Secret Mystic

by on November 29, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the tenth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Crusader Kings II. See the previous reviews here:
Crusader Kings II: The Second Crusade
The Old Gods: That Old-Time Religion
Sons of Abraham: A Little of Everything
Rajas of India: My Elephant for a Kingdom
Charlemagne: Back in Time
Way of Life: The Short Way
Horse Lords: For the Horde
Conclave: Lords of the Realm
The Reaper’s Due: Crusader Kings: Pandemic

The immediate goal of CK II development at the end of 2016 was a further round of optimization and some UI improvements. The next expansion, Monks and Mystics, was announced on December 2, and released, alongside patch 2.7, on March 7, 2017.

Mystic Improvements

Several additions were made to the UI with the patch. First, the idea of marking that a battle will happen in a province, based on current troop movements, was taken from EU IV. Most of the rest centered around the Intrigue screen, which got a redesign to show more decisions at once, and a new panel was separated out added to show all the plots you personally are involved with.

Those who have Conclave saw improvements as well, as icons showing a character’s most likely voting stance if they were on the council were added to the selection menu with an extensive hoverover to show the reasons why. When wanting to change a realm law, you can now go to a council screen where it will show you the likely votes, and you can interact with the characters to try and change them. Also, the children’s education selection got some tips to show what they’d excel in at a glance.

The rules screen got an update as well, with save slots where you can have multiple pre-sets for use in different games. And, Monks and Mystics added one new rule for the devil worshipers.

And finally, a number of updates were done to the map, making the Ural mountains impassable (other than a pass through the middle), fixing the geometry on some lakes, and redrawing rivers to look better, as well as seriously adjusting the path of the Danube.

Secret Societies

Some of the societies introduced here operate in secret, and interestingly, they were available with the patch, instead of needing the expansion.

The societies in question are more properly cults. You can now publicly profess one religion, while secretly following another. That doesn’t have to be tied to the society; you may just privately hold a belief without being in contact with others.

This isn’t as hard as it initially looks, since you can ‘secretly convert’ to the religion of your spouse, or land that’s in your demesne. More importantly, you can tell your lord you’ll convert to his religion when he demands it, but secretly keep your old faith, or if your councilor turns to heresy, you can join him, but both keep it secret.

Each religion has a society of people who secretly follow that religion, so you can set up a network of people, and try to covertly convert others into your sect, and possibly get strong enough to go public.

In many cases, it’s not a big deal, but it does add a nice dimension of religious plotting to go along with all the political plots. It’s also makes religion a bit more personal in feel.

Monastic Orders

The more common type of society is the monastic order. There are nine of these (two for Catholics, with three more for the other major branches of Christianity, one for each of the Indian religions, and then one for the Hellenist religion). They use all the “default” society mechanics, you generally gain a bit of devotion each month for your positive (to them) traits, occasionally get missions from the head of the order (which will grant devotion), and you can trade in devotion for a higher rank in the society, possibly becoming its headmaster someday. Most of them grant a Learning bonus just for being in them (the Benedictine Order instead grants Stewardship), and as rank goes up you get some decision-like abilities, including managing yours and others traits away from negative ones.

The Hermetic Society is like the monastic orders, but has a wider range of activities. Joining causes negative relations with clergy, but can grant a number of bonuses. As opposed to just having event-chain missions, “apprentice” becomes a new minor title to grant, and there are decisions that can be taken to further your investigation of the mysteries of nature and the universe.

The Assassins became a Shiite society focused around Intrigue. Being an Assassin by itself generates more plot power when you want to murder someone, and you can get other Assassin to join in, raising the plot power even more.

And then the demon worshipers are a large expansion-only secret society. They only exist if allowed in the game rules, but always get supernatural abilities if they do (which, if not historical, is largely in line with what a lot of people in the Middle Ages thought was going on). The abilities from this society are generally more powerful than the others, but will cause a character to accumulate negative traits, including physical ones like hunchback or clubfooted.

Inventory Management

For some time, there had been some items in CK II; you could have a saint’s relic, which would get handed down through the generations, for instance. The expansion greatly expanded on this, and systematized it with an inventory screen, and a single modifier trait shows the total of all bonuses you may be getting from them.

It is a fairly basic system as such things go, but does allow for gifting them to another character, looting them from a holding that’s been besieged and such. Occasional event chains can let you search for a rumored artifact, and there are ones that you can have made.

The list of potential items is quite large; many are of course different qualities of the same thing, but even after allowing for that, there’s a lot of potential items here. These range from the mentioned relics to special arms and armor, to items for Hermetic Society missions.

Overall, I find the promise better than the delivery. CK II isn’t an RPG at heart, and the item system shows that. That said, it beats trying to manage a few item-like things without having an item system, so I’m certainly glad it exists.

More Work

Councilors are mostly useful in pushing up the score of the realm in their field, but they can also do three different jobs on the map. With this expansion, each position gains a fourth job, which becomes their default activity when not assigned one of the regular three.

Chancellors can perform statecraft, which reduces threat, and can improve relations with random neighbors or vassals. Marshals can organize the army, which reduces maintenance of retinues and can cause events that improves the skills of your commanders. Stewards administer the realm to speed cultural conversion and add some positive modifiers to provinces in your demesne. Chaplains hunt heretics to find the members of secret societies which you can then deal with.

Spymasters can now sabotage a province, which will cause unrest and various other types of damage. Unlike the others, this is an ‘on map’ job. Instead, the existing scheme job becomes ‘off map’, which had always just slightly enhanced the primary role of discovering plots anyway.

This was a clever addition to the game. Giving the councilors something to do when you aren’t supervising what’s going on manually is great, and would be especially valuable for a new player, which makes it a shame that it’s part of the expansion, but it certainly adds value.

Conclusion

There are complaints that the societies aren’t that good in the long run as they keep throwing the same events at you over and over. This is valid, but there’s more than enough societies to give interest for some time.

My primary complaint is mechanical. This isn’t the first time it has come up, but it’s not hard for these events to have you or someone else in the order traveling some distance to meet for the event. Since being in a society puts you in fairly decent contact with the other members, who may be some distance away, this problem gets accentuated here. Pilgrimages/Hajj have your regent take over while on them, so it is possible to account for this. Just making the character unavailable for commanding for a set time would be enough to get rid of the worst of the problem however.

I’d rate this as a lesser expansion among the more “personal” ones. If those are what you’re interested in, don’t skip this, but certainly get Way of Life and Conclave first.

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Commonwealth of Iron

by on October 28, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the second in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Hearts of Iron IV. See the previous review here:
Hearts of Iron IV: Heart of Production

After a couple of major patches, the first expansion for Hearts of Iron IV was announced on November, 1, 2016. It was a ‘small’ expansion, termed a country pack, which focuses on adding flavor to the game by adding new focus trees for countries outside the main seven (and the free add-on of Poland). Together for Victory focuses on the British Commonwealth, and came out alongside patch 1.3 on December 15, 2016.

Autonomy

Without the expansion, Britain has two subject states (or puppets) at the start of HoI IV: the British Raj (India), and British Malaysia. The rest of the Commonwealth (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa) are merely parts of the starting Allied faction (with no other members, including France, at that point).

With the expansion, they are all considered puppet states of the United Kingdom. However, a fair amount of nuance was added to support this. There are four autonomy levels for any puppet, ranging from “integrated puppet” to “dominion”. Autonomy goes up or down, and will then cause a puppet to shift which level it is at.

Each country held as a puppet shares in a technology sharing pool; each country that has a technology in the pool gives a research bonus to everyone else. These are only available with the patch, and can be set up outside of a set of puppets, but they create them automatically. This is generally a 10% bonus to research per country, but colonies and puppets (the lowest two autonomy levels) get half that. Even at the reduced level, it’s still important for countries that are probably disadvantaged in technology to start with.

Various things will affect autonomy, with the biggest opportunities coming from participating in wars. Actively fighting in a war under the overlord country will generate war participation score which will transfer into autonomy. Similarly, lend-leasing equipment the master needs and exporting raw materials to it will also help. At the level of colony or lower, the overlord can actually build new factories and infrastructure for the puppet, and this lowers autonomy.

Other countries will work under this system too. Manchukuo was split off as a separate country from Japan in the patch (this was as much because of AI improvements as anything else, though the Japan AI seems to struggle in this patch), and it holds that and Mengkukuo as integrated puppets in the 1936 start.

New Trees

The central element of the expansion is five new focus trees for the British Commonwealth (British Malaya does not get this treatment here or in any further expansion; on the other hand there’s extremely little to work with there as a player nation with a grand total of one factory of any type). All of them allow the countries to go fascist or communist (with a fair amount of work), or work for straight independence. (This can all be done without the expansion or using the focus tree, but they are intended to make the process simpler, and give aid to those ideas.)

They only have national spirits (unique country bonuses) with the expansion, and all start as dominions (the highest level of puppet) except the British Raj, which is in the next tier down as a colony.

India (British Raj) has four debilitating national spirits, one of which lowers autonomy each day. It is politically non-aligned and starts with a grand total of seven techs researched in 1936, and only two research slots. Five slots is possible, but they’re not the most accessible. The army is tiny, and vastly under-equipped (the existing infantry divisions are at about 30% equipment). The two military factories will be needed just to equip the infantry. The three branches of the focus tree concentrate on independence, expanding the army, and infrastructure. Independence has an early split between going fascist or communist, and working on those national spirits, but it can’t even be started until world tension reaches 10%, and the path that works on the national spirit and peaceful independence has several medium-term pitfalls.

South Africa’s two national spirits cripple its manpower and lower production. Politically, it is democratic, but one national spirit will cause a small drift towards fascism. Technology is not bad for a small country in 1936, but it will need to import almost all resources, and starts with only one military factory (and no dockyard). The focus tree is divided into six branches, including a sub-branch for going communist where South Africa attempts to kick all the other colonial powers out of Africa.

New Zealand has no beginning national spirits, but suffers from its small size. It only produces tungsten (with some oil and steel available in the focus tree), and will have to trade for everything else with four civilian and one military factory (two of the civilian factories are needed to produce consumer goods at start). There are three available building slots, and the focus tree can net another seven factories. Its three starting divisions use up almost all the available manpower. The focus tree has a number of good bonuses in it, but you’re starting from a tiny base.

Australia is suffering from the Great Depression, which lowers factory output and national unity, but has no other national spirits. It starts with a very low manpower warning (what is available is less than half of what starts in the seven divisions of the army), which could be solved with limited conscription, which requires going three deep into the focus tree. However, that branch also has two research slots and the ability to remove the Great Depression. Four military factories to start feels luxurious compared to other Commonwealth countries, but there’s only nine free building slots to start with, two of which are in New Guinea and the Bismark Islands.

Canada starts in a similarly poor position, with the Great Depression and a conscription crisis putting it at very low manpower. The focus tree allows for a lot of industrial expansion, but it is locked behind world tension and/or being at war. Short of that, there are three available civilian factories, five military, one dockyard, and fifteen building slots at start. It is the only dominion that starts with three research slots, and while it starts with only tungsten and minimal steel production, there is a focus slot that adds 14 oil production that isn’t too hard to get to, and steel and aluminum production in the restricted part.

And finally, the patch added the idea of continuous focus. This is a small set of abilities that can be used instead of the normal focus slots, and will give a bonus as long as it is active. A country is limited to taking them after unlocking ten regular focus slots, so they can’t be used before the end of 1937. Most of the options are increased production (of various types), but can also reduce training time, or speed up repairs. In conjunction with the expansion, they can also generate autonomy points (if a puppet), or reduce them (if an overlord).

Improvements

The country selection screen got a small change. Namely, there is now a second row of options that take you to all the countries that currently have a unique focus tree, but aren’t one of the major seven powers of the game, which is a nice touch now that there’s going to be an expanding list of such countries (and it would get refined a bit as the number of countries grew).

Garrison orders now have the ability to dictate what kinds of things should be garrisoned. And since you can have separate armies covering the same area with different selections, you could set up an army to cover the beaches and airfields, and another to suppress resistance, and so on. It will also now tell you how many divisions are needed to cover all the individual locations implied in the order.

A new type of order was added in the expansion. A normal offensive line will try cover its flanks, causing it to spread out, and cause a fair amount of drift and overlap in crowded fronts. A spearhead order will confine itself to a narrow front, and is designed to be useful for encirclements and the like. This caused ire at having to pay for what should have been a base mechanic (and I agree), but it has remained the only such expansion order type (or new type at all), and letting it unlock with the purchase of any expansion could have been a good idea.

A few new controls were added to the theater interface. You can now set reinforcement priorities for an entire theater, and some new icons will tell you how offensive and defensive combats are going. There’s also a log of all the combats in the theater for the last year, with some more detailed logs available with the expansion. That last might also have been a good idea to offer with any expansion, but frankly they’re not worth worrying about. The extra data available just doesn’t begin to answer any of the questions that might be asked. It might show you that some of your divisional templates aren’t working out, but won’t give any statistics that might tell you why, nor, when it shows lost equipment, give any info beyond the general type (so you might know the enemy is already using the next tank type, but it won’t tell you that it’s been up-armored and up-gunned from the base statistics). But all of this does make proper theater organization more important, as that’s also the main “sort” function here.

In patch 1.3.3, a couple more tweaks were made to the game. Infrastructure now grants a bonus to the time needed to build a factory. This encourages a natural concentration of industry in well-developed areas, but it’s also fighting an overall slowdown on factory building put in to keep the mid-to-late game from seeing too much production. And tooling time (production efficiency) was changed so that it increases rapidly at low values, and slows down as you reach maximum efficiency.

Conclusion

The idea of starting with a smaller expansion that is not aimed at new mechanics points up the lack in HoI IV’s basic design here. There is so much to fill in for details on various countries that this expansion just barely scratches the surface.

Of course, stepping away from the major powers in a WWII game is generally less interesting than for a long-form game like EU IV; a decade isn’t really enough time to fix all the problems of a smaller, less-developed, country. So the other Commonwealth countries are among the more interesting ones to flesh out; also, the new autonomy mechanics make the relationship more interesting for the UK as well. So in the end, I consider it a worthwhile expansion, even if you just want to play as Britain. And there’s a good number of people who will want to play as Canada, Australia, or New Zealand (and presumably South Africa and India, but the former three is where I encounter most of the demand). The new order type and three extra music tracks are a minor bonus on top of that.

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There Be Dragons Here!

by on September 26, 2023 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Computer games

This is the second in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Stellaris. See the previous review here:
Stellaris: Paradox Among the Stars

The first expansion for Stellaris was announced on September 15, 2016, after two major patches had been released. Development was centered around reworking some of the space creatures already in the game, and adding massively powerful new encounters.

At this point, Paradox had reworked how they were doing expansions. Each game from Stellaris on has defined ‘small’ and ‘large’ expansions, with the expansion cycle typically leading with a small one. The small ones are more flavor focused, while the larger ones are where you see the new mechanics and larger changes.

The small Stellaris expansions are called “story packs”, and the first one, Leviathans, came out on October 20th, alongside patch 1.3. My initial Stellaris review was about a patch after this one, so I’m mostly talking about the expansion features here.

Creatures Upon the Deep

The main patch change for monsters was making them regional. That is, each kind that appears is given an area they generally appear in, and possibly a ‘home system’ they are spread around. This helps make them feel a bit more logical, and that home system will generally have a tougher version of the monster to encounter, so that once you’ve done the basic research on what they are, there’s still that extra bit to deal with.

The expansion also added several extremely tough monsters to the mix. These are all easy to spot as the military rating on them just shows a skull symbol instead of a number. Leviathans has nine of these creatures, and a few more have shown up in other expansions.

I don’t want to give any specifics, as they can add to the sense of wonder in the game, so anyone interested should wait to see them in-game. They are, however, quite varied. Not all of them are actually something to fight (though most are).

Enclaves

The other major addition of the expansion are enclaves. These are space stations scattered about the galaxy who will generally stay neutral and be inoffensive. They don’t actually claim the systems they’re in but do show up as extra entities in the contacts list, and can be conversed with diplomatically.

The there’s three types of these stations, a research-oriented one, a unity/influence-oriented one, and then a set around each strategic resource. These are an interesting idea, not necessarily worth buying an expansion over, but it is nice a bit of extra flavor, and an extra place to spend energy, if you have a healthy economy. As a way of tying the features together, the Curators (research station) can also give some details on the monster encounters, including where to go looking for them.

Plantoids

A third, smaller, type of expansion for Stellaris is the “species pack”. At first, this was purely extra art assets, akin to the unit sprites for EU IV or the portrait expansions for CK II. More recently, Paradox has attached a few mechanics to these expansions.

The first species pack, Plantoids, came out ahead of Leviathans, on August 8, alongside patch 1.2.3. The general idea of the art included should be obvious from the name. In patch 3.1, three new species traits were added to the pack, and two new government civics. This transformed it into a nicely thematic set, with the ability to create species that act more like plants, such as needing energy instead of food, and moved it from a skip to a worthwhile purchase for me.

Conclusion

Another major concern of the patch was reworking ship combat and the types of design slots. Paradox would come back to this subject with another major round of reworks much later. Both have helped, but the ‘strong ship roles’ desired by them still don’t do what they’re supposed to.

The enclaves are an interesting idea, and help with making the galaxy feel “lived in”. However, the monsters are the star of the show, and the real reason to get the expansion. If those don’t seem like a good idea to you, skip it. That said, I think they do a lot to add a bit of mystery and spice to the game (as well as causing the occasional choke point), and think this is a very good first expansion to get.

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Institutions of Man

by on August 29, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the ninth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Europa Universalis IV. See the previous reviews here:
Europa Universalis IV: A Fantastic Point of View
Wealth of Nations: National Trade
Res Publica: A Tradition of the People
Art of War: Reform-Minded Patch
El Dorado: Expansion of Gold
Common Sense: Uncommon Changes
The Cossacks: Cossack Estate
Mare Nostrum: Paradox’s Sea

After Mare Nostrum, the development team for Europa Universalis IV next decided to tackle a game mechanic that had been in place since the original game for the next big patch as well as add a number of new features in the next expansion. Patch 1.18 came out on October 11, 2016, to support the expansion Rights of Man. The follow-up 1.19 patch came out on November 24.

Institutional Progress

Ever since the original Europa Universalis computer game, nations had been placed in technological “groups”. Most of Europe was in one, the Ottomans started with better technology, but were in a group that meant that they paid more to advance, and things go downhill the further from Europe you get. It was a fairly simple system meant to showcase Europe’s rise to dominance in the period of the game, and a bit of flexibility was added early on with the ability of countries to “Westernize”, shifting them to a better (cheaper) tech group.

Patch 1.18 did away with this system, replacing it with institutions. There are no groups, no fixed cost penalties, and no Westernization. Instead there’s a series of eight institutions, with one active well before the game begins, and the other seven cropping up every fifty years, and not adopting them causes penalties to advancing in technology.

The first institution is Feudalism, which is described as a variety of means of putting together a centralized state. Most, but not all, of the world has embraced Feudalism as the game starts, but tribal areas (most of Sub-Saharan Africa, the New World, and darkest central Asia) have not, and start with a +50% penalty to technology costs.

In 1450, the Renaissance starts, with one Italian capital getting it, and it spreads from there. Any European (with a very generous definition of “European”) province with good development will start embracing the Renaissance on its own, but bonuses from adjacent provinces means it will spread throughout Italy first, and then into Europe before the rest of the world sees it.

Once an institution starts there is a cumulative +1% to technology cost per year for countries that have not embraced it (with a +50% maximum per institution). Even better, each institution grants a bonus when adopted, so it’s not just a race to avoid penalties, but one to get benefits as well. The technology penalties aren’t that bad at first, but it starts adding up, and if you’re still struggling to adopt the Renaissance in 1500 when Colonialism starts, you’re going to have a problem.

There are ways out of the trap. You only need some of your provinces to adopt the institution before you can force your country to adopt it. You just need to spend ducats (money) for all the provinces that haven’t adopted it yet (yes, that is very expensive for a large country). Adding development (introduced in Common Sense, but added to the base game in patch 1.28) to a province also adds to progress towards the next institution to be adopted there, so you could develop a province until it has the institution, and let it spread from there (also expensive—in monarch points, but you’ll be sinking a lot of extra monarch points into technology if you’re behind in all the hot philosophical fashions).

This is one of the bigger changes to core mechanics in EU IV during its post-release development, and a very good one. The overall idea is inspired, and feels a lot more natural than the old tech groups. Its nearly the only feature of the patch, and it overshadows the Rights of Man expansion, which does have a lot of features.

Cultured Court

The other real feature of the patch allowed better internal management. Each province has a culture, and these cultures are arranged in groups. Provinces of “unaccepted” cultures cause trouble, and will never be as productive. It’s always been possible for things to shift around depending on how prevalent a culture is in your borders, but now there’s a way to manually shift this around. Its generally not a big deal, but is a nice extra bit of control when needed.

At the same time, the expansion greatly increases mechanics around the court. Where normally there is the current ruler and his heir (for monarchies at least), there is now a permanent consort position, which takes over when a regency is needed (instead of a generic ‘regency council’). There’s events and such that can happen around the consort, but mostly it’s there for the regency.

Further control was also added in that a monarch can retire in favor of his heir. This is mostly for those very poor-stat monarchs that you just wish would die so his competent son can take over. And there’s a few other wrinkles, such as disinheriting the current (hopeless) heir, so you can try to get a better one.

Additionally, the expansion enables a list of eight great powers, kind of like in the Victoria series. Those that make the list get bonuses, meaning those powerful nations get some extra help with the expansion. What I find interesting is that the ranking is by total development divided by the current institution tech penalty. So Ming starts as the top power, but will quickly drop off as it has no hope of getting Renaissance quickly, and without some very deliberate player actions, no chance at Colonialism either, which combined will eventually reduce its effective development by half.

Traits of Man

All these rulers, heirs, consorts, and military leaders, also got more fleshed out with traits in the expansion. A ruler (or heir) generally has one as soon as they are of age, and then generate a second one after ten years of rule, and a third after twenty-five years in charge. Military leaders get theirs randomly after battles.

This is basically the version of traits seen in Stellaris, mixed with the leader bonuses seen in Hearts of Iron games. Most of these are bonuses to one government statistic or another, but a few are also negative. An interesting twist is the ruler traits will also determine AI behavior. In addition to the five basic personality types in the base game, an Industrious ruler will spend more on building improvements, a Sinner will raze and plunder provinces, and so on. And of course, some traits will open up new options in some events (which will be highlighted, a bit like in Crusader Kings II).

This is a really nice bit of flavor and since it affects everyone, I’d say it is the main reason to get the expansion.

Governments of Man

The expansion also gives access to two new unique government types. First, the Ottomans get a unique monarchy form. It can’t be voluntarily changed, but the general revolution disaster can change from it, and changing religions will revert it to a despotic monarchy.

The main point of the new type is to keep Osman as the ruling dynasty. There will be no shifting to the dynasty of a royal marriage, if there is no heir for too long, an event will fire to present you with a choice of new heirs.

This doesn’t mean there’s no dynastic worries. There’s a number of new events around scandals in the palace (which can turn into a too-easy source of prestige), or the heir may try to depose the current ruler. This turns into a normal noble revolt, but it is fired by Ottoman-specific events instead of the current revolt system. I’ve only seen the “small” version, which is a fairly typical revolt, but the events imply much bigger ones are possible.

The Prussian Monarchy, meanwhile, has some fairly good bonuses, like most of the unique governments, and also gets a militarization mechanic. This is another percentage scale that grants bonuses to discipline, manpower, and maintenance the higher it goes. Legitimacy and army tradition add to it, while having more provinces causes it to go down. Overall, if Prussia has any reasonable amount of territory, it will tend to go down, so it doesn’t feel like the most useful of bonuses. However, military monarch points can be spent to push it up, and at the historical size of Prussia in say, The Seven Years War, it won’t go down very fast.

Finally, factions were added to revolutionary governments in the expansion. I haven’t done much with that, but it makes a lot of sense for Revolutionary France, or any other government undergoing those kinds of stresses. It also adds an appropriate path from a revolutionary republic to empire, as the diplomatic faction, The Imperials, will shift the government type if they get too powerful.

Coptic Fetish

Two more religions got extra mechanics with this expansion. The Fetishist religion (found in southern Africa) gained cults, which are akin to the Hindu gods in Wealth of Nations. Like them, you pick a bonus from a list every time you get a new ruler. However, it’s not a static list of possible bonuses, and depends on where the particular country is. Also, as they come into contact with other religions they can gain access to new bonuses. So it starts out more limited than Hinduism (there’s typically only three possible bonuses at the start), but can become more flexible over time.

Coptic countries get bonuses from holy sites with RoM. There are five provinces considered holy to the Coptic faith (this is an idea from Crusader Kings II), and every Coptic country can get a bonus (“blessing”) for each one held by any Coptic country. Because of this, success for one can breed success for all—if they don’t spend too much time fighting each other instead.

At the start, two holy sites are under Coptic control, with Askum in Ethiopia, and Qasr Ibrim in Makuria, though the province itself is not Coptic. The other three are further away, with the closest being Alexandria, which means conquering the Mamlukes, or taking on the Ottomans. So, don’t expect many powerful AI Coptic empires, but it is not a bad goal for a good human player in search of a challenge.

Conclusion

Patch 1.18 saw another high-level mechanic change to the game. And again, it broke with tradition, and made the game better for the change. Personally, I like the system a lot, but it does seem to be comparatively easier for the rest of the world to keep up on the institutions. Large portions will be behind for long periods, but they do spread, and this means non-European powers can do much better in late-game technology than previously, which robs some of the historical feel, though from a player perspective the decisions around all this are more interesting.

The expansion is overshadowed by all this, but is still a good expansion. I do have problems in that some of it seems too convenient, namely retiring and disowning rulers and heirs. Also, being a great power confers extra power projection (reasonable), which makes it much easier to float over the 25 limit for an extra leader, and at the top end consistently be at 50 to get extra monarch power, which seems too much of a ‘rich get richer’ effect for me. Similarly, the expansion also allows you to debase currency, effectively taking a loan, but getting corruption instead of the usual loan penalties. Since you normally pay monthly money to fight corruption, this is pretty much just extra loans without having to worry about paying it back.

The religious mechanics are expected at this point, and Coptic is certainly a good choice for expanding the mechanics. The two new unique government types are also interesting choices. For me, the biggest draw are the leader traits, which help add another layer of uniqueness, and bit of potential role play to them. I don’t know that I’d recommend the expansion just for that, but it’s a good foundation for deciding if you want the other features.

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Crusader Kings: Pandemic

by on July 24, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the ninth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Crusader Kings II. See the previous reviews here:
Crusader Kings II: The Second Crusade
The Old Gods: That Old-Time Religion
Sons of Abraham: A Little of Everything
Rajas of India: My Elephant for a Kingdom
Charlemagne: Back in Time
Way of Life: The Short Way
Horse Lords: For the Horde
Conclave: Lords of the Realm

After looking at internal politics in Conclave, Paradox handed CK II development over to a new team, who did a new event-driven expansion. The Reaper’s Due was announced in July 2016, and released on August 25, 2016 alongside patch 2.6, with new features centered around illness, wounds, and disease.

New Rules

One change for the new patch was visible any time you start a new game. After selecting a start date and character to play as, a new screen of rules comes up. There had always been a panel where you could set a few options as you started the game, but now it graduated into its own dialog screen with a lot of options.

Even better, the new screen didn’t have a fixed layout (just a long scrolling list of options), so it was possible to add more later. Or to have ones show up depending on what expansions you had. As I mentioned in the original CK II review, even if you really like Sunset Invasion, you don’t necessarily want to use it every game. Now, there’s an in-game control with four settings for the Aztec invasion: Random, Delayed Random, 13th Century, and Off. There are also similar options for the Mongol invasion, though turning it off completely disables achievements, which is also something the new screen informs you about.

The Reaper’s Due made use of this with three rules that show up if you have the expansion: Major and Minor Epidemics, and Non-Epidemic Diseases. You can’t turn any of these completely off (and can only set when, or if it’s worse than normal for the Black Death), but fewer non-epidemic diseases will disable achievements.

Overall, it was a nice consolidation of options that was really needed. Past the ones already mentioned, Horse Lords, Charlemagne, and Way of Life all have options in the rules screen (looking purely at past expansions). Other notable options include Supernatural Events (which would control some of the notorious events in Sons of Abraham as well as others), and Gender Equality. You can set that last to “Equal” but it disables achievements, you can also set it to “Historical” which keeps you from mucking with the status of women in a culture through the use of laws introduced in Conclave.

More Death

The central part of the expansion is taking a few generic mechanisms and detailing them.

Whereas a character normally gets the trait “ill”, with the expansion they instead get any of twelve symptom traits. They can just pass on their own like “ill”, but can also progress into a disease, which may be something as common as “food poisoning”, or “scurvy”, but may be something picked up from an epidemic, like “slow fever”, or of course, “the plague”.

Similarly, the “maimed” trait is replaced. Generally, a character will gain a “severely injured” trait, which will turn into one of five maimed traits, such as “one-legged”. (CKII also seemingly continues the AD&D tradition of housecats being very dangerous: there is an event where you can kick a cat, gaining the “cruel” trait, and “one-eyed”.)

The diseases themselves mostly act the same as before. They may randomly break out from time to time in various places and then spread from province to province; anyone in those provinces has a chance of catching the disease.

With the expansion, a character can go into seclusion when an epidemic threatens. This takes them away from their duties (a councilor in seclusion cannot perform any of the tasks that can normally be assigned him), and a long time in seclusion will cause bad events to start firing. Worse, they are with their main courtiers, and if one of them caught the disease before going into seclusion, there may be an impromptu reading of “The Masque of the Red Death”.

The Black Death always exists as an in-game epidemic, but with the expansion, it is a bit more scheduled, more deadly, and has a number of events that help it along. Notably, there will generally be a major outbreak which will affect much of the map, followed by endemic minor outbreaks that act more like other disease outbreaks (though the contagiousness and health effects of it are worse that other diseases).

To help keep track of all this, there is a special banner alert (akin to the one for an ongoing crusade) that shows whenever there is an ongoing epidemic in your country, and a new map mode that shows their spread.

Prosperity

The most pervasive new system in the expansion, ironically enough, is prosperity. Each province has a new hidden variable which tracks this, and generally it goes up during times of peace, and can get bonuses from high stewardship. When it gets high enough, it causes a new provincial status that increases taxes and levies, and reduces revolt risks. On the other hand, it reduces disease resistance.

There is a new ambition “to see the realm prosper”, which is basically a promise to stay out of wars for five years, in return for extra prosperity in all the realm’s provinces, and +1 stewardship for the ruler. An independent ruler can also set a crown focus (similar to a mechanism in EU IV), which will increase prosperity in that province.

High prosperity also makes new beneficial events possible, giving minor province modifiers. It can even allow new holding slots to become available (for a very steep cost).

The opposite is depopulation. This can happen from warfare, but is much more likely to happen because of an epidemic disease. A truly large disease outbreak can cause this, and will lower taxes, supply limit, garrison sizes… and raise disease resistance. Minor depopulation (the first step) will pass fairly quickly, but prosperity will need to be built up from scratch.

As long as wars don’t touch a region often (especially to the point of actually taking a holding, which will lower prosperity), provinces will generally be in some condition of prosperity for most of the game. But it does a lot to show a dramatic fall in fortunes when disaster happens.

Is There a Doctor in the House?

To help combat these diseases, there is a new minor title of court physician which can be granted. This should generally go to a well-disposed high-learning character, such as your court chaplain, but there is also a decision to find one if no one seems suitable.

When symptoms appear, the court physician will attempt to diagnose the illness and prepare a treatment. These can range from cautious to experimental, with various degrees of success—and failure. In general, the treatment will further modify the character’s health and basic attributes, hopefully counteracting the effects of the symptoms or disease.

You can also build hospitals. These are special holdings like forts and trade posts, and show up in the same dialog. It’s fairly cheap to build, but they come with a long list of potential improvements, for a very high cost to completely build out.

The basic hospital only has the effect of giving some protection from depopulation. That’s it. The higher levels of the main improvements will give a large bonus to disease resistance (much higher than the penalty for a booming province), but just isn’t practical for every province. Other improvements will also give some technology points, vassal opinion, prestige, basically any of the main fields of the game can get some help from an expansive hospital.

You can also invite a holy order to build a hospital in your capital, but they’ll also get a castle there. Overall, the symbol for showing there’s no hospital is a little too prominent for how many you’ll likely build (the ‘no hospital’ icon will glare at you in every province panel), but it’s a good idea, implemented fairly well, and will consume far more money than prosperous provinces will get you.

Conclusion

It seems odd to be happy for an expansion that mostly tries to kill you, but this is a very polished and worthwhile expansion. There are even more bits away from the features talked about. You can torture prisoners (most likely giving them a maimed trait). New methods of executing prisoners (you don’t get to choose the method, it is picked randomly from a list of appropriate methods). Or you can recruit prisoners into your court.

Unlike the “scope” expansions, this will never be necessary for any play of the game, but it does nicely round out some existing mechanics, it is my favorite among the “event” expansions, and recommended.

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