Luckily for us, though, the Justanids to our south collapsed; less luckily, the Byzantines and Hungarians were quick to the spoils.
The nobility provided some entertainment.
This, however, is where we ended up. The empires of Suomi, Byzantium and the Mongols carved up what used to be the Justanid shahdom, and then it was just the three of us.
Below, the three great faiths: Christianity, Islam and "Suomenusko".
And as a curiosity, the trade republics and the Silk Road.
But every story has an end, and here's this one's.
**
So, that was a long slog, but it ended well. I hope I've made it abundantly clear how much I love this game. It's sort of stealthily worked its way up my all-time favorites list to an almost alarmingly high position, and I'd strongly recommend it to any and all fans of strategy games who are willing to figure out how it works. However, having said that, the end of a gruelingly long campaign seems like a good place to also talk a little about the game's shortcomings.
First and foremost, maybe mainly due to my academic interests but also just in terms of gameplay, we really need to talk about the combat system. I discussed it a little in my previous post, but to recap, there isn't really a whole lot that you, as the player, can do about combat. Tactics are the preserve of the computer, so all you can do is appoint capable leaders and try to have an advantageous army composition. The latter is done by building buildings in your holdings and hiring retinues, so this is long-term work. What little operational art there is basically consists of tricking the AI into attacking into rough terrain across rivers. Finally, strategy is really a matter of cold math: calculating when you have the advantage and attacking when you do.
As combat systems go, this isn't all bad: many strategy games, foremost in my mind the Civilization series where armies are still essentially chess pieces, are much worse. But frankly, war in Crusader Kings II is clinical and boring, and there's not much meaningful scope for player skill.
The fellow Paradox named their strategy engine after maintained, quite correctly in my mind, that war is the continuation of politics by other means. It's kind of a double irony, then, that if the warfare leaves a lot to be desired, the politics themselves are almost completely absent. By this I mean diplomacy, in the sense of relations with other states. There pretty much isn't any. The only real diplomacy is dynastic marriages, which result in non-aggression pacts that can be parlayed into alliances. You don't really have diplomatic relations with other realms: either you're at war or not, and while at peace, there's basically no interaction, and perhaps most importantly, no trade to give you any reason to not be at war. The Reaper's Due adds a Prosperity mechanic which rewards you for being at peace, but does nothing to redress the complete lack of diplomacy.
This spins off onto another pet peeve related to my academic background: while I like that religions are prominently featured in the game, the way inter-faith relations work is deeply unfortunate. While different religions have a rich variety of different ways to declare holy wars on each other, their opportunities for peaceful interaction are even fewer than those between rulers of the same faith, because with very rare exceptions, AI characters from a different religion won't even consider marrying "infidels". This means that interactions with rulers and realms of different religions are practically nil. This is partly why my latest game ended so boringly: there wasn't really anything I could do to come to some kind of terms with either my Muslim or Christian neighbors. Not only is this boring, but it's completely unhistorical. The time period covered by Crusader Kings II certainly had more than its fair share of religious conflict, but throughout - even in the crusades the game is named after - there was also peaceful interaction: trade, cultural exchange, interfaith marriage and much, much more. It's a really unfortunate choice by Paradox, and one not without political dimensions in this day and age, to concentrate so heavily on religious animosities, to the almost total exclusion of peaceful relations.
**
So, having said all that, I'm currently reading John Keay's India: A History, in preparation for a game on the subcontinent with Rajas of India. Later, I intend to get Conclave and Monks and Mystics, and try a new game in Western Europe, just to see how much the game has changed from my Irish days. So certainly none of these shortcomings are keeping me from playing.
Even this game has a finite life, though, and it's been suggested that Monks and Mystics will be one of the last major DLCs. If and when there's a sequel, and I'd gladly pay money for one, I do most sincerely hope that the developers would look at the areas of the game I've highlighted above. Crusader Kings II is a great game, but Crusader Kings III could be so much better.
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