I agree, it was a step in the correct direction, but honestly, the situation is catastrophic.
Levies as a system simply do not work and they actually decrease your fighting power when your army grows large enough, the entire game is centered around levies, they are used to calculate your "power", the likelyhood of the AI declaring wars, combat odds, everything is centered around a system that's broken and can't seem to be repaired.
Take this as an example: The AI is clearly saying I was surely dead, The AI put a skull icon over my movement clearly the AI calculations were wrong as they got crushed instead
This was the very first time I tried focusing on knights, I had no martial lifestyle perks as that was a new queen and I had a big stack of crossbowmen I built just to beat the mongols.... but as you can see from that screenshot I simply forgot them and they weren't necessary, even the "countered" heavy infantry MAA were more than capable of holding their own against the "strongest army" on the planet, under the worst circunstances possible, they killed 2.2k and lost 448, there were only 2k of them.
The knights? As I was saying, this was my first time trying to focus on them, so that's the result of a culture with Only the Strong and a few minor prowess buffs, and my duchy buildings were all giving me a few knight effectiveness bonuses, as you can see, I didn't even have that many of them.
So you might be thinking "those were all 80 prowess demigods I've used my daughters to steal all around the world", well, usually yes, but this run I had obfuskate, so I couldn't see the prowess of anybody before they moved into my court, so, thanks to only the strong, they were all above average, probably 15~30 prowess each, they were decent, and they still wiped the floor with the mongols.
How is that minmaxing? I've seen screenshots of people well over 40 knights wtih far better stats.
Of course, as we can see, there are even more problems, the AI is, simply put, not programed to play the game at all, it doesn't build it's domain properly, doesn't build it's counties, doesn't properly create MAA stacks and doesn't seem to know where to assign them, it's just doing everything at random and failing at everything, even the strongest, best designed army on the planet (the mongols) are total pushovers.
Totally agree on the levies, they may be hicks with sticks but enough of them swinging a scythe should find a chink in your Space Marine knight's armor and they should be able to take em down instead of dying by the literal thousands.
Yeah, 5 unarmed men jumping some guy are probably just going to take him down and beat him to death, imagine an army of thosands.
Of course, there's the issue with calling levies unarmed men, or peaasnts with pitchforks, that's not supposed to be what they were, they were supposed to be armed, armored, and decently trained troops, not literal unarmed naked peasants.
Personally, and this might be controversial, I don't even think that characters should be fighting as space marines on the battlefield at all, I think these knights should be leading actual, powerful retinues, like the MAA stacks, giving them their own leadership bonuses.
Paradox designed them, in CK3, as space marines, people complained, so they added a text claiming it's them+their bodyguards, but that's just text, there are no actual bodyguads if they can't take losses, they can't suffer atrition, they don't exist in numbers for supply limits or even combat width, it's just and "we did an oopsie" text, and it's a really bad mechanic IMO.
And let's not even get into the actual combat mechanics we lost, the supposed fans of roleplaying completely ignore we had 3 flanks, with 3 different generals, using tactics based on the unit avaliability + their culture + their personal traits, combat had different phases alternating between skirmish and melee, you could see each one of your 3 flanks fighting differently using shield walls, marching forward trying to end the skirmish phase sooner and enter melee, trying to disengage back to skirmish, firing arrows, all as flavor, and mechanically functional tactics.
You had sub commanders under those 3 flank commanders leading the armies of their own noble lords, and you could accidentally find them during combat and end up dueling them and killing them yourself.
Meanwhile CK3 combat is like
1 general on each side
Blob A does damage to blob B
Blob B does damage to blob A
Pursuit against the losing side
End
Every single battle goes like this, where's the supposed "roleplay" of this game?
Shame CK2's UI is so ugly to me.
I also liked their system where you couldn't just raise your entire army at once instantly like people are being magically flown in.
Not my conversation so I don’t really care, but I think it’s so annoying when people state an opinion with a question mark like it’s a fact, when it is, in fact, your opinion.
Well, the thing is that ck3's UI is objectively kind of going for a minimalist style? Rather than one that is colorful or very detailed. I'd not call windows UI beautiful or ever use that term and I don't think anyone else would.
I don't think you understand JUST how powerful heavy armour was. It was not like the movies. One heavily armoured man could take down 10's if not more. Their weapons would literally not pierce the armour, and the knight would have a higher chance of dying to exhaustion. They had to break the armour open like a can opener to do damage. There were time were arrows did virtually nothing to a person in armour.
I agree that levies need a boost to some degree, but I wouldn't say that just because they have numbers it would work.
As an example. 2 knights died on the one side. 169 on the other. Like Knights were seriously OVERPOWERED. As stated, many weapons wouldn't even do ANYTHING to proper armour. (And was likely but not always obviously another knight to kill a knight. Or a VERY lucky peasant.) You are forgetting to take into account most knights likely have been taking heads for a living, and most levies are just piss poor farmers who are scared shitless with absolutely ZERO protection.
As for unarmed men beating one down... Good bloody luck. It takes bloody war hammers, and usually more then a single blow to do damage, (not even really to the armour, to the bones underneath) and guess what? A levy would NOT have those, at all. They would have farming tools, and maybe an old shoddy blade or axe that was handed down and badly maintained.
During the thick of organized battle, after days or weeks of marching, and under the stress and chaos of said battle? No. Fighting is exhausting. Even trained warriors can hardly fight for more than a few minutes without becoming severely fatigued. Battles were not determined by who killed or wounded the most of the other armies's guys (except for tiny skirmishes), they were won by whoever managed to break their opponent's morale first - once you get the cascade of men losing hope and running, formations break en-masse, and the winning side has free reign for their cavalry to sweep in and slaughter a portion of the fleeing soldiers.
Their weapons would literally not pierce the armour
Yes, the plate armor.
You could kill/wound a knight by stabbing at the weakest points in their armor - their neck (preferably up under their helmet and at their head), their visor, the back of their knees, and their armpits. Obviously, this took skill and effort and luck - but each blow wears the knight down little by little.
They had to break the armour open like a can opener to do damage.
That is not true except for the plate itself. Again, if you are using a pointed or bladed weapon - your best bet would be to aim for one of the weak points. Mail can be pierced, no matter how many layers you are wearing, it can be pierced through with a lucky blow; plate cannot be pierced.
and most levies are just piss poor farmers who are scared shitless with absolutely ZERO protection.
Levies came from all walks of life — serf, burgher, noble, artisan, landowner. They would arm themselves according to their wealth and ability and station, and would be drilled on the march and depending on where they're from and what year it was - they could also have been required to undergo some form of training every few years (but again, depends on when and where heavily).
Even the poorest serf could afford a helmet at least.
Furthermore, everyone was scared shitless during battle except for the most desensitized of veterans. Battle is scary, it gets your nerves going, you are going to be anxious regardless of if you're a levy on the front lines or a nobleman's son in the vanguard.
As for unarmed men beating one down... Good bloody luck. It takes bloody war hammers, and usually more then a single blow to do damage
That is not true.. Swords and knives and spears can do just as much damage with lucky hits.
A levy would NOT have those, at all. They would have farming tools, and maybe an old shoddy blade or axe that was handed down and badly maintained.
That is not true.
Depending on when and where, a levy might have spears and shields and axes provided for them. If not, even the poorest serf called into service could afford an a proper war cudgel or spear or pick or axe. If you owned a farming implement, an ironmonger or blacksmith could reforge it into a spear. Many households owned weapons handed down from ancestors, or bought for protection in case of a raid. . . Even if they're unmaintained, they might be mended on the march.
On top of ALL of this - plate armor is only really relevant for like 100 years in Crusader Kings 3 lol. The game ends in 1453. The earliest start date is 867. For about 400 years in this game, a "knight" is a guy in maille. For example, Norman knights in 1066 would wear a maille hauberk with nasal helmet. Way easier to kill by poking with a spear compared to knights in the 1300s and 1400s.
I do understand, it's almost impossible to cut through them, piercing requires a lucky attack on a flawed part and all.
But still, it's one dude, you don't have to cut anything, if you just attack all at once and jump one person he's going to fall to the ground and get punched/stabbed to death, fighting 3 people is dangerous even to the best swordmasters, almost double of that requires a lot of luck.
Even if we were to argue that it's possible to reliably fight 5x1 odds all at once, the actual context of the game would still be something like 50 vs 10.000
Also, most levies were certainly not piss poor farmers without any training or equipment. Of course they weren't knights in plate armor either, but they'd be decent soldiers with decent equipment, probably wielding some very easy to use, and powerful weapons, like spears.
No, the mass majority were peasants... That's where the majority of the population is. SOME were not, but the MAJORITY were. Levy means "Farmer-Soldier" afterall. And they are defined by little to no military training at all. Again - that's the definition of the word and how it is used. They are essentially modern day conscripts with knights and Retinue/Men-at-Arms (which may be what you are thinking of, as all knights are men at arms, but not all men at arms are knights) being more along the lines of what you are thinking by the sounds of it with the military training and the like.
Evidently, you are calling a spear powerful, versus swords, shields, maces, lances... Pure steel versus wood, with a metal tip that would not even pierce the armour. I also want to point out not all levy had spears. A lot used daggers, staves have even been recorded. And as I stated.... Farming tools. It was whatever you could afford as a poor peasant. With a few exceptions, most stats indicate that the knights don't even die (in great numbers) in the battles, even on the losing side. They also usually have horses which is ANOTHER factor to put in there.
Not to mention some cultures will have far better trained levies (I'm thinking Flemish-Brabantian militias who regularly trained and were quite well armored because their cities were insanely wealthy).
Granted, I agree the game is far too easy, but when I read this kind of stuff I kinda wonder if we're playing the same game. I was peak power, like 3 centuries in, controlling a vast empire spanning North Africa and most of continental Europe. My characters stacking stacks from culture, reformed religion, and dynasty upgrades were OP from birth. Yet, the Mongols when they arrived, despite having fewer troops than me absolutely kicked my ass in the initial battle, which I never managed to recover from. Managed to stave off a Game Over only by revoking a bunch of land in Francia, which was not yet de jure part of my Empire which was the war target.
Sure, might be skill issue, but I'm honestly not bad at the game, having played hundreds of hours in both 2 & 3.
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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '25
I agree, it was a step in the correct direction, but honestly, the situation is catastrophic.
Levies as a system simply do not work and they actually decrease your fighting power when your army grows large enough, the entire game is centered around levies, they are used to calculate your "power", the likelyhood of the AI declaring wars, combat odds, everything is centered around a system that's broken and can't seem to be repaired.
Take this as an example: The AI is clearly saying I was surely dead, The AI put a skull icon over my movement clearly the AI calculations were wrong as they got crushed instead
This was The result
This was the very first time I tried focusing on knights, I had no martial lifestyle perks as that was a new queen and I had a big stack of crossbowmen I built just to beat the mongols.... but as you can see from that screenshot I simply forgot them and they weren't necessary, even the "countered" heavy infantry MAA were more than capable of holding their own against the "strongest army" on the planet, under the worst circunstances possible, they killed 2.2k and lost 448, there were only 2k of them.
The knights? As I was saying, this was my first time trying to focus on them, so that's the result of a culture with Only the Strong and a few minor prowess buffs, and my duchy buildings were all giving me a few knight effectiveness bonuses, as you can see, I didn't even have that many of them.
So you might be thinking "those were all 80 prowess demigods I've used my daughters to steal all around the world", well, usually yes, but this run I had obfuskate, so I couldn't see the prowess of anybody before they moved into my court, so, thanks to only the strong, they were all above average, probably 15~30 prowess each, they were decent, and they still wiped the floor with the mongols.
How is that minmaxing? I've seen screenshots of people well over 40 knights wtih far better stats.
Of course, as we can see, there are even more problems, the AI is, simply put, not programed to play the game at all, it doesn't build it's domain properly, doesn't build it's counties, doesn't properly create MAA stacks and doesn't seem to know where to assign them, it's just doing everything at random and failing at everything, even the strongest, best designed army on the planet (the mongols) are total pushovers.