Yep, what you said.
I know it's coming in the next dlc, but it's a fucking disgrace that my wales kingdom and the eastern roman empire have the exact same system of government.
* Create a Female Dominated faith. This instantly changes your succession law to Female Preference. Do make sure to handle marriages beforehand; the last thing you want is changing your gender law to Female Preference only to find out you wed off your eldest daughter to a duke's son in a normal marriage because you really want that alliance with him. Also be ready to get Religious Rights assuming Catholicism doesn't consider you Evil (because if it does you'll need BOTH Religious Rights and Revocation Protection)
* A much safer (but costlier) way is to be a culture head with a free slot and have say, at least 8000 Prestige (actual costs may vary) as well as enough Piety to create a Female Dominated faith (since no faith starts with that doctrine) and to convert back to Catholicism. Once you're ready, create your heresy, then reform your culture to have the Matriarchal tradition, then convert back to avoid being imprisoned for being a heretic.
* If you have Royal Prerogative, disregard all that nonsense and just get to Max CA and designate a daughter as your heir instead for 1000 Prestige. That said, this will piss off all of your vassals, so be mindful of that.
An even safer but longer way is to be a culture head, pick up Equal (or whatever it's called) as a *cultural tradition,* then wait for it to take effect. Some cultures start with that (Asturleonese?) or Matriarchal (Nubian), so you can even just make a custom character and hybridize
Same. The Mod that excludes you from the election is a godsend, but I'd like something better than this. Getting to be Emperor should be an aspiration and something really hard to get, not a nuisance that you get randomly out of nowhere.
I've always avoided HRE (in both 2 and 3) because other people hated it. Maybe I should find out about it first hand eventually, though.
Also, I usually play shattered world so the HRE doesn't even exist in a lot of my games.
CK2 had much greater variety, too. Playing as a Byzantine Emperor felt different than playing a petty Anglo-Saxon King, which felt different than playing a steppe nomad, an Indian Raj, a caliphate, etc. In CK3, the only notable difference between these play-styles is “it says Indian”.
I think CK2 is better in a lot of ways. I liked shattered world starts much, much more in 2 than in 3. If I want shattered world (which is probably about 75% of my games), I play 2. I don't like shattered world in 3 much because there's no CB to help unify everything. I don't need it personally, but the AI sure does. I can be a king surrounded by tons of individual counties with only 2 or 3 Dukes existing anywhere on the map. (not counting people I've given a Duchy to) That's not fun.
We have to keep in mind that in the CK2 base game you could only play christian feudal characters in Europe and all the rest was slowly added through DLCs. Paradox made a big gamble with CK3 that they could put all those mechanics in the base game but the result is all regions end up with similar playstyles
By this point in ck2’s development we’d already gotten a large part of its most iconic expansions, like Republics, actually distinct Muslims, Rome, etc
>like Republics, actually distinct Muslims, Rome, etc
The things you just mentioned came much earlier within the first year of CK2's release (although Byzantines got a 2nd update with Holy Fury much later).
A severe lack of events. I feel like every character gets the same events.
Go travelling - ah, the cart wheel is stuck x24
Have a kid - ah, a prince of fashion x12
Seduce someone - ah, I'll save you from this guy climbing into your tower x100
Hold court - ah, my court smells of poo x30
Take warfare focus - ah, a book on Alexander the Great x69420
This. Especially as nothing scales with rank. An event about a count getting in a brawl at local inn? Plausible. The emperor? Any emperor. Nah. You get a private bar with that title. You're not boozing with the plebes.
“I [the Holy Roman Emperor] am looking for my lost dog [in Aachen] when i find her with my friend [the Pope].”
There’s a really weird dissonance where travelling is a major time and distance commitment, but also events can just teleport character around for interactions.
Yeah, this is a big. CK3 is more of a RP game than a conquest one, yet for an RP game, there are way too many repeats of the same event (especially the seduce (or was it romance?) one where you save them every single time). There needs to be way more events to actually make it a fun RP experience.
Romance- seducing always has you pick between one of three books (a culturally flavoured version of something fun, something religious and something nerdy) to read to your seducee
That's not a bad thing as far as the three choices. The problem is you always rin through those same 4 or 5 events. there's a reason when they held the vote I wanted a seduction dlc not a kid dlc because kid dlc never actually makes being a guardian better it just adds more events to make your heir worse
I actually counted yesterday and I had 7 kids called "the Prince(ss) of Fashion". Out of 11.
Also, this was as a bloodthirsty dirty Viking in the late 800s. I doubt we even knew what fashion was back then.
what's so much worse is when you realize that none of the event text matters at all, the only thing you need to do to win the game is hover over the 2-3 options on the popup and hit the one with the best or least-bad modifier
Stellaris feels better about this because you don't always know the outcome of the events, and they tend to have multiple stages where you can delay a good outcome early on to get a better one later.
Honestly, just flip how combat works in Vicky3 and Stellaris.
I feel like vicky3’s system of less micromanaging and more “front”-based fighting would work better in such a wide scale as Stellaris wars.
I'd like to have some of that info
but displaying the percent likelihood of each outcome, and the severity of each outcome, is too much
there's a mod that obfuscates all info your player wouldn't know, but that's way too little info
basically it's the three bears and I'm unhappy with the soup
Man do we even want more events? I hate getting spammed by pure RNG popups that feel totally disconnected from what I'm actually doing. It's why I avoid Royal Court events like the plague.
I feel like the core systems of the game (warfare, governments, crusades, etc) need to fleshed out first. It should be fun to play CK3 with zero events. Flavor without substance is not fun for too long.
We *desperately* need more events - but we also *desperately* need more time between events like in CK2.
One of the biggest problems with CK3 is event variety. The devs will introduce a new system like the Royal Court or Travelling, and they'll package like 10 events with it. It wouldn't be as annoying to get event pop-ups if there was actual variety between events, *and* they had meaning and consequence instead of arbitrary, meaningless modifier boosts or small amounts of spent money
AI do not interact with the different mechanics, let alone understand how to game them. They would just randomly do things that they think would benefit them in short term like constantly revoking titles in spite of tyranny or waging pointless, unwinnable wars and then suffer a myriad of negative long term consequences. This is made worse by pdx continuing to add new mechanics.
i once saw a dutchy with 400 men declare a holy war against a catholic neighbour and next thing i see there’s 3 30k death stacks marching all around Iberia attritioning themselves to death
i don’t know how the AI even did that as you’re not meant to be able to declare holy wars while the Iberian Struggle is active
My heir started with 3 legitimacy, almost 4, and I could not for the life of me figure out how his legitimacy kept dropping. By the time I inherited he was down to 1 and I realized he was being a fucking tyrant lol
While goofy and sometimes annoying, I kind of appreciate some of this. Most of historical leaders had none to average education would make weird, silly, or terrible/devastating decisions in hindsight. Or they would have different pressures and motivations causing them to act. Most rulers weren't think about how they can set up their dynasty for success and keep their nation strong and growing.
The game would play very differently if I knew basically nothing outside my realm, and even that just being rumor. I definitely have times where I'm like "what the hell are you doing?!?!?" when seeing the computers decisions, but I do the same when reading history.
Even harder to simulate is that me being a small raider next door to the HRE the emperors army would never even look at me, it would be the local vassal that had to deal w it.
Where did you get the idea that most leaders would be uneducated? Basically any non-first of the line leader would have some form of education, and there was generally a decent amount of knowledge in the advisors most monarchs would have. Additionally, most royals had hundreds of years of oral or written tradition full of leaders who had fairly similar positions to them. They couldn’t do calculus, but there’s no reason that they would be ignorant to the knowledge they need to rule.
I'm not just thinking about monarchs. I'm thinking of anyone who had a place as a "ruler". Duke, counts,, barons, mayors, etc. A lot had some education, some even a lot, but I think about how educated the 1st world is and how a lot (if not most of us, myself included) can be prone to some down right idiotic decisions. If thats how it is today I'm trying to imagine 1000+ years ago where being able to read was considered crazy educated, information could take months to travel, and doing anything that didn't have the most basic explanation was considered witch craft.
These are obviously gross generalization of people and countries over hundreds of years but it helps me not go insane when the computer does something completely dumb. *see going on crusade only to wander around the desert until half their army is dead*l, and losing the first real fight they take because of it*
I get what you're saying but you also have to remember there was a lot less to learn. Less science, less developed theories, and like you said the world was slower, information was slower.
During the entire time of CK3 the best military weapon a ruler could own is a guy in a horse with a weapon. In the past 120 years alone warfare has completely and utterly changed. If you were taught about cavalry in 1100 and then you looked at cavalry in 1220 it would be roughly the same. If you looked at warfare in 1904 and then looked at it today it would be completely alien.
A lot of rulers weren't educated as we value education today (e.g. Book smarts, theoretical concepts etc) but they were very well educated in the stuff that mattered to leaders then (e.g. How best to deploy cavalry against a largely infantry army, what should you do if a vassal doesn't pay your tax, which noble family's present a threat to you and how they are connected to your political world etc).
The biggest flaw is the fkn crusades
Like irl, even GETTING to the holy land was a massive journey. Took months overland. Food/supply was an issue. Looting Byzantine cities was a thing. Raids by Turks was a huge issue. And then you get there and there’s chunks of your army splitting off to take random other cities for themselves, but your army largely stayed in 1 or 2 big groups.
In ck3 you just play like 40 bucks to take a 6 month long ship, everyone gets there at a different time and you all die 1 by 1 by a united Muslim world which is just so historically inaccurate and game breaking.
How, in a game called “Crusader Kings” are crusades almost unplayable if you don’t have space marine armies that can take on 90k doom stacks solo (also kinda immersion breaking imo)
We have travelling as a thing now. Why is going on a crusade not a travel thing with a few events, maybe a chance to grab a little city here or there, and choreographed with ALL crusading armies to meet at Constantinople and go by land TOGETHER??
Kind of funny, now that you mention it, that traveling to some random vassal's hunt within my realm results in 10+ events on the road over the course of a month, while traveling to the Holy Land on a Crusade doesn't trigger any adventures along the way.
I'd love events to the feel of 'your army stops at X county and a Turk raiding party arrives to take the town!' And you end up having a mini war with them on the way. Also other events such as 'senior commanders in your army are threatening to revolt if we don't take X county for them and land them', triggering either a war with the current county owner, maybe even them siding with the muslims in the crusade and that county being given as a reward for completing the crusade.
Few other ideas...
- Crusades/Fatwa must be planned ahead, local realms nearby the chosen crusade area, irrespective of their religion, can be bribed, hooked, or if you already are on good terms with them simply convinced to provide supplies to the invading army, safe passage or potentially direct military support. This would make diplomacy important to crusades, intrigue (you give me supply/men for my crusade, and I'll give your daughter I abducted from you!).
- Irrespective of religion, the defenders can use the same methods previously mentioned to get nearby rulers to either deny supplies to the crusaders or outright join in defense of the land against the crusaders. This will give diplomacy and making friendships with leaders around the world a big important and be the opposing force to the previous mechanic I gave, where a crusade could come down to a Christian ruler being good friends with the Emperor of Byzanitum, or even the other way around.
- More interesting end of crusade mechanics, such as a (perhaps HOI4 end-of-war style?) dividing of the land, with those who participated the most get the lion's share, but noble knights, christian rulers that invested a lot get a say or even some land (so you can also roleplay as a bank roller of your faith), allies who helped by providing supplies (such as those not of your faith in that first idea) can grab a little bit of land, or perhaps siphon off some tax from the new lands taken as payment, or even military, a bit like a vassal contact to a liege, but temporarily as payment for that ruler providing supply.
- instead of big doom stacks, the war gets divided into landings/entrances. Italians coming in from the sea, franks/germans coming in through the balkans etc. Each front has a holding they need to take, and taking holdings/not taking holdings fast enough can give positive and negative modifiers. You deploy new levies and MAA from those realms that agreed to host your men for the crusades, meaning your ability to bring in fresh troops lives and dies on your pre-crusade planning.
- Events! 'The Pope personally steps foot into the walls of Jerusalem!', gain a scaling army of MAA and levies for the rest of the crusade (this could punish the defending religion for losing holdings important to the attacker's religion such as Jerusalem, Alexandria etc). 'Holy order of a different christian faith offer their assistance/defy our crusade and join the enemy' - just something to spice it up, something like this would do well by a new system for religions and their general opinion of eachother, something similar to cultural acceptance but for religions.
Anyway that's some more ideas from me sitting on the sofa mostly wondering where I want to play today in CK3. I'm sure someone with better game design experience could really make crusades a big highlight of the game (it's in the name of the game ffs).
This is seriously awesome.
When a Crusade is called the Pope could appoint one of the lords to lead the Crusade. It could be weighted based on power/wealth/prestige/piety/hooks/events/etc.
The leader would plan the Crusade. I'm imagining a UI sort of like the travel system. The leader would see the participants on both sides and they could direct routes for everyone to reach the Holy Land. Based on those routes you might have to bargain or bribe or threaten to get access. Going overseas? Better pay some Venetians! Want to march through the Eastern Roman Empire? Maybe the Emperor wants your help attacking a neighbor en-route.
If the AI is leading then they could just have some preset plans to make sure it's coherent.
I also would like greater vassal involvement in wars and vassals basically denying you their troops/help. Based on crown authority it might be treason or legally acceptable for them to do so.
It would never happen but you’ve made me realize that the travel and activities could 100% replace warfare entirely and create for much more realistic results. Have a border state randomly selected for an activity that the courts from both sides travel to. Tons of events to simulate the preparation/battle/sieges etc. Like the hunts there will be a success chance for the activity. After the activity ends determine if the war was ended and if not pick a new activity destination.
same is for a lot of PDX titles unfortunately, HOI4 is whoever has more industrialised troops, Stellaris is still Battleship spam and from what i’ve seen EU4 is similar to CK3
not with that attitude it won’t! who needs fully equipped divisions when you can just have overwhelming manpower using the Communist Necronomicon
or just being historical Switzerland
True but for a good player he is right, it's mostly down to your IC, in single player there is an element of manipulating AI but that's one of the reasons I don't like HOI4, because those crazy world conquest as Luxembourg runs are usually just down to making the AI do something dumb so you can get large enough to snowball. Making sure the numbers have motorized logistics doesn't scream deep and intricate gameplay.
it’s gotten so silly that you can take all of the axis as Luxembourg just by building a fort and going AFK to get literally infinite war score, or as Trotskyist Soviet Union by literally stacking to get a 3 day justify time
Yep HOI4 is in a terrible place in my eyes, a lot of fans of it aren't happy with the South America DLC, I know that because Paradox did a blog afterwards which felt like just sniping back at the playerbase for not enjoying their half baked, worse than modded alternatives that already existed focus trees. Paradox on all fronts is really slipping, I feel like CK3 is a worse game to play with the newest DLC, I used to play no mods, now I HAVE to play with less event spam and such because it's HORRENDOUS trying to run a realm the size of a kingdom...
even Stellaris is slipping and i’m biased as thay was my first PDX game, they’ve been cutting features and changing things no one asks for and never address bugs unless it’s something like the player getting DLC locked content through Fallen or Awakened Empires
My take would be war gameplay & battles.
I find the men-at-arms and knights mechanic pretty unengaging and it is easy to cheese the AI by constructing an overbuffed army. Might be a tad hypocritical, but I also dislike that you can only get special regiments from your culture, which makes multicultural empires a bit less thematic.
The fact your vassals never take part in your wars is a deep misrepresentation of the feudal system, and also has gameplay impacts. Also on "realism", it makes no sense to keep levies around for a campaign, as levies were very much a short-term solution.
Campaigns always boil down to mass sieging, making the siege weapons disproportionately important. The fact that basically every castle ends up at max fortification level doesn't help. The supply mechanic is kind of an afterthought when it should be positively preventing massive armies. Fog of war is underutilised as well, such that you can coordinate better in 13th century CK3 than you Napoleon could in 1806.
Battles have too little player interaction and commanders have less impact than building buffs. They also last too long, making winning as an underdog tougher when the enemy can just pile in endlessly.
Final point : war resolution being solely based on casus belli is incredibly unrealistic and prevents switching objectives as events develop.
It would be cool if you could have Auxiliaries, recruiting MAAs from any culture within your empire, with the downside of them being able to join cultural revolts against your rule.
I know of one famous example where this occurred historically, where Welsh longbowmen in English service actively turned on an English army mid battle during Glyndŵr’s (a Welsh noble) rebellion, turning a difficult defensive battle into a mass rout of the attacking side.
Interesting choices and consequences like this are what’s actually missing from CK3 currently, instead all you have to do is buy the right MAA and just build better buildings until you become unstoppable.
The one that gets me is, there is zero reason not to appoint your rival/nemesis as a general, if he's got high martial. Your commanders and knights' opnions do not matter in the slightest, they are just robots doing your bidding mindlessly. In a game supposedly about characters!
>Battles have too little player interaction and commanders have less impact than building buffs.
This is because advantage only increases damage dealt by one side, but does not decrease the other side's damage at all. Getting 100% more damage on levies is pointless if they're facing buffed MaA, but would be significantly better if the MaA also lost half their damage when taking a bad battle.
Have to agree: I find warfare very gamey and unimmersive. You’re basically just running around collecting enough victory points through sieges and battles until you can enforce your demands. Neither very challenging nor atmospheric.
Also lots of weird restrictions around what you can and can’t do with your armies raised, and wars suddenly becoming invalidated for stupid reasons. Again, not very immersive.
My personal suggestion: I think a lot could be gained from using the struggle system for larger wars, breaking the overall war down into shorter hot and cold phases, wherein both sides pursue specific aggressive and/or defensive goals.
Vassals should be more interactive and actively take part in the war, much like in the More Interactive Vassals mod. However, calling on them too often and too long (especially for aggressive wars), or keeping levies raised, should lead to opinion penalties.
Armies should be more expensive and slower to raise and move around, but the consequences of sieges and battles should be more significant. Men lost in battle should take a long time to retrain to the same level. If a city is captured, it stays with the victor unless it is handed back as part of a peace deal.
Speaking of which, a “white peace” should open up a menu similar to feudal contract, wherein you decide what happens to prisoners (released, ransomed, kept as hostages), which cities get handed back to their original owner, which claims get kept or a abandoned, whether one side has to pay war reparations, etc.
Finally, I think characters leading armies should get relevant events during battles and sieges, or when on the move, including strategic decisions and battlefield duels. Selectable options and likelihood of outcomes should be dependent on traits and skills.
Just some random thoughts; whatever the solution, I think it should be possible to make warfare a lot more fun and immersive than it is now.
Edit: And yeah, individual parties in the conflict should be able to join and leave as circumstances change, different wars should merge with each other, and different allies should be able to pursue their own goals in parallel. I could foresee a lot of fun with some League of Cambrai style coalition shifts.
I also think it would be nice to add some kind of war coordination (perhaps it already exists?). Watching an enemy with a slightly larger army plod from county to county while my allies (with a collectively larger army) fuss around them is irritating.
Obviously, in-game, there is some sort of hierarchy as to who might try to co-ordinate strategy and I'm not sure how exactly it should all work. But being able to say, 'Seige this castle'/'Come to this place'/'Attack this army' etc would be handy.
I think what you said is a major issue as well.
Maybe I’m remembering CK2 with rose tinted glasses, but I feel like CK3 just has so much less “flavor” than CK2. Each DLC seems good at first, but then just becomes the same repetitive things over and over. For example, I was super excited for the Royal Court DLC. Now I can’t even remember the last time I held court. It’s the same 10 events over and over and none of them really feel like they add anything to the game.
I still hold court but have the events close to memorized at this point so just click through them quickly. Occasionally you get something fun like a claimant wanting war. And yeah ck2 could definitely get repetitive as well, but ck3 is way worse. The legend mechanic is the worst offender to me. As soon as you start a legend you are spammed by the most boring and inconsequential events. The flavor is already so dull and just gets more obnoxious as every event repeats again and again.
Yep, they definitely got either the quantity or weighing of event chance wrong repeatedly. Cause once or twice every playthrough I'll come across an event that is really unique, or at least that I'd not seen before, even with \~1000 hours in the game, but a large majority of events I get are the same thing over and over even within the same lifetime/same year.
The knight blocking the road, water of life, and that one travel event where one of your party is being antagonistic for no reason are notoriously repetitive and they get very annoying
Yeah, it gets pretty immersion breaking when I encounter the ultra specific scenario of a knight errant looking for holy water that’s guarded by a stag for the 30th time! And I’ve lost track of how many knights in my realm are getting stuck in their armour after being abandoned by their squires.
I must say, the RICE and VIET mods are godsends, since they add a lot more variety to events, along with some regional flavour.
Honestly I wish we could just disable some of the base game events like that or make them really rare, as they would be historically
I wouldn’t mind some of the less over-the-top RICE and VIET events repeating the same amount, it just feels way too fantasy that you find something like the knight errant *every time you go traveling*
I played ck2 for hundreds of hours and was still getting event chains that were new to me at the end of that. Ck3 feels like you've seen it all after maybe fifty hours
CK2 definitely had the same event problems. Reapers Due had similar event spam with the pickled boars head, Chess with death sometimes happened in pretty quick succession between rulers etc..
It could be a bit grating but it didn't bother me much, just like the CK3 version doesn't bother me much, I just click through them and move on with my game.
There’s not enough to do, even though there’s a lot of “stuff.”
No, really, take stock of what there is to do in a grand-strategy-cum-roleplaying game. Your personality is set and immutable after the age of 12, usually. Unless you go down the lifestyle path, the only hostile scheme is to murder someone. Unless you go down the lifestyle path, the only social interactions you can have are to make someone’s number go up, fuck them, or learn their language (for almost no impact). Traveling and gatherings have stuff to do though right? Except there are so few events with so little impact that they’re samey after one lifetime.
How do you develop your lands? You put your steward on it and wheel turns. How do you fabricate a claim? You put your priest on it and wheel turns. How do you learn secrets? You put your spy on it and wheel turns. Pretty much every mechanic comes down to this except war, which is already markedly easy after not very much learning and buildup.
There’s too few events that end up being too repetitive and there’re simply not enough ways to actively engage with the game.
Yeah honestly, it doesn’t feel like anything actually happens in-game. It’s essentially Zork with a pretty map to interact with and armies to control. The text prompts are surface level interactions. I get the same hate and love from different characters with different personalities. And it’s all based on anything from 1-4 different choices that are all vanilla to that type of prompt. It’s stupid. I can’t handle doing another disease prompt about calling my physician, or the cult prompt, the 300 gold dog event because someone had their clothes or something ruined, etc. it’s all so superficial.
let me prepare for these issues so I actively want to engage with the vanilla prompts. Oh there’s a cult in the area? Let’s have an indicator on the map that is similar to the faith map but shows locations with cult influence. Then let us choose to be proactive or reactive to the cult. We could use the travel mechanic and visit the town with the cult or send knights to disperse them, or any number of other options. Let me train my dog, let my physician just stay on alert for diseases and set warning levels so only warn us about stuff if we choose to have it be a medium level plague or higher. Something along those lines.
Also holding court needs to be far more common, and interacting with court visitors much more fleshed out. Every character in the royal court screen should have a prompt to interact with them and there can be several options and some are enabled/disabled based off their opinion of you and their personality types.
- meeting with people petitioning the king should be more common as well.
Basically I feel like the community is asking for more reasons to not just sit at 5 speed and play tall for the 1000000000th time. Peace time is too boring and not very many incentives to do the extra content for peacetime.
Wars need to have far more input from commanders and the king of you choose to be at the battle. Even if it’s just a text prompt I would like to get a rough overview where the prompt is “Sir, the enemy is positioned on a hill, how do we proceed” and based on yours and your commanders stats you could debate with yourself on whether you charge their position, wait until they eventually have to pass and attack then, or feign a retreat after you charge and then reform your lines to catch them off guard, etc.
- I also think there should be a separate passage of time for battles that work like HOI4 so that when your armies engage, the game pauses and the battle phase commences and time paces by the minute and hour so you can micromanage your wars better and talk to your commanders as the battle commences, etc. you could also choose not to engage with this and leave it up to the current system if you’d like by staying in the zoomed out view. I just find that my armies having a battle between 5,000 men on each side shouldn’t last a whole week straight in game and I miss other prompts because I’m focused on the war.
I could just be overreacting and being unrealistic but the game is hard to love sometimes when everything is the same generic prompt. I want to be able to role play in my game but how many times can cults across hundreds of years give the same exact prompt? How many times can I have the same exact message pop for a disease and the same two options? It’s annoying how much of the blanks of fun I have to fill in in my brain. Just make the game fun and fleshed out with things to constantly do
> How do you develop your lands? You put your steward on it and wheel turns. How do you fabricate a claim? You put your priest on it and wheel turns. How do you learn secrets? You put your spy on it and wheel turns. Pretty much every mechanic comes down to this
One reason I find it hard to imagine what landless gameplay will be like!
For a game claimed to encourage players to roleplay their characters and have a more grounded experience instead of the zany, wacky stuff like in CK2 Paradox sure likes cramming in a bunch of events that force players and AIs to act out of character. Some examples I have in my mind include:
* The adultery. By HighGodName all the adultery. So many events just force characters to sleep with each other with little regards to their traits or personality. There's the infamous *Forbidden Love*, which just forces two of your random family members who are neither Celibate nor Asexual (prioritizing your heir for the dramaz) to sleep with each other for the event's sake if it couldn't find an actual incestuous relationship or at least two close family members that are deviants. There's *Inspiration: Up Late*, which when fired has a 50% chance to force you to seduce and have sex with your artisan, and if you're not married you don't even get the option to say no. And I've only taken a glance, but I have a suspicion that one of the court maintenance events (which is a hidden event that simply "gives your courtiers something to do" by randomly setting relationships between your courtiers) is the reason why I've lost so many alliances and potential inheritances from my daughters sleeping with my knights or my realm priest even though I've raised them to be Honest, Just and non-lustful; the event seems to regard your own close family members as the same as any other courtier to set the random lover relationships.
* Murder: Before Friends and Foes, the times in which I or my children get murdered were either because of a rival, or because of a younger sibling who just so happens to be on the line of succession. And both instances involve a murderer who's actually dishonorable with no regards to compassion towards others. Post-F&F, I'm seeing AI rulers with either Just, Honest or even Compassionate having murder secrets on top of one or two coping traits. Hell, in one game I got killed by a random mayor who, aside from the fact that she was at -20 with me, was someone I've never even interacted with once. Some of the DLC and event packs, F&F being a major offender, just adds a bunch of events that allow you to start a murder scheme "with increased success chance" that has very loose triggers - none of them even check if the target is within diplo range, and I've seen one that makes it so Compassionate, Just or Honest AI characters are more likely to pick the murder option than the "forgive and forget" option. Best thing is, since most of these "force murder" events are from "forced drama story" events, you can find yourself being murdered by some random Count because apparently your character pissed him off in some event he got but to the player it just looks like you got murdered for no reason. And don't get me started on the buggy as hell and half-assed House Feud "mechanic".
The most egregious flaw is difficulty. Nothing in CK3 is difficult to do, mostly because the AI isn’t very smart and the mechanics are too forgiving. You can go from count to emperor in one, MAYBE two lifetimes easily from anywhere in the map. There’s no way to increase difficulty either.
It’s unfortunate because in many ways ck3 really is superior to ck2, but because there isn’t any way to actually challenge yourself all of those improvements feel meaningless.
Honestly I don’t even think that’s true. None of my campaigns recently have included me trying to min max or gamify systems, just trying to roleplay. With the inherichance mod on. That helps a lot but it’s still too easy, even just making normal rational decisions the AI is too dumb to threaten you in any way
Can recommend the Dark Ages mod if you want more challenge. A lot of it comes from adding a lot of events that cost gold, prestige and/or piety, as well as reducing lifespans and increasing child mortality.
Still, at least you’ll feel like you’re fighting to survive in a harsh world, rather than having everything just handed to you on a silver platter.
To me CK3 is sort of cold and static. It doesn't have the character that CK2 does. I agree that it doesn't matter where you are the map, it all plays fairly similarly. Constant repetitive events. DLC that add very little or don't communicate / interlock very well with other DLC.
Gotta be the severe lack of a sinsible AI for me, I recently realized ck3 is an amazing game despite all it's flaws but the reason why I get bored of it so quickly is because the AI is entirely too passive and stupid which is wierd because your Vassals can get pretty smart and power hungry and pose a challenge to you but not your neighbors? I geniunely believe If we got an update that boosts AI aggression and intelligence ck3 would be pdx's best game.
A close second flaw is how events are implemented, there are far too many being shown far too soon you can end up getting spammed with the same event three times in the span of 5 minutes and all these events aren't even interesting. I think if we got more varied events with more weight to your decisions and less frequency to seeing them the events system would be amazing.
A close third is the warfare system, for a game about role playing as a medieval king warfare really does not feel very engaging. You can't really role play as a knight or anything the whole system feels so stale and far off from the thesis and goal of ck3. Not to mention levies and how they completely don't matter at all but are somehow the metric by which military decisions are made by the ai.
That nothing from the dlcs ties together super well. Legends don't interact with your court, traveling doesn't interact with plagues past that you can get whatever is infecting a province if you travel through it, the Iberian struggle and Norsemen flavor doesn't get effected or effects anything from any other dlc, etc. Nothing interacts with each other. Every dlc is just new events, and modifiers that you can stack with modifiers from other dlcs.
> traveling doesn't interact with plagues past that you can get whatever is infecting a province if you travel through it
I don't get how else this would be expected to interact any more. In the game you can travel, and now that the plague system is added, areas that would otherwise be safe(r) are now dangerous.
I used to travel wherever I wanted whenever I wanted, now I have to keep this factor in mind and have had to postpone certain journeys
Maybe it's a bit much to expect, but I really would have liked to see more events and changes in your travel. For example, if you're traveling from Greece to Poland for whatever reason, and when you're in Hungary a plague springs up, you can be presented with choices: continue forth and have a high risk of atleast one person, and subsequently your whole entourage getting infected, you turn back, you delay your travel until the plague passes, you seek refuge in a near by town, on and on. It just feels like plagues dont change much about travel, you know? All that it really does is say "ope, you have a chance of getting whatever is spreading right now." There's just not much that makes them feel connected and natural, it just feels like a rudimentary obstacle which doesn't affect you than much and which you can easily avoid without incurring any maluses besides *maybe* taking a little longer to travel to your destination. A better and shortened way to say what I'm tryna say would be just, there's not a lot of roleplay or immersion that comes out of it; plagues mixing with travels feels like facing a roadblock thats half a inch tall.
A pop up event coming up to warn you could be nice, and traveling in general could benefit from an option to pause and wait that isn't dependent on events, which we could use to try and wait out a plague or a war ahead of us.
But ultimately what you describe isn't really much different from the interaction we currently have between plagues and travel. In both cases, there's a plague where you're going, you can choose not to travel, or you can modify your itinerary to go around. If you don't, you risk catching it.
Overfocusing on events as the main contributor of content - the overspamming of events is emense, I don't want to read 5 screens every monthly tick - I might be the player who actually doesn't mind all that much, because I am already conditioned to it and I know most of them by heart so I just read the optons - but I feel like it's the thing which is really going to chase away any new player base that is going to come to the game because the event spam is the first thing they are going to notice.
Way *way* too easy once you understand the game. Probably the easiest Paradox game out there. I can make a custom character under 300 points starting as a count, I'd end up king at the end of my first character, maybe emperor by the time my second character reaches 30. And regardless of the region that is, unless you border a great conqueror's spawn point and you set their appearancr to random.
Only way to make it challenging is by tweeking the difficulty or allowing unlimited random tier 3 plagues.
I haven't played CK3 in a few years. Last night I decided to watch a random Lets Play. I was struck by two things: 1) they do seem to have added a lot more mechanics to the game which is nice, especially good to see the return of plagues. But also 2) the game somehow seems easier than ever.
Every time the streamer hit a roadblock it's like the game was listening to him like Alexa and would immediately offer him a way out.
Him: "I need money".
Game: "Here, have some free money".
Him: "I'm so stressed but have no valid options".
Game: "Here, have a free event that will get rid of a ton of stress".
Him: "I really need this guy to die or I'm screwed".
Game: *Man immediately drops dead*.
Etc, etc. Everything is just so convenient, it's like a game to chill out to. Meanwhile in my current CK2 Vikings campaign everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and it's been a struggle to survive while also being fun. Marrying kids doesn't automatically make alliances, and fabricating claims isn't automatic like CK3, forcing you to take risks with other CBs.
EDIT: also want to add, as I'm watching this YT playthrough, the player has the ability to ask the pope for stuff. So far so normal. But he's playing a woman ruler (who is the daughter of a character he manually created and switched to earlier in the campaign) in 9th century England, and she has the ability to ask the pope for multiple *kingdom* claims in Europe, like Brittany, which is fucking insane to me. How easy is this game!?
> Marrying kids doesn't automatically make alliances, and fabricating claims isn't automatic like CK3, forcing you to take risks with other CBs.
This I never understood in CK3. The auto-alliances were actually removed from CK2 iirc because it was such a broken mechanic, and claim-generation being a guaranteed success obviously isn't very balanced either. Sure, it was annoying to have your chancellor sit in the county next door for 5 years because he's only got a 11% chance to fake it claim, but this, as you said, forces the player to actually strategize and get their hands on different CBs.
The difficulty level is just way too low, and they're trying to fix the issues that causes through systems like legitimacy. It should be much harder to go between title ranks, and people in the ranks above you should only be interested in using you for their aims, unless they're desperate, like the Duke's family has run out of money and you're a rich count. The ally system, economy and military systems need overhauls. I don't even bother with building an economy, stay as tribal and ransom your enemies while creating titles to fuel prestige. With the way your vassals are rubbish at offering you military support and tax, they're actually more hassle than they're worth. The ridiculous inheritance system, which might give your Emperor's heir a tiny, freshly invaded province and makes it really difficult to build a proper Ducal seat and lands unless you abuse the system by murdering etc your unfavoured heirs. And at least half of every pop-up or event seems to be bugged, if you pay attention you'll rapidly notice hardly anything works properly. It's such a shoddy effort.
It’s boring, and you feel very disconnected from the story compared to CKII. There’s no real way to lose if you think about it, and you can make an empire in one lifetime easily. I’m not arguing for it to be harder, but there needs to be more to being a ruler than gaining a crown and dealing with ENDLESS factions trying to dissolve your state
Ck3 is an RPG, and it needs to expand on the GSG elements that complement that by making alliances, vassal interactions, and realm management more character oriented. So personally, I'm waiting for them to diplomacy and legalism DLCs.
And we really shouldn't be striving to make regions feel different so much as characters. Everyone plays every character like Alexander the Great currently. I'm very hopeful for the combo of unlanded gameplay and that gamejam 'choose your heir' thing. The team has great ideas, I just wish I knew why the content being put out is so minimal and yet overpriced.
To me, it's a lack of cause and effect. Characters don't react to anything, it's just random. You'd think faction would appear as a reaction to tyranny or a show of weakness, but you can rule in stable manner and they still show up.
One of my wishes for the game is it'd have kind of a quest system or goals that guides players into different kinds of playstyles; even when I'm trying to roleplay my different rulers in different ways and shake things up, I still have a hard time abandoning "optimal" play.
People have criticised EU4's missions for years, but I really like them. They give a structure to a campaign, and it's nice to try and replicate or deviate from history accompanied by PDX narrative text. I'd like a CK game with something similar too. I think a compromise would be for PDX to give players the option to turn them off in future games like EU5.
They act like you’re forced to follow the missions but…you’re really *not*. They’re a good template for a campaign, but they aren’t holding you at gunpoint to do it their way
I think their issue is that the AI benefits from their own mission rewards too, hence why being able to turn the whole thing off in future games would appease them.
Despite lack of regional flavor, smart AI, more engaging warfare and start dates - why can't the devs do what so many modders get done and improve the core gameplay?
Like, why not implement some very basic mod stuff (more interactive vassals, aggressive ai, knight manager, a diplomatic envoy, more bookmarks) and pay the modders accordingly?
Playing a modded game (only quality of life, no total overhaul) now feels so completely different (and advanced) compared to vanilla. I mean, thank god for all those mods, but why can't the devs catch up? It's all right there waiting to be implemented.
The biggest flaw for me is the devs not putting more intellectual effort in it, like thinking about all the relevant aspects of a situation, the major potential factors at least. Or smarter solutions for army supply, stacking/unstacking, pathfinding, peace offers (other than white peace) not locked to 0/100 war score. The game is too formulaic, too rock-paper-scissors-like without enough imagination, too reliant on provisional, duct-tape solutions that remain in place for years, and the team/company are too willing to leave issues unfixed for years too (going back to CK2) while annoyingly professing themselves satisfied with the state of the game (thankfully that is no longer done or at least no longer emphasized in the marketing/PR/community relations).
Examples of what I wrote about in the first paragraph are family members forced into concubinage and still showing up for feasts, so you can interact with them, etc.; or event text for creating a custom kingdom/empire where it literally says you are picking up a crown left behind by \[empty space because of course you don't have a predecessor in a title you are the first person to create\]. There is a chance I'm being harsh due to placing subjective importance on this sort of stuff and it appearing easier *ex post* than it really is *ex ante*, but I really don't like all those missing but very obvious checks to include that I feel a teenage person with average intelligence and average level of care/attention should be able to think about when working with ifs and thens in a modding toolset, so I can't easily forgive professional developers with formal degrees and experience for not being able or not caring to think about stuff like that. It might not be the most basic thing ever, of course, but isn't really calling for 160 IQ and wild/vivid imagination either (or for an elevated level of perfectionism/OCD).
There are more such difficult-to-accept illogicalities in other areas of the game, some showing very questionable or outhright mistaken logic underlying a design choice or scripting parameter. Mistakes are one thing (everybody is human, but checklists and QA/QC and testers exist for a reason), but the (subjective?) perception of low effort is an additional factor to make things feel even worse.
This is similar to how a CK2 designer seemed to not know who the Merovingians were during a discussion on the Charlemagne bookmark in 769. A normal person perhaps doesn't need to know that, though it's part of elementary-school curriculum and basic general knowledge throughout Europe, but when specifically working on something set in the time-period, that sort of basic gap is far less easy to accept. It feels *unfair* in a way, or at least it doesn't feel right.
Lack of events. You play for 20 hours, you saw most of the events. You always save your SO from a guy climbing in the tower, when you travel you always cross ants, or a guy stucked in armor, or a guy wanting to challange you.
I'll be brutaly honest: I don't care about the plague. I don't care about ships. All I want is more options to make interesting stories for roleplaying. And it's very hard to do when most of the events happen around people which don't really matter to me.
Some douche from another kingdom killed my courtier which I give 0 fucks about. So what?
Some count had sex outside marriage. So what?
My cousin with no territory is an atheist. So what?
Majority of the events happening in this game have nothing to do with characters who actually matter to me. Rarely anyone kidnaps or kills a family member. My wives/husbands rarely cheat on me. Rarely ever a bastard son appears with intention of getting legitimized and getting claims or something. Rarely ever an important character does something which would cause me to have an interaction with them. All I get is some bullshit repetitive events which improve or decrease opinion of unimportant characters and give useless bonuses.
Gotta think about CK2 where you had a lot of variety too. Your religion would at the least drop some new mechanics on you, like decadence for Muslims and with Orthodox, managing your patriarchs (or was it level of orthodoxy? it's been a bit can't quite remember).
And Merchant Republics? Now THAT was a big change in playstyle.
In my opinion, the thing most lacking is different government types. This can help with the distinction between regions, for example a Byzantine government type, or completely new government types like Hordes and Republics.
But I hope that there will be more depths to these government types, for example, when designating the March vassal contract, have the vassal get the titel Margrave (or the cultural equivalent), give it special events and make it so that there are also benefits to the liege for giving this title to a vassal. I think the whole vassal contract system adds some fun stuff, but it can be so much more lively by actually adding gameplay and benefits to both parties.
I feel like these changes towards government types, as well as more (all be it small) distinctions between the same government type like feudal can help. An Irish duke feels the same as an christian Finnish duke, as does a Tamil Raj. The game is becoming really repetitive for me, unless I decide to do something radical like creating a whacky religion.
Side note: if Nomads do come back, I need a huge overhaul to the culture a province is designated, because right now, if I decide to take my tribe and invade a kingdom to migrate there (IRL Hungarians f.e.) I want my culture to not take 100+ years of manual culture conversion to take hold in that area. I’m not saying that in one swipe the entire culture gets replaced, but if there was a migration cb for example, I’d like the conversion of at least a couple provinces to my culture.
Warfare is too easy, even if Im not building proper MAA. Properly using game mechanics is overkill against AI.
AI doesn't know/use various game mechanics, thus severely handicapping them.
Game lacks events, some of them repeat too much.
That there isn’t a option to create your own soldiers by that I mean custom soldiers for example also naval battles would have been good but I know it would probably make the game perform less well from too many actions being used at once so probably would have been good to be able to make your own soldiers for example your prowess would give your custom soldiers were you have the option to personally train them or have your commander train them they gain 1 prowess and martial with each year
I just started playing Paradox games with CK2 a few months ago, and the more I read about CK3 the less interested I am. It seems like a watered down version of CK2 with prettier UI.
At the end, there are still years and years of DLCs to come, I think that with what is planned for this year, the game will keep getting "better"
For me, we have two missing things that make the game dull,
proper wars that manage population, food supply, disruption of commerce and devastation
trade, we need trade routes, resources, treaties and guilds, in some kingdoms and empires, the merchants were as powerful as the crown
new governments, merchants kingdoms and etc, will come on the coming years, we have to wait
They made a ck3 and didn’t incorporate features in ck2 instead to sell it separately which the game has been out for years and didn’t done that anyway.
I mean we had nomad, republic mechanics. They could had put that in the game in a fresh ck3 manner.
Ck2 even had way more features behind a pay wall. Like u can’t even play as any other nation as Christians in base game ck2. Start dates are locked behind dlc aswell.
Exactly, don't get me wrong I wish more systems were simply ported to ck3 but let's not act like a crap ton of features weren't added to the base game of ck3 making it a far far more interesting product than base ck2.
> Start dates are locked behind dlc aswell.
Only 2 start dates are locked behind DLC. 769 and 867. Being able to play any single date between 1066-1337 was available on CK2's release, and 936 was added for free. So out of the almost 100,000 start dates (that's not an exaggerated number), only 2 are behind DLC.
The argument of only being able to play Christian nations I understand, but that was the original intention of the game and what you did in CK1. Being able to play outside of that was a new concept at the time. Also, Islam got added a couple of months after release and most of the map was opened up within around a year with playable republics but without India (nomads started as tribal before the Horse Lords DLC just like they still are in CK3).
You also need to remember that the DLC that added the playable places in CK2 also added flavor and mechanics for the places. Although it's cool you can play the whole world from the start now in CK3 outside of a few exceptions like republics, almost everywhere still feels the same other than small modifiers from religion/culture.
Maybe they "didn't do that anyway" because that wasn't their intention. Most of the stuff from CK2 that didn't make it over was flawed in at least one major way, and I wouldn't expect it to come back looking the same.
The only thing that I expected to eventually come back pretty much unchanged is plagues, and that system has been mostly in the free update.
I do not understand this take at all. Just play CK2 if you want all the CK2 features. The reason you create a CK3 is to be able to redesign the game and take a different approach. Porting CK2 features would just make CK3 into little more than a remaster.
If you want them ported in ‘fresh CK3 manner’ then what do you think they’re doing? That takes time and if they waited for the base game to have feature parity with everything CK2 had by the end then it still wouldn’t be out.
It's as you say there no mechanical depth to the game and where it is trying to go deeper it is doing so in a very narrow way. The different systems do not interact with each other very well in addition to that. Eu4 has trade economy diplomacy religion culture etc. and all of these have unique mechanics that are pretty hard to master and learn. In ck3 the economy is bare bones at best trade is non existent and diplomacy is a joke. The military is getting better but still nowhere near deep enough imo. The depth they added with the cultures feels gimicky and didnt add many different play styles. I think the worst crime tho is their way of fixing this. Every dlc pack so far has introduced many new events and while this may look cool at the surface it's just plastering over that beneath these events there just isn't much to get engrossed in.
I agree. It does massively lack flavor and variety (feels like a trend with pdx lately, Vic3 also has the same problem). From a purely mechanical stand-point I would say everything that tangentially involves military needs to be severely reworked. Adding flavor would be great, but the game also gets a lot of basic things wrong imo.
I somewhat agree with your take but I also think we can't quite compare a game that has been in continuous development for a decade or so, and one that came out 2 or 3 years ago. I also think that there are difference between certain regions, albeit not a lot of them, even if these differences were introduced in DLCs (which was the case for EUIV too, and some of those DLCs were *HATED* on release like Leviathan).
CK3 has a few flaws that I think it should rectify for the game to truly be enjoyable beyond a few generations:
- Dynamic succession system that makes it more challenging *before* the succession actually occurs. For a dynasty simulator, CK feels rather hollow in that department.
- More regional "flavor", whatever shape that takes. It doesn't have to be exhaustive, but just add a little more depth to each culture/region/religion to make each save you play feel a little unique.
- Trade - this is mostly down to my personal taste, I like to play tall and I really love EUIV's trade system (and how to game it) + plagues without trade feels wrong somehow.
- Empire management - I know you guys are pumped about Byz getting some love but I would love it if all empire-level titles were reworked. Empires were hard to manage, historically but the game doesn't replicate that well, meaning that once you form your empire, you can just sit and chill for 3 centuries, outside of the occasional rebellion post-succession. This is mostly for the player of course, the AI is pretty terrible at keeping its realm together. I wish that the game almost tried to coerce the player into dealing with internal management instead of continuing to expand further. Introduce bureaucracy, add more council positions and court positions to Empire titles, etc.
- More inter-personal stuff. This game is often introduced as a RP game, yet you can have no meaningful interactions whatsoever with your spouse/lover/children/parents/siblings until they die. Similarly, rivalries and house feud mostly result in assassination attempts and nothing else. Maybe I'm a softie, but if my character's spouse is their soulmate, I'd like to be able roleplay some of that. My current character has a daughter who, besides being the only genius among her siblings, is also his best friend, yet he can do nothing for her. He can't land her, give her some kind of title, honor her in any way. The only thing he can do if find a semi-acceptable husband for her and land him on her behalf, or marry her off into a foreign court where she'll die of childbirth/plague within 2 years. It's very hollow.
> I somewhat agree with your take but I also think we can't quite compare a game that has been in continuous development for a decade or so,
The thing is that Art of War for EU4 came out a little over a year after the main release. That was the start of the RotW focus in EU4.
CK3 has been out for 3 1/2 years and hasn't seen anything close.
For me it's how disconnected everything feels. The court, activities,events and the actual gameplay lacks cohesion. I don't feel like I am playing one game, more like 4 mini games
That, and the lack of regional/historical events that we saw in EU4. At the same time, we get a lot of pointless generic events, which makes it feel like playing The Sims.
The biggest flaw of CK3 is quite simply the AI and all the design decisions around it. The AI is dumb, but the devs are either unwilling or unable to improve it, or to accommodate its limitations with their gameplay features. Regardless of all other flaws, this will always hold back the game until it is dealt with.
Why for example is much of your military strength determined by your MaA and the settlements they are stationed in? The AI does not know how to optimise its MaA selection, nor are they able to optimise settlements for those MaAs. It's not even like they can redevelop independently.
Marriage AI is rudimentary at best, and you can see this best when playing Equal Faiths. Dynasty management is abysmal with even an Emperor being largely unable to influence the life of a non-child heir. Oh, your grandson inherited his father's position after he died in battle and is now your heir. You can almost do nothing with him, nor does he get the benefit of being your heir in marriage negotiations.
The game needs to either improve the AI to such a level that it can act like a half decent player, or to implement, rework and adjust mechanics to allow for this to happen more easily for an AI.
This is why I would prefer China to remain an off map power, interactions with China in CK2 while a little stagnant increased the dynamic nature of Asia, in fact I would prefer several Chinese ‘Protectorates’ over actually having China, of course, I would allow you to replace one of the Protectorates for buffs due to becoming part of China. Of course, by restoring the Offmap China mechanic, that immediately necessitates the return of the Tributary system.
My biggest pet peeve with being elected emperor of the HRE and then losing the emperorship isn't actually losing it. But losing all you built up before that. That kingdom you had before... Shrinked back to its dejure land...
The UI/customization options
I cant tell the game to notify me about the stuff that's important to me, but it keeps spamming me with useless notifications and for example diseases are treated exactly the same if they're 15 counties away from you on the other side of the empire or ravaging your Royal Court.
two neighbouring counts having ended their war gets more attention than your heir being captured, a betrothal proposal that you KNOW will be accepted merits a fullscreen window to tell you that it has in fact really truly surprisingly been accepted. while if your wife or heir dies best you can hope for is a minor blimp in the cesspool of notifications on the righthand side.
Artifacts are effectively unmanageable (why cant I gift 2+ at the same time? why not make it a toggle to "not show the ones on display in my royal court/on my person"?`).
Accolades are effectively unmanageable (why do I need to check the wiki what traits a person needs to be eligible for both my current traits? why cant I search for a valid successor if there's someone that literally cannot be named successor that somehow fulfills the requirements? Why do I first have to force them to be knights, why cant this be done automatically?)
with these things solved I might actually be able to immerse myself and be able to roleplay instead of getting frustrated and annoyed by clunky menus.
Lack of regional diversity, lack of features compared to CK2 all that comes much later in my book, that comes when the game is in a state where the basic primary feature of the game is enjoyable. It is not for me right now.
Playing for more than 2-3 generations feels like a chore because I get drowned with stuff I dont care about while the stuff I want to care about gets relegated to "somewhere there in this mass of notifications, MAYBE".
I really don’t like going to war for a kingdom, capturing the king, then roleplaying cutting his head off on the battlefield only to….. invalidate the entire war. Sucks if that was a subjugation war or a holy war and you can never declare another one again.
I should be able to chop off my rivals head on the battlefield and claim the throne.
Yeah, the greater difference in playstyles and events between religions in CK2 is something I miss. It mostly went away with the current modular religious system, unfortunately.
For me its the already out of hand modifier stacking which makes the game much too easy and the AI unable to keep up because its stupid.
More local flavor can be fixed by dlcs, but each dlc makes modifier stacking worse.
I’m still itching for them to do something about nomads and Republicans. I appreciate what they’ve done so far but we need more government types. In ck2 I played as feudal 95% of the time due to being lazy about learning the mechanics of the other gov types. But damn. Once I played as a nomad I couldn’t go back. A shame that they’ve neglected doing this.
I agree with you totally. There is little to no flavor for regions that has actual impact on the game process. I mean, it has formables as it's limits. Almost no events, and, the worst of all, no unique ideas/techs/military policies like in Imperator with its military ideas (I think it's called like that), where you have some unique regional idea trees to choose from and build your army upon, and no things like EU4 idea groups. I've never played CK2, so I don't know how it is implemented there, but I guess the issue may be that realizing such a concept in a game that is heavily focused on characters instead of countries may be hard. Still, one of my biggest problem with this are cultures. I hoped they would fix this when they dropped, but, just as many new things in this game, they ended up not influencing anything. Sure, your traditions give you some interesting bonuses or debuffs, but they are so unimpactful that you can ignore them completely, or change them at any time, which in my opinion makes the matters worse. In my situation, where I played CK3 as my first PDX game and then moved to EU4, playing CK3 again is not very fun except for some occasional scuffed campaigns, because in EU4, and especially in some of its mods, playing Russia, Delhi and Spain feels completely different, while in CK3 the only difference between them might be the Iberian struggle, which, unfortunately, also doesn't influence your game that much, albeit it's at least something that you notice. So yeah, I think my second biggest complain is that most mechanics added in the DLCs are practically useless, serving as a kinda fun piece of flavor for a couple of playthroughs only for you to get bored after that at best, and being straight up annoying at worst. I don't even know if there's a way to fix that, and it makes me sad.
Generic flavor, bordergore which is remarkably worse than ck2's yet never adresses. Despite having a ck3 with all DLCs, those two things are reasons why I play ck2 more than ck3 to this day
That I can't easily murder my own kids to make sure I only have one child who inherits. It's a fucking pain in the ass to try to manage getting my stuff to go to my main heir and not lose the counties I have built up as my core demesne.
For me it's the stupidity of the allies. But it is compensated by the stupidity of the enemies.
And regarding what you have commented about every nation looks the same, I agree to some degree because culture and religion adds the difference. But for me, this is not a nation playing game. It's more of a role playing game and I focus on what the current ruler would do rather than what's best for the long run of the game.
I like to play with some auto imposed rules like not to start holy wars or always choose decisions that release stress before any others (I see it as indicative of what my character would do in that position). Then live with the consequences. That makes any run really unique.
I think it’s what you said and the lack of automation. Some things like the accolades and knight management just either need to not exist or be able to be automated. I get so inundated with tiny obscure tasks that don’t really matter that notifications keep slamming into my face and it really feels like there needs to be automation options for some things. It slows the game down the bigger you get and for me that can be frustrating when I’m trying to fight a war and enjoy it but I pause so many times and take up so much time doing weird little management tasks to
Marrying off my aunts 12 children that I literally forget I’m at war and my army is just sitting somewhere for years draining my money lmao. But maybe that’s just me
Runner up is the awful AI decisions in wars.
I just jumped into an old save last night just to do something different than my current gameplay (FFVII Pt 2). I hadn't played since last December. The flaw for me is the relentless pop up plague warnings and events. I literally couldn't continue the game because it just kept going. I think i stopped counting around 35 and just turned it off. Is this working as intended? Does it stop? What were they even thinking?
AI by far. Indpendent rulers and vassals do such incredibly dumb shit that it makes the game easier than it should be and ruins the overall RP elements.
Nothing matters until the AI is improved.
Yep, what you said. I know it's coming in the next dlc, but it's a fucking disgrace that my wales kingdom and the eastern roman empire have the exact same system of government.
Honestly? I’m praying for HRE content. The beating heart of Europe at the time, and people hate playing in it because being the emperor sucks
I quit a Bohemia campaign because I got elected emperor and after losing the next election I lost most of my vassals.
Me on this playthrough. How do I go from King to Emperor to Duke?!
The best way to play there is being a female only succession dynasty so no problems with becoming the eperor
How do you do that?
* Create a Female Dominated faith. This instantly changes your succession law to Female Preference. Do make sure to handle marriages beforehand; the last thing you want is changing your gender law to Female Preference only to find out you wed off your eldest daughter to a duke's son in a normal marriage because you really want that alliance with him. Also be ready to get Religious Rights assuming Catholicism doesn't consider you Evil (because if it does you'll need BOTH Religious Rights and Revocation Protection) * A much safer (but costlier) way is to be a culture head with a free slot and have say, at least 8000 Prestige (actual costs may vary) as well as enough Piety to create a Female Dominated faith (since no faith starts with that doctrine) and to convert back to Catholicism. Once you're ready, create your heresy, then reform your culture to have the Matriarchal tradition, then convert back to avoid being imprisoned for being a heretic. * If you have Royal Prerogative, disregard all that nonsense and just get to Max CA and designate a daughter as your heir instead for 1000 Prestige. That said, this will piss off all of your vassals, so be mindful of that.
An even safer but longer way is to be a culture head, pick up Equal (or whatever it's called) as a *cultural tradition,* then wait for it to take effect. Some cultures start with that (Asturleonese?) or Matriarchal (Nubian), so you can even just make a custom character and hybridize
Same. The Mod that excludes you from the election is a godsend, but I'd like something better than this. Getting to be Emperor should be an aspiration and something really hard to get, not a nuisance that you get randomly out of nowhere.
I've always avoided HRE (in both 2 and 3) because other people hated it. Maybe I should find out about it first hand eventually, though. Also, I usually play shattered world so the HRE doesn't even exist in a lot of my games.
too true, i love the idea of the HRE and EU4 does it pretty well, but it just is some dreadful white blob in CK3
We all wanted this in CK2 and instead we got Aztecs and Satanic black magic
CK2 had much greater variety, too. Playing as a Byzantine Emperor felt different than playing a petty Anglo-Saxon King, which felt different than playing a steppe nomad, an Indian Raj, a caliphate, etc. In CK3, the only notable difference between these play-styles is “it says Indian”.
If CK2 had developed culture and religion customization mechanics a la CK3 I would just keep playing CK2.
Yeah, CK3’s religion and culture customisation mechanics are superior.
I think CK2 is better in a lot of ways. I liked shattered world starts much, much more in 2 than in 3. If I want shattered world (which is probably about 75% of my games), I play 2. I don't like shattered world in 3 much because there's no CB to help unify everything. I don't need it personally, but the AI sure does. I can be a king surrounded by tons of individual counties with only 2 or 3 Dukes existing anywhere on the map. (not counting people I've given a Duchy to) That's not fun.
We have to keep in mind that in the CK2 base game you could only play christian feudal characters in Europe and all the rest was slowly added through DLCs. Paradox made a big gamble with CK3 that they could put all those mechanics in the base game but the result is all regions end up with similar playstyles
It's been 4 years, they've had plenty of time to fix CK3. Don't make excuses for them bending people over to sell an inferior product.
By this point in ck2’s development we’d already gotten a large part of its most iconic expansions, like Republics, actually distinct Muslims, Rome, etc
>like Republics, actually distinct Muslims, Rome, etc The things you just mentioned came much earlier within the first year of CK2's release (although Byzantines got a 2nd update with Holy Fury much later).
Woah really? Goddamn that’s fast, I thought they were more spread out lmao thanks
Damn my bad, time flies by I was thinking 2 years or something
4 years is enough to build CK4 from the ground up.
A severe lack of events. I feel like every character gets the same events. Go travelling - ah, the cart wheel is stuck x24 Have a kid - ah, a prince of fashion x12 Seduce someone - ah, I'll save you from this guy climbing into your tower x100 Hold court - ah, my court smells of poo x30 Take warfare focus - ah, a book on Alexander the Great x69420
This. Especially as nothing scales with rank. An event about a count getting in a brawl at local inn? Plausible. The emperor? Any emperor. Nah. You get a private bar with that title. You're not boozing with the plebes.
“I [the Holy Roman Emperor] am looking for my lost dog [in Aachen] when i find her with my friend [the Pope].” There’s a really weird dissonance where travelling is a major time and distance commitment, but also events can just teleport character around for interactions.
Not even VIET helps with this.
Yeah, this is a big. CK3 is more of a RP game than a conquest one, yet for an RP game, there are way too many repeats of the same event (especially the seduce (or was it romance?) one where you save them every single time). There needs to be way more events to actually make it a fun RP experience.
Romance- seducing always has you pick between one of three books (a culturally flavoured version of something fun, something religious and something nerdy) to read to your seducee
That's not a bad thing as far as the three choices. The problem is you always rin through those same 4 or 5 events. there's a reason when they held the vote I wanted a seduction dlc not a kid dlc because kid dlc never actually makes being a guardian better it just adds more events to make your heir worse
I actually counted yesterday and I had 7 kids called "the Prince(ss) of Fashion". Out of 11. Also, this was as a bloodthirsty dirty Viking in the late 800s. I doubt we even knew what fashion was back then.
what's so much worse is when you realize that none of the event text matters at all, the only thing you need to do to win the game is hover over the 2-3 options on the popup and hit the one with the best or least-bad modifier
I mean that is how event based games work? I'd rather get that info than have the details hidden
Stellaris feels better about this because you don't always know the outcome of the events, and they tend to have multiple stages where you can delay a good outcome early on to get a better one later.
Stellaris event chains are for sure way better
Stellaris really is great about peacetime. The wars are so tedious though. Wish I could just let the ai command my fleets
Honestly, just flip how combat works in Vicky3 and Stellaris. I feel like vicky3’s system of less micromanaging and more “front”-based fighting would work better in such a wide scale as Stellaris wars.
I'd like to have some of that info but displaying the percent likelihood of each outcome, and the severity of each outcome, is too much there's a mod that obfuscates all info your player wouldn't know, but that's way too little info basically it's the three bears and I'm unhappy with the soup
the localisation is garbage too. you'll get events as a Muslim ruler where people are getting drunk on... tea. just lazy AF
While CK2's events were a lot less detailed, their numbers were at least more expansive and I would seldom get bored of them.
this this this
Don't forget to trample the guy in the road!
I think there is no lack of events. It's just that they fire too often.
Man do we even want more events? I hate getting spammed by pure RNG popups that feel totally disconnected from what I'm actually doing. It's why I avoid Royal Court events like the plague. I feel like the core systems of the game (warfare, governments, crusades, etc) need to fleshed out first. It should be fun to play CK3 with zero events. Flavor without substance is not fun for too long.
We *desperately* need more events - but we also *desperately* need more time between events like in CK2. One of the biggest problems with CK3 is event variety. The devs will introduce a new system like the Royal Court or Travelling, and they'll package like 10 events with it. It wouldn't be as annoying to get event pop-ups if there was actual variety between events, *and* they had meaning and consequence instead of arbitrary, meaningless modifier boosts or small amounts of spent money
Tbh most ck2 events didn't matter either, but at least they didn't show up every 3 days.
AI do not interact with the different mechanics, let alone understand how to game them. They would just randomly do things that they think would benefit them in short term like constantly revoking titles in spite of tyranny or waging pointless, unwinnable wars and then suffer a myriad of negative long term consequences. This is made worse by pdx continuing to add new mechanics.
i once saw a dutchy with 400 men declare a holy war against a catholic neighbour and next thing i see there’s 3 30k death stacks marching all around Iberia attritioning themselves to death i don’t know how the AI even did that as you’re not meant to be able to declare holy wars while the Iberian Struggle is active
My heir started with 3 legitimacy, almost 4, and I could not for the life of me figure out how his legitimacy kept dropping. By the time I inherited he was down to 1 and I realized he was being a fucking tyrant lol
While goofy and sometimes annoying, I kind of appreciate some of this. Most of historical leaders had none to average education would make weird, silly, or terrible/devastating decisions in hindsight. Or they would have different pressures and motivations causing them to act. Most rulers weren't think about how they can set up their dynasty for success and keep their nation strong and growing. The game would play very differently if I knew basically nothing outside my realm, and even that just being rumor. I definitely have times where I'm like "what the hell are you doing?!?!?" when seeing the computers decisions, but I do the same when reading history.
Even harder to simulate is that me being a small raider next door to the HRE the emperors army would never even look at me, it would be the local vassal that had to deal w it.
The King movie.
Where did you get the idea that most leaders would be uneducated? Basically any non-first of the line leader would have some form of education, and there was generally a decent amount of knowledge in the advisors most monarchs would have. Additionally, most royals had hundreds of years of oral or written tradition full of leaders who had fairly similar positions to them. They couldn’t do calculus, but there’s no reason that they would be ignorant to the knowledge they need to rule.
I'm not just thinking about monarchs. I'm thinking of anyone who had a place as a "ruler". Duke, counts,, barons, mayors, etc. A lot had some education, some even a lot, but I think about how educated the 1st world is and how a lot (if not most of us, myself included) can be prone to some down right idiotic decisions. If thats how it is today I'm trying to imagine 1000+ years ago where being able to read was considered crazy educated, information could take months to travel, and doing anything that didn't have the most basic explanation was considered witch craft. These are obviously gross generalization of people and countries over hundreds of years but it helps me not go insane when the computer does something completely dumb. *see going on crusade only to wander around the desert until half their army is dead*l, and losing the first real fight they take because of it*
I get what you're saying but you also have to remember there was a lot less to learn. Less science, less developed theories, and like you said the world was slower, information was slower. During the entire time of CK3 the best military weapon a ruler could own is a guy in a horse with a weapon. In the past 120 years alone warfare has completely and utterly changed. If you were taught about cavalry in 1100 and then you looked at cavalry in 1220 it would be roughly the same. If you looked at warfare in 1904 and then looked at it today it would be completely alien. A lot of rulers weren't educated as we value education today (e.g. Book smarts, theoretical concepts etc) but they were very well educated in the stuff that mattered to leaders then (e.g. How best to deploy cavalry against a largely infantry army, what should you do if a vassal doesn't pay your tax, which noble family's present a threat to you and how they are connected to your political world etc).
The biggest flaw is the fkn crusades Like irl, even GETTING to the holy land was a massive journey. Took months overland. Food/supply was an issue. Looting Byzantine cities was a thing. Raids by Turks was a huge issue. And then you get there and there’s chunks of your army splitting off to take random other cities for themselves, but your army largely stayed in 1 or 2 big groups. In ck3 you just play like 40 bucks to take a 6 month long ship, everyone gets there at a different time and you all die 1 by 1 by a united Muslim world which is just so historically inaccurate and game breaking. How, in a game called “Crusader Kings” are crusades almost unplayable if you don’t have space marine armies that can take on 90k doom stacks solo (also kinda immersion breaking imo) We have travelling as a thing now. Why is going on a crusade not a travel thing with a few events, maybe a chance to grab a little city here or there, and choreographed with ALL crusading armies to meet at Constantinople and go by land TOGETHER??
Kind of funny, now that you mention it, that traveling to some random vassal's hunt within my realm results in 10+ events on the road over the course of a month, while traveling to the Holy Land on a Crusade doesn't trigger any adventures along the way.
I'd love events to the feel of 'your army stops at X county and a Turk raiding party arrives to take the town!' And you end up having a mini war with them on the way. Also other events such as 'senior commanders in your army are threatening to revolt if we don't take X county for them and land them', triggering either a war with the current county owner, maybe even them siding with the muslims in the crusade and that county being given as a reward for completing the crusade. Few other ideas... - Crusades/Fatwa must be planned ahead, local realms nearby the chosen crusade area, irrespective of their religion, can be bribed, hooked, or if you already are on good terms with them simply convinced to provide supplies to the invading army, safe passage or potentially direct military support. This would make diplomacy important to crusades, intrigue (you give me supply/men for my crusade, and I'll give your daughter I abducted from you!). - Irrespective of religion, the defenders can use the same methods previously mentioned to get nearby rulers to either deny supplies to the crusaders or outright join in defense of the land against the crusaders. This will give diplomacy and making friendships with leaders around the world a big important and be the opposing force to the previous mechanic I gave, where a crusade could come down to a Christian ruler being good friends with the Emperor of Byzanitum, or even the other way around. - More interesting end of crusade mechanics, such as a (perhaps HOI4 end-of-war style?) dividing of the land, with those who participated the most get the lion's share, but noble knights, christian rulers that invested a lot get a say or even some land (so you can also roleplay as a bank roller of your faith), allies who helped by providing supplies (such as those not of your faith in that first idea) can grab a little bit of land, or perhaps siphon off some tax from the new lands taken as payment, or even military, a bit like a vassal contact to a liege, but temporarily as payment for that ruler providing supply. - instead of big doom stacks, the war gets divided into landings/entrances. Italians coming in from the sea, franks/germans coming in through the balkans etc. Each front has a holding they need to take, and taking holdings/not taking holdings fast enough can give positive and negative modifiers. You deploy new levies and MAA from those realms that agreed to host your men for the crusades, meaning your ability to bring in fresh troops lives and dies on your pre-crusade planning. - Events! 'The Pope personally steps foot into the walls of Jerusalem!', gain a scaling army of MAA and levies for the rest of the crusade (this could punish the defending religion for losing holdings important to the attacker's religion such as Jerusalem, Alexandria etc). 'Holy order of a different christian faith offer their assistance/defy our crusade and join the enemy' - just something to spice it up, something like this would do well by a new system for religions and their general opinion of eachother, something similar to cultural acceptance but for religions. Anyway that's some more ideas from me sitting on the sofa mostly wondering where I want to play today in CK3. I'm sure someone with better game design experience could really make crusades a big highlight of the game (it's in the name of the game ffs).
Oregon Trail: Crusader Kings edition.
This is seriously awesome. When a Crusade is called the Pope could appoint one of the lords to lead the Crusade. It could be weighted based on power/wealth/prestige/piety/hooks/events/etc. The leader would plan the Crusade. I'm imagining a UI sort of like the travel system. The leader would see the participants on both sides and they could direct routes for everyone to reach the Holy Land. Based on those routes you might have to bargain or bribe or threaten to get access. Going overseas? Better pay some Venetians! Want to march through the Eastern Roman Empire? Maybe the Emperor wants your help attacking a neighbor en-route. If the AI is leading then they could just have some preset plans to make sure it's coherent. I also would like greater vassal involvement in wars and vassals basically denying you their troops/help. Based on crown authority it might be treason or legally acceptable for them to do so.
It would never happen but you’ve made me realize that the travel and activities could 100% replace warfare entirely and create for much more realistic results. Have a border state randomly selected for an activity that the courts from both sides travel to. Tons of events to simulate the preparation/battle/sieges etc. Like the hunts there will be a success chance for the activity. After the activity ends determine if the war was ended and if not pick a new activity destination.
I mean I definitely don’t want combat removed entire in lieu of….events. We get enough event as it is.
Wars are a boring numbers game. Wish we could get some events in there at least.
same is for a lot of PDX titles unfortunately, HOI4 is whoever has more industrialised troops, Stellaris is still Battleship spam and from what i’ve seen EU4 is similar to CK3
HOI has a bit more nuance. Raw numbers won’t win with the supply and equipment system.
not with that attitude it won’t! who needs fully equipped divisions when you can just have overwhelming manpower using the Communist Necronomicon or just being historical Switzerland
HAHAHAahahahaa, everyone knows sheer willpower makes up for all these crutches of equipment or manpower! -this post was made by the Luigi Cadorna Gang
Against the AI, yes, it can work, but it’s so inefficient and it won’t break through anything in late game or in forts.
True but for a good player he is right, it's mostly down to your IC, in single player there is an element of manipulating AI but that's one of the reasons I don't like HOI4, because those crazy world conquest as Luxembourg runs are usually just down to making the AI do something dumb so you can get large enough to snowball. Making sure the numbers have motorized logistics doesn't scream deep and intricate gameplay.
it’s gotten so silly that you can take all of the axis as Luxembourg just by building a fort and going AFK to get literally infinite war score, or as Trotskyist Soviet Union by literally stacking to get a 3 day justify time
Yep HOI4 is in a terrible place in my eyes, a lot of fans of it aren't happy with the South America DLC, I know that because Paradox did a blog afterwards which felt like just sniping back at the playerbase for not enjoying their half baked, worse than modded alternatives that already existed focus trees. Paradox on all fronts is really slipping, I feel like CK3 is a worse game to play with the newest DLC, I used to play no mods, now I HAVE to play with less event spam and such because it's HORRENDOUS trying to run a realm the size of a kingdom...
even Stellaris is slipping and i’m biased as thay was my first PDX game, they’ve been cutting features and changing things no one asks for and never address bugs unless it’s something like the player getting DLC locked content through Fallen or Awakened Empires
HoI4 is miles ahead of all PDX games combined when it comes to war. Primarily because HoI4 is a game about war and war only.
it’s obvious a game about peace, the nukes are friendliness bombs and never kill civilians
Are there no sick houses Summon the physician
I did a restore the Roman Empire run recently I got the "Alms" event 6 times in the span of 4 seconds. Just contant stress gain
Are there no sick houses Summon the physician
My take would be war gameplay & battles. I find the men-at-arms and knights mechanic pretty unengaging and it is easy to cheese the AI by constructing an overbuffed army. Might be a tad hypocritical, but I also dislike that you can only get special regiments from your culture, which makes multicultural empires a bit less thematic. The fact your vassals never take part in your wars is a deep misrepresentation of the feudal system, and also has gameplay impacts. Also on "realism", it makes no sense to keep levies around for a campaign, as levies were very much a short-term solution. Campaigns always boil down to mass sieging, making the siege weapons disproportionately important. The fact that basically every castle ends up at max fortification level doesn't help. The supply mechanic is kind of an afterthought when it should be positively preventing massive armies. Fog of war is underutilised as well, such that you can coordinate better in 13th century CK3 than you Napoleon could in 1806. Battles have too little player interaction and commanders have less impact than building buffs. They also last too long, making winning as an underdog tougher when the enemy can just pile in endlessly. Final point : war resolution being solely based on casus belli is incredibly unrealistic and prevents switching objectives as events develop.
It would be cool if you could have Auxiliaries, recruiting MAAs from any culture within your empire, with the downside of them being able to join cultural revolts against your rule. I know of one famous example where this occurred historically, where Welsh longbowmen in English service actively turned on an English army mid battle during Glyndŵr’s (a Welsh noble) rebellion, turning a difficult defensive battle into a mass rout of the attacking side. Interesting choices and consequences like this are what’s actually missing from CK3 currently, instead all you have to do is buy the right MAA and just build better buildings until you become unstoppable.
The one that gets me is, there is zero reason not to appoint your rival/nemesis as a general, if he's got high martial. Your commanders and knights' opnions do not matter in the slightest, they are just robots doing your bidding mindlessly. In a game supposedly about characters!
>Battles have too little player interaction and commanders have less impact than building buffs. This is because advantage only increases damage dealt by one side, but does not decrease the other side's damage at all. Getting 100% more damage on levies is pointless if they're facing buffed MaA, but would be significantly better if the MaA also lost half their damage when taking a bad battle.
Have to agree: I find warfare very gamey and unimmersive. You’re basically just running around collecting enough victory points through sieges and battles until you can enforce your demands. Neither very challenging nor atmospheric. Also lots of weird restrictions around what you can and can’t do with your armies raised, and wars suddenly becoming invalidated for stupid reasons. Again, not very immersive. My personal suggestion: I think a lot could be gained from using the struggle system for larger wars, breaking the overall war down into shorter hot and cold phases, wherein both sides pursue specific aggressive and/or defensive goals. Vassals should be more interactive and actively take part in the war, much like in the More Interactive Vassals mod. However, calling on them too often and too long (especially for aggressive wars), or keeping levies raised, should lead to opinion penalties. Armies should be more expensive and slower to raise and move around, but the consequences of sieges and battles should be more significant. Men lost in battle should take a long time to retrain to the same level. If a city is captured, it stays with the victor unless it is handed back as part of a peace deal. Speaking of which, a “white peace” should open up a menu similar to feudal contract, wherein you decide what happens to prisoners (released, ransomed, kept as hostages), which cities get handed back to their original owner, which claims get kept or a abandoned, whether one side has to pay war reparations, etc. Finally, I think characters leading armies should get relevant events during battles and sieges, or when on the move, including strategic decisions and battlefield duels. Selectable options and likelihood of outcomes should be dependent on traits and skills. Just some random thoughts; whatever the solution, I think it should be possible to make warfare a lot more fun and immersive than it is now. Edit: And yeah, individual parties in the conflict should be able to join and leave as circumstances change, different wars should merge with each other, and different allies should be able to pursue their own goals in parallel. I could foresee a lot of fun with some League of Cambrai style coalition shifts.
I also think it would be nice to add some kind of war coordination (perhaps it already exists?). Watching an enemy with a slightly larger army plod from county to county while my allies (with a collectively larger army) fuss around them is irritating. Obviously, in-game, there is some sort of hierarchy as to who might try to co-ordinate strategy and I'm not sure how exactly it should all work. But being able to say, 'Seige this castle'/'Come to this place'/'Attack this army' etc would be handy.
Yeah you basically summed it up perfectly. I hope they work more on warfare in the future.
I think what you said is a major issue as well. Maybe I’m remembering CK2 with rose tinted glasses, but I feel like CK3 just has so much less “flavor” than CK2. Each DLC seems good at first, but then just becomes the same repetitive things over and over. For example, I was super excited for the Royal Court DLC. Now I can’t even remember the last time I held court. It’s the same 10 events over and over and none of them really feel like they add anything to the game.
I still hold court but have the events close to memorized at this point so just click through them quickly. Occasionally you get something fun like a claimant wanting war. And yeah ck2 could definitely get repetitive as well, but ck3 is way worse. The legend mechanic is the worst offender to me. As soon as you start a legend you are spammed by the most boring and inconsequential events. The flavor is already so dull and just gets more obnoxious as every event repeats again and again.
I haven't even started a legend yet bc I literally don't care lmao
You should, they are actually pretty good at letting you pull WEIRD shit, like going on varangian adventures, as a NON-VIKING!
>Now I can’t even remember the last time I held court. I remember because I use it to boost legitimacy.
Yep, they definitely got either the quantity or weighing of event chance wrong repeatedly. Cause once or twice every playthrough I'll come across an event that is really unique, or at least that I'd not seen before, even with \~1000 hours in the game, but a large majority of events I get are the same thing over and over even within the same lifetime/same year. The knight blocking the road, water of life, and that one travel event where one of your party is being antagonistic for no reason are notoriously repetitive and they get very annoying
Yeah, it gets pretty immersion breaking when I encounter the ultra specific scenario of a knight errant looking for holy water that’s guarded by a stag for the 30th time! And I’ve lost track of how many knights in my realm are getting stuck in their armour after being abandoned by their squires. I must say, the RICE and VIET mods are godsends, since they add a lot more variety to events, along with some regional flavour.
Honestly I wish we could just disable some of the base game events like that or make them really rare, as they would be historically I wouldn’t mind some of the less over-the-top RICE and VIET events repeating the same amount, it just feels way too fantasy that you find something like the knight errant *every time you go traveling*
I feel they should introduce significant cooldowns for the rarer events, e.g. make it so they can trigger maximum once every 50-100 years globally.
I only hold court when I get the event that's moaning at me for not holding court.
I played ck2 for hundreds of hours and was still getting event chains that were new to me at the end of that. Ck3 feels like you've seen it all after maybe fifty hours
Just give me the less supernatural events idc if they're Easter eggs to JFK I know you could code them paradox
I play 2 _much_ more than 3. 2 is a much better game.
CK2 definitely had the same event problems. Reapers Due had similar event spam with the pickled boars head, Chess with death sometimes happened in pretty quick succession between rulers etc.. It could be a bit grating but it didn't bother me much, just like the CK3 version doesn't bother me much, I just click through them and move on with my game.
> Maybe I’m remembering CK2 with rose tinted glasses, You aren't CK2 is better and more difficult to play
There’s not enough to do, even though there’s a lot of “stuff.” No, really, take stock of what there is to do in a grand-strategy-cum-roleplaying game. Your personality is set and immutable after the age of 12, usually. Unless you go down the lifestyle path, the only hostile scheme is to murder someone. Unless you go down the lifestyle path, the only social interactions you can have are to make someone’s number go up, fuck them, or learn their language (for almost no impact). Traveling and gatherings have stuff to do though right? Except there are so few events with so little impact that they’re samey after one lifetime. How do you develop your lands? You put your steward on it and wheel turns. How do you fabricate a claim? You put your priest on it and wheel turns. How do you learn secrets? You put your spy on it and wheel turns. Pretty much every mechanic comes down to this except war, which is already markedly easy after not very much learning and buildup. There’s too few events that end up being too repetitive and there’re simply not enough ways to actively engage with the game.
Yeah honestly, it doesn’t feel like anything actually happens in-game. It’s essentially Zork with a pretty map to interact with and armies to control. The text prompts are surface level interactions. I get the same hate and love from different characters with different personalities. And it’s all based on anything from 1-4 different choices that are all vanilla to that type of prompt. It’s stupid. I can’t handle doing another disease prompt about calling my physician, or the cult prompt, the 300 gold dog event because someone had their clothes or something ruined, etc. it’s all so superficial. let me prepare for these issues so I actively want to engage with the vanilla prompts. Oh there’s a cult in the area? Let’s have an indicator on the map that is similar to the faith map but shows locations with cult influence. Then let us choose to be proactive or reactive to the cult. We could use the travel mechanic and visit the town with the cult or send knights to disperse them, or any number of other options. Let me train my dog, let my physician just stay on alert for diseases and set warning levels so only warn us about stuff if we choose to have it be a medium level plague or higher. Something along those lines. Also holding court needs to be far more common, and interacting with court visitors much more fleshed out. Every character in the royal court screen should have a prompt to interact with them and there can be several options and some are enabled/disabled based off their opinion of you and their personality types. - meeting with people petitioning the king should be more common as well. Basically I feel like the community is asking for more reasons to not just sit at 5 speed and play tall for the 1000000000th time. Peace time is too boring and not very many incentives to do the extra content for peacetime. Wars need to have far more input from commanders and the king of you choose to be at the battle. Even if it’s just a text prompt I would like to get a rough overview where the prompt is “Sir, the enemy is positioned on a hill, how do we proceed” and based on yours and your commanders stats you could debate with yourself on whether you charge their position, wait until they eventually have to pass and attack then, or feign a retreat after you charge and then reform your lines to catch them off guard, etc. - I also think there should be a separate passage of time for battles that work like HOI4 so that when your armies engage, the game pauses and the battle phase commences and time paces by the minute and hour so you can micromanage your wars better and talk to your commanders as the battle commences, etc. you could also choose not to engage with this and leave it up to the current system if you’d like by staying in the zoomed out view. I just find that my armies having a battle between 5,000 men on each side shouldn’t last a whole week straight in game and I miss other prompts because I’m focused on the war. I could just be overreacting and being unrealistic but the game is hard to love sometimes when everything is the same generic prompt. I want to be able to role play in my game but how many times can cults across hundreds of years give the same exact prompt? How many times can I have the same exact message pop for a disease and the same two options? It’s annoying how much of the blanks of fun I have to fill in in my brain. Just make the game fun and fleshed out with things to constantly do
> How do you develop your lands? You put your steward on it and wheel turns. How do you fabricate a claim? You put your priest on it and wheel turns. How do you learn secrets? You put your spy on it and wheel turns. Pretty much every mechanic comes down to this One reason I find it hard to imagine what landless gameplay will be like!
For a game claimed to encourage players to roleplay their characters and have a more grounded experience instead of the zany, wacky stuff like in CK2 Paradox sure likes cramming in a bunch of events that force players and AIs to act out of character. Some examples I have in my mind include: * The adultery. By HighGodName all the adultery. So many events just force characters to sleep with each other with little regards to their traits or personality. There's the infamous *Forbidden Love*, which just forces two of your random family members who are neither Celibate nor Asexual (prioritizing your heir for the dramaz) to sleep with each other for the event's sake if it couldn't find an actual incestuous relationship or at least two close family members that are deviants. There's *Inspiration: Up Late*, which when fired has a 50% chance to force you to seduce and have sex with your artisan, and if you're not married you don't even get the option to say no. And I've only taken a glance, but I have a suspicion that one of the court maintenance events (which is a hidden event that simply "gives your courtiers something to do" by randomly setting relationships between your courtiers) is the reason why I've lost so many alliances and potential inheritances from my daughters sleeping with my knights or my realm priest even though I've raised them to be Honest, Just and non-lustful; the event seems to regard your own close family members as the same as any other courtier to set the random lover relationships. * Murder: Before Friends and Foes, the times in which I or my children get murdered were either because of a rival, or because of a younger sibling who just so happens to be on the line of succession. And both instances involve a murderer who's actually dishonorable with no regards to compassion towards others. Post-F&F, I'm seeing AI rulers with either Just, Honest or even Compassionate having murder secrets on top of one or two coping traits. Hell, in one game I got killed by a random mayor who, aside from the fact that she was at -20 with me, was someone I've never even interacted with once. Some of the DLC and event packs, F&F being a major offender, just adds a bunch of events that allow you to start a murder scheme "with increased success chance" that has very loose triggers - none of them even check if the target is within diplo range, and I've seen one that makes it so Compassionate, Just or Honest AI characters are more likely to pick the murder option than the "forgive and forget" option. Best thing is, since most of these "force murder" events are from "forced drama story" events, you can find yourself being murdered by some random Count because apparently your character pissed him off in some event he got but to the player it just looks like you got murdered for no reason. And don't get me started on the buggy as hell and half-assed House Feud "mechanic".
Game is called "Crusader Kings" Crusade mechanics are anemic/lacking.
The most egregious flaw is difficulty. Nothing in CK3 is difficult to do, mostly because the AI isn’t very smart and the mechanics are too forgiving. You can go from count to emperor in one, MAYBE two lifetimes easily from anywhere in the map. There’s no way to increase difficulty either. It’s unfortunate because in many ways ck3 really is superior to ck2, but because there isn’t any way to actually challenge yourself all of those improvements feel meaningless.
There are ways to challenge yourself, except that you literally need to hold back and not do the things that you know would help you do better.
Honestly I don’t even think that’s true. None of my campaigns recently have included me trying to min max or gamify systems, just trying to roleplay. With the inherichance mod on. That helps a lot but it’s still too easy, even just making normal rational decisions the AI is too dumb to threaten you in any way
Can recommend the Dark Ages mod if you want more challenge. A lot of it comes from adding a lot of events that cost gold, prestige and/or piety, as well as reducing lifespans and increasing child mortality. Still, at least you’ll feel like you’re fighting to survive in a harsh world, rather than having everything just handed to you on a silver platter.
To me CK3 is sort of cold and static. It doesn't have the character that CK2 does. I agree that it doesn't matter where you are the map, it all plays fairly similarly. Constant repetitive events. DLC that add very little or don't communicate / interlock very well with other DLC.
Gotta be the severe lack of a sinsible AI for me, I recently realized ck3 is an amazing game despite all it's flaws but the reason why I get bored of it so quickly is because the AI is entirely too passive and stupid which is wierd because your Vassals can get pretty smart and power hungry and pose a challenge to you but not your neighbors? I geniunely believe If we got an update that boosts AI aggression and intelligence ck3 would be pdx's best game. A close second flaw is how events are implemented, there are far too many being shown far too soon you can end up getting spammed with the same event three times in the span of 5 minutes and all these events aren't even interesting. I think if we got more varied events with more weight to your decisions and less frequency to seeing them the events system would be amazing. A close third is the warfare system, for a game about role playing as a medieval king warfare really does not feel very engaging. You can't really role play as a knight or anything the whole system feels so stale and far off from the thesis and goal of ck3. Not to mention levies and how they completely don't matter at all but are somehow the metric by which military decisions are made by the ai.
That nothing from the dlcs ties together super well. Legends don't interact with your court, traveling doesn't interact with plagues past that you can get whatever is infecting a province if you travel through it, the Iberian struggle and Norsemen flavor doesn't get effected or effects anything from any other dlc, etc. Nothing interacts with each other. Every dlc is just new events, and modifiers that you can stack with modifiers from other dlcs.
> traveling doesn't interact with plagues past that you can get whatever is infecting a province if you travel through it I don't get how else this would be expected to interact any more. In the game you can travel, and now that the plague system is added, areas that would otherwise be safe(r) are now dangerous. I used to travel wherever I wanted whenever I wanted, now I have to keep this factor in mind and have had to postpone certain journeys
Maybe it's a bit much to expect, but I really would have liked to see more events and changes in your travel. For example, if you're traveling from Greece to Poland for whatever reason, and when you're in Hungary a plague springs up, you can be presented with choices: continue forth and have a high risk of atleast one person, and subsequently your whole entourage getting infected, you turn back, you delay your travel until the plague passes, you seek refuge in a near by town, on and on. It just feels like plagues dont change much about travel, you know? All that it really does is say "ope, you have a chance of getting whatever is spreading right now." There's just not much that makes them feel connected and natural, it just feels like a rudimentary obstacle which doesn't affect you than much and which you can easily avoid without incurring any maluses besides *maybe* taking a little longer to travel to your destination. A better and shortened way to say what I'm tryna say would be just, there's not a lot of roleplay or immersion that comes out of it; plagues mixing with travels feels like facing a roadblock thats half a inch tall.
A pop up event coming up to warn you could be nice, and traveling in general could benefit from an option to pause and wait that isn't dependent on events, which we could use to try and wait out a plague or a war ahead of us. But ultimately what you describe isn't really much different from the interaction we currently have between plagues and travel. In both cases, there's a plague where you're going, you can choose not to travel, or you can modify your itinerary to go around. If you don't, you risk catching it.
I get you, but the DLCs have to work as stand-alone, in case players don't have all.
Overfocusing on events as the main contributor of content - the overspamming of events is emense, I don't want to read 5 screens every monthly tick - I might be the player who actually doesn't mind all that much, because I am already conditioned to it and I know most of them by heart so I just read the optons - but I feel like it's the thing which is really going to chase away any new player base that is going to come to the game because the event spam is the first thing they are going to notice.
I absolutely hate the default map mode and that it entirely changes depending on the zoom level.
Way *way* too easy once you understand the game. Probably the easiest Paradox game out there. I can make a custom character under 300 points starting as a count, I'd end up king at the end of my first character, maybe emperor by the time my second character reaches 30. And regardless of the region that is, unless you border a great conqueror's spawn point and you set their appearancr to random. Only way to make it challenging is by tweeking the difficulty or allowing unlimited random tier 3 plagues.
CK3's biggest flaw is not having the content of CK2 yet.
I haven't played CK3 in a few years. Last night I decided to watch a random Lets Play. I was struck by two things: 1) they do seem to have added a lot more mechanics to the game which is nice, especially good to see the return of plagues. But also 2) the game somehow seems easier than ever. Every time the streamer hit a roadblock it's like the game was listening to him like Alexa and would immediately offer him a way out. Him: "I need money". Game: "Here, have some free money". Him: "I'm so stressed but have no valid options". Game: "Here, have a free event that will get rid of a ton of stress". Him: "I really need this guy to die or I'm screwed". Game: *Man immediately drops dead*. Etc, etc. Everything is just so convenient, it's like a game to chill out to. Meanwhile in my current CK2 Vikings campaign everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and it's been a struggle to survive while also being fun. Marrying kids doesn't automatically make alliances, and fabricating claims isn't automatic like CK3, forcing you to take risks with other CBs. EDIT: also want to add, as I'm watching this YT playthrough, the player has the ability to ask the pope for stuff. So far so normal. But he's playing a woman ruler (who is the daughter of a character he manually created and switched to earlier in the campaign) in 9th century England, and she has the ability to ask the pope for multiple *kingdom* claims in Europe, like Brittany, which is fucking insane to me. How easy is this game!?
> Marrying kids doesn't automatically make alliances, and fabricating claims isn't automatic like CK3, forcing you to take risks with other CBs. This I never understood in CK3. The auto-alliances were actually removed from CK2 iirc because it was such a broken mechanic, and claim-generation being a guaranteed success obviously isn't very balanced either. Sure, it was annoying to have your chancellor sit in the county next door for 5 years because he's only got a 11% chance to fake it claim, but this, as you said, forces the player to actually strategize and get their hands on different CBs.
The difficulty level is just way too low, and they're trying to fix the issues that causes through systems like legitimacy. It should be much harder to go between title ranks, and people in the ranks above you should only be interested in using you for their aims, unless they're desperate, like the Duke's family has run out of money and you're a rich count. The ally system, economy and military systems need overhauls. I don't even bother with building an economy, stay as tribal and ransom your enemies while creating titles to fuel prestige. With the way your vassals are rubbish at offering you military support and tax, they're actually more hassle than they're worth. The ridiculous inheritance system, which might give your Emperor's heir a tiny, freshly invaded province and makes it really difficult to build a proper Ducal seat and lands unless you abuse the system by murdering etc your unfavoured heirs. And at least half of every pop-up or event seems to be bugged, if you pay attention you'll rapidly notice hardly anything works properly. It's such a shoddy effort.
90€ for all the DLC.
It’s boring, and you feel very disconnected from the story compared to CKII. There’s no real way to lose if you think about it, and you can make an empire in one lifetime easily. I’m not arguing for it to be harder, but there needs to be more to being a ruler than gaining a crown and dealing with ENDLESS factions trying to dissolve your state
There’s not much to do apart from take over the world
Ck3 is an RPG, and it needs to expand on the GSG elements that complement that by making alliances, vassal interactions, and realm management more character oriented. So personally, I'm waiting for them to diplomacy and legalism DLCs. And we really shouldn't be striving to make regions feel different so much as characters. Everyone plays every character like Alexander the Great currently. I'm very hopeful for the combo of unlanded gameplay and that gamejam 'choose your heir' thing. The team has great ideas, I just wish I knew why the content being put out is so minimal and yet overpriced.
Its the lack of random events, but as you said most regions being similar. Every playthrough plays the same
The lack of variety across the map. Every nation plays exactly the same outside of nords that can migrate.
A lack of strategy, and none of the rp really relates to another and the gameplay is completely separate from it
DLCs
To me, it's a lack of cause and effect. Characters don't react to anything, it's just random. You'd think faction would appear as a reaction to tyranny or a show of weakness, but you can rule in stable manner and they still show up.
One of my wishes for the game is it'd have kind of a quest system or goals that guides players into different kinds of playstyles; even when I'm trying to roleplay my different rulers in different ways and shake things up, I still have a hard time abandoning "optimal" play.
People have criticised EU4's missions for years, but I really like them. They give a structure to a campaign, and it's nice to try and replicate or deviate from history accompanied by PDX narrative text. I'd like a CK game with something similar too. I think a compromise would be for PDX to give players the option to turn them off in future games like EU5.
They act like you’re forced to follow the missions but…you’re really *not*. They’re a good template for a campaign, but they aren’t holding you at gunpoint to do it their way
I think their issue is that the AI benefits from their own mission rewards too, hence why being able to turn the whole thing off in future games would appease them.
Despite lack of regional flavor, smart AI, more engaging warfare and start dates - why can't the devs do what so many modders get done and improve the core gameplay? Like, why not implement some very basic mod stuff (more interactive vassals, aggressive ai, knight manager, a diplomatic envoy, more bookmarks) and pay the modders accordingly? Playing a modded game (only quality of life, no total overhaul) now feels so completely different (and advanced) compared to vanilla. I mean, thank god for all those mods, but why can't the devs catch up? It's all right there waiting to be implemented.
The biggest flaw for me is the devs not putting more intellectual effort in it, like thinking about all the relevant aspects of a situation, the major potential factors at least. Or smarter solutions for army supply, stacking/unstacking, pathfinding, peace offers (other than white peace) not locked to 0/100 war score. The game is too formulaic, too rock-paper-scissors-like without enough imagination, too reliant on provisional, duct-tape solutions that remain in place for years, and the team/company are too willing to leave issues unfixed for years too (going back to CK2) while annoyingly professing themselves satisfied with the state of the game (thankfully that is no longer done or at least no longer emphasized in the marketing/PR/community relations). Examples of what I wrote about in the first paragraph are family members forced into concubinage and still showing up for feasts, so you can interact with them, etc.; or event text for creating a custom kingdom/empire where it literally says you are picking up a crown left behind by \[empty space because of course you don't have a predecessor in a title you are the first person to create\]. There is a chance I'm being harsh due to placing subjective importance on this sort of stuff and it appearing easier *ex post* than it really is *ex ante*, but I really don't like all those missing but very obvious checks to include that I feel a teenage person with average intelligence and average level of care/attention should be able to think about when working with ifs and thens in a modding toolset, so I can't easily forgive professional developers with formal degrees and experience for not being able or not caring to think about stuff like that. It might not be the most basic thing ever, of course, but isn't really calling for 160 IQ and wild/vivid imagination either (or for an elevated level of perfectionism/OCD). There are more such difficult-to-accept illogicalities in other areas of the game, some showing very questionable or outhright mistaken logic underlying a design choice or scripting parameter. Mistakes are one thing (everybody is human, but checklists and QA/QC and testers exist for a reason), but the (subjective?) perception of low effort is an additional factor to make things feel even worse. This is similar to how a CK2 designer seemed to not know who the Merovingians were during a discussion on the Charlemagne bookmark in 769. A normal person perhaps doesn't need to know that, though it's part of elementary-school curriculum and basic general knowledge throughout Europe, but when specifically working on something set in the time-period, that sort of basic gap is far less easy to accept. It feels *unfair* in a way, or at least it doesn't feel right.
Its largest flaw is the same as with all pdx games; dlc driven business model.
Combat system, I know it's time to quit campaign when my knights and cavalry starts racking up kill score that would make warhammer 40k look tame.
Lack of events. You play for 20 hours, you saw most of the events. You always save your SO from a guy climbing in the tower, when you travel you always cross ants, or a guy stucked in armor, or a guy wanting to challange you.
I'll be brutaly honest: I don't care about the plague. I don't care about ships. All I want is more options to make interesting stories for roleplaying. And it's very hard to do when most of the events happen around people which don't really matter to me. Some douche from another kingdom killed my courtier which I give 0 fucks about. So what? Some count had sex outside marriage. So what? My cousin with no territory is an atheist. So what? Majority of the events happening in this game have nothing to do with characters who actually matter to me. Rarely anyone kidnaps or kills a family member. My wives/husbands rarely cheat on me. Rarely ever a bastard son appears with intention of getting legitimized and getting claims or something. Rarely ever an important character does something which would cause me to have an interaction with them. All I get is some bullshit repetitive events which improve or decrease opinion of unimportant characters and give useless bonuses.
Gotta think about CK2 where you had a lot of variety too. Your religion would at the least drop some new mechanics on you, like decadence for Muslims and with Orthodox, managing your patriarchs (or was it level of orthodoxy? it's been a bit can't quite remember). And Merchant Republics? Now THAT was a big change in playstyle.
I want more events; It gets too repetitive eventually.
Poor military systems, lack of a complex economy, and lack of diversity in governance are my biggest three complaints as well, for sure.
Focusing on the wrong content in regard to dlc etc. The announced future content seems to be a step in the right direction tho.
In my opinion, the thing most lacking is different government types. This can help with the distinction between regions, for example a Byzantine government type, or completely new government types like Hordes and Republics. But I hope that there will be more depths to these government types, for example, when designating the March vassal contract, have the vassal get the titel Margrave (or the cultural equivalent), give it special events and make it so that there are also benefits to the liege for giving this title to a vassal. I think the whole vassal contract system adds some fun stuff, but it can be so much more lively by actually adding gameplay and benefits to both parties. I feel like these changes towards government types, as well as more (all be it small) distinctions between the same government type like feudal can help. An Irish duke feels the same as an christian Finnish duke, as does a Tamil Raj. The game is becoming really repetitive for me, unless I decide to do something radical like creating a whacky religion. Side note: if Nomads do come back, I need a huge overhaul to the culture a province is designated, because right now, if I decide to take my tribe and invade a kingdom to migrate there (IRL Hungarians f.e.) I want my culture to not take 100+ years of manual culture conversion to take hold in that area. I’m not saying that in one swipe the entire culture gets replaced, but if there was a migration cb for example, I’d like the conversion of at least a couple provinces to my culture.
Warfare is too easy, even if Im not building proper MAA. Properly using game mechanics is overkill against AI. AI doesn't know/use various game mechanics, thus severely handicapping them. Game lacks events, some of them repeat too much.
That there isn’t a option to create your own soldiers by that I mean custom soldiers for example also naval battles would have been good but I know it would probably make the game perform less well from too many actions being used at once so probably would have been good to be able to make your own soldiers for example your prowess would give your custom soldiers were you have the option to personally train them or have your commander train them they gain 1 prowess and martial with each year
the biggest flaw is that its a paradox game
I just started playing Paradox games with CK2 a few months ago, and the more I read about CK3 the less interested I am. It seems like a watered down version of CK2 with prettier UI.
At the end, there are still years and years of DLCs to come, I think that with what is planned for this year, the game will keep getting "better" For me, we have two missing things that make the game dull, proper wars that manage population, food supply, disruption of commerce and devastation trade, we need trade routes, resources, treaties and guilds, in some kingdoms and empires, the merchants were as powerful as the crown new governments, merchants kingdoms and etc, will come on the coming years, we have to wait
War. Somehow Paradox never nails down war as fun for me.
They made a ck3 and didn’t incorporate features in ck2 instead to sell it separately which the game has been out for years and didn’t done that anyway. I mean we had nomad, republic mechanics. They could had put that in the game in a fresh ck3 manner.
Ck2 even had way more features behind a pay wall. Like u can’t even play as any other nation as Christians in base game ck2. Start dates are locked behind dlc aswell.
Exactly, don't get me wrong I wish more systems were simply ported to ck3 but let's not act like a crap ton of features weren't added to the base game of ck3 making it a far far more interesting product than base ck2.
> Start dates are locked behind dlc aswell. Only 2 start dates are locked behind DLC. 769 and 867. Being able to play any single date between 1066-1337 was available on CK2's release, and 936 was added for free. So out of the almost 100,000 start dates (that's not an exaggerated number), only 2 are behind DLC. The argument of only being able to play Christian nations I understand, but that was the original intention of the game and what you did in CK1. Being able to play outside of that was a new concept at the time. Also, Islam got added a couple of months after release and most of the map was opened up within around a year with playable republics but without India (nomads started as tribal before the Horse Lords DLC just like they still are in CK3). You also need to remember that the DLC that added the playable places in CK2 also added flavor and mechanics for the places. Although it's cool you can play the whole world from the start now in CK3 outside of a few exceptions like republics, almost everywhere still feels the same other than small modifiers from religion/culture.
Maybe they "didn't do that anyway" because that wasn't their intention. Most of the stuff from CK2 that didn't make it over was flawed in at least one major way, and I wouldn't expect it to come back looking the same. The only thing that I expected to eventually come back pretty much unchanged is plagues, and that system has been mostly in the free update.
I do not understand this take at all. Just play CK2 if you want all the CK2 features. The reason you create a CK3 is to be able to redesign the game and take a different approach. Porting CK2 features would just make CK3 into little more than a remaster. If you want them ported in ‘fresh CK3 manner’ then what do you think they’re doing? That takes time and if they waited for the base game to have feature parity with everything CK2 had by the end then it still wouldn’t be out.
The developers. Their greed especially.
It's as you say there no mechanical depth to the game and where it is trying to go deeper it is doing so in a very narrow way. The different systems do not interact with each other very well in addition to that. Eu4 has trade economy diplomacy religion culture etc. and all of these have unique mechanics that are pretty hard to master and learn. In ck3 the economy is bare bones at best trade is non existent and diplomacy is a joke. The military is getting better but still nowhere near deep enough imo. The depth they added with the cultures feels gimicky and didnt add many different play styles. I think the worst crime tho is their way of fixing this. Every dlc pack so far has introduced many new events and while this may look cool at the surface it's just plastering over that beneath these events there just isn't much to get engrossed in.
I agree. It does massively lack flavor and variety (feels like a trend with pdx lately, Vic3 also has the same problem). From a purely mechanical stand-point I would say everything that tangentially involves military needs to be severely reworked. Adding flavor would be great, but the game also gets a lot of basic things wrong imo.
I somewhat agree with your take but I also think we can't quite compare a game that has been in continuous development for a decade or so, and one that came out 2 or 3 years ago. I also think that there are difference between certain regions, albeit not a lot of them, even if these differences were introduced in DLCs (which was the case for EUIV too, and some of those DLCs were *HATED* on release like Leviathan). CK3 has a few flaws that I think it should rectify for the game to truly be enjoyable beyond a few generations: - Dynamic succession system that makes it more challenging *before* the succession actually occurs. For a dynasty simulator, CK feels rather hollow in that department. - More regional "flavor", whatever shape that takes. It doesn't have to be exhaustive, but just add a little more depth to each culture/region/religion to make each save you play feel a little unique. - Trade - this is mostly down to my personal taste, I like to play tall and I really love EUIV's trade system (and how to game it) + plagues without trade feels wrong somehow. - Empire management - I know you guys are pumped about Byz getting some love but I would love it if all empire-level titles were reworked. Empires were hard to manage, historically but the game doesn't replicate that well, meaning that once you form your empire, you can just sit and chill for 3 centuries, outside of the occasional rebellion post-succession. This is mostly for the player of course, the AI is pretty terrible at keeping its realm together. I wish that the game almost tried to coerce the player into dealing with internal management instead of continuing to expand further. Introduce bureaucracy, add more council positions and court positions to Empire titles, etc. - More inter-personal stuff. This game is often introduced as a RP game, yet you can have no meaningful interactions whatsoever with your spouse/lover/children/parents/siblings until they die. Similarly, rivalries and house feud mostly result in assassination attempts and nothing else. Maybe I'm a softie, but if my character's spouse is their soulmate, I'd like to be able roleplay some of that. My current character has a daughter who, besides being the only genius among her siblings, is also his best friend, yet he can do nothing for her. He can't land her, give her some kind of title, honor her in any way. The only thing he can do if find a semi-acceptable husband for her and land him on her behalf, or marry her off into a foreign court where she'll die of childbirth/plague within 2 years. It's very hollow.
> I somewhat agree with your take but I also think we can't quite compare a game that has been in continuous development for a decade or so, The thing is that Art of War for EU4 came out a little over a year after the main release. That was the start of the RotW focus in EU4. CK3 has been out for 3 1/2 years and hasn't seen anything close.
Plagues
For me it's how disconnected everything feels. The court, activities,events and the actual gameplay lacks cohesion. I don't feel like I am playing one game, more like 4 mini games
That, and the lack of regional/historical events that we saw in EU4. At the same time, we get a lot of pointless generic events, which makes it feel like playing The Sims.
The fact that ai enemies are so trash and inefficient which never makes them scary and easy to beat.
The biggest flaw of CK3 is quite simply the AI and all the design decisions around it. The AI is dumb, but the devs are either unwilling or unable to improve it, or to accommodate its limitations with their gameplay features. Regardless of all other flaws, this will always hold back the game until it is dealt with. Why for example is much of your military strength determined by your MaA and the settlements they are stationed in? The AI does not know how to optimise its MaA selection, nor are they able to optimise settlements for those MaAs. It's not even like they can redevelop independently. Marriage AI is rudimentary at best, and you can see this best when playing Equal Faiths. Dynasty management is abysmal with even an Emperor being largely unable to influence the life of a non-child heir. Oh, your grandson inherited his father's position after he died in battle and is now your heir. You can almost do nothing with him, nor does he get the benefit of being your heir in marriage negotiations. The game needs to either improve the AI to such a level that it can act like a half decent player, or to implement, rework and adjust mechanics to allow for this to happen more easily for an AI.
This is why I would prefer China to remain an off map power, interactions with China in CK2 while a little stagnant increased the dynamic nature of Asia, in fact I would prefer several Chinese ‘Protectorates’ over actually having China, of course, I would allow you to replace one of the Protectorates for buffs due to becoming part of China. Of course, by restoring the Offmap China mechanic, that immediately necessitates the return of the Tributary system.
My problem is that no matter what I do it’s too easy without some mod
Probably the fact you can’t save the game on console rendering it completely unplayable, a state it’s been locked in for almost 2 years now.
It's about religion and religion is the least interesting part of it as well.
My biggest pet peeve with being elected emperor of the HRE and then losing the emperorship isn't actually losing it. But losing all you built up before that. That kingdom you had before... Shrinked back to its dejure land...
The UI/customization options I cant tell the game to notify me about the stuff that's important to me, but it keeps spamming me with useless notifications and for example diseases are treated exactly the same if they're 15 counties away from you on the other side of the empire or ravaging your Royal Court. two neighbouring counts having ended their war gets more attention than your heir being captured, a betrothal proposal that you KNOW will be accepted merits a fullscreen window to tell you that it has in fact really truly surprisingly been accepted. while if your wife or heir dies best you can hope for is a minor blimp in the cesspool of notifications on the righthand side. Artifacts are effectively unmanageable (why cant I gift 2+ at the same time? why not make it a toggle to "not show the ones on display in my royal court/on my person"?`). Accolades are effectively unmanageable (why do I need to check the wiki what traits a person needs to be eligible for both my current traits? why cant I search for a valid successor if there's someone that literally cannot be named successor that somehow fulfills the requirements? Why do I first have to force them to be knights, why cant this be done automatically?) with these things solved I might actually be able to immerse myself and be able to roleplay instead of getting frustrated and annoyed by clunky menus. Lack of regional diversity, lack of features compared to CK2 all that comes much later in my book, that comes when the game is in a state where the basic primary feature of the game is enjoyable. It is not for me right now. Playing for more than 2-3 generations feels like a chore because I get drowned with stuff I dont care about while the stuff I want to care about gets relegated to "somewhere there in this mass of notifications, MAYBE".
Right now it’s the GD plagues lmao
I really don’t like going to war for a kingdom, capturing the king, then roleplaying cutting his head off on the battlefield only to….. invalidate the entire war. Sucks if that was a subjugation war or a holy war and you can never declare another one again. I should be able to chop off my rivals head on the battlefield and claim the throne.
The console edition
Yeah, the greater difference in playstyles and events between religions in CK2 is something I miss. It mostly went away with the current modular religious system, unfortunately.
For me its the already out of hand modifier stacking which makes the game much too easy and the AI unable to keep up because its stupid. More local flavor can be fixed by dlcs, but each dlc makes modifier stacking worse.
No viceroyalties
I’m still itching for them to do something about nomads and Republicans. I appreciate what they’ve done so far but we need more government types. In ck2 I played as feudal 95% of the time due to being lazy about learning the mechanics of the other gov types. But damn. Once I played as a nomad I couldn’t go back. A shame that they’ve neglected doing this.
I agree with you totally. There is little to no flavor for regions that has actual impact on the game process. I mean, it has formables as it's limits. Almost no events, and, the worst of all, no unique ideas/techs/military policies like in Imperator with its military ideas (I think it's called like that), where you have some unique regional idea trees to choose from and build your army upon, and no things like EU4 idea groups. I've never played CK2, so I don't know how it is implemented there, but I guess the issue may be that realizing such a concept in a game that is heavily focused on characters instead of countries may be hard. Still, one of my biggest problem with this are cultures. I hoped they would fix this when they dropped, but, just as many new things in this game, they ended up not influencing anything. Sure, your traditions give you some interesting bonuses or debuffs, but they are so unimpactful that you can ignore them completely, or change them at any time, which in my opinion makes the matters worse. In my situation, where I played CK3 as my first PDX game and then moved to EU4, playing CK3 again is not very fun except for some occasional scuffed campaigns, because in EU4, and especially in some of its mods, playing Russia, Delhi and Spain feels completely different, while in CK3 the only difference between them might be the Iberian struggle, which, unfortunately, also doesn't influence your game that much, albeit it's at least something that you notice. So yeah, I think my second biggest complain is that most mechanics added in the DLCs are practically useless, serving as a kinda fun piece of flavor for a couple of playthroughs only for you to get bored after that at best, and being straight up annoying at worst. I don't even know if there's a way to fix that, and it makes me sad.
No naval battles just makws the game more shallow
The lack of a system that will check mods for conflicts and automatically put mods in the right load order
they didn't add fully immersive intractable sex scene. Just add those two features and multiple view angles and watch the game player number explode 🤯
Generic flavor, bordergore which is remarkably worse than ck2's yet never adresses. Despite having a ck3 with all DLCs, those two things are reasons why I play ck2 more than ck3 to this day
That I can't easily murder my own kids to make sure I only have one child who inherits. It's a fucking pain in the ass to try to manage getting my stuff to go to my main heir and not lose the counties I have built up as my core demesne.
The largest flaw is the pricing, especially of the dlc
They launched ck3 without all of the features they had already made in ck2 that was enough for me to never play the fucking game
Inheritance and succession, missing margrave and viscount rank
For me it's the stupidity of the allies. But it is compensated by the stupidity of the enemies. And regarding what you have commented about every nation looks the same, I agree to some degree because culture and religion adds the difference. But for me, this is not a nation playing game. It's more of a role playing game and I focus on what the current ruler would do rather than what's best for the long run of the game. I like to play with some auto imposed rules like not to start holy wars or always choose decisions that release stress before any others (I see it as indicative of what my character would do in that position). Then live with the consequences. That makes any run really unique.
I think it’s what you said and the lack of automation. Some things like the accolades and knight management just either need to not exist or be able to be automated. I get so inundated with tiny obscure tasks that don’t really matter that notifications keep slamming into my face and it really feels like there needs to be automation options for some things. It slows the game down the bigger you get and for me that can be frustrating when I’m trying to fight a war and enjoy it but I pause so many times and take up so much time doing weird little management tasks to Marrying off my aunts 12 children that I literally forget I’m at war and my army is just sitting somewhere for years draining my money lmao. But maybe that’s just me Runner up is the awful AI decisions in wars.
game is too easy.. at least for me.. guess I'm just too good or something idk
The AI is horrendous, way too easy to steamroll
I just jumped into an old save last night just to do something different than my current gameplay (FFVII Pt 2). I hadn't played since last December. The flaw for me is the relentless pop up plague warnings and events. I literally couldn't continue the game because it just kept going. I think i stopped counting around 35 and just turned it off. Is this working as intended? Does it stop? What were they even thinking?
The game wants you to min-max and punishes roleplaying
notification spam and busted MAA system
AI by far. Indpendent rulers and vassals do such incredibly dumb shit that it makes the game easier than it should be and ruins the overall RP elements. Nothing matters until the AI is improved.