You can appoint a successor for Knight of Tedious Accolade System

[(Rúna)]

Wow, this badly needs a rework / improving.

I didn't really 'get it' when the accolade system was introduced with the Tours & Tournament patches, so kind of ignored it, but I've been playing the game again in the last week and decided to give more attention to the addition, the mechanics of it, and reading up on the different attributes and their requirements. I get it now - if chosen well according to your realm, culture, aims, etc, these can provide massive game-changing buffs to your playthrough. I really like it, at least in principle.

HOWEVER.

It has become increasingly more tedious and immersion breaking from my role-play to almost constantly be navigating the menu design for it, finding worthy successors. I'm not sure I can adequately articulate just how draining on my concentration and focus this system is as it is, but I'm going to try.

First, it's just constant, never stopping. The past few days in playing I was increasingly getting the feeling that maybe theres a bug or something because it felt like every 5 minutes I was having to find another worthy successor. It was very difficult to keep track of, when your attention is managing the realm and activities. I've just started a new campaign so decided to stick to one accolade for time being, and the successor was my caravan master. In just a couple of in-game months, weeks even, I had to re-appoint him as successor to the accolade 4 times now. I've not travelled in that time, or gone to war, merely befriending vassals and examining my holdings. What the hell is going on?!

Which brings be to my next point. A majority of the time, when I am told I need a worthy successor, I can't appoint whomever is listed as an option. I thought maybe it was due to have a small pool of knights, but on a concurrent campaign I have 18 champions and this was happening all the time.

Now, you can recruit potential successors to court through the accolade menu, but if they are greyed out you have to navigate back out the menu to the list of knights, scroll down, find them, force them to be a knight, and that /usually/ seems to sort it. But not always? urgh. I don't know why. But the micromanaging feel of it isn't fun.

The UI design of it is so bad. It wrenches you out of the game to make you click click click and then click click click back to try resolve a problem and then click click click back to make make sure you can do the thing now. Then when you've finished you have to click click click, and then a couple more clicks, to exit the menu and go to other tasks.

I'm not a game designer, I don't know how to do it better, but I'm pretty sure the devs could do it better. Better UI, QoL tweaks, maybe some automation when find options for the worthy successors. My gods, it is tedious when dealing with 1 accolade, 3 is the max I've had at once so far and that was so bad I left my campaign and started a new one, it just sapped all my energy for that campaign and I was losing track of what I wanted to be doing. I don't even want to try it with the full 5 accolades active, as it stands.

There are some other issues with it I haven't covered here, but the whole thing is giving me a headache and I dont want to be grumbling, so I'm leaving it for others to hopefully point them out in comments

[DanielHall15]

I agree, the frequent micromanaging is annoying to begin with, and the obtuse interface makes it even worse. Half the time I tried to restore an accolade I created a new one because that's the only shiny button on that first screen...

I'm currently completely ignoring it in my current run, where I'm just sitting out my last few kings to make it to 1453 for that achievement...

[Bmorekareful]

Very tedious... let us activate knights while in the looking for accolade window..... like wtf