Less Forced Paths, More Player Freedom

[narrow bay]

England Faction – 1.1.9

Estate Building – Building Spam
Estates build without stopping. I tried a run without touching construction, neither manually nor automatically, and before 1500 building maintenance was already through the roof. This forces the player to constantly chase costs and adjust plans with unwanted micromanagement. They also build real “cathedrals in the desert”: expensive buildings in isolated provinces with no development prospects.

Complacency
I already explained in a previous post why, in my view, the complacency system is not well balanced, so I’ll keep it brief. Right now it pushes players into choices that shape the entire campaign. For example, playing England while staying friendly with France becomes extremely difficult: either you spend everything on diplomacy to delay the crisis, or you accept that France must be a permanent rival.

Privileges
Removing privileges should not be easy, but right now keeping them for the entire campaign often feels forced. Dropping from 100 stability to −100 or −50 when removing a noble privilege brings huge costs, crisis risks and negative events. It also assumes long, safe windows before 1600–1700 where thousands of ducats and other resources can be devoted just to removing even two or three of the six noble privileges.

Anglicanism – A Forced Requirement
Another small example is Anglicanism. Requiring a childless ruler between 1530 and 1560 effectively forces a very specific path. Allowing the player to choose whether to change confession, with all the consequences that follow, would give more freedom without removing the historical flavor.

Unions
A similar issue appears with personal unions. There should simply be an option to leave them. Being locked in one for decades means being dragged into wars involving your partner. If that partner is France, you also lose a major rival and threat, which can further increase complacency.

We all know this is a newly released and very ambitious title, so it’s normal that it isn’t perfectly balanced yet. There’s no disappointment or regret in playing it. I’m only sharing my experience in the hope of contributing, even in a small way, to improving its development. This may also be my last post regarding version 1.1.9. In general, the direction should favor giving players more freedom to pursue the paths they want.

[crude sedge]

On privileges i think that it’s right, if you have a very powerful nobility it should be borderline impossible to take ways their rights and certainly not easily. I think it could be cheaper but if there were more ways where the player would be forced to grant one, because outside some starting ones there is no interaction with the actively bad privileges at all

[narrow bay]

I agree it should be difficult, we’re on the same page there. But there are dozens of privileges granted by default at the start, and if we want to remove even a third of them, not to mention half, to steer our own modifiers and values, it becomes practically impossible. You simply won’t have the resources or the time windows to play the remove-and-recover cycle.

So it ends up feeling like another form of forced design, basically “these are the modifiers you keep because we decided so.” I’d rather the game be challenging without locking the player into the direction set by the starting state. It probably needs some additional balancing.

Regarding “bad privileges”, I did run into a few events that almost forced me to grant some. They’re quite rare tho, so I agree there as well.

I see privileges mainly as a way to keep estates satisfied while shaping the values and modifiers you want for your country. That’s why I think removal and access should feel credible, not easy, but realistically achievable.