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Grand Strategy Crusader Kings III

Axioms

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Jul 11, 2019
Messages
1,482
Yep. CK3's UI is ugly and the elements are too big, but the way it structures information is often superior - it's a lot easier to use tooltips to figure out what you're actually affecting.

The scaling options do a lot imo. Still much better use of screen space than CK2 without mods.

The tech system is... OK I guess.

Anything beats the old technology system if we're honest.

Old tech system was trash for sure.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,149
My main issue with it is that its impossible to tech ahead of time. e.g. have fun being stuck with gavelkind until the tier 3 techs at 1050. I can see it getting really old to deal with in every, single, game. CK2's problem was that you only teched ahead in one or two categories but not being able to tech ahead at all kind of sucks.
 

Axioms

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Jul 11, 2019
Messages
1,482
What I don't get is all these crazy idpol game rules but fuck anyone who wants to get tech ahead of time. Makes literally no sense.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,149
What I don't get is all these crazy idpol game rules but fuck anyone who wants to get tech ahead of time. Makes literally no sense.
It's not like we're inventing the atomic bomb in the 11th century. I think figuring out a different type of succession law that doesn't split the realm and lead to civil war isn't that far out of the question. Most other techs are similarly mundane stuff like "build a bigger castle with more dudes" anyway. The idea that the Byzantine Empire (or a reformed Roman Empire) are held back to the same tech levels as the entire rest of the map is pretty silly.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,083
Location
Bulgaria
Speaking of pause: did PDX, by any chance, finally discover the idea of hard, non-toggling pause key, or the game is still prone to ruin your campaign by plopping a game-pausing event at the instant when you are trying to press time-critical pause yourself?
That is exactly what happened in that screen shot. It constantly spam pointless events and fucks up your pause. Events autopause.
 

mondblut

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
22,205
Location
Ingrija
My main issue with it is that its impossible to tech ahead of time. e.g. have fun being stuck with gavelkind until the tier 3 techs at 1050. I can see it getting really old to deal with in every, single, game. CK2's problem was that you only teched ahead in one or two categories but not being able to tech ahead at all kind of sucks.

Another reason to wait for a couple of years until DLCs bring back the non-retarded succession laws. Eldership FTW.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,149
Alright, some Protips™

- Stewardship is the Big Stat again. It's +1 demesne per 5 along with a hefty tax bonus. Getting a good spouse set to boost only stewardship and you can be rocking around 25 or so pretty easily, which means doubled demesne for most characters along with +40% or so to taxes ontop of it. Its also important because more demesne = more unit bonuses.
- The stewardship lifestyle with demanding payment for hooks and extort subjects is very good for easy money quick. All the stewardship lifestyle trees have pretty good bonuses in fact, but definitely start with those two. Other good early perks to skim through are the -50% casus belli cost in martial and Intrigue's ability to fabricate hooks and fertility bonus. If you are small then the +75% knight effectiveness ability in martial is very good, and the +4 knight capacity is only 2 steps further down the tree.
- You definitely want to breed a lot of family members since that's what gets you the legacy points, so try and set up dukes of your dynasty everywhere you can. Legacy-wise the first 3 blood bonuses are really, really good at letting you incest and breed constant geniuses. The -20% casus belli cost from warefare is very usefull, stack with the martial bonus so you can war and still wrack up the top-level prestige and piety ranks. The first two law bonuses are kind of only good if you are landing a lot of your dynasty members, otherwise they do nothing. Rest of the lines are pretty meh.
- Military wise it seems you want to focus on a single regiment type (aside from also bringing artillery for sieges). It's odd, because the game has a system where certain units counter other units, but the "counter" works less the more of that unit you bring. So if you are 100% Bowmen and you stack all bowmen building bonuses across all your demesne your archers will outmatch all but their "counter" easily and when fighting their "counter" will only get a penalty of like 5-10% because the AI won't specifically mass light cavalry. And the AI will never have a well-managed 10 or more demesne stacking all the same buildings to get uber units. I recommend archers because when archers have +50 atk/def the gap between them and heavy infantry with +50 atk/def is pretty marginal but the cost savings is always going to be there and be massive. Though Light Infantry might also work, they have pursuit stats so they'll annihilate a retreating enemy.
- Easymode succession: Dread. Specifically, capture a bunch of heathens in a holy war before succession then as soon as your heir becomes ruler, execute them. At least for Catholic (and I presume most other religions not specifically tolerant) this causes no opinion/tyranny hit with the realm, but gives +10 dread apiece. So your 1 year old emperor can have 100 dread and the whole realm quaking in their boots at the thought of his little finger pointing at them to be taken to the gallows. Not even joking this was my way out of having my emperor die just days after my first son was born (I had a really well-statted adult daughter too) There's probably a few other easy ways to get dread but this is what I found.
- Some culture groups have "hidden" techs that don't show up for other cultures and can't be gained by converting their region, only by culture swapping to them. From what I've seen most of them are just specific man-at-arms regiments (pretty good ones too, but always exceedingly pricey and therefore not worth it IMO). However there was one very important culture I noticed: Occitan/Basque/Aragonese/Catalan has "Visigothic Codes", which allows early usage of high partition and equal inheritance law from the tribal age. If anyone notices any other cultures with unique perks I'd be interested to hear about them.
- Development you can kind of ignore. Your vassals will develop and thereby keep your culture group's average dev high, and osmosis will cause your capital to sort of tag along. Use your steward for cultural conversion.
- The Chaplain is a bit of a problem. The pope calling crusades plummets your religion's fervor which causes heresies to spawn and your chaplain to become absolute shit at conversion. You really kind of need to create your own religion with yourself at the head to manage fervor. And definitely consider taking the Pentarchy reform if you don't have it.
- Technically, if you really wanted to min-max buildings, the best way to do it is to own a bunch of separate duchies and only hold their capitals alone. This is because there are also duchy-level buff buildings. e.g. if you held 10 duchy capitals and 10 archery grounds you'd have -60% men at arms maintenance and +150% damage/50% toughness. Which would obviously be fucking insane, and that's just level 1, level 3 would be -100% maintenane/+450% damage/+150% toughness. There's no penalty for holding lots of duchies that I can see other than that you'd suffer the normal -25 opinion with counts for desiring your duchy. This would trash your vassal limit pretty hard though.
 

Catacombs

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 10, 2017
Messages
5,927
Getting a good spouse set to boost only stewardship and you can be rocking around 25 or so pretty easily, which means doubled demesne for most characters along

I have a spouse with high stewardship, and I let her manage my domain and the payoff has been great.
 

Mortmal

Arcane
Joined
Jun 15, 2009
Messages
9,158
Alright, some Protips™

- Technically, if you really wanted to min-max buildings, the best way to do it is to own a bunch of separate duchies and only hold their capitals alone. This is because there are also duchy-level buff buildings. e.g. if you held 10 duchy capitals and 10 archery grounds you'd have -60% men at arms maintenance and +150% damage/50% toughness. Which would obviously be fucking insane, and that's just level 1, level 3 would be -100% maintenane/+450% damage/+150% toughness. There's no penalty for holding lots of duchies that I can see other than that you'd suffer the normal -25 opinion with counts for desiring your duchy. This would trash your vassal limit pretty hard though.
-10 opinion penalty for every duchies above 2, so it's hefty penalty but doable, kinda playing north korea mode, i guess they wont offer you any levee nor tax .
 

Alienman

Retro-Fascist
Patron
Joined
Sep 10, 2014
Messages
17,040
Location
Mars
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Finally managed to play, and what can I say... I think the engine is a big improvement. The UI seems improved as well, don't really see the problem with it like some here? Otherwise I don't know, seems very basic so far, set up for countless dlcs down the line. Kinda felt bored after an hour or two, and that is not a good feeling playing a new game, but then again it could be explained by that I already have 400 hours in CKII. It's just too similar I guess.
 

Theodora

Arcane
Patron
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Feb 19, 2020
Messages
4,620
Location
anima Bȳzantiī
Regardless of the sometimes awkward character models and the questions about the merits of the UI, the art direction of the game more generally is great. (Craig Mullins' work on the loading screens at least is something special.)

But one thing I'm really loving is the religious symbols, as well as how they're no longer centralised around heresies and a dominant version of a faith.

Religion_coptic.png
Religion_christianity_cathar.png
Religion_catholicism.png
Religion_orthodox.png
Religion_nestorian.png
Religion_christianity_messalian.png

Religion_muwalladi.png
Religion_muhakkima.png
Religion_islam_druze.png
Religion_rabbinism.png
Religion_christianity_bogomilist.png
Religion_christianity_paulicanism.png

Religion_buddhism.png
Religion_kalikula_shaktism.png
Religion_svetambara.png
Religion_zoroastrian.png
Religion_taoism.png
Religion_bon.png

Religion_meshefaresism.png
Religion_valentinianism.png
Religion_manichean.png
Religion_donyipoloism.png
Religion_sedism.png
Religion_zunist.png

Religion_slavic.png
Religion_germanic.png
Religion_baltic.png
Religion_finno_ugric.png
Religion_pagan_magyar.png
Religion_tengri.png

Religion_waaqism.png
Religion_mande.png
Religion_yoruba.png
Religion_kushism.png
Religion_west_african_roog_sene.png
Religion_akanism.png



And an awkward one that defies alignment:
Religion_hellenic.png

I guess Paradox is getting good at this what with HoI4 having a million similar such icons, but it's still way nicer than a few symbols along with a buncuh of red filter recolours. One that stood out especially was the iconoclast symbol, based on the Hagia Irene, one of the few remnants from the period we have. It's a nice touch.
Religion_christianity_iconoclasm.png

istanbul-035600.jpg
 
Last edited:
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,149
Alright, some Protips™

- Technically, if you really wanted to min-max buildings, the best way to do it is to own a bunch of separate duchies and only hold their capitals alone. This is because there are also duchy-level buff buildings. e.g. if you held 10 duchy capitals and 10 archery grounds you'd have -60% men at arms maintenance and +150% damage/50% toughness. Which would obviously be fucking insane, and that's just level 1, level 3 would be -100% maintenane/+450% damage/+150% toughness. There's no penalty for holding lots of duchies that I can see other than that you'd suffer the normal -25 opinion with counts for desiring your duchy. This would trash your vassal limit pretty hard though.
-10 opinion penalty for every duchies above 2, so it's hefty penalty but doable, kinda playing north korea mode, i guess they wont offer you any levee nor tax .

Could have sworn I had more than 2 duchies and didn't see an opinion penalty. Is it delayed by a few months like the penalty for going over demesne?

Oh well. I guess you don't really need it to make super soldiers. Just 10+ demense and 2 duchy-level buildings supporting it is pretty insane, you're looking at archers that are like 5-15x as strong as their number in levies.
 

Smoker

Scholar
Joined
Feb 10, 2017
Messages
120
Serious lack of rivals and friends despite all the shit going on. How are two guys that maimed each other not rivals. Or multiple wars against each other with heirs killed and imprisoned. Or winning a ton with the same commanders and knights. Or always answering the allies calls.
 

Rieser

Scholar
Joined
Oct 10, 2018
Messages
285
Serious lack of rivals and friends despite all the shit going on. How are two guys that maimed each other not rivals. Or multiple wars against each other with heirs killed and imprisoned. Or winning a ton with the same commanders and knights. Or always answering the allies calls.

Some odd stuff there. I mean, raiding foreign kings, kidnapping their wives and forcing them to be your concubines doesn't even make the kings mad - much less rivals. I guess Christians are cucks in CK 3.
 

Theodora

Arcane
Patron
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Feb 19, 2020
Messages
4,620
Location
anima Bȳzantiī
Serious lack of rivals and friends despite all the shit going on. How are two guys that maimed each other not rivals. Or multiple wars against each other with heirs killed and imprisoned. Or winning a ton with the same commanders and knights. Or always answering the allies calls.

Sounds like a balancing issue, so probably temporary.
 

Xamenos

Magister
Patron
Joined
Feb 4, 2020
Messages
1,256
Pathfinder: Wrath
The AI has... issues. I started my second game as a random Count in Byzantium. Manufactured a claim on my neighbouring Count and attacked him. 2 counties each, I had numbers, he had quality (better knights and retinue). I lose the first fight, as I should. My men retreat past the other side of my county. I wait almost a year until they've replenished, and use the time to hire better knights. In that time the AI does not pursue and does not even try to siege my capital. His army is frozen at a city in his main county. After my army is full, I march back down and the AI allows me to start sieging his capital unopposed. And instead of just marching one barony over, he embarks his army and amphibiously attacks. That penalty turned what should have been a close battle into a slaughter for no reason at all.

I uninstalled. Might check it out again after a couple years, just out of morbid curiosity of the bloated, retarded mess it's gonna be.
 

Popiel

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jul 15, 2015
Messages
1,499
Location
Commonwealth
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
It's because Religion to PDS is a means to control.

It has little to do with why some faiths are better than others.
CK3 is, sadly in that context, a game, and religions needed to be gamified because of that.

By the way, I wonder which faiths you consider better and why...
 

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