If At First You Don't Secede: Crusader Kings 2

Published by the small group of history nerds, accountants, and Aspergers people known as Paradox Interactive, Crusader Kings 2 is the latest in a series of games that has been renowned for bugs, game balance issues, and breathtakingly poor tutorials. The average player will be presented with a dated interface that resembles an ERP, an impressively large map filled with foreign names and pretty colours, and no fucking clue as to what anything means or what one should be doing.

The natural response is to turn the piece of shit off as quickly as possible and blame the experience on a hangover or perhaps the consumption of spoiled salmon. And yet in spite of a list of defects that would make a nun reach for a coathanger, this series of games has developed a rabid fan base by offering an innovative take on strategy gameplay that cannot be found anywhere else. With enough digging, user created mods, and agony, a player will find a uniquely rich and open ended experience. A kid this ugly has to have personality, right?

Unlike most any other Paradox game, Crusader Kings 2 works out of the box without major crippling bugs or major balance issues. Buried inside the dated graphics and confusing interface is the most unique take on a strategy RPG I have ever seen. Unlike other Paradox games, Crusader Kings 2 is focused on managing a unique and often defective brood of individuals rather than a faceless nation-state. Your rivals and friends will be personalities and lineages ranging from demanding Popes, ambitious vassals, scheming children and incompetent kings (this is often the player). The goals and destinies of your family of misfits are your own to set as you find your offspring cast adrift in a history of plagues, wars, Mongolian invasions, and of course Crusades.

Once a player has understood the game and become immersed, they may find themselves subconsciously locked into the medieval mindset. Fear and greed will fuel casual atrocities which would otherwise be unthinkable; incest, infanticide, religious fanaticism and bigotry will come so naturally that one might consider donating to Rick Santorum. The inventive ways players can scheme is unsurpassed, and the emergent disasters and opportunities that arise can be stunning.

Have you ever wanted to cackle like an evil mastermind as a century long plan unfolds? Could you consider killing your own loving wife in order to proceed with an important breeding program to secure the crown of France? Would you find it hilarious to watch it all fall apart as your homosexual, hunchback son murders his brothers and you to take the throne? Then this might be the game for you.

Soon this post will be a gameplay guide thing

I *adored* the first Crusader Kings. A genuinely unique title. I've been really looking forward to the sequel.

But the first one did have some serious balance issues, which eventually wore me down. Here's what I want to know:

1. In the first game, you could marry your men to pretty much anyone you wanted. You could also install women in the management positions in your kingdom (except military and religious). Putting these two together meant that within a period of months, you had the best possible managers, and they'd never leave you. Is this still a problem in CK2?

2. Excommunication was ridiculous. If the papal controller was anywhere near you, it was a guaranteed excommunication unless you were a saint. Has this been fixed?

Bullwinkle wrote: I *adored* the first Crusader Kings. A genuinely unique title. I've been really looking forward to the sequel.

But the first one did have some serious balance issues, which eventually wore me down. Here's what I want to know:

1. In the first game, you could marry your men to pretty much anyone you wanted. You could also install women in the management positions in your kingdom (except military and religious). Putting these two together meant that within a period of months, you had the best possible managers, and they'd never leave you. Is this still a problem in CK2?

2. Excommunication was ridiculous. If the papal controller was anywhere near you, it was a guaranteed excommunication unless you were a saint. Has this been fixed?

1. You have somewhat free reign on who you marry, but with a few caveats.

- If your family is nothing, you are far less likely to get acceptances than a prestigious family like the Capets. This is based on the history of how many titles your family has held.

- The relevance of your family to the local politics also plays a part. A neighboring country is more likely to want a marriage (and alliance) than a distant country. A child of a leader who hates your will probably not agree to a marriage of any sort because you're a giant dick.

- The relative rank of the spouses is huge. You can't expect a count in a backwater province to marry a princess. You are almost a peasant to them.

- A bright, gifted bride is much easier to marry off than an incompetent, sinning hunchback.

- You and your son take a sizable prestige hit for marrying your sons to someone far beneath their rank, no matter how talented the wife. You also end up with a shit alliance as opposed to a good one.

- An exceptionally talented wife might want to kill any children of your previous marriages because she's a bitch. And smart enough to pull it off.

- Women can only hold a single position in the council (spymaster), and only if it is your wife or mother. Female leaders can and do exist, but can be a huge, huge problem for various reasons.

As for people never leaving you, vassal revolts are one of the biggest hurdles of the game to overcome. Smart management is more important than military conquest if you want your holdings to survive. If your leader dies an leaves a mess of a situation to his son, his son might not survive the transition. Giving a position is often more of a question of loyalty than ability. In fact, talented people tend to be more ambitious and likely to fuck you.

2. The recent patch fixed excommunication, which was somewhat of a problem for certain players (I never found it to be so, but actively worked on my Papal relations). I'd recommend you try out Wizmod or CK2+ mod if you are worried about it, which greatly reduces the number of casual assassinations and excommunications. In general, if the Pope likes you and your are fairly pious, you wont be kicked out of the church. If he hates you and you are a shithead, you could be fucked.

I am a bit of a sucker for Paradox video games (Europa Universalis single handily killed any love I had left for the Civilization series) and now they are my default free time activity. I am already 146 hours into Crusader Kings 2, and with the first content DLC coming out pretty soon I expect that this game will be holding my attention for a long, long time.

Right now my 8 year old female ruler just inherited a large, foreign kingdom and I am having to deal with a widespread revolt design to topple me from power. To add to that I ran out of money from the cost of maintaining troops, had to take a loan and am now stealing money from the church.

I do not expect this to go well at all.

My Swede king had a long, long series of daughters. The lusty fart decides to up and impregnate his oldest daughter for his first son (an inbred imbecile). My king's brother was married to a woman set to inherit half of Poland, but he decided he was homosexual after a tournament. He died so I decided my king would kill his wife, remarry his brother's widow, and seed the woman himself. At 60 years old, he finally does it! The perfect heir. Sadly the imbecile inbred gargoyle who was destined to replace a bishop (who lived to 90 years) kills him

So here I am with a gargoyle (grand)son king on the throne. My powerful dukes, being relatives of mine, hate the (legitimized) bastard and declare a succession crisis. All of them. Oh shit. About a year into the bloodbath, the Mongolians invade all the way up to Finland and I start to panic. So I played it smart. I murdered some sap married to a powerful Duchess in England, married one my gargoyle's cousins to her and prayed they would have a son. It was our only hope to stay landed at this point because Sweden was about to be fucked.

At home, I hired half of the mercenaries in the realm to put down my murderous vassals, leaving my kingdom helpless to the golden horde. I place all of my non-family dukes as honorary commanders (to kill the treasonous pricks off) as I put up a desperate defense before swearing fealty and losing half of my holdings. The gargoyle mercifully dies, long live the English family!

After a few generations in England where I plot to overthrow the king, I notice the damnedest thing. My family in Sweden somehow regained their positions, and several of them married into the HRE! I marry my ruler to his cousin to consolidate our realms and their son inherits the largest kingdom in the world. He also happens to be a harelipped Cathar dwarf.

Which of the two mods do you like better? I keep going back and forth (and they both have their advantages), but I have not come to any firm decisions.

Wizmod just got rolled into CK2+, I'll go and pop over and see if Wiz has put up a link for the latest version.

Here ya go: www.mediafire.com/?2kzp3rnwwqr4bmp

Check here to see periodically and you should be able to find the latest versions as they come out. I'm not sure if you need to register on the site or not to see this, so let me know if it works:

forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php...age=40&pagenumber=19

Oh, I am familiar with both of them. I have always thought of CK+ as being the newer version of WizMod.

I thought you were referring to DBA as the other one. I probably should have just scrolled up and seen what you were actually talking about rather than assuming and being an idiot.

Buddy, I am pretty familiar with idiocy and assumptions, believe me.

I've got a lot of trust in WizMod/CK2+ (they started off as a few different and incompatible mods from Wiz, Flippycunt, and a few others). The fact that it's the 'standard' somethingawful.com mod means it will have a regular player base to test it out, a massive sounding board for ideas and criticisms, and quite a few guys developing for it. Plus the actual paradox forums are a bad place for terrible posts and I'd rather just check out my regular forums.

Glad to hear CK2 is more pOlished than most paradox titles. The phrase diamond in the rough doesn't even begin to describe paradox.

I got this as part of some absurd sale on Amazon ($12 for CK2, Vic2, SotS1/2, Magicka) before the Steam Summer Sale kicked off and I've sunk goddamn 20 hours into this over the past three days.

God I want to spend a bunch of money and buy a new computer. Primarily to play CK2 and CK2 Game of the Thrones mod.

So CK2 with most of the DLC came along pretty reasonably priced in the Steam winter sale and... I've already sunk 30 hours into it.

And I'm still bad at it. I'm typically a pretty strong player in strategy and RPG video games but I'm hideously bad at this game. I tried starting off as King of a moderately sized and civilized middle-western European empire. Things were going pretty well, I got some of my kids married off to some other pretty decent empires, had a good set of allies, but didn't dare go to war with anybody because for some reason the AI always has way more troops available than I do. So I manage to finagle some additional territory through marriages and murder plots which is fun, and then my King dies and I continue playing as his heir. Immediately everybody in my little kingdom hates me; there's like 3 strong factions supporting various ways to de-King me, and my Spymaster can't stop telling me about the plots to kill my wife and myself. I don't know what the hell has happened, and I don't know why everybody who loved my King hates his heir. Within a couple of years I've lost my Kingdom and am now playing as the Mayor of some town or some bullshit. So I abandon and restart.

Then the same basic thing happens, about three more times. But I get better at building up my lands and getting decent sized armies together. I start picking more plucky little kingdoms and attacking every little one-off unallied spot I can find and my subjects and court love that shit. Suddenly I'm getting prestige and I'm popping out kids and making good marriages for them all while expanding my plucky little kingdom. Soon I will control all of southern England-- Oh shit the Saxons showed up and now I'm dead and so are my heirs and I'm playing as Mayor of some town or some bullshit again. So I abandon and restart.

So I pick a Tribal culture way up at the most northern part of Scandinavia (Kola is the land apparently). Maybe I'm not cut out to be a feudal lord and a little bit of the tribal life will suit me better. Why not, I've got all the DLC anyway I figure. Tribal cultures are weird but soon I'm building up and beating up, and all of what would become modern Finland is mine. I've got some strong allies in the region and between me wife and me concubines I've got more kids than I know what to do with. None of the haughty feudal lords will marry my infidel children so I'm trying to build alliances with other tribes I don't intend to immediately conquer. The Swedish land area is my only real concern but I'm in good with the Karl over there so no worries. The Swedish guy that's my Western neighbor hates me for some reason but screw him anyway because I know the Karl has my back. Then some random-ass bullshit individual province on the other side of Norway attacks me and all of the other Scandinavian people apparently think he's way cooler than I am and then I'm dead again and now I'm playing as some lower-tier tribal dude with one crappy little land area I can do approximately nothing with. This time I'm kind of mad about the whole thing so I spend a few years trying to marry my family into the leadership of the big-ass Swedish empire since they're pretty much taking all of Scandinavia. I work my way up to Chancellor or something and have a pretty good chunk of land and feel pretty good about this again. Apparently I do not know my Scandinavian history because whatever I thought I was a part of was not modern day Sweden. I think. Because the Swedish Revolt kicks in and they hate me, and they're powerful, and pretty soon I'm crushed and I'm playing as Mayor of some town or some bullshit again. So I abandon and restart.

This time I switch the game to Easy difficulty because there is apparently something I am not getting. Now I'm a few generations deep in the Kingdom of Bavaria, and I've conquered Bohemia, and I'm taking out the Slavic tribes to my East and making good with the feudal empires to my West. I've got a land area about 2/3 the size of modern day Poland that borders Italy and what will probably become Germany. I'm throwing around marriages and duchies and whatnot like it's feudal Oprah's 1000th episode. I've got bunches of people in my dungeons. Even so I've almost been wiped out twice, I was pretty sure all of Bavaria was going to kill my heir again when my last King died, and my wife is super ugly, but I've been hanging on. Barely. I'm afraid to load my game and unpause it.

I don't know what the fuck I'm doing in this one.

And I deal with SAP daily...