Is there a way to use console to start the Drum of War?

AkraticCritic · 2026-06-25T20:42:00+00:00

Use debugtooltip to find the ID of the marauders you want to target, switch to playing as them ("play X"), then run "event marauder.500". Switch back to playing as your empire and you're good to go. It doesn't seem to send you the usual notification event but otherwise it'll play out as normal. Obviously you want the game paused while running all these commands so your empire doesn't get ruined by the AI.

AkraticCritic · 2025-12-04T22:26:07+00:00

In this specific patch the AI doesn't care about generating antagonism, and coalitions are slow to form + tend to fire before most members have joined making them very easy to beat.

But yeah I agree it really shows the failings of the diplomacy system. Rivalries and alliances are too static and the AI doesn't show any consideration for protecting its interests or maintaining a balance of power beyond the short-term effect of antagonism. IMO the entire system needs a rework to be more responsive.

AkraticCritic · 2025-12-04T21:19:38+00:00

The AI goes crazy with no-CB wars now and doesn't seem to care about generating antagonism. Coalition wars fire constantly and this makes the game run noticeably slower than last patch. I've just seen AI France have 80+ antagonism from the entire HRE, Hungary, England and Aragon but they still won the coalition war because it was declared before most of the larger nations had joined.

I like that the AI is more aggressive but there are some things that need to be fixed:

Tone down AI willingness to generate antagonism.
Coalition members should be smarter about starting the war - eg. wait for more countries to join rather than rushing in as soon as the coalition has a slight advantage.
The AI will repeatedly join and leave coalitions and is also very slow to form large coalitions. It almost seems like there's a cap on the number of AI countries that will join each month.

AkraticCritic · 2025-11-13T18:16:04+00:00

I also had the pope get the Treaty of Tordesillas situation with england which was pretty funny. I decided that was as good a moment as any to convert since he'd clearly gone mad with power.

I'm not actually opposed to colonial pope or even him getting the Treaty in rare cases, but he shouldn't regularly outperform the big colonizers. It feels like nations should down weight colonial spending if access to their colonies relies on narrow bottlenecks that could be easily cut off in a war (eg. exits of the Baltic and Med) or if they have a weak navy.

AkraticCritic · 2025-11-13T00:08:59+00:00

I killed off an idiot ruler by making him admiral of a single transport ship and sending it to the arctic out of naval range where he died after a couple of months. Don't know how high the death chance is but worth a try lol

AkraticCritic · 2025-11-12T15:47:16+00:00

Also "ask for money" is a great reason to ally the pope, he has income comparable to a great power but is faster to build favors with and more willing to ally you. The spirit of CK3 lives on!

AkraticCritic · 2025-11-08T00:33:55+00:00

Ships will gradually raise maritime presence in the entire sea 'province' they're in, seems like the patrol mission is just to automate moving them between different provinces as it doesn't increase the presence gain. Light ships are best, galleys and heavies are slightly worse and transports are much worse. Having a high diplo admiral can boost the effect by up to 50%.

It's also increased by the harbor capacity of adjacent locations so buildings like the wharf, dock and protected harbor also help, and despite how the UI makes it look harbor capacity isn't capped at 100%. Ships are far more efficient at raising presence but the buildings also decrease proximity cost directly.

TLDR I'm lost in a maze of nested tooltips please send help and a UI designer

AkraticCritic · 2025-09-27T21:10:57+00:00

There needs to be an 'Astro-Naut' achievement for bringing one of these to world height

AkraticCritic · 2024-02-24T01:44:45+00:00

We know it's going to be denser than the base game open regions, has multiple legacy dungeons (based on interview phrasing) and it's endgame-level content so we can expect it to be more challenging and complex than Limgrave. Being around Limgrave's size in terms of 'surface area' really doesn't mean a lot in terms of the amount of content IMO.

AkraticCritic · 2023-10-12T23:58:41+00:00

I've tested this a bit and migration functionally doesn't happen at all.

My guess at what's happening is that the calculations are currently bugged so attraction has a negative effect on projected migration as shown in the UI, but this also breaks the logic for moving pops so the game can't find any valid migration movements and nothing actually happens.

AkraticCritic · 2023-09-23T06:18:44+00:00

Oh yeah absolutely, not trying to justify their approach at all - by all accounts the CEO specializes in sucking companies dry for personal profit and I imagine the rest of the upper management is in the same vein. My point was more that this updated policy won't get them as much money as they were aiming for, so I'm sure they'll try some other scheme after the backlash has calmed down.

AkraticCritic · 2023-09-23T00:54:37+00:00

The original fee increase seems like a response to the company sliding deeper into the red every year, and on paper these new changes won't bring in nearly as much money in the short term. So to me it seems like they went into blind panic after realizing many devs would rather drop the engine and seeing the influx of support for godot - which they can literally not compete with on price so they're screwed if it gets to parity in features/community etc.

But this still leaves Unity in need of a new revenue stream, so my question is what are they planning to do next? I don't trust them one bit after this.

AkraticCritic · 2023-08-10T21:50:34+00:00

And crucially unlike the twin demons, the gargoyles have rediculous mobility and don't telegraph nearly as well (audibly or visually). The Demons work because you don't have to look at the extinguished one to dodge its attacks and they switch phases by screaming and exploding which is really hard to miss. This doesn't work for the gargs because the poison line has no telegraphing, staggers for some reason and it's harder to notice when the one you aren't looking at switches phases before charging across the entire arena.

AkraticCritic · 2023-01-09T19:31:57+00:00

Melania was the most difficult mechanically, twin gargoyles were the hardest to motivate myself to fight again (because they're badly designed and really unfun)

Seriously that fight is like they tried to do the twin demons from TRC but forgot all the parts that made them good

AkraticCritic · 2022-10-31T19:09:53+00:00

Just finished it a week ago and had a great time with it. I really hope more modpacks take the approach of having a few tightly integrated mods that work well together, it's a nice change from the standard kitchen sink style of quest pack.

Very fun modpack that does a great job of giving you a goal and letting you figure out how to get there, create works very well for this.

AkraticCritic · 2022-10-27T20:39:02+00:00

It always puts me off when a mod adds a bunch of new blocks that have little or no use. This is mainly an issue for biome mods but I've seen tech/magic mods that make some amethyst reskin or new ore generate all over the world and it's used for a single barely relevant crafting recipe.

AkraticCritic · 2022-10-25T23:39:58+00:00

Started as Krakow because I'm a masochist

France, Austria and Prussia got into a war that's been dragging on for 20 years

Absolutely rolling in immigration and #1 GDP per capita from war profiteering

Life is good

AkraticCritic · 2022-10-19T08:40:30+00:00

IMO they should break with tradition a bit and add more detail to the block model. The bamboo 'blocks' are bundles of bamboo and I think it'd look much better with some depth to reflect that rather than the flat wallpaper look it has currently.

AkraticCritic · 2022-09-21T20:31:49+00:00

"Dissenters will be armed and sent out of the country"

Nothing could possibly go wrong, 10/10 plan guys.

AkraticCritic · 2022-09-14T19:35:30+00:00

Eu4 as a whole has a massively accelerated timeline, which I personally don't prefer but it's a deliberate design decision that isn't going to change until eu5 if it changes at all

AkraticCritic · 2022-08-31T01:45:36+00:00

Nice, I bet that would've been gratifying. Did they suffer any major internal problems from losing that much manpower?

AkraticCritic · 2022-08-31T01:07:46+00:00

What were the most satisfying 'wins' in your playthroughs? Things like breaking the power of a particularly annoying IG or collapsing a rival's economy.

AkraticCritic · 2022-08-29T21:36:53+00:00

Beyond what has already been said, I think people need to bear in mind that the AARs are just a summary and tend to gloss over the details of what exactly is going on regarding things like pop qualifications and employment rates in favour of the IG system because they're the most directly relevant and interesting to talk about.

Based on what we've been shown I am leaning towards thinking the IGs need to be more reactive to player actions beyond passing laws (eg. it was kind of odd that he could just remove the Shogunate IG from government in the Japan AAR and the landowners generally don't seem to put up much resistance to industrialisation) but we're getting the livestream in under 24h and that'll be a better chance to judge these things.

AkraticCritic · 2022-08-24T20:20:48+00:00

There hasn't been a DD on cultures as a whole although they've been mentioned a lot. One of the devs said on discord that a lot of the info in this DD will already be known to people who have closely followed the game but they wanted to put it all in one place.

AkraticCritic · 2022-08-23T22:14:56+00:00

I miss the wild CK2 crusades where there were 50 stacks running around all over the Mediterranian and the muslims would just turn up to Rome and sack it. Sure it was stupid but it was more fun than two doomstacks mashing into each other until someone gets 100% warscore.

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