StrategyFront Gaming

Crusader Kings 2 is my favorite game ever. So it’s no wonder that I had to write an excessively long review of its sequel. The in-depth character system of Crusader Kings 3 makes it one of the most unique strategy games I’ve played. It builds on the strengths of its predecessor while improving a ton that was wrong with the previous game.

In most strategy games you lead a country as a detached omnipotent figure. Crusader Kings 3 grounds the experience by tying you directly with a character in the world; meaning you were always balancing mundane concerns with your grand political ambitions.

In the game, the black death was not simply a debuff to your nation but is a real danger to you as a character as well. The only strategy game series that ever came close to focusing this much on characters is King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages. 

The other great strength of Crusader Kings is its simulation of internal realm politics. Too many strategy games depict your country as a monolithic entity with the only internal divide being “unrest”, which would cause rebellions. 

Crusader Kings broke this mold by using the Medieval era to depict the petty squabbles of the nobility in each realm. Instead of countries being monolithic blocks, each county is controlled by a character. Due to the decentralized nature of medieval rule, these lords can feud and war at their pleasure without the king’s involvement.

These core features carry over to Crusader Kings 3. Which led me to feel right at home playing the game with the largest mechanical changes coming in through roleplaying and quality of life features which were much-needed areas of improvement.

Overview

Many people found Crusader Kings 2 to be impenetrable. It was a series of bewilderingly interconnected menus and character screens you had to navigate all while making sure your family thrives and your realm does not fall apart. I can safely say that Crusader Kings 3 is a massive improvement over its predecessor in terms of accessibility. If you bounced off Crusader Kings 2 because of complexity then you owe it to yourself to give Crusader Kings 3 a try.

For fans of the previous game, mostly everything is still here, and like I said you’ll feel eerily right at home. This is because the major changes that Crusader Kings 3 makes to the Crusader King’s formula come in how you’ll be doing things not what you’ll actually want to accomplish.

For example, in Crusader Kings 2 if you want to murder someone, you will have to form a plot then invite people to that plot to increase your plot power.

In Crusader Kings 3 you form a scheme and can invite people to that plot or you can follow a quest chain to continually give yourself a higher success chance to impact the assassination. It is a change that gives the player more control over the outcome of their actions, instead of leaving it purely up to random chance. 

There have been some claims of simplified mechanics in Crusader Kings 3. While they’ve scaled some things back that were in Crusader Kings 2 (like tribal mechanics and republics), it doesn’t feel lesser in any way.

Learning The Game

The game’s tutorial features just enough to meet the bare minimum requirement for teaching you the game mechanics through a series of pop-ups. It still doesn’t exactly teach out the overall strategies, tips, or tricks you’ll want to use throughout the game.

Instead, you’ll mostly learn the intricacies of the game through the pop-up tutorials while playing the game. These hints are great since they’re driven by what you are actually doing. 

I often found myself wondering why something would happen, only for it to then have a hint pop-up explaining exactly what that mechanic did. There was a similar system in the previous game, but this one’s implementation is a bit more seamless. 

Graphics and Sound

Graphics here are a huge step up, especially in terms of the character portraits. Let’s be honest, character portraits in Crusader Kings 2 were ugly. In Crusader Kings 3 they look more like Sims (but they really do look good), and their clothing is excellent and evokes the different cultures. 

The UI is a massive improvement over the previous game. Things you need will now be right at your fingertips, so you won’t have to dig into menu after menu. The problem of having “pop-up” spam still persists, I often felt barraged with events, calls to arms, etc. It’s not a game meant to be played on the fastest setting, pause take your time.

Gameplay

The map as well looks great and is packed with detail as each barony is now represented as its own “province”. Though many will not have anything built in them. I was worried that them being broken out from the consolidated view in Crusader Kings 2 would feel like a ton more micromanagement but it didn’t.

There are far fewer map modes in Crusader Kings 3, being cut down to the most useful of the map modes: political, de jure, culture, religion, and dynasty. There are also several other modes tucked away off the main screen. This is probably a much-needed change that cuts down on some confusion in terms of how strictly necessary using other map modes was. 

One step back in terms of the map is that realms will break apart into separate independent entities during a civil war, as they used to in the earlier days of Crusader Kings 2. This is so much more confusing than having there be two unified entities in a civil war. But, it is likely a compromise until they release a patch adding it in. 

Buildings have been simplified overall, you now choose several building slots to provide buffs to your province, troops, or characters. The system in Crusader Kings 2 always felt like an afterthought, somewhere to throw your money in only when you had nothing else to do. Here it feels simpler but more useful, as I can more easily gear holdings toward specific areas, like military or economic.

An extremely positive change is that the AI is far more aggressive than in Crusader Kings 2; they’ll exploit any weakness they see and press any claim they can. This ensures that the characters feel active and like they have goals instead of just being there for the player to interact with.

Playing as the Norman Duke Robert of Apulia, I constantly had Duchess Matilda of Tuscany declaring war for my lands that she had a claim on. It was a great emergent story that developed about the lifelong feud between these two opposing rulers.

Cultures

The culture system now actually has an impact on gameplay. Mainly by determining your technology, instead of the odd province-by-province technology system they had in Crusader Kings 2, your technology level is now tied to your culture.

Technologies are called Innovations in the game and are more of a shared cultural trait or practice than true technologies. These can be anything from coinage, manorialism, communal government, or horseshoes.

There are also several culturally specific Innovations like Reconquista for the Iberian culture group. These add specific historical flavor to certain regions and I’m sure we will be seeing many more be added to the game as the first expansions begin to be released. 

Technological Innovations will also shift eras from Tribal to Early Medieval, High Medieval, and finally Late Medieval, depicting the progress of your civilization as it claws its way out of the Dark Ages.

Your culture’s Innovation research is determined by the culture head who is the most powerful ruler in your culture group. It works far better than in Crusader Kings 2 since everyone in your culture group gets to share in the benefits of the technology, but becoming more powerful will allow you to determine the direction of your people.

Characters

The main changes in terms of how you’ll be interacting with your character are through new RPG-inspired systems like Perks to grant a feeling of progression as the character gets older.

The old Way of Life system has been replaced with these Perk Trees. There are three perk trees for each Lifestyle, which correspond to the different stats your character has. Characters educated in a certain way will get bonuses to gain new perks more quickly which incentives you to play characters in a certain way.

Traits now actually have an impact on how you play the game, if you take too many decisions that conflict with your character’s personality they’ll begin to build up stress, which encourages you to play outside the “optimal” path and actually become invested in the characters traits.

In Crusader Kings 2, you’d want a character with good stats for their buffs of opinion, and troops. Now, you’ll want good characters because a paranoid or insane character will actively change how you play the game.

Politics is personal in the middle ages, and your relations with characters are still defined by familial ties. Alliances are forged through marriages, and wars are the result of ancestral claims to lands or personal feuds. 

Also gone is the obtuse pluses and minuses system of determining whether characters would accept peace or proposals, now everything is shown as a positive or negative number with a tooltip explaining their reasoning. It makes dealing with other characters more interesting and more intuitive.

Similar to the innovation system for cultures, dynasties now have a Legacies system, which grants all members of the dynasty certain traits once you gained a certain amount of renown. This helps to make each dynasty its own personality, and for there to be tangible benefits to increasing the power of other dynasty members.

Intrigue

One of the best things about Crusader Kings 2 was the ability to settle things outside of the realm of warfare. In too many strategy games, the only way to expand or advance is through combat.

Crusader Kings took a different approach with its focus on political machinations and intrigue. Stabbing your opponent in the back or securing a strategic alliance was often just as valuable as going to war. While this was a great idea, it always felt underdeveloped in Crusader Kings 2, I’d find myself going down the same paths and using the same strategies as I did before. 

So while the intrigue and politics were a viable strategy in Crusader Kings 2 they were never as efficient as just going to war. Crusader Kings 3 partially fixes this through its implementation of schemes and hooks which add far more depth to the intrigue system of the game. 

But it is still easier to just go to war for some territory, due to how claims work now…

Claims

In Crusader Kings 2, when trying to fabricate a claim you had a percentage chance each year to fabricate a claim, so you could fabricate it in a few months or wait a full ten years.

It was a frustrating and entirely random system. In Crusader Kings 3, your religious advisor will fabricate claims in a certain number of months, and in the end, you will have to pay a bit but will get the claim.

This means that you can always go to war and in many cases, it’s even more efficient to take the war route than it was in Crusader Kings 2. 

The claims system is much improved in Crusader kings 3 but its ease of use does push me to focus more on expanding through conquest than through intrigue and diplomacy.

Hooks, Secrets, and Schemes

Hooks act as favors which a character can owe you or vice versa. They can affect tons of things in the game, from changing a vassal’s taxes to convincing someone to marry you. 

Building up a pool of hooks is now an important part of convincing others to do your bidding. This is a great improvement and is the most interesting aspect of the intrigue system.

Secrets are hidden traits about a character, like them being a deviant or having heretical religious beliefs. These generally work like hooks and are used to influence characters’ opinions or force them to do your bidding.

Hooks and secrets are both great additions to the system, but they are changes to the how of what you’ll be doing, not the what of intrigue, which I mentioned before was mostly the same. 

You could certainly make the argument that just changing the how of interacting with the system is the more important component (and Crusader Kings 2’s intrigue system didn’t need much improvement), but I’d like to see them expand on it further, as it’s something that is so unique to Crusader Kings.

Schemes have replaced plots from Crusader Kings 2. They can be to murder someone or to sway their opinion of you. Schemes generally work much more intuitively and give the player increased control over the outcome than they did in the previous game except now there are two types, Personal and Hostile. 

You will still be plotting assassinations, but they’re now less reliant on getting the whole kingdom to join in and more about your personal intrigue. Plotting to murder will now also bring stress for characters with certain traits, which makes way more sense then Crusader Kings 2’s world full of psychopaths.

Councilors

The council mechanics are mostly the same here. You’ll need to balance between skilled, loyal, and powerful characters to try and get the most out of your council without pissing off any major lords or opening yourself up to an assassination. Councilors generally have more useful traits than in Crusader Kings 2, though many are very similar. 

The biggest difference is that your spouse is now an advisor in their own right who you can set to give you specific bonuses.

Faiths

Religious systems in Crusader Kings 3 has taken a note from Holy Fury, and are now entirely customizable based on a variety of factors. Players can now form and design their own heresies.

Faiths are defined through their Tenets. Which are essentially how you practice the faith and ties into what rulers can do to interact with their religious heads. Each faith also has its own unique Sins and Virtues, as well as numerous types of Doctrines.

This customizability and granularity help to make each faith feel unique when playing it. It is also amazingly fun to design your own religion and spread it across the world.

Military

Another huge area of improvement here is in the game’s warfare systems. Battles feel more logical, even if it’s still mostly a matter of who brings more troops, there’s now more of a difference with Knights. 

Knights function almost as commanders did in Crusader Kings 2. They’re highly elite named characters who are worth a hundred levy troops. They’ll be subject to events and since they are characters in their own right, can be granted land or given favors. 

Having significantly more knights than your opponents can turn the tide in a battle, though I’m not sure the King of England really only had 20 knights at his disposal. In this way, knights act more as heroic champions then petty feudal lords. They’re depicted more as Knights of the Round Table then their historical role implies. 

When at war there is always a button to raise your troops, which is such a small but important quality of life feature. There is also now an advantage bar during battles, showing who has the upper hand in an engagement. 

Much like Imperator Rome, when you enter a province it will give you a pop-up of who the predicted winner is. I found this indicator to generally be correct in its predictions, and I’m torn on its implementation. 

On the one hand, it makes sense that your advisors would be able to give you a sense of your chances, and it helps make combat less impenetrable but it also takes some of the strategies out of choosing your engagements. You’ll know if you’ve already won or not, and only a mixed indicator is a real toss-up battle where things could go either way. 

Overall the combat system is much improved, especially with the additions of knights, and men at arms, even if the way you interact with the system will mostly be the same. 

Conclusion

If you wanted Crusader Kings 3 to be an improved Crusader Kings 2, then you got your wish. So much of the game feels familiar that I felt right at home even in my first few hours of playing it. 

Compared to recent releases like Imperator Rome, Crusader Kings 3 is extremely polished. Everything works a little more clearly and a little more logically then it did in Crusader Kings 2. 

Ultimately, we know Paradox will continue to support Crusader Kings 3 with expansions for years to come, and this release serves as a strong foundation to build upon in further expansions and patches. They developed the fundamentals right, and now I want to see where they will go with it. 

Please Consider Supporting Us

If you enjoyed our article on Crusader Kings 3 and wanted to purchase the game, please consider doing so through our Affiliate Link on G2A.com. When using this link we receive a commission that helps us keep writing strategy game content! Thank you for your support!

If you’d like to purchase Crusader Kings 3 on G2A.com it is discounted and works on Steam!