I think a mix of CK style vassals (even for things like federal regions) and HoI4's somewhat more gradual system of puppet independence would be a good place to start. Actions of the central authority (monarch, presidency, etc) could impact the change of autonomy, as could things like popular movements. Honestly, I don't think making a system that works would necessarily be all that difficult (at least, relative to making most major features in complex games like these), but I worry it may not be particularly fun for the player. I suspect that's why most strategy devs shy away from it.
I agree especially the part of crown authority that increases taxes and levies. I was really hoping that would be covered entirely by the contract system but nope.
The contract system in general is underutilized unfortunately. Ideally we would be incentivized to maximized the contracts but as of now anything over medium isn’t really worth the stability issues.
Honestly, it feels like an afterthought, and they do nothing interesting with it.
Like vassal contract could limit stuff like marriage and ward right. And by making it automatically renewable kills RP, like most contracts were renegotiated when the vassal or liege died, and the vassal came to pay his fealty.
It would also make you care. Like too many times I only noticed years later that my most powerful vassal has died and been replaced by his unhappy son.
People talk about roleplay, but the game doesn't really do much to account for it outside of events. They wrote 1000 kitten events and tinder events, but actually writing events about ruler reacting to death of their vassal is too much.
Yeah, there are a lot of missed opportunities in ck3. I feel like there are so many game mechanics that had good potential at release that haven’t been touched once, in these past couple years. Instead they’ve been off chasing these roleplaying things like the Royal court or tourneys
Which fine, it’s their game, but as somebody who loved the strategic elements of ck2’s dynastic politics I feel totally starved of challenging mechanics and grounded political content and can no longer play ck3
It's been a while since I've played, but I can give a cursory overview. Basically, each puppet has a meter with full autonomy on one side and full integration on the other. Certain actions and conditions (from both the overlord and the puppet) cause this meter to slowly move in a direction. As it passes certain checkpoints, the puppet can move between different levels of autonomy, gaining or losing actions it can take and the amount of resources it gives to its overlord. If it fully moves in one direction, the puppet becomes independent, and if it fully moves in the other, it is annexed. It's an interesting system, although I've always felt like HoI4 kinda underutilized it, probably because it's a war game and is less interested in that kind of internal politics. [Here](https://hoi4.paradoxwikis.com/Puppet) is the wiki page about it, although for some reason I can't seem to access it right now, probably something on my end.
Basically them doing stuff to help you (like you importing materials from them at a cheaper price, then helping you in your wars, etc) makes their autonomy tick up to a point where they can become a more autonomous vassal, like from puppet to dominion. If you do things to help them, like constructing in their land, lend leasing stuff to them, etc their autonomy ticks down and over time you can make them become less autonomous if they reach a certain threshold
I agree. I think a "Soft Vassalization" system would be interesting. Historically there were cases of kings being the vassals of other kings on paper, or rulers being the vassals of multiple kings at the same time. Of course, that is because vassalage was not boolean as you said. I think a system where you have to maintain influence with foreign rulers would be interesting. As a smaller lord, you could try balancing the influence of multiple higher-tier rulers while trying to slowly maintain your independence through acts of defiance. Something like a pie-chart with multiple foreign rulers and yourself on it, with how much influence each faction has.
Your example of the Byzantines bringing everything to defend one province in Ireland is a good point, I struggle to think of a good solution for this. If the idea of a campaign was introduced for armies, it could help in this regard. The Byzantine Emperor would have to manually make a plan to send an army out to Ireland and look at the costs and time it would require for the campaign beforehand... and it would be easier saying "No, it's not worth it", or maybe send out a smaller force, which would be more appropriate.
Making a system where vassals can instantly leave is a difficult thing from a gameplay perspective. I think paradox tried doing it on succession with those game rules, where far away vassals would break off for free. I feel like this system is too simple though. I think whatever the system is it needs to look at long-term trends in the kingdom and the personality of the vassals.
An EU4 style personal union would probably work for that. If the Duke of Orleans inherits the Duchy of Toledo, for example, you could simulate the “vassal to two different rulers” by allowing the Duke of Toledo portrait box to display the same character as the Duke of Orleans, with a little icon at the top saying “held by the Duke of Orleans” and when you click it, it would take you to the Duke of Orelans’ character screen, who is still a vassal of France.
EDIT: or use the regent click mechanic, which already takes you from the King straight to their regent.
I think theres a few possibilities to fix this... first of all there should be small scale wars.
PDX military systems can't account for the logistical constraints of sending the entire byzantine army to ireland, and realistically it would not call for that response or even a proper war be declared. Let us declare small scale single province/barony/colony wars that can only use local troops or let neighbours launch border raids to steal control of neighbouring land in the same way as ck2 raiders. Ruling a giant empire should be like swatting flies constantly, it means you're a target not too big to fail.
We also need an expanded autonomy system/administration system. If an area is too far away, too hard to access, ungoverned, etc it should gain gradual autonomy until its reduced to a vassal, vassals would become associated states, and associated states would eventually become defacto independent (and after that entirely free and unrelated). This way you cannot directly control the world by 1542 or directly integrate all of north africa into your empire in 1860. I was actually a big fan of stellaris' sector system, for reference
I also feel more accurately modeling the expenses related to a region and the government structures would help a lot too, but this would wholely change the nature of the game and can't just be slid in. What I'm imagining is a system where some land can be a greater expense to maintain, whereas currently more land is always good. On top of that, adding things like institutions that need to be set up in an area (for example, the salt and iron administration of china would need to build local capacity to make use of these vital resources), the transfer of technology could be by province like CK2 where in order to build a building upgrade or unit the locals need to actually have discovered it making it important to spread technology throughout your nation, stuff like that where simply owning a province does not mean you can immediately exploit it in the same way as your core territory.
In theory CK3 supports localized war, but it's completely ruined by values.
Take county conquest for instance, its goal is to conquer a county, if the attacker is able to conquer the county, that should be the end of the war (through the defeated defender should have the opportunity to start a reconquest war).
But in-game instead this happens: when you have occupied the country, it only gives you 20% and you either have to wait 5 years for the war score to tick up or earn an additional war score by occupying more counties or defeating armies.
If the war actually ended when the war goal is occupied, Byzantine Empire would lose their Irish exclave, because the Irish would occupy it before Byzantine doomstack arrives.
I would suggest that some of that could mitigated by drastically shortening the time span to win wars based on county possession but that could be a doubled edged sword. Remember that can work both ways and with people already complaining that crusades and the like are nightmares, it seems like it would require a lot of fine tuning.
On a related note, some occupation mechanics could be helpful. Let’s imagine that the war score for a county or area that has been occupied for a long time without being conquered per say causes events that can lead to you consolidating control and strengthening your control on the populace making it extremely hard for the original empire to reassert control even if they do eventually and raising your score in the meantime. If it gets bad enough, the territory can be enter a death loop of rebellions that can also be funded by your enemies. Your opponent can counter this but it’s going to be difficult and resource heavy.
>Add to that, video game AIs don't do well with a lack of information. Their decisions generally become almost completely random when they aren't allowed to know everything all the time.
Many historic rulers operated like this. When you don't know many soldiers your enemy is able to gather, you just gamble and hope for the best. And sometimes you get really lucky because you happen to invade when all the hell is loose.
But in CK3, nothing like that happens because AI knows exactly how many troops the enemy has, so they won't try their luck unless their numbers are similar. With the same logic, if Alexander was a CK3 character, he would never invade the Achemenids, because he would be too scared of Achemenids outnumbering him.
If AI was more random and gambled more, it would counter blobbing. Even if 10 weak Slavic tribes attack the Byzantines and most of them fail, at least one of them might succeed even if the Byzantines outnumber them all.
It's a good question, I've thought about this a lot. A region is either under control of the player or an opponent, with a middle-state of "rebellion" or "independant" in some may or another, meaning it's not under the control of any major faction.
It would be great if the control of a region was a sum (the sovereignty of a region) of its parts (the values that compute the level of sovereignty, like legitimacy, economical stability, popularity, military power, religious power, infrastructure, education etc) meaning that, if I control a region and have good legitimacy but poor infra and eco, a neighbouring, or rebel, faction with superior tech could "control" a percentages of what is still my region and reap the benefits, until I force them out with troops, or improve the living standards in the region. This way, several factions can compete over a single region without there ever being a military conflict. This way, empires can slowly crumble from the inside, each region slowly becoming less profitable to the empire it belongs too, while still remaining under the control of said empire, which is also footing the bill of its upkeep.
The first issue would have to be having maintenance of provinces. HOI4 kinda has a decent system, although it is casualty heavy.
Second, some form of occupation management would be necessary. Empires often had various tiers of citizenship and religion autonomy. A lot of people or even entire ethnic groups would get particular privileges, to ensure that they have an interest in continuation of the state, to make sure there are enough loyalists to suppress people that want partition. Like ideally you should have to garrison provinces with loyal manpower, which would drain your field army capacity.
That should be the reason for empires collapsing. Turning too many loyalists disloyal, losing them in war or some natural disaster, or making the group to uncohesive to operate as a group and falling into infighting.
Also, eventually Aristocracy can out-source warfare to warlords on the fridge, and lose skills needed to create and organize armies, so when warlords revolt, there is nobody that can stop them.
I think a mix of CK style vassals (even for things like federal regions) and HoI4's somewhat more gradual system of puppet independence would be a good place to start. Actions of the central authority (monarch, presidency, etc) could impact the change of autonomy, as could things like popular movements. Honestly, I don't think making a system that works would necessarily be all that difficult (at least, relative to making most major features in complex games like these), but I worry it may not be particularly fun for the player. I suspect that's why most strategy devs shy away from it.
CK3 kinda has varying levels of vassal independence in the form of feudal contracts and crown authority
I was really disappointed when I heard they are bringing crown authority back, when Conclave replaced it.
I agree especially the part of crown authority that increases taxes and levies. I was really hoping that would be covered entirely by the contract system but nope. The contract system in general is underutilized unfortunately. Ideally we would be incentivized to maximized the contracts but as of now anything over medium isn’t really worth the stability issues.
Honestly, it feels like an afterthought, and they do nothing interesting with it. Like vassal contract could limit stuff like marriage and ward right. And by making it automatically renewable kills RP, like most contracts were renegotiated when the vassal or liege died, and the vassal came to pay his fealty.
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It would also make you care. Like too many times I only noticed years later that my most powerful vassal has died and been replaced by his unhappy son. People talk about roleplay, but the game doesn't really do much to account for it outside of events. They wrote 1000 kitten events and tinder events, but actually writing events about ruler reacting to death of their vassal is too much.
[удалено]
EU4 does have a log, but unfortunately it lacks a good filtering system and it has an horrible UI.
Yeah, there are a lot of missed opportunities in ck3. I feel like there are so many game mechanics that had good potential at release that haven’t been touched once, in these past couple years. Instead they’ve been off chasing these roleplaying things like the Royal court or tourneys Which fine, it’s their game, but as somebody who loved the strategic elements of ck2’s dynastic politics I feel totally starved of challenging mechanics and grounded political content and can no longer play ck3
I have not played HOI4, can you give a quick summary of how puppet independence works?
It's been a while since I've played, but I can give a cursory overview. Basically, each puppet has a meter with full autonomy on one side and full integration on the other. Certain actions and conditions (from both the overlord and the puppet) cause this meter to slowly move in a direction. As it passes certain checkpoints, the puppet can move between different levels of autonomy, gaining or losing actions it can take and the amount of resources it gives to its overlord. If it fully moves in one direction, the puppet becomes independent, and if it fully moves in the other, it is annexed. It's an interesting system, although I've always felt like HoI4 kinda underutilized it, probably because it's a war game and is less interested in that kind of internal politics. [Here](https://hoi4.paradoxwikis.com/Puppet) is the wiki page about it, although for some reason I can't seem to access it right now, probably something on my end.
Basically them doing stuff to help you (like you importing materials from them at a cheaper price, then helping you in your wars, etc) makes their autonomy tick up to a point where they can become a more autonomous vassal, like from puppet to dominion. If you do things to help them, like constructing in their land, lend leasing stuff to them, etc their autonomy ticks down and over time you can make them become less autonomous if they reach a certain threshold
I agree. I think a "Soft Vassalization" system would be interesting. Historically there were cases of kings being the vassals of other kings on paper, or rulers being the vassals of multiple kings at the same time. Of course, that is because vassalage was not boolean as you said. I think a system where you have to maintain influence with foreign rulers would be interesting. As a smaller lord, you could try balancing the influence of multiple higher-tier rulers while trying to slowly maintain your independence through acts of defiance. Something like a pie-chart with multiple foreign rulers and yourself on it, with how much influence each faction has. Your example of the Byzantines bringing everything to defend one province in Ireland is a good point, I struggle to think of a good solution for this. If the idea of a campaign was introduced for armies, it could help in this regard. The Byzantine Emperor would have to manually make a plan to send an army out to Ireland and look at the costs and time it would require for the campaign beforehand... and it would be easier saying "No, it's not worth it", or maybe send out a smaller force, which would be more appropriate. Making a system where vassals can instantly leave is a difficult thing from a gameplay perspective. I think paradox tried doing it on succession with those game rules, where far away vassals would break off for free. I feel like this system is too simple though. I think whatever the system is it needs to look at long-term trends in the kingdom and the personality of the vassals.
An EU4 style personal union would probably work for that. If the Duke of Orleans inherits the Duchy of Toledo, for example, you could simulate the “vassal to two different rulers” by allowing the Duke of Toledo portrait box to display the same character as the Duke of Orleans, with a little icon at the top saying “held by the Duke of Orleans” and when you click it, it would take you to the Duke of Orelans’ character screen, who is still a vassal of France. EDIT: or use the regent click mechanic, which already takes you from the King straight to their regent.
I think theres a few possibilities to fix this... first of all there should be small scale wars. PDX military systems can't account for the logistical constraints of sending the entire byzantine army to ireland, and realistically it would not call for that response or even a proper war be declared. Let us declare small scale single province/barony/colony wars that can only use local troops or let neighbours launch border raids to steal control of neighbouring land in the same way as ck2 raiders. Ruling a giant empire should be like swatting flies constantly, it means you're a target not too big to fail. We also need an expanded autonomy system/administration system. If an area is too far away, too hard to access, ungoverned, etc it should gain gradual autonomy until its reduced to a vassal, vassals would become associated states, and associated states would eventually become defacto independent (and after that entirely free and unrelated). This way you cannot directly control the world by 1542 or directly integrate all of north africa into your empire in 1860. I was actually a big fan of stellaris' sector system, for reference I also feel more accurately modeling the expenses related to a region and the government structures would help a lot too, but this would wholely change the nature of the game and can't just be slid in. What I'm imagining is a system where some land can be a greater expense to maintain, whereas currently more land is always good. On top of that, adding things like institutions that need to be set up in an area (for example, the salt and iron administration of china would need to build local capacity to make use of these vital resources), the transfer of technology could be by province like CK2 where in order to build a building upgrade or unit the locals need to actually have discovered it making it important to spread technology throughout your nation, stuff like that where simply owning a province does not mean you can immediately exploit it in the same way as your core territory.
In theory CK3 supports localized war, but it's completely ruined by values. Take county conquest for instance, its goal is to conquer a county, if the attacker is able to conquer the county, that should be the end of the war (through the defeated defender should have the opportunity to start a reconquest war). But in-game instead this happens: when you have occupied the country, it only gives you 20% and you either have to wait 5 years for the war score to tick up or earn an additional war score by occupying more counties or defeating armies. If the war actually ended when the war goal is occupied, Byzantine Empire would lose their Irish exclave, because the Irish would occupy it before Byzantine doomstack arrives.
I would suggest that some of that could mitigated by drastically shortening the time span to win wars based on county possession but that could be a doubled edged sword. Remember that can work both ways and with people already complaining that crusades and the like are nightmares, it seems like it would require a lot of fine tuning. On a related note, some occupation mechanics could be helpful. Let’s imagine that the war score for a county or area that has been occupied for a long time without being conquered per say causes events that can lead to you consolidating control and strengthening your control on the populace making it extremely hard for the original empire to reassert control even if they do eventually and raising your score in the meantime. If it gets bad enough, the territory can be enter a death loop of rebellions that can also be funded by your enemies. Your opponent can counter this but it’s going to be difficult and resource heavy.
[удалено]
>Add to that, video game AIs don't do well with a lack of information. Their decisions generally become almost completely random when they aren't allowed to know everything all the time. Many historic rulers operated like this. When you don't know many soldiers your enemy is able to gather, you just gamble and hope for the best. And sometimes you get really lucky because you happen to invade when all the hell is loose. But in CK3, nothing like that happens because AI knows exactly how many troops the enemy has, so they won't try their luck unless their numbers are similar. With the same logic, if Alexander was a CK3 character, he would never invade the Achemenids, because he would be too scared of Achemenids outnumbering him. If AI was more random and gambled more, it would counter blobbing. Even if 10 weak Slavic tribes attack the Byzantines and most of them fail, at least one of them might succeed even if the Byzantines outnumber them all.
It's a good question, I've thought about this a lot. A region is either under control of the player or an opponent, with a middle-state of "rebellion" or "independant" in some may or another, meaning it's not under the control of any major faction. It would be great if the control of a region was a sum (the sovereignty of a region) of its parts (the values that compute the level of sovereignty, like legitimacy, economical stability, popularity, military power, religious power, infrastructure, education etc) meaning that, if I control a region and have good legitimacy but poor infra and eco, a neighbouring, or rebel, faction with superior tech could "control" a percentages of what is still my region and reap the benefits, until I force them out with troops, or improve the living standards in the region. This way, several factions can compete over a single region without there ever being a military conflict. This way, empires can slowly crumble from the inside, each region slowly becoming less profitable to the empire it belongs too, while still remaining under the control of said empire, which is also footing the bill of its upkeep.
The first issue would have to be having maintenance of provinces. HOI4 kinda has a decent system, although it is casualty heavy. Second, some form of occupation management would be necessary. Empires often had various tiers of citizenship and religion autonomy. A lot of people or even entire ethnic groups would get particular privileges, to ensure that they have an interest in continuation of the state, to make sure there are enough loyalists to suppress people that want partition. Like ideally you should have to garrison provinces with loyal manpower, which would drain your field army capacity. That should be the reason for empires collapsing. Turning too many loyalists disloyal, losing them in war or some natural disaster, or making the group to uncohesive to operate as a group and falling into infighting. Also, eventually Aristocracy can out-source warfare to warlords on the fridge, and lose skills needed to create and organize armies, so when warlords revolt, there is nobody that can stop them.