politics and loyalty ruin this game

[=SAS= Hafkl]

I dont care this is relevant to the time period, the constant loyalty juggling and civil wars ruin this entire game experience compared to other pdx games.

[ashbery76]

Constant? You must be playing poorly.

[galadon3]

Guess you miss some key-points about it, otherwhise it is not that hard to manage
1. The only people you need to keep loyal are:
A) heads of big families
B) generals (legates)
C) province governors

Of those you can as soon as you bribed them back to loyalty switch out the generals and province governors if they get too bad modifiers that its hard to keep them happy all the time.

2. More personal power makes it more important to keep somebody happy AND makes it harder at the same time since personal power is a negative modifier on loyalty. So its important to never make a head of family (who have already a good chunk of personal power from that) a general or governor. If an existing one bribe, give open hands etc. to get them to the crucial 30 loyalty where you can take away the problematic title.

The rank and file guys who are neither heads of a house or generals/governors you can usually easily ignore, since its not important how many people are disloyal but what percentage of power in the realm is on the disloyal side.
So if you keep happy the 10% of ppl who hold 90% of the power, you are fine.

[QTV]

No. It is what makes it grander...

[Klutch]

This might be helpful:

https://imperator.paradoxwikis.com/Characters#Power_base

Specifically, "Every unit of Power base power base decreases a character's Loyalty.png loyalty by 0.55, making power base one of the most important factors decreasing Loyalty.png character loyalty,"

[drake_hound]

No complaints about this system... was infact one of the biggest surprise when I raised my levy as tribal, and the head of the other house/family, just went his own way and refused to listen to my commands.

I love it... was like a WOW moment finally AI doing stuff on their own. so loyalty does matter.

[Jean-Maurice Nya]

There's the oratory tech tree dedicated to loyalty. The left one helps you with subject nations, the right one helps you with characters.
If you don't manage to keep them loyal by other means, the tech tree is there to help you.

[Cap'n Morgan]

The loyalty and politics mechanics are very much a game of trade-offs with everything else going on in your nation. Some times you'll get synergies, but most of time things are in conflict. I've found that as long as I'm not trying to push any agenda too far in one direction and am happy to ride the rollercoaster that comes with characters and parties being more than just automatons, then things usually work out fine in the end. And if you're keeping everything balanced, then when something major does crop up, you should have no problems finding the resources to do a little bit of reforming, politicking, bribery or minor corruption to fix it up.

[zakdoekje]

its a bit of the same as crusader kings 3 except that ck3 is a little bit harder. i think generaly its easy to keep them loyal, never had a civil war even though its my first time playing imperator rome. (though i have experience with ck2 and ck3 so this helps)

[SpacePoon]

Skill issue

[Facemeister]

Just mash buttons like free hands, give holdings and thats about the skill issue and characters in IR being a deep mechanic.

[Cymoric]

Yeah you'll get plenty of trolly responses from people who love snorting up all the strange, repetitive +10 loyalty and -15 loyalty events.

But yeah it's just not enjoyable at all to constantly have to go swap family members for no real reason. I think they just were determined to throw in some CK3 and some EU4 and so they ended up with a bland middle ground that is stuck on repeating events you've seen a thousand times because there wasn't enough investment to flesh out real events.

I think they wanted to hype up the historical figures somewhat this way but really it does nothing much, mostly the families you deal with are just standin characters and families. The only actually cool, exciting events are the tailored ones like the Diadochi wars etc. Not this tiresome drivel.

And yeah rebels and civil war mechanics are always the most irritating part of these games with no real benefit or reward to balance out the annoyance of dealing with them.

You don't have to be bad to be annoyed at having to play the same mindless free hands, bribe, holdings minigame every 5 minutes. This is so much worse than the mana system everyone raged over and pooped their pants for.

[Cymoric]

Originally posted by QTV:

No. It is what makes it grander...

Constant repetition of the bribe, free hands, and holdings buttons do not make the game "grander". Neither do arbitrary events where you have only choices between negative modifiers with no option to work to avoid the maluses or reward for overcoming them. Having to constantly swap out family members of the great houses doesn't make the game "grander" it's a continual irritation you have to handle every few minutes as your characters will be dying off on a rolling basis.

It's like you are being constantly slapped in the face while trying to work and you say gods what a great inclusion to the experience!

Anyone who's here for the nation building of EU4 will find these sort of events bring the more interesting gameplay of development and expansion and diplomacy to a screeching halt over and over again and involve them in a bunch of quibbly bs which has very little real value to your nation besides avoiding any of the larger cudgels that it waves over your head in case you ignore these groups.

Anyone coming from CK3 will find a bland, bare bones system of repetitious events with little bearing to historical moments that are a shadow of what exists in that game.

Stop defending this as some sort of god tier system that enriches the experience. Anyone who's played the game for a decent amount of time will know it is not great.

And stop knee-jerk trolling people who rightly dislike this garbage set of additions that were never fleshed out for real, thoughtful events with some sort of actual historical context.

[Cymoric]

Originally posted by drake_hound:

No complaints about this system... was infact one of the biggest surprise when I raised my levy as tribal, and the head of the other house/family, just went his own way and refused to listen to my commands.

I love it... was like a WOW moment finally AI doing stuff on their own. so loyalty does matter.

I don't think that's really what OP is complaining about. If disloyalty results in interesting outcomes that's fine.

What he's complaining about is...
1. Constant juggling of loyalty actions and the way they are implemented through these very bland events - these are in fact repetitive and a constant annoyance and serve very little positive purpose so they feel like continual irritations, especially if your background is not CK3 and you didn't ask for this.
You don't have to "get gud" to not like this annoying repetition that adds very little to the game.
2. Civil Wars - I think most would admit that civil wars are poorly implemented and can get you or other countries stuck in a never-ending cycle if you can't reach all areas of the map. I've rarely had to deal with civil wars but I see them often complained about by major streamers who have many hours in the game. They cause problems when you attack people and they have a civil war at the same time. They cause a host of problems. Anyone who says they do not I'm not sure you really have played the game.

[drake_hound]

Originally posted by Cymoric:

Originally posted by drake_hound:

No complaints about this system... was infact one of the biggest surprise when I raised my levy as tribal, and the head of the other house/family, just went his own way and refused to listen to my commands.

I love it... was like a WOW moment finally AI doing stuff on their own. so loyalty does matter.

I don't think that's really what OP is complaining about. If disloyalty results in interesting outcomes that's fine.

What he's complaining about is...
1. Constant juggling of loyalty actions and the way they are implemented through these very bland events - these are in fact repetitive and a constant annoyance and serve very little positive purpose so they feel like continual irritations, especially if your background is not CK3 and you didn't ask for this.
You don't have to "get gud" to not like this annoying repetition that adds very little to the game.
2. Civil Wars - I think most would admit that civil wars are poorly implemented and can get you or other countries stuck in a never-ending cycle if you can't reach all areas of the map. I've rarely had to deal with civil wars but I see them often complained about by major streamers who have many hours in the game. They cause problems when you attack people and they have a civil war at the same time. They cause a host of problems. Anyone who says they do not I'm not sure you really have played the game.

1 so basically you are saying you don't even want to keep a eye on the characters..
What the premise of this game design was, Nations trough Characters..
(which it failed not at the nation part but the character part)
So you don't want it.. WTF do you want this game to be a EUIV in Rome Period?

2 Civil wars, they are meant to be ANNOYING, they are meant to be bothersome.
Like any other revolts in CK2, while your army is far away the people rebel at home.
So plan for it like you always have planned, with stronghold regions that can be used to crush the Civil War. you got so many MICRO options in this game.
and you can't even figure it out.

Even the Rome and other Major powers had a standing army, but they are out to conquer stuff, then raise you levies and deal with the civil war.

This sound more like people never even tried CK2, which was also micromanagement heavy.
especially late game, you don't raise your whole map of levy and army, you builded strong hold county who can raise a Kingdoms worth of levy/troops, when your retinue and capital levy are out to conquer stuff.

[Jean-Maurice Nya]

You don't need to bribe or give freehands at all if you focus on the oratory tech tree. Governors and generals will always be loyal. As for your government, just put only 1-2 families on it to max their number of important characters in your empire so they'll get the loyalty boost and be close to 100 loyalty all the time (maxing your PI yield in the process). The rest of the families will just get regions to govern and with the tech boost they'll always be loyal.
It's just about numbers depending on your goals.