Three Moves Ahead 505: Crusader Kings 3

[Rob Zacny]

Three Moves Ahead 505:

Crusader Kings 3
Rob, Rowan, Fraser, and Leana discuss their feelings on Crusader Kings 3 a few weeks after launch. How do we feel now that we've spent more time with the full version? Why does Rob keep sleeping with his grandkids' wives? Listen in and find out!

Crusader Kings 3

 

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[bvbpl]

Regarding the difficulty curve of the game, it stuck me in playing the game that being cruel and evil is the easy way to play, and it's much more difficult to play as a good person.  Being a sadist, for example, can be the game on easy mode.  As a sadist, you can torture and execute people willy-nilly and you get dread (very useful) plus stress relief.  Try being generous instead, that's much harder as things like revoking the titles of vassal who took up arms against you creates stress.  

 

So it becomes easy to snowball if you're playing as a despot, and the game often subtly encourages you to play as such.  It's effective.  But if you take a step back, you as a player realize you've created a murderous tyrant.

 

It's generally more difficult to play as a good person.  There are tools to help with it, true, but it's so much easier to kill your foes than befriend them.  

 

All of which is to say that there's a lot of different ways to approach the game, and those different approaches reward players differently.  Which is great!  But it also means that if you just sort of go along with how the game initially presents itself to you, if you play the game as a game,  then you're often going to find it easy.  Sometimes you need to find your goals from outside what the game presents on its surface, and CK III is great at providing some of that depth.

[chanman]

Regarding Rob's story of his lecherous king... "Dirty old man seduces his useless/uninterested son's hot wife" is an extremely common plot in Japanese porn.

 

On the topic of the weird eugenics optimization part of CK3, is it possible to accidentally on-purpose end up with offspring as messed up as the Habsburgs from all the excessive consanguinity?

[Gormongous]

On 9/29/2020 at 2:56 AM, chanman said:

On the topic of the weird eugenics optimization part of CK3, is it possible to accidentally on-purpose end up with offspring as messed up as the Habsburgs from all the excessive consanguinity?

 

The "inbred" trait is pretty harsh, but there are perks in the legacy trees quite early on to minimize the harms of inbreeding, so... yes and no?

[derbius]

The excitement so many people show about Crusader Kings 3 still baffles me. I really want to get into it but I find that very obvious gaps are hugely frustrating to me. Doesn't it bother anybody that you don't have any diplomatic options with nobles & kings outside of your court that don't involve either intermarriage, hooks or war? At one level the game seem to be largely about the inter-personal but there is no option for even simple horse-trading (stop messing with my vassal or else, trade you this duchy for that one, I will marry your daughter for 500 gold - that kind of thing). Was that impossible in Crusader Kings 2 also?

[ilitarist]

Yep, it was the same in CK2.

 

Paradox games in general have very limited trade. I think only Stellaris gives you an ability to give something in exchange for other thing. And even there most of the agreements can't be traded. Two thoughts about it that may help:

 

1) The AI and the way it thinks is pretty open. So you can see that AI thinks, say, "I score this proposal of alliance/marriage -2. +10 cause I like you, -12 cause your army is small, +5 cause we have common rivals, -5 cause you're wrong religion" (not real numbers). Instead of paying for the privilege of alliance you can influence a lot of thing. Have an additional common rival, raise their opinion by throwing money at them, get bigger army etc. Yes, this approach means you spend a lot of time to get a deal instead of seeing what exactly they want. But on the other hand you influence the state of the game by a variety of tools to influence the deal instead of just taking options from the list.

2) See it as an indirect control element. I know that in EU4 many people don't like the fact that in addition to other countries having an opinion on yours, your country has an opinion on others too. If your country doesn't like another one you can't propose an alliance. And you can sometimes even see AI deciding they have to fight you and consciously working to lower their opinion on you so that they can attack with no stability hit. In CK3 it's not as direct but you can clearly see that you aren't actually your character, your character sometimes does things beyond your control. You nudge and influence everything. You create a world where alliance or marriage are created, not just writing a suitable terms of transaction.