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[Twinwolf]

You know, I keep hearing about how strong retinues are, but I've never been able to figure out why. They're far smaller than any levies I can raise - the only large advantage I can see is that you can have them active at all times, to respond to a revolt or try to take out a single county.

[Taricus]

They get a bonus from their retinue type. Add in that they get larger as the game goes on via holdings and realm size...

[stabbymcstabstab]

Don't forget parking them on a vassal's land before stripping that vassal of everything.

[hector13]

Yeah retinues are kinda pointless unless you're pull in enough cash to hire and maintain several thousand at a time. There's nothing they can do you can't otherwise do with a levy, except have them raised prior to declaring war.

[stabbymcstabstab]

Well they used to be more useful but remember paradox nerfed them so people would keep using levies.

[Criptfeind]

If I recall (although it's been a while since I tried to understand this stuff and I could also just be wrong) the way combat works in this game makes stacking bonuses very good, and an easy way to do that is having many troops of the same type (because then your commanders, if they are good, can more often select the right tactics and stay in the right phase of the battle for the unit type, and then they all get the tactical bonuses from that tactic, and your commander can gain further traits to help them.) So, that means when you're just a small realm 500 extra troops from retinues isn't very good, but later on when you have thousands of them they become an very significant force. Probably not going to be like, you know, 50% of your power, but a lot higher percentage of your power then their numbers would indicate.

I seem to recall having situations where like, 5 thousand retinue troops, lead by a good commander of their type, could very often take on several times their number of troops from technologically equivalent realms.

[IronyOwl]

There's also the fact that retinues tend to be high quality troop types, so "500 extra troops from retinues" is usually quite a bit more power than 500 levy troops.

[Teneb]

It's that time of the week again.

Spoiler: Dev Diary 40: Visiting the cartographer (click to show/hide)

Greetings everyone!

Today I’m here to talk about one of my favorite parts of our games (a very important one too) and something I’ve been working on. I’m going to talk about the map.

Looking at the work @Trin Tragula does for the map on EU4, I started thinking. Why don’t we do something similar to CK2? So I went looking at the map for various possible improvements. I have not added anything new in terms of provinces or areas. Instead, I wanted to focus on improving the existing map and give it some needed polish.

The CK2 map is not perfect, so there are a quite a few places to look at. But I wanted to start with the terrain and topology. As there several places on the map that, frankly, look out of place. As such, I swooped the map of the most hideous offenders. Several lakes and most major rivers are now much smoother, avoiding ugly and sharp edges. The Ural Mountains are now mostly impassable.

Below you can see a few examples.

Ural mountains:


Lake Baikal, old and new:



The Ganges, old and new:




I also took this opportunity to make some smaller de jure adjustments (I know that not everyone will agree with me on these). These are done for gameplay reasons and considerations. The largest change will be for the kingdom of Cumania. Which I broke off slightly by giving the duchies of Itil and Sarkel to Khazaria, along with Crimea and Cherson (so Taurica no longer holds any de jure land).

A small shift in the kingdoms of the ERE. Greece is a very large kingdom, so I made it slightly smaller by moving Samos and Cibyrrhaeot to Anatolia, and in turn, made Anatolia stay close to the same size by making the duchies of Trebizond and Armeniacon de jure to the kingdom of Trebizond.



Last, and definitely not least. Let’s take a look at Hungary and the Danube. The first thing I did was to redraw parts of the Danube to make it more accurate (as we all know, the old Danube was not quite where it was supposed to be). It now flows much closer to its actual location. The counties along the river have been adjusted accordingly. Pecs, for example, is now located on the correct side of it. The rest of Hungary has also been adjusted so that the kingdom is placed within the Carpathians.

Instead of taking my word for it, you can see for yourself in the screenshot below, in which you can see the updated coast of Croatia as well.



Old Danube for comparison:



Does this make the map perfect? No. But I do think it’s a step in the right direction and an improvement over the previous one.

Let me know what you think!

Complete list of changes:

Code: [Select]

- The Ural mountains are now impassable
- Removed the duplicate island of Kolguyev, in the Barents Sea
- The most northern part of the Onega is now properly filled with water
- The mountains in southern Abyssinia no longer stretches onto the frame of the map
- Fixed an issue in the lower part of the river Don, where the river bed would go above water level
- Removed a bunch of trees that were placed in major rivers
- The terrain around lake Balkhash has been smoothed, to avoid sharp/rough edges
- The terrain around lake Baikal has also been smoothed, no longer will the steep cliffs surround the lake
- The Indus and the Ganges have both been cleaned up:
- The terrain now matches the actual river
- Smaller rivers no longer flow so far into the major rivers
- The borders of the rivers has been made smoother to avoid sharp/rough edges
- The Danube has been redrawn, to better represent its actual location (!)
- The county of Constantinople is now only located on the western side of the Bosphorus, merging the eastern side into the county of Nikaea, connected with a strait
- The duchies of Samos and Cibyrrhaeot are now de jure part of the kingdom of Anatolia, rather than Greece
- The duchies of Trebizond and Armeniacon is now de jure part of the kingdom of Trebizond, rather than Anatolia
- Removed the kingdom of Taurica
- The duchy of Crimea is now de jure kingdom of Khazaria
- The duchy of Cherson is now de jure kingdom of Khazaria
- The coastal counties of Croatia and Serbia have been adjusted and moved slightly to better represent their actual locations
- The eastern counties of Hungary and the surrounding area has been moved and adjusted in order to properly place the kingdom within the Carpathian mountains
- Changed the name of b_mirabel to "Majdal Yaba"
- b_mirabel will be named "Mirabel" if ruled by most European cultures
- b_mirabel will be named "Antipatris" if ruled by Byzantine cultures
- The county of Tobruk is now only located along the coast
- Moved the northern part of c_dalarna to c_herjedalen
- Moved k_venice to de jure e_italy

E: Resized the images.

[Culise]

Given that the old map dates back to EU1 and EU2 in places, any work on the map is a good start.  Even over a decade later, I can still see the old "Saxony" provinces in the modern CK2 map of Germany. 

[EnigmaticHat]

You know, I keep hearing about how strong retinues are, but I've never been able to figure out why. They're far smaller than any levies I can raise - the only large advantage I can see is that you can have them active at all times, to respond to a revolt or try to take out a single county.

Levies are good, but levies + retinues + holy orders + mercenaries are even better.

Also the most efficient place to get levies is your capital province.  If you've got 4 provinces total, great.  But if you've got 100 provinces, suddenly that capital levy (and your personal levy in general) is a drop in the bucket and most of your levies are going to be come from your not necessarily reliable vassals.  Meanwhile being an empire, having increased tech, and having a huge realm make your retinues much larger.

[Cruxador]

Map work is cool and all, but the vanilla map is so far behind SWMH anyway that it's hard to get excited.

[hector13]

You know, I keep hearing about how strong retinues are, but I've never been able to figure out why. They're far smaller than any levies I can raise - the only large advantage I can see is that you can have them active at all times, to respond to a revolt or try to take out a single county.

Levies are good, but levies + retinues + holy orders + mercenaries are even better.

Also the most efficient place to get levies is your capital province.  If you've got 4 provinces total, great.  But if you've got 100 provinces, suddenly that capital levy (and your personal levy in general) is a drop in the bucket and most of your levies are going to be come from your not necessarily reliable vassals.  Meanwhile being an empire, having increased tech, and having a huge realm make your retinues much larger.

I like to have a large capital province that I can build castles in. That way I get a lot of benefit from the steward collecting taxes and the marshal raising troops. I had about 20k troops coming from my capital province alone in my last game.

[PTTG??]

Gotta go with Exclave Independence. It kills border gore dead.

[Teneb]

I truly don't understand why people care about border gore. Exclaves were normal. During the 100 Years War, Navarra had land in northern France, as an example.

[Tawa]

There's a couple of exclaves in an otherwise nice-looking country, and then there's this.