This week, we’re going to be a bit silly and talk about the recently released grand strategy computer game Crusader Kings III, because quite a few of you asked for it.
Now from the beginning I should note that this isn’t a game review. As a game, Crusader Kings III is clearly a tremendous success and a marked improvement over its predecessor. The addition of fully-body avatars (in place of portraits) for the characters and the new stress system move the actual gameplay and experience forward in important ways. So as a game, for just pure fun, it works. If you like the sort of games Paradox puts out, Crusader Kings III is probably the best they’ve done in delivering on a core concept.
But you aren’t here for my game reviews. You are here for me to talk about the history behind the game. So I want to draw out some elements of historical societies that I think CK3 expresses well, and some where I think it stumbles a bit. I’m not going to get into small-picture nit-picking about the names and dates of individual techs or the starting castles of minor counts. Instead, I want to focus on CK3‘s big systems and how well they express fundamental realities about the societies being depicted, both because that is more interesting, but also because it is a fairer way to judge the game’s historicity, since big systems get more development time and attention than tiny details.
As always, if you like what you are reading here, please share it; if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings.
The Hits
The single best thing the Crusader Kings series has ever done is express the personal nature of rulership. In so many strategy games, you play as the incorporeal embodied spirit of a state (as with all of the other Paradox titles) or its immortal god-king (for instance in the Civilization series), with little sense that these societies are actually run by different people with different aims, personalities, desires and proclivities. Strategies are effortlessly coordinated over centuries, with resources and advantage carefully hoarded to support schemes which won’t bear fruit for generations. And that’s simply not how states are actually led: states are led by people with their own goals (both for the system, but also within the system) and their own personal and strategic visions. Sometimes they lack the ability to really think strategically at all!
CK2 attempted this kind of setup, giving each character a set of skills and flaws which made them better at some things and worse at others, but since the player was still entirely in control, it led to the same kinds of problems as other games: a dynasty tended to look like a single hand executing on the same consistent strategy. Sometimes the ruler executed this strategy more competently, sometimes less so. But (for example) an incompetent, wrathful ruler didn’t end up starting a bunch of wars (unless ‘start a bunch of wars’ was something the player had been doing for a while) he just did the slow work of claim-fabrication and crown-authority-raising that the player had already been doing less competently for a while, until the next, more skilled ruled.
CK3‘s stress system is a brilliant modification to that system: forcing your ruler to act out of character for his or herself causes stress and stress can build up to some pretty nasty penalties. Things that work off stress tend to be either bad for you, or very expensive (or both!) so stress-avoidance becomes a key concern. Consequently, while there is still a bit too much of the 500-year-plan approach to the game, a ruler with traits unsuited to that plan can cause radical readjustments or at least long delays. For instance, I normally engage in a pretty continuously, low-intensity ‘vassal pruning’ strategy, revoking titles (typically fabricating claims on them first) and seizing and redistributing land to keep internal borders neat and improve realm stability without taking on too much ‘tyranny’ (which upsets all vassals). But if you end up with a ruler who has generous and thus takes a massive stress penalty for revoking land, or ambitious and thus takes a stress penalty for handing revoked land back out to someone else, at the very least you may be looking at decades where the patient weeding of the vassal-garden simply doesn’t get done. In essence, the traits combined with the stress system forced me to, for a time at least, abandon part of my strategic system and adjust.
That emphasis is particularly fitting for rulership in Medieval Europe, which was highly personal, both in the sense that the individual character of the ruler governed the behavior of the state, and also in the sense that diplomatic relations were fundamentally a consequence of personal relationships. Personal enmities often became state policy in this period (something that, of course, still happens, albeit less frequently) and Crusader Kings is one of the few series that makes any effort to simulate this.
That leads into my second really good thing: non-unitary states. Indeed, you might argue many of these polities aren’t really states at all! I am often frustrated by the degree to which strategy games represent all states – even modern states – as effectively unitary, driven by a single will towards a single goal. Even fiercely authoritarian states like North Korea are subject to internal divisions, conflicting interests and visions, parties and factions within the ruling class. This is, of course, all the more obvious in modern democracies, with political parties and so on.
This fragmentation of power was even more extreme in many medieval polities, especially medieval European polities (but also in the Near East, note especially the fragmentation of power under the Umayyads and Abbasids). Crusader Kings is one of the very few games I have ever seen actually make a solid effort to really capture that fragmentation of power and combine it with the extremely personal elements of politics. In CK3, ‘France’ is not a single unitary entity – it is a person (the king of France) whose strength mostly comes from the taxes and armies he gains from his vassals. Those vassals may or may not be terribly fond of the king, they may have different interests and goals. And so the job of being king is less leading your united, coherent force against the enemy than herding the cats you have for vassals as they compete for power by doing all sorts of things you don’t want (like fighting each other, or you). In large realms, some level of internal warfare is a near constant background hum, often passing practically beneath the notice of the actual monarch (but of course, sapping his strength as money and troops are spent on it rather than on external wars). And in turn, attempting to centralize power is both a key goal and a difficult task (though somewhat easier in CK3 than in CK2, at least for the moment), in part because your vassals know that they are the major losers in a more centralized realm and so will push back against centralization efforts. It captures that push-and-pull which defined much of internal medieval European politics very well.
And all of the warfare plays into the third thing I think is done very well (though I suspect many players find it irritating): siege-centered warfare. The character of warfare in much of the Middle Ages was one generally where sieges were common and battles were rare and CK3 captures this very well. Most of your wars are spent not in exciting battles, but in boring sieges; battles, where you fight them, are almost always either trying to prevent a siege or open the road to one.
The Misses
But that leads neatly into the first of our misses: there isn’t nearly enough ‘low-intensity’ raiding and pillage. When we look at the evidence for the endemic warfare between relatively small medieval European polities (wars between barons, castellans, counts, and so on), what we often see are armies often either too small or too limited in funding or logistics to just sweep aside enemy fortifications. Instead a lot of warfare involved chevauchées – mounted raids to inflict economic damage and (where possible) instigate small-scale engagements on favorable terms. Indeed, even ‘big’ warfare involved quite a lot of this kind of fighting (often on a much larger scale with more impactful economic consequences). This sort of raiding could either force the victim to come to terms in order to make the economic disruption stop or it could steadily weaken the target until a direct attack could succeed. In either case, it was an essential part of warfare in Europe and the Near East during this period and CK3 really doesn’t simulate it at all.
Oh sure, certain cultures can do far larger and more organized ‘raids,’ but that ought to be a feature open to basically everyone during wartime, such that a policy of continuous border raids ought to be a viable alternative or prelude (especially for small or poor states) to extensive siege warfare.
The second ‘miss’ also builds on a ‘hit’ which is that I think Crusader Kings III needs even more non-unitary state mechanics. I want to see vassals able to conspire with foreign powers. I want to see a return of the powerful council mechanics of CK2, where the strongest vassals could impose real penalties on a king who ignored their (often self-interested) ‘advice.’ I’d like to see more complex negotiation with factions (situations where you might give a faction X so that they don’t ask for Y) and more and clearer intra-realm alliances, where a king might have to contend with, say, several counts or dukes who formed a political bloc within his realm. These were aspects that were more heavily developed in Crusader Kings II and so it’s my hope that as we get new mechanics and DLCs for CK3, we’ll see more of that. Especially the ability to use the council to co-opt key vassals into your political bloc, at the cost of giving them a greater say in your decision-making.
Finally, the biggest current ‘miss’ is that the game, despite its large world-map, is very much targeted at affairs in Western Europe. This goes beyond detail in things like little mistakes in county-level rulers and runs into the mechanics of the game, especially the tech-tree. CK3‘s tech tree is time-gated, and key things like succession systems, the ability to found new cities, unit-types and so on are locked behind static year requirements which are themselves based (loosely) on developments in Western Europe during the period.
Which produces all sorts of oddities outside of Western Europe, particularly in the Byzantine Empire, the Near East and India. The Byzantines, for instance, don’t have access to things like cataphracts and city-foundation in the earliest game-start, despite those being old and well-established institutions in the East. While Byzantine and Middle Eastern powers start with better succession laws by default, they are locked out of some of the alternative succession systems and in certain situations can be bumped down to partition-systems because their society won’t ‘invent’ primogeniture until very late in the game. Quite frankly, the tech-system as it exists makes very little sense outside of Western Europe. I cannot imagine it being made to work without giving the Middle East and the Byzantines (and probably also India) their own completely different tech-trees, with much of the Western European tech tree starting out as unlocked (but then balance issues arise…).
This is compounded by some of the other political systems. CK‘s non-unitary system is really designed to simulate affairs in Western and Central Europe and is somewhat poorly adapted to reflect the far more centralized states of the Byzantines or the Middle East. While the geographic ‘duchies’ of the Byzantine Empire correspond fairly well to the historical theme system, the game treats the leaders of these themes (‘Doux’) as hereditary landholders rather than appointed generals (also their title should usually be strategoi). Likewise, the CK3 system really struggles to simulate either the Umayyad/Abassid diwan system or the later heavy reliance on Mamluks (mostly Turkic military slaves) over local levies later on. These are still systems with a lot of delegated power; a Byzantine strategos is still overseeing a theme army (a thema) which is a meaningful military force and Byzantine history has plenty of examples of generals turning local armies against the imperial center.
That said, I am pretty optimistic on this score: CK2 also began with relatively few mechanics to simulate those concerns, but by the end its ability to model Byzantine affairs was pretty good (the Middle East much less so; I hope we’ll see a better approach this time around that is less about ‘decadence‘ and more focused on balancing the pros-and-cons of competing systems of levying troops). My hope is that we’ll see similar expansions with bespoke mechanics for the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and India.
The Unavoidable
Along with the hits and misses, there were two issues which I think were probably unavoidable in a game context, but which are worth noting.
The first is the mechanic around knights. On the one hand, I really like the idea of this mechanic. It puts value on personal combat Prowess (as distinct from the Martial skill which is more about leadership in war) and incentivizes the player to find and recruit talented warriors. That fits with the emphasis on personal combat skill in the warrior ethoi in both Europe and much of the Near East. But there are some, probably unavoidable, issues with this system.
The first is that the number of these knights is very low. I think this is pardonable, because you need to keep the system simple and manageable to a player, but obviously an important king would have more than ten knights in his court. But the broader issue is that the knight-system essentially pushes out the role that used to be played with lords leading their own levies, which I’d like to see come back to really represent the army as a retinue of retinues. In practice, a big royal army ought to at least include not just the levies the king is owed and the knights of his house, but also many of his vassals and their knights.
My own preference would be for a slice of a lord’s household to remain attached to his liege levies when summoned, based on the opinion the vassal has of his liege. So a lord with low opinion might send his required levies with only one of his knights to lead them, but a lord with very high opinion might come himself bringing all of his own knights in tow. Doing it that way would mean that big royal armies might well show up with most of the aristocracy of the realm in them, which makes sense – this is part of what made battles like Agincourt (1415) and Courtrai (1302) so devastating: it was possible to lose a non-trivial fraction of the warrior-aristocracy in a single day if a major royal army were badly beaten. It would also emphasize the difference between smaller armies with perhaps a dozen knights and the big realm-wide armies that might arrive with dozens if not hundreds of named characters (and have consequently have both far greater combat power, but also create far greater risk committing to a battle).
The other issue is just a basic function of computer games: Crusader Kings III cannot handle non-binary states. Politics and lordship in the actual Middle Ages was often very fuzzy; individuals might be both independent (in some of their realms) and vassal to other lords in other parts. Nominal vassals often wavered between actual vassals and de facto independence in ways that the game’s stark yes-or-no logic struggles to simulate.
Likewise, the game has difficulty dealing with long periods of indecisive, relatively low-intensity war. It is either full-on total war or total peace. There are sharp penalties for staying in an offensive war too long, which (along with the limited war goals) discourages the kind of continuous hostilities that typify quite a lot of warfare in the period. But more broadly that plays into the war-goal system itself, which is a gameplay band aid that Paradox has pulled into basically all of their titles, designed to enforce limited wars through an artificial game system rather than historical systems. This system always made a lot more sense in the mostly (diplomatically) limited wars of Europa Universalis and Victoria and far less sense in Crusader Kings or Imperator, where objectives in war often were total and constrained mostly by the difficulty of capturing large numbers of fortified settlements and of keeping armies in the field for prolonged periods.
(Obviously, an obligatory caveat that wars in the EU and Vicky time frames were a lot less limited if they were ‘colonial’ but that is something the games simulate as well, allowing far more powerful war-goals outside of Europe. It’s not perfect, both games have some serious eurocentrism problems (I mean, it’s Europa Universalis), but it makes more sense in the period. Also, I should note that I still vastly prefer the artificial war-goal system of Paradox games to the “In the Grim Darkness of the Not-So-Distant Past, There Is Only War” solution that Creative Assembly has opted for in most of it’s Total War titles.)
Conclusion
Crusader Kings is a rare flower – a game that I might actually recommend as useful for trying to understand a specific place (Western Europe) in a specific time (the Middle Ages). It is far from perfect in this regard and still much more a game than a simulation, but the emphasis laid on the personal nature of rule and the primary of personalities within systems of vassalage means that playing it can, I think, help folks develop the beginnings of a mental model of medieval European politics (which ought then to be refined by much reading). Very few games, I think, meet this bar (though I’d say EU4 as an example of realpolitik does and one can make the case for Hearts of Iron).
Also, it is just darned fun. As you can see above, I am doing what I always do first in almost any Paradox title: returning the Roman Empire to its proper glory.
Next week, we’re going to pick up again with our series on “How Did They Make It” with Iron Production!
Fantastic! I’m downloading CK3 right now and looking forward to experiencing all this for myself. I think the way you explained CK2 was brilliant by the way. I’ve always felt this was true, that the previous game didn’t simulate personal politics so much as a grand strategy of an immortal influence, but could never find the right words to express it well.
One Paradox system that I think might work well in representing pros and cons of different ways states and armies were organized are the sliders from EU3. Rather than a binary flag, the nature of a state, its army, or the economy was the sum of a number of sliding scales between two sets of extremes. Perhaps an actual slider interface may be too god-like of a mechanic, but I imagine there’s some way to elegantly merge the concept into CK3’s presentation and immersion. Maybe in place of a decentralization centralization scale, for example, there’s a court where your ruler can be swayed between his greater vassals or his court bureaucrats?
I’d also be interested in hearing your thoughts on CK3’s economy systems, how they compare to CK2, and how well you think they work as plausible simulations of medieval markets.
Another area where Crusader Kings 3 did really well at least in terms of gameplay was how they revamped the religion system. There are a few different levels of relations between religions, as opposed to the old system where characters of various religions were either mostly okay with each other or hated each other outright. If two religions are hostile to each other, for example, characters of one religion will generally dislike the other but will still intermarry and form alliances; Lollards and the other proto-Protestant sects in the game have this attitude towards Catholicism, for instance. In Crusader Kings 2 this wouldn’t have happened.
Another fun change is the sheer number of different religions present in the game. Gone are the days where the bits of Africa in the game just had “African Paganism” as the religion; no, this time Paradox devoted quite a bit of research to figuring out what exactly the religious practices of each region was, and given them appropriate mechanics. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism are perhaps the best examples of this, since now each of those faiths are split into different religions representing the various sects of each religion; instead of Hinduism, you have Smartism, Vaishnavism, and other Hindu sects, and likewise with Buddhism it’s been split between Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana, among others. I’m not an expert on any of those religions, so I can’t point out where Paradox may have made mistakes in portraying them, but they get points for effort in my book regardless.
This does, of course, lead to a few oddities. In my current run as a Norse-turned-Welsh dynasty ruling over the British Isles plus a few extra bits, southern France converted almost entirely to Priscillianism, a Gnostic sect that died out in the 4th century; there are Gnostic sects that are still around even today, but that one specific sect getting resurrected seems a little odd (in the Crusade that followed, the Ummayad dynasty and a number of Norse rulers sided with the Priscillianists against the Papacy, which I found really interesting). The bizarre popularity of Insular/Irish Christianity in my current run also had my head scratching at some points; my vassals in Britain keep converting back to it, and it’s spread quite far in Eastern Europe among the various Slavic tribes. All that said, ahistorical oddities happening as a result of mostly historically accurate systems are half the fun of Paradox games, so I’m not complaining.
The popularity of Christian heresies, I think, comes from Catholicism having so many characters adhering to it that almost every game month you have some Bishop being exposed as a Cannibal or something. That drops Catholic Fervor, which makes heresies more likely. The systems which are supposed to restore Fervor just can’t keep up with the sheer number of Cannibal Bishops, apparently.
That makes sense, and I think it’s by design. The fervor system is there to give smaller religions some strengths and to help them survive, so larger religious blocs like Catholicism and Ashari Islam almost always have lower fervor.
It’s not entirely unrealistic either, given that there were plenty of heresies and Gnostic sects that appeared all over Europe during the middle ages, and that lots of minority religions survive even today by the skin of their teeth.
The issue isn’t that the heresies exist, or even the rate at which they spawn, it’s that you end up with Catholicism nearly disappearing in favour of, like, Insular Christianity or Adamitism. The intent of the Fervor and Heresy mechanic is to be a sort of push-and-pull, where low Fervor spawns Heresy, which increases Fervor, etc. The push part where low Fervor spawns Heresies is working fine, but the pull side that resets everything back towards a semi-stable state appears to be broken. Instead, there’s a runaway feedback loop.
Now, obviously, in a good historical game alternate histories *should* be possible, but the mark of a *great* historical game is that the actual historical outcome can and most likely will be generated by the game systems without player intervention. CK3 is failing that test where Catholicism (and I assume Islam as well, but my main playthrough has been Catholic so those are the heresies I’m getting pop-ups about) is concerned.
Yes, but they don’t correctly model how they vanish again.
Damn that Baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells!
Did they include the mechanic whereby you can start your own heresy and customise its beliefs based on what would be most advantageous for you? I saw that in a dev diary, and almost hit the roof. “People in the past believed their own religions, dammit!”
I believe in the religion of ..” i get to divorce my wife because she’s ugly”
Seriously, changing religions to suit succession laws is totally historical.
Isn’t that why Henry VIII started the Church of England?
Kind of interesting reversal for someone who had acquired the title “Defender of the Faith” for a letter opposing Martin Luther.
Isn’t that why Henry VIII started the Church of England?
Yes, but that was after the time period covered in the game, and was only possible because of the Protestant Reformation, which in turn was (arguably) only possible because of the invention of the printing press. In other words, it’s not the sort of thing that could (or indeed did) happen during the actual middle ages.
Not exactly. I mean the self interest involved is very clear to us but was probably less transparent to Henry himself.
A true irreligious cynic wouldn’t have challenged something as essential as the Pope’s right to dispense religious rules. He’d have focused on the technical weaknesses of that particular dispensation.
Henry was self interested but not cynical at all. He had to believe that his marriage to Catherine was not only inconvenient but wrong, an offense to God, before he could give himself permission to go ahead with the annulment. He deeply believed that his marriage to his brother’s widow had offended God and they were being punished for their sin. Catherine just as conveniently believed her second marriage was good because the first hadn’t been consummated, which was in fact irrelevant. She was as self deceiving and ethically selective as her husband. If more sympathetic.
Changing from one religion to another for political reasons is historical, but the dev diary in question made it look like you essentially create an entire new religion out of whole cloth to suit your current political needs, which as far as I’m aware never happened, or else only happened rarely.
In the game, it’s technically possible to spawn a custom heresy, but it’s rather difficult in practice unless you make it almost the sole focus of your current ruler. Anything more than a gentle nudge on one tenet or doctrine from your parent religion costs an escalating amount of “Piety” and will make your parent religion consider your Hostile or even Evil, opening you up to retaliatory Holy Wars.
There’s also no guarantee that your vassals, let alone peasantry, will actually convert to your new religion. The chance to convert is based on how much they like you and, again, how different your heresy is from the parent religion.
Oh, well that’s good to hear. Like I said, I was going off a dev diary, and that made it look more like “Here’s a big of doctrines, choose whichever ones you like.”
Speaking of independent kings who were simultaneously vassals of yet another king, that is the rationale behind the Hundred Year War, when the King of England who was equally the Duke of Normandy was subjected to certain feudal penalties by the King of France, who was his feudal overlord in Normandy, though the King of France had no say whatever in the kingdom of England, and equally no authority.
Much the same mix-up was behind the Schleswig-Holstein crisis that the Iron Chancellor Bismarck turned so well into yet another unification war for “The German Empire” under the Prussian King as opposed to “The Holy Roman Empire” – Schleswig and Holstein were states of the Holy Roman Empire that the King of Denmark happened to be the ruler of, and he in his necessarily infinite royal wisdom, decided to make them provinces of Denmark, which as vassal of the Emperor, he was not entitled to do so. So Bismarck – to cut a long story short – staged a little war between the German empire and Denamrk where the Danes were roundly beaten and Schleswig-Hostein became states in the German Empire.
I shudder to think of what the First World War might have been like if the British royal family had still been the Electors of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg (Hanover) and the ghastly propaganda deluge of that war had still occurred … as it was, the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha had to change its name to Windsor because of the anti-German sentiment stirred up …
It was Gascony that was at issue at the beginning of the Hundred Years War, not Normandy. King John lost control over Normandy in the early 1200s, and the loss was acknowledged by Henry III in the Treaty of Paris of 1259. The treaty did confirm the English king’s control over Gascony in what is now southwestern France. Although Gascony was an inheritance from Eleanor of Aquitaine and arguably not a feudal subject of the French King, Henry III agreed to hold these lands as a feudal subject of the King of France. In 1337, the King of France declared Gascony forfeit, and Edward III responded by declaring himself King of France.
If an independent Hanover (and Saxe-Cobourg Gotha) fought on the German side in the First World War while still in personal union with the United Kingdom, King George V might have ended up at war with himself. It was a position in which his son George VI arguably found himself when his Pakistani government fought his Indian government during the 1947-1949 conflict over Kashmir.
That happened in the 100 Years War, Coucy had English lands from his wife so he sent a proxy to lead his English men against France while he fought for France.
The Holy Roman Empire had been replaced by the German Confederation by the time the Schleswig-Holstein War happened. I don’t pretend to understand the exact legal issues surrounding the provinces and their relationship with Denmark (insert obligatory Palmerston quote here), but it was nothing to do with the King of Denmark being a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor.
I love Paradox games, but as usual it looks like CK3 will be better after a couple of DLCs. In the meantime I can still use Stellaris as my go-to grand strategy game.
Minor typo:
“the emphasis laid on the personal nature of rule and the primary of personalities within systems of vassalage”
“primary” should be “primacy” I think.
Also (?) “the warrior ethoi” –> “the warrior ethe” (ἦθος is neuter, not masculine, though maybe Bret did this on purpose to make the word easier to recognise).
A few more typos/corrections (I think):
next, more skilled ruled. –> next, more skilled ruler.
gameplay band aid –> gameplay band-aid
the EU and Vicky time frames –> (Vicky?)
most of it’s Total War titles –> most of its Total War titles
As you can see above, –> “above”??? the screencap map is actually below, isn’t it?
Vicky?
Victoria, another Paradox game.
Ahhh, I see…thanks for your clarification!
Is there ever a point where you’d assign a game as coursework? I feel like I’ve run into a few games in the past that have helped put the player into the mindset of a very particular historical phenomenon, but the danger is in taking the entire game at face value.
I agree most strongly with your second ‘miss.’ I’d love to be able to, for example, be the King of England and make an alliance with the vassals of the King of France (say, the Duke of Burgundy) to help me seize the French crown. Something like “you give me an alliance, I give you a duchy when I win the war.” If either party to the agreement breaks it, then they get a huge negative modifier “dealbreaker” or something.
Maybe they should also implement a mechanic similar to HOI4’s puppet/subject authority that determines how independent a vassal is. They kind of already have it with feudal contracts, but there’s probably room to expand on it.
“. . . be the King of England and make an alliance with the vassals of the King of France. . . ”
Heh heh. That sounds awesome, if you can pull it off.
One time I was Castile, and I supported rebel nobles in Morocco. To my surprise, they rapidly started an uprising that nearly unseated the reigning king. It was funny to watch the chaos.
“. . . sieges were common and battles were rare.”
Very true.
I recently read a biography by Thomas Asbridge of the Normal knight Sir William Marshal, who served under Henry II, Richard I, John, and Henry III of England. In his long career, he fought very few pitched battles, and they were all in the context of a siege.
“The other issue is just a basic function of computer games: Crusader Kings III cannot handle non-binary states. […] The game has difficulty dealing with long periods of indecisive, relatively low-intensity war. It is either full-on total war or total peace.”
Not that anybody needs a strategy game recommendation right after CK3 dropped, but you may enjoy the original (1993) Master Of Orion for exactly this reason. In it the AI is quite happy to engage in undeclared border wars, cold wars, etc, while its opinion of you doing the same is deeply linked to how big your fleet is. It’s one of the big reasons I think the game remains vibrant almost 30 years later.
Did you send your review to the publisher? Given your blog and profession they may actually take it to heart.
Are there any games where the ability to make excellent marriages is a thing? (cough ‘happy Austria’ cough cough)
Certainly perfectly possible in Crusader Kings. Often helped along with assassinatin.
Both Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis have this – indeed, Austria in EU4 has a bunch of “national ideas” that make that a preferred playstyle; acquiring personal unions and gradually integrating them is a common way to play Austria.
Denzel Washington in “Much Ado About Nothing” gives a wonderful depiction of the personal nature of leadership.
So which strategy game would you say is best at simulating Byzantine Empire?
Are there any ways in which CK3 is better than CK2?
I haven’t been able to play CK3 yet myself because I don’t have a computer that can support it and it’s unlikely I’ll be able to afford one in the foreseeable future. But Paradox games usually require a few years of updates until they reach their full potential anyway, so I’m not really bothered by that.
The stress system mentioned in the post is IMO the best innovation over CK2; it effectively nudges you towards actions that are “in-character” for your current ruler’s personality traits. The lifestyle/perk system is nice too, there’s more character progression now for your rulers as they acquire powerful gameplay bonuses over the course of their lives. This also means that succession is an even more precarious time than it was in CK2, as the neophyte ruler is unlikely to have the same well-developed suite of perks to assist in their rule. The hook/favor system is the beginnings of something interesting, though I think here it’s more about the potential than the actual current implementation; as it currently stands it effectively just makes blackmail a very effective form of diplomacy, hopefully in the future the game will feature more ways of generating hooks and favors that are less adversarial.
Biggest gaps compared to CK2 are definitely the expanded council system, which is definitely much missed. Powerful vassals in CK3 will demand a seat on your council but there aren’t really enough mechanics that reward them for having this position, it definitely feels like in CK2 powerful vassals were better able to use a council seat to advance their individual interests.
Biggest miss in the series overall remains the inability of the game to model transactional relationships and how well the ruler holds up their end of these transactions, as in “join my wars and I’ll reward you with lands.” The biggest immersion-breaker for me in the game remains how, every time I conquer new lands I award them not to the vassals and knights who contributed most to my armies but to whatever relative pushover I could find with appropriately obsequious temperament who would be a nice pliant vassal. Ideally the game should somehow punish me for this with those vassals and knights less likely to support me in my next conquest. Some kind of explicitly transactional system wherein I can exchange promises of future land grants for support today seems like a potential way forward here, or perhaps an expansion of the favor/hook system mentioned above, etc…
The stress system mentioned in the post is IMO the best innovation over CK2; it effectively nudges you towards actions that are “in-character” for your current ruler’s personality traits. The lifestyle/perk system is nice too, there’s more character progression now for your rulers as they acquire powerful gameplay bonuses over the course of their lives. This also means that succession is an even more precarious time than it was in CK2, as the neophyte ruler is unlikely to have the same well-developed suite of perks to assist in their rule. The hook/favor system is the beginnings of something interesting, though I think here it’s more about the potential than the actual current implementation; as it currently stands it effectively just makes blackmail a very effective form of diplomacy, hopefully in the future the game will feature more ways of generating hooks and favors that are less adversarial.
Biggest gaps compared to CK2 are definitely the expanded council system, which is definitely much missed. Powerful vassals in CK3 will demand a seat on your council but there aren’t really enough mechanics that reward them for having this position, it definitely feels like in CK2 powerful vassals were better able to use a council seat to advance their individual interests.
Biggest miss in the series overall remains the inability of the game to model transactional relationships and how well the ruler holds up their end of these transactions, as in “join my wars and I’ll reward you with lands.” The biggest immersion-breaker for me in the game remains how, every time I conquer new lands I award them not to the vassals and knights who contributed most to my armies but to whatever relative pushover I could find with appropriately obsequious temperament who would be a nice pliant vassal. Ideally the game should somehow punish me for this with those vassals and knights less likely to support me in my next conquest. Some kind of explicitly transactional system wherein I can exchange promises of future land grants for support today seems like a potential way forward here, or perhaps an expansion of the favor/hook system mentioned above, etc…
I have high hopes that Council mechanics will be coming alongside whatever the first expansion is (hopefully something that expands on the non-Feudal government types). Once we get that, I’ll feel confident in saying that CKIII is strictly superior to CKII in every way, as opposed to being strictly superior in *almost* every way.