Question for the Devs: How good is the "average player"?

[johnty5]

My feeling is that CK3 doesn't need to be more "difficult" in a way where numbers etc. need to be more micromanaged - after all, CK2 wasn't like that. What CK2 had - and what I think CK3 could do with - is more friction. I want the game to throw random shit at me throughout my run that I have to deal with.

Educated a perfect heir and spare? Lol they both died within six months of each other and the fail son you married to an idiot for an alliance is your only option.

Want to get coronated? Lol Pope says no and wont allow it until you've defeated some anti Pope who's heading up an Empire that's got you outclassed - and every month you're not coronated, your vassal's opinion of you goes down by 5.

Want to reorganise your vassals? Lol your Council won't let you and won't budge and everyone's getting ever more pissed off with you.

None of those things are particularly complicated. They're certainly not min-max problems. But they were the sort of thing that CK2 threw at you when you were trying to get a duchy or a kingdom or an empire going. I don't think CK3's problem is that it's too easy (at least in the min-max sense) - I think its problem is it's too plain sailing.

 

[Twentyfists]

As a fairly new, not very good, player what is it you use to gauge how well your game was once you get to the end? In Stellaris there is a running score that rates you against the other empires, but this game is much different. I made it to the end with my dynasty intact. How do you gauge that run through with the next? I enjoy the game and set my own goals, but it seems very hard to compare progress.

Your level of splendor is one good metric; it'll increase from your dynasty's performance overall, and it's the most similar to CK2's score system.

I like this, but also sometimes having low realm stability can be beneficial. If you fight a rebellion and crush it (with your ridiculously OP MAA of course) you get tons of free title revocations and/or huge sums of gold in ransoms. I have sadly forced rebellions (by offending a faction for example) in lapses of power gaming to get these. Having a low player realm stability can be cheesable still.

Is that a sad lapse of power-gaming, or shrewd politics from gameplay-as-intended? I've done this after inheritance and have never felt it to be an egregious issue, outside of balance concerns. Using force to provoke your underlings into a conflict where you're at an advantage in order to assert your power and seize desired territory seems very much like the kind of behavior a landed autocratic ruler would use. It strikes me as something you'd find in the Art of War.

 

[fodazd]

My feeling is that CK3 doesn't need to be more "difficult" in a way where numbers etc. need to be more micromanaged - after all, CK2 wasn't like that. What CK2 has - and what I think CK3 could do with - is more friction. I wan't the game to throw random shit at me throughout my run that I have to deal with.

Educated a perfect heir and spare? Lol they both died within six months of each other and the fail son you married to an idiot for an alliance is your only option.

Want to get coronated? Lol Pope says no and wont allow it until you've defeated some anti Pope who's heading up an Empire that's got you outclassed - and every month you're not coronated, your vassal's opinion of you goes down by 5.

Want to reorganise your vassals? Lol your Council won't let you and won't budge and everyone's getting ever more pissed off with you.

None of those things are particularly complicated. They're certainly not min-max problems. But they were the sort of thing that CK2 threw at you when you were trying to get a duchy or a kingdom or an empire going. I don't think CK3's problem is that it's too easy (at least in the min-max sense) - I think it's problem is it's too plain sailing.

My personal opinion: I agree that one of the things that would make the game more interesting is more possibilities for your heirs to die. Ideally NOT in ways that lead to annoying micro like "I forgot to forbid my 0 prowess son from being a knight, so he just died in battle". However: I disagree that this particular interaction of the CK2 council was a good example of "friction": If people are mad at you because of things they don't allow you to fix because they are mad at you, that is just frustrating.

 

[TripleAgent]

My personal opinion: I agree that one of the things that would make the game more interesting is more possibilities for your heirs to die. Ideally NOT in ways that lead to annoying micro like "I forgot to forbid my 0 prowess son from being a knight, so he just died in battle". However: I disagree that this particular interaction of the CK2 council was a good example of "friction": If people are mad at you because of things they don't allow you to fix because they are mad at you, that is just frustrating.

The solution is to find ways to make them less mad at you (feudal contract adjustments, bribes, etc) or get rid of them (intrigue, imprisonment, murder, title revocation potentially leading to revolt). As it stands, oftentimes your powerful vassals are perfectly fine with everything you do as long as they're on your council to the point where you barely need to do any of that kind of work. I'd prefer the game occasionally frustrating me and forcing me to come up with a solution as opposed to constantly being a pushover to play, which is the situation now. Frustration is fun! Losing is fun!

 

[Troyen]

On that note, another benefit GRs have: general balance should only be addressed for the DEFAULT version of the rules; in so far as the rest of the rules are concerned so long as they don't break the game (and I mean actually breaking with bugs, not our personal definition of "balance") let it be up to the player to tweak them to their peril. I'm of the honest opinion that the devs have much to much on their plate to also bother with balancing varying degrees of difficulty; now, if you only focus on balancing the default Game Rules settings whilst providing opt-in "potentially unbalancing" game rules, that's another story.

The only real inconvenience Game Rules have is that they do require a certain knowledge of how game mechanics actually work; for a newcomer most game rules are like "What again? I sort of understand what I've just read but I don't really know how it translates into the game until I've tried it so... whatever". To this objection I would say that such an undertaking as this would be (massive GR implementation that is) shouldn't be made with new players in mind. Game Rules are an aside to the game, not the game itself, and only with a certain level of experience can a player really use them with foresight.

This can be tricky. Stellaris in 3.0 overhauled the pop growth mechanics and added a game rule that let you use the old option (or even customize new values, but I think most people using the rule just disable the growth cap). The default option is to slow down growth as you get larger to cut back on snowballing and improve endgame performance, yet two years later there are still numerous people that complain about game state when the growth mechanics are disabled. If a game rule option becomes popular enough, the team still has to decide how much effort is spent on maintaining balance and performance across X different game states.

The other downside is too many game rules can lead to choice overload, not to mention be an organizational nightmare. As PDX games get older with more and more rules piled on, it takes longer to start a new game because there are more options to evaluate, even for experienced players. (They're also often just all lumped on a single long page, so it'd be nice if games with more than 20 rules would break them out by category rather than ordered by the date they were added.). Also makes it harder to evaluate bug reports, as while I think the game should be balanced around the default rules, the devs should still fix bugs in their game that arise from using officially supported in-game settings.

But I agree with your larger point that different rules help more with balance than a simple "easy/medium/hard" modifier. I really like how Stellaris lets me customize the mid and endgame dates, which in turn completely impact the pace of the game. It sounds like the upcoming Domain Limit game rule would also fall into this category.

 

[johnty5]

My personal opinion: I agree that one of the things that would make the game more interesting is more possibilities for your heirs to die. Ideally NOT in ways that lead to annoying micro like "I forgot to forbid my 0 prowess son from being a knight, so he just died in battle". However: I disagree that this particular interaction of the CK2 council was a good example of "friction": If people are mad at you because of things they don't allow you to fix because they are mad at you, that is just frustrating.

I don’t disagree. Perhaps I wrote the Council example up in an overly-simplistic way.

I want CK3 to regularly throw annoying-but-solvable problems at me that constantly provide friction while I’m trying to do whatever I set out to do.

 

[Anonymous01]

The solution is to find ways to make them less mad at you (feudal contract adjustments, bribes, etc) or get rid of them (intrigue, imprisonment, murder, title revocation potentially leading to revolt). As it stands, oftentimes your powerful vassals are perfectly fine with everything you do as long as they're on your council to the point where you barely need to do any of that kind of work. I'd prefer the game occasionally frustrating me and forcing me to come up with a solution as opposed to constantly being a pushover to play, which is the situation now. Frustration is fun! Losing is fun!

So true.

That was CK2's magic sauce: there was always more than one way to skin a cat, if you just took some time to think it through.

CK3 with its tech trees and lack of message settings and inert characters doesn't invite enough thinking. It would rather convince us that fart jokes really are funny!

 

[fodazd]

I don’t disagree. Perhaps I wrote the Council example up in an overly-simplistic way.

I want CK3 to regularly throw annoying-but-solvable problems at me that constantly provide friction while I’m trying to do whatever I set out to do.

I like the CK2 council too in principle. Voting on laws, wars, imprisonments and title revocations provided good friction and made sense, and I would really like it if something similar were added to CK3. It's just that I have a few particularly bad memories about the council preventing me from *granting* titles. I do not think that was particularly fun.

 

[King Jong Un]

My feeling is that CK3 doesn't need to be more "difficult" in a way where numbers etc. need to be more micromanaged - after all, CK2 wasn't like that. What CK2 had - and what I think CK3 could do with - is more friction. I want the game to throw random shit at me throughout my run that I have to deal with.

Educated a perfect heir and spare? Lol they both died within six months of each other and the fail son you married to an idiot for an alliance is your only option.

Want to get coronated? Lol Pope says no and wont allow it until you've defeated some anti Pope who's heading up an Empire that's got you outclassed - and every month you're not coronated, your vassal's opinion of you goes down by 5.

Want to reorganise your vassals? Lol your Council won't let you and won't budge and everyone's getting ever more pissed off with you.

None of those things are particularly complicated. They're certainly not min-max problems. But they were the sort of thing that CK2 threw at you when you were trying to get a duchy or a kingdom or an empire going. I don't think CK3's problem is that it's too easy (at least in the min-max sense) - I think its problem is it's too plain sailing.

Lets make it clear, I think educating a heir and spare is possibly a buff farm but not sure, getting coronated is not a buff farm and neither is reoganising vassals.

 

[Ivashanko]

I like the CK2 council too in principle. Voting on laws, wars, imprisonments and title revocations provided good friction and made sense, and I would really like it if something similar were added to CK3. It's just that I have a few particularly bad memories about the council preventing me from *granting* titles. I do not think that was particularly fun.

Granting them at all or granting them to a specific person that the members of the council presumably dislike?

If it is the first, then that sucks. If it is the latter, and if the council is okay with you granting them to another person, then that is awesome and exactly what the game needs more of.

 

[johnty5]

So true.

That was CK2's magic sauce: there was always more than one way to skin a cat, if you just took some time to think it through.

CK3 with its tech trees and lack of message settings and inert characters doesn't invite enough thinking. It would rather convince us that fart jokes really are funny!

Personally, I think CK3's problem is the opposite of that.

There are still as many ways to skin a cat as there were in CK2 - there's just less need to skin cats. That was my point in my original comment. CK3 gives us tools to solve problems - but not enough problems to use them on.

EDIT:

Of course, given the title of the thread, the above is only true to the extent that you've hit a certain skill with CK3. That's why I'd like difficulty levels/game rules we can tweak to match the type of experience we want.

 

[gamerk2]

I think the issue is that there's a point where the AI isn't going to be able to successfully go as wise as the player if they choose to blob, and thus *eventually* the player will always dominate if they choose to do so.

Most fun game was playing as a count, and actually struggled to stay alive due to lack of being able to immediately overpower everyone around me. Until I *accidentally* gained the Kingdom of France due to everyone else in the succession coming down with multiple simultaneous cases of death.

 

[Breebelbox]

I think the issue is that there's a point where the AI isn't going to be able to successfully go as wise as the player if they choose to blob, and thus *eventually* the player will always dominate if they choose to do so.

Most fun game was playing as a count, and actually struggled to stay alive due to lack of being able to immediately overpower everyone around me. Until I *accidentally* gained the Kingdom of France due to everyone else in the succession coming down with multiple simultaneous cases of death.

I'm sorry, but I pretty much only play starting as a single county lord and after a few generations I'm the strongest ruler on the whole map. The game is really lacking some more difficulty settings, imho.

If people think the difficulty is fine, that's great. But people have different tastes and ideas of fun and I think there are quite a lot of people who would like some more optional challenges. So can we please just acknowledge that those people exist and that their desire for higher difficulties is legitimate?

 

[Aregodas]

If people think the difficulty is fine, that's great. But people have different tastes and ideas of fun and I think there are quite a lot of people who would like some more optional challenges. So can we please just acknowledge that those people exist and that their desire for higher difficulties is legitimate?

Acknowledging that concern was precisely the intention when dismissing the idea of using difficulty settings for what I believe is a better option, game rules.
If you don't mind me using your own words -for they serve the point really really well here- "people have different tastes and ideas of fun and I think there are quite a lot of people who would like some more optional challenges"; game rules as a whole would serve that end much better than static difficulty levels. Allow me to elaborate.

Like you, I tend to enjoy best starting as a single county unimportant landed character; more often than not that feels the only way to provide some initial challenge. Now, initial is the important part here; for after an in-game while, no matter if I'm just a simple duke, I will be much too secure in my position for even a realm several times my size to pose an actual threat to my already sprawling dynasty.
But what if I had put in place a GR that increases mortality by a factor of 3? Maybe I'm concerned that is going to blast the AI into oblivion, so I will adjust that rule for Player Only; now, keeping my dynasty alive will be harder. Also, I want handling my realm to be harsher too, so I will lower my own domain limit by half with one GR (this one applying to the AI too, why not? I like me a proper stratified society) and get another one to activate the opinion malus of "holding too many duchies" after just the one instead of the usual two -for player only too-. Perhaps more truculent subjects as well? Sounds good to me, let's double the chance of factions rising against me. Enough with the settings, let's play.

Would this create a harder, more enjoyable experience for you? Some of you reading this might be thinking these were all great suggestions, some may be thinking I'm mad. Who cares? My game, my rules. You don't need to like them; I care not if you do. These are for me, and me alone. And so are the rules you get to set up for your own games.
Compare this freedom of choice to a "hard" difficulty option that touches on 30 different settings at the same time, applying all 30 changes -some of which I like, some of which I don't, none of which I have a say on whether or not they should be part of my game- together. Call me crazy but since I also believe that "people have different tastes and ideas of fun" game rules are more desirable than asking for square difficulty levels.

 

[vandevere]

Acknowledging that concern was precisely the intention when dismissing the idea of using difficulty settings for what I believe is a better option, game rules.
If you don't mind me using your own words -for they serve the point really really well here- "people have different tastes and ideas of fun and I think there are quite a lot of people who would like some more optional challenges"; game rules as a whole would serve that end much better than static difficulty levels. Allow me to elaborate.

Like you, I tend to enjoy best starting as a single county unimportant landed character; more often than not that feels the only way to provide some initial challenge. Now, initial is the important part here; for after an in-game while, no matter if I'm just a simple duke, I will be much too secure in my position for even a realm several times my size to pose an actual threat to my already sprawling dynasty.
But what if I had put in place a GR that increases mortality by a factor of 3? Maybe I'm concerned that is going to blast the AI into oblivion, so I will adjust that rule for Player Only; now, keeping my dynasty alive will be harder. Also, I want handling my realm to be harsher too, so I will lower my own domain limit by half with one GR (this one applying to the AI too, why not? I like me a proper stratified society) and get another one to activate the opinion malus of "holding too many duchies" after just the one instead of the usual two -for player only too-. Perhaps more truculent subjects as well? Sounds good to me, let's double the chance of factions rising against me. Enough with the settings, let's play.

Would this create a harder, more enjoyable experience for you? Some of you reading this might be thinking these were all great suggestions, some may be thinking I'm mad. Who cares? My game, my rules. You don't need to like them; I care not if you do. These are for me, and me alone. And so are the rules you get to set up for your own games.
Compare this freedom of choice to a "hard" difficulty option that touches on 30 different settings at the same time, applying all 30 changes -some of which I like, some of which I don't, none of which I have a say on whether or not they should be part of my game- together. Call me crazy but since I also believe that "people have different tastes and ideas of fun" game rules are more desirable than asking for square difficulty levels.

That's precisely the point of Game Rules; to customize the experience for everyone, as opposed to enforcing a uniform Game Setting on everyone regardless of playstyle. With Game Rules, everyone should be able to play the Game how they want...

 

[MathyM]

I was discussing the games difficulty recently and the main point that came up as we had both gotten all the achievements was "maybe we're just out of touch".

Alright, this is an entirely different tangent here, but how the hell did you get the one where you need to have your Dynasty build 100 Runestones? Did you use the exploit where you abdicate, your heir builds a runestone, starts a war, abdicates, then you repeat? Or did you actually manage to help AI rulers of your dynasty build the ~70 runestones that they have to build in order to meet the target in time?

 

[NATOaster]

Alright, this is an entirely different tangent here, but how the hell did you get the one where you need to have your Dynasty build 100 Runestones? Did you use the exploit where you abdicate, your heir builds a runestone, starts a war, abdicates, then you repeat? Or did you actually manage to help AI rulers of your dynasty build the ~70 runestones that they have to build in order to meet the target in time?

yeah no I just did the stock up a brazillion gold and abdicate repeatedly technique the game's busted

 

[gamerk2]

To me, "hard" difficulty is going for achievements; the AI simply is never going to be much more then adequate.

 

[BoVice9]

The game is at its best (for me anyway) when you face major challenges to have your dynasty survive and you have to rely on your knowledge and experience with the game systems to dig your self out of hole. This is why I choose to play as a 1 county count to start nearly all my playthroughs and why after I reach a point where the game goes autopilot easy I lose interest and start a new run or play another game for a while.

 

[naq29]

I installed some mods that make the gameplay much better:
- More interactive vassals: Vassals will join you in wars and choose sides in civil wars. That make wars bigger and vassals more important than just obstacles that you have to overcome.
- one county one ruler: removes demesne bonus from stewardship and rank. Now you can't hoard holdings and money anymore, and can marry for love instead of your spouse's stewardship.
- letters and loyalty: relation penalty for vassals far from your capital. Now you can't please everyone and to manage your vassal more carefully.
- great conquerors: some characters will randomly get big bonus including troops and casus belli and go to conquer a big empire - more AI opponents for you.