Suggestions for Improved Moddability

[blackninja9939]

@blackninja9939 how much trouble would make adding something to customize siege queue in province? Like "protected_by = b_xyz" parameter in landed_titles, which would skip marked holding in siege unless opponent is in control of b_xyz holding.

Not investigated the siege order much but it just goes in holding order so it shouldn't be too hard to make it put "protected" provinces at the end of the queue. However I have not checked out that code so there is a fair chance we have some more in depth stuff with our ordering instead of a simple queue like I would expect.

 

[blackninja9939]

This isn't a new request, but more of a question for the devs because recently several people have stumbled over this modding-hurdle:

If there's still time for Holy Fury, could you maybe take a look at modifiers?
Because atm, they are more or less a mess, and it's very counter-intuitive to guess which ones could be used in which scope.
For example, disease_defence is only available in a province scope, which is at first confusing because it is used in hospitals, which at first glance seem to be holdings (although they, indeed, are in some way directly part of the province). Similarly, fertility is listed in the wiki as being applicable to holdings, but it is - like only applicable to patrician family palaces afaik. In a similar way, certain things like e.g. ai modifiers (ai_rationality etc) are only available for traits, but not character modifiers, whereas others like e.g. retinuesize are only available in character modifiers, not traits - even though both mechanics are in the same character scope.

So base line, modifiers are somewhat inconsistent in where they can be applied. To allow for more creative ways of modding, it would be helpful if they could be adjusted to a certain degree. Such as that all modifiers currently available in character modifiers are also available for traits, and vice versa. Or that all some modifiers available special holdings (hospital, tradepost, family palace) are also available in regular holdings.
Additionally, it would be great to also have some more modifiers ported to scopes where they make sense, such as build_cost_modifier being available in holdings (because that's where buildings are built), although that would be a separate request and of lesser urgency.

Well, I hope you devs have some time for modding improvements in between the time needed to implement the gazillion of Holy Fury features - and if you have, maybe consider this here

Modifiers are an entirely case by case basis thing, there is no way to just "improve" them as a system as nothing ties together their actual individual usage really. Hence why they are so inconsistent. Doing such an overhaul as you suggested would not be feasible, one would have to go through every single modifier and hook it into the releveant use locations in the code and in some cases create that hook in to begin with.

So whilst a great suggestion which would be very nice there is not much chance of that happening. Some specific really bad ones might be possible to have someone look at, but all of them not so much

 

[blackninja9939]

Such large changes are unlikely to happen to CK2 but I'll keep them in mind for the future of the scripting language.

The meta-script is actually pretty fine for the system, it just evaluates it as normal and will log errors once you get it wrong. Under the hood it effectively just makes a virtual file and writes the effect/trigger and fills in the parameters then parses that virtual file as normal to generate the real output of the effect/trigger. So you get the same error logging as if you had just manually typed out the entire thing.

 

[blackninja9939]

Whilst a species system would be very nice that would be a pretty big overhaul as obviously none of the code remotely works on the assumption there is anything but humans, as can be seen with the fact Glitterhoof ends up in funny positions so often.
So I would not put any stock in that happening

 

[blackninja9939]

The marriage interaction is still hardcoded, unhardcoding all the interactions would be a nice thing, but doing all of them and making sure the performance does not suffer would be a pretty big undertaking.

 

[blackninja9939]

Could we at least have (as someone has said before) an option to toggle whether nomads can skip "infidel" marriage restrictions? And even better, a parameter (something like "can marry infidel nomads = ") settable on religion, culture, government, etc that would forbid marriage with nomads of other religions.

They would default to vanilla parameters so no files would be needed to be changed for vanilla.

I mean, even though marriage is hardcoded, religions have quite a degree of control ("intermarry =", "hostile_within_group =", game rules, etc.) yet nomads skip all this so it'd be good to be able to control it.

Regards.

I'll look at that, will likely not make it in for Holy Fury though if I do get time to do it.

 

[blackninja9939]

Will we at least get something for women who're able to have kids past 45? An elimination of that hard rule on the AI behavior rejecting all marriages involving women past a certain age? That's a big problem for any game with female rulers and anything where women can live and have children significantly longer than in vanilla.

There is a define that handles that already, unless you mean you want more custom behavior for fantasy mods with multiple species?

 

[blackninja9939]

Are you referring to NDefines.NCharacter.MAX_CHILD_BIRTH_AGE? That affects the maximum age at which women can give birth, but doesn't seem to affect how the AI handles marriage - they will still claim women approaching 45 are too old. If there's a different define controlling that, it doesn't seem to be on the wiki.

Oh does the AI not take that into account? It should be doing so I think so if it doesn't that would be an oversight/bug.

 

[blackninja9939]

That seems to be the case - my mod bumped the max age really high then added menopause via trait so some fantasy races can be fertile longer, but marriage proposals still get rejected for the woman being too old.

I'll take a look, won't make it in for HF but can probably get it in for a patch after it.

 

[blackninja9939]

has_religion_feature trigger, currently is completly inflexible and gating a ton of content, hampering custom religions

a way to fix this problem, avoiding big compatibility issues between mods, would be to add ability to tag religions as fulfilling this trigger, maybe from religion's file, or even by a command, similar to the new set_ commands

Wanna be a bit more specific in what you mean?

 

[blackninja9939]

I'm working on an off-map power and while off-maps are fairly moddable, including the UI, I feel they are missing some features which'd go a long way towards making them more flexible.

• A way to change the off-map ruler without killing the current one. As it is now, set_offmap_holder kills the current one and I couldn't find a different way to replace the ruler.
• A way to specify the default death reason for the off-map. As it is now, it calls death_offmap and that explicitly mentions China.
• A way to, in the interface modding, display portraits/dynasty CoAs/title CoAs of dynamically specified targets or at least something other than being limited to the hardcoded "ruler, ruler dynasty, governor, naps, tributaries". Could be done through using persistent_event_targets.
• A way to give an off-map minor title to any character to remove them from the map, normal event evaluation and all that jazz without having them be a ruler.

These are mostly born out of trying to make a mod where the off-map's power dynamic is supposed to be very, uh, dynamic, with characters replacing each other as the ruler fairly often. This is hindered by the facts that once placed on the throne, the ruler is there for life, one way or another; the characters in the dynamic being on-map so affected by diplomacy, events and such (this can be worked around, but it's a lot of extra work); and, perhaps most importantly for my purposes, not being able to actually show the characters in the offmap's window.

If anything else comes to mind, I'll likely edit this post instead of making another.

Possible sure, but this is a pretty obtuse request and I am hesitant to think this is worth spending a lot of time on to get all that stuff in, it seems like an odd way to be using the offmap powers to begin with as opposed to just an actual title which you then give a variable and couple of title decisions on if you want to emulate the offmap currency and decisions on.

Maybe I am just not following your use case, as this seems like the offmap system might not be the best thing to do this with if you are wanting to ping pong rulers back and forth a lot?

 

[blackninja9939]

Unhardcode merchant republics

Wanna be any more vague?

I've already unhardcoded a few things, the remaining things I can think of is the elections and the trade posts. Unless there is something you are thinking of other than that??