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[...]I think if CK3 tries to limit blobbing without giving you something to do in the meantime, it would be a mistake.

Even if I abhor the blobbing concept as a fantasy scenario devoid of any realism with the added drawback of getting old pretty fast in terms of gameplay (it's just rinse and repeat ad nauseum), I agree with you here.
Tasking players with more to do and different objectives to pursue - other than mindless growth - while adding depth in internal and external realm politics are the way to go. This coupled with powerful civil wars caused by the sheer size of the realm in geographic, cultural or religious terms.
Finally, turning wars - even wars the player has the clear advantage on paper - much more riskier would also refrain the players from going about conquering the entire map.
 
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I'm not sure this topic is very relevant, though. CK3 is very character focused. What matter are your dynastic achievements.

I have the havbit to say: if you're aiming to found a mega empire in CK2, you're still learning the game", and I think it will be true in CK3 too. You conquered the world, and now what?

That being said, it would be nice to have more indepth factions and a more troubled empire management, as long as it's fun and interesting. But as long as it works roughly like in CK2 I really don't think it's a big issue. We're going to play characters. What matters more is how each character will influence gameplay. If I can conquer the world and management an enormous realm with any character, then it's a problem, and that's the kind of situation from CK2 I don't want to have in CK3. It doesn't make much sense that a hated coward with low stats is able to preserve high authority in a mega empire.
 
A part of the internal issue is that faction is rarely self-beneficial. Increase council power, what does a vassal get from it if he isn't a council member? Install claimant, what can pretender give them? Establishing independence, is there something that can directly be gained from it?

The 13th century is full of cases that display vassalic desires. Those seemingly being to neglect their obligations and rule as a de facto sovereign, but reap the benefits of being a nominal subject. Thus, the lords that are outside of the king's inner circle should try to force their liege into granting them relief from military servitude and taxes, but continue insisting that the liege defend them during their hour of need. Essentially turning the king into a figurehead and the realm into a confederation.
 
My solution, in light of development feature: allow realms with lots of development and such access to much more hedonistic and decadent events.

So, you rule Constantinople/Baghdad/etc? Get more access to decadent events, especially if you're not ascetic warrior/monk/etc. Male it weaken your family, raise the stakes for civil wars and betrayals.

In short, make decadence available to all and based on how well realm is doing. Even if you as a ruler will be able to abstain, your court and family will become naturally more corrupt, bringing potential risks to your House or even Dynasty, as well as a realm.

EDIT: also, removal of teleportation.
 
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It's simply too cheap to take 100k of troops from Constantinople to Paris, if by sea would be a little more expensive, if by land just divide the army into 10 that will not have atrittion, regional armys do not exist, simply the game leaves you almost For free take the whole army of your kingdom and take it to the other side of the world.
 
For example, you are being invaded by the king of England in Normandy, you as king of france can simply raise all possible soldiers in the southern region of france to help you in the north, in reality that would be a nightmare to do in the short term. term would only be enough to form an army with the peasants and northern lords.
 
This could tie in to warfare mechanics: in CK2, almost every war is anachronistically total (the AI always commits their full force). There should be harsh political and economical penalties for over-committing levies, and this'd give the rebels a fighting chance as their parent empires have to face them on a more even footing than in CK2.

Well there are reasons why feudal levies rarely campaign for a long duration abroad. CK3 should stimulate the harsh cost of not your manpower working the fields and letting the crops rot.

In the real world, the further afield you bring your troops, the more expensive campaigns become.
 
One of the ways I've found expansion to be too easy is pushing claimants. It would be nerfable if there was some interior/exterior separation so that when you push a strong claimnt their land outside your kingdom is out of your control. Then making a duke in your lands a king outside of it would be genuinely a possible threat to yourself.
 
Well as you need your family in control of land of foreign states it wouldn't be great to make it so there were none of those foreign states for then to do so.
 
Well there are reasons why feudal levies rarely campaign for a long duration abroad. CK3 should stimulate the harsh cost of not your manpower working the fields and letting the crops rot.

In the real world, the further afield you bring your troops, the more expensive campaigns become.

And then we pray the AI understands the same economics :)
 
Even if I abhor the blobbing concept as a fantasy scenario devoid of any realism with the added drawback of getting old pretty fast in terms of gameplay (it's just rinse and repeat ad nauseum), I agree with you here.
Tasking players with more to do and different objectives to pursue - other than mindless growth - while adding depth in internal and external realm politics are the way to go. This coupled with powerful civil wars caused by the sheer size of the realm in geographic, cultural or religious terms.

I agree. CK2 has a problem here because blobbing is required in order to access some of the more interesting game features, particularly ones added by later DLC. Religious reformations, bloodline creation, acquisition of certain rare artifacts, and Great Works are only feasible if you can reach certain levels of prestige, piety, or control of both a large area of territory and sometimes specific provinces. If I just want to have a dynasty of really great Dukes of Cumbria, the game doesn't really give me many rewards for doing that. My prestige won't get very high, I won't found any bloodlines (5k prestige is a stretch for a mere Duke unless you go all-in on a winning crusade), and I won't be able to afford to build any great works. Even if generations of wise leadership ensures a century of peace, I don't get much to show for it.

On my most recent game, Saint Rainulf founded four bloodlines and gained innumerable valuable artifacts, but he did it by winning 15+ wars, including two crusades, and founding an empire. If he had stayed in Apulia and promoted culture, learning and economic growth, nobody would have remembered him. It would be nice if there were some positive reward for staying at home, building a strong local culture and succeeding on some dimension that doesn't require constant war.
 
I hope they end the coalition mechanic of CKII. It may have served its purpose of limiting empires to grow to large to quickly but it was unrealistic and annoying.

My idea of limiting blobbing is to let diplomatic distance matter inside an empire. It simply is unrealistic that I can order my vassal in Persia at the same time as the vassal in Italy.
I would propose to let the power of the ruler shrink with growing distance as the vassals get more and more autonomy. Depending on the strength of the ruler these distant vassals could switch to become tributaries if the conditions are right or leave outright.
Wonderful idea mate. They should do this with almost all of Paradox games. Challenging and historically accurate. 10/10.
 
Another solution would be have a stronger internal threat. If you don't integrate recently conquered land and make no effort to do so you should face the risk of massive peasant revolts.
 
To properly manage aggressive territorial expansionism, or "blobbing" as we prefer in the colloquial, there are a few steps that could be taken, I think. One, restricting consanguineous marriages, so that individuals with a common ancestor within three or four generations cannot marry. This is not only representative of history (Habsburg inbreeding is truly a much later development), but also limits the easy accumulation of titles in the family by marriage, and forces outmarriage and more interesting inheritance patterns. No more cousins marrying cousins marrying cousins until all titles become as one because they're the only available marriage partners around with the appropriate dignity to avoid a prestige hit.

Furthermore, removing certain flashpoints for conflict would likely go a long way, as well. Dual or multiple homage, for example. If you manage to maneuver, marry, or murder you way into the duchy of Aquitaine, if that merely results in you also being the duke of Aquitaine in vassalage to the king of France and now paying taxes for it rather than seizing it wholesale and incorporating it into your realm, well, that's going to be a much less blobby outcome, wouldn't you say? Furthermore, the defender in a war of total foreign subjugation (not, emphatically, a claim war - titleholders with a blood claim should always be much better regarded than outright usurpers) should be able to marshal rather greater enthusiasm among their subjects than the aggressor, unless the defender is totally despised by his subjects: see, the English in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Attrition should be high, as well, to reflect the losses suffered due to prolonged guerrilla warfare.

The cost of warfare is another thing that should be addressed. War is expensive, and kings should have other, constant drains on their treasury and expenses to consider. The bulk of revenue should be derived from the king's personal possessions and holdings, with feudal vassals contributing to the realm in a military rather than financial manner, and extraordinary measures being available to raise emergency funds at the risk of alienating one's feodality. Both the Lionheart and King John often had to resort to exceptional means to finance their ambitious expeditions, and in this they were hardly alone among medieval rulers ("In 1188, for example, the pope authorized, and the princes collected, the so-called Saladin tithe, a direct tax of 10 percent imposed on all clerical and lay revenues so as to finance the Third Crusade").
In theory the duty of the noble vassal towards his lord was a purely personal one and to commute it for a money payment was a degradation of the whole feudal relation. The payment of money, especially if it were a fixed and regular payment, carried with it a certain ignoble idea against which, in the form of state taxation, the feudal spirit rebelled to the last. When the vassal agreed to pay something to his lord, he called it, not a tax, but an 'aid' (auxilium), and made it generally payable, not regularly, like the tax-bill of the citizen, but only upon certain occasions - a present, as it were, coming out of his goodwill and not from compulsion; e.g., whenever a fief was newly granted, when it changed its lord, and sometimes when it changed its vassal, it was from the beginning customary to acknowledge the investiture by a small gift to the lord, primarily as a symbol of the grant: then, as the institution grew and manners became more luxurious, the gift increased in value and was thought of as an actual price for the investiture, until finally, at the close of our period, it suffered the fate of all similar contributions and was changed into a definite money payment, still retaining, however, its early name of 'relief.'

The occasions for levying the aids were various but always, in theory, of an exceptional sort. The journey of a lord to the court of his suzerain, or to Rome, or to join a crusade, the knighting of his eldest son, the marriage of his eldest daughter and his ransom from imprisonment are among the most frequent of the feudal 'aids.' The right of the lord to be entertained and provisioned, together with all his following, was one of the most burdensome and, at the same time, most difficult to regulate. Its conversion into a money-tax was, perhaps for this reason, earlier than that of many other of the feudal contributions.
Entities that start out large, like the Byzantine Empire, should be realistically plagued with internal stability problems, with the Byzantines suffering frequent revolts by ambitious generals, impostors, and revolts by Serbian and Bulgarian vassals. The Holy Roman Empire is very much its own entity, with many princes independent in all but title, and the Kaiser should be a very long way indeed from being in a position to command the entire empire's resources. The Iberian kingdoms should start out as suzerains to their Muslim neighbors, and be more inclined to collect tribute from them as they did historically, and to meddle in their internal politics, which would go a long way toward slowing the rate of the Reconquista.

Character traits are another point of consideration. Perhaps not all rulers are created equal. Perhaps an indolent lump of a king, utterly lacking in ambition, content to drown himself in women and wine, may not in fact have access to a kingdom-spanning invasion casus belli, because it would not be in character for such a man to embark on such an exceptional course of action. Most great expansions, like those initiated by Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Alp Arslan, or the Komnenian restoration, were not initiated by men most comparable in manner of living to the three-toed sloth. Such men would be much more likely to leave the expansion of their realm to ambitious vassals than to embark on campaign themselves.

Which brings me to another example. Henry II, King of England, first set foot on Irish soil October 18, 1171. The first English monarch to set foot in Ireland, despite landing at the head of a substantial military force (an army of nearly 5,000 men), Henry's primary focus was more to organize the territorial gains made by his vassals at their own initiative and to receive the submission of the Irish chieftains rather than to wage a war of total conquest for his own purposes. And, soon enough after, on April 17, 1172, he set sail to return to England, not long after being embroiled in a civil war against his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and three sons. The English occupation and conquest of Ireland was a long and drawn-out affair, and as seen here, hardly one quickly or easily settled even by an ambitious king with an armed force behind him, and internal politics often conspire to limit foreign ambitions.
 
My solution, in light of development feature: allow realms with lots of development and such access to much more hedonistic and decadent events.

So, you rule Constantinople/Baghdad/etc? Get more access to decadent events, especially if you're not ascetic warrior/monk/etc. Male it weaken your family, raise the stakes for civil wars and betrayals.

In short, make decadence available to all and based on how well realm is doing. Even if you as a ruler will be able to abstain, your court and family will become naturally more corrupt, bringing potential risks to your House or even Dynasty, as well as a realm.

EDIT: also, removal of teleportation.

Why is anyone disagreeing with you here? Wasn't this the case of the Western Roman Empire? This is actually a great idea, as realms continue to grow more powerful, the people and rulers get too overconfident in their power, arrogant, trading discipline for sloth and debauchery. The result is lower military morale, lowered economic output, factions and power grabs, etc.

We could limit this too superpowerful realms and only after a certain minimum amount of time has passed since the realm reached dominance.
 
One thing that could really help would be for armies to lose morale as they march. So a long, forced march across a continent would leave your forces near zero morale, vulnerable to attack and in need of extended rest in order to recuperate. This effect could be reduced in highly developed counties you control, and increased in enemy territories. Tech could also reduce the impact in later centuries, to allow your reach to naturally grow over time.

The effect would be to greatly hinder our ability to use troops to wage wars far from home. It needs to be a lot more difficult to handle conflicts that take place hundreds or thousands of miles apart. Especially by land; troops currently behave as if they travel everywhere by train, not slogging on foot through rough terrain. If you give troops a more realistic effective range, blobbing becomes a difficult strategic decision rather than the easier optimal path.