thank you, thank you very much for fixing the overskilled characters issue.

@The Gripper Sniffer

The AI doesn't use that character interaction, so that is an issue of other mod or vanilla. Glad you are enjoying Dark Ages.

Hi, I love your mod but I think the negotiate alliance interaction needs to be more restricted. The AI makes nonsensical alliances to rulers halfway across the world and then loses their whole armies to attrition when trying to help them. Maybe increase the required opinion so that characters with different religions are less likely to ally with each other or make distance a factor that influences the acceptance chance

@Rafael, luqfire2016

Glad you are enjoying the experience!

It must be said however the mod has more than 30 game rules to give the player the power to costumize their experience to match their tastes. Murder events or illnesses can be reduced or turned off.
For new players it also should be stressed that, unless they play very poorly, most of their characters will last until old age, with murders and illnesses on.

I decided to play casual game without DA, got quickly bored. Came back to mod in 2 next runs got randomly murdered by courtier, got sick and died. Missed this baby so much :)

Glad to hear that you're expanding upon landless gameplay. This is my favourite mod by a long shot.

@Kate27

There's no lack of plans for it. For instance, in September I am going to develop an extensive event pool for landless characters to spice up that side of gameplay. And I as motivated as ever to continue delivering a different experience of gameplay.

I first downloaded this mod like two years ago or something? So happy to see it's still going strong

Version 2.25 (22/08/2025)

- Event "Quarrel in the Council" now has all text working ok
- Intimidate characters to gain Prestige now works as intended
- Fixed a flag that was not reset in event "Dabbling in Politics"
- Event "Stroke!" now may happen again
- Optimized the structure of the localization files
- Updated all language files (*)





(*) - 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

@donalforducks

Sure, that's the best option.
Enjoy Dark Ages your way. :)

Thanks for the reply, i will just make a submod for myself them to overwrite them with the vanilla art

@donalforducks

Not at all disrespectful, you are absolutely entitled to your particular taste.
Unfortunately, there is no way to remove the new art. I included it because it has different art for all MaA, contrary to vanilla art that reuses many of its images.

hey sorry if this sounds disrepectful but is there a way to disable the new MAA art without me having to dig into the mod file, i just don't vibe with it

@zewasplays

Hi!

I only change a bit the vanilla innovations, don't implement new ones. It is easier for me using DiffMerge to compare vanilla files with mine, that's why I include them wholesale. This being said, perhaps in the future I will implement something more submod friendly.

Glad you are enjoying Dark Ages!

@Cardolam Hi! First of all, thank you for the awesome mod. I'm running through with my first playthrough and loving it so far. Just reaching out because I needed to make a compatibility patch for my own mod and noticed that Dark Ages copies over the vanilla culture innovations files—as an FYI, you can make a new specific innovations file for your mod and only include the ones you want to tweak. That would improve compatibility with other mods, as well as reducing headaches with future updates!

Thanks for the submod!

OMG THANKYOU!!!!!!!!!!!!

@Toney

There wasn't. But now there is. ;)

Download it HERE

Any way to disable the colored name plates?

@JOЯDΛИ

Thanks. Glad you are enjoying!

Best mod for CK3 hands down. Vanilla is too damn easy

@SKIBIDI_RIZZLER123

Sure. Load Dark Ages last in your mod list.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3497178264 it will be compatible with this mod?

I'm an idiot, ignore me... It was a mod conflict with Culture Expanded which I loaded later in the order. Only just started playing again so didn't notice the change

@Tankthinker

Regarding Dull or any other of the traits I mentioned it is not Dark Ages related, then. Same goes for Incapable.

If your skill is not up to the murder system or you simply don't enjoy the implementation you can turn it off via game rule. Certainly having your last 5 characters murdered with the same percentage considered speaks about an occurrence once in a blue moon. Maybe betting on the lottery... ;)

This prompts me to counsel you to browse through all game rules. You can cherry pick how to play this complex mod.


@Taspher

It is done like that for every regiment in the game. The idea being to turn warfare more interesting and risky by reducing the impact of the elements monopolizing the end results: The MaA.

Ya im sorry but its not 5%, every single one of my played characters has either had dull or incapable, thats 9 characters in a row now across two different playthroughs. Ive resorted to using the console commands to remove it.

I think there is some sort of player bias present in your mod because I barely see dull or incapable in other characters.

Also the whole rival system pop up thing where they have a 34% chance to kill you, kills me every time, Ive lost 5 characters in a row to that thing, really annoying.

@Taspher my brother in christ... every unit is limited like that.

Heya, is there any rationale for unique units being limited to 50 rather than 100 as per normal? I'm playing in Nubia, and the Nubian archers and Sahel horses being limited to 50 rather than 100 like their non-unique counterparts makes them somewhat less useful.

@Tankthinker

Dull, Shrewd, Strong, Weak, Loyal an Disloyal have 5% chance of appearing during childhood in Dark Ages. When you get one of them, you cannot get its contrary anymore. The base chance of getting those traits increases a bit if the mother or father have the trait. All characters, not just the player, are subject to these probabilities.

Incapable is not included in this list and certainly Dark Ages is not giving Incapable out of nowhere.

Ok thanks, another thing id like to know is did you adjust the rate at which player characters get negative traits at all?

Every single one of my playthrouhs, all my characters plus children have been getting one of the following - dull, weak or incapable - and I mean every single character of mine, not AI is getting those... doesnt make sense at all what are the odds of that? It never happened for me like this in vanilla

By the way, 5% for MAAs causes siege weapons and war elephants to not reinforce if it's just 1 stack of them. You in theory could fix that for siege weapons quite easily, just double them, siege stat seems ot be per-regiment and not per-soldier, so that wouldnt affect much. Elephants, however, are tough.

@ Tankthinker

Realistic warfare means battles are much more unpredictable, it is much harder to guess their outcomes. It should not affect at all the recovery rate of troops. Levies reinforcement speed is 2% per month (vanilla is 3%) and 5% for MaA (vanilla is 10%).

What exactly is happening with the "Realistic" setting for warfare? I noticed that when it is on my MaA recover severely slowly, like it must be in the 0.1 per month as it changes by like 5 per year. When I switched to "Gamey" it went back to recovering like 5 per month.

Was this intended?

Version 2.24 (04/08/2025)


- The whole line of Murex Farm buildings now gives proper Influence Bonuses
- Reverted Skill cap to 100 (!)
- Updated all language files (*)




(!) - There is a vanilla bug that appears if the cap is lowered from the vanilla 100. Basically it makes skill gain during infancy faster, turning many characters into demi gods, good (at least) at everything.
(*) - 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

@Schwefelgelb et all

There is a strange issue with capping the values of skills. It seems lowering the cap turns the progress of skill gain during infancy much faster and two weeks ago I did just that: capped the skills at 25 from the vanilla 100.
This is something that is totally undocumented and most of all, strange. Why the devs decided to cause this indirect consequence is beyond my understanding.

I am going to provide in a few minutes a quick fix for this issue.

THANK YOU TO ALL THAT REPORTED THIS BUG. SORRY FOR THE TROUBLES.

Hello, a lot of characters that are born or generated after start have very high base skills (12-17) and after getting some buffs from traits almost all chars have 20-25 in all skills, any way to fix this? I have pretty big modlist and can share it, but I also seen that a lot of people have same problem so it is pretty common I guess.

@Minipx

There is a submod for Dark Ages that removes the skill cap. Check out Dark Ages main page for the proper link.

@Mightus

My bad. Will be fixed next Friday. Thx for spotting!

@glenn.clouse, Ettiene

Never experienced that on my end. Most probably a mod conflict. Maybe talking with each other singles out the incompatibilities.

https://imgur.com/mUpOpY9

To remove the cap of 25 for the basic stats, is changing the values there (screenshot) all I need to do, or is there another file that needs to be edited?

I have the same issue with all characters born after start having base 15 in all skills. Otherwise, awesome mod!

This might be a mod conflict, as I've only tried with and without this mod specifically, but it looks like all characters born after game start will tend to have a base of 15 in every attribute upon reaching adulthood. I don't believe this is intended

Hey, I think you made a mistake with the murex farms buildings line, since the second and third level gives you more influence than the fourth one

@ PYTUH либерахи соса

I am not sure if I follow, as so far I did not play in administrative realms.

Version 2.23 (31/07/2025)


- Improved the description of the decision "Assemble the Estates of the Realm"
- Nerfed Governor trait
- Nerfed Murex Farm buildings Influence bonus
- Updated all language files (*)



(*) - 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

@cardolan
At a start date everyone has less skills then next generations. so at a start date most of governors have governor efficiency about 0% what is OK. But their kids will have much more skills so almost every new kid when become governor has 50% efficiency.

@Skibidi

Yes, Dark Ages deepens relations with new events and modifiers.

@zr777445

No, no hiding of info in Dark Ages.

@PITUH

Can you be more specific with the Governor trait problems? Yes Dark Ages does hundreds of changes to traits.

@cardolam does mod do smthg with skills? if so, then could you please change balance of governor trait because every kid then become governor is just like over +50%. But a suppose it will brake strength of administrative govs at the start dates so kinda unsolvable

Does this mod hide enemy military information? If yes how can i disable it? Im playing with quite a big modlist thats why i ask, thanks

well i saw mod that change whole interactions beetwen characters like rivals friends family etc its more deep and meanigfull and does this mod make this too?

@Rafael

If I double the size of some units I'll throw balance out of the window.
Glad you are enjoying, thx for the kind words!

@SKIBIDI_RIZZLER123

Don't understand what you mean. There are certainly hundreds of instances where opinion modifiers are applied in Dark Ages...