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[IronyOwl]

I'd consider that a specific example of a far more general and ancient problem, being that empires don't really have a method of "falling," per se. They can be diminished or swap ownership under certain circumstances, but even that tends to be pretty rare for the big guys.

Scripting an invasion is definitely the realistic solution, but it'd be nice if the game had more mechanisms for things degenerating, whether in central leadership or general province quality.

[Tawa]

Definitely. The only time my own empires have toppled were when I was playing Rome runs and had conquered all the way to de jure France, and even that was fueled by war bitterness and religious tension. Perhaps Centralization's effects could be changed somewhat and have a vassal opinion modifier attached, so that the more decentralized an empire is, the more their vassals dislike them; at the moment, Low and Minimum are almost always superior to anything higher than that because it's generally optimal to own only one duchy (or maybe two small ones) personally and let your vassals administrate everything else.

Since we're talking about this, I think there are two key problems with the portrayal of the HRE in the game: Italy and succession law. To my understanding, Italy was significantly more autonomous under the Emperor than Germany. However, in CKII, Tuscany is just as much a part of the Empire as Saxony, and Italy never breaks free to look the way it does in the later start dates. Perhaps the modified tributaries in the next expansion (including permanent tributaries) could be used to better represent the Italian lands.

The other thing is that casually changing succession from Elective to Primogeniture, as Heinrich Salian is wont to do in-game, is absolutely absurd. The HRE ought to have a special tag that prevents its holder from changing succession laws outside of certain criteria (such as Max Crown Authority without Conclave and Imperial Administration with it,) or at least imposes an extra-heavy vassal opinion penalty when this happens.

Muslim blobs specifically have a mechanic to make them fall, it just isn't as effective as it should be. IMO, the chance for a character to break free after a decadence revolt should be cranked way up; barely anyone breaks free currently.

[pisskop]

I would think that strong vassals should be capable of 'bending the feudal arrangement' to do things otherwise not possible would set it right.  court intrigue in the empire could stand to use some tweaking.

[Rolan7]

I feel like The Council was a step in that direction, giving a few vassals (*usually* the most powerful) an intentionally obnoxious amount of power.

But that doesn't capture the essence of a powerful "vassal" straining against their liege.  Blurring the lines.
Reality doesn't into clear tiers like that, the game has always been an approximation.

[Descan]

I'd consider that a specific example of a far more general and ancient problem, being that empires don't really have a method of "falling," per se. They can be diminished or swap ownership under certain circumstances, but even that tends to be pretty rare for the big guys.

Scripting an invasion is definitely the realistic solution, but it'd be nice if the game had more mechanisms for things degenerating, whether in central leadership or general province quality.

Having vassal obligations and title tiers be less cut and dry would be a good start. As it is, you can't model the King of England having Ducal obligations (William) to France in his Norman holdings; As soon as he gets a king title, he pulls out all his obligations to his King, without the King even being given a claim to get them back.

Having titles be less "A king can only swear fealty to an Emperor" and be less "We can only have one liege (of a higher title)" would help a lot. And if a title could be more fluid in terms of power, that the Byzantine Emperor could have more or less vassals (and those vassals be more or less powerful) less in terms of "I'm the Emperor so you're my bitch" and more based off the state of the realm and his power. If the Emperor isn't able to tell you, the Duke of Cyprus, what to do, then why are you going to give him anything more than lip service? Or if the King could, on a weeks notice, have 10 thousand troops sieging your own house, then you're not going to say "Nah, bitch, I'm a King so fuck off!~" Not to mention that, except for tribal rulers, you *can't* tell your ruler to fuck off with regards to troops. He might get more or less based off relations, but even when I've had -100 relations with *all* my vassals, I still got at least as many as my own holdings, possibly 2 or 3 times.

I'm not really sure what they would look like in practice though. I mean the tributary states are kind of in the right direction, but you still can't owe vassal obligations for "part" of your realm; the King of France should have (and only have) control over the King of England when it comes to the original vassal contract holdings in Normandy. And the power of the emperor should model the waxing and waning; including that sometimes he's little more than a particularly purple duke, and other rulers aren't going to bend the knee to him.

Though a lot of the problem is that a province is just too stable; Barring development of the holdings, a province that's really good is going to stay really good (though the prosperity system helps a little) So the really good holdings of the Byzantine Empire are *always* really good, and the emperor can use his vast swathes of troops to fend off invasions that he wasn't able to in history.

[ZeroGravitas]

I'd consider that a specific example of a far more general and ancient problem, being that empires don't really have a method of "falling," per se. They can be diminished or swap ownership under certain circumstances, but even that tends to be pretty rare for the big guys.

Scripting an invasion is definitely the realistic solution, but it'd be nice if the game had more mechanisms for things degenerating, whether in central leadership or general province quality.

This is my number two complaint in CK2 (after feudal taxes in Western Europe).

The sad thing is that even when they try to do things like decadence invasions, it doesn't really work.

[Teneb]

You know the drill by now

Spoiler: Kabulistan will rule the world (click to show/hide)

Greetings everyone!

I’m Emil “Servancour” Tisander. Most of you might remember me from the update I did to Hungary and the Danube with the release of 2.7. This time however, I wanted to do something of a larger scope, and with the expansion focusing on the eastern part of the map, what better time to revisit the Middle East and bring it a much needed overhaul?

Those of you who watch the streams might already have seen most of what I’ll show you here but I’ll start by explaining what I’ve done and why.

I had a few goals in mind when I started working on the update. First and foremost I wanted to improve the overall geography and move counties to where they are supposed to be. Some having been placed much too far from their actual location (I’m looking at you Damascus). Secondly, there are plenty of titles in the region that are inappropriately named for the time period, so I wanted to go through what makes sense and what doesn’t to improve the historical accuracy as much as possible. Another thing I wanted to do was to split up the kingdom of Persia somewhat. Persia in CK2 has always been a very large kingdom. Splitting it up into several kingdoms will allow for a more dynamic experience.

Empires remain very much the same, though both the Persian Empire and the Arabian Empire have been increased somewhat in size, due to the addition of new counties. Kingdoms however, have been changed quite significantly. The following kingdoms have been added or renamed accordingly:
Added the kingdoms of Daylam, Khorasan, Iraq and Yemen.
Renamed Mesopotamia to Al-Jazira, Afghanistan to Kabulistan, Baluchistan to Sistan, Khiva to Transoxiana.



The county layout is also something that you will notice has changed dramatically. Gone are all the weirdly shaped counties, that would either look like a square or be stretched into all manner of shapes. Every single county in the region has been moved and/or reshaped. The single most noticeable addition will be the Syrian desert. Which, in my opinion, is needed to make sure that the surrounding counties can be placed and shaped properly.



As much as I would like to, I won’t go into detail for all changes I’ve done to the counties. But I’ll highlight some of the more major ones.

Both Fergana and Khuttal are now full-fledged duchies, with three and four counties, respectively.



Several new counties have been added to Yemen, which consists of the duchies Sanaa, Taizz and Hadramut.



The duchy of Medina is renamed to Hijaz and got three new coastal counties added, making the duchy consist of six counties in total.



We’ve also decided to increase the number of counties in the Tarim Basin, in order to make the area more fun and interesting to play in. It has about twice the number of counties compared to the old setup.




That’s some of the biggest changes that you’ll see on the map which is, as always for map updates, a part of the free 2.8 patch. Bear in mind that it’s still a bit of a work in progress. Some counties are likely to get another set of name changes and other tweaks.

Finally, I would like to give a shout out to @elvain, who helped me with a lot of research. Making this update possible to do to such an extent.

Don’t forget to tune into the Medieval Monday streams 16:00-18:00 (CEST)! During which you can poke me if you want to see a specific region or have any other questions.

Well, it looks like the Levant is even more valuable now.

[scriver]

These kind of changes is great for fools like me who derive an embarrassing percent of their geographic knowledge of the world from vidya gaems.

[pisskop]

i live in a country where I'm feeling optimistic if somebody says

 'Ukraine is north of Crimea'


or

if somebody can tell me where turkey is.  i have almost bo faith that the answer will be better than 'somewhere in the middle East'

[Tawa]

Uuugh, Abbasid name placement is going to be terrible... I wish this game had owned wastelands like in EU4 :|

[scriver]

That Kaspian sea kingdom is I'd like made to give the 800s Zoroastrians a kingdom in a single war.

Also now I can finally live out my dreams to be a Reporter-King of al-Jazira.

[EnigmaticHat]

Breaking news!  Al-Jazira is now at war with Syria!  We will crush the dogs with our infinite armies!  You heard it here first folks.

[misko27]

I'd consider that a specific example of a far more general and ancient problem, being that empires don't really have a method of "falling," per se. They can be diminished or swap ownership under certain circumstances, but even that tends to be pretty rare for the big guys.

I completely agree. There just isn't, I don't know, there's no easy way to lose land. You can easily gain land as an empire, hell your vassals may literally do all of the work for you! I find myself a duchy bigger than I remember all the time. So empires just accumulate by nature, but there's no, what's the right phrase here? There's no counterbalancing force to that accumulation, no attritional land loss. There is, at least, a mechanism for a shattering empire (Independence factions), but vassals inevitably flock to something stupid like "Increase council authority". So you see a massive civil war engulf the empire, and then you look back in five years time and it's just sitting there, as it always has, except now the emperor has to ask permission before he banishes people. And there's no way for individual vassals to escape unless they are almost as powerful as the emperor, because there's no way that some 2-bit duke in the England is going to rebel against his Holy Roman Master (I saw the emperor inherit England once, and he destroyed the title; it was awful), and why would he? He'd just get absolutely destroyed when the emperor gets around to crushing him beneath his mighty deathstacks, no matter how long it takes.

I'm not really sure what they would look like in practice though. I mean the tributary states are kind of in the right direction, but you still can't owe vassal obligations for "part" of your realm; the King of France should have (and only have) control over the King of England when it comes to the original vassal contract holdings in Normandy.

I'm not sure if that's doable with the current engine. The current model of CK2 is based on the importance of defacto titles and stuff rather than de jure things (is Normandy a dejure duchy of France? Doesn't matter as soon as the Duke of Normandy is King of England). They'd need to really emphasize the dejure stuff more. maybe in CK3 if not CK2.

Uuugh, Abbasid name placement is going to be terrible... I wish this game had owned wastelands like in EU4 :|

You're telling me. Man, I love map updates, but a little bit of aesthetics go along way (although haven't they updated the name placement? I seemed to see someone imply that from a screenshot of Tibet.)

[Loud Whispers]

I don't like that they replaced muh arab tribal counties with wastelands. I really liked them

[Tawa]

I've been trying incessantly to play a French character as of late. I've mostly been trying people based on how cool their coats of arms are and have adamantly refused to play anybody with more than one county to their name, something that I haven't done since I played Ireland for the first time.

What I've learned so far:

- It is really really ridiculously annoying playing a one-county Christian count. You have precisely two ways to expand: fabricating claims and marriage.

- Fabricating claims never fricking works. I kid you not, I had a 25 diplomacy chancellor sitting on the same county from the day I put him on the council to his death, and not once did he ever manage to fabricate a thing.

- The game of thrones, meanwhile, is an exercise in frustration. Marriages that aren't for the purpose of scheming claims will produce twenty children who live for eighty years each. Marriages intended to give you a claim to a single county will lead to your wife producing a sickly girl and then dying in a freak manure-tavern accident. On the off chance she does not die, all your decent heirs will die at the rate of EU4 6/6/6 rulers and 3-star generals, and you will be stuck with a lazy, hare-lipped, clubfooted imbecile with a weak claim. Don't even think of marrying female rulers; they will invariably be dethroned, get assassinated, or join a failed rebellion and be stripped of their titles.

- If you claw your way up to a remotely prominent status, things will fall apart within thirty years due to circumstances beyond your control. I tried an unorthodox approach: tearing apart the HRE from inside by playing the one-county duke of Savoy, then creating Burgundy and scheming my way onto the throne of France. I created Burgundy and declared independence, along with Italy. Within thirty years the King of Italy had sworn fealty to the Emperor again for no discernible reason, and the King of Bohemia flawlessly pulled off a scheme to inherit Upper Burgundy, the largest duchy in Burgundy.

Coincidentally, the two really annoying roadblocks I hit on this list would be solved with the CBs the next update will add. Border dispute would prevent the problems expanding as a count, and I could reclaim Upper Burgundy with one war using De Jure Duchy claims.

On another note, the devs really didn't think ahead with Heinrich Salian's mother. She has a weak claim to Aquitaine, which Heinrich inherits when she dies. The Duchy of Aquitaine covers at least 75% of the Kingdom of Aquitaine at game start, and because the Duke's wife is 40 years old and he has exactly one kid, a daughter, the HRE conquers Aquitaine from Philippe constantly.