No, more events is NOT the answer....

[Dizzy Ioeuy]

Emergent gameplay and stories come from unforseen interactions and dilemmas brought about by the procedure of the game play accumulating over time. By the *actual* situations, not modifiers bought through a decision offered in an artificial event. An event whose flavor text is read through maybe once before you see it again, skip the text and projecting that event into your gameplay/story- you just don't do it more than once. Skip to the choices and modifiers from those choices, move on.

I mean how many times does the cat story have to happen before it becomes- oh, the cat story, how will i play it this time... it's a choose your adventure level of depth. Which is almost no depth at all.

The meat of the story and such for me in this or any game purporting to try for that goal comes from things like other npcs assassinating me or my loved ones, or my enemies making me hate or like them more, war outcomes, the premises for the wars, tying my family to another through marriage, the stress build up

Take the stress mechanic as an example- paradox completely strips it of its potential power to move you in a story:

Why is stress not caused to build up overt time the longer i'm in a marriage to a woman I hate, or a war I am in against my formerly beloved cousin, or lost as I win a war against a despised enemy (rival) who I finally get to behead... or against the man who cucked me. Why is stress not caused by some kid I have who is constantly questioning my authority and challenging my ideals because he has a personality very different from mine, or relieved by a child (the second in line?) who is my darling and apple of my eye.

Why is stress not tied to having LOTS of kids, or NO kids depending upon my personality and the needs/pressures of my demesne and courtiers pressuring my ass to produce an heir!?

Why is stress not up or down based on my accumulated wealth if I am a pennypincher, or through deeds of spending my wealth and maintaining a low treasury if I am generous- why can it not be tied to that moment I purchase a crap ton of mercenaries all at once to win a war? That should be a very stressful thing to have done!

Why am I not stressed out at all by the sacking of my capital!? Or an enemy army even occupying my lands. Why am I not stressed and gaining it when my wife is a prisoner? And I deary love her. Or the opposite if I hate her.

Why is stress not tied to my traits and my *actual behaviors* in the game other than silly choices in dilemma "events," that never real like they actually happen to me in the game. they are not unique in the way that my actual behavior and situation *is* unique.

The stress mechanic is rich but they never used it to its best effect. Makes me sad.

Paradox is missing the boat here, but I'm sure this in an unpop opinion.

It's why I keep returning to Rimworld and keep waiting for this game to finally add that certain thing it is missing for me right now. I finally, for myself, figured it out.

[creepyfeet]

Funny. I came from Rimworld to this. Personally, I think Rimworld is extremely shallow in comparison.
Still a good game where you gain a reasonable virtual connection to the characters but it just seems far more simplistic in comparison.
PS. That doesn't mean I don't agree with your opinions. I do. Stress needs a complete rehash where it has far more fluidity in relation to real world issues.
Atm it seems far too mechanical and dependent on some very specific events/outcomes.

[cdplayer906]

tell that to the ppl complaing that there weren't enough events when you'd already get spammed. the devs really can't win here w/ how woah is me both sides are. if i'm not mistaken they've added the ability to adjust certain event frequency, so looks like both sides will just have to settle and realize they're not the only ones playing this game.

EDIT - i do agree with a stress rework, though. some instances certainly don't make sense why it would effect negatively or positively

[prime_resistor]

I agree completely

[JC]

Well, eventually there will be a ton of events so you won't be seeing near as many repeats.


On the flip side of that i'd like to see some sort of Randomized event system worked in verse having the same event trigger, at least on the same character, but honestly i'd rather have it remember for the whole game. Instead of seeing that same event you would just have a randomized event happen that does a minor stat change. They could add a simple line of text explaining why you now have -5 martial, or + health, or what ever other random oddity happened.

It would do two things, Make those nicely scripted events be far more rare seeing them once a play through, And it would add some random chance to the game that had some random things happen that are not always just horribly bad or great that could alter your play a bit making each play very different.

I'm sure randomized event's messing with people's stats would make half the folks angry, and the other half happy.. ain't developing games fun?

[taomastercu]

The problem is that CK3 hasn't got a real social simulation.

Characters don't have individual desires, skills, interests/hobbies, or detailed personalities or ideologies. And there's no "populations" who have ideologies for them to interact with either. Not that the Vicky3 populations are interesting enough that that would help, they suffer from the same core issue as CK3 characters.

Events are really the only thing that Paradox is capable of. On top of that "events" can be sold in Sims4 style "content packs" alongside stuff like historical buildings and what not. CK3 is flooded with Sims4/Sims: Medieval players and Paradox loves that because The Sims series is the only one with a more insane and exploitative DLC policy than Paradox.

Deep game systems can really only be sold once and that isn't the profits paradigm Paradox targets. They operate like a political campaign where 60/80% of the money is spent raising more money rather than doing the things needed to win a campaign/make a fantastic game.

Of course Paradox also has structural limitations because they make pseudo real time games with highly accelerated time frames. Ideally you'd make a turn based game to give the simulation and agent AI time to chug but Paradox at best could slow the game down to 1/10 the speed of the current speed one. That would give you time to both simulate and utilize a deeper and more meaningful character sim, although nowhere near as effectively as being turn based.

There are games focusing on a superior social simulation as well as having actually meaningful ideologies, politics, diplomacy, and intrigue. But none of them are precise alternatives to CK3. One or two are fantasy, several are sci fi, some are turn based, others are historical and non-magical but not on Earth, and few are pure PDox style grand strategies.

If you looked at the design plans for games like Axioms Of Dominion that's roughly CK3 but with a better social and political sim and more meaningful system integration. But it does have various differences like being turn based and fantasy.

Axioms originally came up with an idea called "Secrets" back in 2014, and the dev posted an outline for "Social Occasions" in early 2022, which pretty closely correlates to CK3's Grand Events but with more detail. Of course the game is not slated for EA until the end of the year, and it is a fair argument that coming up with game changing ideas is useless when another game gets to market first. There's no strong evidence that Paradox didn't arrive at Secrets and Grand Events independently, though CK3 only started development in 2015.

Regardless, if you read the posts on the design blog which you can find by googling the game's name, you'll see lots of other fantastic concepts equivalent to or better than Secrets or Social Occasions, such as Interests/Skills/Desires, Conspiracies, actual Logistics, and fantasy stuff like non-RNG based Divination(basically operates on the same meta-data as the incredibly "Intrigue" system). It remains to be seen if the game will release into EA as scheduled.

Other games like Alliance of the Sacred Suns(Dune inspired), and Great Houses Of Calderia(alt-historical and head into open-ish beta right now), also have a unique take on some of the same themes as CK3.

[Vicboss]

Not enough events until my king decides to keep a monkey as a pet.