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    Crusader Kings III

    Game » consists of 9 releases. Released Sep 01, 2020

    The third game in the acclaimed Crusader Kings series.

    What's your opinion on CK3? Positives or Negatives? Any good stories?

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    rramo010

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    Hey duders. Since the other post was made pre-release of the game I decided to start a new one. How are you all feeling about the game so far? I thought this one was way easier to get into, and I think the tutorial did a pretty decent job of explaining the most important concepts.

    I think the new Decisions tab really revolutionized the game making it a lot easier knowing what you can do, and what needs to be done. When things went bad for me in CK2, I always had to look up a guide or youtube video.

    RIght now I'm playing as the Piast Dynasty and I just created the Kingdom of Poland. It feels really good starting as small High Chiefdom and expanding across central Europe. My goal is to demount the pope and install my own religion that dominates all of Europe, but I keep getting sidelined by the warring factions in East Francia and my own deceitful sons that all are strong warriors but horrible leaders.

    I'm hoping that Alex does a Quick look and gets into this game because I'd like to hear his take. What do yall think?

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    BaneFireLord

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    I'm only about two hours in so I can't speak much to the gameplay yet but the thing that has struck me the most so far (as someone who dumped ~150 hours into CK2) is how smooth, snappy and visually pleasing everything is, from the interface to the character detail to the map design. The rendering of the world map as a painterly medieval drawing is a huge step up from the utilitarian "yo it's a map" of CK2 and EUIV and it's quite striking. If the gameplay is similarly strong, I don't see myself going back to CK2 any time soon, if ever.

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    Atlas

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    Apologies for incoming mountain of text, but it's 12:45am and I saw Tenet this evening so I'm too exhausted to edit it.

    I have played Crusader Kings II on Steam for nearly 1,400 hours - the only game I have logged more time with is Sid Meier's Civilization V. It's one of my all-time favourite games, and I wrote a blog post on this 'ere website back in 2012 - it was called "Why CKII is the GOTY, and Why You're All Assholes". That was needlessly hyperbolic and inflammatory, obviously, as I did also really love XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but I thought it was a weak year in a lot of ways and thought The Walking Dead Telltale series was quite overrated. I stuck with CKII through the expansions to gameplay, coming back to it for another hundred hours or so every 6-12 months. I adore CKII, maybe as much as it's possible for me to adore a game.

    So, CK3 then. My expectations weren't spectacularly high, because I've got a habit of disliking sequels to some of my most played games (Civ 5 is a masterpiece, and Civ 6 is toilets, see also for XCOM-XCOM2). That said, I think I liked Imperator Rome a lot more than some Paradox fans did, even though I only ever had fun playing as Rome and following the linear, obvious path set out by the game. It came nowhere close to matching the time I sunk into Stellaris, which was about 500 hours, let alone CKII.

    I've played 15 hours of CK3 so far, following on from the tutorial and trying to build a realm starting in Ireland, which has always been considered CK "easy mode" but to be honest was always one of my favourite go-to ways to play CKII. I got up to the early 13th century after starting in 1066.

    I think the game is phenomenal, and I think it also needs some pretty major re-balancing, and some issues definitely need to be ironed out. It's crazy how different the pace and progression of the game feels compared to CKII, and the powers that unlocked by climbing the tech tree are much more impactful than before. I think a lot of the major mechanical changes are positive. I like that Stress encourages you to roleplay by punishing you for taking actions that are against your character's nature. I think using Renown as a means of providing dynasty-boosting buffs is kinda silly but also pretty awesome.

    My biggest pet peeve, and I know I'm not alone in this, is how hard they've made it to keep a realm together with succession laws. Partition is historically quite accurate, and creates a bunch of dynamic challenges, but the way I played CK2 was to find the quickest and easiest way to get rid of Gavelkind and get all of my titles, or at least the biggest ones, onto my favourite heir. I just never found Gavelkind fun or interesting, and the fact that it's not only the default starting point for pretty much every realm but that it requires a LOT of investment in certain ideas/fascinations to change, is a real pain in the arse.

    And in the game I've been playing, I've run into an issue that I don't know how to resolve, because I don't know if it's a bug or not. I'm the King of Ireland and King of Scotland. Both kingdoms have partial partition elective tanistry succession, which means the lords of each kingdom vote for who should become king and I lose some small, not terribly important titles on succession. What's happened is that I want my son to inherit, because he's got good stats and he has TWO sons who are geniuses, but the game won't let him inherit my titles. I choose him as my elected heir for both kingdoms and my vassals like him, and the game says that he's in-line to inherit all my important titles - and then I actually die (at age 85 after ruling for 60 years BTW - thanks to the Body focus lifestyle perk tree for that), and another relative gets Ireland and my son gets Scotland. My main goal has been to create a unified Britannia empire and this event basically destroys 50% of the progress I've made, which I'm pretty pissed off about. And despite me trying numerous different things and the game still saying my son is going to inherit everything, the same thing happens - my realm is split again.

    Smaller stuff: I think the rewards for the lifestyle trees need major rebalancing, as some of them feel totally game-changing and some just feel really minor. In theory, I like that the game incentivises giving council positions to powerful vassals, and punishing you for not doing so, but in reality once your realm reaches a certain size you'll end up with way too many vassals who want a seat at the council and only four seats to go round. Unless you give multiple duchy-level titles to the same vassal, which is a recipe for a civil war once you have a falling out with said vassal.

    Religion, at least Christianity starting in 1066, seems extremely volatile. We had two Crusades, both of which were won by Christians and resulted in members of my dynasty becoming kings, but they didn't really achieve much long-term gain. Heresies appear often and are very powerful, and you don't have the same tools to fight them that you did in CK2. Several major rulers of kingdoms in Christian Europe converted to heresies without much negative consequence.

    And I know it's a relatively small thing, but playing as a merchant republic was one of my favourite ways to play CK2, and I'm a little bummed that it's not in the base version of CK3. I'm sure they'll add it later, and there are so many ways to play the game at launch that it's hard to feel too sore about it.

    I know my list of complaints was longer than my positives, but that's mostly because of the problem I've encountered in my main game. I think there's huge potential for them to build on this game to the point where it becomes just as big and just as special as CK2, but I think their starting point is pretty great, especially with the improvements they've made to accessibility and how clean the presentation is.

    It will almost certainly be my GOTY, even though I still need to play DOOM Eternal and I really loved Super Mega Baseball 3. But it's Crusader Kings, and it's just so much my jam it's not even funny.

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    clagnaught

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    I'm maybe 10 hours into my first "for real" game. I went through the tutorial, started my first game which went out awry, partially because some of the tutorial just didn't quite click with me yet, and then abandoned that save for a second.

    So far I'm really enjoying it. It feels like there are some things I'm not quite getting. First, I'm wondering if I'm playing the game too slowly. Is it normal to be on one character for so long? How long is a single play through anyways?

    Second, is the development super slow in the early game or does everything just take forever? (I went with the earliest time period, which I think is tribal?) For example, I have an unreformed religion. I'm at about 1,200 piety, and the things I want to reform cost about 300. However, after I select it, the cost for some reason jumps up to around 3,000. I have no idea why it jumps up so high. I'm not sure if I'm missing something or if reforming a religion is an undertaking that takes multiple generations to be able to do so. It's sort of like that for everything. I'm getting about 3 gold a month, so projects that cost 500 gold just seems ludicrous right now. Not sure if it's because those projects are so big that you need to save up decades before you can do them (and hope you don't need that gold for anything else) or if I need to focus as much as I can on building farms and whatnot to then to the point where I'm getting like 10 to 20 gold a month. I'm still really enjoying the game, but I'm just not sure if this is the pace, if I'm doing something wrong, or if progression compounds over time, where early on 100 gold is a ton, but a century or two later it becomes more manageable.

    In terms of my story so far:

    At the start of the game, I had four sons and one daughter. I had too many powerful vassals that I didn't know what to do with them. One of them was one of my sons. He was showing up as a murderer (although I wasn't really sure who he killed), but I kind of let it slide. Tonight, he killed my first son, who happened to be my heir, which in turn made him the new heir. My head canon is the second son was tired of not having a place on the council or any real power, so he killed the heir to put himself in power. I imagined my character had a code where if anybody touched his family, that person would die. So I arrested my second son and executed him. This threw the line of succession out of whack. Now my heir is a grandson halfway across the world, whose father is not in my house at all.

    Since then, my older brother--who I had my strongest alliance with--died. My third son also died and my newborn immediately got sick, caught pneumonia, and died. So I went from having almost 6 siblings to 2. Also, during that time, my military conquests became less fruitful. I was on the verge of winning one war, but so many things kept pulling me away from enemy territory. Eventually the math didn't work out and I had to call a white peace for the first time. Overall, things aren't looking too great in my kingdom and I'm honestly not sure if my character will die in battle, be assassinated by somebody else, keep having nervous breakdowns, or what.

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    clagnaught

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    #5  Edited By clagnaught

    So I'm about to abandon my first game. I have 5 gold and get 0.2 gold per month. I have 200 levies, which is not enough to do anything. For example, my neighbor declared war on me, but they had basically 50 levies. However, their castles had over 200 defense, which meant I couldn't capture them. Even seemingly defeat every levy, there was no way to win the war. I had to wait until their opinion ticked down enough to call a white peace like 3 years later. And that is my weak enemy. Just about everybody else could squash me.

    With the low gold, I can't do anything. I'm also at the point where if I lose one more person, I can't fill my council. I think I ran a bug, because I tried to appoint somebody to a different position, but I can't for some reason. So I ended up firing them and now they can't do anything in my court.

    This is not to say I dislike what happened. It was a good story / experience. However, I have no idea how I can turn this around. I know I made some new player mistakes during this game, so that probably didn't help my current situation at all.

    I'm going to fast forward and see if I something can just take me out of my misery. If not, I'll just make a new game, since I would have to play for another 40 years just to save up enough gold build a crappy barracks.

    Edit:

    Yep, just fast forwarded. Entered two more wars I couldn't win, so I surrendered both times and lost everything.

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    nateandrews

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    @theoriginalatlas: I’m new to Crusader Kings and the succession stuff has been the most difficult aspect to wrap my head around. Claims seem to come out of nowhere and the political landscape is constantly shifting due to the deaths of rulers and vassals waging war. It’s a lot of keep track of and once in a while the game will pull the political rug out from under you with no real explanation. I’ve been burned a couple times too!

    Speaking of Crusades, I just lost my first one terribly after forming a gender-equal religion and creeping it into Scotland (playing as Ireland). Unsurprisingly I had pissed off the entirety of Western Europe with my radical teachings and so they absolutely swept me out of there with very little contest.

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    dooz

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    @nateandrews: I'm not new and the claims can still be difficult to keep track of, especially during the tribal era with confederate partition. It helps to change the succession laws as quickly as possible to favor your eldest (I know, easier said than done).

    I've found that I enjoy the game more when I realized that I won't always or even often succeed and setbacks are just a part of the story.

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    nateandrews

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    @dooz: Crisis management has been one of my favorite things to do in the game. I love when a plan mostly succeeds but then is challenged by something, or when it gets most of the way there but a sudden intervention by a third party throws everything off. The lack of a win condition allows for so much creativity and replayability in that regard.

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    Atlas

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    Admission: I've been bouncing off this game pretty hard the past couple of days.

    I'm coming to terms with the fact that some of the core design decisions of CK3 have pushed the game in a direction of play that I struggle with, but which loads of people like - intrigue, crisis, drama, chaos. It's a design philosophy that makes the game a better anecdote generator, but a worse empire-building game. I have tried, on numerous attempts, to play this game as an empire-building simulator, and failed. And by "failed", I don't mean I got an actual Game Over because I controlled no land; I mean "failed" because I abandoned the save.

    I'm bad at picking up the pieces when things go wrong. I'm bad at dealing with being unlucky. The succession laws in the early game are maddening to me, and I feel like I'm banging my head against problems that don't have solutions - they actually do have solutions, but they often involve becoming a tyrant, a murdering psychopath, or both, and that's just not how I've been wanting to play the game.

    This is a "me" problem, and it's come up before. When I find a game like this that I really love, I sometimes find myself finding one line, one path that I like to take and following it, and bailing early when things go wrong. It happened with Civ 5; Egypt was my favourite civ, and I always built a tall civilisation that built tons of Wonders - if someone beat me to Great Library, I was done. It happened in Stellaris - pacifist expansionist, try to expand quickly with minimal investment in military and quit if bottle-necked or invaded. And it's happening with CK3 - I want to try all the different paths and possibilities because I know there's fun to be had, but I got into a pattern with CK2 of just starting in Ireland and doing the usual build-a-big-Britannia-empire thing, and I'm tempted to do it with CK3 except it's harder and more annoying because Insular Christianity, the succession chaos, and the OP Vikings in the 867 start.

    I love this game, I really do. I've been extremely depressed and very much not sleeping well recently, so maybe I'm just very tired. But I think I'll take a break for a bit. I had already taken a pretty extended break to power through Horizon: Zero Dawn, so maybe I need another one or two of those. I might install DOOM Eternal, or Dishonored 2, or play more Sims 4, or maybe dive back into Mount & Blade 2 and see how much it's changed since launch. But trust me, I will be back.

    Final note: one of my favourite starts in CK2 was the last independent Zoroastrian duchy in Persia, which was Dihistan, and rebuilding the Persian Empire of antiquity and becoming the Saoshyant. I don't know that this path is possible in CK3, because in CK2 that start had special troops that give you an early military advantage - in the new game, you're on your own, and you're surrounded by enemies that want to swallow you up. But I wanted to try it...so I used debug mode to start with 5000 gold and a ruler with 20 in all stats. And I had fun for a bit, until I ran into the same issues I'd been running into with succession laws and realm management. It was also a bit too easy, so I guess chalk that one up as an overcorrection.

    If you want to try something wacky and have some fun, try cheating once or twice. It'll never be as satisfying as doing it the hard way - in CK2 I played the Persia start on Ironman, and got the achievement for controlling Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina because my empire was colossal, and that ranks highly in my most satisfying and rewarding gaming accomplishments - but it's a laugh to lean into the chaos and cheat your way into some improbable bullshit.

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    brokemonkey

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    #10  Edited By brokemonkey

    @theoriginalatlas: Your approach to finding fun in CK where you otherwise weren't reminds me of how I used to approach Wolfenstein 3D as a kid: IDDQD, IDKFA, jump straight to Mecha-Hitler and BLAP BLAP BLAP. Never got old. Get fucked, Hitler.

    I suspect you're not alone in bouncing off CK for just those reasons. In most games, they give you problems, and the tools to solve those problems in relatively few steps, and all you need is some skill and persistence and the game closes its loop all nice and tidy, and that just doesn't fly here (or, to a lesser extent, in most Paradox games). The "C" in "Crusader Kings" stands for "clusterfuck," and that's kind of the essence of it and a major part of the appeal. It's such a rare thing to come across in a game, that kind of sidewinding complexity, where thousands of NPCs are playing basically the same game as you, standing in your way because that's how *they'll* get what *they* want; mechanics that intentionally blow your shit up every few hours so you're constantly starting over or facing down brand new crises; constantly being pushed on to your back foot, no matter how big and butch you are, by any number of things you'll inevitably miss or forget about, since it's not remotely possible to keep track of everything you'll need to know in any given moment.

    That's CK baby! But those same clusterfuck-y dynamics are what also allow you to just willy-nilly marry some kids off to whoever, while you're just doot-dee-doo maybe conquering a duchy or two nearby for shits, then finding that two generations later you've inherited the Byzantine Empire as a Catholic, and good luck with that! I don't know of many other games that will let you get down to the kind of wildin' shit as a matter of course. (Many of them are made by Paradox, which is why I'll happily eat big handfuls of shit to play them, including but not limited to uncommunicative interfaces and domino bug-bombs, interesting new mechanics locked behind expensive DLC that let them support and expand these games for 6, 7, 8 years, and that I will inevitably buy [usually on sale] despite my groaning about it; mechanics that are, uh, not particularly interesting but are still locked behind expensive DLC; etc.)

    The closest analog I can think of is Dwarf Fortress, which makes you eat even more shit to play it, but is such an amazing clusterfuck simulator that they just tell you straight off the bat that everything you do will eventually end in tears no matter what. But oh the places you'll go!

    And also CK lets me have the experience of fucking my sister, which, as an only child, is an experience I'll never get to have IRL. :(

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    Fistoh

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    I've loved this game so far, I played quite a bit of CK2 and have been playing Paradox games for quite a while. Where this game distinguishes itself even from CK2 is it feels like to me they've leaned a lot more into the role-playing aspect of CK, it already feels like the events that happen are far more dynamic, and they give you more insight into the character you're playing which enables me as a player to feel a lot more confident that I can make decisions as this person would if they were in the same situation.

    I wish the strategic elements were a bit more fully formed, not being able to properly influence what your allies' armies do has been at times frustrating when they act in a way you don't expect which could cause you to lose an important battle or somesuch. It also feels like you're more at the whim of the simulation throwing something your way you just can't handle.

    I did a simple Ireland game to get into the swing of things and get that achievement for creating the kingdom thereof, and after I united the isle the bubonic plague started sweeping through, killing both of my heir's children and a whole lot of my family, councilors, bunch of members of my court. When my son first contracted it I had my monarch demand a radical treatment that went poorly and left him permanently scarred. I had been preparing him to be a powerful ruler but he ended up reduced to a sickly mask-wearing bitter old man who only ruled for a couple years before he kicked the bucket and left the kingdom to one of the only nephews that managed to survive.

    Also been running a game starting as the Chief of Greater Poland in 867, working to form the Kingdom of Poland and hopefully eventually uniting the west Slavs. Where I left the game off was me being invaded by an orthodox kingdom to the south of me being supported by the Byzantine empire, and this is just as my previous ruler died near the end of the conquest of Lesser Poland; so my alliances were nullifed and at this point no one wants to support me in my defense... I left the game there. There is very little chance I can win that war, but maybe I can play as a vassal of whoever is invading (I forget the belligerent's name) and eventually work my way out of there, possibly after being forced into the orthodoxy.

    All that being said I'm having a very good time with it so far!

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    brokemonkey

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    #13  Edited By brokemonkey

    @fistoh: Where this game distinguishes itself even from CK2 is it feels like to me they've leaned a lot more into the role-playing aspect of CK, it already feels like the events that happen are far more dynamic, and they give you more insight into the character you're playing which enables me as a player to feel a lot more confident that I can make decisions as this person would if they were in the same situation.

    Dead agree. When I first started playing and saw the Stress mechanic I could see right then how confident they were in the more role-playing-centric flow of CK3, going so far as to *enforce* that role-playing element with increasingly severe maluses. Marked a pretty stark contrast with Imperator at launch, which felt so rushed and tentative.

    And yeah, war has never been CK's strong suit. But there are generally ways around it, and in a pinch the end is rarely The End.

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