Crusader Kings III

[Syt]

Oh, and a massive QoL thing: the situation notifications thing at the top now lists if you can ask your head of religion for a claim.

[Solmyr]

I guess this is why the game doesn't default to sea travel (from Reddit):

Sounds like they took inspiration from The White Ship.

[Josephus]

See that duck thing, though.....funny once. Will get annoying quickly.
The thing with these events based game, I can't see much longevity. But we'll see.

[The Minsky Moment]

The CK3 base game is good, but all DLCs so far were mediocre.

Thanks. That's what my sense was.  I can access the base game through Game Pass for now.  Most of my limited game time goes to Steam Deck anyways, and whatever left over is for Victoria.  I'll check in and see what the end of year sales are like.

[Syt]

Drama! I had held off finding a match for my primary heir, because I wanted to wait "for the right one." (I.e. good alliance, claims, something along those lines.)

When he was 18 I finally pulled the trigger on what seemed like a "meh" match because there was just little choice - it seems the AI has gotten better at arranging betrothals for their kids, plus are more reluctant to marry below their station.

So I betrothed him to an Italian girl from some family without land. A few years later I got the notification that I have an alliance with Provence ... somehow a relative of hers became Duke of Provence, but was ousted which put her in charge. When she turned 16 (with 20 diplo, 12 stewardship/intrigue), my son married her, they had a daughter ...

... and a few months later I'm informed that my alliance with Provence has expired, and that my heir got divorced. Looking at the character memories, here's what happened - a few months after the marriage, the Duchess became soulmates with the youngest son of a small landless noble family. Hence she went for divorce and married him matrilineally. My heir is obviously vials with both now (and she has been excommunicated, too ).

As for my heir? Well. When the King of Navarra died and his realm fell into infighting, I made my play for the title (the Pope had granted me a claim). Eventually, I managed to bring down the oldest heir (Ortí) and claim the title.

When I hold court for the first time, a woman shows up with an orphaned girl. Turns out the woman was married to Ortí's brother Antso, making the girl the niece of the king I deposed (and made my vassal). On top of it, her father Antso was slain in battle against my troops. Since I'm compassionate, though, I take her as my ward. And when my heir got divorced I marry the two of them. Happy End. For now ... (Her stats aren't amazing, and she's lesbian, so heirs might not happen much ... )

[Jacob]

I can do without the meme events, like Tamas, but that kind of soap opera drama there I love

I paid for the update already, but I'm going to play it in a few months once patches and fixes are out.

[Solmyr]

CK has always been about soap opera drama.

[Syt]

It's for sure been an interesting ride with this character.

When I took the Navarrese throne, there were a few issues:
1. I'm Catalan, my new vassals are Basque.
2. I gained no land in the deal - I'm sitting still on my two original counties (will lose one when I die due to partition ... ), so I have a fairly limited personal power base.
3. Which means I have very little money beyond what I occasionally siphon off the pope.

In fact I decided to do a Grand Tour to ingratiate myself to my new vassals, but I had to pick a tiny entourage and low luxury expenses to even embark. And after visiting the 1st of 3 stops, war broke out, and my other two vassals had to cancel because of wars.  There were a few attempts at factions, but with a mix of handing out my younger kids as wards and swaying I managed to keep the biggest vassals from throwing down.

My old liege, the Duke of Barcelona, called me to war to subjugate the county of Mallorca. It was a messy conflict, where we were outnumbered, and crossing the sea with my troops a few times was additionally cutting into my budget (and left me barely able to put down a peasant revolt in Navarra); in the end it ended in White Peace. After the war I received a notification in the "situations" menu - I could now vassalize my old liege. The major upshot is that I now rule a contiguous territory from Beziers to Navarra. My liege and I were off to a rocky start. I had originally wanted to befriend him during my brother-in-law's hunt, but that went quite badly. We later made amends during a hunt I organized and continued to bond over our shared interest in hunting. We're not friends per se, but like each other well enough.

Unfortunately, I still don't have many holdings myself. Normally I solved this by marrying female rulers to my character or heir (thus their offspring inheriting my and their mom's titles), but as mentioned the AI seems better at marriages - like my heir's first wife divorcing him to matrilineally re-marry once she gained a title. Or a lot of kids already being betrothed when I check up on them. I'm still far away from having the "tech" for increasing crown authority to be able to revoke titles, and so I can either try to intrigue my way into more land, or flat out conquer territory, which given my coffers and the big blocks in Iberia at the moment won't be easy.

[Tamas]

God damn it Syt, you are making it hard to stay away from a £25 DLC.

How repetitive are you finding the events so far? OPB implied they are very.

[Syt]

Seen two repeat events during travels, but tbh I've been playing AoW4 today.

[Zanza]

You can fabricate a claim on your own vassals and conquer them, no?

[Jacob]

You can fabricate a claim on your own vassals and conquer them, no?

It usually goes: Fabricate --> Revoke --> Fight if they rebel / just get the title

[Syt]

Exactly. I resolved it when I got the tech for going to the next tier of crown authority which allowed me to revoke titles. Also, had set up my heir by conquering the Balearic islands to which he somehow had a claim. Things got a bit messy when my ruler died, aged 78, and the Umayyads ended the Iberian Struggle (making Navarra an Empire ... ) ...

So far I enjoy the expansion.

The travel system is quite cool and adds things to do while at peace in forms of activities. In fact, if you plan to intend to participate in many tournaments or host events yourself (not cheap at the start of the game), it will often mean a lot of time away from home (and your regent running things). Though to be fair, you can generally run wars even when attending a tournament somewhere (you can close the overview screen). Yes, the events start to repeat a bit during the events and journeys (plenty of times someone in my entourage urged not to cross an ants' path because it's a bad omen), but it's still a far cry from the anemic tourneys of CK2. I hope modders will add more events for this.

I kinda wish the "suspense animations" during contests could be disabled?

The regent system is neat but has a few kinks (i.e. regents accompanying you on some travels), but I haven't meddled with it too much yet. I'm kinda agreeing with OPB's criticism, though, that it feels a bit too isolated from other mechanics (factions, existing schemes ... ).

Knight Accolades are a cool idea that feels a bit half way finished at the moment. Yes, you can create your special knight titles that give you special bonuses, and you need to assure some continuity, i.e. that there's a successor in the wings for each title. But from what I've seen that's kind of it. At least I didn't run into any events around these accolades, which seems like a bit of a missed opportunity, and with the feature tucked away in your knights management it's not very front and center. Even in the knight's profile page it will just say "acclaimed knight" but not the name of the title or what bonuses it gives. Again, this is screaming for someone to go and create a bunch of events around this whole system (folks wanting to join the ranks, wanting to replace an existing acclaimed knight, an acclaimed knight asking for land (which I suppose can randomly happen during holding court), knights disgracing themselves, or rivals trying to sabotage their standing and the accolade's reputation ... ).

With the new activities stress becomes a lot easier to manage, but there's also (at least I feel, might be wrong) that it's easier to be stressed, so you may see bigger swings instead of mostly being able to keep things "calm."

I'm still back to AoW4 for now as it's what I'm currently more in the mood for - and I hope there'll be a few patches for this DLC in a week or three.

[Tamas]

Thank you Syt.

During my last attempt with the game (previous patch) I was experimenting with essentially turning off gaining new lifestyle perks (by upping the XP req. to ridiculous heights). It felt like a lot of reasons why the game was too easy came from those perks. I was hoping I could remove lifestyles altogether to reduce the number of events, but that didn't seem possible, definitely not trivial. I am tempted to try again.


Anyways, which one you guys would rather buy? The latest EU4 DLC or the CK3 one?

[Syt]

Meh, I'm, heavily biased, since I like to RP at least a bit in my games and I enjoy emerging narratives. I had a FlyingDutchy playlist on over the weekend where he's playing the EU4 expansion and my impression was that it was mostly him rattling down numbers and modifiers and consulting his Excel sheet (tbf, he was playing max dev stacking as NL), which is really not my kind of playstyle, but the style that I feel EU4 currently caters to most.