Game balance is all over the place now

[atm]

I still love this game, but man have they thrown balance out the window. This expansion could have been an opportunity to at least begin to address the fact that late game becomes absurdly, ahistorically easy, but instead they decided to throw a truckload of gasoline on the dumpster fire that is late-game play.

All the events you can host and attend will shower you with prestige, piety, lifestyle experience, free traits, free lifestyle perks, and as many friendships as you care for.

On the one hand, this is probably OK in the sense that you can't declare ware while you're away on a trip to a feast (although realistically, why would you not be able to do so? Just tell your marshal to get on his horse and go invade somewhere). So in this sense the events are an alternative to standard warfare, and an alternative way to play. This is actually kind of cool.

The problem is that you can still expand almost as much as you could before, even if you are attending every grand wedding, and undertaking endless pilgrimages; you just have to declare ware before you set out (or just after the event finishes). In effect, you get all the benefits of aggressive expansion, PLUS all the (many) benefits of the competitions, feasts, hunts, and weddings (most weddings alone will give you 1-2 free diplomacy perks, at the minimum).
This means there is no real tradeoff; it's just an endless stream of rewards. The path you choose for your lifestyle means little, since you can probably complete entire trees of other paths from the free lifestyle xp and unlocks obtained from weddings.

There really, really needs to be some serious balance work done here. If there is no challenge in the late game, then there comes a point where you just stop playing because you can predict exactly where the rest of the game will go.



My own suggestions for fixes are:

Make opinion have diminishing returns. Currently it's just so easy to stack opinion. Make each point of opinion with characters have less and less effect, so that you can approach but never (or rarely) reach 100.

Make distance meaningful (which is something I thought this expansion was going to do, but hasn't). I thought you'd want to or need to travel to parts of your empire, which would be hard if they were far away. The one existing mechanic with distance is that it takes a long time to raise your troops in distant provinces, but that's only a mild annoyance, rather than a realistic distance penalty.
Give all vassals an opinion malus based on distance to your capital. They don't see you as being useful to them or properly able to protect them, since they cannot travel to your core lands within any reasonable timeframe, nor you to theirs. Likewise, give your holdings a tax penalty based on distance to capital, since if you have to ship everything a huge distance to get to your capital, you're going to have less economic benefits from it.
The distance that would be considered reasonable could increase over time with the tech eras or with techs. There's a reason why England didn't control India in 1100AD - it was just impossible for an empire to do this at this time; it was just too far. Only when travel became advanced enough was it something that could happen.

Likewise, if you are holding a single exclave in some distant hostile land because it has a goldmine, you should expect your neighbors to constantly try and expel you. Imagine if Mali had invaded Germany and set up camp at the Palace of Aachen, and nowhere else. Would all of Europe have just let them sit there? Basically nobody would have accepted it, nor should they in CK3.

Take a page from Rimworld, and make certain negative events dependent on your empire's wealth; perhaps the Mongols could have a strength relative to your wealth (they are inspired by all the loot). Perhaps enemies could be more inclined to band together against you and declare war on your empire on different fronts once you start running away with the game. The point is that there should still be challenges to make the game interesting once you reach the later eras.

Introduce some kind of prestige and piety decay; if you want 10000 prestige or piety for something you'll have to work against progressively more punishing monthly decay. Some people were prestigious, but nobody was ever infinitely prestigious, and unless you are Jesus himself, you are also probably not infinitely pious (although people could probably have been convinced of almost anything back then).

Point is, something like these really needs to be implemented ASAP to make longer games make sense.

[The Former]

In the meantime, the AI doesn't spam events, so I won't either. :)

[Deylendor]

There is one thing we don't consider.

Not everybody is "good" at ck3.

Many struggle to make the "obvious" right decisions ingame, as they don't fully understand many of the game mechanics.

I've seen CK3 players say how CK2 was even more complex and that CK3 is easy.
But compare that to any other game.

CK3 is complex.
The game isn't too easy, you are just too good.

The problem lies in the fact that those who play Ck3 play an astronomical amounts of hours. So they become VERY adept at the game systems and quirks.

The learning curve is so steep there is nowhere else to go once you've reached the top of the curve.
Any additional increase in the game difficulty would make it near impossible for beginners to even get into the game.

Its a somewhat unique problem in the gaming world.

[[OCe]Kagari]

Originally posted by Deylendor:

There is one thing we don't consider.

Not everybody is "good" at ck3.

Many struggle to make the "obvious" right decisions ingame, as they don't fully understand many of the game mechanics.

I've seen CK3 players say how CK2 was even more complex and that CK3 is easy.
But compare that to any other game.

CK3 is complex.
The game isn't too easy, you are just too good.

The problem lies in the fact that those who play Ck3 play an astronomical amounts of hours. So they become VERY adept at the game systems and quirks.

The learning curve is so steep there is nowhere else to go once you've reached the top of the curve.
Any additional increase in the game difficulty would make it near impossible for beginners to even get into the game.

Its a somewhat unique problem in the gaming world.

I dont think the OP suggest anything that can make it harder for beginners to play. It mostly consist of late game stuff

[broartwar]

Originally posted by Deylendor:

The learning curve is so steep there is nowhere else to go once you've reached the top of the curve.
Any additional increase in the game difficulty would make it near impossible for beginners to even get into the game.

Its a somewhat unique problem in the gaming world.

This is very true. The game is very hard, until it's very easy. By the time I could survive at all, I could easily create/reform any Kingdom/Religion I wanted to, and hold onto it with no real issues. Blob to infinity.

[Dizzy Ladybug]

the balance is quite strange at the moment. all the rulers I've had so far were living legends and religious icons. MAA's are still OP with stationing and knight accolades increasing their regimental numbers.

good artifacts are plentiful in tournaments and you can destroy low level items for gold. there are so many powerful traits now: hunter, hastiluder, traveller.

there is also some stat inflation. most of my rulers have had 40+ prowess at some point due to tournament modifiers, among other stat boosts.

before this DLC, you had to spend almost a lifetime farming prestige or piety for an expensive culture or faith reform. now I see that you can accomplish either in a few decades if you have the money for pilgrimages, hunts, and feasts, or if you have a lot of tournaments to participate in.

i still enjoy the DLC a lot, but certain things may need to be re-balanced especially since this is only the second expansion for the game.

[Harris]

I can see a conscious design decision to even out all the playstyles.

Previously reforming tribal was normally a huge commitment, you had to raise an heir with learning education and proper traits for it. Now you can do the piligrimages and trivially end up with 7-8k piety.

You can focus on martial and stack knight effectiveness - or you can focus on stewardship and use traditions like Frugal Armorers and Strength in Numbers to get busted m@a.

If you want to seduce you no longer need a dedicated build as you can pass a diplomacy check during a feast. If you want to murder a rival but are not a schemer - you can do red wedding with diplomacy, or a hunting accident which scales off prowess.

If you want to boost tech without being a scholar - there are now tons of universities on the map you can build with gold from stewardship. Or if you aren't a steward, you can get it by raiding.

Is this such a terrible design though? Well, nope. A dedicated build will always be better at particular things, and the game ultimately encourages specialization through legacies anyway.

[ShepherdOfCats]

Unfortunately they don't do a great job of balancing the game for those who don't have DLC. I struggled to get higher fame levels and then there was that update a while ago that increased the prestige amount between ranks. I had emperor characters who could barely make it to 'exalted among men'. I honestly couldn't rank up my fame level until I caved and started buying DLC. I'd have to constantly be raiding and once I went feudal it felt like I hardly got any prestige at all. (talking about the base game)

Having said that I just did a grand tour visiting about 7 vassals and hit the highest rank (2000 prestige and 150 renown) without really trying. It took a long time as far as traveling goes, but for about 300 gold it was a great way to get the prestige needed to reform my culture.

[Dedmoin]

I was thinking something similar recently.
Coming from CK2 were boni were scarce and events were often quite risky to do.
In CK3 there are boni everywhere. From lifestyle, from buildings, from artifacts, from ...
In CK2 it was difficult to find the right people for the jobs. In CK3, started in 867 and now with my second ruler, having 20+ stats is already normal. People don't even have special traits to get those stats.
With all the opinion modifiers and activities to increase opinions, it is really easy to turn someone from -100 to +100. In CK2 there were less modifiers and all of them were capped to avoid exactly this.
Also uprisings seem to be much less in CK3 than in CK2. I remember to constantly crush some peasents and lords because they didn't like my culture or religion.
In CK3 I am currently liberating Iberia as Moslem and the worst I get from Catholics is some dislike modifer. There was one uprising but it was actually because of several long lasting offensive wars. I crushed the Catholic uprising, imprisoned and ransomed one of the lords. This lord had somewhat negative opinion afterwards and i am currently turning him into my most loyal +100 vassal lol

I understand Paradox wanted to go more casual and avoid frustrating people losing games, which can be frustrating in a game that already lasted some dozen hours, but this is exactly the charme of the game to weight the risks of my choices.