In my opinion you can role play everything, imagine anything and find excuses for an unbalanced game design.
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The Chivalry tree really needs to be toned down.
- Thread starter Wheem
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If Chivalry's bonuses have some straight-up calculation error, then that should be fixed, no question.
Other than that, there are a couple of points floating about:
First is the designed impact of Chivalry, which is significant, and from my perspective is fine because as others have said, lifestyle paths are meant to be strong. I for one am glad it's highly beneficial to plan and invest in going down such paths, as opposed to spending 20 years of a character's life merely to attain a flat 20% bonus to some thing or another. Every path makes you a powerhouse at something, and that's fun and rewarding.
Then there's the matter of knight representation, which is frankly just a bit superfluous. Cosmetic objections to accounting details.
Titled knights historically had retinues of professional men-at-arms which fought with them. 10, 20, 30 of them per knight. To the common folk, those were all knights, but technically and officially speaking, only the leader had the proper title. He's the one we see represented.
One might object to these retinues being invisible, but looking at the big picture and considering Crusader Kings is a character-focused game, the impact of the "little man" is abstracted almost everywhere: your government is most certainly not run by 5-6 people, their institutions aren't one-man jobs, your lands are not populated 100% by levies, your ships get sailors from somewhere, etc.
There's an invisible majority turning the gears of your realm. It's only in the military aspect that we see somewhat more detailed accounting, but being very close to a named character, knight retinues can be reasonably abstracted, as are the agents of a spymaster or the tax collectors of a steward. Anyone is free to disagree with that, but do concede that it's ultimately a visual representation peeve more than anything else.
Other than that, there are a couple of points floating about:
First is the designed impact of Chivalry, which is significant, and from my perspective is fine because as others have said, lifestyle paths are meant to be strong. I for one am glad it's highly beneficial to plan and invest in going down such paths, as opposed to spending 20 years of a character's life merely to attain a flat 20% bonus to some thing or another. Every path makes you a powerhouse at something, and that's fun and rewarding.
Then there's the matter of knight representation, which is frankly just a bit superfluous. Cosmetic objections to accounting details.
Titled knights historically had retinues of professional men-at-arms which fought with them. 10, 20, 30 of them per knight. To the common folk, those were all knights, but technically and officially speaking, only the leader had the proper title. He's the one we see represented.
One might object to these retinues being invisible, but looking at the big picture and considering Crusader Kings is a character-focused game, the impact of the "little man" is abstracted almost everywhere: your government is most certainly not run by 5-6 people, their institutions aren't one-man jobs, your lands are not populated 100% by levies, your ships get sailors from somewhere, etc.
There's an invisible majority turning the gears of your realm. It's only in the military aspect that we see somewhat more detailed accounting, but being very close to a named character, knight retinues can be reasonably abstracted, as are the agents of a spymaster or the tax collectors of a steward. Anyone is free to disagree with that, but do concede that it's ultimately a visual representation peeve more than anything else.
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Yes, that is exactly what he was pointing out and demonstrating in his second screenshot: he said "I mean, the #1 Norse knight in the screenshot above killed 224 men with his 25 prowess, which was 1 kill shy of being triple the amount of my side's top 4 knights combined, which ranged from 19-23 prowess" - this discrepancy being due to chivalry.
With a mere +75% to knight effectiveness, he should have killed 1.75x as many as an equal-prowess knight, right? Instead, he killed almost 10x as many. Here's the screenshot again:
You’re misunderstanding. There are other factors besides the chivalry bonus that explain this. You can find them earlier in this thread.
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There are other things that enhance effectiveness, all of which are cumulative (problematic in itself considering they are all multipliers), but the OP said the only difference was one ruler had chivalry, the other didn't. It's easy to just test this with a save file to see if the applied bonus is too high by simply testing it in a battle, once with and once without the perk, with no other bonuses being different. Then we can see if OP is right or not.
The op does not say this is the only difference. They point to chivalry as potentially the main cause, but there are other differences we know already from the op which disprove this. Again, I’d recommend you read the thread, especially keinwyn’s breakdown on the previous page.
edit: that said, if you’re not convinced, you’re right, anyone can easily test this.
The knights are not actually killing those people.
They are just taking credit for those kills.
'Prowess' is more a measure of their PR machine.
They are just taking credit for those kills.
'Prowess' is more a measure of their PR machine.
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I mean, I'd love for knights to show up with a squad of dudes with them represented in army numbers. It'd really help my versimilitude
Rather than creating a third thread regarding how ridiculous I still think Knights are with the Chivalry tree unlocked, I'll add this here:
The King of East Francia filled out his Strategist tree and spent a lot of gold (for only being 13 years into the game) to recruit and maintain 600 Armored Footmen, but it was all still outperformed by one Count/Knight with 29 Prowess and 2 perks (from the King) invested into the Chivalry tree. With the rest of his knights - complete with their thoroughly mediocre prowess levels - added in, the gap becomes downright silly.
Yes, I hired some cheapo mercenaries to get ~650 Light Footmen to help counter his heavier infantry, but I still don't think that's any excuse for this lopsided imbalance. There are 0 buildings that I can find giving the King of East Francia modifiers for his knights, and he gets +14% from his Marshal's mission (character switched to check).
Meanwhile, I'm playing Norse and have +20% Knight Effectiveness from Halfdan controlling York, yet my top knight with 28 prowess had less than half the kills of the East Francian number-2 knight, who had half his prowess at 14. Furthermore, Duke Otto of Angria (not pictured in the above screenshots) had one quarter of my top champion's prowess, at only 7, yet managed to land 41 kills - only 2 less than my champion with 28 prowess.
It might sound overly dramatic, but this nonsense with the Chivalry tree (and other, stackable modifiers further into the game) are mostly what cause me to repeatedly shelve the game, usually without playing very far into it. This sort of stuff is just way too "gamey" for me, and makes immersion non-existent. Perhaps a temporary bandaid solution of being able to turn off the AI's ability to choose Chivalry would work until some proper balancing can be done? Like with Seduction at one point in CK2, it just allows too much unrealistic silliness (and imbalance vs other "combat trees" as well, in the case of Chivalry).
The King of East Francia filled out his Strategist tree and spent a lot of gold (for only being 13 years into the game) to recruit and maintain 600 Armored Footmen, but it was all still outperformed by one Count/Knight with 29 Prowess and 2 perks (from the King) invested into the Chivalry tree. With the rest of his knights - complete with their thoroughly mediocre prowess levels - added in, the gap becomes downright silly.
Yes, I hired some cheapo mercenaries to get ~650 Light Footmen to help counter his heavier infantry, but I still don't think that's any excuse for this lopsided imbalance. There are 0 buildings that I can find giving the King of East Francia modifiers for his knights, and he gets +14% from his Marshal's mission (character switched to check).
Meanwhile, I'm playing Norse and have +20% Knight Effectiveness from Halfdan controlling York, yet my top knight with 28 prowess had less than half the kills of the East Francian number-2 knight, who had half his prowess at 14. Furthermore, Duke Otto of Angria (not pictured in the above screenshots) had one quarter of my top champion's prowess, at only 7, yet managed to land 41 kills - only 2 less than my champion with 28 prowess.
It might sound overly dramatic, but this nonsense with the Chivalry tree (and other, stackable modifiers further into the game) are mostly what cause me to repeatedly shelve the game, usually without playing very far into it. This sort of stuff is just way too "gamey" for me, and makes immersion non-existent. Perhaps a temporary bandaid solution of being able to turn off the AI's ability to choose Chivalry would work until some proper balancing can be done? Like with Seduction at one point in CK2, it just allows too much unrealistic silliness (and imbalance vs other "combat trees" as well, in the case of Chivalry).
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Knighthood is broken. I know because I have used it frequently at count-tier in order to expand my domains despite the lack of funds for troops.
All you guys are only saying it's broken cause you are misunderstanding something vital in CK. There are no Knights or Champions in CK's unniverse, they are CHADS. It's well balanced...
I explained earlier in the thread that there is more than just chivalry causing your lopsided kill counts.
If knights are broken/op/whatever it is because they a) don't rout, b) have no combat width and c) are almost free.
If knights are broken/op/whatever it is because they a) don't rout, b) have no combat width and c) are almost free.
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I don't want knights to be made weaker. I want them to matter as characters. If you lose a powerful knight because he absconded with the daughter you refused to marry him to, that creates a lot more impactful story when that loss has significant effect on your gameplay, too. In that regard, I think it's a good thing that knights have disproportionate effect on battles, but I feel there isn't enough drama involving them, even though the potential is there.
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Chivalry absolutely has an outsized impact on the early stages of the game, and it's incredibly noticeable when you fight against liege lords who do or don't have 2 little piddling points invested into it. And once you stack enough modifiers alongside Chivalry, you end up with threads like this one. While the AI might not be intentionally doing that to the same degree that a player can, it's still ridiculous.
I think most of us are fine with knights/champions being important characters in the game, even outside of wars or raids, but they shouldn't be fighting like they're using modern artillery on a 9th century battlefield. One thing I'd suggested previously is to have them provide some sort of modifier(s) to armies that they're fighting alongside; at least in that case their effectiveness will be somewhat limited by the rest of the soldiers, rather than having them simply overshadow even top notch men-at-arms that outnumber them by the hundreds.
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Yup. But not nearly to the extent you attempt to make out in your posts. Take your latest example - remove 75% of the enemy's top knight's kills. That leaves 106 kills. That's almost the same as your top three knights combined, whilst you have +20% from York.
While I agree with you, you have the option to mod the game and modding the trees is very easy to do. So, in a way, you can tailor the game to your taste.