Crusader Kings

This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

A medieval wargame played on your computer. It was spun off from the popular game Europa Universalis. The first version of Crusader Kings had some file corruption bugs that were never properly patched, so most people moved to playing Crusader Kings II. After Crusader Kings III was out the second game became free to play (DLCs still have to be bought) so both of them have a large playerbase. The game uses historical figures and situations, so you cannot create a realm of anthropomorphic penoids like in Spore. The first game is still obtainable via abandonware vendors if you care about it.

Crusader Kings II

Okay so this is what most of you probably came for. A.K.A "I murdered my gay heretic son in favor of my retarded syphilitic other child because he is more obedient and fertile, and I can't father more because I got my balls cut off by Greek captors."

Crusader Kings II is best summed up as a Dynasty Simulator. You play the part of the head of a dynasty of nobles as your families fortunes wax and wane through the ages. While initially you could only be various flavors of medieval European noble houses, complete with coat of arms, later expansions would eventually broaden the range of playable experiences to include Arabic harem masters, Mongolian hordes, VIKINGS, Jewish tribes, merchant republics and more, the basic gameplay remains the same: Gain enough power, let your male bloodline survive the tides of history and reach the highest score possible when the game ends.

While that might be the "objective" of the game, (such as: Restoring the Roman Empire and Fucking up all of Europe on the side, Taking Holy Relics back from filthy Heretics, Forming a Holy Roman Empire on Steroids, etc.) the real meat of the gameplay lies in how you guide your character through their lives. Their short, brutal, adultery-filled lives. For example, starting from a petty duke of Murchad, some Irish noobland, ending up a syphilitic, dwarven, insane Holy Roman Emperor having a horse for a courtier (incidentally, some truly insane players use this and a few exploits to make said horse Pope, thereby spreading “horse culture” and having horse nobles pop up everywhere), dying fighting the Jewish Mongols in pagan Lithuania.

With the release of Crusader Kings III the second game because free to play. It still has 15 main DLCs that have to be bought if you want everything. Or you can pay for a subscription service monthly to play them all. FUCKING PARADOX

Crusader Kings III

Released by Paradox in September 2020, the game is a complete redesign from the previous one. Now every character in game is rendered via a 3D model and can do some minor movements on screen. The game also moved away somewhat from "just paint the map your color" to more of a roleplay focus with the addition of a stress meter. Now when your character does something they can gain or lose stress. Gain too much and you get stressed out and can begin indulging in less-than-savory activities which rarely work out for you in the end. These activities largely depend on your characters traits, so a lustful character will probably head down to the local brothel which helps them lose stress but also makes it very possible to catch disease, some of which can make you insane.

At launch there is only two start dates (867 and 1066) and you could not design your own custom ruler and dynasty. This changed with an update in November 2020 with a free update which, in a major Paradox change, allows you to customize your starting ruler and still play on Ironman mode and acquire achievements as long as you do no exceed a certain point threshold during character creation. People have, since then, tried their best to recreate the Hapsburgs in all their giant chin inbred glory.

Graphically the game is far better looking than CK2, with a massive redoing to the map that makes it look like one of those classic maps of yore when you zoom out far enough as well as giving each province multiple sub-regions your troops will have to move through. This makes the game more tactical since you could move an army onto a hill tile within a province by using the quicker plains terrain in it while your opponent slowly trudges through a swamp to get there as well meaning you're more likely to get to the hill and get the defense bonuses.

Another big change is with religion in the game. CK3 launched with 31 religions, almost all of which come with multiple sects (referred to as "faiths" in the game) within them to choose from (Christians can be Catholic, Orthodox, Lollard, etc for instance). However if your religion/faith is not up to your liking, then you can make your own Heresy. You'll need a lot of piety to do so and you'll probably be attacked over it but this really adds to the depth of the roleplay one can get up to in the game.

To further push into /tg/ territory, CK3 almost entirely sidetrack realm-management for dynastic gameplay, in proportions far greater than in previous two titles. Your main goal is to make your dynasty great, and that means far, far, far bigger focus on characters as such. This of course means a massive roleplaying potential, unless you want to just stare into the screen awaiting for pregnancy pop-ups and those informing you you can finally marry your 16 yo kids to someone.

The other great thing about the game is how a local lord will be absolutely unable to maintain any amount of men-at-arms, not to mention those in full harness, so suck it, realismfags and local lord posters! And you will be hard-pressed to even find a duke wealthy enough to afford an entire thousand of those lads.

With the release of the DLC "The Royal Court," far more detail into the roleplaying aspect of the game was achieved. Now artifacts have returned to the game, ranging from ones a character can equip such as crowns, armors, and purple underwear (do not be caught wearing them in the Byzantine Empire), to ones that can be put up on display in the new 3D court kings and emperors now have access to. Court artifacts can range from the fingerbone of a saint and your dynasty's banner to weirder things such as the foreskin of Christ and one of like 50 Excalibur's that appear to be just floating around the British Isles (seriously, everyone and their sister-cousin-wife have one). Along with the artifacts many more decisions are opened up to the player from appointing people to be your seneschal or royal architect, all the way down to threatening to cut a baby in half to figure out who the mother of the baby is (or just plain doing it because you're a sick fuck). You also have to maintain your court's "Grandeur" by keeping people well fed, well accommodated, well staffed, and more, all of which turn into some hefty money sinks if you want to be the best court around and get the best courtiers. Lastly, the DLC finally allows people to alter their cultures in major ways, ranging from what style of culture they are (warlike to courtly, for instance), what kind of "court language" they use, and a number of small tenets that the culture as a whole strive for, such as being xenophilic or isolationist, mountain warriors or desert nomads. If you don't like something about your culture, you can try to become the culture head and blow massive amounts of prestige and time to change it, or you can merge your culture with another (like how the Normans and Anglo-Saxons became the English), or diverge it away from the main culture (such as how the Franks diverged into becoming both the French and Occitans). Player customization has probably never been so advanced in a Paradox game before.

Basic Description

Crusader Kings II Basically follows a simple premise: You're a King/High King/Sultan/Deathlord on a Horse let loose in a world of Heresy, Shitty Friends, Homeless shitheads that wanna make a kingdom out of your existing kingdom and strangers who want to torture you for fun, have fun. Almost immediately you can do whatever the hell you want. See that country right there? You can take it. You wanna have some crazy-ass Harem? You can do that too. The real challenge of the game is keeping your Vassals happy so they don't poison you, keeping your title away from the hundreds of bastards your predecessor left behind, and making sure your next-door neighbor doesn't surprise you with an army of angry Heretics standing at your front doorstep.

Some More Detail

The game world for CK2 is Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Central and Southern Asia as well as what we would consider Western China. The map is then divided into whole mess of little territories called counties. Each county is/can be part of a duchy, each duchy part of a kingdom and each kingdom in turn, can be, or already is a part of an empire. Depending on which game start date you choose (Early Middle Ages of 769, the Viking Age of 867, the Iron Century of 936, the High Middle Ages of 1066 or the Late Middle Ages of 1337) will determine what kingdoms and empires are on the map.

Once you make your choice of start date, you select an independent realm (usually a kingdom but you can select down to a count who rules only one county if you wish) You can then choose any start landed character independent or no whose highest title is above Barony I.E. Counts and, if you have the proper DLC, can then make you're own ruler. Designing the ruler is divided into a few steps, not unlike making a character for typical RPG. You start by designing their looks which is dependent on their ethnicity (you can mix things up too, making a Bedouin woman in Finland or an Irish man in Sri Lanka if you want), then you move on to design their family crest/coat of arms. After this you get to the meat of your character where you choose a bunch of traits for them to increase or decrease their stats. The five "main" stats are Diplomacy (how well you can chat with these inbred asses), Martial (how well you can cleave that Viking berserker in half), Stewardship (how well you can manage your vassals as well as how many you can handle), Intrigue (want to poison your daughter-sister-wife? This is the stat you want) and Learning (how well can you read and/or reason). Three other sub-stats play a big part of the game as well - Health (pretty simple to understand), Fertility (how likely you are to have a kid when doing the nasty) and Age (do you need an explanation on this one?). Every trait you pick raises and/or lowers almost all of your traits and may also affect how others treat you. For example, you could start the game as a Genius (boosts all of your stats basically) but you're paying for it by being older. If you have a lot of good traits but are too old to survive more than a day without someone spoon feeding you prunes, you could take a couple of debilitating traits such as Inbred though that carries a lot of stat, health and fertility penalties as well.

Once your character is made and you're in the game, your ultimate goal is survival of your bloodline, and always have legit successor. Everyone and their Anti-Pope wants your lands. You can turn enemies into friends, friends into enemies and convert to heresies but everything you do comes at a cost of either manpower, gold, prestige or piety (usually combinations of them as well). And you want babies, lots of them. The more kids you have, the more likely at least one won't end up in some Sultan's prison and the more likely you are to let your dynasty continue. Once your character dies (from plague, war, poison, old age or otherwise), if you have an heir that holds territory or inherits your lands, they are your new character. Hopefully you raised them right and they are not inbred, slow, left-handed, cruel heretical zealots.

As your realm expands, the realities of medieval feudalism will start to set in; you will start having to give out and manage territories to your extended family and supporters, as increasing the lands that you rule directly will start to incur high financial penalties. The trade off is that if you don’t manage your internal politics well, that nice juicy region you just conquered will be yoinked away by rebellious relatives, especially if they don’t like the fact that you just started a new religion where inbred nudity is not only permitted, but encouraged. One counter to this is the so-called “North Korea strategy,” whereby you jail your vassals while moving around their offices and possessions until you become the sole power of your kingdom. This still incurs a big financial penalty, but if your empire is large enough, the sheer volume of taxes you receive will far outweigh it.

Some Silly Things

With all of the expansions, the devs have added quite a bit of hilarious little content to the game. Some of these are:

• Playing chess with Death himself for your life.
• Joining a few peasant children to play a tabletop game of figures arrayed against each other, all attacks and armor saves determined with ballistic/assault phases. Now where did we hear that before?
• Inventing flight but wrecking the wingsuit as the baker's son is too fat to maintain lift.
• Being able to break the map up so there are no kings or emperors and half the map is filled with anthropomorphic cats, dogs and dragons.
• Hearing heavy metal covers of Christmas songs during December IRL.
• When sieging Tuscany, Italy, you may be counterattacked by "Tuscan Raiders."
• Literal Cthulhu worship if you are a lunatic pagan.
• Eating an immortal courtier and gaining its powers.
• Blaming the baker's wife and imprisoning her for 20 years to make sure you are slick.
• Sinking so deep into madness that you can declare turnips to be currency, or reach the zenith of madness and make a horrible decision; declaration of Universal Rights of Humanity, ensuring no one in your territories will be discriminated on race, skin, religion or gender, torture is illegal, and the height of civil rights will be reached. Can you imagine? In 1200?
• Making a horse a member of your council and being able to marry her. He in turn, can spawn horse children from human wives who will spread across the world and make the whole world a Game of Thrones...of horses.
• All Greek nobles eat up CPU in philosophizing about castrating EVERY OTHER NON-GREEK. Yes. Google it.

All in all, these little things will pale in comparison to the insanity your personal game will have (such as your spymaster putting a hit out on himself to prevent him from finding out about a hit he put out on himself), but they are always fun to see and reinforce that this is just a game.

Notable Mods

• After the End - What if, instead of Medieval Europe, the game takes place in post-apocalyptic North America? CK3 version is in the works
• Triforce Kings - CK2 with The Legend of Zelda races and characters.
• Elder Kings - From the mad mind of Bethesda, the world of Tamriel is yours to conquer. Ever wondered what an Argonian Empire in Skyrim would be like? This one is for you. For both CK2 an CK3.
• A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin would be proud from all the murder, incest and intrigue you get up to in this game. Comes with multiple start dates as well, starting from before the Valyrian Freehold collapsed up to just before the end of A Feast For Crows in 300 After Conquest. As the CK3 version is being made the final start dates for The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring may not come.
• Warhammer: Geheimnisnacht - A mod set in the Warhammer Fantasy Battle, set around the Time of Three Emperors and the Vampiric Wars, the map covers from Lustria and Naggaroth to the Dark Lands and Chaos Wastes, and include playable factions from old staples like The Empire to obscure shit like The Amazons, Albion and Pygmies (Yes, the fucking Pygmies, here they are Halflings though). CK3 version under development, unfortunately meaning that the Everchosen mechanic for CK2 likely isn't going to fixed but man it will be glorious when the CK3 version is out.
• Faerûn - Forgotten Realms Total Conversion - Yes, someone decided to make a mod to play in everyones favorite kitchen sink fantasy setting, with some creative liberties taken. And yes, there will be a CK3 version.
• The Way of Kings CK3 - For those wanting to play in the Stormlight Archive setting. Generally agreed to be one of the best mods for CK3.
• Princes of Darkness - Dark Ages: Vampire mod, for both CK2 and 3. Pick your vampire lord and manage your domain, or play as the Inquisition and purge all vampires, maybe play as the Kuei-Jin of India and Southeast Asia and seek enlightenment, or be a mummy and drive away the Followers of Set from Egypt, fight against the Wyrm as a werewolf, or rage against the heavens as a demon.

Plenty of others that run the gamut from adding magic, laser guns and more. Make sure they are up-to-date with your version of the game and enjoy.