of stuff, but now you can keep your professionals separate
from the levies.”CALL THE PROS
Knights can join your cause, too. They’re a special kind of
heroic unit, and after training for their whole lives and
splashing out on the best gear, they’re ten times more
effective than the blokes with their farming pitchforks
and armor made out of kitchen utensils. If you want to do
some real damage, slip some knights into your army.
The new map might also have an impact on warfare. It
covers the same area as Crusader Kings II does now, but
with a much larger scale. All the provinces have been
unstacked and expanded, with locales that were
previously hidden away in menus now displayed on the
map itself. This means there are potentially more targets
for you to hit, while the larger playing field also means
more opportunities for Paradox to sneak in terrain that
can modify fights somewhat.
The scale might also help if you’ve got a bit of an ego.
“It makes you feel more powerful, even when you’re
playing a smaller kingdom, if the kingdom is more than
just a few provinces on a map,” says Oltner. Of course, it’s
not the size of the kingdom that matters, it’s how many
enemies you’ve got locked up in your dungeon.
It once again sounds like a lot to juggle, and that’s
before we even get to the new era-based tech system that
will apparently stop players from ballooning in size in the
early part of the game, or the currently under wraps
economic details. Fåhraeus says it’ll be easier to parse this
time, at least, with a Stellaris-like tutorial and a
suggestions widget that gives you hints about what you
should do, highlighting interesting opportunities.
Crusader Kings III is shaping up to be less of a
departure and more iterative than I expected, given how
refreshing its predecessor was. It’s drawing out and
expanding the most popular features while also
introducing things players have been requesting for years,
but so far it’s not provided many surprises. It’s absolutely
playing to its strengths, though, and the extra emphasis on
role-playing should please nearly everyone.EXPAND YOUR KINGDOM
Crusader Kings II’s best DLC
WAY OF LIFE
Small, but essential—this is the
inspiration for one of CKIII’s big
systems, letting you pick a
focus for your character that
confers a stat boost and lots
of events.CONCLAVE
Give your council some love. Oh
no, that’s too much, and now
they want everything. Conclave
gives everyone more agency,
but kinda makes them
assholes. It’s brilliant.MONKS AND MYSTICS
Speak to the devil, join secret
societies, and make cool new
friends. It’s all a bit silly, but
Monks and Mystics boasts
some of the most entertaining
events in the game.OLD GODS
Vikings! They’re rowdy, they like
loot, and they’re lots of fun. The
Old Gods expansion packs in a
lot of flavor, but also practical
things like human sacrifice and
big viking invasions.THE LAST CRUSADE
If you’re Catholic, for instance, but
think that communion should involve
actually eating human flesh, you can
form a new faith, nominally
Christian, but with lots of unique
quirks. Cannibalism is a quirk, right?
If you’ve got enough Piety to spend,
you can make more radical changes,
effectively constructing a new
religion. And yes, you can become a
pope, cosmic timelord, or whatever
away for you and your vassals, and
while you’ll have a lot of them,
they’re not that great in a fight. But
you can also hire special units like
cavalry, or someone who knows how
to hold a sword properly. “CKII had a
confusing number of troop types that
were mixed up in strange ways,” says
Fåhraeus. “You couldn’t make
meaningful decisions with this messyou want to call it. That’s when you get to start doing the
really fun stuff, kicking off crusades and holy wars.
Crusader Kings has always had an awkward
relationship with its titular system. It implies it’s all about
conquest from the perspective of some Europeans, but
that’s not remotely the focus, and certainly not now that
years of DLC have made crusades drift further from the
game’s center. CKIII still isn’t really about crusades.
“I was never really happy with the name Crusader
Kings; something like A Game of Kings would have been
better,” says Fåhraeus. “It’s a ruler simulator set the
medieval times. I prefer to be able to cover the whole
world, or at least the whole Old World, somehow. The
problem is that some countries like China or the
Byzantine Empire weren’t really feudal. So you have to
either make the decision to shoehorn them in, or you
don’t let them be played.”
If crusading does tickle your fancy, however, you’ll still
be able to do plenty of it, though Paradox isn’t ready to
spill the beans about war. Well, not all the beans.
Recruitment has been tidied up a bit, splitting troops into
levies and hired warriors. Levies are the peasants toiling
Crusader Kings III
COVER FEATURE