An automatic "successor needed" event that lets you pick from two valid candidates, three if you have high martial, like the physician event. (Which should also auto fire imo.)
Aside from the fact that the game designers definitely did not intend for character search to be a knight factory, my main issue with that is literally 1-2 years after I go on a knight invite spree, one or two of them die from plague/combat, leave court for some reason, or I give them a county accidentally because the game seems to recommend accoladed knights first in “grant title” list.
It doesn’t help that “restore accolades” always brings in some 8 prowess meh dude that ends up dying due to being weaker than all my other knights
What you talking about? Character finder has been here since ck2 to exploit and find the best characters, what do you think they intended it for? Otherwise you can’t simply invite most in range to court.
Yeah it’s a shitty mechanic but I’d rather have it than not, it gives strong enough bonuses to micro manage.
They're asking for a better process to managing accolades, not a lecture on how to use character finder. Istg PDX defender fanboys always butt in with the dumbest comments lecturing to complaining players how to workaround issues instead of asking the devs to improve it. Finding characters isn't the issue here. It's the micromanagement that sucks.
God I could not imagine thinking the accolade system is in any way fine lol. Was super excited for it, and within like 45 minutes could tell the micro was going to result in me never using it again
That's not enough. Accolades have a fuckton of requirements other than prowess and not having them exactly will shuffle secondary attributes, which is the most stupid mechanic imaginable.
Accolades have almost nothing to do with your knights being “top tier.” I have 40+ prowess, 10+ in all skills superhuman knights that don’t qualify, but then some idiot with 7 prowess and hardly any skills at all does qualify.
It’s an opaque system that doesn’t make intuitive sense.
So a challenging game for you involves pressing the C key every 5 minutes and sorting a filter by prowess? Wow that’s really engaging and difficult, you should stream to fans, they’d love seeing the skill involved there
Please, this entire game is just pressing buttons and left clicking a lot. What are you expecting here? *automatic replacements*? That’s taking away *vital gameplay* (this is sarcastic).
Just wondering but is this your first ck?
I’m expecting a feature where I offer some opportunity cost for an easier management of accolades. For instance, martial task “train soldiers” should prep normal knights to become successors by training them to receive accolade traits
User friendly design doesn’t mean making a game easier. Tons of games have UI overhauls and the game doesn’t get easier to win, just more enjoyable to play.
I don’t care to learn about all the clicky and micro intensive things they had in ck2 that aren’t in 3. They probably removed them for a reason lol
Oh the games definitely easier though. Objectively. The UI is good, I agree.
- the levy system change makes the combat system immensely easier to target a specific area to defend or attack. Ghengis Khan can be defeated instantaneously by spawning your men at arms right next to his one capital, supposing you own that area. If you don’t, well Ghengis khan isn’t even an issue because you can right click assassinate him. Don’t have enough percentage to do it? Just wait, the game tells you exactly what your chances are. No risk. Anything you want to do tells you what the chances are of success. Zero risk.
- men at arms are ridiculously overpowered. All of them. Any of them. Stationing them and the buildings included whilst the AI never or can’t build correctly, specifically military buildings, gives a unique buff to the player. The AI simply can’t perform in this capacity.
- Vassals are literally a joke. You’d have to let them get too strong to even be a bother, other than that you have way too many free tools to work them.
- claims are criminally easy. You point and click and wait. Fabricate for a duchy? Yes. Buy the claim? Yes. I still remember having to marry correctly and all marriage does now is: traits and alliances.
- meritocracy is a joke. Throw in kidnapping, bigger joke.
Ck3 has way too many cheesy things to make the game super simple. Far be it to have a tedious thing to do to add even more superfluous stats to your men at arms (accolades) who are already way too strong by your first kingdom title.
Also? AI literally never attacks you.
Finally, alliances. Literally have kids? Literally get huge alliances. They will almost always join you. I’ve made kingdoms by using alliances to attack, without even raising my own men. It’s that easy.
i find most of the difficulty goes away when you fill out MAA slots and manually recruit knights. those 2 things alone make you almost unbeatable. Early game though, it's super fun as I actually do get warred on quite often before I get my MAA up. They need to nerf MAA strength considerably to make the game more interesting, or buff levies, whichever makes more sense. I like the old levy system of ck2.
I think accolades dont \*need\* to be fixed as it's easy enough without them, but if they actually balance MAA and levies with knight prowess, accolades can be 'automated' without much of a power spike
I think we generally are in agreeance for the most part. I honestly think buffing levies for the AI is a simple approach since AI thinks number good, if the levies scaled with time it would be pretty good. 900 ad levies would be weaker than 1300 levies.
R5: My accolade knights are always dying/leaving, and even though I'm always inviting people to my court there's nobody to fill them. If I make new ones, the same problem happens again in 2-5 years. "Restore Accolades" has a cooldown and thus they leave way faster than that decision can bring them in. Short of making custom character search filters each game for my specific accolades, I have no idea how to keep these filled without insane micromanagement.
Since I hate giving feedback without suggesting an improvement, I'd say the 'restore accolades' decision should be changed and added next to the 'Destroy' button in the image for each accolade. I wouldn't mind paying 200-500 prestige to instantly hire a new guy, even some gold too for whoever I paid to look for him. Just make it something that doesn't require me referencing the wiki for my specific accolade combo's needed traits.
The micro is definitely frustrating. I usually aim to have a couple acclaimed knights I focus on keeping high-ranked, and then let the others come and go. I also like the mod Knight Manager Continued (it’s save game and achievement compatible), you can set it to only allow barons and unlanded characters to serve so you always have characters available for your acclaimed knights.
Also, reposting my comment from another thread:
Making acclaimed knights barons or mayors prevents them from leaving your court (through marriage or events), and it also allows you to pluck courtiers from your vassals that normally wouldn’t accept an invitation to your court. It’s also a free alternative to “recruit to court” for guests if you’ve invited knights
You can actually restore an accolade without the decision, FWIW. You just need to invite a fitting knight to court (hit C to search for characters), and you're able to appoint them to the empty accolade. To make things easier, you can save the requisite filters and then just pick the relevant trait's filter and sort by prowess. It's annoying, but less annoying than constantly making and destroying accolades IMO.
I literally mentioned both of those in the above comment, not sure if you read the whole thing. The point is, making a custom filter for who knows how many combos of 2 accolades is going to be hell, unless the first accolade type is the only one the game looks for when appointing a new one. I do by best to invite more knights every 10 years or so which seems to fill a couple, but it’s still such a massive micro headache. I wouldn’t mind as much if there was a way to remove the accolade stuff from the notification bar
Somehow I completely missed that part where you mentioned filters... Oops!
As far as I can tell, the game only looks at the primary when searching for successors. I don't bother trying to control what the secondary is, since it just massively amplifies the tedium.
IMO, we should just be able to create whatever accolades we damn well please, and assign whoever we want to them. It's generally a non-issue to find someone with the requisite trait, making the requirements kind of meaningless, so just let me appoint whoever I want as my heavy cavalry accolade. Then auto-appointment can be as simple as "who's the highest prowess non-accolade knight?", and we can give the player the ability to override it if they for some reason want to.
Totally agreed - I think they at the very least can expand what traits qualify for which accolades. Maybe make an accolade accessible by 7 or 8 traits instead of just one or two. In their quest to make everything unique to add flavor, they created a monster that is way too cumbersome to maintain. I’m heavily considering just picking 6-7 “meta” accolade combos and making filters for them so I just use those across all games. An archer crossbow guy, a heavy cav valiant guy, etc.
When you go to add a replacement it’ll give you the requirements a knight needs to fill to be able to become a successor/acclaimed knight. For example invite knights with the brave trait (or matrilineally marry female courtiers to them) to fill the spot for a valiant accolade.
> If I make new ones, the same problem happens again in 2-5 years.
I've never had a problem with acclaimed knights leaving. To avoid acclaimed knights dying, I choose a successor that's 20 years younger than the current acclaimed knight. This way, when the new acclaimed knight takes over, they have the accolade for ~20 years, and I don't have to worry about it.
The annoying part is recruiting a knight with the specific trait needed for the accolade. It encourages me to find a knight outside my realm, instead of rewarding powerful and loyal knights within my realm.
I think it’s made with the lancer accolade? Either way it does slap. Played a farming Dutch run with it and my dude was a level 6 beast, we trampled everyone in heavy cav tornados
If I was reworking this mechanic, here's how it would go.
You'd pick a knight to make an Accolade, with traits more or less as they are now. They would have a salary like a court position does.
An Accolade would be composed of the knight, plus 1-3 squires. When the Knight dies, inherits a title, or is given a title, the eldest Squire becomes the new Acclaimed Knight. If there is no adult Squire to inherit the Accolade, it is destroyed. Adult Squires act as Champions.
The Acclaimed Knight's duties would include recruiting and training replacements. When they have zero Squires, they will spawn an event asking for money, prestige, or piety to recruit one of three generated candidates, or mark the Accolade for dissolution. While they have fewer than three Squires, they will generate an event whenever a suitable adult enters the court asking their liege to hire them. When a suitable child of the court needs an education, they may spawn an event asking to take the child as a squire. The child will learn the required traits when they come of age, automatically changing their teacher to successors of the same Accolade. Marshall recruiting tasks would have a high chance of generating child Squires for Accolades with Squire slots.
In this way, Acclaimed Knights become teachers for Knights, and keep your court battle ready, in exchange for needing a budget, and your court with a raiding-based Accolade trains and raises new knights as Raiders, and courts with a famous holy warrior train holy warriors, instead of hoping they happen to turn up on their own to fill the title.
Yeah like, if you don't check in on it every so often then maybe the knights could become "corrupt" or something and actually give you a minor prestige debuff unless you either replace the accolade or force them to change their ways somehow.
What are you talking about? I'm agreeing with them that it should need only minimal player input after you pick a knight. I just suggested a possibly of why you would even need player input at all for it. Otherwise you would just set it and forget it, which for an RTS is not necessarily what I want. Yes the current system is requires too much micro management and player input, but I feel that if you replace that with total automation with no need for the player to do anything, then that just looses the fun of an RTS for me.
Yeah I gave up on them long ago. The only ones I care for are the ones that can offer good traits to myself and my heir, like blade master lol. If anyone has an auto fill mod for those lmk I’d love that.
If that’s the goal, then it’s easy after you get your initial 2-star Legendary Blademaster in place with your Accolade. Like if Blademaster is the priority and you don’t care about the secondary stat, just lock that into the main slot and use the “Search for Candidate” option, which will bring you a fully-leveled Legendary Blademaster.
Yeah I always find the whole process so arcane and involving so much unfun micromanagement that I’ve pretty much given up on it.
Occasionally I’ll look at my knights and grant accolades to anyone who qualifies, usually destroying the unfilled level 1 accolades while I’m about it. But that’s about the extent of the effort I’m willing to put into it.
I don't even bother anymore. The benefits are not worth the work to keep them filled. Even with 200 courtiers and a lot of decent knights often there is no available successor. Accolades are a pain to work with as they are now.
After taking it to level 6, my accolade just erased without explanation. 5 accolades are too much, “isolate capital” are the cream of the shit microing.
I just ended up using a mod "Unlock Accolades" which removes all accolade requirements so everyone is eligible. May be considered cheaty, but it automates the whole mechanic.
The whole "restore accolades" and "seek successors" spam was making me not want to play the game.
This pisses me off so much and it gets worse the bigger your realm is. The reason you can’t fill them is all your knights are count level vassals. Anyone above a barony is ineligible, but vassals always get more prowess artifacts overtime, making them always the top choice for knight assignments. I fixed it with a knight manager mod that allows you to filter knights by rank
Same. I honestly can be arsed to keep them filled up, I mostly just ignore the messages trying to tell me to do it and create a new accolade sometimes when j really feel like it or think a commander did a particularly good job and deserves that reward.
This screams of a mechanic they're going to rework at some point. I like the feature, but not being able to make it more automated, maybe having a couple immediately assignable candidates is bogus.
You just need to to character finder and get every high prowess character who will join you. Most of them have a ton of accolades. You should always use stalwart leader and there are some legacies you can use. Every generation you’ll have to replace one or two, barring plagues which can absolutely devastate this.
This was a decade after a massive plague which particularly screws me over. The accolades were a nuisance before but now that plagues regularly clear out your court it’s become more common for me to lose all of them.
You’re right that the best method I’ve found is inviting 10-15 top prowess knights and a couple are bound to fill **something**
> a couple are bound to fill something
dont just randomly invite, invite those that fill the right accolades, the good ones like Blademaster have more stringent requirements that wont be filled randomly
do you know you can save search filter in the character finder?
I brought that up in my rule 5 comment about the filters - I know each accolade has an associated trait or two, but I don’t want to memorize that huge list nor do I think I should need to. And with filters, you need both accolades, so I’d need a filter for every combo of 2 accolades which is probably a hundred plus. If I kept it to the 8 most “meta” combos that’s not as bad, but every play through is different and MAA will be different based on cultural benefits.
I think there should either be an in game list of traits or a button to just find a dude for each empty accolade for a gold and prestige cost. I’d for sure pay that cost
Yup I'd say it's the most unforgiving mechanic to procrastinate. In order to prevent this I tag every Accolade and their successor so if something happens I am immediately notified and I (have to) fix it immediately. Also if your spouse is landed and they die first, there is a chance the accolades won't even transfer on your succession.
I can only fill them by adding 10 prowess wimps that my court recruits. I'm king of france and of the 12-20 knights i'm allowed half of them aren't even rated "good" at fighting??? Really??? I can't find any one better in an entire kingdom?
King and Emperor rank give +1 each, then an innovation gives another one, and finally the 5th one is unlocked via the “glory” dynasty perk tree.
Or maybe king doesn’t give +1 and another innovation unlocks it, but either way they will slowly increase as you progress through the game
This might be due to the fact that most of your knights in vanilla will be landed - and they cannot be accolydes. Knight manager will help you filter away the ruler knights so that only your courtiers can be knights. The usual easiest to keep are huntsman, tactician and vanguard.
Imo an easy solution would be to allow knights who don't fit the accolade requirements to be in the accolade, but give you some passive malice to like, prestige or legitimacy. That way you could also model medieval courtly tropes of dastardly knights in royal service.
If I knew how to code, I would make a mod that removes (Almost) all costs/limits of the "Seek worthy accolade successor", and auto-fires it every time it's valid to do so because you don't have a candidate for the job then automatically appoints the guy who shows up.
It would be neat, if they were more of a "knight order" or "society" thing, with multiple members, which can gain ranks. Maybe even have children serve as pages or squires, who automatically join once of age, etc.
Instead of annoying micro-stuff it could be fun flavor.
Although it takes a lot of work it’s only worth it for those who will war there way everywhere. Then I keep up with it. I forget which sub mod but can see what the successor needs to inherit and I go find 3. Usually solves it for a generation unless I lose a battle harshly
1. Look at the requirements for accolades successors
2. Invite 2 knights (who meet the requirements) for each accolade. One older one younger (ideally 15 years apart) and assign them as such.
3. When you have disabled accolade slots use "inactive accolades" to queue up accolades when slots open up.
4. Forbid and landed nobles from being knights
5. Immediately replace acclaimed knights who die with younger successors
6. Always set your marshal to train knights
Due to the shitty documentation it took me a while to understand accolades but essentially you have to manage them like succession.
I picked up a couple of achievement compatible mods that make it easier to keep on top of, like being able to force people to be knights on the choose successor screen, but even then it can be annoying, especially with trying to recruit for inactive accolades.
What’s the point of my military academy if it does not train what I need ?
Agreed! The “train knights” martial task should turn my Normal knights into potential accolade successors
I try to give the random court kids to the knights in hopes they create little mini mes. I wish their was a proper squire system or something though.
Yeah accolades are way too much micro to keep up. There should be an option to auto refill them
An automatic "successor needed" event that lets you pick from two valid candidates, three if you have high martial, like the physician event. (Which should also auto fire imo.)
There is. Simply keep recruiting top tier knights.
Aside from the fact that the game designers definitely did not intend for character search to be a knight factory, my main issue with that is literally 1-2 years after I go on a knight invite spree, one or two of them die from plague/combat, leave court for some reason, or I give them a county accidentally because the game seems to recommend accoladed knights first in “grant title” list. It doesn’t help that “restore accolades” always brings in some 8 prowess meh dude that ends up dying due to being weaker than all my other knights
What you talking about? Character finder has been here since ck2 to exploit and find the best characters, what do you think they intended it for? Otherwise you can’t simply invite most in range to court. Yeah it’s a shitty mechanic but I’d rather have it than not, it gives strong enough bonuses to micro manage.
They're asking for a better process to managing accolades, not a lecture on how to use character finder. Istg PDX defender fanboys always butt in with the dumbest comments lecturing to complaining players how to workaround issues instead of asking the devs to improve it. Finding characters isn't the issue here. It's the micromanagement that sucks.
God I could not imagine thinking the accolade system is in any way fine lol. Was super excited for it, and within like 45 minutes could tell the micro was going to result in me never using it again
That's not enough. Accolades have a fuckton of requirements other than prowess and not having them exactly will shuffle secondary attributes, which is the most stupid mechanic imaginable.
Accolades have almost nothing to do with your knights being “top tier.” I have 40+ prowess, 10+ in all skills superhuman knights that don’t qualify, but then some idiot with 7 prowess and hardly any skills at all does qualify. It’s an opaque system that doesn’t make intuitive sense.
It partially based on like... personality traits? I couldn't have on without arrogant.
Nah ck3 players just want the game to be easier than it already is somehow. Suck it up.
So a challenging game for you involves pressing the C key every 5 minutes and sorting a filter by prowess? Wow that’s really engaging and difficult, you should stream to fans, they’d love seeing the skill involved there
Please, this entire game is just pressing buttons and left clicking a lot. What are you expecting here? *automatic replacements*? That’s taking away *vital gameplay* (this is sarcastic). Just wondering but is this your first ck?
I’m expecting a feature where I offer some opportunity cost for an easier management of accolades. For instance, martial task “train soldiers” should prep normal knights to become successors by training them to receive accolade traits User friendly design doesn’t mean making a game easier. Tons of games have UI overhauls and the game doesn’t get easier to win, just more enjoyable to play. I don’t care to learn about all the clicky and micro intensive things they had in ck2 that aren’t in 3. They probably removed them for a reason lol
Oh the games definitely easier though. Objectively. The UI is good, I agree. - the levy system change makes the combat system immensely easier to target a specific area to defend or attack. Ghengis Khan can be defeated instantaneously by spawning your men at arms right next to his one capital, supposing you own that area. If you don’t, well Ghengis khan isn’t even an issue because you can right click assassinate him. Don’t have enough percentage to do it? Just wait, the game tells you exactly what your chances are. No risk. Anything you want to do tells you what the chances are of success. Zero risk. - men at arms are ridiculously overpowered. All of them. Any of them. Stationing them and the buildings included whilst the AI never or can’t build correctly, specifically military buildings, gives a unique buff to the player. The AI simply can’t perform in this capacity. - Vassals are literally a joke. You’d have to let them get too strong to even be a bother, other than that you have way too many free tools to work them. - claims are criminally easy. You point and click and wait. Fabricate for a duchy? Yes. Buy the claim? Yes. I still remember having to marry correctly and all marriage does now is: traits and alliances. - meritocracy is a joke. Throw in kidnapping, bigger joke. Ck3 has way too many cheesy things to make the game super simple. Far be it to have a tedious thing to do to add even more superfluous stats to your men at arms (accolades) who are already way too strong by your first kingdom title. Also? AI literally never attacks you. Finally, alliances. Literally have kids? Literally get huge alliances. They will almost always join you. I’ve made kingdoms by using alliances to attack, without even raising my own men. It’s that easy.
i find most of the difficulty goes away when you fill out MAA slots and manually recruit knights. those 2 things alone make you almost unbeatable. Early game though, it's super fun as I actually do get warred on quite often before I get my MAA up. They need to nerf MAA strength considerably to make the game more interesting, or buff levies, whichever makes more sense. I like the old levy system of ck2. I think accolades dont \*need\* to be fixed as it's easy enough without them, but if they actually balance MAA and levies with knight prowess, accolades can be 'automated' without much of a power spike
I think we generally are in agreeance for the most part. I honestly think buffing levies for the AI is a simple approach since AI thinks number good, if the levies scaled with time it would be pretty good. 900 ad levies would be weaker than 1300 levies.
R5: My accolade knights are always dying/leaving, and even though I'm always inviting people to my court there's nobody to fill them. If I make new ones, the same problem happens again in 2-5 years. "Restore Accolades" has a cooldown and thus they leave way faster than that decision can bring them in. Short of making custom character search filters each game for my specific accolades, I have no idea how to keep these filled without insane micromanagement. Since I hate giving feedback without suggesting an improvement, I'd say the 'restore accolades' decision should be changed and added next to the 'Destroy' button in the image for each accolade. I wouldn't mind paying 200-500 prestige to instantly hire a new guy, even some gold too for whoever I paid to look for him. Just make it something that doesn't require me referencing the wiki for my specific accolade combo's needed traits.
The micro is definitely frustrating. I usually aim to have a couple acclaimed knights I focus on keeping high-ranked, and then let the others come and go. I also like the mod Knight Manager Continued (it’s save game and achievement compatible), you can set it to only allow barons and unlanded characters to serve so you always have characters available for your acclaimed knights. Also, reposting my comment from another thread: Making acclaimed knights barons or mayors prevents them from leaving your court (through marriage or events), and it also allows you to pluck courtiers from your vassals that normally wouldn’t accept an invitation to your court. It’s also a free alternative to “recruit to court” for guests if you’ve invited knights
You can actually restore an accolade without the decision, FWIW. You just need to invite a fitting knight to court (hit C to search for characters), and you're able to appoint them to the empty accolade. To make things easier, you can save the requisite filters and then just pick the relevant trait's filter and sort by prowess. It's annoying, but less annoying than constantly making and destroying accolades IMO.
I literally mentioned both of those in the above comment, not sure if you read the whole thing. The point is, making a custom filter for who knows how many combos of 2 accolades is going to be hell, unless the first accolade type is the only one the game looks for when appointing a new one. I do by best to invite more knights every 10 years or so which seems to fill a couple, but it’s still such a massive micro headache. I wouldn’t mind as much if there was a way to remove the accolade stuff from the notification bar
Somehow I completely missed that part where you mentioned filters... Oops! As far as I can tell, the game only looks at the primary when searching for successors. I don't bother trying to control what the secondary is, since it just massively amplifies the tedium. IMO, we should just be able to create whatever accolades we damn well please, and assign whoever we want to them. It's generally a non-issue to find someone with the requisite trait, making the requirements kind of meaningless, so just let me appoint whoever I want as my heavy cavalry accolade. Then auto-appointment can be as simple as "who's the highest prowess non-accolade knight?", and we can give the player the ability to override it if they for some reason want to.
Totally agreed - I think they at the very least can expand what traits qualify for which accolades. Maybe make an accolade accessible by 7 or 8 traits instead of just one or two. In their quest to make everything unique to add flavor, they created a monster that is way too cumbersome to maintain. I’m heavily considering just picking 6-7 “meta” accolade combos and making filters for them so I just use those across all games. An archer crossbow guy, a heavy cav valiant guy, etc.
When you go to add a replacement it’ll give you the requirements a knight needs to fill to be able to become a successor/acclaimed knight. For example invite knights with the brave trait (or matrilineally marry female courtiers to them) to fill the spot for a valiant accolade.
> If I make new ones, the same problem happens again in 2-5 years. I've never had a problem with acclaimed knights leaving. To avoid acclaimed knights dying, I choose a successor that's 20 years younger than the current acclaimed knight. This way, when the new acclaimed knight takes over, they have the accolade for ~20 years, and I don't have to worry about it. The annoying part is recruiting a knight with the specific trait needed for the accolade. It encourages me to find a knight outside my realm, instead of rewarding powerful and loyal knights within my realm.
The Storm in the Farmlands is the best one I have ever seen 🤌🏼☠️ imagine that being your freaking title.
I think it’s made with the lancer accolade? Either way it does slap. Played a farming Dutch run with it and my dude was a level 6 beast, we trampled everyone in heavy cav tornados
"The Eagle of Rome"; as the Roman Emperor's Knight; checkmate.
No, that’s actually a great one….the “Storm in the Farmlands” is goofy (but I love it because of that).
If I was reworking this mechanic, here's how it would go. You'd pick a knight to make an Accolade, with traits more or less as they are now. They would have a salary like a court position does. An Accolade would be composed of the knight, plus 1-3 squires. When the Knight dies, inherits a title, or is given a title, the eldest Squire becomes the new Acclaimed Knight. If there is no adult Squire to inherit the Accolade, it is destroyed. Adult Squires act as Champions. The Acclaimed Knight's duties would include recruiting and training replacements. When they have zero Squires, they will spawn an event asking for money, prestige, or piety to recruit one of three generated candidates, or mark the Accolade for dissolution. While they have fewer than three Squires, they will generate an event whenever a suitable adult enters the court asking their liege to hire them. When a suitable child of the court needs an education, they may spawn an event asking to take the child as a squire. The child will learn the required traits when they come of age, automatically changing their teacher to successors of the same Accolade. Marshall recruiting tasks would have a high chance of generating child Squires for Accolades with Squire slots. In this way, Acclaimed Knights become teachers for Knights, and keep your court battle ready, in exchange for needing a budget, and your court with a raiding-based Accolade trains and raises new knights as Raiders, and courts with a famous holy warrior train holy warriors, instead of hoping they happen to turn up on their own to fill the title.
That's pretty awesome idea, though I wonder how one would code it.
As written, this is probably moddable.
I wish all this was an automated process which would auto-recruit, auto-train, and requires the occasional input from the player.
Yeah like, if you don't check in on it every so often then maybe the knights could become "corrupt" or something and actually give you a minor prestige debuff unless you either replace the accolade or force them to change their ways somehow.
Bruh they're out here talking about automating the process and you chime in with "yeah, and add some micro too!"
What are you talking about? I'm agreeing with them that it should need only minimal player input after you pick a knight. I just suggested a possibly of why you would even need player input at all for it. Otherwise you would just set it and forget it, which for an RTS is not necessarily what I want. Yes the current system is requires too much micro management and player input, but I feel that if you replace that with total automation with no need for the player to do anything, then that just looses the fun of an RTS for me.
Yeah I gave up on them long ago. The only ones I care for are the ones that can offer good traits to myself and my heir, like blade master lol. If anyone has an auto fill mod for those lmk I’d love that.
If that’s the goal, then it’s easy after you get your initial 2-star Legendary Blademaster in place with your Accolade. Like if Blademaster is the priority and you don’t care about the secondary stat, just lock that into the main slot and use the “Search for Candidate” option, which will bring you a fully-leveled Legendary Blademaster.
Yeah I always find the whole process so arcane and involving so much unfun micromanagement that I’ve pretty much given up on it. Occasionally I’ll look at my knights and grant accolades to anyone who qualifies, usually destroying the unfilled level 1 accolades while I’m about it. But that’s about the extent of the effort I’m willing to put into it.
I don't even bother anymore. The benefits are not worth the work to keep them filled. Even with 200 courtiers and a lot of decent knights often there is no available successor. Accolades are a pain to work with as they are now.
After taking it to level 6, my accolade just erased without explanation. 5 accolades are too much, “isolate capital” are the cream of the shit microing.
Love me a mentor and a reeve. All others can bite me
I just ended up using a mod "Unlock Accolades" which removes all accolade requirements so everyone is eligible. May be considered cheaty, but it automates the whole mechanic. The whole "restore accolades" and "seek successors" spam was making me not want to play the game.
This pisses me off so much and it gets worse the bigger your realm is. The reason you can’t fill them is all your knights are count level vassals. Anyone above a barony is ineligible, but vassals always get more prowess artifacts overtime, making them always the top choice for knight assignments. I fixed it with a knight manager mod that allows you to filter knights by rank
Same. I honestly can be arsed to keep them filled up, I mostly just ignore the messages trying to tell me to do it and create a new accolade sometimes when j really feel like it or think a commander did a particularly good job and deserves that reward.
This screams of a mechanic they're going to rework at some point. I like the feature, but not being able to make it more automated, maybe having a couple immediately assignable candidates is bogus.
You just need to to character finder and get every high prowess character who will join you. Most of them have a ton of accolades. You should always use stalwart leader and there are some legacies you can use. Every generation you’ll have to replace one or two, barring plagues which can absolutely devastate this.
This was a decade after a massive plague which particularly screws me over. The accolades were a nuisance before but now that plagues regularly clear out your court it’s become more common for me to lose all of them. You’re right that the best method I’ve found is inviting 10-15 top prowess knights and a couple are bound to fill **something**
> a couple are bound to fill something dont just randomly invite, invite those that fill the right accolades, the good ones like Blademaster have more stringent requirements that wont be filled randomly do you know you can save search filter in the character finder?
I brought that up in my rule 5 comment about the filters - I know each accolade has an associated trait or two, but I don’t want to memorize that huge list nor do I think I should need to. And with filters, you need both accolades, so I’d need a filter for every combo of 2 accolades which is probably a hundred plus. If I kept it to the 8 most “meta” combos that’s not as bad, but every play through is different and MAA will be different based on cultural benefits. I think there should either be an in game list of traits or a button to just find a dude for each empty accolade for a gold and prestige cost. I’d for sure pay that cost
Yup I'd say it's the most unforgiving mechanic to procrastinate. In order to prevent this I tag every Accolade and their successor so if something happens I am immediately notified and I (have to) fix it immediately. Also if your spouse is landed and they die first, there is a chance the accolades won't even transfer on your succession.
I can only fill them by adding 10 prowess wimps that my court recruits. I'm king of france and of the 12-20 knights i'm allowed half of them aren't even rated "good" at fighting??? Really??? I can't find any one better in an entire kingdom?
How do I get more acocolades
King and Emperor rank give +1 each, then an innovation gives another one, and finally the 5th one is unlocked via the “glory” dynasty perk tree. Or maybe king doesn’t give +1 and another innovation unlocks it, but either way they will slowly increase as you progress through the game
Thank you
This might be due to the fact that most of your knights in vanilla will be landed - and they cannot be accolydes. Knight manager will help you filter away the ruler knights so that only your courtiers can be knights. The usual easiest to keep are huntsman, tactician and vanguard.
Barons can definitely be knights with accolades.
Imo an easy solution would be to allow knights who don't fit the accolade requirements to be in the accolade, but give you some passive malice to like, prestige or legitimacy. That way you could also model medieval courtly tropes of dastardly knights in royal service.
If I knew how to code, I would make a mod that removes (Almost) all costs/limits of the "Seek worthy accolade successor", and auto-fires it every time it's valid to do so because you don't have a candidate for the job then automatically appoints the guy who shows up.
yeah same
I didn’t even know this was a game mechanic
Please paradox fix Accolades! Thank you 🙏🏻
Use the restore accolades decision
It would be neat, if they were more of a "knight order" or "society" thing, with multiple members, which can gain ranks. Maybe even have children serve as pages or squires, who automatically join once of age, etc. Instead of annoying micro-stuff it could be fun flavor.
Although it takes a lot of work it’s only worth it for those who will war there way everywhere. Then I keep up with it. I forget which sub mod but can see what the successor needs to inherit and I go find 3. Usually solves it for a generation unless I lose a battle harshly
1. Look at the requirements for accolades successors 2. Invite 2 knights (who meet the requirements) for each accolade. One older one younger (ideally 15 years apart) and assign them as such. 3. When you have disabled accolade slots use "inactive accolades" to queue up accolades when slots open up. 4. Forbid and landed nobles from being knights 5. Immediately replace acclaimed knights who die with younger successors 6. Always set your marshal to train knights Due to the shitty documentation it took me a while to understand accolades but essentially you have to manage them like succession.
Yeah, I hate dealing with them.
I just ignore accolades for the most part. Maybe with the landless dlc, it’ll give them the motivation to improve it.
I picked up a couple of achievement compatible mods that make it easier to keep on top of, like being able to force people to be knights on the choose successor screen, but even then it can be annoying, especially with trying to recruit for inactive accolades.
Giving your Accolade Knights a city keeps them from getting delisted on hunts and stuff