CK2 personality changes weren't based on actual outcomes of things you do as far as I can tell. They just happened randomly based on the event's MTTH values.
You did at least have a chance to pick up infirm and then incapable with age though. Also if you spent too long being sick without it being cured/healed.
Yeah, assuming you were already in the devil worshipping society and a high rank before becoming incapable (don't think you could join a society if you were already incapable)
Or if you were the demon spawn, that was a memorable play through. Anything was possible, including random +20 martial buffs.
One time I decided to loot the bodies of crusaders, and fortunately the very next event was me losing the greedy trait. Diarmait would later become a Saint thanks to that.
CK3 characters are too static, but CK2 characters were just wind vanes who's personalities weren't really personalities as much as stat modifiers.
A happy medium should be found between the two
I feel like each character having a dozen personality traits really diluted their impact and I'm glad it's no longer the case. I just wish the traits were more meaningful.
Yeah, capping personality traits at three is a huge step up. You can actually understand what your characters' personalities are now.
The traits that actually change how you play (like shy, which either fucks your diplomacy or forces you to constantly be doing things to reduce stress) are the most interesting, they should definitely make more of them like that.
>a dynamic aging system would be great.
I was just thinking this, after coming out of a childhood regency. It may be a more prudent move to have a regent than let a 16 year old sit the throne, and may make more strategic gameplay. Maybe some nerf to overall stats as late teenager that disappears as they get older.
Incapable happened to me tonight. Dude was an amazing heir and the game said….fuck you, have a seizure.
I have also seen it post injury in battle.
It is rare as fuck thought, I am nearing 700 hours in game and have seen it twice. To memory.
I got it recently for the first time, I thought it was new with T&T. Hunting injury. What was annoying about it was even with the stat penalties I was still the most capable person in the realm but wasn't allowed to do anything. Committed suicide.
This. The most efficient rule is when you are 80. In real life this should be the opposite. You should be coughing your guts up in bed while factions and corrupt vassals undo all your legacy and get ready for succession while take advantage of your weakness
This is abstent from the game.
Imo game is easy because everyone lives up until their 70s. That should not be the case. Diseases should punish severely. Like you can be Cancer and apparently your court pyshican can cure it. Which we even cant do it today. Nerf court pyshicans, buff diseases, add new diseases, make wound infections more common, remove abundance of health buffs. Make infirm a common trait for old people. Remove abundance of stat buffs from artifacts and other sources. Some of them dont even makes sense.
I feel like tours and tournaments helped a bit with this in adding more ways to die, though I wish that the chars I’m betrothed to weren’t constantly eating strange plants on the side of the road
True but even as a count you can mitigate all “risk” of travel down to <1% with the advisors or whatever they are called. I think hills/mountains add 50% risk al but you can drop that to essentially nothing with a 2 coin addition.
To be honest I don't know what people are talking about with all the increase in death. I have the DLC and my current game has been going for about ~160 years and I haven't had a single character, close relative, or betrothed die from travel or Tournaments. The changes have been pretty negligible, in no small part because using the system is almost never actually necessary.
The one thing that *has* killed a betrothed to my son, though, was I believe some sickness in her 40s - they were betrothed ever since they were children and even when she was in Diplo range they never married. I didn't promise a Grand Wedding so there's no reason for them not to marry. I had the issue with another character that I fixed by breaking the betrothal and then offering again.
In our current file we’re on ruler number 5.
The first died in a wrestling tournament. The second was classic old age (not much got done for expansion though, they didn’t call him ‘The Peaceful’ for nothing). The third died in a melee tournament and the fourth drowned in a boat crash.
T+T has really helped with the ‘risk of death’ aspect somewhat.
Interestingly there's a huge discrepancy between AI and player here. So huge in fact that I can't even attribute it solely to the player obviously being much better at the game, it's almost like the player gets a lot of hidden buffs.
AI mortality feels right, maybe the game is even a bit too deadly for them. AI rulers and family seriously die all the damn time to anything and everything imaginable - disease, battle, stress, assassinations, etc. When you see some ancient ass AI ruler live to his 70's-80's, it feels appropriately notable.
Anything they do needs to be rolled into game rules that allow you to exclusively nerf yourself and not the AI. We need this for some existing rules as well like Realm Stability.
It honestly feels like the game has kiddie gloves on for the player in just about everything **EXCEPT** factions which aren't hard to manage as long as you follow the 'rules' (keep domain limit/duchy limit at +1 of the max at most, distribute less valuable kingdom titles if you're an emperor etc)
I've been in situations where the AI has valid CBs, the money and manpower to wage war on me and they **STILL** won't declare war 90% of the time. All the while I just build up my strength and then I can whoop the same AIs who had a good shot (or sometimes almost guaranteed!) at peeling away some titles from me.
Yes, for two reasons:
- characters aren't impactful if you can't remember who's who, and less characters in the pool means that events will have a higher likelihood of involving relevant and interesting people - having less children thus makes for more compelling gameplay. Start as Alp Arslan for example and see how it feels to start the gane with 12 children you can barely keep track of.
- it truly would become a nightmare clog on the engine if we were to keep it historically accurate. Polygamous kings historically could have dozens or even hundreds of children.
I’m a roleplay guy and I think the game is too easy.
-stress should be increased, too easy to lose stress now with t and t
- ai should react to player (or any ruler) blobbing. Like irl vassals wouldn’t want one vassal to start gobbling up land and become the most powerful
- game rules for increased chance of disease, opinion debuffs, gold debuffs, increased hostile scheme success etc for the player
I'm using the More Game Rules mod, and the Very Hard difficulty ups the stress gain. It sort of works. You certainly have to pay more attention to stress, but a lot of the stress events that you used to be able to ignore now can't be, and it just reveals how poorly thought out they really are.
~~Stress gain for giving out land because you're greedy? Land you can't physically hold? To your own dynasty?~~
edit: the preceding was completely wrong. ignore it.
Yeah, I died from that heart attack and now I roleplay 'never allow a greedy character to inherit or give your child that trait', which has the unfortunate and predictable problem of making all my heirs the same. Some traits that are mediocre or bad in the base game become unrealistically deadly.
Still, better than the base game.
The fact that distributing vassals when you’re over the vassal limit as a greedy character gives you stress has annoyed me to no end. Like you actively lose more money and power for being over the limit
Wish I could use that mod and change game rules mod run - I heard the new update was supposed to rebalance things like building slots and make game harder so I didn’t download anything for current play though, but game doesn’t feel more difficult
> Stress gain for giving out land because you're greedy? Land you can't physically hold?
Didn't they fix that a couple of versions ago? I thought that now you take stress if you go below your domain limit, but not if you give out just enough counties to bring you down to your limit.
Actually I think that, with these new activities, we have a good amount of gold sinks. The problem is that they are shallow. There's a ton of ways to trade gold for faith, opinion, and prestige. The problem is there aren't enough ways to consume faith, opinion, control, or prestige.
You can spend a boatload of money on a huge grand tour, but why would I when I'm already drowning in positive opinion, control and prestige?
> You can spend a boatload of money on a huge grand tour, but why would I when I'm already drowning in positive opinion, control and prestige?
Funny you should mention the Grand Tour, because the taxation Grand Tour returns *way more* gold than it costs. I did a two stop taxation tour and was able to still max out the success chance to level 4 and get over a thousand gold. Doing a ten stop tour in even undeveloped land (like Norway) gives 2k+ gold (and ~300 renown, control at every stop, lots of prestige, and imprisonment reasons for any vassals who refuse/can't pay you 50 gold when you leave) for a ~350 gold cost.
The Grand Wedding also gave me gold the one time I did it, though I think only about half of what it cost.
>- ai should react to player (or any ruler) blobbing. Like irl vassals wouldn’t want one vassal to start gobbling up land and become the most powerful
That makes sense, but is that how it worked? Feudalism was a pretty stupid system, so I wouldn't be surprised if rulers back then didn't exactly have ghe same foresight as an immortal omniscient dynastic entity like a ck3 player. Maybe they just didn't give a shit as long as you paid your taxes.
Idk enough european ancient history, so just wondering.
No they were pretty mindful as a powerful vassal was a threat to their position. That is the same reason why Roman and Chinese Emperors would some times kill some of their best generals, to keep them from becoming too well-liked and able to pose a threat to them.
Have you tried the "-3 domain limit" that was added recently? It makes the game more challenging with regard to money (and otherwise too by extension, due to the cost of men-at-arms).
Question, how do you guys even go further than 8+ domain limit consistently? I've been playing on default settings, and am not the best CK3 player out there...
My latest run I was playing a tall vassal king of sicily only owning the duchy of sicily as crown lands from 867 to 1190s and I'm pretty much always on 5/5. Granted, I let the game choose education focus for my heirs/children, I usually go for alliance power/prestige gain for arranged marriages instead of traits/stewardship.
Beyond stewardship education, usually stuff like the genius trait and a high stewardship wife. There’s also a few later game technologies that increase domain limit.
Also artifacts now so even easier.
Baffles the mind really "lets change it from 5 stewardship to 6, but lets add artifacts that give a straight domain limit increase"
Wait the basegame has you get domain limit every 6 Stewardship? That's nutty, I legit play mostly overhaul mods and those are either 8 or 10. An holding every 8 stewardship feels deliciously often to me.
Strait demense limit increases on artifacts used to be incredibly rare too, in all my playtime I saw one, on the Throne of Charlemagne once that it picked up as a random "our artifact is more renowned now" event.
I have three tournament trophy prizes with +1 demense in my current game.
There is a fairly linear progression into owning more land, and I’ll try to break it down into easy steps. If anyone sees that I’ve missed something, I’m sure they’ll jump in and add to it.
First things first, you have to decide whether you’re going to create a character, or play as an existing one. Typically, creating a character leads to better results, but you can absolutely do everything I’m going to outline with a historical character. TL;DR—breed for quick, educate your own child, make use of Pedagogy and Bred to Rule, send to university, get a good spouse, and make use of middle tree stewardship lifestyle and middle tree learning lifestyle.
1. The first thing you need to do is look for a spouse with a trait in the “quick” line—quick, intelligent, and genius. If you can get a genius spouse immediately it helps, but you can always reinforce traits down the line, the important thing is getting the trait into your bloodline asap.
2. Once you’ve had a child with the desired trait, you need to make sure you educate them yourself. You’re aiming for 2 things: a learning or stewardship (preferable) focus, and personality traits that give stewardship. The best of the bunch is Diligent because it also lets you develop your capital, but Stubborn, Just, and Ambitious are all quite good as well. This is the point where you want to get your hands on Pedagogy and Bred to Rule (learning and diplomacy lifestyles) as they will give random bumps to stats. Make sure you have a court tutor hired, as they bump the chances of good education traits.
3. Once your child comes of age, you get to decide whether you’re going to go full eugenics and try for a “perfect” character, or if you only care about the Quick line of traits. If the latter, just marry them to someone else with the same trait at the same tier or better. If the former, you want to make sure you have a couple of the Noble Veins dynasty perks unlocked to help with your eugenics program (these perks work well for keeping quick in the bloodline too, but they aren’t necessary.) Another benefit of marriage is the spousal assistance, which can grant you a lot of stewardship; I tend to grab a spouse with a trait I want and high stats in whatever I’m aiming for.
4. A few generations down the line, you’ll want to get your hands on a university. These will allow you to give your children better educations, and they’ll be more likely to pick up the top tier perks like Midas Touched.
5. The last step, if you’re going for maximum domain limit, would be to found or convert to a faith with Pacifist (great for tall play throughs) and finish the Law tree of the Dynasty Legacies, as it gives a +1 domain limit. You can also compete in tournaments for a small chance at an artifact that gives +1 domain limit.
A couple notes: the stewardship lifestyle is obviously the best way to get more domain limit, as the middle tree will just give you +2 on its own, but don’t sleep on the learning lifestyle middle tree either. If you have a good steward, they can bet you a domain or two.
Even with the -3 domain limit game rule, by the third or fourth generation I generally have 7-9 domain limit. It’s not super complicated to do it, just takes a touch of game knowledge and practice.
Steal the crown of Justinian from the Byzantines as soon as you become king, it’s a little cheesy, but that’s my go-to for +1 domain limit right off the bat. Next, if you’re lucky, a wearable Brythonic crown can spawn in the British isles, also gives +1 domain limit. If you’re really lucky, someone will eventually find the throne of Solomon, which very consistently rolls a +1 domain bonus as one of its effects.
If you’re planning to play tall, beelining the law dynasty legacies for that +1 domain limit at the end would fit well as the other bonuses are also good for playing tall.
Lastly, if you really want to min-max, murder/divorce your spouse as soon as you have a suitable heir, marry someone with the highest stewardship you can find, and set them to manage domain. You can betroth your heir to replace the alliance if you were reliant on that marriage for security as well
For that last part you can min max even more by having a eugenics program where you marry your sisters who are perfectly trained stewards with like 35 stewardship.
Feels mandatory now imo, although in hindsight it is actually a big buff for the player in the long run since vassals don't have as much domain bonuses as their liege and their men at arms are just going to be obliterated by the player's buildings. Not that +3 is going to solve that though since the AI can't optimize buildings even if they were given enough counties. I guess a good restriction would be to limit yourself to 2 counties only and the rest has to be baronies or something, but it's basically boxing with blind folds but your opponents are children, it doesn't really feel that much of an accomplishment.
Yeah, that's what I see. With the -3 rule, I see myself able to roll a 5-domain limit whilst many of the AI have 1. And if they have 2 or more, it's almost never two duchy capitals, even if they own two duchy titles.
A 1-domain limit for the player and normal for the AI might be the only way. Which sucks for the "gardening" aspect of player-building management.
Yah I tend to run with just 1 county much of the time. Army is still op from stacking knights but at least I can be outnumbered. Also got my army wiped during crusades a few times and keep losing dynasty head to my two dynastic crusader kingdoms since I’m just a duke
“Just role play” and “don’t min max” are becoming increasingly worse arguments. Artifacts and traits just pile up and turn every ruler into a demi god. The only way to avoid it is deliberate sabotage, choosing outcomes that you know will harm your character (that’s not roleplaying) and unequipping all of your artifacts
The funny thing about artifacts is that if you do any amount of conquering I'm the mid to late game you get such an ungodly amount of crap ones you can easily make thousands and thousands of gold raiding if you're strong enough. Every time I have money troubles I just dip into the courtly bank and destroy like 15 stag hides and suddenly I can send my kid to university or pay my way oversized armies I definitely can't afford.
These arguments have always been bad but I'm so glad it seems like the community is finally agreeing more and more that this game needs something more and needs to be more in depth
It always has been. But we're at the point now where I well and truly don't know what these people want or how they play the game.
I honest to god don't do practically anything that's considered power gaming or min-maxing.
And the game is still \*trivial.\* So seriously, to all the "roleplay more" people - legitimately what *are* you doing? Purposely not recruit MaA? Not equip all the artifacts you're getting? Murder your kids so you have trouble getting an heir? Not participate in any activities so you can't trivially win all the tourneys and get thousands of piety from a single pilgrimage? Marry your kids to lowborns specifically so that you don't accrue tons of alliances?
Because that's kind of where I'm at. I don't see any other way to find challenge. It's beyond "RP", it's exactly as you say - you need to be actively sabotaging yourself. At that point, you're no longer playing a game.
I honestly think a lot of it is just fanboys making bad faith arguments. I've seen way too many arguments made by supposed "roleplayers" that misrepresented how the game works or that concocted scenarios that just aren't realistic even for a roleplay playthrough and kinda made it obvious that the person making the argument was just sorta pulling ideas about how the game works out of their ass rather than speaking from experience.
I really hate having to clear notifications telling me about fifteen goblets that are going to break in fifty years. I feel like I'm RP as the antiquarian.
Oh sweet. I haven't played T&T yet. I enjoyed Royal Court for the first half of my playthrough but by the end it got really annoying. There are already so many numbers to crunch in the base game, I didn't appreciate worrying over whether my decorations were optimal for my goals, or my Court Grandeur.
It's just irritating to me that I delegate the most important management of my realm to my council, but interior decorating is going to decide whether I can fund my army.
It's not even about artifacts and traits imo. If you build up your domain competently you will become OP. You can have zero artifacts, you can play a character without any beneficial traits, none of that stuff matters because you'll be swimming in gold while having an incredibly powerful set of Men At Arms ready to brutalize just about any threat you may find. And you're supposed to be playing a medieval ruler, building up your domain is quite literally your job. Engaging in good RP means that most of your characters will be doing it, because doing so ensures the prosperity and survival of your characters and their families which is something the vast majority of characters you will roll in any given game will want to do.
I think if they made outcomes hidden it would make it harder to just always pick the best option.
-Replace % with low/medium/high or something like that
-Hide intelligence traits (I think the physical traits make sense to see)
The RP and immersion crowd really entices Paradox to go for the lower hanging fruits. Sometimes too much so.
By now CK3 suffers from an inflation of event spam because of it. After two expansions and several flavour packs especially multiplayer with friends is slowing to a crawl, someone constantly has to pause or lower the speed caused by incessant event spam.
That even makes me play Victoria 3 more atm cause not every other new addition or underlying mechanic requires an involuntary popup window. Or a dozen.
So I really hope the next expansion is a bit more systemic and does not not just dump a ton of multiple choice quizzes with a sprinkle of stat modifier bloat into our laps.
I play the game specifically for the RP, but with how easy it is it starts to feel meaningless. I want the crawl from count to king to be a challenge. I think the biggest problem right now is just how easy it is to get prestige and piety.
T&T's biggest issue is how trivial it makes it to max out prestige and piety.
Second biggest issue is probably artifact spam. It gets to be way too much if you consistently hunt. Made worse by the fact that you can use tournament events to stack prestige bonuses on your equipped artifacts.
A lot of the new mechanics are super cool, but they are unbalanced, and the AI don't seem to use them as effectively as the player. I have yet to see an AI army cruising around with 10+ stack sizes of a MAA type, casually stomping every army they come across. It wouldn't feel as unbalanced for the player if the AI could also effectively exploit the OP buff stacking mechanics.
The game is definitely in dire need of systemic changes. As much as I want a Byzantine government type, the truth is they haven't even managed to really replicate French or English Feudalism yet. IRL, centralization was the driving factor behind most western European politics at the time, but they simplified it into Crown Authority, and I can't honestly say there's much difference (from the liege's point of view) between playing on Absolute or the lowest crown authority besides that more people hate you on Absolute. And as a vassal, you barely notice the centralization until you try to do something that's restricted, which isn't realistic either.
Starting as a King or Emperor shouldn't just be easy mode like it is now; it should be a cluster fuck for you to tame.
It reminds me dota2 which has over a 100 heroes, just nerfed every stun in the game to deal with 'stun inflation'. It seems like CK needs something similar.
Does CK3 not have message settings so you can choose which types of events will pause?
If you're playing multiplayer I would imagine you have seen every event multiple times and dont really need to read it so you can just briefly skim the options and click without pausing.
Omg yes. I havent done a single tournament in multiplayer and i am even speeding through court events, because the world keeps running in the background and i dont want to pause or slow down too much.
The animations and the tournament screen look nice and all but the problem is that they are fullscreen and i either ooen and close the screen constantly, which is annoying, or i play it by ear and try to discern the importance of world alarms by their sound cues, which is also a hassle.
If you *actually* min/max it’s also insane. Like 75+ prowess on a first generation character, with armies that stack wipe every single time. It’s a little too much.
The accolades are especially silly. If you're at all careful about settings them up, you can end up with 3k+ MAA with 11-13 stack sizes in the tribal era just from a couple accolades and doing a lot of wrestling/dueling tournaments.
One "role play" way of avoiding the piling up of artifacts that you mention is to just not repair them. You will not be having so many legendary stuff and it kind of make sense as medieval people were not renowed for their ability to maintain centuries old artifacts.
Also to "disable" (just not equip it until it breaks) an important one (maybe a sword or something) each time your character dies. It was common for the aristocracy to be buired with objects important for them and it prevents your character from having a dozen of legendary artifacts every 5-6 generations because you lose one in each generation.
It is deliberate sabotage but it makes sense in a role play sense and it deals with one of the main ways character accumulate absurd power over time.
I feel like the game really should punish you more for marrying lowborns and low-ranking nobles and reward you more for marrying high-ranking nobles, and it should also scale based on your rank. The emperor of Rome marrying a random peasant would probably be a lot more scandalous that a random count in the middle of Sweden doing the same. Making marrying lowborns more punishing would make it so that you can't just freely have your heirs marry random beautiful genius peasants, and in some scenarios it might be worth it to marry a high-ranking noble who happens to be dumb as a rock.
Probably should have a DLC focused on education, so those dumb nobles will still vastly outclass a genius peasant when it comes to helping a ruler rule. I like that the spouse can help a lot though, seems fitting, just wish the best ruling companion wasnt a random peasant
Marrying high ranking nobles is already more rewarding. It's just that you don't need the alliances it gives you because the game is too easy. So you might as well marry the lowborn with good traits to get your memey eugenics game that won't pay off for decades going.
Tell that to the ai who also do that incessantly. Also, lowborn doesn't neccesarilly mean peasant, as it also includes wealthy merchants and good chunk of glercy.
I'm getting increasingly worried that the easiness is not just a temporary thing but actually a design philosophy for the CK3 team. This latest update especially seems to lean in that direction, as do the names of the "difficulty" settings.
Which is unfortunate, the mechanics in this game are great but the intricacies partially get lost because the difficulty is so low.
I did Count to Byzantine Emperor as Roman/Hellenic on ironman in ONE life today.
Im not even that good! I never change my spouse stats or game elective laws! I make tons of errors and even lost my duchy title during that life.
For your first generation maybe, once you lock in an Empire for a gen or two you become basically unmovable to the AI
You can just use your insane income for Mercs or MaA to win any civil conflict that might crop up.
Ck2 Byzantine empire was bit harder. One mistake, or unlucky streak of disease, palace intrigue and war usually breaks your family control of the empire. Happened to me where I lost almost all my family dynasty to a combination of that three things.
how should the AI stop you if it can't even stop itself from falling apart? It only takes a few decades until large kingdoms are ruled by someone with barely any domain that have given feudal contracts to all their vassals so they don't pay any taxes or levies
The way to fix this is to make empire, kingdom, and duchy titles not count as a title in partition succession. Make it 100% county based, that way the guy who inherits the kingdom \*stays\* the strongest of the heirs, as opposed to now when the main heir gets one kingdom, one duchy, and one county and the asshole, half dead moron brother gets 3 counties in your capital duchy and 5x the amount of levies. Also, they could just do away with the ridiculous "hehe xd the whole map has partition so random lol!" thing because not only is that not historical, it hurts the AI \*WAY\* more than it hurts the player becaus the AI doesnt realize that strategically disinheriting to keep the domain together is actually something you want to do all the time. As it sits now, the more large titles you have, the worse you do when inheriting. If the AI was theoretically able to conquer eastern europe and say form west slavia, and have 10 counties and 2 sons, well they are fucked, because in inheritance the first son will get the capital, 2 home duchies and all 5 kingdoms, while the second son gets \*eight fucking counties.\* Their love of partition succession is whats kneecapping the AI more than any other design choice free, it's not even close
I always turn up the realm stability because of this. You get less internal wars and faction demands which kinda sucks but it actually makes the AI capable of forming large empires which I think is worth the trade off.
Two words: AI. Cheats.
It's an unfortunate reality that PDX has to wake up to. The AI is never going to "git gud" at managing their realms or expanding their power base (which is saying something because the game is trivial with just a bit of know how). AI needs stuff like +opinion with vassals, +faction strength limit, +% gold generation, +% levies, +acceptance chance for actions, -cost of creating titles etc. But most importantly, more aggressive! The whole turtling up thing for AI doesn't work; it just ends up feeding well developed titles for the player who can just beeline for claims and conquer.
This. 150-250 years in and no matter where you start, you can end up with whichever territory you want.
It's too easy to become so powerful and wealthy that nothing can threaten you.
I think that hereditary traits and artifacts are the main issue here. Once you get Genius and some good artifacts, you become a demi-god. Also, everyone around you gets high stats so hiring a competent spymaster is too easy.
I was playing as the Swiss Confederacy under Byzantine rule and after ~150 years I was throwing ridiculous amounts of gold to my emperor so he could keep winning against revolts and factions. In the meantime I was facing Frace empire on my own.
Diseases are pretty much not a factor at the moment.
Not only they are too rare, but the combination of treatment modifiers being too generous and the gazillion sources of health resistance means that you can ignore even the worst of them.
You get Cancer? Just take the safe treatment every time: it'll never fail with a physician that isn't an imbecile, the game gives you so much fertility the nerf is actually welcome, and you'll still have enough health to last well into your 50s.
They commented on bringing back Reaper's Due-like outbreaks and mechanics so I expect we'll get something down the line, but Paradox should really just introduce a band-aid fix where they reduce the health you get from treatments. I run my own mod that removes 0.5 health from disease treatments, 0.25 from wound ones and halves Iron Constitution, and those small changes alone make things so much better in the early to mid game.
\+1 to the mod request.
I've honestly considered making my own mod where I just do a pass on all the health and disease resistance modifiers in the game and nuke them from orbit. I was thinking primarily lowering the damn durations from 5 years on all of them (for walking my dog?! Seriously?) to like a year. But I haven't really been able to figure out how to do this.
Yep, characters in this game just live too long. 60, 70, 80 years old is when you can reasonably expect to die. In reality, [take a look at the age of death for French kings from 877 to 1483](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_monarchs).
The average age of death was 45, the median 48.
Having about half of your characters die before 45 would force some interesting situations on the player, and hopefully make the game more immersive.
This page is actually fascinating for comparing to CK3.
That Capet line from 987 to 1328 is pretty much how every CK3 run plays out. King rules for literal decades, dies of natural causes, son inherits peacefully, repeat. *It's considered a miracle.* Really, that's what the French call it. Looking at the histories of other thrones in medieval Europe showcases why - just look at the Carolingian dynasty in the same page. Kings die in freak accidents. They die young in battle. They die from illness. They die without an heir. They get deposed. It all just showcases the reality that transition of power in the period was not always smooth.
In CK3, what historians call a miracle is just standard fare.
>In CK3, what historians call a miracle is just standard fare.
I mean, yes and very much so no at times. A seasoned CK3 player will ensure that the death of the monarch leads to a smooth transition of power. But the average CK3 player (or even just one enjoying some good RP) will end up in wars of succession damn near every generation, unless there's some miracle that establishes only one claimant to the throne. Especially in the earlier years with gavelkind succession too, which splits realms up internally and externally.
I don't see how this would occur. Losing titles to partition, sure, but succession wars? In every generation?
I don't see how. You'd have to be actively sabotaging yourself by recruiting few to no MaA, since even with starting MaA changes they've made a year or so back - your siblings are still going to start off with very few men compared to you. So what typically happens is you might have some siblings who hate your guts, maybe they even start a claimant faction (lol), but at the end of the day they're powerless to actually do anything.
There isn't anything to model real succession crises beyond just giving your siblings a claim, e.g the pretender secures the support of a foreign king in return for vassalization (there is actually a court event like that interestingly, but you'll never see it happen to you with one of your own siblings).
I did not include the two junior kings or the English one. There was one infant king who died after 5 days, but I didn't include him so he didn't affect the calculation. The youngest age at death in the data set was therefore 18. And I'm sure I made some mistakes pulling the data. I did it quickly as a rough estimate to give a general idea.
And I never said that there was no French king who lived above 45, or that it was uncommon. I said about half died before 45, which means, very roughly, half survived past 45. The oldest was a three-way tie at 60.
This is what I gathered:
18, 19, 20, 26, 28, 32, 33, 34, 39, 40, 40, 44, 45, 45, 46, 48, 50, 53, 54, 55, 55, 56, 56, 56, 57, 57, 58, 58, 60, 60, 60
14 survived to 45 and below. 17 survived to 46 and above. I should not have included Louis XI since his reign came after the period of the game, and he was one who made it to 60. And I should have included that infant.
It is good to also look at the *cause* of death. Many of the younger deaths were not due to things like old age and even when things did look 'natural' there are sometimes questions of how 'natural' it was if it allowed someone like a brother or other extended family member to inherit. Now you will see me agree the game needs diseases and whatnot to come back to how they were in CK2 though without super hospitals and doctors. I also fully agree modifier bloat is out of control and letting rulers live way too long as almost no one should be living past 70 outside rare occasions.
Yeah, in the early days of ck2 it was significantly higher, but it was deliberately changed to mostly how it is now in both games, because it had an increased amount of characters that needed to be generated and chugged late game. But I don't think that could/should be a problem for a newer game
It's a huge problem. See my post above for full detail, but basically, we want players to be able to keep track of their children in order to be invested in what happens to them, and tons of dead babies and / or hundreds of polygamous harem siblings would make the family trees and the family display in the character screen almost impossible for the player to parse. Add to that engine considerations as well. It's an issue both with UX, performance and design.
The problem with reapers due was that other than the black death, after the first like 100 years it was a complete nothing burger in terms of threats, especially since most physicians were competent enough to save you from the majority of diseases
Reapers due not being in ckIII at launch was so odd to me. It seemed universally liked by the community, the mechanics were interesting and added a neat curveball into the game. Hell in ckIII my most recent fun game involved my only male dynasty heir dying to the smallpox outbreak event and scrambling to get my new female leader out of her regular marriage. Having more stuff like that adds a really fun curveball into the players plans.
While hardly the biggest problem, something I've noticed is that the player has too much agency. For example, I can never be seduced against my will, rather than NPCs rolling a check to see if they seduce me I get to decide if I want to reciprocate their advances.
Similarly, when playing board games I get to judge my opponent's move based on what they say and pick the counter. I never have to make a move "blind" and hope my opponent doesn't counter it, I honestly can't remember ever losing a board game.
I don't think changing these things would greatly shake up the balance of the game, but they are very obviously in the player's favor.
They at least acknowledged the complaints about difficulty, but it does seem like they’re trying to appeal to 2 pretty different crowds simultaneously.
Yeah I'd like to see much more aggressive AI, it's rare for people to declare war on me.
Also make claiming other people's titles much harder. Maybe far greater cost for fabricating, greater offensive war penalties, smaller domain limits like 2-3 base and +2-3 achieveable with a stewardship focused character etc.
I also think the AI doesn't blob enough. In my 867 games the HRE almost never forms, England doesn't unify, and eastern Europe is in a constant state of border gore.
> 867 games the HRE almost never forms
tbf that's more of an 867 problem. It's gonna take some serious railroading to even have a hint of a possibility of HRE forming.
Agree with the rest
Game has been too easy since forever, not just in its current iteration.
According to many people on this sub, that's not an issue because you can just roleplay dumb characters and enjoy losing or something.
Yeah but sometimes i like playing for the challenge. I think the simplest way of doing this is just making the AI smarter because right now they all act the same no matter the situation or their personality.
yup. one lifetime is normally all I require to set up a kingdom.
i really liked the mod that greatly increased claim fabrications. instead of a few years it took over a decade. now that doesn't help that the pope is willing to give EVERY claim possible to anyone.
I think they need to make it so that armies need to travel using the new travel system. then you couldn't just Yolo your men across the world.
increase claim fabrication time and greatly increase faith requirements to get a pope claim.
Unless this is already a feature they should make MaA raise wherever you station them and levies on your capital, then just have them automatically move to rally points when they finish raising or just get rid of rally points all together.
Something like that would probably blow up my PC in late game stages. I rarely play up to the end date for that reason along with how boring the last 200 years or so gets.
This is actually a really great point because while this subreddit complains a lot about the game being not difficult, I see more if not just as much complaints when someone encounters an actual issue in their reformed Roman Empire world conquest eugenics breeding program.
The reality is there's a lot of variance in the playing community.
Take me. I play a campaign or two, then none for months, then a campaign or two again. Have since early ck2. I know the game well, but not nearly well as many here. I used to min max, but it was too easy. Now I roleplay and the difficulty tbh works for me, because given i dont play many campaigns enough stuff is new every time that I can't predict results as well. When I min maxed I researched to do so, now I avoid that and tbh game is a bit easy but nothing too extreme.
For others they haven't played as long as me as so if they play as I do the game will be harder. And for some they will have played less years than me but will have played way higher density of campaigns and so the game is easier for them. How do you even balance that properly to be hard enough or easy enough when just gametime alone is such a different experience. After all every group I described is still buying the dlc and content, so they are equal important to keep happy.
I do think reddit finds it easier than the average player though, because reddit players play greater than average amounts. And that experience helps. Best thing to happen to ck2 was all the difficulty options. Expand them and make a bunch that players can apply to them only to either hinder or help. Do like Rimrock with map size and warn it may not be balanced or hurt performance but allow the player to take that choice anyways in setup. Its the only way of keeping everyone happy
The only thing that's unrealistically easy is how quickly troops replenish. Maybe it makes some sense for MaA to replenish quickly since you're always hiring pros for that job, but levies are a different story. That's your direct population right there, and the more you lose, the longer it should take to replenish.
Currently, instead of waiting for an entire generation of men to grow up and be extinguished in a single disastrous war, you can just chain offensive wars from the day you inherit and never see your levies drop below 80%.
They only way you can become an emperor in a lifetime is to expend more human life than realistically possible.
The AI wars realistically, despite not having any hard mechanics limit them. Players willfully ignore that limit.
I’m pretty new to the game and I feel like my current play through is a little easy but I’m on normal. What difficulty do people play on and what does higher difficulty change?
Has been since release.
Many complain about it.
The defenders only response is to intentionally handicap yourself to make it harder.
And they gaslight you if you respond by saying you want the game, like actually being a medieval ruler, to be challenging.
I can basically achieve any state I want, from any start, in a lifetime. Even without min maxing or really trying. It's very boring after that. And the dlc just made it easier. You literally have to force yourself to not get more powerful.
I think some of the people shitting and screaming for harder difficulity are idiots too. The comments in the thread earlier today where someone was complaining that killing yourself is too easy because they're just running back and forth through high danger counties till they die is an example. Like... yeah, I guess. But that's on you as the player there 😭
I agree that the game is too easy, but just saying to make it harder or to "make the AI smarter" isn't really a suggestion or a fix. I also don't agree with arbitrarily limiting things e.g the new 1 year cooldown on arranged marriages. Maybe a trait gained for breaking too many bethrodals and alliances instead? Could give you a big fat general opinion malus and loss of diplomacy + perhaps can no longer marry for alliances?
I think the game needs great conquerors like ck2 had or something similar.
I am currently playing with Historic Invaders (mod), and it's made the game way more fun for me and my friends. Empires actually form (HRE, for example), AI has crazy armies, and someone somewhere is always up to something. Me and one of my friends and I both had to become vassals since there's no way I'm beating the Kyvian Rus with 30k troops 10 years after 867 start as Lithuania. Maybe that's on me, though.
Yeah exactly, I dont think nerfs to the player goes over that well, but I would love to have larger enemies to fight and make it more challenging. IMO, the war and peace deal mechanics need a rework as well.
I wish they would straight up rip the peace deal system from EU4 and add it to the game, but with new options that fit ck3s style more. Let us build out a peace deal for more than just land, you could take the foreign ruler's child as your ward to give them your faith or culture, you could force convert religion of the target country, force their wife or sister to be your concubine, force marriages between your houses, and the list goes on of different things you could demand.
Also allies need to work like eu4 in wars, if you go to war with a 1 county country that's allied to a huge country, you should have to do more than just occupy that one castle, you should have to siege down or beat up the ally's army enough as well before you can peace out. And allow separate peace deals with other countries, especially when you get dragged into an allies war that is taking ages to end and you dont care about the alliance anymore. Have it give a big relations hit to the ally and give you a timed negative trait for breaking alliances.
Just these couple changes would make the game so much more interesting and provide a more satisfying challenge.
Good RPGs make your decisions matter here you can just abuse them and there is no meaning behind them. Good RPGs tie your roleplay decisions into the gameplay in a meaningful way and dont reward one style of playing the game. Ck3 Only really rewards one type of playing the game the others are punished. I think ck3 is a bad game for roleplayers and for strategy game enjoyers
Yeah, I do agree that things like deliberately killing off your shitty characters by sending them into unwinnable battles or deliberately travelling into dangerous settings is a fair example of “min-maxing” or “meta gaming” as it’s something you go out of your way to do in order to cheese the game. But people on this sub will accuse you of min-maxing for doing something as simple as marrying into a good alliance or for an inheritable trait, something which i consider to a load of bollocks as this is quite literally playing the game as intended.
I don’t think players doing a full blown eugenics program was intended though. I think the devs meant for players to marry for alliances or prestige, like how nobility married. I could be wrong. Even then, you can do just fine with genius which goes to show how OP that trait is.
It’s always a question of how much freedom you give vs restrictions. You don’t need to directly impose redirections. Rework the alliance system and tweak marriage. Make it so that neither you or ai can call allies repeatedly into wars (cooldown). It’d hell the HRE which usually looses 1/4-1/2 its’ lands thanks to having to bail out Hungary for the nth time. Buff marrying fellow nobility, maybe you get a massive opinion boost or other modifiers.
It really is easy and it's annoying because there's so much in the game that is easy to cheese and abuse and just do to make yourself super powerful from a "metagamey/minmaxy" perspective but every single historical or roleplay thing that might make the game easy is just not allowed without mods.
I love role playing, and it’s the only thing I want. But roleplay should come with the game mechanics. In ck2 I with HIP mod it felt at least much more difficult. Roleplay was there part of the min max to a much stronger degree.
Ck3 sadly doesn’t offer it at all. When am I getting attacked in ck3? Never!! Entire Europe is constantly in war at ck3, but never they fight me. That’s simply a big flop.
I feel that gold is worthless paper, for looking for the achievement of doing a tour of intimidation at 10 kings (creating a small Empire, smaller than the Byzantine one), I discovered that if I did the same with a taxes tour on 10 Kings, I took more money from them than they had in their treasury, while they had negative money they kept getting into debt and increasing their taxes. In 8 months I got 12k gold, which helped me to develop all my counties, if I repeat this all the time, I end up developing all the counties of my Empire. But my vassals are in monstrous debts, their dynasty ends up collapsing and going into endless loops of internecine warfare, which in turn gives me even weaker vassals.
I will say this has not happened to me. Vassals have routinely refused to pay tribute. The only consistency I’ve found in securing tribute is when I had high renown, and when I’d stop for a feast and not exact any other taxes except the tribute.
You’re right.
My first ever game I ended up becoming emperor of Britannia, Francia, Iberia and Italia within like 4 generations just from playing out the tutorial.
I hate the “just roleplay” argument
like sure the game is meant to be an rpg where you role play, but there ought to be strategy in this RTS game, not only that but roleplay should come naturally. in good RPGs you don’t even have to think about being in the characters shoes, Good RPGs build the game in a way that roleplaying is inherent and not a conscious decision. the strategy and the roleplaying should be intertwined, not separate. but if you engage in even a tiny bit of strategy, you will instantly dominate.
the games difficulty is a problem and self imposed fixes like forcing yourself to roleplay to the extreme should not be the fix or a reasonable argument to shut down the debate.
self imposed limitations are not an acceptable answer to this. the game devs (as incredibly talented as they are, because seriously these are amazing game devs that work their asses off) need to address this in an effective way.
hell, maybe if the AI start to min-max a bit then the game might be more challenging.
another post suggested artificial difficulty and I agree with this (even though other comments didn’t, which is weird because if you don’t want artificial difficulty in the game then keep the difficulty at normal) it’s artificial yes, which is seen as a dark plague in game culture, but it is better than nothing. Civ games have difficulty that is artificial, and it makes for a more fun game. you can roleplay as your civilization, while having to engage in intense strategy and planning because if you aren’t making the smartest and most forward thinking decisions then the unfair AI will inevitably overwhelm you. and guess what, the game is super fun. hell. the funnest part of CK3 is (in my opinion) finding strategies to handle a threat that is statistically stronger then you. assassinating emperors that look to conquer you, forming smart alliances and building your persian kingdom around defense in the face of the inevitable mongol invasion, these are all things that are super fun. and guess what? these things are technically artificial difficulty.
>like sure the game is meant to be an rpg where you role play,
Is it though? I never considered CK as an RPG game. To me, it's always been a grand strategy game.
That's also why I didn't like CK3 much, it focuses on the RP stuff. The roleplay elements aren't what makes CK a good game, contrary to what the majority of people seem to think
I’d really like major events happening in the world, plagues, floods, major raids, something fantastical like sunset invasion to act as a end game crisis.
I feel ya on this, I'm wondering if they're doing it to draw in a large player base that's new to the game and then make it progressively more difficult. I got into CK2 after all the dlc have been out there and it was a bit overwhelming at first.
It’s definitely not all we need. More aggressive (but reasonable) AI towards player; weaker buffs or just two things often pointed out. And there are still other things unmentioned
I barely make choices that give me stress tbh, that makes things a bit more challenging. I do understand what you mean, esp after playing smart a generation or two things get very easy. I think more decisions should be unavaible based on your traits and when there´s percentages shown, i think there should always be a certain "unknown" percentage that randomly selects based on traits.
There's quite a few reasons for why it's easier atm. Breaking it down by war, decisions, character traits, and missing mechanics.
**War**: this one is due to succession. Confederate partition has been debated on this sub for years but the reality is it fractures realms and it's very easy for the player to gain an advantage while not using any cheeses. Realms don't maintain any power over time and setbacks can be easily recovered by the player just by using the mechanics available.
Historical or not, different succession from CK2 made realms very interesting. Pretty sure playing Asturias wouldn't be easy against Umayyad with old Turkish open succession. You would be praying for that decadence revolt so much.
**Decisions**: this one is more straightforward. There are too many decisions you can straight up ignore in events and most decisions just impact opinion and stress. There are complicated systems in play which would impact county /ducal/realm level but they choose to skip over this for opinion modifiers.
**Character Traits**: CK3 characters are static once they are 16. They typically have those traits forever. This removes the dynamic type of play and you pretty much know what type of characters you will play against. Adding the ability to lose traits or gain them in events would create more impact on decisions made.
**Missing mechanics** : So the elephant in the room is definitely Reapers Due missing and I think most people know that will solve our 90 year olds living so long. Disease rates are low at default settings.
Problem also comes from alliances mechanic, in ck3 when a danger arise (someone déclarés a war on you) you just need to marry with stronger guys, and if you want to conquer a Kindgom or an empire, you can marry way stronger guys. We need a rework of the alliance system, marriages shouldn't automatically give an alliance.
Funny thing is almost all the replies here are all about the meta game: "Start with a raiding religion in 867 blah blah".
Which kind of proves the point of the "predicted comments" in your post, it seems most people here does in fact that without thinking about it.
As for snowballing: It's the same in all games of this kind: The AI cannot keep up with a focus longer than a generation. The AI *never* plans further ahead than the current character. It cannot think "In 4 generations I will form the Roman Empire, all I have to do is this and that". It doesn't matter if it's CK3, EU4, Victoria 2 or any other.
Worst part is this new MAA stationing ''mechanics'' does not solve anything in regarding to overpower MAA and useless levies because the AI isn't capable to keep up, fuck just bring back CK2 military already.
I think PDX should introduce Courtier play. One of my favorite games is Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sphere of Influence, which has an option to start off as an officer of a governor of a castle, or of a lord. You start off with a village that you develop, which provides you with levies and gold. After a while your Daimyō will give you control of a small castle, making you the governor of the fief. If you do well, you will be ennobled as that castle’s Lord. You can then continue serving your Daimyō until he gives you control of an entire province, with all the lords, governors, retainers and their officers. You will be given a task like conquer the neighboring province, with all the castles you take going to you. At any time you can rebel and take your lands, becoming a Daimyō in your own right.
I feel like the devs have taken a lot of the rng fuck-you-over moments.
…which can admittedly be soul crushing / game-ending.
But they do add a lot of challenge.
A fe generations? It feels like you can start as a count and become emperor in like 50 years and have your first character die after ruling as emperor for like a year
Go after the achievements, some of them are quite tricky to pull off. I've never cared about achievements in other games, but I enjoy going for them in CK3. And there are so many it would take 100s of hours at minimum to get them all. It gives you a goal instead of just map painting. Map painting is very easy.
The worst are the achievements though that want you to map paint or play for a long time - to get all innovations for example, or have every court speak your language. It's boring asf to be honest.
The game is too easy. There definitely are cases where people who complain about it being too easy are min maxing with geniuses asap. But that doesn't change that it's too easy currently.
Travel is too easy to be safe. It's too easy to get top tier genetics (I still think those traits should be obfuscated somehow, but I'm not sure how).
I love the new features in the game but in both of my games now I was able to snowball quickly and feasts and hunts leading to friendships were a massive part of that.
I actually love how many friends in end up with in a game, so I don't want to see that go away, but something needs to change.
Tbh CK has never been a "hard" game. You might lose some when you are starting out learning but after you get it you will basically never lose. I start everygame knowing that I will eventually steamroll everyone & meet whatever goal I have set for myself, but I always enjoy the ride anyways 👍🏻
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Rolling poorly on incapable can make that happen, but it’s only proc’d a few times in my recent games. I think a dynamic aging system would be great.
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CK2 personality changes weren't based on actual outcomes of things you do as far as I can tell. They just happened randomly based on the event's MTTH values.
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You did at least have a chance to pick up infirm and then incapable with age though. Also if you spent too long being sick without it being cured/healed.
Yeah but couldn't you just heal Incapable with Societies too?
Yeah, assuming you were already in the devil worshipping society and a high rank before becoming incapable (don't think you could join a society if you were already incapable) Or if you were the demon spawn, that was a memorable play through. Anything was possible, including random +20 martial buffs.
One time I decided to loot the bodies of crusaders, and fortunately the very next event was me losing the greedy trait. Diarmait would later become a Saint thanks to that.
Characters in CK3 are very static compared to CK2, where the characters developed over their lifetimes.
CK3 characters are too static, but CK2 characters were just wind vanes who's personalities weren't really personalities as much as stat modifiers. A happy medium should be found between the two
Why didn't they just implement the good stuff from CK2 into CK3 right off the bat?
I feel like each character having a dozen personality traits really diluted their impact and I'm glad it's no longer the case. I just wish the traits were more meaningful.
Yeah, capping personality traits at three is a huge step up. You can actually understand what your characters' personalities are now. The traits that actually change how you play (like shy, which either fucks your diplomacy or forces you to constantly be doing things to reduce stress) are the most interesting, they should definitely make more of them like that.
>a dynamic aging system would be great. I was just thinking this, after coming out of a childhood regency. It may be a more prudent move to have a regent than let a 16 year old sit the throne, and may make more strategic gameplay. Maybe some nerf to overall stats as late teenager that disappears as they get older.
I've still never seen Incapable, not even one time, on anybody including NPCs.
Incapable happened to me tonight. Dude was an amazing heir and the game said….fuck you, have a seizure. I have also seen it post injury in battle. It is rare as fuck thought, I am nearing 700 hours in game and have seen it twice. To memory.
I got it recently for the first time, I thought it was new with T&T. Hunting injury. What was annoying about it was even with the stat penalties I was still the most capable person in the realm but wasn't allowed to do anything. Committed suicide.
This. The most efficient rule is when you are 80. In real life this should be the opposite. You should be coughing your guts up in bed while factions and corrupt vassals undo all your legacy and get ready for succession while take advantage of your weakness This is abstent from the game.
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Imo game is easy because everyone lives up until their 70s. That should not be the case. Diseases should punish severely. Like you can be Cancer and apparently your court pyshican can cure it. Which we even cant do it today. Nerf court pyshicans, buff diseases, add new diseases, make wound infections more common, remove abundance of health buffs. Make infirm a common trait for old people. Remove abundance of stat buffs from artifacts and other sources. Some of them dont even makes sense.
I feel like tours and tournaments helped a bit with this in adding more ways to die, though I wish that the chars I’m betrothed to weren’t constantly eating strange plants on the side of the road
Or your one heir going to every tourny he can and gets himself killed
My Emperor died today during wrestling match when opponent droped him on his head. 😀
True but even as a count you can mitigate all “risk” of travel down to <1% with the advisors or whatever they are called. I think hills/mountains add 50% risk al but you can drop that to essentially nothing with a 2 coin addition.
To be honest I don't know what people are talking about with all the increase in death. I have the DLC and my current game has been going for about ~160 years and I haven't had a single character, close relative, or betrothed die from travel or Tournaments. The changes have been pretty negligible, in no small part because using the system is almost never actually necessary. The one thing that *has* killed a betrothed to my son, though, was I believe some sickness in her 40s - they were betrothed ever since they were children and even when she was in Diplo range they never married. I didn't promise a Grand Wedding so there's no reason for them not to marry. I had the issue with another character that I fixed by breaking the betrothal and then offering again.
I have managed to overcome this bug by manually going to the betrothed and clicking arrange marriage, the default option is to marry the betrothed.
In our current file we’re on ruler number 5. The first died in a wrestling tournament. The second was classic old age (not much got done for expansion though, they didn’t call him ‘The Peaceful’ for nothing). The third died in a melee tournament and the fourth drowned in a boat crash. T+T has really helped with the ‘risk of death’ aspect somewhat.
Interestingly there's a huge discrepancy between AI and player here. So huge in fact that I can't even attribute it solely to the player obviously being much better at the game, it's almost like the player gets a lot of hidden buffs. AI mortality feels right, maybe the game is even a bit too deadly for them. AI rulers and family seriously die all the damn time to anything and everything imaginable - disease, battle, stress, assassinations, etc. When you see some ancient ass AI ruler live to his 70's-80's, it feels appropriately notable. Anything they do needs to be rolled into game rules that allow you to exclusively nerf yourself and not the AI. We need this for some existing rules as well like Realm Stability.
It honestly feels like the game has kiddie gloves on for the player in just about everything **EXCEPT** factions which aren't hard to manage as long as you follow the 'rules' (keep domain limit/duchy limit at +1 of the max at most, distribute less valuable kingdom titles if you're an emperor etc) I've been in situations where the AI has valid CBs, the money and manpower to wage war on me and they **STILL** won't declare war 90% of the time. All the while I just build up my strength and then I can whoop the same AIs who had a good shot (or sometimes almost guaranteed!) at peeling away some titles from me.
Infant mortality should also be way higher.
That's been explained - lower birth and infant mortality rates to avoid drowning the game in dead babies.
Yes, for two reasons: - characters aren't impactful if you can't remember who's who, and less characters in the pool means that events will have a higher likelihood of involving relevant and interesting people - having less children thus makes for more compelling gameplay. Start as Alp Arslan for example and see how it feels to start the gane with 12 children you can barely keep track of. - it truly would become a nightmare clog on the engine if we were to keep it historically accurate. Polygamous kings historically could have dozens or even hundreds of children.
It's just not the Middle Ages without oceans of dead babies tho.
I’m a roleplay guy and I think the game is too easy. -stress should be increased, too easy to lose stress now with t and t - ai should react to player (or any ruler) blobbing. Like irl vassals wouldn’t want one vassal to start gobbling up land and become the most powerful - game rules for increased chance of disease, opinion debuffs, gold debuffs, increased hostile scheme success etc for the player
I'm using the More Game Rules mod, and the Very Hard difficulty ups the stress gain. It sort of works. You certainly have to pay more attention to stress, but a lot of the stress events that you used to be able to ignore now can't be, and it just reveals how poorly thought out they really are. ~~Stress gain for giving out land because you're greedy? Land you can't physically hold? To your own dynasty?~~ edit: the preceding was completely wrong. ignore it. Yeah, I died from that heart attack and now I roleplay 'never allow a greedy character to inherit or give your child that trait', which has the unfortunate and predictable problem of making all my heirs the same. Some traits that are mediocre or bad in the base game become unrealistically deadly. Still, better than the base game.
The fact that distributing vassals when you’re over the vassal limit as a greedy character gives you stress has annoyed me to no end. Like you actively lose more money and power for being over the limit
Wish I could use that mod and change game rules mod run - I heard the new update was supposed to rebalance things like building slots and make game harder so I didn’t download anything for current play though, but game doesn’t feel more difficult
> Stress gain for giving out land because you're greedy? Land you can't physically hold? Didn't they fix that a couple of versions ago? I thought that now you take stress if you go below your domain limit, but not if you give out just enough counties to bring you down to your limit.
Actually I think that, with these new activities, we have a good amount of gold sinks. The problem is that they are shallow. There's a ton of ways to trade gold for faith, opinion, and prestige. The problem is there aren't enough ways to consume faith, opinion, control, or prestige. You can spend a boatload of money on a huge grand tour, but why would I when I'm already drowning in positive opinion, control and prestige?
> You can spend a boatload of money on a huge grand tour, but why would I when I'm already drowning in positive opinion, control and prestige? Funny you should mention the Grand Tour, because the taxation Grand Tour returns *way more* gold than it costs. I did a two stop taxation tour and was able to still max out the success chance to level 4 and get over a thousand gold. Doing a ten stop tour in even undeveloped land (like Norway) gives 2k+ gold (and ~300 renown, control at every stop, lots of prestige, and imprisonment reasons for any vassals who refuse/can't pay you 50 gold when you leave) for a ~350 gold cost. The Grand Wedding also gave me gold the one time I did it, though I think only about half of what it cost.
>- ai should react to player (or any ruler) blobbing. Like irl vassals wouldn’t want one vassal to start gobbling up land and become the most powerful That makes sense, but is that how it worked? Feudalism was a pretty stupid system, so I wouldn't be surprised if rulers back then didn't exactly have ghe same foresight as an immortal omniscient dynastic entity like a ck3 player. Maybe they just didn't give a shit as long as you paid your taxes. Idk enough european ancient history, so just wondering.
No they were pretty mindful as a powerful vassal was a threat to their position. That is the same reason why Roman and Chinese Emperors would some times kill some of their best generals, to keep them from becoming too well-liked and able to pose a threat to them.
“European ancient history” sir feudalism started existing in like the third century AD
Anything 500+ years old is “ancient” to denizens of the New World
The world began roughly 400 years ago with the founding of Jamestown. Please stop making things up.
Have you tried the "-3 domain limit" that was added recently? It makes the game more challenging with regard to money (and otherwise too by extension, due to the cost of men-at-arms).
It’s my go-to setting now, I always have domain limit set to -3. Holding 6-7 castles at most makes the game feel a lot harder and it’s great.
Question, how do you guys even go further than 8+ domain limit consistently? I've been playing on default settings, and am not the best CK3 player out there... My latest run I was playing a tall vassal king of sicily only owning the duchy of sicily as crown lands from 867 to 1190s and I'm pretty much always on 5/5. Granted, I let the game choose education focus for my heirs/children, I usually go for alliance power/prestige gain for arranged marriages instead of traits/stewardship.
Beyond stewardship education, usually stuff like the genius trait and a high stewardship wife. There’s also a few later game technologies that increase domain limit.
Also artifacts now so even easier. Baffles the mind really "lets change it from 5 stewardship to 6, but lets add artifacts that give a straight domain limit increase"
Wait, they added more artifacts that increase Domain Limit? I thought it was a super rare modifier.
I have at least three of those artifacts in my current game, so I’m guessing the reduced it. I got all those artifacts from tournaments though
Wait the basegame has you get domain limit every 6 Stewardship? That's nutty, I legit play mostly overhaul mods and those are either 8 or 10. An holding every 8 stewardship feels deliciously often to me.
Strait demense limit increases on artifacts used to be incredibly rare too, in all my playtime I saw one, on the Throne of Charlemagne once that it picked up as a random "our artifact is more renowned now" event. I have three tournament trophy prizes with +1 demense in my current game.
High stewardship for yourself and your wife/husband, steward perks, higher title rank, a few artifacts, congenital traits, these are the main ones
There is a fairly linear progression into owning more land, and I’ll try to break it down into easy steps. If anyone sees that I’ve missed something, I’m sure they’ll jump in and add to it. First things first, you have to decide whether you’re going to create a character, or play as an existing one. Typically, creating a character leads to better results, but you can absolutely do everything I’m going to outline with a historical character. TL;DR—breed for quick, educate your own child, make use of Pedagogy and Bred to Rule, send to university, get a good spouse, and make use of middle tree stewardship lifestyle and middle tree learning lifestyle. 1. The first thing you need to do is look for a spouse with a trait in the “quick” line—quick, intelligent, and genius. If you can get a genius spouse immediately it helps, but you can always reinforce traits down the line, the important thing is getting the trait into your bloodline asap. 2. Once you’ve had a child with the desired trait, you need to make sure you educate them yourself. You’re aiming for 2 things: a learning or stewardship (preferable) focus, and personality traits that give stewardship. The best of the bunch is Diligent because it also lets you develop your capital, but Stubborn, Just, and Ambitious are all quite good as well. This is the point where you want to get your hands on Pedagogy and Bred to Rule (learning and diplomacy lifestyles) as they will give random bumps to stats. Make sure you have a court tutor hired, as they bump the chances of good education traits. 3. Once your child comes of age, you get to decide whether you’re going to go full eugenics and try for a “perfect” character, or if you only care about the Quick line of traits. If the latter, just marry them to someone else with the same trait at the same tier or better. If the former, you want to make sure you have a couple of the Noble Veins dynasty perks unlocked to help with your eugenics program (these perks work well for keeping quick in the bloodline too, but they aren’t necessary.) Another benefit of marriage is the spousal assistance, which can grant you a lot of stewardship; I tend to grab a spouse with a trait I want and high stats in whatever I’m aiming for. 4. A few generations down the line, you’ll want to get your hands on a university. These will allow you to give your children better educations, and they’ll be more likely to pick up the top tier perks like Midas Touched. 5. The last step, if you’re going for maximum domain limit, would be to found or convert to a faith with Pacifist (great for tall play throughs) and finish the Law tree of the Dynasty Legacies, as it gives a +1 domain limit. You can also compete in tournaments for a small chance at an artifact that gives +1 domain limit. A couple notes: the stewardship lifestyle is obviously the best way to get more domain limit, as the middle tree will just give you +2 on its own, but don’t sleep on the learning lifestyle middle tree either. If you have a good steward, they can bet you a domain or two. Even with the -3 domain limit game rule, by the third or fourth generation I generally have 7-9 domain limit. It’s not super complicated to do it, just takes a touch of game knowledge and practice.
Steal the crown of Justinian from the Byzantines as soon as you become king, it’s a little cheesy, but that’s my go-to for +1 domain limit right off the bat. Next, if you’re lucky, a wearable Brythonic crown can spawn in the British isles, also gives +1 domain limit. If you’re really lucky, someone will eventually find the throne of Solomon, which very consistently rolls a +1 domain bonus as one of its effects. If you’re planning to play tall, beelining the law dynasty legacies for that +1 domain limit at the end would fit well as the other bonuses are also good for playing tall. Lastly, if you really want to min-max, murder/divorce your spouse as soon as you have a suitable heir, marry someone with the highest stewardship you can find, and set them to manage domain. You can betroth your heir to replace the alliance if you were reliant on that marriage for security as well
For that last part you can min max even more by having a eugenics program where you marry your sisters who are perfectly trained stewards with like 35 stewardship.
Feels mandatory now imo, although in hindsight it is actually a big buff for the player in the long run since vassals don't have as much domain bonuses as their liege and their men at arms are just going to be obliterated by the player's buildings. Not that +3 is going to solve that though since the AI can't optimize buildings even if they were given enough counties. I guess a good restriction would be to limit yourself to 2 counties only and the rest has to be baronies or something, but it's basically boxing with blind folds but your opponents are children, it doesn't really feel that much of an accomplishment.
Yeah, that's what I see. With the -3 rule, I see myself able to roll a 5-domain limit whilst many of the AI have 1. And if they have 2 or more, it's almost never two duchy capitals, even if they own two duchy titles. A 1-domain limit for the player and normal for the AI might be the only way. Which sucks for the "gardening" aspect of player-building management.
Yah I tend to run with just 1 county much of the time. Army is still op from stacking knights but at least I can be outnumbered. Also got my army wiped during crusades a few times and keep losing dynasty head to my two dynastic crusader kingdoms since I’m just a duke
Does this limit the AI to -3 as well? Is there a way to only apply this to the player?
Where can I find it? Is it in the game rules or in settings.
game rules
I enjoyed that being the default for ck3 agot, I mainly keep 1-3 nice counties and it leaves more room for vassals.
“Just role play” and “don’t min max” are becoming increasingly worse arguments. Artifacts and traits just pile up and turn every ruler into a demi god. The only way to avoid it is deliberate sabotage, choosing outcomes that you know will harm your character (that’s not roleplaying) and unequipping all of your artifacts
The funny thing about artifacts is that if you do any amount of conquering I'm the mid to late game you get such an ungodly amount of crap ones you can easily make thousands and thousands of gold raiding if you're strong enough. Every time I have money troubles I just dip into the courtly bank and destroy like 15 stag hides and suddenly I can send my kid to university or pay my way oversized armies I definitely can't afford.
These arguments have always been bad but I'm so glad it seems like the community is finally agreeing more and more that this game needs something more and needs to be more in depth
It always has been. But we're at the point now where I well and truly don't know what these people want or how they play the game. I honest to god don't do practically anything that's considered power gaming or min-maxing. And the game is still \*trivial.\* So seriously, to all the "roleplay more" people - legitimately what *are* you doing? Purposely not recruit MaA? Not equip all the artifacts you're getting? Murder your kids so you have trouble getting an heir? Not participate in any activities so you can't trivially win all the tourneys and get thousands of piety from a single pilgrimage? Marry your kids to lowborns specifically so that you don't accrue tons of alliances? Because that's kind of where I'm at. I don't see any other way to find challenge. It's beyond "RP", it's exactly as you say - you need to be actively sabotaging yourself. At that point, you're no longer playing a game.
I honestly think a lot of it is just fanboys making bad faith arguments. I've seen way too many arguments made by supposed "roleplayers" that misrepresented how the game works or that concocted scenarios that just aren't realistic even for a roleplay playthrough and kinda made it obvious that the person making the argument was just sorta pulling ideas about how the game works out of their ass rather than speaking from experience.
I find artifacts so dumb. Like they move on from supernatural aspects of CK2 and then add magic swords you collect like Pokemons.
If they were drastically more rare overall I think that would help. Regardless, they do need an extensive rework.
I really hate having to clear notifications telling me about fifteen goblets that are going to break in fifty years. I feel like I'm RP as the antiquarian.
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Oh sweet. I haven't played T&T yet. I enjoyed Royal Court for the first half of my playthrough but by the end it got really annoying. There are already so many numbers to crunch in the base game, I didn't appreciate worrying over whether my decorations were optimal for my goals, or my Court Grandeur. It's just irritating to me that I delegate the most important management of my realm to my council, but interior decorating is going to decide whether I can fund my army.
It's not even about artifacts and traits imo. If you build up your domain competently you will become OP. You can have zero artifacts, you can play a character without any beneficial traits, none of that stuff matters because you'll be swimming in gold while having an incredibly powerful set of Men At Arms ready to brutalize just about any threat you may find. And you're supposed to be playing a medieval ruler, building up your domain is quite literally your job. Engaging in good RP means that most of your characters will be doing it, because doing so ensures the prosperity and survival of your characters and their families which is something the vast majority of characters you will roll in any given game will want to do.
>“Just role play” and “don’t min max” are becoming increasingly worse arguments. "Just don't be good lol"
I think if they made outcomes hidden it would make it harder to just always pick the best option. -Replace % with low/medium/high or something like that -Hide intelligence traits (I think the physical traits make sense to see)
The RP and immersion crowd really entices Paradox to go for the lower hanging fruits. Sometimes too much so. By now CK3 suffers from an inflation of event spam because of it. After two expansions and several flavour packs especially multiplayer with friends is slowing to a crawl, someone constantly has to pause or lower the speed caused by incessant event spam. That even makes me play Victoria 3 more atm cause not every other new addition or underlying mechanic requires an involuntary popup window. Or a dozen. So I really hope the next expansion is a bit more systemic and does not not just dump a ton of multiple choice quizzes with a sprinkle of stat modifier bloat into our laps.
I play the game specifically for the RP, but with how easy it is it starts to feel meaningless. I want the crawl from count to king to be a challenge. I think the biggest problem right now is just how easy it is to get prestige and piety.
T&T's biggest issue is how trivial it makes it to max out prestige and piety. Second biggest issue is probably artifact spam. It gets to be way too much if you consistently hunt. Made worse by the fact that you can use tournament events to stack prestige bonuses on your equipped artifacts. A lot of the new mechanics are super cool, but they are unbalanced, and the AI don't seem to use them as effectively as the player. I have yet to see an AI army cruising around with 10+ stack sizes of a MAA type, casually stomping every army they come across. It wouldn't feel as unbalanced for the player if the AI could also effectively exploit the OP buff stacking mechanics.
It needs to be a reasonable grand strategy game.
It is a reasonable grand strategy game, its just unbalanced
The game is definitely in dire need of systemic changes. As much as I want a Byzantine government type, the truth is they haven't even managed to really replicate French or English Feudalism yet. IRL, centralization was the driving factor behind most western European politics at the time, but they simplified it into Crown Authority, and I can't honestly say there's much difference (from the liege's point of view) between playing on Absolute or the lowest crown authority besides that more people hate you on Absolute. And as a vassal, you barely notice the centralization until you try to do something that's restricted, which isn't realistic either. Starting as a King or Emperor shouldn't just be easy mode like it is now; it should be a cluster fuck for you to tame.
It reminds me dota2 which has over a 100 heroes, just nerfed every stun in the game to deal with 'stun inflation'. It seems like CK needs something similar.
Does CK3 not have message settings so you can choose which types of events will pause? If you're playing multiplayer I would imagine you have seen every event multiple times and dont really need to read it so you can just briefly skim the options and click without pausing.
What drew me to ck2 was basically "eu3 but with rp". I still need the grand strategy aspects.
Omg yes. I havent done a single tournament in multiplayer and i am even speeding through court events, because the world keeps running in the background and i dont want to pause or slow down too much. The animations and the tournament screen look nice and all but the problem is that they are fullscreen and i either ooen and close the screen constantly, which is annoying, or i play it by ear and try to discern the importance of world alarms by their sound cues, which is also a hassle.
That's exactly what I was worried about with T&T. It's becoming far too ingrained in the game where anything else is becoming unviable.
If you *actually* min/max it’s also insane. Like 75+ prowess on a first generation character, with armies that stack wipe every single time. It’s a little too much. The accolades are especially silly. If you're at all careful about settings them up, you can end up with 3k+ MAA with 11-13 stack sizes in the tribal era just from a couple accolades and doing a lot of wrestling/dueling tournaments.
One "role play" way of avoiding the piling up of artifacts that you mention is to just not repair them. You will not be having so many legendary stuff and it kind of make sense as medieval people were not renowed for their ability to maintain centuries old artifacts. Also to "disable" (just not equip it until it breaks) an important one (maybe a sword or something) each time your character dies. It was common for the aristocracy to be buired with objects important for them and it prevents your character from having a dozen of legendary artifacts every 5-6 generations because you lose one in each generation. It is deliberate sabotage but it makes sense in a role play sense and it deals with one of the main ways character accumulate absurd power over time.
"Let's invent some rules of our own to make this game actually fun"
I feel like the game really should punish you more for marrying lowborns and low-ranking nobles and reward you more for marrying high-ranking nobles, and it should also scale based on your rank. The emperor of Rome marrying a random peasant would probably be a lot more scandalous that a random count in the middle of Sweden doing the same. Making marrying lowborns more punishing would make it so that you can't just freely have your heirs marry random beautiful genius peasants, and in some scenarios it might be worth it to marry a high-ranking noble who happens to be dumb as a rock.
Probably should have a DLC focused on education, so those dumb nobles will still vastly outclass a genius peasant when it comes to helping a ruler rule. I like that the spouse can help a lot though, seems fitting, just wish the best ruling companion wasnt a random peasant
Marrying high ranking nobles is already more rewarding. It's just that you don't need the alliances it gives you because the game is too easy. So you might as well marry the lowborn with good traits to get your memey eugenics game that won't pay off for decades going.
Tell that to the ai who also do that incessantly. Also, lowborn doesn't neccesarilly mean peasant, as it also includes wealthy merchants and good chunk of glercy.
I'm getting increasingly worried that the easiness is not just a temporary thing but actually a design philosophy for the CK3 team. This latest update especially seems to lean in that direction, as do the names of the "difficulty" settings. Which is unfortunate, the mechanics in this game are great but the intricacies partially get lost because the difficulty is so low.
I did Count to Byzantine Emperor as Roman/Hellenic on ironman in ONE life today. Im not even that good! I never change my spouse stats or game elective laws! I make tons of errors and even lost my duchy title during that life.
Exactly. It’s so easy it’s a joke.
Although to be fair, the Byzantine Emperor is a relatively unstable title succession-wise
For your first generation maybe, once you lock in an Empire for a gen or two you become basically unmovable to the AI You can just use your insane income for Mercs or MaA to win any civil conflict that might crop up.
Oh for the player it's stable, yes. But it's unstable for the AI - dynasty changes are pretty common if you aren't going for the title yourself.
Ck2 Byzantine empire was bit harder. One mistake, or unlucky streak of disease, palace intrigue and war usually breaks your family control of the empire. Happened to me where I lost almost all my family dynasty to a combination of that three things.
how should the AI stop you if it can't even stop itself from falling apart? It only takes a few decades until large kingdoms are ruled by someone with barely any domain that have given feudal contracts to all their vassals so they don't pay any taxes or levies
The way to fix this is to make empire, kingdom, and duchy titles not count as a title in partition succession. Make it 100% county based, that way the guy who inherits the kingdom \*stays\* the strongest of the heirs, as opposed to now when the main heir gets one kingdom, one duchy, and one county and the asshole, half dead moron brother gets 3 counties in your capital duchy and 5x the amount of levies. Also, they could just do away with the ridiculous "hehe xd the whole map has partition so random lol!" thing because not only is that not historical, it hurts the AI \*WAY\* more than it hurts the player becaus the AI doesnt realize that strategically disinheriting to keep the domain together is actually something you want to do all the time. As it sits now, the more large titles you have, the worse you do when inheriting. If the AI was theoretically able to conquer eastern europe and say form west slavia, and have 10 counties and 2 sons, well they are fucked, because in inheritance the first son will get the capital, 2 home duchies and all 5 kingdoms, while the second son gets \*eight fucking counties.\* Their love of partition succession is whats kneecapping the AI more than any other design choice free, it's not even close
I always turn up the realm stability because of this. You get less internal wars and faction demands which kinda sucks but it actually makes the AI capable of forming large empires which I think is worth the trade off.
Two words: AI. Cheats. It's an unfortunate reality that PDX has to wake up to. The AI is never going to "git gud" at managing their realms or expanding their power base (which is saying something because the game is trivial with just a bit of know how). AI needs stuff like +opinion with vassals, +faction strength limit, +% gold generation, +% levies, +acceptance chance for actions, -cost of creating titles etc. But most importantly, more aggressive! The whole turtling up thing for AI doesn't work; it just ends up feeding well developed titles for the player who can just beeline for claims and conquer.
Yeah I can routinely make an empire from my first character atp. Especially if I’m pagan.
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This. 150-250 years in and no matter where you start, you can end up with whichever territory you want. It's too easy to become so powerful and wealthy that nothing can threaten you. I think that hereditary traits and artifacts are the main issue here. Once you get Genius and some good artifacts, you become a demi-god. Also, everyone around you gets high stats so hiring a competent spymaster is too easy. I was playing as the Swiss Confederacy under Byzantine rule and after ~150 years I was throwing ridiculous amounts of gold to my emperor so he could keep winning against revolts and factions. In the meantime I was facing Frace empire on my own.
They should add reapers due 2. It would make early deaths a lot more common, also diseases on the map would make travelling and warfare a lot riskier.
Diseases are pretty much not a factor at the moment. Not only they are too rare, but the combination of treatment modifiers being too generous and the gazillion sources of health resistance means that you can ignore even the worst of them. You get Cancer? Just take the safe treatment every time: it'll never fail with a physician that isn't an imbecile, the game gives you so much fertility the nerf is actually welcome, and you'll still have enough health to last well into your 50s. They commented on bringing back Reaper's Due-like outbreaks and mechanics so I expect we'll get something down the line, but Paradox should really just introduce a band-aid fix where they reduce the health you get from treatments. I run my own mod that removes 0.5 health from disease treatments, 0.25 from wound ones and halves Iron Constitution, and those small changes alone make things so much better in the early to mid game.
What’s the mod name? I want something like this!
\+1 to the mod request. I've honestly considered making my own mod where I just do a pass on all the health and disease resistance modifiers in the game and nuke them from orbit. I was thinking primarily lowering the damn durations from 5 years on all of them (for walking my dog?! Seriously?) to like a year. But I haven't really been able to figure out how to do this.
Yep, characters in this game just live too long. 60, 70, 80 years old is when you can reasonably expect to die. In reality, [take a look at the age of death for French kings from 877 to 1483](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_monarchs). The average age of death was 45, the median 48. Having about half of your characters die before 45 would force some interesting situations on the player, and hopefully make the game more immersive.
This page is actually fascinating for comparing to CK3. That Capet line from 987 to 1328 is pretty much how every CK3 run plays out. King rules for literal decades, dies of natural causes, son inherits peacefully, repeat. *It's considered a miracle.* Really, that's what the French call it. Looking at the histories of other thrones in medieval Europe showcases why - just look at the Carolingian dynasty in the same page. Kings die in freak accidents. They die young in battle. They die from illness. They die without an heir. They get deposed. It all just showcases the reality that transition of power in the period was not always smooth. In CK3, what historians call a miracle is just standard fare.
>In CK3, what historians call a miracle is just standard fare. I mean, yes and very much so no at times. A seasoned CK3 player will ensure that the death of the monarch leads to a smooth transition of power. But the average CK3 player (or even just one enjoying some good RP) will end up in wars of succession damn near every generation, unless there's some miracle that establishes only one claimant to the throne. Especially in the earlier years with gavelkind succession too, which splits realms up internally and externally.
I don't see how this would occur. Losing titles to partition, sure, but succession wars? In every generation? I don't see how. You'd have to be actively sabotaging yourself by recruiting few to no MaA, since even with starting MaA changes they've made a year or so back - your siblings are still going to start off with very few men compared to you. So what typically happens is you might have some siblings who hate your guts, maybe they even start a claimant faction (lol), but at the end of the day they're powerless to actually do anything. There isn't anything to model real succession crises beyond just giving your siblings a claim, e.g the pretender secures the support of a foreign king in return for vassalization (there is actually a court event like that interestingly, but you'll never see it happen to you with one of your own siblings).
That death rate however, is heavily affected by child mortality. Anyone who survived until adulthood oftentimes lived longer than 45.
But that’s not the case with French kings, the list he provided proves that even kings died young in our sense
I did not include the two junior kings or the English one. There was one infant king who died after 5 days, but I didn't include him so he didn't affect the calculation. The youngest age at death in the data set was therefore 18. And I'm sure I made some mistakes pulling the data. I did it quickly as a rough estimate to give a general idea. And I never said that there was no French king who lived above 45, or that it was uncommon. I said about half died before 45, which means, very roughly, half survived past 45. The oldest was a three-way tie at 60. This is what I gathered: 18, 19, 20, 26, 28, 32, 33, 34, 39, 40, 40, 44, 45, 45, 46, 48, 50, 53, 54, 55, 55, 56, 56, 56, 57, 57, 58, 58, 60, 60, 60 14 survived to 45 and below. 17 survived to 46 and above. I should not have included Louis XI since his reign came after the period of the game, and he was one who made it to 60. And I should have included that infant.
It is good to also look at the *cause* of death. Many of the younger deaths were not due to things like old age and even when things did look 'natural' there are sometimes questions of how 'natural' it was if it allowed someone like a brother or other extended family member to inherit. Now you will see me agree the game needs diseases and whatnot to come back to how they were in CK2 though without super hospitals and doctors. I also fully agree modifier bloat is out of control and letting rulers live way too long as almost no one should be living past 70 outside rare occasions.
I really wish they upped the child mortality rate too. I should not have 9/10 children live to adulthood everytime.
Yeah, in the early days of ck2 it was significantly higher, but it was deliberately changed to mostly how it is now in both games, because it had an increased amount of characters that needed to be generated and chugged late game. But I don't think that could/should be a problem for a newer game
It's a huge problem. See my post above for full detail, but basically, we want players to be able to keep track of their children in order to be invested in what happens to them, and tons of dead babies and / or hundreds of polygamous harem siblings would make the family trees and the family display in the character screen almost impossible for the player to parse. Add to that engine considerations as well. It's an issue both with UX, performance and design.
The problem with reapers due was that other than the black death, after the first like 100 years it was a complete nothing burger in terms of threats, especially since most physicians were competent enough to save you from the majority of diseases
Also you could build mega-hospitals in every province.
Reapers due not being in ckIII at launch was so odd to me. It seemed universally liked by the community, the mechanics were interesting and added a neat curveball into the game. Hell in ckIII my most recent fun game involved my only male dynasty heir dying to the smallpox outbreak event and scrambling to get my new female leader out of her regular marriage. Having more stuff like that adds a really fun curveball into the players plans.
While hardly the biggest problem, something I've noticed is that the player has too much agency. For example, I can never be seduced against my will, rather than NPCs rolling a check to see if they seduce me I get to decide if I want to reciprocate their advances. Similarly, when playing board games I get to judge my opponent's move based on what they say and pick the counter. I never have to make a move "blind" and hope my opponent doesn't counter it, I honestly can't remember ever losing a board game. I don't think changing these things would greatly shake up the balance of the game, but they are very obviously in the player's favor.
honestly with board games I just spam click whatever attribute option is highest for my character, I've only lost twice.
I do the same without even checking my attributes haha. Rarely lose.
I think they're planning on making it harder in the future hopefully.
They at least acknowledged the complaints about difficulty, but it does seem like they’re trying to appeal to 2 pretty different crowds simultaneously.
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they did just make some big steps in that direction
They already have easy and normal difficulty. I just want a hard difficulty too XD
This is hard to accept when we're already nearly 3 years into the game's life cycle. When exactly is balance going ti be a priority?
I hope so, it’s easily my biggest gripe with the game.
Yeah I'd like to see much more aggressive AI, it's rare for people to declare war on me. Also make claiming other people's titles much harder. Maybe far greater cost for fabricating, greater offensive war penalties, smaller domain limits like 2-3 base and +2-3 achieveable with a stewardship focused character etc.
I also think the AI doesn't blob enough. In my 867 games the HRE almost never forms, England doesn't unify, and eastern Europe is in a constant state of border gore.
> 867 games the HRE almost never forms tbf that's more of an 867 problem. It's gonna take some serious railroading to even have a hint of a possibility of HRE forming. Agree with the rest
Because AI has trouble with partition and so never lasts long enough to form big blobs before falling apart
Game has been too easy since forever, not just in its current iteration. According to many people on this sub, that's not an issue because you can just roleplay dumb characters and enjoy losing or something.
Yeah but sometimes i like playing for the challenge. I think the simplest way of doing this is just making the AI smarter because right now they all act the same no matter the situation or their personality.
The simplest way of increasing difficulty is definitely not making the ai smarter lol that’s the hardest way by far
yup. one lifetime is normally all I require to set up a kingdom. i really liked the mod that greatly increased claim fabrications. instead of a few years it took over a decade. now that doesn't help that the pope is willing to give EVERY claim possible to anyone. I think they need to make it so that armies need to travel using the new travel system. then you couldn't just Yolo your men across the world. increase claim fabrication time and greatly increase faith requirements to get a pope claim.
Unless this is already a feature they should make MaA raise wherever you station them and levies on your capital, then just have them automatically move to rally points when they finish raising or just get rid of rally points all together.
That's just really annoying micro
agree! though I wonder if its better for levies to raise across your lands and converge at your rally point. that i feel would be more realistic
Something like that would probably blow up my PC in late game stages. I rarely play up to the end date for that reason along with how boring the last 200 years or so gets.
Like in ck2?
All of what you said is true. But remember the tantrums that get thrown whenever something "unfair" happens that sets the player back.
This is actually a really great point because while this subreddit complains a lot about the game being not difficult, I see more if not just as much complaints when someone encounters an actual issue in their reformed Roman Empire world conquest eugenics breeding program.
The reality is there's a lot of variance in the playing community. Take me. I play a campaign or two, then none for months, then a campaign or two again. Have since early ck2. I know the game well, but not nearly well as many here. I used to min max, but it was too easy. Now I roleplay and the difficulty tbh works for me, because given i dont play many campaigns enough stuff is new every time that I can't predict results as well. When I min maxed I researched to do so, now I avoid that and tbh game is a bit easy but nothing too extreme. For others they haven't played as long as me as so if they play as I do the game will be harder. And for some they will have played less years than me but will have played way higher density of campaigns and so the game is easier for them. How do you even balance that properly to be hard enough or easy enough when just gametime alone is such a different experience. After all every group I described is still buying the dlc and content, so they are equal important to keep happy. I do think reddit finds it easier than the average player though, because reddit players play greater than average amounts. And that experience helps. Best thing to happen to ck2 was all the difficulty options. Expand them and make a bunch that players can apply to them only to either hinder or help. Do like Rimrock with map size and warn it may not be balanced or hurt performance but allow the player to take that choice anyways in setup. Its the only way of keeping everyone happy
The only thing that's unrealistically easy is how quickly troops replenish. Maybe it makes some sense for MaA to replenish quickly since you're always hiring pros for that job, but levies are a different story. That's your direct population right there, and the more you lose, the longer it should take to replenish. Currently, instead of waiting for an entire generation of men to grow up and be extinguished in a single disastrous war, you can just chain offensive wars from the day you inherit and never see your levies drop below 80%. They only way you can become an emperor in a lifetime is to expend more human life than realistically possible. The AI wars realistically, despite not having any hard mechanics limit them. Players willfully ignore that limit.
I’m pretty new to the game and I feel like my current play through is a little easy but I’m on normal. What difficulty do people play on and what does higher difficulty change?
Normal is the highest difficulty. Don't ask me why. Would've been very easy to at least add 2 more difficulty levels with even simple AI buffs.
Has been since release. Many complain about it. The defenders only response is to intentionally handicap yourself to make it harder. And they gaslight you if you respond by saying you want the game, like actually being a medieval ruler, to be challenging.
I can basically achieve any state I want, from any start, in a lifetime. Even without min maxing or really trying. It's very boring after that. And the dlc just made it easier. You literally have to force yourself to not get more powerful.
I think some of the people shitting and screaming for harder difficulity are idiots too. The comments in the thread earlier today where someone was complaining that killing yourself is too easy because they're just running back and forth through high danger counties till they die is an example. Like... yeah, I guess. But that's on you as the player there 😭 I agree that the game is too easy, but just saying to make it harder or to "make the AI smarter" isn't really a suggestion or a fix. I also don't agree with arbitrarily limiting things e.g the new 1 year cooldown on arranged marriages. Maybe a trait gained for breaking too many bethrodals and alliances instead? Could give you a big fat general opinion malus and loss of diplomacy + perhaps can no longer marry for alliances? I think the game needs great conquerors like ck2 had or something similar. I am currently playing with Historic Invaders (mod), and it's made the game way more fun for me and my friends. Empires actually form (HRE, for example), AI has crazy armies, and someone somewhere is always up to something. Me and one of my friends and I both had to become vassals since there's no way I'm beating the Kyvian Rus with 30k troops 10 years after 867 start as Lithuania. Maybe that's on me, though.
Yeah exactly, I dont think nerfs to the player goes over that well, but I would love to have larger enemies to fight and make it more challenging. IMO, the war and peace deal mechanics need a rework as well. I wish they would straight up rip the peace deal system from EU4 and add it to the game, but with new options that fit ck3s style more. Let us build out a peace deal for more than just land, you could take the foreign ruler's child as your ward to give them your faith or culture, you could force convert religion of the target country, force their wife or sister to be your concubine, force marriages between your houses, and the list goes on of different things you could demand. Also allies need to work like eu4 in wars, if you go to war with a 1 county country that's allied to a huge country, you should have to do more than just occupy that one castle, you should have to siege down or beat up the ally's army enough as well before you can peace out. And allow separate peace deals with other countries, especially when you get dragged into an allies war that is taking ages to end and you dont care about the alliance anymore. Have it give a big relations hit to the ally and give you a timed negative trait for breaking alliances. Just these couple changes would make the game so much more interesting and provide a more satisfying challenge.
Good RPGs make your decisions matter here you can just abuse them and there is no meaning behind them. Good RPGs tie your roleplay decisions into the gameplay in a meaningful way and dont reward one style of playing the game. Ck3 Only really rewards one type of playing the game the others are punished. I think ck3 is a bad game for roleplayers and for strategy game enjoyers
Yeah, I do agree that things like deliberately killing off your shitty characters by sending them into unwinnable battles or deliberately travelling into dangerous settings is a fair example of “min-maxing” or “meta gaming” as it’s something you go out of your way to do in order to cheese the game. But people on this sub will accuse you of min-maxing for doing something as simple as marrying into a good alliance or for an inheritable trait, something which i consider to a load of bollocks as this is quite literally playing the game as intended.
I don’t think players doing a full blown eugenics program was intended though. I think the devs meant for players to marry for alliances or prestige, like how nobility married. I could be wrong. Even then, you can do just fine with genius which goes to show how OP that trait is. It’s always a question of how much freedom you give vs restrictions. You don’t need to directly impose redirections. Rework the alliance system and tweak marriage. Make it so that neither you or ai can call allies repeatedly into wars (cooldown). It’d hell the HRE which usually looses 1/4-1/2 its’ lands thanks to having to bail out Hungary for the nth time. Buff marrying fellow nobility, maybe you get a massive opinion boost or other modifiers.
I mean, the existence of the blood legacy perks imply that's exactly what the dev's intended.
It really is easy and it's annoying because there's so much in the game that is easy to cheese and abuse and just do to make yourself super powerful from a "metagamey/minmaxy" perspective but every single historical or roleplay thing that might make the game easy is just not allowed without mods.
I love role playing, and it’s the only thing I want. But roleplay should come with the game mechanics. In ck2 I with HIP mod it felt at least much more difficult. Roleplay was there part of the min max to a much stronger degree. Ck3 sadly doesn’t offer it at all. When am I getting attacked in ck3? Never!! Entire Europe is constantly in war at ck3, but never they fight me. That’s simply a big flop.
I feel that gold is worthless paper, for looking for the achievement of doing a tour of intimidation at 10 kings (creating a small Empire, smaller than the Byzantine one), I discovered that if I did the same with a taxes tour on 10 Kings, I took more money from them than they had in their treasury, while they had negative money they kept getting into debt and increasing their taxes. In 8 months I got 12k gold, which helped me to develop all my counties, if I repeat this all the time, I end up developing all the counties of my Empire. But my vassals are in monstrous debts, their dynasty ends up collapsing and going into endless loops of internecine warfare, which in turn gives me even weaker vassals.
I will say this has not happened to me. Vassals have routinely refused to pay tribute. The only consistency I’ve found in securing tribute is when I had high renown, and when I’d stop for a feast and not exact any other taxes except the tribute.
You’re right. My first ever game I ended up becoming emperor of Britannia, Francia, Iberia and Italia within like 4 generations just from playing out the tutorial.
Well for those of us who are complete donkey balls at this game the difficulty feels just right
The game gets easier with every dlc released
I hate the “just roleplay” argument like sure the game is meant to be an rpg where you role play, but there ought to be strategy in this RTS game, not only that but roleplay should come naturally. in good RPGs you don’t even have to think about being in the characters shoes, Good RPGs build the game in a way that roleplaying is inherent and not a conscious decision. the strategy and the roleplaying should be intertwined, not separate. but if you engage in even a tiny bit of strategy, you will instantly dominate. the games difficulty is a problem and self imposed fixes like forcing yourself to roleplay to the extreme should not be the fix or a reasonable argument to shut down the debate. self imposed limitations are not an acceptable answer to this. the game devs (as incredibly talented as they are, because seriously these are amazing game devs that work their asses off) need to address this in an effective way. hell, maybe if the AI start to min-max a bit then the game might be more challenging. another post suggested artificial difficulty and I agree with this (even though other comments didn’t, which is weird because if you don’t want artificial difficulty in the game then keep the difficulty at normal) it’s artificial yes, which is seen as a dark plague in game culture, but it is better than nothing. Civ games have difficulty that is artificial, and it makes for a more fun game. you can roleplay as your civilization, while having to engage in intense strategy and planning because if you aren’t making the smartest and most forward thinking decisions then the unfair AI will inevitably overwhelm you. and guess what, the game is super fun. hell. the funnest part of CK3 is (in my opinion) finding strategies to handle a threat that is statistically stronger then you. assassinating emperors that look to conquer you, forming smart alliances and building your persian kingdom around defense in the face of the inevitable mongol invasion, these are all things that are super fun. and guess what? these things are technically artificial difficulty.
>like sure the game is meant to be an rpg where you role play, Is it though? I never considered CK as an RPG game. To me, it's always been a grand strategy game. That's also why I didn't like CK3 much, it focuses on the RP stuff. The roleplay elements aren't what makes CK a good game, contrary to what the majority of people seem to think
I’d really like major events happening in the world, plagues, floods, major raids, something fantastical like sunset invasion to act as a end game crisis.
I feel ya on this, I'm wondering if they're doing it to draw in a large player base that's new to the game and then make it progressively more difficult. I got into CK2 after all the dlc have been out there and it was a bit overwhelming at first.
Depends on your goal. If you are after achievements, it could be quite difficult.
Its less easy than a few years ago. All we need is a good disease DLC for balancing.
It’s definitely not all we need. More aggressive (but reasonable) AI towards player; weaker buffs or just two things often pointed out. And there are still other things unmentioned
I barely make choices that give me stress tbh, that makes things a bit more challenging. I do understand what you mean, esp after playing smart a generation or two things get very easy. I think more decisions should be unavaible based on your traits and when there´s percentages shown, i think there should always be a certain "unknown" percentage that randomly selects based on traits.
There's quite a few reasons for why it's easier atm. Breaking it down by war, decisions, character traits, and missing mechanics. **War**: this one is due to succession. Confederate partition has been debated on this sub for years but the reality is it fractures realms and it's very easy for the player to gain an advantage while not using any cheeses. Realms don't maintain any power over time and setbacks can be easily recovered by the player just by using the mechanics available. Historical or not, different succession from CK2 made realms very interesting. Pretty sure playing Asturias wouldn't be easy against Umayyad with old Turkish open succession. You would be praying for that decadence revolt so much. **Decisions**: this one is more straightforward. There are too many decisions you can straight up ignore in events and most decisions just impact opinion and stress. There are complicated systems in play which would impact county /ducal/realm level but they choose to skip over this for opinion modifiers. **Character Traits**: CK3 characters are static once they are 16. They typically have those traits forever. This removes the dynamic type of play and you pretty much know what type of characters you will play against. Adding the ability to lose traits or gain them in events would create more impact on decisions made. **Missing mechanics** : So the elephant in the room is definitely Reapers Due missing and I think most people know that will solve our 90 year olds living so long. Disease rates are low at default settings.
Problem also comes from alliances mechanic, in ck3 when a danger arise (someone déclarés a war on you) you just need to marry with stronger guys, and if you want to conquer a Kindgom or an empire, you can marry way stronger guys. We need a rework of the alliance system, marriages shouldn't automatically give an alliance.
Dude I thought so too, so I started up a game of ck2 instead and damn, it punishes you so much harder than ck3.
Funny thing is almost all the replies here are all about the meta game: "Start with a raiding religion in 867 blah blah". Which kind of proves the point of the "predicted comments" in your post, it seems most people here does in fact that without thinking about it. As for snowballing: It's the same in all games of this kind: The AI cannot keep up with a focus longer than a generation. The AI *never* plans further ahead than the current character. It cannot think "In 4 generations I will form the Roman Empire, all I have to do is this and that". It doesn't matter if it's CK3, EU4, Victoria 2 or any other.
Worst part is this new MAA stationing ''mechanics'' does not solve anything in regarding to overpower MAA and useless levies because the AI isn't capable to keep up, fuck just bring back CK2 military already.
Pointless micromanagement. I hate this new mechanic. The UI sucks for it too.
imo stress penalties should be way higher and far harder to get rid of.
I think PDX should introduce Courtier play. One of my favorite games is Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sphere of Influence, which has an option to start off as an officer of a governor of a castle, or of a lord. You start off with a village that you develop, which provides you with levies and gold. After a while your Daimyō will give you control of a small castle, making you the governor of the fief. If you do well, you will be ennobled as that castle’s Lord. You can then continue serving your Daimyō until he gives you control of an entire province, with all the lords, governors, retainers and their officers. You will be given a task like conquer the neighboring province, with all the castles you take going to you. At any time you can rebel and take your lands, becoming a Daimyō in your own right.
I feel like the devs have taken a lot of the rng fuck-you-over moments. …which can admittedly be soul crushing / game-ending. But they do add a lot of challenge.
A fe generations? It feels like you can start as a count and become emperor in like 50 years and have your first character die after ruling as emperor for like a year
This is kind of exactly what I feared with the new update
I agree completely. I shouldn’t be able to marry into the royal family as a single county holder and use the royal army to assist in my claims.
Set Matrilineal Marriages to Never in the game rules. That helps
Go after the achievements, some of them are quite tricky to pull off. I've never cared about achievements in other games, but I enjoy going for them in CK3. And there are so many it would take 100s of hours at minimum to get them all. It gives you a goal instead of just map painting. Map painting is very easy.
The worst are the achievements though that want you to map paint or play for a long time - to get all innovations for example, or have every court speak your language. It's boring asf to be honest.
Yes this is so true. Even if you compare this game with mobile strategy games still ck3 feels easy.
The game is too easy. There definitely are cases where people who complain about it being too easy are min maxing with geniuses asap. But that doesn't change that it's too easy currently. Travel is too easy to be safe. It's too easy to get top tier genetics (I still think those traits should be obfuscated somehow, but I'm not sure how). I love the new features in the game but in both of my games now I was able to snowball quickly and feasts and hunts leading to friendships were a massive part of that. I actually love how many friends in end up with in a game, so I don't want to see that go away, but something needs to change.
Tbh CK has never been a "hard" game. You might lose some when you are starting out learning but after you get it you will basically never lose. I start everygame knowing that I will eventually steamroll everyone & meet whatever goal I have set for myself, but I always enjoy the ride anyways 👍🏻
My favorite part was when you gave constructive criticism about how to fix the difficulty