CKII is released.

[Vaarna_Aarne]

It's earlier in the topic, but that one's out of date. I'm trying to hammer together an update for the latest version by this weekend.

Well, as long as you used extend instead of replace, events (should I get around to doing those) and everything else should work.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Played in Prince and Thane as last Roman governor in South Italy, married daughter of Basileus and survived Normans thanks to HRE intervention but Mod is still buggy as hell and its CDT all the time so will wait for 1.7b compatible version... Vanilla is much more stable but lack all those LULZY parts like taking concubines and blinding them when you cought them sleeping with other men and childbirth deaths, proper historical map and flags.

 

[Pike]

Playing as Byzantine emperor and not having as much trouble with the factions as I thought I would. They require some monitoring but it still doesn't seem too hard to avoid them firing. Had some factions pop up that wanted to install various people as ruler like my sister married to the king of Rus, but with the new spymaster scheming and arresting some of the powerful backers (since everyone in the empire plots to kill people all the time giving me an excuse) I was able to keep it down. Almost ran into trouble with a similar faction trying to install my cousin(?) that lived in Hungary, but he was landless (an heir) at the time and I was able to just pay to assassinate him. I thought playing an Emperor was going to be more difficult with the expansion. Still its pretty good and worth the low cost.

 

[newcomer]

Playing as Byzantine emperor and not having as much trouble with the factions as I thought I would. They req uire some monitoring but it still doesn't seem too hard to avoid them firing. Had some factions pop up that wanted to install various people as ruler like my sister married to the king of Rus, but with the new spymaster scheming and arresting some of the powerful backers (since everyone in the empire plots to kill people all the time giving me an excuse) I was able to keep it down. Almost ran into trouble with a similar faction trying to install my cousin(?) that lived in Hungary, but he was landless (an heir) at the time and I was able to just pay to assassinate him. I thought playing an Emperor was going to be more difficult with the expansion. Still its pretty good and worth the low cost.

I never experienced defending a faction revolt, only have experienced attacking my AI liege. Maybe it's thanks to my long-lived generations of genius ruler, or my dynastic vassal kings, or other factors (like Augustus trait). The most dangerous faction in my empire is the independence faction which fluctuates between 6-10% of the realm, and is decreasing thanks to my map-painting.

However some people in the forum says the problem starts when the faction revolt actually occurs and spawn 200k no-attrition doomstack for the enemy.

 

[Average Manatee]

From the looks of things CK2 is The Sims: Paradox Edition?

I tried EU3 but after a few hours getting lost in the billion of menus and finally figuring things out the overall gameplay became way too easy and far too simple. How much better is this?

 

[attackfighter]

it's the same, just with a shorter learning phase

 

[20 Eyes]

From the looks of things CK2 is The Sims: Paradox Edition?

Basically. I'm not sure how the last few updates have expanded the game, but this is roughly my initial impression.

 

[PorkaMorka]

From the looks of things CK2 is The Sims: Paradox Edition?

There is also an online dating component. You scour Europe for eligible men and women with claims or inheritances, invite them to your Kingdom, then force them to marry your imbecile cousin at spear point.

That part isn't anywhere near as fun as I made it sound, since you can spend hours on this.

 

[KoolNoodles]

CK2 is probably the most polished game Paradox has released in quite some time. It has some pretty bad multiplayer issues at times and up until last patch some savegame bugs/weird crashes that were probably caused by other patches, but overall it's a good presentation and tons of fun with the right kind of imagination. I.E. you have to "get in to the game". Otherwise you'll just min-max and try to map paint, which is dumb as fuck. If you get the right music going, roast yourself a chicken, have some wine, and settle down to an evening of forged alliances, questionable marriages, skeptical claims, and horribly planned assassinations, you'll have a blast.

 

[mondblut]

I love the retinue system in Legacy of Rome. Finally, a standing army of 100+k (with mercs) I don't have to disband everytime a war is over to attack again.

If only some mod would finally make the major rivers navigable, and add something in place of Suez channel. And automate sending "end plot" command every fucking minute. And remove this fucking rebellion whack-a-mole, were they thinking those constant anarchist uprisings are entertaining or something?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

CK2 is probably the most polished game Paradox has released in quite some time. It has some pretty bad multiplayer issues at times and up until last patch some savegame bugs/weird crashes that were probably caused by other patches, but overall it's a good presentation and tons of fun with the right kind of imagination. I.E. you have to "get in to the game". Otherwise you'll just min-max and try to map paint, which is dumb as fuck. If you get the right music going, roast yourself a chicken, have some wine, and settle down to an evening of forged alliances, questionable marriages, skeptical claims, and horribly planned assassinations, you'll have a blast.

You forgot the most important part in your list: Unfortunate Accidents.

 

[newcomer]

You forgot the most important part in your list: Unfortunate Accidents.

+1 for Dynastic purge! And I found a brilliant method that can be executed by almost every leaders to ensure you get >100% plot chance most of the time

 

[Average Manatee]

"demoed" a copy. After a few hours this looks even more laughable than EU3 was. It's like an RPG where you have a character finder that lets you invite an infinite number of max level characters into your party by giving them a 2 gold wench you picked up off the street. And they will have excellent loyalty very quickly (conversions are really easy), giving you an entire court of perfect geniuses working in harmony while everyone else becomes inbred squabbling rabble.

In one case I was even able to get a genius mayor with 21(42) stewardship who retained control of his cities after being brought to my court. Yes, they directly provided me income even though they were on the other side of the map and the province was controlled by another ruler. Pretty sure that was a bug, but hilarious. Only time I had troubles was when this guy died and his son's Demense wasn't big enough to rule the entire thing, causing half my cities to go to zero income until I helpfully offed him and split my holdings up better amongst my new people.

Then there are mercs, which blow anything to shreds. Plots seem way too powerful since I could care less if the targets I'm trying to kill off hate me, as long as the plot % is decent they will always die eventually. The Pope's opinion is no harder to raise than anyone else, meaning no matter how much you go against him you can still be on good relations. If you even care to, declaring war on him and replacing him with my own was really easy when I tried. No one else in the world seemed to care.

Why is research so damned slow? I have godly advisers working to boost it and at most it budges by 10% a decade. I have castles that are running out of things to build. And the game expects me to research everything for each province? Talk about stupid.

 

[newcomer]

Sounds like a bug to me; clearly it has never be as easy (for me at least) as you make it sound, although I do agree with the right method you can do practically anything you want. Maybe you can share to us how you get a mayor swearing loyalty to you?

 

[Average Manatee]

I have no idea how I did that. My guess is that he was given the mayoral position and the city during the delay between making an offer through the diplomacy interface and the offer being accepted? I didn't notice it until a year or so later.

Other interesting things I have learned in the course of my holy wars against the muslim filth:

- Leaving cities muslim is awesome? Yes actually. +25% tax awesome
- If the pope finds out you have infidels in your court and should imprison them, this is actually a great thing. Imprison them, the pope gets happy. Let them out of prison, the infidel loses any negative modifier for imprisonment and every vassal (including him) gains 10 opinion. It's a win-win situation, worth keeping a few muslims around just to milk constant opinion buffs. You also gain piety IIRC.
-The pope practically throws money at you if you participate in holy wars. Was getting 200 gold more than once a year. This continued for a long time even after the war had ended. My income was only about 150 gold a year when this started happening.

 

[newcomer]

- Leaving cities muslim is awesome? Yes actually. +25% tax awesome

You mean having muslim mayors in your Christian county? I never thought of that strategy, a bit gamey but

- If the pope finds out you have infidels in your court and should imprison them, this is actually a great thing. Imprison them, the pope gets happy. Let them out of prison, the infidel loses any negative modifier for imprisonment and every vassal (including him) gains 10 opinion. It's a win-win situation, worth keeping a few muslims around just to milk constant opinion buffs. You also gain piety IIRC.

You're right

-The pope practically throws money at you if you participate in holy wars. Was getting 200 gold more than once a year. This continued for a long time even after the war had ended. My income was only about 150 gold a year when this started happening.

Shouldn't there be a cooldown of ~5 years for this?

Maybe you should try playing non-catholics. The popamole certainly makes everything easy for you.
Try playing as a muslim for starters. Or if you want more challenge, one of the East African kingdoms

 

[Trash]

Goddammit do I hate the Pdox forums. Get insulted, reply, delete reply because you know nazi pc moderators rule that place, get warned by nazi moderator and a penalty anyway. Then weeks later get 'infraction point' after infraction point over a post you deleted by political correct admin who seems to think that especially deleted content is ground for banning. WTF. And all I want in that place is check out the mods and the occasional news item.

Seriously, when they start using stuff you typed out and deleted instantly against you...

 

[Commissar Draco]

Seriously, when they start using stuff you typed out and deleted instantly against you...

You of all the people bitching about overreacting German Gaystapo mods. I guess it only makes Codex a moar special sewer place for us all. CK2 is more of a RPG than strategy or 4X game and this is her charm, playing as my favorite Capetanate of Italy and after 40 years of dynasty managment, espionage and warfare I am close to unite south Italy... Still not sure if my 65 years impotent Ruler will make it... or which of his imbecile 8 sons and 32 grandkids will pull it, especially since all other Dynastoi plots to bring me down. One thing Prince and thane lacks is the new Exarchate level tittles on lands reconquered by Rhomanoi... Plaing as Despot of Sicily will not be as fun.

 

[Wise Emperor]

So, can I finally create Zoroastrian Shahanshah and lay waste to dirty camel herders, having second renaissance of Persian culture and science? Or I still need mods and just wait for Pagan DLC in January?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well, you can just enable pagan playability yourself.

 

[Wise Emperor]

Yeah, by marrying and exploiting the game system, but it still plays rather awkward, like some strange christian ruler. I just expected (dunno why) some Sword of Islam for pagans.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Actually you can activate pagan playability directly in the file as well, my mod expressly makes use of the function (they introduced it in an early patch due to general butthurt about the difficulty in getting to play non-Christians). But yes, the gameplay is limited, and I do hope they make a pagan expansion (especially because it would entail a large share of attention for the ancestors of yours truly).

I still have to start serious work on porting my content to the latest expansion, though it shouldn't be too hard since it's mostly fixed namefiles, titles and borders.

 

[Spectacle]

New DLC coming, with the long awaited focus on pagans.
Vaarna_Aarne is going to love this:

 

[mondblut]

WHAT.

THE.

FUCK.

????????????????

 

[IDtenT]

It doesn't come with playable pagans. It's more like a fantasy invasion DLC. Well, that's exactly what it is.

It is also actually quite genius, imho, especially if this opens up invasion modding some more.