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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