Game Review: Crusader Kings II

The first thing a new player will be overwhelmed by when they open Crusader Kings II is the sheer number of characters available. You have your choice of any Christian lord in Europe with a title of count or better (characters of other religions are available with DLC) on September 15th, 1066, giving you hundreds of options. If you would prefer a later start date, you can choose any day between then and January 1st, 1337, and the character selection map will update to show the changing politics of Europe as you move the date. Paradox Interactive did a lot of research to make this game. Unlike many grand strategy games, where you can only play as the leader of an entire country, here you can be the king of France, but you can also choose one of the dukes who are sworn to him, or a baron who is a vassal of one of those dukes. Playing as a vassal has its advantages—your liege will protect you in the event that you’re attacked from outside the realm, but you also have to obey your liege’s laws, and give him some of your peasants to fight his wars.

Once you’ve chosen your character (which, if you’re like me, you did by going to the wiki and taking their advice to play your first game as the earl of Dublin), you are greeted by a map that looks much the same as the character selection screen, along with a host of interfaces for managing your realm, in typical Paradox Interactive fashion. However, in addition to the council, laws, technology, military, intrigue, factions, and religion screens, Crusader Kings is unique among Paradox strategy franchises in having a deep character management system, which emphasizes the degree to which the peculiarities of individuals were important in medieval politics.

In addition to the previously mentioned hundreds of playable characters, each lord has a family and a court, and each person has their own set of statistics and traits. The game emphasizes that you’re playing as a character, not a realm, and from time to time dialog windows pop up that tell you about a personal event in your character’s life, usually giving you choices that may affect your traits, prestige, gold, or other characters’ opinions of you. These events underline the differences between medieval and modern morality by presenting choices like imprisoning a vassal for insulting you as equally valid to other options.

However the game really shines when the mechanics cause the player to make morally questionable choices in the course of normal gameplay. For example, sometimes your oldest son might have bad stats. This is bad because when your character dies, you continue playing as your heir. If your second son is better and changing your succession law is not an option, you might want to kill the first one, but to avoid the social repercussions of an execution, the best way to do this is usually to start a war, put him in charge of a small force, and send him to fight the enemy army so he dies honorably in battle. In a different situation, you might marry your heir to the oldest daughter of a king, and then use your spies to systematically assassinate all of his sons, so that his daughter becomes his heir, and eventually your grandson inherits her throne as well as your holdings, with no war required.

It is easy for people in the modern day to look at atrocities that were committed in the middle ages for political reasons and ask, “How could they do such things?” CKII answers this question by putting the player in situations where doing something horrible is simply the best option for ensuring their success in the game. This may not be the intended message of the game, but it is received nonetheless. It should be noted that “success” here is not a well-defined term since the game doesn’t give you an objective, instead you just play until 1453 unless your dynasty dies out, but most players try to expand their families’ holdings as much as they can.

The game also incorporates some less repulsive elements of medieval morality into its mechanics. In order to declare war, you need a reason, called a casus belli. This reason can be as tenuous as your enemies having a different religion from you or your wife having a fabricated claim to a county, but those are still more solid than the reason Russia invaded Crimea in 2014.

Though the game can be difficult to learn and some of its systems are less than perfect, it succeeds in many respects as a medieval nobility simulator and its mechanics create powerful emergent stories. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who has the patience to learn it.