CK2 Dev Diary #52: Rhythm is a Lancer

[Nyrael]

Attacking someone without a just cause should also greatly reduce available levies. CB is mostly necessary to justify the war to your vassals, so that they would aid you with their armies. But an unjustified war is a war where they don't have a reason to send their soldiers into death. Aka, it should be waged mostly by the Monarch's very own forces... or vassals should get angry about raised levies at least thrice as fast.

 

[kmh42]

I would be cool to implement a simple event where a Defender of a castle/city... is refusing to defend at let's the enemy army into the castle/city... without an siege. Maybe when the defender is craven or hast actually the same religion in a holy war, etc... . There could be possible deal before such an capitulation, like a big pile of money changes the owner etc...

 

[TheDungen]

One thing I'm worried about with the possibility of losing fabricate claims is building up three or four claims, perhaps a duchy, and pushing them all at once.

Is there any thoughts among the developers with keeping this in place, or is it in the sights for getting cut in the name of rhythm?

Truth be told I never liked how that worked anyway. with no wargoal you had a really hard time getting the required warscore for those wars. I pretty much always preferred taking counties one at a time instead.

I don't like this change. It's going to be a lot harder for small feudal lords at the start (if you start next to a large power, or even moderate powers), as well as making it much easier for players who know how to exploit mechanics to blob more easily.

Then do what every feudal lord who ever felt threatened in reality did, bend the knee to someone powerful enough to protect you.

Definitely. The Pope and the Church should be more involved in everything tbh.

In the catholic world atleast. In the orthodox world it is the emperor who should be more involved in the church.

Attacking someone without a just cause should also greatly reduce available levies. CB is mostly necessary to justify the war to your vassals, so that they would aid you with their armies. But an unjustified war is a war where they don't have a reason to send their soldiers into death. Aka, it should be waged mostly by the Monarch's very own forces... or vassals should get angry about raised levies at least thrice as fast.

Still arguing for that unless you're on late feudalism you should call your vassals (or at least the powerful vassals) as allies.

 

[Mr. Capiatlist]

Truth be told I never liked how that worked anyway. with no wargoal you had a really hard time getting the required warscore for those wars. I pretty much always preferred taking counties one at a time instead.

The war goal was "press all claims" but there could be an underlying issue with that - I will freely admit I am no expert with these games. And I think it's a matter of play style sometimes. Sometimes I'm okay pressing a single claim, but other times I want to take a bigger bite, make the sacrifices of my soldiers worth it.

 

[DeltaCortis]

Good to see our nagging at PDXCon did something

 

[HD Ketchup III]

Looks good !

 

[Mimwing]

If I were to try to make the fabricate claims job less annoying, I would change it so that placing the chancellor gives a smaller initial chance to fabricate claims, but - depending on the chancellor's stats - this probability scales up every year to 100%. For example, maybe for a chancellor with diplomacy stat X it starts at X% per year, and increases by X/4% per year.

This means that:
- This is more representative of the chancellor building a case instead of being just as likely to pop out a claim on day 1 as 10 years later.
- Claims are guaranteed to happen eventually, as every "missed roll" means that the next time your chances are slightly better.
- You still retain some element of randomness to when you get the claim.
- You have more of an incentive to "invest" into getting a claim for one specific province and think more carefully about your choices.

(On a side note in case it ever comes up, please don't kill the ability to change chancellor location while the claim event has fired and is on screen to get a claim for a different province, while it doesn't make sense from an RP perspective it's a huge relief if you've ever forgotten to move your guy after getting a claim, and whether you moved the guy now or 2 years earlier makes no real difference)

 

[TheDungen]

The war goal was "press all claims" but there could be an underlying issue with that - I will freely admit I am no expert with these games. And I think it's a matter of play style sometimes. Sometimes I'm okay pressing a single claim, but other times I want to take a bigger bite, make the sacrifices of my soldiers worth it.

No that's the casus belli. The wargoal is the condition you need to achieve to get a ticking warscore. For single claims occupying the province that you're trying to conquer is the wargoal, when pressing multiple ones you can't get a ticking warscore and in ck2 that can be a big deal since you need 100 warscore to force demands.

 

[Hyle]

What if the Chancellor reduced the time for law changes, scaled to their Diplomacy? Faster reforms of your legal system would be a good substitute for expanding realm borders.

 

[GUmby_Aaron]

If you are still seeking War related things to add in the next update how about the sacking of Constantinople? You have the Latin Empire start date but in the game there aren't any scripted events which represent the 4th Crusade (scum to their own religion burning a place they deemed holy none the less) so you should add that in your upcoming 'war' dlc.

 

[Negative_Creep]

Just would like to echo the sentiment that fabricate claim has its place in the game even if you're not looking to go to war, in claiming titles from vassals. Besides curbing the power of large vassals, it's also currently the only way to reclaim titles awarded by accident. E.g. I recently conquered a tribal county and promptly proceeded to offload it to a vassal, only to then notice the tribal NPC had just before conquered it from the Khazars and it had nomad agitation active, meaning it would be lost if I didn't find some way to reclaim it. As a merchant republic, I had no end of coin at my disposal, so the cost of fabrication was a non-issue, while reconquering the county later would've been a right hassle. So point being, it's good to keep different options open for different playstyles.

 

[olvirki]

I like the idea of the unjustified war casus belli and think it could replace casus belli fabrication in some ways. Its at least weird that a claim you fabricate on a random county is as valid as the claim you have to the kingdom your maternal grandfather once ruled.

 

[Curator Sapidianus]

Siege Assaults are rather overpowered when you have the numbers to just blitz down even heavily fortified Holdings. So, we decided to experiment with some changes…

Except that this is sometimes the only way for AI to actually win a war. They way AI wages war without an ability to assault heavily fortified Holdings (which is almost every holding in the late game), wars drag for decades and only end in white peace.

EDIT: Average siege in high medieval times took 15-40 days to negotiate an honorable surrender. In dark ages there were no real castles to siege for half a year. There were exceptional sieges that lasted for months and years, but these were rare. The warfare is already too slow in CK2 (troops move to slow, battles and sieges take ages), this fix will only make it slower.

 

[Ben84]

Please, don't get rid of the 'fabricate claim' job. Guys, that is CK2, not Europa Paintingversalis !
Just decrease a bit randomness and make it more relevant to chancellor's stats,traits and opinion ratio. (so let's get a bit more transparency in here)

Also like others mentioned maybe add a little 2 or 3- level event chain, so the player has more control about time,cost and outcome (single county or whole duchy).

Another thought of mine, maybe add a new side-job to the spymaster, so the 'set up agency network'-task also supports the 'fabricate claim' task of the chancellor depending on stats,traits and opinion ratio of the spymaster.

 

[PK_AZ]

What if the Chancellor reduced the time for law changes, scaled to their Diplomacy? Faster reforms of your legal system would be a good substitute for expanding realm borders.

Nope. Time was never really so much bottleneck as vassal opinion / council. And reforming legal system do not make - at least kings and emperors - even remotely as powerful as taking more land.

 

[xionudanton]

Greetings all!

One of the great things about meeting our dear players - you folks - in real life (such as at PDXCON) is getting to hear such a lot of constructive, persuasive suggestions for improvements. For example, two things that were brought up last week were how annoying the “Fabricate Claim” job is, and the fact that Siege Assaults are rather overpowered when you have the numbers to just blitz down even heavily fortified Holdings. So, we decided to experiment with some changes…

First off, we’re going to deemphasize the “Fabricate Claim” job by giving all playable entities (including Christians) a form of “Unjustified War” Casus Belli that will allow you to seize a single County for an upfront cost of Piety, Prestige or Gold (depending on your Religion and Government Form.) Ideally, I’d also like to replace the “Fabricate Claim” job with something else (maybe something to do with foreign embassies and arranging marriages, or something to do with Laws. Suggestions are welcome!) However, we might decide leave it there as it is (it does still have some uses.)

Next, we’re adding a Game Rule for Siege Assaults. The options are “Unlimited”, which works like before, “On”, which disables Assaults against Holdings at Fort Level 6 or above, and “Off”, which disables Assaults entirely. We’re currently playing around with these changes, so the exact rules for the “On” setting might change. On a related note, the time it takes to siege down Holdings is also being tweaked, to make it quicker overall but also making the Fort Level matter more.

View attachment 268105

When we sat down and talked about the above tweaks, we also decided to (rather dramatically) increase the “Ticking Warscore” rate for the attackers in wars. This necessitated splitting some defines (CONTESTED_TITLE_OCCUPIED_WARSCORE_BONUS, etc) into defender and attacker versions.

We are still evaluating how well these changes turned out. It’s likely we’ll tweak some numbers (or even backtrack on something.) So far though, it appears quite promising, positively altering the “rhythm” of warfare!

View attachment 268104

That’s all for now, stay tuned for the CK2 livestream, starting at 16:00 CET today. Until next time!

Hi! It would be really nice if there could be events or options to destroy holdings or change holdings... Thanks!

 

[Crushric]

How about turning "fabricate claim" into "justify feud"? Essentially creating incidents so that the world at large consider the conflict justified, but allowing the target to de-escalate by apologizing and paying compensation, resulting in a truce. This way the counts can somewhat protect themselves from their coreligionist neighbors.

Although honestly, totally unjustified war sounds like a bad idea. While you can fight a war over a stolen bucket, such excuses can be invalidated by a simple apology and returning the said bucket if the other side doesn't want a war. A completely unjustified war should be associated with a huge penalty on par with breaking truce.

Signal boosting this idea here. It sounded rather interesting to me, especially since I habitually begin my games as the weakest count I can find. The idea that you could use fabricate claims jobs instead as a way to force a truce with a scary, bigger neighbor you can't marry into sounds extremely useful. Same if you could use it to farm a bit of money from the deal. Plus, this could mean giving these feud wars their own whacky event names, assuming the devs can use a way to re-localize the name of an ordinary war instead of created a new CB.

Even if this idea were put into place, perhaps you could then choose to reject the apology, or the apology is a backhanded insult, and go to war anyways, perhaps depending on ruler traits. IE, Just rulers are more likely to earnestly apologize and accept Feud Apologies, and an arbitrary one is liable to do whatever he/she wants. Or, zealous rulers will never apologize if you're of a heathen/heretic religion, and cynics (or Tolerance for X) wouldn't take that as much into account. Something like that. It'd make it possible to broadly gauge if you're going to gain a truce or a claim on another based on their personality and opinion of you.

I'm a big fan of deepening the role-playing aspect of CK2, since its key draw to me is its uniquely character-driven dynastic gameplay. That's just my 2 cents, at least.

 

[_Perun_]

Hi! It would be really nice if there could be events or options to destroy holdings or change holdings... Thanks!

Fantastic idea. It would be best to have it after right clicking on a holding's CoA. I would not mind if it cost the same as building a holding from a scratch and take as long to do so. I could even loose all the buildings there and still be happy of having the option.

 

[Burned Coffee]

Well, we will be careful with the balance, and what the AI will do, etc. The Fabricate Claim job is bad for three main reasons:

• Unpredictable Time
• Unpredictable Cost
  
• Unpredictable Outcome

In this case, I prefer a solution that gives more direct player agency. (There will be appropriate penalties for using the new CB.)

Have you guys thought about turning it into a plot? There are already 2 versions of it on the game that I suppose could be expanded.

 

[DarkstarMatryx]

I like the siege option that sounds amazing.
I would love for fabricating a claim to be quicker or easier although I am not sure allowing wars without claims or cassi balli or other already in game reasons would be good unless the penalty would would be severely harsh and just a high prestige or other cost wouldn't be enough. I think it would need to cause an extreme negative opinions of all neighboring countries leaders and their vassals and a moderate negative opinion loss from your own vassal leaders that are not related at least.
That way the act seriously endangers your hold on the throne.