

Meanwhile, Bohemia itself is merely one duchy within the greater Holy Roman Empire. Indeed, given he has claims on all your holdings, he is probably going to be your biggest rival. But even though your brother Konrad is the count of a nearby county, you can’t simply tell him what to do. So when you choose to play as Duke Vratislav of Bohemia, you oversee a handful of counties around Prague and have claims on a couple of others. A relatively important person, to be sure-you will have land to your name, sometimes quite a lot of land-but you are still a single human being.

You don’t even play as a country or state. You don’t play CK3 as a civilization or an empire. And if you need a bit more background, read our Crusader Kings 3 review. They won’t address any advanced strategies, but they should be enough to get you up and running and ready to learn more. These tips should help you overcome the fear and doubt of playing Crusader Kings for the first time. The guardrails are firmly in place.īut even so, it can still be daunting to load a new campaign and find yourself staring at a map of bewildering size, chock-full of realms and people and religions and cultures you don’t intuitively understand. There is a solid tutorial, helpful in-game encyclopedia, and a seemingly endless supply of tooltips. And three, CK3 is more interested than it's ever been in providing an opportunity for novice players to enjoy its myriad charms. For two, it’s just been released and isn’t yet jerry-rigged with dozens of new updates and DLC expansion pulling it all in unwieldy directions, as has been the case with CK2. Gone are the rather plain 2D character portraits, replaced by detailed 3D models that change dynamically over the course of the game, wearing scars earned through battle wounds or simply growing old both gracefully and disgracefully.

Keep your hand up if you really want to give Crusader Kings a try, but find it all a bit too intimidating.Ĭrusader Kings 3 is the best place to start. It’s a series that sounds incredible in the abstract-the perfect digital representation of Game of Thrones-yet reality intervenes in the shape of boring looking maps, reams of statistics, and a litany of esoteric terms of concepts. Or perhaps you heard something about marrying a horse and leaving it to inherit your entire kingdom. About their efforts to topple a dynasty via generations of plotting and scheming finally falling into place as if Rube Goldberg himself was a master spy. Hands up if you’ve heard someone tell a story about their game of Crusader Kings 2.
