Crusader Kings...

[Kashmir Slippers]

Anyone have it? Like it?

I have been interested in CK for a while now and was wondering what you all think about it. I have watched some LP's of it on Youtube, and it looks like it might be the aspi, nerdfest that I was hoping Vicky 2 would be after my 500+ hours of EU3.

I see that Gamersgate has it and the expansion for sale for $20, but that seems a bit expensive to me, and I don't want to buy it just to drop it after two games like I did Vicky 2. Should I keep holding off until there is another sale, fold and just buy it now, or forget about it?

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

Are you serious? CK + DV + Deus Vult Improvement Pact is fun as hell. Don't go in trying to map paint, though. It just takes the fun out of it.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I wouldn't say it necessarily takes the fun out of it. Keeping an empire together through the various Bad Shit (tm) can be fun too.

 

[Quilty]

Pirate it and have a look. Then buy it if you like it. That's what I did, and I had lots of fun with it. I also bought it on GamersGate. However, I must add that the game started to feel empty of content after my second playthrough. The way you manage your relationship with other members of the court and your family is heavily dependent on random events, and after you've seen most of those, the game sort of runs out of things to throw at you. A combination between EU3 and CK would be ideal, because then when you got bored of managing your family, you'd at least have something else to do. I still recommend you try it.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

They did try making the combination between CK and EU3 with Rome.

 

[zool]

Excellent game, and the DVIP mod adds a fair number of random events, though some of them are a bit unbalanced. As FSM said though, don't go map painting with it. Usually, I start with a small county, set myself a goal and spend the rest of game trying to achieve it while using as little force as possible. Watching how the situation evolves on the rest of the world map is pretty fun too.

They were giving out CK + DV for free in one of the latest Paradox newsletters, shame you misssed that.

 

[Kashmir Slippers]

They were giving out CK + DV for free in one of the latest Paradox newsletters, shame you misssed that.

Yeah, I saw that, but I don't think I qualified for it.

Thanks for advice guys. I appreciate it.

 

[curry]

Crusader Kings with DVIP and the graphics improvement mod is hands down the best Paradox game ever. I'm dead serious here.

 

[Trash]

CK also has this wierd habit of surprising you with something completely new every once in awhile. In my last game the crusades suddenly jumped off. Perhaps it was the long period of relative peace before it but suddenly the entire ME was being overrun with what seemed to be every christian noble house's armies in existance. Was pretty bizarre to see islam being wiped out without me having anything to do with it.

 

[Malakal]

Its not that uncommon for crusades to succeed, Christian nations are way more powerful in this game than their Muslim opponents.

CK is truly a great game but I find it lacking in many areas. Hopefully CK2 will be a step in the right direction.

 

[Trash]

It's not just that the crusade succeeded. It's that afterwards islam as a whole was wiped out. Never saw that happen. Usually it becomes a stalemate or the christian nations crumble due to infighting and outside pressure. Mind you, in another game I saw Al Andalus being restored and saw Italy being invaded by wave after wave of islamic sheikdoms. It's what makes CK so great.

Hope CK2 lives up to its predecessor.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

In my current campaign as Finland (started as Sweden, expanding like a true insane homicidal maniac, left a bastard with the Finnish throne when the nobles decided to clean house and get a new king), I actually had to launch a crusade into Scandinavia, due to several sheikhdoms having popped up there behind my back. This eventually led me to decide to usurp the thrones of Sweden (back in my rightful grasp!) and Norway (just for the sake of bloating my long list of titles).

A more interesting thing that I'd never seen before was the arrival of the Mongols... Who were promply roflstomped by the puny Muscovites (most of Russia is mine).

But yea, I'm definately looking forward to CK2 more than any other Paradox game. Ability play as Pagans and sandniggers would be great.

 

[Fafnir]

From what I have read it will not be included in the base package of CK2 you have to buy the DLC to play as Muslems. Created by random Modding team 3.

 

[Trash]

There was a bit of an uproar about this when it became clear you can only play as a christian dynasty. The uproar was mostly because the devs played angry prima donna with their 'how dare you want to play as a muslim when this entire game is about christian dynasties' attitude. First time I felt pissed at Paradox in quite some time. Them trying to downplay the role of religion in the game in forum posts later also pissed me off. I mean, the dark ages without a strong focus on religion? WTF?

That was quite some time ago though. I feel a lot more confident that CK2 will be a worthy successor after recent previews and dev posts. Do hope we'll see a pagan and muslim expansion though. More variation could be nice and both the pagan as islamic offer plenty of that.

Oh and Vaarna_Aarne? Do get the DVIP mod. It adds immensely to the game and stops sillyness like islam invading Norway. Though truthfully, islamic pirates did occasionally even raid the shores of Ireland for slaves. They just never established a permanent foothold.

 

[Phelot]

I'll have to check out these expansions.

Anyway, I've been playing as Nubia and finally got a game going where I'm not immediately invaded. The Fatamids are being picked at by Europe and other Muslims so I made a grab at Egypt and have just about taken it over! Pretty fun if you go to the declare war screen and it shows the military numbers of your enemy, you can watch it dwindle if they're being massacred. They had like 40,000 or so troops and now they're down to just 7,000 or so.

 

[Fens]

CK is my favourite paradox game. but it has its problems.

DVIP solves some, but adds some others:
- muslims can't roam through christian countries when they're at war, unlike christian countries, that can go through any muslim ones when at war with muslims. that stops the sheikdoms in scandinavia, but makes muslims much less of a danger.
- muslim micro kingdoms pop up in north africa and persia and don't stay down when crushed, but pop up again after some time (probably linked to population/culture/religion in the region... not sure) with a single province (even if you took the title... it just goes back to the new kingdom), which is mighty annoying.
- everyone gets filthy rich by mid- to end-game. counties with one province but more than 50k by 1300 are just silly.
- sudden revolts of counties that should be totally loyal.
- sudden disappearance of armies during sieges (didn't look this up in the forum... might be just a bug).
- AI still doesn't drop below 0, which makes golden horde and il-khanate keep their initial several 20k stacks of soldiers indefinitely (even at theoretical -2k per month).
- random events that don't scale to your income/ country size and cost you insane amounts of money whatever option you choose.

that said, this was pretty fun:

total world conquest is possible with DVIP (if you conquer the micro kingdoms simultaneously).

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Oh and Vaarna_Aarne? Do get the DVIP mod. It adds immensely to the game and stops sillyness like islam invading Norway. Though truthfully, islamic pirates did occasionally even raid the shores of Ireland for slaves. They just never established a permanent foothold.

I'm being scared off by all this talk of arbitrary bullshit events. I can't play Magna Mundi Ultimate because of arbitrary bullshit, if DVIP is even close to that level it'll just be the same way for me. Doubly so, since Europa engine is a considerably bigger pain in the ass to modify due to the more delicate and complex command lines (I could have fixed a lot of things I disliked in MMU, if the mod wasn't a labyrinthine mess to anyone who didn't make it).

 

[Trash]

CK is all about events while EU3 is not. The events are what sets CK aside from it being just another map painting game. Some in DVIP are better than others but frankly, the game dealing you bad or good cards is just part of the fun. This being CK it's usually of the bad variety as well. Me like. I'd say give it a chance. People bitch about it sometimes but tend to forget that the good points of the mod basically turn the game from being merely interesting into a classic.

 

[Calem Ravenna]

Also recommend DVIP, it's nowhere near Magna Mundi in terms of reworking the game, mainly a batch of new events and IMO they don't deviate too much from the vanilla ones in terms of their impact on gameplay. Also, DVIP gains some bonus points if you'd rather not have every single character a demigod with an average of 12 in all stats (a DV problem). Or was that fix part of some addon for DVIP?


On the topic of "crusaders wipe out all muslims by 1120 AD" and "Sheikhdom of Akershus" - it's the result of the extremely primitive combat system, the nonexistent naval system, AI's inability to go bankrupt (iand broken economy in general) and oversimplified diplomacy, especially heathen diplomacy (this was slightly improved in DV wasn't it?). No real way to prevent this and what few attempts I've seen at fixing were very arbitrary, like deleting whole muslim fleets if they entered some sea provinces.

As for playing joos, forestniggers, steppeniggers and sandniggers, in CK1 inability to play them was coded into the engine, but people made a hack that tricked the game so they were playable anyway. Best case scenario (though rather unlikely if they really have a pagan/muslim expansion in mind) - in CK2 it will be as simple as editing a couple of text files and even if that fails, there will probably be an alternate method, so personally I'm not concerned too much about this.

Bullshit explanations are bullshit explanations though. I especially liked the one (propagated by some fanboys some time ago, not devs) about the need to completely rework inheritance, vassalage etc. for mud idol worshippers and mudslims, but with Byzantium in the game and perfectly playable it loses a bit of its credibility.

First time I felt pissed at Paradox in quite some time. Them trying to downplay the role of religion in the game in forum posts later also pissed me off. I mean, the dark ages without a strong focus on religion? WTF?

Interesting, care to elaborate a bit?

 

[Trash]

There were a number of dev posts where they seemed to imply that religion would not play as big a role. Them claiming to want to 'focus' on the whole dynasty aspect. Didn't hear that much about it from then on and from previews and the like it does seem like religion found its well earned place in this time frame. Popes, antipopes, heresies and the likes made me a happy camper once more.

 

[curry]

The uproar was mostly because the devs played angry prima donna with their 'how dare you want to play as a muslim when this entire game is about christian dynasties' attitude. First time I felt pissed at Paradox in quite some time. Them trying to downplay the role of religion in the game in forum posts later also pissed me off. I mean, the dark ages without a strong focus on religion? WTF?

Paradox devs are always like that. Whenever someone questions a bad decision of theirs, the answer is always "shut up or get banned" instead of reconsidering or even explaining the reasoning behind their decisions.

It's fucking infuriating.


And CK2 won't have Jews or Judaism in it either.

 

[Malakal]

All of their latest games seem to downplay the role of the religion. This is especially ridiculous in the context of CK where it was extremely important... Dirty atheist Swedes!

 

[Fens]

And CK2 won't have Jews or Judaism in it either.

CK has two regions with a turkish jewish majority in 1066. they do get converted sooner or later and you can't start a jewish war of world conversion, though. judaism isn't a conversion based religion and jews were rarely a majority anywhere, so it does make kind of sense.

 

[Trash]

Not really. Judaism played a noticeable role in the dark ages. Pogroms, extra taxes levied on them, exclusion from many employments but also kingdoms that invited them with open arms and prospered through it. This was in some ways reflected in CK1 so them keeping it out of CK2 is extremely lame. Then again, this is the dev that decided to keep any mention of the policies and horrors of fascism out of the one game that allows you to conquer the world as nazi Germany so no surprises there.

 

[Fens]

well... any word on whether moneylenders are still in ?