Forum Consensus and Opinions on Coalitions?

[yonderTheGreat]

Yeah dude, you presented us with "superb" and "horrible" with nothing in-between.

Mind you, there's no proper poll option, but still, I'd wager it's not going to be remotely reflective of our opinions.

I wonder how many of the "I like the idea but it doesn't work really well" people clicked Agree and how many of the same people clicked Disagree.

 

[Tatterhood]

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.

Each character already keeps track of opinion for each other character, so it's not like the game is completely incapable of handling something like that. That said, it clearly wouldn't help performance and could potentially hurt it. (Also it would likely require much bigger changes to the code than the existing threat system does.)

Probably it's more along the lines of something to consider for CK3 than something likely to be added now.

Edit: Also, unless I'm wrong, only independent rulers can join defensive pacts anyway, so you wouldn't actually have to calculate it for every character.

 

[Naughtius Maximus]

The problem with everyone's suggestions are that they all water down coalitions from being worldwide to regional at best, and the heavier complainers want it abolished completely.

The thing is coalitions do not really slow down blobbing much at all, so to knock it down to regional yet still pack a bite you would need to buff regional defensive pacts a lot.

Mind you I dislike coalitions as well. I find them too lenient. A good way to finally give the system some bite would be to give all the defenders a huge morale, replenishment, and opinion buff.

If you plan to remove worldwide coalitions and just make it regional, you would need something like +300% morale, +%200 replenishment, and +60 rather than +40 opinion. To make assault sieging harder they could probably do with a +20% movement speed buff as well.

As for people who want it abolished, I believe Pebkac and l2p are the answer to their problems.

Coalitions need some kind of bite, regional or currently. They simply aren't a legitimate threat for even average players.

 

[Legionary Guard]

Pressing Disagree here, but really wishing that Helpful was voting for a sort of middle ground: Regardless of the historicity (or lack thereof), I like the concept of coalitions - that small realms band together for mutual defence against a rapidly-expanding neighbor; but I dislike the execution - that, as an example, the Pope joins a coalition with the Russians and Arabians because Byzantium won a Holy War against Egypt.

I think that coalitions should be divided between culture group, i.e. the Frenchmen are getting scared because the Italians and Spanish are getting their asses kicked, or the Byzantines are getting worried because Georgia and Armenia are taking hits. Maybe give coalition targets special event troops so they're actually something of a threat? *Shrugs* I'm not too good at solutions, only for pointing out problems.

 

[SigurdStormhand]

I'm of the opinion, like many others, that the idea od small realms banding together for protection against a larger realm is a good idea, but I also don't like the execution.

One thing I don't think anyone has mentioned yet is that, because of the arbitrary way the mechanic works, it is always reactive. In some starts it's possible to strike four duchies at once when the game starts, and the Defensive Pact then will not form until you actually annex those four duchies. In many cases that first gambit will secure your position in a way that the Pact that then forms afterwards is unable to stop you.

Aside from that, I agree with what others have said - forming this sort of Pact is something that required a lot of diplomacy in real life but there's no diplomacy involved in the game at all. Rulers essentially get an e-vite and everyone says yes.

Edit: For anyone who'd like to see a switch to enable the old factions system as a remedy to rapidly expanding realms, please take a look here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-temporary-titles-for-faction-leaders.961347/

 

[Evan05]

I think Coalitions shouldn't be a hardline defensive faction that calls all of it's members in against you, but instead if you generate enough Threat then your neighbors around you should try to more strategically create alliances with one another with the goal of limiting your expansion.

If that is for whatever reason not practical or even possible, then I'd rather just see them removed from the game all together.

 

[User29]

Yeah dude, you presented us with "superb" and "horrible" with nothing in-between.

Mind you, there's no proper poll option, but still, I'd wager it's not going to be remotely reflective of our opinions.

I wonder how many of the "I like the idea but it doesn't work really well" people clicked Agree and how many of the same people clicked Disagree.

No I totally didn't, I said like or dislike and asked for people to say why

 

[tywinzo]

The problem with coalitions are two things:

1. They should've just improved the existing system. For the purpose of defending themselves, AI should have instead been made smarter and just used the mechanic which is already there: marriage. Perhaps there could even have been some other form of alliance which is purely mutually defensive, but can not be used in offense. Instead we get, as often before, overlapping features (There is a reason alliances formed with marriages [and more seldomly without], so it is also immersion breaking to see that alliances hanging in air works. What is it exactly? A promise to help out? Based on what? How does your partner know that you'll make on your word? With someone else's family member in your own court or for example a common investment of land, there's at least an insurance. The coalition between random members feels like a made up mechanic.).

2. As a deterrant, I had much preferred that rapid expansion/growth is penalized by internal breakdown after the conquest is made, rather than blocking the expansion itself. There would be disagreements forming in the new, larger empire, as happened in history. Cultures, religions, etc would further increase it. Someone who expands too fast would then simply get in trouble trying to manage it. You won the war, but not the peace, etc.

 

[Robert II]

They are pish.

 

[StarSword]

I can understand them teaming up against my invasion of Germany, but it's absolutely insane to have the Shi'a and Sunni Caliphs march all the flipping way up through the Urals to try and stop Catholic Alba from holy-warring for one Germanic county in the middle of Sweden.

It also doesn't bloody work. You just assault all the holdings and then sail troops back home in case the AI got lucky and managed to capture anything more than trade posts.

 

[SigurdStormhand]

OK - here's something I did tonight, started the game in the Old Gods as Basil the Macedonian, after dealing with the invasion of Syracuse (Roma Victrix) I decided to retake all of Sicily and at the same time strike at Krete and the Levant.

Here we are at the start of the war, note at this point I have made no conquests and therefore there is no Defensive Pact:



I'll describe this as a "daring" attack and if one of the larger Muslim rulers decided to get involved this was going to get sticky. Fortunately everybody sat there Stupefied while I took one province in Italy and the Island of Krete:



Here we are half way through, and this is what the Defensive Pact map looks like at this point:



Here we are at the end, all those rulers defeated, it took a while but I was never really stretched. I unwisely murdered one of my vassals though, so I had to give over War Declaration to make sure I wasn't overthrown.



Note my threat level at this point was 75.14%, which means the Christians will now go to war in support of the Muslims.

So, let's summarise:

1. The defensive Pacts did not form until after I actually annexed two realms, and they didn't prevent me from completely unlanding four characters, crippling two others and seriously denting a seventh with what was, frankly, relative ease.

2. After my conquests against exclusively Muslims the largest and most cohesive pact is the Christian one.

3. Despite the fact that all those Christian realms are now safer (because there are no longer Muslim realms with Holy War CB within range) they will now go to war to prevent me from attacking more Muslims.

The problem with this isn't just that it's an arbitrary system or that you end up fighting the mechanic directly instead of the AI because everything is based on a fixed number which has nothing to do with character opinion, it isn't event he fact that the mechanic completely failed to even slow me down as I re-drew the map at the start of the game.

No, the problem is that the Defensive Pact mechanic has created a situation which it is simply impossible to rationalise, it's fatal to the sense of immersion (not a word I would normally use) because it's impossible to see this as anything other than a game mechanic. This might be forgiveable if it actually retarded player expansion, but it clearly doesn't.

 

[kekeface123]

It needs fixing, threat should fade away faster during peacetime.
Also, Muslims shouldn't form defensive pacts with Christians and Hindus, that's absurd.

 

[SigurdStormhand]

I don't think the mechanic is redeemable, and I'd like to see the devs make it so turning it off doesn't invalidate achievements, because it clearly doesn't make the game harder. The most it does is make inexperienced players think the game is harder than it is, or slow down expansion slightly by forcing you to declare wars one by one, rather than in a group as I did there. That's not a good thing though, because those seven wars seriously destabilised my realm and had either of those factions triggered I would have had to peace out and been in serious trouble, though not anywhere near as much trouble as I would have been pre-RoI. I fought a province revolt and a rebellion by one of my vassals when I tried to revoke his Duchy in that period too. If those had been pre-RoI factions that triggered at 85% (instead of getting over 160% and not triggering) I would have been very nervous.

It's ironic that the Defensive Pacts encourage you to "turtle" which is the safest strategy for conquest and the one least likely to leave you overstretched or with internal stability problems. Those seven conquests are the most daring thing I've done in a while but the game now wants me to wait years before trying something else like that, it's actively discouraging me from risking another war right now because I'll have to fight christians to take Muslim lands, and that's no fun in a game like this when the Christians should be cheering you on.

 

[StarSword]

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.

But how many of those characters are independent rulers? Barons can't do anything by themselves and there's only 1,465 provinces, and unless you're using a shattered world mod the actual number of independent realms is a hell of a lot smaller than that.

Basically take the EU4 version of threat and replace "country" with "top liege".

 

[kmh42]

OK - here's something I did tonight, started the game in the Old Gods as Basil the Macedonian, after dealing with the invasion of Syracuse (Roma Victrix) I decided to retake all of Sicily and at the same time strike at Krete and the Levant.

Here we are at the start of the war, note at this point I have made no conquests and therefore there is no Defensive Pact:

View attachment 199366

I'll describe this as a "daring" attack and if one of the larger Muslim rulers decided to get involved this was going to get sticky. Fortunately everybody sat there Stupefied while I took one province in Italy and the Island of Krete:

View attachment 199367

Here we are half way through, and this is what the Defensive Pact map looks like at this point:

View attachment 199368

Here we are at the end, all those rulers defeated, it took a while but I was never really stretched. I unwisely murdered one of my vassals though, so I had to give over War Declaration to make sure I wasn't overthrown.

View attachment 199373

Note my threat level at this point was 75.14%, which means the Christians will now go to war in support of the Muslims.

So, let's summarise:

1. The defensive Pacts did not form until after I actually annexed two realms, and they didn't prevent me from completely unlanding four characters, crippling two others and seriously denting a seventh with what was, frankly, relative ease.

2. After my conquests against exclusively Muslims the largest and most cohesive pact is the Christian one.

3. Despite the fact that all those Christian realms are now safer (because there are no longer Muslim realms with Holy War CB within range) they will now go to war to prevent me from attacking more Muslims.

The problem with this isn't just that it's an arbitrary system or that you end up fighting the mechanic directly instead of the AI because everything is based on a fixed number which has nothing to do with character opinion, it isn't event he fact that the mechanic completely failed to even slow me down as I re-drew the map at the start of the game.

No, the problem is that the Defensive Pact mechanic has created a situation which it is simply impossible to rationalise, it's fatal to the sense of immersion (not a word I would normally use) because it's impossible to see this as anything other than a game mechanic. This might be forgiveable if it actually retarded player expansion, but it clearly doesn't.

Just look at the entries in the WC#3

 

[SigurdStormhand]

Just look at the entries in the WC#3

I saw - while I am certainly impressed at the service done for Rome I think it's sad that you have to go through the labourious process of fighting Pacts, it doesn't even seem to slow the guys down at all.

This mechanic just needs to go.

 

[kmh42]

... it doesn't even seem to slow the guys down at all.

That's the point. But let us be serious, do we want to DP stop us from snowballing? I like the idea of DP on a certain stage when you have to think about who you attacking. I don't want to be completely stop at some point. I think most agree that a internal mechanic needs to stop snowballing.
The actual effect should just be more organic (not static values), reasonable (culture and direction of conquest) and needs to include diplomacy (opinion) into it.

 

[SigurdStormhand]

That's the point. But let us be serious, do we want to DP stop us from snowballing? I like the idea of DP on a certain stage when you have to think about who you attacking. I don't want to be completely stop at some point. I think most agree that a internal mechanic needs to stop snowballing.
The actual effect should just be more organic (not static values), reasonable (culture and direction of conquest) and needs to include diplomacy (opinion) into it.

I think the DP mechanic was introduced because the AI was unable to form sensible alliance networks. At this point we need to be honest and tell Paradox that the mechanic does nothing to either improve gameplay or impede expansion by the player. If anything it gives the player an unfair advantage because they can ignore the Pact and attack anyway where the AI would try to avoid attacking Pact members.

In my test it was internal stability and the threat of Civil War that gave me pause and influenced my decision making, not the formation of Pacts and the prospect of fighting them all at once.

That's why I have a thread going in the Suggestions forum asking for a switch to restore the old Factions system.

 

[kmh42]

I think the DP mechanic was introduced because the AI was unable to form sensible alliance networks

I don't agree on that because AI was never able to handle threat or DP. Either they stopped expanding at a certain threat lvl, no matter how big the DP vs realm was or they completely ignored it, like the Mongols, and send the units back and forth till ticking warscore and some attrition beat them.

At this point we need to be honest and tell Paradox that the mechanic does nothing to either improve gameplay or impede expansion by the player.

That's for sure but I would be surprise me if the devs not already know this. At least they have an open ear:

If you have specific thread balance ideas, make a thread and I can look at it.

This comment refers to DP.

If anything it gives the player an unfair advantage because they can ignore the Pact and attack anyway where the AI would try to avoid attacking Pact members.

Nearly every 2.5 feature was counter productive to AI vs player balance. But this is mostly because they forgot the teach the AI any of the new features. They are aware of that too:

Instead, we’ll optimize the game and improve the AI (sorely needed, though I've done some work on it for the upcoming patch)...

 

[SigurdStormhand]

Well, as I said before, I don't believe the current Defensive Pact mechanic is redeemable, it either needs to be removed and changes made to internal politics to discourage expansion or it needs to be completely redesigned.