I used to give my king vassals specific counties near the capitals or borders to be able to raise their entire levy in those specific spots.
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I used to give my king vassals specific counties near the capitals or borders to be able to raise their entire levy in those specific spots.
100% agree.
On the note of tech tradeoffs, what vanilla-esque kind of tradeoffs would you like to see for different techs? Im making a balance mod and i really like that idea but i dont have much thought on what i can do except make armies more expensive to maintain with army techs.
On the note of tech tradeoffs, what vanilla-esque kind of tradeoffs would you like to see for different techs? Im making a balance mod and i really like that idea but i dont have much thought on what i can do except make armies more expensive to maintain with army techs.
I just realized that the unraised army speed heavily punishes the AI which only chooses to raise troops outside of their capital if it's being raided, if the capital is occupied or under a siege. This means that if the AI has a massive realm, it will take ages for their army to path find to the front lines. Meanwhile the player can nigh instantly spawn their army with a constant movement speed of 40 units per day. Sure the raised armies do have a 20% speed bonus while in friendly territory, but the unraised armies are not affected by things such as islands or terrain at all from my understanding.
So I propose heavily nerfing unraised levies. Giving them a slight edge over raised troops makes sense since they aren't slowed down by a baggage train, but it shouldn't be faster than the retreat speed which is 4.5 units per day. Make the movement speed 3.5 units per day for unraised levies, it makes no sense to exhaust them when they are mustering with forced retreat levels of speed.
So I propose heavily nerfing unraised levies. Giving them a slight edge over raised troops makes sense since they aren't slowed down by a baggage train, but it shouldn't be faster than the retreat speed which is 4.5 units per day. Make the movement speed 3.5 units per day for unraised levies, it makes no sense to exhaust them when they are mustering with forced retreat levels of speed.
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True. Even so, the cost of embarking and the risk of being attack amid raising your army will still be overlooked.
This was definitivelly one of my earlier experiences.
Back then there were no retinues with higher stats I could use to trash neighbors, even though they are a fraction of the power of MAA, they are still powerful.
So forging a big empire was a much tougher task, I did it, and I was proud of what I had created.
But back then there was no council you could use to appease your vassals, there were no "powerful vassals" mechanic you could abuse to make the biggest threats in your realm unable to take action against you by granding them council positions, and every time your ruler died most of your vassals had absolutely no respect for the new emperor, and rebellions were common.
This, added to the lack of MAA, the reliance on opinions to get more levies from my vassals to field an army, lead to very bloody sucession wars, as you said, maintaining power was hard, and I quickly realized that I had just as many enemies outside of my realm as I had inside.
It was also harder to expand back then and claims were far more important, specially among christians, so I'd start marrying my sons to distant kingdom's family members hoping I could steer the correct people to the throne, so they would generate weak claims for my family members so I could eventually use them to take their kingdoms if, for some reason, a woman or child ended up on their throne.
It was a great experience, and I dare say the "bland" CK2 experience, lacking in many of the DLCs & content I loved was the best experience I ever had thanks to the superior balance at the time.
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Even then, I feel like retinue badly needed some trade-off aside from just costing you more money. Retinues should become powerful political entities on their own as generals might challenge the ruler as well.
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If only that game had a sequel in which they could make such interesting game changes...
I'm being mean, but yes, I've said many times on this forum that Imperator 2.0's military system would be a perfect fit for Crusader Kings.
Make it so that levies can be promoted into man-at-arms (the amount determined by tech and law) and make them require an appointment of a general. Then allow the General to join factions and plot coups. For bonus points make it so that vassals get mad if one of them isn't appointed and you have a real downside to centralizing military power.
I'd also love if commanders could go rouge and stop following orders if their loyalty dropped too low, making your armies controlled by the AI. That is such a cool touch in Imperator, and its perfect for a character drama like Crusader Kings. But that would require much more drastic changes to the military system.
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I think the problem is MaA or retinues are developed as an afterthought for CK. It's matter of "okay, not everyone in middle age is feudal so we need to add some form of professional army". The problem is they design it with no real downside, I think partly due to a close examination of what happened to realms that did have professional armies in the middle ages.
Byzantine armies, Arab armies and even Tang armies revolted just like Roman legions of old. But because the design didn't give any real trade off to professional army, game mechanics for such stuff isn't well developed.
CK3 is suffering from the problem of making feudalism as a base, then tacking on all sorts of new features to allow the player to get away from feudalism but without much of a cost or trade offs.
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It's impossible the game to be harder when we've an AI that doesn't play the game.
Let's start with PDX attempt to stop snowball, drain gold events and cost scaling by era. It made AI constantly broke so they barely build anything and without income they barely have MaA because they can't afford.
AI building priority it's awful, they love fortifications and because they're unable to replace buildings their holdings are almost always awful.
AI decision making for battles it's terrible. They run when they can potentially win a battle and they chase you when they will most definitely get destroyed. This has never been good but RtP advantage changes made it even worse, AI it's even more incompetent now.
AI can't station MaA properly. AI just pick random accolades. Then on top of AI being incompetent you've the absolute lack of balance. Any half decent player can stack bonuses while AI can't.
These things make you basically play the game alone, AI it's there just waiting to get conquered.
Let's start with PDX attempt to stop snowball, drain gold events and cost scaling by era. It made AI constantly broke so they barely build anything and without income they barely have MaA because they can't afford.
AI building priority it's awful, they love fortifications and because they're unable to replace buildings their holdings are almost always awful.
AI decision making for battles it's terrible. They run when they can potentially win a battle and they chase you when they will most definitely get destroyed. This has never been good but RtP advantage changes made it even worse, AI it's even more incompetent now.
AI can't station MaA properly. AI just pick random accolades. Then on top of AI being incompetent you've the absolute lack of balance. Any half decent player can stack bonuses while AI can't.
These things make you basically play the game alone, AI it's there just waiting to get conquered.
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I feel "prevent snowballing" is never going to happen, every strategy game has this problem and not a single one attempted to fix it.
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They can at least attempt to reduce it, that's not an excuse, especially considering how bad it gets in ck3, there's lots of room for improvement. And the game even has a built-in anti-snowballing systems like vassals.
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It is because when games implement it, players instantly find a way to navigate it.
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Yes. But in ck3 case you not only instantly find a way to bypass it, but it's also extremely easy to do. You dont need to minmax your armies to beat everyone with half of your MAAs. You dont need to minmax your characters for everyone to have +100 opinion of you all the time. Sure you can minmax for that, but i dont think trying to combat that is reasonable. However the fact that you dont even need to tryhard to do all that is just bad balance/design and it really shouldn't be excused.
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Currently, other than literally setting the game to a language I can't read, I have not found a way to not completely obliterate the AI even when I'm trying to handicap myself in CK3.
If you read a text on a building saying "bonus to heavy infantry" and you station HI on that county that's enough to break the game and destroy any fun you could have had in your gameplay.
Same goes for building any counties thinking of making money
Or developing
Or trying to play with genetics
Or pretty much anything you can think of, other than spamming activities to delete money.
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Yes that's the problem!
As a minmaxer myself part of the fun it's to break the game and the problem it's not break the game per se. It's how easily or how many steps are required to break the game and right now it requires 1 step. Only thing you need it's a basic knowledge of the game and common sense: I've heavy infantry I'm gonna build barracks where they're stationed.
If I had to make a faith, tailor a culture, build my domain for 200 years I dont care that I broke the game, it actually feels good that I did all of that and managed to break the game. In other hand it's not fun that I break the game for just having 1 brain cell.
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The main thing is the game is build around buff and bonus you can unlock with no real trade offs. Take legacy for example. Once you unlock it you never lose the legacy even if you have a series of shit heirs.
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Tied in with this: with the new 'automated armies' system, the I:R system seems like an even better fit (and were a really great touch!)
I'd go one step further: you can only directly control armies if you, the king, are leading the army. Otherwise, you have to give general instructions to your military leaders and trust them to follow them.
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It would make the relationship balancing game even more important. As suddenly it matters who your generals are, and who you appoint as marshal. Do you want a loyal but incompetent general? Or do you want an excellent but disloyal general leading the armies?
And how do you ensure loyal and competent generals don't get backstabbed by jealous rivals because they think you as the ruler is favouring one general too much?
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I would make it so as you go up the tech ladder you get more development, demesne, and MAA, but you get less levies (to the point you get zero in endgame), vassal taxes (also trending towards zero), negative vassal opinion modifiers that get harder and harder to surmount, and decreased vassal limit. This is to simulate centralization as the middle ages come to a close.
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