1) Cannons. The Mongol Empire was significant not only for conquering half the CK2 map, but also for introducing cannons to it from China, with Islamic usage picking up in the late 13th century, and in Europe, starting from Iberia where designs were copied from the Moors who learnt them from the Mamluks, only a few decades after. They had a number of significant affects on warfare in the era, the main one being that the castle or fortress was no longer offered the sanctity it once had. Many academics suggest that the cannon was partly responsible for the death of feudalism, because local lords could no longer defy central administration safe in the knowledge that even very large armies struggled to take castles, and instead had to be wary of a brand new weapon so expensive usually only royal armies could afford their use. Click to expand...

2) Naval warfare. Early on, this mostly it consists of grappling your ship to another so your men could board, so this could be as simple as just allowing armies in transport ships in the same sea zone to fight. By the early 14th century, the first recorded use of artillery on ships begins, and so in the last ~150 years of the game, naval warfare could become much more significant. Click to expand...

3) Cadet dynasties. Almost everyone wants these, not much more to say. Click to expand...

4) Wills - allowing us to specify who gets what under primogeniture as long as each person's inheritance adds up to a particular score. Click to expand...

5) An expanded diplomacy system. For example, offering someone a marriage to come to our court, or being willing to pay the AI a dowry of a county in return for extra +++ towards a marriage. Click to expand...

6) Allow retinues to rebel. The game gets waaay too safe once you have retinues. If you had to appoint a certain amount of generals per retinues, and these generals got "temporary" titles that allowed them to rebel and plot against you, you'd make the game a lot more intriguing and also help balance out the Byzantines. Click to expand...

7) Better factions and large empire management. Generally speaking, I think using coalitions is the wrong way about it. Instead, I want vassals to be more uppity. The new temporary title all-under-one-liege mechanic sucks and leads to all revolts being steamed easily. Vassals which have no contiguous connection to your territory are totally faithful, and in general everyone is much too loyal. Click to expand...

8) Better culture mechanics. Northern Italy needs to stop going German. Click to expand...

Probably would be a fun thing to have. I just started playing recently and was thinking of this myself -- how having a lot of castles really helps slow down sieges and provide more troops, but in the long term these wouldn't be as useful because someone who can afford to field cannons would crush them. Though with mercenaries and retinues, gold and cities already seem to be ideal.I've actually been enjoying the lack of naval encounters, though I mainly have EU2 experience, where you had to deal with crazy attrition and a single ship could repeatedly attack to stop you from landing troops. And neither of those things applied to the AI, so it mainly was just a player-based annoyance. I think the issue is that navies are primarily a way of transporting ground troops, but an AI can't really utilize them intelligently unless they can just use them as a point A -> point B thing like they already are.Like the first day I played this I was wondering why House Burgundy had no relation to the Capets. Have to be careful with this though, I think, because the dynasty mechanics run so deep in everything else. Done right, it'd be an ideal replacement for the current standard/matrilineal marriage system, which wasn't really a thing in reality.This was another immediately obvious thing to add from the perspective of a fairly-new player. Could have permanent opinion modifiers on succession as well, based on if the other characters think what they got was fair. Which could be different based on line of succession as well -- a firstborn would desire more titles/land, whereas others further down the line would want a more even distribution.Would need to have caps and stuff. Don't want to just drag heir to the HRE over matrilinearlly because you threw a few thousand gold at him.Yeah, the big issue with keeping a standing army in this period is that the troops are going to develop more loyalty to their generals than to you. And if you command them directly there's still a potential threat in keeping tons of armed men around you at all times, what if someone bribes them? The other big issues with standing armies are that people don't want to remain part of an army forever, and civilians don't like the control and abuses it generates.Not sure I have any constructive input on this. But I will say my current approach is just to send the spymaster around to troublesome vassals and they quickly agree to avoid factions. But even factions seem a bit silly, they basically just represent a single vassal's unhappiness and don't tend to garner much support. What I've read about factions in CK2+ sounds more interesting. They should be kinda common associations that can damage you if you ignore them, or help you if you work with them -- not just some lord saying "I want to steal such-and-such title/land" until they're discouraged from it. Might be worth looking at Tropico 3/4's faction system, in a number of cases pleasing one of them meant displeasing another, and earning the support of the more powerful ones could be helpful to maintaing your own power (though it suffered in that certain factions were always mor.AFAIK, province culture changes to that of a neighboring all at once via random silent events or something, based on ruler stewardship, correct? Culture change should probably be more of a deliberate, gradual process, that requires diversion of resources from other pursuits. The ideal is probably to have percentage culture, but even then most places historically don't undergo anything resembling a true culture change unless it's forced.