Dark Ages

Greetings and welcome to Dark Ages!

Abstract

Dark Ages is a mod designed for the segment of the players who have mastered the vanilla game and have a penchant for good role play. In Dark Ages you will face a more challenging, realistic and gritty game without providing the AI blatant bonuses.

You will lose battles and wars, your gold will not be enough to build everything, you will be presented with difficult choices and different aspects of gameplay will need to be juggled in a careful exercise of risk management. Expect sudden turns of fate and the unpredictability of fortune while a plethora of new events and decisions add significantly to the emergent narrative the player experiences. Hopefully, the lives of your digital rulers will be infused with much more drama and depth.

Install Instructions

– Place Dark Ages as the last in the CK3 mod list
– For total conversions instead of placing it as the last in the list, try placing it immediately before the total conversion mod. Due to the complexity of Dark Ages compatibility with total conversions is not assured.
– If you are using More Provinces Expanded, even if it’s not a total conversion, make sure you load Dark Ages BEFORE it
– If this is the first time with the mod, play with a King or Emperor. You will need to adapt your style of play to the vast changes to game balance Dark Ages introduces and you are better off if you start the game in a consolidated position.

Some Features

– Weekly updated (every Friday there are bug fixes, tweaks and new content)

– Plenty of game rules for the player to customize the gameplay according to his/her taste

– Warfare has been rebalanced and is now more unpredictable and consequential.

– Several money sinks have been introduced, to keep the game more challenging and interesting.

– Diseases can kill. Expect to get "under the weather" more frequently, sometimes leading to serious diseases. The older one gets, the riskier it becomes. As with all the other implementations of the mod, traits and the overall health of the character can turn diseases more or less riskier.

– Given the right conditions, a character can now attempt to partly change personality at mid life, if he/she is willing to bear the increase in stress.

– There are many different game aspects that might lead to murder attempts on the player character.

– Character development as well as lifestyle perks have been reviewed in order to produce less powerful characters.

– Traits are used in most of the mod’s implementation. For instance, a Rival might hate the character but if he has some "good" personality traits he/she will never plan a murder attempt. In another example, an Herculean character will have a much lower chance of getting a serious disease than a Weak one.

– New paths the player can invest into to make some gold. Through decision the player can for instance, plan a trade route or assemble a pirate fleet. Of course, these decisions can be more or less sucessful – or even possible at all – depending on character skills and traits.

– Possibility to train your less endowed Knights to improve their Prowess… for a price, of course.

– Possibility to train yourself to increase your Prowess – if it is not good – with the level of improvement being determined by luck but also by the quality of the weapon master you recruit.

– Pregnancies are risky affairs and children will die very young much more often.

– Characters can now be completely infertile and the range of fertility is now much higher, up and down. Expect characters with the Fertile trait to never be infertile and characters with the Infertile trait to almost always be completely infertile. There is a 5% chance that any character is infertile and that will not be known. If you see the years passing without an heir, you can – if your character is not very principled – forge an heir.

– Stress has been heavily used in the mod and going into aggressive warfare will yearly increase it by a certain amount randomly controlled dependent on the character personality traits – a Compassionate character will have a much harder time dealing with his/her conscience than a Callous one.
Conversely, when at peace, the Stress will decrease naturally by itself, again dependent on traits – in this case Compassionate characters will recover Stress faster than Callous ones.

– If the player character is over 39, without a direct heir and the character is not very principled, the player can choose to go in search for a impostor to pose as a legal heir. There are some choices in between, with different consequences for gameplay…

– Vassals will have an opinion penalty if they are far from the capital of the player character and lack some personality traits (like Loyal or Just). The farther they are, the higher the opinion penalty.

– The Dread concept has been reviewed. It is now a two edged sword. On one hand it gives all the bonuses the players already know plus the capability of the player character to intimidate his/her vassals or courtiers to give him/her something (like gold, for instance). On the other hand it progressively lowers vassal’s opinions and the higher the level of Dread (starting at 15), the higher the chance some powerful malcontent just order an assassination attempt on the player character. Now, how much risk is the player willing to withstand to reap the benefits of Dread?

– There is a couple of new Traits. One of them is the Cutthroat Politician and it might be earned if the character is a Councillor. The other I’ll let you find yourself…

– There are new decisions to help the player to administrate better his/her Domain. You can now implement Harsh Rules, Plan Purges or Lower Taxes, for instance. This is important as having counties with very poor opinion will make the player character run the risk of getting attacked while going around inside his/her Domain. The same goes for low Control of the counties of his Domain.

– If his/her Council lacks talented people, the player might elect to attempt to locate someone with a good skill in the profession sought.

– There are a few changes made to the Legacies, specially the Blood Legacy has been balanced. Ubbermenchen will be rarer…

– Characters have now the ability of borrowing money by asking the right people

– many, many, many more things…

The fate of my last 15 rulers in CK3 v1.8 with Dark Ages:

– Died at 59 of old age
– Died at 67 of old age
– Died at 42 ambushed by bandits due to low control in a domain province
– Died at 66 of old age
– Died at 33 of Consumption
– Died at 60 of payback for ordering a purge
– Died at 75 of old age
– Died at 25 murdered by a rival
– Died at 69 of old age
– Died at 39 with a heart failure from stress
– Died at 54 with Cancer
– Died at 71 of old age
– Died at 27 with Pneumonia
– Died at 71 with Pneumonia
– Died at 66 of old age

Chinese Translation : HERE
Russian Translation : HERE
Spanish Translation : HERE

Grateful for the work of the translators I cannot vouch for the state of the translations or their quality.

A word of deep thanks to NoHackToday as he allowed me to include his superlative More Background Illustrations into Dark Ages to enrich the variety of the events’ backgrounds with many, many new beautiful contextual art.

A word of deep thanks to The Professor as he allowed me to include his superlative Men at Arms Art into Dark Ages to provide each MaA unit with its own art.