Crusader Kings 3 is the long awaited and cunningly named sequel to the much beloved (amongst hardcore grand strategy fans!) medieval dynasty simulator, Crusader Kings 2. Developed and published by three framed studio Paradox Interactive, it builds upon the already vast and intricate mechanisms that 8 years of ongoing DLC and expansions have brought to Crusader Kings 2.

The bane of all of Paradix's grand strategy games has been the steep cliff face learning curve which tends to put off all but the most dedicated game. Luckily, this is the sort of gamer that is most attracted to PC gaming.

The Setup

How to best describe the Paradox brand of Grand Strategy? Paradox games are essentially "everything" simulators where you take charge of a county/country/empire and plot it's survival across a time-span of centuries or millennia. You ARE the embodiment of the country, and YOU make the decisions that effect the many intricate mechanisms that effect the economy, domestic politics, foreign affairs, technology and warfare.

There are Grand Strategy games set in the medieval past, the early 20th century, the Age of Enlightenment and the far-off future. All are slow moving epics with emergent stories and narratives as you navigate the game universe to change or re-live history.

The Crusader Kings series brings all of this high-level machinations down to the personal level of kings and petty tyrants of the medieval ages. It is a game that tied around personal feuds and alliances, backstabbing and intrigue, honour and savagery.

You play as the head of your house, and when you die... you control the heir of your dynasty.... and each character in your dynasty has different traits, and the game "encourages" you to really role-play to your character strengths and weaknesses.

This is a game where the emergent stories take a sharply personal edge... from the time that your younger brother banded together with other siblings to destroy you after you seduced his children... to the time when you stayed locked up in isolation because your player avatar was too shy to interact with people.

The Game

Crusader Kings 3 is still played out on a huge medieval map, all the incredible narratives and stories are described in story panels with some critical decision making baked into events. The world map is huge... you can play any country from around 800 AD in the European, Asian and North African continents. This is a holdover from the vast expansion packs that Crusader Kings 2 laid as a basis for this game. So, an incredible array of cultures and religions to start from!

Of course, that is a completely zoomed out map of the known world at the time. Most of the time, you will be focused more upon your local region, during which all the map overlays are incredibly useful for gleaning information about county and kingdom borders, de jure claims and terrain effects. The medieval world is a tangle of constantly shifting personal alliances and feuds that sometimes pass down through generations. Navigating this political terrain is not for the faint of heart, you need to be smart, ruthless and charming in equal measures. Knowing when to use the iron fist or the velvet glove is critical if you don't want to become an evil tyrant that the world is united against or a lowly lackey of a greater king.

I'm afraid that Crusader Kings 3 is just too big and complex a simulation to really go into depth about all the interlocking mechanics at play here. So, I'm going to skimp a little bit on the details and describe a much larger overview of the game.

Grand Strategy games from Paradox have always been unbelievably intricate simulations with so much going on behind the scenes. It can be quite bewildering with so much information contained in menus sitting behind nested menus. When you are controlling a country, things aren't quite so bad... you learn and you eventually find all the information that you need.

However, in Crusader Kings, you are dealing with personal affairs and interactions of characters (and the way that this affects your kingdom). Sure, there are the regular running of kingdom economies, warfare and diplomacy.... but it is the personal relationships which is the meat and purpose of the game. For this, the idea of nested menus in the previous iteration (Crusader Kings 2) was a disaster!

Crusader Kings 3 has fixed this UI disaster with better displayed information and iconography, with evolving character portraits that also reflect traits of the character as well. However, the big winner of the day is.... TOOLTIPS!... and more specifically, NESTED TOOLTIPS! It is unbelievable how much of a difference this makes to the game, being able to call up descriptions of critical information, and then following that description on to other game mechanic interactions.

Managing war and the economy are relatively trivial tasks. The critical thing to remember is the fact that you are ruler by the consent of your vassals. Sure, you are likely more powerful in military and economic strength than any single vassal... but against the combined might of your court, you are likely to be swatted aside. So, the key is to keep everyone happy... or at least focused upon enemies other than yourself! Sadly, most of the nobles tend to looking out for themselves and their kin... and this makes for some tricky juggling to keep everyone appeased... by gold, position, trickery or the point of a sword.

A interesting character development of Crusader Kings 3 are the Lifestyle and Stress mechanics. The Lifestyle mechanic is essentially a light RPG progression that you can "level" up your character with, focusing on various styles of ruler-ship that best mesh with your character strengths and weaknesses.

The stress mechanic is a really innovative one though, where your character gains stress if they act against their "natural" compulsion. So, a character with the "shy" trait will gain stress if they are forced to interact with people, and the "sadistic" character lose stress by torturing people! It is a great way to encourage role-play of the avatar rather than seeing them as cookie cutter figureheads that inconveniently die on the way to leading your dynasty to greatness. The idea that you play as a shy introvert in one lifetime to switch to a blood-thirsty sex machine in the next... it's fun!

Visuals, Sound and Performance

Despite the fact that the game looks quite lush on the closest zoom, it isn't really a graphically intensive game. Most of the images are mostly static with little animation, and menus don't really take that much graphical grunt to display! Where it will hammer your computer is in the CPU department... it is running a simulation of around 1000 characters in real-time! That said, I've not really had any problems with it on my XPS15 laptop, but I've not pushed the speed past the medium setting. I'm not sure that you could play the game faster than that anyway...

After the initial game launch, games are fast to save and load... but that initial launch does take quite a bit of time!

Where I Was a little bit disappointed was in the choice of music background. Sure, the music is sufficiently epic and atmospheric... but I feel like it was a missed opportunity to include music from the time period and cultures. I remember the first time I heard the Civilisation series do that... as you progressed through ages, the music stepped up to the appropriate age as well. It was mind-blowingly awesome to experience as a musician (probably no one else noticed it...).... I felt like this series could leverage a bit more of a music landscape.... even if it only made one little nerd happy on the inside!

My Thoughts

The biggest hurdle for new players to the Grand Strategy genre is the sprawl of nested menus, often with little description about how various interlocking mechanics work! I am a seasoned grand strategy player, having played and loved most of the Paradox offerings, but I hit a hard wall with the Crusader Kings 2 UI. Crusader Kings 3 adds a much friendlier graphical layer to the characters and a more streamlined and intuitive user interface, making for an incredibly compelling addition to the Grand Strategy genre!

The stories that emerge from these games are what you make of it... you set your own goals in the world, and you head towards them, often being deflected to a different goal or story along the way. Just scouring the internet, it is amazing what sort of things people have done in the game... my favourite so far was the player who made it his dynastic goal to EAT THE POPE!.

Review Specs

DELL XPS15 (9560)

CPU: i7-7700HQ
RAM: 16 GB
Storage: SSD
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050

Splinterlands (aka the best blockchain game out there!)

Humble Bundle

Have you heard of Humble Bundle? It's a place to get some really great deals on Games, e-books and comic bundles. However, if you sign up for a Humble Bundle Subscription (12 USD per month) you get some really nice bonuses!

1. A 100+ USD bundle of games delivered direct to you each month, redeemable on Steam, Uplay or direct download (depending on the game). This includes recent Triple A games!
2. Access to the Humble Bundle "Trove", a list of 60 games (and growing...) which are free to play as long as you remain a subscriber!
3. Additional Discounts on the Humble Bundle store, with the choice of supporting charities, Humble Bundle or developers in whatever percentage that you wish!

Humble Bundle Subscriptions, it's a no brainer for the dedicated gamer!