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Eric the Mauve posted:Yeah the mercenary thing doesn't seem to have any useful benefit. If you're a big realm then your merc band will be huge but just as expensive per soldier as any other merc band--and thus so expensive no one will ever hire them and you won't get any income--you don't get their services any cheaper than anyone else, and their troop composition is based right off of yours and is thus usually inferior to what you get from the similarly priced high end pre-existing merc bands. All you seem to really get out of the deal is occasional pestering from the merc guy for more troops. Isn't the point of it for smaller realms, which can use the merc system to essentially trade levies for income, while as a side effect creating smaller and more affordable mercenary companies that other small realms can take advantage of?
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# ¿ Feb 12, 2016 07:25 |
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# ¿ May 14, 2024 13:46 |
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Autonomous Monster posted:It is really drat stupid that if you want to circumvent the tyranny penalty for an execution all you have to do is oubliette them and wait. Really, the stupid thing is that once you get someone in your prison cell, there is basically zero downside to leaving them there forever. I just straight-up release everyone I capture now, unless I can get a big ransom for them or I have some other compelling reason to keep them around.
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# ¿ Feb 12, 2016 15:56 |
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a7m2 posted:The new DLC got a lot of really bad reviews on Steam. Are the issues people had with it actual issues and/or resolved yet? It introduces more challenges for bigger nations to make it more difficult to stomp all over everything forever and effortlessly paint the map, and it mostly kills the ability to effortlessly breed and raise nigh-superhuman children, so naturally people got super angry at it. There are, as usual, some issues with the DLC, but they're fairly minor and the game is quite playable right now; most of the vitriol seems to be directed at the things that make large player-controlled realms less of a trivial snorefest.
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# ¿ Feb 12, 2016 17:08 |
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Elias_Maluco posted:From what Im reading here, most people are enjoying the new council mechanics, but coalitions, shattered retreat and the new education system seems bad. I think they're just controversial because they're big changes amd they're not 100% fine-tuned yet, but I think they were absolutely necessary. Shattered retreat fixes the fact that a battle used to almost always lead to the losing stack getting completely annihilated, because the losing stack would just get pursued and re-engaged right away with no chance to recover morale, and would just be defeated over and over again until it was whittled down to nothing. Coalitions and infamy fixes the problem of a big enough blob being totally unstoppable except by another comparably-sized blob, which makes things really boring for the blob and really lovely for the small nations near the blob. The council system is fantastic, and was a much needed revamp - it could be even better, but it's still a big improvement over the lovely faction system.
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# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 01:33 |
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Strudel Man posted:Man. High city taxes can be really bad for merchant republics, because of the way their family income distribution is treated as an expense, rather than directly reducing their income. I finally bumped my burgher taxes up to the maximum 50%, and the Grand Mayor of Mann's income is now only 2.39 a month. Patricians pay only half the tax that city tax laws would normally require of them - so if you have a 50% city tax, a merchant republic will only pay 25% tax.
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# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 14:54 |
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Solemn Sloth posted:I still don't get gavelkind. The duchy counts as a more valuable title than the county titles since it's higher-level, so since the main heir gets the duchy, gavelkind gives more counties to the other heirs to compensate for only getting lower-level titles. Because of this, the primary heir tends to get screwed on direct land control under gavelkind - since they get the highest-level titles, they get fewer counties than the other heirs.
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# ¿ Feb 15, 2016 23:11 |
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Eric the Mauve posted:Both infamy (by making you wait longer between wars, kind of, or else fight against 8 different armies that don't coordinate and so you have to take the time to track each one down for warscore) and shattered retreat (by making your wars take longer to complete) slow map painting down, but don't really do anything to make it harder. Shattered retreat isn't really meant to make map painting harder, it just reduces the massive advantage given to the winner of the first battle by giving the loser some breathing room to get their morale back together and shuffle troops around (and make attrition more of a concern for the enemy) before their defeated stack gets attacked again. It comes up the most in basically-even fights, where if a twist of the RNG leads you to lose the battle, your stack inevitably used to get obliterated (even if you took relatively small casualties in that first battle) without having a real second chance to pull it together and fight back. With shattered retreat, you're still at a disadvantage if you lose but at least you didn't lose your entire army at once. Infany could use some more tweaking, sure, but it was always bullshit that none of your neighbors would care even the slightest bit about aggressively gobbling up your other neighbors, and you could expand freely without limit as long as you were bigger than your biggest neighbor since it was unlikely for them to have any seriously threatening alliances. CKII simply doesn't possess the international diplomatic options necessary to allow for containment of a strong country. You just have to hope they collapse from within, which doesn't happen all that often - player blobs are ironclad, and people complain constantly about AI blobs not collapsing often enough.
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# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 16:45 |
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Eric the Mauve posted:The only problem Is that so? AI realms do incur infamy like players do, there is a diplo option to be in a coalition against them, and the AI probably won't know how to game coalitions the way players do, so they should at least theoretically be effective. I haven't had a chance to test being in a coalition against an AI blob yet, but the total lack of commentary I've seen on that angle suggests most people complaining about it haven't even thought about it, let alone tried it.
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# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 16:59 |
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a7m2 posted:Will coalitions still get involved in holy wars of other religions? Think Orthodox or Pagans defending the Sunnis in a holy war against them. No. Coalition members of other religions will ignore holy wars.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2016 05:09 |
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a7m2 posted:So which is it? Playing Ironman so I don't feel like experimenting. Eric misunderstood your question. Different religions will join the same coalition, which after the next patch will be changed so that different religions join separate coalitions unless infamy gets really drat high. That's what Eric was referring to. However, according to Paradox: quote:3. No, the Pope won't defend the Abbasids if you decide to Holy War them. Even if the Abbasids and the Pope is in the same coalition against you, they won't necessarily join wars declared on each other. CB's marked as 'Holy' will not incur the wrath of your coreligionists, this most notably applies to the common 'Holy War' CB. Which is actually slightly different from what I said - it looks like other religions might still join the holy war, but coalition members of your own religion won't.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2016 21:58 |
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It sounds like fixing seduction needs to be more about overhauling the system itself (or just making it a lot less likely for the AI to actually use it), rather than just bolting on a modifier. The whole thing reminds me of the old diplo-assassinations - as long as your intrigue was high enough and you weren't terribly concerned about relations, you could just spam them over and over until they worked, and the AI was clearly restricted from using them much or else kingdoms would have been ridiculous murderscapes.
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# ¿ Feb 24, 2016 00:05 |
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Deceitful Penguin posted:I mean, how the hell does it even say who is a strong vassal? None of these fuckers are individually super strong, but they all seem to think that they're "strong vassals". If they're going to have literally every duke want to be on the council, there needs something more than just an advisor title. I think it's just your X biggest vassals based on amount of territory they own, even if they own a pittance compared to you. Maybe, just maybe, the Ibadi caliphate is intended to be difficult to form? If the Sayyid condition was easy then there would be no reason to ever bother with the territory conditions (though it was probably much easier when Ibadi was just a heresy and therefore easy to swap to). Take some time, build up a strong kingdom, and go for it. CKII covers a pretty long time period now, I wouldn't worry about running out! If you're really intent on forming the Ibadi caliphate right out of the gate, just use the Ruler Designer to create yourself a Sayyid character. Then boom, just grind up Piety and you've got the Ibadi caliphate with virtually no effort expended!
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# ¿ Feb 26, 2016 14:47 |
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ThomasPaine posted:I would like to be able to search by trait as well You can! Type in "genius" or whatever into the character finder
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# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 00:53 |
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Apoffys posted:After I've crushed the Capuan army and gotten settled into the siege, the emperor declares a tribute war on them. Which he wins instantly, somehow. I've never managed to win any sort of war without getting to 100% war score, but apparently the same rules don't apply to the A.I. There are a couple of ways to get an instant 100% warscore, although they're not common and not usually the kind of thing you can pull off on purpose. The main one I can think of is having the enemy ruler imprisoned somehow (usually by capturing them in battle).
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# ¿ Mar 7, 2016 22:13 |
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OhGreatAGinger posted:Can anybody give me any tips to keeping the 'council wants more power' faction happy? Get stronger than your vassals so that factions are less of a threat, while working to placate the biggest offenders, and keeping enough of a war chest around that you can always stomp a civil war. Also, make sure that any particularly ambitious vassals suffer unfortunate accidents. To keep vassals out of factions, it's not enough for them to have a positive opinion of you - they need to have a high opinion of you. I think you need to get someone up to 70 opinion of you before they'll drop out of a faction.
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# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 13:37 |
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OhGreatAGinger posted:Yeah that's what I'm doing really, my demesne is at max with as many holdings as possible full of baronies that I keep as upgraded as possible, I keep my retinue at max capacity, add in the varangian guard I've got a good 15,000 man army ready to fight for me. Start weakening your vassals, then. Depending on the size of your realm it might also be worth handing out kingdoms - it's easier to please one king than six dukes, and now those dukes are scheming against the king instead of you. Or just give the council more power. Honestly, the council is way less frustrating and opaque to deal with than factions are.
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# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 22:23 |
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MikeC posted:So I got back into the game after some DLC sales and I just started playing as Wessex 867 start. These prepared invasions are brutal as hell. I only managed to survive the first one because half the British Isles decided to join me on their own but I can't win this second one no matter how hard I save scum. I can get about 3k troops by 882 and hire another 3.5k and these guys show up 10k of which 4k is from an event according to the character sheet. Does losing give you a game over? If not, just let the loss happen, and spend some time as a vassal while saving up money and cultivating alliances for your chance to strike. The downside to event troops is that they're unreplenishable and sometimes temporary - once you lose them, they're gone forever, and that means you can't count on having them later when the guys you just conquered rebel against you.
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# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 14:47 |
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Eric the Mauve posted:Apoffys, that is a very good post and I agree 100%. It's not like it could be much better, given how dull the CKII war system is - it's basically a choice between "they all combine into one or several giant doomstacks that you have to outnumber or be crushed by" or "they don't combine into doomstacks, you can demolish them one by one at leisure". That's also a big reason coalitions were added. Since CKII warfare isn't particularly tactical, the alliance mechanics are deliberately very limited, and the AI deliberately plays badly, you basically win the game as soon as you're the biggest and richest country and can then proceed to gobble up your neighbors endlessly with no repercussions or challenge. In theory, coalitions are supposed to incentivize players to pay more attention to managing alliances, handing out territory, and nurturing dynastic branches rather than just monopolizing everything and painting the map. In practice, it doesn't really work because no matter how many options Paradox offers for managing or defanging coalition threat, players prefer to just beat their head against that brick wall and brute-force their way through. See also: Zero One posted:I wish they added back some player agency with the Council by turning down the punishment for going against them. Is it really that unfair to temporarily lose the benefits of having a council if you break the restrictions it imposes on you? I'd say it grants far more player freedom than most other things in CKII - instead of just saying "you can't do this because a condition isn't met" like most actions, it gives you the option to violate that condition in return for losing the benefits you gained from imposing that condition on yourself in the first place.
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# ¿ Apr 21, 2016 17:00 |
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Deceitful Penguin posted:My own mother just broke our alliance because she felt that I wasn't assisting her in her wars. Could just be a bad decision. Did she have a trait like arbitrary or insane? Unlike players, the AI mostly tries to roleplay their traits rather than just treating them as stat modifiers, so they sometimes make non-optimal or downright ridiculous decisions if it fits their traits.
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# ¿ Apr 25, 2016 21:05 |
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I'd say the current problem with popes in CKII is that the papal mechanics are both mostly non-interactive and basically impossible to use without being gamey, so the AI never uses the Pope for anything and it just becomes another unique advantage granted to large player empires. It's not just that the Pope never does anything on his own, it's that the AI never uses him against you the way you can use him against your neighbors.
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# ¿ May 1, 2016 16:39 |
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Larry Parrish posted:How the gently caress does Conclave work. In an MP game my single vassal demanded to be on the council and had like -100 but was not actually eligible to be on it in any way. Also all my councilors were +80 or higher but absolutely any action I could take besides going AFK and watching gold tick up caused a tyranny hit. Council members have more complicated thought processes than just "rubber-stamp everything if they like you, reject everything if they hate you". Try actually reading the things that come up, and maybe even mousing over them?
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# ¿ May 1, 2016 21:19 |
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queeb posted:so from what I see conclave is pretty divisive. Im bad at the game but kinda want to start playing again, conclave is the only DLC i don't own. Should I not bother picking it up? Conclave is fantastic. The problem is that when Paradox releases a DLC, they always release a big available-to-everyone patch at the same time, so the changes in the patch tend to get associated with the DLC - even though you get those changes whether you buy the DLC or not. The patch that came out at the same time as Conclave included a lot of additional balancing factors added to combat and diplomacy, intended to make large empires a little less steamrolly and make the late-game a little more interesting than "set up claim, declare war, effortlessly curbstomp, repeat", and those changes are fairly controversial. But you get those balance changes whether you buy Conclave or not, so don't let all that hate affect your decision.
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# ¿ May 18, 2016 18:09 |
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Pretty sure the AI characters vote for the person they like the best (based on relation scores), not the one with the highest stats.
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# ¿ Jun 8, 2016 16:12 |
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AndrewP posted:I am trying to learn this game and am doing the Ireland start. I pressed my claim on one of my du jure counties and won it, but my new vassal hates me and won't cough up the levies. So is there anything I should be doing except waiting for him to come around or maybe giving him a gift even though I'm still poor? Waiting around is normal and natural for this game, especially when you're small and poor, and shifting people's opinion of you is often a long-term project. Unless he dies, in which case his heir will generally be more agreeable (unless you're caught sticking the knife in his back).
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# ¿ Jun 13, 2016 15:43 |
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TheCIASentMe posted:New players already have trouble with the "How do I declare war? I sent my spymaster to get a claim but he's not doing anything?" Etc etc. Now they have to deal with the "Help! My vassal's are rebelling even though they're at 50+ relations with me?!" Or "My council loves me but won't let me do anything?" Vassals could always rebel even though you were at 50+ relations with them, even before Conclave. The magic number to keep them out of Independence factions was 60, or 80 to get them out of a faction they were already in. That's why I'm such a huge fan of Conclave - factions have always been awful garbage that were virtually impossible to manage, and the council is honestly a gigantic improvement over that.
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# ¿ Jun 14, 2016 18:53 |
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Demon_Corsair posted:E2: Is there a way to flip your Councillors personalities? 3 loving malcontents is going to be a rough go for this king. Councilor attitudes aren't entirely set in stone. While they're mostly dependent on traits and stuff, they're also affected by relationships - a councilor who has a bad opinion of you is a lot more likely to be a malcontent. You can also get favors from them and then call in those favors to force them to support your proposals. It would also be incredibly convenient if your malcontent councillors all suffered unfortunate accidents of the deadly sort. cock hero flux posted:You didn't get to choose the trait in the event unless you were either the kid or the teacher so unless you wanted to teach all the little bastards yourself(which meant they would all have similar stats to you which you might not have wanted) you had to put them in the care of someone else which meant being pretty careful about who you picked. Only for one or two generations, though. Once you did get an heir with the optimal education, his traits weren't much of a problem because you could then pass that education down to their children while choosing optimal traits, and breeding in optimal genetics, so it quickly snowballed into a line of Genius Grey Eminence superhumans with no negative traits. Once you got a ruler with the desired education, the only reason to have anyone else tutor your likely heirs was if you wanted a culture flip.
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# ¿ Jul 8, 2016 19:45 |
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ShootaBoy posted:So is Conclave still unfun broken poo poo or is it worth 15 bux? You already got the parts people hate for free, might as well shell out for the parts people like.
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# ¿ Jul 19, 2016 16:37 |
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ElGroucho posted:Shattered retreat sucks and it makes surrounding a county pointless instead of awesome Shattered retreat makes underdog wars a lot more fun since I'm not completely hosed if a major force gets caught by the enemy doomstack before I was ready to fight. It gives me room to shuffle troops around to try and recover from the situation, as opposed to saying "well, guess I lose this war". It's a welcome addition that makes CKII warfare between comparable forces slightly more interactive than "crash doomstacks into each other, winner gets to micromanage their troops for ten minutes in order to drive home the inevitable victory". I guess it's boring if you're always the big dog who's methodically stomping all their neighbors one at a time, but I feel like people would hate the Conclave patch a lot less if they tried starting as a small vassal or something.
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# ¿ Jul 27, 2016 17:01 |
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Simplex posted:I forgot the term is morale in CK2, but the problem as I see it is that after you win a battle the losing side always has near zero morale, while the winning side retains their morale, which is what enables you to ping-pong the enemy until its fully destroyed. The shattered retreat is supposed to address this problem by allowing an army to retreat unmolested, but I think it's fixing the issue from the wrong side. The victorious side should have more difficulty in rampaging around the countryside after winning a battle than they currently do. Shattered retreat addresses the problem by giving the loser some time and space in which to scrape together more troops to salvage the situation. For example, with shattered retreat it's possible to raise some mercenaries and send them to the retreat destination to save your army and prevent it from being completely annihilated, whereas without shattered retreat your army would be ground down to worthlessness long before you got there and you'd have to fight the rest of the war with mercs alone. To me, it's a welcome bit of depth to CKII's mostly-brainless warfare, though the AI is rarely able to make use of it.
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# ¿ Jul 27, 2016 21:26 |
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I wish it were easier to tell other countries' relative strength compared to yours. There's so many different places in the interface you have to check to assess how many troops another country could potentially bring out in a war, and then you declare and they pull an extra 7k troops out of their butt anyway. It'd also be nice to have some feedback on what won or lost you a battle, beyond the obvious "you invaded over a river/into a mountain range" icons. Sometimes I get into a battle with a slight numerical advantage, on the plains, with no river crossing, and handpicked commanders with solid traits...and I lose, for no apparent reason.
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# ¿ Sep 22, 2016 14:56 |
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Parallax Scroll posted:I think it was kill them in this case. I was looking at a few "title might pass out of realm" warnings and made plans for how to keep a few that required several things to happen in a specific order, hence the need to keep notes. I've been trying to use them to cement an advantage over a strong foe who's temporarily weak but too big for me to slice a meaningful chunk off - for example, if East Francia's in a real vulnerable position but I can only peel a single county off them, I'd rather take a big chunk of their income and pour it into building an advantage over them. In theory, anyway. Literally every time I try to tributary someone, they pull extra troops out of nowhere, all my other neighbors declare war on me, I get a peasant revolt the size of my entire army, vikings pillage the heck out of my territory and drain my treasury, and my allies do fuckall.
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# ¿ Sep 24, 2016 15:12 |
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Canadian Surf Club posted:in catching up with DLC, I noticed people here recommending Conclave but the Steam reviews make it sound like a huge headache to play with. Every DLC is released alongside an accompanying free patch that everyone gets whether they buy it or not, and if the free patch has features that people don't like, they blame it on the DLC and go complain about it in the reviews. The patch that came along with Conclave added some new mechanics that were a bit unpolished and pretty unpopular, like shattered retreat and defensive pacts, but those aren't actually part of Conclave and you get them whether you buy the DLC or not. Also, later updates added the rules system that lets you turn them off. Conclave itself is really good. The council system fixes two big gripes I previously had about the game: managing factions and unruly vassals was a pain because there wasn't really much you could do about it other than handing out money and sticking your spymaster places to wait on random events, and once you got big enough you could pretty much have a permanently stable realm with every major vassal either too small or too content to cause any real inconvenience. The council system and the favors system both make dealing with your powerful vassals far more interesting and interactive while also introducing tradeoffs and sources of instability that can keep you on your toes even in the late-game. Some people don't like the new education system, but it's not like education was great before.
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# ¿ Mar 9, 2017 17:07 |
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spectralent posted:I feel like if your personal realm is big enough you still don't care; to my knowledge, Conclave didn't make factions any worse. It just meant people who were powerful were more likely to join factions, which they do anyway if you can't keep them content. The big "Wants to be on the Council" modifier makes it a little harder to cruise along with 100 opinion from everyone, and the favors system means that a single vassal can cause quite a bit of trouble if they're dedicated enough to being obnoxious. The thing is that before, factions were incredibly dull. There were three ways to prevent vassals from joining factions or get them out of factions that they joined: 1. Get their opinion score over a certain number 2. Stick your spymaster on their capital and wait for an event to fire 3. The first one you don't really have that much control over, especially considering the high numbers you needed to block certain factions, and the other two are just betting your spymaster's intrigue scores are high enough that the event will fire before the faction gets big enough to be a threat. The council gives you another option for taking people out of factions in exchange for potentially worse stats and council actions, and makes the council a more interesting decision than "just appoint the guy with the highest stat". Thanks to favors, that one rear end in a top hat who's just determined to screw with you at all costs can cause a lot of trouble even if all your other vassals like you.
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# ¿ Mar 9, 2017 19:07 |
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spectralent posted:Well, having good opinions doesn't matter for factions at least. Every time I had someone with a high opinion I assumed they'd disband, and they never did. 100 opinion seems to be the only guarantee. Good opinions do matter for factions, particularly for the likelihood that someone will join a faction, but they have to be really good to actually prevent people from joining factions or get people out of factions that they've already joined. For example, you have to get someone above 75 opinion to get them to leave a Succession-related faction, and you have to get them above 80 opinion to get them to leave an Independence faction. That means that even if your vassals have a generally positive opinion of you, it can still be difficult to handle factions that way because you need them to absolutely love you in order to get them out of the faction. My problem with old factions isn't busywork, it's that there's practically nothing you can do about them if you don't have a large enough troop advantage. The opinion thresholds are high enough that unless you start handing out territory, they're often out of reach even if you already had a decent relationship with your vassals. That just leaves scheming and assassinations, and both are random events, meaning that all you can do is turn them on and pray that the event fires before the faction issues its demand. Much like dealing with adventurers, all you can really do is save up your money and your troops while hoping the assassination event happens before the war triggers. Conclave changes that, though. It gives you a lot more control over how powerful and dangerous factions can become, in exchange for having to surrender some autonomy to the council and put up with potentially having less effective council actions.
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# ¿ Mar 9, 2017 21:15 |
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I'm usually not one to obsess over pretty borders, but the Charlemagne start seems to have a particular knack for making Europe into a horrific jumbled mess.
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# ¿ Mar 10, 2017 02:55 |
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Shbobdb posted:Is there a mod that makes courtiers of invaded/raided provinces pregnant with bastard children of the invader's type? Well, uh, that sure is a question to ask.
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# ¿ Mar 11, 2017 20:46 |
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Carcer posted:Combat is still an inscrutable black box. When I complained about this earlier in the thread I was told that commanders make little difference and that when fighting tribals you can win if you have a large number of heavy infantry, Combat isn't really a black box, its just that there's very little you can do to actually control or interact with it unless you want to get really gamey, the automatic selections the game makes for the very few things you can control tend to be bad, and there's a big random factor that can lead to you getting hosed over regardless. HI is far better than LI, but just having a lot of HI isn't necessarily going to overturn a 25% numerical disadvantage - especially if your flanks aren't well-balanced or your morale is crap.
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# ¿ Mar 12, 2017 16:30 |
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Shbobdb posted:I want a mechanic where I can spread a trait through conquest. Not the lurid descriptions that the few mods I bothered looking at provided. Have you tried looking for a mod that spreads disease along with conquest, or looked at any zombie/vampire mods (I'm sure there's probably a few) to see what they do?
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# ¿ Mar 12, 2017 17:38 |
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Even though I'm a (custom) Emperor and my imperial realm laws ban titles from passing out of my realm, one of my dukes inherited the crown of a neighboring kingdom...and instead of remaining my vassal, he became independent and took his duchy with him. What would cause that to happen? Since I held a higher level title than the one he inherited, shouldn't I have remained his liege?
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# ¿ Mar 13, 2017 00:30 |
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# ¿ May 14, 2024 13:46 |
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The Narrator posted:How can I make use of the college of cardinals/pope? Is the endgoal just trying to get a dynasty member on the papal throne so I have a much better chance of a buddypope? While I'm pleased to see holy men from my realm getting into the college, there doesn't seem to be much benefit from it in the end. Once you get your hands on some titles in de jure Italy, you become an elector and crown candidate, even if you're not actually a vassal of the King of Italy. That's what happened to my vassal Duke - even though he wasn't a vassal of the King of Germany, his duchy was in de jure German territory, and I guess he'd been buttering up the electors.
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# ¿ Mar 13, 2017 02:03 |