Okay, follow up on this statement. match_mult looks at neither total garrison or total levy. I'm still working out exactly what it's looking at though.
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Event troops function based on pre-2.0 levy values
- Thread starter Mann42
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I will, but I feel like I need to validate the data more. I'm getting some different results now that imply crown law and opinion modifiers are considered in some way, so I want to be 100% sure so I can provide Paradox with good data.
It seems like the largest discrepancies I find with match_mult are in large kingdoms and empires, so now I'm leaning towards the possibility that it's only ignoring the new de jure penalties - which is still the crux of my observation but not nearly as bad as I thought it was. If they're already taking laws/opinion into account when determining the event troop size, it seems easy enough to simply add the vassal holding penalties into the calc.
Nothing makes me sadder than to see people defend a bug as an intended change, when fixing the bug would ultimately make it easier to implement things the way they want, if Paradox actually wanted to, or mod them, if they don't.
Wow this is definitely the post of the month for me. Excellent finding and with the little bit of tinkering I have been doing, I know finding this could not have been easy.
I do hope the Paradox devs take the time to sort through your post, it definitely helps make sense of the wrongness I have felt since the patch was released. Hopefully we can get a proper patch out and go back to actually playing our feudal simulator.
I do hope the Paradox devs take the time to sort through your post, it definitely helps make sense of the wrongness I have felt since the patch was released. Hopefully we can get a proper patch out and go back to actually playing our feudal simulator.
I hope they leave this alone
For the first time someone liberated East Francia(Old Gods DLC) in the game I'm playing and formed Germany
Never knew Germany could be made in CK2
And sometimes Cultural or Religious rebellions even win!
It's awesome
I think most of us in this thread think revolts should succeed more often than they did previously and are really just looking for someone to sanity check all of these calculations (as they currently result in some rather out-there troop counts). For the record, though, East Francia IS Germany just with a Karling on the throne.
De jure penalties at least seem like they would be the most dramatic factor, considering their potent effect in game.
This is an aside to what you're investigating currently but I was thinking... I wouldn't mind if it didn't take in to account the full penalty for very large empires. The numbers can be pretty out of sight for empires, but they still seem to hold together more often than they ought. To me, it seems medium-sized kingdoms/dukedoms suffer the most from the current calculations, effectively being unable to defend against any event firing without significant cash on hand. Any thoughts on this? Would it make sense to leave some "adjustment factor" in that diminished the "de jure" factor's impact on the computation at "very large" empire levels? This all assuming they clear up how the computation is working...
My concern is that, if the calculation doesn't take vassalization penalties into account, then it encourages ahistorical types of gameplay, such as North Korea mode and the kingdom of counts strategy, since those minimize the de jure penalties. If the calculation takes de jure penalties into account, but the event troops are balanced to be larger, then the resulting challenge will be consistent to all players, regardless of whether they play historically by handing out titles or try to beat the system by using North Korea mode. 150% of what you have will actually be 150% of what you have, instead of right now where it's 200% of what a legitimate player has and 100% of what a North Korea mode player has.
That's fair. Perhaps it would make more sense if, say, an empire of 200 counties, faced 150% while a kingdom of 25 would face 100%. Those are just arbitrary numbers, should probably scale rather than threshold. Would resolve my question without making it dependent on the penalty at all. To further discourage NK Mode and it's absurdness, the % could increase based on how much over your limit you were? Anyway, I won't derail the main purpose of this thread any further. Just wanted to throw out some other ideas about what the calculation could leverage to keep up the challenge were it changed to consider de jure penalties.
Thanks for the great post! I am relatively new to the game, but still find it weird that some random guys just amassed thrice what the Byzantine Emperor can and invaded.
Again, Paradox have not been thorough in their testing, especially testing on later stages of the game when countries grew larger.
Again, Paradox have not been thorough in their testing, especially testing on later stages of the game when countries grew larger.
Well, I do see where you're coming from, but I think it would also require a discussion about the very nature of the 2.0 liege levy bonuses/penalties and why it was designed such that having 200 counties is so much preferable to having dukes or kings.
An interesting side effect of properly scaling to the player's actual levies, including penalties, is that players who play properly and take all those vassal penalties to levies on the chin will actually be facing comparatively smaller event troops, and their ability to purchase mercs can turn the tide. If you've played in such as a way as to optimize your levy too much, then the gap between your 100% and the event troop 150% will grow so large that no amount of mercs and holy orders can save you. It would actually be smarter to play in such a way to balance your overall levies so you have enough to face your enemies but not so many that you can't use mercs/holy orders to face revolts and event troops.
For example, imagine I'm playing an NK mode empire that can draw 100k in levies. Now imagine the same empire is drawing 25k levies when played properly with vassals and whatnot.
- An event troop rebellion of 150% spawns. For the NK player, that's 150k troops. For the proper player, that's 37.5k.
- As the NK player, I'd have to buy up every single merc and holy order and they will definitely still be at a deficiency. As the proper player, it will be expensive, but I can draw on my savings to hire enough mercs/holy orders to numerically turn the tide.
Personally, I think that the very nature of percentages solves a lot of the problems people are complaining about, and that making it even more convoluted will simply lead to more exploitation and optimization that goes counter to the spirit of the game. True percentages are also nice because it gives you a perfectly calculatable baseline from which to balance from, which is something I feel Paradox has obfuscated too much for both themselves and for us as players.
In the end, I feel that properly balancing the event troop calculation is the first step, followed by changing the percentages to fit the intent of making rebellions/events scary, followed at the very end with tweaks and scaling adjustments based on titles, etc.
Oh, and I updated the OP with some new data, which has altered some of my conclusion but in some ways looks even worse than before.
Agreed. The less obfuscated the better, and that change alone will at least make "NK Mode" not the end-all it currently is and give us a better baseline. As long as it doesn't make event troops a complete non-factor (as they were before), it's nothing but an improvement.
Great post, Mann! I hope Paradox notices the weirdness of their formula.
I would like to see them add a new modifier for event troops. A multiplier for being over the demesne limit. So if you are 150/10, the Event troops have 15x than if you are at 10/10.
That should radically kill NK mode.
I would like to see them add a new modifier for event troops. A multiplier for being over the demesne limit. So if you are 150/10, the Event troops have 15x than if you are at 10/10.
That should radically kill NK mode.
That's one thing I'm worried about. I like that event troops are a threat; I just don't like the absurd numbers of troops they get. I don't want to see them nerfed to irrelevance; I just want their numbers to at least be plausible.
I think I discovered the reason for this while playing last night. The answer is that it is only preferable in theory, but not necessarily in practice. Because the number of levy troops that vassals give you is based in part on their opinion of you, the system takes into account the relative ease of keeping vassals happy enough to give the max levies.
I had a large empire with duke level vassals. While growing the empire it was easy to keep the dukes content. However, when I reached the point of having 80+ duke vassals, faction maintenance became a full-time job. Even with a vassal Pope giving my about 120 gold a month in taxes and excommunicating whoever I want, I realized that I was never going to be able to get max troops or stop an independence faction from firing at some point. I decided to see what would happen if I created king titles and passed them out. The end result was that the total levies supplied by vassals increased. The levies from de jure territories was greatly reduced, but levies from non-de jure territories increased more than enough to make up for it. The reason was that keeping one non-de jure vassal happy was a lot easier than keeping a bunch of them happy.
Obviously, that's just one game, but it appears that for practical reasons creating all the feudal levels in non-de jure territories makes sense under the new system.
A potential problem that I have with this is that scaling event troops to the actual levies a player can draw at the moment the troops are spawned could in theory reward bad decisions. Because of the vassal opinion component to vassal levies, a ruler who went tyrannical and pissed everyone off might see fewer event troops than a good ruler. If event troops represent people rallying against the ruler, that would seem to be the opposite of what should happen.
An off the top of my head idea is to not use vassal levies at all in the calculation. Event troops could be based off of a ruler's demesne levies and retinue cap. Because actual retinue numbers are less than the cap for most players, the max event troops will be greater than what a ruler can handle on his own. People playing the game as a feudal lord could bridge the numbers gap by calling up vassal levies. That would not be an option in NK mode. Of course, that has the disadvantage of requiring LoR and I haven't thought it all the through.
Saw this good post/thread only now. Definitely deserves more attention.
However, I would prefer a +10% modifier for every point over the domain limit. That would shut this playstyle down completely.
I think that would be a great solution.I would like to see them add a new modifier for event troops. A multiplier for being over the demesne limit. So if you are 150/10, the Event troops have 15x than if you are at 10/10.
That should radically kill NK mode.
However, I would prefer a +10% modifier for every point over the domain limit. That would shut this playstyle down completely.
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My personal opinion is there are 2 major issues with the new levy system.
1- the fact that you get significantly more troops from NK > Count only > Duke only > King level vassals is a problem in and of itself, it goes counter to the spirit of the feudal system. If it was only slightly less, I could accept it has a trade off for the ease of managing fewer vassal (I wont go into the kings vs dukes management issues though).
2- Event troops, particularly the ones at the TOG start date don't seem to take the significantly reduces levies into consideration, we've seen something similar when TOG came out and the 1066 Stamford bridge starting troops for William the Bastard were way too low. I won't blame PDox for the oversight, there are so many variables, it's really hard to catch them all.
That leads me to the goal of the levy nerf, what was the reason behind the levy rework, was it to make blobing harder? If so, it does hinder blobing but only slightly, once I gain a certain size, I'll do most of my fighting with retinues, I may have used troops from levies to fight on two fronts at the same time before I got an obnoxious number of retinue so it does slow down early blobing but only slightly.
Was it done to make large empires harder to maintain? Technically rebel kings or dukes would now have more levies that an Emperor but again retinues will often trump that advantage, beside, with high diplo, it's fairly easy to maintain an Empire content and faction free. It does however encourage going count only (if not NK) and can make a small king or duke too vulnerable to early factions.
Was it done to make prepared invasions more successful? I rarely noticed successful invasions pre 2.0 but, I now see a lot more of them, as it gone up too high? I don't know, I have paid enough attention to tell.
Was it solely done to hinder the AI from blobing? I don't have enough info to tell if that's the case or not, I've seen the different Karling realms gobble up each other often only to break apart after a few generations.
1- the fact that you get significantly more troops from NK > Count only > Duke only > King level vassals is a problem in and of itself, it goes counter to the spirit of the feudal system. If it was only slightly less, I could accept it has a trade off for the ease of managing fewer vassal (I wont go into the kings vs dukes management issues though).
2- Event troops, particularly the ones at the TOG start date don't seem to take the significantly reduces levies into consideration, we've seen something similar when TOG came out and the 1066 Stamford bridge starting troops for William the Bastard were way too low. I won't blame PDox for the oversight, there are so many variables, it's really hard to catch them all.
That leads me to the goal of the levy nerf, what was the reason behind the levy rework, was it to make blobing harder? If so, it does hinder blobing but only slightly, once I gain a certain size, I'll do most of my fighting with retinues, I may have used troops from levies to fight on two fronts at the same time before I got an obnoxious number of retinue so it does slow down early blobing but only slightly.
Was it done to make large empires harder to maintain? Technically rebel kings or dukes would now have more levies that an Emperor but again retinues will often trump that advantage, beside, with high diplo, it's fairly easy to maintain an Empire content and faction free. It does however encourage going count only (if not NK) and can make a small king or duke too vulnerable to early factions.
Was it done to make prepared invasions more successful? I rarely noticed successful invasions pre 2.0 but, I now see a lot more of them, as it gone up too high? I don't know, I have paid enough attention to tell.
Was it solely done to hinder the AI from blobing? I don't have enough info to tell if that's the case or not, I've seen the different Karling realms gobble up each other often only to break apart after a few generations.
You won't believe what happened to me. In my new game as king of France, I had a faction war where a duke claimed my throne. As I was about to lose, "loyalists flocked to my banner", allowing me to win the decisive battle. :happy:
That's great -- too bad we don't see the loyalists show up as an actual faction...
I wonder what Dracko would say to this post, haven't seen any of those loyalists yet.