A while ago I started using the More interactive vassals mod by perl (and other people). I combined it with big battle view and battle ground commanders.
The combined result was a nice change from vanilla gameplay, with wars becoming more engaging and personal. It wasn't perfect, and a couple of balancing issues became apparent for large realms.
More importantly, despite the radical changes this mod introduces, I found it to be totally fun and playable -- so imo this is a viable path towards improving war mechanics without massively overhauling the game.
So basically more interactive vassals allow lieges to call their vassals to wars where they are leaders. Vassals who stand to lose land in a war join automatically. There is also a betray liege mechanic, where your vassals can join the enemy when war is declared. This mod has an extensive list of game options -- so it's very customizable. Highly recommended overall.
Big battle view and battle ground commanders just add a bit more flavor to the war interface.
The game was definitely a lot of fun early on, both as an adventurer and as a duke/small king. At some point the number of vassals balloons and with it the size of the armies you can muster, making big empires snowballing much more likely. However it does feel like an issue which can be fixed with some balancing and fine tuning.
A bigger issue was not the fault of this mod per se, but rather a flaw in the game itself which the mod highlight -- namely, the complete absence of any sensible way to coordinate army plans among allies. Clearly, there is some AI logic there, where the allies are divided into groups, i.e. there is a main stack with the army leader and some allies, and other supporting stacks scattered around (which is necessary to distribute the supply consumption).
But this logic is completely hidden from the player. The only way to coordinate with AI allies is to change what my army is doing, pause, observe the change in what their armies are doing, etc.
Recently a tooltip has been added, which allows you to see intended action of an army -- but it is tedious to look up and requires you to dig deep into tooltip trees.
Adding a simple interface to the *already existing behavior and functionality* seems like an easy way to improve things.
Anyway, the point is, it would be really nice to add a way to organize armies and coordinate actions and plans.
Something simple, minimal. Anything would be better than the current obscure and somewhat convoluted way to manage wars.
The combined result was a nice change from vanilla gameplay, with wars becoming more engaging and personal. It wasn't perfect, and a couple of balancing issues became apparent for large realms.
More importantly, despite the radical changes this mod introduces, I found it to be totally fun and playable -- so imo this is a viable path towards improving war mechanics without massively overhauling the game.
So basically more interactive vassals allow lieges to call their vassals to wars where they are leaders. Vassals who stand to lose land in a war join automatically. There is also a betray liege mechanic, where your vassals can join the enemy when war is declared. This mod has an extensive list of game options -- so it's very customizable. Highly recommended overall.
Big battle view and battle ground commanders just add a bit more flavor to the war interface.
The game was definitely a lot of fun early on, both as an adventurer and as a duke/small king. At some point the number of vassals balloons and with it the size of the armies you can muster, making big empires snowballing much more likely. However it does feel like an issue which can be fixed with some balancing and fine tuning.
A bigger issue was not the fault of this mod per se, but rather a flaw in the game itself which the mod highlight -- namely, the complete absence of any sensible way to coordinate army plans among allies. Clearly, there is some AI logic there, where the allies are divided into groups, i.e. there is a main stack with the army leader and some allies, and other supporting stacks scattered around (which is necessary to distribute the supply consumption).
But this logic is completely hidden from the player. The only way to coordinate with AI allies is to change what my army is doing, pause, observe the change in what their armies are doing, etc.
Recently a tooltip has been added, which allows you to see intended action of an army -- but it is tedious to look up and requires you to dig deep into tooltip trees.
Adding a simple interface to the *already existing behavior and functionality* seems like an easy way to improve things.
Anyway, the point is, it would be really nice to add a way to organize armies and coordinate actions and plans.
Something simple, minimal. Anything would be better than the current obscure and somewhat convoluted way to manage wars.