Grand Strategy Crusader Kings III

[Axioms]

Man I had to stop reading the PDox forums

I wish you'd stop reading the Codex

Yes I'm sure the whopping 4-5 threads I occasionally post in are causing you great trauma. Hopefuly you can afford a top notch therapist to deal with the suffering.

 

[Axioms]

New dev diary mediocre as hell. There was a brief rush of braindead losers saying it was amazing followed by relentless optimists saying the changes could amount to something cool *eventually* and now lots of mildly to very negative comments. God bless Paradox. If they actually made 8-9/10 instead of 5-7/10 games they'd block out all the potential competition but luckily they are shite.

 

[Axioms]

Vassal Stances seem interesting. I do think it would be interesting to have each character with more than one stance.

I'm not sure I like the changes in Domains and Buildings. I feel like you already to dedicate yourself a lot to Stewardship to get a decently-sized domain. Plus, seems more liable to hurt the AI - it needs its rulers to properly accumulate big Domains to make itself more threatening. As for buildings - AFAIK they are still quite weak. Even in CKII, there was zero reason to start building until you managed to carve yourself your planned domain and got rid of Gavelkind.

Vassal stances are half assed. The general idea is fine. The lazy and shoddy implementation is not.

 

[JarlFrank]

Guy on reddit has a Paradox moment: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKi...omfg_the_khan_became_buddhist_and_asked_if_i/

Omfg, the Khan became buddhist and asked if I wanted to become one too, i said yes and i forgot that i didnt have the expansion. I haven't saved for a while so all for nothing??

 

[Victor1234]

New dev diary mediocre as hell. There was a brief rush of braindead losers saying it was amazing followed by relentless optimists saying the changes could amount to something cool *eventually* and now lots of mildly to very negative comments. God bless Paradox. If they actually made 8-9/10 instead of 5-7/10 games they'd block out all the potential competition but luckily they are shite.

They are lucky to have momentum just from being around, releasing games for 20 years. If a new developer other than PDox had released Victoria 3 or even CK 3 as it was on release, they would've folded already with the generic 50 negative/mixed reviews on Steam. Console is also making up more and more of their sales which potential new competitors won't have the budget/marketing to tap.

These barriers to entry effectively block out potential competition anyways until the quality gets low enough that they crash altogether and free up the market share with their demise.

 

[Axioms]

New dev diary mediocre as hell. There was a brief rush of braindead losers saying it was amazing followed by relentless optimists saying the changes could amount to something cool *eventually* and now lots of mildly to very negative comments. God bless Paradox. If they actually made 8-9/10 instead of 5-7/10 games they'd block out all the potential competition but luckily they are shite.

They are lucky to have momentum just from being around, releasing games for 20 years. If a new developer other than PDox had released Victoria 3 or even CK 3 as it was on release, they would've folded already with the generic 50 negative/mixed reviews on Steam. Console is also making up more and more of their sales which potential new competitors won't have the budget/marketing to tap.

These barriers to entry effectively block out potential competition anyways until the quality gets low enough that they crash altogether and free up the market share with their demise.

I have always argued that the direction they pursued with CK3 was a sort of AAA style raising the production values and stream friendliness bar to block out competition. So I guess we are essentially in disagreement although I'm more cynical about it? Like I think the top level execs explictly planned for this strategy instead of it occuring organically.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Guy on reddit has a Paradox moment: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKi...omfg_the_khan_became_buddhist_and_asked_if_i/

Omfg, the Khan became buddhist and asked if I wanted to become one too, i said yes and i forgot that i didnt have the expansion. I haven't saved for a while so all for nothing??

 

[Fedora Master]

You know what I say about PDX DLC.

 

[Red Hexapus]

Guy on reddit has a Paradox moment: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKi...omfg_the_khan_became_buddhist_and_asked_if_i/

Omfg, the Khan became buddhist and asked if I wanted to become one too, i said yes and i forgot that i didnt have the expansion. I haven't saved for a while so all for nothing??

Had a similar thing happen to me at one point (but not because of my fault). Was playing Carloman, doing really well. Suddenly the pope decides to die and for whatever fucking reason the cardinals decide I would make a great pope. Which lead to GAME OVER, because "fuck you, you cannot play as pope in CK2"...

 

[Mikeal]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...velopment-in-ck3.1567812/page-3#post-28795420

 

[Turrul]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...velopment-in-ck3.1567812/page-3#post-28795420

I can maybe handle farting jokes as "historically accurate", but memey fake drama events are straight bullshit.
You have several events (Royal Court Events especially) adding a random bullshit trait like Sadistic, Drunkard etc. to your offspring and then courtiers complaining about it. It's like they're doing the things in wrong order, instead of conflicts between personalities causing drama, they create fake drama out of thin air to fuel an artificial conflict.

 

[Fedora Master]

This is the same game that will randomly turn your Kind, Humble and Pious heir into a murderer for "drama".

 

[Heroic Liberator]

This is the same game that will randomly turn your Kind, Humble and Pious heir into a murderer for "drama".

It's due to the way in which their shitty event system is set up. The events are detached from what sorts of characters that you have in your court, so the random events that fire have to make use of preexisting characters regardless of whether there are any whose traits fit or not for the events in question. Putting the cart before the horse tier game design.

 

[Axioms]

This is the same game that will randomly turn your Kind, Humble and Pious heir into a murderer for "drama".

It's due to the way in which their shitty event system is set up. The events are detached from what sorts of characters that you have in your court, so the random events that fire have to make use of preexisting characters regardless of whether there are any whose traits fit or not for the events in question. Putting the cart before the horse tier game design.

Paradox has to rely on events because the structure of the game caps the complexity that is possible. You can't have a truly deep character system because the AI can't handle it in real time.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

It's due to the way in which their shitty event system is set up. The events are detached from what sorts of characters that you have in your court, so the random events that fire have to make use of preexisting characters regardless of whether there are any whose traits fit or not for the events in question. Putting the cart before the horse tier game design.

Paradox has to rely on events because the structure of the game caps the complexity that is possible. You can't have a truly deep character system because the AI can't handle it in real time.

It's not (only) the issue that they have to rely on events, but that they have detached the event system from the characters. Events themselves have an estimated time to fire rather than characters having them depending on their traits (a.i. ideally you'd have particular events being tied to particular character statuses and traits hence some events not occurring at all if you do not meet the prerequisites within whatever character pool, such as your court or your family, is being targeted for them). I guess it's to avoid overtaxing your CPU, but this sort of stuff doesn't seem *that* intensive given the permutation powers of modern CPUs (unless the devs want to lower the minimum requirements for their games, which they probably do, in order to expand their possible customer base to those playing on older rigs).

 

[Axioms]

It's due to the way in which their shitty event system is set up. The events are detached from what sorts of characters that you have in your court, so the random events that fire have to make use of preexisting characters regardless of whether there are any whose traits fit or not for the events in question. Putting the cart before the horse tier game design.

Paradox has to rely on events because the structure of the game caps the complexity that is possible. You can't have a truly deep character system because the AI can't handle it in real time.

It's not (only) the issue that they have to rely on events, but that they have detached the event system from the characters. Events themselves have an estimated time to fire rather than characters having them depending on their traits (a.i. ideally you'd have particular events being tied to particular character statuses and traits hence some events not occurring at all if you do not meet the prerequisites within whatever character pool, such as your court or your family, is being targeted for them). I guess it's to avoid overtaxing your CPU, but this sort of stuff doesn't seem *that* intensive given the permutation powers of modern CPUs (unless the devs want to lower the minimum requirements for their games, which they probably do, in order to expand their possible customer base to those playing on older rigs).

So there are a 5 digit number of characters that have to make decisions and then you have events. So they don't give characters meaningful differentiation. Like they don't have interests, or desires, or ideology. They have generic personalities that don't do much. Like ambitious characters all act the same as far as things related to being ambitious. You can't have like 5 ambitious characters work together, not that characters can really do anything complex enough to need to work together but still.

 

[dsndo]

they create fake drama out of thin air to fuel an artificial conflict.

Most of the event writers are women and people write about what they know.

 

[AdamReith]

Discovering the shallowness of the event engine is what killed CK2 for me too. I went on to build a few prototypes for a "true" event engine but since each individual event is hand written I found it really limits emergent interactions. Either you go all out simulation ala Dwarf Fortress and rely on the users own imagination to fill the gaps or you accept that the whole thing is just an illusion.

Without serious expansion (probably beyond the limits of CK3's engine) it's nothing more than a funny card game where you draw a good or a bad card every now and then with some crappy flavour text. Though in my opinion CK3 failed to make even that aspect of it fun with constant cringe writing and lazy interactions. Jamming their shitty events into your scenario without any threshold of compatibility is so bad but I have a feeling they do it because they are so sparse that you might only get a few through a whole game if they waited for appropriate contexts.

Hope we get something that seeks out the sweet spot between CK2 and full on simulations in the future though. Might give it another whack myself at some point. Does make me wonder what a full on simulation with a ChatGPT style layer contextualizing events might play like though.

 

[Axioms]

Discovering the shallowness of the event engine is what killed CK2 for me too. I went on to build a few prototypes for a "true" event engine but since each individual event is hand written I found it really limits emergent interactions. Either you go all out simulation ala Dwarf Fortress and rely on the users own imagination to fill the gaps or you accept that the whole thing is just an illusion.

Without serious expansion (probably beyond the limits of CK3's engine) it's nothing more than a funny card game where you draw a good or a bad card every now and then with some crappy flavour text. Though in my opinion CK3 failed to make even that aspect of it fun with constant cringe writing and lazy interactions. Jamming their shitty events into your scenario without any threshold of compatibility is so bad but I have a feeling they do it because they are so sparse that you might only get a few through a whole game if they waited for appropriate contexts.

Hope we get something that seeks out the sweet spot between CK2 and full on simulations in the future though. Might give it another whack myself at some point. Does make me wonder what a full on simulation with a ChatGPT style layer contextualizing events might play like though.

Paradox games are limited by an engine that was really more optimized for EU4 than anything else. EU4 doesn't really play at being a simulation and it is obvious it is an idle game with a map game on top. And it is arguably the best Paradox game IMO.

As far as a simulation version of CK2, I'm relatively close to finishing a game that is adjacent to that. I started on the idea prior to knowing about CK2 and there are significant core differences like being turn based, fantasy, and containing significant character simulation and citybuilder/mmo economic mechanics plus a much deeper set of RPG elements(since it is fantasy). But you could turn off magic and make a historical mod that closely followed the CK2-3 map that would play like superior turn based CK2. Of course many Paradox fans are obsessed with RTWP and fancy graphics so I'm not sure if such a mod would really take off.

I feel like a lot of PDox fans claim to want a superior historical simulation but they aren't willing to sacrifice the things they'd need to to get there and they'll just limp along in CK3 always whining but never accepting that it is limited at the core.

 

[HeroMarine]

CK2 is so much better than this shit.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

 

[thesecret1]

Yes, that's what I want in my medieval history simulator. A content pack giving my character a wardrobe.

 

[Axioms]

Yes, that's what I want in my medieval history simulator. A content pack giving my character a wardrobe.

How about meaningful and interactive banditry/piracy/raiding with state sponsored bandits and pirates and interaction between that stuff and intrigue and diplomacy and also meaningful realm administration which also interacts with that stuff? Not in CK3 though. Where the titular feature doesn't even work and would still be trash if it did.

 

[Spectral Pontifex]

Yes, that's what I want in my medieval history simulator. A content pack giving my character a wardrobe.

How about meaningful and interactive banditry/piracy/raiding with state sponsored bandits and pirates and interaction between that stuff and intrigue and diplomacy and also meaningful realm administration which also interacts with that stuff? Not in CK3 though. Where the titular feature doesn't even work and would still be trash if it did.

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[Infinitron]