@Ahoyande Glad you enjoy the mod and thank you very much for your feedback and suggestions.

Originally posted by Ahoyande:

1. Allow Player to Change AI FoAs

I noticed that it's possible to grant AIs Vanity Titles through the console. However, the Change Form of Address button doesn't show up for AI characters.

Since the mod is roleplay-only, it would be good to allow the player to change any duchy-tier character's FoA

While I personally prefer customization options to appear only for player characters (like dynasty/title rename buttons do in vanilla), I'm generally open to the idea of giving the player an option to edit AI FoAs and making its availability toggleable via a game rule or similar means.

However, the game currently has an annoying limitation which makes implementing this more difficult than it should be. As you probably noticed, this mod uses a modified version of "Rename Title" dialog to collect player input for male/female forms. Unfortunately, the hardcoded function available to modders which opens this rename dialog for some reason performs an internal check that the title being renamed is currently held by the player (held by the player or a vassal actually, see @Ahoyande's post below) and does not open dialog if it isn't. This means that it's very difficult to let the player rename any title they don't hold themselves (hold directly or through a vassal) (note the glaring lack of "Rename Any Title" mods on Workshop), and since FoA customization mechanism relies on title renaming, it suffers from the same problem as well.

I'm not saying that there are no possible workarounds for this problem, but they are all quite a pain to implement and I'd rather the developers just remove the unnecessary check in one of the next patches.

Originally posted by Ahoyande:

2. Lower-Rank FoAs (Unlanded, Baron, and Count)

Your mod actually does change FoAs for Counts and Barons in limited circumstances.

Yes, the game's flavorization mechanism applies an opposite gender title to the ruler's spouse, provided that they are of a lower rank than the ruler. Like a reigning Countess, who is the wife of an Emperor will be called an Empress, even though her own title is a mere County. (You know this of course, but I'm writing this out for other people who might be reading the post.)

Anyway, this feature just happened to automatically work for custom FoAs as well without any effort on my part, since custom FoAs are themselves titles.

Originally posted by Ahoyande:

But unexpectedly, one or two or Matilda's Count-rank ancestors also became "Lord Consort," and when she inherited a barony from a vassal with no heirs, the dead baron became known as "Lord Consort." (Please let me know if you'd like screenshots.)

Oh wow, that's messed up. XD

Yeah, I already reproduced this behaviour. So basically the game's flavorization logic for dead characters works in mysterious ways and looks like for some reason it applies your custom FoA to any dead character who died while holding any of your current titles, not just your primary. (Like if you grant away one of your counties, the corresponding dead count ancestor will stop using your FoA.) Very interesting. Not sure it's entirely fixable mod-side, but I'll see if I can make some workaround to prevent this behaviour.

Originally posted by Ahoyande:

This demonstrates to me that there is a way to bind the Vanity title effects to lower rank titles.

There are ways, it's just that, as your example proves, they are hard to control so as to apply only to the needed characters. And the problem is additionally compounded by the issue with title rename window, which I mentioned earlier.

But yes, it should be possible to allow unlanded and low-ranked noble characters to use a custom FoA without ranking up via some workaround like giving them a fake council position. But it's hard to say whether the time needed to implement it is currently worth it, given the coming release of Royal Court, which might change some stuff and possibly introduce a better way to mod this (Court Positions in particular look promising).

At any rate, bug fixes aside, I plan to wait with major updates to this mod until Royal Court is released, since it will probably bring with it some changes relevant for modding and it also might break some things, so I feel it would be best to wait with huge changes to the mod until that point, to not have to redo them.

Thanks again for your kind words and your feedback.

Thanks for your reply.

Originally posted by TerraPass:

this mod uses a modified version of "Rename Title" dialog to collect player input for male/female forms. Unfortunately, the hardcoded function available to modders which opens this rename dialog for some reason performs an internal check that the title being renamed is currently held by the player and does not open dialog if it isn't. This means that it's very difficult to let the player rename any title they don't hold themselves (note the glaring lack of "Rename Any Title" mods on Workshop), and since FoA customization mechanism relies on title renaming, it suffers from the same problem as well.

To be more specific, it actually checks to see if the title is held by a player or vassal of the player, is that right?

Originally posted by TerraPass:

While I personally prefer customization options to appear only for player characters (like dynasty/title rename buttons do in vanilla)

In a recent patch, paradox added the ability for players to edit house name, dynasty name, and motto for anyone in their realm.

https://ibb.co/hcrvL0Q
https://ibb.co/pz6Hnx9

I wonder if the feature suffers from the same limitations as Rename Title, and whether it might be useful to explore as a possible help for CTFA issues.

Thanks again!

Just tested it and yes, you're right! It does work for vassals too. How did I miss it?

Well, this changes things, it means I can allow FoA customization for Duke+ vassals in the player's realm. Thank you very much for drawing my attention to it, I'll see if I can include this change in a mod update.

Originally posted by TerraPass:

Originally posted by Ahoyande:

But unexpectedly, one or two or Matilda's Count-rank ancestors also became "Lord Consort," and when she inherited a barony from a vassal with no heirs, the dead baron became known as "Lord Consort." (Please let me know if you'd like screenshots.)

Oh wow, that's messed up. XD

Yeah, I already reproduced this behaviour. So basically the game's flavorization logic for dead characters works in mysterious ways and looks like for some reason it applies your custom FoA to any dead character who died while holding any of your current titles, not just your primary. (Like if you grant away one of your counties, the corresponding dead count ancestor will stop using your FoA.) Very interesting. Not sure it's entirely fixable mod-side, but I'll see if I can make some workaround to prevent this behaviour.

Oh nooo, this is a vanilla issue. It works the same way for vanilla Caliphs - their dead Sheikh ancestors are called Caliphs despite never holding a Caliphate, as long as the current Caliph happens to hold the sheikhdom which the dead guy held.
This is going to be a fun one to fix...

Thanks for the excellent Vassals Update!

However, King-rank vassals are destroying their hidden Vanity duchy after a few weeks or months.

Originally posted by Ahoyande:

However, King-rank vassals are destroying their hidden Vanity duchy after a few weeks or months.

Thanks for reporting this.
Interesting that the AI doesn't want to hold on to a titular duchy, despite it not counting towards duchy limit. I'll see if I can make some workaround for this.

In the future I think it would probably be better to tie vassal FoAs to the player's own vanity title, this way it would no longer depend on the whims of vassal kings' AI and would also allow the player to customize all vassal titles at the same time, including potentially Barons and Counts.
(This would be at the cost of being able to single out one vassal to call him "That Idiot Vratislav of Bohemia" or something, but still.)

Originally posted by TerraPass:

Originally posted by Ahoyande:

However, King-rank vassals are destroying their hidden Vanity duchy after a few weeks or months.

In the future I think it would probably be better to tie vassal FoAs to the player's own vanity title, this way it would no longer depend on the whims of vassal kings' AI and would also allow the player to customize all vassal titles at the same time, including potentially Barons and Counts.
(This would be at the cost of being able to single out one vassal to call him "That Idiot Vratislav of Bohemia" or something, but still.)

Yeah, there are definitely PROs and CONs.

I vote for BOTH if possible, but of course there are always trade-offs.

So I've experimented with this a bit.

I used the Title Manager mod to make king-rank vassal's vanity duchy dejure instead of titular.

The king stopped destroying the vanity duchy. And making the vanity duchy dejure did not break the CTFA functionality in any way.

Maybe this can also be a workaround to the Baron/Count problem: the CTFA vanity title does not need to be titular, therefore baronies and counties can be given to the ai to set their FOAs.

Additionally, using a vanity county or barony would stop the AI from destroying the vanity title since counties and baronies cannot be destroyed.

Finally, isn't there a {can_be_destroyed = yes/no} command that can be used if needed?

Originally posted by Ahoyande:

I used the Title Manager mod to make king-rank vassal's vanity duchy dejure instead of titular.

You mean you transfered some counties de jure into the vanity duchy?
And thanks for taking the time to experiment with the mod.

Originally posted by Ahoyande:

Maybe this can also be a workaround to the Baron/Count problem: the CTFA vanity title does not need to be titular, therefore baronies and counties can be given to the ai to set their FOAs.

Technically they can, but the problem here is, unlike higher titles, counties and baronies are tied to actual provinces on the map, so characters would have to get/give up some land every time they switch between custom/standard FoAs. And it would also require this mod to modify the map - to add provinces/holdings for vanity baronies - in order to support FoA functionality, which seems unreasonable and creates an additional compatibility issue with map mods.

Purely titular baronies/counties on the other hand would be very useful to implement Baron/Count FoAs but those are unfortunately not supported by the game.

Originally posted by Ahoyande:

Finally, isn't there a {can_be_destroyed = yes/no} command that can be used if needed?

Not to my knowledge.
And judging from the silence in response to a similar question I asked yesterday on CK3 Mod Co-op - not to more experienced modders' knowledge either.

For now I've implemented a workaround[github.com] for the King-vassals problem, which involves handling and undoing AI vanity title destruction, unless it was requested by the player or by the mod in the first place.
So far it's looking good. If I don't find any further issues, I'll upload an update with it as soon as I finish testing it.

Originally posted by TerraPass:

Originally posted by Ahoyande:

I used the Title Manager mod to make king-rank vassal's vanity duchy dejure instead of titular.

You mean you transfered some counties de jure into the vanity duchy?

Yes exactly.

Just uploaded version 0.2.2 of the mod, which addresses the King-vassals situation and also makes several smaller fixes.

Originally posted by Ahoyande:

Originally posted by TerraPass:

You mean you transfered some counties de jure into the vanity duchy?

Yes exactly.

I see. Very useful info to know.
However, for now I'll try to refrain from having VTs affect the de jure structure of landed titles, since I intended them to be as hidden an unobtrusive as possible.

RE: unlanded FOAs:

I'm don't know why this didn't occur to me before, but today I realized . . .

Unlanded FoAs are just names!

For example, if Duchess Matilda wanted her kids to be titled Lords & Ladies, she could simply name them "Lord Albrecht" or "Lady Maria."

The only hiccup with this solution is that they would be "lords" of their house/dynasty rather than "lords" of their parent's demesne. So Albrecht would be "Lord Albrecht di Canossa" rather than "Lord Albrecht of Tuscany." But this is easily remedied by Cadet Branch mods.

So a possible fix for the Unlanded FOAs challenge could be:

1. Add a "Son" or "Male Descendant" field to the Vanity FOA window and a second field for Daughters/Female Descendants

2. When children/descendants are born, fire an event that pre-fixes the player's Son/Daughter/Descendant title to the newborn's given name

This is clever and might turn out to be a viable approach for some unlanded characters, though given a lack of proper string manipulation tools in the modding toolset, I'm not sure if there's a good way to prepend strings to character names and then un-prepend them as needed.

Specifically for the case of ruler children however, there is a potentially simpler approach based on a mechanism already built into the game - the one that gives out Prince/Princess titles to children of kings and emperors. If my intuition is correct, it could be utilized to give out a player-customizable title instead. I plan to look at it in more detail after implementing mass customization of vassal FoAs, since both of these features will probably require similar changes to the mod.

Would it be possible to add an editor for the "Kingdom of" part of the title?

For example, changing the "Kingdom of" Finland to the "Grand Duchy of" Finland.

That way, the Grand Duke of Finland doesn't keep on ruling the Kingdom of Finland XD

I'm not sure if this is possible, or if it would take too much time, but it'd sure be interesting if it was in