Crusader Kings II really makes it hard to do anything about one of your dynasty members, council members or other vassals and members of your court being imprisoned.
All this comes together to constitute one of those core things that causes intense frustration, because it happens to characters you might've grown attached to, and the game mechanics feel so broken and abandoned and ramshackle in this area. My playthroughs often end on a bug/oversight like this because I don't want (or can't because Ironman) to use the console or hunt for hours for an updated mod that fixes the problem (hint: nothing on the Steam workshop at the moment addresses freeing prisoners, except perhaps as part of huge total conversions).
For Crusader Kings III, I think we'd already be in a better place if successfully sieging a holding instantly liberated anyone present who you're not at war with. (And who's not related to or in the employ of someone you're at war with.)
Then if you feel like it adds flavour and historicity, you can add rare exceptions when things get more complicated than that and you need to deal with an event. For instance sometimes if the enemy holds your heir prisoner they could've managed to sneak him out through a secret passage and transfert him to another holding. But the base mechanics and the intuitive default case need to make sense first!
I really hope that Crusader Kings III gets a laser focus on its core features all along development. For me, it could mean the difference between a game I want to like but ultimately have mixed feelings about, and a masterpiece I can't stop playing.
- You can sometimes offer to ransom them, but the AI often refuses for obscure reasons.
- You can siege the location, but it rarely results in you freeing them. You could presumably do it again and again until you roll the dice correctly , but it requires letting the enemy take back the place intentionally (at which point immersion and believability go out the window) or re-declaring war - for which you might not have a casus belli.
- You can (apparently, I never knew until recently) take the intruigue focus and hope you get an event to plot to free that character. Of course, the game doesn't tell you about this anywhere.
- You can send money to them and hope they use it to ransom themselves.
- There are some cases where you can do strictly nothing, for instance if it's the daughter of a friendly foreign ruler you'd like to marry but is unfortunately in prison. It would be a nice chivalrous mission for a game set in the age of chivalry, but nope.
All this comes together to constitute one of those core things that causes intense frustration, because it happens to characters you might've grown attached to, and the game mechanics feel so broken and abandoned and ramshackle in this area. My playthroughs often end on a bug/oversight like this because I don't want (or can't because Ironman) to use the console or hunt for hours for an updated mod that fixes the problem (hint: nothing on the Steam workshop at the moment addresses freeing prisoners, except perhaps as part of huge total conversions).
For Crusader Kings III, I think we'd already be in a better place if successfully sieging a holding instantly liberated anyone present who you're not at war with. (And who's not related to or in the employ of someone you're at war with.)
Then if you feel like it adds flavour and historicity, you can add rare exceptions when things get more complicated than that and you need to deal with an event. For instance sometimes if the enemy holds your heir prisoner they could've managed to sneak him out through a secret passage and transfert him to another holding. But the base mechanics and the intuitive default case need to make sense first!
I really hope that Crusader Kings III gets a laser focus on its core features all along development. For me, it could mean the difference between a game I want to like but ultimately have mixed feelings about, and a masterpiece I can't stop playing.