Aren't they fantasy mods? Immortality? Medieval medicine? (Medicine became net life extending in the second half of the 19th century)
I prefer realism.
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Aren't they fantasy mods? Immortality? Medieval medicine? (Medicine became net life extending in the second half of the 19th century)
I prefer realism.
To some extent. One the one hand medieval medicine was a lot more advanced than you think (it wasn't just leeches), but many of the treatments are pretty absurd.
You can turn off the truly crazy things like satanism and immortality
You can turn off the truly crazy things like satanism and immortality
They had some fantastic elements, like the immortality and devil worships, though based on the fears and beliefs of the time. Most of the DLC is not. Reaper's Due is mostly focused on revamping the disease system and making the bubonic plague an actual devastating plague that will kill tons of people. Most of the societies in Monks and Mystics are things like monastic orders or the Assassins. It's just that the more fantastic parts are the ones that become memes, so you hear the most about those.
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Other than the immortality thing (turning off supernatural disables it anyway) Reapers Due is probably one of the least fantastic/most realistic ones. The Prosperity system for provinces is great, it makes economics a lot more dynamic since more than just disease can damage prosperity. It's a nice reward for keeping your realm safe and makes the aftermath of epidemics that much more devastating. It's hard to tax people or raise levies when almost everyone is dead, even if the disease has passed. The event that can occur with high prosperity that lets you reclaim marginal land for a large initial investment, i.e. build a new holding slot, is also nice and reminds me of some the 12th and 13th-century economic expansion.
The changes to how diseases work also make it more realistic in a lot of ways. Any disease can be deadly but some are far more dangerous than others. It does add some ways to deal with it, but the option that can possibly "cure" something is very extreme. It will maim you, it might kill you, and it might give you an infection that kills you anyway (and infections are something the court physician can't treat). The other option randomly does something between making it much worse to mostly offsetting the penalties (the treatment cannot give you a bonus above the malus from the disease. )
It's worth attempting treatment, especially in desperate situations, but even maximizing your chances it's always a gamble. Sometimes it is worth the risk, sometimes it isn't. Which flavor text it uses to describe your treatment has no correlation to the results you get from it, and that seems quite intentional. It very much creates the feeling, to the modern player, that your court physician is trying medieval medicine and if it happens to work it's just luck.
As a game mechanic, it's not that the medicine is net life expanding compared to the base game, it just offsets how much more brutal the diseases are. (Obviously inside the same run you have a somewhat better life expectancy if you can hire a really good physician, but even as an emperor that isn't always easy. If you have a bad one it's much more likely to decrease your life expectancy.) I think I mostly wind up in about the same place with or without it enabled, the flavor is just more realistic with it enabled.
The hospitals you can build are also very expensive. Even as a raiding culture/MR, I'm probably not going to build them outside my demesne unless I can use that province as a chokehold to help keep diseases from getting to my capital. I haven't had great success with that tactic that anyway.
Flavor-wise they mostly focus on charity and dealing with the dying rather than helping the sick so they recover.
Mechanically they only give a bonus to keeping diseases from spreading into the county and help protect it from getting the depopulated malus if the disease does spread there. They don't provide any bonus to treatment once you are sick, and do not seem to reduce how long the disease stays in the province. It isn't until the last few levels of the main building (which are several thousand wealth to build and require high-level construction tech) that the bonuses to prevent a disease from spreading to the province can actually outweigh the malus that high Prosperity gives to encouraging disease spread. Even then, it won't stop something like the plague.
They have other effects as well, in terms of generating some techpoints, generating piety and encouraging tech spread, but those seem less relevant to your concerns (as a player they do help make them worth building though). It does speed up tech more than the base game, but mostly I feel that more if I do an early start (and tech getting too high too fast is an issue then anyway). Even then you won't get those bonuses until you've already dumped a lot of points into construction and spent a lot of wealth.
Since you said you're a guy that likes to map paint, you're going to find defensive pacts as just an annoying speed bump. Hell, I don't think most people like them at all since it does jack all against the largest blobs but slows kingdoms from going to empire tier.
Thanks to the previous two posters for educating me, I guess... now you have weakened my defences against buying more DLC. A large percentage of the top posts in the reddit group seem to be about their immortal god king divorcing his horse wife after being castrated by the experimental treatment for piles, or somesuch, which seemed kind of absurd to me. I have Conclave, Rajas, Horse, WoL, Legacy, and Jade. Would you say Reaper's is the best of what's left?
There are options to disable "Supernatural" and "Absurd" events when you start a new game.
I'm still playing around and didn't bother to go past the second generation yet, but it seems a more than just valid strategy now to use the early game to establish a network of tributaries that outweighs any defensive pact
Glad to help
If you give it a go, I hope you enjoy it. HF is a lot of fun, but depends on what you want to play (I'm having fun with a pagan run currently, I haven't tried the changes as a Christian yet.) Reaper's Due basically affects every play though. Either are good choices to me.
And yeah you want Holy Fury first. Bloodlines and Warrior Lodges are plenty of fun to play around with.