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