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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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Woah, lots of disagrees around here!

Stopping blobbing is a welcome addition, but I, too, would have liked to see it handled through internal matters.
 
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This is a travesty. Coalitions from EU4 is simply not the most fun mechanic and does not add much to the current CK2 mechanics. I simply don't think coalitions bring much to the dynasty based game here.
 
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Woah, lots of disagrees around here!

Stopping blobbing is a welcome addition, but I, too, would have liked to see it handled through internal matters.

I don't think the disagrees are directed towards anti-Blobbing. They are directed towards the way that Paradox are going about doing it
 
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If five vassals share a liege and one vassal gets a bunch of infamy, can the other four vassals coalition the fifth one?

After they removed the plot to get titles taken away from rival vassals, I've been hoping we'd see new ways to torment my fellow vassal peers.
 
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I don't think the disagrees are directed towards anti-Blobbing. They are directed towards the way that Paradox are going about doing it

Even more, I think they are mostly concerned with the deatails of said coalition system. Like the possibility of said system taxing heirs too much for the sins of their father or for some game-breaking coalitions.
For instance, if the HRE starts expanding towards pagan Lithuania I don't think most players would mind facing a coalition of the nearby Pagan tribes concerned with their own survival. But if the game mechanics enable, say, France to join this coalition, then it wouldn' make any sense and it would break immersion for everyone and I think people are rightly concerned with that kind of possibility.
 
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I'm normally a Paradox fanboy who happily swallows everything Paradox throws at me, but for this new feature I have serious doubt, and it seems I'm not alone. I wish Paradox was not so secretive about new features, this is an example which probably would have gained a lot from being discussed with the community at a much earlier date. I sincerly hope it will play out well, and not ruin what is my all time favorite strategy game.
 
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2012 - "Badboy won't appear in CK2"

2015 - "Badboy mechanics!"

I am very disappointed from this U-turn.

Especially because the reason why I quit EU4 is the countless yet useless game mechanics created with the purpose of making WC more difficult.
(I should have waited some more months before switching to CK2, apparently)

Everytime DDRJake published a WC video, the devs got angry with: "How dares that guy beat our game?!?!", and to defend their "honor" they complicated the game, not caring about the 99.9% of players who never doubt the dev's masculinity and just wished to play a fun game.

Now EU4 (differently from EU3) is a bugfest, partly because the mechanics are too many to be properly tested.

Please do not make to CK2 what you did to EU4.
 
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Nice. I remember it being way to easy to conquer land in CK2.
 
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The immediate problem I see with this is that nowhere in that post did you say that factors like culture and religion play into coalitions. I mean, even your Seljuk example: a bunch of Islamic states are panicking over the fellow Islamic state conquering Miaphysite Armenia. Georgia, an Orthodox country, is a member of this coalition. This makes negative sense.
 
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Not sure what to think of this. Was anyone asking for this?

Plenty of people asked for making conquests (not just WC) harder- me inclided. But making England and Persia able to gang to stop me from gaining territories wasn't something I had in mind...

Seriously, Pdox- CHANGE YOUR TUNE! Make game smarter, make me MANAGE what I conquer. Make me THINK before I declare war. Make me PREPARE. It's a GRAND strategy game and it handles more and more like Total War minus battles.
 
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But that was how it worked in this era...

I couldn't agree more, but devs are too picky about that. Some things pass with title, some not... And considering how simple some mechanics are (laws, inheritance, marriages...), it leads to something that is much further from reality than it should be.
 
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Well, even if it is a patch content, Steam gives you the option of reverting to a previous version if the mechanic is annoying enough.

What would be the ultimate Buridan´s ass would be if Pdx adds an optimization modifier to the patch that actually works: players who dislike other new mechanics will be caught between reverting back to the previous version and having the game run smoothly. :D
 
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