Features

• Vassals and rulers receive titles prefixing their names (e.g., Duke Aldric), which can be seen throughout the game
• Each title has a cultural variant (e.g., Jarl Hakon)
• Each title has a gender variant (e.g., Emir/Emira or Count/Countess)
• Vassal titles are distributed by ranking of prominence within their kingdom (3 vassal tiers, 1 ruler tier)
• Spouses of titled nobles also receive an appropriate title
• Titles are fully customizable, and custom cultures' titles may be easily added
• Party names reflect the party leader's titled name, making them much easier to recognize on-map
• When titled nobles die, their title persists forever (unless you remove the mod)
• Provides instant context upon the degree of importance of a noble
• Can be freely added to an existing campaign
• Worry-free removal from a campaign with no special steps required (all traces of the mod will vanish)
  

Compatibility

Noble Titles plays well with others:

• No external dependencies
• As mentioned above, worry-free addition and removal to and from existing savegames
• If your game has custom cultures in it, the mod will gracefully fallback to defaults
• Only one possible (soft) incompatibility: any mods that manipulate/replace existing characters' names. As far as I know, the one and only instance of this is Detailed Character Creation, as it allows you to rename characters. This is perfectly fine to use, but note: if the character you're renaming has a title, just don't mess with the title prefix of the name (modify the name itself as you please), and all will be well.
  

Prerequisites

Noble Titles works right out of the box: it has no external dependencies. However, it does very lightly employ Harmony, and while Harmony is already packaged with Noble Titles, here's a pro-tip:

In the long run, you'll encounter fewer compatibility issues for any mod which uses Harmony -- practically all of them -- if you install the centralized Harmony mod and put it at the very top of your mod list. Using the centralized version of Harmony in such a manner will ensure that the game is always using the correct version.

Title Listing

Note that we strove to maintain approximately the same English-accessibility to the cultural titles as TaleWorlds does in general throughout the game. Credit goes to BigPharma for curating all of these title designations both for a reasonable degree of "represented cultures" accuracy and gameplay considerations.



How It Works

Noble Titles assigns vassals and rulers one of 4 title ranks. Internally, these ranks are denoted Baron, Count, Duke, and King. Before applying a title to a character, it's translated to a gender- and culture-specific title according to the definitions in the titles.json file, which you may freely customize (see the Customization section).

The culture of the kingdom to which the character belongs is used for cultural titles. Thus, if you're a Sturgian by birth but have sworn fealty to Aserai, you'll be an Emir instead of a Jarl.

If a titled noble's spouse is without their own distinct title, the spouse will gain the title's gender-translated form. E.g., in Vlandia, a Duke's wife is a Duchess.

Updates to noble titles due to status changes are evaluated daily, so there will be a minimal delay before receiving an expected title change. In the future, many types of status changes will be reflected immediately.

Determination of Title Rank

All non-mercenary vassals in a kingdom are ranked by "fief score" with a tie-breaker on their clan's renown. The fief score is a sum of their owned fiefs, where a town counts for 3 castles. In short, they are ranked by prominence.

1. Baron-tier vassals are those with a fief score less than 3, including the unlanded.
2. Count-tier vassals are the lower two-thirds of the remaining, non-Baron vassals.
3. Duke-tier vassals are the remaining upper third of vassals (if any).
4. King-tier is always reserved for the kingdom's ruler.

Issues

TaleWorlds seems to be fine with referring to all nobles by their first name only. However, in some very rare instances in the game's text specifically when referring to faction leaders, a ruler title is added in front of their name. Since Noble Titles stores characters' title prefix directly in their name, this means you may rarely see something like "Emperor Emperor Garios" in a conversation.

I was keen on addressing all of the affected game texts to remove the redundant title, but frustratingly, vanilla game text for the English language apparently cannot be overridden by mods (unless the code which uses it is replaced entirely). Extreme hacks that might prove incompatible with other mods would be necessary to circumvent this shortcoming.

As such, I decided that the immersive value-add from this mod -- particularly in the simple and highly-compatible form that it is -- still far, far outweighed the suboptimality of players potentially seeing a redundant text string as described once in a great while.

Customization

You may customize all title designations as well as add support for custom cultures by editing the titles.json file. This file is located just inside of the installed mod's folder (<game folder>/Modules/NobleTitles/titles.json). If you've read the How It Works section, the file structure should be fairly obvious. Here's a list of things to be sure to do in order to stay out of trouble (i.e., to avoid an exception / crash while loading the game).

• All field names are case-sensitive.
• A culture named default must always be defined. This is the fallback for any other cultures that aren't defined in the file.
• Each defined culture must have an entry for King, Duke, Count, and Baron.
• All title entries must have a Male field. However, if the Female field is left undefined, it will default to be the same as the Male field (but not in reverse).
• Careful not to screw up the JSON syntax. A syntax-highlighting text editor is recommended.
  

Final Notes

If you appreciate Noble Titles, then please do remember to endorse it! Additionally, you might be interested in my other mods:

• Houses of Calradia, which solves AI marriage and prevents AI clan extinction. A must-have for Pacemaker users.
• Pacemaker, which gives you powerful, fine-grained control over the campaign timescale.
  

As with all of my projects, quality contributions and collaboration are very welcome, but even if you just want to browse the source code for Noble Titles, you may do so via its GitHub repository:

https://github.com/zijistark/NobleTitles