CKII is released.

[oscar]

But did the Mongols have that sort of effect? Were they any more devastating than a Christian army pushing back the Muslims in Spain, or the Seljuks slaughtering their way across Turkey?

 

[Malakal]

Russia before Mongol invasion was a classic feudal state with different social groups competing for power and with rule of law and custom. After the invasion it became what we currently know as Russia - a despotic tyrannical state where human life is worthless and peasants were enslaved on their fields. Mongol invasion has changed Russian society and their way of thinking, has allowed for the creation of unrestricted rule of the monarch.

At the same time Mongol invasion has eliminated almost all Russian states competing with Muscovy - only Novgorod remained since it wasnt conquered. It tells us a lot about that event when a very rich and successful state of Kievan Rus is obliterated and wiped out of the map almost instantly NEVER to recover.

When we look south we see what became of Muslim world conquered by Mongols. Baghdad is an excellent example. Once a centre of the Muslim world, city of scholars it was completely and, again, with no recovery in sight, destroyed.

So yes, this invasion was way more serious and damaging than normal conquests and only comparable to Huns and Vandals.

 

[sser]

I did a lot of research on the Mongol expansions a few years ago for a class on Arab history.

They wrecked everything pretty hard, to put it in layman's terms. They moved on an operational level not really seen at that time. Their invasion of Persia/Afghanistan is legitimately scary to read even in text. The defenders would be facing one army only to have an entire force appear from the mountains behind them; mobility (and at those numbers) that was simply unheard of. The famous Hashishun had an impenetrable mountain fortress at Alamut. They pissed off the Mongols, so in turn the Mongols built siege weapons on the adjacent mountains and flung stones across the valleys. As said, they pretty much destroyed Baghdad with such ferocity that the effects are still felt to this day, a horribly destructive campaign that pretty much ruined the Arab sphere of power for years and years (1260 is one of those crucial dates in human history, IMO). There was a general by the name of Subutai, a strangely unknown figure, who basically crapped all over everyone he faced. If you know Western history you might be somewhat familiar with him as the guy who destroyed both the Polish and Hungarian armies in a matter of two days (and with his own army split). The records show that the Mongols were planning a ten year invasion of Europe -- that probably would not have been remotely slowed -- but the Khan died and all the generals and tribal heads went back home to put the political house in order. I'm being terse here, but basically the Mongols were scary as fuck and quite possibly the realest thing to the word "scourge" I can think of.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Note to self: Make post conquest event for Mongorians where they wreck ALL shit in the holdings.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Progress:

- The pagan unification Invasion CB now only works against the exact same religion AND culture, not culture group. The reason for making it culture specific target only was because if it was culture group, Finnish pagans could theoretically go on a rampage if you use Ruler Designer from get go or someone gets too lucky.
- Byzantine Emperor is now a titular title.

Finished any moment now, as soon as I figure out the necessary lines:
- BE now has a penalty modifer of -25% taxes and -33% levies that will be lifted either in 1265, OR if the ruler is of House Komnenos (happy now?).

Things to look into:

- Where the hell is the file on Laws and modifiers for vassals accepting them?
- Divide Kingdom of Byzantium title into King of Greece and a new kingly title for Asia Minor past the coastal duchies of Aegian Islands and Samos?
- Siege building destruction events.
- Mongorian destruction and mayhem events.
- Mongorians resistant to cultural and religious conversion, with the exception of Islam? This is generally a major issue with them, as they convert multiple times and often end up Russified in case of the Golden Horde.
- Mongorians have good military tech progress, shit tech progress everywhere else.
- Create a better unification CB for Lithuanians, so it's likelier that they will be strong enough to resist Christian invasion?
- Add tactical conversion choice events for Lithuanian nobility after a certain date?

 

[curry]

Progress:
- BE now has a penalty modifer of -25% taxes and -33% levies that will be lifted either in 1265, OR if the ruler is of House Komnenos (happy now?).

No, make it the other way around. BE should start strong and get weaker later so that it gets crushed like it did.

And there should be no dynasty specific stuff. It's all about individuals, some Dynasties just breed better rulers.

Progress:
- Divide Kingdom of Byzantium title into King of Greece and a new kingly title for Asia Minor past the coastal duchies of Aegian Islands and Samos?

Greece and Rum sounds about right. The prerequisite for Greece should be that BE doesn't exist and for Rum it should be Islam.

- Mongorians resistant to cultural and religious conversion, with the exception of Islam? This is generally a major issue with them, as they convert multiple times and often end up Russified in case of the Golden Horde.

The Mongols did in fact interact with Christians as well and could have converted to Christianity. Their likelyhood of converting to a religion should depend on the religion of the area they control, you can do this with province events, meaning each province of a certain religion increases the likelyhood of the conversion event firing. The conversion should always start with the Khan and then spread liege to vassal.

Their culture should change with time as well. You should figure out how to prevent the Mongols from converting provinces to tengriism and mongol though.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

BE is supposed to get its tenderized ass handed to it in a takeaway kebab package shortly after game start, having gone into massive decline following a string of inept Emperors. If anything, it should start out weak and get its Eastern parts eaten up by Turks, have a major civil war following that (hopefully), get a chance to recover with a Komnenos (assuming Civil War happens, not as likely due to modifiers not accepting vassal_opinion), go into decline again if they lose Komnenos dynasty rule, and by the endgame be just so royally fucked that it doesn't need a modifier to be fucked further by oily Turks. Obviously the modifier was made with players picking duke Komnenos in mind.

In case of the Asia Minor kingly title, I was thinking Rum and making it a Muslim title. However, in case of Greece it's gonna be harder for the condition to feature "Byzantine Empire does not exist." I think it'd work better if I put in two magic lines to the effect "is independent" "is not an Emperor" along with limiting it to Greek culture. Now, to find some decent coats of arms...

See, the problem is that almost without exception the Golden Horde converts to Catholicism or Orthodoxy. And trust me, just from a gameplay perspective this is a massive case of fucked up-ness, not to mention historical accuracy. It's gonna be a hard thing to fix. By contrast the Mongol cultural and religious conversion of provinces is easy as piss to fix, just gotta add the "Mongol line-up" of titles and a modifier to conversion events.

Anyway, what I did just now:

- HRE now has hard-lock on getting more than minimum central authority for the Emperor. AI behaviour in regards to voting on laws seems to be scripted based on relations and is in the AI files, so it's easier to just hard-lock dat beeotch.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Moar done:

- Hard-locking the HRE didn't work out. The game doesn't seem to do "NOT = { has_landed_title = e_hre }" too well. Will investigate further. HALP PLZ

- Added Rum as a new kingdom title. Must be Muslim and a Turk to create. Consists of Anatolia, Armeniacon, Nikae, Thracesia, Cibyrrhaeot, Trebizon, Charianon and Paphlagonia.
- Gave Rum a flag.
- Kingdom of Byzantium is now Kingdom of Greece, to create must not be subject of BE, Greek and Christian.
- Moved Cherson to the de jure of Khazaria. Colour changed on political map.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Success!

HRE is now forever Elective, and can't raise Crown Authority above Low! Other laws are immutable, but I guess I achieved the goal. I also removed the vassal opinion bonus from Elective, so Salian will not rule forever.

 

[Malakal]

I dislike locking stuff, its not very elegant. How about tying crown authority to prerequisites, either high legalism (to represent advances in administration, custom and philosophy emphasizing central government) or high ruler stats and certain traits required for raising it. So a strong emperor can still raise crown authority while weak ones will lose it due to vassal plotting.

Lithuania needs to be overall way more powerful, after all it managed to resist Christian advances for centuries and conquer large swaths of Russia. I suggest a culture specific pagan only building giving them some more troops. Like a warrior cult but Lithuanian only.

About BE: Maybe cutting their buildings in provinces would help. After all how many troops could they field in 1066? Wikipedia says about 40 000 under strong emperors in XII century. Thats WAY less than currently. Yes, BE was advanced, but they didnt have HUGE armies. Leave their high tech and some developed lands but cut buildings elsewhere.
And here is a novel idea of mine: introduce a new character trait - byzantine noble. Give it only to people of the correct culture and religion. This trait would give -30 loyalty to lieges and make AI more rebellious and prone to plotting. Also a cruse solution but somehow better than hard coded penalties.

 

[Tigranes]

HRE is still plenty powerful when locked into that - not the best solution, but certainly better than now. I wish they just went down the EU path where all countries are separate but the Emperor gets mad bonuses.

Keep going Vaarna

 

[20 Eyes]

Continuing my game as the French Duke of Navarre, I obtained two Castilian provinces. France is in shambles because of civil war #47 of the game. I knew I should have helped end these wars years ago, but I didn't see any benefit in doing this so I let them tear each other apart. I could have tipped the scale for the king and ended this before it got out of hand. Now the Muslim rapetrain declared a Holy War for my Castilian provinces and of course all the Holy Orders are already in service. No sizable French force can come to my aid (surprise, surprise).

Now I've got to decide if I should just cut my losses for now (I still control all of Navarre) or if I should go balls to the wall and probably broke trying to fight the incoming doomstacks off. Five Iberian French-controlled provinces, even with hundreds of gold in mercenaries, against all of Muslim Iberia and Northern Africa doesn't sound like a fight I want anything to do with.

 

[Malakal]

If you fold now they will come for the rest later. Weak France = Mauretania in Occitiaine. Had this happen a few times already. So you either stop them now or migrate to Ireland.

Civil wars can be a blessing though when it comes to your own career. Nothing better than civil war torn kingdom for an ambitious duke with a plot to install elective monarchy, when it succeeds you vote yourself and instantly declare war using depose liege casus belli therefore installing yourself as the next king. My game as the house of Luisignian (yes, the Crusader King house, they start as counts) went that way.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I dislike locking stuff, its not very elegant. How about tying crown authority to prerequisites, either high legalism (to represent advances in administration, custom and philosophy emphasizing central government) or high ruler stats and certain traits required for raising it. So a strong emperor can still raise crown authority while weak ones will lose it due to vassal plotting.

Lithuania needs to be overall way more powerful, after all it managed to resist Christian advances for centuries and conquer large swaths of Russia. I suggest a culture specific pagan only building giving them some more troops. Like a warrior cult but Lithuanian only.

About BE: Maybe cutting their buildings in provinces would help. After all how many troops could they field in 1066? Wikipedia says about 40 000 under strong emperors in XII century. Thats WAY less than currently. Yes, BE was advanced, but they didnt have HUGE armies. Leave their high tech and some developed lands but cut buildings elsewhere.
And here is a novel idea of mine: introduce a new character trait - byzantine noble. Give it only to people of the correct culture and religion. This trait would give -30 loyalty to lieges and make AI more rebellious and prone to plotting. Also a cruse solution but somehow better than hard coded penalties.

Well, it's generally a good solution because it forces the HRE to stay a nominally unified country, because at Minimal and Low the Empire will have internal wars. Another thing is that modifying the crown laws can be touchy stuff. Most of all though, I think HRE should *never* be able to limit vassal power, there should always be internal powerplays among vassals going on. Not to mention of course that in my experience losing crown authority is *very* unlikely, especially to a level below Medium (which is the "no internal wars" level). Similar to how HRE should never have to possibility of getting rid of Elective. In fact, I think I quite like the implications of my current system: The Emperor does not hold much authority over his realm and elective is no longer rigged in the reigning Emperor's favor by the +30 vassal opinion, but being the Emperor is still desirable because it will grant you income and levies (what I meant with other laws being immutable was that they can't be locked), but re-election is going to be hard if you rake up the goods.

Actually the restoration of the old Warrior Cult gives them that potential, but what I should do to make it happen is give Lithuanians a separate pagan unification Invasion CB that affects their culture group, with little or no stat requirements. Another question is whether to tie it to the Lithuanian culture specifically or Baltic culture group, personally I'd go for Lithuanians. This way it's highly possible that a Lithuanian tribe is going to become large and powerful enough to repel any would-be crusaders and expand.

Cutting buildings would be little impact to BE, and it'd be quite a blow to the civil wars. Instead I could raise the penalty modifier to -50% levies. I'm also adding in a condition about maximum realm size to the penalty modifier happening, making Byzantine Empire stronger when it's reduced to a small size.

The Byzantine Noble is a great idea, actually. It's also very easy to implement, though actually it's easier to make the conditions like this: Trait is applied when liege holds the Byzantine Emperor title and the character is feudal (mayor's and bishop's exempt). Trait is removed if the Emperor is no longer the liege. The reason why I wouldn't just make it a vassal opinion penalty trait for the Emperor is because then it'd affect Cities and Temples as well.

 

[Malakal]

Yes, I understand your point from the gameplay point of view but in the XI century it wasnt set in stone that France will become an absolute monarchy while HRE will be a confederation of quasi independent states. It might have been the other way entirely and both outcomes are plausible. I mean, Habsburgs were going really well with their reforms and centralizing power and only reformation stopped them from reforming the HRE into a centralized state.

I am not in favour of limiting rebelliousness and plotting in BE only to nobles. After all merchants and bishops can be as tricky as nobles. I think that the solution lies in behaviour, mainly plotting - if lunatic trait makes AI less predictable then maybe its possible to mod traits to entice characters to raise rebellion based plots like lower crown authority, depose, and independence for wrong culture/religion vassals.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Habsburgs only became Holy Roman Emperors in the 15th century though, so their reforms are something I will not consider putting in from a historical perspective either.

Well in that case I'll make a Byzantine Emperor trait instead, much simpler that way.

The Lunatic trait has a special code for it called "AI_rationality." I'm not sure if it's possible to radically modify behaviour in such a manner otherwise, but relations between wrong religion + wrong culture vassals and liege are already very strained and the vassal is likely to rebel.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

How long till you have a working alpha, Vaarna? I'm almost done with my current game, and am willing to test how the changes work out in the long run.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I posted the Finno-Ugric parts of the mod (minus events, but that's longterm stuff of low priority, besides I need Certified Codex Expert ideas for those) a few pages back.

The current stuff... Most likely tomorrow, I'd say. If I'm lazy, Sunday. Then again, if I get the mood today after eating ribs you might see V2 today.

Today's planned work list:
- Byzantine Emperor trait.
- Lithuanian Baltic unification CB.
- Mongolian tech modifier.

Maybe today:
- Siege building destruction event.
- Mongorian conquest building destruction event.

EDIT: Request:

Some artistically inclined Codexer could make me an icon for Byzantine Emperor.

 

[curry]

Did you guys noticed that there's a new patch. Opinions ?

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Those BE/Seljuk changes indicate that they do think the dynamic between them is wrong at the start of the game. But I don't think they're gonna change much in practice. The rest is mostly bug fixes.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Here's V2: http://www.filedropper.com/kalevalav2

Changes and additions:
- Mongolian building destruction event created. On average happens once per month of occupation, in case of Muslims and Russians the rate is five times faster.
- Rebel goodness events now fire much more often (standard is every 2 months), and have modifiers that slow or speed them up based on ruler traits. Cruel rulers for example get these events four times faster, Just rulers twice as slow.
- Byzantine Emperor trait added. Grants -30 Vassal Relations.
- Lithuanian unification CB added. Lithuanians can invade any culture group kin, as long as the invader doesn't possess a kingly title.
- Mongol Invasion CB locked if Mongols aren't Altaic, ie Golden Horde spontaneously turns into Russians.
- The first Seljuk war can now grab the entire kingdom of Armenia.

To resolve:
- Byzantine Emperor trait is invisible, but the effect works.

To add (possibly):
- Siege building destruction event.

To add (definately):
- Patch 1.05d compatibility.
- Pagan events.
- Finnish pagan events.

To consider:
- Finish the Bohemian Rhapsody event for the king of Bohemia.
- Figure out if there's a total realm size scope, use for Byzantine Decline modifier instead of an arbitrary year.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

It also has the HRE changes, right?

Btw. In my heretic Georgia game, the Basileus converted to Iconoclasm. Then he died, and was succeeded by his 4 year old son, who is also Iconoclast. The result:

Spoiler

And this is after all the independence wars ended.

 

[oscar]

Liberal would be proud

I've been having a fun time with Byzantines, just using Vaarna's earlier independence wars mod and BGA. Was slowly losing a long and bloody civil war (won most of the field battles but having 2/3 of the empire in revolt meant I couldn't be everywhere at once and was slowly losing warscore by sieges), but got lucky and pulled off an assassination on the traitorous cousin and ended it after a hard-fought 20 years. Right as the Muslim world decides its time for a jihad on Antioch

I'm not so sure about this historical determinism Vaarna. As said, the HRE being a weak confederation and the Byzantine Empire losing to the Turks and being a in state of constant plotting and rebellion shouldn't be forced into the game.

- Mongolian building destruction event created. On average happens once per month of occupation, in case of Muslims and Russians the rate is five times faster.

Interesting. Could be used to represent the petering out of the Horde as it reached into Hungary and Poland. Though then again, perhaps the Mongols really were seriously considering a drive to the Atlantic.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Yes, HRE changes are in.

What happened to the flag of Georgia?

I'm not so sure about this historical determinism Vaarna. As said, the HRE being a weak confederation and the Byzantine Empire losing to the Turks and being a in state of constant plotting and rebellion shouldn't be forced into the game.

Preferable to their usual mode of endless blobbing.


PS: FYI guys, the mod makes use of a custome user_dir path (due to map changes), so you may want to send your settings files there (it's in the standard user_dir folder for CK2, look for Kalevala folder).

 

[sser]

I was wondering, who do you give out counties to? Family? Highly-skilled courtiers? I've done a mix of both. I found my bros like to revolt a lot (Aragon)... I'm not sure what it means when title is lost on succession, though. Does that just mean the place goes up for grabs completely once the king dies? Shouldn't the heir to the king be the successor to the county? Anyway, this bastard Duke of Barcelona allied up with a French bro and 12k French assholes pretty much wrecked my shit after trying to finish him off. Gotta pay more attention to the allied menu from now on... Also, is Aragon ridiculously easy or is it just me? I basically had free land grabs on all the surrounding territories. I captured shitloads of Emirs and Muftis, ransoming/executing/releasing the lot of them. Basically Aragon has de jure claims on a ton of surrounding land making for an easy start to the game. Quite enjoyable, regardless, as the place is buzzing with activity 24/7.