Given the thread about how this game is broken and @PDX-Trinexx 's reply there I decided it might be useful to open a new thread for various more specific suggestions that people might have. If CK3's devs had a "custodians team" that took a significant amount of time and effort to revisit, fix, change, and rebalance core parts of the game, what would we (the veteran CK3 players who want to keep returning to it) like them to do?
Hopefully if we redirect actual suggestions here from the original thread and keep the non-constructive complaints there it would be useful for the devs and they'll do something about it.
I'll start, and I apologize beforehand for the wall of text.
Even if you disagree with some of what I'll say please add your own input.
The AI
As many have said, the AI needs improvement, and not the kind of improvement that just gives it flat buffs. Since the AI plays the game against the player it should know how to play it.
The AI hardly ever builds new MAA and appropriate buildings. Money unspent = wasted potential. The AI currently seems to be weighted towards saving up a large treasury and then spending it on mercs when a war starts (or on activities otherwise), and that is much less effective than buying new MAA and buildings in the first place.
I understand that the way each character spends their gold is decided by their traits, which determines their "Economical Archetype", but the decisions they make are currently very bad by any standard, resulting in it being too easy for the player to grow and win wars. The AI should always be weighted towards optimal decisions to some degree, and not just make random bad decisions whenever it accumulated enough gold.
Demonstration from a fresh game:
Here I played in Ireland and switched to the Kaiser of the HRE once he started a war to demonstrate the incompetence of the AI. The Kaiser chose to spend 550 gold on a mercenary company of 400 pikemen while not building any MAA since the start of the game. His enemy is the duke of Veletia, a tribal who has a smaller army overall, 0 cavalry and mostly relies on skirmishers - while the Kaiser has heavy infantry. The Kaiser would have been better off keeping his money or investing in an income-generating building to offset the extremely expensive maintenance cost of his army. He also did not appoint any accolades, nor did he appoint a Master of the Horse (for extra knights and knight effectiveness) but at least he stationed his MAA regiments and switched his marshal to the task that increases knight effectiveness.
Modifiers
There are some additive modifiers that have too many sources. Sometimes it does not take a lot of active effort to stack them to the point they overwhelm any sense of balance and challenge in the game, and it can happen without even noticing. If a modifier can get stacked without deliberate planning then it has no strategy, which is pretty bad in a strategy game.
Let's look at some of the worst offenders:
Number of knights + knight effectiveness:
whenever these two modifers are sufficiently stacked you get space marines that can win any battle. One can understand their strength from the CK3 wiki:
While medieval space marines can be fun, the issue lies in how easy it is to obtain these modifiers. Let us look at the knight situation of two random tribes from the same game above:
The duke of Samogitia has 71% more knight effectiveness than his almost identical neighbor, the duke of Prussia, thanks to one trait - Chivalric Dominance. The poor lad pays for a Master of the Horse to deliver a knight effectiveness bonus of 8%, as if that's going to help.
Many rulers around them have only 110%, by the way.
And I wish the 75% from that one trait was the only broken source of knight effectiveness - we have buildings that increase it by 25% every upgrade, a cultural tradition that increases it by 100%, a type of accolade that give 40%/80%, up to 15% from each artifact, and various modifiers from a billion other sources.
The situation with number of knights is similar:
This is the number of knights of William the Conqueror after his conquest of England. +4 from a perk, +4 from martial, +3 from master of the horse are some very strong and very accessible modifiers
Prowess (and other stats):
As we've seen before, each point of prowess grants a knight 100 damage and 10 toughness. A knight with 20 prowess deals 2000 damage before modifiers, which is as much as 200 levies. That's fine. The issue is that most sources of prowess, just like many other modifiers, are all over the place. You do not deliberately train to build up your prowess, you just happen to have a lot of it. The result is that late enough into the game you are guaranteed ridiculously high stats due to being aware of their sources.
Let's look at the prowess of William the Conqueror:
William is, of course, an exceptionally powerful individual. But what did he do to acquire such power?
Well, he took two perks in the Gallant perk tree for +8 and he bought a mace for 100 gold for +6. He also got +2 from his culture, +2 from his house and +4 from his actual personality.
Those are, of course, rookie numbers, as any player knows that with enough time and gold one can become ironman (the superhero) through artifacts alone.
There is a rather simple solution to the stacking of prowess:
Opinion modifiers (and relationships):
Waaaaaay too many of them, and once again they're all over the place. A character's opinion of you is a sum of 10 to 30 different modifiers and that, put simply, is a bad system. When you rule over 10 vassals and each of them has 10 reasons for being mad at you you aren't even going to open the opinion tooltip, you're just going to throw a feast to get that +50 - or give them some gold - and forget about them. Any kind of big opinion bonus that you can get is just a bandaid solution to the very real problem of this being a non egaging system. And just like the other modifiers above, opinion tends to get stacked in the late game and you get lots of vassals with +100 opinion of you even if you murdered their whole family.
Prince Imrahil sure does love Aragorn. In fact, he loves him so much I'm pretty sure he still would even if Aragorn killed his mother and slept with his wife.
And have no doubt: it absolutely does happen in vanilla playthroughs.
The worst and most meaningless thing about these huge lists of opinion modifiers is the relationships. Being a friend with someone grants you +60 opinion with them, which is just slightly better than getting properly drunk with them in a good feast and about as good as giving them a title. The way you acquire friends and rivals also seems to be pretty random and depends entirely on events, unless you happen to have access to the befriend scheme.
To prove the point of this rant and understand how better the opinion and relationship system could be and how important it is that it improves (this game is all about characters and their relationships, after all) I'd like to compare it to a different PDX game, which used to have the same system but changed it into something better - Stellaris.
In Stellaris relations between empires range between 1500 to -1500 and are the sum of the opinions of both sides towards eachother. General opinion modifiers like having the same traits are worth roughly as much as they do in CK3, but you also have the option to improve - or harm - opinion.
Opinion has tiers: -1500 to -750 is terrible relations, -750 to -300 is tense relations, -300 to 300 is neutral relations, 300 to 750 is positive relations and 750 to 1500 is excellent relations. The tier of relations, as well as other circumstances, determine the AI's attitude towards another empire. An empire's attitude towards another is the main thing that determines what kind of diplomacy they'd be willing to do, and there are like 30 of them.
The reason this system is better is that it is able to simulate the building of a relationship in a continuous manner, and it is able to tell you with a single word what your relationship actually is. It is extremely clear to understand your relationships with everyone in Stellaris and it is impossible to give someone a gift to bump their opinion of you to the point of a true friend (well, maybe if you give them a lot of gifts).
You don't even have to open the tooltip to understand their opinion of us, one word is sufficient: suspicious. The way this system works enables relationships to be shown in a compelling manner.
Fundamentally such a system carries the same amount of information the current system does, so it is not like implementing it in CK3 - which has way more characters than Stellaris does empires - will hurt performance.
Here is how this can be applied to CK3:
I could have seduced Sauron if the mod devs didn't disable it.
More difficulty for higher titles
In RPGs leveling up does not make the game easier. You get more power, but so do your enemies. The game knows to continue giving you challenges appropriate to your level. In CK3, however, rising to a higher rank absolutely makes the game easier, because you get more troops, gold and prestige but the challenges around you stay the same. As for the challenges inside your now larger realm, well, the factions don't do anything most of the time.
As long as you remain stronger than your hater vassals you can continue growing and snowballing.
To demonstrate the issue, let's look at the factions that the HRE has a few years after the beginning of the game, to see whether playing as the emperor is any challenge:
I would even go so far to say that CK3 doesn't have a factions system. It merely has a revolts system.
Another issue is the inflation of resources. Here we can see a very modest inflation of piety of prestige, that happens in most successful playthroughs where one stays emperor-rank:
The gold income can also be ten times as large.
I propose to hit two birds with one stone by once again looking at how Stellaris implemented factions - for the last time, I swear.
The Stellaris faction system isn't that good for Stellaris itself, in my opinion, but it holds a good principle around which the CK3 factions system could be overhauled.
The factions in Stellaris are a representation of your pops in accordance with their values. Supposedly, your pops join factions according to their ethics, making the respective factions stronger. The factions all have an approval rating which is determined by the laws and actions of your empire - different factions want different things according to their values. The reward for pleasing a faction is more unity, based on how strong that faction is.
Now imagine if CK3's factions system wasn't a rebellions system directly imported from CK2, but rather actually represented what your vassals were thinking about your rule. If only the game categorized each vassal in accordance with their values and expectations.... Oh wait! It does:
The vassal stances could be the basis of a much better factions system.
In a well-balanced faction system, the larger the realm gets the more factions there are and the harder it is to please everyone.
Hopefully if we redirect actual suggestions here from the original thread and keep the non-constructive complaints there it would be useful for the devs and they'll do something about it.
I'll start, and I apologize beforehand for the wall of text.
Even if you disagree with some of what I'll say please add your own input.
The AI
As many have said, the AI needs improvement, and not the kind of improvement that just gives it flat buffs. Since the AI plays the game against the player it should know how to play it.
The AI hardly ever builds new MAA and appropriate buildings. Money unspent = wasted potential. The AI currently seems to be weighted towards saving up a large treasury and then spending it on mercs when a war starts (or on activities otherwise), and that is much less effective than buying new MAA and buildings in the first place.
I understand that the way each character spends their gold is decided by their traits, which determines their "Economical Archetype", but the decisions they make are currently very bad by any standard, resulting in it being too easy for the player to grow and win wars. The AI should always be weighted towards optimal decisions to some degree, and not just make random bad decisions whenever it accumulated enough gold.
Demonstration from a fresh game:
Here I played in Ireland and switched to the Kaiser of the HRE once he started a war to demonstrate the incompetence of the AI. The Kaiser chose to spend 550 gold on a mercenary company of 400 pikemen while not building any MAA since the start of the game. His enemy is the duke of Veletia, a tribal who has a smaller army overall, 0 cavalry and mostly relies on skirmishers - while the Kaiser has heavy infantry. The Kaiser would have been better off keeping his money or investing in an income-generating building to offset the extremely expensive maintenance cost of his army. He also did not appoint any accolades, nor did he appoint a Master of the Horse (for extra knights and knight effectiveness) but at least he stationed his MAA regiments and switched his marshal to the task that increases knight effectiveness.
- The decision of when to spend its money should derive from the number of years it would be able to keep its army raised - especially if it plans on starting a war. The Kaiser shouldn't declare a war if his treasury after hiring the mercs only lasts him for 1 year. In all likelihood the AI calculated that the treasury would be sufficient before hiring the mercs, hiring them was a mistake.
- The AI should evaluate strength primarly using the strength of MAA, and take counters into account. Basically each unit's weight should stem from the regiments' actual modified stats, and modified by whatever the enemy (or future enemy) has. The evaluation currently gives levies too much weight, resulting in the AI consistently losing to the player's superior MAA.
- When the AI chooses to build a new MAA regiment it should be considering how good that MAA is given all the buffs that apply on it, including buffs that would apply after stationing it, and also the counters that its future enemies have (if it plans on having a future enemy).
- Obviously during a war the AI should also consider strength evaluation and MAA counters when choosing to hire a merc company.
- When the AI chooses to build a new building, it should focus on tax-generating buildings if its income is too low to support its raised army for too long, and otherwise on buildings that boost the MAA that it actually has.
Modifiers
There are some additive modifiers that have too many sources. Sometimes it does not take a lot of active effort to stack them to the point they overwhelm any sense of balance and challenge in the game, and it can happen without even noticing. If a modifier can get stacked without deliberate planning then it has no strategy, which is pretty bad in a strategy game.
Let's look at some of the worst offenders:
Number of knights + knight effectiveness:
whenever these two modifers are sufficiently stacked you get space marines that can win any battle. One can understand their strength from the CK3 wiki:
While medieval space marines can be fun, the issue lies in how easy it is to obtain these modifiers. Let us look at the knight situation of two random tribes from the same game above:
The duke of Samogitia has 71% more knight effectiveness than his almost identical neighbor, the duke of Prussia, thanks to one trait - Chivalric Dominance. The poor lad pays for a Master of the Horse to deliver a knight effectiveness bonus of 8%, as if that's going to help.
Many rulers around them have only 110%, by the way.
And I wish the 75% from that one trait was the only broken source of knight effectiveness - we have buildings that increase it by 25% every upgrade, a cultural tradition that increases it by 100%, a type of accolade that give 40%/80%, up to 15% from each artifact, and various modifiers from a billion other sources.
The situation with number of knights is similar:
This is the number of knights of William the Conqueror after his conquest of England. +4 from a perk, +4 from martial, +3 from master of the horse are some very strong and very accessible modifiers
- Most of the knight modifiers that currently exist should instead become modifiers that improve the effectiveness of marshal tasks. This way they would still be considered powerful even if they are turned into much smaller bonuses - since the marshal can do other stuff beside improving knight effectiveness. Otherwise they should all be lowered to the same kind of scale. 200% knight effectiveness should be the result of some very deliberate end-game stacking that required a long time to pull off - normally you should have between 100% and 140%.
- Martial should not increase the number of knights, nor should a perk and neither should the master of the horse. +4 is few for England but a lot for Nottinghamshire, so the number of knights one has should be pretty static. You want more knights? Build an academy.
- The Only The Strong tradition is way too strong and should have a bigger drawback.
Prowess (and other stats):
As we've seen before, each point of prowess grants a knight 100 damage and 10 toughness. A knight with 20 prowess deals 2000 damage before modifiers, which is as much as 200 levies. That's fine. The issue is that most sources of prowess, just like many other modifiers, are all over the place. You do not deliberately train to build up your prowess, you just happen to have a lot of it. The result is that late enough into the game you are guaranteed ridiculously high stats due to being aware of their sources.
Let's look at the prowess of William the Conqueror:
William is, of course, an exceptionally powerful individual. But what did he do to acquire such power?
Well, he took two perks in the Gallant perk tree for +8 and he bought a mace for 100 gold for +6. He also got +2 from his culture, +2 from his house and +4 from his actual personality.
Those are, of course, rookie numbers, as any player knows that with enough time and gold one can become ironman (the superhero) through artifacts alone.
There is a rather simple solution to the stacking of prowess:
- Make the primary sources of prowess be the Blademaster trait and the prowess education trait set. Those traits are currently criminally underused. They should give a LOT more prowess, be experience-based and be hooked up to the train commanders marshal task, to duels, to fighting in battles, to anything relevant. Most current sources of prowess should only give experience bonus and thus improvement would require actual effort, investment or risk.
- It makes sense that artifacts give prowess but lower that amount a bit.
- The same philosophy as above would really improve how the other stats are handled as well. ALL education traits should be experience-based and many of the current personality traits should give an experience bonus to them instead. We would be able to level them up through various proactive means like activities. Make us work for our high-stat characters instead of just lucking out on traits.
- Genetic traits are overpowered.
Opinion modifiers (and relationships):
Waaaaaay too many of them, and once again they're all over the place. A character's opinion of you is a sum of 10 to 30 different modifiers and that, put simply, is a bad system. When you rule over 10 vassals and each of them has 10 reasons for being mad at you you aren't even going to open the opinion tooltip, you're just going to throw a feast to get that +50 - or give them some gold - and forget about them. Any kind of big opinion bonus that you can get is just a bandaid solution to the very real problem of this being a non egaging system. And just like the other modifiers above, opinion tends to get stacked in the late game and you get lots of vassals with +100 opinion of you even if you murdered their whole family.
Prince Imrahil sure does love Aragorn. In fact, he loves him so much I'm pretty sure he still would even if Aragorn killed his mother and slept with his wife.
And have no doubt: it absolutely does happen in vanilla playthroughs.
The worst and most meaningless thing about these huge lists of opinion modifiers is the relationships. Being a friend with someone grants you +60 opinion with them, which is just slightly better than getting properly drunk with them in a good feast and about as good as giving them a title. The way you acquire friends and rivals also seems to be pretty random and depends entirely on events, unless you happen to have access to the befriend scheme.
To prove the point of this rant and understand how better the opinion and relationship system could be and how important it is that it improves (this game is all about characters and their relationships, after all) I'd like to compare it to a different PDX game, which used to have the same system but changed it into something better - Stellaris.
In Stellaris relations between empires range between 1500 to -1500 and are the sum of the opinions of both sides towards eachother. General opinion modifiers like having the same traits are worth roughly as much as they do in CK3, but you also have the option to improve - or harm - opinion.
Opinion has tiers: -1500 to -750 is terrible relations, -750 to -300 is tense relations, -300 to 300 is neutral relations, 300 to 750 is positive relations and 750 to 1500 is excellent relations. The tier of relations, as well as other circumstances, determine the AI's attitude towards another empire. An empire's attitude towards another is the main thing that determines what kind of diplomacy they'd be willing to do, and there are like 30 of them.
The reason this system is better is that it is able to simulate the building of a relationship in a continuous manner, and it is able to tell you with a single word what your relationship actually is. It is extremely clear to understand your relationships with everyone in Stellaris and it is impossible to give someone a gift to bump their opinion of you to the point of a true friend (well, maybe if you give them a lot of gifts).
You don't even have to open the tooltip to understand their opinion of us, one word is sufficient: suspicious. The way this system works enables relationships to be shown in a compelling manner.
Fundamentally such a system carries the same amount of information the current system does, so it is not like implementing it in CK3 - which has way more characters than Stellaris does empires - will hurt performance.
Here is how this can be applied to CK3:
- Relations would range between -1500 to 1500 with five tiers, and be the sum of both sides' opinions, just like in Stellaris. This way opinion modifier stacking - which happens way too often - would simply cease to be an issue. Double-sided opinion boosts such as alliances or dynasty would become worth twice as much.
- Some of the actions that currently give temporary opinion modifiers would become an equivalent of "improve relations". Not all, only ones that are clearly more personal and friendship-building, such as sway, being in activities together, and being pleased from various events. Thus my relationship with people wouldn't just jump by "+50", it would grow towards friendship as a result of our actions.
- Friendship and rivalry would be the result of being in the high or low tier of relations respectively, in addition to actually becoming a friend via event. Same for best friend and nemesis. No more randomly befriending people without realizing it. You would also break up with your lover or soulmate if your relationship reaches a tier that's too low.
- Friend, rival, best friend, nemesis, lover, ward, guardian, mentor, student, soulmate, intimidated, terrified, obedient, and much more would all be a character's attitude towards another. A character would always have an attitude towards us - even "neutral". In fact it would help to have a bunch of neutral attitudes, as most of your vassals and the rest of the world would be various shades of neutral. Those attitudes would be more important than opinion in diplomacy.
- In particular, having a positive attitude should be required to get enough acceptance for a good marriage, because right now getting high value alliances through marriage is way too easy. Alliances should be the result of cultivating a relationship.
- All attitudes would have their own icons displayed on a character's portrait, like friends and rivals currently do.
- Events that do things like create a new friendship or rivalry would have the natural effect of immediately switching the attitude and a big opinion change.
- Hostile actions such as murder or vassal revocations should lower opinion much lower, so that they could completely sour relations.
- The trust system, where being allies and honoring deal builds up trust which aids in diplomacy deals acceptance, is also a good system to replicate.
- Some of the general opinion modifiers currently in game, in particular the ones from diplomacy and fame, should become something else - opinion improvement speed, trust growth speed, whatever. There's just too many modifiers and they drown out the opinion maluses that are supposed to be important.
I could have seduced Sauron if the mod devs didn't disable it.
More difficulty for higher titles
In RPGs leveling up does not make the game easier. You get more power, but so do your enemies. The game knows to continue giving you challenges appropriate to your level. In CK3, however, rising to a higher rank absolutely makes the game easier, because you get more troops, gold and prestige but the challenges around you stay the same. As for the challenges inside your now larger realm, well, the factions don't do anything most of the time.
As long as you remain stronger than your hater vassals you can continue growing and snowballing.
To demonstrate the issue, let's look at the factions that the HRE has a few years after the beginning of the game, to see whether playing as the emperor is any challenge:
I would even go so far to say that CK3 doesn't have a factions system. It merely has a revolts system.
Another issue is the inflation of resources. Here we can see a very modest inflation of piety of prestige, that happens in most successful playthroughs where one stays emperor-rank:
The gold income can also be ten times as large.
I propose to hit two birds with one stone by once again looking at how Stellaris implemented factions - for the last time, I swear.
The Stellaris faction system isn't that good for Stellaris itself, in my opinion, but it holds a good principle around which the CK3 factions system could be overhauled.
The factions in Stellaris are a representation of your pops in accordance with their values. Supposedly, your pops join factions according to their ethics, making the respective factions stronger. The factions all have an approval rating which is determined by the laws and actions of your empire - different factions want different things according to their values. The reward for pleasing a faction is more unity, based on how strong that faction is.
Now imagine if CK3's factions system wasn't a rebellions system directly imported from CK2, but rather actually represented what your vassals were thinking about your rule. If only the game categorized each vassal in accordance with their values and expectations.... Oh wait! It does:
The vassal stances could be the basis of a much better factions system.
In a well-balanced faction system, the larger the realm gets the more factions there are and the harder it is to please everyone.
- Vassals would have to choose a faction or suffer a prestige malus (due to not taking parts in the affairs of their realm).
- There will be different factions for different vassal stances, but several ones for the same stance might exist for different kingdoms, or different cultures or religions or something.
- Each faction will have an approval which will change based on the actions of the liege. Particularly high approval would make a faction loyal and particularly low approval would make it disloyal, and that would have an impact on the relations between the vassals in it and the liege.
- Each faction would expect different things, in accordance with their vassal stance and maybe other variables, like culture values, depending on how these factions are actually defined.
- There might be various generic ways to raise faction approval temporarily by spending gold, prestige or piety, thereby providing a "vent" for resource inflation to keep the realm stable.
- Factions should be able to split - if a faction becomes disloyal but it includes loyal members the loyalists should be able to quit and form their own faction. Same for the other way around.
- Disloyal factions would be able to choose a cause for rebellion - which would work the same way the factions currently do. Other factions will be able to join the same cause, and if there is enough strength behind a cause they would all rebel. Members of loyalist factions will always side with the liege and neutrals will get the event that allows them to pick a side.
- Bonus points if the factions can fight eachother for some reason, and vote together in elections.
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