CKII is released.

[Trash]

Updated Memento Mori to work with the new patch and DLC. Nerfed childbirth deathrate and chances for a natural death at certain ages since Pdox toned down the birthrate once more. Viking raids can also destroy buildings a bit easier than in vanilla. Other than that it's pretty much the same as in the last version of the mod.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/zw2hbgvif8ofmh0/Memento_Mori_for_CKII_1.10.rar

Going to see if I can easily update Culturally Different Cities to 1.10. You can however forget about the Better Looking Characters mod. That one is now so out of date that any updating would come down to a hack job. Only a complete overhaul would work and that's not something I'm up to.

Not exactly sure why but can't create any ships despite holding coastal provinces, going to see if looting all the way down the coast to Germany will work.

You now need to build shipyards and such to be able to make them. A little balancing thing to stop Vikings from being to OP. Prolly same with the high building costs they have.

 

[Kattze]

The adventurer system is the shit. One of my younger sons (playing as the Norse) tried to invade Damietta in Egypt on his own, he almost succeeded if only I give him much more in support. He was captured and imprisoned by the Tulunids, in an effort to a avenge my son, I prepared an invasion to attack Egypt only for the Aghlabids (who held Mauretania and Africa) to come to the aid of the Tulunids and defeat my invasion force.

 

[anus_pounder]

The adventurer system is the shit. One of my younger sons (playing as the Norse) tried to invade Damietta in Egypt on his own, he almost succeeded if only I give him much more in support. He was captured and imprisoned by the Tulunids, in an effort to a avenge my son, I prepared an invasion to attack Egypt only for the Aghlabids (who held Mauretania and Africa) to come to the aid of the Tulunids and defeat my invasion force.

Sounds like something right of a bad hollywood 'epic'.

Well. If at first you don't succeed...

 

[Spectacle]

Looting is very lucrative, as the one province count of the Færeyjar I could easily raise 500 gold in a few years of raiding, which would be unthinkable for a 1 province Christian count. I was just about to hire mercenaries to go on a conquest spree when I realized I had no way of transporting the mercenaries away from my tiny island, my 7 ship fleet couldn't fit even the smallest mercenary company. I had to conquer a vulnerable county in Ireland and move my capital there to get a foothold.

I foresee raiding getting tedious after a while though, it takes a lot of micromanagement of armies and fleets to do it, but you're gimping yourself if you're not constantly raiding for money and prestige.

 

[sser]

Yeah, but if you think about it, raiding is one of the primary gameplay elements of the Norse. Kinda like handling decadence and male family in the Muslim lands, it's just one of the main features to deal with. I personally enjoy the raiding because it gives me something to do between all the other downtime. My problem with it is that it has a high potential to be overpowered. With enough ships and men, you can "raid" half the continent and come back with a warchest that'll hold you steady for the next decade easily. And by "raid" I mean cause serious damage not only free of charge, but be paid to do it. I was a little shocked when I outright destroyed a holding somewhere in Russia due to one of my raids. Realizing it's a gameplay element is one thing, but those holdings are costly to build, and if that happened to me I'd be WTF'ing back to my desktop.

 

[curry]

I haven't played TOG yet but let me guess, it makes Vikings OP?

Just like all the previous DLCs made whoever they focused on OP.

Paradox, Paradox never changes

 

[Trash]

Before everyone would just improve ad infinitum and increase holdings all across the board. A simple race to the top so to speak. I for one am very glad to see buildings getting destroyed through raiding and even have the occasional holding burn down. It will make the worldmap a much more interesting place to manage and will force players to not take forever growing settlements for granted.

Add to this some modded events to simulate province prosperity, natural disasters and places getting damaged through regular warfare and it's moving into defenitive incline territory.

The idea behind viking balance is a simple one. At the start you can pretty much plunder to your hearts content. This will slowly subside as you are very vulnerable to being converted and by ever increasing fortification levels. At a certain point you WILL be overclassed by the christian powers and then you'll either have to convert or have canonised your own religion. Losing the whole plunder mechanic while doing so. That whole subjegation CB otoh, that needs work.

EDIT: Well, fuck CDC. It's working to a certain extent but the modder has made such a tangle of the graphic files that I need to basically reattach them to every culture in the game to match the last patch. Doable but not fun. Since the original modder was online and posting a week ago I'll assume he'll update it himself. If not, I can always spend a few angry hours at it.

 

[PorkaMorka]

How full are your courts getting?

Even before this expansion I had to work very hard to keep my court under 30 people to avoid the birth rate penalty. I can only imagine that this would become much more problematic in the expansion, if you are making proper use of the new rape dungeon feature.

As fun as it would be to have a rape dungeon full of women with super high stats, managing the resulting dynasty members and keeping down the number of people in your court seems like it would be very difficult.

Maybe they need a feature where you can quickly and easily send people to live with your relatives. I know there are some tricks to get rid of them, but sometimes they are not practical.

 

[Kem0sabe]

The rape dungeon feature actually opens up a bunch of DLC possibilities, accessorise.

 

[Trash]

How full are your courts getting?

After both the measles, typhus and a long war? Not so full.

 

[RedScum]

I lol'd.

+2 in martial for me!

 

[Merkwürdigliebe]

Sow how is the whole fertility changes thing working out for you other guys?

I think my dynasty must be blessed by Freyr. Combine that with the mandatory gavelkind, it makes for some nice fun game play with unstable realms.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The plan to use glowing rocks found in the woods to poison his mead was found too conspicuous.

The idea behind viking balance is a simple one. At the start you can pretty much plunder to your hearts content. This will slowly subside as you are very vulnerable to being converted and by ever increasing fortification levels. At a certain point you WILL be overclassed by the christian powers and then you'll either have to convert or have canonised your own religion. Losing the whole plunder mechanic while doing so. That whole subjegation CB otoh, that needs work.

Generally the main problem is that Gavelkind doesn't do enough "damage".

I'd also argue that Rurik isn't actually the OP steamroller in the game, the lack of religious and cultural integrity in his place in the woods can prove fatal with unfortunate accidents (the above great success pretty much single-handedly delivered a killing blow to his realm, the instability quickly escalated and eventually ripped the place apart when I swooped in to nab Novgorod for myself). The real problem crowd are the Danes, who start with seriously powerful provinces, which combined with their fleet means they can easily build a powerful and stable empire due to the fleet edge they start the game with.

And I agree, Subjugate does need a lot of work, like certain basic limits to the circumstances when it is valid. I had a vast realm very quickly and reformed fast (since flushing baby boys down the toilet is getting costly). With Become King ambition, you basically go on a conquest spree once you hit critical mass and can easily take your neighbours in short order. It also presents a problem when it can be targeted rather liberally, I had Swedes attack my realm in the same manner, which would obviously present a huge problem. IMO, the easiest method would be to just remove the CB when you have a full kingdom (or some arbitrary number of provinces roughly corresponding the average kingdom), or just make Gavelkind more severe like suggested earlier.


Also, my biggest "ooh, nice gold you got there" moment was when this random Italian devil decided to come and conquer Livonia for himself (adventurer). Well, once he was thrown in the dungeon I realized the dude had 500 gold with him. So, took his gold, sent him back home to Apulia.

 

[Tigranes]

It's been a breeze so far. When Rurik I died the successor had two younger bro dukes but they being dukes in the Kingdom of Rus remained within the realm, so no splitting. Just about every single vassal hated the new King's guts and I spent 15 years stomping on 4 rebellions, but even with half my max demesne I had enough troops to stomp them out without calling on vassals, using my raiding loot for mercenaries. Now he's consolidated, everyone accepts him, and the Kingdom only lost 1 province. I did work hard with Chancellor, Gifts and Honourary Titles, meaning none of the brothers actually participated in the rebellions.

We will see, I think being so far away from Christian Kingdoms makes it easier, but I feel like my neighbouring Pagans could be more aggressive also. After this I"ll start as a much weaker tribe and see how that goes.

 

[anus_pounder]

Anyone tried a game as the far east tengri (Cumans, I think) yet?

 

[Whisky]

Anyone tried a game as the far east tengri (Cumans, I think) yet?

Played as the Khazars once. Decided to raid Mighty Georgia for loot and deformed DLC facepack wimminz. Before I could even reach it, everyone started wanting independence in my demesne. Then the Pechenegs declared war on me. Not sure why everyone decided to buttfuck me.

Perhaps Liberal was right. Georgia is protected from on high.

 

[anus_pounder]

Anyone tried a game as the far east tengri (Cumans, I think) yet?

Played as the Khazars once. Decided to raid Mighty Georgia for loot and deformed DLC facepack wimminz. Before I could even reach it, everyone started wanted independence in my demesne. Then the Pechenegs declared war on me. Not sure why everyone decided to buttfuck me.

Perhaps Liberal was right. Georgia is protected from on high.

Was there ever any doubt?

 

[Average Manatee]

I haven't played TOG yet but let me guess, it makes Vikings OP?

Just like all the previous DLCs made whoever they focused on OP.

Paradox, Paradox never changes

More than Republics.

I technically started as a OPM count. Within a decade I could afford to have every merc available hired on a permanent basis*. From there all that was left to do was charge around on boats (norse vassals don't get mad from their levies being raised) knocking down every other minor and getting those religious sites. This is me 18 years into the game, where I was able to reform the norse religion. Reforming the religion is actually a bad idea though imo, you lose your 50% retinue bonus and vassals get mad for raising levies, all you gain is the ability to holy war and have different succession laws. Plus lots of your vassals stay old norse and hate you as a heretic, though that might be a bug.

Right after this I converted to catholic, assassinated the pope and gave the new one a random holding, then got his blessing to invade France. Sadly that just makes me become France, which means I wouldn't get to keep my nice orange color.

*not as impressive as it sounds seeing how there are only 3, but more than enough to buttfuck his papalness and those merchant republics for the lewt.


Other pagans are almost as bad, since they get most of the same CBs (attack any neighbor for a county any time and any pagan for a kingdom/duchy once a decade, just can't attack any coastal city without a border). They don't get the retinue bonus though, but they do get some rather powerful other bonuses (e.g. Slavic and Suomenusko get +80% to unit defense, +80% to garrison sizes in their territory, and +.8 morale). Zoroastrians get nothing and are setup to be raped by muslims immediately, but hey, they get to fuck their sisters and mothers and get piety from it.

 

[Kattze]

I haven't played TOG yet but let me guess, it makes Vikings OP?

Just like all the previous DLCs made whoever they focused on OP.

Paradox, Paradox never changes

Not all vikings just Denmark mostly.

 

[Kattze]

Hope some modder makes event packs for non-norse pagans (especially for Tengri and West African) because their events are really lacking.

 

[Whisky]

Yeah, West Africans get nothing special about them, except for location and the ability to get Ultimogeniture. They can't even raid.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The namefile for Finnish culture group is significantly better this time around (though fucking Virtanen is still there). The addition of Mordvins rounds out the eastern edge, though splitting Baltic Finns to Estonians and Finnish is kind of questionable (the majority cultures around present day Latvia are still fucked for the most part, but it's a minor thing).

Overall, the only thing I feel I should do is switch Finno-Ugrics to either use the Russian or Norse portrait pack clothes and sprites.

EDIT: And yes, if anyone knows how the clothes are decided, I would appreciate a quick how-to in changing them.

 

[Trash]

EDIT: And yes, if anyone knows how the clothes are decided, I would appreciate a quick how-to in changing them.

You can easily pick and choose in the internal files. Just check out any portrait pack and you see which ones. It is however a bitch to port this shit for each patch as they tend to toss around cultures and so on.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

EDIT: And yes, if anyone knows how the clothes are decided, I would appreciate a quick how-to in changing them.

You can easily pick and choose in the internal files. Just check out any portrait pack and you see which ones. It is however a bitch to port this shit for each patch as they tend to toss around cultures and so on.

A bit more specific with the instructions please. Never done modding with this stuff in CK2 yet.

 

[KazikluBey]

I've seen you complain a few times about Virtanen. Wikipedia wasn't terribly helpful, but I take it it's a rather modern, burgher class invention along the lines of Swedish names as Lindberg, Granström, Hedlund, Almgren, etc?

I tried playing TPatT for a bit, but though it seems rather neat it slows down the game on my crappy laptop a bit much to be bearable in the long run. : x