Crusader Kings 2 was a surprise hit in the PC gaming world. Unlike the seemingly more inaccessible flagship franchise of Paradox Interactive Europa Universalis, this grand strategy title managed to gain a wider audience of many people who played more RTS style games, such as Starcraft or Total War, or turn-based games like Civilization. The same process was true for me. Before Crusader Kings 2, I had not played any Paradox games, so I had no idea what to expect. What I found was the surprising charm that earned this game a Game of the Year nomination.
The sheer depth of this game is what makes it special. Players can select any feudal lord in Europe from the lowest count of Briefne (a small county in Ireland) to the emperor of the Byzantine Empire, and the Ruler Creator DLC allows players to even create their own dynastic founder and replace any of the lords of Europe. Further extending the possibilities of the game, the Sword of Islam DLC adds access to the many Sunni and Shia rulers with their own levels of hierarchy and the Republic adds access to the republics of Venice, Pisa, etc.
Almost every one of the territories on the map has a character associated with it to play as. Selecting one can be daunting but adds incredible replay value to the game.
After the sizeable task of deciding a starting character, the player’s primary goal is simply to survive and pass on his or her holdings to the next generation. Aside from this essential goal, every other task is up to the player to determine. Would you like to unite the Irish dukes and earls into a strong Kingdom of Ireland? You can do it with the proper planning. Want to establish a leverage yourself to take the Holy Roman Empire? With good planning and maneuvering, you can. The freedom can be off-putting to some players, but many will enjoy the ability to simply do what they choose.
What really makes this game stand out is the long-term consequences of actions and the advanced AI. When I started my first game as an Irish duke, I had no idea that my decision to marry my son and heir to a princess of Aragon would a generation later allow me to claim Aragon and thus have permanent interests in Spain despite losing Aragon about three generations later. I thus found myself in holy wars with the Spanish Muslims and gained considerable territory in southern Spain that I held even after Aragon rebelled and gained independence. Thus, one marriage I arranged in the first generation of my dynasty still influences how I play the game about 250 years later.
The AI in this game is incredibly sophisticated; every character has an opinion of every other character based on a wide variety of factors, from whether you are charitable or if you killed one of their family members. This opinion systems gives characters in the game very realistic motivations and goals. For example, if a character who is your vassal has a claim on your title, they will hate you for that and will take any opportunity to press their claim and oust you. It always seemed to me that these people would wait for a moment of weakness on my part to strike, such as when I am fighting another war. This behavior always struck me as highly human-like.
These two unique strengths of the game hooked me and kept me playing for over 50 hours in just a few weeks. It really has the legendary Civilization “just one turn” mentality and is surprisingly engaging considering you are always looking at the same basic screen (the map of Europe) with various pop-ups. It is also an incredibly complex game that requires many playthroughs to truly understand the mechanics, and even then it will likely still surprise you.
- Graphics/Visual Effects 5
As I mentioned, the main visual of this game is the map of Europe; from the start to the finish of the play session, this map will occupy the majority of the screen. For this reason, the game does not have the graphical appeal or variety of many similar titles, such as Total War games. The game’s visual experience also suffers from a lack of character face diversity (even with the DLC faces packs)–almost everyone of the same rank and gender looks about the same as everyone else of that rank and gender. This is not that big a deal except that the faces are the only way to see a character in the game; greater variety would be helpful in this regard to differentiate people.
The map, however, is surprisingly versatile graphically, allowing the player to visualize all the currents of religion, culture, and politics with various map modes. Also, the unit models for armies do not look too bad; though they are small on the map, they are quite detailed. For this reason, I will finalize a rating of 5 for graphics.
- Story Content 8
While it might be surprising that I have rated the story content fairly high for this title as it has no specific goals, I think two major strengths of the game create a good story experience: the careful historical setup possible for the start of the game (there are stories already in play depending on when you start the game) and the potential for the game to generate stories.
As far as the historical stories, one of the best examples is the first bookmarked date (when most players start the game). At the start of the game in this scenario, there is a three-way battle for England going on between Duke William of Normandy, King Harald of England, and King Harald of Norway. This is the drama of this scenario and the winner will hold considerable influence throughout the game. What is particularly exciting about this story element is that each time you play the game, the winner of the war changes. In my first game, for example, Norway won, but it is equally common for William to win. This political story changes the entire course of the game. In addition, the Crusades and Mongol invasions add more interesting story elements to the game.
Secondly, the game is extremely good at generating stories. The robust AI with each character’s unique ambitions and characteristics leads to dramatic stories of succession, family betrayal, and war. As players pursue their own self-selected goals, they inevitably come into contact with the AI’s goals, and the conflict ensues. These conflicts create such a nuanced story progression that is just fun to talk with other people about because it is the stuff of fantasy novels. This means that while there is no specific storyline to play through in the game, the game becomes a story just because of its mechanics.
After a long dynasty, the family tree tells an awesome story of intrigue, war, and politics.
Yet, this approach does not appeal to all users. For this reason, this category ends up with an 8 because it creates strong stories for those users who are in to making their own storylines.
For examples of the storytelling potential of this game, check out these AARs (after-action reports):
- Story Pacing 10
One of the surprising aspects of this game is how well paced the game is even though the game’s scope is about 400 years and covers many generations of the family. Despite this scope, things seem to happen all the time as you are playing. You would be surprised how many events and family dramas can happen in a short space of time, especially when you are at war at the same time.
While this may not be the case when you first start, in my experience things start happening very quickly and it becomes quite engrossing. In addition, the game allows you to easily change the pace of the game to whatever speed you are most comfortable with. This is highly useful for long sieges or waiting for a truce to end, times when I had to increase the speed to faster than my normal speed in order to get on with the game. The great thing about the game is it allows you to make these choices to tailor the pace to your playstyle.
- Gameplay 10
As one might expect from a Paradox Interactive game, the gameplay of Crusader Kings 2 is incredibly complex. While it is somewhat difficult to learn and requires some getting used to, once a player has learned the basics of managing their realm and family, the gameplay becomes incredibly fun. Because of the strong AI in the title, everything you do feels like a chess move that might make one person like you better but make another form a faction to overthrow you. Much of the game entails working for solutions to unintended consequences of other actions you have taken; in this sense, then, the gameplay feels quite molded to your playstyle and the history you have created for your characters.
The gameplay itself involves navigating through player, diplomacy, and holding info screens, which might seem a bit boring but actually becomes quite fun just because of how much information is passing through these menus all at once and how nuanced every action you can take becomes. There are also various popup events that grab your attention, such as declarations of war, proposals of marriage, or events related to holding a grand tournament or a summer fair. Some of these events have choices that you can make that will give your character traits or change relationships with other characters. There is usually some degree of risk in these choices; for example, you might have a 50% chance of gaining the good trait “Just” (makes most vassals like you better) but a 20% chance of gaining the bad trait “Craven” (labels you a coward and reduces your martial skill and relationships with vassals) with a certain choice. These popups add a little spice and sometimes change the course of how your current ruler’s reign is going.
This is an example of a pop-up event. In this case, the character gains the useful trait “Brave.”
The warfare system is quite unique. Unlike many strategy games where you declare war, occupy an enemies territories, and then when you sign a peace treaty those territories you’ve occupied join your realm, CK2 requires that every war have a casus beli (or “cause of war”). There are a great many types of causes, the most common of which is to press your ruler or one of your vassal’s claims on a territory controlled by another ruler. No matter which territories you capture during the war, when peace is signed you will only receive the benefits that you declared the war for (i.e. if you pressed a claim on a county, you will only gain that county from the enemy surrender). The need to have a cause for war makes warfare much more strategic; you have to set up the conditions that will allow you to declare war, which usually takes some time.
Need to capture territory from a lord of another religion? The Holy War casus beli is always available against rulers of another religion and allows you to seize all titles held by nobles of another religion in the area you’ve conquered if you win. This is useful but risky because usually other lords of the same religion will join the war against you.
- User Interface/Controls 8
The interface for this game has some real strengths but also a few annoying weaknesses. The most helpful thing about the interface is that everything you see on the screen gives you some form of information, including the world map. By filtering the map for the kind of information you want, you can quickly find religious, cultural, diplomatic, terrain, etc. information on any territory just by putting the mouse over the territory itself on the map. The map, then, becomes a powerful user interface tool for almost any action you need to do.
This screenshot is a good example of one of the map modes. This particular mode is called “Independent Realms” and shows the various powers that act independently (as in, have no liege). You can see that this particular playthrough has the Byzantine Empire incredibly fragmented.
Besides the map, the character and diplomacy screens are also fairly easy to navigate with a few well-integrated shortcuts. By clicking on a character’s face, you open their character screen that gives all the information you need on them. By right-click on their face, you have the option of also going straight to a diplomacy screen with them, allowing you to do any action you want on the character, such as declaring war, proposing marriage, or throwing them in prison. This system is quite intuitive, allowing you to quickly get to the screen that will help you most.
The one complaint that I have for a completely counter-intuitive feature of the game is how difficult it is to find the screen where you build buildings in a holding. It requires clicking on the county, then clicking on the image of the hold to bring up the building list. This feature was so hidden I spent half of my first game not building any buildings on my holds, making them considerably weaker and me considerably poorer than I should have been. This difficult to find feature brings the UI/Controls rating down to an 8 because I think the other interfaces are quite helpful.
- Soundtrack 5
The soundtrack for CK2 is not terrible by any means. It is fairly good medieval sounding music; the problem with the soundtrack is that, even with extra music from DLC, it is extremely repetitive. This problem may be due to the nature of the game that encourages long play sessions and one main screen (the map), but Paradox could have definitely included more tracks and maybe contextualized them a bit more (certain tracks that play while you are at war, for instance, that do not play when you are at peace).
- Replayability 10
Replayability for this game is, for all intents and purposes, infinite because there are so many different characters, so many starting dates and scenarios, and so many different ways that the AI plays the game even if you start with the same character at the same date. No two games will be alike, although some things will be more likely to happen. The DLC adds even more possibilities, making this game easily one of the games I will continue to come back to and always have a new experience.
- Completeness 8
Most of the bugs I have encountered in this game have been with multiplayer; there are many annoying bugs that make setting up and sustaining a multiplayer game difficult. Crashes on these games are frequent and there is an odd error that requires a restart of the host’s game if players take too long to choose their character. My single player experience so far at over 50 hours has been pretty much bug free, however.
To play as a Republic or a Muslim ruler requires DLC even though these entities exist in the base game. However, I think that the experience for these types of rulers is so different that the DLC adds to an already complete game for the most part rather than enables essential features.
Likewise, the game has a huge amount of DLC for a game only a year or so old. This suggests that some features are disabled, meaning the game might not be very complete. However, this is really not a huge issue as the basic experience of a feudal lord is unlocked at retail purchase. You can experience most of what makes this game special with no DLC; however, it is somewhat annoying that Muslim rulers and republics are there in the game but not playable without DLC. For this reason I give completeness an 8 because while some features that should be in the full game are disabled without DLC, by and large many players will not miss them at all.
- Support 10
Paradox does a great job of connecting with players and giving great patches that add features and streamline gameplay. Recent patches have solved annoyances with fragmented armies from vassals and added a faction system that allows vassals to band together against their liege, a realistic and balanced way to give vassals more political power. This game definitely deserves a 10 on support as I have no complaints so far and feel that most users agree.
- Uniqueness 10
The medieval strategy genre is incredibly overpopulated; it just seems to be a great setting to make a strategy video game. With this plethora of similarly set games, it becomes very important for any medieval strategy game to do something different from the others. Crusader Kings 2 succeeds in this regard; to my knowledge (aside from the possible exception of Crusader Kings 1), no other medieval strategy game focuses as heavily as CK2 on the characters. The Duke of Kent, for example, has a personality and pursues certain goals that his successor might not; it isn’t the duchy itself that defines the gameplay but the man or woman who rules it. Although there is warfare, it is much less central to the gameplay than other medieval strategy games. The essence of the game is creating a dynasty, interacting with other world powers and your vassals, and controlling the succession of your titles. The reason Crusader Kings 2 was such a surprise hit was because of this wholly different way of portraying medieval life.
Intangible: +6
I am giving the game a +6 intangible rating for its ability to create stories; it is a game that makes for a good story. It is fun to talk about with others and is so compelling that many players brag about close to 1000 hours played. I think the reason for this is because of how interesting the new timelines of medieval Europe you craft each time the game is played; it answers the question of what might happen if William the Conqueror failed to conquer England, what might happen if the Crusades were a success and a Christian kingdom was established in Jerusalem, or if the Mongols conquered the Byzantine Empire and converted to Sunni Islam (this just happened to me last night). The ability of this game to create stories, then, allows it to transcend itself; it goes beyond being a game and becoming almost a platform for creating stories.
However, I recognize that this game is probably not for everyone. If you are not a fan of games that have a steep learning curve or that do not have high budget visual effects, you should probably avoid this title. However, if you are a fan of Civilization and the campaign mode of Total War, this would be the perfect entry into the “grand strategy” genre for you. It is complex, yes, but not quite as complicated as other games in the genre; chances are this kind of gamer will be hooked and, like me, want to experience other Paradox Interactive titles such as Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron.
For more information, check out the subreddit for CK2 at http://www.reddit.com/r/crusaderkings.
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