CK2 Dev Diary #106 - New Succession Laws Extravaganza

[Silfae]

Will it be possible to script the succession laws so that several titles under elective all go to the winner of the main title?
i.e. if I have three kingdoms, all with elective succession, can it be possible to make it so that all three are tied under the succession of the main one?

Not easily, but it might be possibly with some hacky workaround, making it so that if a title has X succession law and is not primary and the primary title also has X succession law, no Electors are available and the only candidate is the current heir of the primary title. It would need to be tested, though.

Will Imperial override iqta and monastic feudal so you can play Shia Rome or Bodpa Byzantium?

Yes, if it's your primary title, the Imperial Government is prioritized over the other "feudal" governments.

Will the switch to scripted rules make it possible to have full cognatic elective realms? Even if it's just moddable now?
Can I have a female Kaiserin on the throne of the HRE?

This was already possible. If you have Feudal Elective + Full Cognatic, you can elect Kaiserins. The AI's behavior has been largely improved with the new system, so Electors are not always somewhat against picking women regardless of laws and religion.

I love this sooo much for my sneaky-Sicily-duchess-who-always-marries-Basil-and-kills-his-children-so-that-hers-can-inheret game, hopefully (since she's always the lethally competent spymaster after she marries him) this'll make it legitimately feasible to become empress directly, instead of always being throne-adjacent until I take over it with military might. I've wanted that playthrough for so, so long.

That is a possibility if your ruler manages to get enough favor within the court now, yes.

Anyway, question: do Romuva and African pagans retain the eldership succession upon reformation or do they need to pick a doctrine to keep it?

Only unreformed tribals of those religion start with it, unless you pick one of the Doctrines that unlock it.

 

[Silfae]

Out of curiosity, suppose I am playing as Charlemagne, and I create the HRE - what happens to the succession type of my kingdom titles? Will they also switch to Princely Elective, be destroyed when I create the HRE, or am I doomed to be sabotaged by Gavelkind no matter what as Charlemagne?

Only the HRE gets Princely Elective, the decision works otherwise in the exact same way as it did before.

 

[Silfae]

Will the random world versions also use imperial gov, as well as the elective laws?

Yes.

So I'm reading this correctly, eldership does not check for religion, right? So if I have a polyglot realm, I may end up with elders of several different religions? That sounds awesome!

Yes, though the Elders themselves might care about your candidate's religion depending on what their religion is.

So Is the old tactic of inviting pretenders and landing them to press their claims no longer a valid strategy for Byzantine expansion?

I'm not sure why it shouldn't?

Hey, i don't kow if this has been answered already, but is it possible for Catholic/Orthodox to have enatic succession type?

Not in regular games, but they can be customized in Random World to use it.

 

[Divine]

@Divine Would it be possible to make viceroyalties into a form of elective succession with two votes for the liege and 1 vote for the viceroy. So the Liege by default picks herself as heir but can choose to elect the viceroys choice instead?

And further if that's possible then eligibility could encompass all her vassals, and her dynasty, your heir, and your direct vassals with yourself as the default choice?

I feel that this would be a much more powerful system than what we currently have in place.

Hmm interesting, in theory that should be possible. Right now however the liege is not considered for the potential of electors only de-facto and de-jure below rulers. It could be bypassed by giving the liege a claim on the title (since claimants are considered for electors) but that also affects other gameplay. I'll write up the idea to include the liege for possible electors to possible patch improvements.

 

[Divine]

Query, if it hasn't been asked, @Silfae , would it be possible to make it so that a ruler in an elective system when meeting certain conditions could set the terms in game for a candidate? I know you mentioned it's moddable, but I like the idea of Elective systems being able to have their own menu/interface where you could set conditions for what sort of candidate is to be considered. It could be something that's like Crown Authority, where it can be changed only once per ruler, or it could be changed every ten years

It should be possible to have certain conditions for the candidate depend on the current law-set of the title. So if I understand you correctly, then yes. It might prove to be a bit difficult to present this in an informative way to the player though.

 

[Divine]

Does this mean that electors to a title have to be vassals or de jure vassals of the title? If so, that’s a shame, I was hoping I could use the system for an elective religious head, similar to the college of cardinals.

We didn't want to consider every character in the game to be electors for every title because of performance reasons. The full list of currently considered electors before applying the scripted conditions are the following;
All living dynasty members of the current ruler,
All de jure below rulers,
All de facto below rulers,
The religious head of the current ruler,
The spouses of the current ruler,
The claimants of the title,
The courtiers of the current ruler.

If you have any good suggestions of smaller sub-set of characters that would be interesting to include then I would be happy to consider adding those for a future patch.

 

[Divine]

I think someone proposed "owners of holy sites of the current ruler's religion".
Someone else proposed "liege of current ruler".
A (probably too off the wall) one I came up with is "patricians with trade posts in counties owned by the current ruler". I can see that one being way too convoluted to handle, but the first 2 are probably not too bad performance wise. Religions typically have exactly 5 holy sites and rulers only ever have 1 liege.

Good ideas, I'll add them to a list of potential patch material.

 

[Divine]

That's really interesting.

If I'm reading this right you could also theoretically use the voting systems range and built in malleability for the vote power factors to make the liege lose enough say(votes) in the succession of the viceroyalty to select himself as heir based on things like his current amount of titles, traits, how well he likes the current owner, and even the current date right? So by using a system like that you could then make it so that rulers slowly lose the power they have to keep viceroyalties from becoming basically feudal and would be able to retain that power with good traits, or having justifications. To add to that you could even put in a game rule at that point to make viceroyal titles that haven't been returned the top liege in 2 or 3 successions to automatically become feudal titles thus representing the degradation of viceroyalties into feudal titles over time that happened throughout the most of the games time period.

Hell with this system you can represent charlemagne's HRE and lands as starting as viceroyalties (with the viceroyalty law off) and let them degrade into the feudal realms of the later start dates as each succession is a battle to return the titles to the top liege lest they forever become feudal (until the late game).


How about the emperor of china and members of your society?

Nothing here sounds particularly impossible ones I manage to add the liege to the potentials. I'm happy to see the system spawn creative ideas.

 

[Divine]

Well like, I was thinking that you could require that say they have a certain level of competency... must be of your faith, must be of your culture... make it so they can't inherit if X, that sort of thing.

Also sounds like things possible to put conditions on.
If you don't want them as hard blockers though you might want to instead add negative weightings for incompentent / infidels when the electors are considering whom to cast their vote upon.

 

[Divine]

- The liege(s) of the title holder. The direct liege would probably be enough for most uses, though for some stuff (e.g. pentarchy seats, holy sites, or rel head titles that are the vassal of a vassal) you might want to have the top liege get involved.

- The council members (including advisors and regents (if in a regency)) of the liege(s) of the title holder. Again, the direct liege's council would presumably be enough for most reasons.

- Cardinals (or the (vague) equivalent, for modded religions) or holders of some (rare) minor title that aren't subjects of the title holder (e.g. the holder of the Caesar title having a vote on ERE/RE elective viceroyalty succession). If it was possible to cache certain minor title holders with cached = yes (similar to traits) and we thus easily could scope to those characters, it would presumably be less performance-intensive than checking all characters (or all rulers) to see if they're cardinals (or whatever), and such caching might be useful elsewhere too (e.g. if we want to have an event trigger a follow-up for a random cardinal).

- Tributaries and suzerains, if we want either to be permitted to take part in the election of either.

The liege is something that sounds really useful for a lot of ideas!

With the current limitations of minor titles and council membership wouldn't they already be included by all-de-facto-vassals + all courtiers?

Oh! Tributaries and suzerains might give some interesting diplomatic annexation potential.

 

[Divine]

All characters with at least one cached trait.

Haha, you mean part of the 'global-interesting-characters-list'?

 

[Divine]

There may be still be a misunderstanding.

I'm not asking from a modding perspective. I'm asking if such things will be put in by the devs themselves.

Ah! Thanks for clarifying. I think @Silfae might be better suited to answer that since he scripted the specific conditions for the ai-behavior.

 

[Divine]

My understanding would be that societies might not be all too suitable since membership is too fleeting and easily manipulated by the player unless you mod some way to enforce membership in certain societies for elective rulers?

Cached traits are probably cheap enough here since it's the traits that keep track of the characters (with some overhead cost on every addition of traits during other events for the amount of cached traits you cover). The succession updates mostly needs to cover all of the existing traits.

 

[Divine]

@Divine Now that we have your attention on the modding aspects of this, a few suggestions:

As I understand, electors will take weeks/months to change their votes based on changing circumstances, how about an effect to force-update the votes for a given elective title?

Extending "hold_election = yes" to all elective successions, not just merchant republics.

And finally, and probably least likely to happen, allowing the holder of a title to be candidate/heir to the title itself, to allow for re-election in case of an election held not at the death of a ruler.

Thanks for taking time answering all these questions!

One of pricier parts of the calculations are to figure out which candidate to nominate for the electors and it's also run as part of the AI so there needs to be some extra sanity checking to make sure we won't OOS and/or freeze for a couple of seconds by some instant forcing.

The part about electing the current ruler sounds interesting for term time limited successions. I'm just wondering a bit how it should handle the on death situation if half of the votes are cast on the current (now dead ruler) - even if we force new votes here it might miss out on ruler's nomination bias due to timing problems.

 

[Divine]

Hi, do you think in future patches you guys might polish up/add a few more societies? Just curious, because i feel they could be much more than they are now

I'm not holding it for impossible since societies allow a bunch of fun powers / character interaction across borders. However, they do require quite a lot of work to give them enough and proper content so it might happen that we will prioritize other features.

 

[Divine]

Disallow the ruler from nominating themselves, have the ruler's vote and bias go towards themselves during re-elections but to their nominee during on-death elections? (Or generally, elections where they aren't a valid candidate for whatever reason.)

There are a bunch of special handling since it's almost two different kinds of elections and a bunch of things that needs to happen at once. A lot of moving parts are a bit trickier to catch. If I get some time over I'll try to look into the possibilities but I won't promise anything.

 

[Divine]

One I would like is to include also courtiers of vassals or vassals of vassals, so that we can mod some kind of Democracy where everyone in the realm has a vote.

Vassals of vassals should be possible to mod. I'm hesitant to add all realm characters since that can amount to thousands of characters in the late game and will affect performance.

 

[Silfae]

It essentially makes a viceroyal roman empire impossible, you'd be insanely over the vassal limit and even using superdukes each time a superduke dies its a huge opinion malus.

The new government only precludes the Emperor from usurping Kingdoms, it does not prevent a ruler from inheriting, creating, or revoking them.

 

[Silfae]

-can you limit potential heirs to electors only?
-can you limit electors to title religion only?
-can you limit electors to specific government type only
-can you have an arbitrary number of electors?
-can you have multiple levels of elector priority (possesses holy site, then king rank, then duke rank, ect...)?

Yes.

like the pope does. upon inheritance they give their current title(s) to their heir and receives the titles they're inheriting separately.

Not directly, it might be possible to simulate something similar with hidden events.

 

[Silfae]

Maybe someone has already asked this ( in this case sorry) but let's say:

- The Varangian Guard is my Marshal and a general, also having very good stats
- The Ecumenical Patriarch is my Court Chaplain ( don't remember right now the Greek title) and also has very good stats.

My child is still underage and I don't have other legitimate possible heirs ( Let's say also that i'm a widower). So does that mean that the two guys from above have very strong possibilities to become the next emperor at my death?

As far as other Electors are concerned, they are likely to vote for them, yes (especially the Marshal). It still depends a lot on whom you decide to pick, since the Emperor has the highest voting power (unless you lost it in the meantime).
If the other Electors are split on different candidates and your Emperor is very prestigious and respected, you might be able to put your child on the throne even just as the only voter supporting him.