Warfare Overhual Ideas?

[J0k3rzW!ld]

How so? Powerful hardware getting cheaper and cheaper, tools and languages are getting more accessible and easy to use, ai assistance helps as well.

Yes somewhat true, tools are becoming better to ease workload but in the grand scheme of things you still need people to operate/use those tools and people cost money. Studios are growing, developing and/or publishing more games per year. Developing these newer game takes years before they receive any revenue. With bigger studios also more employees, PDX has 7 studios in total and around 650+ employees.

Games are graphically better overall. Gone are the days were we just mainly cared for gameplay mechanics and didn't really care how the game looked to a certain degree. Higher quality and complexity is greater which takes more time to develop, program, draw, and implement. Greater promotion and marketing costs, social media teams and content creation, community and forum management.

This isn't taking to account the general stuff with overhead as a business in general. (building rent/costs, boat load of variety of taxes on profit and employee wages, software and licenses needed etc), the list goes on and on. These titles as a whole cost massive amounts of money to produce and with that huge amounts of risks.

Sometimes I even have to give credit and take a step back when giving reviews about games "not being completed fully before release". in my opinion lots of player-bases get spoiled and take for granted just how much goes into trying to get a good game out. Studios have to make money for us to get more content or successor games, That's law. Even after release studios have to stay on top of patch-fixes, updates, figuring out DLCs, getting feedback., etc.

 

[Silens]

Sometimes I even have to give credit and take a step back when giving reviews about games "not being completed fully before release". in my opinion lots of player-bases get spoiled and take for granted just how much goes into trying to get a good game out. Studios have to make money for us to get more content or successor games, That's law. Even after release studios have to stay on top of patch-fixes, updates, figuring out DLCs, getting feedback., etc.

And I always like to point out that, despite the rising pressure of inflation and price hikes, and game prices stagnating overall, that PDX with its newer titles tends to hand out major parts of newly developed content for free to everyone. That imho improved the size and quality of the updates (if we see the free update and the DLC as one entity), when compared to older PDX games.

I appreciate that level of trust towards the customer, and am always glad that this strategy pays, even if the tone surrounding DLC discussions often gets rough.

 

[Willy Waggler]

With bigger studios also more employees, PDX has 7 studios in total and around 650+ employees.

How many of them are actually meaningfully involved in the development, and not in "gender equality officer"-like positions. Seems like not the games are getting more costly to develop, but just greed and incompetence are the problem.

 

[Tom The Viking YT]

The problem is that their rock paper scissors doesnt even work, rework the damn countering, all it does is make players make 1 unit type armies and never interact with it.

One type of MAA units stacks are so OP, imagine those viking elephant riders with 200 attack lol

 

[Benismann]

One type of MAA units stacks are so OP, imagine those viking elephant riders with 200 attack lol

They're certainly less OP than they were when common buildings just buffed all your MAAs instead of the whole stationing thing we have nowadays, but countering still works to encourage them (and accolades kinda do so too but idc whatever you can have 5 of those) and it sucks.

Elephants are also one of the few units that always fear countering because 1 regiment of pikemen fully counters 2 regiments of elephants (and half counters 4 of them). However I dont think all MAAs should work like that coz that would be incredibly annoying, and even then monoarmies would still be your best bet at dealing any damage whatsoever since mixed ones will just counter each other to the ground

 

[MarkFranz]

Peace Deals are so necessary in this game, this was the very system that should have been enhanced in the transition from CK2 to CK3, yet it stayed the very same system that it was!!

Staying very same is understatement, some is outright degraded.

 

[Jaevelklein]

I wish CK 3 would introduce a battle simulator third party app that plays out battles on actual terrain with actual units

 

[EmperorDweeb]

I wish CK 3 would introduce a battle simulator third party app that plays out battles on actual terrain with actual units

There are mods that'll just open up Medieval II: Total War, or Bannerlord to resolve battles like this

 

[GhostDanny]

There are mods that'll just open up Medieval II: Total War, or Bannerlord to resolve battles like this

So every time I start a battle I need save my game.
Shut it down
Start a new game.
Load the battle.
Do the battle save again.
Quit that game.
Restart Ck3 (which takes ages to load for me)
Walk over to the next battle and repeat the whole process all over again?

And you can forget about me ruining both games at once, my PC can't handle that.

 

[junassa]

I haven't read the whole thread, but with respect to ally AI wars: they have got to get rid of the AI being "skeptical" of player's helping.


Also, since the latest rework, in my experience, in my wars the AI have been suicidal (taking on armies at least twice their size), and cowardly in their own. It's really annoying.

 

[peteoj]

I haven't read the whole thread, but with respect to ally AI wars: they have got to get rid of the AI being "skeptical" of player's helping.


Also, since the latest rework, in my experience, in my wars the AI have been suicidal (taking on armies at least twice their size), and cowardly in their own. It's really annoying.

I still have no idea why they added all those Vassal directives and stuff but didn't think it would make sense to add ai ally directives to force your ai ally to either join their armies to yours, chase down enemy stacks or siege down provinces instead of relying on the stupid ai to know what it's supposed to do.

 

[BeyondExpectation]

So every time I start a battle I need save my game.
Shut it down
Start a new game.
Load the battle.
Do the battle save again.
Quit that game.
Restart Ck3 (which takes ages to load for me)
Walk over to the next battle and repeat the whole process all over again?

And you can forget about me ruining both games at once, my PC can't handle that.

No, you don't need to do all that. The mods integrate them much more smoothly.

 

[vyshan]

So a big thing IMO is that CK3 is a character focused game and thus warfare should also be a character focused thing. What do I mean by this.

Say I am the duke of York and I have a rivalry with the Duke of Lancaster and his family. If he is a commander leading armies then I would want to be a commander, and ideally I would want my son if he is of age or one of my loyal vassals to be a commander. As one of the powerful vassals in England, I would demand this, and if the king did not give me my commands then I would be upset(lose opinion).

Since I am rivals with the duke of Lancaster, as we arrive to say the gates of Edinburgh in England's quest to conquer Scotland, I would want one of two things. First to have the right to lead the assault and get the glory and honor that comes with taking such a location. But if I can't be in charge I would sure as hell not want the duke of Lancaster and his allies in charge, I rather have the king or the duke of Kent in charge at least they aren't the perfidious Lancastrians.

Now instead say there is a civil war between the king of England's sons. at first I might be neutral chosing not to support either son. I don't really care who rules england as long as I get to rule the duchy of York. However the duke of Lancaster decides to support Prince Robert for the throne of England, well know I am pissed. I didn't care about this conflict before but now prince robert is suporting my hated rival, the duke of Lancaster? that just wont do. So I am very likely to make an offer to Prince William to support his claim to the throne of England so that the duke of Lancaster can't increase his power. Or if for some reason we are both fighting for prince Robert, then now Robert has to balance our hatred for each other. Knowing that if he favors one duke over the other that one of us might just bolt from the war and switch sides.

and of course being at war allows plenty of schemes and skullduggery to happen. If I was far more of an intrigue duke instead of a warlike duke, I might use the war to advance my schemes.

This is just a very basic sort of thing I outlined right here but the drama and character focus should be front and center.

Beyond that there are a few other things I think would be good.

Destructiveness
Destructiveness isn't here just in the chance of characters to die, but it is that. But it is about what warfare does to the landscape and towns. What do I mean here? Well, warfare is destructive to the people. Most medieval warfare was raiding with the battles and sieges sprinkled in. and that raiding was more often than not to the peasants then the lords themselves.

Then you have effectively mass slaughter. Things like the first crusade, the harrying of the north, the Mongol conquests and so on. Simulating this should be reflected. The bloodshed spilled in some of these conflicts is destructive. Lots of people die, people who could have been taxpayers, builders, farmers, smiths, soldiers, clerics, and so on.

Then you have the destruction of buildings. Right now buildings don't tend to be destroyed all that much outside of some events. You have looting and pillaging that destroys buildings. From things like Nalanda and the House of wisdom to smaller shrines and buildings.

A slightly related element is the spread of diseases. Diseases can be just as if not more so destructive than the actual armies that are doing the fighting. And diseases spread quickly and easily among armies, especially in this period. Long periods of prolonged warfare with lots of fighting will spread disease. This could actually lead to temporary truces or even ceasefires, after all if you are fighting a civil war and the king dies because he got sick on campaign. Well that changes things.

 

[wthree]

Before making warfare more interesting, the basics need to be fixed.

From the moment the enemy declares whack-a-mole, its just an absolute slog. Chasing down various armies while youre being bombarded with obnoxious multi-chain events that turns the game into something resembling a dodgy streaming website.

1) The automated armies is a step in the right direction, but unfortionately the AI isnt very intelligent so they just sit around dying of attrition while the enemy conquers your capital.
Fix: Automate armies individually (a la Imperator), and be able to give specific instructions (e.g chase down this specific army, protect this area, etc). This turns whack-a-mole into warfare.

2) The UI is quite possibly the worst of any paradox game. This is in dire need of fixing. Simple things like confusingly placed icons so it looks like an army is in a different province, something as simple as selecting an army is a huge undertaking.

3) Events. Events should be slowed down during war, and some just outright shouldn't happen, especially if youre leading the army yourself. CK3 already has a huge problem of annoying repetitive events as it is, but its just so much worse during a war. I dont care about this random courtiers slightly misshapen toenail on a good day, I dont care about it at all during a war.