Forum Consensus and Opinions on Coalitions?

[User29]

Please hit "agree" if you like coalitions for game balance and/or think it's historically accurate and/or plausible that defensive coalitions are in the game. I'd love if you commented on why

Please hit "disagree" if you think coalitions are a misplaced anachronism that doesn't make sense for the time frame and breaks your immersion? I'd love if you commented on why

Please hit "helpful" if you want to snicker about not contributing but still making your mark.
You can still comment, especially if it makes other people snicker




So anyway I've played the game a long time without the coalitions and now have had a long game with them and I gotta say, getting 50% threat for holy warring Portucale and -12% threat for the crusade of Andalusia has pretty much cemented my dislike of the feature, while I can appreciate that it slows down blobbing and makes the game harder it just jars me cause it strikes a chord of implausibility, not because "your enemies enemy is scary and we must stop them" but because the timeframe really doesn't have any notion of these coalitions, the Mongols took everything one by one, there was no coalition of the Mamluks and Poland but you can take much less land as the Mongols and find a coalition several times stronger than that

With all that said, I'm not actually mad about coalitions, I'm just sort of miffed and dislike the feature, I'm hoping it's an option that can be turned off in the future but worse case scenario I'll just mod it out.

It's especially irksome when the threat percentages seem so... all over the place as with my 4 province holy war compared to Iberia spanning crusade.

 

[BrokenSky]

My opinion is that the idea is good, but the implementation could stand to be better, for example diplomatic vassalization should not generate threat, and de jure wars should probably generate basically none. On the other hand, a prepared invasion of England vs. Mercia should probably make all the other anglo-saxon realms form a defence pact. But yeah, CB should strongly affect it, as well as strong vs. weak claims. (Strong claims should get reduction). Holy war should matter more to people of the religion you HW into than other religions etc.

But the feature should be there; it just needs a bit of a rebalance.

 

[Notho]

I'm not a fan of most of the Conclave changes. It's the only dlc I have turned off besides Sunset Invasion.

I would probably use it if some of the features were reworked, though.

 

[Hector of Troy]

I dislike it entirely. Here are my reasons:

1- It's ahistorical and immersion breaking. I don't find it realistic having to fight a world coalition against my realm under no circumstances.

2- It makes for boring gameplay. Deciding between fighting the world or sitting around and doing nothing doesn't seem like engaging or fun gameplay to me.

Moreover, coalitions seem to displease, in general, both blobbers and blobbing haters. Both sides will often agree coalitions are an undesired artificial limitation. Since this feature is already water under the bridge, despite the hundreds of down votes it received when the respective developer diary announced the new mechanics, my humble suggestions to developers are:

1- Make this feature optional - which I believe will happen in the next patch.

2- Reinstate pre-ROI faction system and also make it optional on the menu. This would allow players to decide whether they want instability and RNG factors to play a more decisive role in rebellions or not. If enabled, rebellions should once again be tougher and carry more unpredictable outcomes.

This I believe would please everyone and cover all personal preferences. Players would then decide between playing CK2 as is; turn off coalitions; or revive the former faction system. Everybody wins.

 

[Tatterhood]

I tend to be on the side that the idea of defensive pacts is not so bad, but the specific details make them both annoying and immersion-breaking. Like if I'm a Norse king conquering Finland one province at a time, it seems reasonable that the various Finnish tribes would consider teaming up against me. It seems much less reasonable that my fellow Norseman would join that same defensive pact just because they're also "pagan". (Especially if I'm the Fylkir!)

I think what would help a lot would be if AI rulers were smarter about who they consider threatening. Instead of a single "threat level", each ruler should have their own idea of how much of a threat they consider you, based on your past actions. For instance: if you conquer a province, that increases your threat rating more with rulers close to that province than it does with rulers who might be close to you but in a direction you haven't been expanding. It could take into account other factors like: rulers who don't like you or who you've already fought wars against might get scared faster than ones you have good relations with, rulers of other religions get scared faster than ones of your religion, etc. This is also where the CB used can affect things: holy wars don't scare rulers of your own religion, but might scare rulers of other religions more than usual. De jure wars only scare rulers who are in your de jure territory.

(Whether or not this could reasonably implemented in the game as it exists, I don't know.)

 

[theStormWeaver]

I distinctly remember how annoyed I (and lots of people on the forums) were with nonsensical AI behavior regarding juggernaut empires. You'd watch a cluster of small realms sit by and do nothing as a neighbor kingdom would slowly gobble them all up. If they had banded together to defend themselves early on, they'd all be fine.

I think Coalitions are a great addition that have added a strategic dimension to blobbing. You now have to consider the rate at which you blob; strategic marriages *actually matter* now.

 

[zharliette]

I dislike Coalitons mainly because they have made the forum really boring and repetitive.

 

[RagingJaws]

Biased set of options you have there.

Coalitions fall into two separate situations. They are either useless because the player is already strong enough to wipe out any organized defense or pointless due to lack of casus belli to use. Plus, the AI doesn't organize themselves all too well into them. It's simply another system in game that I occasionally take a look at but it has yet to affect my playing style, which is often simply methodical carving up of realms province by province, preferably into my personal demesne before handing out, when I get the chance. I don't break truces. I don't push claimants

My experience so far:

• Catholic English Kingdom (lack of enough casus belli to be truly threatening to other realms)
• Norse Republic (Varied cultural and religious realms don't band together fast enough before I have the upper hand. No limit on attacking, so I'm only held back by my love of raiding)
• Byzantine Empire (Same as the Norse Republic, replace raiding with holy warring, with the addition of being much stronger militarily than several coalitions worth)

I've yet to play another Muslim game since buying sword of Islam way back. Did not like decadence as it was, though I haven't tried it since it was changed. As for Nomads, can't really stand it. I've tried a few separate games so far that all peter out from lack of interest. The worst thing about play a Nomad is feeling under-strength all the time though that might be just bad playing on my part.

 

[Fishman786]

If a war doesn't result in the revocation of any titles it shouldn't cause any infamy, IMO. And revoking titles from people whom you've just conquered should.

 

[kmh42]

Please hit "agree" if you like coalitions for game balance

No agree or disagree.

think it's historically accurate

I don't mind very much about historical accuracy

plausible that defensive coalitions are in the game

Agree

Please hit "disagree" if you think coalitions are a misplaced anachronism that doesn't make sense for the time frame and breaks your immersi

No disagree on that

Let me expand my opinion on this from a post I made a while ago

Defensive pacts and threat
I don't hate it but I don't love it. The cool thing is it adds a little bit more depth. Rulers around you care when you grab a huge area of land. It also make me think about a little bit more who I am going to attack and which one I marry with. But it doesn't scale good. It get really fast out of hand when a certain level of realm size is reached. When I am a huge Empire which can field ten thousands of man and I conquer two duchies and I see the rest of the map, who I have no alliance or NAP with, against me. No matter which culture, religion or even if they are at war against each other. This is not only stupid from a immersion point of view. The AI is not closely able to handle this large scale wars. Neither on the defensive side nor as the attackers (see Mongols). So the best way is to avoid threat and don't expand fast or completely ignore it and conquer anyway^^. For me there is much potential in this mechanic but it still needs a lot of work.

There are many little problems that make this feature so much questionable.

1. The reason why the devs included this feature was to stop or to slow aggressive expansion. It failed this goal!
2. Different rulers banding together to protect eachother against a common enemy is a highly diplomatic act, but there is absolutely no diplomacy involved. Opinion and culture doesn't play a role at all in those alliance nor does religion nor distance play a role at a certain stage . (Patch 2.5 was not a good day for foreign diplomacy, looking at you aCtA and unbreakable NAPs or random NAP.
3. The AI in it's current state is able to handle this large scale wars. With all these failed army movment, siege canceling, not attaching and war prioritization.

I stay with "I don't hate it but I don't love it". It could be such an interesting feature but it's too simple and not thought fully through.

 

[Silversweeeper]

I like the concept but dislike the implementation. The idea of other realms banding together against an aggressor, particularly if they are much smaller than the aggressor, makes a lot of sense, but it makes very little sense when rulers with no presence in the area you expand into are as horrified by the expansion as the guy you just attacked even if you attacked their mortal foe or attacked someone well beyond their diplomatic range.

 

[Bernard95]

For me, I can't say I love them but they tend not be as big of a deal as some people make them out to be. If you're like a Christian king or lower you're probably not even going to notice your threat level at all, especially if your primary means of expansion is just fabrication. When you do a bigger claim war or holy war, you can afford to just let it burn for a few years- alternating between war and peace. It's when you start to get a bit bigger into empire-tier when the threat starts to become a problem and when you see things like 50% for a single duchy, but after a certain point (let's say Restored Roman Empire or Abbasid size) you can simply ignore the defensive pacts and blitzkrieg your way to victory.

At times the defensive pact system makes complete sense- if for example you're holy warring the Baltic like crazy trying to form the Wendish Empire, then all of the Pagans in the area start banding together. At other times you end up with nations across the world banding together for nearly no reason and you see such silliness as the Pope becoming paranoid because you took some land over in India. Regardless, I agree with others who like the concept but the see the implementation as poor. If anything the defensive pacts should always be locked to geographic regions and threat should be reduced when simply pressing de jure claims, vassalizing, or inheriting.

Edit: And as someone else suggested, doing pacts by culture group wouldn't be a terrible suggestion either. EU4 does something similar with its AE system.

 

[Naughtius Maximus]

I go this game back in February, and basically have never lived without coalitions.

They have never stopped me yet, and at worst they kept me in a 10 year long war for Italy as Byzantine Emperor. Did I mention worst? I meant awesome. Frankly it's disgustingly easy to bypass or even confront coalitions, one of the reasons why I always find people who complain about them.....lacking in some categories. Especially those who claim roleplaying/immersion as their goal yet are running into coalition issues. They're basically blobbers being dishonest about blobbing.

 

[BeyondExpectation]

There was a great thread I can’t find suggesting that coalitions be groups defined by a single attribute that function as an alliance against different attributes, e.g. a Christian league that forms as a mutual defensive alliance against heathen attacks, but not against Christians, or a series of Irish culture minors in a mutual defensive alliance against anyone who attacks of a different culture.

 

[klopkr]

I like the new ones when they're at a reasonable size. It lets OPMs gang up on me a bit. I wish there were other systems for them to band together though. Like a league or a 'federation'.

 

[clockworkBabbag]

I tend to be on the side that the idea of defensive pacts is not so bad, but the specific details make them both annoying and immersion-breaking. Like if I'm a Norse king conquering Finland one province at a time, it seems reasonable that the various Finnish tribes would consider teaming up against me. It seems much less reasonable that my fellow Norseman would join that same defensive pact just because they're also "pagan". (Especially if I'm the Fylkir!)

I think what would help a lot would be if AI rulers were smarter about who they consider threatening. Instead of a single "threat level", each ruler should have their own idea of how much of a threat they consider you, based on your past actions. For instance: if you conquer a province, that increases your threat rating more with rulers close to that province than it does with rulers who might be close to you but in a direction you haven't been expanding. It could take into account other factors like: rulers who don't like you or who you've already fought wars against might get scared faster than ones you have good relations with, rulers of other religions get scared faster than ones of your religion, etc. This is also where the CB used can affect things: holy wars don't scare rulers of your own religion, but might scare rulers of other religions more than usual. De jure wars only scare rulers who are in your de jure territory.

(Whether or not this could reasonably implemented in the game as it exists, I don't know.)

It's definitely true that the reasons defensive pacts feel so weird with regards to who wants to join a defensive pact against you is that threat does not function like AE. Instead of everyone else having their own opinion of you, you have one threat value that everyone else sees as exactly the same. So in EU4 it's pretty easy to tune who find what to be threatening expansion, while in CK2 it's absolutely not. Unfortunately, it's just not feasible in CK2 to track threat like that; in EU4 you have only a few hundred countries, but in CK2 you have thousands of characters.

So, since we're probably stuck with threat rating being how it is, tuning who joins defensive pacts requires solutions outside just messing with threat. Make it so that nations can't join a defensive pact against you unless you've attacked someone in their religious group in the last however many years. That way you still have threat being how, well, threatening and warlike you are in general, but people are only going to be able to join a defensive pact against you if you've actually shown that you will be a threat to them.

 

[pesco77]

Coalitions created in response to threat need to be generated within the bounds of a de jure empire, and the effect of threat should be reduced with distance. This way, there won't be coalitions formed by people who have nothing to do with each other, and at a certain point, others just won't care what's happening on the other side of Europe.

So for a large empire, you might have various local coalitions: The Muslim coalition of Arabia, the Muslim coalition of Persia, the Christian coalition of Britannia, the Christian coalition of Italia. Pushing the Muslims out of Iberia might alarm the Arabian Muslims, but doesn't really threaten the Muslims in Abyssinia too much.

Also, as pointed out in the OP, what generates threat needs to be fixed. Holy Wars and Crusades should generate very little threat for those of the same faith, high threat for those of the target faith, and average threat for those of a third religion. Winning de jure wars should generate less threat. Conquest or Invasion CBs should generate higher threat, in comparison.

 

[clockworkBabbag]

Also, as pointed out in the OP, what generates threat needs to be fixed. Holy Wars and Crusades should generate very little threat for those of the same faith, high threat for those of the target faith, and average threat for those of a third religion. Winning de jure wars should generate less threat. Conquest or Invasion CBs should generate higher threat, in comparison.

While I think the rest of your post is good ideas, that's not feasible. There are too many characters to track threat separately for every character to every other character. Currently threat is a value the person who generates threat has, and everyone else sees the same value. The fact that this doesn't allow tuning of threat based on religion/culture/whatever (besides defensive pact thresholds) is actually what enables threat to be tied to title and/or inherited, since there's no point in worrying about what the characteristics of the character that inherits the threat will be.

Were you to change how threat works in order to make everyone see different values appropriate to whatever things you want to modify the value, you would have to make threat be a value each character keeps track of for every other character, and you would have to do it this way. You couldn't simply tie it to primary title, because inheritance or other means of titles changing hands could change how much the ruler of said title should care about threat from a given source depending on who holds the title next.

 

[wthree]

As many have said, I like the principle of coalitions, I just dislike how they've been implemented.

The problem is, there was a mechanic that already existed that worked semi-well: the ability for characters of the same religion to join in holy wars.

It would be great if coalitions were completed scrapped, and instead this feature was expanded. For example, if characters could join in on defensive wars against titles with high threat, within certain limits, potentially based on borders (i.e a kingdom could help out their neighbor if they are invaded by a high threat title).

 

[sreckom92]

You should put "helpful" as "dislike it, but don't really care much".....