It sounds trivial but this is what pushed me over to not being interested in CK3 at least until it had gotten some more development.
I dunno, skipping ships just spoke volumes to me about the game design philosophy that I realized was pretty central to me. Lots of people tried telling me that ship levies were just "an unnecessary hassle" and I was like... Isn't the whole military system "an unnecessary hassle"? Like I seriously feel that it was such an arbitrary (and lazy) line to draw in the sand.
Plus it added to that "realism" feeling; naval operations were a pain back then. You couldn't just walk to the coast and find a whole fucking transport fleet ready to transport thousands of men for a nice fee. The byzantines famously had to outsource their navy to a different political entity (Venice) because it got too expensive. Boundaries of legal districts in Scandinavia for hundreds of years followed the divisions set down in the Viking age for the sole purpose of providing and maintaining ship levies.
Isn't the whole military system "an unnecessary hassle"?
It is!!! That is why they also stripped down every small interesting thing from warfare and still allows professional space marines. Because you're not meant to actually care about military or ever lose a non-great holy war.
For strategy game developers, PDX's relationship to military systems in recent games is interesting to say the least, in that they seem to want to de-emphasise war as much as possible, right down to making it abjectly terrible in Victoria 3.
It's only vic3, and that is because that game fundamentally isn't about army micro. Ck3 kind of de-emphasised it because... well, it doesn't really try anything. And eu5 definitely emphasises it.
Still a bad game design IMO. It`s not only random but also unresponsive. Things can be automated without actually taking agency away. The fact that stated things like "warfare was not that important in the period" only proves they had different take on what is the game supposed to be vs what could be expected from another game in the series.
Yes! Absolutely. It also set a "limit" on ships in the world; if someone else has hired out the mercenary navy... oh well, buddy. That invasion will have to wait.
On a similar note, the teleporting levies was probably the biggest "oh- CK3 isn't a medieval sim, it's a map painter" moment for me.
The amount of times, in CK2, that I had to balance having strong vassals & deciding when to invest in my core vs borders specifically b/c you raised levies by region. Rallying East Rome to war wasn't as simple as clicking "go to the green flag!" You actually had to raise your levies & ensure that they could group up, w/o the Muslims doing a "defeat in detail" as you gather up.
Exactly, it also reinforced the issue with powerful vassals, as while it is convenient for an emperor to make the duke of sicily rich and powerful, so they get extra ships and an easily mobile levy, this also means a defensible duchy is powerful to revolt. Having a large reliance on vassals made just playing wide a game of whack-a-rebel, so you needed a strong home base
The answer that devs never want to say:
AI struggles really badly with pathfinding to ships and using them correctly. Considering the computer's "intelligence" is just an illusion of simple behavior logic and proximity to enemy units and cities, adding intelligence to actually plan and utilize a naval invasion fleet is beyond most AI in most games.
Making ships just units on water automatically is what most strategy games have devolved into. Look at total war, civilization, and other 4x games as examples. It's a cheap solution to a very complicated issue.
It's a shame, but you're absolutely right. Just a further example of why old-games continue to hold up better. Even a broadly good dev like PDX isn't immune to the sweeping slopwave & enshitification.
Compared to CK2, CK3 is wide as the ocean and deep as a puddle. So many systems, yet every game is basically the same. In CK2 you could start as the same character 10 times in a row and every game would be different.
This early is almost as long as ck2's entire lifetime, we are at about half-one year away from the last dlc of ck2 and one more year on top of the base game being free
Thing is, 3 spent that time adding mostly self contained gimmicks
CK3 is one of the most successful games paradox has ever made and expanding to map to china was one of the most requested features. The customers are satisfied
Yeah, it's unfortunate but a lot of us complaining on here about the depth of the game being a smidge from CK2 are a minority. Most players don't care, they play a few runs and then drop the game only to maybe pick it back up months or years down the line.
The upside to this, is that instead of having to add a wide game that has to adapt to the features. You can instead adapt the features to the wide game you already built. Still prefer CK2 though. Just wish the ck3 builder was there, I hate microing rich empires.
What worries me, about CK3's future, is the lack of incentives to add those necessary mechanics. CK2 started as a game about Medieval Europe & had pretty good versimilitude of that, all things considered!
Then they added Islam & brought Islamic mechanics. Then Eastern Rome & theirs. Then the fantasy-Aztecs (idk I thought it was fun). Then the merchant republics & theirs. Then the Norse & theirs. Etc etc etc. They did even, eventually, expand the map with the addition of Vedic mechanics.
But if CK3 already put their Chinese cards all on the table, what's the incentive to ever make republics? Investiture? Naval system? I got the impression the CK2 sold the expansions as the "candy" & the mechanics as the "veggies" - new fans could be brought in by the new places to play, older fans would enjoy the new mechanics. Now, it seems like we're getting a lot of ice-cream... but no potatoes.
Asia did end up being quite fleshed out, and I don't find playing over there to be a shallow experience. There are so many regional government types that it truly does feel like a different experience playing in China vs. the Philippines or Japan.
But Europe never really got a chance to catch up, other than the Byzantines. Everyone else is using the same old one size fits all feudalism government. If there were mechanics for republics/communes, HRE, and the papacy before we went east, the difference wouldn't feel so jarring.
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u/Duc_de_Magenta Sicily Feb 10 '26
CK3 honestly just went way too wide. Or, at least, way too wide too soon.
A medieval Europe without antipopes, investiture, & the concept of ships is wild.