The only real way to keep moving your legacy forward is to hatch schemes of your own. If you sit back reading the help screens, the game itself will pass you by.

What starts out as overwhelming eventually becomes easy to understand, due in part to the fact that it’s all written out in plain language.īut Crusader Kings 3 isn’t simply a bookish pursuit. Opening up one tooltip will spawn three or four more, each with more new information than the last. It’s the only way I was able to come to personal grips with the game’s multiple currencies, its powerful system of councillors, and its byzantine and shifting system of vassalage. The result is an active tips system that is opt-in, one that explains the game’s multiple concepts on an as-needed basis. What it does have is an informative tooltip system that draws from that larger encyclopedia. Like many other games in the Paradox Interactive library, the game doesn’t have much in the way of a tutorial. My greatest resource in learning to play Crusader Kings 3 has been the game’s clever new in-game encyclopedia. For a franchise whose previous entries were primarily known for having near-vertical learning curves and an impenetrable user interface, Crusader Kings 3 is a remarkable achievement in transparency. The game does a surprisingly good job of supporting and allowing the player to pull off these kinds of wild stunts. I did what any other conscientious ruler in the 12th century would do - and murdered my younger son instead. Morality has an in-game cost, but so does inaction. Here, you can see a massive army ready to break a siege, ending the player’s hope of enforcing their demands. It would also have increased my stress, driving me ever closer to madness. In gameplay terms, the hit to my reputation (both Piety and Prestige) would have been catastrophic. But neither my religious obligations to my faith (the Pope frowns on incest, as you can imagine) nor my ongoing love affair with the Holy Roman Emperor (with whom I shared a venereal disease, by the way) provided an incentive for me to get in bed with my own son. Politically and militarily it was the right thing to do, as it would have consolidated our dynastic holdings following the death of my husband. It’s a delicate balancing act, and one that forces players to understand the characters they have under their control and play them to type - or be prepared to deal with the consequences.Īt one point, while playing as Matilda of Tuscany around the year 1100, my own son offered to marry me. Kings and queens can literally go insane, reducing their ability to rule and setting themselves up for ruin. You can make a good and pious ruler do terrible things, but push anyone too far and they’ll snap. The challenge is in piling up the right decisions in the right order to set yourself - and your children - up for success while not going stark raving mad.įor the first time in franchise history, Crusader Kings 3 models the idea of stress. Meanwhile, every other character in the world is trying to do the same kinds of things. Don’t like your boss? Then seduce your liege and murder them in their sleep. Want your neighbor’s land? The game has half a dozen ways to take it for yourself. It’s because where other strategy games tend to say no, Crusader Kings 3 says yes.ĭon’t like your wife or your husband? Then arrange for a divorce. That’s not because the game itself is capricious.

Once the simulation is set in motion, just about anything can happen. You can step into the shoes of any one of hundreds of different historical figures spread out all across the ancient world, from the British Isles and Africa to India and the Mongolian steppe.

Or you can begin the game in the 11th century, when huge, ponderous beasts like the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy dominate the landscape. You can enter the fray in the ninth century, when the majority of individual kingdoms are small and feisty. What’s remarkable is the sheer scale of the game. Your heir will now actually look like a combination of you and your spouse. In this latest iteration, Paradox has significantly upgraded the visuals.

Crusader kings 3