Suggesting 'being in control of the emperor'

[Nick The Hun]

Like Dong Zhuo and Cao Cao, using the emperor as a puppet. But ingame.
As first, i don't know if it's possible yet to declare yourself emperor after capturing him or Luoyang/Chang'An. But that would be nice.
For example if you would capture the emperor and you're able to assassinate him somehow while he belongs to you. Your faction heir will become emperor.

Powers
If that would give you powers like writing an Imperial Edict, sending it towards a player. Making that player attack a faction or do something else diplomatic. Like you're the papal states with the Pope in vanille medieval 2 tw. Having that power, everyone has to follow you or they're excommunicated.
And being able to call upon a crusade, as emperor. Or as a group against a common enemy like with Dong Zhuo.

Court
I'm thinking of a system like the Cardinals of Rome we could have a Court of the Emperor. Or every player could have his own Court to call upon a common enemy, sending messages to other factions to callupon against for example Cao Cao or someone else who's growing big.
Which probably asks for alot of scripting xD These are just suggestions, use them as you like.

[Gigantus]

Playing the pope faction has always been plagued with problems - from what I remember the college of cardinals is the culprit for regular crashes.

We have been toying with several script ideas regarding usurping the throne, but there isn't really much you can do with the pope faction other then changing name and interface elements - the mechanics stay the same. We are therefore concentrating on the existing 'regular' factions and trying out a few ideas.

The court idea is partially implemented through the faction standings, you may have come across the 'tall poppy' trigger for instance. With a bit of tweaking that might even work more intensely. For the time being our file is empty as the 'vanilla' values would mess things up big time, but here is the section I was talking about:

; Make factions get a case of the 'tall poppy' syndrome.  get narky about the larger factions
;------------------------------------------
Trigger 0086_Update_Tall_Poppy1
    WhenToTest FactionTurnStart

    Condition FactionHasRank
        and FactionScorePercent overall > 90
        and FactionScoreRank overall <= 1

    FactionStanding exclude_factions { } normalise -1.0 90

;------------------------------------------
Trigger 0087_Update_Tall_Poppy2
    WhenToTest FactionTurnStart

    Condition FactionHasRank
        and FactionScorePercent overall > 80
        and FactionScoreRank overall <= 3

    FactionStanding exclude_factions { } normalise -1.0 135

;------------------------------------------
Trigger 0088_Update_Tall_Poppy3
    WhenToTest FactionTurnStart

    Condition FactionHasRank
        and FactionScorePercent overall > 70
        and FactionScoreRank overall <= 5

    FactionStanding exclude_factions { } normalise -1.0 180


; Make factions try and band up with smaller factions
;------------------------------------------
Trigger 0089_Update_Band_Together1
    WhenToTest FactionTurnStart

    Condition FactionHasRank
        and FactionScorePercent overall < 30
        and FactionScoreRank overall > 3

    FactionStanding exclude_factions { } normalise 1.0 60

;------------------------------------------
Trigger 0090_Update_Band_Together2
    WhenToTest FactionTurnStart

    Condition FactionHasRank
        and FactionScorePercent overall < 20
        and FactionScoreRank overall > 4

    FactionStanding exclude_factions { } normalise 1.0 45

;------------------------------------------
Trigger 0091_Update_BandTogether3
    WhenToTest FactionTurnStart

    Condition FactionHasRank
        and FactionScorePercent overall < 10
        and FactionScoreRank overall > 5

    FactionStanding exclude_factions { } normalise 1.0 30

[Gongsunzan]

I think for crusades to work correctly every faction would need to be "catholic" religion. But you cant call crusades on other catholics unless they are excommunicated so i dont know how the developers could get this to work. I guess you could script it so that a really large faction gets scripted to be excommunicated and call it something like a secret edict from the emperor to get rid of someone with too much power. But to control the emperor and call crusades might be a little more difficult to do. You might have to script something where you can choose to excommunicate a faction then call a crusade on them. I dont know if this is possible though.

[Gigantus]

We have got seven religions in the game and a lot of scripting depends on what religion a faction is - rewriting that will be major job.

It is possible to excommunicate a faction via missions (there is no script command) - it will need some experimenting how set up a custom mission's conditions, but the 'PayBack' includes the excommunicate option. Probably a few hundred lines of script will be needed to cover the trigger conditions for the create_mission command, because I can't see a way to script the mission (descr_missions) to give a mission to the most powerful faction.

[Gongsunzan]

Yea i figured you guys wanted to keep the religions diffrent.

[Spartan999]

I think in the RTW version of ROTK, if you control enough province your faction leader gets a trait called "puppet emperor" (this was only for New and Old order, I don't know about the other beliefs), and eventually your faction leader became emperor. So my assumption would be that since most of the trait system seems to be the same in both version that the puppet emperor trait should be in this as well?

[Seether]

It might be in action right now, but we will be doing our own unique system with controlling Emperor Xian, supporting the Han, deposing the emperor, and establishing kingdoms.

[Nick The Hun]

I'm not a scripter myself so sadly i can't help you with such things.
How about, when the "Emperor faction/player" declares war on an enemy, the enemy is immediately excommunicated. Making him ripe for crusade?

[Gigantus]

See post #4 (unfortunately): "It is possible to excommunicate a faction via missions (there is no script command)..."