Now before y’all start hating me for such an insolent title, let me preface this post by saying that I love the game. One does not simply play a game over 450 hours without enjoying it thoroughly. That being said, after playing many sessions I've come to regard CKII as exactly that: not a Douglas DC-3, but a Sikorsky Ilya Muromets, a proof that such games are viable, riveting and have a huge potential, but far, far from the plateau. Now feel free to respectfully disagree.
What’s a CKII?
So what’s a CKII? A grand strategy you say. And you’re 50% correct. CKII fuses grand strategy layer with character management/RPG/Sims-like simulation layer. And to my mind, this fusion creates a genre of its own. I do not have a good name for it, unfortunately. Something like grand character management simulator (GCMS). Oy vey, sounds awful. If anyone has a better name, please, share it.
The character layer
In this fusion the character layer is the primary one, what drives the gameplay and makes the game so great. The grand strategy layer (the map, countries, wars, epidemics etc.) does not serve the player directly by providing a map which you can paint in the most beautiful colour (that you can do in any other PDX game).
Rather it supplements the character layer by providing a grand simulation of the living, breathing world with a lot of things going on at the same time. This is a crucial distinction between CKII and the Sims series (I understand the comparison is a bit silly, but IMO it applies): in the former being just one of many medieval rulers gives the necessary grandness of scope (hence the G in GCMS).
In CKII (unlike the Sims) you can travel half the world to China stealing artefacts in Beijing and making friends along the way, you can send your son to serve the Byzantine emperor as his personal guard, you can watch the world tremble from the wrath of both Mongols and Aztecs, you can try to steal from a rival's alchemic laboratory, get captured and thrown in prison, seduce his wife and break free with her help. And most importantly, all of this is going to happen not only to you but to hundreds (if not thousands) of people around you. Whereas in the Sims you can redecorate your house or something.
So what’s wrong?
So far I mostly extolled the virtues of CKII without mentioning the problems that make it “just a proof of concept”. I think there are 6 main issues with the game:
As the devs are always ready to remind us when replying to requests for more ambitious features, CKII is a game about playing a medieval dynasty. But I think the real focus of players’ attention is not exactly there. Don’t get me wrong, the dynastic power-games could be an excellent part of a GCMS, but as it stands you can’t play them in CKII.
Your relatives do not present any real threat (and best use for them is to ship them to China), there are no cliques in a dynasty, they have no say in what you do and how the country is governed, there are no consolidated policies between different rulers in a dynasty, and most importantly there is no “feeling” of making your family grow strong (*shouts from the back row* and where are cadet branches?).
However, the main point is that a game doesn't have to be about dynasties to be a good GCSM. And the fact that suggestions about making holy orders and adventurers playable or giving more love to merchant republics are relentlessly appearing in this forum means that for the player base it’s not about dynasties, it’s about playing the character game.
World simulation
The better the simulation, the better the GCMS is going to be. I think it’s fair to say that. And of course one could find many flaws in the current model: there are no logistics in the game, map is divided arbitrarily into provinces, there is no simulation for the actual peasants in provinces or popolo minuto of cities, trade is simulated poorly with static trade routes and no real Mediterranean trade to speak of.
At the same time, we have to concede that making a good simulation is a Sisyphean task limited both by coding man-hours and by the power of today's computers. And the devs are trying to make it better. An example of that is the rework of the trade system in JD and addition of African trade routes in the upcoming HF.
All in all, I'm not going to expand on this topic too much, because I think it's important enough to deserve a separate post.
Game systems integration
I think any CKII player with a hundred hours of playtime can name at least a dozen examples of that off the top of their head. My favourite is the inability to go hunting if you are one-eyed or one-handed (poor, poor Jaime Lannister can never hunt again apparently). A close second place is the inability to land women even with the Full Status of Women. And if all of these complaints were to be listed together, there would be hundreds of small little improvements that would make the game much more immersive and enjoyable.
This problem stems from the same obstacle as the previous one: it just requires too many man-hours to properly go through all the events and script them anew integrating everything nicely (not to mention that you have to think it through first). That being said I wish the devs were to take a bigger interest in fixing it. Ideally, there should be a paid DLC focused entirely not on anything new, but on tying together what's already in the game. We are unlikely to see it, however (financial considerations I suppose).
Scarcity of content
Now that's a very important one. You might say that I'm talking out of my hat on this one. In the previous paragraph, I said the exact opposite thing. But both these things can simultaneously be true. For a game to be truly a grand CMS it needs an abundance of content. That's because the game we have now can be exhausted relatively easily.
You play a couple of sessions and you got 80% of the game figured out: all the main events, all foci, all the societies etc. There will still be left some specific mechanics (for instance what’s it’s like to play Suomenusko), but the bulk will be known. But an essential component of GCMS (IMO) is the constant sense of wonder and exploration: the world around you is teeming with possibilities and you never know what you might encounter next.
To give an example, right now the Scholarship focus consists only of the event chain for an observatory (which you can do as tribal or nomadic even, speaking of poor integration). It lasts for about 4.5 years (give or take); you get your tech points and then switch to some other focus never to return again until the next character.
Now imagine instead a focus with ten, twenty times more content to it: different types of research you can do, branching event chains, nice integration with the Hermetics, different playstyles depending on whether you’re a scholar or a mystic and so on. You could take that focus for twenty years and only explore 5% of what the focus has to offer. Now imagine this principle being applied to the game at large (and with proper integration). That’s what I’m talking about.
The game is too easy
Now, this is going to be subjective, so I’m going to make a few clarifications:
And the power creep is not making the game easier. The last expansion as you know introduced China. And while Chinese interactions are powerful by itself (now your 20+ martial commanders have Way of the Dog and Way of Leopard while you no longer build universities, because you don’t need scrapes), I wanna talk about the Hermetics (which BTW is the best society to join with every character).
Hermetics, you see, have these things called artefacts which they can craft or find quite reliably. And then sell them to China for thousands of Grace. I’m not kidding: level 4 Magnum Opus gives 2 000 Grace while Emerald Tablets give 5 000 Grace (values are doubled if the Emperor likes wealth). “Mortimer, do you understand what a king can accomplish with 5 000 of Grace?” “What?” “An entire century of Master Engineers!”
Any game loses its appeal if it presents no challenge. This OP mechanics and no real way to balance them by obstacles lead to a serious lack of challenge in CKII. In theory, you can half your demesne and vassal limits in the game settings, but remember: tedious does not mean hard. It just means tedious.
No incentives to roleplay and lack of attachments to characters
This is one of the most important points. In the beginning, I likened CKII to an RPG. Now in an RPG there is RP. In theory, you can roleplay in this game: being arbitrary you can randomly revoke titles from vassals, being lustful you can use seduction focus non-stop, being slothful you can just speed-five the game. But unless you're into this kind of stuff, you're likely to try to play the game in an optimal way. And the fact that your character is wrath does not prevent you in any way to act as patiently and calculating as ever.
I’m not going to talk much about this topic because the problem is fairly self-evident, whereas talking about it in depth requires its own post. But I will mention its sister problem: your characters (and characters around you) do not mean anything to you. They’re just tools for your reincarnating self.
Now sometimes you’re gonna play an awesome hunchback lunatic who’s going to become grandmaster of the Assassins and threw the Franks out of Jerusalem (watch the video for an example of this stuff), but more often than not it’s just gonna be another regular dude, who's going to do some things and then die. The game just doesn't provide opportunities to remember them by (and lacklustre eulogy on the succession screen does not help).
In all honesty, I don't know how to solve this problem, although I have some ideas which I might touch upon in another post.
Conclusion
You can see now I hope what I mean by the title. CKII is an excellent game in itself, but it’s a pioneer of its genre (and it’s a difficult genre to master), so it’s bound to have numerous flaws. Who’s to blame for it? Well, certainly not the devs. I never played the original Crusader Kings, but from what I gather CKII has been a tremendous improvement over it even in its original form. And I can attest that the DLCs have made the game twice or trice more interesting and immersive over the years (even if I'm not always agreeing with the choice of content). WoL and M&M seem to be on point for making the game a better GCMS.
All in all the problems we are seeing are just the inevitable pangs of growth. I didn’t use the planes metaphor in the beginning randomly: it’s not that the designers of DC-3 were smarter than Sikorsky, it’s that they had Sikorsky’s shoulders to stand on. So in 20 years or so we might finally see a GCMS realised in its full blazing glory.
P.S. If you read through to the end, then congratulations: I have much respect for you. I only touched upon certain important points since this post is enough of a text-wall as is, so I might cover them in other posts if this gathers attention from my fellow forum participants.
What’s a CKII?
So what’s a CKII? A grand strategy you say. And you’re 50% correct. CKII fuses grand strategy layer with character management/RPG/Sims-like simulation layer. And to my mind, this fusion creates a genre of its own. I do not have a good name for it, unfortunately. Something like grand character management simulator (GCMS). Oy vey, sounds awful. If anyone has a better name, please, share it.
The character layer
In this fusion the character layer is the primary one, what drives the gameplay and makes the game so great. The grand strategy layer (the map, countries, wars, epidemics etc.) does not serve the player directly by providing a map which you can paint in the most beautiful colour (that you can do in any other PDX game).
Rather it supplements the character layer by providing a grand simulation of the living, breathing world with a lot of things going on at the same time. This is a crucial distinction between CKII and the Sims series (I understand the comparison is a bit silly, but IMO it applies): in the former being just one of many medieval rulers gives the necessary grandness of scope (hence the G in GCMS).
In CKII (unlike the Sims) you can travel half the world to China stealing artefacts in Beijing and making friends along the way, you can send your son to serve the Byzantine emperor as his personal guard, you can watch the world tremble from the wrath of both Mongols and Aztecs, you can try to steal from a rival's alchemic laboratory, get captured and thrown in prison, seduce his wife and break free with her help. And most importantly, all of this is going to happen not only to you but to hundreds (if not thousands) of people around you. Whereas in the Sims you can redecorate your house or something.
So what’s wrong?
So far I mostly extolled the virtues of CKII without mentioning the problems that make it “just a proof of concept”. I think there are 6 main issues with the game:
- The initial focus of the game wasn't entirely right;
- World simulation is imperfect (to put it mildly);
- Game systems are poorly integrated;
- A scarcity of content (believe it or not);
- The game is too easy to exploit (partly because of the power creep) which makes it too easy;
- No incentives to roleplay and lack of attachment to characters.
As the devs are always ready to remind us when replying to requests for more ambitious features, CKII is a game about playing a medieval dynasty. But I think the real focus of players’ attention is not exactly there. Don’t get me wrong, the dynastic power-games could be an excellent part of a GCMS, but as it stands you can’t play them in CKII.
Your relatives do not present any real threat (and best use for them is to ship them to China), there are no cliques in a dynasty, they have no say in what you do and how the country is governed, there are no consolidated policies between different rulers in a dynasty, and most importantly there is no “feeling” of making your family grow strong (*shouts from the back row* and where are cadet branches?).
However, the main point is that a game doesn't have to be about dynasties to be a good GCSM. And the fact that suggestions about making holy orders and adventurers playable or giving more love to merchant republics are relentlessly appearing in this forum means that for the player base it’s not about dynasties, it’s about playing the character game.
World simulation
The better the simulation, the better the GCMS is going to be. I think it’s fair to say that. And of course one could find many flaws in the current model: there are no logistics in the game, map is divided arbitrarily into provinces, there is no simulation for the actual peasants in provinces or popolo minuto of cities, trade is simulated poorly with static trade routes and no real Mediterranean trade to speak of.
At the same time, we have to concede that making a good simulation is a Sisyphean task limited both by coding man-hours and by the power of today's computers. And the devs are trying to make it better. An example of that is the rework of the trade system in JD and addition of African trade routes in the upcoming HF.
All in all, I'm not going to expand on this topic too much, because I think it's important enough to deserve a separate post.
Game systems integration
I think any CKII player with a hundred hours of playtime can name at least a dozen examples of that off the top of their head. My favourite is the inability to go hunting if you are one-eyed or one-handed (poor, poor Jaime Lannister can never hunt again apparently). A close second place is the inability to land women even with the Full Status of Women. And if all of these complaints were to be listed together, there would be hundreds of small little improvements that would make the game much more immersive and enjoyable.
This problem stems from the same obstacle as the previous one: it just requires too many man-hours to properly go through all the events and script them anew integrating everything nicely (not to mention that you have to think it through first). That being said I wish the devs were to take a bigger interest in fixing it. Ideally, there should be a paid DLC focused entirely not on anything new, but on tying together what's already in the game. We are unlikely to see it, however (financial considerations I suppose).
Scarcity of content
Now that's a very important one. You might say that I'm talking out of my hat on this one. In the previous paragraph, I said the exact opposite thing. But both these things can simultaneously be true. For a game to be truly a grand CMS it needs an abundance of content. That's because the game we have now can be exhausted relatively easily.
You play a couple of sessions and you got 80% of the game figured out: all the main events, all foci, all the societies etc. There will still be left some specific mechanics (for instance what’s it’s like to play Suomenusko), but the bulk will be known. But an essential component of GCMS (IMO) is the constant sense of wonder and exploration: the world around you is teeming with possibilities and you never know what you might encounter next.
To give an example, right now the Scholarship focus consists only of the event chain for an observatory (which you can do as tribal or nomadic even, speaking of poor integration). It lasts for about 4.5 years (give or take); you get your tech points and then switch to some other focus never to return again until the next character.
Now imagine instead a focus with ten, twenty times more content to it: different types of research you can do, branching event chains, nice integration with the Hermetics, different playstyles depending on whether you’re a scholar or a mystic and so on. You could take that focus for twenty years and only explore 5% of what the focus has to offer. Now imagine this principle being applied to the game at large (and with proper integration). That’s what I’m talking about.
The game is too easy
Now, this is going to be subjective, so I’m going to make a few clarifications:
- The game can be very hard early on if you have an unfavourable start, but if manage to survive, it becomes just as easy as starting as an emperor;
- Tedious does not mean hard. It just means tedious.
- Your subjective difficulty level depends on whether you know certain tricks (like getting tech points from observatory with every character as I mentioned above) that make the game way easier. I'll give more examples below.
And the power creep is not making the game easier. The last expansion as you know introduced China. And while Chinese interactions are powerful by itself (now your 20+ martial commanders have Way of the Dog and Way of Leopard while you no longer build universities, because you don’t need scrapes), I wanna talk about the Hermetics (which BTW is the best society to join with every character).
Hermetics, you see, have these things called artefacts which they can craft or find quite reliably. And then sell them to China for thousands of Grace. I’m not kidding: level 4 Magnum Opus gives 2 000 Grace while Emerald Tablets give 5 000 Grace (values are doubled if the Emperor likes wealth). “Mortimer, do you understand what a king can accomplish with 5 000 of Grace?” “What?” “An entire century of Master Engineers!”
Any game loses its appeal if it presents no challenge. This OP mechanics and no real way to balance them by obstacles lead to a serious lack of challenge in CKII. In theory, you can half your demesne and vassal limits in the game settings, but remember: tedious does not mean hard. It just means tedious.
No incentives to roleplay and lack of attachments to characters
This is one of the most important points. In the beginning, I likened CKII to an RPG. Now in an RPG there is RP. In theory, you can roleplay in this game: being arbitrary you can randomly revoke titles from vassals, being lustful you can use seduction focus non-stop, being slothful you can just speed-five the game. But unless you're into this kind of stuff, you're likely to try to play the game in an optimal way. And the fact that your character is wrath does not prevent you in any way to act as patiently and calculating as ever.
I’m not going to talk much about this topic because the problem is fairly self-evident, whereas talking about it in depth requires its own post. But I will mention its sister problem: your characters (and characters around you) do not mean anything to you. They’re just tools for your reincarnating self.
Now sometimes you’re gonna play an awesome hunchback lunatic who’s going to become grandmaster of the Assassins and threw the Franks out of Jerusalem (watch the video for an example of this stuff), but more often than not it’s just gonna be another regular dude, who's going to do some things and then die. The game just doesn't provide opportunities to remember them by (and lacklustre eulogy on the succession screen does not help).
In all honesty, I don't know how to solve this problem, although I have some ideas which I might touch upon in another post.
Conclusion
You can see now I hope what I mean by the title. CKII is an excellent game in itself, but it’s a pioneer of its genre (and it’s a difficult genre to master), so it’s bound to have numerous flaws. Who’s to blame for it? Well, certainly not the devs. I never played the original Crusader Kings, but from what I gather CKII has been a tremendous improvement over it even in its original form. And I can attest that the DLCs have made the game twice or trice more interesting and immersive over the years (even if I'm not always agreeing with the choice of content). WoL and M&M seem to be on point for making the game a better GCMS.
All in all the problems we are seeing are just the inevitable pangs of growth. I didn’t use the planes metaphor in the beginning randomly: it’s not that the designers of DC-3 were smarter than Sikorsky, it’s that they had Sikorsky’s shoulders to stand on. So in 20 years or so we might finally see a GCMS realised in its full blazing glory.
P.S. If you read through to the end, then congratulations: I have much respect for you. I only touched upon certain important points since this post is enough of a text-wall as is, so I might cover them in other posts if this gathers attention from my fellow forum participants.
