Heya! Thanks for the concerns, they're very valid - as others have said in this thread, I don't imagine we'll get release balance spot on, but we'll likely adjust with subsequent patches. FWIW, this was also a concern I had during development (as one of the devs working a bit further away from the high-reward activity areas, mostly down in the schemey regent mines), and I 100% see how it appears to be an issue in screenshots/videos.
In actual play, it doesn't work out nearly as poorly as you might imagine. There's a substantial currency cost involved for the host (generally gold), and most pressingly of all, a substantial time cost for everyone involved. Whilst you're travelling to/hosting an activity, you're not warring, you're doing something entirely separate. You're generally not focusing on marriage or tweaking your council or watching the map tick by or doing any of the other little things that take up your playtime. The time cost does a lot to balance relatively high rewards at the upper tiers, because of the opportunity and focus cost for stuff you can't do elsewhere, and because if you're off doing all that stuff, you're not hosting or attending an activity. There's definitely more free-flowing currency & artefacts in the game economy, but it's not as over-juiced as small snippets might make it seem, at least in my opinion.
If it helps to allay fears somewhat, we did actually initially balance down. We kept rewards tamped, we had more negative effects in events, we played it a bit safe with how far-reaching activities could be. A much more sombre, 1.8-but-with-better-activity-depth feel was had. The overwhelming feedback from everyone who touched those versions can be summed up like this:
"Why would I ever hold an activity if these are how they play?"
... when the reward for such a layout of time and effort felt like a let down from the investment you spent, people just didn't like playing with them. What's more, because they replaced the older systems of push-button-receive-currency, the new systems, for all that they might be fun in the moment, felt actively frustrating, because things you relied on to advance your ability to interact with other parts of the title no longer reliably did that. If you were really unlucky, you could actually come out of activities you'd put a lot of time and effort into with a substantial net negative on the very resources you hoped to gain. Not because you'd ever gotten some monumental screw-up, but because lots of little maluses over time added up to neuter then invert the net tally earnt.
Aaaand at that point, someone, somewhere, brought out a comparison to the hold court events and that was basically that. We balanced up across the board, feedback improved, some people adapted to an activity-only style of play even, crowds cheered, babies wept, etc. It's almost certainly going to still need some balancing with a mass audience, but it's way better to have people telling us where something is too much and can be reduced rather than where something is too little and should be scrapped.
Now, that's not to say you can't break the economy or some of the game systems. It's CK3, if you try hard enough, or gish the hell out of a character with the ruler designer or skilled play, you can definitely get some quirky results. That's just kinda how some systems roll, so I'm not gonna say that's not possible (in the same way most other game systems can result in the same with a bit of effort), but I think we did get to a fairly good point where it doesn't feel like you have to clip your own wings in order to avoid getting too much out of the game systems.
:fingerguns: Back atcha hot stuff.
Honestly, I'm sorry to hear you feel left out.
We do hear the request for higher difficulty levels intermittently, and though there's a few people on the team who'd like such, personally, I'm really not a fan. Invariably they'd just be giving random bonuses to the AI & maluses to the player - that's all the easy difficulties do atm. And tbh, that feels like a cop-out. It's not really making the title harder, it's stacking weights on the backs of players.
Which, y'know, might sound fine, why not let people opt in to that if they want to? The answer there is because nothing else in the title accounts for that: costs are not designed to be variable in that way, systems are not designed to account for those types of sliding brackets, the AI isn't set up to cope with that level of variability. Some costs'd get dialled up, and in exchange, some parts of the title would likely break, some would quietly bork their balance in a way that's basically invisible to anything but dedicated playtesting in that specific area, some would kinda work but feel wrong, and so on. We'd be giving you a button to break your game labelled "harder difficulty" and then shrugging our shoulders at you when you press it and it breaks your game but doesn't necessarily make anything all that much harder.
Of course, we could sit down and rejig things till that's not the case. Definitely not impossible, not even technically, but it's a lot of potential work to both make and maintain forever. That work doesn't come out of nowhere, it's an opportunity cost that we do instead of other things. Do we put 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 8 months worth of development delay in before the next DLC so that we can add that game rule and have it meaningfully do something rather than be a placebo that's also a secret mild poison? What do we get out of that? What does the playerbase get out of that, including the harder difficulty fans, who I suspect have other things they would prefer ahead of said game rule?
Turning difficulty down is easy. We turn some things off, we reduce some negative modifiers on the player that new players won't have headspace to grok straight away. Turning difficult up in a meaningful way is disproportionately hard.
Ok, that's a lot of doom'n'gloom, and I didn't really mean to dump on you. So, to try for a bit of positivity, the type of difficulty I would like to see added to the title is meaningful friction, meaningful setbacks, and better AI. These are all much harder to do, both to actually make and to get dev time for, than small tweaks, but various team members are working on 'em. I'd like to see more ways for characters to die unexpectedly. I'd like to see ever-tighter war AI & more difficulty for the player wrangling their armies in war. I'd like to see the AI get better at the economy so that player snowballing is less of an issue, because the AI is snowballing alongside you. I'd like to see more nuance to factions and ways for them to destabilise your realm. I'd like to see ways to break up blobbing that don't make people ragequit. We've done some work on some of these for this release, some for upcoming patches, some are planned for the future, and some are just glorious dreams that I drunkenly ramble about at work drinks to anyone who can't find somewhere else to sit. To me, this stuff is difficulty, and it's a much better use of time than us chasing a working set of difficulty modifiers.
Just my two pennies.- 28
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