Does the Form Portugal decision make sense?

[Meka66]

It is one of the decisions that really should have been revised post Royal Court IMHO.

Alas, you're right. Unfortunately we don't have infinite time and resources, and there was a desire to touch up this decision specifically with Royal Court and Fate of Iberia, but both had other priorities or complications.

I managed to touch up the Outremer culture for Royal Court only because Outremer culture isn't tied to any historical characters in the database while Portuguese, English, Norman, Swedish, etc. all either exist in the history files or in the 1066 start date so changing them would be much more complex. It's something I'd like to change, but it's a matter of time unfortunately.

 

[Meka66]

Saying you don't have infinite time and resources baffles the mind. If you can't properly depict the region you're making an entire DLC about, perhaps rethink your release strategy. An Iberian DLC shouldn't neglect 1 of the 2 countries that currently populate the peninsula. The same happened in EU4 with Golden Century, where Portugal got shafted in favor of focus on the Spanish kingdoms.

Hold up, not having the time to update one old decision to use new mechanics of another DLC is not reason enough to cancel the entire expansion.

Like I wanna update these old decisions to use the new mechanics, but the realities of game development mean that other things get priority. Had we decided to focus on this one thing instead of something else, that something else would now have a thread on the forums asking about it.

For the EU4 thing, we are different teams. Completely different people made that expansion, and I can't speak for their decision making process.

I'd much rather have the devs admit they just didn't realize somehow (which would still be terrible but perhaps excusable to a certain degree)

But that would be a lie, I did realise this is something that could have been done, other things just got priority, and that is beyond my control.

Ones where Paradox admits that they were aware something wasn't up to snuff

Now let's make something quite clear, I am not Mr Paradox. We're not a hive-mind, and my forum account isn't the official company account for making announcements and stuff. Lord knows I wouldn't be able to write half the stuff I do if I were.

I am a designer on Crusader Kings, one of several. When I use words like "I" and "me", I am talking literally. I personally want to update these things, that doesn't mean the entire company or development team agrees that this is something we should do. When you reply to me on the forums, you are replying to me personally as a designer on CK3, not Paradox as a company.

Like if you all want me to engage here, answer questions, talk about our process, read through suggestions and ideas, you need to understand I am just a guy on the team.

 

[Meka66]

Could we at least get an option to form it as a king?

I'd like that too, it's one of those decisions that has been around for a long time, and at some point I'd like to do a broad sweep of them and make changes where it makes sense.

 

[Meka66]

Not to mention you must control EVERY historical Portuguese duchy (Portucale, Coimbra, Beja and Algarve) in order to unlock de decision, which is absurd considering half of this territory was controlled when the kingdom was actually founded. And of course, the choices for Portuguese culture traditions are pretty weird.

IMO, you should only need two duchies (Portucale and Coimbra) and get claims in the other two, and maybe add a certain era or innovation trigger so the thing could happen around 1100s (like historically did), but I'm not sure about the last one.

Part of the difficulty with doing that is we need to be mindful of what could potentially be happening in the game at that point. It's possible that you are playing as Badajoz, and you're about to become the king when suddenly the duke of Portucale takes this decision and now most of your kingdom is no longer de jure. It's a potential point of very high frustration for the player.

I agree that the decision needs some tweaks and changes, but when doing so we need to be mindful of what other potential problems this can open up.

By the way, this would also be a nice opportunity to revise the "Unite the Spanish Thrones" decision, which is way overpowered and prevents further Castile and Leon splits like historically happened in 1157 (death of Alfonso VII). I would rather have two sepparate decisions about combining León and Galicia (especially if the later is smaller because Portugal already exists as a De Jure Kingdom, thus) and auto-drifting Toledo into Castile. That way you would have a more historical realm consolidation. And then, maybe, another "combine Leon and Castile" for the Late Middle Ages (1200>) or something like that (union of the realms within the Crown of Castile).

Ah yes, the giga-kingdoms decisions. I did revise one of them once, specifically the "Unite the West Slavs" decision. Some people seem to really like them, when I removed giga-Poland from the game, it lead to a very lengthy Reddit post describing why they dislike this.

Personally, I'd want to do a sweep and make the kingdom merging decisions do something else, but I'm not so convinced this is something that would be uncontroversial haha.

The required duchies match real life Portugal. Even though it was recognized by the Pope as a kingdom in the later half of the 12th century as a kingdom, it really wasn’t much of a kingdom until it reached the southern coast.

Part of what restricts us from doing something like this is our de-jure mechanics don't really allow for something to be doubly de-jure. So we wouldn't be able to have a scenario where Christians view the duchies as de-jure Portugal, and the Muslims do not.

Since de-jure shift is slow, I see why the decision was originally implemented the way it is, but it should definitely be revised at some point to both be more accurate to history and more engaging to enact because I broadly agree, I would also like to see Portugal come into existence more often