If you wish to support me, please consider signing up for my Patreon for more content like this :) patreon.com/andystake ALSO JOIN THE DISCORD: discord.gg/U5Mzj5vXZg
seeing how far this game has come since launch has been insane, from dlc to the insane variety of quality mods, both large and small. I've loved this game for over 1000 hours and I will likely continue to love it for the foreseeable future. It's not perfect, but there is truly nothing like it.
Thats it. You can complain as much as you like just like any other paradox fan loves to do but theres just nothing like Ck3 out there if you like the genre, period. Nothing comes close.
As much as I love CK I think the franchise has a foundational design flaw, which I have some hope that CK3 will eventually fix: You can't, and wouldn't want, to simulate everything in a game. There is a ladder of abstraction where some things are systematized and have gameplay built around them, while at the other end of the spectrum you have things that are represented as just buffs or the like. Most of CK is rooted in simulating social, political, and institutional factors. There's the whole concept of characters, but also how their interactions and relationships shape politics, abstract political concepts like Legitimacy or House Unity, larger structures like Culture and Religion that are more than just the Characters that make them up. Accordingly, much of the gameplay is built around making your character act, acting upon other characters, giving people jobs, influencing and being influenced by social structures, etc. However, the in-game economy and warfare systems are a glaring and critical exception to this. Econ and military are represented more materialistically in the game. Pre-T&T, for all CK games, The economy involves simply holding a set of things, operating on a loop of gold->things->gold+troops. For this process your character is *there*, they provide a buff and determine demesne size, but that is the extent of it. Consider MAA vs. knights in army building. MAA are bought and maintained on demand with gold, have no impact outside of battles and sieges, are quantified by equipment class, and are quantified by 6 stats (including regiment size) plus terrain and seasonal buffs/debuffs and equipment class counters. Knights, meanwhile, are characters who can be recruited in a variety of ways drawing different systems, they can be filling a variety of other roles and engage with other characters; their fighting ability is summed up in a single number that does not draw from any of these other game systems. Just in terms of mechanical depth, the comparative advantage of weapon systems obviously has more focus than the social construction of the army or aristocratic retinues. This has the effect of isolating the game into two halves that are not integrated together on the systemic level. That then limits what you can do with things like vassal obligations without breaking the balance of the game, and makes it difficult to add more complexity to the econ and war gameplay without producing bloat. However, CK3 has started to improve on this in recent updates, particularly on the econ side of things. With T&T and LotD we have more interaction of the map and characters, through activities, plagues, traveling danger, legends, and buildings which can serve to modify these things. However, the Domicile buildings for administrative Estates and adventurer Camps represent a whole new paradigm, doing many entirely new types of things, including: unlocking new court positions, adding new tasks to preexisting court positions, unlocking new character interactions, unlocking new decisions, having bespoke synergies with specific other buildings, unlocking new Intents for Activities, unlocking new investment options and levels for activities, triggering effects when specific things happen (local to that county or more broadly, as with succession), maintaining an internal counter to facilitate behavior in the long term and more. We can imagine the economy as having three parts: how you improve the economy/how it feeds into itself, what the actual use-value of the economy is, and how you manage it to ensure you're squeezing the most out of what you have. Domicile-style buildings are excellent in the latter two areas, emphasizing the role of your infrastructure as tools for characters, and introducing effects that scale with your ability to manage and interact with things like other characters, creating an economy which is integrated into the rest of the game in a way the CK as a franchise has not yet seen. Reworking buildings in general to function similarly (though adapted in some instances to the possibility of having multiple potential instances of the same building) would improve the game dramatically, and the devs have indicated that they'd like to do something like that. The "generative" aspect of the economy, how you develop it, is still pretty weak though, still mostly being "slap gold into gold sink". This is alleviated for admin nobles and adventurers because they have ways to gains gold through engaging actively with their own game mechanics, and there are some baby steps to shake things up, but ideally new systems could be implemented here going forwards. We also see in the Byzantine Empire a more developed military, which focuses more on the distinction between a personal guard and formal army, tying the latter to Theme type and where soldiers are manipulated using Influence. It's a fairly simple system, very much baby steps, but is again a shift towards social structures and characters interacting with things rather than a purely passive pool of armaments.
Ck3 is getting better and better contentwise, it's time to focus on mid/late game dificulty. What lacks for ck3(love the game, one of a kind) is the AI to take advantage of good opportunities to harm ur kingdom or your family legacy and deeper consequencer to your invasions. Should be harder to keep ur realm under control if you are a tribal conqueror for example. Would be nice to see specific stuff of a religion/region/culture organic happening in other religion/region/culture like a papacy of another religion emerging, funding crusades, etc.
i just started like 3 month ago, it still hooks me i have now already 150 hours in the game, its really enjoyable, only few bugs, various mods, every evening when i start a run, looks different.
RICE, Community flavor pack, Fallen Eagle! I really think we’re in need of that population and republic dlc (which will probably add trade) but yeah this game is extremely unique and my favorite out of all of paradox’s games
Good video. This is why I won't purchase project Caesar or EU5 as I like to call it on release and wait 2-3 years until it will have fleshed out basic features. Or avoid the buyers remorse as I have with Imperator Rome.
Amazing game, but the DLCs have often been meh or an outright miss. Compared to the prices for the DLCs, I'm not entirely satisfied with the quality and themes of the DLCs. Also, I hate the cosmetic DLCs price range. Stuff like that should be included in the other DLCs or come very cheap.
I can agree with that to a big extent, it is the easiest Paradox game for a reason. However, play a game without save scumming even once and tell me it's still as easy.
If you wish to support me, please consider signing up for my Patreon for more content like this :) patreon.com/andystake
ALSO JOIN THE DISCORD: discord.gg/U5Mzj5vXZg
For real though they need to add that damn horse back into the game!
Hah!
A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse DLC!!!
@@WeDemandGlitterhoof my kingdom for a name checks out, and it does!!
Glitterhoof lives on in CK3 as Errorhoof; if you do some questionable script work, you just might see him!
They should remove haesteinn and then you would have like 0 content moving forward
This video is a massive accomplishment, absolutely amazing work Andy!
Thank you so much my friend, means a lot!
Been playing for 4 months, totally worth it every penny. DLC's are important (some of them), buying only fit you're playstyle.
seeing how far this game has come since launch has been insane, from dlc to the insane variety of quality mods, both large and small. I've loved this game for over 1000 hours and I will likely continue to love it for the foreseeable future. It's not perfect, but there is truly nothing like it.
Thats it. You can complain as much as you like just like any other paradox fan loves to do but theres just nothing like Ck3 out there if you like the genre, period. Nothing comes close.
As much as I love CK I think the franchise has a foundational design flaw, which I have some hope that CK3 will eventually fix:
You can't, and wouldn't want, to simulate everything in a game. There is a ladder of abstraction where some things are systematized and have gameplay built around them, while at the other end of the spectrum you have things that are represented as just buffs or the like. Most of CK is rooted in simulating social, political, and institutional factors. There's the whole concept of characters, but also how their interactions and relationships shape politics, abstract political concepts like Legitimacy or House Unity, larger structures like Culture and Religion that are more than just the Characters that make them up. Accordingly, much of the gameplay is built around making your character act, acting upon other characters, giving people jobs, influencing and being influenced by social structures, etc. However, the in-game economy and warfare systems are a glaring and critical exception to this.
Econ and military are represented more materialistically in the game. Pre-T&T, for all CK games, The economy involves simply holding a set of things, operating on a loop of gold->things->gold+troops. For this process your character is *there*, they provide a buff and determine demesne size, but that is the extent of it. Consider MAA vs. knights in army building. MAA are bought and maintained on demand with gold, have no impact outside of battles and sieges, are quantified by equipment class, and are quantified by 6 stats (including regiment size) plus terrain and seasonal buffs/debuffs and equipment class counters. Knights, meanwhile, are characters who can be recruited in a variety of ways drawing different systems, they can be filling a variety of other roles and engage with other characters; their fighting ability is summed up in a single number that does not draw from any of these other game systems. Just in terms of mechanical depth, the comparative advantage of weapon systems obviously has more focus than the social construction of the army or aristocratic retinues.
This has the effect of isolating the game into two halves that are not integrated together on the systemic level. That then limits what you can do with things like vassal obligations without breaking the balance of the game, and makes it difficult to add more complexity to the econ and war gameplay without producing bloat. However, CK3 has started to improve on this in recent updates, particularly on the econ side of things.
With T&T and LotD we have more interaction of the map and characters, through activities, plagues, traveling danger, legends, and buildings which can serve to modify these things. However, the Domicile buildings for administrative Estates and adventurer Camps represent a whole new paradigm, doing many entirely new types of things, including: unlocking new court positions, adding new tasks to preexisting court positions, unlocking new character interactions, unlocking new decisions, having bespoke synergies with specific other buildings, unlocking new Intents for Activities, unlocking new investment options and levels for activities, triggering effects when specific things happen (local to that county or more broadly, as with succession), maintaining an internal counter to facilitate behavior in the long term and more. We can imagine the economy as having three parts: how you improve the economy/how it feeds into itself, what the actual use-value of the economy is, and how you manage it to ensure you're squeezing the most out of what you have. Domicile-style buildings are excellent in the latter two areas, emphasizing the role of your infrastructure as tools for characters, and introducing effects that scale with your ability to manage and interact with things like other characters, creating an economy which is integrated into the rest of the game in a way the CK as a franchise has not yet seen. Reworking buildings in general to function similarly (though adapted in some instances to the possibility of having multiple potential instances of the same building) would improve the game dramatically, and the devs have indicated that they'd like to do something like that. The "generative" aspect of the economy, how you develop it, is still pretty weak though, still mostly being "slap gold into gold sink". This is alleviated for admin nobles and adventurers because they have ways to gains gold through engaging actively with their own game mechanics, and there are some baby steps to shake things up, but ideally new systems could be implemented here going forwards. We also see in the Byzantine Empire a more developed military, which focuses more on the distinction between a personal guard and formal army, tying the latter to Theme type and where soldiers are manipulated using Influence. It's a fairly simple system, very much baby steps, but is again a shift towards social structures and characters interacting with things rather than a purely passive pool of armaments.
Ck3 is getting better and better contentwise, it's time to focus on mid/late game dificulty.
What lacks for ck3(love the game, one of a kind) is the AI to take advantage of good opportunities to harm ur kingdom or your family legacy and deeper consequencer to your invasions. Should be harder to keep ur realm under control if you are a tribal conqueror for example.
Would be nice to see specific stuff of a religion/region/culture organic happening in other religion/region/culture like a papacy of another religion emerging, funding crusades, etc.
More Bookmarks + mod is a total conversion more popular than Bronze Age, and despite its name, is the closest CK3 mod in inspiration to CK2's HIP mod.
I need to check that mod out more!
Stunning work, even though I haven't finished the video yet. Wanted to add a comment to boost algorithm for now. You deserve it.
Thank you so much, I really appreciate that! :)
i just started like 3 month ago, it still hooks me i have now already 150 hours in the game, its really enjoyable, only few bugs, various mods, every evening when i start a run, looks different.
Glad you enjoy it!
RICE, Community flavor pack, Fallen Eagle! I really think we’re in need of that population and republic dlc (which will probably add trade) but yeah this game is extremely unique and my favorite out of all of paradox’s games
This is a massive review!!!!
Rajas of Asia is mod really worth a mention. It adds rest of Asia to CK3.
WRT to Snapstrategy's comment - secret factions will be implemented into the new update of the obfusckate mod, coming very soon.
Wow just finished watching your previous ck3 MOD video and you just happaened to release this like 50 mins ago ……gotta watch this too ig 😂😂😂
hope you enjoy it :)
Damn bro, you are seriously underrated
That’s what I like to hear 🙏
Great review!
Thanks!🙏
Good video.
This is why I won't purchase project Caesar or EU5 as I like to call it on release and wait 2-3 years until it will have fleshed out basic features.
Or avoid the buyers remorse as I have with Imperator Rome.
absolutely insanely long CK3 review, you're a legend man!
Thanks brother, I hope you enjoy it!
3 hour video from Andy about CK3? Lemme clear my schedule.
Legend, glad to see you here
this is a work of art. do you have a patreon?
thank you so much, I love hearing that! Here is my patreon, it's very basic! patreon.com/andystake
Amazing game, but the DLCs have often been meh or an outright miss. Compared to the prices for the DLCs, I'm not entirely satisfied with the quality and themes of the DLCs.
Also, I hate the cosmetic DLCs price range. Stuff like that should be included in the other DLCs or come very cheap.
If they bring the ck2 raising army system and holding and retinues i will think about it
I need links for the mods mentioned
damn right
you know it
Please put timestamps
I put down some simple ones for now :)
eugenics simulator, map painter with terrible ai and lifeless UI, graphically - playdough.
did I miss anything before I watch the video?
CK3 is still way too easy
I can agree with that to a big extent, it is the easiest Paradox game for a reason. However, play a game without save scumming even once and tell me it's still as easy.
I dont know if you played since conquerors came to the game, they can be trouble, especially if they also have scourge of the gods.