Grand Strategy Crusader Kings III

[Average Manatee]

Tried this adventurer thing. It's so stupid.

Maybe I'm the only one autistic about this, but I want to see an actual economy. Not in the sense of Victoria 3, but in the sense of event rewards and quests that involve actual money generated by actual rulers paying for actual services. Instead its almost all characters generated on the fly who get free money and give you free money for doing RNG activities. And the devs still refuse to make taxation a relevant means of income. The byzantine empire only makes 15g/month in my game, yet I'm supposed to believe that a random non-name asshole can afford 75g for me to kill some other random no name asshole? I'm pretty sure even the "joining a rulers wars for money" thing is conjuring money out of thin air at some point because there's no way these dukes can afford to pay me 100g when their monthly income is literally 2.5.

MAA are still just stupidly OP, you don't have to pay maintenance as an adventurer, and they can reinforce instantly. For a game that is fundamentally based on military power it astonishes me that they haven't fixed levies being completely worthless. It was stretching the plausibility before when a count could maintain a crack army capable of toppling kingdoms, but hey, I'm sure it happened at some point in history to some extraordinarily capable count in charge of a wealthy area with a weak king. But now you can do that as a group of like 8 dudes out camping in the wilderness who just happen to have 4000 troops which by my calculations could fight 72,000 levies. The Byzantine Emperor currently has 4000.

So Adventuring lays bare the stupidity of the CK3 system. What is the fundamental point of being a high rank and ruler of vast realms? It's not money, you don't get that. It's not levies, those are useless. It's... nothing.

Also special mention to how stupid the prestige/piety system is. I can't invade a realm with a kingdom or empire CB unless I gain enough magical prestige to increase my fame level. Never mind that I've had an army that could stackwipe any empire on the map for decades, I can only take a single county or duchy. At this point I feel like we can start rightfully calling the fame/devotion levels "mana" like in EU4, because the mechanics are completely ridiculous artificial roadblocks to normal things you should be able to do. What's funny is that I had next to no piety until unlocking a lifestyle bonus that gave +0.4 piety for every follower who loved me, which quickly skyrocketed me to max devotion. There's probably some way to gain massive amounts of prestige as an adventurer, I need 25,000 prestige apparently to make an empire-level invasion, but I can't find it. And I got an event that unavoidably decreased my fame level because of stupid bullshit. Fuck grinding these retarded quests and fuck this whole retarded system.

 

[darkpatriot]

I think they made a mistake in trying to make adventuring an alternate way to play the game. They should have focused on it solely being a transitory way to keep playing after losing your land (or as an extra difficult start) with the goal being very firmly to try to find a way to gain some land back with very limited resources.

Making it so you can create an entity as strong and rich as an empire, just much more easily and without having to deal with any of the obstacles that are normally in the game, wasn't a great idea.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

It still sort of incentivizes you to go back to being landed tbh. Not like the contracts are varied enough to keep things engaging or what have you.

 

[Average Manatee]

Well if the incentive is player strength then you basically need a super strong min-maxed demense with the right terrain types and all to buff a MAA army more than an adventuring band does. Now granted an adventuring band needs a lot of money to develop their buildings, it's probably like 5000 gold either way, but the adventurers do it in a permanent unrevokable zero maintenance way. And when you go from adventurer to ruler you instantly lose all those buildings, your MAA cost upkeep, and your new demense will cost 5000 gold and probably 30 years of time building things before you're back to parity with where you were before.

I feel like if you're gonna be an adventurer at all you might as well just stay there permanently and try to install your dynasty on thrones while protecting them once they are on there. I guess that's a kind of interesting gameplay but when you're so overpowered and nothing can hurt you it feels kind of like godmode. Pissing off rulers has next to no drawback. You might get expelled if they hate you a huge amount, but not even supporting Bulgaria against the Byzantines caused this to happen to me while my camp was in Constantinople. Your army is always loyal, always free, replenishing either from basically free provisions or through free recruitment at settlements (once you get to max devotion you get 80% replenishment).

Funny enough it feels like the shapeshifter campaign from Warhammer 3, where his cults existed ontop of settlements, his faction was functionally immortal, and basically the entire game was just fucking with factions to help or hinder the AIs as you please.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Pissing off rulers has next to no drawback

Dunno man, you mooch provisions off them one too many times and suddenly they're plotting to kill you.

On another note, I been playing this and Bannerlord, and I gotta say, I can't figure what this game's core gameplay is- Bannerlord is nowhere close to this game in terms of things you do out of combat but that combat is at the core of it, and it is fun. And this game has what, clicking through events as the main part of it?

 

[Fedora Master]

And this game has what, clicking through events as the main part of it?

Painting the map and making meme rulers.

 

[Mikeal]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/my-patch-1-5-review.1509797/

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/this-game-is-fundamentally-broken.1661745/

 

[Fedora Master]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/my-patch-1-5-review.1509797/

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/this-game-is-fundamentally-broken.1661745/

Good old PDX Echo Chamber

 

[Castozor]

So the CK2 subscription was on sale and I retried it a bit. still unsure if I really like this gameplay over EU4 but it's okay so far. So seeing as CK3 is also on sale is there any reason to pick it up over 2? Issue with these Paradox games seems to be that without a ton of DLC they are rather shallow so how does this hold up compared to 2 with all bells and whistles?

 

[thesecret1]

Spent the last week playing around with various CK3 mods. The game seems to have, at last, reached the state where it's at least playable. My impressions:
- CK3's UI is terrible dogshit, whoever made it deserves to get whipped. Absolute fucking cancer, both visually and functionally
- CK3's baronies are objectively better than CK2's holdings
- building chains are about on par in both, CK3 forcing you to make choices is a decent change, but ultimately rendered somewhat pointless by some buildings being clearly far more useful than others
- where retinues in CK2 were an elite core that supplemented the levies, CK3's men at arms utterly break the game. They replace levies rather than supplementing them, being both vastly more powerful, but also oftentimes more numerous. This means that buildings that raise the amount of levies are worthless and, more importantly, that vassals providing levies becomes pointless as well – you are always better off asking them to give you no levies, but more money, since money directly translates into more men at arms. That's one of the major systems the game stands on broken to shit. Terrible design.
- religion and culture mechanics are alright, but feel like they come at the expense of flavor.
- new intrigue system is nice, but I find myself rarely, if ever, interacting with it. It's just not that common that I need something from the NPCs (and when I do, it's usually for them to die, which hooks aren't all that useful for), so the virtually only thing I get to use them on is modifying vassal contracts
- for whatever reason, if you rebel against your liege, the war goal is for you to capture your liege's capital, meaning that rebellions across the game are doomed to failure most of the time
- CK3's writing is awful. Reddit humor everywhere, and even when they try to be serious, it reads like a high schooler LARPing. A mod that'd rewrite all the events would improve the game massively
- 3D models instead of portraits is massive decline. All the characters look like retards. They never manage to look cool or rugged or whatever
- royal court stuff is basically just free stats and boni with virtually no negatives. Classic Parajew bloat.
- laudable attempts to make imperial realms behave differently from regular feudal. Unfortunately, it is far too easy to go from nobody to emperor because the AI is braindead

Overall the game suffers not from lack of ideas, but overall terrible execution

 

[IDtenT]

This is the modern Paradox game I least enjoy playing. Which is a reversion on the previous Gen.

 

[Castozor]

Well I suppose that settles it, thanks for the write up.

 

[thesecret1]

More impressions:
- the travel system is tuned to be a massive pain in the ass. Do you plan to travel far? Then get ready to be bombarded by event after event after event. If you did the foolish mistake of not spending some small amount of cash for guides or whatever, you'll probably get ultra fucked, but even if you don't, you'll have to deal with inane crap every couple of days
- activities in general are a good idea and finally give you something to do. Unfortunately, the balance is shit. Want to befriend somebody? Go to the same event as he does, set it as your focus, and you'll succeed virtually always. Want to murder someone but your assassination plot is hopelessly weak? Invite him on a hunt, set him as a murder target, and you'll usually get a solid chance somewhere around 50/50 to off him right then and there. Fail and you'll just get an opinion malus with him or something, just try again next time
- tournaments are genuinely neat, but I'm near-certain it's all fudged to favor the player massively. You can lose, of course, but even if your character is total trash and the competition is fierce, you're likely to win half the time
- lifestyles are eh, can't say I like or dislike them. In practice, you'll get some super useful perk every 20 years or so while collecting many worthless ones until then. AI makes use of this too, but usually rather shittily, so it definitely favors the player, but isn't game breaking
- stress is a good feature. It's not hard to manage, but it makes you avoid the options that would generate too much of it. Solves the issue of ck2 where you always picked the same option in every event because it was the best one
- economy seems kinda fucked. Any game I played, the vast majority of my income came from my domain, not the vassals. I think it's because they manage their domains poorly. With that in mind, and knowing the levies they provide are worthless, I question what benefit there even is to them. I just had a game where I was a king-sized vassal in BYZ and the emperor decided to imprison me. Naturally, I refused and braced for impact. Only, the impact didn't come. Emperor's entire army was 6k levies vs my 5k men at arms, and since men at arms are so disproportionately better, the outcome was entire BYZ army being slaughtered down to every last man. What good were all those vassals to the emperor, then, if all he could raise was such a pathetic force?
- tying innovations to culture is a good move because it ensures savages remain savages even if they move the capital to Rome and vice versa. Culture hybridization, however, is gamey shit that seems tailored for minmaxing and exploits. I play with it turned off, personally
- there is no way to turn off de jure drift. It pisses me off to no end, fucking border gore mechanic

I think that's about every important aspect of the game covered unless I'm forgetting something

 

[Average Manatee]

- activities in general are a good idea and finally give you something to do. Unfortunately, the balance is shit. Want to befriend somebody? Go to the same event as he does, set it as your focus, and you'll succeed virtually always. Want to murder someone but your assassination plot is hopelessly weak? Invite him on a hunt, set him as a murder target, and you'll usually get a solid chance somewhere around 50/50 to off him right then and there. Fail and you'll just get an opinion malus with him or something, just try again next time

Natural consequence of the system and mechanics. If you can plot to kill someone from the comfort of the world map then there has to be a massively better chance to make it worth paying for and scheduling an activity to kill them. A better system would make the activity part of the plot.

- tournaments are genuinely neat, but I'm near-certain it's all fudged to favor the player massively. You can lose, of course, but even if your character is total trash and the competition is fierce, you're likely to win half the time

Possibly, but remember that AI rulers are absolutely retarded and have shit stats/traits. It's probably also taking into account prowess so if you've collected even a handful of shitty equipment you're 2x as strong as they are.

- economy seems kinda fucked. Any game I played, the vast majority of my income came from my domain, not the vassals. I think it's because they manage their domains poorly.

It's partially that. It's also the fact that building slots are limited now so if an AI makes a bad choice (or spawns with a bad choice) they and you end up punished by it for the next 600 years of gameplay. If buildings that produce levies are built then that's all that province is going to generate and all that is taxable. It's also because Paradox for some reason nerfed default vassal taxation from 20% to 10%

 

[thesecret1]

Possibly, but remember that AI rulers are absolutely retarded and have shit stats/traits. It's probably also taking into account prowess so if you've collected even a handful of shitty equipment you're 2x as strong as they are.

I had a prowess of 1 and attended a wrestling contest thrice. I won two of them. Same goes for archery contests.

It's partially that. It's also the fact that building slots are limited now so if an AI makes a bad choice (or spawns with a bad choice) they and you end up punished by it for the next 600 years of gameplay. If buildings that produce levies are built then that's all that province is going to generate and all that is taxable. It's also because Paradox for some reason nerfed default vassal taxation from 20% to 10%

Possibly, but the reason behind it doesn't matter all that much. When you have an income of +60 from your domain, and +3 from all your vassals, you begin questioning why even bother expanding at all. And indeed, even empire-level realms are pushovers are as result since they don't even get all that many of those worthless levies from them. It's somehow even worse than in CK2, which already suffered from domain being massively more important than vassals (and single-county emperors of massive realms being far, far weaker than they should be), but here it's taken to the extreme.

The entire economy of the game needs a massive overhaul because right now it's like half the game loop is missing. Men-at-arms need massive nerfing (speaking of, the space marine knights could use some too), ideally by making them far less numerous. Levies should form the backbone of any army, and should be provided in solid amounts from vassals (along with taxes) so that emperors of large realms get a lot of money and troops from them. Building chains need an overhaul to reflect these changes, with changes to the AI so that it actually gets some income going.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

- where retinues in CK2 were an elite core that supplemented the levies, CK3's men at arms utterly break the game. They replace levies rather than supplementing them, being both vastly more powerful, but also oftentimes more numerous. This means that buildings that raise the amount of levies are worthless and, more importantly, that vassals providing levies becomes pointless as well – you are always better off asking them to give you no levies, but more money, since money directly translates into more men at arms. That's one of the major systems the game stands on broken to shit. Terrible design.

I think everyone agrees that this is the biggest issue of the game right now. A game about the medieval age, making obtaining armies from your vassals a bad idea - is very stupid.

I think one problem is that in CKII, you got the same forces from levies that you would get from retinues - except maybe more exotic troop types. The difference is that Retinues had greater control of what units you got, than from Levies, allowing use of better tactics and better use of generals towards your retinue units.
In CKIII, Levies are just a byword for shitty peasant cannonfodder soldiers.

So your super-army of MaA just obliterates the enemy's army of shitty idiot peasants.

A connected problem, I think, is the fact CKIII does not punish monobuild retinues. You can just build an army of the same unit type and rekt everyone. In real medieval combat, most forces were a combination of Infantry, Cavalry and Ranged Units. If you built an all-Heavy Infantry army, your enemies would probably just clown on you with a combination of archers pelting your forces non-stop and cavalry charges. If you built an army of heavy cavalry only, the opposition would just show up with lots of pikes. And so on.

(and then there's the fact Sieges as a mechanic still suck dick - in a game about the fucking age of castles and shit)

- new intrigue system is nice, but I find myself rarely, if ever, interacting with it. It's just not that common that I need something from the NPCs (and when I do, it's usually for them to die, which hooks aren't all that useful for), so the virtually only thing I get to use them on is modifying vassal contracts

The intrigue system did get improved with Roads to Power.
In my experience, I mostly use my hooks for Golden Obligations cash payoffs. Horny Tax is a fantastic income source, especially early on.

 

[Average Manatee]

Possibly, but the reason behind it doesn't matter all that much. When you have an income of +60 from your domain, and +3 from all your vassals, you begin questioning why even bother expanding at all. And indeed, even empire-level realms are pushovers are as result since they don't even get all that many of those worthless levies from them. It's somehow even worse than in CK2, which already suffered from domain being massively more important than vassals (and single-county emperors of massive realms being far, far weaker than they should be), but here it's taken to the extreme.

The entire economy of the game needs a massive overhaul because right now it's like half the game loop is missing. Men-at-arms need massive nerfing (speaking of, the space marine knights could use some too), ideally by making them far less numerous. Levies should form the backbone of any army, and should be provided in solid amounts from vassals (along with taxes) so that emperors of large realms get a lot of money and troops from them. Building chains need an overhaul to reflect these changes, with changes to the AI so that it actually gets some income going.

Yeah, people have been saying these things out since day 1 (literally the day after release I posted that MAA were supersoldiers in this thread). It's now roughly day 2000 with paradox not even acknowledging it as something worth improving. Kind of strange, all of their other games they tend to be pretty willing to rework fundamentally bad mechanics like these, especially when people complain often. Maybe it takes a year or two but its been 5...

 

[thesecret1]

I think everyone agrees that this is the biggest issue of the game right now. A game about the medieval age, making obtaining armies from your vassals a bad idea - is very stupid.

I think one problem is that in CKII, you got the same forces from levies that you would get from retinues - except maybe more exotic troop types. The difference is that Retinues had greater control of what units you got, than from Levies, allowing use of better tactics and better use of generals towards your retinue units.
In CKIII, Levies are just a byword for shitty peasant cannonfodder soldiers.

So your super-army of MaA just obliterates the enemy's army of shitty idiot peasants.

A connected problem, I think, is the fact CKIII does not punish monobuild retinues. You can just build an army of the same unit type and rekt everyone. In real medieval combat, most forces were a combination of Infantry, Cavalry and Ranged Units. If you built an all-Heavy Infantry army, your enemies would probably just clown on you with a combination of archers pelting your forces non-stop and cavalry charges. If you built an army of heavy cavalry only, the opposition would just show up with lots of pikes. And so on.

(and then there's the fact Sieges as a mechanic still suck dick - in a game about the fucking age of castles and shit)

Yeah, IRL levies got split into different roles, so they were idiot peasants with bows, idiot peasant footmen, etc. while the nobility handled the cavalry part. The main issue though is the ridiculous amount of men at arms one can afford. A count with a decent domain can employ more men at arms than he has levies! CK2 had the right balance in this regard – retinues were so expensive and so few that it was usually better to only start fielding them once you were at least king-level, relying on levies until then. And even late game, levies easily outnumbered all your retinues ten to one, and unless you fought against weak shitters, your super elite retinue army would get buried by bodies if you sent them out alone.

The intrigue system did get improved with Roads to Power.
In my experience, I mostly use my hooks for Golden Obligations cash payoffs. Horny Tax is a fantastic income source, especially early on.

Yeah, I tried that, but it's such a boring use of the system and almost feels like cheesing.

Yeah, people have been saying these things out since day 1. It's now roughly day 2000 with paradox not even acknowledging it as something worth improving.

Don't worry, CK3 will get it's "biggest year yet"!

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah, IRL levies got split into different roles, so they were idiot peasants with bows, idiot peasant footmen, etc. while the nobility handled the cavalry part.

Yeah, effectively the levies WERE the MAA. It's a weird distinction for the game to make between the two. What should actually go on is that your levy maximum should dictate some kind of "available manpower" stat and then it was up to you how to equip them, whether they'd be cheap light infantry or hugely expensive heavy cav, and in what ratio each unit should be employed (you'd also need to rework battle mechanics to encourage diversity rather than monostacks).

The main issue though is the ridiculous amount of men at arms one can afford. A count with a decent domain can employ more men at arms than he has levies!

At the very least, if they aren't going to rework it as I said above, they should cap MAA based on amount of land/rank/vassals, anything other than the present system where it's all determined by tech. As if it makes sense that you have 5000 heavy infantry and need to wait 100 years for your culture to research having 6000 heavy infantry.

 

[Borelli]

for whatever reason, if you rebel against your liege, the war goal is for you to capture your liege's capital, meaning that rebellions across the game are doomed to failure most of the time

Holy shit CK2 had the same problem at the start but they changed it later so that you only need to defend against your liege to win. How did they make the same mistake in CK3?

 

[thesecret1]

for whatever reason, if you rebel against your liege, the war goal is for you to capture your liege's capital, meaning that rebellions across the game are doomed to failure most of the time

Holy shit CK2 had the same problem at the start but they changed it later so that you only need to defend against your liege to win. How did they make the same mistake in CK3?

I think it's because if the rebels win, you are forced to abdicate, so the logic is that they need to go to your palace and coup you. Only that wargoal is retarded for a count that resisted my efforts to arrest him (which seems to be the most common form of rebellion among the AI too) - he literally cannot succeed since he often doesn't even have enough troops to besiege the capital. The most common way for revolts to succeed is thus for the rebels to get lucky and capture the liege in battle. Any other time, they're forced on the offensive despite having inferior forces.

 

[mondblut]

Levies should form the backbone of any army

Nah, fuck levies. The greatest achievement in any CK2 playthrough is the realization that you now have enough retinues or permanent income for mercs to never touch that trash again.

dragging together 100500 tiny squads of shitty troops across half of europe AFTER you start a war, gee, vhat fun.

 

[thesecret1]

dragging together 100500 tiny squads of shitty troops across half of europe AFTER you start a war, gee, vhat fun.

Levies don't work that way anymore in ck3 tho

 

[thesecret1]

Deciding I want to know ALL CK3 can offer aside from broken systems so that I can leave it lie for another year or two, I went and got myself some of the biggest mods for it (because where, if not there, can mods fix it?) My review:
AGOT: Needs more time in the oven. Right now, it doesn't even have feature parity with CK2's version, and by a long shot. Aside from that, it seems alright.
After the End: Dogshit. Avoid. Devs fell to massive feature creep where it's almost like every province has a different religion, which just means they all suck because there's not enough focus on fleshing them out. Aside from that, it's more or less vanilla CK3.
LOTR: Decent, but heavily underbaked. Very light on interesting content while the devs, instead of focusing on the actually important bits, keep expanding the map with more and more distant lands. A lot of lore in the tooltips though – they clearly took great care there, and you can get the rough idea of entire setting's history through them alone. Mechanics present therein seem interesting, but mostly fall flat when not paired with interesting events.
Fallen Eagle: Bad. Avoid. Focuses on the fall of the Roman Empire, only it starts it too early, meaning they'd need some heavy scripting work to get it to actually occur. Which they don't. Rome splitting in two gave independence to north africa and Hispania for some reason (I think they fucked up somewhere in the scripts), Attila ends up being a loser that fails to even unite the tribes, and WRE never even comes in danger of falling even past the date of its actual destruction IRL. I've also played one of their recommended starts and there's virtually zero flavor or reaction to anything you do.
When The World Stopped Making Sense: Actually pretty fine, deals with the period right when WRE falls. Has some interesting mechanics but nothing game-changing, but the initial setup is very good (the things that historically happened then do happen now) and things feel kinda authentic. Like the others, however, it is light on content.

More than 4 years after release, all the big mods seem strangely unfinished and light on content, though I guess I may be spoiled by CK2 where the mods had oodles of time to get things to a finished state. Some of the mods make an effort to fix up some of vanilla's shortcomings to mixed success, but I wouldn't say any of them manage to really "fix" the game. It's always mitigation rather than a real fix, and the broken foundation always ends up showing through the attempts to paint over it. The issues with levies and MAAs are probably the worst offender.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

More than 4 years after release, all the big mods seem strangely unfinished and light on content, though I guess I may be spoiled by CK2 where the mods had oodles of time to get things to a finished state.

Quite a few of them are busy on fixing up the adventurer mechanics if I recall right.
Princes of darkness is definitely one to try, I hear.