CKII is released.

[Xamenos]

Yes, but unless you start as the Holy Roman Emperor in vanilla CK2 or something there will be plenty other rulers that start as more powerful than you. And any game rule that slows you down also slows the AI down, probably even more. It's not a solution either.You simply cannot have a SW game that approaches the difficulty of starting as a weak nobody in vanilla.

 

[attackfighter]

Thoughts on difficulty in CK2:

My most recent game had me go for two achievements successively: ten thrones and legend of the Indo-Norse. I did the first achievement the fun way and started as a Norse duke, went on a continuous conquering spree and released all of the kingdoms I captured with one of my kin on their thrones. At the end of this, I had ruined Christendom and was on my way to Islam and Egypt and whence to India.

Conquering India demonstrated how little risk of ever losing there is in this game. With my huskarl retinue force comprising twenty-five thousand retinue points and eighty-five hundred soldiers I made the journey to India in two trips and started out by conquering a mono-province principality. From there, I used tributary wars to subdue each of the surrounding powers one by one and then started conquering their lands, one by one. Throughout the entire process, I realized, there was an infinitesimal chance that I could ever lose. And this was despite having only eighty-five hundred soldiers in a totally remote land, surrounded by religious enemies many nations of which could individually field stacks of fifteen thousand soldiers or more.

There was a minuscule chance of me ever losing a single battle, due to the superior quality of my retinues and commanders. There was a minuscule chance on top of that that I would lose enough battles successively that I would lose a given war. And compounding that there was a minuscule chance that I would lose enough wars successively to throw me out of India.

At worst, there was the chance that I could suffer minor or even moderate setbacks, but there was no chance at all that I could ever lose in my conquest of India. It was almost totally impossible.

So that I think is a flaw in the game. The game is still fun for its expansionist elements. It is fun to see how efficiently you can expand and how you can use your mastery of its mechanics to optimize your ascendance and your attainment of achievements. But there is no fun deriving from tension. There is no fun deriving from the possibility that you might lose, as there is in other games.

It makes me wish that they had made Holy Fire with a view to allowing you to set specific parameters on the difficulties you face. If they had allowed you to set it so that you start as a count while everyone else starts as dukes, who have aggressive AI so that they expand at a fast rate, and so that there are intermittent invasions by outside, Mongolian-like event-forces, then that would add some real, fun, dramatic, tension-inducing elements to the game.

That is what the game is missing. Without these features it is only half of a game. It has spiral elements but not anti-spiral elements, to put this in the language of an anime. You can win at varying rates but you can never lose.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

It goes beyond that. It's that it isn't a matter of chance whether you win or lose. The combat model used in CK2 is almost all in prep (the only other two factors are if you bother to bait the AI, and if the dice rolls are super wonky for a battle, and they are both dwarfed by the prep), you know if you'll win or lose the moment war starts.

 

[Xamenos]

It goes beyond that. It's that it isn't a matter of chance whether you win or lose. The combat model used in CK2 is almost all in prep (the only other two factors are if you bother to bait the AI, and if the dice rolls are super wonky for a battle, and they are both dwarfed by the prep), you know if you'll win or lose the moment war starts.

And it is made worse by the fact the AI can't prep for shit.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

On the other hand, it's basically the only thing that allows you to punch above your weight as the player. If the AI really did just follow the meta, everything would be determined the moment war starts 100% of the time instead of 99% of the time.

 

[Xamenos]

Indeed. The real solution would be for Paradox to make a game with better mechanics, but we all know the chances for that.

 

[Axioms]

Indeed. The real solution would be for Paradox to make a game with better mechanics, but we all know the chances for that.

Combat is the place with the least bad mechanics.

 

[thesecret1]

It's easy to beat the game regardless of where you start. You can add self-imposed challenges like "I will never swear fealty to anyone, nor convert" that can make things harder, but the game actually offers you plenty of ways to make things easy again. There's a lot of reasons for why it is like this, but I think the most glaring one is the AI. The AI is terrible, it's incredibly passive and reactive rather than proactive. When you start eating a kingdom from the inside, swallowing lands of neighbour vassals, does the liege AI ever do anything about it? No, it just gives you a seat on the council. If you start expanding at a rapid rate, do your neighbours ever band together to smash you apart? No, at most they'll go into a defensive alliance, but they will never actually agree to pool their forces and conquer your shit. The few times the AI actually manages to get something threatening going (such as a great holy war or a massive civil war) it's ineptitude at combat gives you a victory anyway.

Paradox has been plagued by bad AI for a long time now, but it only seems to be getting worse and worse as they add more mechanics to their games – their AI cannot utilize them well, so it's just more tools stacking the deck for the player

 

[Axioms]

Paradox will never be capable of a capable UI. If anything limiting and simplifying mechanics is a bad thing. The AI will be shit no matter what and you ruin the mechanics for the players.

 

[wwsd]

Not sure if anyone plays this anymore or if CK3 is playable now, but I'm probably not going to give more money to the Swedes, so fuck it.

On the back of my interest in all things Portuguese I tried playing the County of Portugal (duchy in the game) in 1066. I've tried this before but it's pretty tough. You start as a vassal of Galicia, which usually gets conquered by the Leonese quickly, giving you a strong overlord that's hard to break away from. Or you get holy warred early on.

This time I had some more luck. One weakness of Portugal in this gamestart is that you start with a wife in her early 30s and one daughter who is married, but not matrilineally. I focussed on Seduction to father some legitimised bastards, but then realised I could just switch to seniority succession since there were still a few brothers and uncles around.

Galicia survived but was pretty weak. After they lost a war, I quickly formed independence faction with 180% strength, and won the independence war as Galicia still refused to let me go. I made some good alliances with my many children (Navarre, Castille, Denmark, HRE, and France at different points). Not all of them were able to help me all the time, but I usually had some decent back-up in the several defensive holy wars with Muslims, although I got through by the skin of my teeth a few times.

I then helped Navarra in their Reconquista war for Aragon, and then declared my own one for most of central Portugal. The Islamic realm I was targeting was fractured so I didn't get Lisbon yet, but that followed shortly after. By then I had enough prestige and piety for the "Create Portugal" (the kingdom) event decision. My first ruler, Nuno Mendes, lived to the age of 77 and I had the pope crown him king of Portugal just before his death. His only legitimate son died and he was succeeded by his insane, syphilitic first bastard (older male relatives were long dead, so seniority didn't kick in), who does at least have one son, but will probably not be able to change any laws due to everyone hating him. I kind of expect to get assassinated soon.

This is pretty fun, and this is just one ruler so far. I feel some satisfaction of being able to beat history by forming the Kingdom of Portugal as the last descendant of the Asturian Vímara, who gave his name to Guimarães, as opposed to the Burgundians. Now the Algarve awaits...

 

[thesecret1]

Geheimnisnacht mod is fun

 

[wwsd]

Haven't gotten much further in that game. I accidentally married off my heir to a countess in the HRE, not realising that that automatically made him a vassal of the HRE once he inherited. I think I've only ever finished one or two CK2 games starting in 1066, let alone earlier game starts. Usually I get bored or ragequit long before that. Never tried Asturias in Old Gods either.

Two recent games I've played:

- El Cid as Count of Valencia in the earliest possibility (1093 or '94 or something). I've failed at this a few times in the past, but now I was able to break out and form the Kingdom of Valencia and start a dynasty. Not too shabby. Haven't progressed further with that, might pick it up later. In my previous attempts there was not yet the Reconquista feature, which is pretty useful.
- Shia Kalbid dynasty in Palermo in 1066. Fucking hard as nails too. If you holy-war your Christian neighbours, more often than not they'll call in the Pope and HRE. Still, eventually I was able to take all of the de jure Kingdom of Africa and the island of Sicily, and that was a solid base to start conquering the mainland. However, when I finally had enough land to crown myself Sultan of Sicily, this led to an instant crusade with the usual 200k-300k Christian soldiers knocking at my door. And that so quickly that I didn't even have the time to do the whole "raise warscore by sieging Rome" trick because they were already assaulting all my provinces. So I lost and only had Africa left. I might try picking up the game again and reconquering the lost lands, but I think I'll just keep getting beaten down by crusades in the end.

I still play this game sometimes because I only have a 2014 laptop.

 

[thesecret1]

Any super cool mods for it lately? Something with a lot of meat, say.

Most modders moved onto CK3, though so far, CK2 mods are far better than CK3 ones this early in the development, and probably will remain that way for another year or two.

The best mods I know of (in no particular order):
The Winter King – some very cool features there (love the dynamic creation/destruction of de iure duchies, for example), lots of aesthetics to it. Set in England and France right after the fall of Rome
Elder Kings – total conversion into TES universe, pretty cool with tons of various features
A Game of Thrones mod – total conversion into The World of Ice & Fire, again with plentiful features (though fairly sparse in areas not covered by the series' books)
Nova Monumenta Iaponiae Historica – Mod that covers medieval Japan. Not actually all the finished, with few features of its own, but chock full of Japanese autism. The dynasty trees are something outta this world, like holy shit. Play it if you feel like playing vanilla, but in Japan
Warhammer: Geheimnisnacht – excellent, fun mod that converts the game in Warhammer Fantasy. Unfortunately I tend to run into severe performance issues after a couple decades of playing, but maybe that's just me.
After the End – a rather silly mod that deals with post-post-apo Americas that are now essentially in the middle ages with feudalism, various religions that worship the atomic blast and the llike. Pretty fun, though silly

 

[zapotec]

There is a Forggoten Realms mod in the works for CK2

 

[HeroMarine]

So, I'm finishing my mod. It's mainly for a realistic rebalance for a ton of content in the game, supposed to be played with all DLCs. I particularly like to play with the Random World feature, it creates a realistic fantasy setting imo. I'll put a link here when I'm finished.

 

[Average Manatee]

It goes beyond that. It's that it isn't a matter of chance whether you win or lose. The combat model used in CK2 is almost all in prep (the only other two factors are if you bother to bait the AI, and if the dice rolls are super wonky for a battle, and they are both dwarfed by the prep), you know if you'll win or lose the moment war starts.

Strictly speaking you can win almost anything if you just know how to obtain enough cash quickly for the right mercs. Single decisive battles are so important that you rarely need more than 1 or 2 mercs for an extended period of time, if you can afford a doomstack for 6 months to wipe the enemy army you've won.

It's actually kind of funny when you attack the mega-rich pope and he does this to you.

 

[HeroMarine]

My mod makes combat way more random and somewhat dependent on the troop composition/terrain and good generals. It's no longer a simple numbers game.

 

[HeroMarine]

So, I'm finishing my mod. It's mainly for a realistic rebalance for a ton of content in the game, supposed to be played with all DLCs. I particularly like to play with the Random World feature, it creates a realistic fantasy setting imo. I'll put a link here when I'm finished.

My mod makes combat way more random and somewhat dependent on the troop composition/terrain and good generals. It's no longer a simple numbers game.

And here it is, the very first version of the mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2682208893

It's far from finished but it's working. Eventually I'll describe in detail all the changes and recommendations on how to use it (all DLCs, for example). Try it out if you want and bring comments to me, I'm very open to improving it by continue to update it with suggestions.

 

[thesecret1]

So, I'm finishing my mod. It's mainly for a realistic rebalance for a ton of content in the game, supposed to be played with all DLCs. I particularly like to play with the Random World feature, it creates a realistic fantasy setting imo. I'll put a link here when I'm finished.

My mod makes combat way more random and somewhat dependent on the troop composition/terrain and good generals. It's no longer a simple numbers game.

And here it is, the very first version of the mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2682208893

It's far from finished but it's working. Eventually I'll describe in detail all the changes and recommendations on how to use it (all DLCs, for example). Try it out if you want and bring comments to me, I'm very open to improving it by continue to update it with suggestions.

Tell us more about your mod, shill it to us.

 

[HeroMarine]

So, I'm finishing my mod. It's mainly for a realistic rebalance for a ton of content in the game, supposed to be played with all DLCs. I particularly like to play with the Random World feature, it creates a realistic fantasy setting imo. I'll put a link here when I'm finished.

My mod makes combat way more random and somewhat dependent on the troop composition/terrain and good generals. It's no longer a simple numbers game.

And here it is, the very first version of the mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2682208893

It's far from finished but it's working. Eventually I'll describe in detail all the changes and recommendations on how to use it (all DLCs, for example). Try it out if you want and bring comments to me, I'm very open to improving it by continue to update it with suggestions.

Tell us more about your mod, shill it to us.

It changes hundreds of game parameters, realm laws, traits, ambitions, factions, rebellions, event chances and consequences, battle tactics, and scripted effects. The goal is to try and generate a more realistic medieval experience and less frustration for the player who wants to play the game in a more roleplaying manner with increased difficulty in conquering and keeping a realm under control, particularly with poor characters. It's not recommended for gamers who want to "win" the game easily. The AI will behave in a manner that simulates medieval history way better than vanilla, leading to entertainment for people interested in history/alternate history.

 

[zool]

So, I'm finishing my mod. It's mainly for a realistic rebalance for a ton of content in the game, supposed to be played with all DLCs. I particularly like to play with the Random World feature, it creates a realistic fantasy setting imo. I'll put a link here when I'm finished.

My mod makes combat way more random and somewhat dependent on the troop composition/terrain and good generals. It's no longer a simple numbers game.

And here it is, the very first version of the mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2682208893

It's far from finished but it's working. Eventually I'll describe in detail all the changes and recommendations on how to use it (all DLCs, for example). Try it out if you want and bring comments to me, I'm very open to improving it by continue to update it with suggestions.

Tell us more about your mod, shill it to us.

It changes hundreds of game parameters, realm laws, traits, ambitions, factions, rebellions, event chances and consequences, battle tactics, and scripted effects. The goal is to try and generate a more realistic medieval experience and less frustration for the player who wants to play the game in a more roleplaying manner with increased difficulty in conquering and keeping a realm under control, particularly with poor characters. It's not recommended for gamers who want to "win" the game easily. The AI will behave in a manner that simulates medieval history way better than vanilla, leading to entertainment for people interested in history/alternate history.

Shill it further please. What game parameters does it change? What changes does it bring to traits? How exactly will the AI behave in a manner that simulates medieval history way better than vanilla?

Also, how compatible/incompatible is it with other mods (including HIP)?

 

[Sinilevä]

HeroMarine Yes, man, would be nice if you could elaborate.

 

[HeroMarine]

It changes hundreds of game parameters, realm laws, traits, ambitions, factions, rebellions, event chances and consequences, battle tactics, and scripted effects. The goal is to try and generate a more realistic medieval experience and less frustration for the player who wants to play the game in a more roleplaying manner with increased difficulty in conquering and keeping a realm under control, particularly with poor characters. It's not recommended for gamers who want to "win" the game easily. The AI will behave in a manner that simulates medieval history way better than vanilla, leading to entertainment for people interested in history/alternate history.

Shill it further please. What game parameters does it change? What changes does it bring to traits? How exactly will the AI behave in a manner that simulates medieval history way better than vanilla?

Also, how compatible/incompatible is it with other mods (including HIP)?

I'll love to write a better description. Sorry for posting in a hyperbolic style above, you guys know me.

I'll check what I changed in parameters, static modifiers, and other files to see what are the biggest changes in laws, economics, technology, diplomacy, war, combat, lifestyles, diseases, etc. The mod goal is to achieve a better (alt)historical simulation than vanilla, which caters more to modern/arcade tastes. The gameplay with mod doesn't deviate that much from vanilla but I feel it makes playing with more sensible restrictions to total domination/victory and is much more fun to roleplay. I injected Christian morality and European-centered history interpetration, so for cultures far from Europe changes might make lesser sense. I didn't mess much with those.

As AI character behaviors, the plans was for them to interact with the player and each other in a more logical way, so I set out to create more real-life characters. However, I don't know how to program the AI. A lot of mechanics can't be changed without using tools than I know how to. So I went through traits and event files changing opinions between them to make people like or hate each other more based on personality (e.g., same_trait_opinion). Many AI choice percentage chances and factors were changed to depend on more traits where it made more sense. Playing the game you feel characters will have more extreme feelings and behaviors toward the player and each other. This is something to take further in continued development, I want to avoid too stagnant or too chaotic realms.

I'm not familiar with the balance mod scene and never checked compatibility with any other mods, but I'll now check what happens when you enable it and HIP and try to play. Nevermind, just looked at this: https://ck2.paradoxwikis.com/Historical_Immersion_Project
This is a completely different ballgame. My mod is child's play.

 

[HeroMarine]

Man I really need to check Iren's mod in my next game. Any mods compatible with it?

No idea, I never used any other when using mine. Mix it at your peril.
I need to update it on Steam btw, I'll do it eventually, after I finish my Kaiserreich LP, perhaps.

 

[thesecret1]

New version of Geheimnisnacht mod (total conversion into Warhammer Fantasy) dropped. It's really good
Link