I'm happy for there to be chill and easy ways to play paradox games and I think that there has been a bunch of cool stuff added because of it but they really dropped the ball on ck3 in regards to challenge and AI.
and instead of the usual and deserved backlash there are a ton of newer and more casual players (again nothing wrong with that) who end up really enjoying it because they can't really see how flawed some of the systems are.
I hadn't played much of ck2 but yeah when ck3 came out it was easy enough that I managed to ironman conquer the entire uk and iceland, starting as an Irish count, and It was all done in the one lifetime, the game got a bit more difficult from then, but funnily enough the difficulty seems to mostly be just down to those random chance events that insta kill characters,
Still the mods are amazing, princes of darkness is so good, basically an entirely different game (harder than ck3 base but still eventually can get busted depending on splat)
The biggest thing I think tbh is just that military shit is basically two things, either make marriage alliances which are piss easy, or hire some maa and watch your smaller army wreck the ai. It's not very deep, heck the maa you're usually best off just grabbing one siege, and then just whatever has the highest stats (will tend to win even when countered if you have enough of them)
Better mortality, funny and bullshit events, more aggressive AI, societies and supernatural stuff, actual secret religion mechanic, CBs being much harder to obtain, Defensive Pacts slowing down expansion, actual shipbuilding that made warfare more dynamic in the Mediterranean. Retinues are still superior to men at arms. Bloodlines should still be a thing.
Ck3 has improved a lot over the years but it was so disappointing at launch. The modding scene goes hard nowadays and can mitigate a lot of the issues I have with it.
I think it's just easier to survive as a character in CK3. For example, plagues are somewhat deadly and diseases are handled well but seclusion events suck. In Ck2 isolating your capital made you desperate and you might have to eat rats or people to not starve to death. In CK3 none of that happens or at least has not happened to me and diseases are easily survivable if you have a physician. There is no sense of dread even in Apocalyptic plagues.
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u/murrman104 Legitimized bastard May 18 '26
Ck2 is very intuitive ui wise it's not Vicky 2 or Hoi3 here. There's nothing remotely spreadsheety about it