How are the conclave mechanics nowadays?

[Lord Canterbury]

I've been on hiatus from CK2 since conclave dropped... partly because the generally interweb view seemed to be that it made the game worse, so I didn't both getting it. As things have no doubt moved on by now, I was wondering if people could enlighten me on a few issues. (Ideally in a reasonably calm and rational way... I have faith in this forum ).

Specifically:

1 - Defensive pacts seemed to be rather unpopular. Was this simply because they limited rapid expansion? (I'm an EU1 vet who rather liked the infamy mechanic... so expansion inhibitors I am totally happy with). Was there more to it that this?

2 - Shattered retreat some people seemed really unhappy with. Since I've been back and had a look they seem fairly benign... enemy retreats four or five provinces, wars drag on a little bit more.... is there more to the displeasure with this that I am missing?

3 - The council mechanics. My fear was that this just seemed like extra busywork for not much extra gameplay experience. For those who use the council, how much busywork is involved? (I'm really not keen on busywork). I'm assuming in some way the councils acts to constrain action much like a regent does? I'm okay with some additional constraint as to me at adds some additional gameplay challenge.

Apologies is this has been debated before (I imagine it has). If a similar thread exists, feel free to point me towards it.

P.S. I'm aware all of the above is optional... I'm just seeking the collective enlightenment of this forum as to pros and cons of each aspect.

 

[Chairman Noob]

Defensive pacts are widely seen as unrealistic. It was worse in the original 2.5 when they operated regardless of religion, e.g. Catholicswould form defensive pacts with Muslims against fellow Catholics for threat incurred by winning a crusade. Nowadays they're mostly separated by religion, but it can still lead to huge alliances covering entire continents and world wars involving almost every independent realm on the map, which feels more like the 1940s than the middle ages to many.

Regarding shattered retreat there are two reasons it wasn't universally liked: 1. it was seen as unrealistic that an army would be able to run away hundreds or even thousands of kilometers extremely fast, often leaving their own realm and ending up in random neutral territory - for example in a war between some HRE duke in Saxony and the pagans in Mecklenburg, his armies might end up in Mainz or even Bavaria. And 2. it means that the numerically stronger side in a war will pretty much always win. Without shattered retreat smaller realms can have a small chance to use "guerilla-style" tactics to beat enemy stacks one by one and chase them down, while with shattered retreat they'll just regroup and reinforce several provinces away even if you manage to win a battle. It also makes warfare much more siege-centered.

Council power depends on what powers you grant the council by law, but if they feel they don't have enough power they'll form factions. How often that happens seems to mostly depend on realm size, if you've got a reasonably sized empire as long as the council doesn't have power over at least one thing, there'll be a strong "increase council power" faction at all times.

 

[schondetta]

1 the option to turn off defensive pacts is by the far the best thing pdx has done for ck2 since before they introduced defensive pacts. Its not that they limited expansion its that it SLOWED the game down to a crawl. yeah maybe if your playing France or something and you just want to chill there all day. But lets say reclaiming dejrue border as the byzantines or playing any horde ever? nope. take one duchy and wait 20 years . take one duchy. wait 20 years. Its unnecessarily, arbitrary, and doesnt enhance immersion in any way ever.

2 I dont really find an issue with shattered retreat other than when your giant and your eating small nations it makes it more work than it needs to be. Or fighting an adventurer. I play with it off anyways because im stuck in my old ways. Like with DP, doesnt add anything to the game

3 Not a big fan of council mechanics or really anything from conclave. I was excited when it first announced but the implementation is horrid. I could go on all day on why but I am not going to. what i do like however is the non-aggression pacts you make with vassals. what this does is give you a incentive to care about your extended dynasty which IMO is a root feature of the game. They should've done more with this since tending to your dyansty is the premier mechanic of the game that has been forsaken.

 

[Bernard95]

With both shattered retreat and defensive pacts, they can be disabled when you start a game as part of the 2.6 patch if they're not to your liking. With me personally I don't mind either, but depending on who I'm playing as and what my goals are I'll set my game rules accordingly. Neither are as bad as they were on the original 2.5 patch, but like the Conclave DLC itself it's more of a case of personal preference.

As for the Council mechanics, it largely depends on your starting laws. Start with full or mostly full council authority and they'll more than likely block every action you try to take. Start with none and you can most likely keep it that way unti you hit empire-tier or so. Then you give them the right concerning war declaration and they'll most likely want for nothing, perfectly content not to raise a hand to you (especially if you happen to get NAPs with the vassals not on the Council). If you're a smaller realm however and you have a moment of weakness, your vassals won't hesitate to demand council rights and there's a semi decent chance they'll do it more than once.

 

[clockworkBabbag]

The main kneejerk objections to defensive pacts seemed to be that people essentially complained they couldn't paint the map in 20 years anymore. Instead of learning how to deal with the mechanics, they just whined about it. It turned out, after people learned how to handle the mechanics, that defensive pacts really aren't any kind of serious hard block on expansion once you know what you're doing.
There are still legitimate criticisms about how it's implemented, though. Personally, I feel the fact that it tried too hard to differentiate itself from AE from EU4 is what leads to the rather ridiculous ways people care about your conquests that they really shouldn't be concerned about. Having one value for threat that everyone sees the same is harder to make work realistically than a value for AE opinion that everyone else has of you.

Shattered retreat was always fine in concept, and they've tweaked it since initial release to remove some of the more ridiculous retreat paths so I don't see any reasonable complaints about it anymore. It's far preferrable to ping-ponging armies. Some people just insisted on fighting wars in CK2 stupidly - i.e. trying to wipe out their opponent's army entirely instead of just sieging holdings down after winning a battle.
Especially of note is how people who really thought they wanted shattered retreat to go away immediately had complaints about ping-pong when they tried playing with it turned off.

I really like the council mechanics. I feel that concerns about "busy work" in a game in which literally everything is just clicking are far too vague and uninformative to really address properly. It definitely makes internal politics more of a thing, unless you're aiming for absolute authority (which you generally achieve by gaming the non-aggression pact system and then ignoring your very angry vassals entirely, filling your council up with only loyal sycophants with no power). Since a minimally-empowered council gives you certain stability benefits, it's not entirely clear that absolute authority is superior anyway. Depends on your playstyle.

 

[Kljunas]

Especially of note is how people who really thought they wanted shattered retreat to go away immediately had complaints about ping-pong when they tried playing with it turned off.

To be fair that's also because casualty rate has been reduced when shattered retreat was introduced.

 

[clockworkBabbag]

To be fair that's also because casualty rate has been reduced when shattered retreat was introduced.

That's really only tangentially related, though. It's not like that change was done in order to make wiping out armies with ping-pong harder, it was done because the point of warfare in CK2 is not to hunt down armies, but rather to siege. Trying to compare shattered retreat to no shattered retreat under a different ruleset doesn't make sense. Shattered retreat with the same casualty rate as before would still be better than ping-pong.

 

[Kljunas]

That's really only tangentially related, though. It's not like that change was done in order to make wiping out armies with ping-pong harder, it was done because the point of warfare in CK2 is not to hunt down armies, but rather to siege. Trying to compare shattered retreat to no shattered retreat under a different ruleset doesn't make sense. Shattered retreat with the same casualty rate as before would still be better than ping-pong.

Ping-ponging enemies to death was usually the optimal strategy before shattered retreat though. Maybe it wasn't "the point" but it's how it ended up working in practice. Even the AI did it. Of course the point of shattered retreat is to make hunting down armies harder, so that the optimal strategy is something less stupid.

I'm just saying that if you turn off shattered retreat today, it's going to be worse than it used to be before shattered retread was introduced because less casualties means more ping-pongs before the army is annihilated.

 

[dragoon9105]

Ping Ponging enemies to death still is the optimal strategy for when you have SR on anyway. Just have 2 stacks instead of 1. Bounce them between both until they run out of troops and the stack wipes. Else you let them run away, they reinforce back to full and assault away your hard work. Thus turning combat from this:

Into this

So its about as In depth as before except the new System heavily favors the guy with more Income/Troops. Which regenerating stacks already do heavily.

Defensive Pacts was the change that most people freaked out about that didn't really come of anything. As you get bigger your wars generate more threat which in theory technically can slow down player growth. Except it doesn't, Because Mercenaries and pausing exist, so one of the major goals of Defensive pacts, making it more difficult to expand for large empires (The other is to contain AI blobbing) falls a bit short.

The primary way I get around DP's is I declare as many wars as I know I can handle, Win them all (90-100 WS no peacing), Pause, Then lower levies, declare wars again, peace out the old ones and reraise and keep chugging, Eventually you get to such a size you can assault rush holdings down with retinues/mercs and thus DP's are pointless.

Council Mechanics were cool. For about 5 seconds. The controversy is people think they make the game difficult, which they do when you don't understand them. Its one of those Mechanics that end up working more towards annoying you than actually hurting you. Every ruler will have a Council Faction form at some point, either on succession or when they inevitably give the council an excuse to join factions. The Council Faction, becuase they use the council faction system takes into no account how much money you have, So you can predictably, Anger the Council, Let them revolt, Hire mercs, Win, Imprison all members, Ransom/Execute them to actually profit from civil war. Rinse and Repeat, also you get tech points from this, and of course prestige.

The council only becomes a problem when your Tribal/Nomad since you have to ask your babysitters to do virtually anything, which leads to fun solution of Stacking the council full of Loyalists while paused, Doing what you want, and then putting your Khan/Vassal Council Members in. It doesn't matter that they hate you, they are on the Council, they cant do Jack and you can still do whatever you want. Sure their heirs might like you less, But They also end up on the Council ad Infinitum so they cant do jack either. All for the Price of some piety/gold/courtier opinion.

Education, Is the missed one that nobody mentions. I don't know if the feeling is mutual since it doesn't seem to be talked much about, at all. I get what they were going for with it, but overall the Education pre conclave felt more personal with 10-15 events for your wards as opposed to just 3 events (Usually the same events) and 2 focus picks. The old system actually felt more open for roleplaying since you could choose to actively give your kids bad traits if you so chose (And some events had you choosing between two multiple bad or multiple good traits which were the better events overall).

Now you just sorta pick an education that matches their childhood traits and stats if attentive or if you're lazy like me, Struggle-Martial Duty-Stewardship/Diplo. I suppose the bonus now is you don't need to pick an educator for all your kids which takes about 4 clicks, Now you have to pick a focus, twice, which takes longer and feels a whole lot less personal. "Throw this son into the Commander Factory like all the others" I don't even bother educating daughters with it, not worth the clicks. And being perfectly honest, I barely pay attention to my kids anymore at this point until I inherit, since they matter that little, After all I need those council spots for my Vassals. The Ai is more than willing to send me Marriage offers themselves that I find agreeable.

 

[Lord Canterbury]

The main kneejerk objections to defensive pacts seemed to be that people essentially complained they couldn't paint the map in 20 years anymore. Instead of learning how to deal with the mechanics, they just whined about it. It turned out, after people learned how to handle the mechanics, that defensive pacts really aren't any kind of serious hard block on expansion once you know what you're doing.
There are still legitimate criticisms about how it's implemented, though. Personally, I feel the fact that it tried too hard to differentiate itself from AE from EU4 is what leads to the rather ridiculous ways people care about your conquests that they really shouldn't be concerned about. Having one value for threat that everyone sees the same is harder to make work realistically than a value for AE opinion that everyone else has of you.

Shattered retreat was always fine in concept, and they've tweaked it since initial release to remove some of the more ridiculous retreat paths so I don't see any reasonable complaints about it anymore. It's far preferrable to ping-ponging armies. Some people just insisted on fighting wars in CK2 stupidly - i.e. trying to wipe out their opponent's army entirely instead of just sieging holdings down after winning a battle.
Especially of note is how people who really thought they wanted shattered retreat to go away immediately had complaints about ping-pong when they tried playing with it turned off.

I really like the council mechanics. I feel that concerns about "busy work" in a game in which literally everything is just clicking are far too vague and uninformative to really address properly. It definitely makes internal politics more of a thing, unless you're aiming for absolute authority (which you generally achieve by gaming the non-aggression pact system and then ignoring your very angry vassals entirely, filling your council up with only loyal sycophants with no power). Since a minimally-empowered council gives you certain stability benefits, it's not entirely clear that absolute authority is superior anyway. Depends on your playstyle.

Thanks for feedback. It seems that defensive pacts and shattered retreat fit fine for how I play the game.

On the council mechanics, my concern is that they seems like something that adds extra management actions, without fundamentally adding much in the way of gameplay. I'm already managing my vassal opinions (which I see as an essential part of the gameplay, though a little tedious mechanically at times). The council seems like another layer of vassal management... more buttons to click, without really impacting the core gameplay of managing vassals?

I guess I see it as likely to add complexity, without adding much depth:

(This s is just how it looks to me without having played the council mechanics... I'm keen to understand if its like that in practice... certainly some of the initial reactions suggested it was).

 

[finkellll]

My problem with defensive pacts was that we were pulled in to every rebellion, so it was difficult to have no wars.

Never had a problem with shattered retreat. Much better than ping pong wars.

The council is not busy work, I feel like its very good at making us think about internal politics. The decisions between family prestige, raw stats, and happy vassals are a big improvement.

It does get kind of gamey tho. Simply put an unruly vassal on the council and they can't rebel.

 

[_Perun_]

All the Conclave mechanics have one thing in common: the moment one stops to rationalize mechanics and tries to enjoy the game, it looks less like a computer game and more like a proper medieval experience. I do not need to agree with the reason why the whole world is hating me, I just enjoy the feeling of ruling an empire everyone are afraid of. I do not need to calculate precise escape route of an army because I, as a medieval ruler, do not possess maps advanced enough. I am perfectly fine knowing how many of them is actually there and what the region they escape to is called. I do not really need to see my council working in a predictable way according to any law, I am happy having means to make them do what I need them to do.

All of those mechanics are rather rewarding if only not to focus on alleged inconsistencies. Just sit back and have a nice trip.

 

[schondetta]

Thanks for feedback. It seems that defensive pacts and shattered retreat fit fine for how I play the game.

On the council mechanics, my concern is that they seems like something that adds extra management actions, without fundamentally adding much in the way of gameplay. I'm already managing my vassal opinions (which I see as an essential part of the gameplay, though a little tedious mechanically at times). The council seems like another layer of vassal management... more buttons to click, without really impacting the core gameplay of managing vassals?

I guess I see it as likely to add complexity, without adding much depth:

(This s is just how it looks to me without having played the council mechanics... I'm keen to understand if its like that in practice... certainly some of the initial reactions suggested it was).

Your on point with the council mechanics. and i wanted to expand on that.

The main reason that the council mechanic is a failure is because all it is is a road block to features of the game you already had access to. just disable conclave and boom! you can do everything you could before minus the road block . So what incentives the player to play with it? NOTHING. The feeling of accomplishment isnt there because there is nothing to reward you.

What SHOULD of been implanted with the council was a way for you to utilize favors, etc to enact supplemental features that you couldn't do otherwise. like for example. revoking titles without opinion penalty. declaring war for two counties. increasing demse size etc etc. That way a player feels like there is actually a reason to have a council in the first place.

would it not of been so much better if hard work and strategic play with the council lead the player to find a way to use the council to their advantage that they couldn't otherwise use? ( at the risk of council revolts and whatnot)

 

[dragoon9105]

Well the reward is money, but it doesn't come from being a good liege and making your council members happy. It comes from deliberately making your vassals revolt so you can ransom them and take their land. Thus doubling or tripling your income and tech growth. Which I don't think is WAD.

Paradox emphasised in the DD's for conclave that with a happy/empowered council you will not have to worry about factions which generally would tend to crop up unless you expanded and ran your realm very efficiently pre-conclave. The opposite is true, You can have a council of 7 Powerful Vassals all with positive opinion of you but all joining a council power faction on succession becuase your heir peacefully took the throne and the Council isn't allowed to vote on banishment yet. So the question gets asked, "If they are just going to revolt every succession, why don't I do something about it?" Then the age old Wisdom Ck2 has been teaching since the begining comes to mind "They cant revolt if they are all in Jail"

 

[SigurdStormhand]

The game itself is in fairly good shape right now, you can turn off Shattered Retreat and Pacts, so you don't have to worry about them. Right now I feel like maybe having SR on is marginally better, but it's your call. You can still get achievements either way.

Conclave is... still Conclave.

It has good bits and bad bits. You'll certainly be a lot wealthier with Conclave on, and you'll have more granular control over laws. The Council is, overall, not a threat. Their demands for more power can often be given into without any real danger and then reverted in a few years. Just don't give them too much power.

The Education System is a real letdown though.

 

[Gans]

I've only one problem with shattered retreat. It makes manual retreat literally sh*t. Now it's better not to retreat manually even if you are losing. Thats very logical and intuitive right?

 

[Robert II]

Mediocre.

 

[choffman0710]

What SHOULD of been implanted with the council was a way for you to utilize favors, etc to enact supplemental features that you couldn't do otherwise. like for example. revoking titles without opinion penalty. declaring war for two counties. increasing demse size etc etc. That way a player feels like there is actually a reason to have a council in the first place.

would it not of been so much better if hard work and strategic play with the council lead the player to find a way to use the council to their advantage that they couldn't otherwise use? ( at the risk of council revolts and whatnot)

Yeah this is an excellent idea. It's too much like baby sitting right now. I love the idea of revoking a title or executing someone penalty free with my favors as opposed to just being allowed to do normal things. I'm not historian but I'm pretty sure if some councilor told a king he's not allowed to invade some country there would be a dead or imprisoned councilor. It just seems strange.
The biggest issue with me is still the new education system. It seems like a classic example of "if it ain't broke"

 

[Red Earth]

The council will seem more interesting if you are a vassal and your liege is granting you favors for support.