King without power

[WhiteEyedSh4rk]

The more my empire grows, the less power I seem to have. If there are any votes like making peace or granting fiefs, my council makes very bad decisions, but if I try to hinder them from ruining my plans, it costs me easily 400 influence and the more lords join my faction, the more it will cost me until eventually I have no voice against the council anymore and they will make all decisions, which kinda ruins the whole idea of having your own kingdom. If I conquer a big city, there is not even the option to grand it to myself and I have to give it to one of my useless lords, since I already have 2 cities, which is not enough to cover my expenses from all the trebute I have to pay now thanks to my councils decisions.. I dont know if its the same for other factions, since I only played as part of the empire culture so far, but for empire its certainly a big problem.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

Yeah it's pretty bad that they make the player's faction use the brain dead AI calculation for voting . Or rather the AI calculation that was fine tuned to make sure AI don't wipe each other out (except Battania RIP) and have stale world so little jimmy can master smithing and have 10 million gold before beginning to play the game. They look at being able to get a little bit of money and vote for peace when you're winning a war or vote for more war when they're not even helping the current one. You have waste a lot of influence to keep a war going to finish it. One trick I use is to keep all the enemies prisoner in my party (with da perks) and then if I'm low on influence and vassal try to pass peace I dump them all in a vassal prison for a quick 300-400 influence and block em!

I would 1000% prefer warband system where you're the boss and the vassal can get mad.

 

[MostBlunted]

I would 1000% prefer warband system where you're the boss and the vassal can get mad.

 

[WhiteEyedSh4rk]

Now I am waiting since 2 ingame weeks and there is literally not one thing to do when there is peace time. We are just loosing money because of all the trebute payments. If I want to start a war, I have to pay 740 influence!! I have about 3000, but if I spend 740, create an army for about 150 influence and have to sustain it long enough to concuer a city, they will constantly spam me with peace votums that each cost about 700 influence too so I very quickly just run out of influence. There is no way to get that much influence that quick, so I am bound to be in eternal peace time again and cant progress the game, its really frustrating! Am I the only one suffering from that?

 

[bodhi]

War is not a good thing. It creates destruction and chaos. Your Lords are right, your warmongering ways are wrong.

 

[MostBlunted]

But what if it´s just a special operation?

 

[Great love Immortal]

I would 1000% prefer warband system where you're the boss and the vassal can get mad.

Remember the good old days when you would lose 10 relations with every vassal for granting somebody a village...

 

[bodhi]

But what if it´s just a special operation?

That's too obvious. Better to place a passive-aggressive doomstack on the border and pretend they're only out for a peaceful afternoon stroll. Fools the Lords every time.

 

[WhiteEyedSh4rk]

Remember the good old days when you would lose 10 relations with every vassal for granting somebody a village...

That system was kinda wacky but at least you had some kind of power at all, I feel like being ruled by my vassals now..

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

This is my situation in every recent game I play, I carry my faction while the vassals run wild and they try to **** me over and slow progress at ever chance.

I got some tricks to keep getting my way anyways, but I would rather not have to hustle to pull one over my own vassals all the time.

Remember the good old days when you would lose 10 relations with every vassal for granting somebody a village...

But also remember the satisfaction of locking in the honorable lords at 100 relations and never having to worry about it dropping again! The was a whole sub game of taking stinky lords (whp get a village and will leave someday)when you're starting out and slowly collecting the honorable ones over time!

 

[WhiteEyedSh4rk]

This is my situation in every recent game I play, I carry my faction while the vassals run wild and they try to **** me over and slow progress at ever chance.

I got some tricks to keep getting my way anyways, but I would rather not have to hustle to pull one over my own vassals all the time.


But also remember the satisfaction of locking in the honorable lords at 100 relations and never having to worry about it dropping again! The was a whole sub game of taking stinky lords (whp get a village and will leave someday)when you're starting out and slowly collecting the honorable ones over time!

At least im not alone with that. I dont think there is a way to make vassals understand any kind of tactics, the solution would be quite easy though, there should be a fairly drastic limit for influence a king needs to spend to decide against the vassals. Lets say at max 200 influence, but depending on the number of votes against, there should be a penalty in relation, so that eventually the lords will consider leaving the faction if their king ignores them too often.

 

[Theofilos]

They intentionally making the AI bad so theres ballance insteed of improving it to overcome whatever problem it has and that is in all aspects of the game from battles to kingdom decisions cuz simply they are incopentent.

 

[PeteSKTemplar]

Well on the side note it seems as good reminder what is wrong with todays "demo/cleptocracy" that ppl have no power over polituteds so at least in the game we have more democracy than is sought

 

[AJAJP_Juan]

This is the better system. You want many vassals to field the biggest armies around? Then come to the idea that they together are stronger than you, and saying "Buh am a king" doesnt matter. The only problem is because endless armies you are forced to have as much manpower as possible. Once (and if) big battles become more impactful, having as much clans wont be seen as a necessity.

 

[black_bulldog]

This is the better system. You want many vassals to field the biggest armies around? Then come to the idea that they together are stronger than you, and saying "Buh am a king" doesnt matter. The only problem is because endless armies you are forced to have as much manpower as possible. Once (and if) big battles become more impactful, having as much clans wont be seen as a necessity.

If the Kingdom was well established and lords had hereditary titles then ofc this kind of attitude would make sense but all are newly appointed. But I'd be ok with the present system if the ai made logical sense about what they're doing but they don't. Imho a better system would be have you and lords to form internal allegiances and possibly enemies or rivals in your kingdom. It would involve some kind of subtlety and subterfuge and make everyone spend influence and money to gain allies and would probably be a fun way to spice up the mid to late game with internal politics.

But what we have now is a bad system where the ai puts us into multiple needless wars. They want to end those war too early or when you're kindgom is winning and in the end you most likely end up paying reparations to too many other kingdoms and far too much and most of the time you end up paying when you were winning. The whole problem with the whole political system is that it feels like something kindergartner would think up, it's far too simple, it completely puts you the player at a disadvantage instead of a system of pluses and minuses, also you're at the mercy of the ai and have no way to pressure the ai to do anything. It's counterintuitive, and lastly it's unfun for many players because it doesn't feel like you're in charge.

 

[Lesbosisles]

But what if it´s just a special operation?

Now that's why they gather armies during peace time... Mystery solved!

 

[Great love Immortal]

But also remember the satisfaction of locking in the honorable lords at 100 relations and never having to worry about it dropping again! The was a whole sub game of taking stinky lords (whp get a village and will leave someday)when you're starting out and slowly collecting the honorable ones over time!

I remember the first Warband run, I did I was being assassinated every time I entered a tavern and lords only stayed in my factions to curse me out at a feast. All I would ever do was spam my noble companions and machosistic vassals who only joined me because I defeated them. Tutorials for games like M&B and every Paradox game are garbage.

 

[WhiteEyedSh4rk]

Ok at this point my vasalls literally are trying to silence me

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

Ok at this point my vasalls literally are trying to silence me

This junk makes me want to abdicate, leave and just execute them all ? But for now if you save often, you can re-load if they vote some UNEXCEPTABLE thing (and you're out of influence) but it gets really tedious. At least with policies it's random so they might pass some benign thing instead. It'd be nice if they could vote for some useful stuff, but they don't so I always pass about 7 policies before I have any vassals. IMO anything that can be re-loaded out of needs a revision to be interactable instead, like 1. should not be "random" there should be a transparent reason why X vassals want X effect such as war/peace or policy. 2. Player ruler should be able to interact to influence these wants/reasons and present alternatives to keep the faction on track.

 

[black_bulldog]

Ok at this point my vasalls literally are trying to silence me

Yeah at that point I'd either start a new game, or better yet close the game and maybe come back in a month or 2 because that would piss me off.

This junk makes me want to abdicate, leave and just execute them all ?

If we could do that, that actually might be fun to do occasionally and spice up some game play.

But for now if you save often, you can re-load if they vote some UNEXCEPTABLE thing (and you're out of influence) but it gets really tedious. At least with policies it's random so they might pass some benign thing instead. It'd be nice if they could vote for some useful stuff, but they don't so I always pass about 7 policies before I have any vassals. IMO anything that can be re-loaded out of needs a revision to be interactable instead, like 1. should not be "random" there should be a transparent reason why X vassals want X effect such as war/peace or policy. 2. Player ruler should be able to interact to influence these wants/reasons and present alternatives to keep the faction on track.

Imho there is far too much randomness in this game, and that necessitates the need for save scumming. I'm fine with some randomness but I don't want to feel like the game mechanics to put in place to **** me over just because Taleworlds doesn't understand how to make a fun game. It feels like so many core mechanics are boring at best or laborious at worse.