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Chatoustikmou

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May 21, 2016
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This suggestions stems from this discussion thread.
The OP was complaining that Crown Authority is based on your character, and not on a per-title basis, so inheritance messes up Crown Authority in all kind of wild ways, sometimes setting you back for no good reasons.

The suggestion is the following :
Make Crown Authority an aggregate of the average Feudal Contract Scores of all Vassals in the realm


Feudal Contract Score


Feudal Contracts are comprised of 3 elements, most having an impact on the vassal opinion :
- Levy Obligations, ranging from Exempt (0% Tax, +10 Vassal opinion) to Massive (25% Tax, -25 Vassal opinion)
- Tax Obligations, ranging from Exempt (0% Levies, +10 Vassal opinion) to Massive (50% Levies, -25 Vassal opinion)
- Rights : there are 7 different rights, that are either granted or not. 5 of them have a +/- 5 Vassal opinion associated with them, depending if they are granted or not, 2 do not (Coinage Rights and Fortification Rights).

Let us assume that both Coinage Rights and Fortification Rights could also provide a +5 Vassal opinion modifier when granted, as they are more beneficial than not to the Vassals.
Here is the comparison between the maximum and minimum cumulated Vassal opinion modifiers associated with Feudal Contracts :

Max opinion modifier
Min opinion modifier
Tax Obligation
+ 10​
- 25​
Levies Obligation
+ 10​
- 25​
Religious Rights
+ 5​
0​
Title Revocation Protection
+ 5​
0​
War Declaration Rights
+ 5​
0​
Succession Rights
0​
- 5​
Coinage Rights
+ 5​
0​
Fortification Rights
+ 5​
0​
Total
+ 45
- 55

(Nb : I have renamed a couple of rights, because at the moment, some have a positive opinion modifier when enacted, whereas others have a negative opinion modifier when enacted, which is a bit confusing. Renaming some ensures that they work the same way : positive opinion when granted or negative opinion when not granted, but never the other way around.)

That gives us a total range of +/- 100 Vassal opinion between the most beneficial contract possible, and the least beneficial contract possible. Well that's a handy scale for sure !

Feudal Contract Score would follow the following simple formula, and would range from 0 to 100 :
Feudal Contract Score = - (sum of Vassal opinion modifiers - 40)


Aggregate Crown Authority

Crown Authority would no longer be something you arbitrarily modifiy at the press of a button. Instead, it would be automatically determined depending on the weighted average Feudal Contract Score of the realm, the weight of each Vassal depending on their number of provinces :

Feudal Contract Weight = Vassal Realm Size / (Liege Realm Size - Liege Domain)

So using Feudal Contract Scores, and Feudal Contract Weights, we can determine the average Crown Authority of the realm, which would translate to the actual Crown Authority levels as it reaches certain thresholds.


Crown Authority effects

Since you would need to modify your Vassal's contracts to gradually shift your Crown Authority, and those already heavily impact Levies, Taxes and Vassal opinion, Crown Authority would no longer have any global effect on those.

Feudal Contracts rights supersede Crown Authority and are inherited, but Crown Authority levels would still grant different Obligations and Rights by default for newly created Feudal Contracts. It would specifically be used :
- as the default contract when you grant a title to an unlanded character
- as the default contract when your vassal's own vassal gains independance
- as the contract reset when losing or caving in to a "Lower Crown Authority" faction (on a per vassal basis, rights not specified in the following table wouldn't be modified as a result of Factions)

Other effects of Crown Authority would remain unchanged (changing Inheritance laws, Vassal retractation, Imprisonment rights for refusing Vasssal retractation and Title revocation if applicable, Title inheritance outside the realm).


Weighted Average
Crown Authority Level
Default Tax​
Default Levy​
Title Revocation Protection​
War Declaration Rights​
0​
Autonomous Vassals​
Exempt​
Exempt​
Granted​
Granted​
25​
Limited Crown Authority​
Low​
Low​
Granted​
Granted​
50​
High Crown Authority​
Normal​
Normal​
Not granted​
Not granted​
75​
Absolute Crown Authority​
High​
High​
Not granted​
Not granted​


Related changes

- The Liberty Faction, which aims to lower Crown Authority, would result in practice in the modification of the contracts of all Vassals involved in the Faction instead (which should result in a drop in Crown Authority levels, but might not systematically, depending on who participates, their Contract Score, and their Contract Weight prior to the change).

- Vassal Contracts could still only be modified once per Ruler and per Vassal, but maybe it should allow for 2 or 3 Tyrannical changes (a detrimental change without a beneficial change to compensate). At the moment it only allows for 1 uncompensated detrimental change, whereas going from a 25 Contract Score to a 50 Contract Score takes at least 2 changes.

- Opinion modifiers for granting land would not stack but reset. So you'd get the same modifier from granting 1 county than for granting 10, and you'd have to grant a higher-tier title to get a better modifier. This would avoid gaming the system too much, and stacking modifier to be able to renegotiate the contract aggressively.

- Since there wouldn't be any Prestige cost associated to raising Crown Authority, maybe there should be a Prestige cost to renegociating contracts instead, the cost being higher for negotiating with a higher-tier title, but not exponentially so => it would be cheaper to negotiate with a Duke holding 5 counties, than to negotiate with 5 Counts.


Benefits

- Crown Authority would be more organic and less arbitrary than it is now, which in my book is always a good thing.

- Crown Authority would still change when you inherit new titles (or when you die and your Primary Heir already had vassals of his own), but not as dramatically, and either way it wouldn't change the dynamics of your realm so as much as it does now, and throw your realm in chaos.

- It would have players engage with Feudal Contracts a lot more. They are a neat idea on paper, but at the moment I don't much care for them, and they can be totally ignored for the most part.

- It would give an incentive for the player towards decentralization of power, instead of hoarding as many counts (and later dukes) as possible and always beeing at max vassal limit, to avoid making managing Feudal Contracts a chore, and to avoid paying an obscene amount of Prestige to renegotiate with everyone

- Reaching higher Crown Authority would be facilitated by landing the Player Character's close relatives instead of random lowborns, for the added opinion bonus (usually, if you're not a total d*ck to your relatives =P), to be able to renegotiate more easily. So structural nepotism would correlate with higher Crown Authority, as it should I guess ? I'm not sure, but either way, any incentive to land the ruler's relatives is also good gameplay in my book, so I'm all for it.



So here goes, hope you all like that !
Please do comment if you don't, or if you'd add things. I'm sure I missed some implications of the whole thing =)
 
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There might be potential in this, too, to take contracts with republican and maybe even religious vassals into account.

I've started to mod it, and there are a lot of things I didn't take into account =)

One is that technically, Clan and Feudal follow the same set of rules. They don't apply to them the same way, but if you change how Crown Authority works... well Clan are impacted. So I had to create a seperate Clan Authority.

Then there's the question of, what about Feudal vassals of Clan rulers, and Clan vassals of Feudal rulers ? It was done quite easily until then, because the set of rules was common, but since I split it in 2, it's not so obvious anymore.

Anyway, I'm trying to get a version 1.0 out of the door for the end of the week, and I'll see where I go from there =)
 
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For Tribes, It doesn't, and it doesn't have to. They're doing their own thing regarding Tribal Authority, and it works fine as a separate mechanic. Though the balance of it all can be questionned as well, cause as it is, the positive gameplay loop of raiders is really strong, especially for Norse raiders. The more Prestige you have, the more MAAs you can field, the stronger you get. And those troops give you more Prestige by raiding. Also the more Fame you have (and the 2 correlate), the more your vassals contribute to your levies, the stronger you get, the weaker they get. So basically, you almost never have any internal challenge.

And as a Norse, since Prestige is basically a renewable resource that you can farm, and there's no cooldown on changing Tribal Authority, you can get from lowest to highest in a couple of years.


Clan is an issue, as they are using the same system. So I'm toying with a Clan Authority, which updates every trimester based on the weighted average opinion of direct vassals. It will need a lot of balancing, but technically it works fine, and it's coherent with what the Clan playstyle is supposed to be, i.e. having vassals that have a good opinion of you.


And for the moment, I'm purpôsefully ignoring vassals that are not of your government type, so since I'm using weighted average, well they tank your average, as does having a huge domain yourself. So in practice :
- if more than 25% of your realm is held by vassals that are a different government type than you, you can never reach 75% Crown / Clan Authority
- if your domain is more than 25% your realm size, you can never get higher than 75% Crown / Clan Authority.

I have no problem with the 1st one, the 2nd could be more of an issue.
I could not count realm size in this, but the math is tricky as your domain size is not necessarily a number of counties, since it counts baronies.
And I like having something that actually rewards not hoarding the maximum land possible.
 
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