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NK mode means owning every single county in some large realm, such as the HRE. While you suffer a -90% tax and levy penalty for doing this, the sheer number of counties (150+) you own lets you steamroll over this limitation.
At present, it seems that NK mode in CK3 is not only sustainable, but possibly the most powerful gameplay strategy available. Once you get there, your empire becomes a giant gold + prestige + renown farm. It doesn't have any real counters, other than the fact that it might make the player lose interest in the game. This isn't the thing that really bothers me about it, though.
What really bothers me is that, by being a feasible form of play, NK mode highlights the fact that CK3 does a poor (non-existent) job of modeling an important and interesting aspect of medieval rule: what happens when one person tries to bite off too much.
It is unrealistic for a single ruler to personally run a realm as large as the HRE armed with nothing but medieval-era administration and technology. What would happen if someone actually tried this? The counties at the far corners of the empire would quickly realize that the emperor is a largely absent and effectively non-existent entity in their lives. Disasters would take weeks to communicate to the royal court and receive a reply. Taxes would be "forgotten". Royal decrees would become impractical to enforce. The organization of local levies into a coherent royal army would be a mess.
Local counties might even start signing treaties with foreign powers. Given the lack of royal government, any notion of a coherent realm or national unity would dissipate. If run this way for long enough, local powerful figures would emerge and occupy the power vacuums existing all over the empire. Some might swear fealty to the emperor. Others might break off to independence.
This would be an interesting thing to model in the game.
There are a few ways to nerf North Korea mode even without using county control, and it could have been done in CK2. One example is to just make extra counties past a certain limit over the demense to contribute -100% of tax and levies. Case closed.
But the mechanic of county control lets us nerf NK mode in a softer and more realistic way corresponding to the inability of royal authority to stretch itself so thin. We could impose a total control threshold depending on one's demense limit. For instance, if one has a demesne limit of 5, then one's total control threshold could be set at 5 x 100 x 1.5 (the constant C = 1.5 can be adjusted as necessary). This gives you a total of 750 control points to work with.
If the sum total of the control of all of your county holdings exceeds your total control threshold, then you start to get a monthly tick decreasing the control of all of your counties (how rapid depending on how far you are over the limit). Also actions like the Marshal consolidating control don't work while you are over the control threshold. Better yet, the game could introduce special events that can trigger when you are well over your control threshold. We could even add an achievement for someone who manages to stay above their control threshold for a certain long period of time.
All of this would be easy to implement using existing mechanics, and introduce interesting gameplay revolving around the limits of royal authority. With the nice bonus that it completely burns NK mode down to the ground.
At present, it seems that NK mode in CK3 is not only sustainable, but possibly the most powerful gameplay strategy available. Once you get there, your empire becomes a giant gold + prestige + renown farm. It doesn't have any real counters, other than the fact that it might make the player lose interest in the game. This isn't the thing that really bothers me about it, though.
What really bothers me is that, by being a feasible form of play, NK mode highlights the fact that CK3 does a poor (non-existent) job of modeling an important and interesting aspect of medieval rule: what happens when one person tries to bite off too much.
It is unrealistic for a single ruler to personally run a realm as large as the HRE armed with nothing but medieval-era administration and technology. What would happen if someone actually tried this? The counties at the far corners of the empire would quickly realize that the emperor is a largely absent and effectively non-existent entity in their lives. Disasters would take weeks to communicate to the royal court and receive a reply. Taxes would be "forgotten". Royal decrees would become impractical to enforce. The organization of local levies into a coherent royal army would be a mess.
Local counties might even start signing treaties with foreign powers. Given the lack of royal government, any notion of a coherent realm or national unity would dissipate. If run this way for long enough, local powerful figures would emerge and occupy the power vacuums existing all over the empire. Some might swear fealty to the emperor. Others might break off to independence.
This would be an interesting thing to model in the game.
There are a few ways to nerf North Korea mode even without using county control, and it could have been done in CK2. One example is to just make extra counties past a certain limit over the demense to contribute -100% of tax and levies. Case closed.
But the mechanic of county control lets us nerf NK mode in a softer and more realistic way corresponding to the inability of royal authority to stretch itself so thin. We could impose a total control threshold depending on one's demense limit. For instance, if one has a demesne limit of 5, then one's total control threshold could be set at 5 x 100 x 1.5 (the constant C = 1.5 can be adjusted as necessary). This gives you a total of 750 control points to work with.
If the sum total of the control of all of your county holdings exceeds your total control threshold, then you start to get a monthly tick decreasing the control of all of your counties (how rapid depending on how far you are over the limit). Also actions like the Marshal consolidating control don't work while you are over the control threshold. Better yet, the game could introduce special events that can trigger when you are well over your control threshold. We could even add an achievement for someone who manages to stay above their control threshold for a certain long period of time.
All of this would be easy to implement using existing mechanics, and introduce interesting gameplay revolving around the limits of royal authority. With the nice bonus that it completely burns NK mode down to the ground.
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