Despite Jarkko's fantasies, I have played CK enough to know that I dont really want to play it much longer. It is a game I may play SP, but I think will ultimately be unsatisfying. I have played so many video games now that the "ooooh cool" phase drops off pretty fast. CK is, despite the "awe" that affect many of you, a passing novelty. It lacks the staying power of EU2.
1. CK falls victim to the same problem as Civ3 and Vicky; the "game" is micromanagement. Most of your time is spent managing the internal workings of your country. Appointing court members, arranging marriages, managing vassals, and so on. In EU2, this is abstracted away and auto-managed. You get events occasionally, but you are not agonizing over who will run the daily business of Provence. The consequence is that you have more time for other things.
2. Another problem is that the game is very easy (unlike Victoria). The AI is pathetic. And the differences in power between the major nations is imbalanced, so people are playing games as counts/dukes of England or Ireland or Scandinavia or France. So the majority of Europe is just going about its business as stupid AI nations that fall apart.
3. The game has no ROTW. There is no colonial model. This limits so many things that it is scary. The game is set during a period of major imbalance of power (amongst religious groups or between them). This imbalance is even more problematic than in EU2. The result will be not-so-fun MP games once the skill levels advance a notch and the novelty wears off.
4. There is no way to efficient way to raise extra troops. This is the opposite extreme of the problem with huge manpower in EU2. It is going to engender extremely conservative war-fighting. Who wants to risk losing their army when it takes years to regenerate?
5. Technology is taken out of the player's control and advances almost randomly. There can be no competitive drive to achieve better technology.
6. The game is buggy. Buggy to the point of hair pulling. I dont know why Paradox cant release a game with quality controls. Hell, I have a 50-50 chance of crashing every time I surrender to reload (since someone forgot to put a LOAD option on the F10 menu). The load times are insanely long. The save files are enormously cumbersome. All these frustrations accumulate and put people off.
EU2 is elegantly simple and infinitely complex; like Chess.
CK is clumsy, imbalanced, and ultimately unsatisfying
I can see why people think CK is fun. It has novelty value. In a month or two, people will be seeing the truth.
