Thursday, 19 April 2012
Kyra has been enthusiastically failing at Crusader Kings II.
Oooh! This is in the Axis of Awesome!
~
In a desperate attempt to get the taste of art-game out of my mouth, I spontaneously bought a copy of Crusader Kings II off Steam the other day. I honestly don’t entirely know why I went for it over, for example, any of the other eighty bazillion awesome things available on Steam. I know I'm meant to hate Steam because of DRM and Evil and stuff but it's so unbelievably convenient and exciting that I am completely in thrall to it. It's like having all the games I've ever wanted at my fingertips for less than I'd be willing to pay for them. Anyway, the truth is, I'm unremittingly terrible at strategy games but every now and then again I get an itch that can only be satisfied by obsessively sucking at one (the 'at' occupies a very important position in that sentence).
For the record, the last strategy game I was good at was Civilisation II and that’s only because it was broken, and I knew precisely how it was broken so I could exploit it shamelessly. It was a beautiful relationship. The other thing I find a bit disconcerting about strategy games is that the besotted/bored curve for them seems to be exceptionally sharp compared to other games. Rather than just losing interest gradually over a period of days or weeks, I go from being unable to think about anything else to never wanting to see the thing again in the space of about five seconds.
Something like this (totally scientific, man):
In Civilisation it’s usually at about the point the industrial revolution happens because after that the game isn’t pretty any more. Or, to put it less girlishly, the build up is always infinitely more interesting than the consolidation. I’d far rather be two guys with a shovel and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, getting excited because they’ve discovered A Whale, than a globe-spanning empire sending an army of tanks against the last bastions of the Sioux, who once traded me the wheel for the alphabet. That doesn’t make me feel awesome, it just makes me feel sad. And I don't see the point of games unless they make feel awesome.
Thankfully there’s no danger of anything like that happening with
Crusader Kings II because I don’t have a fucking clue how to play it. Genres operate primarily through familiarity, which is all very comforting and pleasurable, but it does mean that when you bravely branch out into something different it can feel extraordinarily palate-cleansing, as long as you don’t mind also feeling hopeless and clueless for much of the experience. I think there’s an extent to which we tend to downplay the effect of familiarity on the ways we interact with games. Just consider Shim's article on Torment; a lot of the points he raises about the inaccessibility of game content are completely valid but, for those of us who played it when it first came out, it's embedded in our consciousness to such an extent that the arbitrary connections we accepted without question feel natural.
I mean, the first time I played Baldurs Gate I was naive enough to believe the game when it told me to go straight to the Friendly Arm Inn, where, of course, I was killed repeatedly by Tarnesh, who was probably an epic level 3 and far beyond both my level and my meagre D&D skill-set. Nowadays, I’m trained enough in the ways of cRPGs to know that going direct to your destination is the stupidest thing you can do. If I ever fancy replaying BG I instinctively head off into the wilderness to pick off wolves and level up, or make a beeline for where I know Xar and Wossname are waiting. Or, exploit the engine by nipping into the Friendly Arm to recruit Khalid and Jaheira before heading back out to pwn Tarnesh. Or perhaps even just kite the dude into of the city guards.
The point is that my behviour comes from knowing not only how Baldurs Gate works, but how those kind of games work. And I don’t mean to sound all jaded but it’s been a long time since a game surprised me. The rhythms and tropes of cRPGs are practically second nature to me now. It’ll take me a few minutes or so to get my head around a new system, and to work out how to optimise my character, but I’m not really doing anything fundamentally different to whatever I've done in the last ten cRPGs I’ve played. Unless you count Dark Souls, which is best described as an exercise in mortification. But with a game like Crusader Kings II, I genuinely have no idea what to do, or what I’m supposed to do, and that’s even more exciting than it is bewildering.
I mean, I’ve read the manual, I diligently played the tutorial but when I chose a random Spanish King and found myself confronted by a map of my territories while Dark Ages Europe did its own thing around me, I found I had utterly no reference points for interacting with the game, or interpreting what was happening. My king was unmarried? How did I get married. Oh like this. Omg, who do I marry? I can press a de jure ducal claim? Is that good? This guy wants to be my spymaster instead of my current spymaster, okay? This count is asking for money. The Pope is calling a holy war? What the fuck?! Somebody help me!
I’ve since managed to get the hang of things enough to survive a generation or two, but the intricacies remain elusive and, y’know something, that’s okay. I think it’s probably what being a feudal ruler is like - i.e. something you make up as you go along. The game is set between 1066 and 1457, and the basic notion is that you can play pretty much any dude in Europe. Well, maybe not Ongle the Mushroom Farmer. But you can be a king, a duke, or a count and the ‘aim’ of the game, if you can call it that, is basically to found a lasting dynasty. The main antagonist, putting aside all them infidels, is history itself (ahh, d’you see) which gives the game a strangely authentic feel as time marches chaotically onwards, reminding you of your ultimate irrelevance, and ensuring your best laid schemes inevitably fall prey to some absurd and random fluke.
It’s pausable real time and the action takes place entirely on a map (yes, yes, for many many hours I’ve been playing a game with basically no graphics - although it is a very pretty map) and within a wealth of menu screens. It’s not so much that there’s a lot to read in the game, but there’s a hell of a lot to interpret. I tend to spend most of my time trying to unravel why certain events are happening - why my wife keeps murdering my spymaster, for example, or why the Duke of Suchandsuch hates my guts. Or why the moment you turn your back on your heir for five seconds he degenerates into a kinslaying Cathar.
The biggest challenge, I mean once you’ve got over the fact you’re never going to understand anything, is working out what you’re supposed to do. Sometimes half a century will pass with nothing of of note happening at all, and sometimes you’ll be trapped in an fraught conflict over a rock in the middle of nowhere for decades at a time. Passivity is just as acceptable a strategy as the opposite. I’ve had Kings who have literally just kept things ticking over for their entire lifetimes, and others who have conquered nations in the brief twenty years of their rule. And, unlike many of the other strategy games I’ve played, expansion for expansion’s sake is rarely a sensible approach. Firstly it takes a lot of resources and secondly, unless you’re going up against infidels, you need a reason, which may or may not be made up. And even if you do the win the war you just initiated, you’ll still only walk away with the piddly little piece of nowhere you dubiously claimed rightfully belonged to you anyway. This can all seem a bit daunting but once you get accustomed to the way it works you soon start inventing goals for yourself, whether it’s uniting Scotland, undercutting your most influential Duke’s powerbase or getting rid of your worthless heir before he reproduces in the hope of somebody decent inheriting your throne, and growing ever more Machiavellian as time passes.
Back when I was King of Ireland and Scotland, I realised that one of my Dukes had basically accumulated far too many territories, and was getting powerful enough to challenge my rule, so I decided to betrothe (is that even a word?) my two year old heir to his five year old daughter, who was currently his sole heir. Their eventual child, who would be of my dynasty and probably played by me, following the death of the current king and his heir, would therefore inherit all the Duke's lands, alongside my own, which would allow me to re-distribute them at my leisure to my burgeoning army of fantastically loyal, content, honest, weak, stuttering courtiers. (I am very careful to grant land only to inept people who love me). Of course, I needed to stop the current Duke having any more children so I imprisoned him on a spurious pretext until he died. And the whole plot did sort of come to fruition about sixty years down the line, although my heir's wife, who was rather savvy and I think suspected what was going on, was constantly scheming against him. The downside was that I temporarily lost control of dynasty,since the education of my heir's heir was left to the Duke's family and they apparently raised him psycho but in the game of thrones you win or you watch generations of careful eugenics pissed down the drain by a heretic with a hairlip.
Like Sim City, I think it’s fair to say that CK2 is more a toy than a game, for it’s far less about the act of winning than the act of playing. A Henry VIII Simulator might also be an apt description, since there’s something about being a ruler in that kind of setting that leads you down paths of hopeless lust, gluttony and power-grabbing. I mean, obviously you can make choices that would lead to your king being just, kindly and pious, or you can have him do nothing but hold enormous feasts and shag anything that moves, which somehow feels far more satisfying. But, mainly, I think CK2 is the best roleplaying game I’ve ever played. It’s like living A Game of Thrones. And while I can't imagine myself babbling away at someone about the plot of Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Dan and I did basically hold Arthur hostage while we breathlessly recounted for him the saga of King Alberic The Fat, one time (hopeless) King of Ireland, who was knocked off his horse in a minor border skirmish and spent the rest of his lengthy reign as a vegetable, a fat vegetable.
My most ‘successful’ game saw me, over several generations, uniting Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England under my rulership - the Scottish Isles, as I took to calling it. Sadly, about twenty years before game end, King Findley the Holy, a sprightly seventy-four year old, who had sired eighteen children across five wives and three mistresses, and was generally beloved by everyone, died in his sleep and was succeeded by his weak, stuttering, kinslaying, excommunicated heir who was, err, not very popular at all. And that was the end of the Scottish Isles. We managed to just about get things stabilized by 1457 but that was mainly because we’d killed and impaled nearly everyone in the realm. But by far the high point of the whole game for me was when England, which had managed to fight off the Norman invasion but not, apparently, the Norwegians, after several generations of intrigue and infighting with me chipping away at the England/Scottish border, finally fell to (wait for it)...
Needless to say, I did what anyone would have done in the circumstances. I called up my allies, I went to the Pope for a legion of Knights Templar and I waged Holy War.
Holy War. For Oxford.
That is way better than anything that happened in actual history.
We won, by the way, we drove the infidel back to Cornwall. I was so proud.
And games in which everything has gone horrendously wrong have been, if anything, even more entertaining. Let me tell you, dear readers, about Fernando. Heir to the kingdom of Castile, the aged King Sanchez’s only son, Fernando, who I raised lovingly and carefully to have every possible advantage, who also happened to be a big gay. He was a beautiful and pious youth, a mastermind theologian, learned, elegant, beloved of court and church alike, and did I mention? Gay as a box of hair. Well great.
I therefore comb the courts of Europe looking for a lusty 16 year old to do the dirty while Fernando lies back and thinks of Castile. Eventually I find an up-for-anything Bavarian Princess and sit staring at the happy couple as the years pass, waiting for them to breed. Fernando, however, continues to love God like there’s no tomorrow, and the Pope who, incidentally, hates me for being a tyrannical, impious glutton, really takes a shine to him. This has a knock-on effect on my bishops who like Fernando way more than they like me, and assassination intrigues quadruple until my spymaster is himself assassinated and I have to replace him with a paranoid hunchbacked dwarf. And time ticks on and poor King Sanchez is a wreck but, no, those pandas are still not fucking to save their species.
In desperation Sanchez takes a mistress who promptly obliges him with … his seventh daughter. NOOOOO! His actual wife is not best pleased but must eventually forgive him because not long after she, too, becomes pregnant. And, joy of joys, a boy! I promptly name him Sanchez to send a message.
Which leaves the problem: what to do with gay Fernando?
Unfortunately the loss of my competent spymaster has left me somewhat screwed when it comes to intrigue. I toy with assassination but I have a 21% chance of achieving it, and a 48% of being discovered, which will make everyone hate me even more than they already do.
Thankfully, the Pope finally comes through for me, albeit unintentionally. He calls a Holy War for some pathetic strip of land miles from anywhere. Perfect. Fernando has no military skills whatsoever. I raise 500 men, stick them in a boat and dispatch them, along with Gay Fernando, to the middle east. Bet God can’t help you now, my son.
Except. Hum.
Somehow, Fernando covers himself in glory in the Middle East, I think by the simple expedient of hanging out with armies far larger than himself. But while thousands upon thousands of (straight) men die around him, Fernando basically stands in the middle of whatever city they’re meant to be crusading for - and only wins the fucking goddamn crusade. The ecstatic Pope gives him Whereveritwas, along with several other territories WAY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MAP from me, and there Fernando remains, completely out of my reach. His wife’s opinion of him, by now, has tanked to -100 hatred and he appears to be spending all his time with a young Italian courtier he presumably met on Crusade, who bears the following traits: homosexual, attractive, poet. My eyebrow, oh how raised it is.
Well. Fine. Fuck you Fernando, I have a son of my own who-
WHAT DO YOU MEAN NATURAL CAUSES?!
It is all too much for King Sanchez. The ironic disappointments of life do for him, and he dies aged sixty nine, leaving the entirety of his kingdom to Gay Fernando, who rules wisely and happily (although without issue) until he is assassinated by his own wife, and my dynasty is well and true over. I try to feel resentful but it was such an epic and glorious failure that I'm nothing but delighted, and I spend the next few days telling anyone who will listen to the Ballad of Gay Fernando.
And that, right there, is the reason Crusader Kings II might just be the most awesome game I’ve ever played.
For the record, the last strategy game I was good at was Civilisation II and that’s only because it was broken, and I knew precisely how it was broken so I could exploit it shamelessly. It was a beautiful relationship. The other thing I find a bit disconcerting about strategy games is that the besotted/bored curve for them seems to be exceptionally sharp compared to other games. Rather than just losing interest gradually over a period of days or weeks, I go from being unable to think about anything else to never wanting to see the thing again in the space of about five seconds.
Something like this (totally scientific, man):
In Civilisation it’s usually at about the point the industrial revolution happens because after that the game isn’t pretty any more. Or, to put it less girlishly, the build up is always infinitely more interesting than the consolidation. I’d far rather be two guys with a shovel and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, getting excited because they’ve discovered A Whale, than a globe-spanning empire sending an army of tanks against the last bastions of the Sioux, who once traded me the wheel for the alphabet. That doesn’t make me feel awesome, it just makes me feel sad. And I don't see the point of games unless they make feel awesome.
Thankfully there’s no danger of anything like that happening with
Crusader Kings II because I don’t have a fucking clue how to play it. Genres operate primarily through familiarity, which is all very comforting and pleasurable, but it does mean that when you bravely branch out into something different it can feel extraordinarily palate-cleansing, as long as you don’t mind also feeling hopeless and clueless for much of the experience. I think there’s an extent to which we tend to downplay the effect of familiarity on the ways we interact with games. Just consider Shim's article on Torment; a lot of the points he raises about the inaccessibility of game content are completely valid but, for those of us who played it when it first came out, it's embedded in our consciousness to such an extent that the arbitrary connections we accepted without question feel natural.
I mean, the first time I played Baldurs Gate I was naive enough to believe the game when it told me to go straight to the Friendly Arm Inn, where, of course, I was killed repeatedly by Tarnesh, who was probably an epic level 3 and far beyond both my level and my meagre D&D skill-set. Nowadays, I’m trained enough in the ways of cRPGs to know that going direct to your destination is the stupidest thing you can do. If I ever fancy replaying BG I instinctively head off into the wilderness to pick off wolves and level up, or make a beeline for where I know Xar and Wossname are waiting. Or, exploit the engine by nipping into the Friendly Arm to recruit Khalid and Jaheira before heading back out to pwn Tarnesh. Or perhaps even just kite the dude into of the city guards.
The point is that my behviour comes from knowing not only how Baldurs Gate works, but how those kind of games work. And I don’t mean to sound all jaded but it’s been a long time since a game surprised me. The rhythms and tropes of cRPGs are practically second nature to me now. It’ll take me a few minutes or so to get my head around a new system, and to work out how to optimise my character, but I’m not really doing anything fundamentally different to whatever I've done in the last ten cRPGs I’ve played. Unless you count Dark Souls, which is best described as an exercise in mortification. But with a game like Crusader Kings II, I genuinely have no idea what to do, or what I’m supposed to do, and that’s even more exciting than it is bewildering.
I mean, I’ve read the manual, I diligently played the tutorial but when I chose a random Spanish King and found myself confronted by a map of my territories while Dark Ages Europe did its own thing around me, I found I had utterly no reference points for interacting with the game, or interpreting what was happening. My king was unmarried? How did I get married. Oh like this. Omg, who do I marry? I can press a de jure ducal claim? Is that good? This guy wants to be my spymaster instead of my current spymaster, okay? This count is asking for money. The Pope is calling a holy war? What the fuck?! Somebody help me!
I’ve since managed to get the hang of things enough to survive a generation or two, but the intricacies remain elusive and, y’know something, that’s okay. I think it’s probably what being a feudal ruler is like - i.e. something you make up as you go along. The game is set between 1066 and 1457, and the basic notion is that you can play pretty much any dude in Europe. Well, maybe not Ongle the Mushroom Farmer. But you can be a king, a duke, or a count and the ‘aim’ of the game, if you can call it that, is basically to found a lasting dynasty. The main antagonist, putting aside all them infidels, is history itself (ahh, d’you see) which gives the game a strangely authentic feel as time marches chaotically onwards, reminding you of your ultimate irrelevance, and ensuring your best laid schemes inevitably fall prey to some absurd and random fluke.
It’s pausable real time and the action takes place entirely on a map (yes, yes, for many many hours I’ve been playing a game with basically no graphics - although it is a very pretty map) and within a wealth of menu screens. It’s not so much that there’s a lot to read in the game, but there’s a hell of a lot to interpret. I tend to spend most of my time trying to unravel why certain events are happening - why my wife keeps murdering my spymaster, for example, or why the Duke of Suchandsuch hates my guts. Or why the moment you turn your back on your heir for five seconds he degenerates into a kinslaying Cathar.
The biggest challenge, I mean once you’ve got over the fact you’re never going to understand anything, is working out what you’re supposed to do. Sometimes half a century will pass with nothing of of note happening at all, and sometimes you’ll be trapped in an fraught conflict over a rock in the middle of nowhere for decades at a time. Passivity is just as acceptable a strategy as the opposite. I’ve had Kings who have literally just kept things ticking over for their entire lifetimes, and others who have conquered nations in the brief twenty years of their rule. And, unlike many of the other strategy games I’ve played, expansion for expansion’s sake is rarely a sensible approach. Firstly it takes a lot of resources and secondly, unless you’re going up against infidels, you need a reason, which may or may not be made up. And even if you do the win the war you just initiated, you’ll still only walk away with the piddly little piece of nowhere you dubiously claimed rightfully belonged to you anyway. This can all seem a bit daunting but once you get accustomed to the way it works you soon start inventing goals for yourself, whether it’s uniting Scotland, undercutting your most influential Duke’s powerbase or getting rid of your worthless heir before he reproduces in the hope of somebody decent inheriting your throne, and growing ever more Machiavellian as time passes.
Back when I was King of Ireland and Scotland, I realised that one of my Dukes had basically accumulated far too many territories, and was getting powerful enough to challenge my rule, so I decided to betrothe (is that even a word?) my two year old heir to his five year old daughter, who was currently his sole heir. Their eventual child, who would be of my dynasty and probably played by me, following the death of the current king and his heir, would therefore inherit all the Duke's lands, alongside my own, which would allow me to re-distribute them at my leisure to my burgeoning army of fantastically loyal, content, honest, weak, stuttering courtiers. (I am very careful to grant land only to inept people who love me). Of course, I needed to stop the current Duke having any more children so I imprisoned him on a spurious pretext until he died. And the whole plot did sort of come to fruition about sixty years down the line, although my heir's wife, who was rather savvy and I think suspected what was going on, was constantly scheming against him. The downside was that I temporarily lost control of dynasty,since the education of my heir's heir was left to the Duke's family and they apparently raised him psycho but in the game of thrones you win or you watch generations of careful eugenics pissed down the drain by a heretic with a hairlip.
Like Sim City, I think it’s fair to say that CK2 is more a toy than a game, for it’s far less about the act of winning than the act of playing. A Henry VIII Simulator might also be an apt description, since there’s something about being a ruler in that kind of setting that leads you down paths of hopeless lust, gluttony and power-grabbing. I mean, obviously you can make choices that would lead to your king being just, kindly and pious, or you can have him do nothing but hold enormous feasts and shag anything that moves, which somehow feels far more satisfying. But, mainly, I think CK2 is the best roleplaying game I’ve ever played. It’s like living A Game of Thrones. And while I can't imagine myself babbling away at someone about the plot of Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Dan and I did basically hold Arthur hostage while we breathlessly recounted for him the saga of King Alberic The Fat, one time (hopeless) King of Ireland, who was knocked off his horse in a minor border skirmish and spent the rest of his lengthy reign as a vegetable, a fat vegetable.
My most ‘successful’ game saw me, over several generations, uniting Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England under my rulership - the Scottish Isles, as I took to calling it. Sadly, about twenty years before game end, King Findley the Holy, a sprightly seventy-four year old, who had sired eighteen children across five wives and three mistresses, and was generally beloved by everyone, died in his sleep and was succeeded by his weak, stuttering, kinslaying, excommunicated heir who was, err, not very popular at all. And that was the end of the Scottish Isles. We managed to just about get things stabilized by 1457 but that was mainly because we’d killed and impaled nearly everyone in the realm. But by far the high point of the whole game for me was when England, which had managed to fight off the Norman invasion but not, apparently, the Norwegians, after several generations of intrigue and infighting with me chipping away at the England/Scottish border, finally fell to (wait for it)...
Needless to say, I did what anyone would have done in the circumstances. I called up my allies, I went to the Pope for a legion of Knights Templar and I waged Holy War.
Holy War. For Oxford.
That is way better than anything that happened in actual history.
We won, by the way, we drove the infidel back to Cornwall. I was so proud.
And games in which everything has gone horrendously wrong have been, if anything, even more entertaining. Let me tell you, dear readers, about Fernando. Heir to the kingdom of Castile, the aged King Sanchez’s only son, Fernando, who I raised lovingly and carefully to have every possible advantage, who also happened to be a big gay. He was a beautiful and pious youth, a mastermind theologian, learned, elegant, beloved of court and church alike, and did I mention? Gay as a box of hair. Well great.
I therefore comb the courts of Europe looking for a lusty 16 year old to do the dirty while Fernando lies back and thinks of Castile. Eventually I find an up-for-anything Bavarian Princess and sit staring at the happy couple as the years pass, waiting for them to breed. Fernando, however, continues to love God like there’s no tomorrow, and the Pope who, incidentally, hates me for being a tyrannical, impious glutton, really takes a shine to him. This has a knock-on effect on my bishops who like Fernando way more than they like me, and assassination intrigues quadruple until my spymaster is himself assassinated and I have to replace him with a paranoid hunchbacked dwarf. And time ticks on and poor King Sanchez is a wreck but, no, those pandas are still not fucking to save their species.
In desperation Sanchez takes a mistress who promptly obliges him with … his seventh daughter. NOOOOO! His actual wife is not best pleased but must eventually forgive him because not long after she, too, becomes pregnant. And, joy of joys, a boy! I promptly name him Sanchez to send a message.
Which leaves the problem: what to do with gay Fernando?
Unfortunately the loss of my competent spymaster has left me somewhat screwed when it comes to intrigue. I toy with assassination but I have a 21% chance of achieving it, and a 48% of being discovered, which will make everyone hate me even more than they already do.
Thankfully, the Pope finally comes through for me, albeit unintentionally. He calls a Holy War for some pathetic strip of land miles from anywhere. Perfect. Fernando has no military skills whatsoever. I raise 500 men, stick them in a boat and dispatch them, along with Gay Fernando, to the middle east. Bet God can’t help you now, my son.
Except. Hum.
Somehow, Fernando covers himself in glory in the Middle East, I think by the simple expedient of hanging out with armies far larger than himself. But while thousands upon thousands of (straight) men die around him, Fernando basically stands in the middle of whatever city they’re meant to be crusading for - and only wins the fucking goddamn crusade. The ecstatic Pope gives him Whereveritwas, along with several other territories WAY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MAP from me, and there Fernando remains, completely out of my reach. His wife’s opinion of him, by now, has tanked to -100 hatred and he appears to be spending all his time with a young Italian courtier he presumably met on Crusade, who bears the following traits: homosexual, attractive, poet. My eyebrow, oh how raised it is.
Well. Fine. Fuck you Fernando, I have a son of my own who-
WHAT DO YOU MEAN NATURAL CAUSES?!
It is all too much for King Sanchez. The ironic disappointments of life do for him, and he dies aged sixty nine, leaving the entirety of his kingdom to Gay Fernando, who rules wisely and happily (although without issue) until he is assassinated by his own wife, and my dynasty is well and true over. I try to feel resentful but it was such an epic and glorious failure that I'm nothing but delighted, and I spend the next few days telling anyone who will listen to the Ballad of Gay Fernando.
And that, right there, is the reason Crusader Kings II might just be the most awesome game I’ve ever played.
Themes: Computer Games
~
bookmark this with - facebook - delicious - digg - stumbleupon - reddit
~
Khaaaaaaaaaan! (/shatner)
I need to get this game and we need to play some multiplayer.
I look him up, and HA. The puny bastard barely has 800 armed men to his name, whereas, I was a mighty king, with an army of 7000!
MANUFACTURE CLAIM -> WARRRR
Oh.
Oh yeah.
He's friends with the King of Germany. And the King is very upset with me. And he and 50,000 of his friends are coming over to express just how upset they are.
Well, shit. Kingdom over.
Now all I need is 32 friends :P
Also Fernando was fine. Fernando had a lovely time with his Italian catamite. Everybody else was fucked.
@Axiomatic
I love the vagaries of fortune the game inflicts on you. I think there's a sort of underlying chaotic justice to it :) You couldn't desperately broker a white peace? That's basically what I do whenever somebody bigger than me rocks up, making me the archetypical schoolyard bully who beats up the little guy and then rolls over the moment somebody challenges him.
Ferretbrain Crusades! I haven't tried multiplayer yet but I am WELL UP FOR IT :)
Good times. The way history span off the rails each play-through was mightily, mightily entertaining.
This sequel sounds even more awesome.
Except, it seems, Mrs Fernando.
Fourthed! This sounds like it is indeed the Best Game Evar.
Compared to Europa Universalis III, which I've played a lot, it seems Paradox Interactive takes a different approach to the whole grand strategy genre with both Crusader Kings. In EU3, it still remains on an abstract level, where you steer a state through history and while it works in the same way of letting the player set their own goals, whether it is survival as a small state or trying to bouild a trade empire in addition to just conquering a whole lot, while stuff goes on in the world, it isn't as personal as CK2.
A thought on the satisfying way the roleplaying aspect comes through in strategy games(which always has some roleplaying aspects) and which really comes out nicely in CK2 is how it handles the aspect of player's choice in roleplaying vs. story and more precisely the issue of moral choice and its repercussions, which have been discussed here also.
Instead of trying to handle moral choices as through a moral theory, by working from a sort of deontic angle of good vs. bad, CK2 puts the player in a world, where the actions are very much controlled by the player and the consequences of those actions are the reactions of the other factions or persons in the world, who have their own agendas, beliefs and ambitions. If you take a certain action, some people will be angry and others wil. l support it and in some cases everybody else will hate you. So the focus is on transactions between different free agents, which will react in some ways which are predictable and in some ways which are not.
When into this mix randomness is added, there come many occasions where the player is really put between hard choices where the right and wrong of is a balance between different outcomes and the fallout of the decision is felt when the pope excommunicates you and the uppity duke decides this is the right time to get rid of you and most of your allies will not help, because they're mad at you as well. As in the real world, everything becomes a matter of politics and you can't stay out of the rain if you want to keep your hands on the power and so you get wet as well.
Of course as the other agents are not real individuals, but NPCs, it has to be made right, but I feel CK2 succeeds in this.
Essentially anybody can pause the game, and then they are the only person who can pause the game for 30 seconds (but they can unpause at will).
The 'host' controls the time BUT the game seems to determine if players are lagging behind and then it slows time down. Generally you seem to play, in practice, at the second fastest speed with player-determined pauses.
It is quite fun. We should totally do it :)
Does the multi-player game still let you select title level? I'd be up for something small, until I figure out the whole "how not to have your kingdom dissolve into a mass of rioting peasants, disingenuous dukes, and holy wars". Seriously, Spain is great until every single Muslim nation in the world decides to claim Castille for themselves. And the Pope is all "lalala I can't see you". I seriously considered converting just to piss him off. But for one brief, glorious evening, I was king of four nations, and heir to a nice little duchy in France.
I do wish that there was a better opportunity to understand what motivates people. I don't have any inkling why I constantly have the opportunity to kill my wife, but not the little bastard that is preventing my heir from inheriting another county. I've been through all the tutorials, but I'm still not sure how to get troops to a crusade before it ends. (Can't I just hand them off to the Pope somehow?) I don't really entirely understand inheritance - sometimes the pretenders to the throne aren't who I expected *at all*.
Dav
I haven't done any great things ever - so you're doing better than me :P To be honest, I think the game is supposed to sort of follow rises and falls, a bit like actual history, so I'm not sure it's even possible NOT to have kingdoms dissolving into a mass of rioting peasants, disingenuous dukes, and holy wars! I mean no matter how hard you try, and no matter how well you plan, some random thing always turns up to throw everything into dissaray.
I tend to have very a couple of very successful generations and then horrible chaos and doom, but playing through the horrible chaos and doom is actually pretty fun. I once lost pretty much all Scotland on account of being a very confused 3 year old girl...
I've found you get more plot opportunities if you're not a king - in fact, the only plot for a king seems to be killing your wife, which might be why it's always there. You can assassinate pretty much anybody you like (within your country) from the diplomacy menu, though of course you might get caught for it. Also I usually embrace uprisings enthusiastically because they allow me to wean out the ambitious and the competent. Basically if one Duke is getting too big for his boots, or I covet his land, I bug the shit out of him until he revolts, smack him down and arrest him, strip away his title (with full support of my vassals because he's a traitor) and then either keep his stuff or find some content imbecile who loves me and grant it to him.
First off I tried being the ruler of Iceland, on the basis that that would be a good chance to get a handle on the domestic side of things. That was fun, though it got boring having essentially no external pressures whilst at the same time not really having the means to actually go and be an external threat to someone else. Though there was one bit where I got a chance to convert to Waldensianism nearly 70 years before Peter Waldo's birth (and if that doesn't prove that Waldensianism is the true faith I don't know what does) which was quite fun.
Then I decided I wanted to get a better hang of war so I started up a game as the Holy Roman Emperor, noted that one of my vassals happened to have a de jure claim to Rome, cracked my knuckles and declared war on the Pope. (Historically speaking you weren't much of a HRE unless you overthrew at least one Pope.)
Where the hell does the man keep all those troops? The Vatican must be stuffed with barracks.
My new plan is to experiment with granting landed titles only to ancient, loving, unmarried lowborns, with the idea that either they'll a) die shortly and I'll reinherit and can reassign, or b) will manage to get married, but will probably only have one or two kids before dying - and the kids can be married off and/or killed if necessary. Education is hit or miss, for me - it's pretty rare that I get out what I wanted when I shipped the future lackey off to Chaste Count Olaf's School of Contented Imbecility. Often they come out rattling sabers and rarin' to have ten ambitious martial sons.
I do love that the game is all fuck yeah, Waldensianism, of course you know what that is. (I had to look it up, along with a bunch of the other stuff. It's educational!)
King of SwedenEmperor of Scandinavia and doing quite well. Only a couple of generations in, but already I control all of modern-day Sweden, Finland, and most of Norway (would've been all of Norway, if not for that damn Danish King beating me to the punch with the other part).I'm a bit stuck right now since acquiring anything more either requires attacking someone bigger than me, or chipping away at Northern Europe via boat, and my vassals already aren't too happy about how long I've been raising their levies. I think it's time for a period of peace and plenty for the Emperor of Scandinavia (who is 3/4 Syrian, I might add). Also I need to convert the rest of those damn pagan vassals to Catholicism.
That's probably a really bad idea. I ended up randomly picking the main heir to the Byzantine Empire early on, and because I didn't really have a good grasp on what to do, the Empire suddenly exploded into 900 warring factions the instant I succeeded my father.
Then my character died without me even getting much of a notification (I like to think he had a heart attack on signing the surrender out of sheer spite) and the Kingdom was inherited by his grandson - despite his son being alive at the time. Luckily my dad is my heir so I gave him heaps of power and spent the next few years kicking my heels expecting to be assassinated. Then the Byzantine empire was engulfed in civil war between the Emperor and the monophysite prince and I thought "aha!" and had my boy king call up the troops and try to take back the chunk of Croatia that had been nicked from us. Then the prince turned out to have too many forces for us so I had to surrender again.
Desperate to avoid being constantly screwed over by this heretic Prince I thought "Fuck it, I'll swear fealty to someone bigger than me". The only person who was offering it was the Byzantine emperor, which seemed to be an elegant solution - after all, he was busy crushing his son, right?
Then his son wins the civil war and hates me.
Then I realised I could convert to his heresy in order to make him like me.
Then I realised I could browbeat people into converting to my heresy.
So the Despot of Croatia, having survived to adulthood even though I didn't seriously expect him to, is currently having his heretic chaplain run an Inquisition in Zagreb to purge the Catholic menace whilst bullying his nobles into becoming heretics themselves.
It's great how in this game you start off with very simple goals and then you end up going off on these mad tangents.
Our first act was to pool our meagre funds to finance an assassination attempt on Good King Harold - which failed hard, but thankfully our involvement was not noticed.
As the King fought a losing war against the Norman invaders, Lancaster and Norfolk, wanting to get off the sinking ship of Saxon England as soon as possible, quickly declared independence. Northumberland adopted a Sitting On His Arse strategy that seemed to serve him well. But while Norfolk laid siege to a shopping mall in Colchester, Lancaster pressed the wrong button (SO HE SAYS) and inadvertently surrendered to the King, who promptly arrested him for being a traitorous fuckwit who couldn't even properly mount a war of independence and left him to die in prison. The Duchy of Lancaster therefore passed to a 1 year old girl, who declared the King a poohead and immediately launched her own war of independence.
Northumberland continued Sitting On His Arse TM, occasionally bickering over a piece of land the size of a postage stamp that the Scottish wanted to keep.
Norfolk then cannily bethrothed his zero year old daughter to Robert of Maine, the 18 year old son of William the Bastard Invader. A plan with absolutely no drawbacks.
By now, Merrie Englande of Yore is roundly fucked and we all surrender. Norfolk randomly acquires syphilis in Colchester, which he passes to his wife, who dies. Panic-stricken at having only 1 very young daughter (who is being brought up to be a proper Norman by William the Bastard because Norfolk is a turncoating weasel) Norfolk frantically marries the nearest lusty 16 year old ... lesbian, who, after what seems like many years of anguished swiving, provides a son and heir for the syphilitic Duke of Essex.
Northumberland the Spymaster, of Sitting On His Arse fame, drops dead for "no clear reason" and the duchy is inherited by his four year old son.
While the large Duchys of Northumberland and Lancaster start carving up Ulster and Wales respectively, the tiny three counties of Norfolk is overcome by tertiary syphilis induced hubris and invades ... France.
This is not successful, and Norfolk surrenders, losing all his piety, prestige and money, before dying ignominiously in Colchester (yes fucking Colchester) during a routine suppression of 200 rebels in hoodies.
At this point in time, Norfolk is a 3, Lancaster is 11 and Northumberland is 14.
Finally, Northumberland comes of age and becomes a mastermind tactician with the England's dodgiest tashe; he marries an Abyssinian princess and makes yet another (unsuccessful) attempt to enforce his ducal right to a park bench in Scotland. Meanwhile, Lancaster also become of age and turns out to be a right hottie, and well on the way to making herself Queen of Wales.
Norfolk is, still, however 4 years old, with no money, no prestige and no piety. Therefore pre-empting a fine old English tradition, he promptly dissolves the monasteries and takes all their stuff. The Pope is not thrilled and excommunicates him. Whereupon Norfolk follows up by assassinating his own sister - in a desperate bid to hold onto the pathetic three counties he already has due to being too young to change the succession laws.
Drogo of Norfolk is now 6 year old: a cruel, patient, excommunicated kinslayer.
And that's as far as we got....
She'd also like it known that she is the prettiest princess of all.
Seriously, he was Richard III + Henry VIII at the age of 4.
It's probably a good job we stopped playing when we did...
Having engulfed Wales entirely, the Duchess of Lancaster turned her attention to the lesser counts of England. Warwick seemed ripe for the taking, and she had a claim for it which was actually genuine, but foolishly King Robert had raised Crown Authority to the point where vassals could not war on each other. The Duchess therefore declared war on Robert to protect the ancient rights of the peerage, and was joined in this by the Duke of Northumberland. The south of England erupted into a patchwork of independent statelets, with the King forced to call on aid from Scotland and his French holdings to remain a viable force in the war.
The young Duke of Norfolk wasn't able to find a legitimate means to join the fray, and indeed was too busy murdering his tutors to pay attention to affairs of war. The war dragged on for years, however, and soon he came of age, and in doing so set forth at the head of his troops once the king called them up yet again to try and break the deadlock. At this point the Duke of Northumberland, who had got lost and wandered onto Norfolk's lands, accidentally attacked his army, slaughtered them, and killed Norfolk.
The tiny baby Duchess of Norfolk then realised she had a claim on Kent which needed pressing (Kent having gone to one of her poo-head siblings), and declared war on King Robert to get it back, depriving him of yet more lands. This forced him to sue for peace with Lancaster and Northumberland, which they accepted. Then they joined Norfolk's war and smashed up the King's armies yet again.
King Robert II now rules England in name only; his vassals act autonomously, and any crown policy which earns the disapproval of the major dukes is likely to inspire another humiliating civil war. Norfolk consolidates her gains in the south, whilst Northumberland and Lancaster, by now completely addicted to warfare, have been regularly at war since the peace. Northumberland is currently conquering the various disparate warlords of Ireland, whilst Lancaster, having matrilineally snagged a Scottish prince, is attempting to conquer all of Scotland.
Oh, and apparently the First Crusade failed but that's on the other side of the world so who cares?
- Going on Hajj is awesome. You get to fight Christian pirates and everything!
- Kyra and I went on a marrying spree when we realised we were in a polygamous culture. End result: Kyra's wives keep dying for mysterious reasons, my wives keep trying to murder each other so I have to lock them up for their own protection. Meanwhile, Dan was less greedy with the wives, but did end up getting caught shagging a chambermaid. This was mere days after I made him spiritual leader of half the Muslim world so his timing could have been better.
- You can have Grand Viziers! Also your main religious councillor's job is to convert people via preaching and give out charity on your behalf, as opposed to the Christian rulers whose personal clerics conduct Inquisitions and try to sway bishops into liking you more than they like the Pope.
Hah, I'm not falling for that one, I know what Grand Viziers are like.
By sending an expeditionary force to occupy Rome.
I still can't believe that worked. You only took an army of about 1000 odd men? After that It was just a case of playing whack-a-Christian to prevent any of the small groups of armies dribbling into the holy land forming one big army while the whole crusade fell apart due to the papacy been reduced to a small panic room in Rome.
I personally (when I wasn't dying from the sniffles) spent most of the game building villages and towns in my castles while sending armies to help with the constant civil wars against Arthur because he has like, 7 emir titles and the npcs don't like it when Sultans have more than 2. From what I can tell Dan spent most of the game trying to find positions for his idiot sons and fighting with his bastard half-brothers while Kyra spent the game reciting Vogon Poetry at her vassals causing them to all hate her thus meaning she became afraid to step outside for fear of causing a riot. Although though I'm sure the two of them can tell you more about what they had been up too.
It was a lot of fun though and (as I had hoped) a good deal funnier then single player.
I believe you actually had strategy and shit while I spent my time mocking Dan's incredibly unattractive daughter he fobbed off on Arthur...
I also inadvertently packed my heir off to Cairo at a shockingly young age which is why he grew up a complete waste of space with his only talent, apparently, being poetry.
Good quality beard though.