Crusader Kings 2 Redux

[Razgovory]

There is a mod that does Post-Apocalyptic America.  Unfortuantly the map doesn't go west of the Rockies yet.

[Caliga]

Can I be the: Wild Horse Woman.

[Razgovory]

Can I be the: Wild Horse Woman.

Apparently Yes.  It's heavily influenced by Canticle for Leibowitz.  I started out as Grand Duke of Boone's Lick and am now the King of Iowa.

[jimmy olsen]

Played the Charlemagne scenario a while. Was doing well, Mom killed Karloman, I kept my marriage with the Lombard princess I married and conquered the Saxons. Towards the end of that war of conquest there was a major revolt, but I managed to put them down, and then 12,000 Saxon rebels rise up.

[Razgovory]

It took over 15 years to subdue Saxony.

[Martinus]

Can I be the: Wild Horse Woman.

Apparently Yes.  It's heavily influenced by Canticle for Leibowitz.  I started out as Grand Duke of Boone's Lick and am now the King of Iowa.

"Grand Duke of Boone's Lick" sounds like a porn name in a very niche porn.

[Jacob]

Do you guys usually play Ironman mode or regular? And if regular, how much do you save-reload and how much save-file editing do you tend to do?

[Syt]

I don't play iron man, but I never reload or save edit.


In my Muslim game I forgot that you need to check the religion screen to tell off your decadent family members. At 60+ decadence (thanks, uncle! ) I turned the ship around and am now under 50 again. It cost me the Sheikhdom of Ilam, though (since re-conquered), while I was fighting my decadent uncle and a pretender half-brother. Fortunately, my allies bailed me out of that pickle.

It's rather amusing so far. Everyone in Abbasid Empire is united for one cause only (besides outside invaders): keep crown authority low, so you can still wage war against you fellow vassals.

I started as Sheikh of Basra in Charlemagne start, and I'm now Emir of Basra and Tigris (and the Caliph gave me a sheikhdom in Ethiopia), looking at new targets.

[Caliga]

I don't play iron man, but I never reload or save edit.

Same.  I would play Iron Man but for some reason the option to do that is always disabled for me.

[Solmyr]

I don't play iron man, but I never reload or save edit.

Same.  I would play Iron Man but for some reason the option to do that is always disabled for me.

Did you mod the game somehow?

[Syt]

So, there was a bit of an ugly war. My main character died; the heir took over, but his half-brother, Sheikh of Muscat tried to poison him. I tried to arrest him, but he and half my vassals rise up against me. Fortunately, with help of my allies, I manage to put them down, arrest a lot of people, and revoke many titles. And this happens again a generation later. Fortunately, my new ruler has a high stewardship score and can hold 5 sheikhdoms, as opposed to his dad who could only manage one. I am now Emir of Basra, Tigris and Oman, and if I had the army to take on the Caliph I could go for independence and found my own kingdom.

[Syt]

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?839310-Why-I-believe-the-game-is-broken-and-Paradox-only-semi-professional

Why I believe the game is broken and Paradox (acting) only semi-professional

[EDIT: Well, you can consider it 'acting' rather than 'being' and 'right now, in the light of its history of handling CK2' rather than 'in general', but while I don't mean to cause offence, I do mean to make a strong statement.]

1. Seduction focus. We all know what this does. Half the world has Lover's Pox. There are multiple bastards per female character. Even married people with a lot of green traits and no red traits choose this focus.

Worse. From dev messages it seems the goal of introducing this was to shake up the place, i.e. troll the players slightly. Well, you've got your trolling day. You've ruined my game. How about you actually play the game yourself to find out how it feels on the receiving end of that jape? Brilliant.

2. Even without seduction focus, the place is a brothel. Read my bug report about my cheating queens in four generations in a row. All of them virtuous women judging by the traits. (The high AI honour/high AI rationality kind of type.) Also plenty of royal daughters having bastards for all the court to see.

3. Regencies. If you have a regent, you're screwed. Base Reluctance -- prevents you even from handing out excess titles when you exceed your demesne limit (except maybe to a very narrow range of characters the regent adores). So imagine what happens when you win a crusade for a large kingdom under a regency.

The above is not the only problem — there's been a relative long-standing issue with lowering crown authority multiple times and consuming the king's opportunity to change that law.

Also the fact that the regent somehow almost always ends up being your spymaster — who most of the time just simply doesn't have the public standing (as reflected in the justification of the fact that this is the only council position that allows women normally — since spymasters operate in the shadow, outside of the public eye anyway). Your spymaster normally doesn't have any high stewardship. With the nerfed demesne limit (and yes, it has been nerfed, it hasn't always been that low), this means you're hitting an excess demesne penalty, like -20% income and -10 opinion per each excess holding.

4. Antipopes are permanent and have been for a long while. This means Catholics duking it out almost incessantly and depleting their levies even as Muslims nibble on their fringes (good if fringes with a HW rather than a kingdom-sized invasion).

There are also women and children with claims on the Papacy. They have been there since release. There are still occasional female Catholic bishops.

And your married heir can be your Catholic Court Chaplain. At least landed feudal/burgher vassals have been excluded, eventually.

5. AI is incompetent and almost nonexistent. It cannot handle defensive warfare. Attackers tend to win. Due to being unable to handle terrain formation/geography correctly, France always loses. Umayyads attack k_WestFrancia in a jihad for k_Aquitaine and park a 10K stack in Dax. That's autowin, because Francia will keep feeding small stacks to them. Over rivers and mountains. Byzzies can botch their wars against the Caliph in similar ways. AI can't find paths, either. Fatimids will march to Sicily through Constantinople and Rome. Zirids (Tunis) will March to Sicily through Gibraltar, Barcelona, Rome etc. AI gets locked up in loops, marching back and forth, unable to decide. Crusades are often random walking around attrition fests or funnelling-in of small stacks via ships to die one after one just after landing. And more.

6. War is a grindfest in more ways than incompetent defence, poor pathfinding, suiciding and ignorance of attrition. Previously, when the game was new, a peace proposal could come at any minute when the AI decided it was not worth it (any more). Now, with some exceptions, waiting out till 100% is the prevailing mode. AI typically won't surrender before 100%. Sometimes not even at 100%. This unnecessarily prolongs the warfare, as does the duct-tape fix of restricting war score to 99% unless a major battle is fought.

7. Lowborn marriages all over the place. Around patch 1.04, 1.05 or some such time, some players complained about AI being too good at matchmaking. Now we see Lowborn marriages all over the place. Heirs of kingdoms, aged 19 or so, are married to old women (38 etc.) with no stat above 8 and poor traits. All the bloody time. I suspect this is because of something in the code that doesn't allow AI to be efficient in looking for brides outside its own court. Other people say this has more to do with AI valuing young characters overmuch but switching to desperate mode at age 21 or 23 or something like that. Perhaps it's both. This Lowborn bug has been around for 2 years now.

8. Misdesign with WoL. WoL was supposed to give you more things to do. Except it removed Pilgrimage and Great Hunt unless you pick their corresponding focus. Now you need to be a professed dedicated hunter in order to have a single freaking hunting expedition for your leisure. At least Summer Festival is still there and Carousing didn't disable Great Feast.

What's more, hunting is basically all about the 1-2 hunts you get per season (I get 2 hunts if I pause on 1 September, when hunting first becomes available, and then a 2nd hunt around 31 October if I'm lucky). You can't hunt at war, making the focus largely useless, depending on your style/current geopolitics.

Carousing has a cooldown period of >500 days. Not much to do here. Many other foci only spawn rare random events.

And guess what? War focus cannot be advanced during war! How brilliant. You need to be at peace, not a commander. As a Muslim, you can at least duel decadents, but as a Catholic you're limited to excommunicates (not that many), foes (most of the time I don't have any), rivals (1, maybe 2) and that's it. You can't duel, for example, the opposing monarch in a war, to save your troops' lives and settle your claims and family grudges between the two of you.

There's currently no way to gain the Strategist trait. Still. Ever since December.

8. Finally we can do something about our relatives and similar people being jailed by someone else, albeit it requires the Intrigue focus. After three years of talking about it (as it was picked up right on release). We still cannot free an abducted woman when we get physical custody of her — if you find someone's concubine in a hole in the wall after a siege, you can only either return her to her abductor or keep her in your jail indefinitely.

Hypothetical case: You're the German count of Ostfriesland. Your neighbour is the German count of Oldenburg. You finally fabricate that claim on the raiding guy from Rogaland and go after his county. You capture his concubine, the daughter of your pal the Count of Oldenburg. You can't return her to his father. You can only return her to the Chief of Rogaland, whom she hates at -100 (with 'Abductor' clearly visible on the list of reasons).

I haven't checked — as it would be too complicated to replicate — what happens if that concubine is your character's own mother. Or daughter. Or sister.

If it's your wife, you can't just go and free her. Your marriage is over. Divorce. Even in the Catholic world. Seriously. And I don't want to think what if you find that wife in a hole after a siege of that pagan/tribal's capital.

9. Most adventurers, but in any case many of them, seem to be Celibate members of knightly orders, who gave up their inheritance to join that order and live and die as Celibate monks in the first place. But now they are deciding to conquer a piece of land somewhere to become secular rulers. And they don't get excommunicated or anything. Once in a while would be all right, but they literally provide the core cadre of adventurers.

10. Speaking of military orders weirdness — they are full of spouses of landed women. Their ranks are also largely composed of husbands of young wives & fathers of small children.

11. Speaking of military orders again — the piety bonus or penalty for allowing/denying a request by your courtier to join such an order is +100/–100. Compare this to the meagre +25 for building and granting an entire bishopric. Even a whole county doesn't rise to 100 piety. Probably not a duchy, either. What were the directly responsible designers thinking? What about their supervisors?

You know what happens when you deny your courtier's request to join Calatrava? He will ask about Santiago in a couple of months. And then the Hospitallers. And then the Templars. After asking about Teutonic Knights he will shut up. Because there are no more orders. This is because Catholics have 4-5 orders at any time. This means net -400/-500 piety.

This was reported ages ago, Paradox doesn't care.

12. Levy nerf without nerfing event troops, adventurers and the rest of them to match. Somehow alpha & beta testing didn't reveal this before go-live. This would be okay. Once or twice. But things like this happen every single patch. WoL was unplayable for a month, this falling on Christmas time, when not only Paradox but also players had their Christmas break (fortunately, we were able to roll down). Rajas also introduced their own issues. Republics got messed up in one of such recent patches.

Bottom line: nerfs by decree and untested changes. Worse than untested changes, the changes don't seem to undergo conceptual QA before (I hope) being handed to the testing team. Whoever comes up with a change doesn't compare it against the bigger picture of the game.

13. Currently, cultural levies are stronger than cultural retinues. This means that the semi-professional conscripts you raise from your holdings have higher stats than elite unites on permanent active duty. In real-life terms this is comparable to reservists or even total newbie conscripts having higher stats than marines or even special forces.

And why? Because Paradox though retinues were OP and didn't know what else to do about that.

Check out for yourself. Cultural buildings is where you want to look for the stats of your cultural levies. Let me also add that cultural levies benefit from Training Grounds and other buildings in the place they are levied from.

My main problem with this is the obvious nonsense of this.

14. Muslim OP opinion and muslim gold. This one should probably be higher up. This means that Abbassid Caliphs generally have very cohesive and obedient realms from the Ganges to Ceuta. They also make a heckton of gold. Eventually, even a rump Abbassid state (only in Asia, no Africa, even after losing land to crusaders and Byzantines) can field 100K men, and the sheikhs and emirs swim in gold.

15. Decadence. 'Nuff said. It has never been done right, and I doubt it ever will.

16. In Crusader Kings 2, crusades don't work. You would consider this a paradox normally, right? Except in a recent interview it came out that the game's lead designer was unhappy with the name and considered it an unfortunate encumberrance. How about honest advertising and honest communication then? The game has always been marketed and sold as 'Crusader Kings', not as 'Middle Ages'.

17. There have been more such changes and surprises concerning the direction of the game. For example, at release the game had a largely different de iure kingdom setup than now. As for empires, there were two: the HRE and BYZ. This represented a Europe-centric perspective with a Byzantine-centric perspective in the east. De iure Byzantine Empire included Palestine (k_Jerusalem) — the way it was seen by Byzantines of the day during the first crusade. And even by some in Catholic Europe. Around patch 1.05 Paradox comes out of the closet with fantasy kingdoms and fantasy empires, totally changing the de iure philosophy of the game after release.

So where's your sense of direction, Paradox? Every time a new design lead pops up in the team you're going to turn a major concept in a released game upside down?

Or were you plotting that even before release? — Which I find hard to believe. Generally, post-release development of this game tends to lend itself to the conclusion that the game is being handled by new staff, possibly inexperienced and unsupervised and not too familiar with the game. I got a partial confirmation of this info from a staff member in one of these discussions.

18. The ego problem. Things I mentioned above hint of a certain individual 'vision', which is not really clear, not really constant or certain, not communicated to players. There is a strong personality at play somewhere there, with a knack for controversial decisions and for trolling the player base (also hinting at seduction here in particular). There is also a troubling cult-like sentiment in the forum, which is partly reflected by the style and language of PR messages. There has recently been more PR and publicity management than real communication. There's also a visible disconnect and some kind of sick secrecy about some things. Or whatever else it is. I can't really tell because of all the miscommunication.

The untested nerfs also suggest that someone might either be feeling infallible (his decisions don't need background/fact checking/big picture analysis and QA or testing) or not really caring about the outcome since he doesn't play his own game in the first place. The nonsense we're asked to believe also crosses normal boundaries.

19. Related to the above is the current fanboyism mentality in the forums, shared by some moderators and some people from P-dox (though thankfully not developers that I know of), intent on debunking reports about real issues that affect the quality of the game. This typically means employing the narrowest definition of 'bug' possible and dismissing or downplaying everything which is possible as a mere suggestion — preferably to be binned and forgotten. This has recently gone as far as moderator interventions moving threads about historical accuracy of certain dates etc. outside of the bug forum.

20. There is no incentive to be a loyal vassal. Vassals are actually locked out of the realm's wars — they can't and won't assist their liege even if they can be losing land in the war. They can't raise their personal levies and help. Well, the human player can, but he won't be able to affect the warscore, only destroy the liege's enemy's armies physically.

In fact, expensive vassal retinues will stand locked in place, idle, and get slaughtered by the liege's enemies, forcing the AI-controlled vassal to incur heavy costs of replacement.

21. This has been denied multiple times, but it looks like the balancing of this game — largely a singleplayer game — was done around multiplayer. This refers especially to the de iure setup of equal-sized small kingdoms and very small empires, so that every place has its own de iure empire and everyone can become an emperor in his corner of the world. This is hard for me to bring up, because I want to believe the devs who said it wasn't the case, the game was not being balanced around multiplayer equality of opportunity for the players. However, I can't just wish away all the hints of this. So maybe there was a subconscious bias towards multiplayer equality of chances? I don't know. But that sort of equality-of-opportunity balancing is detrimental to realism and thus immersion.

22. Princes of the revolt. Whoever even basically wants to reduce crown authority level is made out to be some sort of anti-king or anti-emperor, with his kids being hailed as princes of the revolt, also in the spouse finder screen. I remember warning Paradox of complications connected with consolidating individual allied rebels into one faction led by a temporary liege, and they didn't listen. Or didn't care. Now we have this.

And guess what? Paradox doesn't care. 'Princes of the Lower Crown Authority Revolt' have been around for like half a year.

23. Mongols. There's been a lot of talking about this and still not a good way of handling them other than than attrition-free megastacks, recently allowed to break up so that they are easier to kill off individually. The Mongols are becoming a greater problem every time normal realms' armies are nerfed, be it levies or retinues or military orders.

24. Tribal holdings. They are nice and cool, but transitioning from tribalism to feudalism results in an awfully long path of progress, basically putting such realms way behind their condition from later starting dates. So for example if you start in 769 and play all the way to 1066, converting from tribal to feudal along the way, you're likely going to end up less developed than if you started with the same realm in a 1066 historical start. You're also much weaker than the societies that were already feudal when you started.

25. Just check out the bug forum.

In summary, to describe the game as being in a beta condition right now would be quite generous. Early beta, maybe late alpha would be more like it, and the state of things is deteriorating.

***

Thus, CK2 manages to be a truly enchanting, inviting, addictive game — largely due to its team and appeal — ridden with more issues than one can think about, permanently broken, currently being in a sort of alpha/beta stage and deteriorating after release.

However, while it was certainly largely playable before, nowadays it's becoming more hassle and grief than it's worth.

And Paradox's patching record has been very clear. More an more arbitrary untested changes. More and more bugs introduced with each and every patch. Extended periods of unplayability. This falls well below professional standards and more in league with amateur modders.

Only technical stability (not many graphical glitches or CTDs or save corruptions) blurs this picture, along with the great visual and acoustic appeal (it truly is eye candy, and Adreas Waldetoft's soundtracks are so lovely). But this is a game with basically botched AI and a lot of inconsistent/nonsensical mechanics, and patches are only making it worse. The team's habits show an absence of QA or proper processes, with a hint of juniors running the show without proper supervision and with an ego or personal vision somewhere in the higher echelons complicating this.

There may be an underlying problem, I don't want to say 'deceit', with the game being continually marketed as 'Crusader Kings' in name, where the people in charge have a different vision of it than what has been officially advertised to the players. And in any case that vision is certainly unclear and chaotic and communication is bad. There seems to be a disconnect with the player base regarding the necessity or priority of fixing certain bugs or the tolerability of game-breaking bugs.

***

Proposed solution (not to be taken too seriously, since it's based on largely insufficient information and guesswork):

1. Juniors need supervision by seniors, period.
2. Changes need QA and big picture consistency/cohesiveness analysis. Draw flowcharts on paper if necessary. Know the game before you change anything in it. Preferably play the game.
3. Think of good, working, permanent solutions. No more duct-tape devices that stay on forever.
4. Get consistent. Get permanent. Know what you are doing. No more cycle of nerfs and unnerfs by ear (improvisation).
5. Know what your concepts are, and follow them.
6. Be clear on those concepts and communicate them.
7. No more design/balancing changes just to troll the players/shake things up a bit.
8. Keep the ego in check. Sorry, had to say this.
9. Get serious about bug fixing.
10. Decrease your tolerance for nonsense (like the levies > retinue thing). Make sure that your AI scripts meet with common sense. Try to make AI think in human terms. Impose checks that reflect plausible human emotions.
11. Communicate. If something looks like an AI mistake (i.e. badly coded AI) but it's supposed to reflect human mistakes, just say it. Designing your game as something else at core than what you've been advertising it as being is not good communication.
12. Non-optional patches to vanilla are not really the right vehicle for second-guesses, afterthoughts and total U-turns from your previous design philosophy.

[garbon]

Exec sum? I can only look at so much whining* though from skimming it looks like complaints cover everything?

*that has not been generated by myself

[Syt]

Well, he touches a few valid points, but his tone and verbosity make it whiny and preachy. And he accuses Paradox of having an ego (which may or may not be true, but he's not exactly the one to cast stones there ).

[Razgovory]

Guy comes off as an asshole.