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Dev Diary 11: Stopping The Snowball

Hey! So today we will talk about some mechanics we’ve added to make other rulers react to what happens in the world. We want to slow down the snowball and prolong the time it takes to conquer the world, so it shouldn’t be as easy to do. Snowballs are pretty evil, just like medieval rulers.

Just as with the shattered retreat mechanic we took inspiration from Europa Universalis 4 in our decision to add Coalitions. Our coalitions however are based on an Infamy value instead of Aggressive Expansion. You might recognize the name Infamy from our old games, but even though it shares the name it will work quite differently.

Infamy is limited to be within the range of 0 to 100% and will slowly decay over time based on how strong your max military potential is. When you hit 25% infamy, coalitions will be unlocked and AIs will start joining them based on how threatened they feel.Your infamy will serve as a hint on how aggressive and dangerous other rulers think your realm is. You gain infamy primarily by conquering land through war or by inheriting a fair maidens huge tracts of land.

The amount of Infamy you gain is based on the action you do, how much land you take and how large your realm already is. So for instance the Kaiser of the HRE declaring a war for Flanders and taking it is going to make the neighbours more worried than if Pomerania manages to take Mecklenburg.
capture(56).png


Coalitions themselves are mostly defensive in Crusader Kings, if any member gets attacked by the target of the coalition they will automatically be called into the war. If a member starts a war against the target they only get a normal call to arms which they can choose to decline.

For an AI to join a coalition they will consider the relative strength between the target and themselves, how threatened they think they are and how much infamy the target has accrued. You can view the current coalition someone has against them by the diplomacy field on the character screen.

capture(54).png


But it might not be the easiest way to view it so we also added a mapmode to more easily visualize Coalitions. A nation which turns up white is the nation you have currently selected, blue will be targetable for coalitions, yellow means they have a coalition against them and Red means they are members of the coalition against the currently selected one.

capture(55).jpg
 
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I just fear the things that this won't take into consideration, like geographical distance. You have Egypt and a portion of Northern India in agreement to defend each other against the Seljuks. Why the fuck does Northern India care about what happens in Egypt, and vice versa? This feature- the fact that any one country can have only one coalition against it- feels incredibly silly on that basis. Disregarding the complete disregard for differing cultures, religions, and government types.
 
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The problem with this, is twofold. First this does nothing to address the fact that large nations are abnormally stable baring player intervention horde invasions, or gavelkind succession. Untill the A.I gets fixed to resist having it's heir educated by a differing culture, so there aren't homogeneous realms then infamy does't matter. The Holy Roman Empire, Byzantine, and the Abbassid can take on multiple states and win, all because within a 150 years you are large state filled with same culture and religious vassals.

Secondly can we trust vassals and coalitions to actually mean something, if even crusades can be fought back with enough numbers.
 
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CK2 has many good gameplay aspects, one of them is the chance to play with an Emperor (very easy) or a Count (hard).

After learning the basic game mechanics, I have never played a King or Emperor again because it becomes dull quickly. If I want to have fun I'll start as a Count/Duke with the aim of building an Empire/Kingdom, after that I'll restart somewhere else to do the same in a different setting.

Given the fact the initial starting date allows you to play 700 years (unlike the 350 of Vanilla), there is no need to say that if you start as an Emperor you might gobble the whole world if you really wish to, but it's no big deal. Just like EU's World Conquest, the strategy is more related to intimate knowledge of the game system (and costant bug exploiting, if the posted WC video are of any indication) than real skill.
If someone wants to invest hours of his free time into painting a CK2 map, what's wrong with that? Just let him do it and call it a day. He's a paying customer after all, he should be allowed to use his money as he sees fit.

If someone, anyone, wants a good challenge, he should just play a Count. There is little point into create anti-Emperor and anti-Kings special mechanics.

As a paying customer, my opinion is that bugfixing and present mechanics development should be the target if time has to be invested.
 
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This is a really bad idea. If these are the only sort of additions you have left to make to this game I think it's time to know when to stop and let it sit as a finished product and start work on something else.
 
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Turn off steams auto update

That's not a very good response. The whole point of the DLC system was that if we really didn't like a major change to the game we could opt out, but still get bug fixes. One of these days, they'll tame Seduction and I want to be there to see it.

I don't understand how the proposed change undermines roleplay in any way. Surely it adds roleplaying possibilities?

How long have you been playing Paradox games? Once this patch gets released, you'll be seeing coalitions of the Pope, the Caliph, and pagan Russia against Charlemagne. Everyone will complain and they'll move on to adding more "features" no one asked for.
 
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Paradox, seriously? If you do not have an actual historian or a Historical Accuracy team in your studio, please hire one.

And I'm still not over the fact that you were too lazy to improve AI and instead put a land passage between Italy and Greece.

Hopefully this will be the last expansion for CK2. It already has too much and the game slows down even only after 150 years. Plus, I'm tired of starting a game, then stopping for several months because of university, then trying to play again but can't because you released two expansions and now my save game is incompatible...
 
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Dracko81post: 20346072 said:
Lucky for you they provide access to previous versions of the game in steam so you can finish your previous saves then.
Yeah, that is a possibility, but then I don't get the bug fixes, or some of the new features that are actually good. It's either all or nothing.

Plus, I want to export the save to EU4, but the conversion only works for the most recent versions. If I want to export a save file from a year ago, then chances are, I'm outta luck.
 
Yeah, that is a possibility, but then I don't get the bug fixes, or some of the new features that are actually good. It's either all or nothing.

Plus, I want to export the save to EU4, but the conversion only works for the most recent versions. If I want to export a save file from a year ago, then chances are, I'm outta luck.
You said you can't play your old saves. You can, unfortunately there are issues between versions, typically caused by things like bug fixes and new features.

If you want to play with the new stuff, you start a new game.
 
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That's not a very good response. The whole point of the DLC system was that if we really didn't like a major change to the game we could opt out, but still get bug fixes. One of these days, they'll tame Seduction and I want to be there to see it.



How long have you been playing Paradox games? Once this patch gets released, you'll be seeing coalitions of the Pope, the Caliph, and pagan Russia against Charlemagne. Everyone will complain and they'll move on to adding more "features" no one asked for.
Well we'll just have to wait and see whether or not coalitions end up being bad or good won't we.
 
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How does this system work with crusades? Do you get a ton of infamy with scotland because you suddenly wont jerusalem in a war as the english? What if you accidentally inherit something huge like the HRE? Currently there's no easy way to get rid of a top title. How will this effect nations that have to be at war or raiding? Shouldn't people be glad you're removing the infidels?

I guess I'm just glad that I finished my SPQR run before the next dlc.
 
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Dracko81:
You're right for pointing out the obvious error that I've owned the game for "five years". I've only owned the game since 2012, but at the time of writing (3 AM locally) I was a bit unsure how long it had actually been. I edited to "four years" (still wrong, but closer!) in an adjacent tab, because Chrome/Paradoxplaza saves your posting content across tabs looking at pages in the same thread. But that wasn't the tab in which I ended up hitting "Post Reply". :) Sorry about the mixup.
You're free to not read, of course. I was adressing the developers after all. It would be a pretty poor attempt to claim greater legitimacy if we're being honest, so if you want to discredit my arguments on that basis then --... well, I have no real answer to that, that's not how discussions are had.
 
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And thus Paradox told us that they ran out of ideal but still want to milk some more.
You know, you don't have to buy the DLC if you don't want to.
 
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You know, you don't have to buy the DLC if you don't want to.

Pretty much this.

There are some very good design questions people have inquired about regarding this feature (for example, but not limited to, religious wars, special titles like the pope, distance, modability) but a lot of complaints here basically boil down to having their cake and eating it too as well as many people simply not understanding how often this happened in history (it did, it just wasn't called coalitions).
 
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