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The Five Families

You can download this mod directly from here:
https://www.nexusmods.com/crusaderkings2/mods/63/?

INTRODUCTION
Are you like me? Do you enjoy the sense of moral superiority you get from playing as a forward-thinking Republic in a world surrounded by the backward simple-mindedness of petty monarchs?

Well if you do, you were probably disappointed to find out that Merchant Republics play almost exactly the same as Feudal governments, and are "Republics" essentially in name only. The elections are a sham, you just funnel enough money into them (which is very easy to do considering your income) and periodically prune the other Patrician families and you'll easily have yourself a quasi-monarchy. You'll have the nicest mansion on the block and 100+ tradeposts, and everyone else will be lucky to live to old age because of your insane murder plot power.

In short, I wanted to make a mod to make Republic gameplay markedly different from the standard Feudal experience.


DESCRIPTION
As a Patrician within a Merchant Republic, this mod will allow you to take control of the other Patrician families within your realm at will. Simply right-click on their character portrait and select the "Take Control" option to play as them. The idea is that you'll no longer be looking out for a single Patrician family, but all five of them. You'll actually have incentive now to let each family grow in strength, so that you can have a pool of quality candidates to choose from to lead your Republic, instead of just playing feudalism-lite with your own family and massacring all the others. Trade post limits will actually mean something now, because there won't be one family far above the limit hoarding all the posts anymore. Also, since you won't be obligated to rig every election in favor of a single family, your realm's rulership will actually have dynastic variation now, as a true Republic should.


This mod includes some custom game rules so that you can choose how restrictive you want the "Take Control" option to be. You can restrict its usage to once a year, once every 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, or only once per lifetime. You can also set it to only allow switching to your current liege, or to not have any restrictions at all (other than requiring that your character and the character you're switching to are both Patricians, of course).

I've also added one other option to this mod that can be enabled or disabled via game rule: as a non-Republican character (i.e. Feudal, Iqta, etc.), if you have a Merchant Republic vassal, you can irreversibly switch your character to a Patrician from within that Republic. From that point on, you can use the "Take Control" option to switch between the other Patricians normally. The purpose of this option is so that you can essentially create a playable Merchant Republic anywhere in the world (by giving a duchy to a coastal Republic county vassal) without having to resort to exploits or cheats.




Please be sure to let me know in the comments if you encounter any bugs, or if you have any suggestions for improving upon this mod.

Thanks!