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Crusader Kings 2

A digression on philosophy, where one wonders what it is all about?

I don't know how the education system works outside of the UK, but here, when you are 16 you finish your obligatory schooling. You can choose to go on in the Education system and get your A-Levels, which then open the door to university, or you can enter full time employment, or an apprenticeship (which is we are to believe what is written in Bounce and Talent is Overrated is actually potentially a very useful thing indeed) or some combination therein.

You go from studying about 10 subjects, which you then must narrow down to 4 (and then to 3 a year later), which represents quite the shift. In my school, you also got to ditch the uniform. In many ways, it was a rehearsal for university and marked you out as some sort of elite (we were also housed in a separate campus on site) – we were, in short, no longer children, but nearly adults (especially as some people very quickly got cars etc, and also house parties ended up being alcohol fuelled as we all knew someone who was willing and able to buy us booze.)

Anyway, before making your choices as to what to study, you got to go to a mini session in your subjects of interest, a sort of try before you buy thing, and I remember going for the English Literature taster. The Teacher in charge was never one of my favourites (too earnest and fanatical for my taste) but I had always liked the subject, and had shown promise in it (which, like many other things, was more than tempered by laziness). In our taster, our Teacher got us to read a poem, then discuss it, but eventually the conversation moved onto Lord of The Rings. He asked us one simple question:

What is it about?

Incredulously (how could he not know what it was about?) I started to outline that it dealt with Frodo Baggins on an impossible quest etc. He stopped me short. "That's the plot" he said, "tell me what the book is about." I was, to put it mildly, discomfited. I, who had read the goddamed thing 8 times (by the way, some context, this was the year when the Fellowship of the Ring was released in cinemas, and boy did I go over that with a fine tooth comb- NO TOM BOMBADIL?!!!) and could recite parts of it etc, I couldn't articulate what it was about.

By the end of the class, it seemed the book was about the dichotomy of good and evil (how the Elvish etc rings drew their power from Sauron, and to kill Sauron meant to diminish themselves) and how there are no real happy endings, or clear-cut victories, or how corruptible the heart of man (Isildur) or the influence of progress (the Scouring of the shire) etc. In my defence, there are long, in depth documentaries on the LOTR DVD packs (yes, I bought the Collector's Edition) that still can't quite answer my Teacher's question in a succinct manner, so what hope did I have, in that small and dingy classroom, as a 16 year old stripling?

But the central question stayed with me for a long time, and influenced (and continues to do so) how I view things. Whatever a thing is about, it is rarely the narrative of the thing that provides the answer. That narrative can be seen as scaffolding, or scene setting, but it is never what it is about.

That question surfaced recently when I was reading this series on PC Gamer (a magazine that got me hooked into pc games some 16 years ago...) and also thinking about Game of Thrones. That's another literary series that I'm proud to say I was all geeked up on before it became popular. Now every man and his dog (except me, btw, I refuse to do so) has watched the series, and even my brother, who as a dyslexic has probably never finished a book in his life, is reading the series, and enjoying it. If I were to ask the man on the street (or woman, seeing as we live in such gender sensitive times...) that taut, tight, condensed question, what is it about, I wonder what they would say?

What would you say?

Would you give me a narrative?

Would you talk about the Borgias?

Would you mention the Dothraki?

Or would you just talk about the nudity and violence?

Reading that article made me think that Crusader Kings 2 consistently throws up these amazing stories. I had dabbled a bit in this Paradox title, but it had never drawn me in. A good gamer friend of mine plays Europa Universalis a great deal, and seems to love it. Living in a Golden Age of gaming means there are more games than ever before, and the bar is getting set higher. Had World of Magic released 10 years ago it would, I imagine, have been very well received, but it came out facing the competition in the forms of Age of Wonders 3 and Endless Legend. I talk elsewhere about what I think of those 2 games. Basically, I decided that dropping £30+ on EU4 wasn't a realistic proposition (actually, the truth is I'm feeding a growing Board games addiction, and those things are not cheap...) and reading the RPS article gave me the shove I needed to reinstall and try out CK2 again. I mean, this thing has sold very well indeed, and it's not like me to be so far behind the zeitgeist on something.

NB: what follows isn't a review as such, as my policy is to play 50 hrs+ of a game before writing a review, and for reasons outlined below, that is going to be...challenging.

I recently realised, as I detail when talking about it, that Endless Legends and AoW3 are very different games, and trying to play them like each other is the root cause of why some don't like the other. It made me think that as a player, you should really know what is a game about? With that question burning at the forefront of my mind, I fearfully dipped a toe in Crusader Kings 2.

I booted it up, remembering that the last time I did so I didn't survive the tutorial because it was possibly the worst tutorial I have ever come across. When I say I didn't survive, what happened was that I was given an instruction to carry out and no way to do so, so it got uninstalled. Fundamentally, I play games for fun, more on this later...

So, installed and patched, I notice there is a new tutorial, casting me as the King of Leon. My interest piqued (+ 1 to Paradox). I know the places on this map. I have been to Salamanca, visited the university there, and gotten gloriously drunk on its cobbled streets. I've been to Valladolid (which claims the purest Spanish of all). I spent a week in Galicia, enjoying some delectable seafood and learning that Celtic culture (to a degree) is alive and well there (surprising, given that for most people Spain is this very Romanesque Latin culture bastion, hell the language itself is very close to Latin, more so than French for sure) – they even have bagpipes!

I have even run with the bulls in Pamplona (lots of fun, not nearly as dangerous as people would have you believe – I got kicked in the head, and I'm still sane, right? RIGHT?!)

And so, I started. The tutorial wasn't useful. I was told to set an ambition to get married, and then via my leader portrait told to select a wife from the list. The thing is, it made much more sense to select the regions I was most interested in (Castille, Navarra, Galicia if you must know) and find an eligible lady there and talk to her directly. Still cumbersome, with many clicks involved, but I got myself married, and easier than going through a list (minor fail). Then it told me to invade the Canary Islands. I spend some time every year in Gran Canaria so I had no problems doing this. Anyway, this incident was intended to show me how to fabricate a claim, which as a mechanic is really a very good idea (epic plus). I raised my vassals as instructed, and raised my ships as instructed, which were too few, so I hired some mercenaries, as instructed. I sent all the ships to port, as instructed, and my armies to that port, as instructed. Then I sent my soldiers onto the ships, as instructed.

No dice. Nada. Nothing. Did not work. I reread the instructions, nothing was working. I tried splitting my armies, nothing helped. In vexation I went to the Steam forums to ask for help, and was told to make sure my ships were in harbour. So, back to the game, visually checking the screen – they looked like they were in the harbour, but there was nothing to tell me, via a tooltip, that they were there.

First Epic Fail (please keep count as I continue to rant), and not on me either. Game design, more accurately User Interface, at fault.

I figured it out eventually. Yes, they were in harbour, but the ships, all 44 of them by this point, were not combined as a navy, even though they were occupying exactly the same space. I had to select the disparate fleets and combine them as a Navy, but the game never once thought to tell me this. This is a remarkably simple thing to do (providing instruction, and yes, also combining them in game is simple). In AoW3, if your 3 ships occupy the same hex as 2 other friendly ships, they become a single fleet of 5 ships. It's intuitive, it makes sense, it's an obvious thing (If the space is occupied by unfriendly ships, you start a fight).

Epic Fail.

In disgust, I stopped the tutorial, and figured that Paradox were clearly incompetent at making tutorials that made sense and actually helped the player. Steam seemed to agree with me as well, for what that's worth. I decided that ultimately, as I know enough (from reading other peoples' stories incidentally) about the game mechanics (here I refer to things like intrigue, plots, fabricating claims) to start my own game.

I decide to start as the King of Leon again. My Uncle is causing me trouble, and I am very intrigued. My brothers are the Rulers of Galicia and Castille, so I am wondering why Uncle Pedro was passed over. Was he related to my Father? Was my Father King of all 3 Kingdoms (doubtful, as I imagine he would have kept them together)? How did we get to this situation? Uncle Pedro kept hassling me for his own Realm, but he hates me so much that I knew that was a dicey proposition. I got rid of him a.s.a.p. So, game has my interest, epic plus. I realise I can get these answers online, but put it this way – a game, a largely passive source of entertainment, especially this one, has got me asking questions and wanting to know more.

That is amazing.

I set myself the goal of uniting these 3 Kingdoms, facing down the Moors and uniting the Peninsula. In reality, from the start date given of 1066, it took until 1492 for the Spaniards to do this, and they couldn't get Portugal either. At that point, having taken back the Alhambra they then decided upon adventures in America, then went on to dominate Europe and the world before the English descended upon them like vampiric Pirates eventually destroying the Grand Armada . These times are well remembered in La Coruña by the way, as they commemorate facing down and defeating Francis Drake. In a similar way, we British remember specific things like the events of a Bridge Too Far which for the Germans is probably of more academic interest (they're more likely to remember Dresden or Stalingrad than Arnhem).

So, in this game, I decided to press my legitimate claim to the Throne of Galicia. I know it's legitimate, even if a weak, claim because the game tells me so with notifications at the top of the screen minor plus) so I start the war.

The war seems to go okay, I mean I win the first few fights, but I don't really know how or why I am, other than having more troops. I also then get sucked into long sieges that take seemingly forever. At this point I'm thinking this is realistic, but really a bit boring. A graphical makeover could be done here, surely? I'm going to say minor plus here.

And then my levies start getting fractious, as they've been away from their farms too long. This is incredible, in the sense of straining credulity, not in the sense of something good. They have successfully captured 3 enemy towns, looted them and are presumably full of someone else's grain, yet they want to go back to their farms? This is a war that is going well ...

minor fail.

And then the King of Castille decides to join the party, and promptly marches past all my cities to attack me while I am in Galicia. I lose, and badly, and then I realise one thing about this game:

The combat is atrocious. The abstraction of warfare is ridiculous, really unrealistic (in a game that prides itself on historical accuracy) and really no fun at all. It's not an exaggeration to say I have finally found a combat system I detest more than that of Endless Legend.

It's that bad, and the thing is, looking at this as a consumer, there is absolutely no need for it to be so bad. I'm not asking for total tactical control, and oddly enough, in this setting, I could see the Endless Legend system actually working extremely well.

Sad to say, EPIC fail.

And then it hit me, what this game is about. You may already have reached the same conclusions as I, but here it is:

It's about people (and as an extension, their dynasty and kingdom), their relations and ambitions. It's a story generator.

It most emphatically is not about medieval warfare (by the way, is there a game that is about this? I know Pike and Shot is late medieval/renaissance warfare, and is apparently very good, and is, paradoxically, a Paradox title as well. I mean, Medieval Total War 1 and 2 are all about battles, but I'd hardly call them medieval simulators), medieval life (other than nearly every rpg being vaguely set in medieval times). It's not a grand strategy game either, and it's not an Empire Builder game (which is a more accurate term for what people refer to as 4x games).

Crusader Kings, when you boil it down, is basically the Sims, with Medieval trapping and none of the busy work of bathing your people. It's also why it fits so incredibly well with Game of Thrones (that's about people and ambition too by the way).

Simply put, this is a game about managing your dynasty and your bloodline, and everything else around it is there to facilitate this. Now, it helps that the game does that very well (it also helps that it features a time period that it's target audience both know and enjoy very much). Your mileage may vary considerably with this game, but the essential draw is a timeless one – people like and dislike people, and playing this game you can create stories. Stories, especially one where you can get the player involved, are always timeless.

Just don't come in here expecting to reprise your Total war role as the King of England who outclassed all on the battlefield. I don't think it is even possible to emulate the Battle of Agincourt, but it may be possible to recreate the Hundred Years war. (which is precisely the inverse of Total War!)

As a bloodline/dynasty management game, it excels, but as a strategy, or wargame, it is terrible. Anyway, last thought on Crusader Kings, a game I will continue to play and one that will continue to vex me: "A game is a way to play by a set of rules. Good rules help you find the fun, bad rules obscure it. But the rules are not, themselves, the fun." James Ernest, Kobold Guide to Boardgame design.

Substitute 'rules' for 'game mechanics' (which is more relevant a term for computer games) and this encapsulates my thoughts on Crusader Kings 2: there's a great game to be had there, hiding under some bizarre UI stuff and atrocious combat rules.

Now imagine if somehow, satisfying (a nebulous term, as there are many different representations of battle) battles were brought into this format?

Wouldn't that be a grand game?

Something that brought the satisfaction of a Total War battle, wrapped it up in the dynasty management, politics and relationship simulator of Crusader Kings 2, but without the tedium of Total War (oh yay, another battle, and no way to end a war) or the opaque interface/mechanic interplay of Crusader Kings? Well, it turns out someone has that same idea. Actually, I imagine that if I've had this idea, then countless others have, but in this case, someone has tried to implement said idea... Enter Massive Chalice, stage left, which will be the subject of my next article. Enter Sovereignty, stage right, which I shall write about soon.