CKII is released.

Count your blessings man.
After long hours invested in trying to experience a RPG wargame in RTK X, I'm starting to appreciate the minimization of micro in CK2. There were literally too much tedium in managing a city, let alone a kingdom when you have so many decisions to make as compared to the free-flowing pain-free nature of decision making in CK2.

You don't even have to feed your troops. All you gotta watch is morale and income.

 

I'd like a bit more tedium in CK2. It doesn't matter what person I play, which religion they follow, or where on the map I start, virtually every game reaches the same point where I have a strong, defensible kingdom/empire, and I just spend the last 200 years of the scenario at the fastest speed hoping something will happen. It gets old after a while, and I don't always want to conquer all of Europe.

I have posted about it before, but virtually all of the DLC's just lengthen the timeline, extend the map, or let you play different religions with slight UI changes but the same core gameplay, and this one seems par for the course. I just wish that Paradox would do a DLC that addressed some of the problems with the intrinsic gameplay instead of slapping new things on the side.

 

To be honest the vassal limit feels to me like Paradox have decided that people have bitched about the realm being boring because it's so easy to pacify vassals that they are forcing you to make king titles to create artificial instability through an annoying mechanic. It doesn't really solve the problem of things being boring in peace time but have really just mandated making content vassals only and going diplo education.

 

The next DLC is disappointing. The only feature that I like is the tribal holdings, the rest doesn't seem to justify another $20 DLC.

 

rk47 playing ck2 chinese edition

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These new features seem good. Will they (and teh new start-date?) add more CPU load?

Until I get 2 more gigabytes of RAM I'm not upgrading my CKII beyond Patch 2.04.

I would prefer a dark-ages game from 450 AD to 860 AD. Since they're going a hundred years back, then we could get a post-Crisis of the Third Century Rome until 750 or something.

 

I welcome the new changes and it's nice we will have winter (finally! I always wondered wtf were they thinking making winter offensives so effective), but for the DLC itself... I feel it's going to be Aztecs/RoI again - I'll get it for -75%/-66% just because I want my game to have more options, but I won't feel an urge to get it before the sale. Still, I'll await official announcements with it, but I am not very excited. I really thought the DLC will be about theocracies and popes, they disappointed me a bit with Charlemagne...

 

Do the Mongols invade India pretty hard or to they travel west? I ask because I have rarely had problems with the Mongols by lucking out and they just stop right when they get to me and internal politics rips them apart so I end up fight 1/10 of their total forces and wiping them out completely.

 

Flip a coin. Sometimes that's just how the horde rolls.
I've had Mongols who never reached Eastern Europe and just conquer the whole Persian while at another game they won't stop past Russia and never even reached the middle east.

 

Well I have never gotten to the Mongols post-India and the farthest I've ever seen them get was Kiev. By that time the 2 hordes are killing each other or attrition has killed their stacks whenever that kicks in and I get invaded by some pitiful band which I wipe away and rebels engulf them.

Really not looking for ward to fighting them either way as taking Punjab from the Ghaznavids was a nightmare with all their horse archers.

 

You didn't even turn off the "action centre" (or whatever it's called in English) in the taskbar. What the fuck is wrong with you, you sicko.

Also, the oicture is obviously fake because it's the pr0n that is on top "layer", you can't play a game in the background as keyboard input would go into the Windows Media Player.

HA! Caught! Kodex Kool Points -2 for the two above reasons. +1 for making a joke though.

 

All these DLC's have me asking: what on earth will Paradox do with CK3?

After adding all this additional content to the game, CK3 will probably feel like a downgrade. It's like getting all The Sims expansions, they buying The Sims 2 and finding out lots of items and careers missing, or going from HoMM 3 to 4 and finding they cut the number of units in half and eliminated a couple of factions.

 

Vassal Limit and Tribal mechanics sound great, but the elective gavelkind things seems a little strange. It could actually work if for example the elective gavelking had also senior election. Meaning not only they choose what titles go to who, but also they choose a senior, de facto next ruler that they will be vassals to. Then after the election they should get a decision to honor the power of the senior or not, and the senior on the other hand should get a decision to declare war or not if a vassal decides to go independent. Senior would of course call in all levies, but because the vassals would be autonomous they could ignore the call to war with much lesser penalty then normal on the basis that this is an internal issue, but couldn't ignore call to war without normal penalty if the war was against a foreing threat. Also elevtive gavelkind should've fixed, unchangable lowest crown authority to simulate that - yes they are vassals of the Senior, but can do almost anything they want, like fight each other.

This would be actually somewhat historically accurate. Becasue this would similar to what happaned to Poland in 1138. Fragmentation of the country into 5 pieces, which one was a Seniorate Province that was suppose to have a degree of control over other parts. But the princes almost instantly started ignoring the Senior, yet when the outside threat presented itself they usually banded together. Like for example with Mongol Incursion into Poland.

The mechanic I wrote above is probably stupid and innacurate - I just wanted to give same example that elective gavelkind should have entirely new mechanic of ruling the country and not be just another form of succession law that changes little and which you can get rid of pretty fast.

 

Or it's like going from Tropico 4 with all DLC to vanilla Tropico 5 that feels barebone. Or like going from Civ 4 with all expansion into vanilla Civ 5. Or like going from EU3 with all expansions to vanilla EU4, or.....etc. It's just the nature of this type of business model. The next installment will always feel like a downgrade for a period of time.

 

Well it seems I'm in the minority as I hate the sound of the new vassal limit. Because people didn't play feudalism the exact way Paradox wants (and the way that it wasn't actually done in much of the map and time frame of the game) they add more artificial limits to force them to instead of making their system better and more efficient then the alternative. Like vassals finally treating realm laws as laws and not mild suggestions to ignore for some stupid default.

 

Query: Is CK2 slower after India being added in the map? Because I heard they did some optimisations, but I don't know if that compensated or even helped make the game overrall faster. Because of that, I still haven't upgraded from 2.04.

Didn't EUIV have most of the old EUIII Divine Wind features, except the ones cut?

 

slow. cant be bothered to play ironman with the slow saves.

 

o rly

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I called the new time period, RK. You owe me 100 bucks.

 

But what about mongols?

 

The patch which added India (what was it? 2.11? 2.14?) improved the performance a bit for me even though it added the new lands. It wasn't an amazing improvement, but a noticeable one.

Anyway, if the game is slow for you then disable trees and clouds, it gives a huge FPS boost.

 

Thank you, Konjad. Maybe I will get the newest versions, then.

 

Why don't you just get the new version while keeping the old one? So you could compare them and choose whichever works better for you?

 

Hmmm... good idea! Thank you once again!
Is the India DLC worth it?

 

Not for the full price, it's actually a rather mediocre add-on. You don't lose anything interesting not buying it, but if you collect all DLCs you might enjoy playing with it for a while. Just get it on a -50% or a larger sale.

I'd recommend muslim, byzantine, norsemen and jew DLCs though (in this order), if you haven't got them yet.