The stat scaling problem

[Torredebelem]

Since mods have been mentioned, give the mod in my signature a try. I combed the code for almost all sources of stat bloat and tried to curb it everywhere using several different methods. You can certainly hope to have 21 in a Skill, but it is not at all common to achieve. Not even a 15 is common at any rate.

 

[costevie]

i've been curious about the dark ages mod to address this very question. how does the AI as you get deeper into the game?

 

[qer]

Kill Genetics, for they make for to powerful superhumans

Kill Artifacts, for they allow to transcend the weakness of the flesh

Kill education, for it allows 20+years of job experience at 16 years of age (shit, this would actually be great on RL)

Seriously speaking, stat bloat was an issue in CK2 specially with DLC, it was an issue upon CK3 release and every new DLC will make it worse, What need to be done is a change of view from the design perspective so that the focus is engaging game mechanics and the narrative they create, not stat bloating. I will say this as many times as needed, games that forces the player to play with a bad hand once in a while are more interesting than those without any struggle. Beyond balancing current elements, I would love if newer expansions were designed around not making the player more powerful.

 

[TheRealRemus]

would love if newer expansions were designed around not making the player more powerful.

I hope very much that pdx will at least try to follow this in the futur. IMO eu4 went the exact opposite direction. With every new dlc They introduced new buttons to further increase power creep :/

 

[guiskj]

This a symptom of a bigger illness, imo.

For all the cool things, design-wise, in CK3, the Devs don't seem to have a hard definition if what the ceiling for any of their metrics should be. This leads to inflation everywhere in the game with every patch and DLC.

MaA size has gotten out of control.
Knights impact on battlefield is out of control.
Artifact count is out of control.
Avg number of traits on a character is out of control.
Prowess stat is insanely out of control.
Character attributes, where 10 used to mean average, now I consider my attribute average if it is below 20, because it is so easy to boost.
Money income is out of control.

So on and so on and so. I knew, as soon as CK3 came out, that the lack of any cap on ANYTHING was going to lead to inflation everywhere. Caps are good, we should learn to love them because it keeps Devs honest towards a defined vision. Specially if your business model is DLC heavy where there is incentive to make the new DLC more packed with bonus than the last.

I vehemently believe that is vastly easier to keep a game balanced by fixing caps being, inevitably, too easily hit, than by trying to play wack-a-mole with inflation of stats. Also, caps are easy for the AI, whereas inflation and trying to implement value sinks is like quicksand for the AI and easily gamed by the player.

 

[MarkFranz]

the Devs don't seem to have a hard definition if what the ceiling for any of their metrics should be.

Have to disagree on that one. There is some where Devs put clear definition of top ceiling. Stats and Prowess are capped at 100. : )

 

[IanReSc]

When they released the TaT DD's I brought up the question of adding more and more opportunities to gain prestige and piety. I wasn't even thinking about articacts and skills back then.

I feel like you don't even have to try to breed superhumans in this game. It just happens as time goes by. And that does happen withpout breeding the congenital traits into your bloodline on purpose. Sadly I never got a response in said DD.

What I find even more odd is the fact that they are aware of it. They even put it into their floorplan. So one would assume that they have some sort of crude plan down the line. In the mean time, the game becomes easier and easier. Heck, we can even upgrade our education now and can even reach a new level of it.

 

[costevie]

I literally never try to do super breeding and am a thru and thru role player. Even I regularly get characters with 20+ stats. Worse still, I rarely have characters who are actually *bad* at anything. By the end of their life, the lowest you’ll see is like an 8/9 sometimes. Which as others have said, leads characters to all feeling sorta the same.

 

[SectorsAreOkay]

When they released the TaT DD's I brought up the question of adding more and more opportunities to gain prestige and piety. I wasn't even thinking about articacts and skills back then.

I feel like you don't even have to try to breed superhumans in this game. It just happens as time goes by. And that does happen withpout breeding the congenital traits into your bloodline on purpose. Sadly I never got a response in said DD.

What I find even more odd is the fact that they are aware of it. They even put it into their floorplan. So one would assume that they have some sort of crude plan down the line. In the mean time, the game becomes easier and easier. Heck, we can even upgrade our education now and can even reach a new level of it.

I don't understand why there needed to be more ways to get prestige. I'm always overflowing.

 

[saltybreadisgood]

Agreed, too many ways of increasing your stats. Should add some restrictions like adding a limit to how many stat-increasing special buildings you can utilise at once and then making us choose which ones we want to get stats from. Should also make it a lot more difficult to get genius.

 

[opellulo]

This a symptom of a bigger illness, imo.

Pretty much agree: averages should follow a Gaussian distribution, where instead they just stack up thanks to successive improvements. There are several ways to fix this "line goes up" creep: soft caps, incremental improvements, risk/reward mechanics, and simple chance rolls BUT any of these options would add frustration for the player, and I don't think the vast majority of players would be happy with that.

IMHO a simple toggle like "limit stacking" that adds one or more of these remedies would be the simplest solution and would work much better than the "difficulty" setting that just allows the IA to cheat.

 

[Gliese58i]

There's only 2 answers, it was the same in CK2; roleplay OR download an overhaul mod and a bunch of +difficulty mods. These games are not made to be the least bit challenging, if you want that you need to either put heavy constraints on your play OR completely overhaul the game through mods or both.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

What if they included a system like the province development caps on the innovation/tech tree? That way max stats could be limited until certain innovations raise the soft stat cap.

Eyeglasses could raise the cap on learning, the stirrup could raise the soft cap on prowess for people trained in horse riding. Three field crop rotation could raise the soft cap on stewardship. Access to Toledo steel and, later, gunpowder raises the soft cap for martial. Advanced age can reduce some skills, like learning if you don’t have a reading lens, archery prowess declines if you haven’t unlocked the crossbow, and so on.

Certain cultural modifications can make the central Asian plains cultures better on the horse. And so on…

That way, you can add all the artifacts and all the learnings and trainings, but stats have additional soft caps and limitations until the right innovations come along.

It’s a rough idea. I hope the idea is coming across. Real life comes with “logarithmic” s-curve limitations on any “limited resource” effort (like human skills). (There is always a point of diminishing returns.) If the game only captures the early exponential part of a skill system, ignoring the point of diminishing returns, we will always get the “stat bloat”.

 

[Zylathas]

I think what Ck III needs is diminishing returns. That each +1 after a certain point contributes less.

 

[BlueMoon20]

What if they included a system like the province development caps on the innovation/tech tree? That way max stats could be limited until certain innovations raise the soft stat cap.

Eyeglasses could raise the cap on learning, the stirrup could raise the soft cap on prowess for people trained in horse riding. Three field crop rotation could raise the soft cap on stewardship. Access to Toledo steel and, later, gunpowder raises the soft cap for martial. Advanced age can reduce some skills, like learning if you don’t have a reading lens, archery prowess declines if you haven’t unlocked the crossbow, and so on.

Certain cultural modifications can make the central Asian plains cultures better on the horse. And so on…

That way, you can add all the artifacts and all the learnings and trainings, but stats have additional soft caps and limitations until the right innovations come along.

It’s a rough idea. I hope the idea is coming across. Real life comes with “logarithmic” s-curve limitations on any “limited resource” effort (like human skills). (There is always a point of diminishing returns.) If the game only captures the early exponential part of a skill system, ignoring the point of diminishing returns, we will always get the “stat bloat”.

Sorry, but I have to disagree about the innovation softcaps.

The first problem is that with softcaps such as these, the characters would feel even more the same.
You would now be incentivized to get a stat up to that softcap and then work on the others. Meaning that every character would be effectively the same after you get the right artifacts, legacies, ... - a god on every field compared to the others.


Also, it might help a bit in the early game, but each innovation breaks the floodgates wide oped - and the endgame is already broken enough. Also, if only you have that innovation, in that few years, the AI is actually forbidden from catching up to you until they also get that innovation. So in the years between that, they're even weaker then they are currently.


This is why almost nobody finishes the game. By the time you finish like 3-5 characters, you're way to powerful. You can just paint the map as you want. I'm not gonna say it's not fun the first time. But after the first time, you don't feel anything else except disappointment when you get to that stage of the game. Also, the point is that ck3 is supposed to be more than a map painter. But the decisions become meaningless, the setbacks practically don't exist anymore, enemies and attackers are nonexistent or weak and the neighboring kings are pushovers.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

Ok. So any limitation shouldn’t flatten out the skill profile. Then what if education skill raises the soft cap for that skill? That means a human led family can’t simply snowball past the AI, and the snowball is individual and always changing every generation. That way the AI isn’t always behind, like would happen with a culture-tech limitation. The hard limit is already 100 skill points, how to encourage variety as the game progresses, letting individuals “standing on the shoulder of giants”, but yet AI can somehow keep up without cheats… There need to be better designed trade offs, somehow.

 

[guiskj]

One possible way to help alleviate this would be to make traits that give attribute increases also decrease one or two other.

That way, if the Devs still want characters to "easily" reach 25+ in an attribute, then it will come at a cost of several subpar attributes.

If you've played Fallout or Wasteland you know what I mean. CK3 traits seem to be either totally positive or totally negative, from an attribute perspective. I want more the kind that has trade-offs.

 

[naq29]

Then what if education skill raises the soft cap for that skill?

Good idea. Also learning should raise the cap of other skills as well, and other skills raise learning cap.