CKII is released.

Definitely this.

The societies seem to be proof-of-concept stuff to guide modders in how to make missions and stuff. They are badly imbalanced and feel out of place. The devil-worshipping society in particular basically gives you guaranteed immortality + ability to kidnap and execute anyone without tyranny. Unfortunately Paradox made societies hardcoded to be mutually exclusive which seems to screw over modders who were planning to let characters be in multiple societies at once.

 

Good. If there's one thing CK2 needed, it was guaranteed immortality. Because just getting the immortality quest line in every single game wasn't enough. The game is so hard, you really need Godmode. And then people will whine about not feeling challenged and they'll add in more stuff like shattered retreat and totally historical medieval concepts like "threat level" and "defensive pacts". Now all we need is nukes and pacts like NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

 

They already did....

 

Why would you need nuke when you have demonic possession ? That last DLC "monk&mystic" should be renamed to "Hail lucifer" the advantages you get from that "secret" society are unbelievable.You see a lone county ? abduct the guy, demonic possession, force vassalize him , force revoke title. You are emperor with many powerful vassals ? Demonic possession, 100% loyal guy , although they rarely murder you.You need more money ? abduct some guy from lower rank than you and ransom it, 50 dark power= 70 gold thats the exchange rate.Want a new wife ? dark divorce. Want anyone dead ? tainted touch.Lucifer has a solution for everything and its costing you nothing at all.
The christians secret societies gives you a discount on temple building, a birth control system, free character virtues and a better medic, rather cool but not nearly as good. Hermetic order, immortality at the end, else nothing of worth.

 

If you don't go to the extremes (immortality), I find the Hermetic order quite practical, because it has a cure for the annoying "Stressed" trait, which the game, imo, dishes out way too often.

 

Playing them a little more i found you can easily exploit it to get massive learning bonuses too.

 

The health penalty of Stressed is truly awful. Feels like most of the time I get sick I'll recover just fine so long as I'm under 50 years old, but if I get Stressed + sick, it's death within a month.

 

Keep in mind, Sloth massively reduces the chance of getting Stressed.

 

The modern concept of stress was unknown in Medieval times anyway.

 

Anyone noticed a change for the worse in how the AI handles its armies during war? I'm not sure whether I just hadn't noticed it before but it appears to be... just moving around more aimlessly than before. An army will siege something, then just go to some area that is not involved in the war effort, and then march back again.

 

Right, I was browsing the Warhammer mod subforum and saw this:

followed by this:

Which of you jokers was it?

 

Haven't played the game in a long while, so might've forgotten how to do this, but why can't I find any proper options to force my vassals with negative opinion to pay their obligations? Who the fuck do they think they are? Feudalism isn't a popularity contest: you pay your liege or get your shit fucked up - and yet the game isn't giving me a casus belli for it, like all I'm supposed to do is suck up to my vassals or something. What's the deal here?

 

Getting a casus belli for something as trivial as not liking you would make the effort of running a kingdom... Well, too trivial. Bottomline is that if you have a powerful vassal that's a thorn in your side, you need to put some effort into getting shit done about it. Say, send the spymaster to make up some bullshit if you never uncover a treasonous plot by them. Fabricate claims on their better lands and take them for yourself or grant to a more amiable vassal. Favor another vassal in disputes against them. Assassinate them. Provoke them to start a faction war that you can win. Become a heretic and purge the realm of popery/whatever. Bribe them with money and fancy hats. Sacrifice them to Satan. Or, just put more effort into being a popular ruler.

Gist is, you are supposed to have to put effort into cleaning house home first and then worry about the foreign devils around you. The game is about running the kindergarten/nest of vipers.

 

The game has had a minimum tax and levy rate regardless of opinion for a long time. Think of that as the actual tax rate and the rest as gifts given in return for good will or something.

Not sure about this bit of history but I'm guessing if you actually tried to tax a town 50% in medieval Europe without there being 200k mongols on the horizon they'd revolt instantly. So the minimum is the legally minimum contribution. The rest is the inhabitants trying to butter you up and/or corruption.

 

Um... medieval inhabitants aren't going to pay twice the tax they need to because they want to 'butter you up', and corruption is when tax collectors keep the money from the state

 

There's always been instances of leaders being willing to give a free hand to their underlings and look the other way so long as they benefited from more cash or better performance. Dunno if that's technically corruption but you get the deal. e.g. "I don't care what you do with your town so long as the money flows".

 

? I wouldn't care if it was just about them "not liking" - this is about them not paying what they are obligated to, which was never trivial.

What I'd do is give an uppity vassal a decision: a) to pay in full or b) withhold a certain amount, which then gives their liege a casus belli to enforce the full payment for 10 years.
For balance reasons, I'd make using the CB add a cumulative "tyrannical ruler" modifier to all vassals, but the CB should be there - it makes zero sense not to. We aren't playing Crusader Cucks here... are we?

Maybe. Rather silly to expect someone to pay several times the amount they have to simply because they "like" their liege, though. If the goal was to butter up, the AI could've simply been given the option for occasional extra contribution via a decision.
Still, I forgot about the minimums. Kinda-sorta helps to larp it off, but I'd rather have vassals be the ones who have to pucker up for their liege, not the other way around. Let tyranny come with penalties, but the option should be there.

 

Yeah, what happens is the tax collectors and town mayors get extra money, not the state. So it can make some sense for, say, Counts to extort their region, a la Roman governors - then it starts to make less sense to have superhigh taxes nationwide when you're a King (does CK actually calculate tax income feudally, i.e. you get % from nobles refracted by loyalty etc., or is it calculated raw from nation population?)

 

Yeah, OK. Still, I think the idea of people who don't like you complying less with your taxes makes sense. It's not like its the 21st century where we have computers and stuff to tabulate things. It's hard to figure out how much something is worth and how much a region is producing. That's kind of what the stewardship skill is and why you make more cash with it.

 

Multiple stages, you first have the province's base tax income from holdings, buildings, and modifiers, which is then changed by the Stewardship of the people directly in control of the holdings, then the congaline of % tax up the feudal ladder modified by opinions starts.

See, being able to use a CB to force full payment of taxes would be TOO EASY. It'd make managing your finances trivial. Furthermore, it'd be a completely gamist mechanic.

CK2 uses an abstraction of medieval taxation to make it into something simple enough to be used as a game mechanic (ie, taxes are collected as cash transfers to royal bank account, rather than all sorts of shit whatever peasant happens to be able to scrounge up as a living in a subsistence agriculture and almost never in gold or currency). Basically the gist is that while you have a GUI telling you that your vassal isn't paying as much as they could, the actual ruler you are playing as would have absolutely no idea this was the case. This is essentially an abstract form of corruption that's baked into backroom politics. The low opinion vassal is not merely someone who doesn't like you, they are a potential rebel and most likely a part of one dangerous faction if not the leader of it. They'd have every reason to come up with whatever plausible bullshit excuse (see letter saying "doge ateth thine taxes, liege, the peasants art starving woe is us" or whatever) but ultimately the game aspect here is that you are presented with a problem that if left unattended will at minimum sap your resources to grow as a problem or will explode into a bigger problem, with now you having to find a way to deal with the problem of which the game presents several. The trick is in finding a way that doesn't cause tyranny. Another thing to note is that the tax system itself is designed to work as a way of tying into the game's feudal state management mechanics, historical simulation would just have no taxation at all from the nobility (one of their most zealously guarded privileges until the downfall of estates system all across Europe), and would really just steal from your shit to build golden outhouses and such bullshit.

Also of note regarding earlier mention of 50% taxation is that you have been too inundated with living in the time of sensible and relatively human governing and economics. 50% was the low end of tormenting your peasantry scale, in places like Sweden-Finland it's estimated that it might be as high as 75% (EDIT: Of further note in regards to these estimates is that income taxation or percentile based taxation was not a thing, most common form of taxation was an arbitrary amount of tax based on what someone thought the peasant should be able to produce on their patch; we also aren't getting into all the exemptions and special cases like equipping and supporting a horseman for the king's army to gain tax exemption in Sweden-Finland). Thing is, taxation was not exactly an all that organized business, and one reason for why France organized itself so rapidly after the triple Henry shenanigans was that the estates of each subdivision of France handed the king indefinate right to set whatever new bullshit taxes they could come up with. That's also a thing that's not really presented in the game, that taxes consisted of many many bullshit taxes that were especially during wartime made up very arbitrarily to squeeze out every scrap of loose resources (mainly agricultural products, naturally) that could then be turned to cash. Another example of abstraction is that the Church takes its tenths from you rather than from all your peasants. If the game had a realistic presentation of medieval taxation, most players would be very confused by it, in rising debt funded by Italian bankers, and thinking "oh god I don't know how these poor peasants put up with all this shit heaped on them."

 

They're adding Tibet.

 

PROHIBITED IN CHINAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

 

China when. I want to see if Swedes can do better ROTK-like than Japanese

 

Crusader Chinks