About This File
Various Vexation Removers
by SuccinctScrivener (a.k.a. ThrowAwayToThrowAway)
Various Vexation Removers is collection of small quality of life improvements and bugfixes for Crusader Kings II. Each module is fully independent of the others and you can pick and choose which ones you wish to use.
Attention: this mod is not installed quite like a normal mod. Read the installation instructions.
The modules:
Inquisition Intercessions:
Tired of marrying off your children, only for them to be burned alive for something silly like a bit of demon worship? Or you're playing as a vassal and your liege decides to burn your spouse as a witch and there's nothing you can do? This mod aims to make inquisitions a bit less annoying in 3 ways:
- Makes non-zealous AI characters much less murderous towards their accused friends and family, and more likely to pardon them.
- An intercession system where when someone of interest to the player is accused of apostasy, the player gets a chance to intercede with the accusing lord and call in a favor, lean on their friendship, or use their charm and so forth to get the accused declared innocent. If your religion has a religious head like the pope, you can ask them to declare either the accused you're advocating for or yourself innocent, similar to requesting a claim or excommunication. The ai will also appeal accusations against characters of interest to them, though the scope for who is considered of interest to them is much narrower.
- For some reason in the vanilla game, when you decide an accused person is innocent, it still adds the opinion_accused_apostate opinion modifier to the accused, granting you a revoke\prison\banish\execute\divorce reason. It seems weird to declare someone innocent of being an apostate, and then go and revoke their title on account of them being an apostate, so this mod removes that portion of the code.
There is both a version for vanilla CK2, and a version that is compatible with the mod "Faster Council & Better Council Scaling". Use one or the other.
No AI Secret Cults:
Did the idea of the secret cult mechanic sound cool to you? Did you like the idea of founding your own cult, taking down Catholicism from within, reversing the outcome of the Albigensian crusade, or reviving Hellenism? Were you then utterly disappointed by the neverending headache that the secret cults actually are in the game? Well I have a simple solution for you. This mod restricts the choice to start a cult to players only. Once you start a cult, the ai will join and expand it as normal. Once the cult goes public, it will then remain dormant unless a player restarts it.
Note that the mod won't do anything if you have secret cults disabled in the game rules. It also won't affect other mods, like Tentacled Dreams, whose cults don't use the vanilla decision.
Mass House Arrest:
Are your raids constantly bringing in more prisoners? Are you tired of constantly moving people one by one to house arrest because there's no real point to keeping them in the dungeon instead of putting them in either house arrest or the oubliette? Well say no more; this mod adds two decisions. One to move all prisoners not in the oubliette to house arrest, and the other to move only children, since children under house arrest are treated as if they had the heritage focus.
Note: There is a visual bug in the tooltip where some prisoners may be listed twice. This is due a bug on Paradox's end, and I don't know of any easy way around it. That said, it's purely a visual bug.
Retract Merchant Republics:
Some time ago, Paradox introduced a bug when they made it so you can't retract patricians, since doing so would bork the merchant republic. However, the doge of a merchant republic is also a patrician and thus you bizarrely cannot retract duke tier merchant republics from your vassal kings. The Retract Vassal decision is hard-coded, so as a work around this mod adds a new decision to retract specifically merchant republic vassals. It is, as near as I can make it, a clone of the vanilla decision with two caveats. First, since there is no way for modders to interact with the revoke reason system, you will always have the eat the general vassal opinion penalty the first time you try to retract unless you have a law or government that negates the penalty, although not the second time if the vassal refuses and revolts. Secondly, when the ai will refuse a revocation and when they will retract from their vassals relies on some educated guesswork and reverse engineering since we don't have access to that particular bit of code.
(See https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/2-6-3-cannot-retract-vassalage-of-merchant-republics-from-feudal-kings.999480/ for more details on the bug)
Less Irrational Smithing:
So a weird thing about the vanilla 'Hire a smith' decision is that the smith can't actually fail or do a worse job than what you hired them to do. The only real negative outcome is if they try to steal it. Bizarrely it's actually better to have an utterly incompetent smith, because if the smith 'fails', then you get the chance to spend more money on the item to upgrade it one tier higher. This mod alters the event chain so that you have the chance to spend more to upgrade your smithed item if your smith 'succeeds' rather than 'fails'.
Additionally, inspired by a similar change in "Republics Fixed", I have made it so multi-kings can purchase tier 3 items, the same as an emperor, and multi-dukes can purchase tier 2 items, the same as a king. The trade-off is that you always have to pay full price, no longer scaled by your income. The file also includes Republics Fixed's scaled_wealth caps.
Less Hostile Feast Rejections:
The 'Hold a feast' decision always seemed a bit underwhelming to me in part because, for an event that was supposed to improve people's opinion of you, you'd always end up with a surprising number of people weirdly upset with you just for inviting them. This is because the options for the ai to accept or reject the invitation are only weakly correlated to their opinion of you, so it was mostly random. This mod edits the event options by making the ai's choice more strongly correlated to the invitee's opinion of you, and by preventing them from getting upset at all unless they already disliked you.
No Great Work Religion Requirements:
For some reason, the Grand University and Great Library have a religion requirement, but that religion requirement includes every single vanilla religion, so it just needlessly excludes mod added religions that aren't a part of any vanilla religion group. This mod simply deletes that requirement. There is a also version provided that compatible with the "Historic Buildings" building mod. Choose one or the other.
Never Over or Under Weight:
Prevents characters from ever getting the malnourished or fat trait, and removes them from characters who already have them. Somebody requested this on the forums a while ago, and I figured I may as well throw it up here. Note that it will conflict with any other mod that edits 00_scripted_effects.txt, such as Lesbocracy, or 00_portrait_properties.txt, such as Portraits' Fix.
Egyptian Female Cheek Tint Fix:
A quick and simple fix for the discolored cheeks that ethnically Egyptian woman have.
List Suitors:
I had the idea to overcome the limitations of the character viewer by generating tooltips instead. One thing that's frustratingly hard to do is to find good candidates to marry your children off to. This adds a decision to show a series of events where the tooltips list all the characters in diplomatic range who are unmarried and have a strong claim or are heirs to a title. The lists are separated between male and female, as well as between King+ tier and Duke tier. If anybody has any good ideas for something else the character viewer fails at that this technique might solve, let me know on the forums.
To Install:
Extract the archive to a neutral directory, such as your desktop. In the folder you will find "Various Vexation Removers.mod " and a folder for each module. Move the .mod file to your ...\Paradox Interactive\Crusader Kings II\mod\ folder. Inside each of module is a folder named "Various Vexation Removers". For each module you wish to install, drag that "Various Vexation Removers" folder to your ...\mod\ directory. Overwrite if prompted.
Changelog:
v1.0 - initial release
