Crusader Kings III early thoughts and impressions?
I've only played for a couple of hours so these really are "impressions".
Positively i'll say its probably PDS's best release. Very few bugs and they are mostly minor that i have seen. There seems to be enough generic and western european content to keep most fans happy, at least for a couple of weeks. I surprisingly like the UI colour and set up. I thought it was a bit modern in the dev diaries but it works well and is less tacky than a thematic scheme might look. The cycling of the map modes on zoom works well. The amount of "meme" is really overplayed on the reddits and marketing, ive only played a few hours but the flavour reminds me of early CK2 rather than late Glitterhoof CK2.
My main negatives at the moment are i find there is often an overwhelming amount of information on screen between the side panels, the alerts tab at the top and how wherever you put your mouse seems to open one or more information popups its a bit cluttered.
I thought the 3D characters would be more memorable than the 2D portraits but i find the opposite. I cant remember any of the characters by image, they all feel very similar. This might be until i am more familiar with the differences though.
There is tons to do outside Europe too. I've been playing in West Africa with a pagan religion dynasty in the Songhai culture region east of Ghana, and I've been super evil in my playthrough so far, since they get crazy amounts piety for human sacrifices (2x for kids!). And when combined with my sadistic trait starting character (who can imprison and sacrifice his own kids) and his lustful, genius wife, plus a constant supply of fresh concubines, I managed to sacrifice enough kids and prisoners of war to reform the religion in about 40 years, and morph it into an even more fucked up custom religion. And best of all, my heir now has the genius trait too, as does his sister-wife, with no other brothers or unwed sisters alive anymore to screw up the inheritance either... so I'm in a really fantastic place for when my King finally dies.
I started playing at 1am last night, and it's almost 1pm the next day so I went on a 12 hour binge and still fell like I have barely scratched the surface. It's definitely the most complete feeling game at launch that Paradox has released in a very long time, and I cant wait to start playing again once I wake up in 8 hours. :P
So far I like it, but without being super excited about it. It plays well and feels very much like CK2, but a CK2 where they stripped a lot of the cruft off of it. No longer do you have to agree a second time to have a kid complete a planned engagement! No more choosing educational focuses for each of your 12 kids! I feel like they put some work into making sure that every decision and click you make actually matters, with a minimum of makework.
On the negative side, it doesn't really feel that different from CK2 with all the DLC. On the positive side, you don't have to pay hundreds of dollars for it.
I was just about to submit GamesIndustry.biz's "Critical Consensus" article about the game separately, but putting it here seems like an appropriate place: Crusader Kings 3 - Critical Consensus
I really need to sit down and force myself to learn this game. My only gripes with the Civilization series are the lack of roleplaying and not enough micro-managing, so the CK series always struck me as the obvious solution to that problem.
Unfortunately I run face-first into the learning curve every single time I tried to get into CK2. I watched Let's Plays, I tried the in-game tutorial, but idk it just never stuck with me. I was hoping it'd be more like Civilization where it's easy to start playing, but there's an underlying complexity to it that you pick up on after a few games. But it seems like CK's complexity is there from the get-go.
Any suggestions? Does CK3 have a tutorial to ease folks in? Or am I just not trying hard enough?
Yeah, it does. And the in-game tutorial for CK3 is actually reasonably comprehensive this time round too. You just click "Play Tutorial" when it promps you after first loading up the game, and it drops you into a 1066 start where you play as Petty King Murchad mac Donnchad of Munster in Ireland {AKA newbie Island), and then the official tutorial kicks off and lasts for about an hour or so. It walks you through all the basics of the mechanics and UI, and even touches on some of the more advanced stuff as well. Although even after the tutorial ends, CK3 also has really good tooltips and even some guide popups to help you out at certain key points. The built in suggestion/reminder system is also really great and can pretty much guide you through your first few playthroughs too... so for completely new players CK3 will likely be a lot easier to learn than CK2, IMO.
p.s. Even though I have almost 400 hours in CK2, I still ran through the tutorial really quickly just to get a grip on the new systems, mechanics, and menu locations... and it was good enough that afterwards I felt pretty comfortable with going straight into Ironman, so that says a lot.
My big fear for this, and why I've been avoiding getting too involved is that it continues the trend of Paradox games going from a more feel of influencing a simulated world to the a board game-y feel (e.g. EU4 "Spend mana to convert province"). Well that and the Stellaris and Imperator launches were pretty weak. Stellaris they've turned around, my impression is Imperator not so much. How's it feeling so far?
I'm already up to 51 hours played in 3.5 days, and I'm about to dive in for another lengthy session again right after this, so I think that says it all. :P
As to your complaints about their other games; Converting a province's culture or religion in CK3 actually requires an advisor be dedicated solely to that task for years on end, you don't just click to spend points and have it happen automagically like in EU4. It also takes many, many years to succeed (% chance to make incremental progress every month, depending on the advisor skill level) and progress can be gained or lost if certain events tied to the task occur. And if you move the advisor to another task at any point before the conversion is done, you reset all your progress... so once you commit your advisor to doing one of those jobs you better hope something else more important doesn't pop up that requires them to switch roles. Although if your advisor dies or you swap them for a better one, the new advisor can seamlessly take over the conversion job though, so at least it's not totally unfair in that regard.
There are times when you just spend points to accomplish things in CK3 but they all honestly make sense from a roleplaying perspective. E.g. You spend cash or prestige to start some event chains, like hosting a feast, or putting out a call for champions to come to your court. You need to spend piety or prestige, depending on the casus belli you use, to declare war. You need to spend cash and prestige to build province improvements. Etc. But even then, most of those events still take time to finish and have varied outcomes; It's only the triggering of them that costs points. The exception there being using cash to hire or bribe people, which is instantaneous.
So based on your complaints of the other Paradox games, I think you would probably be pretty happy with CK3, since it's much more of a real-time roleplaying game in a simulated world, rather than an abstracted, clinical, detached feeling map painter like the others.
p.s. My new badass, albino, Norse king and his family: https://i.imgur.com/gas8xSs.png :P
Does the Royal Edition offer anything significant game-play wise? I haven't bought the game yet, I'll be able to buy it by the end of September. Royal edition is costing less than the game plus expansion pack combo.
It doesn't include any game changing stuff, no... but it will eventually, since it's basically just a way to prepurchase some of the upcoming DLC at a slightly reduced price. The only thing that you get from it you can use immediately is the Fashion of the Abbasid Court DLC, but that's entirely cosmetic. So IMO the Royal Edition is only worth getting if you know for absolute certain that you will be buying the first expansion and flavor packs.