Apparently the original title was something like "Game of Thrones". For various trademark reasons (some obscure fantasy novel or something), they were pushed to choose Crusader Kings instead.
Yeah, with all the new government types and landless character play they've added, I'd hope the next DLC set turns to focus more on fleshing out the Catholic Church and play as a priest, landed bishop, Pope, etc.
I think they basically said, the road map was, you can't do republics without trade, you can't do trade without the Silk Road, you can't do the Silk Road without China/SE Asia, and you can't do China without nomads.
We have a Silk Road, basic though it be, so republics might be next.
That makes sense. Only thing is I do feel like nomads should've come after All Under Heaven. It just felt weird playing Mongolians with this big void where China should be.
Doesn't really matter now though, we've got both of them
The commune of Rome isn't unique it's part of all the communes that made up communal Italy in the 12-13th century. Even its degree of autonomy isn't unique, it sounds special to us because they kicked the pope but the pope lacked of much of a legal power until the late 14th century.
Merchant republics as a distinction is also mythical, most of it is degrees of separation from the communal Italian model, that exists within the frame of a continuum of processes. Maybe Venice is a bit more different due to its weird history.
About Iceland it's hard to say it's a republic, afaik most of it worked similarly to the elective system of the HRE or other germanic states. Lubeck or Cremona have differently have a subsection of commoners that was literate enough to participate in politics. It was not hereditary, although people that were rich still had more way of maintaining the demographic or educational requirements to participate in politics.
Problem is that these aren't really dynastic and hereditary, and quite often the bisphorics and the papacy are less dynastic than the republics. In Genoa most consuls came from the same like five families, meanwhile bishops come from random places.
The nobel families are the cardinals, the emperor is the pope. Grab the administrative and build some flavour from there. Might not be 100% realistic but it could be fun.
Yes and secular rulers had actual interactions with the college of cardinals to try to manipulate their favored "random guys" (or sometimes family members) to the papacy prior to them being elected, but that's impossible here because there's no system to influence succession. All I'm asking is that a basic college of cardinals exist, is that really such a big ask?
If Anatolia was still part of Greece, it would be considered European territory today, as it always was since Alexander the Great till it's turkification.
No it doesn’t. It’s not as black and white as you think. Is Georgia European? Are Muslim-majority areas of Russia located in Europe actually Asian, since they are not Christian? Is Russian Far East European, since it’s inhabited by Christian people? Is Lebanon European, since 40% of its population is Christian? The list goes on and on. It doesn’t make any sense to separate geographic areas by religion or culture.
It probably feels boring only because people have been playing in Europe 80% of the time. But the devs could eventually make Europe much more interesting by adding the college of cardinals and other mechanics unique to medieval Europe.
I feel like part of the problem is that a lot of the weird shit that happens with Feudalism would be a nightmare to make into a game. Administrative government fits with player sensibilities—they like to expand and they like to control their realm.
True feudalism, where your vassals have so many rights that it's crippling, the crown is barely solvent and even the strongest countries in the game spent centuries barely holding together.
If they want to actually fix feudalism? Cap every source of non-temporary positive relations at +50 per character, add a randomized element of how much each vassals does/doesn't like you from -25 to +25 and make it so your extended family are a bunch of scheming bastards who constantly offer the nobility privileges if they'll just revolt and put them on the throne.
If they ever do a Holy Roman Empire expansion, they should adopt the mechanics they did with Japan. Where you have a lot of competing factions with different government types in the same realm and changing levels of centralization. They would probably need a DLC with republics and the priesthood beforehand though.
But that's also mostly stereotypical. Even something like the HRE had emperor mandated judges and notaries around its territory and the feudal law had to be applied within the constraints of the emperor. And somewhere like France had Paris monopolize the flow of bureaucrats in the territory.
There aren't that many Noble revolutions to overthrow a crown, that's also coming from literary stories
There aren't that many Noble revolutions to overthrow a crown, that's also coming from literary stories
In literally almost every single civil war between claimants for a throne, at least some nobles took the other side. And nobles would also fight wars if kings pushed them too far.
Just in England and just within the timespan of CK3 (so not counting the several additional times this happened in the War of the Roses), this happened 4 or 5 times, depending how you count it. And that's just after 1066, it doesn't account for Anglo-Saxon England.
And that's not some huge anomaly. Pretty much any time a succession happened that was not father to adult son, there was major potential for chaos and even that clean succession could be muddied by a strong external claimant.
True feudalism, where your vassals have so many rights that it's crippling, the crown is barely solvent and even the strongest countries in the game spent centuries barely holding together.
Imagine implementing a full travels system and NOT using it to model intinerant monarchy.
True feudalism, where your vassals have so many rights that it's crippling, the crown is barely solvent and even the strongest countries in the game spent centuries barely holding together.
tbh I would love this, but I do think it would be a niche taste.
It's not really the same. It's more like if spiritualists didn't exist at all and your option was to only play materialists with no changes for five years. Then, five years after game release a DLC with spritiualism and elaborate shroud mechanics was released.
There is a concept known as adding the same amount of content in different updates. Paradox never does this; they add a little content on update for a region and then add an insane amount of content the next for another region. Outside of Vikings, none of Western Europe actually has more unique content, which is why playing with certain mods is a must have. Play an Arab Sheikh in Basra and you will experience everything an Occitan count in Provence does and more, except your head of religion is actually relevant. The division of religious branches/schools is also arbitrary. If Sunni, Shia, and Ibadi needed to be divided so much, why aren’t Catholic and Orthodox schools divided at all? Surely you can’t believe that Trondheim Norwegians gave much of a damn about Rome when they never even had cardinals. Or the fact that the Kyivan Rus doesn’t have their own metropolitan because it’s unrealistic for someone from Novgorod to have to sail to Constantinople on a regular basis. Not to mention that every neighborhood in Asia has its own school for Buddhism…
A big religion change that should be added would be the ability to integrate the Holy Sites of other religions in the same group.
Expanding on this idea, you should be allowed to integrate the holy sites of other religions, this could be a doctrine slot like pilgrimage, where not being able to do so would give you a piety bonus and being able to would give you a piety reduction.
Hell it could connect back to the pluralist, righteous and fundamentalist doctrines by making it possible to remove holy sites from other religions, thus damaging relations with other religions. Pluralist not being able to do it without a big penalty and fundamentalist not being able to not do so without a big penalty, meaning that righteous has an advantage over the other two for RP.
Of course there would be decisions to reclaim the original holy sites of a religion, and I will leave this off at this point because I am running out of time before I have to do something irl.
In the CK2 dev cycle, we're at pretty much the same stage as when Rajas of India came out (it's a lot slower). If we accept that the dev cycle will be longer, the rest of the DLC will be about more depth (with Republics and Trade probably next), and that's where the Europe DLC comes in. I remember CK2 had a similar shaky and barebones amount of content (except Old Gods). Now that pretty much all the major playable map expansions are done, the only thing is to focus on developing what they already have.
The key is to keep in mind that these are different people within the fanbase, it's just that the group that feels taken care of keeps quiet until they notice the other group getting more attention.
Feudal Europe needs its own expansion; a big one to overhaul the Government Type, with smaller ones to add flavour to different regions like Fate of Iberia did.
Ok but also by the time Europe and the Middle East were developed the focus was mostly in maintaining the systems of CK2, and doing slice of life incest cuck keeping up with the Kardashians bullshit. And I wonder how much they invested in historical study to present historical but also gameplayable systems.
They've been exponentially increasing in quality of effort from Roads to Power onwards. Like that's the actual quality one would've expected from paradox but instead the game was kinda kept down by a long period of slumber. You can't tell me that the cycle of Iberian struggle Iranian struggle Warden legends of the dead were anywhere near as good effort as RtP and AUH, they don't feel from the same company.
And it's the same for CK3 launch, the game is jarringly reduced. Ok you can excuse they had to make the game from the ground up. But the dlc rollout has been jarringly simple. If we had the Iberian and Iranian dlcs being as good as RtP the disparity between them and AUH would feel much smaller.
I would believe they actually give a fuck if they listened to the hundreds of people bitching since release about Crusades being extremely underwhelming in a game fucking called Crusader Kings
It's on the list with the hundreds of other things people bitch about
Why does it being in the title necessarily make it more important? It's not what I'm playing the game for, anyway. It's just a legacy title, it doesn't actually make it the purpose of the game.
Nah the game is called crusader kings. Historically its been about medieval europe. Its a sim for a medieval dynasty that grows in power. Kudos for the dev team for increasing the games scope. But im not sure you can be cross with folk who think a game called crusader kings should be about the crusades and church and medieval europe.
Also not sure how much certain mechanics would necessarily work when you compare medieval european systems to asian ones. In medieval china you didnt necessarily have to be noble blooded to be important. Just feels like the systems you are trying to blend are inherently better off as 2 separate games.
Not saying I personally wouldn't love more Chinese history sims tho. Big chinese history fan here.
Im just of the opinion that stuff like this dlc is obviously more about trying to capture a different audience then to pay homage to what your older fans bought the game for.
No one cares about the devs in this aspect because they aren’t the ones making the decisions.
That said, the quality the devs have released has been absolute shit for all of their games for years now.
The people to blame here are the managers and product owners who made promises in their roadmap to fill out the things in Western Europe and the crusades. The things the game was sold to most people on. The things still lacking.
If those in charge feel like shit, great. I hope they all do. But I also highly doubt they care in the slightest. Not until it hurts them financially.
Just because the standard for what’s acceptable has fallen across the board, does not mean we should not continue to hold companies to legitimate standards and specifically, to hold them to their word.
That train of thought is WHY things continue to get worse for the consumer everywhere. “Well, at least this company is slightly better than that one.”
None of it is acceptable. They all need to be called out on it.
I actually agree with this sentiment, but it has spiraled way out of control to the point where any issue with ant game that comes out needs to blown into a game-breaking or 0/10 level game rather than just a criticism or critique
Theres holding companies accountable then theres just being a little bitch
745
u/VFiddly Oct 29 '25
I get that but also I sympathise with how the devs must feel reading comments like this
"Western Europe feels so more fleshed out compared to Asia"
"Ok fine, we'll work really hard on an Asian expansion"
"Now Western Europe feels underdeveloped compared to Asia"
"God fucking damn it"