hi, i reviewed the code you've made. seems there are too much balance content overriding the vanilla files. it's possible for us to get a lite version?like a mechanic and events only version.

okok thnx for all the help and the amazing mod

@Ozare

I can confirm the vassals of the Emperor start with a ballista unit, yes. But the Emperor starts with a Ballista plus another unit type, which suggests the AI will not only pick Ballistas for the armies. I don't know what is happening and can only speculate thats because the Ballista is a unit with combat as well as siege capability that is majored by the heuristics of the AI.

@Ozare

Will check what is afoot. Thanks for the report!

Hi I have a lil bug to report, I only have This mod on, and when starting a new game 867 all the themes on the byzantine empire have the same Ballistrai MAA, on vanilla you see variations; that being skoutatoi or akritai, but literally every single themes has the same Ballistrai and they don't seem to be recruiting anythong other than that

@Hedj

I can only say that denounce/disinherit happy House Heads have nothing to do with Dark Ages.

@Spectre016

Dark Ages is balanced for the Far East but no content developed specifically for the region at this time. Of course, you will experience lots of content that applies to the whole world.

I wonder how optimised is this with china and japan gameplay?

Listen, when this happened i had a bunch of other mods so i can't exactly pin point the issue exactly but i definitely do not recommend LMF with this.
I don't know which mod it is but one of them makes House Heads extremely denounce/disinherit happy, i had a grand marriage arranged with a ruler once, the house head disinherited her, it cancelled the grand marriage and my character had no access to the marriage option anymore, so i'd be careful.

I tried it with LMF this week, i think it got a large overhaul recently. I'm not sure but I felt like (with no real proof but vibes) marriage options felt kind of strange. But I hadn't seen any actual problems beyond that.

I disabled LMF's pregnancy modifiers though. I wish there was a way to fully disable all LMF marriage options.

That said, what would you recommend for the LMF settings?

LMF definitely played fine with Dark Ages a few months ago. The compatibility might have changed since then.

I haven’t played the game since, but it was honestly a great experience.

I recommend loading LMF last and disabling all of Dark Ages pregnancy and fertility effects and see if you run into any issues.

LMF is a near essential mod for the marriage rebalance and the pregnancy location check makes the game feel so much better.

@Cardolam My bad, turns out it's caused by a mod conflict. Sorry for bothering you without doing my due diligence.

@Tiberivs

As the author of LMF states in the description of the mod, LMF can cause troubles with major complex mods, where Dark Ages fits. I would say there will be some minor issues that probably will not be noticed.

Load Dark Ages last in your mod order, otherwise it is possible that bigger complications might arise.


@ BlueTh4nus

It is done like that on purpose. You can stop the mustering of troops when you decide. So longer for bigger army, shorter for smaller one. Vanilla mustering times are gamey in the extreme and go against the strategic depth this game begs to have.

This being said I have good news for you. Check the description of Dark Ages and you'll find a submod that does exactly what you want.

Can you change how long army gathering takes in the game rules or is it always going to be incredibly slow?

Dark Ages is compatible with LMF?
(Love Marriage Family)

Version 3.11 (28/11/2025)


- Tweaked Administrative Government modifiers
- Balanced Mandala Capital Great Projects 3rd party contributions
- Opened Influence events to a bigger range of characters (!)
- Fixed many instances where events for landed characters were firing for landless
- Updated all language files (*)





(!) - Was being limited to Admin Byzantium
(*) - The language displayed is always English except for Spanish that has now an updated internal translation in Dark Ages. There are submods for Spanish, Polish, German, Chinese and Russian translations. I don't have a clue how update they are

@sephiroxical19981202

Yes, you are totally right on events that should not be targetting landless characters. Thank you for reporting this.

Regarding levy modifiers, can you be more explicit?


Will be releasing a new version of the mod in a few minutes. Stay tuned for a version with the fixes to the problems you reported!

The levy size modifiers from the game rules are applied twice to the player's realm. Also I get an event called "seasonal markets" that only applies irrelevant modifiers to my estate, even though I'm actually governing a county already. It seems that quite a few events from this mod treat family estate title as a county title.

@Falvick

Check

HERE

and report back if the attempt at compatching has been successful.

@Hedj

My personal preference are the default game rules. But I am not going to suggest my way of playing is "better" than any other, though.

@Falvick

I'll see what I can do. Dark Ages is fully compatible with CFP, EPE and Cultures Expanded (with its own submod). I am not sure about More Holding Graphics.

@Cardolam, i don’t mean to include Jimmy’s mod. I mean possibility to use it with Dark Ages
So that they will replace MAA pictures that are in Dark Ages and maintain the overall visual style throughout the game. And at the same time, to not break anything in work of Dark Ages or game functionality.

Because, according to estimates, there are certain top of visual mods in the community that are used by most people who play CK3

These are CFP/EPE/Cultures expanded/More holding graphics and this mod that changes maa

This mod is too much of a ♥♥♥♥ you destined at meta gamers than role players like me but i'll be testing further, i'm using more interactive vassals in conjunction with this to try to circumvent every battle being some insane slaughter on either side, do you have any recommended settings for the rules ?

@ Falvick

Cannot add the images by myself on moral grounds. Will not include a mod inside Dark Ages without proper agreement of the developers, sorry.

Is it possible to add patch to replace maa pictures in this mod with cultural armies 2 mod, please. They already add a lot of good fit vanilla style MAA unique images?

@ miguelmonte2005


Without the battle modifiers, the odds in any of the settings of the Warfare game rule are the same for both sides. So, the battle roll can be 50 for you or against you with the same probability.

It should also be noted that the battle roll, given the length of time a battle usually lasts, is performed more than once but much less than in vanilla, where the rolls are so frequent the law of averages nullify any randomness warfare certainly has.

What the setting of the game rule influences is in the damage done per point of battle advantage, that in turn has a big impact in the final outcome of battle, specially mixed with the much rarer change in the battle rolls, as said above.

(cont)

(cont)

The present system, using the "Realistic" setting, is able to depict historical upsets where the clear underdog is able to win battles, much as it happens from time to time in History.

Thus, contrary to vanilla, the present system in Dark Ages is able to depict catastrophic and unexpected defeats such as presented in the battles of Agincourt or Aljubarrota, for instance.

@miguelmonte2005 there's a gamerule about combat or smth like that, move it off "realistic"

gr8 and absolutely infuriating mod. 4 out of 4 battles with -50 modifier... what can i do about it? thk u in advance for any help!

@ Vesterix

Yes, without issues.

Is this mod work with "more interactive vassals"?

@Cardolam: Oh, that's fantastic! I shall go digging deeper to find where those events reside.

Thank you so much again for all your amazing work!

@Teellox

None of those events are from Dark Ages.

@Flamebite

Glad you are enjoying!

@ Captain Smollett

Thx for the clarification and everything more that includes streamlining parts of my code, teaching me stuff and clearing my doubts. ;)

@Teellox that's a vanilla issue

Also reporting that whenever I contribute to an ally's war, I'm told "Your contribution was lower than the required 100, so you gain nothing", even though my contribution is in the thousands and I carried them to victory.

after 2 years this mod has become one of the best in the workshop. it used to be a half finished product but now it's very polished and worth playing. my favorite.

Not sure if it's from Dark Ages or another mod (VIET?), but there's a "hold court" event where one is prompted to build a city in a county that doesn't yet have one, and there's an option to delegate that to one's seneschal or steward. Choosing that option causes the "hold court" event to just end; if there's other people in the queue they don't get heard, and the "hold court" rewards granted at the end of the queue are not given.

@LexanRyder

Glad the issue is sorted out but I am skeptic about the end result of mixing 78 mods... ;)


@ Sergius

No extra punishments at all. Probably some oddity with vanilla.

Hello, I am currently doing a vanilla + dark ages run as a mandala ruler. For some reasons I had two rulers now die of old age, without enabling new piety levels for their heirs. I am just wondering if this is some bug of the vanilla game, or if your extra punishments on old people might have messed with the system?

Sorry if I can't say more spicifically what or if its even your mod that might be causing this. Thanks anyway for keeping in pristine condition!

@Sephiroxical
I'm sure some mods are conflicting, cause it literally gave me 244 mb sized errors, and the moment I took it out it started working again, modding is really brain surgery lmao.

@LexanRyder Weird, I also run both Dark Ages and Knight manager continued, played for dozens of hours without any issue.

@ Cardolam

Due to some strange black magic I cannot fully grasp turns out that the mod named "Knight manager continued" was the problematic one that was causing my entire modlist to collapse, thanks for your patience and understanding and good luck! this mod is truly amazing, o7.

@ LexanRyder

1) I started checking a game rule in the on_actions file
2) I added a single character flag to a specific decision
3) I added 4 events - that were already in the mod but nor called - only happening to playable AI countries


None of this whatsoever would disrupt your game. Check the updates in any of your other 77 mods for some problem.

I'd be willing to share my mod list or even better, if you could provide me somehow the previous version of your mod I'd be really grateful, I'd get you a coffee r two for you troubles if you'd liike cause I was really enjoying the roleplay I had going on.

So uh.... got a 78 modlist that worked perfectly until you updated the mod this evening, I checked, not trying to be a downer here but what was changed exactly this update?, I'm genuinely curious about what happened cause now I'm going mad trying to figure out how to come back to my save and its driving me nuts for real, no trying to disrespect you at all as I'm deeply grateful for your work and the existance of this mod in the first place, but I do wanna share my frustration a bit cause I was prepared to create a custom hegemony and got the equivalent of being smacked in the ass and denied to resume my playthrough.

@Cardolam Thank you for the quick response. I won't use LMF in the playset.

@ NHNster

As the author of LMF states in the description of the mod, LMF can cause troubles with major complex mods, where Dark Ages fits. I would say there will be some minor issues that probably will not be noticed.

Load Dark Ages last in your mod order, otherwise it is possible that bigger complications might arise.

Is dark age compatible with Love Marriage Family?

@Tiberivs

It's true they can become extremelly indebted, but just today I saw the Biz recovering from < -5000 to positives within three or four years.

@Cardolam My problem was that administrative empires like the Byzantines and Chinese would spiral into absurd debt. But I just saw there was an update, so I'll test the mod again!

Version 3.10 (17/11/2025)


- Landless death by murder is now off if you select the relevant option in "Murder System" rule
- Now characters can only perform once per lifetime the decision "Seek Higher Education", as per the description
- Strengthened some Governments that were following a death spiral of debt

@ Tiberivs

What are the issues you experience?
I let the game run in observer mode for about 40 years and they were going strong.