Why Islam needs a CB specific in gridning down the Byzantines

[Axis89]

As a Byzantine player I have always struggled finding any fun when my borders seem so calm, the steppe nomads are quiet, and the muslims in the east, who historically was an annual menace, threat and rarely an oppurtinity, never do anything.
So to at least help on the eastern border issue, they should have a Conquest Hadith/Jihad against the Romans as appearantly was was promised/prophezised by the prophet of Islam.

I'd love that challange, to be regarded as THE TARGET by the Islamic world when playing the Romans(Byzantines).

Source:

https://istanbultarihi.ist/423-the-conquest-hadith-and-the-muslim-sieges-of-constantinople

 

[DukeLeto42]

For the most part, the standard Holy War CB covers the need for this conflict. The real problem is that you are the Byzantine Empire - they just can't beat you, so they don't (and shouldn't) try. The ability to concentrate forces and curb-stomp the enemy makes the steady back-and-forth of border conflicts impossible for large enemies.

 

[Soter I]

The threats to ERE are a joke at the moment. Guess the region needs a DLC to cover it properly... Though it's a matter of making the AI more aggressive in the those borders

 

[Axis89]

Well if defensive alliances were a thing, and the Byz even though strong-ish would constantly have threats east and west, and the Islamic armies maybe was a little bit more beefy.. then maybe. But they still need personality enough as AI to look at the Romans and think "we want to contest question them" instead og spending resources on a war in Afghanistan or Nubia, making it even easier for the Byzantines.

 

[Jia Xu]

They already have THREE different kingdom level CBs. Conquest, Holy War, and Jihad. Why would they need a fourth? If Muslims aren't attacking Byzantium, it's because they can't. They have other conflicts with other neighbours, they don't have the cash, they don't have enough troops, Byzantium + allies are too strong, etc., etc. None of these problems would be fixed by a fourth kingdom level CB. lol

 

[Axis89]

They already have THREE different kingdom level CBs. Conquest, Holy War, and Jihad. Why would they need a fourth? If Muslims aren't attacking Byzantium, it's because they can't. They have other conflicts with other neighbours, they don't have the cash, they don't have enough troops, Byzantium + allies are too strong, etc., etc. None of these problems would be fixed by a fourth kingdom level CB. lol

LOL, a lol does not help, you're not preventing any alternate solution, all you're saying is that this doesn't work amd it's so dumb that you're laughing.

Fine, disagree, but don't get rude.

 

[Anna_Gein]

Raiding should be expanded to represent border warfare through annual raiding expeditions. This would allow lesser politites to still be a nuance and potential menace to large empires such as the Byzantine Empire.

It would be good from a gameplay perspective : you do not need to be more powerful than the Byzs to be active threat to the Byzs. And vice versa.

It would be great for accuracy too as after the Umayyad, the eschatological beliefs tying the fall of "Rome" aka "Constantinople to the End of days was "tone done" so to speak. Leaving only raids and expeditions warfare without the goal to capture large swathe of lands yet at times highly intense until Manzikert.

 

[m0xxY]

With respect, I think the OP is viewing the issue from the wrong angle.

It's not that the Muslims should be attacking the Byzantines more as things stand, it's that the Byzantines do not currently have many of the mechanics that should weaken them internally. If the Byzantines were weaker and more prone to collapse and coups, the nearby Muslims would be more likely to take advantage.

So I agree that a new form of CB is not the solution - although it is possibly the sort of solution PDX may end up going with.

The real solution is to flesh out the Byzantines with new mechanics and systemic problems which will weaken them - save for an ambitious player trying to stop it - to the point where the Muslims launching attacks and chipping away at their territory makes sense.

 

[Secuter]

One of the problems, as I perceive it, is that no such things as local or regional conflicts exist. This is not just a problem with the ERE, but everywhere in the game. Everywhere, any conflict is immediately taken to the highest level, as you will always be fighting the highest authority of a given realm.
For local conflicts, fighting over baronies would allow you to chip away at an enemy. Naturally, it may evolve into a larger conflict, where the CB is slowly expanded. This could happen by moving troops into areas that wasn't initially part of the hostilities.
Expanding the scope of war, however, makes little sense as the peace treaty is set in stone from the get go. Oh, you've literally occupied the entirety of the ERE? It's too bad that the Victory/Defeat peace treaty was written before we started the war. Oh, you defeated the attackers and conquered the neighboring lands, wouldn't it be cool if you could demand those areas in a peace treaty? Too bad, here's this paltry amount of money that only covers a small part of your expenditures.

So, in short:
Allow the conquest of baronies
Allow local wars, that don't involve the entire realm all the time
Allow local wars to evolve into larger regional and even realm wars
Revamp the hopelessly archaic peace treaty system to make them flexible.

Flexible peace treaties could work like this (copied from an old comment I made):
Have you played Total War Three Kingdoms (3K)? If not, then let me explain. The Total War series are notoriously bad at diplomacy - or at least they were. The AI went to war for no particular reason, didn't want to trade because of some unknown reason and the list goes on. Well, 3K Total War managed to turn that completely around and today it is a a very, very robust and thought through diplomacy system.

The system is different from EUIV as it allows both parties to raise demands during peace negotiations - or any other negotiation for that matter. Something which isn't even possible in EUIV despite almost no negotiations throughout history were completely one-sided.

A very crude image of it would be like this:

Demand:	Give:
The county of Toulouse	350 ducats
The county of Carcassonne	Marriage with Marianne (your daughter)
The Title: Duke of Toulouse	The county of Nevers
Establish Non-aggression pact	Establish Non-aggression pact

 

[Rubidium]

At the very least, it would be nice if Muslims could actually call Jihads. AFAICT, the AI will never call a jihad, even after they are officially unlocked.

That was one of the few (non-Viking/horde/4th Crusade) ways that the 1066 Byzantines could die in CK2: if they got hit with both a Sunni and Shia jihad at the same time.

But yes, a big issue is that the Byzantines are too stable. They will always have more troops than anyone else (and due to getting primogeniture centuries ahead of everyone else, they will actually keep their domain instead of having it whittled away by successions), which means no AI realm could beat them, and the AI isn't suicidal enough to try.

Oh well, at least I can dream of the Fourth Crusade being re-introduced and stomping the Byzantines that way.

 

[m0xxY]

At the very least, it would be nice if Muslims could actually call Jihads. AFAICT, the AI will never call a jihad, even after they are officially unlocked.

@Mcgan is that true? Is there a reason for it?

 

[Herennius]

is that true? Is there a reason for it?

I'm not sure if they never do it (IIRC I have seen it one single time), but at best then very rarely.

 

[Mcgan]

@Mcgan is that true? Is there a reason for it?

I have seen others say that before, and I don't remember ever seeing a Jihad started by the AI, so I would think it is true.

But I don't know why. directed_great_holy_war has ai_only_against_neighbors = yes which limits it a bit, but there must be more to it.

 

[Eltener]

The threats to ERE are a joke at the moment. Guess the region needs a DLC to cover it properly... Though it's a matter of making the AI more aggressive in the those borders

Both region-specific DLC so far have buffed those regions. So either we'll first get a Middle East one that a Greek one subsequently undoes, or a Greek one that makes the issue even worse before a Middle East one finally fixes it.

 

[Axis89]

With respect, I think the OP is viewing the issue from the wrong angle.

It's not that the Muslims should be attacking the Byzantines more as things stand, it's that the Byzantines do not currently have many of the mechanics that should weaken them internally. If the Byzantines were weaker and more prone to collapse and coups, the nearby Muslims would be more likely to take advantage.

So I agree that a new form of CB is not the solution - although it is possibly the sort of solution PDX may end up going with.

The real solution is to flesh out the Byzantines with new mechanics and systemic problems which will weaken them - save for an ambitious player trying to stop it - to the point where the Muslims launching attacks and chipping away at their territory makes sense.

I disagree as tje Byzantine had always been internally volatile, it is their Republican heritage since Augustus, that's how their government worked, though it could open up for more opportunistic AI.
What the Byz need in my view is braver, tougher threats from the outside, having to split forces or pick a place to be and a place not to be when multiple threats pop up.
After Manzikert the Romans for the first time in their history didn't only face steppe nomad warfare north of the Danube and south into today's Bulgaria, the Seljuk Turks brought that fear into Anatolia, having that and the Latin Normans to the west, they were struggling with three fronts at the same time, each looking for weakness or opportunities. On top of that the army of the Byz wasn't as agile as before, they couldn't raise two armies, of the east and west, they only had resources for one tagmata with the devalued currency etc, so they didn't have the flexibility as before Basil II and up until him.

 

[tilly]

personally i reckon anatolia should be a struggle region. not, you know, an exact copy of the iberian peninsula, different factors involved there, but i think it would help simulate the back-and-forth and fairly unique politicking a bit better than not at all

the struggle system gives me a lot of hope for more mechanical flexibility in the future of ck3 development - ive long been pretty frustrated with the bad contracts under one big title approach to the hre and id love to see that revised. really hope to see paradox mess around with the concept of struggles a bit more, once theyre done fixing all the stuff that doesnt work (i do not want to see them mess around with jack anything until they fix all the stuff that doesnt work)

 

[Jia Xu]

personally i reckon anatolia should be a struggle region. not, you know, an exact copy of the iberian peninsula, different factors involved there, but i think it would help simulate the back-and-forth and fairly unique politicking a bit better than not at all

the struggle system gives me a lot of hope for more mechanical flexibility in the future of ck3 development - ive long been pretty frustrated with the bad contracts under one big title approach to the hre and id love to see that revised. really hope to see paradox mess around with the concept of struggles a bit more, once theyre done fixing all the stuff that doesnt work (i do not want to see them mess around with jack anything until they fix all the stuff that doesnt work)

Everyone wants struggles, everywhere. All this would do would make Byzantium infinitely more stable and powerful.

Everyone already has the ability to fight religious enemies. What struggles do is allow for religious enemies to live in peace. Struggles turn off holy wars and allow religious enemies to intermarry. The Byzantine Emperor marrying the daughter of the Abassid Caliph and turning off holy wars is not going to fix any of these problems.

More struggle zones are not the answer!

 

[newtlord]

I think, in general, it needs to be easier to take small outlying regions from large empires (see the "limited wars" suggestion from a few posts above for an example of how this might be worked). In CK3, the Norman adventurers would never be able to take Sicily from the Byzantines (so, as a workaround, the game pretends that the remaining Byzantine possessions in Sicily are independent to give them a chance), and giving them a special CB would do nothing to help them. So too most of the Muslims.

Another issue is that the AI, even when potentially capable of defeating a powerful empire, generally prefers to focus on easier opponents first. This will almost always put the Byzantines near the bottom of the list, especially for Muslims who rarely lack a possible CB against any of their neighbors.

 

[tilly]

Everyone wants struggles, everywhere. All this would do would make Byzantium infinitely more stable and powerful.

Everyone already has the ability to fight religious enemies. What struggles do is allow for religious enemies to live in peace. Struggles turn off holy wars and allow religious enemies to intermarry. The Byzantine Emperor marrying the daughter of the Abassid Caliph and turning off holy wars is not going to fix any of these problems.

More struggle zones are not the answer!

you seem to be envisioning struggles as all much the same as the iberian struggle, whereas im envisioning them as a framework to build more complicated political situations in specific regions where it applies. if you just straight up copy/pasted the iberian struggle, which youll note i specifically said should not be done, then yeah obviously its a terrible idea. just gives byzantine ai a stupid powerful cb to clean up with faster than it already does

i really think a struggle could be used to make anatolia more dynamic than it currently is. in both starts its got a weird position as a transitionary point between the islamic and christian world, and i would really like for that to be simulated more than not at all. at present it just gets swallowed close to immediately whenever the byzantine ai stops scratching its butthole and being in debt for five minutes and thats really not how it went, is it

and like. the thing is, there were some kind of weird, out there marriages! not free intermarrying, and usually itd involve conversion, but the georgian bagratids and the rumite seljuks did sometimes marry into each other and that sure as hell isnt going to happen in this iteration of the game. this only becomes a problem if its implemented lazily - which, i mean, fair, valid concern given the track record, but just the same i dont think its smart to write it off entirely as a way to make the region less firmly and inevitably in the hands of the byzantines

 

[Qutb87]

For the OP. The raid CB which is part of the Iberian struggle mechanics is a reasonable approximation of frontier raiding. The template can be used to mod in your own generic razzia style war mechanic outside of the standard raid features available. I did this myself and the AI regularly use it but as mentioned, the ERE is a monster powerhouse so another cb won't affect them.

On the topic of Muslim AI calling Jihads, I regularly see the Fatimids do this if they managed to consolidate themselves. However it is always against comparatively weak immediate neighbors in the Maghreb or East Africa. Barring 867 the Abbasids are far too weak to trouble any potential targets for a GHW even if they end up as a kingdom level state a decade or two after the 1066 start. Couple with this with the AI prioritising immediate neighbours and you have limited scope.

The defining block to any anti-Byzantine threat emanating is the severe weakness of AI run clan government, terrible succession types and a general lack of any game mechanics (nearly 2 years after game release) that give a decent abstraction of the strengths and weaknesses all these states had.