Information displayed at players.

[Sopapa]

This is a suggestion for CK III (altough I'd like this to be done in CK II and EU IV too).

I understand how hard it must be to balance the game out in terms of how much information is displayed at the players. The game must find a way to make the players be aware of the possibilities they have of succesfully carrying an action without, at the same time, making everything too easy. I know a lot of people (especially newer players) need having a lot of info easily displayed at them so that they can make even the most basic stuff (like deciding whether or not attacking a neighbor, or who to marry to), but I feel that sometimes the game just tell us TOO MUCH about anything we want to know, and that kind of ruins the immersion sometimes.

For example, in CK II you can know the exact amount of money every character makes per month, the exact size of their army, who their commanders are, who they're at war against, who their allies are, what their opinions on other people are, etc. I'm not saying all of this is "objectively" bad, but personally I would love if there was an option added when setting up a new run that let the players choose how much info they have available to them, so that maybe when we're more experienced at the game we could regulate that in order to make it more immersive.

 

[LordofLight]

in CK II you can know the exact amount of money every character makes per month, the exact size of their army, who their commanders are, who they're at war against, who their allies are, what their opinions on other people are, etc.

Seems like something that should be a feature alongside an intrigue expansion and possibly spy networks. But with how our "spy network" is limited to 1 councilor probably not the best. Even in CK2 you can recruit a maid as a 'spy' but no spy network means little there.

Needing to spy and gain info on people would be a very organic way of unlocking this information. But even then I'm not sure if I like the idea of not having this info for it to be a full on feature. Eh I'm torn. An option would be nice to not see the info but the game isnt built with that in mind so it'd probably just degrade the player experience for anyone using it.

 

[Darrigan]

I'd also love to have less numerical info. For example: instead having my relation with another character expressed as an exact number, it would be more immersive if it gave a vague indication ("Love", "Like", "Indifferent", "Dislike", "Hate"). Same for character stats, army sizes,...

Right now you can exactly predict the outcome of your actions. If you want to have a character that dislikes you (-10), you offer him a bribe and the tooltip says this will increase his opinion by exactly 25. You know that as a result the character will like you for a value of 15. Whereas if the tooltip says the character just "dislikes" you, and offering him a bribe would improve his opinion of you by "a small amount", you don't know for sure if it will be enough to tip the balance.

Also, now you can quickly see that a potential enemy has 1000 men available, while you have 1250. This makes it easy to decide wether to attack or not. While if the tooltip would only give an indication, it would more be a gamble. This would make the game more risky and challenging.

 

[Sopapa]

Seems like something that should be a feature alongside an intrigue expansion and possibly spy networks. But with how our "spy network" is limited to 1 councilor probably not the best. Even in CK2 you can recruit a maid as a 'spy' but no spy network means little there.

Needing to spy and gain info on people would be a very organic way of unlocking this information. But even then I'm not sure if I like the idea of not having this info for it to be a full on feature. Eh I'm torn. An option would be nice to not see the info but the game isnt built with that in mind so it'd probably just degrade the player experience for anyone using it.

I really like the idea of spy networks giving you some of this information! Maybe they'll add a little bit of this with the new "secrets" mechanics, but I think most things will be known to players as in CK II. About the degrading of player experience, I think that, once we get familiarized with the game, we'll probably be able to sense a lot of the things we don't see. For example, if we see someone's daughter doesn't want to murder her parents, we'll probably know she won't accept even if we bribe her. But maybe she would, and she's too important because if we convince her to plot with us, the happening of the murder is certain, so... do we risk losing all that money in order to have a shot into killing someone, or we find more easily bribed people to help us out? In Ck II that's not even a question, the game literally tells you who would like to be bribed. And again, I'm not saying that that is necessarily bad, some people may prefer it that way, but I think many of us would like to see how the game plays out without so much information about the outcome of every action we take. So I think adding it as an option would be fine to everyone.

 

[Sopapa]

I'd also love to have less numerical info. For example: instead having my relation with another character expressed as an exact number, it would be more immersive if it gave a vague indication ("Love", "Like", "Indifferent", "Dislike", "Hate"). Same for character stats, army sizes,...

Right now you can exactly predict the outcome of your actions. If you want to have a character that dislikes you (-10), you offer him a bribe and the tooltip says this will increase his opinion by exactly 25. You know that as a result the character will like you for a value of 15. Whereas if the tooltip says the character just "dislikes" you, and offering him a bribe would improve his opinion of you by "a small amount", you don't know for sure if it will be enough to tip the balance.

Also, now you can quickly see that a potential enemy has 1000 men available, while you have 1250. This makes it easy to decide wether to attack or not. While if the tooltip would only give an indication, it would more be a gamble. This would make the game more risky and challenging.

Yeah, I totally agree! Again, as long as changing things like this is an option, and not the only way to play it.

 

[Sopapa]

I would also like to add that I think that, ideally, we should be able to decide between many options, like: "Show information": "default", "a lot", "some", "a little", "none", or "Show information": "default", "character's power (gold, army, etc), opinions, and outcomes of your actions", "Character's power and opinions", "Only opinions"... etc. They could also add an option similar to diplomatic range but that also made us impossible to know what's beyond our reach (more or less like in Europa Universalis IV), and maybe that range of knowledge could be amplified by a certain technology (and/or spynetwork).

 

[Riamus]

I like the idea of a gameplay rule that you can set to hide outcome chances and stats for choices as well as various stats and details. This is more strategy than RPG, but I think everyone can agree that there's still a lot of RPG in CK. If you were to play just about any popular mainstream RPG, you are unlikely to see what the results of your dialog choices will be. You usually have to guess the best choice and then see where it goes from there. In CK2, there is the event that fires often for your children/wards where you can give them certain stats like diligent, but it costs you... stress for one, lowered stats for a period of time for another. Knowing the costs ahead of time seems like too much information.

Of course, once you've seen the results of the events once or twice, you'll know how you want to do them in the future, so hiding the outcome stats only helps for a limited time unless the outcome stats can change within the same event (such as maybe not getting stressed every time or something like that). And in CK3, with stress being numerical, the choice to not help the child could even potentially have its own negative effect either always or occasionally. So if you did add hidden information, I'd like to also include more variety in the results to go with it so you don't just memorize the information that's hidden or Google it and then you're not getting any value out of hidden information. I'd also like the Spymaster (or even other council members, vassals, courtiers, events, etc.) to be able to learn some of the hidden information to make for an even more interesting game. But it definitely should be optional as it would have a drastic effect on how the gameplay works if you add in such mechanics.

Another possibility is to have the results of your choice show up, but have some random hidden results as well. For example, let's say that your choice to guide your ward toward diligence has the results of "Ward gains diligence, and PC gains stressed" (PC = your player character) with 2 hidden outcomes. Those hidden outcomes could be a variety (random) from a list of possibilities, such as "Ward gets +10 opinion of PC for helping" or "Ward gets -10 opinion of PC for being pushy" or "PC gets +1 diplomacy for successfully helping the ward".... or whatever sounds good (these are probably not the best options, but they are here just for examples). So you see some stats that will always occur and you know that there are some random ones that can occur (perhaps even the possibility that none of the hidden stats occur) and those could be good or bad. It can make for a game where it feels more like you are the character rather than a future person playing a character from the past with all knowledge at their fingertips as it were. And again, this should be a game rule choice as it could easily be annoying for players to not know whether their choices are good or bad overall. People do hate RNG.

 

[Fletz]

I'd also love to have less numerical info. For example: instead having my relation with another character expressed as an exact number, it would be more immersive if it gave a vague indication ("Love", "Like", "Indifferent", "Dislike", "Hate"). Same for character stats, army sizes,...

Right now you can exactly predict the outcome of your actions. If you want to have a character that dislikes you (-10), you offer him a bribe and the tooltip says this will increase his opinion by exactly 25. You know that as a result the character will like you for a value of 15. Whereas if the tooltip says the character just "dislikes" you, and offering him a bribe would improve his opinion of you by "a small amount", you don't know for sure if it will be enough to tip the balance.

Also, now you can quickly see that a potential enemy has 1000 men available, while you have 1250. This makes it easy to decide wether to attack or not. While if the tooltip would only give an indication, it would more be a gamble. This would make the game more risky and challenging.

100% Agree!

I would love if there would be the option to turn most of the "numbers" to describing texts. Would be a great addition for a future update of the game. So then the game would feel more authentic&realistic.

For example the health bar in I:R -> there is a number of health shown and you can exactly calculate on which day the character will die
Much better how it is in CK3 -> its described as "very healthy" or "weak" or "time to say goodbye"

Instead of knowing that a scheme has a 95% chance of success it would be much better if its written as "almost impossible to fail"

 

[Torredebelem]

100% Agree!

I would love if there would be the option to turn most of the "numbers" to describing texts. Would be a great addition for a future update of the game. So then the game would feel more authentic&realistic.

For example the health bar in I:R -> there is a number of health shown and you can exactly calculate on which day the character will die
Much better how it is in CK3 -> its described as "very healthy" or "weak" or "time to say goodbye"

Instead of knowing that a scheme has a 95% chance of success it would be much better if its written as "almost impossible to fail"

THIS.

If you want more granularity in the information, you should use your espionage capabilities on a character/court.