DevDiary 32 - Modding Improvements

Hooray for Black Sea Games and THQ Nordic! You're the Best! I'll play Knights of Honor 2: Sovereign, until I grow old and tell stories to my children how I conquered Europe with Cumania 🙂
Can't wait to see you in Thursday, guys!

Edited January 24 by Yavor

Hey guys, I certainly did not expect an update on modding that fast after release but I am not one to complain 

As a modder I was wondering how you plan to communicate with the modding community regarding technical requests? As an example, I'm planning to add a building/upgrade called 'Imperial Roads', which should only increase the speed of armies in the province with that building. There is currently no variable in the definitions with which I could accomplish that as speed_modifications cannot be changed for roads only.

As for tools I'd like to see, I'm personally already happy if we get command line tools to generate the binaries for maps and assets. Doesn't need to have fancy UI.

There is not enough historical/gameplay weight in elements throughout the game that should be moddable:

1. Make cities moddable - cities are all alike, they need to be able to be modded to have unique buildings, either buildable only in a specific city like Constantinople or non-destructible in a city so the importance of taking certain cities is markedly and memorably higher than others.

2. Make cultures moddable - faction differences are not pronounced, muslim factions need to be able to have multiple spouses, be able to have scripted events like christians having heresy based rebellions and unrest different from the paganism spreading, heresies should be moddable to be an influence bridge between factions that is between religion and culture. Culture should affect combat given climate conditions.

3. Make armies moddable - generals, even level 15 dont survive past a few battles, and units dont matter, an army lead by a talented leader should be able to survive in a somewhat good shape after ten and more battles, so unit experience begins to matter and you get attached to you army, general. Even more so for crusade moddability, multiple factions and generals should be able to join a crusade, or at least bolster it with money and units so the crusade is more impactful to the game as a whole, same for jihads.

4. Make learning moddable - Marshals should only be able to progress in their leveling up only to a certain point with books, after which the system from KoH1 should apply, allow modders to add skills modifying temporarily the map like making temporary camps, harassment/delay fortifications, bridges. Knights should be able to be moddable to gain skills based on successes/failures be it marshals improving an archery skill when winning many battles leading archers or clerics fulfilling missions.

5. Make navigation moddable - mountains have to be able to slow armies, seasons need to affect armies, a modder should be able to restrict an army building ships to only shipyards to strengthen chokepoints like Gibraltar or the Bosphorus and to only building ships outside harbors if the general has the navigation skill at a certain level, a modder should be able to enforce river crossing penalties to armies in both battles around rivers and movement slowdown to enforce natural river boundaries.

6. Make weather moddable - both cyclical seasonal weather, scriptable weather events(diseases?) and regional weather should be able to be modded to affect building outputs (eg. farms in Sweden), armies and battles.

Edited January 24 by ebearsson

What about some more tweaks on the difficulty of the AI or adding even more difficulties? 

Thank you devs!!!

By embracing mods you give every player a chance to enjoy your creation the way that suits them best.

Loving the game as it is, can't wait for the flavor mods can bring.

On 1/24/2023 at 11:55 PM, ebearsson said:

There is not enough historical/gameplay weight in elements throughout the game that should be moddable:

1. Make cities moddable - cities are all alike, they need to be able to be modded to have unique buildings, either buildable only in a specific city like Constantinople or non-destructible in a city so the importance of taking certain cities is markedly and memorably higher than others.

2. Make cultures moddable - faction differences are not pronounced, muslim factions need to be able to have multiple spouses, be able to have scripted events like christians having heresy based rebellions and unrest different from the paganism spreading, heresies should be moddable to be an influence bridge between factions that is between religion and culture. Culture should affect combat given climate conditions.

3. Make armies moddable - generals, even level 15 dont survive past a few battles, and units dont matter, an army lead by a talented leader should be able to survive in a somewhat good shape after ten and more battles, so unit experience begins to matter and you get attached to you army, general. Even more so for crusade moddability, multiple factions and generals should be able to join a crusade, or at least bolster it with money and units so the crusade is more impactful to the game as a whole, same for jihads.

4. Make learning moddable - Marshals should only be able to progress in their leveling up only to a certain point with books, after which the system from KoH1 should apply, allow modders to add skills modifying temporarily the map like making temporary camps, harassment/delay fortifications, bridges. Knights should be able to be moddable to gain skills based on successes/failures be it marshals improving an archery skill when winning many battles leading archers or clerics fulfilling missions.

5. Make navigation moddable - mountains have to be able to slow armies, seasons need to affect armies, a modder should be able to restrict an army building ships to only shipyards to strengthen chokepoints like Gibraltar or the Bosphorus and to only building ships outside harbors if the general has the navigation skill at a certain level, a modder should be able to enforce river crossing penalties to armies in both battles around rivers and movement slowdown to enforce natural river boundaries.

6. Make weather moddable - both cyclical seasonal weather, scriptable weather events(diseases?) and regional weather should be able to be modded to affect building outputs (eg. farms in Sweden), armies and battles.

Totally agree - the historical weight needs to be heavily touched. For this reason totally support those 6 points.

To add some additional aspects on:
1) Make cities moddable - I actually miss having the opportunity to modify the city defenses. Specifically, the towers, catapults, gate cauldrons, etc. Also, indeed cities like Constantinople, Rome, etc must always have certain type of buildings that are undestructable, like cathedrals, universities, etc. Thats what makes them special to conquer as well.
4) Make learning moddable - this suggestion would be highly valued not only for marshals, but for the other types as well. Imagine we have a cleric that converted 3 or more provinces to your religion - he should be a prime candidate for a Pope or a Merchant with expeditions to have the possibility to add estate or something that adds additional bonuses to the province.
6) Make weather moddable - having multiple resources or farms in certain regions like Sahara or Scandinavia is unrealistic. There should be boundaries there that will make you conquer new lands, just like the Vikings raided the south and the Arabs Europe. 

Some additional points:
7) Upgradable units - units that are already purchased and are Light, would be nice if they can be upgraded to Heavy.
8. Summarised news - worsen or improved relationship as an effect from a certain action, is coming up as separate messages. It will be better if they are summed up in 1 message
9) Peace offerings - it will be nice if it is given an option to make certain negotiations or demands when the opponent is asking for peace

Other than that... Love the game

I just realized the recording of the last dev stream hasn't been uploaded to youtube yet (THQ Nordic Inside)...can we request for that to be uploaded? (and in the future, soon after the stream ends?)

I think having them available would make it easier to refer to others when they're hungry for more information that isn't included in these blog posts. I also listen to them occasionally like a podcast between my daily work, and I think it's wonderful that you uploaded them the first place. Thank you!

Can we look forward to some modding tutorial? Would be useful.

I like the game. After 60 hours of playing, I found a problem with this game: a large country cannot withstand the attacks of three small countries simultaneously (the number of territories of this large country is more than the sum of these three small countries), not because of a lack of war resources but due to a restriction on the number of generals. Please allow generals not to occupy the knight slots above, for example, they can be recruited directly in cities, and these generals can have a separate interface for quickly locating the position of the army. I know that it is possible to modify the upper limit of the number of knights, but due to UI restrictions, I cannot find knights that exceed the number of slots above. My English is not very good, I hope you can understand what I mean, thank you.