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Mindel

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Jan 23, 2018
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There are some particularly important features about historical appanages which don't seem to be addressed in the latest Tinto Flavor. I think the mechanic needs to be adjusted to take these into account. The key principle here is that appanages are dynastically intertwined with the royal line, and their gameplay should reflect this.



Appanages should not be easily annexed outside of suitable dynastic conditions

The most dangerous feature about appanages to the French crown was the fact that, once granted, they persist until the cadet branch goes extinct in the male line. In many ways the results end up looking like a slow-moving gavelkind (i.e trainwreck). For their part, the Capetians were saved from the worst of it by pure luck, as many of its younger branches died out while the senior line lasted some three centuries.

Nevertheless, the royal line kept finding out the hard way that, while it may feel natural for a king to grant fiefdoms to younger sons they love, after two or three generations the crown often ends up with an unruly vassal that sometimes sides with foreign enemies. The feeling of kinship is gone by that point.

Appanages should always keep track of the cadet branch it was granted to. Instead of just having some pro forma waiting period before France can start annexing appanages like any other kind of vassal, there should be suitable (and uncommon) dynastic conditions which need to be met before any annexation process can even start.

One is that the appanage must not have a legitimate male ruler from the cadet branch it was granted to. This should be the foundational principle behind appanages : so long as there is still a legiimate heir in the male line, the crown cannot just take the appanage away. At least, not without armed force and a huge hit to legitimacy, and doing so should scare the hell out of other appanages.

The suitable dynastic conditions I can think of are if the succession ends up with

1) a female ruler (if the Salic law ever changes in France, then even this should no longer qualify), or
2) one outside the cadet branch (this should definitely always qualify, although I'm not sure how it would happen).

The appanage should also have a chance to contest any annexation with warfare. It would be natural for foreign powers seeking to weaken France to ally with appanages fighting annexation. Valois Burgundy after the death of Charles the Bold is one of the main examples.



Appanages should always have an important role to play whenever the senior line falls into trouble

If the French king dies without a direct heir, then the appanages would be the natural claimants for the throne. Different appanages should have the opportunity to support this or that claimant, and contest it with civil war. Regardless of who wins, the remaining appanages should retain strong claims on the throne afterwards, for at least a few generations.

Again, appanages are not just any old vassals. They are the uncles and cousins of the royal line. If the royal line should somehow go extinct, of course it is the appanages that would step up to get first claims on the throne.

On a related note, appanages should be similarly important for regencies. The model case is the regency of Charles VI leading up to the Armagnac-Burgundian war, fought between the appanages of Orleans and Burgundy.

When the French crown falls into a regency (Charles VI was schizophrenic), then appanages can contest each other for control over the regency. Warfare should not be the only means to do this, but it should be on the table.

Philippe the Bold and Louis of Orleans struggled with each other to grab royal resources during the regency of Charles VI, but they never erupted into open warfare. Once Philippe died, his son John the Fearless was more brazen and ordered the murder of Louis, setting off an open civil war. The opposing sides started doing things like violently seizing control of Paris. Eventually the Dauphin fell under the control of the Armagnac side, who ordered to assassination of John the Fearless, his son Philippe the Good allied with the English as a result, and the conflicted merged into the war between the Dauphin and England.

What the game needs here is a regency mechanic in which control can be divided between various appanages like a pie chart. Having control means being able to, among other things, redirect the royal treasury into your coffers, so this should be a big deal worth fighting over. If the king should die, then the appanage with greatest control over the regency would naturally be in the best position to claim the throne. Finally, it should be possible for appanages to go to open warfare with one another for control over the regency (this is different from fighting to seize the throne for yourself), and even to call foreign allies into the fray.



What appanages should do for EUV

Playing an appanage should come with an aspect of CK-like dynastic competition and backstabbing. You are playing a member of the royal house, with all the family tensions implicit. Sometimes everybody is on the same team, but other times you may be waiting on the sidelines for a chance to help your favorite cousin take the throne. When this opportunity arises, the game should provide appanages with multiple avenues (both peaceful and not) to gain power (including economic power, trade/industry monopolies, etc).

With the right mechanics in play, I think appanages could potentially be the most interesting form of domestic/internal gameplay that EUV can so far implement. But without this, they feel like ordinary vassals with a different name tag slapped on.



The game needs an attractive reason for an overlord to create appanages. One idea : more effective control

This should not be a situation where every human player absolutely wants to annex every appanage they can as soon as they can. That is not proper game balance. There needs to be some real benefit aside from some boost in legitimacy, which is not nearly enough. There were good reasons for French kings to create appanages in the past, and the player should also have convincing reasons to create appanages in certain situations.

One idea I have in mind is that appanages should give you a way to extend control more effectively to regions distant from the capital. I would impose an onerous limit on how much land the French crown can effectively control at the beginning of the game, essentially as a limitation of feudal methods. This should incentivize France to create appanages, because having a friendly appanage with full control over Burgundy may well give you more money (through vassal fees) and soldiers than you would get by holding Dijon directly but weakly, at the cost of having an independent appanage control those troops.

Later on, as France advances to more modern bureaucracy, its feudal-era control limitations will fall away. Then the appeal of having appanages should decline, and the crown should have more incentive to integrate them directly into the royal domain.



Appanages should not be limited to France

There is no reason is particular for only France to have access to appanages. They should be open to any nation with the right set of laws about dynastic inheritance. Any feudal ruler seeking to extend firm control over an unruly region should have an incentive to create an appanage there. Even China should be able to create appanages, although that would be silly because appanages would offer no advantage in the face of Chinese bureaucracy. This should be a sandbox feature.
 
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Another way in which appanages could be made more attractive would be to have rulers of appanages function as extra members of the French cabinet. So if the French king has some brilliant younger son whose stats he doesn't want to go to waste, he could give that son an appanage, thereby giving himself an extra minister with very high stats. This way, a kingdom with many appanages would have a huge pile of extra ministers they could use for all kinds of specialized tasks, beyond that of an ordinary nation. Running the country can be more efficient when it becomes a whole-effort family endeavor.

This is the kind of trade-off I imagine might actually compel players to create appanages. It has to be something much better than a legitimacy bump, and maybe even improved control by itself is not enough. But having 10 more ministers than your foreign rivals might just be enough to compel them to adopt appanages themselves. And that is the kind of game balance we want.

Of course, the same high stats cannot be guaranteed for that son's heirs...
 
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Just to demonstrate how versatile these proposed appanage mechanics can be, we can also use them to model the political situation in England leading up to War of the Roses.

Here, we have the Lancaster cadet branch seizing the throne way back in 1399. But by 1455 Henry VI was effectively incapable as a ruler, and the cadet branch of York (modeled as an appanage) fights to gain control of the regency. This starts off with peaceful intrigue, but devolves into open warfare, where the Yorkists succeed enough to push through a law giving itself the throne after Henry VI dies, using the claim that the York branch gained back from the time when the Lancasters overthrew Richard II in 1399. Then we have more back and forth fighting until the Yorkists manage to kill the royal heir (Henry VI's son Edward) and then murder Henry VI to claim the throne by force.

Interestingly enough, here we see an appanage controlling the regency act to try to keep the king in a regency against his wishes.

So yeah. We need a good mechanic to model dynastic struggles, and I think a suitably developed version of appanages (along with extra mechanics for regencies representing control by various powers) would be a good way to implement this.

Regents being able to force their rulers to stay in regency, and even kill the rulers to seize the throne themselves, should be a possibility I think Tinto should incorporate into the game. These kinds of things were not possible before because regents were just abstract characters rather than player-controlled states. But once we have appanages effectively becoming regents this opens up a new world of interesting possibilities for regent gameplay.
 
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I think the core issue here is that the ruler of the vassal country cannot be a part of the overlord's council or really interact with the suzerain's internal politics in any meaningful way.

There was a suggestion I gave for Georgia where the 2nd highest ranking vizier, the Atabag (almost always the prince of Samtskhe since 1334) should be given a privilege for the nobility as a way to represent their status as such powerful lords. Upon the death of the Atabag, the king could choose to grant this privilege to some other lord to not centralise the power around Samtskhe, or something.

Maybe something similar can be done in France..?
 
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Appanages should not be limited to France

There is no reason is particular for only France to have access to appanages. They should be open to any nation with the right set of laws about dynastic inheritance. Any feudal ruler seeking to extend firm control over an unruly region should have an incentive to create an appanage there. Even China should be able to create appanages, although that would be silly because appanages would offer no advantage in the face of Chinese bureaucracy. This should be a sandbox feature.
Are there any historical examples of appanages outside of France and Georgia?
 
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Seriously — is there anyone who actually chooses to play only as a subject? ? ? and why?
Under right circumstances that sounds extremely appealing yeah, even if I don't see it very plausible in EU5
I find the idea of not having full initiative and instead having to do a lot of reactive movements based on what AIs do to be quite fun, but it does require an AI that feels less like an algorithm and a bit more like a human, which is probably not very likely to happen
 
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Under right circumstances that sounds extremely appealing yeah, even if I don't see it very plausible in EU5
I find the idea of not having full initiative and instead having to do a lot of reactive movements based on what AIs do to be quite fun, but it does require an AI that feels less like an algorithm and a bit more like a human, which is probably not very likely to happen
if AI actually gets stronger, especially one that truly understands the game mechanics, it would be basically unbeatable against a human. That’s the common critique: an AI that just runs on strict algorithms can’t match human creativity and adaptability.

So realistically, for AI to be truly effective in GSGs, someone bold enough has to step up and actually play against a learning, evolving AI so it can improve. Otherwise, it’ll just remain a scripted algorithm doing reactive moves, like you said, nothing more human-like.

Until then, AI won’t be more than a fancy set of rules reacting to player input — which is kinda the frustrating status quo for a lot of us.
 
if AI actually gets stronger, especially one that truly understands the game mechanics, it would be basically unbeatable against a human. That’s the common critique: an AI that just runs on strict algorithms can’t match human creativity and adaptability.
I explicitly didn't say a competent AI, but an AI that feels more like a human, i.e. one that feels fun to interact with, not necessarily one that is extremely challenging.
For instance, in an ideal world we should be able to describe what kind of personality an in-game AI has, and it should even change it over the course of the campaign. EU4 had some moderate attempts at it with ruler personalities but it never really worked.
This is different from a "competent" AI because a competent AI would technically also be predictable and samey

It's a moot point in any case, because yeah, I don't really believe we can expect to get such AI
 
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Are there any historical examples of appanages outside of France and Georgia?
Anywhere that didnt routinely kill their brothers for the throne
There are some particularly important features about historical appanages which don't seem to be addressed in the latest Tinto Flavor. I think the mechanic needs to be adjusted to take these into account. The key principle here is that appanages are dynastically intertwined with the royal line, and their gameplay should reflect this.



Appanages should not be easily annexed outside of suitable dynastic conditions

The most dangerous feature about appanages to the French crown was the fact that, once granted, they persist until the cadet branch goes extinct in the male line. In many ways the results end up looking like a slow-moving gavelkind (i.e trainwreck). For their part, the Capetians were saved from the worst of it by pure luck, as many of its younger branches died out while the senior line lasted some three centuries.

Nevertheless, the royal line kept finding out the hard way that, while it may feel natural for a king to grant fiefdoms to younger sons they love, after two or three generations the crown often ends up with an unruly vassal that sometimes sides with foreign enemies. The feeling of kinship is gone by that point.

Appanages should always keep track of the cadet branch it was granted to. Instead of just having some pro forma waiting period before France can start annexing appanages like any other kind of vassal, there should be suitable (and uncommon) dynastic conditions which need to be met before any annexation process can even start.

One is that the appanage must not have a legitimate male ruler from the cadet branch it was granted to. This should be the foundational principle behind appanages : so long as there is still a legiimate heir in the male line, the crown cannot just take the appanage away. At least, not without armed force and a huge hit to legitimacy, and doing so should scare the hell out of other appanages.

The suitable dynastic conditions I can think of are if the succession ends up with

1) a female ruler (if the Salic law ever changes in France, then even this should no longer qualify), or
2) one outside the cadet branch (this should definitely always qualify, although I'm not sure how it would happen).

The appanage should also have a chance to contest any annexation with warfare. It would be natural for foreign powers seeking to weaken France to ally with appanages fighting annexation. Valois Burgundy after the death of Charles the Bold is one of the main examples.



Appanages should always have an important role to play whenever the senior line falls into trouble

If the French king dies without a direct heir, then the appanages would be the natural claimants for the throne. Different appanages should have the opportunity to support this or that claimant, and contest it with civil war. Regardless of who wins, the remaining appanages should retain strong claims on the throne afterwards, for at least a few generations.

Again, appanages are not just any old vassals. They are the uncles and cousins of the royal line. If the royal line should somehow go extinct, of course it is the appanages that would step up to get first claims on the throne.

On a related note, appanages should be similarly important for regencies. The model case is the regency of Charles VI leading up to the Armagnac-Burgundian war, fought between the appanages of Orleans and Burgundy.

When the French crown falls into a regency (Charles VI was schizophrenic), then appanages can contest each other for control over the regency. Warfare should not be the only means to do this, but it should be on the table.

Philippe the Bold and Louis of Orleans struggled with each other to grab royal resources during the regency of Charles VI, but they never erupted into open warfare. Once Philippe died, his son John the Fearless was more brazen and ordered the murder of Louis, setting off an open civil war. The opposing sides started doing things like violently seizing control of Paris. Eventually the Dauphin fell under the control of the Armagnac side, who ordered to assassination of John the Fearless, his son Philippe the Good allied with the English as a result, and the conflicted merged into the war between the Dauphin and England.

What the game needs here is a regency mechanic in which control can be divided between various appanages like a pie chart. Having control means being able to, among other things, redirect the royal treasury into your coffers, so this should be a big deal worth fighting over. If the king should die, then the appanage with greatest control over the regency would naturally be in the best position to claim the throne. Finally, it should be possible for appanages to go to open warfare with one another for control over the regency (this is different from fighting to seize the throne for yourself), and even to call foreign allies into the fray.



What appanages should do for EUV

Playing an appanage should come with an aspect of CK-like dynastic competition and backstabbing. You are playing a member of the royal house, with all the family tensions implicit. Sometimes everybody is on the same team, but other times you may be waiting on the sidelines for a chance to help your favorite cousin take the throne. When this opportunity arises, the game should provide appanages with multiple avenues (both peaceful and not) to gain power (including economic power, trade/industry monopolies, etc).

With the right mechanics in play, I think appanages could potentially be the most interesting form of domestic/internal gameplay that EUV can so far implement. But without this, they feel like ordinary vassals with a different name tag slapped on.



The game needs an attractive reason for an overlord to create appanages. One idea : more effective control

This should not be a situation where every human player absolutely wants to annex every appanage they can as soon as they can. That is not proper game balance. There needs to be some real benefit aside from some boost in legitimacy, which is not nearly enough. There were good reasons for French kings to create appanages in the past, and the player should also have convincing reasons to create appanages in certain situations.

One idea I have in mind is that appanages should give you a way to extend control more effectively to regions distant from the capital. I would impose an onerous limit on how much land the French crown can effectively control at the beginning of the game, essentially as a limitation of feudal methods. This should incentivize France to create appanages, because having a friendly appanage with full control over Burgundy may well give you more money (through vassal fees) and soldiers than you would get by holding Dijon directly but weakly, at the cost of having an independent appanage control those troops.

Later on, as France advances to more modern bureaucracy, its feudal-era control limitations will fall away. Then the appeal of having appanages should decline, and the crown should have more incentive to integrate them directly into the royal domain.



Appanages should not be limited to France

There is no reason is particular for only France to have access to appanages. They should be open to any nation with the right set of laws about dynastic inheritance. Any feudal ruler seeking to extend firm control over an unruly region should have an incentive to create an appanage there. Even China should be able to create appanages, although that would be silly because appanages would offer no advantage in the face of Chinese bureaucracy. This should be a sandbox feature.
These mechanics sound really cool, I hope some get ported over, appanages being in cabinet; and their proximity to the king changing between generations from brother, to uncle, to cousin, to distant cousin, is something I hope gets in. John the Fearless assassination is an example of trying to stay relevant despite being that much more distant
 
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So realistically, for AI to be truly effective in GSGs, someone bold enough has to step up and actually play against a learning, evolving AI so it can improve.
It's funny that you skipped over the part where someone actually needs to create this learning, evolving AI, which also needs to run efficiently enough your PC or laptop can run literally hundreds of instances of it at the same time.
 
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I also feel like rather than Appanages being insta-annexed if their male line dies out, if the male line dies the Appanaage should instead be put into a PU with the king and they can choose whether or not to annex the territory. However they can also choose to re-grant the appaange to a son of theirs instead. So the appanage would stay on the map and you'd still have to work to incorporate the lands(or to dole it out once more) rather than insta grabbing it.
 
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sounds like fun to me

if not actually creating tons of opms, some sort of mechanic going on underneath would be good imo
One of the main issues with using actual countries for it would be trying to place them all in 1337, it'd end up weakening countries based on the amount of sources we have on their dynasty members or subdivisions, and usually we have more info on the "historical winners" so weakening only them seems kinda wrong.

If there was some sort of governor system for family members, where they're necessary to use to maintain stability but have a small risk of declaring independence, I think it would be an accurate enough depiction of the region.
 
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