Crusader Kings II

[Monk]

The female penalties are indeed far too over the top. -20 overall for having a female ruler AND a female heir? Come on. I think, now that I am thinking about it, i'll make a simple mod and change that later for my own preference.

I think I'm a rarity in that I actually quite like the ruler designer as is. Having a lunatic, possessed, drunken hedonist found my dynasty (and then educate my heirs ) is very amusing to my mind. Plus, you're highly likely to get the nickname 'The Accursed,' which is rather cool.

I quite enjoy it myself but it's clear it had multiplayer in mind when it was designed. Most of the traits have a sense of "balance" to them, so making a ruler you want can be pretty difficult.

After watching quill18's playthrough of CK2 using Castille 1066, I finally decided to buy it. The ruler designer is one of the most worthless things I've seen, next to Oblivion's horse armor. Made a female? Everyone hates you. No children to start out with? Good luck getting children in the game (even on Very Easy, Lustful, Hedonist). Female heir? Everyone hates you. Want to play a young character? You need to take gimpy traits. Want to be powerful? You are going to be old enough to not enjoy the designed ruler. High intrigue? Good luck trying to get money needed to utilize said intrigue.
I spent 5 bucks to play how I wanted to play, and now the game is telling me that I cant play how I wanted to play. Paradox games in a nutshell, I tell ya.

As far as I know difficulty does not at all affect fertility, but female rulers are by their nature a lot harder to get children than if you were playing a male. Once a female character hits 45 her fertility drops like a ROCK. It's still possible to get pregnant after that but your odds are so small its negligible. Not only that but if your personal court has over 30 characters in it already, base fertility rates also suffer a penalty. If you are a female ruler and are suffering a number of bad luck rolls most of your reign, you can easily hit age 45 with very few or no children. It can cause some really troublesome succession situations.

Still, if you were a young character you should have been getting pregnant like crazy. +40% to fertility from lustful/hedonist is insane. Maybe your husband was shooting blanks, or you were just having some terrible luck in the probability.

[Ishmael]

That reminds me, has anybody seen a mod that gets rid of the fertility penalty with a large court? If not, would there be any way to mod it myself?

[Monk]

That reminds me, has anybody seen a mod that gets rid of the fertility penalty with a large court? If not, would there be any way to mod it myself?

Yup, its in defines.txt in your common folder. (remember, .txt not .lua! Thats a different defines file altogether!) I got curious so i started looking around and found it. The base is 30 characters per court and at that size the file explains every couple will on average have one less child. Experiment to your hearts desire!

Playing my own mod which eliminates female penalties altogether (will post once I refine it to my liking). Started in Leinster, Ireland, 1066 as a female Countess. Married a Prince of Denmark and then had a son. My father-in-law died and made my new husband King, and named my son as his heir. An ornery Spymaster with a 61% plot power insured that he tripped on some stairs. My son is now King of Denmark.
Oh lawdy, this game is hilarious if played right.

Now that's how you play CK2!

[Greyblades]

Not bad, but I've assassinated an entire family tree in one day to inherit scotland.[/smug]
:P

[johnhughthom]

Not bad, but I've assassinated an entire family tree in one day to inherit scotland.[/smug]
:P

Gamey lameness is a reason to be smug?

[Greyblades]

It wasnt gamey, I spent years getting enough gold for multiple assassins! It's a valid tactic.

[Ishmael]

Thanks Monk! I've added a '0' to the end of that 30 and increased the base number of children to 3; lets see how this plays.

[rickinator9]

Dev diary!
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...am-Dev-Diary-1

[Monk]

Dev diary!
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...am-Dev-Diary-1

For flavour, we have also made it so that duchy tier and above titles held by rulers of Iranian, Arabic and Turkish cultures are named after the ruling dynasty. For example, the Kingdom of Egypt automatically becomes the Fatimid Sultanate while the Fatimids are in power (though the original name is also used where appropriate.) In case the same dynasty holds several high rank titles, only the highest is named after the dynasty. Thus, we can have both a Seljuk Sultanate and a Sultanate of Rum, both ruled by the Seljuk dynasty. Randomly generated characters of these cultures automatically get a dynasty name suitable to name states after (ending with -id or -n, etc).

Lastly (for this dev diary), there are seven new creatable empires (the Arabian Empire, the Empire of Persia, Britannia, Scandinavia, Francia, Spain and Russia) and a whole slew of new de jure kingdoms, mostly to break up the old kingdom of Khazaria. Now, I know the addition of the new empires is controversial, but the creation conditions are designed to be fairly difficult to achieve, so the AI will very rarely do it. We want players to have the imperial option to strive for if they so desire - the Unions turned out to be a popular feature in Europa Universalis III.

Oh my god this is amazing.

[Monk]

Apologies once again for double post but here's another mod for you guys: A quick tweak to the defines.lua file to ensure that everything in the ruler designer is free. Want to create a super king who is equal parts dashing, daring, strong and intelligent? Want to make him a 16 year old prodigy without a single flaw? Well now you can! Here is an edited defines.lua which will allow every trait to be free in the designer.







Files modified:
common/defines.lua - http://www.mediafire.com/?0cl7ya2kr3rpkpy

Be warned that making incredibly overpowered rulers and breaking your regional balance may result from this. Use it wisely: or don't! Either way. This mod is also compatible with my other tweaks, just drop it into your mod's (or the base game's if you dont have a mod) common folder and you're good to go.

edit: had a scare and thought the defines I edited affected more than just the ruler designer. Turns out they do not and all is well. Link re-added.

[rickinator9]

Oh my god this is amazing.

Certainly. My only concern is that Persia is a kingdom and an empire.

[Beskar]

Oh my god this is amazing.

I think I will stop doing my edits then, it seems the DLC will make what I wanted (Britannia, Scandinavia, Spain and Russia empires) a reality and it comes out during the month.

[Kekvit Irae]

As far as I know difficulty does not at all affect fertility

Go to options, choose Very Easy, then mouse over the option. You'll get a bonus to fertility. Only happens on VE, not Easy. It's why I decided to try out my first playthrough in Ireland with a female ruler on VE.

[Monk]

Go to options, choose Very Easy, then mouse over the option. You'll get a bonus to fertility. Only happens on VE, not Easy. It's why I decided to try out my first playthrough in Ireland with a female ruler on VE.

Ah this explains why i missed it. Thanks for the clarification

[Kekvit Irae]

Aaaaaaand... it all went to hell now.

Son of my ruler inherited the kingdom, and it all went fine until he died suddenly in battle, leaving behind no male heirs. Biggest problem? The closest heir he had was a daughter who I was training up to be a spymaster. She came to power with not a single point of Stewardship to her name. And then came the kingdom-wide revolts. These were easy enough to put down... until the Moors came knocking with 12k troops.

[rickinator9]

Aaaaaaand... it all went to hell now.

Son of my ruler inherited the kingdom, and it all went fine until he died suddenly in battle, leaving behind no male heirs. Biggest problem? The closest heir he had was a daughter who I was training up to be a spymaster. She came to power with not a single point of Stewardship to her name. And then came the kingdom-wide revolts. These were easy enough to put down... until the Moors came knocking with 12k troops.

Yeah, a rule in CKII is that when you have women on the throne, the throne gets destroyed. Although I do seem some 'Catherine the Great' types once in a while, it doesn't happen that much.

I checked out game of thrones mod and I'm impressed. I took the Lannisters and Tywin died within a year or two. The imp became king... with Cersei as his regent. Of course, that naturally meant trouble.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Be nice, eh Cersei?

And then Tyrion went to war against the Targaryens and was imprisoned.

There is however something I don't like about this mod. The members of your dynasty will often ask for titles, which you often can't give. If you don't give them, you'll get a tyranny effect. This pretty much makes playing Freys impossible

[Beskar]

Anyone interested in possibly doing an Org compilation of user tweaks and what not? It seems many of us has ideas and tweaks we would like to do, so perhaps throwing some of these together might produce something nice.

[Monk]

Anyone interested in possibly doing an Org compilation of user tweaks and what not? It seems many of us has ideas and tweaks we would like to do, so perhaps throwing some of these together might produce something nice.

Yeah that sounds like fun. So far the things i have changed are relatively minor but imo go a long way to helping the feel of the game. Those include the change to the female dynastic penalty, making all religions playable, and the ability to have absolute-cognatic no matter your culture.

I've also been experimenting with time locking crown authority. It was an idea I got from the Dawn of Kingdoms mod and really seemed to stop the AI spamming its authority in its tracks, simply add a year requirement - sounds simple enough right? I haven't had the chance to do extensive observer games to see how this affects overall balance but in the mod in question it slows down the military build up quite effectively.