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Euro Fratricide Simulator 2020 - Talking about Crusader Kings 3

karzac

(he/him)
Crusader Kings 3 comes out on September 1, which is very soon! Feels like a good time to make a thread and get hyped.

I really liked what I played of CK2, but the churn of expansions and patches was a bit too much for me to keep up with, so I'm really excited to get in on the ground floor with this one. And Paradox seem to be really leaning into the things that people like about CK2, with a huge emphasis on characters, RPG mechanics and event-based storytelling this time around. Plus, they seem to have put a heavy focus on informative UI and good tutorialization, which should make it more welcoming to new players.

There's a bunch of videos regarding the game on Paradox's Youtube channel, including a tutorial series and some long-form play sessions.


 
Release day! I wasn't planning on diving into this until the weekend at the earliest, but the early buzz seems to be very positive, so I don't know that I'll be able to resist dipping in at least a little bit today.
 
Always found CKII harder to get into than EU4 and didn't keep up with the DLC, but I've bought this. Personally find it hard to get invested in eugenics/lineage games. The tutorial seems pretty good but I'm not sure I wouldn't be quickly owned if I continued on. Not sure I wanna stay playing this Irish dynasty or start a new game as something else... I think my goal for any game would be to make sure Gay is Okay and then I guess just ruthlessly conquer land bc that's you gotta do. I have the vague impression this game has an enhanced Fuck Around system, though. That's nice!

Ah, I see culture groups have sorcerous powers and traits attributed to them this time... great.
 

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
I love hearing stories from people playing CK and EU but I seem incapable of being able to play a game. I couldn't even make it through the tutorials in EU4 or CK2!
 

keurig

AO Tennis no Kiseki
(he/him)
Heads up that the game has crossplatform multiplayer between the Xbox Game Pass PC release and Steam. Really glad that this happened as I was worried that I'd convincing friends to try out the $1 trial of GamePass to play MP with me.

Been playing the game in multiplayer for a few hours with a friend and this is really good. For all intents and purposes it feels like the perfect sequel to CK2.
 
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karzac

(he/him)
Played a few hours this evening! I'm really enjoying it - played through the tutorial, which is way way better than CK2. And the tooltips are extremely useful. Haven't had any super interesting stories yet - mostly just started steamrolling over the rest of the counties in Ireland, since none of them can match my military strength - but I can definitely see how things are going to start butting up each other. I'm already having a tough time keeping all of my vassals happy, since they all want seats on the council.
 
Trying out a few abortive games... picked a highlighted Hausa ruler in the 9th century. She's pagan (Bori) and I'd like to reform the faith but I'm not actually sure how difficult it is... I can't get to the holy sites immediately because her husband is in between me and them? Rude. Then tried the Saffarid ruler. He starts out at war and at first has way more troops but also I sent his army into his lands and they didn't seem to be sieging anything... should probably figure that out. Then the enemy got more guys. Rude!!

Anyway, never in my life have I played a CK game very far so I'm sure there are lots of basic things I'm not getting. I should probably just stick with that Irish tutorial minor... but that's not what I want~
 

SilentSnake

Administrator
(He/him)
Staff member
Moderator
This is my first Crusader Kings and I'm kinda awash in options right now. I became the King of Ireland through military might after completing the tutorial, but now I'm having big "now what" feelings. Like, should I keep conquering in this game? Should I start a new one? Also, I've grasped the military loop for the most part - fabricate a claim on a piece of land, then take it by force - but I still don't understand how all the other systems work or how to use them to progress. I'm still in progress figuring this game out.
 

karzac

(he/him)
I recommend sticking with a one campaign for at least a couple of generations. The real meat of Crusader Kings is in the generational play - you're not just trying to conquer an empire, but build an empire that lasts. Good goals for the tutorial once you've conquered Ireland: make sure you have a good heir, try to get better succession laws, try to get your heir married into a family line that will produce claims on other kingdoms, build buildings in your capital county to create strong infrastructure.

One minor complaint I have: the Dynasty family tree sucks. There's no ability to pan around it (as far as I can see) and it doesn't show spouses, so it's hard to tell how people are related. It's a small thing, but in many ways building your dynastic tree is the goal of the game, so it kinda sucks that the end product is so lackluster, especially since it seems like a pretty straightforward thing to do right.
 

Vidfamne

Banned
I'm on the fence about buying this. I've often been unhappy with the direction of PDX games ever since and including Crusader Kings 2 (in my opinion, they have drastically declined as strategy games, HOI4 being the nadir as of yet), and I'm further embittered by such pandering in this game as "pure-blooded" incest and Sims (even with tits out; that makes the neo-PDX slogan "we create the games, you create the stories" morbidly funny, at least), or mechanical stagnation / regression, e.g. why is there still no naval combat? why are flanks gone? etc.

On the other hand, CK2 with the astounding HIP mod was at least in the running for my favourite PDX game yet, and this Bronze Age mod for CK3 already intrigues me, too. What's more, there's always the chance of an unprecedented "genre mix" demanding new ways of brain-wracking: much as the skill trees offend my purity, are they all that different from e.g. EU3's national ideas? Which were fun after all. And there's always multiplayer.

In that vein, would anyone be interested in a pass-the-save game? i.e. players are ordered into a list, each player plays the save for X years (maybe 10 or 20), optionally writes a short after-action report / briefing for the next player here, and uploads their save for the next player on the list to continue.
Might be a good way to learn, try different styles, get discussion going (not that the thread doesn't have this), and most of all, introduce delightful chaos. It would also cut down on the hefty time commitment with PDX games as I know them.

edit 7 Sep: simply put, this game is very poor, and I refunded after one hour. Long sketch of a critique:

Hooks are a good addition.

The culture/religion rework is appreciated, I like that it makes some contentious areas such as the Iberian taifat or Bosnia more difficult to hold / unproductive for the usual empires. At least in expectation, as I didn't play long enough to judge. Also the ditching of heresies as "derivative" of another religion, with particularly egregious cases such as Manichaean being spun off Zoroastrianism, or Yazidi or Druze off Islam.

Prestige matters more and piety is harder to come by... until you get a decent income, at which point it becomes more trivial to attain than in CK2 (pilgrimages are too strong). Not good.

No more popup spam from calling 50 tribal vassal allies to war. No more ship management. The bland CK2 tech system and sending your spymaster to Constantinople every game is gone.

Game is less cluttered with marginal / pointless "flavour" than CK2 (this will change, because it's so easy to get suckered into accepting DLC as healthy and normal, I made this mistake with CK2 myself -- never again! -- and CK3 will run the exact damn same gauntlet).

That's all the good points.

The user interface is abysmal. It's unresponsive, it hides its information behind multiple layers of tooltips, it has hover-menus you have to fix via right-click before you can use them productively, it's cluttered all over the place, it seems designed for mobile devices. Event boxes take up ridiculous space to accommodate the unnecessary ragdolls -- add a scheme notification above, a battle overview below, charinfo to the left, council to the right, and every single UI element gets into the way of another one. Mapmodes have been cut, with some of the most useful from CK2 (e.g. Show Vassal Realms) or even simple political (!) being gone, after simple terrain has already been ditched ever since PDX went over to map pornography.

Barony-tier holdings as atomic provinces add nothing, no tactical depth (there are not nearly enough combat units on the map for that to come into play, this isn't Hearts of Iron), no strategic granularity, not even anything LARP-wise. It just leads to more clicking as you chase armies. They might as well still be in the counties.

MTTH is dead, long live the progress gauge. This is a change almost across-the-board, everything is a gauge now. I like this somewhat in the case of stress (makes more sense than a binary switch), except that stress becomes too easy to manage with merely decent income (again). For everything else, e.g. schemes, cultural conversion, fabricating claims, it's a step back to making the game even easier to control without any possible interference from non-player agents (and be it just Fortune). Cultural conversion is especially ridiculous at the scale it allows; I played as Gudrød Crovan of the Isles and assimilated a third of Scotland, as well as Ulster, to Turbo-Norwegian by like 1100.

Expansion is easier than ever, yet I can't press claims for two counties in the same war. Keeping your realm united (or reuniting it quickly) is easier than ever, yet I cannot switch out of gavelkind until the 13th century due to technology being "communal" / "cultural" now, which replaced a bad system with a worse one.

Navies being gone is one of the worst changes. The computer embarks for no reason, disembarks when your armies are close, tends to sail straight for your capital in any defensive war (granted, this is true for CK2 as well, but that game is 8 years older), and my alliance with Duke Ota of Bohemia regularly resulted in 2000 troops fighting by my side on the British Isles, instead of any sensible local diplomacy constraining my expansion.

The wargame side became even poorer. Flanks are gone. Tactics also seem to be gone. Cultural retinues likewise. The new retinues are called men-at-arms. The computer only ever seems to use light infantry and cavalry men-at-arms, which means you should build archers and pikes only and bolster them with duchy buildings, creating super-soldiers by 1100. It took an alliance of Munster, Gwynedd, Scotland and England to finally force me to cede one county at one point, while I was also fighting Norway.
Indeed, wars are generally decided by alliances before they even start, not strategy or tactics. Since these largely rest on marrying your children to the right people and/or constantly using Sway schemes with a Diplomatic skill tree perk to enable alliances without familial relations, they are also not very interesting.

Tyranny is much less important because you also accumulate dread, which also pacifies vassals.

On the Believable Worlds front, Lappland constantly invaded Scotland (and unsuccessfully England), Scandinavians still make the Baltic coast a patchwork for little reason and obliterate most of the pagans long before the 13th century, Jerusalem flipped to Islam shortly after the First Crusade (lol), the HRE abandons Italy if it rebels even once and still habitually consumes France early, and most egregiously, BYZ is stable beyond belief and grew to Ottomans-at-their-zenith proportions in my game -- again, by ~1100. Seljuks and Fatimids didn't even appear to have clashed at all. Poland snakes into Russia while having lost most of Volhynia. And so on. Most of these behaviours are either the same as in CK2, or downgrades. I really didn't notice any region that behaved more plausibly -- maybe India, which seemed unusually stable rather than housing 3 empires.

Speaking of which, the fantasy empires such as "Carpathia", "Britannia", "Scandinavia", "the Wendish Empire" etc. still exist (and "Maghreb" is imho a terrible new addition for the sake of "balance" only), which again just makes managing big realms easier yet since you can delegate to de-jure vassal kings, and gavelkind won't split the de-jure empire. There should be just five de-jure empires: HRE, ERE, Arabia (to represent the Rashidun Caliphate), Persia and Tibet. The "Charlemagne button" for custom realms is fine since it requires extraordinary prestige; but otherwise, claiming unprecedented Imperial authority in e.g. Scandinavia should not be as easy as the restoration of a traditional empire.

I realize PDX have long since ceased making strategy games or "historical simulators" anyhow. See also Stellaris. See also HOI4. See also CK1/2, really.

I hope for "indie" devs to rise to influence and take a good chunk out of pernicious neo-PDX's wholly undeserved near-monopoly. I've said this elsewhere, but Rhye's and Fall of Civilization is a better strategy game and history simulator than any PDX game after EU2.
 
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karzac

(he/him)
That sounds like it could be fun! I think the appropriate way to do it would be to pass the save upon character death, though, no?

Updated to my Ireland game - played for about an hour this evening, streaming for a friend. Conquered another county - problem was, they were already at war with Dublin, which meant that I inherited that war when I took the county. And it turns out Dublin is by far the strongest competitor to Munster in 11th century Ireland - the war ranged on for at least two years. I had to buy two mercenary companies and go into severe debt. Thankfully, some money from the Pope, and some assistance from my father in law, the Prince of Gwynned (who I should have asked for help much earlier, even if he's a sadist and kinslayer) let me manage things well enough to sue for white peace. Hopefully that hasn't set me too far back.
 
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Vidfamne

Banned
Character lifespans would indeed be more flavourful, but it has the disadvantage of imbalancing each player's contribution by luck, e.g. if one character lives 70 years and the next one 5. It might all seem to balance out on average, but the early years are more important / interesting ("snowball effect"), so such an imbalance arising early would, I think, defeat the purpose.

You could do e.g. "10 years min, 20 years max, pass the save if character dies in between", I suppose, but I'd still prefer a flat X years.
 

karzac

(he/him)
Isn't creating chaos the point though? I don't know if balancing things would be that important.

In other news, I became King of Ireland last night. Still have one or two counties holding out, but they should be easy to vassalize. Changed to Tanistry succession too, so I could make my better son my heir.
 

Juno

The DRKest Roe
(He, Him)
I started in Iceland and I am slowly working my way through parts of Ireland and the UK. I've made it to age 70 with my first character and have outlived half my children, including my heir. However, he had a daughter before dying so she'll be my next heir.

Question: How do you legitimize bastards? Everything I see online says you need to be the Dynasty Head, which I am, but I cannot find the option at all. Are there certain limitations on I'm not aware of?
 

karzac

(he/him)
Alright, so I got my first really good story.

It starts with my first character, High King Murchad of Ireland, marrying into the Bleddyn dynasty in order to bring some sweet claims on the Welsh principalities into my family line. Then Murchad finagled it so that his second son, Donnchad, would become King after his death and thereby be able to use the Welsh claims from his mother to grow his domain. So a few decades later, as Donnchad, went to war with the much weaker child king of Wales for one of the principalities under his rule. Simple enough.

Problem is, the High Chieftain of Lappland, who had some territories in the Isles off the coast of Scotland, saw this as an opportunity to invade and steal the Earldom of Thomond out from under me. Not much I could do about that - I was winning the Welsh war and I knew I'd be able to take Thomond back eventually fairly easily.

So I surrendered, but not before the High Chieftain won a siege and took my daughter hostage. And refused to ransom her to me. Eventually, a few years later, he released her. Great, I thought! Except for some reason her betrothal had been broken and she wasn't in my court anymore. And when I went to invite her back, I couldn't, because she was now the High Chieftain's concubine! What the fuck? That's so fucked up! He released her from prison as long as she would sleep with him!

Well, I couldn't have that - I started a murder scheme to kill the dude so I could have my daughter (and her potential marriage alliances) back. Thankfully, the odds of success where maximum - I guess the dude who extorts people for sex wasn't too popular, and it helped that my daughter was sharing his bed. I killed him in short order and brought her back to my court.

Then I went to war to take Thomond back. It was actually a pretty hard fought war - lots of back and forth sieges. Again, my daughter got captured. This time though, I won the war.

Here's the wild thing: the new High Chieftain released my daughter and turned her into his concubine! Again! What the fuck is with these people?

So, time to murder again. Once again, 95% success rate - although this time my daughter would required a bribe to join. I guess she had Lappland Syndrome?

Anyway, it all worked out for the best - I had her new lover killed and married her off to the King of Bavaria for a bunch of prestige and sweet alliance.
 

nataeryn

Discovered Construction
(he/him)
so i gave CK3 a try and quite enjoyed it.
I think the Hook system is a great innovation to the scheming.
I really think the dynasty idea is pretty cool too in that it encourages me somewhat to not murder all my relatives.
I think the way tech works as a cultural thing is interesting. anything is better than the by county method from CK2 i think.
I liked the skill tree and also the stress system. I like that it encourages you to roll play but gives you flexibility. I liked that you can set your spouse to either use half of all her stats or all of just one stat.
At first I thought the combat was a bit simple without the flanks, but I do like that it is much less to micromanage and I do like the Knights as a simplification compared to assigning commanders to flanks and individual vassal levies. And they kept some of the old complexity with the men-at-arms.
 

karzac

(he/him)
Yeah, I'm actually finding myself quite enjoying the combat. I like that the men-at-arms make you think about counters and terrain. I'm not quite at the point where it makes a huge difference - I'm still at a level of armies where you mostly just through them at the enemy capital - but I could see that stuff making a big difference when I've got 2 or 3 decent sized armies.

EDIT: Lol, then I got my ass kicked so badly in a war that I had to reload to a previous save.
 
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nataeryn

Discovered Construction
(he/him)
oh, i also like how plots work now. CK2 plots were basically either the plot power is over 100% or its not. CK3 plots actually make sense.
Just overall everything works more like you expect it to work
 

karzac

(he/him)
Agreed! Although I do wish there was a bit more variety in schemes - I know a few of the skill trees over other options, but right now I'm pretty much just swaying people. I wish there was a Spread Rumours scheme, to make everybody hate the target of the scheme.

Oh, a note about war: don't let the enemy siege your capital. If they capture your character, they'll be able to automatically Enforce Demands. I had to restart my war against Wales 3 times because of that.
 

karzac

(he/him)
I just want to take a moment to memorialize High King Donnchad, King of Ireland and Wales for a moment. He died at the ripe old age of 77, renowned as a scholar, having taken the kingdom his father had given him and expanding it to include all of Wales, as well as Northumbria. He contributed to two crusades, leading to him becoming Exalted Among Men and a Paragon of Virtue. It also earned his daughter the title of Queen of Syria, no small feat. Of course, all anyone remembered of him at his death were a few romantic dalliances in his youth - but he embraced celibacy eventually, devoting himself to rule and study. And sure, he plotted a few murders, but only one of them was against a child! All around, he was a great guy and he will be missed.
 

Mr Bean

Chief Detective
This particular family only lasted 2 generations but they were a doozy. Started as a small Maharajah in southern India with a scholarship focus. Tried to expand my empire the old fashioned way by fabricating claims and sending in the troops, but my neighbor was having none of that and rolled in and dumpstered me even though we theoretically had even army numbers and skills. After that I decide to play to my strengths and go peaceful nerd kingdom building up my piety. It’s at this point that I meet a witch who teaches me herbalism and the secrets of Mara. I then go about converting the rest of my family to witchcraft and found a coven. Then I form a new religion as an offshoot of Buddhism where women are equal and witchcraft is allowed. Then I form a holy order of mendicant knights to defend said religion. It’s at this point that half my court and relations all strip off their clothes and go loud and proud with the witchery. Unfortunately, my patriarch’s health starts failing at this point at the ripe old age of 77. His daughter takes over and tries to hold things together, but a massive army from the north rolls in, says my family is a bunch of wierdos and deposes the entire family killing the run.

RIP crazy witch kingdom, you will be missed.
 
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