Has there ever been an expansion pack announced this far after the initial release? It’s been three years since Crusader Kings stole my heart, and now they are giving it an add-on.
And, despite the “Deus Vult” subtitle, the expansion seems mostly for the role-playing side of the game not the crusading. Johan Andersson says in a forum thread that the religious war system is being “reworked” but no details. And we’re only two months out. Instead we have loyalty, rivalry, foster-children, new education system for kids. Though, undoubtedly, many of these things will spill over into the war and peace and expansion part of the game, there is little here that screams high politics in the Medieval era.
Which is, by the way, perfectly fine with me. Crusader Kings was a middling strategy game married to a captivating household management sim, a sim that got more interesting and elaborate with every patch.
So how is it. Will you elaborate on this here? I’m particularly interested in how the friend/rival thing works, as this is a mechanism that I have in Imperium, and at least superficially identical.
I’ll have a more complete evaluation once I’ve put some campaigns through the works. But here’s a thumbnail sketch.
I mostly like the friends/rivals thing. It works fairly well in helping you focus your attention on specific individuals who could cause you trouble, and, as a vassal, friendship and rivalry give you some additional calculations to consider. (If I revolt against England will my friend Essex support me?) Events are set up to let you choose between expanding the friendship to form a circle of mutual support or turning the rivalry into armed camps.
It doesn’t, however, work to keep the larger AI controlled domains united. They still collapse very quickly, even if the King has a legion of admirers. And there are a lot of events tied to the friend/rival mechanic that are needlessly repetitive.
There are a lot of little things in DV that, added together, make CK even better, though there are some new stability issues that have forced me to go to earlier autosaves a few times.
I look forward to any further thoughts you might have. I won’t get around to this any time soon myself, so its always interesting to read what others think and add to one’s list of “dos” and “donts”.
I think that if a game has characters in competition with each other, anything that makes this competition clear and meaningful is a “do”. Though I’m not sure how your system has evolved since we last “spoke”, even something as simple as opposing traits could work, like it does in Civ 4. Similar traits give a bonus, opposites a malus, events could increase or decrease things, etc.