ck3 and paradox games are too easy - /vst/

Anonymous08/20/26, 15:23No.2471433CK3 AND PARADOX GAMES ARE TOO EASY

I'm playing CK3 +dlc for the first time, but I had already played CK2 for about 100 hours, like 7-8 years ago. And at most I was a decent player. It has the same problem as CK2 (and every Paradox game afaik): the game is too easy, and nothing really stops you from snowballing into becoming an empire. And once you get there, it's really boring and you basically have to paint the map. I started with 2 counties as the Count of Urgell (my liege was the Duke of Barcelona), and I declared war against another count within the duchy and easily won with my allies. For some reason, he didn't have any allies. Meanwhile, my liege was at war with a Muslim ruler controlling the Balearic Islands. So I declared war on him soon after, and again, he didn't have any allies, and the mf lost despite controlling more counties than me. I got the Duchy of Barcelona, and I also created the Duchy of Languedoc since I controlled most of its counties. Now I'll just conquer the Balearic Islands for myself. Why didn't they have any allies? Will my new liege (the King of France) even do anything as I keep expanding?

Replies

Anon08/21/26, 01:47No.2471847

An AI liege will only do anything if they want your titles. I was duke of Sicily then my liege, king of Sicily tried to revoke my titles because he wanted the de jure capital of Sicily kingdom. The King of France will leave you alone unless he hates you.

Anon08/21/26, 08:16No.2471936

>paradox games are too easy >entire post is about the easiest paradox game once you're good enough at sikh empire/egypt/USCA in victoria 2 (idk about 3) i think you'll have the right to say paradox games are too easy. without exploits, there are no easy ways to snowball as countries that don't have a naturally high native population (excluding the new world)

Anon08/21/26, 21:25No.2472308

>the game is too easy, and nothing really stops you from snowballing into becoming an empire. I have been saying this day one. And yet every expansion actually makes the game easier by intruding pay to win mechanics. >easily won with my allies That's the thing: in CK2, marriage gave non-aggression pacts, which you had to expand into alliances by being in good terms with them. In CK3, you get a full alliance on marriage. So, strat is just ally the biggest guy, and call them to every war, knowing they will commit all their troops to it and get nothing out of it. The game would be significantly harder if allies could only be called into defensive wars.That being said, I don't think count emerging into emperorship should be impossible, as it did happen. The real issue is how easy the game becomes after you reach the rank of emperor. Emperorship essentially makes you immune to the partition mechanic.Which essentially only leaves the faction system as something to contain empires, and it is a joke. Out of 8/10 times, the faction that fires is the Liberty faction, which will lower your crown authority, and then you can just undo it in 10 years. Separatist factions only show up if vassals have different cultures or religions. Introduction of dissolution fact was an interesting addition, but it's kinda nonsensical and pretty uncommon

Anon08/22/26, 01:39No.2472476

The game doesn't have proper warfare or logistics and can't model why the king of France shouldn't be able to have his entire army in Hungary. There's no ability for the AI to no CB you if the rewards are good and you're unprepared enough. There's no ability to intervene in succession. All successions always procede according to law and never are interfered with. Fertility goes up as you go up in rank. Once you're an emperor, there's no risk of having no heirs and a succession crisis. Legitimacy isn't calculated per title. So once you get to high legitimacy, you can conquer while everyone likes you. The majority of the AI is passive, with only a few characters having the right combination of personality traits to act. The amount that are well positioned rulers can be counted on one hand. The AI spends a lot of time at activities, where it cannot engage in diplomacy or warfare. The AI will never build and optimize around good MAAs. Regardless of how much money or many threats it has. The AI will almost never declare war on characters they like. Which given how easy it is to get opinion bonuses, a lot of reasonable wars will never happen. Plagues don't kill enough rulers, don't destroy buildings, and fail to destabilize realms. More so if you do the handful of things that together negate plagues. Ditto for natural disasters save that they can't be negated. War score is not balanced against war goals. It takes the same amount of war score to conquer a county as it does an empire. Only scaling by the amount of holdings the defender has.

Anon08/23/26, 23:24No.2473564

what if i tell you that the goal is not to become an empire, that there are in fact no goals at all in ck3 except to not die without an heir.

Anon08/24/26, 02:59No.2473679

Two problems with Paradox games. One's inherent to the genre, one the players.>genre problem You play multiple characters' lifespans. You are a beyond-human entity (in the context of the game) that plans in centuries, is never corrupt, and its entire will is bent towards maximizing its country's power. Real countries have rulers who are weak, or make mistakes, or just don't try that hard and are content with what they have, or who are corrupt, etc. The AI, if it's programmed to feel reasonably believable/historical, behaves like this and makes those short term decisions. The player doesn't.>player problem Players get seething mad when control is taken away from them. IRL you don't construct the buildings or set the laws everywhere or move the soldiers around. IRL you instruct your government what you want them to do, and ministers do it with varying levels of competence, loyalty, and self-interest. And then often they do that by delegating to other people, or you just flat out don't have jurisdiction over X region because it's ruled by Y lord or is Z substate with its own rights and the best you can hope for is negotiation. You can't have that in a GSG, look how pissing mad Stellaris' user base got when Paradox briefly enforced AI sectors - as you expanded past a certain point, many of your systems had to be governed by a local AI sector governor. This is realistic, it's how countries actually work, even unitary states need local administrators. Players hate it. They want total control, they never want ANY part of their country to be suboptimal because a local (AI) governor made bad decisions.

Anon08/24/26, 15:23No.2473940

>autistic blogposting thread

Anon08/28/26, 15:25No.2477216

>Start game as King of Pagan in 1066 >Larp and build royal guard and elephant army >My 3000 men at arms destroys every army >Can't expand until I finish upgrading temple due to vassal limit >Temple requirements take a whole lifetime to complete Playing Mandala is such a grind. And it feels so unrewarding being able to destroy everything with men at arms.

Anon08/28/26, 16:11No.2477236

yeah it pisses me off i didn't start as slavic pagan in 1066 just to get ignored most of the time, blob out and have my bumfuck province develop higher than constantinopole, but that's how every single playthrough looks like

Anon08/28/26, 21:58No.2477474

well then play more challenging starts, faggot. have you played as the Zunists and reformed their religion? I doubt it. How many achievements do you have? Do you even play in Ironman, bro? etc.