Crusader Kings III General Discussion

OK, so I noticed that there were no achievements enabled for the tutorial Munster game, (I managed to unify Ireland under by benevolent rule pretty easily) so I started a new game as the Jorvik Duke in the earliest time period. Annoyingly, changing gender or sexual orientation rules kills achievements (though you can make the gender laws inverted, which would be interesting), so vanilla it is.

In classic CK fashion, the "easy" start was not straightforward, dumping you in the middle of a war against Northumberland and his two allies forming the rest of England. I've never known how to deal with a situation like that. I always get heavily punished for splitting my forces, so I keep my guys in a single doomstack. That mad bastard Ivar the Bloodless was raiding everybody at the same time, further muddying the waters. Then I got cancer and died.

His heir is a prissy beancounter (in start contrast to his supermartial Dad), both Chaste and Paranoid. My choice of a lustful wife means she is getting pregnant, but he's going out of his mind with suspicion. Then all the alliances I created by marrying my family off wanted my help in their wars, so back to war it is. It's pretty busy.

My first Let's Play! Let me know what you think;

Is it wrong that I am playing for free via XBox game pass, but, I want to buy the game on Steam so that I can get achievements?

I like the achievements because it gives me things to focus on.

PWAlessi wrote:

Is it wrong that I am playing for free via XBox game pass, but, I want to buy the game on Steam so that I can get achievements?

I like the achievements because it gives me things to focus on.

Not wrong. I'm the same, I've been wrestling with the idea since my first play session on game pass yesterday.

Had one of those moments... Playing Halfdan Whiteshirt in Jorvik (York) in an 876 start, so you know he’s badass. After romping in the War of the Four Brothers, I set my eyes on a County just to my south. I had just short of 3000 Elite badasses by this point, and they had around 400 peasant levies. So I invaded and rapidly invested their main city and took it. It was all very quick, one battle, one short siege.

Funny thing is, two other rulers had declared around the same time I did. But they had to sail in. So just as I’m finishing the siege, about 500 guys show up in boats and are like WTF dude?! As they get slaughtered. Followed immediately by another group of 700 also looking for easy pickings. Bad timing, boys! 2 quick wars, 70 gold, 150 prestige, and several hostages. I can just imagine their utter shock as their 400 peasant army opponent turned out to be 3000 motivated bastards looking for more of a fight.

Oh, and Ale, the itinerant knight I dumped two counties onto after I blew out my domain limit in the big war solely because I need to and he had excellent stewardship and diplomacy, turned out to be a fantastic asset. Check your court periodically for these gems in the rough. I’ve had two enhancements to my counties through events featuring his good works. He is actually improving through his work running his counties. Amazing.

There are achievements on the xbox app, even when playing with game pass.

The more I play the more impressed I am with what they've done with CK3. The lifestyle trees combined with stress add RPG-like progression for your current player character, and the renown and dynasty stuff add progression elements to your dynasty over time. Just so much attention to detail and creativity about how to improve things from Ck2 yet keep the spirit of that game intact. I'm sure I'm somewhat biased because I wanted to like this game and I like Ck2 a lot and I'm generally not picky about games, but I'm super happy that I'm having as much fun with this as I had hoped.

Some other random thoughts...

- I think I was able to play the tutorial with achievements on, by turning them on before starting the tutorial. I might be mistaken on this. However, the second game I started, with Ironman turned on, has morphed into a game with achievements turned off for some reason. I don't know how that happened, but, bummer. I wish you could just click "enable" Ironman mode and it would stay that way by default too.

- I'm not finding things too easy. Playing on normal difficulty. I think a large part of the difficulty factor comes from whatever situation you find yourself in, as with CK2. Some situations are super easy. Others, not so.

- While the game flow is definitely improved in places over CK2, there are definitely situations where you can find yourself "waiting" in the game, and places where things just take time to get set up the way you want them. I got Ireland half formed in my current game, but got stuck with two remaining contenders who had formed super strong alliances, and England had morphed into a massive Scandinavian empire, and Scotland was much stronger as well, so it was kind of "well, I need to bide my time for a better opportunity". But... I think that there is a lot of room for creativity with combining lifestyle choices and the situation you find yourself in. With the right lifestyle moves I think I could have done better at creating opportunities to get things unstuck quicker. For example, I probably could have assassinated the leader of a country with which one of the other Irish petty kings had an alliance, which probably would have canceled the alliance and allowed me to attack them sooner. So in other words, the game gives you ways to keep things moving if you can be creative enough to tap into them.

jrralls wrote:

My first Let's Play! Let me know what you think;

... snippy ...

Nice! Congrats on your first Let's Play! I'm at work now so I can't watch at the moment, but I've subscribed and look forward to checking it out.

I'm thinking to start a Let's Play this weekend as well, once I recover from the sleep deprivation from the last two nights.

absurddoctor wrote:

There are achievements on the xbox app, even when playing with game pass.

I need to flex those steam hours though.

IT really is amazing how the game opens up after your first ruler dies and you really get intot he full-blown intricacies of the relationships and stuff.

My initial ruler died, and his son took over and it's gone from "sunshine, lollipops" to "Living on a Prayer." My only son and heir died, my THREE WIVES keep on popping out daughters, I'm now sandwiched between the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire, and my current heir is my paranoid, maimed Half-brother who just threw his wife in jail for allegedly cheating on him.

Crusader Kings 3 already has 100 mods, including a Vampire: The Masquerade total conversion

What an amazing, crazy world we live in.

EDIT: Oh, I get it. Some modders had early access to the game. This is a helpful 5-minute summary of some of the helpful/fun mods available now:

I'm excited to see some of the things done with maps and lifestyles, sounds like modding could add tons of additional replayability to the game.

wow thats fast

Totally hooked right now. The character investment of getting a notice that my chancellor was bad-mouthing me, well he's easily replaced. Opponent's alliance getting in my way, attack the alliance link, not the group. It has such compelling game play potential without even scratching the surface yet.

A neat, obvious to me now, UI tip that I found was that when trying to figure out where someone is from in a dialog like a marriage list, clicking on the small shield/banner brings up the title description window, but clicking a second time performs the Go To action on the map.

I think the magic of this version is the focus and presentation of information that matters to you and those you interact with in the drop down menu at the top of the screen. That pulls all the important stuff together for you to consider. It's something you had to do with maybe a dozen different menus in CK2, a periodic scan for issues and events, but the fact that it's right there gives you constant important tasks to consider, and plan, and problems to remedy. Even your possible war declarations are all lined up there to choose from. For me, this is the most useful change in the entire game. It helps keep things moving.

I think Paradox has finally broken the Curse of V1. I don't see gaps in this game, like we have in every other one they've done for years. This is a rich, interesting, complex game with a streamlined UI and emergent stories popping from every seam. So much fun, so immersive.

I had gone deeply in debt in prestige, money, and piety to have my Kingdom of Ireland press my claim to the Kingdom of England and a huge chunk of France and I just barely managed to win. At that point I was planning on trying to have a decade of peace to rebuild my reserves and that's when a faction rose up to take away the Kingdom of Ireland to some dude I didn't even recognize.

I looked at the support it had and figured with how week I was I would lose anyway so I decided to give in and give the dude the title to Kingdom of Ireland, figuring that I had the better title of Kingdom of England so I could use that.

BUT.... the entire mega-structure was all called the Kingdom of Ireland (a fact that for some reason didn't register with me) and when I gave that up I gave up everything and didn't have any land so....

game over.

Woopsie.

Yep! Gotta watch out for the details. Although I did have a nice one where a son of mine and one other vassal got into a Baronial tussle. I was the son's heir. My son died in the war, and I was his heir, and I *think* what happened is that the whole thing got cancelled because my vassal was now trying it on with his liege, which is a Nordic No-No. At least, best as I can figure it, at that point all Hell was breaking loose. (As his epigraph noted, my leader had been through so much in his last decade that when the alcohol finally finished him off, he welcomed death...)

Much of the island of Ireland is now Sweden, and I'm down to my single original county. The current character has some decent intrigue skills, and that has been fun, even if wars have mostly not gone my way. During one of the Swedish thefts of my territory, my wife was captured. After the war, the Swedish king released her ... but only to become his concubine. Suddenly spouseless, I figured I would look around for a good alliance, but in the meantime I would try to seduce all of his concubines. That is when I discovered I could attempt to elope with my former wife, and successfully did so. Then I seduced the rest of his concubines.

Then I tried to murder him, and a good chunk of the women in his court were happy to try to help me. But the jerk died of old age instead. Fortunately plenty of people were happy to help me again when I decided to knock off his son, and that went well. Sweden is still a pretty big kingdom, but is now ruled by a 3 year old, so hopefully that easy pushing them off of my island.

I'm not sure how many kids we have had, but quite a few. I had a lot of ... daliances, but only produced one bastard. Unfortunately the bastard's mother decided to let everyone know what was up, which caused some problem. I guess not too many though, as my wife is pregnant again at the age of 43.

I have to agree with Robear. While there are always things to be improved and I'm sure they will find some, Paradox has finally managed to launch a game that isn't broken at release.

It is very polished and wildly inventive. Truly the thing to take your mind out of the present for a few hours.

No one tell my 22 intrigue welsh wife about my Iberian lover and soulmate.

boogle wrote:

No one tell my 22 intrigue welsh wife about my Iberian lover and soulmate.

If she's really got 22 Intrigue, she probably already knows.

Hrdina wrote:
boogle wrote:

No one tell my 22 intrigue welsh wife about my Iberian lover and soulmate.

If she's really got 22 Intrigue, she probably already knows.

Being married to a welsh wife IRL, I can attest that 22 intrigue is par for the course.

Having 15 children with four different wives is not recommended.

Credit to my gay king for nevertheless taking one for the team and having two sons with his queen.

Lost a holy war and had to convert to Catholic. Had to give up my two concubines.

This religion sucks...

tanstaafl wrote:

Lost a holy war and had to convert to Catholic. Had to give up my two concubines.

This religion sucks...

Hello friend, let me tell you about the joy and beauty of Insular Christianity...

thrawn82 wrote:
tanstaafl wrote:

Lost a holy war and had to convert to Catholic. Had to give up my two concubines.

This religion sucks...

Hello friend, let me tell you about the joy and beauty of Insular Christianity...

Yes, Insular Christianity is where my 15 children have come from. It's all fun and games until the succession kicks in.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

It's all fun and games until the succession kicks in.

That really should be this game's box quote. In my experience, the game goes just fine.... up until your first king dies and then the intrigue really gets started.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

It's all fun and games until the succession kicks in.

Truth!

It's all fun and games until you have to kill your wife whose claim you just pressed/won in order for your joint heir to inherit the Kingdom of France. Only to have her overthrown by the Holy Roman Empire before your heir/you could take over. At least my heir(now character) still has a pressed claim to France while already being the King of Ireland.

It's all fun and games until you and your two allies are trying to conquer a territory that you are slightly more powerful than as an allied group. Oops, a couple of my lineage died in battle. No biggie, until a message pops that those deaths cancelled all ally relations. I then watched all of my ally troops hop in a boat and sail away. The following month did not go as planned.