Originally Posted by
opaxite
Couple of observations playing Poland around turn 100: Please take these with a grain of salt. I am new to this mod, and I only played Vanilla before. I don't know anything about modding and the history of balancing decisions you've made. Some of the problems you've most likely considered. For context, I play on Easy campaign difficulty, and I understand the game is not balanced around that.
- Some areas have become heretic meetups. It's sort of historic in Bohemia, but feels un-historic near Rome. Seems like priests are too easily converted, there are none to be seen. Just heretics.
- My princesses have a really, really short movement range, feels like 50% of a regular character or even less. It takes years to get to a suitor, who often gets married in the meantime. Then onto another suitor, rinse and repeat. If the target moves in the opposite direction, the princess can not catch up with him. Meanwhile, the Princess is getting old. Short range also makes princesses somewhat useless as diplomats, as they need to be solely focused on reaching suitors ASAP.
- AI princesses are abundant. Managed to marry both my FL and FH to full heart princesses. There's always a handful of princesses walking around. Haven't seen a foreign diplomat in ages on the other hand.
- I'm still only allowed 1 diplomat, which feels a bit lacking at this point, especially when my own princesses are scarce, and not very useful as diplomats. I could bribe another faction's diplomat, but I can't find any.
- There's not much incentive to level up or specialize spies. They are abundant, cheap to recruit, cheap to maintain, easy to replace. I mostly use them for recon. The only time I actually need to use the spy action is to reveal a potential suitor's character traits. If one spy fails to do that, there's always another nearby. Just spam spies.
- AI seems to make weird decisions. HRE will break an alliance to besiege a vulnerable settlement with a tiny army, when my own reinforcements are in range, and their own reinforcements are scattered far away.
- AI scatters forces a lot, making family members and even faction leaders walk almost alone, while two of their other small stacks are nearby. Makes it very easy to defeat them in detail and feels like an exploit. At the same time, smaller scale battles feel much more refreshing and immresive, compared to vanilla ever-present full stack battles of fully developed armies.
- Mercenaries feel like an exploit: I can keep a reserve of around 5000 and raise a force immediately when needed. Once I defeat the opposing army, I can disband the units. All in the same turn. But this might be actually historic.
- Seems like the pool of mercenaries is too big, but at the same time, I end up almost never using them: They are always abundant, so I don't have to "seize the opportunity", and they are too expensive to be kept long-term.
- Replenishment mechanics make this an entirely different game. I am absolutely in love with how rare some of the units are. With that being said, I think the times to train another unit could still be much, much longer. Would give me a reason to recruit those mercenaries perhaps.
- I am getting notifications about new family members being born, while they are not in the family tree, like generals married to a noble lady.
- I am getting reccurent messages about certain events, e.g. the founding of Moscow.
Thank you for all the amazing work. This mod is a true work of art. I'm 4th generation, still didn't manage to get mi FL crowned, and I love it.