CKII is released.

[janior]

the fun part is to play as a retarded inbred ruler, game teaches you to deal with the consequences of fucking your mother and i respect that

 

[Space Satan]

I want to play a nation, enact policies, raise armies, beat other nations with religion/economy/warfare/whatever I like, paint the map, rake in sweet cash.

There were no nations in CKII period. There were next to no standing armies during CKII period. There were rulers, each deciding their politics and wars and alliances.

Oh, and also kill every single child except one in order not to have my country get cut in half - and then reload if that one child dies to a chicken crossing the road.

then don't savescum and game became much more punishing and unforgiing. And killing 4 out of 5 children can turn you into an enemy for all vassals.

 

[thesheeep]

I want to play a nation, enact policies, raise armies, beat other nations with religion/economy/warfare/whatever I like, paint the map, rake in sweet cash.

There were no nations in CKII period. There were next to no standing armies during CKII period. There were rulers, each deciding their politics and wars and alliances.

Way to argue semantics.
Nations, kingdoms, empires, whatever you want to call it as enclosed entities on the map certainly existed because they have for thousands of years.

If you truly want to play ruler from the perspective of one, there is King of Dragon Pass and now Six Ages - and maybe similar games?
But I do NOT want to play a ruler when I play a grand strategy game, I want to play a nation. Yes, that is an abstract concept, but so what? That's exactly what you do in EUIV and many other games.
Rulers in these games are modificators, nothing more. As it should be.

Oh, and also kill every single child except one in order not to have my country get cut in half - and then reload if that one child dies to a chicken crossing the road.

then don't savescum and game became much more punishing and unforgiing.

You can punish and forgive mistakes. The game just deciding to tell me that "Oh, btw, your son is now dead because X" isn't punishment for a mistake I made, it's just the game throwing its used butt plug in my face.

And killing 4 out of 5 children can turn you into an enemy for all vassals.

Yeah, I'm not talking about killing in broad daylight, you know, there are better methods.

 

[Preben]

EU4 and Stellaris are probably the last games of its kind. CK2 The Sims: Medieval Edition & Groom Your Patriarch DLC showed that character-based gameplay is the way to go.

FTFY.

I mean, come on... what's the deal with this?
I want to play a nation, enact policies, raise armies, beat other nations with religion/economy/warfare/whatever I like, paint the map, rake in sweet cash.
What I don't want to deal with is the infertility of my ruler, the fear of mice of my offspring, the incestuous tendencies of my twenty-nine uncles, the teenage angst of my advisors, a portal to hell that I push stones into to close it (WTF?!) and having to "gib cash every X years" to keep everyone's mum happy. Oh, and also kill every single child except one in order not to have my country get cut in half - and then reload if that one child dies to a chicken crossing the road.
I want to rule a nation, not babysit its drama queens.

I'd gladly return to CK2 if there was a mod removing all that character babysitting - I'm not against having many characters around to determine success or failure, I'm against having to deal with their uninteresting life events.

Then go playing fucking Risk, if your main interest is map painting and stomping your enemies. The problem with EU4's approach is that it is fun for the first century or so. Provided that you don't have a severe brain damage, by that point you should be the most powerful nation in the world. All that is left is snowballing over everybody.

EU4 is bad in modelling actual historical processes because it leaves all your nation's resources at your disposal, with all other actors being reduced to modifiers and possible rebels. In reality though kings, doges and stadholders had multiple constraints and had to manoeuvrer in internal politics in order to have anything done. Even "absolutist" kings like Louis XIV weren't really absolutist in a way we imagine, since there were scores of local entrenched interests that had full right to tell the king's officials to GTFO and mind their own business. In EU4 you can declare war to anyone, accept an abstract penalty in stability and roll over your enemy, while in reality a king doing that without a good cause would face massive opposition, problems with gathering of taxes and would be at serious risk of having an unfortunate accident of slipping and falling on some daggers. EU4 is also atrocious at handling dynasty politics. Aside from religion, inheritance disputes were the main drive of conflicts between powers of the day, and each such war was an occasion to drastically reshuffle holdings of each princely family involved. In EU4 dynasty conflicts are degraded to disputes over who will form a Personal Union, which itself is just another way to paint the map.

Each of these problems can be handled by a character-based system, where instead of a nation you lead a family.

 

[Space Satan]

Yeah, I'm not talking about killing in broad daylight, you know, there are better methods.

Which could fail

You can punish and forgive mistakes. The game just deciding to tell me that "Oh, btw, your son is now dead because X" isn't punishment for a mistake I made, it's just the game throwing its used butt plug in my face.

Random shit happens. Deal with it. Cope with it.

 

[Preben]

Random shit happens. Deal with it. Cope with it.

And have a contingency plan in the form of younger branches of the family.

 

[thesheeep]

Then go playing fucking Risk, if your main interest is map painting and stomping your enemies. The problem with EU4's approach is that it is fun for the first century or so. Provided that you don't have a severe brain damage, by that point you should be the most powerful nation in the world. All that is left is snowballing over everybody.

I never play powerful nations in any game, EUIV or else.
I usually start as a minor, like an Irish minor or Ceylon or Tibet or Bali, etc.
It takes way more than 100 years to get to such a position - if it can ever be reached.
Though I have to say I'm talking about mods like VeF or MEIOU&Taxes here, which make the game significantly harder and more detailed. Not sure about vanilla, but I doubt you could build up a minor to a world power in 100 years even there.

And let's please not pretend that CK2 devolves into anything else after some time, though I will admit it might take longer (this time, I do speak about vanilla, as I have no experience with CK2 mods).
As soon as you have established a system that no longer divides your nation if your rules dies, you are golden. And that is for nations that don't start with such a system to begin with.

EU4 is bad in modelling actual historical processes because it leaves all your nation's resources at your disposal, with all other actors being reduced to modifiers and possible rebels.

Well, duh! It is a grand strategy game, not an exact simulation.

But again, I'm not against character-based systems per se.
What annoys me about CK2 is all the banal shit like finding babysitters for your offspring, nonsensical popup-questlines, dealing with fertility problems, scrolling endless lists of people just to find some guys to marry your people off to, etc.
If all of that was removed or automated and you only had to deal with actually and directly nation-related character mechanics, that would be fine with me - even if I'd still prefer it all to be abstracted away, I'd probably enjoy it anyway.
Like, offering a mode that just automates most of that stuff I don't want to deal with would be perfectly acceptable to me, and those who like to play The Sims in their grand strategy games for whatever reason could still do it.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Even the most bureaucratic and established medieval realm such as Kingdom of France or Roman Empire went to step after generation or two of bad rulers. and most others were literally formed by single giant and died with him like Samo Kingdom in Moravia. We don't realize this know cause today all is owned and decided by banks and oligarchs behind closed doors but this is what politics looked like only 100 years ago.

 

[oscar]

I'm getting a little sick of the trend in some strategy games of over penalising conquerors. EUIV and Civ V were horribly guilty of this. In EUIV conquering some tiny sliver of Hungary will somehow technologically set you back ten years to integrate it while in Civ V no one ever establishes more than five cities as the penalties become too crippling meaning vast swathes of the map and good land remain uncolonised simply because even the AI knows better than to bother touching it. There already is a punishment for building military units.. their cost and upkeep. Building tall rather than conquering wide should be something you do because you have to not because it's a just-as-good-if-not-better decision than conquering provinces which will be paying 0.5% tax to you through various modifiers for 200 years. It makes you wonder why Napoleon or Timur even bothered since according to recent 4X games peasants remain loyal to the old monarch for hundreds of years refusing to provide either manpower or tax out of anachronistic patriotism.

 

[Fedora Master]

Some of those problems stem from the timeline of EU. The game starts out in the late middle ages and simulates the creation of nation states but it doesn't really simulate the mental change of the population within them, who start identifying as part of a nation.

 

[Ranarama]

Who gives a fuck? Vanilla is completely outdated

Not true. Especially the older patch levels. They are the best, before paradox went retarded and patched out murdering your own children. It's like they don't care how ahistorical their game becomes.

 

[J_C]

Who gives a fuck? Vanilla is completely outdated

They are the best, before paradox went retarded and patched out murdering your own children.

You have your priorities in order. :D

 

[vonAchdorf]

They did that, to not make Gavelkind pointless. But yeah, fixing this kind of "exploit" in a single player game is also pointless.

 

[JarlFrank]

CK2 is the most fun Paradox game, and once you get into the mindset of it and play Ironman, you'll enjoy it tremendously.

Playing as a powerful queen who got a good matrilineal marriage and several genius sons and daughters, then losing half of them to the plague, dying of the plague yourself, having your 5 year old daughter inherit because all her brothers and her elder sisters have died, then being invaded by the neighboring muslims because they saw the perfect opportunity for a holy war, then managing to capture the caliph in battle and being able to force a war victory but deciding to castrate him instead because you can... that's 100000 times more fun than map-painting.

 

[wwsd]

I never play CK2 without Ironman, and I'm a notorious save-scummer in other games. The whole point of the game is the struggle for power with both its ups and downs. One of my favourite game starts that I've done many times is as the Count of Naples in 1066. Defy the odds to conquer the Mezzogiorno instead of the Normans. Join the Byzantines and save them at the last minute from simultaneous Sunni and Shia jihads. Pursue a policy of intermarriage with the ruling family of the Empire. See all your machinations go up in smoke due to epidemic diseases. Wait out the regency as your 2-year-old granddaughter inherits. Keep her from being assassinated. Groom a new heir with a claim on the Empire. Seize it at long last. Try to rein in the hopelessly consolidated bureaucracy. Go a bridge too far trying to revoke people, get forced to abdicate, try again with a new heir. Conquer. Mend the schism and reform the Roman Empire. It's infuriating at times, but it's certainly more involved than a simple save-reload procession from point A to B.

Anyway, I like the changing of battle events. It's nice to have a true warrior character who leads his troops into battle, but it's pretty random how you can just get wounded or die without any particular actions causing this except your leading the army in general. Contrary to what I said above, I don't particularly enjoy regencies. It seems to me that they're trying to nuance it, rather than dumb it down by eliminating the danger to your character altogether. I hope they're smart enough not to have all these events happen all the time, otherwise it will quickly become repetitive even if there's like 20 of them. Do spare a thought for the poor saddle-bag kittens, though.

 

[Tigranes]

What is the best CK2 patch version / DLC / mod combo these days, anyway? I haven't fired it up in years.

I too think CK2 is best when there aren't 800 different events firing all the time, and I hate seeing stupid shit like demonic possession or whatever in there. It's all about starting as a Count in some assfuck corner of Europe, making it big, fucking it up, boom and bust.

 

[wwsd]

Right now I just fire up the latest version with all DLCs except Jade Dragon, which I don't own because I don't care about China probrems. I happen to own Sunset Invasion (it came in a bundle) but I turn off the Aztec invasion so it doesn't actually do anything. Some time ago they made it so that you could just turn modules on and off, and that's great. E.g. you can turn off all the supernatural demonic possession and Satan worshippers content. Then save those settings so you don't have to work through them the next time.

 

[Fedora Master]

They did that, to not make Gavelkind pointless. But yeah, fixing this kind of "exploit" in a single player game is also pointless.

You can still cheese Gavelkind by making tons of bastards and only legitimizing the best of the bunch.

 

[vonAchdorf]

What is the best CK2 patch version / DLC / mod combo these days, anyway? I haven't fired it up in years.

I too think CK2 is best when there aren't 800 different events firing all the time, and I hate seeing stupid shit like demonic possession or whatever in there. It's all about starting as a Count in some assfuck corner of Europe, making it big, fucking it up, boom and bust.

The added a configuration menu some time ago, where you can disable supernatural events / Satanists / various other things.

 

[Preben]

They did that, to not make Gavelkind pointless. But yeah, fixing this kind of "exploit" in a single player game is also pointless.

You can still cheese Gavelkind by making tons of bastards and only legitimizing the best of the bunch.

Then your best bastard dies two years into his reign from sawing off legs by his crackpot doctor. Game over unless you savescum.

 

[Ocelot]

What is the best CK2 patch version / DLC / mod combo these days, anyway? I haven't fired it up in years.

Absolutely essential DLCs: Legacy of Rome, A way of life.

Essential: Charlemagne and Old Gods.

Ignore the newest one (Jade Dragon) if you don't give a shit about east asians.

 

[Preben]

Reaper's Due is also essential. Both for immense fun and performance (since it regularly culls characters).

 

[Fedora Master]

They did that, to not make Gavelkind pointless. But yeah, fixing this kind of "exploit" in a single player game is also pointless.

You can still cheese Gavelkind by making tons of bastards and only legitimizing the best of the bunch.

Then your best bastard dies two years into his reign from sawing off legs by his crackpot doctor. Game over unless you savescum.

Don't ever use experimental surgery. Always tell your doctor to make sure he knows what he's doing.

 

[wwsd]

The experimental treatment is pretty funny with diseases that don't go away, like cancer. The physician will then lop off the infested body part and "cure" you of cancer.

 

[Space Satan]

Experimentac can cure you of some crippling shit in situations when you have nothing to lose.