Some final, disjointed thoughts on CK3.

Crusader Kings, more than any other game in Paradox’s library, is primarily event-driven. The game lets you set up as the king of England, and then set up schemes to go to war with your neighbors or build up your finances, or whatever else. But the primary way you’ll interact with the game is actually random events. This is where the problems start, and they don’t stop.

Some of the events are quite fine, there are a lot related to the “lifestyle” you choose for your king that are honestly quite good. If you’ve focused on a war education, you’ll get events where your king trains in mock battles, or debates strategy with his marshal. If you’ve focused on learning, you’ll get events to translate old books.

But many of the events have no sense of time, place, or consequences. And those annoy the hell out of me. There is an event where a cult believes that the head of a saint has rolled down into your castle. Nevermind that most castles would be built on high ground, the cult wants to be allowed to search your castle and find the head. If you tell them no, then a few months later the cult leader will break out, hold your king at knifepoint, and if you still refuse to let him search the castle he’ll decapitate you.

Let’s break this down:

No sense of time. This game is set in the middle ages, your character is a king. Kings don’t just walk around on their own like it’s a Hollywood movie. They have guards, servants, and hangers-on at every point in time. Why can a cult just barge into a castle and confront the king? Why can the leader then sneak into the king’s bedroom? If security is this lax, then why are peasant revolts in the game so unsuccessful? This event makes it seem easy to barge in and kill the king whenever you want. This sort of thing breaks the illusion that the game is a living, breathing world because the event runs contrary to the actual logic of its setting and to the logic of the rest of the game!

No sense of place. Again, this is an event that happens in the castle of a king. Those things tend to be located on high ground and are heavily fortified against invasion. This is because both foreign kings and disgruntled peasants would love a chance to kill the king and either take his land or get reprieve from his taxes. Yet these facts are ignored to create and event where a head rolled into your castle and a bunch of cultists have barged in.

No sense of consequences. If the cultist does succeed in killing your king, there isn’t any reaction from the rest of your family or friends. You just start playing as your heir and the cultist wanders off. And if you weren’t happy at the cultists barging into your throne room earlier, you aren’t allowed to just have them all arrested and thrown in the dungeons, even though that’s the logical action to them breaking into your castle and demanding to break into it further. The actions of this event have no consequences outside the event itself. Either they search the castle and you get some small bonus, or they kill you and you play as your heir. In a game that gives mechanical benefits to you hiring bodyguards and hangers on, none of those things matter as the cultist will just waltz in and cut your head off because the event demands it.

This is just one event out of many, but it is very indicative of all of them. If you’re studying a foreign language, far off kings will teleport across half the map to knock over all your notes, even though again you’d be presumably studying in your own damn castle. All this because the game wants you to develop rivalries but can’t do so based on the actual conquering that happens in the game. If you have a cat, a foreign king may sneak into your catapult armory to launch the cat out of a catapult, again despite that making no sense in the time and place and this presumably happening on your army grounds where you should have soldiers capable of subduing him. The game desperately wants to spice things up with a small handful of events, but none of those are written well enough to be in any way meaningful or interesting. So instead they try to go over-the-top and just completely break the spell that this is an actual game about medieval kings and such.

I wrote recently about how it feels CK3 was made for the Devs to have fun and not the players. I’ll add a few more final thoughts on the specifics of my Gavelkind/partition gripe.

So to reiterate, Gavelkind aka Partition was an inheritance law in Crusader Kings 2 in which your children each inherited a title on your character’s death. Since you then played as one of those children, each generation you would end up weaker than what you started with. Players didn’t like this and so the first thing anyone did in a game was change their succession laws to “not Gavelkind.” Primogeniture, Seniority and Elective were all different choices with interesting drawbacks but they solved the problem of getting weaker every death quite nicely.

In Crusader King’s 3, the dev team decided that rather than improve Gavelkind so it was more fun, they would just lock people into Gavelkind as the only possible option. Now it’s impossible to switch out without either being a Bohemian or having some very late game tech (games often end early when they player gets bored however). Even elective monarchy doesn’t stop Gavelkind anymore.

I feel this was entirely the wrong move. Gavelkind isn’t fun, they should have made it more fun instead of locking you into it. CK2 had a very weak way of trying to make Gavelkind be viable, by increasing how many holdings you could have without penalty. But it was rare that a character could actually conquer or inherit enough holdings to made that useful, so it didn’t actually matter.

I’d much prefer it if CK3 made this succession law useful in a way that would be interesting to the players, then went back to allowing us to pick succession laws early.

Here’s an idea: since in Gavelkind every child inherits equally, maybe make it that under this succession law the player can pick who they will play as next. Not pick their heir, just who they will play as. You often get into a situation where your eldest child is a moron whereas your second oldest is smart, strong, handsome, and highly skilled. Without doing game-y shit like killing off your own child, their is now no way to play as that second son instead. I’d make it so that Gavelkind lets you play as them.

The eldest child would still inherit the highest title. Your older brother would still be the king or emperor while you’d be stuck as a count. But since you’d now be playing as a character with tons of good traits, you’d have to resources to climb your way back up. Even better is this would create a dynamic way for the player’s power to scale down during the game. The game becomes very boring very quickly once you created an empire, created your own faith, and are now too strong for anyone to challenge you. Players also don’t like losing wars, so they tend to just rage-quit instead of continuing play if something bad happens to them. This creates a dynamic where the player’s power goes exponentially up forever, and nothing can challenge them besides very boring and arbitrary RNG.

This Gavelkind change would change that. All the player’s heirs are equal under this succession law, so having the player choose who they will play as would be perfectly fine. And yet it would let the player lose a lot of power without rage quitting. This would be especially fun for players who play the genetics game, as choosing to continue on as a minor noble with all the good traits would be more rewarding for them than continuing as a powerful emperor or king.

In CK2 as a republic you could even choose your heir this way. Normally your heir was the oldest member of your Dynasty as a republic, but there was a special minor title called “designated heir” that let you get around this. You could do something similar in CK3 (although minor titles have been removed). Just call it “father’s/mother’s blessing” and draw parallels to the story of Jacob and Esau (it is a game all about catholic royalty, remember).

Mechanically I’d like to stress that my idea wouldn’t change how the inheritance works. If you choose to play as your youngest son instead of your oldest, you’ll still be choosing to play as the weakest successor. But it gives Gavelkind an actual reason to exist and be fun. If you want to stay powerful every generation, you pick Primogeniture. If you want to play the election game, you pick Elective. If you want to reunite your family lands after handing out vast tracks to your uncles, you pick Seniority (and for god’s sake don’t limit Seniority to only Bohemians!). But if you want to choose your future, you can stick with Gavelkind, the “historically accurate” inheritance law.

I can’t find the quote right now (and I have a headache so I don’t want to), but a quote attributed to Sid Meier is that in a video game, the goal should be for the player to be having fun, not the devs. I think of that a lot because one of the reasons I hate modern Paradox is because they think it’s the other way around. The player should dance to the dev’s tune, and if they’re not playing “right” then the devs need to “fix” that.

I say this because I recently posted about playing Imperator: Rome, and one of my friends thought it would be funny to gift me Crusader Kings 3, since I said in that review that I didn’t plan on ever buying another Paradox game. And when I started playing my gift, the first thing I realized is that CK3 is definitely a game that looked at CK2 and decided “the players weren’t playing right, we need to fix that.”

There’s a ton of things I could say about CK3. I’ll briefly mention that the lack of a ledger, most UI elements, and a MINIMAP make this by far the most tedious Paradox game to play. There’s some good ideas but it’s way to hard to get to any of them, pointlessly so. The whole thing needs a UI redesign from the ground up, but that’s not what I’m here for.

In CK2 and CK3, you play as a feudal family through the generations. From lord to lord you get to take the reigns of some feudal noble and expand your kingdom, fight off rebels, go Crusading, and what have you. As it’s a dynastic game, decisions about succession and titles are paramount. To cut to the chase, the primary inheritance law is called “Gavelkind” or “Partition,” in which the realm is divided among the ruler’s children. So if you hold 3 counties and have 3 sons (assuming male-preference), then each son inherits 1 county. This makes it difficult when your character dies and you start playing as the eldest son, since you’ve become 1/3 as strong as you were before.

This means that Gavelkind succession in CK2 was an endless loop of getting strong, realm partitioning, and working your way back to square 1. Most players hated it, and so the first piece of advice given to new players was always “get rid of Gavelkind.” It was fun to choose different succession laws for different occasions. Seniority let you reunite family lands as elderly, title-holding members of your dynasty were the primary inheritors. Primogeniture meant only your eldest son inherited. And elective meant you could choose your heir as long as you could game the election. It was pretty fun.

Then the devs saw this and decided that the players were playing “wrong.” They needed to be spending more time in Gavelkind as it was “historically accurate.” So now Gavelkind is renamed “partition” and it’s almost impossible to get out of it. Elective succession laws only apply to kingdom level titles, so your counties and duchies still get split on death even if you’re elective. Primogeniture has been relegated to being only available at the tail end of the game. To add, they’ve removed the ability to actually start at the tail end of the game, so you can’t even get any use out of Primogeniture since most people’s games will end much sooner when they get bored. And finally seniority succession is now locked behind a cultural tradition available only to the Bohemians. Because I guess no one else is able to just study the idea and decide “hey, we’d like to do that too.”

The game still isn’t historically accurate by any means. Succession was never this cut and dry. But the devs are having more fun now and the players less, so that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

I’ve bought my friend Kenshi in return for CK3, and I feel I’ll quickly fall off of this one much like Imperator. It’s definitely not bad, but it’s moving in a direction I don’t appreciate.

So this is a big topic that I’ve thought about a lot but I’m going to break it down into little pieces to try to get something written on paper.

I don’t like the introduction of Mana in EU4. If you’ve played EU4, you know this is a well-worn topic, but for the others, here goes.

In EU4, most every action in the game will cost one of 3 resources. These resources are called “monarch points” but the community calls them “mana.” Your admin mana mostly deals with stability and integrating conquered provinces into your realm. Diplo mana mostly deals with peace treaties, trade, and the navy. Military mana mostly deals with the military and rebels. The problems with this system start right off the bat with how one imaginary resource is performing multiple completely unrelated tasks. Why will signing a big peace treaty prevent me from hiring a new admiral? And furthermore, why do most actions happen instantly once I save up enough mana, shouldn’t technology be something you research over time? Instead here you just save up your mana and at the click of a button all your soldiers are better.

The unrealistic game-y-ness is the origin of the (originally derogatory) term “mana,” as the system makes your king seem like a wizard casting spells rather than a monarch ruling the country. “I was casting a spell to summon a general, but now I can’t cast cannon spells!” <- I spent my military mana on generals and now can’t afford technology. Diplo mana is the worst by far with how game-y and spell-like it is. Peace treaties, trade powers, naval leaders, espionage ideas, diplo is just the dumping ground for anything and everything that doesn’t neatly fit into either admin or military.

Another big downside with the mana is how it is earned. Every country gets 3 points of each, but the lion’s share of your mana will come from your ruler, who can add up to 6 points in each category. You can also get up to 3 points of each type from advisors, but in the base EU4 game half or more of your country’s total mana comes solely from their king. This brings EU4 back into the “Great Man” theory of history, in that the country of your ruler doesn’t matter a bit. It is your ruler himself who is solely responsible for researching tech, maintaining stability, summoning generals, reducing war exhaustion, and everything else. There are a lot of questions about why some countries succeed and others fail. EU4’s answer is that successful countries just had a powerful wizard as ruler who generated enough mana to research all the tech.

And in a way it’s downright racist to present history this way. Countries don’t just succeed because of their ruler, European rulers weren’t smarter than their counterparts in the rest of the world, making every single action a country takes or can take come down to how much mana their ruler generates just makes it seem like you read Edward Gibbon once and then slept through all your history classes.

This isn’t just ahistorical but it’s bad gameplay too. You don’t have any control over who you get as ruler, so your game will largely be determined by how lucky you get with this. Making pretty much every action a player can take come down to the luck of how much mana they can afford (because of how good of a ruler they got) is just bad gameplay design. Oddly enough it’s pretty clear Paradox even agrees with me, because while they haven’t abandoned mana in EU4, they did mostly abandon it in Imperator:Rome, and in EU4 they have added a number of systems to address the luck-based irregularity of mana.

Pretty much every DLC Paradox puts out mostly revolves around new ways to let the player generate mana. Getting advisors up to level 5, estates, razing enemy territory as a horde, disinheriting bad rulers or heirs, it’s clear that Paradox knows that the mana system is unfun and too luck based. So every DLC lets players pay for the privilege of ignoring it more and more. But it’s too much work to change EU4 now, and Johan is too stubborn to admit that he’s wrong, so mana is going to see out the remainder of Paradox’s EU4. Fans should hope they see the light and remove it for EU5.