CKII is released.

[Average Manatee]

A few pages back I made a post regarding winning combat with the numerical odds against you. There IS a lot you can do, but it's kind of cheezy and makes it too easy if you aren't playing a very hard start.

- Martial is useless without traits. It's basically a bonus magnifier and malus minimizer. Good traits (light infantry leader + mountain fighter) can easily lead to your units being 2-3x as powerful as your enemy's.

- Retinue let you customize troop composition. And Archers are by far the best retinue unit in all situations. Usually you should aim for a 60/40 archer split to minimize the enemy immediately charging into melee. Stack all archers on one flank, unleash the death star super laser on an unsuspecting enemy flank.

 

[curry]

Vikings still OP or has there been a balanced patch recently?

 

[Wise Emperor]

Cross post from EU thread

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...ersalis-IV&s=15354918d57414b17b7eb0b301ee522a

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Cross post from EU thread

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...ersalis-IV&s=15354918d57414b17b7eb0b301ee522a

 

[Cosmic Misogynerd]

'Sup Mother Russia.

 

[Turisas]

In before death threats to Paradox for defiling the One True Faith (of peace).

 

[Quilty]

Memento Mori for CKII 1.103

Memento Mori is a mod born out of a simple ambition. To bring back a little bit of the uncertainty and excitement that came with managing a dynasty in the original Crusader Kings with the excellent DVIP mod. While Crusader Kings II is in almost every aspect an improvement on the original game, Paradox has drastically lowered the difficulties and dangers that your characters run into during their life in the middle ages. Diseases back then were deadly, medical care was more apt to kill you than heal you, giving birth was like playing Russian roulette and violence maimed and killed as often as it gave prestige. This mod attempts to emulate the hardships that people endured in those times. Mind you, this is not made to make life for your nobles impossible or the game a whole lot more difficult. This is designed to make you stop taking easy births, easy sickbeds and long lifespans for granted and to make you be a lot more invested in the succession of your lineage. In short, to make the Medieval Dynasty Simulator part of this amazing game a little more exciting. Hope you enjoy it!

Diseases are more virulent and deadly.
Wounds are more serious.
Battles have become slightly more dangerous for the participants.
More prestige gained for participants in battle.
Traveling over the sea has become a bit more like the dangerous thing it used to be.
Assassination attempts have more serious consequences.
Sieges may lead to buildings being destroyed.
Children can now be stillborn.

Memento Mori: http://www.mediafire.com/?4zzeq5t6tj9o3uu

For those interested in a larger mod there is Memento Mori Expanded for CKII 1.103. In it I've integrated those mods that I feel are absolutely necessary for Crusader Kings II but don't change around the basic gameplay too much. In it we've got the excellent extra ambitions and objectives from the Additional Objectives 2.0 mod, the beautiful coats of arms from Arko's Armoriepack, Syren's Nicknames mod, the best portrait mod with the extremely pretty Cultures and Portraits Revamp and the Culturally Different Cities mod. Which makes the worldmap look that much better that it's amazing Paradox themselves never bothered. All of these mods won't change around the vanilla game too much, but it sure becomes a hell of a lot more fun to look at and play around with. Have fun.

Memento Mori Expanded: http://www.mediafire.com/?idd4dhx75sdipsr

Many thanks to Wiz, Cybrxkhan, Vaarne Aarne, Syren, apg, fawr, avee, GAGA extrem, rafek, the_chancellor and all those other people whom I bothered with endless questions and from whose mods I both learned and burrowed. Especially a big thanks to all the mods included in this expanded version. This thing wouldn't exist without you!

Also linking to the excellent El Cid's Music Mod which adds the music of both the original Crusader Kings and Medieval: Total War to the soundtrack. Get this, it's excellent. Just copy the files into your music folder and copy song.txt there as well.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/a5llm22cjd2dyrz/music.zip

Having trouble installing your mod. I tried putting it into documents/Paradox etc. but the mod didn't show up in the launcher. Tried putting it into the mod folder that already exists in the CK2 installation folder, but that didn't work either. Which is weird, because I clearly remember being able to use one of the previous versions of your mod.

 

[Trash]

That's wierd, Quilty. Mods should go into the user/my documents/paradox interactive/crusader kings 2/mod directory. The mod should be a directory and a *.mod file. Hope this helps.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Constantinople seems soooo much better than the other capitals. When I reformed the Roman Empire, there was that decision to switch capitals to Rome, and it was like a -100 ducats income difference.

if there's something i've never understood in ck2 is how money is earned.
example: in my latest game i own almost the whole map (i went too far, now i want to try to see if my vassals can conquer all the remaining by themselves), all my vassals love me, i have decent tech and all the needed buildings yet i earn about 60 ducats per month, while you're speaking about a 100 ducats *difference*.
what am i doing so horribly wrong?

 

[RK47]

Your tax rate, most likely.
Having the entire world, yet setting 0% Noble Tax gives you just the City & Church Tax due to your demesne limit.

 

[Turisas]

Yeah, tax the cities for everything they've got (mayors won't like it, but who cares when they can't do shit about it). And everyone else too if you can get away with it.

 

[Emily]

Did they address major empires blobing and blobing to no end?
I havent seen Byzantium have any problems for 100+years now. Hre seems pretty stable also. They just blob and blob more

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

There was a problem initially with Muslims with the release of TOG. But the first patch fixed that (Decadence events had stopped firing properly).

 

[Trash]

Decadence is still just a gimmick that won't splinter massive blobs but just changes their ruling house. That needs to change.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Relations and rebellion events are still tied to Decadence, yes? Since before the patch, Abbasids were forever stable and expanding. Immediately after the patch, every single Muslim empire fractured for good within 10 years.

 

[Baptismbyfire]

Can you always trust your spymaster when he says that he found someone plotting against someone?

What determines whether a mayor or bishop invests his money into upgrading his town/church?

 

[Trash]

Can you always trust your spymaster when he says that he found someone plotting against someone?

Unfortunately, yes. And the answer to your second question is a shitty rng.

 

[Zeriel]

So, playing Byzantium as hellenic roman (ruler designer!), got bored around the point where I reform the empire, and remembered people here talking about how empires just keep blobbing forever. So I switched to a tiny kingdom and just let time pass to see what happened. Wasn't expecting much. The condition of the empire at this point: every territory required to reform empire under imperial control, along with the entire Kingdom of Hungary, and some holdings in the northeast steppes. Most duchies and best provinces are in the hands of the ruling empress (20+ diplomacy), and her son--the lion's share for her son, so the empress should have zero popularity concerns. The empire is #1 on realmsize worldwide.

Click unpause, watch from tiny kingdom in corner of world...

Within 3 years the empire has fragmented into a dozen different fiefdoms, and changed its flag. Why, you ask? The hellenic emperor of Rome and all its holdings has converted to the Sunni faith.

So, yeah, if the AI can botch that situation up that bad, no wonder it never presents a problem for the player. Still, I suppose that at least punctures the myth of eternal blobbing? (Although I imagine someone will say Hellenic faith is even worse than Islam for this sort of thing.)

 

[Trash]

Who says the AI botched up? The emperor just saw the light.

 

[Zeriel]

Well, when the "light" involves losing half your territory, I kind of tend to see it as a monumental failure, but who am I to say. Maybe the harem he gets in return is just that amazing.

 

[Grinolf]

What determines whether a mayor or bishop invests his money into upgrading his town/church?

Personally I find, that it is better to updrage 1-2 money buildings in your vassal baronies after you build up your holdings. Then they start upgrade it themselves rather frequently. But it also may be worth to purchase technology buildings, than waiting until baron decided to spend money on them.
Also it depends on how much you using their levies, since they pay for it from their own pocket.

 

[Spectacle]

Also, if you build a new city or temple, hand it over to the existing mayor/bishop in the province, and he can use the income from his old holding to upgrade the new one.

 

[Trash]

Well, when the "light" involves losing half your territory, I kind of tend to see it as a monumental failure, but who am I to say. Maybe the harem he gets in return is just that amazing.

Charlemagne ruled the biggest empire in the west in centuries. Then when he died he divided it across his three sons who quickly turned on each other and let the whole thing come crashing down. History isn't a simple exponential growth according to clear mathematical and rational principles. It's generally a mess. I love how CK 1 and in lesser form CK 2 do justice to this by making it about individual rulers and their families instead of ever expanding nations.

When an AI kingdom goes to the shitter and it happens because of a completely valid in game reason then it's not a failure of the AI. It's a regular and for me even integral part of gameplay. This game isn't about blobs as much as it is about dynasties. With the way the user base drools over map painting and gets upset about everything that gets in the way of that I'm however pretty sure that any CK3 will be almost indistinguisable from all the other Pdox map painters.

 

[Zeriel]

If you are literally the #1 faction in the world by realmsize, you have zero incentive to switch religions to that of a far weaker enemy, let alone to a religion that will piss off all your vassals. While CK2's systems can have cool emergent moments, this case strikes me as the AI having some terrible weighting in its decision making somewhere. Considering it vassalized the biggest Sunni faction after converting, I think that's why it converted, but the better route would have just been to annex them entirely.

(This problem occurs in most Paradox games, actually: the AI is just really unlikely to press its advantage if it is #1.)

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The problem is mostly in the quirks and practicalities of gavelkind succession. It doesn't really cause the kind of destruction and mayhem you'd expect.