Out of character thread XVII

[FactionHeir]

He'll have one vote - his authority gives him bonus votes.

Not quite. So far, the emperor's vote has always been equal to his authority without +1 I believe. We also clarified a few months back that the emperor is not an elector. As only electors receive +1 base, the emperor does not get this unless I missed something.

Do you mean you had been more lenient than the vanilla game but aren't now? Or do you mean you are tighter than the vanilla game? If the latter, how does kotorfix differ from the vanilla game in assigning authority?

Both actually. It used to be more lenient than vanilla somewhere in the second or third version and now is about equal to it (maybe a tiny bit stricter). However, the traits that give/remove authority have been increased slightly on the other hand, so that balances out.

Assassination and spying seem odd things to give you authority. Both are supposed to be covert and so are not obvious ways of increasing your standing. And assassinations are something a chivalrous King would wish to engage in. (I know this a criticism of the base game rather than kotorfix changes.)

See it this way: People might not know you are involved directly in spying/assassination, but someone is giving you that title "the Killer/the Watcher", right? So while you can hide clear facts that you were the conspirator, there are rumors and pointers that suggest they were ordered by you. So who would really dare oppose you openly if they know you make use of agents rather generously and accidents happen?

Elberhard's low authority is fine given the history of the cataclysm, but the more I learn of how authority is gained, the less I like it. It would seem better to tie it to losses or acquisitions of the Reich's provinces, plus some personal traits (either bad ones like feck or good ones from battles etc).

I would like that if it were possible. You cannot check for both factionleader and number of regions in the same trigger. Sounds silly, but its true. Of course you could work around this and give everyone the trait and then remove it off those who are not leader, but there's a lot of other problems with that (such as the problem with not being able to compare region count of a previous turn to this turn, so the system would break down after a while)

On a sidenote, the PoliticallyStrong/PoliticallyWeak and FactionKiller/FathersLegacy traits sadly don't work and cannot be fixed because a certain condition (LeaderDestroyedFaction and FactionDestroyed) don't work and are part of the hardcode. Those would add a lot of flair (the former for successful/failed diplomacy the latter for destroying factions and being the son of such a father)

You'll be happy to learn though that today I managed to fix up the AdoredByPope and PopesEnforcer traits without having to include the descr_missions file in the fix (although that would be useful for other reasons)