CK3 launched with an excellent custom religion system that allowed you to create your own heresy, selecting everything from the bonuses it gives practitioners to its teachings on, for example, homosexuality or witchcraft. Royal Court introduces new and rewarding ways to leave your mark on the map, too. A new king of historical strategy has been crowned. In fact, if I had to pick only one game to play for the rest of my life, the decision wouldn’t be that difficult. All of the engrossingly flawed characters and stories of love, war, triumph, and loss that have already dynamically emerged from my playthroughs feel like just the beginning of something legendary. I have thousands of hours in the previous game, and I expect to spend at least that many in this third installment. My biggest critique is that hearing petitions always locks you into a camera angle looking down on the proceedings from on high, which feels too static and doesn't let me look my subjects in the eye when I tell them, “This sounds like a you problem.” But it's great to feel like I'm making a difference in the lives of the average people living in my kingdom nonetheless.Ĭrusader Kings 3 is a superb strategy game, a great RPG, and a master class in how to take the best parts of existing systems and make them deeper and better. It's especially nice during moments when you don't have any wars or backroom schemes going on, and breaks up long periods of waiting for a claim to be fabricated or anything else that could previously slow a campaign down. Hearing petitions and making decisions, like which town to favor in a bitter rivalry between two mayors, adds a lot of new and welcome story generation. This serves as a smart check on very large empires, since having to balance the court budget against your army and infrastructure soaks up enough excess resources to help with some of CK3's late-game snowballing problems. The bigger your realm is, the more grandeur you're expected to have, with penalties to your prestige if you fall behind. Hiring flavorful and period-appropriate new positions like a Court Poet or increasing your spending on servants and fashion raise grandeur, and it's not all just for bragging rights. At least until my trickster main character obtained the ability to demoralize and paralyze enemies at the start of combat for free.Maintaining a court means keeping up with grandeur, a new stat representing how absolutely lit life at your court is. I had to drop from Core to Daring after dealing with Too Many Gargoyles, but I feel like I’ve still been forced to use turn based more often than not. That said, very into the rest of the game so far near the end of Act 3. I kinda love that it exists, but if I ever decide to replay the game there’s a significant chance I just turn it off. I feel like the rest of the game is surprisingly stable for a CRPG at launch (at least compared to Kingmaker, which took months to “get there”) but this whole separate turn-based combat is peak Eastern Bloc “we put it in because we could” excess. I know there’s a pedigree there, but it feels like a real janky, cut-rate approximation of Heroes of Might and Magic. Like hey I have to hand it to Owlcat for *going for it* with the crusade stuff, but boy it sure is a mess. Help the Lich, get some bone boys and more spell options. Convince Galfrey to come along, get a unit of Paladins and a morale boost. Rescue the Hellknights quickly, get a unit a Hellknights. I wish they took a page from something like Suikoden instead, where you just had the army battles for major events, with the stuff you do prior to the major battles influencing your available units. It's absurdly tedious, and the game would end up like 300 hours long if you actually played it as seemingly intended. The 10 strength armies have some unit stacks in the 500-700 range, and you need similar numbers on your units for them to not be one-shot, which requires multiple ingame years of fiddling with base management and recruiting and slowly moving crap around the map, including dozens of completely useless freebie units that you'll never get enough of to make worth using. That Azata is the most extreme example I've seen, but the same problem extends to everything else. and you only recruit three of them per week, and it takes a decree to do it. I would probably need a hundred of them to even match the Cleric stack I've had since Act 2. It also screws up your formation because it takes up four tiles there, but only one in battle. Low damage, low movement, okay but not amazing durability, and a weak heal spell. I finally caved and modded crusade stuff out.Įveryone else's complaints are totally accurate, but the last straw for me was finally unlocking a unique Azata unit only for it to be unbelievably bad.
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