We experimented with herd decay during development, but it caused too many situations where you could end up in a negative feedback loop resulting your character essentially being bricked (among other issues); we can ding your existing herd count directly as we do with Zuds now, but negative herd income isn't something we're looking at doing for that reason.
That's understandable but you also have to understand that given the current grumblings in the community that PDX has made it impossible to lose a game that's already numbingly easy, adding in another "don't worry about consequences, you can still work out of any situation you get yourself into" currency doesn't do much to help that perception. It also makes the Steppes seem far less harsh and threatening if you're always going to have herd.
I don't know, I believe I've been able to expand the steppe once after the decision disappeared briefly. Unfortunately all of the options except for one then disappeared and didn't come back. It's very strange how it works, I feel like I'd need to actually look at the code for it to see what is going wrong (like the "Summon Fair Courtiers" decision just straight-up only fires the event once, there's no indication in the code that it was ever intended to give you three courtiers, so it's a mystery to me why the tooltip suggests you will get three).
While I do agree that the game could have some more challenge, I think that generally having the option of potential eventual recovery in the future is a good gameplay decision (ie. lost all land down to county or forced to be adventurer). It sounds like herd decay leads to outcomes that are less losing and having to rebuild and more of stuck in a frustrating limbo where you can’t do anything until you get lucky which is not a fun or good gameplay experience.
Someone linked to a suggestion that seems to work here (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/expand-the-steppe-bugged.1738120/)
That's why!? Not being able to do this decision is ruining my runs of trying to turn all possible land into the steppe.
How can you death spiral if 10 herd on a low fertility land should be less damaging than having 10,000 herd on a low fertility land?
there's a dozen ways you could address this while keeping herd decay. at the most basic, just let a nomad character choose to abandon his realm and become an adventurer, and nudge the player to do this when he's in a death spiral if playtesting says that's needed. it's a soft game over. if we are afraid of death spirals, why not just block the AI from ever declaring on a player who is already at war, or in debt?
after intesive testing it only happens if your landless without any title at all then it crashes at that exact moment and only then, if the team can also fix that crash then we are in for a lot more fun again because it worked before 1.16 update. if you hold a baron level title then no crashes
That is exactly what we want though, a way to actually LOSE. Maybe you can't recover and need to become an adventurer and start over. Maybe your yurt upgrades get rolled back as all but the most loyal courtiers desert you. Make bad decisions have real consequences. The game is too easy!
as much as many wish they would balance based on that, they aren't gonna do it cause adventurer gameplay is locked behind RTP, I do like the idea of yurt upgrades rolling back tho.
There's nothing to fix, because titleless and baron characters are not supposed to be playable. You need to contact whomever made the mod that let you do that to see if they can find another workaround.
