So, at this point I figured I'd go for the whole kingdom of monsters setup, y'know, forgive the vamps, drag in the dead, breed the gods and dragons, all while holding the furred throne in the north.

Now I know that there's a lot of chaos involved in the lycans by design, the whole ursurption by weakness thing is interesting and I wanted to try and forge a strong bloodline utilizing that system.

BUT this whole thing went crackerjacks after my ruler who created the lycan culture kicked the bucket, every time a new ruler would hit the throne, there would be an utter deluge of challenges, sometimes as many as six repeated challenges from THE SAME VASSAL in succession.

Not only that, even if you beat them down others would crawl out of the woodwork and bog the game down with another 5-40 prompts during the "Wolf Fight" scenes that makes every succession a bloody nightmare.

Also, if your ruler is -EVER- a hidden wolf or not a wolf at all, EVERYONE gets in on the party, not just people with under +30 opinion of that liege, even if you beat them once before.

So this brings me to my next issue, the dead, no matter what they have a -100 opinion of you, which is fine, until the previous two issues come to you, with lycan werewolf undead burying you in challenges you will eventually be brought low by your wounds with no time to recover between challenges.

A couple of things could solve this issue, the first is that for every failed challenge, the challenger has an increased approval of the challenged by 20 or so, that way eventually they'll approve of you enough to stop doing what they're doing.

The second thing to solve this would be to limit the number of challenges per year and prevent / stop challenges during wartime, so many times my warrior would get nicked and like sharks smelling blood in the water they're all over them yet again.

The third would be adding an honor / dishonor buff or debuff for attacking a wounded liege in the eyes of the pack (-10 opinion I'd suggest) with a further debuff if they lose (being weaker than a weakened liege -20) giving very real penalties to those who would try to grind someone down.

Same would be applied for the honorable / dishonorable choice in the fight with a -10 opinion debuff if it was noticed by the observers.

I would advise adjusting the fight to be less message spammy and rely more on combat stats, the only prompt being at the beginning what kind of fighting style you want to go with (Aggressive, Defensive, Deceitful, Magic, etc.)

They should also not be able to challenge for all titles of a liege during the fight, they should only be able to challenge for leadership, lower holdings should be protected from the challenge (as they should be challenged by the lower wolves within those holdings.

Finally I would say that the mechanic is great, it needs some form of Causus Beli mechanic, like a "Pride" stat (see the Magica stat in Elder Kings if you would like an example of how to apply that) wherein a challenge costs a certain amount of pride to stop the AI from being able to constantly mash the button like a psychotic monkey on crack.

Pride would be attached to certain wolf events like the resist or give in or the wild hunt or any others really so it's not something you can simply spam willy nilly, but pride cost should alter based on not just what you think of your liege but how the pack feels about the liege (total general opinion Vs. cost) so if everyone hates their guts, then the pride cost will be a pittance, but if they're beloved, ya gotta muster quite the chops to take them to task.


As it stands, I have to contantly go for maiming and wounding tactics (something that should be seen as dishonorable and give a debuff if the changes above are applied) to weaken vassals enough to eventually get them to stop harassing me with popups, and it's just unfun.