CKII is released.

People i have a technical problem with this game. The 1.05 works perfectly but when i install ANY of the newer patches and start the game the interface is invisible, what gives?

 

Well either try to install 1.05->1.06->1.07->1.08 or ask at Paradox forum.

 

Perhaps a complete reinstall followed up by only installing the latest patch might fix it. Do you have any mods or DLC installed?

 

Works just fine if you replace inviting the Arab with inviting his non-infidel wife, who came from your court and just married him yesterday. Bringing him along, of course. As long as they aren't Content or specially hating you/loving their new lord they will either do it as soon as you ask or require a mere 20 gold donation first. Another nice thing is that family members get a huge bonus to the chance to come back to court, meaning you can use any shitty daughter to bring in the next Saladin who has 30 in a stat at 20 years of age to be a ridiculously good councilor.

Yeah, but at this point why even bother with needing fleets? It's really just a lot of busywork micromanagement if there are zero ways to actually lose the ships. If you play a coastal game (I'm fond of the Batatzes in Achaia myself), you'll spend 2 or 3 minutes on the first 3 days of every way just loading units up correctly. Might as well just have them seamless and behind the scenes at this point if there is going to be no counter to ships. Make troops able to cross water on their own and increase the upkeep by 50% when this is going on.

Also, naval transports should be slowed down a bit if the AI isn't going to use it properly. It's really overpowering to have something like 10-100x more maneuverability. Attrition needs to be added in some form as well, should not be able to throw around 50k deathstacks nearly anywhere in the world without any attrition just because they are standing on a ship.

 

They used to have attrition on ships, It started at around 6k I believe. This was way to easy to circumvent though. Just break your army up and send it in 6k waves that are kept a sea zone or two apart. So all it really added was a lot more micromanagement and you could still move armies of any size around rapidly while taking no naval attrition. They went ahead and removed the naval attrition in a patch in order to get rid of needless micromanagement. You could imagine that the massive navies and the armies they transport are abstracted and are actually broken up into smaller fleets to better facilitate travel and logistics. I suppose you could make naval attrition always occur and not be dependant on the size of the army transported so choosing to use naval transport incurs the cost of attrition in order to get better strategic mobility. Of course then a person could just make their naval journeys less than a month long hops in order to avoid naval attrition. So you get another case of micromanagement beats attrition.

Naval attrition would probably also further complicate the AIs use of Navies and you are definitely right about the AI not taking advantage of navies. That has been a reoccurring problem in almost every Paradox title though. It's been a reoccurring problem in almost every Total War title as well for that matter. I guess there is just something hard about naval transport AI. Probably has to do with how every coastal location has every other coastal location as a potential destination. So I don't know if we are gonna get competent naval transport AIs anytime soon. It might just have to remain one of those things that is an advantage for the player(like all features introduced in games that AIs can't figure out how to use properly).

I don't think that getting rid of navies and abstracting naval transport is the solution though. The way it works now, the more coastal holdings a nation/power has the better their sea transport capacity. Landlocked folks are entirely dependent on mercenaries for naval transport. If navies are abstracted away the naval capacity of different countries wouldn't be taken into account. I suppose they could base the gold cost/upkeep increase on the number of coastal holdings you have or something like that but I think the current system does a better job of accomplishing that and communicating it to the player.

Wasn't one of the patches/DLCs supposed to have armies raised appear in larger chunks instead of spread all around every county? That should help reduce the micromanagement of gathering up your armies before war. I suppose that wouldn't do anything for coastal counties not connected to the rest of your territory though.

I haven't played CK2 since the Sword of Islam DLC. I should get the new DLCs and play it again. It's a good game.

 

Actually that significantly depowers naval armies. One of the biggest points in favour of them is that while the enemy (in my case the ERE) takes over a month to gather its doomstack together my forces are ready in a week to drop their 50k on scattered groups of 10-15k and eat away 3/4ths of their strength before the ERE is prepared. If you were forced to send things in 6k chunks you would face much more expensive naval landings trying to only land 6k units every few weeks against the 10k-15k stacks. That said, I agree it's an absolute PITA.

Which is why I think it would be a good ideas to simply let land units travel across the sea and abstract out the navy. The biggest problem with designing AI for this is the somewhat complex planning ahead needed to get the navy and army to work in tandem. Removing the navy from the equation and treating sea provinces the same as land provinces with regards to movement (adding on attrition/upkeep/combat modifiers as needed) basically solves the problem. At this point the mechanic doesn't add anything to the game, and it's one that the AI can't use and the player doesn't want to use except for the fact that it lets you beat an AI that can't use it.

Well, the mercs are basically an upkeep system (and a fucking expensive one at that, by the time you can afford to blow 75 gold a month to transport 10k troops the game should be considered "won"). That's not a bad idea, but I think attrition would be better to balance this out. Say, every coastal province raises the supply limit for all water provinces by 250 troops? I think that sounds about right.

Paradox games communicating things to the player? . But seriously, simply adding a tooltip when you hover over the supply limit statistic for coastal provinces would be par for the course.

Only inasmuch as that vassals that have other vassals raise their army all in one chunk (which merely saves you the need to press the button to combine armies, once in a while). Doesn't really do anything unless you perform a semi-exploit to make all vassals with vassals have their main holding in a central location so that their troops across the map appear magically next to your capital when you summon them.

One game whenever I raised my son's/daughter's levy it spawned as a 100k uber-group on the province next to my capital. I considered it the nuclear option to be spawned ontop of any invading army, then despawned before attrition kicked it. Or shuttled into a fleet to quickly do the same to another province, but my child's income went to several negative hundred a month from it being raised so I didn't want to prolong this. It's funny how every time you play you find new ridiculously funny exploits to perform. (How my children got 100k-sized levies is another amusing exploit by the way...)

 

In first CK armies where travelling by sea paying for transport that materialized from thin air. It wasn't actually fun and for the sake of gameplay I think the current system is optimal. And don't forget that attrition still happens when army is loaded on a docked ship.

Without that gamey system(no attrition), there wouldn't be any viable strategy to destroy hordes doomstacks.

 

I've never actually seen the hordes since I've always started my games at the beginning, but no-attrition doomstacks walking around from hordes should probably be changed in the first place as it sounds like a blight upon every mechanic in the game. Give them double supply limit or whatever, but 100k stacks should not be marching or sailing around anywhere in the game, whether by player or AI.

 

Not really. I spent a couple of months keeping a 100k retinue loaded on a docked fleet in a province that just turned nahuatl, in anticipation of asstec landing (only to find out it misfired because the game goes all the way back from 1.04, and somebody had to be given e_mexikha via console first in order to enable the stupid invasion), and it did not suffer attrition. Any disembarked troops in the same province, however, no matter how few, did suffer full attrition as if the entire army was landed. Moreover, reloading a saved game caused embarked docked army to disembark. It cost me about 10k in losses to notice Eventually I gave up and sent them sailing outside.

 

I had in my mind that other/rest of the doomstack NOT embarked on the ship suffers attrition, even if there is only 1000 of them. My fault.

 

You didn't have to wait weeks between waves. If you landed in several counties and assaulted to gain a foothold quickly(so you troops directly in the port) it took very little time to get even a very large army landed with very few losses(whether due to attrition or assaulting). Naval attrition sounds like a good idea it is just far to easy to micromanage your way around it. That is why they got rid of it.

The current system serves as a hard limit. There is a maximum you are able to move based on your coastal holdings, or how many overpriced(and limited in quantity) mercs with ships you can afford. So a largely landlocked power will just not be able to move many(possibly none) troops by ship, no matter how rich and powerful they are. Not just that but it is able to take into account things like vassal relationships, recently conquered province penalties, how developed the holdings are, and if naval levies have recently been depleted. Abstracting away the ships will lose most of that. And it is communicated very well to the player how better/more coastal holdings = more naval levies = more naval transport capacity. It doesn't use a hidden formula to calculate what kind of increased upkeep/attrition penalties you will take and is so intuitive it doesn't need even a tooltip to communicate the concept.

That seems pretty reasonable to me. I almost never stack my armies in doomstacks anyway. I try and keep them under the attrition limit unless I have a need of more troops in the county for a reason, such as a battle or I need more for a successful assault. As a result I usually have them broken up in chunks close enough together that they can assemble as one army if needed. I also like having Armies that I can raise close to the borders so I can get them active doing something quicker.

TBH though it's not really the combat that is a strength of CK2. Aside from HOI it's not the strength of any of the Paradox titles.

The exploits will always exist in Paradox title.

If I was in charge I would change the way the navies work in CK2 like this.

-Reduce the size of naval levies(or the number of troops transported per ship). Reduce it to between a quarter and half of what it is right now, maybe even reduce it a little more if that is still too much. That way the only people that will be able to move their entire realms levies in one go are ones that are made up almost entirely of coastal provinces with well developed cities. Everyone else will have to contend with only being able to transport a portion of their armies by boat.

-Introduce time based naval attrition. That is so you can't just have armies sitting out in the water or in the port not having to worry about attrition. You should get a month or two free(should be long enough for most journeys) but after that it starts ramping up quickly.

-Have how long it takes armies to embark and disembark be effected by how large the army is. Larger armies take longer to load on boats and longer to disembark. Of course you would have to make sure that that all the armies embarking/disembarking in a county/sea zone are totaled for the purpose of determining how long it takes.

I think those changes would help reduce the effectiveness of some existing exploits, makes the choices concerning your realms seapower(both it's utilization and how much you realm will have) more interesting, and doesn't increase the amount of unecessary/uninteresting micromanagement any. I'm also pretty sure it doesn't introduce any new exploits but that's always possible.

 

No, I'm not talking about landing and assaulting. I'm talking about easily smashing an army 3x your size after 2 weeks of declaring war because you can massively overpower local, fragmented armies before the AI forms a doomstack (and as far as I'm concerned, doomstack isn't neccesarily 100k, it's any huge stack that would hurt your troops). As a coastal power you can fight 3 to 1, 4 to 1, 5 to 1 odds easily and come out with almost no losses this way. We're talking straight up landing your entire army on 1/10 of the enemy's army, killing it in 5 days or so, getting back on the boat and going off to snipe another. That's the biggest exploit of naval armies, and one that attrition at sea would fix.

Except it also limits the AI to never using ships effectively, which kills the game for all non-landlocked nations.

Heh, certainly. That was just a funny side-comment on what the system does. It's fun to find exploits but after using them once I'm done. The problem comes in when clearly intended mechanics are essentially an exploit because the AI is unable to use them properly and are vastly underpowered because of it.

That makes micromanagement worse. The loading and unloading is the PITA of the ship micromanagement when it needs to be done constantly. Granted, it reduces the power of exploits, but not in a good way.

Would be good, fix a lot of weirdness (Sicily sailing up to Norway? Yeah totally legit). I would say that the attrition should depend on the troop/ship ratio. i.e., 100% loaded = 1 or 2 months before attrition, 10% loaded = a year or more. The problem if that there is also constant loading/unloading of troops in the tactic/exploit I mentioned above. IIRC EU3 had both distance from friendly province and time at sea penalties, no reason CK2 couldn't copy those.

Don't really like this. Doesn't make much sense logically. Better just to make the disembark take a longer time, independent of army size. It's like, what, 3 days? Enemy armies in the province you are moving into should always have a chance to get away, but nothing can react to that. Moving from sea to land should take about as much time as a land to land movement.

 

I did not know that Crusader Kings Lets you do successful amphibious operations. I always assumed that the penalty for amphibious assaults must be massive(like it should be). The problem with this exploit you have presented here isn't that you can move your army without any attrition, It is that you are winning these fights. The defender should be massacring an attacker if they are doing an amphibious attack unless the attacker has some kind of overwhelming numbers. like more than 10 to 1. And the defenders should still be causing at least as many casualties as they are taking in those situations. There is a reason that large scale amphibious assaults didn't really happen until WW2. The technology didn't exist to properly coordinate that kind of operation at a large scale or allow for rapid enough disembarkation. If your enemy caught you disembarking you were screwed because your forces would be completely disorganized(like entirely, almost no command and control was possible) during a landing and split up between those who had already landed and those who were still waiting to disembark. Disembarking a very large force could take days, or weeks even if the beach/harbor wasn't a very suitable one. There were very few harbors/beaches in the medieval period that were capable of handling several hundred ships rapidly. Especially when you consider that a lot of them would have tidal limitations so they couldn't even use 100% of the daylight for disembarkation operations. So an enemy that catches you landing, even a small one, is going to mess your world up. Realistically you would stop trying to land and sail away. So maybe the presence of an enemy force at least 1/10th your size should just make landing impossible.

Plus if you are hitting places within the same kingdom you aren't taking very long sea journeys. If you are able to keep your naval journeys less than a month most of the time you will avoid most of the naval attrition and it wouldn't cause significant casualties(I suppose you would be caught taking attrition more often though). Naval attrition only really had n effect for longer journeys, like about halfway across the Mediterranean.

I don't see us getting a viable naval AI for CK2, even if navies are abstracted away. It's hardly the only AI problem in CK2 anyway. Maybe they improved the AI but the AI I played wasn't to good at avoiding attrition, assembling forces at the decisive points quickly, or managing levy call up and dismissal so they could effectively win wars without taking lots of unnecessary losses. that;s why I would focus on reducing the effectiveness of naval operations instead of just simplifying them in the hopes that the AI would be capable of using them effectively. Even if you get the AI moving troops over the water it still isn't going to be selecting it's destinations very well. It doesn't select it's destinations very well for land movement.

It only makes it worse for people that insist on trying to move their entire army around by ship when they don't have the naval capacity to do that. The purpose of this change is to make using naval transport less viable for realms that aren't focused on sea power. So it can only be used to supplement land movement and not replace it entirely.

The EU2 mechanics were exactly what I was thinking of.

I think it makes perfect sense. Medieval embarkations and disembarkation were not quick for large forces. Honestly a force of 50,000 wouldn't be able to embark/disembark in many(if not most) of the coastal counties as their weren't suitable beaches/harbors to facilitate it.

 

OK full reinstall fixed it so now i can play the game but i have another problem. It lags, and i am not talking about framerate issues, the game runs smoothly for 30 in-game days then it takes full 2 seconds to pass one in-game day (at fastest speed). Changing the resolution to lowest doesn't work. How to fix this?

 

Its not a graphic issue since graphics in Paradox games dont use much resources. Instead its a problem of calculating power since those games rely on RAM very much and are not using it very effectively (bad optimization). Try fixing by changing how much RAM is available for the game. From what I recall once a month is when some calculations are being done in the game so it makes sense...

 

It's not a monthly lag because it can go from 15th to 15th next month with no problem. The game flows usually like this:
smoooooooooooooth LAG smooooooooooth LAG smooooooooth LAG

 

Also with newer versions i'm getting "unhandled exception" at the launcher screen why is that.

 

Borelli is your autosave frequency set to monthly?

 

I think its time to give this game another go what with all the DLC and patches since release. Any recommended mods that don't alter the game too much? I remember there being a mod that added a ton of events that were mostly balanced.

 

5 years intervals.

 

No idea what is causing your slowdown then. Normally monthly slowdown in Paradox games are due to the calculations it makes at end of the month but if you are saying the slowdowns aren't happening at the end of the month(or even the same time every month) then I've got no clue.

 

Does it happen with other games too? Never had issues like this with CK2. How much RAM do you have and how much free space do you have on the disk with the page file? Also, try temporarily turning off your antivirus along with all the other background software you might have running and see if it helps. It shouldn't help with most of AV software I'm acquainted with but hey, you can give it a try.

 

Dev Diary 4 (last)

1.09 patch notes

• Ultimogeniture Succession: the youngest child inherits
• Tanistry: A version of Feudal Elective where the electors must pick a member of your dynasty, but will tend to pick distant relatives, preferably old claimants
• Grant Independence Diplomatic option
• Automatic cultural renaming of titles in your realm. So you'll automatically see Smyrna turn into Izmir if held by Turks, etc.
• Added 1241 Bookmark - "The Mongols"
• The Reign length opinion modifers are now dependent on how long a character has been the liege of someone, not how long the primary title has been held
• All merc regiments now grow in max size over time
• Added more mercenary bands: Finns, Lapps, Abyssinians, Nubians, Lithuanians, Scots, Irish and Alans

 

All good updates. Absolutely loving the idea of the new succession laws.

 

Hallelujah. I've been waiting for this.