Most Complicated unintuitive game released

Chess isn´t complex. The rules are simple.

It´s just that some games are easy to learn, but hard to master (chess), while others are the opposite.

airyn124 said:

heres a wild crazy idea...next time they hire (or get volunteers) a few gamers or college sophomores or something, they play the game before it is released, point out the most confusing things, maybe they pay a few second year computer science students like $8 an hour to write a functional "how to" and a pdf with some annotated screen shots. Voila! Cheap fix. And you could probably pay half of them in paradox gift cards.

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Heck, just get a volunteer/staffer to skim through the Quick Questions thread, jot down a list of frequently asked questions, and come up with some good concise answers. Then have every patch update the in-game hints to include answers to these questions.

Beagá said:

Chess isn´t complex. The rules are simple.

It´s just that some games are easy to learn, but hard to master (chess), while others are the opposite.

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+1

newuser99 said:

(For the 3rd time this week I had to explain the very useful and totally undocumented feature of marking 'people of interest' that you'll automatically receive in-game updates on).

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Care to make it a 4th?
That sounds like a super-useful feature when you need to closely monitor a King so as to prevent him having a son. (so that his 1 daughter married to my son inherits the throne.)

So far I've only had to kill his son, his original wife, and his second (pregnant) wife. I suppose the latter could be considered a 2-fer ^^
The Polish crown shall be mine! (well, technically it'll be my grandson's, but whatever....)

TehJumpingJawa said:

Care to make it a 4th?

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Right-click on the character's portrait. This brings up two little quick links to go to character/go to diplomacy. Right-click again on the "go to character" quick link. This brings up 3 more options. One of them is mark/unmark the character as a character of special interest.

TehJumpingJawa said:

Care to make it a 4th?
That sounds like a super-useful feature when you need to closely monitor a King so as to prevent him having a son. (so that his 1 daughter married to my son inherits the throne.)

So far I've only had to kill his son, his original wife, and his second (pregnant) wife. I suppose the latter could be considered a 2-fer ^^
The Polish crown shall be mine! (well, technically it'll be my grandson's, but whatever....)

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Certainly sir. Right click a character's portrait and you have two options pop-up: LEFT: [Personal/Stats page] and RIGHT: [Diplomacy Menu]. Right-Click the [Personal Stats] pop-up on the left and three more options pop up. Left-click the STAR and that person is now tagged, and their name will show up on the big stats block on the right of your screen. (Where your provinces are listed, which you can minimize/lock)

You'll now get updates when they do something interesting, win a war, die, etc. Not sure if you'd have to STAR the King or if you'd have to instead STAR his wife to detect pregnancies though. Probably her if I'd have to guess.

For clarity:

Right-click a person's portrait
Right-click the LEFT option (Personal/stat page)
Left-click the STAR

Do the same process again to unselect them.

Excellent! TY!

CK2 is a game I would never give to a child under 15 years old as it has an extensive learning curve and younger kids tend to have short attention spans and probably wouldn't hang in there long enough to understand the game and get to the fun of it. Its also a game I would never give to someone who is impatient, very casual (only has a few hours to play at a time), or only likes action movies because its not going to be their thing. Make no mistake this is a niche game and Paradox Interactive is a niche company. You need to be a thinker to appreciate this game as with most Paradox Interactive titles. If you don't enjoy spending a lot of time thinking, analyzing, strategizing and experimenting you aren't going to really be into this game. That's not a flaw of the game, just a mismatch between your own temperament and that of the game.

John Hadley said:

You need to be a thinker to appreciate this game as with most Paradox Interactive titles. If you don't enjoy spending a lot of time thinking, analyzing, strategizing and experimenting you aren't going to really be into this game. That's not a flaw of the game, just a mismatch between your own temperament and that of the game.

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It's not really a thinking or complicated game. Nearly anyone could pick it up if they understood the rules. The only problem is that currently the only way to learn is through gross trial and error. You could take a person of high intelligence and throw him the game and let him/her bang around in frustration for an hour. Now take a person of average intelligence and let me explain how things work for an hour as we play together. The latter person will be having a lot more fun after one hour (and countless hours thereafter until equilibrium) then the former.

As a friend who convinced several other friends to buy the game it happened just the same. They tried and got frustrated, until I walked them through it and now they have fun with it. They didn't get a higher IQ just by listening to me, they got an outlet for baseline understanding that was lacking. It doesn't matter how masterful a product is, if it requires either (A) an attentive nearby expert or (B) 10-30 hours of steep learning curve then something needs to be corrected. Considering how fun the product is once you get going, Paradox can only increase sales and word of mouth by making it more accessible.