As the head of an existing culture you can swap out or add pillars, from adopting Roman-style standing armies to becoming horse nomads who completely ignore attrition on the windswept steppes. Now, we can do the same thing with our entire culture as well.
CK3 launched with an excellent custom religion system that allowed you to create your own heresy, selecting everything from the bonuses it gives practitioners to its teachings on, for example, homosexuality or witchcraft. Royal Court introduces new and rewarding ways to leave your mark on the map, too. A new king of historical strategy has been crowned. In fact, if I had to pick only one game to play for the rest of my life, the decision wouldn’t be that difficult. All of the engrossingly flawed characters and stories of love, war, triumph, and loss that have already dynamically emerged from my playthroughs feel like just the beginning of something legendary. I have thousands of hours in the previous game, and I expect to spend at least that many in this third installment. My biggest critique is that hearing petitions always locks you into a camera angle looking down on the proceedings from on high, which feels too static and doesn't let me look my subjects in the eye when I tell them, “This sounds like a you problem.” But it's great to feel like I'm making a difference in the lives of the average people living in my kingdom nonetheless.Ĭrusader Kings 3 is a superb strategy game, a great RPG, and a master class in how to take the best parts of existing systems and make them deeper and better. It's especially nice during moments when you don't have any wars or backroom schemes going on, and breaks up long periods of waiting for a claim to be fabricated or anything else that could previously slow a campaign down. Hearing petitions and making decisions, like which town to favor in a bitter rivalry between two mayors, adds a lot of new and welcome story generation. This serves as a smart check on very large empires, since having to balance the court budget against your army and infrastructure soaks up enough excess resources to help with some of CK3's late-game snowballing problems. The bigger your realm is, the more grandeur you're expected to have, with penalties to your prestige if you fall behind. Hiring flavorful and period-appropriate new positions like a Court Poet or increasing your spending on servants and fashion raise grandeur, and it's not all just for bragging rights. Maintaining a court means keeping up with grandeur, a new stat representing how absolutely lit life at your court is. But the intrigue and excitement of the court itself are too good to pass up.
It’s a bit painful that you can’t access most of it when playing as a duke or a tribal ruler, which had previously been two of my favorite types of characters and seem like a perfect fit for the kind of intimate, less expansion-focused playstyle having your own court allows.
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But not Royal Court, which is full of new features which add more personal involvement and an empowering level of control over how your society functions. Some recent expansions to Paradox's older games, like Europa Universalis IV, have seemed like the devs are just looking for stuff to do at this point. While the base game of Crusader Kings 3 was already a masterpiece, it's remarkable how incomplete it would feel to go back to it after playing Royal Court. As I sit perched atop my throne and welcome another throng of unwashed petitioners to track mud across my brand-new Persian carpet, surely bringing with them all manner of trivial frustrations to waste my time, one thought sits at the front of my mind: where has this been all my life? Royal Court is the first major expansion for Crusader Kings 3, and between a full 3D throne room that puts you in the world, to the return of the inventory system from Crusader Kings 2, to wonderfully customizable cultures, everything feels like it was meant to be here all along.