Collections: Teaching Paradox, Crusader Kings III, Part I: Making It Personal

It's still fun even if you aren't hyper optimizing and playing perfectly with every mechanic

I think Paradox games tend to scare people away by leading them to think that all of the minutiae of their mechanics matter far more than they actually do.

It seems incredibly complicated at a glance, but as you say a lot of the details might as well be inconsequential unless you're somebody obsessed with min-maxing your game experience.

I may be biased since I have literally thousands of hours in pdx games, but honestly the games are only superficially complex, and they could really use additional complex8ty and meaningful mechanics.

>I love the idea of the Paradox grand strategy games, but they seem to me to be almost gratuitously complex. Everything has so. many. parameters. In turn, this seems to make the games (1) require learning a lot of details that are 'coincidental complexity' rather than 'essential complexity' (like a staggering number of unit types and combinations), serving only the purpose of having a (superficially) richer backdrop, and (2) involve a lot of micro-management at the most miniscule levels, again seemingly just to have those things in there, not necessarily because they make a big difference in how the game plays out.

Well, the idea is to simulate running a country, so "a mass of small things that funnel into few things" is kinda the point. The richer backdrop is entire point here, and the bunch of smaller systems have storytelling purpose aside from purely mechanical one. And on occasion some small decision does play role much farther in. Like, hell, I had cases where me getting a cat saved me in the long term coz I got stress reduction from it in a moment where I really needed it.

Factorio would be on the other end of that, there is very little unneeded complexity and very well paced gameplay.

There are games like Distant Worlds that allow for varied level of automation (up to fully AI running empire), which is in itself pretty interesting idea when it comes to teaching players complex games.

>This has kept me from jumping in. From my point of view, I would love it if there would be simple way to dumb down some of the systems, have the game handle some of the micro-management, possibly remove some of the nuance of units, traits, and so on. I know it exists in the games to some extent, but from what I have seen enabling these things in itself required quite a bit of work. Perhaps I just haven't looked hard enough.

CK3 is significantly easier than CK2 to get in. I hit the ground running with CK3, bounced hard off CKII. The builtin mini-tutorials and "tooltips that have tooltips" make discovery of game systems so much easier, and game have a system that will inform you when there is a problem in your empire and what would be the ways to solve it

It gets worse than that. They change mechanics with updates and DLC. So all the work I took to learn EU4 was gone in two DLCs. I don't know what the estates are, and I no longer care, because it would be far too much work to figure out how the game plays now.

There are some people that play with a full appreciation of the numbers and want to min-max everything, as you’d expect. But this is absolutely not my experience of Crusader Kings II and especially III. You can approach it almost entirely as a role playing game, or even a story-telling sandbox. You find yourself in situations that aren’t just “how do I beat this neighbouring power with greater attack/defence numbers” but more like “oh no, my oldest children died, I’ve married off my remaining daughter for an alliance and all her heirs are of the wrong house, how can I get her to remarry while forcing the kids to all to become monks or die?” All while writing love poetry to your wife and looking after your favourite horse.

> none of these rulers have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force

It's a bit of a weird thing to say. It's an internal definition i.e. legitimacy is defined by the sovereign. There's no external force that grants legitimacy on a state or its actions; within a state, the sovereign (even popular ones) will attack uses of force that it hasn't sanctioned.

I liked many things about CKII, but I think the expansions very quickly began to jump the shark, and they sometimes sacrificed historical accuracy to cater to popular perceptions. For instance, Paradox knew well that the kind of "haw-haw let's sacrifice our enemies to Odin" paganism that people wanted didn't resemble those historical belief systems very much, so they came up with the option of establishing "reformed pagan" faiths which just happened to be what people wanted. And don't even get me started on secret societies. You could play without those expansions, but then you felt like you were playing a long-abandoned game.

I find Stellaris 100% easier to grasp than any other Paradox game. I think it's due to a fact in other Paradox games you essentially start in a middle of someone else's save. In Stellaris, for the most part, everyone starts at the same time.

Just start as a fanatic militarist monarch, and you're playing a nearly regular strategy at this point.

I would say CK3 have much better new player introduction (I also bounced of CK2), but if you bounced off Stellaris, which is the easiest of Paradox titles to get into, you'd probably have same problem. But you can always wait for free week I guess