DESCRIPTION
Hello players, I am Malorn, some of you who play EU4 M&T may know who I am. This mod was created for my personal use, but I was encouraged to make it available so others could benefit from it. This is a balancing mod which alters several key defines to improve the base game balance, producing better outcomes. Succession is a little less secure, and rulers with massive empires cannot muster forces as rapidly. This will NOT make the game easier in most cases, since the player is often the larger power in many wars. :::: Muster travel speed has been drastically reduced. You will no longer be able to amass your full army nearly instantly at any rally point. Equally, dismissing your armies will be quite a risk in a war, since they will take much longer to travel back to their homes. This is actually a rather nasty nerf for a large empire, as it can take quite a while to actually get a full army assembled. This has no effects on MAA units. Second, levies do not regenerate with nearly the speed they once did. You can and will be worn down if you fight wars constantly with heavy losses. Again, a nerf for a larger empire, which due to it's size may find itself in many smaller wars. MAA regeneration is also reduced, but only slightly, with the cost adjusted to match. Losing masses of men is no longer a trivial matter. Finally, army movement itself is slowed slightly, even when raised. Armies will not zip around the map, this makes positioning and supply more important to consider, and again limits the ability of a single army to respond to multiple smaller armies. Sea travel is also quite a bit slower, though days without attrition has been adjusted to allow the same total range, just without the insanely rapid speeds. Smaller, more compact realms will see rather large benefits from these three changes, and equally larger realms will feel their weight as the burden it should be. :::: The other primary area of adjustment involves children. Namely, fertility is something which is...much more fragile. You will, on average see fertility reduce more when you are older, and base childbirth is reduced. You will see far fewer children on average, meaning that bonuses to fertility have more inherent benefit. Children, and women, are more likely to die in childbirth, or have other outcomes which are not ideal, this is especially the case when the mother is in poor health. While less children can make succession easier with partition laws, this may also harm the player, since the AI is far less able and willing to murder, disinherit or cheese their way to a single heir. AI realms will be a bit less prone to fracturing, at least from succession. There is also the very real danger of not having ENOUGH children, meaning that ill timed deaths can result in real problems. Your idiot fifth cousin is now your heir, have a great day! :::: Religious tenets have been rebalanced, with the goal of making more tenets viable or interesting. There should be, ultimately, no 'bad' tenets that are never worth taking in any situation. This will improve difficulty in the game, as the AI generally won't make their own religion, and thus the player will min-max and many default religions had weak tenets by default. Improving these 'bad' tenets helps this situation, and thus base religions will be stronger by comparison to their prior selves, or against the player min-max religion. A few religious choices were changed to fit history, mostly in cost, but in a few cases availability. Sacred childbirth, for example, was not an option for Christian faiths... despite Catholicism's huge fixation on Mary... seems like it should at least be possible, since naked Christians who live in forests are an option. A lot of minor cost adjustments, as well, just to smooth out some odd situations with religions. :::: There are also an increasing number of general changes involving: -> opinion calculation -> scheme success and ability for characters to protect themselves with good intrigue scores -> call to war acceptance changes -> several changes which make religious unity less simple to achieve, especially among vassals. -> Cultural difference opinion penalties increased -> Dread changes, closing loopholes which allow dread to be gained without some cost Most of these changes again are problems for empires more then smaller powers, reflecting the real difficulties of maintaining a large empire that might contain other cultures and religions. This may also benefit religions and strategies which sacrifice pure power builds for those with more tolerance. Which is a weak playstyle already, so a good balance outcome. :::: In sum, this is a balance mod with the focus on increased realism and anti-blobbing measures on the organic level. It is not about hard interventions, but about tuning the game rules to produce certain outcomes. It may be expanded as more ways to improve CK3 become obvious. I would highly recommend using my mod with the excellent More Game Rules mod. It is most assuredly compatible, and many of those rules permit other solid balance changes which I highly recommend, and would have created on my own, had pfried not already done so.
CHANGELOG
v2 - Released 2022-02-08

REQUIREMENTS

Crusader Kings III

Full game

FORUM LINKS