Dev Diary #140 - Legacy of Persia & 1.11 'Peacock' Free Update

[Wokeg]

Exactly what I want. Your new player stop playing when his character dies. I stop playing when my characters is 70 with max health, have 40 in every stats and all perks available and I'm bored as hell because he is a god amongst men like his father and the previous 10 generations.

New players are happy now that they have no harm events, why should I not? I spent years and ungodly amount of money in Para games, doesn't mean I don't count

I actually did do... ahem, a lightly cursed thing, just in case we wanted to rebalance these again in future that should actually make the percentage values easily tweaked now. If you want the old values back literally the second the DLC drops, then:

1. Open \game\common\script_values\10_health_values.txt.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the file.
3. You should see six values, looking like "harm_event_random_list_low_odd_success_value".
4. Adjust them in pairs down to how you'd like (original values should be in the patch notes), save the file, & boot the title.

... sorted. I realise this isn't your ideal or the most convenient thing, but it'll solve it for you in the ultra short term.

For anything more permanent than that, we'll keep an eye on our social spaces in the usual manner and, if the demand is there, add a game rule. As-is I chose not to because I'm afraid it really is the tiniest minority of people who seem to want the old values and tbh the game rule list is already kinda bloated.

That aside, I do want to say that I hear you when you say you want more lethality and difficulty in the title. I'm happy harm events were able to help a little on that front for you, and I know it must suck when a thing you like gets changed in a way you don't agree with. We're not abandoning you, we will add more ways for people to get hurt and die, and difficulty is an on-going thing we're looking into, it's just that this specific attempt backfired a little too much.

So, I actually havn't complained about these, but ever since they were introduced, I played on default settings, and it felt completely off. (I felt like every ruler got them, and always died). So in my last 2 playthroughs i decided to keep count. Out of 18 rulers, 16 had harm events - one guy got through without anything negative, rest were incapable or dead. About half were below 50

If anyone has had the same experience as I've had on the default settings, i can full Appreciate why they were unhappy. That is just not fun, and honestly doesnt feel Random.

I'm fully aware it's not statistically significant (hense why I use the Word feel), but it really ruined alot of the fun for me!

Aye, this overkill thing was actually a (small) part of the problem with them: see, this doesn't reproduce in testing. QA's never flagged it, I can't reproduce it my end when I test for it, it's largely reported by individuals who are incensed by it and didn't seem to do anything to provoke it. There's no factor I can see that makes it more or less likely, no amount of niche edge-case bugfixing has addressed it, it just doesn't seem to be statistically likely — but it is still possible, if enough things lines up and someone gets unlucky. :| And with a sample size of a few hundred thousand players, more than a few people get very unlucky.

I believe you when you say 16 out of 18 rulers over two playthroughs got harm events, and then I look at my observation games and see a number that's maybe a tenth of that and am left pondering how to reduce the chances of pure bad luck without reinforcing the (already fairly hefty) safeguards for players whilst still keeping things able to happen much at all. Reinforcing the hard lock on subsequent harm events within dynasties was actually a nerf I didn't whack in there in the end, felt like they'd already been hit by everything else and didn't need that too.

Thank you for the explanation.

I didn't have strong opinions on the balance of harm events themselves but definitely got a sense that there was lot of tweaking to do, and it seems perfectly reasonable to me to cut them if they don't work as intended. I generally argue for a more demanding play experience (more "friction" as you call it), but I'm definitely not the type to argue that the players face should be smashed into the gravel and rubbed around either.

To me what's important is that the experience is balanced, challenging, transparent and fair. If harm events weren't cutting it, I'm happy to know you are apparently still working on the problem in a different way.

Your patience is very much appreciated and your concerns are valid! We're looking into other ways to approach all of these things, and that was a contributing factor in my feeling like harm events could be nobbled.

I like the harm events. Rulers in the Middle Ages did die randomly and stupidly sometimes. Plus it keeps you from totally gaming the succession every generation.

But I think my ideal would be: harm events but nerfed a bit (like in this patch), plus increase chance of dying as a commander, plus really tone down character health modifiers (these are the real problem), plus make some diseases more lethal.

All solid notes and all avenues that we're looking into in various ways already! Getting a bit more into the design of it a little, I guess, but my suspicion is that it'll feel a lot more fair to newbs and roleplay-focused peeps if they're struck down by a disease/in battle. Health modifiers are just something we've been too liberal with generally honestly.

Lower general life expectancy by 5 years. Off-set it by increasing the Blood 5 legacy perk life expectancy bonus by an additional 5 years. Life expectancy goes down across the board but players who liked living a bit longer can still take the legacy perk. Painless, clean solution.

Though those are contributing factors I'm afraid it's a bit more complicated than that. There's a lot of health modifiers in the game and a lot of health stacking that people can do. I think we'd get a (much deserved) kicking if we did this and declared health gain sufficiently rebalanced.

<snip>

I think you're right on the money here. I had hoped that harm events would offer that element of risk and unpredictability, being harsh but fair and occasionally forcing players to reevaluate what their mid-to-long term strategy is. Some people (who I am very grateful for) really liked this, they enjoyed the unexpected wrench in the gears every now and then felt like it was more historic method of play to just have bad luck wallop 'em from time to time. Not every monarch lives to 80, not every healthy 20 year old lasts till 30.

The problem is, for most players, they didn't feel historic, they felt gamey and frustrating. There wasn't the buy-in of "bad luck can strike at any time!", they were instead perceived as "the game has said you will now stop playing it/stop doing the thing you were having fun with!". Harms were intended to help address the ability of players to game around systems and stack modifiers by providing an element of luck that just wouldn't let you game around it (consciously or unconsciously), which was a consistent factor in medieval politics, but that just... didn't feel good for most players, and I think a degree of that is because they removed too much agency. Yes, you couldn't easily play to avoid them and that made them great for countering gaming around them, so they added a degree of difficulty and variability, but that also generally meant that they felt unearnt.

This is fine in a history book but in a game, where most (though by no means all) players expect to be treated semi-fairly/preferentially (even if they don't consciously think that), it can feel a lot more unreasonable than it actually is. It's also not really as simple as adding relevant event chains for all of them ("simple"; there's like... ~45 odd variants or so, which would've been a prohibitive amount of content even for something made in my spare time), and even if that had been done, people would've figured out ways to avoid them gamily which runs counter to the whole point of having them to begin with and creates a two-track system where the players who want them the most and tend to be more experienced are disproportionately less vulnerable to them.

I think the missing element is ensuring there's a core of buy-in from the player, even if the ultimate test is still harsh/semi-random. Battle, disease, natural disasters, more dangerous schemes, these are all avenues we can likely try to look more down in future because they all feel a bit more like either part of the title's systems or else just intuitively dangerous. They were also stuff we (and specifically me, even) wanted to look into anyway, but they would've been generally longer term projects, which is partially why I shied away into something a bit more actionable immediately to begin with. Still, you live and you learn.

Don't be too harsh about your work, harm events did a wonderful job at what they do best : sometime, death makes irruption in your good plans, and there is nothing you can do. They are a really great entropy provider, something that just happen, you did not plan, and you have to manage it. They are *vital* for the health of the game.
On the other hand they were a poor way to "reduce the overall life expectancy", as it might have felt like a sword of Damocles with a hidden timer : everytime the clock ticked, you died.

I would divide it in two mechanics :
- Events that are much less deadly but more frequent, and better integrated into the overall game - something closer to what we had with the diseases in CK2: numerous, not very deadly when well treated, but exerting constant pressure
- Violent and sudden deaths, which keep that healthy entropy of "this happened", but rarer, and less of an impression of "I walked into the room and boom heart attack", but more integrated into the activities: choking at a feast or falling off a horse while hunting, giving the impression that it was the activity itself that killed you, and not the reaper with a hidden timer...

Only saw this after writing the above blob of rambling design thoughts, but thank you for your kind words and I think you're entirely correct on the former category. The latter is problematic because, depending on balance/frequency/exact triggers, you can end up with a situation where people avoid specific areas exactly because they know there's a chance of serious problems awaiting them.

Though it's a bit severe, a good example here would be playdates, and how dear gods why would you ever allow a child to go on a playdate pre-EP2 you monster, because you the (experienced) player know that there's a very good chance the child you send is going to drown within minutes of arrival. Hanging random death content off of other content is tricksy because, if any number of things go wrong, you can wind up tainting a whole mechanic/content pool. By no means impossible, and there's some areas where this will just innately feel fairer than others (e.g., warfare), but it calls for a bit more of a delicate touch and that's something we've occasionally had problems with.

 

[Wixelt]

Pretty sure I fixed that one... *looks up my list of commits on this patch* Yep, I did.

Why did you skip over my question Oxycoon? (I will not bug you again after you answer)

 

[BudgetHedgehog]

dear gods why would you ever allow a child to go on a playdate pre-EP2 you monster

You know, it's funny - I'd send my children off to Meet Peers as often as it cropped up and host them too and I think I only had a child drown once.

 

[ACanadian]

<snip>

Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts and experience on this, it's really nice of you to take the time to reply to us, and it's good to know that you are looking into this! I'm confident that you'll eventually find a solution to this issue that everyone can agree on.

Now I can't help but wonder, were sudden player deaths generally better received in CK2? And if so, why? Unless it's a case of rose-tinted glasses, I seem to remember that CK2 was a fair bit more lethal than CK3, or at least that's the impression I had.

 

[A_Dane]

I actually did do... ahem, a lightly cursed thing, just in case we wanted to rebalance these again in future that should actually make the percentage values easily tweaked now. If you want the old values back literally the second the DLC drops, then:

1. Open \game\common\script_values\10_health_values.txt.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the file.
3. You should see six values, looking like "harm_event_random_list_low_odd_success_value".
4. Adjust them in pairs down to how you'd like (original values should be in the patch notes), save the file, & boot the title.

... sorted. I realise this isn't your ideal or the most convenient thing, but it'll solve it for you in the ultra short term.

For anything more permanent than that, we'll keep an eye on our social spaces in the usual manner and, if the demand is there, add a game rule. As-is I chose not to because I'm afraid it really is the tiniest minority of people who seem to want the old values and tbh the game rule list is already kinda bloated.

That aside, I do want to say that I hear you when you say you want more lethality and difficulty in the title. I'm happy harm events were able to help a little on that front for you, and I know it must suck when a thing you like gets changed in a way you don't agree with. We're not abandoning you, we will add more ways for people to get hurt and die, and difficulty is an on-going thing we're looking into, it's just that this specific attempt backfired a little too much.

Aye, this overkill thing was actually a (small) part of the problem with them: see, this doesn't reproduce in testing. QA's never flagged it, I can't reproduce it my end when I test for it, it's largely reported by individuals who are incensed by it and didn't seem to do anything to provoke it. There's no factor I can see that makes it more or less likely, no amount of niche edge-case bugfixing has addressed it, it just doesn't seem to be statistically likely — but it is still possible, if enough things lines up and someone gets unlucky. :| And with a sample size of a few hundred thousand players, more than a few people get very unlucky.

I believe you when you say 16 out of 18 rulers over two playthroughs got harm events, and then I look at my observation games and see a number that's maybe a tenth of that and am left pondering how to reduce the chances of pure bad luck without reinforcing the (already fairly hefty) safeguards for players whilst still keeping things able to happen much at all. Reinforcing the hard lock on subsequent harm events within dynasties was actually a nerf I didn't whack in there in the end, felt like they'd already been hit by everything else and didn't need that too.

Your patience is very much appreciated and your concerns are valid! We're looking into other ways to approach all of these things, and that was a contributing factor in my feeling like harm events could be nobbled.

All solid notes and all avenues that we're looking into in various ways already! Getting a bit more into the design of it a little, I guess, but my suspicion is that it'll feel a lot more fair to newbs and roleplay-focused peeps if they're struck down by a disease/in battle. Health modifiers are just something we've been too liberal with generally honestly.

Though those are contributing factors I'm afraid it's a bit more complicated than that. There's a lot of health modifiers in the game and a lot of health stacking that people can do. I think we'd get a (much deserved) kicking if we did this and declared health gain sufficiently rebalanced.

I think you're right on the money here. I had hoped that harm events would offer that element of risk and unpredictability, being harsh but fair and occasionally forcing players to reevaluate what their mid-to-long term strategy is. Some people (who I am very grateful for) really liked this, they enjoyed the unexpected wrench in the gears every now and then felt like it was more historic method of play to just have bad luck wallop 'em from time to time. Not every monarch lives to 80, not every healthy 20 year old lasts till 30.

The problem is, for most players, they didn't feel historic, they felt gamey and frustrating. There wasn't the buy-in of "bad luck can strike at any time!", they were instead perceived as "the game has said you will now stop playing it/stop doing the thing you were having fun with!". Harms were intended to help address the ability of players to game around systems and stack modifiers by providing an element of luck that just wouldn't let you game around it (consciously or unconsciously), which was a consistent factor in medieval politics, but that just... didn't feel good for most players, and I think a degree of that is because they removed too much agency. Yes, you couldn't easily play to avoid them and that made them great for countering gaming around them, so they added a degree of difficulty and variability, but that also generally meant that they felt unearnt.

This is fine in a history book but in a game, where most (though by no means all) players expect to be treated semi-fairly/preferentially (even if they don't consciously think that), it can feel a lot more unreasonable than it actually is. It's also not really as simple as adding relevant event chains for all of them ("simple"; there's like... ~45 odd variants or so, which would've been a prohibitive amount of content even for something made in my spare time), and even if that had been done, people would've figured out ways to avoid them gamily which runs counter to the whole point of having them to begin with and creates a two-track system where the players who want them the most and tend to be more experienced are disproportionately less vulnerable to them.

I think the missing element is ensuring there's a core of buy-in from the player, even if the ultimate test is still harsh/semi-random. Battle, disease, natural disasters, more dangerous schemes, these are all avenues we can likely try to look more down in future because they all feel a bit more like either part of the title's systems or else just intuitively dangerous. They were also stuff we (and specifically me, even) wanted to look into anyway, but they would've been generally longer term projects, which is partially why I shied away into something a bit more actionable immediately to begin with. Still, you live and you learn.

Only saw this after writing the above blob of rambling design thoughts, but thank you for your kind words and I think you're entirely correct on the former category. The latter is problematic because, depending on balance/frequency/exact triggers, you can end up with a situation where people avoid specific areas exactly because they know there's a chance of serious problems awaiting them.

Though it's a bit severe, a good example here would be playdates, and how dear gods why would you ever allow a child to go on a playdate pre-EP2 you monster, because you the (experienced) player know that there's a very good chance the child you send is going to drown within minutes of arrival. Hanging random death content off of other content is tricksy because, if any number of things go wrong, you can wind up tainting a whole mechanic/content pool. By no means impossible, and there's some areas where this will just innately feel fairer than others (e.g., warfare), but it calls for a bit more of a delicate touch and that's something we've occasionally had problems with.

Thanks for acknowledging my pain!

Joking aside: as I said, i never reported precisely because of the fact, that I was probably a minority - I know what i'm seeing is extremely unlikely. Wasnt meant as a criticism of you/the events, asI actually like the idea, it just becomes a lot less fun when it's almost a certainty, as opposed a possibility, and with the numbers i experienced it very much feels like the former! However it was meaning illustrate to the very frustrated players that commented on the change, that it's very much not fun for everyone as it was

In regards to the changes: wouldnt a possible change be more dangerous hunts and tournaments/travels? If there's a chance of dying on a hunt (which it incidentally dosnt feel like atm), it's still an opportunity you have to buy into?

 

[tilly]

Why did you skip over my question Oxycoon? (I will not bugger you again after you answer)

"to bug" means to pester
"to bugger" means to sodomize rectally

all things considered i think not responding is the reasonable reaction here

 

[Admiral Boysen]

Darius Revenge
View attachment 1044708
As a character of Iranian heritage, hold the Empire of Persia, Kingdom of Thessalonika, and Kingdom of Hellas.

IMHO the kingdoms being held by vassals (of your faith and/or heritage?) should also count

 

[Muhammad Abdurrahman]

Can't we have the new 2D throne room art in the Persian character interface like the ones in Fate of Iberia?

 

[vandevere]

Weird bit of praise for the devs here. Before the update, whenever I had to open the tabs on the side-especially the courtiers Tab-my PC's fan always turned on as accessing the tabs seemed make my computer work harder. Today, post Update, I've accessed the Courtiers Tab several times, without even a peep from the pc fan.

Thank you for making things easier for my puter!

 

[Flamestar]

I think imo the problem with the harm system is that it can't be the main balance against long reigns because there is no element of strategy in this strategy game. I think you need some amount of removal of control obviously, but players should almost always have some sort of control. To me, I feel like this problem has been answered to a good degree already, in CK2! For the life of me, I can't wrap my head around why the features of Reapers' Due wasn't part of the CK3 base game on release. It wasn't perfect obviously and could use some work, but the system had a general logic. You had regional epidemics, specific diseases, etc, which all had compromises that had players have to choose how to approach disease. I'd imagine these features are high up on the CK3 priority list, but much of the work will just be to catch up to where ck2 has been for years, and so the advancements to the systems will be much more constrained then they would've been if they had just been a part of the original release.

Still, I figure that once these features return, the question of balancing harm will be a much simpler one.

 

[Voy]

I like the prestige changes. It will hopefully be much better. I am however a little bit surprised the setup changes and new characters weren't more extensive than they ended up being. Big hopes for the 1.12 patch to bring in the big changes that didn't make the closing.

 

[Panagean]

Looking forwards to this! My first run will be themed around a bad joke about Nietzche and the bit after the famous "God is dead and we have killed him" quote - Reform a Zoroastrian faith to have all doctrines accepted (and various other somewhat nihilistic tenets, like hedonistic, pursuit of power and sacred lies).

 

[Khrome]

From a previous dev diary:

"The biggest changes are to certain religious groups or sects that were important in 9th century Iran - the Mu’tazila, the Khurramites, the Azariqa."

Were there no changes made to the Mu'tazila? I think at least they should have Basra as a holy site instead of Sinai, as Basra was a centre of Mutazilite thought.

I did see an "Islamic Rationalism" tenet somewhere, but that may just be renamed "Literalism"....

 

[apollo1989vieten]

Glad to see at least part of my suggestion for the HRE as part of the update, though that part is a minor part of my suggestion.

 

[A_Dane]

Glad to see at least part of my suggestion for the HRE as part of the update, though that part is a minor part of my suggestion.

What exactly did they do?

 

[katyastevens]

Some thoughts on harm events: I'm still waiting on a Reaper's Due DLC/addition to the game as I recall that made CK2 a lot more challenging when a big epidemic turned up. Some you could hope and wait out while others were an immediate "close the gates" decision - but even then you had starvation events, people smuggling in a lover who may or may not be infected, and a bunch of other situations

I have had characters die in tournaments so that is one random incident that is still under the player's control, and I'd hope a similar idea could be added to hunts and piligrimages/realm travel if it's not already (I've seen events for getting ill on occasion but no actual deaths). Longer trips should incur more danger and hostility, and again I know we have options for caravan masters, bodyguards etc. to reduce the risk but again there should be some element of player action - does the benefits (or potential of) outweigh the risks?

What if a peasant revolt happens in a region you're travelling to - do you push through and hope the peasants ignore you (more likely if you're not a local ruler, or less likely because you're a ruler and have money)? Do you redirect your route at a cost and risk what might be happening in another region? An outbreak of disease, raiders, hostile locals...there's a good few options there which risk harm

Another thought was maintenance of buildings and troops, mostly linked to Royal Court I realised, but what if things like choosing to have fewer servants had a higher risk of death - bathing is one of the harm events, so how about making it more likely with fewer servants (fewer people around to assist and fewer people around to hear you if you're in trouble). Simple food could come with a higher chance of food poisoning, while luxury food has a higher chance of causing gout or illness because a cook put in a wrong ingredient. Shared living environments for visitors means a higher chance of an outbreak of disease, separate quarters being lower

Costs to maintain your castle and men-at-arms - crumbling walls risk them falling apart, and if you haven't been investing in your MAA they'll have poorer weapons and armour which means a lot more danger to the commanders (or you). We have wetnurses to help reduce illnesses and incidents for babies, why not a similar system for other aspects of rulership?

 

[apollo1989vieten]

What exactly did they do?

Part of my suggestion was that East Francia not be required to reform the HRE.

 

[ENFP]

I believe you can turn it back on through game rules. I do fully agree that the game needs to not give the player special treatment however. (Player has special protection against murder plots with only one plot against the player at a time being possible, the AI doesn't factor the player's armies as allied military strength for deciding to declare a war, (I'm partially ok with this since it lead to lots of cases where a one-county nobody would declare wars because they know your military can do all the heavy lifting, and this was added in post-launch to stop AI "join my war" spam) etc.)

Do you know where this is the game files (allied AI not accounting player strength for war) I'd like to make a mod disabling this.

 

[ENFP]

Harm events are one of the best additions to the game since launch. It is disappointing to see them nerfed so heavily. At least it will be easy to mod back to default.

 

[BrotherJonathan]

As far the the discussion around RNG-type stuff goes, I think one of the best analyzes of the topic comes from Sid Meier. His maxim is generally that RNG can be fun, but there should always be some way for the player to affect or mitigate it. Otherwise, it just feels frustrating and arbitrary instead of fun.