Grand Strategy Crusader Kings III

[Fedora Master]

All PDX games after CK2 are meme games that only exist so people can make the first Nubian Empress of the Satanic Roman Empire.

 

[Larianshill]

So tl;dr, is the adventurer thing actually good?

If you're a mercenary, it's pretty good, but gets boring after a while. If you're not a mercenary, it gets boring fast.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

It was then that a massive fuck-off army of 8k screaming moors showed up to engage Gonçalo's forces of 1.8k MaA during a siege. Gonçalo army of pikemen, heavy cavalry and armored footmen proceeded to engage in what was one of the biggest curb-stomps on the Crusader... or should have been. Rather, Gonçalo and his "Hands of God" proceeded to narrowly beat the vastly larger heathen force, while the rest of Christendom just stood and watched. A second subsequent attack finally had the rest of the Crusade help, and Gonçalo managed to win the Crusade by actually sieging down land.

Yeah, combat changes made that possible. From the Roads to Power release patchnotes:

Advantage now affects battles by a factor of 10 (up from 2), this makes having the right commanders/fighting in the right terrain much more important, allowing smaller armies to beat larger ones more consistently.

So now, for example, an advange of 30 in combat (defending across a strait) means 300% more damage alone, without accounting commanders and other sources of advantage. Wining 1:10 may now be feasible.

Yes.
I think Advantage is a neat system, because it helps beat More Number = More Good. It plays better with things like MaA, the character system, etc.
Before, my big CKIII stat was always Stewardship, because I wanted to get more gold, but now Martial is way more solid and a good martial beatstick for a ruler or premier knight can turn defeats into victories. It really rewards getting good knights and speccing your characters, whereas before the war-winning meta was to just have fuckloads of gold and drown the opposition in mercs.

The problem is that the way Advantage is working right now is just nuts. They need to nerf that stuff, but that's just balance and tuning. Either decrease the given advantage values or decrease how much advantage affect battle.

CKII had a similar problem with retinues, but Retinues weren't inherently better than levies, they were just a permanent army. Retinues were better than levies because you could make a tighter troop concentration and use combined with culture to get the right tactics in order to decimate the opposition.

Would be cool if you could spec into the reverse and, say, drown the opposition in a tide of dumb peasant canonfodder.
Sometimes I wonder if they shouldn't just throw levies as a concept into the trash and just turn "Peasant Levy" into types of El Cheapo MaAs, with low price/maintenance. Something you spend peanuts to buy and maintain, then throw en masse into the opposition.

Maybe tie to Popular Opinion and County Control of the Stationed County somehow?

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Patch coming next week, probably

 

[Average Manatee]

o now, for example, an advange of 30 in combat (defending across a strait) means 300% more damage alone, without accounting commanders and other sources of advantage. Wining 1:10 may now be feasible.

Ehh, yuck. I don't like when combat is dominated by a small simplistic "how gud at fighting" stat. I much preferred when you had a commander with like heavy infantry and mountain traits and they dominated when you combine those circumstances

 

[darkpatriot]

o now, for example, an advange of 30 in combat (defending across a strait) means 300% more damage alone, without accounting commanders and other sources of advantage. Wining 1:10 may now be feasible.

Ehh, yuck. I don't like when combat is dominated by a small simplistic "how gud at fighting" stat. I much preferred when you had a commander with like heavy infantry and mountain traits and they dominated when you combine those circumstances

Not really. Terrain, perks, quality (men-at-arms counters), commander traits, and other situational modifiers are hugely important still. Without those you only really get a 30 advantage if you have an almost max quality commander against a scrub.

 

[Average Manatee]

Not really. Terrain, perks, quality (men-at-arms counters), commander traits, and other situational modifiers are hugely important still. Without those you only really get a 30 advantage if you have an almost max quality commander against a scrub.

You get +10 advantage just form picking chivalry focus and getting 3 perks in (And its on the line that gives you knights which was already arguably one of the strongest options for small and/or earlygame realms). +100% bonus damage in combat just from that is ridiculously stupid. We're back to CK2 where martial rulers are the only way to play.

 

[Axioms]

Almost like a high level of abstraction leads to heavily incentivized minmaxing and terrible outcomes.

 

[Dvd22]

I also think advantage is wayyy overtuned atm, a lot of the balance details for this DLC seems off, like the gold rewards for landless characters. They have multiplied advantage to damage ratio by 5 and called it a day. Maybe the strategy is to make landless martial characters more influential and fun to play, more "epic" and later when the novelty wears off (and they have sold enough) nerf the values to more sensible numbers, as usual with Paradox these days.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

So I've gotten bored of my old game and decided to restart and add some mods, but not many mods are updated right now.

So I went with a Mazdraist Daylamite Intrigue Freebooter Adventurer I made, Iranian Intermezzo 800s start:
- If parts of the world map were neighborhoods in a city, the Iranian Intermezzo areas would be like those super shady and dodgy parts of the city everyone avoids, because they're crawling with robbers, thieves, etc, and everyone is either robbing someone or being robbed. So much fucking travel danger! The Unrest phase of the Intermezzo really fucks up travel safety, and there will be low control low popular opinion holdings fucking everywhere. You have to max the fuck out of Travel Safety if you want to go anywhere without getting hit with constant Travel Danger issues. If you can take a boat, it's worth it, just pay Experienced Captains. I was lucky, I started in Gilan and could take boats across the Caspian Sea until I started maxxing my Travel Safety. This isn't safe ol' Europe, mind Travel Safety or the Travel System will fuck you up. Camp Perimeter is a must-have.
- This is especially important if you're playing a Criminal Character, because you need to constantly move that camp about.

- Playing Criminal is definitively different from playing a normal character.
- One thing I notice is that you often get options between avoiding gallowsbait or increasing it. Gallowsbait definitively makes most characters hate your guts, but there are ways to offset that. Seems like the "avoid gallowsbait increase" options are for Adventurers who commit the occasional crime of opportunity but don't want to tank the massive rep bonuses or exile you get from being part of the Gallowsbait Gallery, while going full Gallowsbait is for specialized criminals who don't give a fuck and want the bonuses from the gallowsbait levels.
- Criminal/Freebooter play is definitively Intrigue oriented, but there are also checks for Prowess, Diplo, Martial and others. There's even learning contracts for criminals. But Intrigue is King, just like Martial is King for Swords-for-Hire.
- Watch your patrons and stick to them, DON'T run criminals contracts which fuck them over and decrease your relationship, only the ones which help them. Having patrons who like you is useful, as it allows you a safe heaven from expulsion. You will get kicked from territory all the time, so not cultivating a good network of patrons might deny you camping rights to entire duchies or even kingdoms. Generally, don't fuck with with top lieges own who entire duchies or above. Fragmented territory is your friend.
- If you can, take a dip into Stewardship and get Golden Obligations (and something else too, because you're going to invest in it for a while until you can go back to your previous lifestyle focuses). Being able to turn hooks into gold is great. Sure, you can use the Request Interaction to do this, but you can also use it for other things, and I'm not sure you want to use the Request Interaction all the time - it really eats your Prestige. Golden Obligations payments are free. This is especially important once the Intrigue Tree starts giving you ways of getting more Secrets and more Hooks.

- Someone banned you from a county/duchy/realm? Fuck 'em. Run hostile schemes on them. Kidnap and ransom them back. Murder them. Torture them for secrets. Seduce their children (ok not really hostile lol, but it adds to Hall of Patrons if you specced right into the Seducer intrigue focus properly). Dip into all the criminal contracts which can hurt them.
- Because my plan is to eventually turn my camp into a large incestuous harem ("Only those pure of mind, body and blood can free Persia!" - my character, probably), my character is bringing in and marrying/concubining/seducing women fairly frequently and making lots of babies. On 15 or so far. Even gave him a congenital trait to help with this.
- Between banning and having to go after contracts, Criminal Characters definitively move quite a bit.
- I like how some criminal contracts give you the opportunity to make more money than the number contract success indicates. You can really get humoungous quantities of money that way, from cut-pursing random nobles, taking extra treasure from nobles, etc.
- I haven't gotten the opportunity to use Seduce to get patrons, but Muslim world has very few female rulers so that's probably why. You might be able to get a lot of milleage out of this.
- A really annoying thing is that there isn't a "List of Bannings" anywhere, you have to put who banned you from where on memory, or find it by trying to travel to the territory.
- If you're travelling and there's little danger or hurry, use "Search for Secrets" to try and find some useful secrets. At the least, you can use this to make nobles pay the horny tax.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Behold... THE GRAND HEIST!

I did fuck up, through. This absolute gigachad had one breach so I just kept using the stress option to loot everything until it was empty... which promptly exploded his heart and killed him. Should have looked into the stress tab first. Rookie mistake.
Bro literally self-nuked by using the forbidden stealing technique... but he got ALL THE GOLD!
Helluva way for the biggest Gallowsbait of all Eranshah to go. He died doing what he loved... taking other people's gold.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

So tl;dr, is the adventurer thing actually good? I remember that sort of thing was actually possible back in CK2, you could start as a single county holder in a large empire, work your way up the ranks, become a spymaster or something, and eventually betray your liege and become the sovereign yourself.

What did they add in CK3? Also, how does it interplay with the dynastic mechanics? AKA, can you first work on building your dynasty, and then elevate your entire your family into power? It would be cool, as that's how it worked for the Borgias or the Julio-Claudians.

From my games: Yep, it's pretty good. It's definitively radically different from starting as a count or the like.

On the dynasty side: I would say that the difference between starting from Adventurer to starting from Count, is that Adventurer has a weaker start in the Dynasty, Eugenics and Marriage Games, in exchange for an easier time building up money and military power to climb up.

(bear in mind, so far I've done Mercenaries and Freebooters, I have no idea how other types of Adventurer do, nor how Administrative Landless works)

Adventurers:
- Weak on the matter of Dynasty Renown, your little Renow is pretty much dependent on how many people your family has, or somehow placing your relatives on thrones.
- Weak on the marriage game, getting good marriages with landed nobles is harder. I haven't tried this yet, but I think the way to go is to use seduction focus on single young nobles of the opposite sex. You can demand marriages with requests but so far I've been able to get anything good - and I also think that shit is bugged, because when you use this, you take the prestige hit BEFORE selecting someone, so if you can't find someone you want or are allowed to marry, you tank a prestige hit even if you didn't marry anyone.
- Your diplo range is way smaller than landed rulers', so your diplo game is going to be weaker as a matter of course. Especially because you need to be moving around to get more contracts.
- Camp Followers seem to have an immense fertility hit, so you will likely have issues making anyone not of your dynasty make eugenically fit babies. It's also just sad seeing your old followers die without children. If you want to engage in eugenic breeding and dynasty expansion, you have to pretty much get loads of lovers and preferably take the Seduction tree.
(it's also very annoying you can no longer GIVE/OFFER concubines to people like in CKII)
- You can make more money than your average count or even duke. They actually had to nerf with the hotfix, but I think you can still get a lot of money, and even more if you do crime.
- VERY strong militarily, especially Mercenary Adventurers. It's not that hard to build up like over a thousand soldiers in retinue, with good retinues too. Stuff like Horse Archers/Light Cav or Armored Cav/Armored Infantry/Pikemen combo, with the right combination of culture, character traits and camp buildings, can straight out demolish larger numbers of levies and other garbo MaAs. A good Adventurer Merc camp with properly kitted out MaA and Commanders, can probably demolish everyone except maybe the big boys (ERE, Abbasids, HRE, 800s Ummayads, etc), Conquerors with enough steam, and OP shit like Mongols. Its actually silly how MaA is cheap and good.
- Adventurers can pretty much drain the AI of money and power. It can actually get silly that these guys are paying me that much. And then there are criminals who can fuck landed rulers hard.
- Unlike landed characters, it's pretty hard to get game-overed, as long as you have heirs you should be good. Your biggest threat is probably ending up parked somewhere you were exiled and being unable to leave for some reason, getting your character jailed.
- You can literally run from plagues.


My main quibble with Adventurer right now is that unless you need to get landed NAO, its simply not worth it for an Adventurer to settle for anything less than a King, or maybe a Duke in some land with good provinces. You would think that Adventurer -> Count would be a linear climb, but you would be wrong. Once you start getting some serious MaA, you can start helping factions and getting involved in wars, and make serious money. If you're Catholic, you can get loads of land from a Crusade.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

So tl;dr, is the adventurer thing actually good? I remember that sort of thing was actually possible back in CK2, you could start as a single county holder in a large empire, work your way up the ranks, become a spymaster or something, and eventually betray your liege and become the sovereign yourself.

What did they add in CK3? Also, how does it interplay with the dynastic mechanics? AKA, can you first work on building your dynasty, and then elevate your entire your family into power? It would be cool, as that's how it worked for the Borgias or the Julio-Claudians.

From my games: Yep, it's pretty good. It's definitively radically different from starting as a count or the like.

On the dynasty side: I would say that the difference between starting from Adventurer to starting from Count, is that Adventurer has a weaker start in the Dynasty, Eugenics and Marriage Games, in exchange for an easier time building up money and military power to climb up.

(bear in mind, so far I've done Mercenaries and Freebooters, I have no idea how other types of Adventurer do, nor how Administrative Landless works)

Adventurers:
- Weak on the matter of Dynasty Renown, your little Renow is pretty much dependent on how many people your family has, or somehow placing your relatives on thrones.
- Weak on the marriage game, getting good marriages with landed nobles is harder. I haven't tried this yet, but I think the way to go is to use seduction focus on single young nobles of the opposite sex. You can demand marriages with requests but so far I've been able to get anything good - and I also think that shit is bugged, because when you use this, you take the prestige hit BEFORE selecting someone, so if you can't find someone you want or are allowed to marry, you tank a prestige hit even if you didn't marry anyone.
- Your diplo range is way smaller than landed rulers', so your diplo game is going to be weaker as a matter of course. Especially because you need to be moving around to get more contracts.
- Camp Followers seem to have an immense fertility hit, so you will likely have issues making anyone not of your dynasty make eugenically fit babies. It's also just sad seeing your old followers die without children. If you want to engage in eugenic breeding and dynasty expansion, you have to pretty much get loads of lovers and preferably take the Seduction tree.
(it's also very annoying you can no longer GIVE/OFFER concubines to people like in CKII)
- You can make more money than your average count or even duke. They actually had to nerf with the hotfix, but I think you can still get a lot of money, and even more if you do crime.
- VERY strong militarily, especially Mercenary Adventurers. It's not that hard to build up like over a thousand soldiers in retinue, with good retinues too. Stuff like Horse Archers/Light Cav or Armored Cav/Armored Infantry/Pikemen combo, with the right combination of culture, character traits and camp buildings, can straight out demolish larger numbers of levies and other garbo MaAs. A good Adventurer Merc camp with properly kitted out MaA and Commanders, can probably demolish everyone except maybe the big boys (ERE, Abbasids, HRE, 800s Ummayads, etc), Conquerors with enough steam, and OP shit like Mongols. Its actually silly how MaA is cheap and good.
- Adventurers can pretty much drain the AI of money and power. It can actually get silly that these guys are paying me that much. And then there are criminals who can fuck landed rulers hard.
- Unlike landed characters, it's pretty hard to get game-overed, as long as you have heirs you should be good. Your biggest threat is probably ending up parked somewhere you were exiled and being unable to leave for some reason, getting your character jailed.
- You can literally run from plagues.


My main quibble with Adventurer right now is that unless you need to get landed NAO, its simply not worth it for an Adventurer to settle for anything less than a King, or maybe a Duke in some land with good provinces. You would think that Adventurer -> Count would be a linear climb, but you would be wrong. Once you start getting some serious MaA, you can start helping factions and getting involved in wars, and make serious money. If you're Catholic, you can get loads of land from a Crusade.

It's pretty fun. You also don't get system slowdowns from having a massive realm to manage. Last game was hell when it took me minutes just to grant a title to my vassals or just look at my list of vassals.
In comparison the adventurer is way lighter to handle but boy my game just keeps throwing bad luck at me. If it's not cancer, it's wife dying in childbirth, or losing a duel to the death when I exceed opponent's prowess by 40 points, or pissing off whatever king sends poetry my way, or camp folllowers killing each other off. I can't even tell if it's one playthrough or several now.

 

[Axioms]

So tl;dr, is the adventurer thing actually good? I remember that sort of thing was actually possible back in CK2, you could start as a single county holder in a large empire, work your way up the ranks, become a spymaster or something, and eventually betray your liege and become the sovereign yourself.

What did they add in CK3? Also, how does it interplay with the dynastic mechanics? AKA, can you first work on building your dynasty, and then elevate your entire your family into power? It would be cool, as that's how it worked for the Borgias or the Julio-Claudians.

From my games: Yep, it's pretty good. It's definitively radically different from starting as a count or the like.

On the dynasty side: I would say that the difference between starting from Adventurer to starting from Count, is that Adventurer has a weaker start in the Dynasty, Eugenics and Marriage Games, in exchange for an easier time building up money and military power to climb up.

(bear in mind, so far I've done Mercenaries and Freebooters, I have no idea how other types of Adventurer do, nor how Administrative Landless works)

Adventurers:
- Weak on the matter of Dynasty Renown, your little Renow is pretty much dependent on how many people your family has, or somehow placing your relatives on thrones.
- Weak on the marriage game, getting good marriages with landed nobles is harder. I haven't tried this yet, but I think the way to go is to use seduction focus on single young nobles of the opposite sex. You can demand marriages with requests but so far I've been able to get anything good - and I also think that shit is bugged, because when you use this, you take the prestige hit BEFORE selecting someone, so if you can't find someone you want or are allowed to marry, you tank a prestige hit even if you didn't marry anyone.
- Your diplo range is way smaller than landed rulers', so your diplo game is going to be weaker as a matter of course. Especially because you need to be moving around to get more contracts.
- Camp Followers seem to have an immense fertility hit, so you will likely have issues making anyone not of your dynasty make eugenically fit babies. It's also just sad seeing your old followers die without children. If you want to engage in eugenic breeding and dynasty expansion, you have to pretty much get loads of lovers and preferably take the Seduction tree.
(it's also very annoying you can no longer GIVE/OFFER concubines to people like in CKII)
- You can make more money than your average count or even duke. They actually had to nerf with the hotfix, but I think you can still get a lot of money, and even more if you do crime.
- VERY strong militarily, especially Mercenary Adventurers. It's not that hard to build up like over a thousand soldiers in retinue, with good retinues too. Stuff like Horse Archers/Light Cav or Armored Cav/Armored Infantry/Pikemen combo, with the right combination of culture, character traits and camp buildings, can straight out demolish larger numbers of levies and other garbo MaAs. A good Adventurer Merc camp with properly kitted out MaA and Commanders, can probably demolish everyone except maybe the big boys (ERE, Abbasids, HRE, 800s Ummayads, etc), Conquerors with enough steam, and OP shit like Mongols. Its actually silly how MaA is cheap and good.
- Adventurers can pretty much drain the AI of money and power. It can actually get silly that these guys are paying me that much. And then there are criminals who can fuck landed rulers hard.
- Unlike landed characters, it's pretty hard to get game-overed, as long as you have heirs you should be good. Your biggest threat is probably ending up parked somewhere you were exiled and being unable to leave for some reason, getting your character jailed.
- You can literally run from plagues.


My main quibble with Adventurer right now is that unless you need to get landed NAO, its simply not worth it for an Adventurer to settle for anything less than a King, or maybe a Duke in some land with good provinces. You would think that Adventurer -> Count would be a linear climb, but you would be wrong. Once you start getting some serious MaA, you can start helping factions and getting involved in wars, and make serious money. If you're Catholic, you can get loads of land from a Crusade.

It's pretty fun. You also don't get system slowdowns from having a massive realm to manage. Last game was hell when it took me minutes just to grant a title to my vassals or just look at my list of vassals.
In comparison the adventurer is way lighter to handle but boy my game just keeps throwing bad luck at me. If it's not cancer, it's wife dying in childbirth, or losing a duel to the death when I exceed opponent's prowess by 40 points, or pissing off whatever king sends poetry my way, or camp folllowers killing each other off. I can't even tell if it's one playthrough or several now.

The biggest flaw of CK3 is the random event system that they use to compensate for the fact that the social simulation and character relationships are non-existent. You should be able to figure out whether your allies/vassals/retainers/friends/love interests are happy or unhapy with each other and do things to mitigate any issues plus having a deeper friendship/loyalty between them and you. A real social simulation would also make dealing with patrons more interesting.

 

[Dvd22]

Legends of the dead is as terrible as they said...

Legitimacy is more or less broken without the DLCs and the AI dosent know how to handle it anyways, or how to survive plagues (that tank legitimacy even further) and to add salt to the injury the plague spam is very real. I think the idea of the DLC was to increase the difficulty but achieves the opposite. The AI becomes so weak and crippled with the plagues killing droves of NPCs and the legitimacy penalties causing internal strife that there is no opposition really.

Also, there is little point in puting your dynasty in another throne, more often than not they will be wiped out by a plague. I had to disable plagues and legitimacy for the AI to start "working" and do something again.

 

[Rieser]

So tl;dr, is the adventurer thing actually good? I remember that sort of thing was actually possible back in CK2, you could start as a single county holder in a large empire, work your way up the ranks, become a spymaster or something, and eventually betray your liege and become the sovereign yourself.

What did they add in CK3? Also, how does it interplay with the dynastic mechanics? AKA, can you first work on building your dynasty, and then elevate your entire your family into power? It would be cool, as that's how it worked for the Borgias or the Julio-Claudians.

From my games: Yep, it's pretty good. It's definitively radically different from starting as a count or the like.

On the dynasty side: I would say that the difference between starting from Adventurer to starting from Count, is that Adventurer has a weaker start in the Dynasty, Eugenics and Marriage Games, in exchange for an easier time building up money and military power to climb up.

(bear in mind, so far I've done Mercenaries and Freebooters, I have no idea how other types of Adventurer do, nor how Administrative Landless works)

Adventurers:
- Weak on the matter of Dynasty Renown, your little Renow is pretty much dependent on how many people your family has, or somehow placing your relatives on thrones.
- Weak on the marriage game, getting good marriages with landed nobles is harder. I haven't tried this yet, but I think the way to go is to use seduction focus on single young nobles of the opposite sex. You can demand marriages with requests but so far I've been able to get anything good - and I also think that shit is bugged, because when you use this, you take the prestige hit BEFORE selecting someone, so if you can't find someone you want or are allowed to marry, you tank a prestige hit even if you didn't marry anyone.
- Your diplo range is way smaller than landed rulers', so your diplo game is going to be weaker as a matter of course. Especially because you need to be moving around to get more contracts.
- Camp Followers seem to have an immense fertility hit, so you will likely have issues making anyone not of your dynasty make eugenically fit babies. It's also just sad seeing your old followers die without children. If you want to engage in eugenic breeding and dynasty expansion, you have to pretty much get loads of lovers and preferably take the Seduction tree.
(it's also very annoying you can no longer GIVE/OFFER concubines to people like in CKII)
- You can make more money than your average count or even duke. They actually had to nerf with the hotfix, but I think you can still get a lot of money, and even more if you do crime.
- VERY strong militarily, especially Mercenary Adventurers. It's not that hard to build up like over a thousand soldiers in retinue, with good retinues too. Stuff like Horse Archers/Light Cav or Armored Cav/Armored Infantry/Pikemen combo, with the right combination of culture, character traits and camp buildings, can straight out demolish larger numbers of levies and other garbo MaAs. A good Adventurer Merc camp with properly kitted out MaA and Commanders, can probably demolish everyone except maybe the big boys (ERE, Abbasids, HRE, 800s Ummayads, etc), Conquerors with enough steam, and OP shit like Mongols. Its actually silly how MaA is cheap and good.
- Adventurers can pretty much drain the AI of money and power. It can actually get silly that these guys are paying me that much. And then there are criminals who can fuck landed rulers hard.
- Unlike landed characters, it's pretty hard to get game-overed, as long as you have heirs you should be good. Your biggest threat is probably ending up parked somewhere you were exiled and being unable to leave for some reason, getting your character jailed.
- You can literally run from plagues.


My main quibble with Adventurer right now is that unless you need to get landed NAO, its simply not worth it for an Adventurer to settle for anything less than a King, or maybe a Duke in some land with good provinces. You would think that Adventurer -> Count would be a linear climb, but you would be wrong. Once you start getting some serious MaA, you can start helping factions and getting involved in wars, and make serious money. If you're Catholic, you can get loads of land from a Crusade.

It's pretty fun. You also don't get system slowdowns from having a massive realm to manage. Last game was hell when it took me minutes just to grant a title to my vassals or just look at my list of vassals.
In comparison the adventurer is way lighter to handle but boy my game just keeps throwing bad luck at me. If it's not cancer, it's wife dying in childbirth, or losing a duel to the death when I exceed opponent's prowess by 40 points, or pissing off whatever king sends poetry my way, or camp folllowers killing each other off. I can't even tell if it's one playthrough or several now.

The biggest flaw of CK3 is the random event system that they use to compensate for the fact that the social simulation and character relationships are non-existent. You should be able to figure out whether your allies/vassals/retainers/friends/love interests are happy or unhapy with each other and do things to mitigate any issues plus having a deeper friendship/loyalty between them and you. A real social simulation would also make dealing with patrons more interesting.

Are there any games that do these things well? Not my usual genre so I really have no clue.

 

[Axioms]

So tl;dr, is the adventurer thing actually good? I remember that sort of thing was actually possible back in CK2, you could start as a single county holder in a large empire, work your way up the ranks, become a spymaster or something, and eventually betray your liege and become the sovereign yourself.

What did they add in CK3? Also, how does it interplay with the dynastic mechanics? AKA, can you first work on building your dynasty, and then elevate your entire your family into power? It would be cool, as that's how it worked for the Borgias or the Julio-Claudians.

From my games: Yep, it's pretty good. It's definitively radically different from starting as a count or the like.

On the dynasty side: I would say that the difference between starting from Adventurer to starting from Count, is that Adventurer has a weaker start in the Dynasty, Eugenics and Marriage Games, in exchange for an easier time building up money and military power to climb up.

(bear in mind, so far I've done Mercenaries and Freebooters, I have no idea how other types of Adventurer do, nor how Administrative Landless works)

Adventurers:
- Weak on the matter of Dynasty Renown, your little Renow is pretty much dependent on how many people your family has, or somehow placing your relatives on thrones.
- Weak on the marriage game, getting good marriages with landed nobles is harder. I haven't tried this yet, but I think the way to go is to use seduction focus on single young nobles of the opposite sex. You can demand marriages with requests but so far I've been able to get anything good - and I also think that shit is bugged, because when you use this, you take the prestige hit BEFORE selecting someone, so if you can't find someone you want or are allowed to marry, you tank a prestige hit even if you didn't marry anyone.
- Your diplo range is way smaller than landed rulers', so your diplo game is going to be weaker as a matter of course. Especially because you need to be moving around to get more contracts.
- Camp Followers seem to have an immense fertility hit, so you will likely have issues making anyone not of your dynasty make eugenically fit babies. It's also just sad seeing your old followers die without children. If you want to engage in eugenic breeding and dynasty expansion, you have to pretty much get loads of lovers and preferably take the Seduction tree.
(it's also very annoying you can no longer GIVE/OFFER concubines to people like in CKII)
- You can make more money than your average count or even duke. They actually had to nerf with the hotfix, but I think you can still get a lot of money, and even more if you do crime.
- VERY strong militarily, especially Mercenary Adventurers. It's not that hard to build up like over a thousand soldiers in retinue, with good retinues too. Stuff like Horse Archers/Light Cav or Armored Cav/Armored Infantry/Pikemen combo, with the right combination of culture, character traits and camp buildings, can straight out demolish larger numbers of levies and other garbo MaAs. A good Adventurer Merc camp with properly kitted out MaA and Commanders, can probably demolish everyone except maybe the big boys (ERE, Abbasids, HRE, 800s Ummayads, etc), Conquerors with enough steam, and OP shit like Mongols. Its actually silly how MaA is cheap and good.
- Adventurers can pretty much drain the AI of money and power. It can actually get silly that these guys are paying me that much. And then there are criminals who can fuck landed rulers hard.
- Unlike landed characters, it's pretty hard to get game-overed, as long as you have heirs you should be good. Your biggest threat is probably ending up parked somewhere you were exiled and being unable to leave for some reason, getting your character jailed.
- You can literally run from plagues.


My main quibble with Adventurer right now is that unless you need to get landed NAO, its simply not worth it for an Adventurer to settle for anything less than a King, or maybe a Duke in some land with good provinces. You would think that Adventurer -> Count would be a linear climb, but you would be wrong. Once you start getting some serious MaA, you can start helping factions and getting involved in wars, and make serious money. If you're Catholic, you can get loads of land from a Crusade.

It's pretty fun. You also don't get system slowdowns from having a massive realm to manage. Last game was hell when it took me minutes just to grant a title to my vassals or just look at my list of vassals.
In comparison the adventurer is way lighter to handle but boy my game just keeps throwing bad luck at me. If it's not cancer, it's wife dying in childbirth, or losing a duel to the death when I exceed opponent's prowess by 40 points, or pissing off whatever king sends poetry my way, or camp folllowers killing each other off. I can't even tell if it's one playthrough or several now.

The biggest flaw of CK3 is the random event system that they use to compensate for the fact that the social simulation and character relationships are non-existent. You should be able to figure out whether your allies/vassals/retainers/friends/love interests are happy or unhapy with each other and do things to mitigate any issues plus having a deeper friendship/loyalty between them and you. A real social simulation would also make dealing with patrons more interesting.

Are there any games that do these things well? Not my usual genre so I really have no clue.

Not really? But there's no reason you couldn't. With current RAM and CPU capability you could run a deep, dynamic, and flexible social sim with 10s of 1000s of characters if you wanted to in a Paradox style, or adjacent, Map & Menu style. Although turnbased would be better you *could* do it with real-time or tick-based games. But for someone Paradox wants to half ass both the GSG and RPG aspects of CK3 thus pissing off anyone who isn't a casual.

 

[Gostak]

[...]

[...]

[...]

The biggest flaw of CK3 is the random event system that they use to compensate for the fact that the social simulation and character relationships are non-existent. You should be able to figure out whether your allies/vassals/retainers/friends/love interests are happy or unhapy with each other and do things to mitigate any issues plus having a deeper friendship/loyalty between them and you. A real social simulation would also make dealing with patrons more interesting.

Are there any games that do these things well? Not my usual genre so I really have no clue.

Do yourself a favor and play Star Dynasties instead already (except you who already do/did).
Superior game is superior.

Then make me some outstanding modding additions for it, mmkay?

I shall attempt likewise.

Because this is exactly one of the strong suites in comparison here.
Best I have seen in any game actually.
Go right ahead and try the demo from Steam and see / judge it for yourself.

 

[darkpatriot]

[...]

[...]

[...]

The biggest flaw of CK3 is the random event system that they use to compensate for the fact that the social simulation and character relationships are non-existent. You should be able to figure out whether your allies/vassals/retainers/friends/love interests are happy or unhapy with each other and do things to mitigate any issues plus having a deeper friendship/loyalty between them and you. A real social simulation would also make dealing with patrons more interesting.

Are there any games that do these things well? Not my usual genre so I really have no clue.

Do yourself a favor and play Star Dynasties instead already (except you who already do/did).
Superior game is superior.

Then make me some outstanding modding additions for it, mmkay?

I shall attempt likewise.

Because this is exactly one of the strong suites in comparison here.
Best I have seen in any game actually.
Go right ahead and try the demo from Steam and see / judge it for yourself.

Star Dynasties is the barest bones of a game and the developer abandoned it long ago. You will be lucky to get one 2 hour playthrough out of the game. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

 

[Axioms]

[...]

[...]

[...]

The biggest flaw of CK3 is the random event system that they use to compensate for the fact that the social simulation and character relationships are non-existent. You should be able to figure out whether your allies/vassals/retainers/friends/love interests are happy or unhapy with each other and do things to mitigate any issues plus having a deeper friendship/loyalty between them and you. A real social simulation would also make dealing with patrons more interesting.

Are there any games that do these things well? Not my usual genre so I really have no clue.

Do yourself a favor and play Star Dynasties instead already (except you who already do/did).
Superior game is superior.

Then make me some outstanding modding additions for it, mmkay?

I shall attempt likewise.

Because this is exactly one of the strong suites in comparison here.
Best I have seen in any game actually.
Go right ahead and try the demo from Steam and see / judge it for yourself.

Star Dynasties has some minor improvements in some ways but hardly the kind of comprehensive system I'm talking about. Also it is dead.

Also, also, I beat the game in 3 turns and only cruel and heartless dev nerfs stopped me from doing it in two turns.

 

[Gostak]

"minor improvements in some ways"
Hardly minor, especially when taking the competition (only CK?!?) into account, but yes in ways (multiple, yay)!
And still butthurt about the dev having improved his game and stopped your alleged three turn "win" crap? Pathetic!
People turn to such a game for the journey, not to min-max speed-run it ...

 

[Axioms]

"minor improvements in some ways"
Hardly minor, especially when taking the competition (only CK?!?) into account, but yes in ways (multiple, yay)!
And still butthurt about the dev having improved his game and stopped your alleged three turn "win" crap? Pathetic!
People turn to such a game for the journey, not to min-max speed-run it ...

You'll have to detail the major superior mechanics you are talking about.

And what I'm bitter about is he nerfed the key action *right before* I was going to get a two turn win. You can still win the game in 3-4 turns but never 2, in the current version.

Also, the "crap" was just the power of friendship! Why do you hate friends?

 

[Minecrawler]

Legends of the dead is as terrible as they said...

Legitimacy is more or less broken without the DLCs and the AI dosent know how to handle it anyways, or how to survive plagues (that tank legitimacy even further) and to add salt to the injury the plague spam is very real. I think the idea of the DLC was to increase the difficulty but achieves the opposite. The AI becomes so weak and crippled with the plagues killing droves of NPCs and the legitimacy penalties causing internal strife that there is no opposition really.

Also, there is little point in puting your dynasty in another throne, more often than not they will be wiped out by a plague. I had to disable plagues and legitimacy for the AI to start "working" and do something again.

Legitimacy was never intended as anything but a blunt cash milking tool. They don't care if it breaks the AI or not.
They don't care if it's being treated consistently as the same concept.
But people on the forums suggested there should be a way to pass it to your heir. Lo and behold, now it's possible with a new estate (dlc-feature) building.

Buy all the DLCs and it becomes a high-speed map-painting bulldozer supertool. Pure unfiltered shit.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

So I've been kind of addicted to this game and after some more playing, some more finkin':

- First, to get it out of the way: Why is the Iranian Intermezzo so fucking short? IRL it lasted two centuries, but here it barely lasts a century. For Adventurers its a fucking nightmare, because you have to either content yourself to a mere Duchy before conquest or somehow carve a kingdom with a character on his 70-80s, especially if you're on the gallowsbait life. If your high prestige character dies, its back to the start. Also, you can barely enjoy the chaos, you know? (even if in practice, you're better off getting out of the fucking Iranian Intermezzo area and doing jobs in India and Arabia or something).
- I underestimated the ease to get a kingdom as an adventurer. The big stumbling block is Prestige, you need Exalted Among Men level to do Kingdom-level adventurer invasions. You will probably get what you require if you go pure marshal, but Freebooters don't have such sources of prestiges from their contracts - you need to Merc, Merc hard.

- Freebooter meta seems to be getting Intrigue Torturer up to "Crime Pays" (+50% payouts for crime contracts), getting Juicy Rumours for more intrigue and +50% crime contract payouts, then get yourself a Master of Spoils and Barber's Tools with Mortician's Tools. Once you get Master of Spoils, start building MaA and getting into any wars around you. Hell, if they won't hire you, Assist War and do it pro-bono. Ignore sieges unless you need to stop a war from being lost, just attack enemy armies and take their lunch money. You will get ~50-100 prestige per battle won and quite a bit of gold, too. Plus, ransoms. By this point, your war machine will pretty much pay for itself and print money. War is a Racket, buddy, and you're the Cappo di Tutti Cappi.
- I don't think stuff like Man-Hagglers and Master Thieves are worth it, unless you intend to stay even longer adventuring and say, want to build a giant fuck-off pile of gold before settling down. Master Thief seems useless to me, the gold doesn't really matter and the secrecy bonus is pretty much worthless because intrigue-focused freebooters will have enough intrigue already.
- I had a war in which I literally kept the fighting going on, so I could rake on more prestige and gold. To my enjoyment, enemy armies just kept coming.

- I -think- that if you play your intrigue cards right, you can make gold through turning nearby nobles into paypigs using Abduct and Forge Hook, especially if you have a Man-Haggler. Twice-Schemed means you can run two cons at once. Not sure if its worth it, because you will need enough plot helpers to allow you to run all these cons while still running contracts and/or wars.

- Between normal MaA replenishment and castle garrisons, you can pretty much reinforce your MaA infinitely - especially at high levels of prestige and piety.
- Once you max Intrigue as a Freebooter, you want to max out Learning to increase your health and make your ruler last as long as possible.
- Get Wit Levels of Hastiluder as fast as possible, it increases your lifestyle income.
- Park your camp in the most friendly nearby ruler. Someone you helped in a war for free or seduced, is a good candidate.

- Stress: Until your health starts going to shit, you don't want to lose stress as an Intriguer, you want to get stress. "Thriving in Chaos" pumps your stats, going to stress lvl2 is worth it if you have enough health modifiers, just be careful and don't get too close to lvl3. Think of stress as your "Overclock Mode". Some crime contracts allow you to get ensured sucess in exchange for +stress, use them carefully. Once your health starts decreasing, go down to lvl1 and stay there.
- If you're doing this, I recommend parking in a castle near a temple. You can reinforce MaA through the castle's garrison, even in enemy territory. The temple is there so you can balance your humours in case health goes bad and healing yourself from being ill.
- Keep stealing supplies, all the damn time lol. Its hilarious how abusable that is.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

So I've been kind of addicted to this game

Shit I know what that's like.
Mods?