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Birken

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Sep 28, 2009
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Hi Everyone!

So we decided to reveal some of the patch material last week and I think we can do that every other week from now on (until announcement obviously, after that you’ll get info on features every week up until release).

This week I’d like to ask your opinion on something related to design instead. As you know, we sometimes want to add soft barriers to our games. The demesne limit is one such barrier, ie you can hold more counties than it, but they’ll be less efficient so it’s often suboptimal to do so. I think this is a pretty ok way of letting players play the game like they want to, while telling you that the intention is to not go past this line (or not far past it at least). For you who played Sengoku, you might remember vassals asking for titles and getting angry if you didn’t hand them out which was a quick solution to a similar problem. In the Sengoku case, players who didn’t follow the rules usually got irritated by the constant spam of vassals asking for titles (and if you were way past the limit, you’d get it all the time). The solution was obviously not a good one. What I personally prefer when possible, is to give the player’s that follow the rules some kind of bonus instead.

So the question I’d like to ask you is:

What kind of bonus would you like to see as a trade off for limiting yourself in the game? The limit could be anything here, demesne limit is already taken care of so think of other stuff.

Related to that question:
If you could add optional limits that would give you bonuses, what type of limits would you like to see?
This could be anything from having all your titles and vassals as within the dejure of your primary title, or always making sure to be married to a daughter of the Byzantine emperor.


dd8.jpg


A small spoiler from an interface Work-In-Progress.
 
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Here I was after the last dev diary thinking this dev diary series was going to be about actual dev diaries and game features. Back to scraping the bottom of the barrel, eh?
 
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Here I was after the last dev diary thinking this dev diary series was going to be about actual dev diaries and game features. Back to scraping the bottom of the barrel, eh?
There clearly isn't DLC coming out anytime soon and so the choice is either have them post stuff about the development process in general or get nothing it seems. Besides, we'll get things every two weeks. There's no reason to be greedy.
 
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I'd like to see a bonus along the lines of getting control over changing culture in your counties when fuedal. Also another limit could be that you shouldn't culture change your vassals to yours if you've conquered them and they're not your culture. A bonus for such a limit would be that you would get an opinion bonus for leaving them the same culture ruling over their cultural lands.
 
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An actual High King of Ireland mechanic!
 
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How about when I defeat an adventurer I get 500 - 1000 prestige. Random people with claims just popping up somewhere, ignoring all of the rules, pulling 12k+ troops out of their ass, only to be defeated and hey you get nothing. Yea thats a fun and balanced mechanic.
 
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I think there should be some kind of oppinion bous if you manage your realm 'good' in terms of balancing the power.
Right now there is an oppinion bonus for ruling a long time. Maybe there should be a growing oppinion boost if you maintain the power balance within your realm.
If you don't want to do that maybe it would be a good idea to give an oppinion bonus for every demense point that is not used. E.g. you can hold 6 demenses but only have 5, so that gives you +10 oppinion of your vassals.
Like this you could also benefit from not stacking up your demense, thus keeping your vassals happy.

Another idea could be that if your retinue army grows too big, vassals start to get threatened by your sheer power. That also could give a small opinion penalty, also like having mercenaries in peace time (supressing factions) and so on. (The mercenary thing could work similar to the raised levy modifier).
Though, if you do any of this, I'd ask you to make those features completely moddable, as rebalancing might be crucial for some kind of mods.

Cheers
flogi
 
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One thing I always disliked was how de-jure drifting worked. If I'm the King of Germany and conquer the provinces of the Kingdom of Pomerania, the duchies would nicely drift into my Kingdom. But if I take another Kingdom level title or even become the HRE this drifting would stop. It would be great if I had some sort of control over that and could influence the drifting process directly.

And I also fully agree with @nogluten.
 
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The problem is that, unless the bonus is really huge, it's going to end up like Development in EU4 - completely overshadowed by conquest, conquest, conquest. It's just too easy, too profitable, and too rewarding, eating everything in sight: vassals are happy yes-men puppets most of the time, you can control enclaves on the other side of the continent with no problem, getting absolute authority is trivial, and the Pope cares not for anything you do, if you are Catholic (or a Catholic heresy).

Now, I don't want to be the elitist scum, but the game is just too easy, especially at higher levels. It's all about feudalism; the bigger you get, the harder the game should become, because if on one hand you are safe from outer threats, inner threats do nothing but inflate. Consider the great countries of this period: all of them collapsed, or had their authority undermined by their vassals, again and again and again. Only one, France, got out of the Renaissance in good shape, and it did so through a lot of time spent with irrelevant kings and feuding "vassals". The HRE? Diffused. The ERE? Destroyed, and feudalized before that. Andalusia and the Caliphate? Exploded. The Mongol Empire? Divided.

There's no real way around making great empires hard to play - but then again, why should there be one? If I open EU4 as a total newbie and load up Albania or Navarra, I'm going to get spanked hard - it's not like the game has to bend sideways to make it easy. Hard situations should be hard to solve, and a newbie that has inherited the ERE might consider leaving it to a cousin or uncle, instead of demanding they win even though they're out of their depth.
 
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At the moment there is very little incentive not to blob. It would be good if there was some sort of peace dividend such as an economic boost, which gradually increased the longer you were at peace. Also perhaps some sort of boost for having good relations with your neighbours.

On a similar note, I think learning needs a boost as there doesn't seem to be as much incentive to go down this path as some of the others.
 
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Hi Everyone!

So we decided to reveal some of the patch material last week and I think we can do that every other week from now on (until announcement obviously, after that you’ll get info on features every week up until release).

This week I’d like to ask your opinion on something related to design instead. As you know, we sometimes want to add soft barriers to our games. The demesne limit is one such barrier, ie you can hold more counties than it, but they’ll be less efficient so it’s often suboptimal to do so. I think this is a pretty ok way of letting players play the game like they want to, while telling you that the intention is to not go past this line (or not far past it at least). For you who played Sengoku, you might remember vassals asking for titles and getting angry if you didn’t hand them out which was a quick solution to a similar problem. In the Sengoku case, players who didn’t follow the rules usually got irritated by the constant spam of vassals asking for titles (and if you were way past the limit, you’d get it all the time). The solution was obviously not a good one. What I personally prefer when possible, is to give the player’s that follow the rules some kind of bonus instead.

So the question I’d like to ask you is:

What kind of bonus would you like to see as a trade off for limiting yourself in the game? The limit could be anything here, demesne limit is already taken care of so think of other stuff.

Related to that question:
If you could add optional limits that would give you bonuses, what type of limits would you like to see?
This could be anything from having all your titles and vassals as within the dejure of your primary title, or always making sure to be married to a daughter of the Byzantine emperor.


View attachment 143099

A small spoiler from an interface Work-In-Progress.
I disagree holding a realm together in ck2 is war to easy anyway without even more bonuses being handed out. The penatly curve for holding more land yourself (and more importantly to have a certain number of vassals) could be a bit less binary but I think penatlies are the way to go. It should start cutting in to your efficiency at lower levels but take longer to become quite as harsh as it is as you pass the threshhold today. Perphaps pronvince/vassal efficiency scores which drops the more demesene/vassals you have compared to some current tech level. With three colour codes green (no penatly) yellow orange and red.

Expecting a player to limit themselves is stupid instead make holding a larger realm together actually require work.
 
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@Birken : you already mentioned being in De Jure limits, but a soft limit on the total size of your realm would be great. If it is done well, it could single-handedly solve the recurrent issue of blob being too stable, while still letting the people who want to do a Wolrd Conquest able to do so if they dedicate efforts to it.

This limit could depend on Diplomacy *and* Stewardship (obviously, since Diplo is for Vassal limit, Steward for Demesne limit) + Prestige. Now, should it depend on personal or dynasty prestige, or both? I'm not sure, but I think that it should slowly increase as time passes, so Dynasty Prestige should be of importance somewhere.
For the "bonus-if-you-respect" instead of "malus-if-you-refuses": some bonus opinion if you are above the limit, especially when you want to conquer new lands to reach the limit? Maybe a longer grace period when vassals don't have opinion penalties when you use their levies?


The second point that comes back often in the Suggestion subforum is a more flexible way to declare war and get land/titles in the end of a war, akin to the one in EU4, but I think someone from Paradox officially said there wouldn't be such kind of negotiation engine in CK2 ever?

Finally, this is the perfect occasion to remind you that there IS a suggestion subforum. Personally, I keep hope that you do read it, even if you very rarely answer to the threads there, but it's becoming harder and harder :)
 
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Maybe if you have primogeniture and no direct son only brothers or no one, you should get "No successor"- 5 opinion with vassals, and flip it to "Has successor" +5 opinion when he does. Maaaaaaybe a + or - 1& revolt risk. Back in the day if you were primogeniture and you had only brothers or no successor it cause jitters at the least.
 
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Make vassals more eager to join independence factions if you are a big empire (High number of holdings in your realm) and having vassals that are not of your culture or culture group hate you more the more bigger your empire is.
Also the Pope should be more involved in politics: declaring wars to have more land in Italy and being more eager to excommunicate people, specially if they have Free investiture or are in a war with him or have lands that he wants for himself.
 
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Very pleased to see that you guys are very aware of this issue! Some ideas I had off the top of my head:

Rather than comparing the number of men on each side of a siege to see whether you are allowed to "progress" in sieging, you could construct a siege score based on more things. Currently it feels kind of frustrating to have 5 less men than the besieged, making you unable to siege at all, despite having far superior units.

Another is the possibility to add a dowry (money or even titles) to a marriage or betrothal proposal.
 
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Make vassals more eager to join independence factions if you are a big empire (High number of holdings in your realm) and having vassals that are not of your culture or culture group hate you more the more bigger your empire is.
Also the Pope should be more involved in politics: declaring wars to have more land in Italy and being more eager to excommunicate people, specially if they have Free investiture or are in a war with him or have lands that he wants for himself.
I'd actually argue against the latter; different culture vassals should be little more difficult than same culture; this isn't the age of nationalism. Different religion vassals should obviously hate you, but it should be perfectly reasonable to hold a multicultural empire. Maybe this will avoid the inevitable disappearance of the Dutch and other minor nationalities.

I do think there should be scaling opinion penalties with blobbing too big. Not so much that it makes a big blob unreasonable (and it should obviously be very moddable, otherwise e.g. AGOT mod with its giant Westeros would be basically unplayable), but something. Perhaps vassals within your de jure duchy get a larger bonus, de jure kingdom a smaller, de jure empire nothing, and then non de jure get a malus that decays with the de jure change timer?

Regardless, factions need to be able to conduct normal diplomacy (including some ability to call in friends from within the realm to join the revolt). You can give a penalty to prestige/acceptance to represent that they aren't really a king, but there needs to be some way to intervene. As it is, not only are factions too weak to matter in blobbing, but they also cause issues with e.g. marriage diplomacy (my son is betrothed to your daughter, but can't marry until you finish that war to lower crown authority that has been raging for a decade).
 
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