The Seljuks in my 1066 game stretch from Armenia to Siberia, from Samara to Arabia. Despite high decadence, three powerful defensive pacts and me retargeting two crusades directly at them.
Defensive Pacts - On or Off?
- Thread starter Castios
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I keep them on. Blobbing hard and taking tons of land through wars *should* attract a lot of negative attention from neighbors and rivals. If anything, I find the mechanic to be pretty weak overall, because it doesn't lead to as much backlash as it should. I would love to see a slider that gave various thresholds for Defensive Pacts to form, rather than a simple On/Off switch. Let us decide whether neighbors band against you after a few minor conquests, or whether they take more of a hands-off approach until you start blobbing hard, or whether they get a retaliation CB to cut you down to size in advance when you poke the bear too often.
I always turn them off. Not because I want things to get easier (since there are workarounds to get rid of threat) but because they utterly break immersion for me. I'm always mad seeing the Pope forming an alliance against me with the Caliph while I'm a true christian knight with a saintly bloodline and being crowned by said Pope. Defensive pacts should be reworked to be more consistent. It should be more difficult for large empires to form alliance and easier for lesser countries. I mean allying with an empire back them could mean falling in their sphere of influence and becoming over dependent of them to the point you just get annexed. Since this mechanic does not exist then I don't see any way to make defensive pacts viable for me.
I turn them off. I don't mind them in theory, but in practice I find them unfun. I've said before that they wanted to avoid being accused of just copying EU's coalitions, so they changed it by getting rid of the things that make EU's coalitions work.
Most notably, threat is a universal factor; different religions may form different pacts, but they all view you with the same threat. In comparison, EU4 explicitly had AE scale based on where you were expanding, so e.g. Hungary would "feel" a different level of AE from conquering Constantinople than Ethiopia would. This gave you the ability to be strategic with your expansion, rotating where you were expanding to let AE cool off in one area while you were still free to expand in other areas. Instead, at high threat levels in CK2, you either have to sit there and not fight any wars for ages while it burns off, or fight the entire world over one county (and while you can likely win, it becomes fairly tedious).
The other issue is the scaling, which others have mentioned. It goes fairly quickly from "threat is basically a non-issue, especially for religions with sparse CBs" to "literally any expansion means you have massive threat and have to sit there for ages before it goes down." If it scaled slower (and to a lesser height) and burned off quicker, it might be more manageable.
Most notably, threat is a universal factor; different religions may form different pacts, but they all view you with the same threat. In comparison, EU4 explicitly had AE scale based on where you were expanding, so e.g. Hungary would "feel" a different level of AE from conquering Constantinople than Ethiopia would. This gave you the ability to be strategic with your expansion, rotating where you were expanding to let AE cool off in one area while you were still free to expand in other areas. Instead, at high threat levels in CK2, you either have to sit there and not fight any wars for ages while it burns off, or fight the entire world over one county (and while you can likely win, it becomes fairly tedious).
The other issue is the scaling, which others have mentioned. It goes fairly quickly from "threat is basically a non-issue, especially for religions with sparse CBs" to "literally any expansion means you have massive threat and have to sit there for ages before it goes down." If it scaled slower (and to a lesser height) and burned off quicker, it might be more manageable.
I keep it always on. And I'd even add an optional rule that Threat decay much slower while your character is still alive, then faster when it dies.
It is supposed to be a character-driven threat, so if your player's declaring war and expanding left and right your neighbors should want to bandwagon to stop you.
It is supposed to be a character-driven threat, so if your player's declaring war and expanding left and right your neighbors should want to bandwagon to stop you.
Oh man, if it were my neighbors forming a defensive pact I'd leave them on. It tends to be that no matter where in the world you are, once you have threat, attacking ANY Christian means suffering the full weight of HRE and Byzantium silmultaneously.
Just keep it on. It's a really minor stepping stone anyways. It's only an issue if you're trying to acquire your second empire (so two empire sizes.)
If you are smaller than that threat decays surprisingly fast. If you're larger you mow them down regardless.
What Paradox really needs is an internal threat difficulty spike. As it is even the AI can maintain a sprawling empire until the end of the game, with their only real threat being a bigger blob.
If you are smaller than that threat decays surprisingly fast. If you're larger you mow them down regardless.
What Paradox really needs is an internal threat difficulty spike. As it is even the AI can maintain a sprawling empire until the end of the game, with their only real threat being a bigger blob.