Is instabuild a bug?

[Saphire]

So I started out as a custom character in an ironman game, basically a norse dude in the Mediteranean. Invaded Byzantines from Crete and got all of greece. With this same legendary character, I created a builders bloodlines (build 24 holdings) from the insane wealth I got from raiding. Also can I just say kudos to the county conquest casus beli? I had to conquer an huge amount of land to have space to build my holdings - money wasn't even the problem.

So with the builder bloodline in hand, I got a nice architect from the chinese (gave them a holy nail and a 24 martial brilliant commander when they liked germanic cultures), which gives an additional 30% build speed.

Now that I had 50% build speed and -50% build cost, I realized that could use my 17 steward to speed it up a ton - +45-47.5%, which made literally everything build in like a week or two. Finally, when I upgraded to a lvl 20 steward, I realized, that it took 1 DAY for buildings to build. You can probably achieve the same effect without the builder bloodline if you kidnap some thralls and have a better steward.

Is this a bug? Should I report this? I know it has been technically possible for a while (in agot mod, I used slave camps with the same effect), but I never thought that it was this simple to get in vanilla ironman.

Now it doesn't remove build cost, so that's still a thing, but coupled with looting as well, its basically free instabuilt holdings. I could build my own castle, and insta upgrade the whole thing in just a month.

Europe Update - skip if you want to.
Also a while later I converted to orthodoxy - I would have become Christian, but MA there is 0%, probably because I had a habit of raiding rome and beat back their annoying crusade by just swimming over and sieging said rome down for insta 85 warscore, and the pope immediately tried to surrender - i refused, mostly because there was a germanic dude invading germany and I wanted to help a fellow out, so I beat up a bunch of catholic armies and won the war legit. Brittania is split between Hvitserk king of ireland (controls Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and portions of England, as well as Galicia 4 some reason), a waldenesian English king(who only owns like a third of England), and Denmark which probably stole its land from said waldenesian king. Germany is dominated by Norway holding Lothabringia, and germanic Poland holding most of East Francia except for a Fratecelli duke. Karlings still rule France/Aquatine, like all of it, but 50 percent of it (like county religion, not ruler religion) is Cathar while Brittany and a not insignificant part of west Francia are Fratecelli. Sardini and Corsica, as well as Barcelona are controlled by a Waldenesian. Burgundy is entirely carpeted in Waldenesian, but still has a catholic ruler (some kid of a female karling queen), and Italy is the only mostly catholic kingdom, w/ only lombardy being Fratecelli. Italy also has a rando dynasty descended from a karling grandma. So Catholocism is basically dead. Might have been fun to be a superhuman revival of Catholocism who heroically restored it after his ancestors destroyed it, but it was just easier with Orthodox counties to turn orthodox.
Edit: The number of catholic counties is 193, and the number of all of it's heresies combined is 194. Pretty cool right?

Note: you cannot replicate this without Holy Fury and Jade Dragon.

 

[MK1980]

i suppose the build speed modifiers could be capped at some arbitary value so you can never get rid of the last 10 or 20% or something. seems a bit silly that you can trim it down to a min value of 1 day.

but i don't think it's such a big deal from a balance point of view. even if you have basically infinite cash, you can only chain build until you hit the maximum building levels for your current tech level. that's a finite number of buildings that you would hit within a few years or decades of "normal" building, too. so you get some building upgrades a few years earlier then you'd get them without those stacked modifiers.

i guess it would be more broken if you could stack the price reduction to 100% and get the buildings for free. but build times aren't that important, imo.
i think the game wouldn't even play very differently if there was no such thing as build times and all building upgrades were instant by default.

 

[Varren]

Now that you're Orthodox, the next step is to restore the Roman Empire, then sack Roma, then rebuild it so you can say Rome was built in a day!

 

[Castimirr]

Shhh.... don't tell them. I like that bug. LOL

It is pretty broken though. I realized recently I could build a new city, (I'm feudal), upgrade all the bits I care about and then hand it off to a mayor fully upgraded, without having to hold it long enough that holding it was an issue. It also seriously speeds up hospitals and stacking maxed-out baronies in your capital. The oddest thing is it also applies to building the holding itself. The biggest limit is technology. I'd say technology and money, but I can raid in my current game, so wealth is irrelevant.

It was possible to do before HF though, you just had to stack the build modifiers high enough with things like the master builder event, high stewardship, etc.

 

[Dahoota]

I wouldn't say it's a bug so much as an oversight, and not a particularly bad one. As MK1980 said you're basically throttled by tech and available cash pretty quickly anyway.

 

[TheKingofWinter]

yeah, its fully possible to get a 1 day build time, if you get right modifiers and stack them with the reduce building time steward option.

 

[jonjowett]

Bumping this thread to note that it's possible to get better than -100% build cost and -100% build time.

In my current Indo-Norse run (waiting for a province to flip to Norse culture), I'm king of a custom kingdom that basically covers the Deccan Empire. I'm doing a lot of raiding, and China just went into a Golden Age.

Here's the recipe:

• Golden Age Scholar-Bureaucrat (-30% build cost & time)
• Thrall Workers VI in capital (-60% build cost & time) (obtained from excessive raiding as Germanic)
  
• Stone Quarry in capital (-25% build cost & - 20% build time)

Implied total in capital county: -115% build cost & -120% build time

Unfortunately, even at -115%, the actual build cost hasn't gone all the way down to 0 (or 1) gold. (I vaguely recall that the base build cost might be 150%, which might go some way towards explaining this discrepancy.) Still, it's pretty cheap!

 

[HandicapdHippo]

(I vaguely recall that the base build cost might be 150%, which might go some way towards explaining this discrepancy.)

It is, there is a defines setting for it that multiples all building costs, I guess at some point paradox wanted to increases all building costs and figured it would be easier to do so via a single change rather than editing every single building in the files.