That Old-Time Religion

by on August 18, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the second in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Crusader Kings II. See the original review here:
Crusader Kings II: The Second Crusade

With the release of The Republic, Paradox’s CK team mentioned that they had finally exhausted all the ideas they’d had for the game during development. So it isn’t so surprising that the fifth expansion for Crusader Kings II started a new round of expansions by expanding the scope of the game.

The Old Gods was released on May 28th, 2013, along with patch 1.10. My main review of CK II covered the state of the game as of the last free patch before the expansion after this (1.111; more properly ‘1.11.1’), so this review will concentrate on the features of the expansion itself.

A New Start

The major feature of the expansion was a new starting date of AD 867, 199 years before the previous starting date of the game. Pretty much everything else about the expansion is related to this feature. Sadly, it does not conform to the usual ‘timeline’ practice of Paradox’s games, so there is no way to start in between 867 and 1066.

This is a very different environment than the comparatively settled 11th Century, with Charlemagne’s empire broken up into five parts, and not yet in anything resembling their modern forms, while England is fractured between different minor or ‘petty’ kings, and in the middle of dealing with Viking invasions.

Raiding

The map was re-worked so some major rivers became akin to sea areas: They were now navigable for ships, so sea-borne forces can work inland before coming ashore again, potentially going around or through all sorts of defenses.

Pagan rulers can raise an army, set it to ‘raiding’ mode, and attack neighboring and overseas provinces for loot… without being at war (though much the same mechanics apply to any army that is at war). Anyone raided becomes hostile and can attack the raiders and the origin country for a short while, and can start an actual war. But especially with raiders made mobile with ships, it can be very difficult for a ruler to protect his own lands.

The point of this activity is that each province has a pool of money that in turn produces taxes. Fortification values of the holdings protect some of this value (until the holding is taken in a siege; for looters this won’t ‘take’ the holding, but they will get a massive cash bonus), and the rest is vulnerable to looting. When the pool is drained, taxes are reduced or eliminated until it can replenish. But the money doesn’t disappear; when raiding a neighboring province, the looted money goes straight to the raider’s treasury, along with a prestige boost. Overseas raids send money to the fleet, and the money is transferred to the owner’s treasury when it comes back home.

I generally like the idea (actually, I rather like any time Paradox plays around with war/peace mechanics), and it’s amazingly thematic, but there is a problem. A raiding army generates a bit of loot every four days out of a limited pool. Keeping an eye on when a province is exhausted, and it is time to move on becomes micro-management. If you’re raiding by sea, then you need to move back to the fleet, which halts movement, and then give the order to land in the next province. If you have a small realm with not much to do, this might not be too bad, but if you have a large realm, it’s a problem, as there’s no automation for, ‘loot this, move on’, or ‘warn me if a hostile army shows up.’

Religion

Along with the earlier start, the expansion makes Zoroastrians and the pagan religions playable (this includes the Aztecs if playing with Sunset Invasion). By the time of the normal start, all of these are fairly limited in utility, with small areas and few rulers still following those faiths (though a large chunk of Eastern Europe is still Tengri), but it would not end the game if you converted to one of them (to make your new Aztec overlords happy, for instance), but the 867 start has wide possibilities for the standard set of them.

And finally, the patch featured an enhancement for all religions. Each one has five holy sites, and control of them is the main basis for current authority for that religion (see the original review). This helped out that system immensely, and helps with the demise of the pagan religions mid-game as their holy sites get taken over by encroaching Christians and Muslims.

Pagans

All of the pagans together are considered one religion group, but there are two different styles of mechanics for them, offensive and defensive. All of them have access to various casus belli that make expansion easy, but are locked to gavelkind inheritance, which splits the realm amongst all the heirs, leading to a great deal of instability. Also, there is a steep penalty to non-pagan supply in pagan territories, so that large armies cannot easily go in and suppress the pagans.

That penalty goes away at organization technology 4 (all of a sudden, instead of graduated), while gavelkind keeps large pagan empires from lasting long, and they have a hard time converting provinces to their religion, while pagan leaders tend to be vulnerable to converting to Christianity or Islam from outside influence. This means the various brands of pagans are very powerful early on, especially as they’re hard to invade, but will fade as the game goes on.

Offensive pagans (Germanic, Tengri, and Aztec) have a bonus to their muster sizes, and pay no money or opinion penalty for mustering troops, so they can easily field large armies, especially considering their lower technology levels which inhibit holding development.

Defensive pagans (Romuva, Slavic, Suomenusko, and West African) have a bonus to garrison sizes, and have a +80% to defense when fighting on territory (any territory, including someone else’s) of their religion. This combines to make offensive operations against tribes of these faiths exceptionally punishing.

Additionally, Germanic leaders may take an ambition to gain a particular king-level title (say, of Scotland or of England). This allows them to declare a prepared invasion, where a large number of warriors will gather in special event-created armies in the expectation of loot and plunder. The actual war must happen within two years, or the character will lose a lot of prestige, but it grants him an even bigger and more powerful army to conquer large realms with.

Finally, there is the option to reform a pagan religion. The idea is to organize the religion with formal scripture and hierarchy, so that it can try to compete with the world religions of Christianity and Islam. I’m not exactly sold on this idea, as ‘competing’ with a religion like this isn’t part of the mind set of the era. But, it is at least as likely as any other method for those religions to survive. At any rate, it requires control of that religion’s holy sites to accomplish, which certainly makes it a challenge for any of them, as some of these tend to be in the area of powerful Christian or Muslim states.

Reforming the religion disables the standard advantages it provides, but reduces the main problems as well (conversion rate, and increased ‘short reign’ penalties). When it happens, everyone else of that religion gets a decision of whether to reform along with the person who did it, or keep to the old ways, which then becomes a heresy of the new reformed faith.

Zoroastrians

The other enabled religion is a much smaller deal. Zoroastrianism is an older religion, and is considered an organized one in game, though there is no high priesthood (it having been eliminated by the Muslims…).

There’s only one duke-level Zoroastrian ruler as of 867, out by the Caspian Sea, and the holy sites are scattered across the ex-Persian Empire, making play of the Zoroastrians very challenging, as there’s no friends, and religious authority is low, making conversion difficult, and the three heresies likely to pop up often. As of 1066 there are no playable Zoroastrians, though there are still courtiers and provinces of that religion. Even better, doing well as a Zoroastrian puts you right in the path of the Seljuks.

Paradox still gave the religion the full suite of mechanics: A Zoroastrian ruler of the Persian Empire (one of the ‘de jure’ empires not normally in existence) can restore the high priesthood, giving the religion a head that can operate like the head of the Orthodox church, and be declared Saoshyant, a messiah-figure.

Conclusion

At first glance, a single bookmark doesn’t seem like much of an expansion, but Paradox really went all-out to expand CK II to the new era. My initial worry was that the game just couldn’t handle the feel of the period. But in the main it works very well. There are events to help a few ‘transitions’ between the periods such as the split up of Norse culture into various sub-cultures, and the Magyar transition from a tribe to the settled nation of Hungary, though I’m not yet convinced that it really does post-Charlemangian western Europe very well (I haven’t played enough to really tell).

If you don’t feel like playing as pagan, it’s not as valuable, but still a good expansion if you want to deal with the challenges of a Christian Europe that is much less secure than in 1066. The cross-over with Sunset Invasion is a nice touch, though not a reason in itself to get it.

└ Tags: , ,
1 Comment

Darkest Victoria

by on July 25, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the third in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Victoria II. See the previous reviews here:
Victoria II: Same But Different
A House Divided: Limited Expansion

Just about a year after A House Divided came out, the second expansion for Victoria II was announced. The primary goal for Heart of Darkness was to re-work colonial ventures, and concentrate on the Scramble for Africa. It was released on April 16th for PC, with a Mac version that appeared slightly later.

Note that this review is just on this expansion, and you may wish to go back over my review of the main game and AHD, listed above, for a refresher on the full game.

Source of the Nile

As the central focus of the expansion, colonization was completely reworked. The ideas of colonial range, and ‘life rating’ to restrict things remained, but just about everything else is different.

Once an area is open to colonization, you send an expedition to the region. If, after 270 days, no one else has sent an expedition to the region, you can establish a protectorate, and it will develop normally. Otherwise, you can send colonists, and then establish an outpost, a settlement, and guard posts, all in a race with the other power(s)s.

If you don’t keep pushing more development in the region, it will eventually go to the other power. If you both continually reinforce your holdings, a confrontation will eventually result as a crisis erupts over the disputed area (see below).

All of this takes colonial power. You get a flat amount of points for the early naval technology “Post-Nelsonian Thought”, and then more for every naval base and combat ship in your navy (with more advanced ones generating more). These points are invested in each step of colonizing, so a long fight with another Power over a region will sap both country’s power (and attention). Transforming a region into a true colony also takes more colonial power. Only releasing it as a dominion or transforming it into an actual state releases the colonial power for re-use.

In general, the new system works well, though there’s still no actual ‘exploration’ of Africa beyond the abstracted events that have been in the game all along. I’m a bit disappointed that there’s nothing around sending the expeditions specifically, that could tie into tracing the course of the Nile, or other bits of European uncertainty.

War at Sea

Naval combat got a complete rework, becoming a bit more like HoI III’s naval combat than a clone of EU III’s. Ships entering combat now spend time time getting into visual range, and then pick a target to go after. Ships will often be going after a ship that’s going after a different enemy ship, and so forth….

Ships have proper speed, evasion, and gunnery ranges, so light ships dart in and engage the enemy screen, while the longer-ranged capital ship guns open up on their counterparts. The damage and morale parts of combat work largely the same as before, so ships may go into a ‘retreat’ mode, where they try to get away from the enemy before being sunk. Of course, if the ships targeted on it are faster, it may not work out very well.

In some ways, it feels like it might be a little too detailed for such a high-level game as Victoria II, but it does make naval combat flow much more like actual battles, and it certainly captures the feel of a battle like Jutland very well.

Also, a new ship class, battleship, was added to represent the pre-dreadnoughts, and show more of the evolution of capital ships after early ironclads. Finally, ships now require certain minimum levels of naval bases to construct, representing the large shipyards needed to build the large warships of the early 20th Century. Since these also take a fair amount of effort to build, there is now quite a delay on getting the largest ships, which need two technologies (one for the ship class, one for the port facilities), and constructing at least one high-level port before even starting on the ships.

Origins of WWI

The feature that has the biggest impact on the entire game is the new crisis system. Every once in a while, a problem will emerge with two countries in a region, who will then start looking for Great Powers to back their resolution to the problem.

Once each side has a backer (which doesn’t always happen), any Great Power on the same continent has to get involved or lose prestige. Once involved, the Powers can align themselves one one side or the other, and the leaders of each side can offer concessions to attract support. And the two leaders can try to hammer out a solution, or one leader, finding itself politically isolated may concede.

There is only a limited amount of time for this to happen however. If a crisis goes unresolved long enough, it will turn into a war over the primary goals of the crisis, with all the involved Great Powers as belligerents.

Crises can arise anywhere there are two countries with an interest in the same state, either from one having cores (a valid/traditional claim) on another country’s territory, or two Powers trying to colonize the same state, or from liberation movements within a country.

The Balkans are a common source of crises, because Greece is already independent at the start of the game, and holds cores on most of the territory around it. In this situation, a minor nation is allowed to put a national focus on one of its cores, which will start increasing the flashpoint tension until a crisis erupts. If the Ottomans are still a Great Power, they automatically back themselves, but if Greece can get support from other Great Powers, they can get the Ottomans to back down and hand a province over, or fight them for it on Greece’s behalf.

Its a clever way to give minor countries a bit more control, and of course is a nice way to show the increasing tensions of the late 19th/early 20th centuries as the rising militarism of the population will cause crises to become more common late in the game.

Rail Baron

Railroads got a graphical overhaul so that they appear in all map modes now (a complaint of mine originally). Also, they don’t sprawl to all possible destinations, but generally (graphically) connect to one other province that already has a railroad. This makes them look a bit more natural, but as separate regions develop railroads that grow together, their rails never connect, which make projects like the Trans-Continental Railroad look wrong. It’s a nice boost to the looks of the game, but I think they should have had more connections appear as the level of rail in the province go up, which would solve the trouble.

Conclusion

This is a much easier recommendation than the previous expansion. Every major feature helps Victoria II feel more like the 19th Century. Some of the ideas work out better than others, but they do all work. They add a bit more complication to the game, but since they don’t complicate the main parts of the game, the expansion does not make the game any more difficult to learn. I recommend getting this expansion in general, and if when initially getting Victoria II, you can get it as a complete package with both expansions, I definitely recommend going straight to that.

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment 

A Minor EU

by on June 18, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the twelfth in a series of reviews of Paradox’s empire management games. See the earlier reviews here:
Europa Universalis II: A Tale of Two Europas
Hearts of Iron: Europa of Iron
Victoria: Nineteenth Century Essay
Crusader Kings: A Dynastic Adventure
Hearts of Iron II: Return Engagement
Europa Universalis III: A Whole New World
Europa Universalis: Rome: Make a Desert and Call it a Game
Hearts of Iron III: One Plus Two Equals Three
Victoria II: Same But Different
Sengoku: Shogun: Only War
Crusader Kings II: The Second Crusade

At the end of 2009, French independent development studio AGEOD was acquired by Paradox Interactive, and renamed ‘Paradox France’ as a separate internal development studio. The first/primary project of the new arrangement was to take one of their best titles (Napoleon’s Campaigns), and do a sequel in Paradox’s Clausewitz engine. Unfortunately, this did not work out, and Paradox France, while still owned by Paradox Interactive, was eventually renamed back to AGEOD, and still develops games under its own AGE engine.

Napoleon’s Campaigns II was retitled March of the Eagles and brought over to Paradox Development Studio for a complete rework. The final game is in many ways typical of Paradox’s pausable real-time empire management series (as opposed to the turn-based, and more traditionally wargame mechanic feel of AGEOD’s games), and was released for PC in February 2013, and on Mac in May. There were two minor patches, but the game did not get any long-term attention.

Locale

MotE covers 15 years of the Napoleonic Era, from 1805 to 1820, with an area map that covers Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East (Crusader Kings II provided the initial basis of the map). Like all of PDS’s other games, this is a pauseable real-time game, though with the short time scale, there’s eight periods per day, instead everything happening purely by each day. This mostly just gives battles more chances for events, as movement, construction, and so on, just happens at the start of each day.

The map is fairly detailed, with lots of provinces, but some are much more important than others. All of them have terrain, a development level, and roads, but only some have cities, or fortresses which form the basis of war goals, and taxes. While all provinces have a name that appears if you zoom in close enough, cities and fortresses have name plates that appear much further out, which also indicate that they can be garrisoned with military units stationed inside them (and those that are garrisoned will have an appropriate national flag next to the name plate).

Each province can be built up, but only cities will ever generate taxes, and most things are fairly expensive. With the relatively short time-span, improvements have to carefully judged. Depots can be established to improve local supply limits, recruiting times, and manpower. Roads also help with supply as well as speeding movement; development of a province does the same, but also increases the amount of money generated (with a multiple, and most provinces have a base tax of ‘0’), but this can be very expensive.

Forts and ports can also be built and upgraded in each province, with the fairly obvious defensive military benefits for forts, while ports help with shipbuilding and repair, and also provide some money from harbor taxes. There’s no technological or other restrictions on any of these, just the fact that it’s a big world, and there’s only so much time.

Dominating Europe

As usual with a Paradox game, you can play as any country you like on the map. However, only the eight major powers have proper goals. Like in Sengoku, there is an actual goal to work towards: establish both land and naval dominance.

Each of the major powers has its own list of ten provinces for land dominance, and ten more for naval dominance. Any country that can get seven of it’s list can gain dominance, and if it can be dominant in both, it wins at that point. France and Britain are accorded their central place in the period by France already having land dominance when the game starts, and Britain already has naval dominance. Complicating dominance gain is that you cannot become dominant in a category if someone else already is, so victory probably means defeating another power (or two); however, dominance is judged by current control, so a temporary shift in control during a war is enough for a change-over.

If no one manages to hit both lists of goals in fifteen years, then the country with the highest prestige will win a minor victory, so a smaller country could win by going the full distance, and picking up lots of prestige in the process.

Ideas

There’s a number of ways that each country is a bit different from the others: the ruler and his abilities (and historical changes are given in events), different government types, and bonuses they give, and the available generals and admirals are based on actual historical performance and availability.

However, each country has the ability to adopt ideas as the game goes on to emphasize certain traits and gain bonuses. There are seven general categories with five ideas each (which must be gotten in sequence), and then the major powers each have a unique eighth category as well.

This general concept had shown up previously in EU III and EU: Rome, where some of them were available at the start, and others became available as technology progressed. Here, you can only get at later ideas in a group by getting all the preceding ones. Since some of them mix and match naval and land bonuses, this can cause annoyance for a country focused more on one or the other. Also, unlike the other two games, you cannot change out an idea you’ve taken for a different one; it’s purely building up bonuses, instead of determining what you need right now.

Each month, every country gains 15 points for spending on ideas. Some countries get events that grant more points in a lump sum, or as a bonus every month for a year or the like. Gaining an idea costs 200 points, and when that number of points has been stored up, an alert appears letting you know you can get a new bonus. In addition, you can easily see what ideas other countries have gotten by looking at their diplomatic view.

Finally, every battle fought generates idea points. Both sides can get points, but the side that was defeated will generally get a lot more than the winner. So a country that experiences a string of defeats will get new idea(s) much earlier than their opponents, and can leverage that to come back more capable later.

Diplomacy

Diplomatic options work much the same here as they do in the EU series, if cut down a little. You have diplomats to do actions with, and you get more each month; every country has a bilateral relationship value with every other country that gets modified for actions between them. There’s no dynastic options for royal marriages, and in fact, there’s no alliances. Instead, there are coalitions.

A coalition is basically an alliance, but it is aimed against a particular country, in particular, it must be against one that currently has dominance of either type. Anyone else, including the other dominant power, can start a coalition against that power, to try and bring enough force to bear to force it out of its dominant position. Generally, the country starting a coalition will promise some money each month as a subsidy until the coalition disbands.

You can can have vassals and satellite nations, you can guarantee a country against attack, and give military access to another country so that they have an easier time getting to their enemy…. Generally, other than coalitions, and the mentioned exceptions, it follows the EU diplomatic model fairly closely.

Armies

As with other Paradox games, armies are assembled from discrete brigades of different types. Here, there’s a fair amount of detail, and different countries get access to slightly different types of brigades, but that’s generally down to details, and not very noticeable.

An assembled army in the field has a fair number of options on its own. These are generally available as a series of buttons at the top of the army listing. A small army could be set to hide inside a fortress if an enemy army catches it (instantly making it an enlarged garrison that will be tougher to beat until—hopefully—help arrives). At the same time, or alternatively, it can be instructed to avoid battle, but that one is fairly chancy, and the possibility of a battle is checked each day that it is in the same province as an enemy army.

There’s a few things that are only enabled by taking certain ideas. ‘March to the Sound of Guns’, causes an army to attempt to automatically join a battle in an adjacent province. Unfortunately, you then need to remember to turn if off again if a large army becomes depleted and no longer capable of helping much in a battle. ‘Forced March’ just causes an army to move faster, but also increases attrition.

Inside the army, there’s enough going on that there’s three different views of an army in the game. The most collapsed view is all you’ll ever get if you’ve selected multiple armies, and just gives the name of the army, overall commander, and current strength of the army, along with the controls just mentioned. An expanded view gives similar details for each flank of the army, as well as a breakdown of overall strength by each general troop type. And then the most expanded view shows exactly what brigades are in each flank, and what order they’ll generally enter combat in.

There are seven general troop types, with four of them being infantry. Guard infantry are considered their own type, who are some of the best units in the game, with good morale, but only some generals can use them at all. At the opposite end are militiamen, who’s advantages are numbers and being cheap to recruit. In between are line and light infantry, the main ‘regular’ formations. Cavalry and Artillery only consist one general type, though of course there are different types of brigades within them, including, confusingly, guard cavalry brigades, which are indeed high-quality heavy cavalry, but don’t require special commanders to utilize.

There are also brigades that are suitable for garrison use, including fortress artillery with almost no mobility. And the seventh general troop type is ‘service’, which is just for supply train brigades. Supply is a fairly important part of MotE, and army can take its own supplies with it to supplement shortfalls from being far from home. It is sadly hard to get a real handle on how supplies are working as most of it is hidden from view, though the outliner breaks down each separate area that armies are attempting to take supplies from, and how well supplied that area is.

Combat

Once a land battle is joined, it works much like it does in CK II. There’s three flanks, and each flank has its own units and commanders. The commanders pick tactics that modify performance, and those can lead to events that add another layer to what happens.

In addition to this, there is also the reserve, with an overall commander who also makes a lesser contribution improving the troops’ performance. More importantly, he directs the commitment of reserves to the flanks, and can also pull out spent units into the reserve. This is probably the most detailed representation of combat Paradox has done yet.

While the eight periods per day doesn’t mean a whole lot elsewhere, it does here, as each period is a time when events can happen. This is also a small problem, as in each period commanders are picking options, the overall commander observes part of the battlefield, and events happen, and all of these go by too fast to really understand just what is going on. Also, a decision point seems to be reached more quickly, and along with the eight periods per day, battles tend to take 2-3 days, which is a bit long for Napoleonic battles, but far shorter than it takes in all of Paradox’s other games, where you have to figure a ‘battle’ is more of a representation of possibly several conflicts as two forces maneuver within the province.

Conclusion

This was Paradox’s second ‘small’ game within a couple of years, and also their last one so far, with no hints that they’ll ever do a more limited game like this again. Sengoku can be seen as a ‘lighter’ version of Crusader Kings II, and this game ended up feeling like a limited version of Europa Universalis. Notably, while there has been an ‘idea’ system in other Paradox games going back to EU III, this particular version most strongly resembles the one that would show up in EU IV later in the year.

While this game was probably no more successful than Sengoku (I note the Metacritic scores are nearly identical), I actually enjoy it more. Sengoku is a game I want to enjoy more than I actually do, as it just feels a bit limited and empty. MotE successfully limits its focus so that it feels like a much more complete game. Some of this, I think, is because of its roots, it retains a more wargame focus. Either I’m just very used to those, or… there’s a good reason why they’re a successful formula. As a final note, I’ll mention that many reviews have pointed it out as a good multiplayer game, because it’s much shorter than a lot of grand strategy games.

└ Tags: , , ,
1 Comment

A Final Polish

by on April 14, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the second in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Hearts of Iron III. See the previous review here:
Hearts of Iron III: One Plus Two Equals Three

A year after the previous expansion, Paradox announced a third expansion for their WWII grand-strategy game, HoI III. As usual, it targeted a few particular subjects, and Their Finest Hour came out in September 2012 for PC, with a Mac release following two months later. Since the Collection was for the previous release, and there no further expansions, it was never included in a collection of its own.

Doing it Your Way

While HoI III starts in 1936, the main event usually doesn’t get going for at least three years. There are options to begin at that point, but one reason for the 1936 start is to work on production, politics, and research how you want them, rather than what happened historically. So Paradox added the ‘Custom Game Mode’ which allows some reworking of all of that, starting with a particular scenario as a base.

It’s an interesting idea, if not one that I’ve done much with, though I’ve seen it noted that its especially handy for a multi-player game, so you can start with the action about to get underway, and still have things set up as you want, as if you’ve played from 1936.

Combined Arms

Generally speaking, at any point in history, armies have been aided by having different elements which synergize with each other. This especially true in WWII, and was well recognized at the time, as well as in a variety of different games on the subject, all the way down to Panzer General’s rock-paper-scissors model of combat that made it such an effective game in a very simple format.

HoI III tried modeling that by each type of brigade have being ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ depending on its type, and then granting a bonus to a division that had a mid-range ‘softness’ rating, even if the elements of that division didn’t add up to anything special.

With TFH, they’ve gotten rid of this arbitrary rating, and now look for a combination of infantry and the other arms. Everything’s color-coded on the production screen, and there is a bonus to a division that contains armor, artillery, ‘direct fire’ (AT and AA assets), and engineers. This much more like how some operational-level wargames look at the problem, and an easier to understand answer to the problem.

Landing Craft

Amphibious invasions came in for a round of extra detail. Now, invading forces must disembark from their transport craft, and in addition to the normal amphibious invasion penalties, they suffer a reduction to damage dealt and taken while they unload (granting extra time for a naval battle to disrupt everything). Unloading progresses through several hours until the troops are fully unloaded and operating normally (as normally as possible during an invasion combat).

In addition to this, two new unit types were added to the game. You can still invade using normal transports, but can now research landing craft, which are much more effective, and also lead to research to reduce the amount of time a landing takes, and the defensiveness of all transport-type units.

The landing craft are really transports with associated landing craft, as they can do everything the transports can, including shift units across an ocean. They’re better than the base transports in every way, including speed, defense and carrying capacity. Researching the improvements to invasions mentioned above then allows research of assault ships, which act the same as landing craft, but with better defense, and some bonuses for armor unloading from them.

This is one of the more visible changes to the game (as long as you’re not playing a fairly land-locked game like Russia). And it is a nice bit of extra detail that helps make amphibious operations flow a bit better.

Special Units

The main seven nations also came in for special treatment by getting new unique units. These are all slightly better versions of regular units, and can only be built in fairly limited quantities (no more than 4% of all infantry brigades). Three of them are better mountain brigades than normal (though the British Gurkhas can also airdrop), two are improved infantry, and US Rangers are a paratroop brigade, and the German SS units are improved motorized infantry (which, despite the reputation, is not appropriate for SS units as a whole… the number of well-equipped and trained SS units is about right for the number that you can build).

They’re a neat idea, and well into the ‘why not?’, range of things. Though there might be something to be said for being able to just spend a bit more on a unit to make it better trained/competent in general. Though that is pretty much what the division composition, and the flags for ‘prioritize upgrades and reinforcements’ already does.

Conclusion

TFH would be the last expansion for HoI III, and certainly the game had come far from it’s initial extremely buggy release. It’s a fairly decent package of changes, and seems to have sold well, and certainly gets recommendations from fans of the game.

Certainly, if you like HoI III, it’s worth getting, as everything it does is an improvement, and there are no backward steps. Furthermore, if you’re just getting the game (or rather the Collection, which has the previous two expansions), and you can get this in a package deal, get it. It does not make the game any more complicated or harder for a new player; it just reworks a few things that needed it. At the same time, it’s not going to change your mind about it either; it took a while for me to start noticing what had changed at all.

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment 

The Second Crusade

by on March 6, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the eleventh in a series of reviews of Paradox’s empire management games. See the earlier reviews here:
Europa Universalis II: A Tale of Two Europas
Hearts of Iron: Europa of Iron
Victoria: Nineteenth Century Essay
Crusader Kings: A Dynastic Adventure
Hearts of Iron II: Return Engagement
Europa Universalis III: A Whole New World
Europa Universalis: Rome: Make a Desert and Call it a Game
Hearts of Iron III: One Plus Two Equals Three
Victoria II: Same But Different
Sengoku: Shogun: Only War

Once Paradox had released a Clausewitz-based sequel of Victoria, a similar sequel to Crusader Kings was an obvious project. This turned out to be Paradox’s next project, which was announced in late 2010, and then spent another year-and-a-half in development.

While Victoria II was close to being a ‘cleaned up’ version of the original game, it was quickly apparent that Crusader Kings was being re-thought and developed from scratch. The graphics of the Clausewitz engine got an extensive overhaul, and the new game was powered by ‘Clausewitz 2.0’, and all their later games are easily discernible on the basis of new graphics alone.

Crusader Kings II was released for PC on February 14, 2012, with in-house Mac and Linux versions released later (previously, Mac versions were developed by a third party, and the 2013 Linux release was a first for Paradox). It was highly successful for one of their complex strategy titles, and got attention from a lot of people who ordinarily did not play their games.

CK II has seen extensive changes since release, but this review is about the early versions of the game, specifically patch 1.111 (the earliest version currently available through Steam). By the time this patch came out, five expansions had already come out, and four of them (Sword of Islam, Legacy of Rome, The Republic, and Sunset Invasion) will also be discussed here.

The New Model

That Crusader Kings II was slightly different from the immediately preceding Paradox games was obvious from the outset, as it reached a new height of presentation. The map was fully 3D (only seen in Europa Universalis: Rome and Sengoku before), and looked excellent, with new multi-colored borders that easily show the political situation in the other map modes. Once through the loading screens, the map was highlighted by a low-angle shot that shifted to a higher angle as the menus came up. Selecting various menu options causes the camera to fly around to different points of the map, showing off the new graphics.

While the game was released on several on-line stores and on disk, there were effectively two slightly different versions. One linked into their on-line store, GamersGate, for purchasing optional DLC, and the other was on Steam. Paradox found that they were having to maintain two different versions of the code, and eventually consolidated onto one platform, Steam, which also had good tools for pushing patches out to players.

This caused consternation among fans who preferred Paradox’s own service for any of several reasons. Another matter that gave me concern at the time was the quick release of multiple, small, expansions to the game (the four covered here came out within a single year). I preferred the idea of bigger, less frequent, expansions that packaged a bunch of things together with a longer development time.

In the long run, Paradox was right. The new-style expansions introduce new features, or re-work old systems, and the essentials of these are included for free in a new patch for everyone. This means that those who buy the expansions are funding the continued development of the game for everyone. And in multiplayer it doesn’t matter who has which expansion: not having one may restrict what a player is allowed to do (or play as), but everyone is on the same version of the main game, and not segregated by the expansions for multiplayer or support. Even better, they are not dependent on each other: you can skip boring expansion A, and still get and use exciting expansion B, instead of having to get the first to use the second. Steam’s service then allows them to keep everyone on the most recent patch version, and handles the multiplayer component. (They have also used Steam’s ‘beta’ programs to let people go back to a particular version, generally to finish a long game.)

Paradox had already been offering small DLCs for the more recent titles, consisting of ‘sprite packs’, or unit graphics for various nationalities (not really sprites…). In addition to the bigger ‘expansion’ DLC, Paradox made more sprite packs for CK II, introduced graphical DLC of more portraits for CK II characters (which does take a surprising number of art assets in their ‘layer’ system, and probably needs charging for to do at all), and also music DLC of three to four new tracks that expand the playlist in game, though many are themed and only play (or play more often) under certain circumstances.

Expanded Characters

The essential character of Crusader Kings II did not change at all from the first game. You play as a particular landed noble, who ages and dies, and play passes to your heir, or, in the absence of a landed heir of your dynasty, the game ends.

Unlike the two games in between that had featured characters, CK II expanded, rather than simplified, the system. A fifth primary attribute, learning, was added, to go with the court priest position on the council, that had no matching attribute in the first game. The trait system was retained largely as is, but with even more traits, and a central set of fourteen based on the seven deadly sins and the seven heavenly virtues. These are naturally pairs of ‘opposites’, traits that will cancel each other, and several of them have direct effects on the opinions of churchmen and piety.

A new set of military traits were added that are like the ones from EU: Rome; they don’t have specific in-combat events tied to them, but they do have modifiers to combat (all of which are summarized in a specific spot on the character screen), and change what tactics a flank under his command might use.

Past that, most other earlier details of the system hold true: characters have money, prestige, and piety. Events fire for particular characters, who then must make a decision. A nice addition, from an early patch, was that choices that exist purely because of certain traits or characteristics will have a colored border, and the hoverover will state why it is available.

Holding the Realm

One of the more interesting new ideas of CK II is that it splits up the basic provinces (/counties) of the map. Each county consists of one to seven holdings (usually three), which each have their own liege. There are three different types: castles, cities and temples, and they each have their own type of lord, who is considered unsuited to the other two. Each holding then has a number of buildings, which provide bonuses and can be improved with the expenditure of money.

Castles have barons, who are the next rung down of the normal feudal chain of command. They provide the best fortification values, and the most troops, and a small amount of tax income.

Cities have mayors, who can become lord mayors or grand mayors (or doge) if they control a full county or duchy as a merchant republic. Towns provide the best taxes, and can provide a good number of light troops in musters.

Temples have bishops, who can become arch-bishops and similar, if they hold extensive lands in a theocracy. They provide moderate taxes, and start lightly fortified, but can get good defensive values later in the game, and provide heavy troops.

Within each type of holding, the available buildings are the same, except for (usually) one which is derived from the area’s culture. There’s generally ten different buildings (including the coastal-only shipyard) which can be improved from three to six levels, with each increasing the bonuses of the building. These buildings determine the holding’s fortification level and garrison size (which both make it more difficult to take in a siege), its tax revenue, and the exact composition of its levy.

Generally, one castle holding will be the county capital, and the county title goes with that capital. However, the capital can be changed, and that holding will take over the county title, and change the general type of government, if it isn’t a castle. Also, many counties can have more holdings than they start with (the absolute maximum is six, but not many counties can actually have more than four or five), which costs a lot of money, but can be any type of holding desired.

This is one of the more innovative areas of CK II, as it keeps from making the map any more complicated, but allows things like Venice holding a single coastal city while the local lord holds the area as a whole. There’s an amount of micromanagement in the handling of your holdings similar to the old improvement system, but since you still only have control over your own demense (which is generally just the county capitals), the new system isn’t any harder to administer.

In addition, each realm has its own laws, which determine how succession works, how large levies are, how much is paid in taxes, etc. Kings and emperors have realm laws that hold for everyone below them for clerical investiture (if you’re Catholic), and crown authority, which determines how much freedom of action vassals actually have. This allows for a lot of regional and period differences in feudalism to be represented, and for changes over time. They can be largely ignored without hurting anything, though the AI will probably make demands over the succession sooner or later….

Warfare

As with the first game, there are no standing armies in CK II (…with an exception in the ‘Legacy of Rome’ section below). Instead you raise a levy of your own men, and those of your vassals. How many men your vassals contribute depends on their current opinion of you, and leaving them raised for too long causes a penalty to their opinion (unless on crusade, or in a defensive war) that slowly builds, and only slowly goes away.

In addition, there are also mercenary troops to hire. These are expensive, both to hire and to pay, but are often fairly large units, and someone in a vulnerable position can try to save up money to pay them and inflate the army at a critical time. Some of them can have some very effective troop types, and come with their own commanders. Once religious orders are founded, they may also be hired as mercenaries, but cost piety instead of gold to hire (but require gold to keep on).

As before, there are seven general types of troops, with horse archers being only available to certain cultures. However, combat itself changed from the first game, and does not use the same general system seen in most of the other Clausewitz games.

Combat is broken up into three flanks, which each have their own units allocated to it (this is done by units—individual musters and mercenary bands—so if you only have one unit involved, you only occupy the center), and can have its own commander. These are drawn from your vassals, your marshal, some minor titles, and of course, you can lead the army yourself. The performance of each flank will depend on the troops there, the martial ability and traits of the commander, and his current tactic.

Combat starts at range with skirmishing, and then eventually turns into a melee. Commander traits and ability will determine how long this takes, as an effective commander with lots of archers will actually work to prevent the combat from going to melee and continue the skirmishing, while one with lots of heavy infantry will try to close the range faster. Every day, each flank loses some men, and takes some morale loss. Once morale drops too low, that flank will flee, and the opposing enemy flank will be free to attack an adjacent enemy flank with a bonus. Once all three flanks are fleeing, the enemy will be free to pursue for five days, inflicting a lot of casualties in the process. It’s a big improvement over the original system, and frankly more appropriate, and better presented than the standard Clausewitz system.

Unlike the first game, ships are present here. Instead of just automatically hiring ships to go overseas, you muster your ships and arrange them to ferry your troops over water. They tend to be very expensive to keep mustered, and there is no combat between ships, so there’s still no way to prevent a landing.

Intrigue

A large part of CK II’s success was that it did a good job with the idea of all these people plotting to do underhanded things to each other. It gave the game that extra bit of life, and made sure that ‘peaceful’ times could still be tense. Originally, various things a character got into were all handled through the ‘plot’ interface, but this was split up into plots, factions, and ambitions as of the release of Legacy of Rome.

Ambitions are much like they were in EU: Rome: personal goals, to gain money, fame, get a particular post, etc. One of the early patches added self-improvement ambitions for any primary stats that are too low. These cause a number of events to fire that give opportunities to improve the relevant stat. It’s not a bad idea, but most of the related events feel too artificial, and unlikely for most of the characters to actually take part in. Other ambitions retain the normal idea of providing a reward for completing them, such as getting a +1 to the relevant attribute when gaining a desired office.

Plots are larger goals that affect someone else. Killing someone is the classic example, and there’s usually a few eligible targets for that plot (plotting to kill your spouse is nearly always a valid plot, if not always a desirable one…). As a liege, you can also plot to revoke a vassal’s title; otherwise, you can try to gain a claim on a fellow vassal’s title, or a claim on your direct liege’s title. Unlike ambitions, you can intrigue with other people to help you out. There is always a danger that the plot will be exposed, but as more people are recruited into a plot, it’s power increases, which makes it more likely that it will succeed. (For title plots, certain target numbers must be hit, but for a murder, higher power makes it more likely that some form of ‘death under suspicious circumstances’ will happen to the target.)

Factions are open groups of people who support a change in the realm as a whole, whether that be installing a new ruler, lowering crown authority, or changing the succession. It is possible for there to be two sections in the faction display, one for factions in your liege’s court, and a second for factions in your court. A plot will end if something happens to its leader (death, changing his mind…), but a faction will continue as long as there’s still at least one member. The members of a faction will make their liege unhappy (as it’s all public), but if they can gain enough power, they will give him an ultimatum: accept their proposal (new heir, independence…) or fight. Various lords who wish to be independent of their liege may still rebel on their own, but a faction for (separate) independence allows for a potentially very dangerous unified front.

Religion

Naturally, religion is more fleshed out than in the original. There are three groups of religions (Christian, Islam, Pagan), which then break down into particular religions. To begin with, only Catholic Christianity was truly detailed, but early expansions fleshed out Orthodoxy and the two major branches of Islam.

Like in the first game, a player can only play Christian characters in the base game, though any branch of Christianity is available. Catholic kings and emperors get to decide if they will invest their own bishops, or let the Pope do it (which was a constant struggle during the Middle Ages) as a crown law. In addition to this, rulers can set up antipopes who becomes the head of the church for that realm (keeping the taxes that would normally flow out of the country), and can potentially supplant the current pope.

Each also religion has an authority rating, which abstractly measures just how stable the current structure is, and how likely heresies are to spring up. Holy wars, control of holy sites, conversions, and the like all modify this. It has some important long-term effects, but is not a constant concern most of the time.

And every religious branch has its own heresies. These generally have very poor relations with their ‘parent’ religion, while other branches and religious groups don’t care as much. As authority goes down, AI religious characters have a chance of suddenly ‘seeing the light’, and converting to a heresy, and then trying to convince everyone around them to convert. Usually, they end up being locked up or convinced to convert back (the latter often after the former), but it is possible for a serious heresy to crop up in unusual places.

Sword of Islam

The first expansion for CKII came out in June 2012, and granted the option to play as an Islamic character. The mechanics for them were reworked, and with the accompanying patch, the AI uses those mechanics whether you have the expansion or not.

The most important addition is that all Muslim dynasties have decadence. This is generated by individual members of the dynasty, and there are limited ways of lowering it again. At 25% decadence, a Muslim dynasty acts normally, but as it goes up from there income and troop morale goes down. Actually getting it below 25% provides bonuses to both, so a ‘young’ Muslim dynasty can be very powerful.

Large, successful dynasties tend to settle down and ‘go soft’ (or at the least have more characters who individually might do so), generating decadence each month that slowly erodes its effectiveness. A ruler can tell a decadent relative to ‘shape up’, and even imprison the impious sybarite. Handing out landed titles is the easiest way to lower decadence, and even command in battles will erode it a little.

In addition, there’s lots of other touches: Brothers have a permanent relations penalty with each other, encouraging a lot of infighting in dynasties (and considering that powerful rulers are expected to have several wives… well). There’s traits (Sayyid and Mirza) to indicate descent from Mohammad; there’s no theocracies, instead temples can be freely held by barons; and then there’s the ability to go on Hajj, which puts your realm in the hands of a regent while a number of events play out the journey to Mecca.

Overall, the patch added a lot of flavor to the game even if you don’t get the expansion, and of course it greatly expands the scope of the game.

Legacy of Rome

The second expansion was released in October 2012, and looked at detailing the Byzantine Empire. Some of this (like appointing Patriarchs as an Orthodox ruler) became available to everyone, but most of it was in the form of new events and decisions that are only available by having the expansion active. A lot of it allows for typical Byzantine activities such as blinding pretenders and a ‘born in the purple’ trait is added for characters who are higher in the succession.

And there are some large-scale events, if you gain the power needed. On the secular side, a powerful enough emperor can ‘restore the empire’ and force western Europe to acknowledge the power the Emperor, and change the country tag from Byzantium to Roman. Religiously, you can (forcibly) mend the Great Schism by restoring the Pentarchy and enforce a single church, which turns Catholicism into a heresy of Orthodoxy, instead of a separate branch.

However, the expansion also introduces retinues, or small standing armies. Unusually, it’s a wide-ranging feature, but it only exists (for the player and AI) if the expansion is enabled. A landed noble will have a limit on retinue size dependent on rank and holdings, and adding different types of troops which consume that limit depending on their type. Unlike normal levies, retinues are free under normal circumstances, but cost to initially recruit, and cost money to reinforce back to full, meaning they will cost money when first hired (as they start with one man and reinforce from there), and during a war after taking losses… right when things are expensive from all the mobilized levies.

This is a more problematic expansion. If, for some reason, you’re not interested in the Eastern Empire, the extra content will do no good. The retinues are a nice idea, and fairly period, but there’s been long-term concerns about what they do to the balance of the game, and the stability of larger counties (though I’ll note that I find Hungary is less stable with retinues, as it is more effective at tearing itself apart whenever I have them active). The bad news is that there’s no way to have the content without the retinues.

Sunset Invasion

On Halloween 2012 Paradox announced an unusual DLC that is not always considered one of the expansions to the game. It was developed during the team’s free time, and was released on November 15.

One of the big events in both CK games is the arrival of the Mongols on the eastern edge of the map. The entire point of Sunset Invasion is to shake up the game by providing the same sort of event on the western edge. To whit, sometime after 1200 ‘thousands of ships’ filled with bloodthirsty Aztec warriors land somewhere in western Europe and start conquering things and sacrificing people to their gods.

That’s… pretty much it. It’s tightly focused around that one idea, and the complete ahistoricity of it got a lot of complaints from vocal fans. As a way of completely changing the dynamics of the game, I find it a really fun idea. But one thing that makes it different is that other expansions are typically something you want on all the time (or if you don’t like it, off all the time), while this is one where it should be thought about before beginning each game.

The Republic

The fourth expansion came out in January 2013, and added a new mode of play. Each merchant republic (a realm led by a mayor instead of a count) now has five leading families, who are fully fleshed out (their own courts, and all their relatives, instead of often being automatically promoted from an event or decision to make a new mayor). Each time the doge or lord mayor dies, a new one is picked from the current heads of the five families, who then serves for life.

The families always use seniority inheritance, which means the oldest available male in the dynasty is the patrician, and when a doge is elected it is done as a combination of the candidate’s age, prestige, and the current ‘campaign fund’ (with age being the dominant determiner), with some randomness. Since the doge who just died was the most senior member of that particular family, his heir is unlikely to become the next doge, and the leader of the republic should cycle through the families, though it could easily trade back and forth between two of them.

A new holding slot was added to each coastal province (on a separate tab) for a trading post. These can only be established by the merchant families, and add tax value to the province as well as send money home. Multiple posts in the same sea zone boosts the value of all of them, as does having multiple sea areas connected into one trade zone (all the sea areas dominated by trade posts of a single republic). This allows for wars over trade between republics, and normal realms can raze a trade post, which loses the extra income, but nets a large amount of loot.

With The Republic expansion enabled, you can play as a patrician, which means that at least some of the time you will not be landed at all (since you’re not the current doge). This means that it’s a more limited play style than most, though there’s always the trade posts to manage, and the family’s mansion to improve (basically the family’s permanent holding, which does not appear on the map at all). However, it does do a good job of giving merchant republics much better motivations for their activities.

Conclusion

Crusader Kings II was a new start for Paradox in several ways. It got attention outside of their usual customers. It was the start of what’s been a very successful development model for them (though they’ve toned it down a bit, games aren’t getting expansions at anywhere near the rate CK II did for its first couple of years). And it was the start of Clausewitz 2.0, which is part of what got the attention in the first place.

The game itself is deserving of all the praise and attention it got. As I said about the first game, it’s not often that you get a strategy game that shows the weaknesses of a large organization instead of just its strengths. And many of the extra details this time highlight more of those weaknesses. It’s certainly not a game for everyone, but the extra spark of personality invested by all the plotting makes it a game that some people who don’t care for typical grand strategy games enjoy immensely.

└ Tags: , , ,
11 Comments