Are you fan enough for Crusader Kings 2?

Good question. It says it is, but I did not download an update. I think I’ll uninstall and reinstall from scratch just to be safe.


Oh wait, when I look at DLC it says it’s not installed.

Coincidence, that you can turn everything into animals in an expansion that could easily be misread “Holy Furry”? I think not!

Crusader Kings 2 is now finally becoming the best pawlitics simulator ever designed. Purrfect! Paradox are the true meowsters of Grand Strategy.

I’m pretty sure this is the last expansion and they’ve had this in their back pocket for a while. The horse elect was always one of the best events in the game. I loved it when that would trigger and I’d try to keep him on as long as possible. I think they planned on just a horse empire easter egg and then someone said, “Why just horses?”

Looking forward to making a cat empire. I just hope someone mods in lots of additional animal portraits to meld with the current art-style. bbbbppppptttttttt

I hate you. :p

YAES.

Holy Fury manual.

I wonder if Troy Goodfellow wrote that manual? It looks good! BTW, I can’t seem to find him in the QT3 list of peeps to do a call-out.

Also - interface scaling appears to work very nicely! Yippee! The one issue, just like it is in all Paradox games and a few other games that do interface scaling, is the stuff that’s scaled is kinda blurry.

Troy definitely was here once upon a time, but I believe his account went dormant (hence in flaggable) in the great migration. Perhaps earlier!

He did, he’s in the credits.

The manual really is good - and damn there’s a lot of things to do in this DLC.
I can’t even decide where to start. 🤔 But the reformed pagan and warrior lodge mechanics look cool, so I’ll probably start there, even though playing a Cat realm is mighty tempting.

All other non Holy Fury DLC is 50% off.
IMO Way of Life is mandatory (let’s you choose a focus), followed by:
Monks and Mystics (societies and artifacts)
The various portrait packs (the original ones are just so … ugh.)

I’m going to add the Old Gods and Conclave. At 50% off, Reaper’s Due is tempting too.

(For me, I find DLC that adds to role play potential and things to do other than blobbing appealing.)

For all those revisiting the game. Are you turning off Chinese invasion stuff? I do want to focus on Euro-centric, Russian, and Middle-Eastern stuff. But I like the silk road options as well.

https://twitter.com/TroyGoodfellow/status/1062416481730748416

Awesome thanks!

I do turn off the invasion mechanics in an attempt to keep the megablobs from forming, even though from what I’ve seen since returning is large AI realms seem to form anyway and tend to remain pretty stable.

I played CK 2 at release and bounced off of it pretty hard. At the time it seemed like it was mostly forging relationships by wading through a list of people, and trying to figure out who would get what land when the leader died.

A lot of DLC has come out since then, and I imagine a lot of free updates to it. Has more meat been added to the game in the way of features so there is more to actually do? Has the strategy game part of it been strengthened?

Yes to everything, you can look at the features of each individual DLC to get an idea. This is the role playing strategy game. It’s a singular achievement, there’s nothing else like it. I’m surprised that no developer has tried to make anything remotely related, it must be really hard to put games like these together.

I ended up buying Holy Fury, Conclave, The Old Gods, Reapers Due and some assorted portrait packs. It’s like playing an entirely new game.

I decided on a ‘test’ run as a Baltic pagan (Estonia in a shattered world start with a ruler designer leader.) Playing pagan is a completely different play style than I’m use to, and it took me several starts to get going. But once I did, I managed to reform my religion and get a bloodline.
My religion:


When I do this again, I would forego meritocracy as I can get the same thing essentially with elective government. Equality though is all kinds of awesome - especially since my Baltic chief ended up with eight daughters and one son. :) As the head of the religion though I can go around declaring Holy Wars on neighbors. However against other pagans (except for my own and its heresy) I suffer severe attrition - and it’s going to be a while before military 4.

I got the bloodline rising to the top of the Warrior lodge (which has some pretty awesome benefits along the way) but it took a long time. The bloodline I got isn’t all that impressive, but it was a fun story:

I had to fight a series of duels (including this guy and his pet bear, sad face for the bears.)

And my bloodline (pictured is my shield maiden daughter; she’s wounded from dueling with me.)

Shattered world is really cool, and it’s going to be hard to go back to a normal timeline.

I’ve also played around with the random world … and I’ll share one in a follow up post.

I’ve made quite a few random worlds just to see what they’re like. Here’s one where everything is random except no empires and more pagans. It’s kind of a nightmare world where almost all of the religions can raid and declare holy wars. Here’s a fun one (check out the cat and duck icons heh):

But this guy has a hell of a bloodline! (You can find which ones exist in your world by going to the ledger)

I try to get into the flow of CK2 every few months and run into a wall and stop. It SHOULD be the kind of open ended game I love. I need a mind meld with someone who knows how to play so I’m not constantly clicking on everything trying to figure out what’s going on.