I don't need late game to be more difficult, I want late game to feel more alive

[ray243]

There's a comment about asking for a more difficult or more challenging game in CK3, I think ultimately this is perhaps not the right question to ask. Rather than just about making the game more difficult, I much rather prefer a late game to feel more immersive and more alive.

By this I mean the game should have more features and characters that can make running a huge empire, and ensuring your dynasty remained in power of that huge empire engaging. The bigger your empire, the more you have to balance a wide array of groups and people with different vested interest, and you need to feel like you're constantly networking and appeasing different groups, or playing groups against each other to keep the peace.

Having a super powerful conqueror to fight, or a big plague to deal with doesn't make late game more fun just because it's more challenging. Instead, late game can be more immersive if we get more features that make politicking more challenging, managing the different personalities of your vassals more engaging, or how you have to think about reforming and adapting your empire under different pressure to make it more meaningful.

 

[LACKADAISICAL]

The bigger your empire, the more you have to balance a wide array of groups and people with different vested interest, and you need to feel like you're constantly networking and appeasing different groups, or playing groups against each other to keep the peace.

I would really enjoy some content focusing on making culture matter more beyond what buildings you can build in counties.

Becoming a giant empire almost always means presiding over increasingly diverse realms, but diversity is not really a very relevant game mechanic since county culture doesn't really matter and converting religion across huge swaths of land is trivial.

I'd love to have more incentives to mollify certain cultural groups by creating religiously/culturally protected vassal realms. You *can* create religiously protected minority vassals right now just for RP purposes, but mechanically it is the worse strategic move compared to creating a realm where all vassals have the same faith/culture. It'd be fun for it to actually serve a purpose.

For historical inspiration, I think of various events where ethnicities outside the ruling caste formed important parts of the administration of empires. Jewish leaders like Samuel ibn Naghrilla running Muslim taifa states, Mamluk Turk slave warriors running the military in Egypt, Zanj slaves causing chaos in Mesopotamia, stuff like that.

Basically, governing a large, ethnically diverse Empire should feel different from running a small, homogeneous kingdom, and there should be some mechanics representing the level of discord or harmony between the different groups in your realm. We have cultural acceptance, but its impact on the game is pretty minimal--it steadily increases just by sharing a realm even if you completely shut out certain cultures from power, which is weird, and even when it is low it doesn't really do anything.

It might be cool to have cultures within your realm have a "cultural leader" character representing them, who could press the monarch to grant more concessions in the form of landing more characters of their culture, refraining from converting counties, etc. Because cultures with no landed characters become more or less completely passive and docile.

 

[ray243]

I would really enjoy some content focusing on making culture matter more beyond what buildings you can build in counties.

Becoming a giant empire almost always means presiding over increasingly diverse realms, but diversity is not really a very relevant game mechanic since county culture doesn't really matter and converting religion across huge swaths of land is trivial.

I'd love to have more incentives to mollify certain cultural groups by creating religiously/culturally protected vassal realms. You *can* create religiously protected minority vassals right now just for RP purposes, but mechanically it is the worse strategic move compared to creating a realm where all vassals have the same faith/culture. It'd be fun for it to actually serve a purpose.

For historical inspiration, I think of various events where ethnicities outside the ruling caste formed important parts of the administration of empires. Jewish leaders like Samuel ibn Naghrilla running Muslim taifa states, Mamluk Turk slave warriors running the military in Egypt, Zanj slaves causing chaos in Mesopotamia, stuff like that.

Basically, governing a large, ethnically diverse Empire should feel different from running a small, homogeneous kingdom, and there should be some mechanics representing the level of discord or harmony between the different groups in your realm. We have cultural acceptance, but its impact on the game is pretty minimal--it steadily increases just by sharing a realm even if you completely shut out certain cultures from power, which is weird, and even when it is low it doesn't really do anything.

It might be cool to have cultures within your realm have a "cultural leader" character representing them, who could press the monarch to grant more concessions in the form of landing more characters of their culture, refraining from converting counties, etc. Because cultures with no landed characters become more or less completely passive and docile.

I think it's a matter of actually introducing mechanics that can add to late game experience, instead of merely making it about having bigger enemies to fight with your mongol doomstacks or your black death coming in and wiping out development.

I want a game that even if you're playing as a large peaceful empire without many foreign threats of diseases, you still have lots of fun as the main imperial dynasty family ensuring your dynasty stays in power by marrying off to the right clans, working with newcomers to undermine old powerful clans, or just to ensure the main powerful groups and ethnicities are not trying to kill each other within your empire.

Be a management simulator, not just a conquest game at late stage.

 

[ray243]

A lot of it can do things with game design. Ideally, a player starting the game should start small, a small noble estate, a small county, or a landless adventurer should be easy to manage on a management side because there's not much you need to do.

Things are simple, direct and you can manage things personally. But the game should scale in challenge as you become someone managing something bigger and bigger in scope. We don't need super smart AI, just immersive AI that makes it more challenging to manage a bigger realm because there's more people with different views you have to balance.

Empires are hard to manage long-term because you needed to ensure not just your good ruler can manage it, but also the dynasty can survive even a few bad rulers. A lot of the game design mechanics are built around making the game easier the more powerful you are. Unfortunately, this means the longer a player plays the game, the less challenge they will face.

 

[guiskj]

I have a slim degree of hope that the innovation rework the Dev video alluded to can help with this.

Right now in CK3, playing the first 100 of the 867 start feels almost identical to playing the last 100 years of the game, largely because the innovations are almost all about giving bonuses instead of unlocking new gameplay.