Great DLC! - But the nex DLC/Patch needs to be about Warfare and Grand Strategy

[Wokeg]

I think a focus on trade & republics could be very great, specificaly with the new travelling system, i really want to see caravans of merchants coming through the silk way.

Also giving more importance on trade on a county / duchy / kingdom / empire wealth, it should not be limited to republics.

Bruh, trade was important for everyone. Trade and merchant republics alongside Warfare can be 2 big expansions for next 2 years.

Hehe, rageair keeps muttering this type of thing whenever anyone makes anything with the new travel system. We've got so much of the core stuff we'd need for trade to work. There's just a few extra systems we'd want to tie much of it together. We'll see what future expansions bring!

CK2 wasn't particularly difficult - but with your characters and heirs randomly dying and forcing you to play as your fourth-born failson or scrabble around trying to find an heir of your dynasty at all

I have never seen ck playerbase complaining about berserker event (the one where you kill your whole family) for example.

[innocent whistling]

Anyhoo think y'all're gonna like 1.9.1.

I wonder what expansion would it be then, however – imperial gov feels like an ideal companion for a Byzantine pack, but Byzantium alone wouldn't be a focus of an expansion -- iirc expansions are intended to expand upon the whole game world, not just a specific region. Imperial gov would be available elsewhere outside ERE ofc, but I don't think they'd make the gov itself non-free (as opposed to republics, as they are already unplayable as opposed to Byzantium and other empires, so it makes sense if republics are made playable only after purchasing a republic expansion)

Oh we've got a few ideas. I will include a maddening little teaser:

Spoiler: Remember the Floorplan for the Future DD?

There was a WIP-tagged screenshot of a bunch of blurred out slides in that DD. Those are the actual one-pitch slides for various major expansions, so we've got strong ideas for what partners with what for each. They are, per the tag, WIP, so we're not married to any of those specific designs till we start work on them, but we know at least roughly what we'd like to partner with what.

 

[grommile]

Imperial gov would be available elsewhere outside ERE ofc,

My expectation is this:

In the free patch, we'd get a big new modder-friendly mechanical framework for How Government/Society Works, with the existing neat little boxes of Clan, Feudal, and Tribal, and one or more new neat little boxes for Bureaucratic Empires, Theocracies, Republics, etc, being implemented in terms of that framework.

In the accompanying DLC, we'd get lots of "flavour" stuff and some kind of gameplay-level system, built on the new framework, for evolving our governments so that we could step outside of the neat little boxes.

 

[johnty5]

Hehe, rageair keeps muttering this type of thing whenever anyone makes anything with the new travel system. We've got so much of the core stuff we'd need for trade to work. There's just a few extra systems we'd want to tie much of it together. We'll see what future expansions bring!


[innocent whistling]

Anyhoo think y'all're gonna like 1.9.1.

Oh we've got a few ideas. I will include a maddening little teaser:

Spoiler: Remember the Floorplan for the Future DD?

There was a WIP-tagged screenshot of a bunch of blurred out slides in that DD. Those are the actual one-pitch slides for various major expansions, so we've got strong ideas for what partners with what for each. They are, per the tag, WIP, so we're not married to any of those specific designs till we start work on them, but we know at least roughly what we'd like to partner with what.

One of my favourite things about this forum is days when @Wokeg is all like “I can’t really say anything about upcoming stuff” before then spending the rest of the day dropping massive hints about upcoming stuff.

 

[Breebelbox]

We've certainly focused quite a lot on some of the more lateral elements of the franchise with the two expansions so far, and I would strongly expect us to look at doing some more traditional content in future. I'm not going to promise you warfare specifically, I'm afraid, but I think the sentiment over here is that we've definitely spent enough time on trying to flesh out the personal lives of rulers and ruled now - it's high time to change tack and focus on something else. Sorry if that's irritatingly vague, but I think my lead would have me skinned alive if I started dropping hints about the types of things we're looking at next literally the day after we drop an expansion.

Difficulty is certainly something we're hoping to work on over the next few releases - we've done a bit of that this update, got some more stuff in the pipeline (some very short term, some more mid/long term), and some things that are just at the (very very no promises) proposal stage.

Mmmm, not really what I said, I'm afraid, so I'll go ahead and quote myself for context to anyone just reading this comment:

If that's not the type of content you'd like, then we will have to agree to disagree on difficulty after all, but I can't really agree with claiming that I said it's fine for everything to be a cake-walk and that we intend to only support that forever.

Said and continues to say, at least at last check, FWIW. He's the chief creative officer at PDS these days, sorta equivalent to the game directors' director.

I don't know, to me it sounded that you would like to work on mechanics which might create more friction and challenges and of course I would appreciate that greatly. But unless my English isn't what it used to be you also said that you don't believe in introducing a higher difficulty and that it would also be too difficult and time consuming.

So if I understand correctly that would mean that those new mechanics would be part of the normal difficulty. That could mean that the people who enjoyed the normal difficulty so far might find this too difficult then. That wouldn't be a big issue since they could use the easy difficulty instead.

But the issue would still stand that some people could still find the game too easy and they would be stuck with the normal difficulty. I mean there is a reason why having easy, normal and a hard difficulty is pretty much a business standard since decades (if the choice of difficulty is provided, of course). Players are different and have different preferences, so having more options is always a positive and helps to satisfy the diversity of players. The Dev team called the current highest difficulty "normal" themselves, they are obviously aware that it isn't super hard.

I just don't see how just introducing more mechanics without an optional higher difficulty setting would solve the issues at hand. Another big question is when we will see those new mechanics.

 

['Ciusi]

This is a very silly thing to say and I don't actually believe that you think it.

Of course I was deliberately exaggerating to make a point.

 

[OnceSetCannotBeChanged]

Next patch/DLC needs to be about bug fixes. I literally don’t care what the theme is as long as it works properly and old lingering bugs are dealt with.

 

[grommile]

Next patch/DLC needs to be about bug fixes.

The next DLC will not be about bug fixes, I can assure you.

(The DLC is the part we pay for.)

 

[OnceSetCannotBeChanged]

The next DLC will not be about bug fixes, I can assure you.

(The DLC is the part we pay for.)

I’m aware. It’s just my way of complaining about all the headline features that aren’t working/barely working right now.

 

[Voy]

Next patch/DLC needs to be about bug fixes. I literally don’t care what the theme is as long as it works properly and old lingering bugs are dealt with.

1.9 patch came with a lot of bug fixes to popular community problems. They even adapted an older version of the Unofficial Patch. The game has not been better.

 

[SupercanelP085]

1.9 patch came with a lot of bug fixes to popular community problems. They even adapted an older version of the Unofficial Patch. The game has not been better.

They go in the right way

 

[klopkr]

Don't forget that by next expansion we're talking about next year.
This whole year is RP, like the last ones.

And at this rate, even if we got warfare next (we won't) it'll be YEARS before basic important things like decent warfare will be in this game. And even then, the devs like the current design of the game so I'm not too confident they truly understand why basic gameplay like warfare is bad or why many of their events and systems decrease player engagement rather than increase.

This game is quickly becoming a macro click fest. I have to click so so much to get basic things I want out in the game. Warfare is full of clicks just to prance around the map as the AI runs away. Now most event generators in game are tons and tons of minutia clicks for the same tournament/court/situation. Travel is thankfully mostly autogenerated but still can require extra clicks for safety.

Sometimes I feel like this game is bogged down with focusing on the petty daily work a ruler has to do on a single day tick rather than grand visions of what they want to achieve with abstractions taking away the chore of it.

In a game like HoI4 or EU4, significantly more of the clicks and decisions I make change the situation over all. In CK3 I constantly feel like I had to make decisions or adjustments of basically no importance, or of very little importance.

I think the longer I play the CK series the more I think my characters reactions should be automatic and delegated based on the way they already are, with my overall actions dictating how my character would react in a situation. I'm already dreaming of ways of automating the choices in most events since most aren't substantial and I'm mostly choosing (does my character act like themselves, pick the best bonus, or do something dumb and unrelated) and I don't think that's a real game choice that matters. Not enough to be prompted, and not enough to have to click the screen for it, muchless 20 of these for a simple feast.

I feel like in another franchise I would just click a button to set the way my character will act in minutia events and then recieve updates on their interactions as things go along, rather than picking for every event. And I'm starting to think I would prefer that franchise.

Similarly in war, I could see in another franchise clicking an enemy once and seeing my army chasing it down automatically.

Both those changes would make playing the game a lot faster, more streamlined, and not popular with a type of player that wants to play a game where scale of one tick isn't a day.

CK has always been inspired by the sims and dramas. And I love that inspiration. I want to feel that the characters are living and interacting. But I feel like a cancerous part of that inspiration is seeping in. It's been known for a long time that if you don't take control of your sims life they are going to fail at living and end up in a cycle of burning their house down and peeing the floor before a young death. A lot of commentary on that franchise has been about how much you have to babysit them and click and click to make every mundane decision in their lives. I feel deeply that this has passed on to CK and it's a huge mistake in my book.

I genuinely feel that every DLC to CK3 makes me have to babysit my ruler to live the life he use to do automatically through abstraction. I do like the depth of seeing his day but I do not like having to make so so many worthless choices.

TL;DR
I don't have my hopes up about the direction of this game. I think it's making you do too many pointless and mundane clicks and should be a game that plays itself more with you generally guiding the direction instead of the micro.

This is the most micro paradox game in the worst way to me.