Dev Thoughts - Title Creation Button

[Unready]

I've just wanted to say what after redraw of Persian part of map several duchies become titular - Hamadan, Estafan, Tigris and Kermanshah.
Now they are completely useless. If I create them and give to county level vassals, their former sovereigns DOW them and usurp counties thus destroying these titles.
If I give them to dukes - their inheritance become the mess.
If I give them to kings - they just destroy them.
Every time this part of the game is ugly mess.

 

[yezhanquan]

You use them to create merchant republics?

 

[vandevere]

As already mentioned at the start. This is not something we are actively working on at the moment, but rather my thoughts about the game. So it is not like this is a feature we are planning to add right now.

Though I agree, it probably would make world conquest even easier.

Just so long as you remember that not everyone goes the WQ Route. Before the Game Rules Pages were created, I used to grind my teeth every time someone demanded a nerf to "Prevent Blobbing" because all of these nerfs, some of which were very harsh, and all of which were global, had a tendency to destroy small realms as well.

Now, with a the Game Rules Page in place, it might make more sense to put any nerfs in the Game Rules Page, and let people play how they like...

 

[Caeserion]

Also, would it be possible to disable title creation for nomads? They don't care for landed titles so why would they create them? I get that it gives them prestige but there's no point to it. Duchy titles maybe to create vassal MR if they want that cash but that about it. Our prime example of nomads settling down, the mongols, retained and took pride in their khanate heritage, and rarely styled themselves as anything else (if they did, it was religious titles - Emir of the faithful or whatever)

 

[Giulls]

The permanent title creation alert for titles you don’t care about has been an issue for me in the past. With imperial administration you are in a position where you MUST create duchy titles as soon as it becomes possible to hand them out as viceroyalties. If you delay this it is possible a vassal will create the title himself as a regular duchy, making him and all of his descendants hate you forever.
Normally this isn’t a problem since you can be quick on the alert but if the alert is already there (I don’t want to create any of these titular kingdoms/other empires!) and if your vassal sneakily did some conquering to form a duchy you get completely blindsided by this.

 

[yezhanquan]

Nomads cannot create merchant republics unless they take over a coastal republic ( they cannot grant counties to non-nomads).

I create kingdoms to steal vassal clans' vassals before releasing them to lower threat or to weaken them.

 

[Kukumarro]

You can address the issue of Multiple Empires without messing around code by creating a dual Empire. You just need to make a special rule under which you won't suffer opinion penalties from de jure vassals of the non-main title.

This issue should be addressed for Multiple Kingdoms too. It was fairly common in the middle ages to hold more than one kingdom title. After kingdom's inheritance reformed out of gavelkind, many entities started to be known as "Crowns". Examples:

• The Crown of Castille was made of the kingdoms of Galicia, Leon, and Castille: each kingdom had distinct laws, rights and institutions. Some lands were held directly by the Crown rather than being part of the kingdom.
  
• The Crown of Aragon was made of the County of Barcelona + the kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia and Mallorca. It later added the kingdoms of Sardinia, Napoles and Sicily.

I think you can simulate this, and address the problem at hand, in an extremely simple manner. You just need to add the exception for the opinion penalty if the De Jure vassal shares your culture and religion. This would simulate the effort of the foreign conquerors to set loyal vassals in place, who in turn should know that as foreigners, if the people don't like them, they need the Crown to support their rule.

If you go crazy you can really add Crowns to the game, but it will be easier to just add a Crown Law to the main title (which holds the name of the crown) relating how the Crown entity respects the cultures of its component kingdoms. So you can eliminate revolt risk associated to different culture, if you respect the kingdom's culture, but in turn no culture switch happens.

 

[Kukumarro]

The final solution is simply removing the opinion malus on having several empire titles. I don't really have any data saying this is good or bad.

Just to note, I am saying something different from your proposal. You said "remove the malus". I said "remove the malus IF".

The idea of adding a crown law related to culture tolerance may address this well. Different culture characters (always maintaining the malus for different culture) will have the non-main-title malus removed if the tolerance law is in place. If you respect their laws and traditions, why should they rebel? The fact that they prefer to be ruled by somebody of their culture is already implicit in the different-culture malus.

If you want to be able to respect the culture of one of your secondary titles' land but not another, just make the crown law associated to these secondary titles so you can choose as you like. So you can have a Roman empire very tolerant with italians but very hostile to their newly conquered turk subjects.

It also implies that you can add a lot more cultures for historical flavor without making gameplay difficult in very culturally-fractured places like Iberia. You can have Galician, Leonese and Aragonese without incurring revolts, manpower/tax penalties or opinion maluses.

 

[Rubidium]

Interesting topic! A few of my thoughts:

• I like the idea of a "don't care about this title" checkbox; it could easily go on the window for that title
• I also like the idea of allowing de jure drift of secondary title land into your primary title. Just add some prestige weight to the titles to limit AI silliness (Rome=Persia>Byzantium=HRE>Latin Empire>Francia>everything else seems like a reasonable hierarchy to make the AI make sensible choices.
  
• Speaking of the Latin Empire, are they going to get any love with the titular title overwork?
• Reducing opinion maluses for multiple duchy titles for kings: my only concern with this is to make sure that the AI still tends to give out titles regularly, to enable vassal play.
• For multiple Empire titles, my only concern is how it affects the balance of factions (independence vs. Duke X for title vs. change succession law for title)

 

[KillerCRS]

I think most of the Emperor titles ought to be replaced with a decision that destroys all of the constituent Kingdoms and gives you a unique king-level title "High King of xyz". There are very few historical examples of Kings being subservient to Emperors in the scope of the game (Bohemia under the HRE and Thessalonica under the Latin Empire is all that immediately comes to mind). The unification of England, for example, did not see the House of Wessex declaring themselves Emperors of England, the other Kingdoms faded to irrelevance in the face of the unified English Kingdom.

As far as I'm concerned, the title of "Emperor" in Europe during the medieval period has very strict connotations and connections to Rome. This taboo wasn't really broken until Napoleon came along, unless you count the Slavic tsardoms. Only the states that claimed Roman successor status during the frame of the game (HRE, ERE, Latin Empire, and Bulgaria*) have any business declaring themselves an Empire.

*With regard to Bulgaria, I guess their unique case could introduce a new mechanic. The Khans of Bulgaria declared themselves Tsars after decisively defeating the ERE in 913. With that in mind, these High Kingdoms I talked about before could become Empires if they decisively defeat the Empire of their particular branch of Christianity (Catholics defeating the HRE, Orthodox Christians defeating the ERE), but they would get a large malus with the head of their branch of Christianity. There shouldn't be any Kingdoms under them, though. I guess heretics should be able to form whatever Empire they want as they don't respect Papal/Patriarchal authority.

I don't know enough about the rest of the world to comment on their title-forming mechanics.

 

[Red Earth]

I'm wondering about how the dismiss alert button works. Does it not come back the next time there's a new alert, because I just assumed it could dismiss a title creation alert and it would pop up again if a new title became available. Thus I didn't think the title button was a problem.

The two duchies limit didn't bother me because it just feels so basic to the game, like the number of cards in your hand in poker. However one solution I heard was to not have the opinion mails if you're gavelkind succession. Could go further and have duchies default to gavelkind succession under some circumstances. Like if they're outside your capital kingdom, or if you don't have a county title within them, or duchy limit could vary by government. Vassal limits alone have often forced me to give out kingdoms anyway, so I can't imagine wanting to hold many duke titles with the many count vassals that come with it. I get the logic of vassals being mad that a king has duchy titles cuz "you're a king, duke titles should be going to us", but if you don't have a kingdom there shouldn't be a limit because you can't give them out without granting independence.

Regarding titular titles, I don't see much point of making them if you have a higher rank title, but if you don't then it's good for creating new kingdom, although not needed if you have 'create custom kingdom' and I'm fine waiting for drift. Titular duchies are different because nothing can drift into them so it seems like they should have a decision.
If it does become decision based one question I have is what happens if a title becomes titular because everything drifts out if it? Does it then get a decision of its own to restore it, or does it go by the old rules and it is created by the capital holder and they wait for things to drift back?

Multiple empire titles seem like, for lack of an era appropriate term, a "first world problem". Too many crowns, not enough heads? Boo boo. Suck it up, buttercup.
However one way to go might be to have a reverse gavelkind effect (if not gavelkind obviously) where extra empire titles are destroyed on succession if they're going to the same person. Still, the problem of too much empire seems like a problem many would be glad to have.

 

[Snow Crystal]

• Speaking of the Latin Empire, are they going to get any love with the titular title overwork?

To answer this directly. The titular title changes is done on a per-title basis, rather than an overhaul of the system. So as it stands right now, I don't think the Latin Empire will have any changes made to it.

If it does become decision based one question I have is what happens if a title becomes titular because everything drifts out if it? Does it then get a decision of its own to restore it, or does it go by the old rules and it is created by the capital holder and they wait for things to drift back?.

As I make the decisions manually, normal titles would just turn into titular akin to how they work at the moment. It is more a change made to stop the flooding of titular titles from different bookmarks popping up, rather than reworking the whole system.

 

[Tarvok]

TBH, I feel like the static "de jure" map was a mistake that ought to go away with either CK3 or some overhaul that turns CK2 into Ck2.9995. *All* titles should be created "by decision" (even if we keep those decisions on a separate screen). There should be all kinds of overlapping titles, each related to different cultures with different ideas on how the map should be drawn (and the custom title option should also be there). And Empires should be "universal" in scope; empires lay claim to the entire world, and thus there is no room for a single polity holding "multiple empires"; their empire is The Empire. And there should be a substantial opinion malus between separate emperors.

 

[dylanfellows]

Honestly this all sounds just like ways to dumb down the game and accelerate map-painting. Which is totally fine with game rules and mods that can spike the difficulty back up. But I don't see any actual gameplay benefit to increasing or removing the limit of duchies.

 

[Avil]

I'm probably late to the party, but i would like to share my thoughts on the topic of discussion:
1) duchies. Sure, if you're duke, duchy limit doesn't make much sense. Main issue is amount of vassals you can control when you're a duke. But when you're higher, it probably would be better for duchies, you control all counties in, to be "free". General strategy for that kind of duchies is "destroy the title, noone gonna care anyway". So maybe make them "lesser", i.e. more like honorary titles that give prestige and don't get penalized, and probably keep political bonuses (to give actual purpose for not ignoring that mechanic)? That way you can control more duchies with actual vassals, and it motivates proper centralization, plus vassals would be mad about titles that actually matter.
As a side point, it would be cool to give an option to ignore uncreated duchies outside of your "direct" control, i.e. under your vassals de jure.
3) It was always a mess to change laws for kingdoms, but for empires it's even worse. I always thought it would be better if all secondary empires inherited all laws from your primary title, and counted as "lesser" titles, i.e. just an addition to qualities of your primary title. It still'll be possible for titles to get separated if some big rebellion happen, but lesser empire title not gonna mean anything under already existing one, excepting total score and amount of time a herald requires to properly introduce Your Highness.

 

[Caspoi]

How about removing the title creation button and have title creation done by decision instead? Also if you change it to decision you could allow for example allow other religions create the kingdom of Jerusalem without gaining the huge amount of piety. So you could change the create Israel decision to instead create Jerusalem but if the holder is Jewish it's name changes along with it's flag? Similarly a non Christian or Jew who creates it will instead create it and it will be called Palestine and have a different flag? Arguably I find many of the flags through out the middle east a bit strange giving how if you do not have a religion that replaces the flags they will often be covered in crosses and Christian symbols perhaps alternative flags for other religions?

I agree with the idea regarding the Kingdom of Jerusalem overall but would probably limit the name of "Jerusalem" to Catholics as it was exclusively the name of the Crusader state. Orthdox rulers (primarily Byzantium) should call it Palestine.

 

[Voigt]

TBH, I feel like the static "de jure" map was a mistake that ought to go away with either CK3 or some overhaul that turns CK2 into Ck2.9995. *All* titles should be created "by decision" (even if we keep those decisions on a separate screen). There should be all kinds of overlapping titles, each related to different cultures with different ideas on how the map should be drawn (and the custom title option should also be there). And Empires should be "universal" in scope; empires lay claim to the entire world, and thus there is no room for a single polity holding "multiple empires"; their empire is The Empire. And there should be a substantial opinion malus between separate emperors.

I would agree that ahistorical de-Jure Maps are really difficult, but it makes sense for existing Empires. So HRE Empire with an dejure Bohemian King vassall, which has himself de-jure subjects.
I still don't like that there are de-jure Empires beside HRE, ERE, Abassids, and maybe Ethopia, Persia, Mongolia and India.
But I also can see that it would be lots of work to make dozens, if not hundreds of decisions to create Kingdoms/Empires for every possible combination of geographic location, religion and culture.

 

[WJS]

What is the justification for de jure territories, anyway? I get how they work in the game, but especially at the early dates, is there really a "every one knows that's part of England" thing going on?

 

[KillerCRS]

What is the justification for de jure territories, anyway? I get how they work in the game, but especially at the early dates, is there really a "every one knows that's part of England" thing going on?

The Norman Kings of England continued to swear fealty to the Kings of France when acting as Duke of Normandy for about 100 years.

 

[Caeserion]

What is the justification for de jure territories, anyway? I get how they work in the game, but especially at the early dates, is there really a "every one knows that's part of England" thing going on?

Kings in Europe were initially not King of X but rather King of X people. They claimed dominion over all people with a shared cultural identity - Rex Francorum, Rex Angles, etc. This trend survived well into the middle ages. Eg: Canute the Great had his official title as King of the English, the Norwegians, the Danish and some of the Swedes. It was only later that they dropped the title King of X people and took the title King of X (I believe Philip Augustus of France was the first to do so in 1190). Over time, people settled for easily defined territories rather than nebulous culture (plus it made administration easier).

Since you know where your people live you legally claim them and their lands as part of your kingdom. By that logic the game should have CBs to allow you to conquer any land with your culture but since culture shifts randomly in CK2 its hard. Plus its probably easier to set defined territories in-game.

But if thats too weak to you then remember that people often have an idea of a larger union and have done so for centuries. The numerous kingdoms of India all identified with the idea of Bharat and aspired to unite it - no one managed this till the british and even they ruled over client kingdoms for a large portion rather than direct rule. Genghis Khan probably only sought to unite the steppe but ventured further due to diplomatic insults and vengeance (stupid Khwarzemians). King of Great Britain was around as an idea before anyone claimed it, as were numerous other 'titles' now lost to history.