Crusader Kings II: Monks and Mystics

[ghostryder]

I'm surprised no one has started a thread on this release. Been out a couple days. Since CK2 is about the funniest and best game Paradox has ever done IMHO I'm glad to see an overwhelming posative score on Steam--which is no easy feat. Looks like a lot of fun too. here's one review:

> Join Satan's Own
> Stumble upon immortality (Worship Satan forever with no repercussions? Sweet)
> Become High Priest of Satan's Own
> People never discover what I truly am, leading His Dark Legion for almost a century
> Convert every major ruler of England
> Kidnap the Pope then do horrible unspeakable things to him until he join's the Legion
> Stick a demon in the Pope to make sure he always stays loyal
> Satan asks me to chose a mother for the Antichrist
> Chose my hot italian wife, becoming the defacto father of the Antichrist
> Over the next 5 years, excommunicate everyone in England I couldn't convert
> After 150 years of darkness, the Pope comes to visit only to discover the demon plans to overthrow me, Pope stabs me in the back. The end of almost two centuries of rule.

10/10 Would spawn the spawn of Satan again

[Ian C]

I got that and the fixed Conclave DLC. The new patch also adds tons of new free stuff, especially the new game customization options before game start which is really neat.

Yeah, it has the demonic stuff but also Secret Societies and orders and you can collect relics and other stuff.


Patch notes:




###################
# Expansion Features
###################
- Societies:
- Join Societies to gain different bonuses and access to a wide set of various powers, each unique to the different types of Societies!
- Power has to be earned however, complete quests given to you by the Society in order to gain Society Currency, which can be used to increase in rank or spent on the powers available to you
- All Societies come with new clothing unique to them, which brings more variety to the existing portraits!

- Monastic Societies:
- Join monastic orders such as the Benedictines, Dominicans, the Community of Saint Basil, or Dharmic orders such as the Advaita Matha
- Members may enjoy increased Learning or Stewardship and increased Piety gain!
- Quests include the following:
- Do Penance or Meditation to show your devotion
- Build a Temple
- Go on a Pilgrimage
- And more!
- Powers include the ability to:
- Toggle Celibacy
- Inviting a Holy Ascetic to your court
- And more!

- Devil Worshiping Societies:
- Join and worship the evil side of your religion with Societies such as Lucifer's Own, the Fellowship of Hel, the Plaguebringers and others
- Members may enjoy a bonus in increased Intrigue!
- Quests include the following:
- Corrupt a Pries
- Perform a Sacrifice
- Desecrate a Temple
- And more!
- Powers include the ability to:
- Abduct people
- Perform a Dark Divorce
- Summon a Familiar
- And more!

- The Assassin Society:
- Serve the grandmaster and plot against those who would interfere with your plans, or rise high enough in ranks to become grandmaster yourself!
- Members of the Assassins may enjoy the benefit of increased Intrigue, Plot Power, Personal Combat Skill, and more!
- Quests include the following:
- Murder a designated target
- Convert counties to the true faith
- Collect the debt of another member who has yet to pay back
- And more!
- Power include the ability to:
- Borrow Money from the order
- Raise an Army
- Intimidate Rulers for Favors
- And more!

- The Hermetic Society:
- Hermetics focus on learning and are always trying to discover hidden truth, may it be in looking at the stars, performing alchemy, or understanding the divine
- Members of the Hermetics enjoy the benefit of increased Learning!
- Quests inlcude the following:
- Gather Ingredients
- Build a Laboratory
- Find a rare Scroll or Tablet
- And more!
- Power include the ability to:
- Perform Scrying
- Make Horoscope
- Write a Magnum Opus
- And more!

- Artifacts:
- Be visited by a great goldsmith, who can craft magnificant crown jewels for any worthy ruler who can affort it!
- Hire the assistance of a weaponsmith, who can craft a wide set of different weapons to boost your performance when leading armies!
- Learn of relics thought to be long lost and set out on a quest to aquire these important artifacts and put them in the safety of you Treasury

- Additional Council Jobs:
- Perform Statecraft:
- Your Chancellor will improve your relation with vassals, neighboring rulers and your liege, as well as increasing the speed at which Threat decay!
- Organize the Army:
- Your Marshal will seek to train you commanders and reduce the maintenence cost of your Retinue/Horde units!
- Administer Realm:
- Your Steward will strive to improve your demesne by increasing culture conversion rate and Prosperity gain!
- Sabotage Province:
- Send your Spymaster to sabotage a county by reducing Prosperity, lower the defence to make it easier to siege, or increase the revolt risk!
- Hunt Apostates:
- Have your Court Chaplain search for heretical Societies to reveal the members and have them punished, while also increasing your Piety gain!

- AI Orders:
- As a primary participant in a war, you are now able to give orders to your allies
- AI allies will peform the orders they recieve for as long as they don't have wars of their own that they deem more important
- In the Province View, you can use the order "Siege" to have an ally siege the selected county
- In the Selected Army window, you can use the order "Attach Army" to have an ally attach to the selected army
- Added "Allies in Wars" tab in the Military View
- Lists all allies you have in ongoing wars and what orders they have, if any
- Allows you to give the orders "Focus on Sieging" and "Focus on Hunting Enemy Armies"

- Child Naming Buttons:
- When a child is born, you have new options of choosing an appropriate name
- Random: Will randomly pick a name from the culture list
- Name after Parent: Will name the child after the father/mother
- Name after Grandparent: Will name the child after any grandfathers/grandmothers
- Name after random Ancestor: Will randomly pick a name from any member of your dynasty

- Prisoner Management:
- With the new Prisoner Management tool, it is even easier to get rid of all those useless characters filling up your dungeon!
- Set various filters to handle only the prisoners you want to, enabling you to avoid potential penalties or executing someone who can pay ransom by mistake
- Mass Release: Release all prisoners according to your current filter settings
- Mass Ransom: Ransom all prisoners according to your current filter settings
- Mass Execute: Execute all prisoners according to your current filter settings

- Added Dharmic Pilgrimage Event Chain for all Dharmic religions

###################
# Free Features
###################
- Religious Cults:
- Gone are the days when you are forced to abandon the old ways, as you are able to falsely confess to a new religion while still keeping true to your faith in secret
- When you convert, you can choose to secretly still worship your old religion
- With enough Prestige, a ruler with a secret religion can create a cult to recruit more members
- Powers include the ability to:
- Evoke Sympathy for your secret religion in other rulers
- Induct rulers to your secret religion
- Openly Adopt Faith to openly convert to your secret religion, forcing other members within your realm to do the same

- Treasury:
- Rulers now possess a treasury, a place in which to store collected artifacts and items
- Several old items that used to be Character Modifiers have been replaced with actual artifacts and will instead be placed within the Treasury

- Map Update:
- The Ural mountains are now impassable
- Removed the duplicate island of Kolguyev, in the Barents Sea
- The most northern part of the Onega is now properly filled with water
- The mountains in southern Abyssinia no longer stretches onto the frame of the map
- Fixed an issue in the lower part of the river Don, where the river bed would go above water level
- Removed a bunch of trees that were placed in major rivers
- The terrain around lake Balkhash has been smoothed, to avoid sharp/rough edges
- The terrain around lake Baikal has also been smoothed, no longer will the steep cliffs surround the lake
- The Indus and the Ganges have both been cleaned up:
- The terrain now matches the actual river
- Smaller rivers no longer flow so far into the major rivers
- The borders of the rivers has been made smoother to avoid sharp/rough edges
- The Danube has been redrawn, to better respresent its actual location (!)
- The county of Constantinople is now only located on the western side of the Bosphorus, merging the eastern side into the county of Nikomedeia, connected with a strait
- The duchies of Samos and Cibyrrhaeot are now de jure part of the kingdom of Anatolia, rather than Greece
- The duchies of Trebizond and Armeniacon is now de jure part of the kingdom of Trebizond, rather than Anatolia
- Removed the kingdom of Taurica
- The duchy of Crimea is now de jure kingdom of Khazaria
- The duchy of Cherson is now de jure kingdom of Khazaria
- The coastal counties of Croatia and Serbia have been adjusted and moved slightly to better represent their actual locations
- The eastern counties of Hungary and the surrounding area has been moved and adjusted in order to properly place the kingdom within the Carpathian mountains
- Changed the name of b_mirabel to "Majdal Yaba"
- b_mirabel will be named "Mirabel" if ruled by most European cultures
- b_mirabel will be named "Antipatris" if ruled by Byzantine cultures
- The county of Tobruk is now only located along the coast
- Moved the northern part of c_dalarna to c_herjedalen
- Moved k_venice to de jure e_italy

- Improved the character finder:
- Added a "Reset Browser Filters" button
- Added a "Diplo Range" filter
- Added a "Join Court" filter
- Characters that will join your court if bribed now get a yellow hand rather than a red thumbs down
- Added functionality for saving and loading a set of filters. Allowing for up to four slots of different configurations. These persist across campaigns
- The "Great House" character filter now includes the option "Not Mine" to avoid characters of your dynasty to to appear in the search

- Improved the game rules screen:
- Now possible to filter the rules by a variety of groups
- Now possible to save and load sets of rule options

- Updated the Intrigue interface:
- Now shows 7 decisions rather than 4
- Decisions can now be marked as important/not important, allowing you to decide what decisions you want alerts for
- Your plot and backed plots has been moved to a tab of its own
- Backed plots now show their target
- Known plots have "Join Plot" and "End Plot" buttons
- Auto-stop Plots has been moved to the "Known Plots" tab
- Now shows 6 prisoners/threats at a time instead of 5
- The plot choice list now shows 6 plots at a time instead of 5

- Added an on-map Combat Indicator:
- The indicator will show if a battle will happen in a county as a result of the movements of adjacent units
- The indicator will highlight any defensiv bonuses, river crossing or strait crossing

- Added an "Embark All" button when having multiple armies selected. It loads as many of the selected units as possible onto ships
- Added alert for councillors having no job assigned to them
- Remastered the volume of all existing songs and sound effects for an improved soundscape

CONCLAVE:
- When selecting councillors, you will now be able to see what voting archetype they're likely to pick
- You can now send law changes to consideration by the council
- The council view tells you how your councilors are voting (or would vote) on a law change


More: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/update-2-7-released-checksum-whgq-not-for-problem-reports.1003442/

[undercovergeek]

I don't know whether I'm getting old or grumpy but I loved this game, still do really but the constant changes and updates make me think I'll never understand it fully and stops me starting a new game

[Barthheart]

I don't know whether I'm getting old or grumpy but I loved this game, still do really but the constant changes and updates make me think I'll never understand it fully and stops me starting a new game

You are old and grumpy because I know I am and I feel the same way.

Just need to sit down and concentrate on it instead of SQUIRREL!

[undercovergeek]

Lmao - it's no so much attention span more 2 weeks of click this for that and click here to get that but a month later it's no no, click there now and click this for that and don't try to be this anymore because these new penalties and remember how you were supposed to do this when republics were cool, not any more now build churches so you can be a monk and so on

But I just relearned this for the 40th time last week!!!!!

[Nefaro]

Sounds like a good DLC, with all that extra fun added to the game.  ;D   \m/

[JasonPratt]

Is there a way to turn off the overly supernatural effects? I was not a big fan of having an actual anti-Christ leading armies of darkness being regularly triggered by one of the DLCs (Sons of Abraham?) which otherwise expanded the religious aspects.

I like the expanded religious aspects (Satanic, neutral, and other), but I don't always want to start sliding over into Warhammer-lite.  :-\ It is possible to have one without the other. {points at actual history}

[Ian C]

Is there a way to turn off the overly supernatural effects?

Yes, and a bunch of other options like disabling 'Shattered Retreat'. You can even tailor the effects of other things like epidemics to be dynamic, historical or random.
You can also save and load custom rule sets.

[Toonces]

I think I've reached culmination with these DLCs.  This game is easily the most expensive in my collection, and I just know I'm barely scratching the surface of it, even about 100 hours in.

[ghostryder]

Is there a way to turn off the overly supernatural effects? I was not a big fan of having an actual anti-Christ leading armies of darkness being regularly triggered by one of the DLCs (Sons of Abraham?) which otherwise expanded the religious aspects.

I like the expanded religious aspects (Satanic, neutral, and other), but I don't always want to start sliding over into Warhammer-lite.  :-\ It is possible to have one without the other. {points at actual history}

The option to turn off supernatural events have been there for some time.

[JasonPratt]

Option to turn off supernatural events is where...?

[ghostryder]

At the start of the game. It isn't available during.

Having said that-now that the game has been played a while there's a ton of negatives. Only the Satanic cults are really done.

Miaphysites, Nestorians, unreformed pagans, and other major religions that actually need secret cult mechanics do not have them. Instead, secret cults of secret worshippers are only available to Catholics, Sunnis, and other super-strong, super-stable religions that rarely need to practice in secret. (Thankful exceptions include Jews and Zoroastrians, who can form secret cults -- but why do just Zoroastrians when you could have done the historically secret Miaphysites??) -suejak

Oh and by the way: You might spend a lot of time collecting alchemy ingredients, but they can't be used at all, despite pre-release promises.

[Toonces]

[/hijack on]

Hey GR,
Back in the Wargamer days, you had mentioned a full-on vampire city add-on for Morrowind.  Is that still out there and do you know where I can find it?  I've been getting back into Morrowind with the MGSO mod.

[/hijack off]

[ghostryder]

Well that's a blast from the past--but back in my modding days and fellow member of AGM was Qarl's The Underground. Most of the mod takes place in dungeons-with a bar located under Balmora. It's an "adult" mod and pretty large--and pretty hard to complete.


http://mw.modhistory.com/download-35-11514

I had The underground 2 (not compatable) on my HD for years but lost it on a HD fail. I don't believe Qarl ever officially released it-- but it can be located above.

Qarl's no longer with us-and it's a shame AGM's RPG never saw daylight. He was quite talented as your see in playing the mod.


.

[Toonces]

Thanks man, that's it.