Is restoring the Roman Empire in Crusader Kings 3 the hardest challenge?
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Is restoring the Roman Empire in Crusader Kings 3 the hardest challenge?
Is restoring the Roman Empire in Crusader Kings 3 the hardest challenge?
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No, the hardest challenge is finding something good in that dogshit game.
why must the first post also be the best post?
Forming the realm of the Outremer in CKII and managing to keep it going was pretty rough
At least I got to wipe out all israelites on the map and completely erase the Solomon bloodline as well while I was at it
>Not breeding all the bloodlines into one gigachad bloodline
Ck3 is a shit game.
The only fun game I ever had was conquering a province in Crimea as a Godwin, losing my last province in England and recreating an Anglo Saxon Kingdom and never downgrading to empire level.
yes make an Ireland that doesn't collapse in 1 generation
I still find myself baffled at how mismanaged this game has been. The game released as barebones as is physically possible, and it took them a full year and a half to release the first expansion, with only the obligatory vikingwank flavor pack in between. And that first expansion is the fricking royal court shit that feels more like some '90s 3DCG render demo with "go frick yourself" events tacked on than it does an interesting expansion that, y'know, expands the scope of the game. Then we get that fricking fate of portugal one that makes it impossible to form an empire in Iberia without keeping other states alive long enough for you to land on the right fricking astrological phase while you have to scramble to match all sorts of confusing and ephemeral requirements like having 12 friends for your interfaith tea parties or 15 neighboring dukes whose daughters you have personally deflowered, a state of affairs that was only patched another year and a half later. At least the tournaments actually feel kinda nice with that tournament DLC, but frick me they just keep adding these mechanics that add no meat whatsoever, just endless tedium and 2000s dreamworks-graphics frills. I know you're supposed to make your own fun with this game, but it's pretty fricking hard to make your own fun when the game has about as much depth as a poorly dug ditch.
They exerted all that effort to make little virtual sims, so now they actually have to put them to use. It was a massive mistake. They should have just cut their losses, because I think that the actual meat of CK3 has a better basis than CK2 had initially. I think that they simplified shit in the right places, added a few places for the player to have granular control, and generally made it fun to do things other than just map paint and blob out.
>I still find myself baffled at how mismanaged this game has been
Stellaris
City Skylines 2
Victoria 3
Hearts of Iron 4
Prison Architect
it's time to get comfortable with the fact that Paradox has turned into a truly worthless company. genuinely some of the saddest shit
I can't even remember the last game of theirs that was actually tolerable at this point. CK2? Maybe HoI3?
it's amazing how both paradox and CA have basically a monopoly on their respective genres and they still managed to utterly fail at everything
>it's amazing how both paradox and CA have basically a monopoly on their respective genres and they still managed to utterly fail at everything
I mean the entire benefit of having a monopoly is that you don't really have to try, not like people have other choices in your specific market/niche
It's pretty self explanatory how these companies came to their current state
yeah I guess it's a nice case study on why monopolies are bad, should be taught in schools
Not really, because it's only a monopoly by chance, there's no competitors because no one else wants to feed this specific niche
It's literally the most boring and less predatory type of monopoly, and thus arguably not even a monopoly
It's just an ass situation where that specific market didn't attract much/any competition, but it's not like there's barriers to enter like you'd find in real monopolies
I think Paradox has a monopoly on its genre largely because of the tooling they've developed. Their engine is practically a solved problem, getting only little tweaks and aesthetic changes over the games, and the actual creation of game parameters is piss easy, having looked into how mods are made ages ago. They just need to paint by numbers, basically. This is why they're able to shit out new DLC for everything constantly. And since they hold this tooling for themselves and will never give it out to other companies only hobby modders, the niche of grand strategy is cornered by the beast of Paradox who can shit out 5 new DLCs for Hearts of Iron by the time any other company finishes their GS game.
I mean kinda, but in 2024 that's a mostly solved issue in game development, no?
This isn't like the 90s or early 2000s where you had to either build your shit inhouse or pay moronic amounts of money for an engine you barely understand, shit like Unity and Unreal Engine are pretty accessible and industry standard, Unity is even used for other complex management games like Cities Skylines, where they have to keep track of several little processes at once, so it's not like there isn't precedent for these sandbox management games
I just think the idea that the one thing that's keeping other medium to large sized companies is purely tech related is a bit silly in today's market
But it is true that they can generally outpace new competitors just by farming out plenty of DLC in a short amount of time for several games that tend to aim at the same type of customer, I'm just not sure that's enough to tell other gaming companies to "back off"
I think the real issue is that these games are pretty niche and the chance to grow is so tiny that you'd actually be moronic to even attempt it, because even if you somehow beat Paradox at their own game you're still stuck in a market that probably won't grow much in the next 5-10 years, so why the frick are you staking a strong claim on it?
>Prison Architect
>Paradox makes PA2
>Cuts chapel, executions, weather, and workshops
>>Cuts chapel, executions, weather, and workshops
THEY DID WHAT
Small indie company, please understand
I'm all for CK3 slander, because frick Paradox and how they managed their DLC for it, but
>The game released as barebones as is physically possible
This is bullshit, CK3 has been like their one good release, every other grand strategy paradox game I can recall was total ass at release, and recognised as such, while CK3 was very much praised as being their best release at the time (and to this day, while I'm at it)
And now next expansion will add the ability to create epics about your exploits and ancestors as well as legitmacy and adding plagues that'll ravage the land with a new late game threat being the black plague.
i dropped paraisraelite games after ck2, why is 3 so bad? Does it have naval battles?
>naval battles
There are no navies. You pay a fee in gold for your army to embark. There is no combat at sea whatsoever.
it's got very little content, very little event variety, it's easy, it's very predictable, and as a result it's just plain boring.
As an example:
in CK2, if you wanted to switch to a crazy religion, you had to work MIRACLES to fulfill the prerequisites. And when you did, you got actual flavor text and game mechanics.
In CK3, you can create any religion you want just by collecting enough piety. There will be some vassal/pope outrage when you do, and you can counter that outrage by either using hooks or by stomping everyone with your minmaxed Space Marine heavy infantry.
Changing anything about the world is just a matter of sitting and waiting. All lords, regardless of rank, are normalized towards having roughly the same size armies, so if you upgrade your troops you will never lose a war. But the end result of it all is that you have a big blob, your ruler dies, there's a civil war (which you win), and then you go back to having a big blob.
on a broader note, this is exactly what's wrong with all modern Paradox products
>fans love doing meme runs in our old games
>for the new game, we should make it really easy to do meme runs so EVERYONE can have fun!
if you wanted to play as Chile in HoI2, you would have to get very content with the entirety of your research coming from a single historical manufacturing firm with terrible stats.
if you want to play Chile in HoI4, you just need to hit fast forward, grind out some focus nodes, and then you can be a relevant contender in WW2 and expand blob
I like how unbalanced vicky2 is, with some countries being total inherent shitholes due to bad pops and rgos where you have to really game the system in order to make them work and others that play themselves
I like playing as alfred. Killing haesteinn is the best feeling ever.