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Hey all!

So today I felt that I was going to spoil some of the bigger stuff we are working on with the new patch, I thought Birken was a bit too mean keeping you guys on edge for so long. As several of you have noted we now have a Pacts tab in the character screen and I am going to tell you guys what it is all about.

So why it was changed is because we decided that we wanted to rewrite a bit how alliances worked in Crusader Kings making it much more predictable who will be in your war. No, as some of you tried to guess we have not made it no longer required to marry other rulers to forge an alliance, that is still a very big part of the core gameplay in the game. What we have done is that we have divided it up in two steps, Non-Aggression Pacts and Alliances.


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Now now, don’t fetch your pitchforks yet! The idea we have is to make the marriage much more focused on its strategical nature than just finding your “soulmate” with impressive tracts of land.

Now when you first marry off your daughter or son you will be figuratively negotiating an agreement with the other ruler to come to terms over your issues with each other, resulting in a Non-Aggression Pact between your two mighty realms. This can later can be improved into a proper Alliance. This is an action done separately after the marriage as been finalized. You don’t have to wait until your family members have grown up however as betrothals also counts when formalizing these pacts.

This does mean that you do not have a Non-Aggression Pact with your close kins but they can still be made into allies without a marriage. Meaning you no longer get the penalties of attacking close kin unless you choose to make your them your ally.

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Picture has been censored to not reveal undisclosed features

With these changes the AI has also been changed a bit to be more capable in recognizing Realpolitik instead of purely going on opinions. It is not much but the AI is now capable of properly identifying threats and will try to form Non-Aggression pacts with these, or if they refuse, ally someone else with a common interest to contain the threat. The idea is also that the AI no longer wants to aid these threats, but instead only preserve the status quo and keep them off their back. They will refuse to ally these threats most of the time in order to not help them become stronger.

Since we now have a distinct action you can perform to ally someone we have also changed how they relate to wars to make it less of a guessing game.

Allies for both sides will be shown in the Declare War screen showing who will join the war on what side. Also important to know with these changes is that allies are now required to honor their alliance, meaning they can not refuse a call to arms. So now you know exactly who you can count on when the war starts. However if your ally is starting an offensive war against someone you have a Non-Aggression Pact with you have to stand out.

All of this is in the Free Patch that will be coming with the next expansion.
 
No, well not completely.


I bolded "directly" for a reason.




edited to prevent misunderstanding.
It still reduces the paths to an alliance, as a marriage is now required either way. Honestly, I'd prefer it if NAPs were a bit more separate from the marriage mechanic. That is, a full alliance would require a NAP, a diplomatic interaction, and a marriage. That way, you could allow for a diplo interaction to upgrade a friendship to a NAP, and later a marriage to upgrade it again to a full alliance, or you could do it the default way where a NAP is formed by a marriage, and then is upgraded to a full alliance via a diplo interaction. That would allow for a much more flexible system, especially if additional, alternative conditions for forming a NAP could be added in by mods.


As this change is removing the ability of mods to create alliances via events, I'm seriously hoping that the devs put in some way for mods to retain that functionality.
 
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With these changes the AI has also been changed a bit to be more capable in recognizing Realpolitik instead of purely going on opinions.

Does this mean the AI will also handle matrilineal marriages better, so we won't see female rulers with absolute cognatic or enatic sucession laws killing off their dynasties and giving up their dynasty's only province?
 
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Several people missed my point entirely, actually.


Me: Certain faiths disapproved of marrying outside the faith; characters of those faiths should receive opinion penalties/piety loss when they marry outside their faith.

Other poster: But Christians married outside the faith in history!

Me: I didn't say that didn't happen, I said that it was not approved of by others.

Other poster: But Christians married outside the faith in history!

Me: Yes, I know, and my point is that when that happens in game there should be reasonable consequences.

Other poster: But that ignores that there were Byzantine Emperors who married heathens!

Me: Are you even reading what I am saying?
I was never arguing with you. Only pointing out that things are more complex than you made them out to be. As for your conclusions I have no thought on the matter, I believe that paradox will think about it if they deem it important.
 
Maybe I used a poor choice of words, maybe not. The term Realpolitik is used differently in different parts of the world.

As a German I'm using the German version.
Hence in a Catholic world, where heathens are being regarded as less than human (that WAS the Zeitgeist back then during the Crusades) I would argue that vassals and especially the Holy See wouldn't be happy to see for example the Holy Roman Emperor marrying a Muslim woman.
The Emperor would then have to decide, would he be willing to risk Excommunication and maybe even vassals revolting to marry that woman? That is Realpolitik the way I understand it and the way it was taught to me in school.

On the other hand, a King of Jerusalem, having the choice of risking Excommunication or securing an Alliance with one of his strongest opponents, would be an entirely different matter. In the first case with the HRE I personally would lean towards not marrying the woman, but as King of Jerusalem things could be very different.

Also ERE doesn't matter, since the views of the Orthodox and the Catholic church regarding heathens and Crusades in General were very different.

I'm just asking for consequences instead of the game being fine with whatever I do.

Sorry, but there was no "zeitgeist" that covers 700 years of history and the majority of the planet's surface. Take your stereotypes and simplistic history elsewhere.
 
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I was never arguing with you. Only pointing out that things are more complex than you made them out to be. As for your conclusions I have no thought on the matter, I believe that paradox will think about it if they deem it important.

Regardless, I was fully aware that Christian rulers, Muslim Rulers, Tengri Rulers etc. have made opportunistic alliances through marriage to other faith-groups throughout history.

All I want to see is sensible penalties for the religions where that is not acceptable. Jewish and Christian faiths particularly.

Perhaps bonuses for faith-groups where it would be seen as a sort of achievement.
 
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Sorry, but there was no "zeitgeist" that covers 700 years of history and the majority of the planet's surface. Take your stereotypes and simplistic history elsewhere.

Sorry, but if you had actually bothered to read my other posts in this thread you would know that I referred to the Age of Crusades in particular when I mentioned Zeitgeist and not the entire timespan of the game. Like here
Feel free to correct my views with arguments. And yes I can change my views if I think the argument is solid. I've yet to see a solid one however.
 
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... but not always.

There is, of course, a convert religion action.

Yes. But this action don't work for marriages... in marriages it was ONLY the spouse who converted. Not the father of the spouse.So a Catholic king in Iberia could marry his daughter to a Muslim Emir and the daughter was the only one who needed to convert. And this isn't possible ingame.

Or do you mean a 'Convert to Husband's religion' decision? Which isn't really the same since this would be voluntary by the spouse...

But sadly interreligious marriages are not even possible ingame currently... so...
 
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Sorry for the lag from published date to my reply but I'd like to have my say as well.

With that said, thank you for the dev diary Groogy and the input by Birken and others. Continual dialogue between y'all and us in the community is the most effective way to keep my loyalty. Overall, I am encouraged by this info dump but my major concern is on implementation - WoL was a wonderful concept which, imho, missed the mark in deployment and after-release support. It is the one dlc I won't use (although I bought to support the company) until the reality matches the concept as presented better.

Now to the details:

  • Yeah, think about it, if your friends, then you're probably past hating each other based on religious views.
    • Implementation is essential here. More Realpolitik among the ai routines was needed years ago. Let's hope the reality matches the vision this dlc cycle.
  • We are reaching a point of arguing semantics. Feel free to comment the content of my post, rather than the meaning of one damn word. Seriously.
    • Seriously! The content's meaning of your post hinges in semantics. Orthodoxy and the many conflicts to determine what that means is based on semantics. Historicity means we need to be on the same page so expectations for the community are (sorry for the oun) realistic. More on this later.
  • Regardless, I was fully aware that Christian rulers, Muslim Rulers, Tengri Rulers etc. have made opportunistic alliances through marriage to other faith-groups throughout history. All I want to see is sensible penalties for the religions where that is not acceptable. Jewish and Christian faiths particularly. Perhaps bonuses for faith-groups where it would be seen as a sort of achievement.
    • This qualification was malleable throughout the game's time-line. Not only was the 8th & 9th centuries different than the 13th and 14th centuries but "what is acceptable" was different from religious head to religious head (even within the same faith) The Pope supported Charlemagne's marriage proposals to Greek Orthodox Irene and her children but not between "Lombard" and Frank Catholics proving that what is acceptable always depended on what was necessary.
Sometimes, the bridal parties would have a conversion, and at other times, they did not. If the receiving realm of the bride needed better ties with multiple tribes/realms of the old religion, the bride being of their same religion was better for more productive relations. If the receiving realm only wanted to better ties with one dynasty conversion happened more readily, CK2 might be too simplistic to model this but my hope is that it is possible to model within the implementation without mods.
 
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So not only are we forced to honor all calls to arms, we're hit with events forcing us to send our troops to war?

What the hell? What about all the circumstances in which historical rulers decided not to honor alliances? What if circumstances change after the formation of an alliance, and it becomes an act of national suicide to participate in a war with our ally?

Why can't we have a system like EUIV, where there are opinion thresholds above which alliances are always honored, and below which they are always ignored; and in which you see clearly before the declaration of war which of your allies and which of the enemy's allies are going to join in?
 
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If we are punished for not participating on our allies wars, what about wars that last 1 week? If a count rebels against the HRE, the war will be over before I'm even able to assemble my troops. Am I going to be punished regardless?

The kind of war could also be taken in to account, so that typically shorter wars, like de jure claims would have a smaller impact on relations, but typically longer ones, like kingdom or empire claims would have a larger impact if the ai didn't think you were pulling your weight.

I made a suggestion in another thread that opinion gain or loss could depend upon warscore contribution compared to some value based on your ability to contribute, perhaps levy size, money on hand or whatever. If you didn't "pull your weight" so to speak then you would get less opinion bonus for helping, or in some case even a malus.

The idea would be that if you were called in to help a war that was almost over you would actually have to weigh up the pros and cons - how much opinion malus do I get for refusing to help vs how much would I get for agreeing to help but knowing that there is no chance I will be able to get troops to the are in time to help ?

More trade off decisions like this would be great.
 
I was talking about game mechanics, not real life/history, ya know.
Now we had a misunderstanding.
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...how is Ajax doing ?



Oops, slightly offtopic. :D

...(later)....what the.. , they are first in the table before Eindhoven ? Scandalous !

If you'd followed the Eredivisie, then you'd know the table is approximately right, that is Ajax and Feyenoord are performing better in most games (except not against PSV) than PSV. Their European performance is up to now not is to be expected from Ajax, noblesse oblige. This week the head of the youth academy Wim Jonk was fired by General Director Marc Overmars, which in part is a result of club politics.... Anyway I'm sure non football fans are all bored by this ;).

On topic, may be so, but than that IMHO ought to be a part of the game mechanics. The game shouldn't be rooted in what happened historically, but when it comes to game mechanics that actually is all that bad. This kind of strategic political marriages were not uncommon during the period covered by the game, nor were those uncommon before or after.
 
So not only are we forced to honor all calls to arms, we're hit with events forcing us to send our troops to war?

What the hell? What about all the circumstances in which historical rulers decided not to honor alliances? What if circumstances change after the formation of an alliance, and it becomes an act of national suicide to participate in a war with our ally?

Why can't we have a system like EUIV, where there are opinion thresholds above which alliances are always honored, and below which they are always ignored; and in which you see clearly before the declaration of war which of your allies and which of the enemy's allies are going to join in?
Well you're forced to honour all calls but you'll get way fewer calls than you presently do.

That said I agree there should be an option to not heed the call, at much more severe penatlies than presently though (becuase again you'll have fewer alliances).
 
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I made a suggestion in another thread that opinion gain or loss could depend upon warscore contribution compared to some value based on your ability to contribute, perhaps levy size, money on hand or whatever. If you didn't "pull your weight" so to speak then you would get less opinion bonus for helping, or in some case even a malus.

The idea would be that if you were called in to help a war that was almost over you would actually have to weigh up the pros and cons - how much opinion malus do I get for refusing to help vs how much would I get for agreeing to help but knowing that there is no chance I will be able to get troops to the are in time to help ?

More trade off decisions like this would be great.

That might be an interesting way to do it, but I definitely think that something should be done, not to force players to help their allies, but to incentivize it, I think that that would add even more depth to the game.
 
Is the AI now smarter with marriages?

I don't want to see a Jewish France again.