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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2320 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 13, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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For me, it was probably Crusader Kings II.

This happened around halfway into the game's lifetime, with the Way of Life and Monks and Mystics expansions marking the transformation from a grounded feudal politics simulator into a wacky reddit screenshot generator, with a slew of event spam I had to download mods to turn off. This was further followed by expansions that expanded the map to include cultures and regions that weren't at all comparable to the european feudal system and in addition slowed the game down to a crawl.

I have barely looked at CKIII. Beyond the fact they've got to recreate and overhaul all of 2's features to make it worth my while, the game seems to be designed for people who loved horse popes and/or want to play Medieval Bridgerton. Everything else that bothered me about CK2 is still there: limited diplomacy, can't intervene between two vassals fighting especially when one of your vassals is directly related to you and countless other things.

This has happened in a few other games but CKII is where I saw it happening in real time.

Felt the same about CKII. CKIII toned down the wackiness a ton, at least at the start (I only played at release), no horse popes or magical satanists, but it seems like the current issue is, like most PDX games, it's extremely easy to become overpowered with even a modicum of game sense.

CKIII toned down the wackiness a ton

Not really, designing new cultures and religions is exactly the kind of cancer that overtook CK2. Now CK3 has imbalanced adventurers where you go around the map as a medieval Herakles instead of dying with 80% probability in the first year like any other small business.

Yeah, the reception to the Roads to Power release has been really funny to me. Sure, adventurers are absurdly overpowered shonen protagonists who can live to 130 while making more money from one contract than most kingdoms do in a year, but hey, they feel really nice to play. The RP! The truth is most CK players don’t want a realistic medieval political simulator, they want the aesthetic of one (in which they win). Compare to Legends of the Dead being canned for the update introducing plagues (losing your genius beautiful Herculean heir bc of RNG sucks, Henry I would agree). But tbh winning is fun, as is dressing up your 3D medieval not!Sims in fancy clothes, so I’m not complaining

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