Rob Zacny

Episode 317: Crusader Kings II: Horse Lords

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Three Moves Ahead 317:

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Crusader Kings II: Horse Lords

TJ Hafer and Rowan Kaiser joing Rob Zacny to discuss the latest expansion to CK2, Horse Lords. Horse Lords allows the player to assume the role of the eastern hordes, galloping across Europe and the CK2 interface. Has CK2 finally been stretched to its limit?

Crusader Kings II, Horse Lords

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TJ Hafer and Rowan Kaiser joing Rob Zacny to discuss the latest expansion to CK2, Horse Lords. Horse Lords allows the player to assume the role of the eastern hordes, galloping across Europe and the CK2 interface. Has CK2 finally been stretched to its limit?

 

I'm excited to listen to this episode, especially because I haven't gotten the chance to buy or play this latest DLC. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the soft power of the steppes is an inconceivable thing to create in the CK2 engine, which is all about about the hard power of rank and rule in the feudal system, but I'll be just as happy to be wrong.

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The discussion about knowing who to trust and having the game obscure that is remarkably similar to a game design idea I've had since listening to your episode on espionage. Get out of my head!

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I too was looking forward to this episode.  Not as positive as I would have hoped but considering I've played CKII very little, I'm sure there will be a great experience waiting for me once I do have the time.  

 

As there isn't a general forum for the show for us to ask questions, I'll pose one here if you don't mind: For Rowan, why were you so scathing about Totalbiscuit recently?  It seemed a little excessive.  I just wondered what caused such a strong view.  

 

Other than that, keep up the good work team. 

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CK2 always had wrong interface. It was always developed as not the game people have played. 

 

They've started to talk about it but weren't cruel enough. Paradox thought that people would want another grand strategy and added many mechanics people didn't need. And this core still limits the game. Why do you want to see the map all the map? It only represents millitary and technology mechanics. When you think about economics - every province is really 1-7 economical units. The province may have unlimited number of characters - those guy who really matter. They didn't even update map when it was obvious it's inefficient: they could add ruler portrait on top of country instead of country name which means nothing. And spouses, and heirs. The map is tacked on upon the game. Or, say, intrigue screen has tiny window into a list of personal decisions which was not enough to contain stuff you need even after couple of expansions. And vice versa: look at buildings. Have you ever read any AAR where those buildings were important? No surprise they didn't touch buildings ever. And no person in the world understands how combat works, no one bases decisions on it.

 

Other issues hurt too like game being too fast. You never remember all those special snowflakes. Feudal and religion systems are not as developed as you can hope (why can't we have alliances between different religions or personal conversion a la Lithuania?). But those are design decisions. Building the game based on grand strategy template was clear limitation.

 

I hope CK3 will look more like Mount&Blade instead of EU3.

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I did enjoy Horse Lords a lot, but yeah, I do felt the interface limitation, but mostly when I did my first plays, where I was really confused of how exactly I raise a army when playing with nomads, but that clan window is very good. I do agree also with the confusion with the nomads and how much each clan hold lands (by that window I could figure the total, but where are this provinces is quite trick). Small note: to divide a clan you got have some requisites and I think (not 100% they can resist, same with begin absorved).

 

Anyway, despite that, I did really like it. Now in one hand nomads could be "easy mode" (much like old gods some viking starts where), but things can get messy - in my game as a clan vassal to the khan of the Khazars, we did really start rolling around, taking everything going far as Croatia. Then, between the sucession crisis and the other horde we often fight (and lose) against, we start to crumble very fast, losing ground, while the world raised against us. Even when we managed to get thing back in place, when where never able to recover what we lost and in each crisis we just lost more and more and everytime more faster, right now the Khazars are reduce to my clan, which became the leader simple because there is only one more clan. It was really fun to play this. Ah, I do also agree that maybe there should me more incentive or ways to avoid became the "supreme ruler", I did found out that playing as someone vassal to be really great.

 

Now, on having the relationship values (and traits) obscured....it´s a good idea, but I am not sure it work except in a game build really around that and with a lot of transparency (so much that might not even make it worth hid it on the first place), otherwise if just might feel random (specially if the player can´t figure the context). Medieval 1 kind had that, I mean, character had, where character had certain traits that remained hidden, unless a spy (or maybe something else) bring them to light causing trouble to them. But, it simple wasn´t worth, and even if this character might became a target to the inquisition, it was simple easier to kill them by other means.

 

King of Dragon Pass does that too (I mean have obscured things) and it is major source of frustration, since thing happen and often you have simple no idea of the why - specially in Heroquests, where you could fail even if you did the right choices , because your character failed in a skill test but the game never tell you that.


I feel that the game is at the right size now, with the Horse Lords filling maybe last more external gap that might need to be done, now the way I think the way would be looking inwards, because there they still have a lot of thing that they could do, specially now, with the every external expansion in place.

 

Crusader Kings 3? I would love, but I think is still a bit to early for that. I don´t feel tired of CK2 at all and still one of my favorite games, but I could understand other people, specially after playing one campaign or several of them. That why I often do breaks between campaigns (I do this even with other games, once I finish one, I do take a large break before I back) or given that the we know so much about the game that it lead to optimal strategies..

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Crusader Kings 3? I would love, but I think is still a bit to early for that. I don´t feel tired of CK2 at all and still one of my favorite games, but I could understand other people, specially after playing one campaign or several of them. That why I often do breaks between campaigns (I do this even with other games, once I finish one, I do take a large break before I back) or given that the we know so much about the game that it lead to optimal strategies..

 

I have to take breaks, too, not because I'm ever able to stop gaming the system, even when trying to roleplay, but because I have interest in playing only a small section of the CK2 world (mostly southern France and the Holy Roman Empire, as well as adjacent regions) and there's a limited number of interesting starts that I can burn myself out playing if I'm not careful.

 

Really, what I want to see more than anything in the next installment of Crusader Kings is better-curated bookmarks outside of 1066 that are worthwhile to play. The other two "flagship" bookmarks, 867 and 769, are awful insofar as producing an outcome with even an remote historical plausibility, and all the post-1066 bookmarks are riddled with knee-slapping errors that simply shouldn't exist in a world with both the Europäische Stammtafeln and the "Medieval Lands" amateur prosopography project readily available. If I read about a medieval lord in a history book, I feel like I should be able to play him in the game, but unless he's a king or a major duke, good luck! Sigh.

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As much as I love being able to try and follow in the footsteps of Ghengis Khan I feel the game has increasingly lost its way in feature bloat over time. New additions either don't mesh well with the original focused vision or fails to tie back into the pre-existing design neatly, detracting from the well honed design of the base game. Paradox seem committed to smaller, more frequent mini-expansions to their own detriment at times; sometimes their content add-ons feel like they needed to be done as part of a larger traditional expansion.

 

Extending the timeline of the game back to 867 and 769 was a mistake in my opinion, the game needs more depth but it keeps getting more breadth by either extending the timeline or the landmass. Those breadth-style expansions might be what sells the best but it doesn't necassarily mean it is what is best for the game. It can have a similiar problem to Europa Universalis where everything is defined by wars and realm size, anything inbetween is just the downtime between another military conquest on the way to world conquest.

 

Don't even get me started on how the game has changed to the point that it might as well be called Crusader Emperors II due to a number of factors, such as being about (often fantasy) empires and the stability of realms (like Kingdoms). It is still good fun but I wouldn't say Crusader Kings II has stuck to its original vision, sometimes people need to learn to leave things alone and move on.

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I haven't listened through the entire podcast yet, but I do want to comment on something: I really hope that Paradox never makes the CK2 endgame like the EU4 endgame. External pushback to expansion makes a lot less sense with CK2's unique mechanics and I'm not a fan of the badboy dogpile anyway. What CK2 has that EU4 doesn't have, at least since the patch where they introduced core decay, is the ability for empires to disintegrate. It's not a zero-sum game, like in midgame EU4 where land is only lost by becoming part of a neighboring empire; land can be lost by becoming part of no empire, as outlying counties and duchies slip out from under a kingdom that no longer has the power to hold them. It's a cool mechanic and yet one that CK2 barely ever puts to good use. There are a few reasons for this:

  • The power of kingdoms and empires make them too stable. The AI is automatically quite hesitant to take action against a higher title simply because the resources available to the latter (theoretical, at times, rather than practical) are so much higher. A county typically forms between one half and one fifth of a duchy, but the majority of kingdoms have somewhere close to a dozen duchies, which combines with the larger demesne and retinue of kings and emperors to make them flatly less vulnerable in AI calculations, even before more powerful allies are factored into the equation. The alterations to how vassal levies are calculated has helped a bit, but although the AI always loves just to plot against a player with a higher title, it's still very loath to take action because the scales have been tipped from the start.
  • Speaking of plotting, factions still suck. Disaffected characters will join factions almost at random, so a mildly disliked ruler will have maybe a half-dozen factions with a couple of vassals in each. It feels implausible, both that slightly sore feelings would turn half of a kingdom's vassals against their king and that they can't even work together to decide on his replacement. CK2Plus and several other mods have made this a solved problem for years now, with independence, claimant, and crown authority factions tossed out in favor of several static "special interests" that demand higher crown authority, lower crown authority, different succession laws, and so on through scripting. It makes a king always have some pressure on him, rather than a good king never having any pressure and a bad king having unrelenting pressure. I also just honestly think it worked better when plots represented such things instead of factions, but that's never coming back.
  • There's no danger of a kingdom disintegrating because of a poor heir for succession. The "realm size" mechanic that was introduced with the Charlemagne DLC is a good idea that is totally obviated by even basic competence with the game's systems. Sure, if you go over your realm size and your king dies, there's a (far too small) chance that some duchies will gain their independence, but averting that is trivial: drop your centralization, give away one of your demesne counties to a younger son, and then take it back once the title has passed on. Why the realm size penalty upon succession is counted via the dead man's stats and not the living heir's, I don't know, but there you go. Honestly, I miss The Winter King, a mod where there was a check to see whether an heir was "worthy" (through hitting a certain sum of stats and not having a certain few traits) and, if they weren't worthy, then a large minority of vassals would go independent. Sometimes, it would trigger a succession war instead, or simply destroy the title. In that mod, death was something to be dreaded and prepared for, maybe even by changing succession laws to avoid a bad heir, as opposed simply to a loss of the claims that the current character possesses.
  • There's also just a defect in the way that CK2's simulation of feudalism works, because there's no reason for a ruler to have any relationship with his vassal's vassals. Not only does it allow for gamey exploits like kings imprisoning their dukes' counts for ransom without any consequence, but it protects kings and emperors from entire tiers of disgruntled vassals. No matter how evil a duke is, his vassals will never cause trouble for you by petitioning you to denounce him or rebelling against you for failing to do anything about him. In fact, it's good for an evil duke to have angry vassals, because they might overthrow him and replace him with one of their own, who'd presumably be more open to good relations. Emperors make it even worse, because even dukes cease to be a threat, more so if you shove them under vassal kings and reduce your vassal ranks to three or four characters who can be easily bribed or intimidated into happiness. See my first point and start all over again, I guess!

Vassal relations are the place where I find myself missing the first Crusader Kings the most. I know that it's bound to be forgotten as a footnote, now that the sequel has met with some success, but it had parts that were better. The way it worked, a disgruntled vassal would occasionally get a "rebellious" trait, which gave them an overall stat boost and an opinion malus with their ruler. Think of it as the "Ambitious" trait, but with more mechanical effects. If enough vassals were rebellious or certain other sets of conditions were met, the ruler would get a trait called "realm duress" and the rebellious vassals would get individual events offering to let them start various kinds of civil wars, to be independent, seize the throne, or take land. Even if realm duress never happened, rebellious vassals were always given the chance at various random points in time and upon succession to stay loyal, slip out of the realm without a fight, or fight a war for independence to remove the ruler's claim to their lands. It did a much better job of simulating, for example, how the new Holy Roman Emperor always had to invade Italy to remind it that it was under his authority.

 

I have no illusions that CK2 will ever have something like realm duress. It was always a deeply unpleasant ten or twenty years of time in the game that almost certainly spelled the end of your dynasty at that level of title, with the only mechanical benefit being a more plausibly dynamic map. Still, I wish at least that factions were more long-term things with static goals applying pressure to the players, which would combine with entry options to vassals of vassals and external allies of vassals to make them worth paying attention to beyond bribes and bullying. There are ways to make the endgame interesting, and they all involve making the act of ruling a large empire a balancing act that's likely to fall apart upon the death of its ruler, time and again.

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I have to take breaks, too, not because I'm ever able to stop gaming the system, even when trying to roleplay, but because I have interest in playing only a small section of the CK2 world (mostly southern France and the Holy Roman Empire, as well as adjacent regions) and there's a limited number of interesting starts that I can burn myself out playing if I'm not careful.

 

Really, what I want to see more than anything in the next installment of Crusader Kings is better-curated bookmarks outside of 1066 that are worthwhile to play. The other two "flagship" bookmarks, 867 and 769, are awful insofar as producing an outcome with even an remote historical plausibility, and all the post-1066 bookmarks are riddled with knee-slapping errors that simply shouldn't exist in a world with both the Europäische Stammtafeln and the "Medieval Lands" amateur prosopography project readily available. If I read about a medieval lord in a history book, I feel like I should be able to play him in the game, but unless he's a king or a major duke, good luck! Sigh.

I understand. For me, I too enjoy history (I got degree in history, but I am moving toward graphical design), but  don´t mind much any start or situation, I enjoy this games for all the emergent gameplay and stories that could happen, I like when I zoom out and have too wonder "what just is going on?", I confess that I never liked when game try to hard to put thing in rails (my problem with some older eu 2 mods).

 

Anyway... they talked about Mount & Blade: Warband, which I found curious, because in one hand I would love the team talk about more about it - I love the game, but while M&B have amazing combat, the politics/goverment is rather bland. Sure is easy to get to know everybody, since is smaller cast of characters, but its almost impossible to track which castle/fief belong to who except by going to a old interface (faction - > find the lord -> see his holdings, but no map mode or anything) . Also, all factions have the same exact kind of goverment, even the nomad ones.  Build things in your village or castle is even more vague - cost too much do too little (and your village will get sacked anyway).

 

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Oh ugh, really? The podcast ends with agreement that opinion modifiers should be more hidden from the player? I promise you, guys, that it'd be cool the first few times that your Sun King dies with no warning from a conspiracy led by his supposed best friend, and then never again. In a game about personal relationships, giving the player less ability to assess those relationships is not fun. How do you know if your ally will come to war with you if you don't know his opinion of you? Will we go back to EU3's "Likely/Maybe/Not Likely" trichotomy that Paradox was so proud of ditching for EU4? Or will we just have a "search out opinion" function attached to a character or an interface that the player will be obligated to spam for more efficient play?

 

I understand. For me, I too enjoy history (I got degree in history, but I am moving toward graphical design), but  don´t mind much any start or situation, I enjoy this games for all the emergent gameplay and stories that could happen, I like when I zoom out and have too wonder "what just is going on?", I confess that I never liked when game try to hard to put thing in rails (my problem with some older eu 2 mods).

 

Well, there's historical accuracy and then historical plausibility. I lean towards the latter, most of the time, but there are always emergent events that tick me off. How many times has the Holy Roman Emperor inherited the kingdom England or Norway and that just gets sucked into their de jure lands, never to break free again? That's implausible.

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Oh ugh, really? The podcast ends with agreement that opinion modifiers should be more hidden from the player?

 

To be specific, podcast ended with agreement that second stats that would add limited ambiguity to opinion would be cool to see.

 

Like, you should be able to clearly see broad characteristics that could have dual meaning but then have the characters have ability to 'hide' their exact interpretation of those characteristics from each other (primarily the player since AIs don't care much).

 

So on the broadest, ledger available information you get 100% confirmed info that character John A is ambitious.  Then based on your character's ability to read people and John A's counter people skill, you can see (or fail to see) exactly what that ambition leads to... like is John A happy to stay as your most powerful Duke?  Or will he not stop til he becomes an emperor?

 

Still has major problems in similar ways that you mentioned though of course.  But it is lot more fleshed out and feels plausible in some ways.

 

Like imagine such a game where you perform various social activities to pick up cues... host parties, tournaments, etc.  CK2 is pretty close to that so it's kinda cool thought~

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To be specific, podcast ended with agreement that second stats that would add limited ambiguity to opinion would be cool to see.

 

Like, you should be able to clearly see broad characteristics that could have dual meaning but then have the characters have ability to 'hide' their exact interpretation of those characteristics from each other (primarily the player since AIs don't care much).

 

So on the broadest, ledger available information you get 100% confirmed info that character John A is ambitious.  Then based on your character's ability to read people and John A's counter people skill, you can see (or fail to see) exactly what that ambition leads to... like is John A happy to stay as your most powerful Duke?  Or will he not stop til he becomes an emperor?

 

Still has major problems in similar ways that you mentioned though of course.  But it is lot more fleshed out and feels plausible in some ways.

 

Like imagine such a game where you perform various social activities to pick up cues... host parties, tournaments, etc.  CK2 is pretty close to that so it's kinda cool thought~

 

Yeah, there are games where deception and uncertainty in social interactions could be and would be great, but not Paradox games. Every title in the Paradox stable is about presenting the player with a massive spread of information and challenging them to extract meaning from it and make decisions thereby. If some of that information is hidden or inaccurate, it doesn't make the game King of Dragon Pass, it just makes the game harder to play well because meaning is harder (or just more tedious) to extract.

 

For instance, Paradox has already struggled with a similar design choice in EU4 and come down against it. At launch, nations had opinions of other nations, represented by numerical values that were exposed to the player, but the behavior of those nations was dictated by their attitude, which was a partial black box calculated through a combination of that opinion value, the geopolitical situation of the nation, and a totally hidden variable called "ruler personality." What it usually meant is that a neighboring nation with a friendly attitude, high opinion, and slightly lesser power than you would suddenly attack you out of the blue because that hidden value had flipped. People argued that it was more realistic or authentic or whatever not to have absolute knowledge of the factors influencing a nation's behavior, but eventually Paradox decided that giving a hidden variable the power to upset completely any plans that the player had made and was in the process of executing might be more thematic but less fun, unless the entire game's design was changed to accommodate such random losses of agency. Ruler personality is visible and its effects on a nation's opinion are now represented by granular values. I don't think many people have complained, because uncertain motives in grand strategy are overwhelmingly cool on paper but tedious or frustrating in action.

 

Speaking of... Has there been a King of Dragon Pass episode of TMA yet? The recent Steam release makes for a great time to revisit it!

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Right, but that's because EU4 had nothing you could do to help yourself come to more exact information.  It was a layer of misinformation without anything for player to interact with other than throwing their calculations off (which is sometimes very valuable (xcom relies on it to force players to prepare for contingencies) but definitely not the way that EU4 did (nor are PDX games really good enough encouraging players for backup plans cause of its micro-turn-pacing)).  I believe that the part about performing more 'mundane' (by strategy genre standard) activities to extract clues, aka 'information-mining', is the key here.  Definitely not EU4 though because micro actions in that game are not set to have 'information-mining' as a major function, while more personal game like CK2 can.  At least I'm having a very easy time imagining good portion of CK2 session being about going through more minute details of life to build up and maintain your information on other people.  To be clear, I think game should never give you wrong info.  I think it should be clearly presented as 'unknown' variables.

 

But maybe you are completely right because then this kinda hurts the 'dynasty' planning aspect of the game which is a huge part of CK2.  The game I'm thinking of here probably needs to have characters last far longer than they do in CK2.

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To be clear, I think game should never give you wrong info.  I think it should be clearly presented as 'unknown' variables.

 

I guess not "wrong," per se, but Paradox games do have a tendency to spotlight mostly meaningless or irrelevant information (like the map, in CK2) while sidelining or hiding actually important information (aggressive expansion remains the most important value in EU4 for efficient play, yet the interface options for it still don't tell you as much as you'd like), especially as their games develop and dominant strategies emerge.

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I guess not "wrong," per se, but Paradox games do have a tendency to spotlight mostly meaningless or irrelevant information (like the map, in CK2) while sidelining or hiding actually important information (aggressive expansion remains the most important value in EU4 for efficient play, yet the interface options for it still don't tell you as much as you'd like), especially as their games develop and dominant strategies emerge.

 

Indeed.  I think it must be a side effect of using same engine for 4+ different games.  The map mode swiching kinda works, but yeah it is still sidelining great deal of important information for sure.

 

Oh and Rob got avatar pic for the forum!  Oh this is so exciting~

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I guess not "wrong," per se, but Paradox games do have a tendency to spotlight mostly meaningless or irrelevant information (like the map, in CK2) while sidelining or hiding actually important information (aggressive expansion remains the most important value in EU4 for efficient play, yet the interface options for it still don't tell you as much as you'd like), especially as their games develop and dominant strategies emerge.

 

With Agressive Expansion you can at least argue only specific subset of players needs it - the ones who go for World Conquest. In CK2 map is useless and unergonomic for most of the time. Oh let me tell you how I spend 20 minutes transfering vassals after inheriting Francia as Charlemagne. You could think they could somehow highlight selected vassal's domain on map or even allow you to select what vassal to transfer to some duke by just clicking neighboring county, not scrolling through list of cunts. 

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With Agressive Expansion you can at least argue only specific subset of players needs it - the ones who go for World Conquest.

 

Well, it wouldn't hurt for new players either. At least every other day, there's a thread created on the EU4 forums by someone asking why all of Europe declared war on them after they annexed their three-province neighbor, ending their campaign, and the answer's always "Pay more attention to the Aggressive Expansion mapmode and the tiny set of numerical values at the bottom of the peace interface."

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I'm with you, Gormongous. If you are going to show a number value, it needs to be a correct representation of that value. If you want more ambiguity then you should remove the number and have to get the information a different way rather than have a misleading number. A 70 actually being a -4 is not interesting or fun. A proclaimed loyal vassal who tells you they're really upset when you bring them to court might be interesting. Degrading your trust in the numbers laid out is not a good way to go. "Oh I thought I had 1000 florins but whoops I only have 200 because the treasurer is untrustworthy".

 

Highlighting irrelevant info isn't the same as hiding relevant info. That's inefficient UI design, not malicious intent.

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