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Rob Zacny

Episode 241: Sons of Abraham

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Campo Santo's Nels Anderson joins Rob, Rowan, and T.J Hafer to talk about the Crusader Kings 2 Sons of Abraham expansion and why it speaks to so many people outside the traditional grand-strategy sphere.

 

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Finally, a podcast on the Idle Thumbs network about Lords Management!

 

I wonder how much of the success of the game can be attributed to the concurrent popularity of Game of Thrones?

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Any chance we could get a link to that bonkers story from the paradox forums? Rob did a great job retelling it, but I still want to know more.

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Any chance we could get a link to that bonkers story from the paradox forums? Rob did a great job retelling it, but I still want to know more.

 

I'm assuming it's the one I posted in the Crusader Kings II thread about The Omen homage: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?736028-From-Holy-Kingdom-to-Unholy-nightmare-Why-this-is-the-best-DLC-yet

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Somehow this has me giggling like a child.

 

In theory, I think it's really dumb to have a horror-movie homage in a game about medieval politics. In practice, I love reading about it and wish it happened to me.

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In theory, I think it's really dumb to have a horror-movie homage in a game about medieval politics. In practice, I love reading about it and wish it happened to me.

 

In theory it would be nice to have a switch to shut off the supernatural stuff, though I suppose if one really cared one could dig into the event files.  In practice, though, since it's all fiction I don't find myself getting exercised about it either.  So to speak.

 

I think it just appeals to the little part of me that's left from when I was twelve.

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Having actually listened to the episode now, I think they make a good point to talk about the conflation of the personal and the political in Crusader Kings II. The absence of a distinction between the two was a hallmark of the Middle Ages, so the ways that the game lures you into a similar state through engrossing RPG elements and small-scale threats is really great. It's basically a fulfillment of every promise explicitly and implicitly made in the design of the first Crusader Kings, although I miss a little how the Holy Roman Empire would instantly blow apart a week after game start, as if the developers couldn't code a reason for such a huge and heterogeneous kingdom to stay together. Then again, there were a lot more disruptive elements in the first game, like the ability for vassals to refuse liege requests for levies and the ability for a non-de jure vassal whose opinion stayed negative for too long to go independent without a fight. But those are pretty much the only two things the first Crusader Kings did better.

 

Best stories? Mine are kind of lame, since I prefer interesting story moments to insane implausibilities, hence I rarely play the 867 start. But I had a great moment as the Bagrationi princes of Armenia, when I managed to inherit the kingdom of Georgia, which would save my own from an Abbasid invasion, only to have my king break the personal union by dying immediately after a second son was born. As my first son, a legitimized bastard in his thirties, I started a civil war to win back the kingdom, only to die in the first battle. The kingdoms were now reunited under a one-year-old boy, who was not the one I had in mind to face down the Abbasids. I had to swear fealty to Byzantium and have him educated by the emperor when he asked. That was how his grandson eventually became king of Anatolia too, but that's another story.

 

I also had a good time as a series of the Billung dukes of Saxony, who couldn't have a son to save their collective lives. If anything, it taught me a lot about the matrilineal marriage and claim inheritance mechanics. I think I posted a small AAR of it in the strategy forum's Crusader Kings II thread.

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Crusader Kings success and it reach far beyond the expected fan base might be due a couple of reasons:

One thing that often plague Grand Strategy games and 4X is that due scale things get very abstract (in case of space 4X, often due poor race design, everything became not only abstract, but "alien" in the bad sense of the word*) and because of this, thing get very distant and impersonal. Also, "people" does not appear much in such games, despite the fact we have such huge amount of works, books, essays, movies, ect.. about what famous leaders, generals did or not, or what their role in something was (like the many works about Ney´s role in the charge of the French cavalry in Waterloo), we often don´t see that much in games, at best we assign "admirals" or other thing but the don´t have personalities or interactions, they are just "bonus".(space 4X love to do that).

Now CK2, manages to avoid this traps in quite amazing ways, you have this immense and active "cast" of characters and the game all about their interactions (even without a single line of dialogs they get very personal and grow as time passes) something we often see only in some jrpgs/jstrategy/visual novels games, which also often are much about having a large cast of character interacting with each other, some epics (CK2 remember me a lot of the Tale of the Heike) and historical novels/dramas/books (like the Cursed Kings trilogy).

Another thing, and it something I was thinking about the episode about the State or RTS, might be that despite begin a rather complex game, like all Paradox games, it does not have rigid "Winstates" or require any "technical perfection" to play it, this allow for th eache player to figure how to play it in their own rhythm, and the setting make for ok for you to commit mistakes (something that other game (or the other players) might not forgive in different cases) this could helped new players. And the smaller focus too.

Now about some funs stories:

In old game I played with the William the Conqueror. I was able to win England, but I did commit some mistakes along the way, like upsetting the remaining saxon nobles by removing their titles and giving to much power to my allies, but while William was alive, things still in manageable, but when he died, the throne passed to his son, which was not like his father, those begin his struggle to live under his father shadow and trying to keep things in one piece. For while he did, we was good as his father, but one wrong marriage, of his sister with the mighty Duke of Buckingham prove to be a mistake.

The idea with that marriage was to keep the duke in line, but his wife was ambitious, and him too. Things start to spiral out of control as more and more vassals start to rebel and plots came one after another, while the French King was clearly planning to retake Normandy. The king armies and mercenaries run from one place to another, until coffers became empty and then Buckingham rise up in rebellion forcing the king exhausted to give up the crown or lose everything. He lose the crown which goes to the Buckingham´s puppet, but that gives William´s son enough breathing space, as most vassals stop to rebel and the few lasting ones could be crushed. Later one, while Buckingham and his puppet fight against each other, William´s son swear loyalty again to the King of France, which saved him from a potential war and take way many lands and vassals from England.

In another game, I noticed that one daughter, married to the King of Bohemia, which already had a son from a previous marriage, on her own set up to murder his child, so the throne goes to her child.

* Note: some 4x races designs, often to me appear to be only superficial "exotic" without any deep or reflection ingame, which mean great ideas often wasted. Take the creatures which live inside gas giants in Master of Orion 3, on the surface the concept looks great, that it until you notice, that this race play exactly like all other and due some bizarre reasons, they even build farms (why? how?) or could became Monarchy (how creatures which live inside gas giant have concept of bloodline, nobility and titles?). Even better, another race was of intelligent cristal, again on concept looks great. But ingame, they play and behave exactly like everybody, which bring a lot of questions, like how or why they build ships and how can you board one of them? I mean, like how your guys can fit inside their ship? (if memory don´t fail me, you can board ship in mmo3, but I could be wrong). Funny fact to remember, Master of Orion 3 races where designed to be more "realistic" because the art direct believed that the old races where too "silly".

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* Note: some 4x races designs, often to me appear to be only superficial "exotic" without any deep or reflection ingame, which mean great ideas often wasted. Take the creatures which live inside gas giants in Master of Orion 3, on the surface the concept looks great, that it until you notice, that this race play exactly like all other and due some bizarre reasons, they even build farms (why? how?) or could became Monarchy (how creatures which live inside gas giant have concept of bloodline, nobility and titles?). Even better, another race was of intelligent cristal, again on concept looks great. But ingame, they play and behave exactly like everybody, which bring a lot of questions, like how or why they build ships and how can you board one of them? I mean, like how your guys can fit inside their ship? (if memory don´t fail me, you can board ship in mmo3, but I could be wrong). Funny fact to remember, Master of Orion 3 races where designed to be more "realistic" because the art direct believed that the old races where too "silly".

 

That's a classic speculative fiction problem. Your "elves" or "dwarves" or "vulcans" or "klingons" are just humans with makeup and a single personality trait dialed up to 11. It's a hard problem to overcome; I remember an episode of Prisoners of Gravity that was dealing with it, and they had Robert Sawyer on talking about how nobody does real aliens and he was going to show us all how it was done in his new book "Far Seer". Which totally failed to do so; the characters were a planet of sentient dinosaurs, but they were just allegorical humans with a more aggressive territorial instinct.  IIRC in the second book of the trilogy the dinosaurs discovered Freudian psychology, which in retrospect makes me wonder if Sawyer was just trolling everyone.

 

The problem with proper aliens is that it's hard to make them actually alien, because you tend to think of them in the framework of your own needs and politics. Besides, if there's little or no overlap in needs or desires, where's the conflict? 4x games are ultimately about resource clashes, so there has to be some overlap of needs or you have no game. If the plasma race is only interested in colonizing the surface of neutron stars, why would they ever come into conflict with the gas giant dwellers?  Unless the gas giant folks were sending out those damned slylandro probes...

 

I don't say that to absolve the authors of responsibility, just to point out that repeated failure is unsurprising. Star Trek would be the classic example here, but it's but one of many.

 

Mechanically, I think the problem is that game designers are approaching it backwards. Someone says "we need seven non-human races" and the art folks go off for a bit and come back and say "Cigar Chomping Scottish Bears!", "Slime Wearing Power Armor!", "Psychotic Samurai Lizards!", "Cute Big Eyed Puppy Things With Chainswords And Anger Management Issues!", "Some Sort Of Ethereal Vapor With Eyes!", "Greys!" and "An Entire Race Of Barbarella Cheesecake Amazon Fanservice!" along with concept sketches, and everyone cheers and work starts. When it comes time to figure out what each race does, they're kind of stuck.

 

I think the proper approach is to come at it from a list of interesting interlocking needs and abilities, make a game around that, and then try to make factions that fit the mechanics. You might sill get some of the same aliens out of it, more or less, but they'll fit the mechanics of an interesting game rather than constraining it or breaking the metaphor.

 

The game I keep coming back to for this is the Dune boardgame. All the factions in that are human (arguably; the spacing guild is one of the factions, so ymmv...), but the faction abilities are very asymmetric. Everyone is at the mercy of the coriolis storm, but only the Fremen player knows how far it's going to move this turn. Landing troops on Arrakis costs everyone money, but that money is payed to the Guild. And the Bene Geserit can slip someone onto Arrakis free any time anyone else lands someone. When treachery cards are being auctioned, only the Harkonnen player knows what card is being bid on, and the Emperor player gets the money. At the beginning of the game, the Bene Geserit player secretly writes down a turn and a faction, and if the faction noted wins on the turn noted, the Bene Geserit player wins instead. If the game goes 12 turns with no winner, the Guild wins.

 

It's an excellent asymmetric game, and though it's science fiction, there isn't an alien in sight.

 

I think where CK2 wins here is that it doesn't try particularly hard for cosmetic differences between powers; it's much more about playing the hand you're dealt.

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