Crusader Kings III

[Tamas]

You left out the cat-apult event:

[jimmy olsen]

I've been playing a new game with the Iberian DLC as Barcelona, usurped Aragon and now control all of it and Valencia, except for Mallorca.

I like the new struggle mechanic.

[Jacob]

I think the event system is really solid, but that the "funny" events are pretty tedious. If that's the tenor of the content then think I'll be giving the update a pass.

[Tamas]

I think the event system is really solid, but that the "funny" events are pretty tedious. If that's the tenor of the content then think I'll be giving the update a pass.

Yeah the reason it frustrates me much is that all the groundwork is there in the game to make it rise above CK2. UI is far better, mechanics are improved upon, and in many cases event choices when taken seriously are better (via the Stress mechanic you actually face a choice).

But then it is laden with events like these which just kick you right out of any immersion you might be building.

[garbon]

While I see the stress mechanic often painted as something positive, I'm not sure it works all that well in reality. Copying a little bit from posts I saw on p'dox forum.

on paper, its genius, it forces player/characters to play into their traits and punish them if they do something their characters wouldnt naturally be doing and realistically would cause a lot of stress to them

and thats all on paper, actually, its not all that is on paper, only the idea is good
but how that mechanic is implemented in a game where you can pause, is horrible, because stress is really meaningless, and only problems you will ever have with stress is with your heir (the characters you are not playing until your current ruler dies)

let me explain what i mean

as player, its braindead easy to counter the stress, and its especially made even easier after royal court dlc, because you get loads of bonuses on stress relief from your court and minor titles (like master of the hunt or cup bearer), now, one feast (and there is no reason to not spam them anyways whenever you can, meaning every 5 years or whatever the cooldown is, the point is they should always be on cooldown) can clear 2 and a half levels of stress, which means if you have 3rd level stress, after only one feast, you will be on 0 level stress, so what i do is, i time everything on those periods (which is also easy to do because base cooldown for everything in game is either 5 or 10 years), hit pause, spam stress to insane levels, no event will fire because you have to unpause for them to trigger, than after gaining all the stress and gaining all the bonuses from it, i just click for feast, boom 0 level stress again, i can safely unpause the game and no event will fire because im on 0 stress level

if for some reason after feast im still having 1 level of stress, i just take the option where i get more stress and delay mental breakdown for 5 years, so after feast finishes, i just hit the hunt, and thats it, now you have 0 stress at all, in 5 years all cooldowns will reset and you can do that all over again

...

so where is the problem you may ask and what does it have to do with your heir?
well i explained why for players, stress is like it doesnt even exist, but now, for AI...
its horrible, another reason why stress is poorly implemented in game, is because on paper, yea its supposed to guide the character to behave how their traits dictate, and well i explained already why player doesnt have to follow their traits and can neglect stress, but AI... well AI cant mitigate or rather deal with stress as effectively as player can, so one would think that AI would listen to their traits, right? the truth is, its a no

Beside, as a player you may find situation that make sense to RP in a direction the devs did not think of or could not code. Once I played as a rather violent and zealous English king. I went to participate in a bloody Teutonic crusader against the poor Lithuanian. At some point I had a event about my characters watching the devastated battlefield after a terrible battles. Somehow it made sense to me to actually order my men to bury our dead rather than move just move on and leave their body to the ravens. An act of mercy if you want whereas CK3 would have punished me with stress for not keeping my character stricly uni dimensional. An other event during the same war had me capture a special axes with pagan runes on it : I could either destroy it, throw it away or keep it. I felt like the game wanted me to destroy it ina feat of zeal but to me, it made more sense if my character kept it as a prize of war. After all my characters had killed a lot of pagans. Why not keep it as a prize and a sign of his battles against hated heathen ? It made sense too given how it led his life before it : an effective ruler who developed a lot his domain and the realm but became increasingly violent and somewhat sinister a la Emperor Hadrian.

Maybe if the events were a bit more substantial it would be great - but as is just appears to straight jacket you into whatever level of creativity a given event author had.

[jimmy olsen]

Eh...if you have a big family you can easily build up a lot of stress dealing with them, without a convenient feast available for a few years, or you just don't have the money to pay for one because of a war.

[Tamas]

I am not saying the stress mechanic is flawless or is utilised perfectly, but it goes a LONG way in pushing the player toward RP-ing the traits of their characters, and makes it much easier to tie consequences to otherwise optimal choices.

I almost never paused before selecting event choices in CK2, especially the childhood ones - one gave a good trait the other a bad one. Wow that's tough! Now there can be (admittedly uncommon) situations where I feel I cannot afford to choose the good option because it would overstress my character too much.

[garbon]

Eh...if you have a big family you can easily build up a lot of stress dealing with them, without a convenient feast available for a few years, or you just don't have the money to pay for one because of a war.

Which is actually one of the lamest sources of stress. No, I wouldn't become a gibbering idiot because I had multiple extended relatives die.

[Tamas]

Eh...if you have a big family you can easily build up a lot of stress dealing with them, without a convenient feast available for a few years, or you just don't have the money to pay for one because of a war.

Which is actually one of the lamest sources of stress. No, I wouldn't become a gibbering idiot because I had multiple extended relatives die.

How about the character you are playing, though? Stress is tied to traits.

[garbon]

I am not saying the stress mechanic is flawless or is utilised perfectly, but it goes a LONG way in pushing the player toward RP-ing the traits of their characters, and makes it much easier to tie consequences to otherwise optimal choices.

So trying to forece players to roleplay who otherwise wouldn't want to? Doesn't that seem strange?

I almost never paused before selecting event choices in CK2, especially the childhood ones - one gave a good trait the other a bad one. Wow that's tough! Now there can be (admittedly uncommon) situations where I feel I cannot afford to choose the good option because it would overstress my character too much.

I may have forgotten as it appears I've only played CK3 for 66 hours - but is that how the system with stress works? I don't recall that many times where I had choice of gaining good trait + stress or gaining bad trait and now stress. I mostly recall game deciding whether or not character gets stressed based on already existing personality traits. I also recall sometimes getting stress reduction events that had choice of get bad trait + stress reduction vs get more stress.

[garbon]

Eh...if you have a big family you can easily build up a lot of stress dealing with them, without a convenient feast available for a few years, or you just don't have the money to pay for one because of a war.

Which is actually one of the lamest sources of stress. No, I wouldn't become a gibbering idiot because I had multiple extended relatives die.

How about the character you are playing, though? Stress is tied to traits.

I'd think it would be even more so in the medieval period, no?

[Tamas]

Point is, the basis of the system (as I recall) is that most event choices result in X amount of extra stress for characters with the Y trait. So, a given event choice may be nonconsequential for one character and a major issue for another. This is a marked improvement over CK2.

The number of non-annoying events (like the upcoming cat-apult) is low which reduces replayability, but the above design makes each event more replayable and relevant than it would have been in CK2.

Is it always realistic? Maybe not, but I think it usually more realistic than the (comparatively) non-consequential CK2 events.

e.g. in my recent abortive attempt of trying out the Eagles mod, my guy had the Honest trait (I think that's what it was). The result was that a lot of political machination events caused a lot of stress. We can argue about the exact events and whether they should have come up at all (some of them definitely felt forced and out of character), but it did feel thematic to see an Honest guy being made rickety over having to scheme.

[garbon]

My take is that the stress system doesn't pose much of an issue, particularly once you've a few dynastic legacies and a couple artifacts. Basically little bite.

And then on role-playing front just feels like a straight jacket that has things determined just on how a given event writer felt the roleplay should play out. Don't really have sense of unified vision on that front either.

Because of failings on both fronts, I don't really see it enhancing playability nor additive to any role playing that I self enforce.

Maybe, I'd feel differently if there were fewer non annoying events as it was pretty immersion breaking when my lustful ruler got stressed because I wouldn't let him try to seduce his brother.

[Zanza]

I guess I will wait for at least 50% off for that event pack, if at all. Does not seem to add much to the game...

[Tamas]

I guess I will wait for at least 50% off for that event pack, if at all. Does not seem to add much to the game...

This is the bit of a conundrum with the way the game works. When you play it feels like it would be nice if it had more events because what's there gets boring quite fast.

But then, like a year ago, I tried VIET (this big event mod) and maybe it has improved since but what that was, was a spam of even more inconsequential events than the vanilla ones, utter distractions from any given business I was trying to get ahead with, especially as they seemed to be giving teeny-tiny bonuses/maluses.