and there are too many preconceptions in the way anyway.
In every thread it seems the devs have said, here is a new feature, and you have come along and said no, in the middle ages people werent intelligent enough for that, People are people no matter the era! and the devs wouldnt put all the hard work of making a new feature into it unless there was a reason too! they are not idiots and given precedent there is no reason to except them to be.
This is a game about the High Middle Ages, not a barbaric romantic fantasy of knights in a dark whiggish dystopia for some damned movie. No Historian would agree with your conclusions and prejudices but a large number of hollywood executives and console computer game designers would, and do you really want CK2 to take that kind of a stance? To be simple and bigoted instead of complex, historically plausible and full of enough different things and way of going about things to be fun to play?
I kind of want CK2 to be the best game it can be, the Devs are trying to do that. Why do you want it to be so much less?
Plots stand to make the game more fun, wheres the problem? whether or not you agree with the history, whats wrong with fun and interesting? offering two ways of doing things instead of forcing one? Thats what games are about, choice and consequences, its what makes them not movies.
Even if plots only add a little to the game, thats still an addition! and every little bit adds up.
 
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I can't quote all of what you said, Orinsul, but let's pretend like I am. It's definitely true that a lot of disputes weren't settled via warfare--the papal courts in Rome did a roaring business in litigation, particularly in the thirteenth century. But I think the disputes that people tend to find interesting and worthy of inclusion in a game like this really aren't those sorts of disputes. Lords especially almost never agreed among one another as to what court ought to have jurisdiction over their dispute (if there was a court in the first place), and when we're getting up to the scale of "I ought to be count/duke/king of that," it just didn't happen. Sometimes the pope might depose somebody, but that didn't tend to turn out peacefully (e.g. Heinrich IV). Also, I think Nick was, at least in the first part of his response, being more descriptive--a lot of these plots do seem to end up in war, which makes more sense in an era when the principle of "might makes right" wasn't something to be ashamed of yet. But obviously they all don't, unless people are going to go to war to decide who gets to be the chancellor of the HRE.
Also, the game does happen mostly to be about kings (well, nobility) and wars. So I don't think you can fault anybody for thinking that. There's definitely more to the history than that, but it's either not terribly entertaining for most people (micromanaging merchant caravans to St. Denis? think I'll pass), or just not well known, even to professional historians (since common people didn't leave us much in the way of source material).
Lastly, the High Middle Ages were NOT a good time in which to live by any means. They get a worse press than they deserve, but they were still pretty awful.
 
Geez Orinsul,

You're reading a lot into a single post.

You're also totally ignoring the context.

We're talking about Plots, a specific feature of the game. The game is about a specific class of person in Medieval times. And the simple fact is that members of that class fought a lot more wars then we do today. If you want to take that relatively banal statement and conclude I've said they were all gang-raping thugs you are simply incorrect

More to the point:
Can you name a single thing appropriate to the Plots feature -- ie: consisting of several vassals scheming secretly -- that could not result in a war? Can you even find something that would have less then an 80% chance of resulting in a) nothing happening or b) a war?

Nick
 
So is Crusader Kings 2 just going to turn out to be another Sengoku, just on a Euro map and dynasties instead of clans? Cause I gotta tell you, I've got Sengoku and was.... underwhelmed, at best. But I'm a diehard Deus Vult player (Welsh pride!) and was counting on CK2 being a MORE exciting experience than CKDV, but as things stand I enjoy DV more than I do Sengoku, and CK2 seems to be shaping up to be a Sengoku with little tweaks, different titles and a different map. Say it isn't so?
 
Relevance to the post being that I feel like plots are as underwhelming as the whole of Sengoku.
 
More to the point:
Can you name a single thing appropriate to the Plots feature -- ie: consisting of several vassals scheming secretly -- that could not result in a war? Can you even find something that would have less then an 80% chance of resulting in a) nothing happening or b) a war?

Nick

there have been dozens of examples and suggestions throughout this thread and others, yourve just responded every-time with an opinion that such a thing would never happen despite it happening all the time. it isnt one post but a long succession of posts thats the issue, not taken out of context as the context is you keep doing it. But maybe thats not your fault, you say name a single thing? alot of things have been named, maybe you just dont bother to remember.

Result in a war is not the point. anything can result in a war, a cat in a tree can result in a war if the situation is right. can only be achieved by war is the issue, which nothing is. If a plot fails then you have the war, but if it succeeds then you achieve the aim without a war, its a pretty simple concept.
The Kings were at the mercy of their barons and vassals, not absolute dictators as after the reformation, but rule by consent. Liege and Lord each having responsibilities to each other and each being answerable to the other, Plots go some way towards representing that.
in CK you had to go to war to force a policy change. To threaten a war if a policy isnt changed. Thats Plots, not to start a war but achieve the same thing without a costly and illegal war.
 
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So is Crusader Kings 2 just going to turn out to be another Sengoku, just on a Euro map and dynasties instead of clans? Cause I gotta tell you, I've got Sengoku and was.... underwhelmed, at best. But I'm a diehard Deus Vult player (Welsh pride!) and was counting on CK2 being a MORE exciting experience than CKDV, but as things stand I enjoy DV more than I do Sengoku, and CK2 seems to be shaping up to be a Sengoku with little tweaks, different titles and a different map. Say it isn't so?

exactly what leads you to this conclusion?

So far, It seems to me, that there's gonna be way more stuff than in CK: DV...
 
Relevance to the post being that I feel like plots are as underwhelming as the whole of Sengoku.

Plots are supposed to suck. Feudal lords didn't actually do that much plotting. This just isn't an era when you could get anything done by having a meeting.

As far as I can tell this game will have everything DV had, plus Barons, plus better Civil Wars (a rebel claimant to the throne will act just like a King, so he'll be able to be the overlord of Duke-level rebels).

Nick

EDIT:
Realized I'm being way too hyperbolic about plots sucking. Alone they aren't too interesting.

However, if you consider them in context of an actual game they become a lot cooler. For example in CK1 if your King was weak and you had a bunch of land you could usurp his title, and declare war. But all you were doing was clicking a button, and you couldn't even try if you only held 9 of the Kingdom's 15 provinces.

In CK2 you'll be able to start a plot to usurp the throne. This will be a lot more involved then clicking a button, and will require you to invite people to the plot. You ask enough of the right people before you get caught and you;re golden. You can even try this on your enemies in other Kingdoms, altho I'd assume that their subjects will be much less likely to go with you.

Hopefully inviting people will be more then a matter of clicking buttons. There'll be events and lots of them will say, "yes, if you do x when you're King," but that hasn;t been mentioned by the devs yet.
 
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there have been dozens of examples and suggestions throughout this thread and others, yourve just responded every-time with an opinion that such a thing would never happen despite it happening all the time. it isnt one post but a long succession of posts thats the issue, not taken out of context as the context is you keep doing it. But maybe thats not your fault, you say name a single thing? alot of things have been named, maybe you just dont bother to remember.

Dozens?

Then you won't have any trouble naming a single Plot that doesn't result in somebody getting an event that says "Give in to plot or fight."

Nick
 
Can you denounce a character that have invited you to a plot? And correspondly, if your liege/king/whatever have complete confidence in you, can you denounce a non-existent plot to get rid of somebody? Can you have a plot that consists in forging evidence to frame someone for a non-existent plot? Am I going too far?
 
An example from the Gamespot beta preview was a Plot to kill your wife. I'm pretty sure that the wife cannot decide to declare war instead of getting killed.

Although if your wife has a powerbase of her own she should be able to run away and declare war on you. And is she doesnt perhaps her powerful relatives should consider intervening in some way.
 
Dozens?

Then you won't have any trouble naming a single Plot that doesn't result in somebody getting an event that says "Give in to plot or fight."

Nick

why should the victim have no choice but to succumb? no matter when backed into a corner you should always have the option to bite.
just as you can decline diplomacy, why make it one sided? give an option is the only practical thing.

Can i name a plot, no i dont know what the plots in the game will be, but i can name a suggestion, declare your liege's heir a bastard by conspiring with fellow vassals and the spy master and the second in line.

Remove your duke by falsifying evidence of crimes and abuses, getting your fellow counts and barons and your king to agree and hes out just a count, and your the duke. Same plot would work for getting rid of troublesome bishops.

Break up a the kings betrothal by working with fellow vassals to discredit the brides family. Replace a regent by gathering greater support, etc, there very easy to make up
 
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