Crusader kings 3 best start series#

It requires having an alliance with every independent Iberian ruler – at the moment there are far too many – and holding directly less than half of the peninsula (at the moment I hold I bit too much).

The issue now is shaping events to allow me to fire the détente struggle-ending, which is going to take some doing. That’s not a problem though because, as you can see here, I am already the preeminent power in the Iberian Peninsula.

With the death of Ajannas I, we move on to Ajannas II ibn Ajannas (his son), an excellent administrator, decent diplomat and indifferent warrior. And of course we pick up with our running CKIII game steering House al-Yiliqi.

Crusader kings 3 best start series#

The next post in the series will be dealing with norms (both cultural and religious) along with the broader concept of legitimacy, so all of those issues will be returned to in more detail then. CKIII‘s core mechanics (characters, vassal-liege relations, opinion-bonuses, religion and culture) are all fairly tightly intertwined (because they all impact character’s opinions of other characters), so teasing them apart for the purpose of analysis is at best a bit imperfect. The same as last week there is going to be a lot of ‘when we get to it’ notes as we go through here. One more thing to note before we dive in. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter ( where I hold court. If you have a really high opinion modifier of these posts, you can also contribute revenues via Patreon. This week’s part will look at how the game models ‘feudal’ vassalage in Christian Europe, while next week’s second half will look at how the game modifies those systems to try and model different forms of political fragmentation in Islamic polities, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean.īut first, if you want to contribute levies to this project, please share what you are reading. This post ended up being very long so I have split it into two parts. The polities that do exist are highly fragmented, with power shared between a liege and many vassals who essentially function as states-within-a-state, who may contribute revenue and levies to their liege but may also oppose them and actively work against the liege’s goals and strategies. But there are no states as such in CKIII. As we noted last week, most of Paradox’s titles adopt a broadly neo-realist framework when thinking about international relations, which tends (in its most common forms) to treat states as largely unitary – a single entity with a single set of interests. Fundamentally, Crusader Kings III is a game about political fragmentation and decentralization, in a way that few other strategy games are. This week we’re going to turn from the person of the ruler to the structure of polity that CKIII envisages. Last time we opened by discussing how CKIII attempts to simulate and represent the distinctly personal character of rule and decision-making in the Middle Ages and how this contrasted with both Paradox’s other grand strategy titles, which are far more state-oriented. This is the second part of a four-part ( I) series examining the historical assumptions of the popular historical grand strategy game Crusader Kings III, by Paradox Interactive.