I was wondering, if you might be able to make a compatibility patch for Dark Ages and After the End? Or if one is already made, then I would definitely like to use it for that mod. Otherwise, thanks for the awesome mod.

"Dark Ages" compatible with "Better UI Scaling"?

@ Yankas

Some thing is strange with your install. Bowmen are numbered at 50 in Dark Ages. Basically I halved all the MaA numbers. If it was 100, now is 50, if it was 50, now it is 25 and if it was 25, now it is 13.

I noticed that cultural retinues like Huscarl and Vigmen have size of 50, while the regular versions like Bowmen are still at a 100.

I was just wondering if this is intended, or if some other mod is overwriting some changes here, which really shouldn't be the case since dark ages is at the bottom of my load order.

@Captain Smollett

Good catch! An event with improved effect description is always a better event. Was not aware of the syntax. Thx!

events/darkages_swap_traits.txt events should use add_trait_force_tooltip for adding opposing trait in option c so you could actually see the effect in-game

Ahhh, i didnt look there, oops, ok then, fair enough, although i still think it kind of ruins funerals a lot. Maybe feasts too? But i didnt click them much so i can't tell. Hunts are surprisingly fine though.

@Captain Smollett

Check file \common\activities\activity_types\hunt.txt . You'll see the only difference between vanilla and Dark Ages is the parameter "chance_of_no_event". The same goes for every other activity implemented by Paradox.

@Cardolam i see you may have done it for grand activities and funeral, but not for hunts or feasts and judging by my experience with hunts you didnt change event frequency there.

@ Captain Smollett

I did reduce the number of events by the same amount for all activities. Also edited out bonus for them. But funerals seemed to me quite unbalanced, even by Paradox standards.

@Dr.Vaфе!ь

Investing on grandeur is one of the many strategies available to you. Pick another path if it is far from good for your case. You can also avoid assembling the "Estates of the Realm"... for a "price" of course. As for vassal taxes, their nerf was done because they were so abusable by Admin Govs.

@Cardolam

Thank you for reply, I understand playing wide is very difficult task. What the point then to play as admin gov. if the whole point of admin is low individual power but high amount of vassals.
All Kings spend almost zero gold to sustain required minimum grandeur, they simply cannot afford it. Even the Byzantine empire falling apart because dukes breaking up, leading count rank vassals ending.
I can still play as duke, spend almost none on grandeur and get my 1-2gold from 1-3 vassals, I don't have to deal with powerful whiny vassals because all of them are counts and I get full levy.
As Emperor I deal with very powerful factions, sinking a lot of gold on "Estates of Realm" and grandeur, no levy contribution, no tax contribution. Maybe vassal taxes game rule has to be somewhat relaxed for admin govs.

@Cardolam sure, but why didnt you nerf the other activities then? You still get plenty of event spam in hunts and feasts...

@ Captain Smollett

1 - Done. Thx!
2 - Is not going to fly as besides exhausting the limited number of events pretty quickly, I don't like at all the frequency of them in vanilla. I am pretty confortable with the present odds. I just nerfed the effects of the funeral events.
3 - I was not aware of that bonus. Yes, the bonus will be lowered. Thx!

As for your other comments about Dread, just imagine what you can accomplish intimidating everyone around with 100 Dread... cash cow, prestige cow, piety cow, renown cow, intimidating into never joining factions...you name it... but yes, it is a risky way of life!

@Riaman

Yes, you are very good deleting that decision. That's a clean and neat procedure.

is it okay if I delete, darkages_enforce_a_purge_decision from darkages_decision.txt. I hate the unnecessarily edgy event, and one of my vassal did it thrice in his lifetime. I love thhis mod and added difficulties but I have to say that one decision is pure crap.

Also with dread now being kind of risky, maybe spymaster position should not give 30 baseline dread?.. Or give smth else, as this is a very weak "bonus" if i can even call it that as it also effectively lowers opinion of your court and vassals by -15 and rolls additonal deaths due to dread.... And also torturer tree! Like.... all of it. I dont even know if i want -1000% dread decay, it will nuke opinion of everyone with me as my dread will be basically permanently at 100 (so, -50 opinion with everyone relevant) with max chances of dying to it.... Maybe torturer trait could lower the death roll chances? Or some perk in torturer tree, or something else, idk.
I dont think dread is underpowered or anything, or at least i dont have enough experience to conclude if it is or isnt, but i think i can say that those 2 things need to be re-checked with "new" dread in mind....

im also starting to regret not starting a discussion out of my thoughts and just dumping it all in the comments

Im here yet again with more things to say:
1. Un-named outcome got fixed, but you need to remove the /n in the end of success/failure loc strings, if i could send a picture i would, but you can just trigger any of the events where you use it via debug console and see that that line break causes funkiness with colon being in its own line alone... it's weird

2. You nuked chances of events on funerals way too hard. I get 1-2 events per funeral and it's really sad. I see you are overwriting funeral events too, why not just nerf whatever you think is too powerful in the events themsevles and keep the chances of them happening the same? Regardless, i think chance_to_happen in ce1_funeral_on_actions.txt should be semireverted to at least 50%. Ideally you would just nerf OP events themselves and revert the chance back to 100, but keeping things as they are rn is just nasty, getting no events on funerals is just not fun IMO, they're also just not worth it now at all.

@ Captain Smollett

Yep.

Ah, so it was meant to be not colored? Ok then.

@ Captain Smollett

Sure. Exactly like the other "flavour titles" have been so far. Check culture_titles_l_english, lines 1209 and below.

Uhh... it seems like Marquess isnt colored at all now..

Version 2.21 (18/07/2025)


- Now the AI only checks for Forging Heir once every 10 years (was 5 years)
- Landless Contracts Schemes now have a maximum success chance of 95% (is 100% in vanilla)
- Talented Courtiers can only be generated at game start if playing with a Landed Character
- Fixed 14 modifiers to the "Call Ally" interaction that were not showing their values(#)
- Fixed 28 instances where hidden probabilities in random lists were not given descriptions(#)
- Fixed color problem of Marquess title(#)
- Seeking Higher Education through decision now works(#)
- Updated all language files (*)



(#) - Thanks to @Captain Smollett for these well reported and better spotted long standing bugs
(*) - The language displayed is always English except for Spanish that has now an updated internal translation in Dark Ages. There are submods for Spanish, Polish, German, Chinese and Russian translations. I don't have a clue how update they are

bro its totally my fault i put the rules how i like them but i mustve missed the delayed genetics. thank you so much for the help.

@HenriSerra

Pure Blooded appears immediately because it is not considered a genetic trait in Dark Ages, otherwise it would be hidden too. If you experienced immediate genetic traits upon birth before with Dark Ages, you had the "Delayed Genetics" game rule disabled (it is enabled by default).

@ Kalashnikov

Nobody stated it is incompatible yet. Try loading Dark Ages last in order (thus after FE and everything else) and if it doesn't work, try loading it before FE.

@Cardolam thing is maybe my game was always different because both with vanilla or with mods traits like genius, herculean and beautifull always appeared for the start when born. also fecund and oure blood. now for some reason pure blood is the only one that shows up and thats because i changed the value to 100 if both parents have it thats all. i now have to play without dark ages because theres is no inheritable traits showing up. thats why i asked if you changed anything in regard of inheritable traits any value or something. but thanks for the help anyway

@Dr.Vaфе!ь

Sure, Dark Ages curbs unmanegeable polities from existing. I am pretty sure you can streamline your Realm in terms fo vassals, mostly having Kings, some Dukes and some counts as vassals. My sugestion is for you to organize your Realm and distribute vassals among the your dejure polities, instead of centralizing everything on yourself. If you are an empreor you should have Kingdom titles mostly as vassals. If you are a King your vassals should be based on your Dukes and if you are a Duke based on your Counts. Having direct vassals half a world away is not good planning and should noit be rewarded.

@Captain Smollett

Thank you for your opinions. There are some that I find to the point (cutting long tooltips in decisions, fe) and other less so (removing the effects on options that are dependent on different variables, fe). They are there for the player to gauge his/her chances of being successful.

@ HenriSerra

I didn't change Pure Blooded in any way or form. Now as you have played the mod for some time and if using standard rules, you are probably aware inheritable traits don't show up immediately, instead manifesting themselves along childhood.

I've run into problem. Doing Slavia run and I have a lot of vassals, forced to switch to admin government type to sustain such huge amount of vassals.( 97 of max 124 ). But they don't pay vassal taxes at all, it is around 2 gold per month, without the mod it is 32 per month. I simply cannot sustain the empire because game forces me to spend maximum on royal court grandeur.

@Cardolam ive been having problems with the inheritable traits. now when both parents have genius for example the kid still isnt getting it. the only thing i changed was the pure blood files so that if both parents have it it will get inherited value at 100. so when a kid is born it only shows pure blood trait. this is something new since ive been using your mod for some time and there werent any problems. did you change something on that regard or can you help me with that?
ive already test and it is the dark ages mod causing this problem.

@Cardolam fair enough, although the fact that you have to explain it to me kind of implies that it is not communicated well enough in game....
Also did u read through the 2 part big comment? you didnt say anything about that

And while im here - alliances are still extremely abusable (especially ones through betrothals). "Desires alliance" specifically i think has to be nerfed because why would random indian ruler 3 times my size (both realm and army wise) want an alliance with a duke on an island across the ocean (socotra)? And maybe some penalty for calling in an ally and then breaking betrothal through which the alliance was attained has to be added? Or just acceptance of betrothals with alliances from player specifically should be lowered or smth, because that's just nasty.

@Captain Smollett

Fixed all instances (where 28) where hidden probabilities were not given descriptions. Many thanks!

Colour encoding: Fixed the Marquess... I think. Thanks!

Higher Education: Indeed, there was a problem with the central event. Thank you!

Bodyguards are working. They might get killed but improve your chances of survival in the events that include provision for them. The chances are 25% lower than base for 1 bodyguard and 40% lower than base for 2 bodyguards. Notice the same event has different base chances of survival each time it fires.

AI struggling... it already has enough crutches. Dark Ages doesn't implement anything special for any timeline.

Ok actual last thing i want to criticise (i have a lot of thoughts on the mod despite playing it only twice, one of the times being like a year ago. That's what being a modder does to a mf...). No hard feelings, but those things beyond bother me in the mod, so i have to point them out.

I am not a fan of putting actual effect info into flavour text which you seem to be doing a lot of. Putting actual relevant info into decisions description just messes with my brain. Vanilla game never does that, it would opt for a custom tooltip in the effects summary instead, which is why the way you do it feels kind of wonky. I understand if you dont want to disclose all the effects of decisions, but you already mention them in the flavour text - i would rather see that be mentioned in the effects, and flavor text being left for flavor only.

split due to 1000 characters limit, see the comment below.

You also seem to never use Game concepts or icons in the text, which makes it really hard to read to pick relevant info out of, game concepts not just allow the player to hover over them and see what they refer to, but also make the words themselves stand out as they become light blue. And icons are... icons, pretty obvious.

I would also suggest being less verbose in explaining what influences outcomes, especially since you're not showing chances anyways, so why would i need to know what influences them in such detail if i dont know the chances in the first place? I think a simple "Outcome is influenced by your %STAT%, education and relevant/kind/evil/greedy/whatever traits" would do just fine for most of the instances.

Most of those are, however, opinions, and you are free to reject them, especially since changing all that would require you to rewrite a good chunk of the loc, but i think a lot of people would appreciate clearer distinction between effects and flavor at least.

Oh and another couple of things:
Error log seems to complain about darkages_higher_education.txt a lot, seems like you missed a bracket somewhere
Council positions give a very little lifestyle XP mult (+15% for being a steward of a king). Considering skills themselves give +5% per point, it's extremely low. Same with dynastic legacies. Same with education (except it gives skills too so maybe it's fine that way?)
Bodyguards.... might not do anything in your death events? Like... i get 30% chance to die and then also my bodyguard gets 50% chance to die.... that might not be intentional? Shouldnt he be dying first at the very least? And the chances didnt seem to be massively lowered either, so idk if it just doesnt work or if it just doesnt communicate that it works much

And lastly AI seems to struggle a lot on 867 start.....

@Cardolam np, i would also raise the penalties for that a bit, just -5 for greedy trait is kind of low, especially as a player-only penalty.

Another buggy thing i want to report on is that some events with random_list's and hidden chances display "un-named outcome" in purple. I saw at least two, but i dont remember what the second one was. The first one is Reverse of the Coin, second option (smth about theological discussions) displays "un-named outcome" for both of the effects.

And another thing, this is probably some color encoding missing closing, but being a Marquess made concil invitation unreadable coz it painted all the text starting with Marquess light blue (you can guess how readable it is on a light-yellow background)

@ Captain Smollett

You are absolutely right on the allies' calling. Solved 14 such instances for tomorrow's version. Sorry for the misinformation and thanks for the report.
As for the "Strange Lack of Vigour" event, I prefer other way to implement how potentially critical events should be presented.

@Cardolam character_interactions\00_alliance.txt line 603, im pretty sure it's that one.

And for the illness event - i think a toast is attention-catching enough, and it's not like you can do anything about said illness anyways, so euhhh.. you do you i guess.

@Captain Smollett

- "Your Ally is Greedy" has nothing to do with Dark Ages.

- "Strange lack of vigour", No. It happens once every 10 years on average, so, not that common. Besides, I would never bury an event that potencially might lead to death under notifications.

Also could you please turn the "strange lack of vigor" into a notification instead of it being a full blown event? Its really annoying and its not like it gives you any options anyways, It's double as annoying coz it gets removed 3 months later with another event popping out obstructing the screen and pausing the game...

Is it intentional that "your ally is greedy" does not come with a number in the tooltip for calling allies? It's not that hard to deduce by how much it reduces acceptance anyways, it's bizzare that it's not tooltipped especially since there're modifiers somewhere in the game that already have "[recipient] greed: -X" localised for them, you could just take that (i think you can find it in some mpo interactions)

@Cardolam, thank you so much. I actually tried to delete the titleformatting.gui before and that only partially solved the problem, creating another one :)

I'll delete both, then.

Again, thank you and keep up with the amazing work!

@mairao

There's no way to code a game rule for that. You can however edit the Dark Ages mod files for that. It is very simple.

1) Open the folder gui. Delete the only file there (titleformatting.gui). You can delete the folder.
2) Open the folder localization\[LANGUAGE]. Delete the file culture_titles_[LANGUAGE].yml.
3) Done.

Glad you are enjoying Dark Ages!

First of all, I'd like to thank you for this incredible mod. After 1000 hours of CK3, I added Dark Ages to my mod list and it's been such a refreshing experience. It makes the game incredibly more challenging, especially when roleplaying.

That said, there is one thing I don't like about this mod, which is the colored text for titles. And the biggest issue for me is that I sometimes struggle to read some of the text because of the poor contrast with the background. Is there a way to remove those colors from the text? Can a game rule be introduced or can I edit a file to get vanilla text colors back?

Again, thank you so much for all the work put into this great mod!

thanks so much for the link!

@ mwinedl

CE needs a compatch, yes. Otherwise you either forfeit the changes made to traditions and innovations from one of the mods. I strongly suggest you keep the innovations from Dark Ages as a few of them are totally unbalanced in vanilla.

I have no idea about the effectiveness or accuracy of the third party compatch you mention but I would say it is a very easy one to pull off.

Thanks for your reply Cardolam. Do both mods (Dark Ages and Culture Expanded) work together well or is there a compatch requested (I see there is a compatch mod available, not made by you though)

@Vladimir Lenin

Can't be defined by game rule.
One of my mods does exactly that. Just load it after Dark Ages, so it should come last in your mod's list.

Get it here

Glad you are enjoying!

hey can you make a game rule to not reduce men-in-arms, because i've been trying to play with Cultural Armies II and i end up 2 sets of men-in-arms types, presumably because you delete vanilla ones and add new units that have 50 men instead of 100 and other mods changing men-in-arms do the same. You could improve compatibility by just adding one game rule. But overall a very nice mod, its always must-have for my games

Version 2.20 (11/07/2025)


- Nerfed Smithies (!)
- Nerfed Barracks (!)
- Now the Just trait subtracts 25% from the chance of the AI to enact the Forge Heir decision
- Now the Arbitrary trait adds 25% to the chance of the AI to enact the Forge Heir decision
- Small changes of maximum and minimum duration of Mercenary contracts
- Now players can hire Mercenaries if they are at most in debt of 36 months
- Adopted the new vanilla value of Damage for Knights of 50. Was 70, down from the 100 in previous vanilla versions
- Updated all language files (*)



(!) - Addressed specifically the senseless, unbalanced bonuses to maximum MAA regiments
(*) - The language displayed is always English except for Spanish that has now an updated internal translation in Dark Ages. There are submods for Spanish, Polish, German, Chinese and Russian translations. I don't have a clue how update they are

@FlamingTerminator

I recommend Dark Ages to be loaded last in that case as it is the most complex mod and needs to overwrite any other stuff that might be conflicting.

i admit i could be wrong, but i treated More Bookmarks+ like a overhaul, so i loaded it after Dark Age's, i don't recall any issues from that