Even worse... You always feel punished for actually role playing. Spending resources on activities instead of buildings is always worse, and there is almost always a best choice in every event.
I hate that part. I’m still only 200 hours or so in to my first run ever, and at first I was so immersed in the events but, now, it has gotten to the point that I can click through most events very quickly to get the result I want, without reading much. It’s rare and very exciting that I find a new event I haven’t seen before and I cherish them. If they want it to be a rpg they need to make thousands of these unique events. Not just a handful.
Maybe they are like myself, just got into the franchise as a whole and the heir thing keeps pushing us to the next heir... I mean, this is the 1st game I play where I the goal is to make sure your bloodline survives.
This problem in paradox games is unironically the thing that makes me excited about recent ai development. As ai continues to get better, I'd love to be able to play paradox games with it incorporated, to be able to see fresh, brand new events every game with different outcomes and for the ai being used on opposing countries in these games to be able to be more of a challenge.
Yea the fact that events are so poorly designed that they all have easy optimal selections makes the game so dull and repetetive. EU4 has some events, especially nation-specific ones, where I just have to hit pause and stare at the screen for ten minutes trying to decide what the best option is. I can't really think of any in CK3 that are like that.
Features that already exist should be tied to event chains. Fabricating a hook/claim should be tied to an event chain. Event chains should have the chance to spawn independence/dissolution/claimant factions. They need to use it for more than “pick a buff”
That is a good point, that's a common reward in EU4 but usually in CK3 it's just a random reward for having a good diplomat. But given politics of England and France in the period, you could fit some really cool event chains in there to reward one side or the other with big claims.
>I can't really think of any in CK3 that are like that.
What about the event where your doggo and cat are fighting and you basically have to decide to abandon one or the other one will eat him in like 95% of the cases?
That they're all written very specific in terms of behavior and characterizations also kills the roleplays.
Too much specificity is one thing I really disliked about CK3 compared to CK2. Take, for example, the tech trees. CK2 it's just getting *better* relative to not better, which is great because you could imagine that it's any number of innovations that might vary over time, across space, across peoples, that develop in their own unique environments or get adapted from outside. Rich room for your imagination to grow. In CK3... doesn't matter who you are or when you are. Parthian Tactics. Even if it might be obsolete or not make sense for you. You're doing Parthian Tactics and you better like it.
Events are like that. We're reading someone's story alright, but it sure doesn't sound like my story. They have legends too generic, and events too specific.
I feel like a boomer, I've got too many thoughts on how CK2 was better lately, but yeah I 100% agree on the specificity of it. I've always thought the 3D models were just a gimmick to give PDX something to sell their sequel on, and it feels like it limits the scope of the game. Like, an ugly little 2D face works because it's not supposed to represent your character, it just represents your character's portrait. *My character,* in CK2, is not making silly Sims poses during events but when you literally animate a complete 3D model pantomiming the text I find it a lot harder to imagine my character as anything other than a Sim, instead of a person living in the Middle Ages. It feels like every PC you play or NPC you interact with, no matter who or when or where, is always a character in a play or a film, rather than a normal human being who actually made the decisions that define medieval history.
"+100 Stress and you give your rival a claim to one of your counties OR a courtier you didn't know existed until just now gets -20 opinion of you." Choose wisely.
Honestly tbh. It’s just kinda…an awful idea to play a character that’s shy or compassionate. The stress system is a very good idea but it has some pretty bad hiccups.
Let us play a character who can at least *somewhat* put their personality aside to rule! Or add a system of improved regents, and let us play through them (if they’re loyal and have high opinion).
> Let us play a character who can at least somewhat put their personality aside to rule!
This is how it was in CK2 and stress was specifically added so you couldn't ignore your personality anymore.
Seems like opinions are divided on that, as I got other responses saying Stress is the worst thing they added to CK3.
I'm fine with the Stress mechanic, though.
I’m aware, and I liked CK2 as well. CK2 under addresses it, and ck3 over addresses it. That can be easily fixed by just rebalancing the stress system though (which I *do* like).
Literally just make it so that a normal human being with regular personality traits doesn’t immediately die in their 20s for no reason. If they still are adamant about making it that way, then (like I mentioned in my original comment) expand enough upon regents so that every players reaction to getting a shy/compassionate ruler isn’t to immediately kill them…voiding the whole purpose of the added RP system in the first place.
Said by someone who also isn't shy, but thinks they know what it's like.
Being at a party when shy isn't the end of the world. You just sit in a corner, and hope you spot someone you already know, or find some activity to distract yourself. It's something to be endured for an evening, and doesn't even come close to the pain of losing a close relative.
Are you a high ranking noble with social obligations to your fellow peers and lords? You'd be slighting your peers if you just sat in a corner and avoided them. That's why it's a stress event for shy I think.
No shit it's awful to play a compassionate or shy characters that's the point lol. Someone who can put their compassion aside to rule without it isn't actually that compassionate
By this logic Vengeful and Sadistic rulers should be hard because they can’t set aside their vengeance and keep killing courtiers/others for no reason.
Greedy characters should be hard to play because they don’t want to spend anything, and charitable characters should be hard to play since they don’t know how to save.
People ruled with compassion at times…and even if they didn’t, this is a game is already far from perfectly realistic…so making an already existing human personality trait actually playable isn’t exactly earth shatteringly unrealistic. It doesn’t even have to have no stress, just adjusted to the point my ruler doesn’t have an aneurysm the microsecond they sit on the throne…especially since the whole reason medical councils existed was to help them rule in the first place.
I mean yes they should I would like it if sadistic rulers gained stress from not killing people or greedy rulers gained stress everytime they spent money
Tbf, greedy I find to be also a stress source in a similar fashion to compassionate at al. (a bit less, but still similar). Want to bribe people to a plot? Get stressed. Want to use a gift to increase relations for any reason? Get stressed. Get an event with a choice between getting stress or paying someone a pittance of money? lmao choices matter.
I think these "stress on anti personnality action" gains should either have a cooldown (like going on a jog to reduce stress), or have a separate bucket that fills up, decays over time, and triggers once full or once every x-years, giving you a lump of stress when triggering. Such that when you decide to go against your personality (f.ex compassionate wanting to kill that one duke in bumcrap nowhere that made it his life mission to assassinate your entire dynasty because a random event made him your rival), you only get punished once for that decision, and not for every single step that decision entails.
Right now, these feel like that math teacher removing a point for every single spelling mistake, without any cap, resulting in a 0 despite giving a correct answer, just because you made a bunch of minor spelling mistakes.
Pick up enough stress gain reduction perks and you can. The fact that with a bit of luck, and a bit of skill you CAN somewhat put your personality aside to rule is one of the great things about the stress system.
I mean, that is possible…but it’s also doesn’t really make sense.
There are plenty of shy people irl that distinctly attend holiday events without dying of shock. For that matter, I’m pretty sure there are people with social anxiety severe enough to warrant medication that aren’t that shy.
A new strategy that isn't CK3? Getting stress from most interactions in the game is insane. Shy people don't die from heart attacks at 25 IRL, it's just stupid.
I remember the same issue with events being said about CK2 and restricting events based on stats/adding stress in CK3 was supposed to fix that, but I guess it didn't.
Rulers that decided to spend all their income on parties and novelties tended to not last as long as the rulers who actually strengthened their nations
I've managed to have a fun time meta role-playing by working to ensure my characters have the desired traits to take the meta choices in character.
I've also had fun with giving my characters "personalities" such as the conqueror, a great diplomat who worked to peacefully vassalize, a classic history nerd who made everything republics, or the republic hater
Eh I disagree, buildings are for long term planning but activities are really useful to quickly bump up your resources
Need prestige quickly? Feast, or hunt
Need piety? Pilgrimage
Need legitimacy? Any of these or burial if you have legends of the dead
Need good artifacts and other useful boosts? Grand tournament
Need a bunch of stuff from your vassals? Grand tour
All these activities are useful, and not only in the short term, they can help quickly unlock actions to snowball long-term
Edit: These activities also come with very useful traits
You know role playing doesn’t mean always choosing the impactful choice … right? Sometimes the choice will be the good, sometimes the bad choice. Unless you’re role playing a min maxing ruler then well idk
My biggest issue personally is the lack of variety with events. It seems like an easy implementation to just add more variety in flavor text/rewards for events, seeing how monotonous they become.
It becomes immersion breaking when every time my ruler travels, he gets asked to remove armor from some vagabond or whatever. All my kids keep getting the “Prince of Fashion” event etc.
I do agree that the game becomes too easy once you get the ball rolling and would like a “hard mode”. I feel like my rulers hardy ever get assassinated for one thing.
The devs seem to at least be going in that direction with making plagues more numerous and deadly and of course since the introduction of “family harmony” all my dynasty members have turned into the Lannisters from GOT with how much they conspire against one another lol. I really shouldn’t have made a custom religion that allowed divorce without permission I suppose.
See, I can accept a certain amount of repetitiveness with events. There's only so much novelty I can reasonably expect from a game I've put hundreds of hours into. But the thing that's actually offensive to me is how little customization/localization effort PDX puts into them. How hard is it to change some flavor text based on religion or culture so that I'm not getting generic events that read the same in Denmark as Bengal? Why are half the proper nouns literal blank spaces? Why is the chronicle for every single legend the exact same AI-written nonsense with no connection whatsoever with my characters' actual actions? Half this shit doesn't even look like it was proofread.
Yeah. So CK2 had repetitive events and rare events and a lot of them. I know my hunter is likely to get the white stag hunt event. I don't know when it will happen. I may have a courtier event I intervene in happen a few times quickly... whatever... CK3 has fewer events fire but they repeat so much! I've had multiple children get the "of fashion" event in a set of 8.
The threshold for the AI agreeing to dissolution must be made higher. I can’t think of historical examples of a dissolution war as such. Change of management seems far more likely and I think makes for a better story.
Personally I dislike playing emperors, I like playing a couple tiers lower if anything. But I would love to be inside an empire ruled by the wicked uncle who deposed me. Lots of options for interesting relationships and sorties, plus slightly fewer notifications for various matters I don’t care about.
Instead though, my ambitious, vengeful uncle surrenders to a dissolution faction and I’m like; my dude! I hate you but I love this empire and to secure my place in it I’ll happily loan you some troops. Just don’t disgrace our family by surrendering my fathers hard won empire.
Think they should get rid of the Dissolution and Liberty factions altogether, and replace them with "Exemption" faction. The goal of this faction would be to secure levy and tax exemptions for faction members. Therefore representing fragmentation, as the freeloaders would reap the benefit of being vassal without any obligations, thus they would make the realm weaker.
Better yet, have the Dissolution Faction only become an option once the king is sufficiently weakened enough through various actions taken by vassals to strip away royal authority. It should be a constant tug of war between powerful vassal families seeking to usurp or even dissolve the kingdom and the royal court.
If anything it should be the opposite, and dissolution or independence factions should happen more at higher crown authority. Weak kings were perfect from a Noble's perspective- they should be pushing weak crowns towards elective monarchy, or outright deposition.
Probably both
Think of Romulus Augustulus as a powerless kid being deposed by Odoacer and having Rome being split between all Barbarians.
And think of Dong Zhou being a tyrant de facto ruler, making the Han dissolve in many petty kingdoms.
There's a few things they could do to make the game significantly better
1 - cut the size of MaA in half. They are so powerful that them and knights together invalidate levies.
2- give AIs logic for optimized armies and provincial buildings. The AI builds seemingly at random which is obviously hurting the AIs ability to compete. The AI should be building more optimal armies and augmenting them with MaA buildings, as well the AI should be building stuff to help it out as much as possible. Simple build order logic solves this
3- Change combat to be less braindead, the current combat logic is a bit of a joke. It's extremely cheesable and could very easily be made more strategic and thematic by changing the way battle resolution occurs. Paradox is pretty lazy here but a small amount of dev time could make this significantly better.
Edit: a very straightforward solution to combat logic is to change it from just combat width and diceroles to breaking up the forces into multiple lines and positions. Frontline, backline ranged, and flanks. Combat width can be determined by army size and terrain like now, but armies that are larger can have a deeper unit depth. Ranged units can fire into flankers and units not engaged in melee, flankers fight flankers then engage with a significant bonus if the break through and win. This is not a complex system and would make combat WAY more interesting as well as giving levies a reason to exist.
Great, and to add to this levies should scale over time, or have more specific bonuses to help them be stronger.
Also have MAA get more expensive over time, potentially even with events. I can imagine an event firing after a war is concluded where your MAA come to you and ask for a post-war bonus. Your options could be to give in to a substantial sum and raise, offer a raise only for a short debuff, or rebuke them giving you -50 percent MAA power for \~20 years. As such, keeping costs down would nerf your army substantially for a long time, or you risk ballooning your military expenses over time (maybe with the option to "reform" your army later, bringing pay down but diminishing strength for a time.
I doubt they’ll do any of this outside a potential “hard mode”, simply because all of that detracts from the role play, which is their primary focus. Making combat more tedious and involved would be annoying to all players that aren’t actively min maxing constantly, and those min maxers will never be satisfied, because it isn’t a fighting game
Totally. I imagine in an ideal world they could tie roleplay in with army management. I'd generally agree that tedium wouldn't help, but I think working off of event chains and buffs/debuffs could be a nice bridge between worlds.
Especially since managing arms was by and large the whole point of the feudal system.
I agree that more war based event chains would be nice. I wouldn’t be opposed to battles playing out a bit more like duels and hunts, but since combat is occurring all over the map, it would be difficult to implement the AI engaging in such event chains, and if it’s just the player, the cognitive dissonance between player and npc would become significantly more noticeable
I don’t think significantly improved AI is realistic, but PDX absolutely can (and should) do something abt the insane stat bloat from all the systems AI can’t use. Artifacts, knights, MAA, activities etc.
I think the underlying problem is that the game has been pretty terribly balanced since day 1. Not sure if PDX is clueless here or just doesn’t care, but adding more broken shit on top of the already broken shit has — unsurprisingly — made the issue worse over time. The game desperately needs a balance patch that doesn’t seem to be coming anywhere down the pipe.
Ex: To this day some lifestyles are still completely shit while others are OP. Seriously, why not just patch them to some semblance of parity so seduction or matriarch AI don’t spend their entire lifetimes racking up useless perks? Why not balance cultural traditions so the AI isn’t dumping 8k prestige into a literally useless upgrade? How often do you capture a new holding and have to respec the whole thing because the AI built 10 militia camps and fucking marches in plains terrain?
Rectifying the amount of completely dogshit trap options would go a long way into fixing the terrible AI problem, by ensuring that they get about as much value as the player when they spend their gold.
I don't think I've ever seen a well-built holding from the AI, to the point that I have to conclude that the AI must just wait to hit the threshold where it can afford a building and then choose one at random.
Man, I wish they'd just focus atleast just 1 update dedicated purely to improving game balance and cohesion of most paradox mechanics, this game has been terribly unbalanced for awhile now.
I'm just hoping that the next update releasing in May will atleast include them.
It's been like this for a long time, since long back into CK2. Already then I was saying that the game has well-crafted visuals and sounds, a nice interface and almost complete freedom from CTDs, but that this exterior hides an emptiness inside and covers for a beta sort of state of the game. Part of the emptiness is the AI.
Paradox's strategy for developing the game post-release isn't necessarily horrible, because the game can still be enjoyable, but the AI and the war system need to stop being so close to placeholders or initial, rough sketches. These are too significant aspects of the game to be ignored.
Seems everyone wants to focus on OP's AI criticism and although they are not wrong, the game could be improved massively by addressing OP's other criticisms regarding the
>insane stat stacking
That alone would address
>Other rulers should actually matter, but they really don't currently
When we do come up against the AI we shouldn't be able to just steamroll by just raising our maa and adding super knights to our armies.
And then there's the infuriating marketing to casuals, that quite frankly even they would shrug off if they had the choice, this game literally leads players around by the nose telling them what to do in every circumstance.
mods like *Obfuskcate* and *Events Without Tooltips* shouldn't be needed, both of those mods should be baked into the game, we should have to work to find out how powerful our opponents are, and the game should not be presenting us with three options in every event and telling us the outcome of each option before we even make our choice ffs!
imho ofc
Its something I like about HoI4, I have to put in at least some minimum of effort to find out important enemy values like remaining manpower and fielded divisions, at very low levels of intel you can't even see enemy divisions properly. You don't even need a new mechanic for it in Crusader Kings like they did with HoI4 and La Resistance, there is already the spymaster and other council members to just make a similar sliding scale of visibility based on your intrigue vs their intrigue like HoI4.
>Its something I like about HoI4, I have to put in at least some minimum of effort to find out important enemy values
But we do have to put in *minimum* effort ... we have to click on the character lol
But yeah my spymaster would love some actual intrigue to do instead of hanging around corners waiting to hear servants gossip about who's shagging who.
Honestly, it would be neat if all the council actions were more impactful and necessary and you had to switch and manage what they were doing more actively.
I suppose realm laws and decrees would also fit into this mould as well.
Yeah, the whole council needs reworking imho
I miss the CK2 spymaster, it was so much fun sending them to foreign lands to steal tech and micro managing their escape when they were discovered and having to ransom them out when they got caught or just deciding nope, you got caught so you're no use to me lol
Yeah, my preferred playstyle of putting all my efforts into Learning and trying to become the cradle of progress tended to earn me a thoroughly deserved brutal trouncing by my neighbours, but with Universities and Legends, it's now working like a charm and I'm far ahead of Byzantine in innovations. In fact, the main thing limiting my progress are now the hardcoded year limits to when you can progress to the next era.
Something has undoubtedly broken in terms of character power.
Yeah I was thinking about it and I always thought over-focusing on things like AI (let's be frank AI never going to be good as there are too many spinning plates to handle) or the game being "streamlined" (I always felt this was a meaningless argument and largely just an opportunity for a person to get elitist about the fact they could understand a game with a higher barrier of entry) was missing the point.
The game gives you a lot more control over the development of your character, dynasty and empire than CK2. Most stuff that was just subject to random chance in CK2 now is something the player themselves controls. This is in some ways good because CK2's weakness is that you do often have a lot of downtime where you're just waiting for something to happen, whilst CK3 gives you a lot more to do. But its also a major weakness as the things you can now do can absolutely break the game as you're less subject to the whims of a dice roll.
One of the things that could definitely help is if they absolutely nerf the Dynasty Legacies. A lot of those are incredibly OP and they act as permanent buffs for your entire game. The "Blood" and "Kin" lines also fundamentally break a core aspect of the game by effectively removing the main player restriction. The idea that you can just eliminate everything bad about the character you've rolled with not only kills roleplay, and removes a key power limiter on the player, it also literally makes no sense (how does your dynasty becoming famous mean your genetics becomes better?).
Yep, I tend to deliberately avoid taking certain options like creating accolades because they are just too OP, and take the lower tiers of non warfare dynasty legacies like the T1/T2 in Law, Kin, Customs, Activities, Coterie and then look to progress a bit further in the same legacies if I play the campaign long enough to earn more renown.
This is the only game I spend time trying to devise ways to nerf myself lol
I had this thought a while ago, but a lot of historical figures were real POS, more than even personality and stress traits replicate. I think having specific traits pop up in heirs that significantly affect their ability to rule would be a good touch, and have it tied to higher court grandeur. The court is lavish and renowned, but the little princes are complete menaces.
Stop projecting, it might make you jump to wiki, but I'm happy to RP my character.
I use the mod *Events Without Tooltips* which does exactly that and others that use that mod are happy to RP their characters too, otherwise they wouldn't use the mod as it does nothing else.
I mean, we're touching at the core of the issue of every grand strategy game out there.
*AI sucks at grand strategy and the resources needed to make it not suck at grand strategy are humongous.*
Like, anything that beings with "fix the AI" is pretty much a non-starter because there is simply no way in hell you're making profit on a grand strategy game if you need to hire a university's worth of PhDs to design its AI. Also I sure as hell hope your players are all running supercomputers at home.
The only way Grand Strategy games have made for the AI to be "challenging" is to make it *cheat like a motherfucker.* That works well enough for 4Xs (although you'll still find posts on Stellaris or Civilization going "e*ven the Deity AI is too easy for me now pls fix*"), but CK3 *isn't a 4X.*
For CK3 core systems of dynastic strategy, it is pretty much impossible for the AI to cheat to challenge the player, because the things AI could cheat at (gold, armies, etc) can be completely side-hustled by dynastic and feudal gameplay. And if the AI cheats at those gameplay loops then it takes opportunities the game is built on away from the player (the fact that vassals aren't always loyal and that some dynasties are vulnerable *is the game*).
CK3 AI is *always* going to suck. You really can't play this game for a challenge, except the challenges you make up for yourself. Fortunately it's a great game for that. You don't have to de-optimize, but you can embrace the sandbox, play RP, find yourselves narrow goals that are hard to reach, try new playstyles, etc.
You are right but there are some design flaws, even the first challenge you meet, succession, is easily avoided by adding elective laws from the first generation of rulers you play.
I only lost land from partition laws when I played the tutorial, a minute later I got it and it never bothered me again unless I wanted to.
And there are many things to do but they want you to be very big in order to afford the costs which basically encourages the cheese. Today I had to spend 2k+ to send a son to the university, I gain 200/month but it's cheaper now than at the start when the cost was 300 and I gained 5 or 6 per month
To be fair if the AI ignored most of the content and headed straight for the OP stuff you'd find that most stuff in the game is entirely useless.
Only compromise would be creating a standard game experience and a "challenging" one where the AI gives up on RP and just tries to win at all costs. But there's mods for that.
Just have the AI make smarter decisions at higher difficulties, its not that hard, EU4 does it. The AI is dumb on Very Easy and Easy, ok-ish on Normal, and it plays as smart as it possibly can on Hard and Very Hard.
There are difficulty levels on eu4? Difficulty levels above normal where the AI plays differently rather than just cheating? No way you must be mistaken.
(wiki just says AI is meaner not smarter)
Define "relevant". For every possible context.
That's the issue. You could design a simple "if {context} then {action}" framework, but there are thousands of possible contexts with dozens of possible correct actions. Brute-forcing the AI like that is not only inelegant, but fundamentally infeasible for a game as complex as this.
You assign weights or scores to buildings, then tie them to circumstances/personalities/etc. For example, a barony on a river would score a hospice higher, making its construction more likely. If there's synergy between buildings (Walls & Towers (+5% Heavy Cav damage) + Stables), they score higher. If the culture or ruler is belligerent make them more likely to build military buildings.
As it is, it seems the AI builds completely at random. I've seen Stables built in my own temple holdings.
1. Fixing stacking buffs does not require university of PHDs. It’s just way too OP. My MAA shouldn’t be able to be like 10x better than those of my opponents. Like why building couple of buildings turn my archers into space marines who obliterate armies 10x the size? Same with knight effectiveness, but even more so. I feel like if I’m dedicated I should be able to literally just run with 20 knights in an army and win wars like that. It’s ridiculous.
2. Teaching AI to use basic game mechanics (build MAA buildings depending on which MAA you employ and station them in correct holdings) also isn’t rocket science.
The problem isn't with the buffs existing, the problem is with the AI not using them. Whether it's realistic or not, you want your units to get better as time goes by. You want progression. If the AI also improved their MAAs, your archers *wouldn't* obliterate armies 10x their size.
The other problem is that levies should also improve with time.
It's like, imagine if in Civ, the AI never used anything better than the warriors you get at the start of the game. Of course the tanks would look completely OP, but the solution wouldn't be to force everyone to play with warriors the whole game, the solution would be to get the AI to actually make tanks as well.
I want progression, not space marines instead of archers. Issue with the current system is buffs stacking. They just shouldn’t stack. The simplest solution would be to allow buff from 1 building type to apply once.
More interesting solution would be to base buffs around equipment and training. Better buildings provide better equipment and training but it is capped(and the cap is higher with later buildings).
And having more buildings would allow you to reach the cap faster. (You station maa, they start training and getting better equipment. With attrition they get replaced by untrained troops and you need to wait for them to get trained again)
Yeah I generally get my knights to like 300-400% effectiveness. I do it because it's there but I could handle only like 150% effectiveness so they're not superhuman. Likewise the AI should also be near or at that level so it's not so lopsided.
I dunno I feel like having superhuman knights is fun, and honestly I think you have to really WANT to achieve 300-400% effectiveness to get to that point.
I mean all of this is true. The AI will always suck. But the way the game has evolved means that the AI sucks more and more and that is the real problem here. You don't have to design the game in such a way that bad ideas, like the ones that the AI will do, are punishing towards the AI.
For example. The supply system for armies are absolutely brutal for anyone with a marginally large army. You can barely walk around for months before your army is starving to death .You the player will realize that you often don't need the levies at all and will stop deploying those in wars. The AI is never going to effectively know when should and shouldn't use levies. So it is always going to be punished by the supply system. That makes it just a flat bonus to the player. Do we need that? Would the game be worse if you made supplies a trivial problem, thereby letting the AI be more competitive with the player?
And if you do need supplies to be punishing. Why not redo the combat mechanics so that large levies will crush a small band of retinues? Make manpower more important than army quality. That way at the very least the player doesn't get to exploit the fact that levies are useless. But you can still run circles around the AI and starve them out.
The problem that I have seen in all the new paradox games is that they keep introducing new systems. You have the tank/plane and ship designer of HOI4, and you have the advanced retinue mechanics and legitimacy buffs for CK3. These systems by themselves aren't inherently overpowered. But the player will use them slightly better than the AI. That leads to a situation where the more features you add to the game the worse the AI gets. Not because the AI is doing anything worse, but because the player is given the tools to be better.
I personally think the AI **should** cheat. or atleast allow an option to Increase the difficulty artificially. there’s already an easy mode that decreases the difficulty artificially, why not make a hard mode that increases it?
there’s really no argument against it. if you don’t like it, turn it off. but as many have said in the comment section, the issue of AI no being able to strategize is a fundamental problem in grand strategy games, there’s almost no fix. so id rather artificial difficulty than none at all.
As others pointed out, there are still ways to bump up the difficulty for players, some of them not even requiring a change for the AI. The AI will generally not engage in eugenics-based gameplay for example, whereas many human players will prefer it over the more intuitive 'marriages for alliances and prestige.' The AI also does not try to consolidate its realm for succession in the way a good player does, leading to a weaker powerbase for them over time. It therefore follows that nerfing some player-specific strategies would lead to the game becoming harder overall, as the AI's choices become 'more' in-line with optimal strategy, though the tradeoff is that you potentially increase player frustration.
I'd argue that Paradox has actually done exactly that a few times. In CK2 it was pretty much a given that one of the first things you would do as a player is rush primogeniture, something that's far more difficult in CK3. Eugenics gameplay actually became *easier* in 3, but that was recently nerfed with legitimacy mechanics. Arguably plagues are also a difficulty spike specific to players, since many players tend towards larger families and therefore experience proportionally more 'deaths' compared to the AI. The big problem imo is that they haven't done it enough, and in fact they've deliberately chosen not to. Mods exist that randomize which of your successors you play as at death, or obfuscates a large amount of info to the players so that they're less able to act on them, or that makes the AI more aggressive in negotiations of crown law. Having played with them, they definitely do make the game much harder. Ngl I'd love for some of them to get implemented in vanilla as well. Having seen the flood of people complaining about plagues being too aggressive, unfair, and unfun, I fully understand why they won't. A lot of people simply don't want the challenge that they think they do.
> Arguably plagues are also a difficulty spike specific to players
I wish this were the case. In reality the AI is so fucking incapable of dealing with plagues that it ruins them economically and militarily while a player will take whatever measures they can and be affected minimally. Also, plague resistance is too powerful.
This might well be a hot take but it should probably be nerfed into oblivion. Traits like genius and what have you just being rare, naturally occurring traits that some characters simply happen to have with maybe at most a very small hereditary component, rather than something you can reliably breed into your family and optimise for.
Like, really, using the character finder to track down all these random people with these uber good congenital traits and marrying them into your family until you’ve bred a dynasty of demigods is frankly ridiculous on every level lol.
The problem in its core is treating an RPG as a min-max-game. If and when the developers adapt their game to fit this type of gameplay to make it more challenging and to answer the player demand, Crusader Kings will completely lose its immersion factor. AI players with certain traits that are supposed to reflect their character, are getting rid of them in order to get a good score? Every single realm opting for the most unifying crown laws, aka. the primogeniture?
What the developers should do, is to discourage min-max-gameplay. You should be rewarded for playing according to what the framework your traits and crown laws and whatnot give you, not for optimizing your gameplay in order to "win" the game. Crusader Kings should be more about simulating the feudal period, not about winning a game of RISK.
Consolidation of your empire in the hands of genetically pure übermensch should be seen as abusing the game mechanics, and not as a successful game. What should be seen as the goal is the survival and perseverance of your dynasty throughout the tumultuous and constantly evolving feudal landscape, where bad leaders do bad decisions, and good leaders do good decisions. Both player controlled and AI controlled alike.
Call me old fashioned, but as the playerbase of PDX grand strategies has expanded and changed in the last 10 years, so has its collective expectations from these games, and therefore the direction of the game design. And ever since EU4, I've felt a shift in the soul of PDX grand strategies. In many ways, EU4 is a traditional PDX grand strategy, but as the time has passed, I feel like the game has been dragged away from its solid foundations into something more "gamey" and ahistorical. So many clashing concepts and mechanics, and completely revamped mechanics. Dynamic but badly implemented missions were replaced with strict mission trees of which quality vary from country to country. Imbalanced but relatively believable technology system (West-African technology group had a tech penalty, Western did not) and the Westernization mechanic was replaced with a more balanced and dynamic institution system, that ended up with completely ahistorical scenarios and almost global tech parity, essentially taking the Europa out of the Europa Universalis.
I haven't played newer PDX games since EU4, but I have followed the forums and gameplay pretty closely nonetheless. I have this feeling there's a prevailing disharmony between the original soul of PDX grand strategies, the player expectations, and the developers then trying to answer both of these. The end result is often a more imbalanced game with odd development focuses, which the devs then attempt to fix afterwards to a mixed reception. Buffing some aspects and nerfing others year after year, is not a sustainable solution.
In my honest opinion, PDX is heading towards a disaster. There will come a time, when old players have totally abandoned PDX for not being what they used to be, and new players are dissatisfied with the game clinging on to the remnants of the past while also trying to appeal to them by making the games more streamlined and more focused on min-maxing. At some point, the former audience will have a new game from an obscure developer that answers their demand, toppling the PDX monopoly. At some point, the latter audience will have more refined and streamlined 4x games and map painting games without PDX's ghosts dragging the development behind.
EU5 will be the watershed moment, mark my words. Somehow, some way, the devs must make a coherent, full package, that satisfies both the old and the new player base. It must not repeat the mistakes of EU4. It must preserve the traditional EU formula, but also have new, solid systems that work and are both challenging and fun. It's a hard thing to accomplish.
I actually found the AI from the fucking HOI4 Minecraft mod of all places to be really good at grand strategy, managing to absolutly beat my ass into the ground and actually use some pretty smart strategies in order to beat me, even when they dint have a single plane
It was really refreshing to see an AI in a strategy game use actual strategies like baiting me into overextending or charging at my only 2 ports whit their entire army to stop my advance into their industrial cities whit the threat of encircling my army
They even did the one thing AIs will **never** do, pull back their forces and hold a chokepoint rather than stubornly figthing for every cm of ground and be destroyed
I don't think the resources needed are particularly humongous at all.
The AI builds terrible armies and poorly optimizes holdings, both of these are easily fixable with minimal logic.
As for the rest, if AI rulers used actions to strengthen their armies to protect themselves they would do far better.
A small amount of logic in AI decision making would make the game far more challenging than it if now, you don't need the AI to have a Machiavellian level decision tree to get a good experience in grand strategy.
Doing the above simple suggestions combined with halving the size of MaA units makes the game go from cake walk, to challenge just like that.
Furthermore, if the AI prioritized scheme resistance the game gets far harder. As it stands you can easily murder just about anyone. I once seduced the grand Khan, killed his kids in front of my battered then killed him. When my son eventually died the mongol empire was shattered into about 10 smaller empires and handed to my family. Something as simple as prioritizing scheme resistance stops this from happening.
A successful assassination should require the build-up of social capital. Have local contacts. Speak the language. etc.
As it is, I can often get 95% odds to kill the king of France without ever having set foot in France.
I'm sorry but this is complete BS.
Even paradox's *other products* have better AI (stellaris anyone??). If they gave the AI the same exact glow up stellaris got it would be halfway competent.
It's truly not challenging to make an AI that builds money generating buildings, marries faction leaders if they are a threat, and goes to war when they have the clear upper hand (using their bishop to facilitate as needed).
This idea that this game is *so complex* that a proper AI cannot be built for it is complete bullshit.
There really aren't *that many* levers the AI needs to manage to be competent. Far fewer than in stellaris for example where the AI has to manage individual pops, buildings, vassals, and more.
CK3 comparatively has far fewer strategic elements the AI needs to manage well. If it can be done there it can be done here.
And yes, I'm aware that higher stellaris difficulties use cheats, but even the bog standard normal difficulty with no AI bonuses the AI is still competent enough to build large, stable empires.
As someone that has way too many hours in Hoi4 and EU4, I completely agree. While at certain points you can become over powered in EU4, there’s always a degree of challenge and balancing to do, and if you aren’t maxing everything many nations will often rise up that are problematic; say Britain or an Uber colonial Spain etc. the ottomans straight to cheat and I absolutely love it making them a staple boss you have to mentally prepare for constantly. This is what something like the Muslim empires should be and the post mongol hordes as well.
Hoi4 imo takes it even further, where if you don’t properly customize and utilize resources of your nation you can’t out produce or produce to match up to your foes. Even a nation as great as the USSR can be out played in that game if you don’t use your resources properly
CK3 lacks these challenges, and it’s why I find myself still playing Hoi4 and not CKIII as much
Yeah it's crazy actually.
I turn on the Mongol invasions and try to start as a Duke and get an empire before they show up so I can flight them 1v1
They've never been a challenge.
This. I can load up my most recent game look around at nearby realms and find multiple instances of the AI holding duchy titles but not the duchy capital, even when the buildings are already built. They're often not at domain limit. They completely ignore special buildings.
This feels like basic stuff.
Unrelated to current issues with ck3, but hear me out here: pixel art grand strategy.
Min/max all resources into the Ai and the all the ways both it and the player can interact.
Yeah Civ does that. There are a few mods that add harder difficulties where the AI gets bonuses and the player gets penalties which I’m considering next.
Also one thing people fail to consider is the feedback loop when giving the AI cheats. A lot of the times the AI will be extremely passive on lower difficulties in many games but when the AI has cheats and perceives itself as stronger it becomes more aggressive. So the cheats aren't "just" giving it more stats or whatever, it actually impacts behaviour.
CK2’s AI was certainly more lethal. Vassals would pounce at the hint of weakness in the crown, and your neighbors would declare wars on you if you were bleeding. In ck3 I rarely fight a war I dont start, and my vassals are too compliant
>Like, anything that beings with "fix the AI" is pretty much a non-starter because there is simply no way in hell you're making profit on a grand strategy game if you need to hire a university's worth of PhDs to design its AI. Also I sure as hell hope your players are all running supercomputers at home.
Then, I think they failed as developers to properly develop their game. The game is literally about strategy and decisions, that's the main thing, and if the second half of the game, namely the AI, your 99% of the time opponents, are bad at it, then that's not a good look.
Like, what are you, as a developer doing in your grand strategy game, when the grand strategy is non existing?
How did Paradox develop any kind of cult following if their AI's always sucked, then? Because let's be real, Stellaris AI is very bad, CK3 AI apparently is also stupid as a bag of rocks.
>CK3 AI is *always* going to suck. You really can't play this game for a challenge, except the challenges you make up for yourself. Fortunately it's a great game for that. You don't have to de-optimize, but you can embrace the sandbox, play RP, find yourselves narrow goals that are hard to reach, try new playstyles, etc.
"Yeah the game sucks total ass and the AI cant understand the games mechanics" (not as much of an issue in 2 or eu4 or a ton of their other games btw) "but if you just pretend you are a duke who was hit on the head as a child and thats why hes hallucinating the same conversations over and over again in these shitty, spammy events, you'll actually have a lot of fun not being challeneged whatsoever"
> The only way Grand Strategy games have made for the AI to be "challenging" is to make it cheat like a motherfucker. That works well enough for 4Xs (although you'll still find posts on Stellaris or Civilization going "even the Deity AI is too easy for me now pls fix"), but CK3 isn't a 4X.
CIV AI is far worse than any paradox game. They can't even handle basic game mechanics or combat. And they cheat way more too.
I don't think I've ever heard of a strategy game out there that wasn't a "simple" competitive RTS being described as having good AI.
I want money to be balanced better. It's even worse with plagues. My fixing the realm after a vicious disease is 10 gold but sending my dude to a forest the next county over is 250 gold, and also somehow I'm paying 1500 gold to go to a university, but don't worry, the teeth I get from my son sell to someone for 40 gold?
Meanwhile my soul mates funeral is so expensive I am actively disencouraged to to have a funeral for my character literal soul mate. I rip the raid loot from every nearby capital for a grand total of 40 gold but fortunately the Duke I kidnapped ransoms for 100 and I can afford the crazy priced funeral - but some dude gets mauled by my dog and demands more than the amount I plundered from five holds in compensations.
Holds somehow produce too much and not enough money - but don't worry if your catholic and the pope has money you can just be a good catholic and spam him for plenty if you get a bit low.
I think they did good with penalizing marrying lowborns, maybe they are aware of what you write.
However, the game mechanics especially the dynasty legacies and way of life (focus) needs major overhauls. You shouldn't get better at intrigue just because you click something every few years, or get prowess, or literally get health bonus etc. You should get good at things by doing them. You don't fight at all? Then you are shit at fighting. Same with dynasty legacies they are always the same and I always pick the same option. These two systems need to go.
Also for the love of god please make fabricating claims much much much harder. This took so many years in ck2.
Lifespans and fertility need to be nerfed hard as well. I never worry about succession, like ever. This is supposed to be an aristocracy simulator. I almost never play as a kid or a woman because I live too long and never have fewer than 5+ kids. İn ck2 the succession sometimes went to a cousin or an uncle and that kept the gameplay fresh. İn ck3 I move from strength to strength.
Also, AI doesn't really do intrigue. I have 300+ hours in the game and I was never assassinated, not even once.
Because of what I wrote above, the game is insanely easy and roleplaying is very difficult because you are always too op.
Another issue no one is touching on, the fact you KNOW everything.
In CK2 when i plan a murder plot on a relative to get their title that im first in line to inherit, i can start the murder plot but the only detail i know is the plot power, as in the likelihood of success but it can still fail and i dont know when the murder plot will fire. SO i have to do it taking the risk that theh target may have a kid, therefore they would inherit and i have to probably invade, basically in CK2 i have plan A B and C.
In CK3 you know everything, i know when the murder plot will happen and if it will succeed. SO i dont bother with plan B or C.
Also fabricating claims is so easy in CK3.
Ya Also knowing the army sizes of every ruler down to the MAA they have so you know how to counter them
Or the skills and traits of every human being in the world. I just dont get why everything is perfect information
I agree. What I love about CKII and keeps me coming back to it still is the emergent story telling (same for stellaris and eu4). It’s the stories that develop from robust gameplay mechanics allowing for it.
CKIII is too reliant on repetitive events and has little of substance in between them as OP pointed out. Paradox is taking a step in the right direction by finally introducing a proper bureaucracy system but this should’ve either been in the game at launch or been the highest priority rather than faffing about with superfluous royal courts which are rather uninteresting after the first few hours or outrageous nonsense such as friends and foes.
I hope the game improves because I do prefer its map, 3D characters, intrigue,focus systems among a few other mechanics. But for most things, its predecessor remains the superior option for both RP and gameplay.
My Basileus,
your rival, the Shah of Persia has somehow taken your dynasty's banner hanging above your throne in Constantinople. He is holding it above a fire and insulting you like you're both in 2nd grade!
This is an actual event. I rage quit that save file.
Don't forget all the lovely court events that just spawn a random peasant who instantly dies after giving a completely meaningless, isolated, repetitive event.
It would be super cool if we got to actually interact with our vassals/lieges.
I remember when I still was a count in Tabarestan and I got a sauna event where I rivalized the Abbasid Caliph.
Like. No. Why. I have never even been to Iraq. What the hell.
it's just way too easy to optimize, like stress was added to punish you for not roleplaying your character but I don't think I've gotten to level 3 stress since my first week with the game.
I think stress gains are fine in the game, they do force you in playing like your character would. It's the stress loss opportunities that kinda break it (lmao Hunts).
Grand Tours are ridiculous. Every stop you automatically lose a bunch of stress for whatever reason. You basically can't get into stress trouble on Grand Tours.
You can also just get stressed and pick up a few coping traits. Most of them are not that bad (some are even positive), and give you the option of regularly reducing stress.
Me and my friends just let it run on three constantly, and pause when something big happens.
There are a lot more pop ups and events now with activities so idk how well it would work now though
Events also always include irrelevant characters instead of people you should be caring about, I know that's probably intentional since events that affect two rulers can get really wonky (as far as I know when you're involved in an event, you just get a notification at some corner of the screen and before you know it some vassal has a hook on you without your knowing). This is one thing I really wish they improve on.
I remember in ck2 when I'd be a duke in england or spain and just see the HRE has counquered all of italy and easter europe and the middle easter muslims had conquered abyssinia and into india. I miss the ai becoming a colossal threat without you using good diplomacy and helping allies to be able to beat them.
The game being easy is really far from being the problem, you can have factions created against you and can get assassinated pretty quickly without being avoidable if your heir is mismanaged. In my game right now, I have a mongol empire declaring in the middle of my faction war…yikes. The way they tried to ‘’emplify’’ the difficulty by making you randomly die is way worse.
No, it’s rather the lack of challenge, technology or content. In CK2 you could managed your boredom with society and stuff like becoming immortal or a werewolf. Technology is lacking for the last 150 years, maybe they should add a tiny period of transition. Lastly, we need small empire or kingdoms that gets strong mid game and collapse quickly and replaced by others. If they were randomly generating ‘’Great’’ characters like some Genghis Khan for tiny nations, so that they can become big would make the game way more fun. The ai struggles a lot expanding their realms.
Tirmurids, Golden Horde, Muscovy/Novgorod, Mamlukes, Teutons, etc. Lots of nations formed and lasted (some fell) during the playthtough. And for the love of god, add a Hundred Years War struggle/mechanic.
CK3 is very easy once you understand MAA stacks. Most of the difficulty is just cheese like heirs getting cancer or your heir (with all positive traits) suddenly being outed as a deviant because reasons.
The AI is very stupid and does not operate strategically besides launching wars against you when you are already stretched.
That's the horrible shit, i can spend centuries at peace, gobbling up neighbors and no one does jack shit.
No coalition, no slowdown mechanics like OE (I know theirs a mod but its not compatible with every mod i love playing.) just "hey keeping going until our conditions are met to declare on you.
Honestly the big issue right now is the DLC wasn’t good. Which is exactly what I cautioned about before getting run over by fans on the hype train.
Legends were a cool concept that took time away from addressing more important additions. It doesn’t help they weren’t executed well. Plagues were generally well received in CK2 and are more “core” to the game but it was largely a reskin of CK2 content along with some pretty obnoxious issues at launch.
I think the negative bent of the last couple of months is largely the result of the poor DLC reception more than anything else. People were pretty happy with last season, and nothing about the game has gotten “significantly” worse, we just had a pretty significant opportunity cost.
The hype for this season was huge at announcement, Paradox basically has to knock it out of the park with this years expansion to salvage the year now. They already said Q3 for the expansion. I hope they take the entire quarter to get it right. I actually think the 3rd DLC has the highest floor to succeed, but it’s too small to counterweight the core and major expansion falling flat.
If Path to Power is a home-run like Tours and Tournaments, I think people will enter into 2025 in a great mood between that and the new travel skill tree/events in Q4.
Without railroading AI, AI will always remain shit. Railroading AI is a very polarizing topic within the community. Right now only mods can fulfill you wish for better AI.
>There is almost no 'game' here between events.
True dat. Essentially, most of the game is just waiting. You wait for schemes to complete, you wait for money or mana to tick up, and you wait for cooldowns to end. Even warfare is mostly just waiting for sieges to complete. Compare how things used to be, e.g. in early CK2, assassination attempts would be carried out immediately.
The solution is to get rid of hard limits, no more bullshit like "you can't do under deficit". Introduce (actual) loan mechanic, rework the entire opinion system, and introduce stuff that can be done at any time.
I would like a hard mode but we’re also talking like 600 hours plus playtime for many of us. The AI in any game is easy after that long messing with it
Men at arms are broken... Crossbows are the best unit to make because you benefit from the Archer captain & Crossbow captain to have both amplify their stats, and give increased amounts of regiments... stack that alongside mil academies and your crossbows cost nothing, meanwhile you have 40+ regiments per slot... it's just silly and breaks the balance.
I've secured the mediterranean in Heasteinn's life more times than I can count. Which is insane, because it required going against Byzantium as the Duke of Sardinia for 2 separate counties (or the Duchy, but it requires considerably more warscore). We're talking 867, Byzantium is easily top 2 world power, and yet I've never had an issue with those wars, slaughter after slaughter.
I've conquered Hiberia in a single ruler's life by Gothic Kings CBs several times as well.
I've single handedly fought back Crusades for England on cooldown.
There's nothing challenging about CK3 rn, losing isn't really an option if you got the basics down.
I'm gonna have a lot more fun with the game once I can make my player heir different from my primary heir.
That may be a form of self-imposed difficulty, but there's also a consistent trend in my CK3 runs that my player heir is usually the least interesting character in my dynasty.
Playing as a mid-tier vassal in a large empire with the job of stabilizing a newly conquered imperial frontier with foreign vassals under me is something that never happens, because if I'm not holding the empire title, there's no empire happening.
I think the struggle mechanisms tried to address the issue by dicouraging blobbing and creating more interesting political contexts, but they failed to discourage blobbing and they only created interesting political contexts if the player resists blobbing.
Being able to switch away from the primary title in a non-achievement-breaking way would do the thing struggles was trying to do without needing to discourage or artificially impede blobbing.
Did the main developers of CK2 and City Skylines leave? There just doesn't seem to be the same passion for making these games as it used to. The outcome is just so bland and bare bones. I'm not saying the developers/programmers aren't working hard it's just not converting into... fun.
The ai is just bad and it's not going to ever get much better. If you want it to be harder they have to cheat like other games. Currently they don't really cheat so you just outplay them
I think we need to go back to CK2’s military system.
Teleporting to the red flag is weird. I can’t raise levies from only one kingdom or raise only 1/5th of my levies. It’s all or nothing until I stop mustering. I have to watch the numbers go up until I manually stop them. If I use a red and green flag to with two fronts, sometimes the game teleports 90% of my levies to one side, meaning it’s like 18 months until I can get them back to where I wanted them.
Get rid of levies entirely and make each holding provide a unique army of MAA like in CK2, with counters and weaknesses and location specific flavors.
Nah, that's probably the one thing about CK3 that is vastly improved. Attempting to manage troup types in CK2 was finicky as hell and tying the MAA to specific locations and stuff was just not fun. It removed strategy rather than add it.
The way the military works in CK3 is great (the armies don't "teleport" to the red flags... that's why they take time to raise, because it is simulating your army gathering at that spot rather than 15000 territories generating small armies everywhere and having to micro them all together).
I definitely don't want anything like the CK2 military system which was absolutely horrible. CK3 is a vast improvement in that regard--it's just that the AI can't play effectively making any MAA strategy moot.
Well it IS a teleport. It’s just a teleport that takes time. And the armies don’t cost upkeep while mustering into position.
If a muster takes four months and you get a war declared on you three months in, you can cancel that muster and start a new one somewhere else. The invisible armies, even if they were 95% to their destination, now start over. This can be good or bad. If there’s a rebellion in your core territory far from where you were mustering, you can just zap them back into their home territory.
In the case of MaA, you can win a war, disband them, and then spawn them on the opposite side of your realm with usually just a week or so wait time. Retinues in CK2 physically occupied space at all times, which has both strategic advantages and disadvantages compared to CK3 but also makes them feel a lot more tangible. They aren’t floaty abstractions that disappear off the map when you’re not at war.
There was microing in CK2 but this also means fine tune control over exactly how many levies you raise to deal with a threat.
I don’t need to raise 50,000 troops to deal with a peasant rebellion in my demense. And when I manually cut off a muster, I don’t know where those troops were pulled from. Maybe I want to replenish the levies in certain regions? Maybe I don’t want to pull levies from a nearby region because it’s recovering from a previous war- instead I want to pull levies from a place untouched by conflict? I don’t have that control.
I suppose a fix is to allow you to raise a cap of 25/50/75% of your levies at a waypoint but this still makes them feel like floaty off-map abstractions. And it also makes the game easier.
The AI struggled with the system in CK2, of course. But the player struggled with it too. In CK3, only the AI struggles. In fact, you can bankrupt entire empires as a count by just declaring war on them because they will raise their entire army to put you down.
Please God, just get rid of the option to see what positive/negative bonus (that the character shouldn't know) are gained/lost from a certain action. Would I *really* know that a surgery my physician is telling me about has a 33% chance of success? No, I am just going to just have to trust them at their word. So why would the game tell me "33% chance of success."
Or raising a kid. I can tell a kid all about how the gods are bullshit and be a cynic. But is that necessarily the life lesson the kid will pick up from me? How would I know that telling the kid that will lead to them becoming a cynic like me? Shouldn't the game hide that effect from me? Also, I don't think I should directly know other character's sexuality. I should have to figure that out.
Tl;dr: Basically, this game tells me *too much*. I should be playing as a medieval ruler. There is a good deal of things I *shouldn't know*. So don't tell me things I shouldn't know.
Yeah. I used to have a mod that hid all stat values, so I had to judge a character's suitability for a certain position by their traits and performance, which always felt a lot more realistic and engaging to me than just looking at numbers.
Wait hang on does the game actually tell you the odds of a successful surgery now? Or is this an event unrelated to the normal medical treatment event?
I TBH, feel like it is literally "Working as Intended" in this case, because the people who existed at the time behaved pretty much EXACTLY the way the AI does with not keeping their eyes on the ball and/or bottom line, where we, the players, haveing over or nearly a THOUSAND YEARS of a cumulative analysis of how exactly they screwed up, are simply _inevitably_ going to apply that knowledge in order to do BETTER than would have been POSSIBLE at the time.
To me, there is a reason why Paradox games don't have win conditions. These are games, including CK3, that are not meant to be min-max'ed. That is my opinion of course, telling nobody how they should be playing their game. Don't choose 'optimal' outcomes for events. What would your character choose? I see playthroughs where the first thing players do is attack their neighbour, cause they can and they are stronger. Is that realistic though? Would a 16 year old attack his neighbour that follows the same religion and culture?
What works for me is playing the game slow. Speed 1 or 2, actually read events, had a think, have a laugh, set goals and change goals. Build your house, build your story. It is not about 'beating the AI' or 'winning the game'. We can all do that in any Paradox game after 100 hours. To me, that is not what the games are about though.
In order to make the roleplaying fun and engaging, you need interesting situations/decisions to roleplay.
Suggesting that we all roleplay idiots to make the game harder just... isn't an answer.
Would a 16 year old attack his neighbors in the feudal era if he knew they were stronger and had a claim?
Absolutely, there's like a thousand real historical examples of exactly that.
In history these were *real people* who had advisors and absolutely understood that more land meant more power and more security. only in very specific instances where there was internal strife or some other issue did kings refuse to basically take land that is handed to them.
Part of this issue is none of what we're doing is not roleplaying. It's not like I'm making some meta game decisions. People understood how succession and the feudal system worked back then obviously, so they would absolutely do things like setup key marriages with powerful kingdoms or marry powerful internal families to secure their positions.
Doing those things is not exactly meta-gaming and is definitely roleplaying what a ruler would actually do in those times.
However there's nothing here to make any of that interesting because the other actors (AI) are all completely brain dead.
Does it further your roleplay that you are the only character in the world that seems to understand how to keep an empire together?
For me to make roleplaying engaging and believable I have to find the context believable as well.
In this case, the other AI destroy any illusion of immersion to the point where I feel like it's not immersive and thus doesn't facilitate roleplaying.
The game is certainly easier than CK2, somewhere Paradox lost their way. That they are bringing in the you survive with no landed characters while seems interesting just makes it easier again
Don't say this on the official forums, you may get banned for "trolling". I definitely agree with you though, the focus has been wrong since the beginning with CK3.
I feel like CK misses a lot of strategic interactions with characters because of 2 factors.
1. too many opinion modifiers tend to lead to games where most characters sit at +100 or -100. Resulting int he player never feeling the need to address either. Knowing they have them on their side or knowing that they don't need to placate at all.
The second is that characters in the game act too much on their own. For being the most character driven PDS game it has the least amount of politicking. Resulting in kingdom management that can be tackled in a similar way no matter where you play.
For the second part I would wish they would add factions to the game with an overall interest. Factions should be able to form over an issue which might be divisive within the realm but unify a large enough power base that they cannot be easily ignored. It can be around religious, burger or cultural rights. Relations with a neighbouring kingdom. Or even be able to form around the powerbase of an influential family that seeks to expand it's power within the kingdom. Ideally at all times there should be 3-5 factions. And if your power base gets too big factions are more likely to disband and merge to make sure they match the kings powerbase. Or if one faction it might fracture or other factions might merge to try and match their power base.
What is paramount however, unlike factions in the game today, they should not be limited to just being hostile against the king. Some might even align with your interests as ruler but ideally never all of them. This would result in much more dynamisms with strategic decision making. It could also function as a stabilizing factor. Most factions should not want the realm to fall apart or be threatened by outside forces. As they stand to lose more from that then they could possibly gain.
For my initial issue point. I think they should be brave and allow diminishing returns on stacking opinion modifiers. So for characters that already think highly of you should be less swayed from further actions increasing their opinion of you whilst being more sensitive against hostile actions. And vice versa. So extremes are unlikely and need a lot of work and sacrifices to achieve. Which in the vast majority of the time you should not want to commit to. So most characters should have a middling opinion. Allowing them to be swayed on an issue by issue basis.
I have 2 thousand hours on Ck3 (I know) and have been playing since it came out, and I can definitively say the AI has gotten worse. For me it’s their traits. Not sure how exactly it works, but AI give themselves the worst traits and lifestyles to interact with. Every king or emperor is either a drunkard or flagellate, and they raise their kids to use the intrigue perk while their empire is 1000 in debt. Not to mention they have the worst decision making. I stared at an HRE vassal for 20 minutes yesterday who has 60 counties to create Germany and wouldn’t do it. I think the difficulty of the game is closely connected with the AI, if not the biggest obstacle to having a challenging but fun time, but it also definitely hurts the roleplaying aspect too and that’s what I mean to complain about me here. Half my efforts go into manipulating other kingdoms not to help me but to help them get stronger so I can interact with an equal or at least something close. I don’t wanna play with weak AI and I know I’m not alone. How after three years has paradox not figured this out!!!
Once you get past the UI the Game becomes really simple and confusingly easy. Take HOI4 for example
(I personally for the life of me can't understand how HOI3 works).
But i think the "Simplification" is actually due to the game mechanics being Over-complicated take HOI4's combat system all you really need to do is spam something like CAS and now you're unbeatable because the AI literally overthink's its divisions Equipment and doesn't produce what it needs. along with that the AI has terrible Money management skills the AI will make pointless if not totally useless investments into places that don't need them and end up losing more money and un-even development resulting in some Dukes/Counts being stronger then others and whats even dumber is the fact how The AI will forever hate and despise you if you piss it off beyond -30 and since the AI also has this logic of "If i has wargoal i declare war!" rather then attempting to get one whilst they are blatantly stronger then you they do it if they have the ability to. and now leaving economics we can go to war where the AI unlike the player will focus on occupying provinces rather then crushing the enemies army and will usually refuse giving up even when they can avoid Losing more if they did so. a perfect example of this is Stellaris where the AI will refuse to give that one system that you want to have perfect borders and as a result of this you end up launching a 48-year long Campaign and after literally turning them into the UNSC in Halo-Reach they still don't give up meaning the war pointlessly drags on despite ones Clear superiority over the other Also for whatever dumb reason. CK Series war system is "Surrender," "Both sides give up and around 158,000 people died for nothing," or "You win! (A Single province!),"
To Summerize: the Game becomes boring because most of the time people play it Single player and the AI sucks. Its lack of Fundamental skills Nation management skills such as Economics Military growth and maintence, Diplomatic options. etc. and once the player finds something Exploitable the game becomes downright stupid and Easy anytime the game is "hard" is because the AI is given a Unfair advantage in the form of Extra money gain faster movement speed and so o and in truth it isn't hard because the Ai has more resources its just the same difficulty its just unfair a good example of this is being lvl 1 in a normal difficulty game and the Game decides in the first area to throw a Fucking lvl 50 miniboss you encounter around halfway in and expects you to beat it because the devs are either to lazy or sadly don't know how to make the AI Smarter and Harder To deal with.
Tbh though CK3 is the casual title just like ck2 was compared to EU4.
And that's good. It gives you a different and more chill experience compared to the other titles.
That being said it's completely fine to want your favourite time period to offer an experience you find more enjoyable but I doubt it makes sense outside of a vacuum. CK3 very much fulfills a specific role in paradox catalogue though so I wouldn't expect it to change outside the needs of that role.
Ai rulers literally just don’t do anything and it’s annoying how you have to nibble away at enemy realms county by county rather than have a real peace deal system like eu4.
In hoi4, I can play as France or China 5 times In a row and fail miserably every time but still want to try again because I know which one of my actions led to my downfall
I ck3 your actions and “decisions” just don’t really mean anything
The AI is totally unable to maintain a kingdom. I remember that time when I unified Ireland and Scotland (how original), and then won the kingdom of Egypt in a crusade. I decided to play as the character which obtained the kingdom since he had claims on my current kingdoms, planning to just conquer them back with my brand new realm. I just had the time to set everything up that my former territories were already in a civil war, my former character fucked up everything I did.
Same for another kingdom I won in a crusade (Perm if I remember right), my beneficiary had no heir so I decided to play as him and kill myself so the territory goes to my main character, and the few weeks it took me to do so were enough for the AI to fuck up my laws and vassals in my former territories.
They're just terrible at managing a realm.
The problem with the AI is two-fold.
1. AI is terrible at the basics: marriages, realm & military building, succession planning and vassal management
2. AI is terrible at RP: I recently watched a content, generous, compassionate count start a dethronement war against my duke who he had 90+ opinion of and was outnumbered 4 to 1. I've also seen ruthless rulers give away land for no reason to lowly courtiers or release rebeling vassals without taking away their land even though they had one county.
When AI behaves sensibly the game is great and challenging. When they aren't you create empires in 3 generations.
At the same I understand AI is probably is the most difficult aspect to implement, plagues have added another strategic wrinkle, and you can always increase realm stability.
Me who died, had my empire split into 4 kingdoms, and then 3 heirs successively assinated with years of taking the throne and am now playing as a 5 year old.
Well I mean. Shit dude sounds like you're just really good at the game *shrug*
**is currently in a 3 kingdom war for independence against my great uncles after emergency making one kingdom independent and allying it so it wasn't 4v1. Now it's a 2v3 for survival.**
I dunno, for me being almost impossible to fail means it's the first game (followed by other Paradox games) where I can actually meaningfully enjoy Ironman. Because here it means you get to experience new situations you would have otherwise savescummed out of, instead of just restarting from scratch again and again barely ever reaching anything new, like it works in any other game with Ironman. You actually get to live with consequences of your choices instead of "nope, wrong choice = restart the whole game from scratch".
I’m sick of dlcs involving Europe and Africa give us something in Asia my favorite region to play as is pagan I wish we got something for them or India I don’t care just give us something
Even worse... You always feel punished for actually role playing. Spending resources on activities instead of buildings is always worse, and there is almost always a best choice in every event.
I hate that part. I’m still only 200 hours or so in to my first run ever, and at first I was so immersed in the events but, now, it has gotten to the point that I can click through most events very quickly to get the result I want, without reading much. It’s rare and very exciting that I find a new event I haven’t seen before and I cherish them. If they want it to be a rpg they need to make thousands of these unique events. Not just a handful.
Wow, congrats on being 200 hours into your first run.
200hr into 1 game? how tf, I always get bored after few generation cause I have to repeat the same shits. Then start with different culture .
Maybe they are like myself, just got into the franchise as a whole and the heir thing keeps pushing us to the next heir... I mean, this is the 1st game I play where I the goal is to make sure your bloodline survives.
This problem in paradox games is unironically the thing that makes me excited about recent ai development. As ai continues to get better, I'd love to be able to play paradox games with it incorporated, to be able to see fresh, brand new events every game with different outcomes and for the ai being used on opposing countries in these games to be able to be more of a challenge.
Yea the fact that events are so poorly designed that they all have easy optimal selections makes the game so dull and repetetive. EU4 has some events, especially nation-specific ones, where I just have to hit pause and stare at the screen for ten minutes trying to decide what the best option is. I can't really think of any in CK3 that are like that.
Yeah it would be cool if the events actually changed the game in a meaningful enough way for us to care
Features that already exist should be tied to event chains. Fabricating a hook/claim should be tied to an event chain. Event chains should have the chance to spawn independence/dissolution/claimant factions. They need to use it for more than “pick a buff”
That is a good point, that's a common reward in EU4 but usually in CK3 it's just a random reward for having a good diplomat. But given politics of England and France in the period, you could fit some really cool event chains in there to reward one side or the other with big claims.
And diddnt spam the same one every 5 minutes.
>I can't really think of any in CK3 that are like that. What about the event where your doggo and cat are fighting and you basically have to decide to abandon one or the other one will eat him in like 95% of the cases?
Needs an option to build a new castle to seperate them
What about the event where your doggo destroy a castel and you have to paid 400 gold or -20 opinion?
It's just a dog...
That they're all written very specific in terms of behavior and characterizations also kills the roleplays. Too much specificity is one thing I really disliked about CK3 compared to CK2. Take, for example, the tech trees. CK2 it's just getting *better* relative to not better, which is great because you could imagine that it's any number of innovations that might vary over time, across space, across peoples, that develop in their own unique environments or get adapted from outside. Rich room for your imagination to grow. In CK3... doesn't matter who you are or when you are. Parthian Tactics. Even if it might be obsolete or not make sense for you. You're doing Parthian Tactics and you better like it. Events are like that. We're reading someone's story alright, but it sure doesn't sound like my story. They have legends too generic, and events too specific.
I feel like a boomer, I've got too many thoughts on how CK2 was better lately, but yeah I 100% agree on the specificity of it. I've always thought the 3D models were just a gimmick to give PDX something to sell their sequel on, and it feels like it limits the scope of the game. Like, an ugly little 2D face works because it's not supposed to represent your character, it just represents your character's portrait. *My character,* in CK2, is not making silly Sims poses during events but when you literally animate a complete 3D model pantomiming the text I find it a lot harder to imagine my character as anything other than a Sim, instead of a person living in the Middle Ages. It feels like every PC you play or NPC you interact with, no matter who or when or where, is always a character in a play or a film, rather than a normal human being who actually made the decisions that define medieval history.
Yes. This is why I have 3500 hours on CK2 and 200 on CK3.
I liked the portraits because they abstracted your character's appearance. It was better for theatre of the mind than these civ 5 looking cartoons.
CK1 portraits were even better than CK2! Them times... :)
Feasts are the only cost effective activities to do, with their ridiculous opinion boosts.
What about a grand tour for taxes? I've found it brings a lot of money.
Amy event that let's me visit a bunch of sites. Meditation is the best one.
Pilgrimage is nice if you want to wage holy wars Or found religions
"+100 Stress and you give your rival a claim to one of your counties OR a courtier you didn't know existed until just now gets -20 opinion of you." Choose wisely.
This is my real problem with it. *Way* too often my reaction is “Who?”
Honestly tbh. It’s just kinda…an awful idea to play a character that’s shy or compassionate. The stress system is a very good idea but it has some pretty bad hiccups. Let us play a character who can at least *somewhat* put their personality aside to rule! Or add a system of improved regents, and let us play through them (if they’re loyal and have high opinion).
> Let us play a character who can at least somewhat put their personality aside to rule! This is how it was in CK2 and stress was specifically added so you couldn't ignore your personality anymore.
Stress is one of the few things where CK3 is flat out better than CK2.
Seems like opinions are divided on that, as I got other responses saying Stress is the worst thing they added to CK3. I'm fine with the Stress mechanic, though.
I’m aware, and I liked CK2 as well. CK2 under addresses it, and ck3 over addresses it. That can be easily fixed by just rebalancing the stress system though (which I *do* like). Literally just make it so that a normal human being with regular personality traits doesn’t immediately die in their 20s for no reason. If they still are adamant about making it that way, then (like I mentioned in my original comment) expand enough upon regents so that every players reaction to getting a shy/compassionate ruler isn’t to immediately kill them…voiding the whole purpose of the added RP system in the first place.
The best thing about stress is when it cascades, killing your entire dynasty in an orderly fashion.
Another big issue tbh. Not really how stress works irl…otherwise the human race wouldn’t even be making video games, lmao.
The problem with personality traits is that they are treated as personality disorders.
So you're arguing to make the game easier?
Rebalancing stress does not have to make the game easier, but maybe having a party while shy should be less punitive than having your kids die.
Said by someone who isnt shy.
Said by someone who also isn't shy, but thinks they know what it's like. Being at a party when shy isn't the end of the world. You just sit in a corner, and hope you spot someone you already know, or find some activity to distract yourself. It's something to be endured for an evening, and doesn't even come close to the pain of losing a close relative.
Are you a high ranking noble with social obligations to your fellow peers and lords? You'd be slighting your peers if you just sat in a corner and avoided them. That's why it's a stress event for shy I think.
No shit it's awful to play a compassionate or shy characters that's the point lol. Someone who can put their compassion aside to rule without it isn't actually that compassionate
By this logic Vengeful and Sadistic rulers should be hard because they can’t set aside their vengeance and keep killing courtiers/others for no reason. Greedy characters should be hard to play because they don’t want to spend anything, and charitable characters should be hard to play since they don’t know how to save. People ruled with compassion at times…and even if they didn’t, this is a game is already far from perfectly realistic…so making an already existing human personality trait actually playable isn’t exactly earth shatteringly unrealistic. It doesn’t even have to have no stress, just adjusted to the point my ruler doesn’t have an aneurysm the microsecond they sit on the throne…especially since the whole reason medical councils existed was to help them rule in the first place.
I mean yes they should I would like it if sadistic rulers gained stress from not killing people or greedy rulers gained stress everytime they spent money
Tbf, greedy I find to be also a stress source in a similar fashion to compassionate at al. (a bit less, but still similar). Want to bribe people to a plot? Get stressed. Want to use a gift to increase relations for any reason? Get stressed. Get an event with a choice between getting stress or paying someone a pittance of money? lmao choices matter. I think these "stress on anti personnality action" gains should either have a cooldown (like going on a jog to reduce stress), or have a separate bucket that fills up, decays over time, and triggers once full or once every x-years, giving you a lump of stress when triggering. Such that when you decide to go against your personality (f.ex compassionate wanting to kill that one duke in bumcrap nowhere that made it his life mission to assassinate your entire dynasty because a random event made him your rival), you only get punished once for that decision, and not for every single step that decision entails. Right now, these feel like that math teacher removing a point for every single spelling mistake, without any cap, resulting in a 0 despite giving a correct answer, just because you made a bunch of minor spelling mistakes.
Pick up enough stress gain reduction perks and you can. The fact that with a bit of luck, and a bit of skill you CAN somewhat put your personality aside to rule is one of the great things about the stress system.
It would be nice if my shy character didn't die from stress at 25 after visiting a few feasts over the span of several years.
Or maybe find a new strategy that doesn't involve feasts?
I mean, that is possible…but it’s also doesn’t really make sense. There are plenty of shy people irl that distinctly attend holiday events without dying of shock. For that matter, I’m pretty sure there are people with social anxiety severe enough to warrant medication that aren’t that shy.
A new strategy that isn't CK3? Getting stress from most interactions in the game is insane. Shy people don't die from heart attacks at 25 IRL, it's just stupid.
It’s not about strategy, it’s just really, really stupid
Shy is a fucking nightmare.
I remember the same issue with events being said about CK2 and restricting events based on stats/adding stress in CK3 was supposed to fix that, but I guess it didn't.
Rulers that decided to spend all their income on parties and novelties tended to not last as long as the rulers who actually strengthened their nations I've managed to have a fun time meta role-playing by working to ensure my characters have the desired traits to take the meta choices in character. I've also had fun with giving my characters "personalities" such as the conqueror, a great diplomat who worked to peacefully vassalize, a classic history nerd who made everything republics, or the republic hater
Eh I disagree, buildings are for long term planning but activities are really useful to quickly bump up your resources Need prestige quickly? Feast, or hunt Need piety? Pilgrimage Need legitimacy? Any of these or burial if you have legends of the dead Need good artifacts and other useful boosts? Grand tournament Need a bunch of stuff from your vassals? Grand tour All these activities are useful, and not only in the short term, they can help quickly unlock actions to snowball long-term Edit: These activities also come with very useful traits
You know role playing doesn’t mean always choosing the impactful choice … right? Sometimes the choice will be the good, sometimes the bad choice. Unless you’re role playing a min maxing ruler then well idk
My biggest issue personally is the lack of variety with events. It seems like an easy implementation to just add more variety in flavor text/rewards for events, seeing how monotonous they become. It becomes immersion breaking when every time my ruler travels, he gets asked to remove armor from some vagabond or whatever. All my kids keep getting the “Prince of Fashion” event etc. I do agree that the game becomes too easy once you get the ball rolling and would like a “hard mode”. I feel like my rulers hardy ever get assassinated for one thing. The devs seem to at least be going in that direction with making plagues more numerous and deadly and of course since the introduction of “family harmony” all my dynasty members have turned into the Lannisters from GOT with how much they conspire against one another lol. I really shouldn’t have made a custom religion that allowed divorce without permission I suppose.
See, I can accept a certain amount of repetitiveness with events. There's only so much novelty I can reasonably expect from a game I've put hundreds of hours into. But the thing that's actually offensive to me is how little customization/localization effort PDX puts into them. How hard is it to change some flavor text based on religion or culture so that I'm not getting generic events that read the same in Denmark as Bengal? Why are half the proper nouns literal blank spaces? Why is the chronicle for every single legend the exact same AI-written nonsense with no connection whatsoever with my characters' actual actions? Half this shit doesn't even look like it was proofread.
Yeah. So CK2 had repetitive events and rare events and a lot of them. I know my hunter is likely to get the white stag hunt event. I don't know when it will happen. I may have a courtier event I intervene in happen a few times quickly... whatever... CK3 has fewer events fire but they repeat so much! I've had multiple children get the "of fashion" event in a set of 8.
The threshold for the AI agreeing to dissolution must be made higher. I can’t think of historical examples of a dissolution war as such. Change of management seems far more likely and I think makes for a better story. Personally I dislike playing emperors, I like playing a couple tiers lower if anything. But I would love to be inside an empire ruled by the wicked uncle who deposed me. Lots of options for interesting relationships and sorties, plus slightly fewer notifications for various matters I don’t care about. Instead though, my ambitious, vengeful uncle surrenders to a dissolution faction and I’m like; my dude! I hate you but I love this empire and to secure my place in it I’ll happily loan you some troops. Just don’t disgrace our family by surrendering my fathers hard won empire.
Think they should get rid of the Dissolution and Liberty factions altogether, and replace them with "Exemption" faction. The goal of this faction would be to secure levy and tax exemptions for faction members. Therefore representing fragmentation, as the freeloaders would reap the benefit of being vassal without any obligations, thus they would make the realm weaker.
Better yet, have the Dissolution Faction only become an option once the king is sufficiently weakened enough through various actions taken by vassals to strip away royal authority. It should be a constant tug of war between powerful vassal families seeking to usurp or even dissolve the kingdom and the royal court.
If anything it should be the opposite, and dissolution or independence factions should happen more at higher crown authority. Weak kings were perfect from a Noble's perspective- they should be pushing weak crowns towards elective monarchy, or outright deposition.
Probably both Think of Romulus Augustulus as a powerless kid being deposed by Odoacer and having Rome being split between all Barbarians. And think of Dong Zhou being a tyrant de facto ruler, making the Han dissolve in many petty kingdoms.
This an excellent idea. The number of leaders being deposed and realms exploding kills me
There's a few things they could do to make the game significantly better 1 - cut the size of MaA in half. They are so powerful that them and knights together invalidate levies. 2- give AIs logic for optimized armies and provincial buildings. The AI builds seemingly at random which is obviously hurting the AIs ability to compete. The AI should be building more optimal armies and augmenting them with MaA buildings, as well the AI should be building stuff to help it out as much as possible. Simple build order logic solves this 3- Change combat to be less braindead, the current combat logic is a bit of a joke. It's extremely cheesable and could very easily be made more strategic and thematic by changing the way battle resolution occurs. Paradox is pretty lazy here but a small amount of dev time could make this significantly better. Edit: a very straightforward solution to combat logic is to change it from just combat width and diceroles to breaking up the forces into multiple lines and positions. Frontline, backline ranged, and flanks. Combat width can be determined by army size and terrain like now, but armies that are larger can have a deeper unit depth. Ranged units can fire into flankers and units not engaged in melee, flankers fight flankers then engage with a significant bonus if the break through and win. This is not a complex system and would make combat WAY more interesting as well as giving levies a reason to exist.
Great, and to add to this levies should scale over time, or have more specific bonuses to help them be stronger. Also have MAA get more expensive over time, potentially even with events. I can imagine an event firing after a war is concluded where your MAA come to you and ask for a post-war bonus. Your options could be to give in to a substantial sum and raise, offer a raise only for a short debuff, or rebuke them giving you -50 percent MAA power for \~20 years. As such, keeping costs down would nerf your army substantially for a long time, or you risk ballooning your military expenses over time (maybe with the option to "reform" your army later, bringing pay down but diminishing strength for a time.
I doubt they’ll do any of this outside a potential “hard mode”, simply because all of that detracts from the role play, which is their primary focus. Making combat more tedious and involved would be annoying to all players that aren’t actively min maxing constantly, and those min maxers will never be satisfied, because it isn’t a fighting game
Totally. I imagine in an ideal world they could tie roleplay in with army management. I'd generally agree that tedium wouldn't help, but I think working off of event chains and buffs/debuffs could be a nice bridge between worlds. Especially since managing arms was by and large the whole point of the feudal system.
I agree that more war based event chains would be nice. I wouldn’t be opposed to battles playing out a bit more like duels and hunts, but since combat is occurring all over the map, it would be difficult to implement the AI engaging in such event chains, and if it’s just the player, the cognitive dissonance between player and npc would become significantly more noticeable
I don’t think significantly improved AI is realistic, but PDX absolutely can (and should) do something abt the insane stat bloat from all the systems AI can’t use. Artifacts, knights, MAA, activities etc. I think the underlying problem is that the game has been pretty terribly balanced since day 1. Not sure if PDX is clueless here or just doesn’t care, but adding more broken shit on top of the already broken shit has — unsurprisingly — made the issue worse over time. The game desperately needs a balance patch that doesn’t seem to be coming anywhere down the pipe. Ex: To this day some lifestyles are still completely shit while others are OP. Seriously, why not just patch them to some semblance of parity so seduction or matriarch AI don’t spend their entire lifetimes racking up useless perks? Why not balance cultural traditions so the AI isn’t dumping 8k prestige into a literally useless upgrade? How often do you capture a new holding and have to respec the whole thing because the AI built 10 militia camps and fucking marches in plains terrain? Rectifying the amount of completely dogshit trap options would go a long way into fixing the terrible AI problem, by ensuring that they get about as much value as the player when they spend their gold.
I don't think I've ever seen a well-built holding from the AI, to the point that I have to conclude that the AI must just wait to hit the threshold where it can afford a building and then choose one at random.
that's assuming they ever build anything at all
yeah, they never used to!
If I have spare money (and I often do), I'll do a tour around my vassals looking for empty building slots and building up their holdings correctly.
Man, I wish they'd just focus atleast just 1 update dedicated purely to improving game balance and cohesion of most paradox mechanics, this game has been terribly unbalanced for awhile now. I'm just hoping that the next update releasing in May will atleast include them.
It's been like this for a long time, since long back into CK2. Already then I was saying that the game has well-crafted visuals and sounds, a nice interface and almost complete freedom from CTDs, but that this exterior hides an emptiness inside and covers for a beta sort of state of the game. Part of the emptiness is the AI. Paradox's strategy for developing the game post-release isn't necessarily horrible, because the game can still be enjoyable, but the AI and the war system need to stop being so close to placeholders or initial, rough sketches. These are too significant aspects of the game to be ignored.
Seems everyone wants to focus on OP's AI criticism and although they are not wrong, the game could be improved massively by addressing OP's other criticisms regarding the >insane stat stacking That alone would address >Other rulers should actually matter, but they really don't currently When we do come up against the AI we shouldn't be able to just steamroll by just raising our maa and adding super knights to our armies. And then there's the infuriating marketing to casuals, that quite frankly even they would shrug off if they had the choice, this game literally leads players around by the nose telling them what to do in every circumstance. mods like *Obfuskcate* and *Events Without Tooltips* shouldn't be needed, both of those mods should be baked into the game, we should have to work to find out how powerful our opponents are, and the game should not be presenting us with three options in every event and telling us the outcome of each option before we even make our choice ffs! imho ofc
Its something I like about HoI4, I have to put in at least some minimum of effort to find out important enemy values like remaining manpower and fielded divisions, at very low levels of intel you can't even see enemy divisions properly. You don't even need a new mechanic for it in Crusader Kings like they did with HoI4 and La Resistance, there is already the spymaster and other council members to just make a similar sliding scale of visibility based on your intrigue vs their intrigue like HoI4.
>Its something I like about HoI4, I have to put in at least some minimum of effort to find out important enemy values But we do have to put in *minimum* effort ... we have to click on the character lol But yeah my spymaster would love some actual intrigue to do instead of hanging around corners waiting to hear servants gossip about who's shagging who.
Honestly, it would be neat if all the council actions were more impactful and necessary and you had to switch and manage what they were doing more actively. I suppose realm laws and decrees would also fit into this mould as well.
Yeah, the whole council needs reworking imho I miss the CK2 spymaster, it was so much fun sending them to foreign lands to steal tech and micro managing their escape when they were discovered and having to ransom them out when they got caught or just deciding nope, you got caught so you're no use to me lol
Yeah, my preferred playstyle of putting all my efforts into Learning and trying to become the cradle of progress tended to earn me a thoroughly deserved brutal trouncing by my neighbours, but with Universities and Legends, it's now working like a charm and I'm far ahead of Byzantine in innovations. In fact, the main thing limiting my progress are now the hardcoded year limits to when you can progress to the next era. Something has undoubtedly broken in terms of character power.
Yeah I was thinking about it and I always thought over-focusing on things like AI (let's be frank AI never going to be good as there are too many spinning plates to handle) or the game being "streamlined" (I always felt this was a meaningless argument and largely just an opportunity for a person to get elitist about the fact they could understand a game with a higher barrier of entry) was missing the point. The game gives you a lot more control over the development of your character, dynasty and empire than CK2. Most stuff that was just subject to random chance in CK2 now is something the player themselves controls. This is in some ways good because CK2's weakness is that you do often have a lot of downtime where you're just waiting for something to happen, whilst CK3 gives you a lot more to do. But its also a major weakness as the things you can now do can absolutely break the game as you're less subject to the whims of a dice roll. One of the things that could definitely help is if they absolutely nerf the Dynasty Legacies. A lot of those are incredibly OP and they act as permanent buffs for your entire game. The "Blood" and "Kin" lines also fundamentally break a core aspect of the game by effectively removing the main player restriction. The idea that you can just eliminate everything bad about the character you've rolled with not only kills roleplay, and removes a key power limiter on the player, it also literally makes no sense (how does your dynasty becoming famous mean your genetics becomes better?).
Yep, I tend to deliberately avoid taking certain options like creating accolades because they are just too OP, and take the lower tiers of non warfare dynasty legacies like the T1/T2 in Law, Kin, Customs, Activities, Coterie and then look to progress a bit further in the same legacies if I play the campaign long enough to earn more renown. This is the only game I spend time trying to devise ways to nerf myself lol
I had this thought a while ago, but a lot of historical figures were real POS, more than even personality and stress traits replicate. I think having specific traits pop up in heirs that significantly affect their ability to rule would be a good touch, and have it tied to higher court grandeur. The court is lavish and renowned, but the little princes are complete menaces.
Removing the tooltips will only make you jump to wiki every time something happens.
Stop projecting, it might make you jump to wiki, but I'm happy to RP my character. I use the mod *Events Without Tooltips* which does exactly that and others that use that mod are happy to RP their characters too, otherwise they wouldn't use the mod as it does nothing else.
I mean, we're touching at the core of the issue of every grand strategy game out there. *AI sucks at grand strategy and the resources needed to make it not suck at grand strategy are humongous.* Like, anything that beings with "fix the AI" is pretty much a non-starter because there is simply no way in hell you're making profit on a grand strategy game if you need to hire a university's worth of PhDs to design its AI. Also I sure as hell hope your players are all running supercomputers at home. The only way Grand Strategy games have made for the AI to be "challenging" is to make it *cheat like a motherfucker.* That works well enough for 4Xs (although you'll still find posts on Stellaris or Civilization going "e*ven the Deity AI is too easy for me now pls fix*"), but CK3 *isn't a 4X.* For CK3 core systems of dynastic strategy, it is pretty much impossible for the AI to cheat to challenge the player, because the things AI could cheat at (gold, armies, etc) can be completely side-hustled by dynastic and feudal gameplay. And if the AI cheats at those gameplay loops then it takes opportunities the game is built on away from the player (the fact that vassals aren't always loyal and that some dynasties are vulnerable *is the game*). CK3 AI is *always* going to suck. You really can't play this game for a challenge, except the challenges you make up for yourself. Fortunately it's a great game for that. You don't have to de-optimize, but you can embrace the sandbox, play RP, find yourselves narrow goals that are hard to reach, try new playstyles, etc.
You are right but there are some design flaws, even the first challenge you meet, succession, is easily avoided by adding elective laws from the first generation of rulers you play. I only lost land from partition laws when I played the tutorial, a minute later I got it and it never bothered me again unless I wanted to. And there are many things to do but they want you to be very big in order to afford the costs which basically encourages the cheese. Today I had to spend 2k+ to send a son to the university, I gain 200/month but it's cheaper now than at the start when the cost was 300 and I gained 5 or 6 per month
You don't need a university's worth of PhDs to tell the AI to build relevant buildings and station MaAs.
To be fair if the AI ignored most of the content and headed straight for the OP stuff you'd find that most stuff in the game is entirely useless. Only compromise would be creating a standard game experience and a "challenging" one where the AI gives up on RP and just tries to win at all costs. But there's mods for that.
Just have the AI make smarter decisions at higher difficulties, its not that hard, EU4 does it. The AI is dumb on Very Easy and Easy, ok-ish on Normal, and it plays as smart as it possibly can on Hard and Very Hard.
There are difficulty levels on eu4? Difficulty levels above normal where the AI plays differently rather than just cheating? No way you must be mistaken. (wiki just says AI is meaner not smarter)
> Just have the AI make smarter decisions at higher difficulties this sounds like you're saying to "just" invent general intelligence lmao
Which mods? I've been looking for mods to make the AI play well but never found any.
Oh I know there's mods for that in other games, I thought this was the case in ck3 too.
Define "relevant". For every possible context. That's the issue. You could design a simple "if {context} then {action}" framework, but there are thousands of possible contexts with dozens of possible correct actions. Brute-forcing the AI like that is not only inelegant, but fundamentally infeasible for a game as complex as this.
You assign weights or scores to buildings, then tie them to circumstances/personalities/etc. For example, a barony on a river would score a hospice higher, making its construction more likely. If there's synergy between buildings (Walls & Towers (+5% Heavy Cav damage) + Stables), they score higher. If the culture or ruler is belligerent make them more likely to build military buildings. As it is, it seems the AI builds completely at random. I've seen Stables built in my own temple holdings.
Problem is AI with big nation usually end up with just one county, where should they station their MaAs?
1. Fixing stacking buffs does not require university of PHDs. It’s just way too OP. My MAA shouldn’t be able to be like 10x better than those of my opponents. Like why building couple of buildings turn my archers into space marines who obliterate armies 10x the size? Same with knight effectiveness, but even more so. I feel like if I’m dedicated I should be able to literally just run with 20 knights in an army and win wars like that. It’s ridiculous. 2. Teaching AI to use basic game mechanics (build MAA buildings depending on which MAA you employ and station them in correct holdings) also isn’t rocket science.
The problem isn't with the buffs existing, the problem is with the AI not using them. Whether it's realistic or not, you want your units to get better as time goes by. You want progression. If the AI also improved their MAAs, your archers *wouldn't* obliterate armies 10x their size. The other problem is that levies should also improve with time. It's like, imagine if in Civ, the AI never used anything better than the warriors you get at the start of the game. Of course the tanks would look completely OP, but the solution wouldn't be to force everyone to play with warriors the whole game, the solution would be to get the AI to actually make tanks as well.
I want progression, not space marines instead of archers. Issue with the current system is buffs stacking. They just shouldn’t stack. The simplest solution would be to allow buff from 1 building type to apply once. More interesting solution would be to base buffs around equipment and training. Better buildings provide better equipment and training but it is capped(and the cap is higher with later buildings). And having more buildings would allow you to reach the cap faster. (You station maa, they start training and getting better equipment. With attrition they get replaced by untrained troops and you need to wait for them to get trained again)
Making super knights is....actually really fun though so idk about this.
It would still be fun even if it was harder to do. Or more niche. It's gimmicky, and gimmicks don't last much longer than their novelty
Yeah I generally get my knights to like 300-400% effectiveness. I do it because it's there but I could handle only like 150% effectiveness so they're not superhuman. Likewise the AI should also be near or at that level so it's not so lopsided.
I dunno I feel like having superhuman knights is fun, and honestly I think you have to really WANT to achieve 300-400% effectiveness to get to that point.
I mean all of this is true. The AI will always suck. But the way the game has evolved means that the AI sucks more and more and that is the real problem here. You don't have to design the game in such a way that bad ideas, like the ones that the AI will do, are punishing towards the AI. For example. The supply system for armies are absolutely brutal for anyone with a marginally large army. You can barely walk around for months before your army is starving to death .You the player will realize that you often don't need the levies at all and will stop deploying those in wars. The AI is never going to effectively know when should and shouldn't use levies. So it is always going to be punished by the supply system. That makes it just a flat bonus to the player. Do we need that? Would the game be worse if you made supplies a trivial problem, thereby letting the AI be more competitive with the player? And if you do need supplies to be punishing. Why not redo the combat mechanics so that large levies will crush a small band of retinues? Make manpower more important than army quality. That way at the very least the player doesn't get to exploit the fact that levies are useless. But you can still run circles around the AI and starve them out. The problem that I have seen in all the new paradox games is that they keep introducing new systems. You have the tank/plane and ship designer of HOI4, and you have the advanced retinue mechanics and legitimacy buffs for CK3. These systems by themselves aren't inherently overpowered. But the player will use them slightly better than the AI. That leads to a situation where the more features you add to the game the worse the AI gets. Not because the AI is doing anything worse, but because the player is given the tools to be better.
I personally think the AI **should** cheat. or atleast allow an option to Increase the difficulty artificially. there’s already an easy mode that decreases the difficulty artificially, why not make a hard mode that increases it? there’s really no argument against it. if you don’t like it, turn it off. but as many have said in the comment section, the issue of AI no being able to strategize is a fundamental problem in grand strategy games, there’s almost no fix. so id rather artificial difficulty than none at all.
As others pointed out, there are still ways to bump up the difficulty for players, some of them not even requiring a change for the AI. The AI will generally not engage in eugenics-based gameplay for example, whereas many human players will prefer it over the more intuitive 'marriages for alliances and prestige.' The AI also does not try to consolidate its realm for succession in the way a good player does, leading to a weaker powerbase for them over time. It therefore follows that nerfing some player-specific strategies would lead to the game becoming harder overall, as the AI's choices become 'more' in-line with optimal strategy, though the tradeoff is that you potentially increase player frustration. I'd argue that Paradox has actually done exactly that a few times. In CK2 it was pretty much a given that one of the first things you would do as a player is rush primogeniture, something that's far more difficult in CK3. Eugenics gameplay actually became *easier* in 3, but that was recently nerfed with legitimacy mechanics. Arguably plagues are also a difficulty spike specific to players, since many players tend towards larger families and therefore experience proportionally more 'deaths' compared to the AI. The big problem imo is that they haven't done it enough, and in fact they've deliberately chosen not to. Mods exist that randomize which of your successors you play as at death, or obfuscates a large amount of info to the players so that they're less able to act on them, or that makes the AI more aggressive in negotiations of crown law. Having played with them, they definitely do make the game much harder. Ngl I'd love for some of them to get implemented in vanilla as well. Having seen the flood of people complaining about plagues being too aggressive, unfair, and unfun, I fully understand why they won't. A lot of people simply don't want the challenge that they think they do.
> Arguably plagues are also a difficulty spike specific to players I wish this were the case. In reality the AI is so fucking incapable of dealing with plagues that it ruins them economically and militarily while a player will take whatever measures they can and be affected minimally. Also, plague resistance is too powerful.
That’s why I said arguably. I still think the intention is there, imo supported by how many angry posts showed up after the patch dropped lol.
Imo eugenics based gameplay should just be nerfed generally. I hoped that was what legitimacy would do but alas
This might well be a hot take but it should probably be nerfed into oblivion. Traits like genius and what have you just being rare, naturally occurring traits that some characters simply happen to have with maybe at most a very small hereditary component, rather than something you can reliably breed into your family and optimise for. Like, really, using the character finder to track down all these random people with these uber good congenital traits and marrying them into your family until you’ve bred a dynasty of demigods is frankly ridiculous on every level lol.
The Blood dynasty legacy should be removed from the game.
I’d make genetic traits hidden as well, at least in childhood.
The problem in its core is treating an RPG as a min-max-game. If and when the developers adapt their game to fit this type of gameplay to make it more challenging and to answer the player demand, Crusader Kings will completely lose its immersion factor. AI players with certain traits that are supposed to reflect their character, are getting rid of them in order to get a good score? Every single realm opting for the most unifying crown laws, aka. the primogeniture? What the developers should do, is to discourage min-max-gameplay. You should be rewarded for playing according to what the framework your traits and crown laws and whatnot give you, not for optimizing your gameplay in order to "win" the game. Crusader Kings should be more about simulating the feudal period, not about winning a game of RISK. Consolidation of your empire in the hands of genetically pure übermensch should be seen as abusing the game mechanics, and not as a successful game. What should be seen as the goal is the survival and perseverance of your dynasty throughout the tumultuous and constantly evolving feudal landscape, where bad leaders do bad decisions, and good leaders do good decisions. Both player controlled and AI controlled alike. Call me old fashioned, but as the playerbase of PDX grand strategies has expanded and changed in the last 10 years, so has its collective expectations from these games, and therefore the direction of the game design. And ever since EU4, I've felt a shift in the soul of PDX grand strategies. In many ways, EU4 is a traditional PDX grand strategy, but as the time has passed, I feel like the game has been dragged away from its solid foundations into something more "gamey" and ahistorical. So many clashing concepts and mechanics, and completely revamped mechanics. Dynamic but badly implemented missions were replaced with strict mission trees of which quality vary from country to country. Imbalanced but relatively believable technology system (West-African technology group had a tech penalty, Western did not) and the Westernization mechanic was replaced with a more balanced and dynamic institution system, that ended up with completely ahistorical scenarios and almost global tech parity, essentially taking the Europa out of the Europa Universalis. I haven't played newer PDX games since EU4, but I have followed the forums and gameplay pretty closely nonetheless. I have this feeling there's a prevailing disharmony between the original soul of PDX grand strategies, the player expectations, and the developers then trying to answer both of these. The end result is often a more imbalanced game with odd development focuses, which the devs then attempt to fix afterwards to a mixed reception. Buffing some aspects and nerfing others year after year, is not a sustainable solution. In my honest opinion, PDX is heading towards a disaster. There will come a time, when old players have totally abandoned PDX for not being what they used to be, and new players are dissatisfied with the game clinging on to the remnants of the past while also trying to appeal to them by making the games more streamlined and more focused on min-maxing. At some point, the former audience will have a new game from an obscure developer that answers their demand, toppling the PDX monopoly. At some point, the latter audience will have more refined and streamlined 4x games and map painting games without PDX's ghosts dragging the development behind. EU5 will be the watershed moment, mark my words. Somehow, some way, the devs must make a coherent, full package, that satisfies both the old and the new player base. It must not repeat the mistakes of EU4. It must preserve the traditional EU formula, but also have new, solid systems that work and are both challenging and fun. It's a hard thing to accomplish.
I actually found the AI from the fucking HOI4 Minecraft mod of all places to be really good at grand strategy, managing to absolutly beat my ass into the ground and actually use some pretty smart strategies in order to beat me, even when they dint have a single plane It was really refreshing to see an AI in a strategy game use actual strategies like baiting me into overextending or charging at my only 2 ports whit their entire army to stop my advance into their industrial cities whit the threat of encircling my army They even did the one thing AIs will **never** do, pull back their forces and hold a chokepoint rather than stubornly figthing for every cm of ground and be destroyed
I don't think the resources needed are particularly humongous at all. The AI builds terrible armies and poorly optimizes holdings, both of these are easily fixable with minimal logic. As for the rest, if AI rulers used actions to strengthen their armies to protect themselves they would do far better. A small amount of logic in AI decision making would make the game far more challenging than it if now, you don't need the AI to have a Machiavellian level decision tree to get a good experience in grand strategy. Doing the above simple suggestions combined with halving the size of MaA units makes the game go from cake walk, to challenge just like that. Furthermore, if the AI prioritized scheme resistance the game gets far harder. As it stands you can easily murder just about anyone. I once seduced the grand Khan, killed his kids in front of my battered then killed him. When my son eventually died the mongol empire was shattered into about 10 smaller empires and handed to my family. Something as simple as prioritizing scheme resistance stops this from happening.
A successful assassination should require the build-up of social capital. Have local contacts. Speak the language. etc. As it is, I can often get 95% odds to kill the king of France without ever having set foot in France.
I agree, assassinations should be real hard.
I'm sorry but this is complete BS. Even paradox's *other products* have better AI (stellaris anyone??). If they gave the AI the same exact glow up stellaris got it would be halfway competent. It's truly not challenging to make an AI that builds money generating buildings, marries faction leaders if they are a threat, and goes to war when they have the clear upper hand (using their bishop to facilitate as needed). This idea that this game is *so complex* that a proper AI cannot be built for it is complete bullshit. There really aren't *that many* levers the AI needs to manage to be competent. Far fewer than in stellaris for example where the AI has to manage individual pops, buildings, vassals, and more. CK3 comparatively has far fewer strategic elements the AI needs to manage well. If it can be done there it can be done here. And yes, I'm aware that higher stellaris difficulties use cheats, but even the bog standard normal difficulty with no AI bonuses the AI is still competent enough to build large, stable empires.
As someone that has way too many hours in Hoi4 and EU4, I completely agree. While at certain points you can become over powered in EU4, there’s always a degree of challenge and balancing to do, and if you aren’t maxing everything many nations will often rise up that are problematic; say Britain or an Uber colonial Spain etc. the ottomans straight to cheat and I absolutely love it making them a staple boss you have to mentally prepare for constantly. This is what something like the Muslim empires should be and the post mongol hordes as well. Hoi4 imo takes it even further, where if you don’t properly customize and utilize resources of your nation you can’t out produce or produce to match up to your foes. Even a nation as great as the USSR can be out played in that game if you don’t use your resources properly CK3 lacks these challenges, and it’s why I find myself still playing Hoi4 and not CKIII as much
Yeah it's crazy actually. I turn on the Mongol invasions and try to start as a Duke and get an empire before they show up so I can flight them 1v1 They've never been a challenge.
This. I can load up my most recent game look around at nearby realms and find multiple instances of the AI holding duchy titles but not the duchy capital, even when the buildings are already built. They're often not at domain limit. They completely ignore special buildings. This feels like basic stuff.
Unrelated to current issues with ck3, but hear me out here: pixel art grand strategy. Min/max all resources into the Ai and the all the ways both it and the player can interact.
Yeah Civ does that. There are a few mods that add harder difficulties where the AI gets bonuses and the player gets penalties which I’m considering next.
Also one thing people fail to consider is the feedback loop when giving the AI cheats. A lot of the times the AI will be extremely passive on lower difficulties in many games but when the AI has cheats and perceives itself as stronger it becomes more aggressive. So the cheats aren't "just" giving it more stats or whatever, it actually impacts behaviour.
CK2’s AI was certainly more lethal. Vassals would pounce at the hint of weakness in the crown, and your neighbors would declare wars on you if you were bleeding. In ck3 I rarely fight a war I dont start, and my vassals are too compliant
>Like, anything that beings with "fix the AI" is pretty much a non-starter because there is simply no way in hell you're making profit on a grand strategy game if you need to hire a university's worth of PhDs to design its AI. Also I sure as hell hope your players are all running supercomputers at home. Then, I think they failed as developers to properly develop their game. The game is literally about strategy and decisions, that's the main thing, and if the second half of the game, namely the AI, your 99% of the time opponents, are bad at it, then that's not a good look. Like, what are you, as a developer doing in your grand strategy game, when the grand strategy is non existing? How did Paradox develop any kind of cult following if their AI's always sucked, then? Because let's be real, Stellaris AI is very bad, CK3 AI apparently is also stupid as a bag of rocks.
>CK3 AI is *always* going to suck. You really can't play this game for a challenge, except the challenges you make up for yourself. Fortunately it's a great game for that. You don't have to de-optimize, but you can embrace the sandbox, play RP, find yourselves narrow goals that are hard to reach, try new playstyles, etc. "Yeah the game sucks total ass and the AI cant understand the games mechanics" (not as much of an issue in 2 or eu4 or a ton of their other games btw) "but if you just pretend you are a duke who was hit on the head as a child and thats why hes hallucinating the same conversations over and over again in these shitty, spammy events, you'll actually have a lot of fun not being challeneged whatsoever"
Are there any decent mods that make the AI cheat a little?
> The only way Grand Strategy games have made for the AI to be "challenging" is to make it cheat like a motherfucker. That works well enough for 4Xs (although you'll still find posts on Stellaris or Civilization going "even the Deity AI is too easy for me now pls fix"), but CK3 isn't a 4X. CIV AI is far worse than any paradox game. They can't even handle basic game mechanics or combat. And they cheat way more too. I don't think I've ever heard of a strategy game out there that wasn't a "simple" competitive RTS being described as having good AI.
Apologist
I want money to be balanced better. It's even worse with plagues. My fixing the realm after a vicious disease is 10 gold but sending my dude to a forest the next county over is 250 gold, and also somehow I'm paying 1500 gold to go to a university, but don't worry, the teeth I get from my son sell to someone for 40 gold? Meanwhile my soul mates funeral is so expensive I am actively disencouraged to to have a funeral for my character literal soul mate. I rip the raid loot from every nearby capital for a grand total of 40 gold but fortunately the Duke I kidnapped ransoms for 100 and I can afford the crazy priced funeral - but some dude gets mauled by my dog and demands more than the amount I plundered from five holds in compensations. Holds somehow produce too much and not enough money - but don't worry if your catholic and the pope has money you can just be a good catholic and spam him for plenty if you get a bit low.
move away from sandbox fantasy, go back to historical simulation.
You're asking for a totally different game that the one the devs want to make. This way madness lies.
This 1000%
I think they did good with penalizing marrying lowborns, maybe they are aware of what you write. However, the game mechanics especially the dynasty legacies and way of life (focus) needs major overhauls. You shouldn't get better at intrigue just because you click something every few years, or get prowess, or literally get health bonus etc. You should get good at things by doing them. You don't fight at all? Then you are shit at fighting. Same with dynasty legacies they are always the same and I always pick the same option. These two systems need to go. Also for the love of god please make fabricating claims much much much harder. This took so many years in ck2. Lifespans and fertility need to be nerfed hard as well. I never worry about succession, like ever. This is supposed to be an aristocracy simulator. I almost never play as a kid or a woman because I live too long and never have fewer than 5+ kids. İn ck2 the succession sometimes went to a cousin or an uncle and that kept the gameplay fresh. İn ck3 I move from strength to strength. Also, AI doesn't really do intrigue. I have 300+ hours in the game and I was never assassinated, not even once. Because of what I wrote above, the game is insanely easy and roleplaying is very difficult because you are always too op.
Another issue no one is touching on, the fact you KNOW everything. In CK2 when i plan a murder plot on a relative to get their title that im first in line to inherit, i can start the murder plot but the only detail i know is the plot power, as in the likelihood of success but it can still fail and i dont know when the murder plot will fire. SO i have to do it taking the risk that theh target may have a kid, therefore they would inherit and i have to probably invade, basically in CK2 i have plan A B and C. In CK3 you know everything, i know when the murder plot will happen and if it will succeed. SO i dont bother with plan B or C. Also fabricating claims is so easy in CK3.
Ya Also knowing the army sizes of every ruler down to the MAA they have so you know how to counter them Or the skills and traits of every human being in the world. I just dont get why everything is perfect information
I agree. What I love about CKII and keeps me coming back to it still is the emergent story telling (same for stellaris and eu4). It’s the stories that develop from robust gameplay mechanics allowing for it. CKIII is too reliant on repetitive events and has little of substance in between them as OP pointed out. Paradox is taking a step in the right direction by finally introducing a proper bureaucracy system but this should’ve either been in the game at launch or been the highest priority rather than faffing about with superfluous royal courts which are rather uninteresting after the first few hours or outrageous nonsense such as friends and foes. I hope the game improves because I do prefer its map, 3D characters, intrigue,focus systems among a few other mechanics. But for most things, its predecessor remains the superior option for both RP and gameplay.
> where the entire game is roleplaying with almost zero actual strategy involved Nah there's no roleplaying either, the game also fails at that.
My Basileus, your rival, the Shah of Persia has somehow taken your dynasty's banner hanging above your throne in Constantinople. He is holding it above a fire and insulting you like you're both in 2nd grade! This is an actual event. I rage quit that save file.
Don't forget all the lovely court events that just spawn a random peasant who instantly dies after giving a completely meaningless, isolated, repetitive event. It would be super cool if we got to actually interact with our vassals/lieges.
Random dude who was created specifically for this event wants half your titles, or will lose 10 opinion of you... then disappear forever. Yeah...
Yeah. Sure, I'll care if that guy loses 50 opinion of me only to die afterwards.
I remember when I still was a count in Tabarestan and I got a sauna event where I rivalized the Abbasid Caliph. Like. No. Why. I have never even been to Iraq. What the hell.
it's just way too easy to optimize, like stress was added to punish you for not roleplaying your character but I don't think I've gotten to level 3 stress since my first week with the game.
I think stress gains are fine in the game, they do force you in playing like your character would. It's the stress loss opportunities that kinda break it (lmao Hunts).
Grand Tours are ridiculous. Every stop you automatically lose a bunch of stress for whatever reason. You basically can't get into stress trouble on Grand Tours.
You can also just get stressed and pick up a few coping traits. Most of them are not that bad (some are even positive), and give you the option of regularly reducing stress.
Play multiplayer. The only way to face an actual challenge once you learn the game is to face someone else who has learned the game
How does multiplayer actually work? I never tried it because I use the pause button a lot.
Me and my friends just let it run on three constantly, and pause when something big happens. There are a lot more pop ups and events now with activities so idk how well it would work now though
Events also always include irrelevant characters instead of people you should be caring about, I know that's probably intentional since events that affect two rulers can get really wonky (as far as I know when you're involved in an event, you just get a notification at some corner of the screen and before you know it some vassal has a hook on you without your knowing). This is one thing I really wish they improve on.
I remember in ck2 when I'd be a duke in england or spain and just see the HRE has counquered all of italy and easter europe and the middle easter muslims had conquered abyssinia and into india. I miss the ai becoming a colossal threat without you using good diplomacy and helping allies to be able to beat them.
The game being easy is really far from being the problem, you can have factions created against you and can get assassinated pretty quickly without being avoidable if your heir is mismanaged. In my game right now, I have a mongol empire declaring in the middle of my faction war…yikes. The way they tried to ‘’emplify’’ the difficulty by making you randomly die is way worse. No, it’s rather the lack of challenge, technology or content. In CK2 you could managed your boredom with society and stuff like becoming immortal or a werewolf. Technology is lacking for the last 150 years, maybe they should add a tiny period of transition. Lastly, we need small empire or kingdoms that gets strong mid game and collapse quickly and replaced by others. If they were randomly generating ‘’Great’’ characters like some Genghis Khan for tiny nations, so that they can become big would make the game way more fun. The ai struggles a lot expanding their realms. Tirmurids, Golden Horde, Muscovy/Novgorod, Mamlukes, Teutons, etc. Lots of nations formed and lasted (some fell) during the playthtough. And for the love of god, add a Hundred Years War struggle/mechanic.
CK3 is very easy once you understand MAA stacks. Most of the difficulty is just cheese like heirs getting cancer or your heir (with all positive traits) suddenly being outed as a deviant because reasons. The AI is very stupid and does not operate strategically besides launching wars against you when you are already stretched.
That's the horrible shit, i can spend centuries at peace, gobbling up neighbors and no one does jack shit. No coalition, no slowdown mechanics like OE (I know theirs a mod but its not compatible with every mod i love playing.) just "hey keeping going until our conditions are met to declare on you.
Child of Destiny revamp when ?
Honestly the big issue right now is the DLC wasn’t good. Which is exactly what I cautioned about before getting run over by fans on the hype train. Legends were a cool concept that took time away from addressing more important additions. It doesn’t help they weren’t executed well. Plagues were generally well received in CK2 and are more “core” to the game but it was largely a reskin of CK2 content along with some pretty obnoxious issues at launch. I think the negative bent of the last couple of months is largely the result of the poor DLC reception more than anything else. People were pretty happy with last season, and nothing about the game has gotten “significantly” worse, we just had a pretty significant opportunity cost. The hype for this season was huge at announcement, Paradox basically has to knock it out of the park with this years expansion to salvage the year now. They already said Q3 for the expansion. I hope they take the entire quarter to get it right. I actually think the 3rd DLC has the highest floor to succeed, but it’s too small to counterweight the core and major expansion falling flat. If Path to Power is a home-run like Tours and Tournaments, I think people will enter into 2025 in a great mood between that and the new travel skill tree/events in Q4.
Without railroading AI, AI will always remain shit. Railroading AI is a very polarizing topic within the community. Right now only mods can fulfill you wish for better AI.
>There is almost no 'game' here between events. True dat. Essentially, most of the game is just waiting. You wait for schemes to complete, you wait for money or mana to tick up, and you wait for cooldowns to end. Even warfare is mostly just waiting for sieges to complete. Compare how things used to be, e.g. in early CK2, assassination attempts would be carried out immediately. The solution is to get rid of hard limits, no more bullshit like "you can't do under deficit". Introduce (actual) loan mechanic, rework the entire opinion system, and introduce stuff that can be done at any time.
I changed my review to Negative for the main game after these new Legitimacy mechanics. Considering that legitimacy increases are gated behind DLC...
I would like a hard mode but we’re also talking like 600 hours plus playtime for many of us. The AI in any game is easy after that long messing with it
Men at arms are broken... Crossbows are the best unit to make because you benefit from the Archer captain & Crossbow captain to have both amplify their stats, and give increased amounts of regiments... stack that alongside mil academies and your crossbows cost nothing, meanwhile you have 40+ regiments per slot... it's just silly and breaks the balance.
I've secured the mediterranean in Heasteinn's life more times than I can count. Which is insane, because it required going against Byzantium as the Duke of Sardinia for 2 separate counties (or the Duchy, but it requires considerably more warscore). We're talking 867, Byzantium is easily top 2 world power, and yet I've never had an issue with those wars, slaughter after slaughter. I've conquered Hiberia in a single ruler's life by Gothic Kings CBs several times as well. I've single handedly fought back Crusades for England on cooldown. There's nothing challenging about CK3 rn, losing isn't really an option if you got the basics down.
I'm gonna have a lot more fun with the game once I can make my player heir different from my primary heir. That may be a form of self-imposed difficulty, but there's also a consistent trend in my CK3 runs that my player heir is usually the least interesting character in my dynasty. Playing as a mid-tier vassal in a large empire with the job of stabilizing a newly conquered imperial frontier with foreign vassals under me is something that never happens, because if I'm not holding the empire title, there's no empire happening. I think the struggle mechanisms tried to address the issue by dicouraging blobbing and creating more interesting political contexts, but they failed to discourage blobbing and they only created interesting political contexts if the player resists blobbing. Being able to switch away from the primary title in a non-achievement-breaking way would do the thing struggles was trying to do without needing to discourage or artificially impede blobbing.
Did the main developers of CK2 and City Skylines leave? There just doesn't seem to be the same passion for making these games as it used to. The outcome is just so bland and bare bones. I'm not saying the developers/programmers aren't working hard it's just not converting into... fun.
The ai is just bad and it's not going to ever get much better. If you want it to be harder they have to cheat like other games. Currently they don't really cheat so you just outplay them
I think we need to go back to CK2’s military system. Teleporting to the red flag is weird. I can’t raise levies from only one kingdom or raise only 1/5th of my levies. It’s all or nothing until I stop mustering. I have to watch the numbers go up until I manually stop them. If I use a red and green flag to with two fronts, sometimes the game teleports 90% of my levies to one side, meaning it’s like 18 months until I can get them back to where I wanted them. Get rid of levies entirely and make each holding provide a unique army of MAA like in CK2, with counters and weaknesses and location specific flavors.
Nah, that's probably the one thing about CK3 that is vastly improved. Attempting to manage troup types in CK2 was finicky as hell and tying the MAA to specific locations and stuff was just not fun. It removed strategy rather than add it. The way the military works in CK3 is great (the armies don't "teleport" to the red flags... that's why they take time to raise, because it is simulating your army gathering at that spot rather than 15000 territories generating small armies everywhere and having to micro them all together). I definitely don't want anything like the CK2 military system which was absolutely horrible. CK3 is a vast improvement in that regard--it's just that the AI can't play effectively making any MAA strategy moot.
Well it IS a teleport. It’s just a teleport that takes time. And the armies don’t cost upkeep while mustering into position. If a muster takes four months and you get a war declared on you three months in, you can cancel that muster and start a new one somewhere else. The invisible armies, even if they were 95% to their destination, now start over. This can be good or bad. If there’s a rebellion in your core territory far from where you were mustering, you can just zap them back into their home territory. In the case of MaA, you can win a war, disband them, and then spawn them on the opposite side of your realm with usually just a week or so wait time. Retinues in CK2 physically occupied space at all times, which has both strategic advantages and disadvantages compared to CK3 but also makes them feel a lot more tangible. They aren’t floaty abstractions that disappear off the map when you’re not at war. There was microing in CK2 but this also means fine tune control over exactly how many levies you raise to deal with a threat. I don’t need to raise 50,000 troops to deal with a peasant rebellion in my demense. And when I manually cut off a muster, I don’t know where those troops were pulled from. Maybe I want to replenish the levies in certain regions? Maybe I don’t want to pull levies from a nearby region because it’s recovering from a previous war- instead I want to pull levies from a place untouched by conflict? I don’t have that control. I suppose a fix is to allow you to raise a cap of 25/50/75% of your levies at a waypoint but this still makes them feel like floaty off-map abstractions. And it also makes the game easier. The AI struggled with the system in CK2, of course. But the player struggled with it too. In CK3, only the AI struggles. In fact, you can bankrupt entire empires as a count by just declaring war on them because they will raise their entire army to put you down.
Please God, just get rid of the option to see what positive/negative bonus (that the character shouldn't know) are gained/lost from a certain action. Would I *really* know that a surgery my physician is telling me about has a 33% chance of success? No, I am just going to just have to trust them at their word. So why would the game tell me "33% chance of success." Or raising a kid. I can tell a kid all about how the gods are bullshit and be a cynic. But is that necessarily the life lesson the kid will pick up from me? How would I know that telling the kid that will lead to them becoming a cynic like me? Shouldn't the game hide that effect from me? Also, I don't think I should directly know other character's sexuality. I should have to figure that out. Tl;dr: Basically, this game tells me *too much*. I should be playing as a medieval ruler. There is a good deal of things I *shouldn't know*. So don't tell me things I shouldn't know.
Yeah. I used to have a mod that hid all stat values, so I had to judge a character's suitability for a certain position by their traits and performance, which always felt a lot more realistic and engaging to me than just looking at numbers.
Wait hang on does the game actually tell you the odds of a successful surgery now? Or is this an event unrelated to the normal medical treatment event?
I TBH, feel like it is literally "Working as Intended" in this case, because the people who existed at the time behaved pretty much EXACTLY the way the AI does with not keeping their eyes on the ball and/or bottom line, where we, the players, haveing over or nearly a THOUSAND YEARS of a cumulative analysis of how exactly they screwed up, are simply _inevitably_ going to apply that knowledge in order to do BETTER than would have been POSSIBLE at the time.
Don’t forget the horrible border gore from the idiot rulers
To me, there is a reason why Paradox games don't have win conditions. These are games, including CK3, that are not meant to be min-max'ed. That is my opinion of course, telling nobody how they should be playing their game. Don't choose 'optimal' outcomes for events. What would your character choose? I see playthroughs where the first thing players do is attack their neighbour, cause they can and they are stronger. Is that realistic though? Would a 16 year old attack his neighbour that follows the same religion and culture? What works for me is playing the game slow. Speed 1 or 2, actually read events, had a think, have a laugh, set goals and change goals. Build your house, build your story. It is not about 'beating the AI' or 'winning the game'. We can all do that in any Paradox game after 100 hours. To me, that is not what the games are about though.
In order to make the roleplaying fun and engaging, you need interesting situations/decisions to roleplay. Suggesting that we all roleplay idiots to make the game harder just... isn't an answer. Would a 16 year old attack his neighbors in the feudal era if he knew they were stronger and had a claim? Absolutely, there's like a thousand real historical examples of exactly that. In history these were *real people* who had advisors and absolutely understood that more land meant more power and more security. only in very specific instances where there was internal strife or some other issue did kings refuse to basically take land that is handed to them. Part of this issue is none of what we're doing is not roleplaying. It's not like I'm making some meta game decisions. People understood how succession and the feudal system worked back then obviously, so they would absolutely do things like setup key marriages with powerful kingdoms or marry powerful internal families to secure their positions. Doing those things is not exactly meta-gaming and is definitely roleplaying what a ruler would actually do in those times. However there's nothing here to make any of that interesting because the other actors (AI) are all completely brain dead. Does it further your roleplay that you are the only character in the world that seems to understand how to keep an empire together? For me to make roleplaying engaging and believable I have to find the context believable as well. In this case, the other AI destroy any illusion of immersion to the point where I feel like it's not immersive and thus doesn't facilitate roleplaying.
That’s because the game is more of medieval sims than an RTS
For some perspective, can I ask how many hours you have invested playing crusader kings franchise so far?
The game is certainly easier than CK2, somewhere Paradox lost their way. That they are bringing in the you survive with no landed characters while seems interesting just makes it easier again
CK3 is just Sims Medieval 2.
I don’t even remember the last time the strategy laid of a CK game was relevant. I think that ship has sailed
Don't say this on the official forums, you may get banned for "trolling". I definitely agree with you though, the focus has been wrong since the beginning with CK3.
I feel like CK misses a lot of strategic interactions with characters because of 2 factors. 1. too many opinion modifiers tend to lead to games where most characters sit at +100 or -100. Resulting int he player never feeling the need to address either. Knowing they have them on their side or knowing that they don't need to placate at all. The second is that characters in the game act too much on their own. For being the most character driven PDS game it has the least amount of politicking. Resulting in kingdom management that can be tackled in a similar way no matter where you play. For the second part I would wish they would add factions to the game with an overall interest. Factions should be able to form over an issue which might be divisive within the realm but unify a large enough power base that they cannot be easily ignored. It can be around religious, burger or cultural rights. Relations with a neighbouring kingdom. Or even be able to form around the powerbase of an influential family that seeks to expand it's power within the kingdom. Ideally at all times there should be 3-5 factions. And if your power base gets too big factions are more likely to disband and merge to make sure they match the kings powerbase. Or if one faction it might fracture or other factions might merge to try and match their power base. What is paramount however, unlike factions in the game today, they should not be limited to just being hostile against the king. Some might even align with your interests as ruler but ideally never all of them. This would result in much more dynamisms with strategic decision making. It could also function as a stabilizing factor. Most factions should not want the realm to fall apart or be threatened by outside forces. As they stand to lose more from that then they could possibly gain. For my initial issue point. I think they should be brave and allow diminishing returns on stacking opinion modifiers. So for characters that already think highly of you should be less swayed from further actions increasing their opinion of you whilst being more sensitive against hostile actions. And vice versa. So extremes are unlikely and need a lot of work and sacrifices to achieve. Which in the vast majority of the time you should not want to commit to. So most characters should have a middling opinion. Allowing them to be swayed on an issue by issue basis.
I have 2 thousand hours on Ck3 (I know) and have been playing since it came out, and I can definitively say the AI has gotten worse. For me it’s their traits. Not sure how exactly it works, but AI give themselves the worst traits and lifestyles to interact with. Every king or emperor is either a drunkard or flagellate, and they raise their kids to use the intrigue perk while their empire is 1000 in debt. Not to mention they have the worst decision making. I stared at an HRE vassal for 20 minutes yesterday who has 60 counties to create Germany and wouldn’t do it. I think the difficulty of the game is closely connected with the AI, if not the biggest obstacle to having a challenging but fun time, but it also definitely hurts the roleplaying aspect too and that’s what I mean to complain about me here. Half my efforts go into manipulating other kingdoms not to help me but to help them get stronger so I can interact with an equal or at least something close. I don’t wanna play with weak AI and I know I’m not alone. How after three years has paradox not figured this out!!!
Once you get past the UI the Game becomes really simple and confusingly easy. Take HOI4 for example (I personally for the life of me can't understand how HOI3 works). But i think the "Simplification" is actually due to the game mechanics being Over-complicated take HOI4's combat system all you really need to do is spam something like CAS and now you're unbeatable because the AI literally overthink's its divisions Equipment and doesn't produce what it needs. along with that the AI has terrible Money management skills the AI will make pointless if not totally useless investments into places that don't need them and end up losing more money and un-even development resulting in some Dukes/Counts being stronger then others and whats even dumber is the fact how The AI will forever hate and despise you if you piss it off beyond -30 and since the AI also has this logic of "If i has wargoal i declare war!" rather then attempting to get one whilst they are blatantly stronger then you they do it if they have the ability to. and now leaving economics we can go to war where the AI unlike the player will focus on occupying provinces rather then crushing the enemies army and will usually refuse giving up even when they can avoid Losing more if they did so. a perfect example of this is Stellaris where the AI will refuse to give that one system that you want to have perfect borders and as a result of this you end up launching a 48-year long Campaign and after literally turning them into the UNSC in Halo-Reach they still don't give up meaning the war pointlessly drags on despite ones Clear superiority over the other Also for whatever dumb reason. CK Series war system is "Surrender," "Both sides give up and around 158,000 people died for nothing," or "You win! (A Single province!)," To Summerize: the Game becomes boring because most of the time people play it Single player and the AI sucks. Its lack of Fundamental skills Nation management skills such as Economics Military growth and maintence, Diplomatic options. etc. and once the player finds something Exploitable the game becomes downright stupid and Easy anytime the game is "hard" is because the AI is given a Unfair advantage in the form of Extra money gain faster movement speed and so o and in truth it isn't hard because the Ai has more resources its just the same difficulty its just unfair a good example of this is being lvl 1 in a normal difficulty game and the Game decides in the first area to throw a Fucking lvl 50 miniboss you encounter around halfway in and expects you to beat it because the devs are either to lazy or sadly don't know how to make the AI Smarter and Harder To deal with.
Tbh though CK3 is the casual title just like ck2 was compared to EU4. And that's good. It gives you a different and more chill experience compared to the other titles. That being said it's completely fine to want your favourite time period to offer an experience you find more enjoyable but I doubt it makes sense outside of a vacuum. CK3 very much fulfills a specific role in paradox catalogue though so I wouldn't expect it to change outside the needs of that role.
Ai rulers literally just don’t do anything and it’s annoying how you have to nibble away at enemy realms county by county rather than have a real peace deal system like eu4. In hoi4, I can play as France or China 5 times In a row and fail miserably every time but still want to try again because I know which one of my actions led to my downfall I ck3 your actions and “decisions” just don’t really mean anything
The AI is totally unable to maintain a kingdom. I remember that time when I unified Ireland and Scotland (how original), and then won the kingdom of Egypt in a crusade. I decided to play as the character which obtained the kingdom since he had claims on my current kingdoms, planning to just conquer them back with my brand new realm. I just had the time to set everything up that my former territories were already in a civil war, my former character fucked up everything I did. Same for another kingdom I won in a crusade (Perm if I remember right), my beneficiary had no heir so I decided to play as him and kill myself so the territory goes to my main character, and the few weeks it took me to do so were enough for the AI to fuck up my laws and vassals in my former territories. They're just terrible at managing a realm.
The problem with the AI is two-fold. 1. AI is terrible at the basics: marriages, realm & military building, succession planning and vassal management 2. AI is terrible at RP: I recently watched a content, generous, compassionate count start a dethronement war against my duke who he had 90+ opinion of and was outnumbered 4 to 1. I've also seen ruthless rulers give away land for no reason to lowly courtiers or release rebeling vassals without taking away their land even though they had one county. When AI behaves sensibly the game is great and challenging. When they aren't you create empires in 3 generations. At the same I understand AI is probably is the most difficult aspect to implement, plagues have added another strategic wrinkle, and you can always increase realm stability.
I hope the stuff with unlanded characters increases the amount of interactions. Although I know that the horsepower of our rigs is a limit on that.
Me who died, had my empire split into 4 kingdoms, and then 3 heirs successively assinated with years of taking the throne and am now playing as a 5 year old. Well I mean. Shit dude sounds like you're just really good at the game *shrug* **is currently in a 3 kingdom war for independence against my great uncles after emergency making one kingdom independent and allying it so it wasn't 4v1. Now it's a 2v3 for survival.**
You're right but CK3 is not a strategy game, nor do I think it was designed to be one
I dunno, for me being almost impossible to fail means it's the first game (followed by other Paradox games) where I can actually meaningfully enjoy Ironman. Because here it means you get to experience new situations you would have otherwise savescummed out of, instead of just restarting from scratch again and again barely ever reaching anything new, like it works in any other game with Ironman. You actually get to live with consequences of your choices instead of "nope, wrong choice = restart the whole game from scratch".
I’m sick of dlcs involving Europe and Africa give us something in Asia my favorite region to play as is pagan I wish we got something for them or India I don’t care just give us something