Maybe solving difficulty question is not that complicated after all

[Aztlantix]

So long story short - recently I've tried ObfusCKate mod for CK3, and let me tell you: oh boy, this is a gamechanger! To quote myself from a different thread:

When you not know everything about everyone down to minute details regarding personality traits (including inheritable ones), army size, wealth size etc.. It forces you to play a lot more careful and less abusive. I strongly believe that integrating ObfusCKate into base game as a game rule will instantly fix all talking of arcade gameplay.

It honestly amazing how lack of info forces you to play the way medieval feudals lived, here are couple of examples:

1) In vanilla game I almost always marry lowborn spouses with inheritable traits like genius, beautiful etc. Now, since you dont have this inforamition at hand, you will instead generally pick high-born partner.

2) In vanilla for some reason you always have info on wealth and military might of distant realms, which allows you to pick them out one by one, snowballing in the process. Now with fog of war you never know for sure whether you opponent is stronger than you or not. You can start a war and lose, which almost never happens to experienced players in vanilla.


Instead of risking losing l instantly knowing whether you potential spouse a genius or not, you would now

Well the obvious answer would be - if you like it then play with the mod, but the truth is that mods like this are developed by single or, if rarely lucky, by small team of several people and due to nature of modding will always be somewhat buggy, clunky or not up to date. I think this idea of informational "fog of war" is very fitting for CK3 and has the right to be at least considered to be implemented.


I'm really hoping that devs will contribute some thoughts on this matter in this thread: was this ever discussed as a solution to difficulty issue, do they have plans on integrating it and if not - why?

 

[Greifental]

You know what? You didn't even need a mod for it. You can just give yourself the same restrictions on marrying or who to fight war against or with whom to ally. There's nothing holding you back from fighting stronger foes for roleplay reasons from time to time.

I wonder, does the mod only change things for the player or for ai versus ai aswell?

 

[Alphonce]

It’s indeed a good first step to encourage more strategic decision-making, and especially to make diplomacy and intrigue far more useful. For example, we could send spies to uncover the personalities, interests, and plots of our rivals. And let’s not forget the language mechanic — currently it serves almost no purpose, but it could be used to get to know neighbors of different cultures and build strategic relationships .

 

[Benismann]

It's an interesting mod, but older paradox games managed difficulty way better than CK3 and they had stuff like ledger, allowing you to see way more than you see in CK3.
Also community manager posted somewhere some day (i think on reddit?) that obfuscate isnt really that popular and creating systems like that would take quite some time. That's also why it cant be optional, because that's way too much effort and dev time for a feature 5% of the playerbase will use.
And imo the first priority should be the AI, even things that mods can change like buildings/MAA weights, are really wacky in vanilla, and it wouldnt be hard nor performance-heavy to fix them.

 

[kimuyama]

They could perhaps do a ofbusCKate lite: an option to obfuscate the skill points behind lables from "excellent" to "poor" like in job aptitudes, and something similar with opinion.
Of course, that would really be a mostly cosmetic change, something more robust like using a diplomat or spymaster to find out their real talent would be appreciated

 

[Torredebelem]

So long story short - recently I've tried ObfusCKate mod for CK3, and let me tell you: oh boy, this is a gamechanger! To quote myself from a different thread:



It honestly amazing how lack of info forces you to play the way medieval feudals lived, here are couple of examples:

1) In vanilla game I almost always marry lowborn spouses with inheritable traits like genius, beautiful etc. Now, since you dont have this inforamition at hand, you will instead generally pick high-born partner.

2) In vanilla for some reason you always have info on wealth and military might of distant realms, which allows you to pick them out one by one, snowballing in the process. Now with fog of war you never know for sure whether you opponent is stronger than you or not. You can start a war and lose, which almost never happens to experienced players in vanilla.


Instead of risking losing l instantly knowing whether you potential spouse a genius or not, you would now

Well the obvious answer would be - if you like it then play with the mod, but the truth is that mods like this are developed by single or, if rarely lucky, by small team of several people and due to nature of modding will always be somewhat buggy, clunky or not up to date. I think this idea of informational "fog of war" is very fitting for CK3 and has the right to be at least considered to be implemented.


I'm really hoping that devs will contribute some thoughts on this matter in this thread: was this ever discussed as a solution to difficulty issue, do they have plans on integrating it and if not - why?

ObfusCKate(*) is very restrictive, intrusive and take out the part of the game that allows the player to peruse and marvel at how other characters "feel". As other users pointed out before me, it is also not that popular.

To compare, I once included the mod "Immersive Realm Espionage"(!) - a much less restrictive implementation that also hides information - into Dark Ages and experienced a significant negative net number of players over about a month. That was the only time I experienced such and it stopped immediately after I removed that mod from being included in Dark Ages. Certainly, devs are not going to spend their time on fringe preferences.



(*) - I personally have nothing against ObfusCKate and have all respect for the modder that implemented primely a very interesting idea. As with many others however, it is not my cup of tea as it restricts too much info from my curious eyes. Even if much more realistic, I find it much funnier for my personal taste to be able to picture other's personalities and skills. Things would change if as @Alphonce suggested, a whole gameplay loop was dedicated to such implementation.

(!) - I cannot recommend enough Immersive Realm Espionage even if it will also somewhat limits what the player knows about other characters

​

 

[peteoj]

Tried obfuscate and while it's great, all it does is hide the fact that you're not omniscient anymore but the same rules still apply as the ai is still fundamentally unable to play the game and the player still gets coddled by unbalanced modifiers.

 

[Ttrgw]

The only effective way to counter eugenics is to remove traits like genius or make them non-inheritable.
That way, players wouldn't feel compelled to engage in eugenics in a game set in a time where it wasn't even a concept.

 

[MummyMonk]

The only effective way to counter eugenics is to remove traits like genius or make them non-inheritable.
That way, players wouldn't feel compelled to engage in eugenics in a game set in a time where it wasn't even a concept.

I'm in – where do we sign up for devs to implement this? An aspect of the game that fits nowhere immersion-wise