I'm a longtime EU2 fan (I still consider it the best game I've ever played), and bought CK soon after release hoping for more of that EU magic in a different timesetting. Needless to say I was pretty disappointed, and I shelved the game to await the inevitable string of patches. I've recently come back to CK for a second look, and I must say that the latest incarnation is a vastly better game. I'm on CK "fulltime" now and really enjoying it. In the interest of making it even better I thought I'd post a couple of observations about the things that stuck out to me most as I played a half-gc on the latest version (I am the Italian Normans).
1. Crusades: They work now! Huzzah! The pope says "take Jerusalem" and the ai goes for it. It's beautiful. The only probem I see is that there are too many of them... as soon as Jerusalem falls it's on to Alexandria, then immediately Spain and Africa. Granted I've only played half of one gc, so maybe it's a fluke, but the Christians have swept all before them so far, with only minor help from me (I was still getting the hang of things during most of the Crusades). And near as I can figure, once North Africa is taken by crusading armies it's theirs forever, since a)the region has no defensive depth (it's just a narrow strip of provinces), b)revolters are powerless to actually revolt away from the conquerors, and c)it's simple to transport big armies across the Med. I almost can't believe that I'm complaining about ai crusaders being TOO effective, but there it is.
2. Religious conversions: Way way too common imo. Within 10-20 years of the conquest of any Muslim region, it's solidly Catholic. It happens even sooner if a human is the conqueror. This seems wrong. The problem seems to be that a)there are too many different conversion events (I've had half-a-dozen or so separate ones fire for me) and b)the percent chance of conversion on most of them is very high. Furthermore, for the human who has to choose, the costs of trying to convert and the benefits of choosing not to are both very small, and there appear to be very few revert-back-to-old religion events, if any (I haven't checked the event files; the scripting looks very daunting compared to the EU2 events I'm used to...).
3. Childhood events: Annoying. For my own progeny they might be good, but I'm getting tired of clicking through the constant "someone wants to borrow your toys" events for all the children-of-distant-relatives-by-marriage who keep appearing in my court for some reason.
That said, I want to stress how good the game is now. Big-time kudos to the beta team and Johan, and sorry if all this stuff has been brought up and discussed to death before.
Phil
1. Crusades: They work now! Huzzah! The pope says "take Jerusalem" and the ai goes for it. It's beautiful. The only probem I see is that there are too many of them... as soon as Jerusalem falls it's on to Alexandria, then immediately Spain and Africa. Granted I've only played half of one gc, so maybe it's a fluke, but the Christians have swept all before them so far, with only minor help from me (I was still getting the hang of things during most of the Crusades). And near as I can figure, once North Africa is taken by crusading armies it's theirs forever, since a)the region has no defensive depth (it's just a narrow strip of provinces), b)revolters are powerless to actually revolt away from the conquerors, and c)it's simple to transport big armies across the Med. I almost can't believe that I'm complaining about ai crusaders being TOO effective, but there it is.
2. Religious conversions: Way way too common imo. Within 10-20 years of the conquest of any Muslim region, it's solidly Catholic. It happens even sooner if a human is the conqueror. This seems wrong. The problem seems to be that a)there are too many different conversion events (I've had half-a-dozen or so separate ones fire for me) and b)the percent chance of conversion on most of them is very high. Furthermore, for the human who has to choose, the costs of trying to convert and the benefits of choosing not to are both very small, and there appear to be very few revert-back-to-old religion events, if any (I haven't checked the event files; the scripting looks very daunting compared to the EU2 events I'm used to...).
3. Childhood events: Annoying. For my own progeny they might be good, but I'm getting tired of clicking through the constant "someone wants to borrow your toys" events for all the children-of-distant-relatives-by-marriage who keep appearing in my court for some reason.
That said, I want to stress how good the game is now. Big-time kudos to the beta team and Johan, and sorry if all this stuff has been brought up and discussed to death before.
Phil
