wojtekoxx

THE addition that broke the game for many, many people. Let's start with good sides. Additional start date (that not many people like due to abbasids out of control). Zunist religion. What ****: >Making custom empire or kingdom funnily wrecks dejure borders of predefined kingdoms and empires, because you WILL want to eventually destroy your title and use neat dejure predefined one - NOPE. Charlie events are ultimate noob scenario ones. You get half of europe + saxony + italy just by decisions. From then convert to religion of your choice adn the world is your oyster! >Retinues are completely butchered. They become drain on your economy for hardly any benefit. Barely better than normal troops, they are ridiculously expensive and will die during marching through your own territory. Most of viable retinues became butchered with this patch, and now you are stuck with pikemen for like 3 years now. Horse archers, cataphracts, knights? Forget them, they are useless. Addition of cultural retinues to the game (at least for many new cultures) killed diversity, because now you are stuck with horrible things unless you convert to different culture which is gamebreaking. > Tribals. So you want to be pagan. Peaceful pagan, just sitting in your country and minding your business untilyou are ready to expand? nope. You are tribal now. Everyone around you gets 2500 troops for 500 prestige, so you will waste all your prestige defending from backward peasants. If you decided defending is boring, you can look at your 0.3 g/month income or BLOB, because there is nothing else to do. If you are stupid enough to have at least 2 kids, they will automatically create kingdoms after your death and good luck attacking your brother. So you are forced to blob even more to make empire OR stop any conquest whatsoever the moment you are 40 years old, because you are too old to create empire. Good times. To sum up, retinues as bad as they are now, will never again allow you to just mind your business with strong, professional army EARNED by big tech. You will feel weak from the first to last year of your game. Good luck.

Good sides of conclave: Education system. The council in late game (after you missed most the fun). Avoiding revolts. Regents stop being people you want to smash to pieces the moment you turn 16, including castrating their whole family for undoing 100 years of your progress in 2 months (crown authority). Bad sides: First 100 years or 200 of your campaign will be filled with tedium, as you unlock the laws enabling you actual RULING your country. Of course each time you will need to pay anything from 50 to 500 gold to at least 3 people, not much unlike paying for DLC's to unlock vital game functions.

Mind you, my grade for this game would be 10/10 if 2 DLC's never happened. I will just review old version of the game, then add some minus points in the end. CK2 as a game allows you to heavily roleplay and enact the wonder scenarios you always dreamed of reading about history. Reverse Manzikert? Check. Make pagan religion of choice (or all of them) survive? Check. Make Islam/Christianity win or fail miserably? All possible. Have sex with your cousin? Check. Be a mediocre ruler, like hundreds in real life before you - possible. Have your country ruled in succession by alikes of Alexander or Napoleon and leading it to glory? All possible. In addition, your history knowledge with this game will skyrocket. I wouldn't complain about hard to play, because you can just use some cheats as training wheels early. Now here come bad things. Imagine if playing GTA it took you 2 minutes to steal a car, and police would chase you forever like in real life. Is this more realistic? Yes. Does it kill the game for you? Yes as well. CK2 had 2 bad dlcs that while had some redeeming qualities, destroyed the fun out of game. First one is Charlemagne, which makes retinues useless (only like 2% of cultures in the game have good retinues). Want to feel forced to reform religion so you will basically never play as a king OR unreformed for prolonged time - hell yeah, because you are some crap called tribal now. Now let's get to conclave. What are the most fun times in the playthrough? Well, first 100 years, when you are consolidating power, or maybe going from the count to emperor / multi king. Which hours of conclave **** the most? The same hours, because your council has almost everything in their favour and it takes you 5/10 years and 500-2000 gold each time to allow you to actually rule kingdom, where you'd possible need/want to do somethings like: you have right to banish bad people, you can revoke titles from traitors, you can grant YOUR titles to someone else, you can imprison bad people and many others!