One reason this Steppe DLC is unbalanced: Herd is immortal. Your passive Herd change is always positive no matter how bad the steppe season is.

[Rex Hiemis]

I agree; it surprised me first. Didnt Paradox think about this? Even the plague raging havoc in the region did nothing to my herd.

 

[r3xm0rt1s]

I love how they made court cost AND expected grandeur scale with pure realm size and then just threw that thing in for some reason. Why.

Those are fine, mostly. Just be rich. Perhaps it is too cheap to have high grandeur when you are small. The problem is that court grandeur levels cap at 10, and therefore a large realm cannot maintain buffs from being above expected grandeur.

Raise the maximum grandeur level to 20, keep grandeur expectation capped at 10, and cap the grandeur over expected level at 10. Problem solved. How to gain 200 court grandeur? The burden is on the modifier stacker. Personally, I like artifact manager mod to merge them as there are few ways to keep growing in power otherwise once I reach stat caps.

 

[MirrorMonkey2]

Btw one of the important reasons why nomads are OP for no reason. I guess they wanted to emulate CK2 when hordes were retinue, and retinue was always raised. Buy why can I raise my 20k levies from my feudal vassals together with my 3k MAA and put them on the border before the war starts, while other feudals can't? What's the point of giving nomads this buff?

And let me guess, does the AI do that or is it YET ANOTHER thing which can on be exploited by the player to make the game EVEN EASIER?
I‘m not talking just the Greatest of Khans. If this is a feature then ideally most rulers should use this suprise tactic in most wars.

 

[Benismann]

Those are fine, mostly. Just be rich.

I mean yes, Im just saying that those 2 mechanics dont work together. If both expected and cost scale with realm size, why r small realms getting increased bonus from being above expected? Their expected AND costs to maintain it are as low as they can get already....

 

[Benismann]

And let me guess, does the AI do that or is it YET ANOTHER thing which can on be exploited by the player to make the game EVEN EASIER?
I‘m not talking just the Greatest of Khans. If this is a feature then ideally most rulers should use this suprise tactic in most wars.

AI does declare wars with armies raised but in my observations - usually to it's own detriment :Р
and ofc they dont do the "raise troops beforehand and station them near your border"

 

[lo24681]

Update, per Reddit passive herd decay ain’t coming

https://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKings/comments/1kgte1w/pc_update_1161

 

[Benismann]

Update, per Reddit passive herd decay ain’t coming

https://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKings/comments/1kgte1w/pc_update_1161

This is very sad. Trinexx said it lead to deathspirals or smth like that, but..... just base it on current herd? You can deathspiral if your herd decays by certain percentage every month/year or whatever. Or at least it will be very hard to do so.
The only problem that has, as i figured out from my implementing herd decay in my own mod, is that if the whole steppe happens to roll a bad season (assuming seasons are impactful enough, so not an issue in vanilla) then everyone is just screwed. But that sounds more like a seasons system problem

 

[lo24681]

I think at the very least they should add it in the code, that way modders can do it if they don’t want to.

 

[Benismann]

I think at the very least they should add it in the code, that way modders can do it if they don’t want to.

like what?... domicile_monthly_herd_add exists and so do scalable modifiers

 

[Ral Rednaxela]

This is very sad. Trinexx said it lead to deathspirals or smth like that, but..... just base it on current herd? You can deathspiral if your herd decays by certain percentage every month/year or whatever. Or at least it will be very hard to do so.
The only problem that has, as i figured out from my implementing herd decay in my own mod, is that if the whole steppe happens to roll a bad season (assuming seasons are impactful enough, so not an issue in vanilla) then everyone is just screwed. But that sounds more like a seasons system problem

There's a bullet point in the balance changes that looks promising but I won't be able to check out how it works exactly until this evening:

• Added Herd loss during a White Zud for Nomadic rulers: 10% of their current herd during a White Zud, 20% during a Havsarsan Zud

But, I agree it's disappointing they're so against the idea. There's definitely ways to implement it without getting into a death spiral, if it's so much of a problem just turn it off if your Herd bank is below a certain amount.

 

[Benismann]

There's a bullet point in the balance changes that looks promising but I won't be able to check out how it works exactly until this evening:

• Added Herd loss during a White Zud for Nomadic rulers: 10% of their current herd during a White Zud, 20% during a Havsarsan Zud

But, I agree it's disappointing they're so against the idea. There's definitely ways to implement it without getting into a death spiral, if it's so much of a problem just turn it off if your Herd bank is below a certain amount.

Yeah but that's only once at season start. they last what, 10 years? So even if you get white Zud back to back all the time, that's only like -1% yearly. That means to maintain your 100k herd in those conditions you would have to have a MERE 84 herd per month. Now boot up the game and see for how long your herd income stays at less than 100 :Р

 

[WTH666444]

There's a bullet point in the balance changes that looks promising but I won't be able to check out how it works exactly until this evening:

• Added Herd loss during a White Zud for Nomadic rulers: 10% of their current herd during a White Zud, 20% during a Havsarsan Zud

But, I agree it's disappointing they're so against the idea. There's definitely ways to implement it without getting into a death spiral, if it's so much of a problem just turn it off if your Herd bank is below a certain amount.

No other PDX game is worried about death spirals. Justification doesn‘t sit right with me.