Crusader Kings 3 - Downton Abbey for the 12th Century

Glad to hear you’re enjoying it. I have to admit I think CK2 is still superior (as it has more storyline material), but the mechanics in CK3 are better.

As Norse, you absolutely need to use your own raiders to collect money and prestige, then use the gained prestige to build up your hird of professional warriors (you pay Prestige for them, rather than money). Rinse and repeat to build up a big “treasury” and a large force. If enemies raid you, raise up the hird and crush them. If you are out raiding at the time (which is when they’ll usually come knocking), raid them back later (Norse don’t turn the other cheek).

Alliances are tricky. You want to be allied with characters who can support you in wars, but who won’t drag you into a lot of losing wars. Ideally, you want to be allied to someone who is the top dog in their region, which will usually mean they are strong enough to help you win your wars, and that they can win wars without your help. That way you can contribute to their wars and get prestige cheaply (ideally, they defeat the enemy army, and then you can send in a small force to help them siege), while also earning their favor for helping them.

Generally, I do four things with marriages:

  1. Secure the loyalty of my vassals. A vassal who is allied to you through marriage cannot revolt against you, so this is a great way to secure the realm with a new ruler.
  2. Alliances with powerful rulers who can be of help in war. Most useful in the early game, and - as you’ve found - can be a double-edged sword. Note also that if you join a war but don’t live up to your commitments, they are liable to call you out about it.
  3. Dynastic marriages that allow your dynasty to take over new lands. Can be difficult, but important for getting renown.
  4. Improving the bloodline. Probably the majority of marriages, when I play (I’m apparently a Bene Gesserit). But it’s a smart thing to do even if you don’t want to go too much down that road, as you get get sons-in-laws who can be used to fill court positions and fight as champions (with good chances that the following generation may also contain useful cousins of your dynasty).

Oh, great! More good info. Thanks so much.

I will prob hold off on playing the Norse for a bit as they seem more complicated what with raiding and stuff. I will prob look up some streams/guides for them.

I try and do both 1 and 3 off the bat. My last long play I ended up with only one child for two generations and that pretty much killed me off. So now I try to make babies and marry them off as best I can.

2 is something I try, obviously, but I’m still getting the hang of it and what is a good ally and what is a bad one to get in bed with.

4 seems a bit further out in terms of me understanding it enough to create good kids with my own choices. I mean, I try not to marry into obvious nutters like Stubborn or Vengeful but mostly I’m still early on enough that I don’t have a ton of choices so just go with the lesser of 3 evils.

Who will be a good ally and who is a bad one can be hard to predict. I’ve managed what I thought were great alliances with King’s who subsequently lost first their Kingdom and then their Duchies. There is quite a bit of luck involved.

What is a good or bad trait depends a bit on the religion (sinful traits are obviusly not ideal), but traits are not necessarily all bad even if they sound it. If you’re not Christian (for whom it is a sin), Vengeful is actually a pretty OK trait. Stubborn costs you a little bit of opinion, but gives you a sweet +3 to Stewardship and a nice health boost, so I wouldn’t count that as a directly bad trait either. It can be pretty cool to have on a wife, if you’re using her to give + on your stewardship (my preferred use of the wife) as that is almost a full +1 extra supporting on that trait.

The ones you want to avoid (on your own character) are Shy, Gluttonous, Paranoid, and Compassionate. Those are all awful traits that make your character worse and result in tons of stress. Temperate, Gregarious, Diligent and Ambitious are the best. In general, traits that inflict stress on you for doing what you nedd to do are awful; aka - most of the Christian virtues in this game (Asatru is much better - Vengeful is a pretty OK trait, and extra good as a virtue, and both Brave and Wrathful are excellent traits).

But those traits are always acquired through the “guardianship” of a child (which is why you should ideally tutor your heir yourself, so that you make the best choices during their formative years of 6-15). They don’t get inherited, except through tutoring, so whether your wife has them or not is rarely all that relevant.

The traits you’re looking for when rearing the future generations, are the congenital traits - beauty (comely/handsome/beautiful), intelligence, physical (all of these three have 3 levels), and fecund. Those can be passed down to your descendants, and have a very high chance to be passed on if both parents have the same trait. And you wish to avoid the negative congenitals like bleeder, wheezer, dwarf, hunchback, stupid, ugly, etc. Choices are often limited in the early game, but as the pool of characters grow during the game, there are usually quite a few dynasty less characters (or simply unlanded by events) with good congenital traits who become eligible for marriage or betrothal.

Keep in mind that you also control who marries your unlanded Champions/Courtiers. Getting them married to a genius or amazonian woman, can provide future useful courtiers and prospective sons/daughters-in-law with those traits.

Very cool!

I’m still grogging the whole courtier stuff and what to do with them if they don’t have a particular job in my court. But I’m enjoying figuring it out.

If a courtier does not have a strong connection to your court (i.e., a job, being married to someone with a job, or being the underage child of someone with a job), they’ll usually leave your court at some point. Especially if your court gets too big. Even your grown kids may get antsy if they are given nothing to do.

I guess the feedback has been really positive (narrator: it hasn’t), because prices just doubled.

I could understand if they had decided to target a different price point for future flavor packs but doubling the price of existing ones retroactively is very strange to me. I can’t recall a developer ever doing that before, although maybe that just speaks to my obliviousness.

This won’t effect all the people that have already bought it but people who have held out at $6.99 seem like they wouldn’t be likely candidates to buy at $12.99? Why bother? Just announce that future flavor packs will be more expensive going forward and spin it as “we’re increasing the scope of these flavor packs so the price will reflect that”.

It’s not like they have done any additional work on them to justify doubling the price, right? Seems like it’s just price gouging to me.

I guess there is inflation, etc., but still a very weird decision. I guess it’s the old retail trick of changing the packaging. It’ll certainly look a lot more impressive in future when the discount the packs by 75%…

I guess Paradox were upset that these two DLCs got “Mostly Positive” reviews on Steam. The company policy must be that all DLCs have to receive a maximum of “Mixed” reviews, otherwise the team is obviously being too pro-consumer.

Interesting dev diary today talking about their long-term plans for the game. Also some reflection on things to this point and I think some acknowledgement that they haven’t quite gotten their season pass-type concept quite right yet.

I just love this sort of analysis of Paradox games - it makes me really want to pick up CK3 again. Parts I and II are also great.

With those pillars in place, the game doesn’t have to pull the player out for a lecture on constructivism or kingship: instead players are going to rapidly note, especially when running a large realm that anything with a general opinion or vassal opinion bonus is very valuable to realm stability and that staying king or emperor over multiple generations is going to require racking up as many of those things as possible. And off the player goes, performing kingship (or failing to do so and finding their realm cracks up under the pressure of faction wars). In the process it provides a striking example of how often foreign policy is domestic policy by other means, as players routinely will use foreign policy (especially warfare) as a potential solution for domestic policy problems, which works in societies where military success is the ultimate marker of successful kingship.

And I can’t stress how unusual this approach, trying to get the player to play like a historical figure and to understand the concerns that shaped their behavior, is in this genre.

What’s the state of the game today? I picked it up at launch along with the expansion pass (looks like I do not have Friends & Foes) and played for about 160 hours. Lost interest and never got back to it. Looks like there was some complaining about the AI around February. I was thinking about getting back into it.

Ah yes, I remember why I moved on now. I seemed to be spending a lot of my time matchmaking.

You can’t just let your children marry willy-nilly, they will pick inappropriate spouses and set the Bene Gesserit breeding program back generations…

Seems like that’s something that monarchs of the past would have said as well, haha.

Got tired of it after a while because there really isn’t much content in it for more than around 2-3 generations of characters, IMO. There are new DLC packs out that add more content (Friends and Rivals?), but then you’ll need to pay for those too if it’s not part of your pass.

Unique game, but I suspect I’m never going to like Paradox’s DLC strategy.

Hmm. Trying to play again after taking a break of at least a year. I am hating the Royal Court stuff. It’s poorly documented and I’m making pretty random decisions that I have no idea what the effect will be. I am also hating the new court positions. The game is completely opaque regarding what contributes to a characters aptitude, or even what the requriements for a particular position are.

I think I’m warming to the character travel stuff, but it finally hit me where my big disconnect is and why this DLC announcement made me uncomfortable. It’s too easy to play this game fast and fly through the lives of some of your characters while being very focused on the big picture. Paradox needs to take a big step and really force the game to slow down. The more they enrich the character/RPG stuff the more they could pull this off. Have the Royal Court be more present and less of a side activity(speed up individual instances, though). And then lean into this character location stuff so that you’re frequently away from your capital. All this can still happen within the grand strategy background, but have that stuff just go slower so that you end up more connected to the life of your character.

Also, here’s to hoping the travel mechanic helps make large empires more unwieldy/unstable.

“Systemic Refinements” hides the changes I’m probably most excited about in this upcoming patch for hopefully actually improving the base game. Redo of buildings, troop bonuses, and the vassal stances(which will hopefully make it hard to keep all your vassals happy).

Hmm… I wasn’t very impressed by how well Friends and Foes meshes into the game, so I’ll reserve judgement on this. Off-hand it sounds like a potentially interesting feature.

The Grand Tour thing strikes me as interesting but maybe not as an option, because in practice the vast majority of the Kings in this game would be continually on Grand Tours until the 1200-1300s. Most medieval Kingdoms did not have real capitals - rather the royal court would travel from royal estate to royal estate, eating out the stored food and forage in one place before moving on to the next. Often, it was the only effective way for the King to make use of the income from those estates and an effective way to tax his nobles.