Anyone else generally pleased at the DLC trend?

[Pendables]

I can't call T&T good when tournaments are bad and grand tours are maybe the single worst thing in the entire game. The travel system itself is good but it's the kind of thing that should have been in at release and the whole game should have been designed around it instead of shoddily inserting it into a game where characters teleport around all the time.

 

[MirrorMonkey2]

I agree, it seems that the order of the DLCs is well planned out and the way they build on one another is great.

I for one am very much looking forward to All Under Heaven as it makes a lot of areas I like to play as such as the Tarim Basin more interesting. It also makes me want to play in areas which I‘ve avoided until now due to the unnatural cutoff of the map (such as Gansu, Mongolia, Tibet and Burma).

 

[The Shacks]

Broadly speaking, I do think these forums complain too much. With a few major exceptions (Royal Court, Legends of the Dead), CK3's DLC has mostly been good, with some exceptional standouts (Tours & Tournaments, Roads to Power). The team has shown us that they learn from their mistakes, too. Wandering Lords was easily the best Event Pack, and the Iranian Struggle feels much more interactive and less tedious than the Iberian Struggle.

The game still has serious problems, of course. It is much easier to exploit than CK2 was, even if the player is not trying. And there's definitely truth to the criticism that each major expansion adds unnecessary new mechanics and resources rather than expanding on what already exists.

I have great faith in the developers and their vision for the game. The consensus is correct; CK3 isn't CK2, and it doesn't need to be. It is its own game and I love it as much as I do its predecessor.

My biggest hope is that the devs will pay more attention to the overall cohesiveness of the game as time passes. I don't blame them for their focus on new content, and it's not as if they've entirely forgotten about prior DLCs. But the current "cluttered" feel of the game damages their vision and holds the game back from its full potential.

On an optimistic note, I want to remind everyone that many of CK2's best DLCs (Jade Dragon, Holy Fury) came very late in its development cycle; they helped tie disparate elements of the game together while revisiting topics like the Crusades. Mid-development major DLCs like Rajas of India and Horse Lords were absolutely panned at the time of their release... anyone who was on the forums at that time probably remembers.

Genuine question, did Wandering Lords and Friends and Foes ( half baked feud system, cool needs work ) actually DO anything? I do not play CK3 as much as CK2, with only a modest 750 hours but I dont really feel like I get anything from them or see any real content from them. I actually use Wards and Wardens content a lot more frequently, atleast that I am aware of ( I like the hostage thang, props Paradox ).~

Beyond that though I agree with you and the OP mostly. General direction is encouraging, feels like they are complexifying and granularising the system as they go. It would be nice at this point though if they had a Culture Team and a Custodian Team who worked on filling out the world and on joining up old content to work with new to leave less isolated systems as you say. It's been encouraging to see the deeper building blocks get made though and I think they team is becoming more skilled and confident, which leaves us needing a custodian team all the more to fix older content.

Less mana ties into the above statement and was iterated elsewhere in this thread. Already some mana seems like a duplicate of other mana. Lets not go too Johan here.

#Nomoremagicships
#Ck2-ish Levvies and armies when plz

 

[InsidiousMage]

Wandering Lords

I assume you mean Wandering Nobles and yes, it added literally an entirely new lifestyle to the game. The Inspection tree is actually pretty broken and can significantly increase your income and especially so in 867.

 

[The Shacks]

I agree with everything else, but legitimacy is very much not just prestige. Altho, as always, the implementation is weird. I think it should passively tick down all the time, especially higher ones, without it it's just a bar that you fill up doing stuff and then it just stays full unless you do something nasty.

Yeah something like this. I initially wasent sure but having now played a fair bit of the newer DLCs, especially as intentionally tyranical rulers.... Its just too easy to accumulate and too hard to loose. Especially if you have all the DLCs and make active use of feasts, hunts, progressions etc. etc. and do the normal day to day stuff a ruler is meant to do. It's really damn hard to go below Level 4 and you always easily reach level 5 on your first character no matter if hes a count or an emperor.

 

[The Shacks]

I assume you mean Wandering Nobles and yes, it added literally an entirely new lifestyle to the game. The Inspection tree is actually pretty broken and can significantly increase your income and especially so in 867.

Hrhmm I dont think i've specced into Wandering once, just feels unuititive as a ruler, usually got more to do than wander around other peoples nations. I take it there is actually a wealth of gameplay within the new stuff there? Guess I need to give it a whirl.

 

[InsidiousMage]

I take it there is actually a wealth of gameplay within the new stuff there?

Not really. The Inspection activity and lifestyle are really good for upping your income, though its mostly temporary, but the activity itself is pretty boring and basically like a hunt where you take options to increase your chance of success. I haven't really used the other two lifestyles and they feel like a real mishmash of bonuses that don't really correlate to anything. I haven't used them because they do feel like of out-of-place from a historicity angle but that's just a gut feeling my on part. I'll basically go into the Inspection lifestyle if I've got no real use for the lifestyle trait my ruler has but I've rarely actually filled it out as my first tree.

 

[Renarin]

Hrhmm I dont think i've specced into Wandering once, just feels unuititive as a ruler, usually got more to do than wander around other peoples nations. I take it there is actually a wealth of gameplay within the new stuff there? Guess I need to give it a whirl.

I actually think the Wandering trees are designed in a more satisfying way than most of the standard trees. Each of the Wandering skill trees can be summed up as "you get rewards from playing the game a certain way + you get a new thing that synergizes with those bonuses + some static bonuses that help you play the game that way". For example, the Voyager Tree perks give you a bunch of bonuses whenever you visit POI, Courts, highly developed areas, etc. along with an activity that gives you a reason to travel a long way, and some bonuses like being better at handling regencies and better mercenary guards. Meanwhile the Inspector Tree is structured more around using Traveling and Activities to give economic bonuses to your own Counties, and Wandering is like if Inspector was built around "people resources" like Stress, Prestige, relationships, etc. The end result is that they all encourage you to play the game a certain way through offering incentives. Some of the standard perk trees do that, like arguably Family Hierarch, but most just make you 'better at x' which ends up being less connected to how you act out your character's reign. Of course, this also means that the trees can be pretty OP, because you can take a more active role in min-maxing the rewards from them, but that too can be satisfying. I personally hope that at some point the perk trees all get reworked to similarly incentivise making your character do certain things/play a certain way in that vein.

 

[Benismann]

Yeah something like this. I initially wasent sure but having now played a fair bit of the newer DLCs, especially as intentionally tyranical rulers.... Its just too easy to accumulate and too hard to loose. Especially if you have all the DLCs and make active use of feasts, hunts, progressions etc. etc. and do the normal day to day stuff a ruler is meant to do. It's really damn hard to go below Level 4 and you always easily reach level 5 on your first character no matter if hes a count or an emperor.

Yeah and guess what mod did it? :Р Except I did that, and then paradox rolled out 1.15, which adds even more legitimacy sources, apparently -2.75 a month is nothing for an empire, since im still not using court musician's massive legitimacy boost and barely hold court....

 

[Tschobo]

The DLCs are except a few (Legends of the Dead, Royal Court and Friends and Family) the best thing in the game right now. I am really content with the development cycle of those.

But there are other issues and gripes I have with the game that aren't fixed properly in the base Game:

• AI Dynasties and Houses have no Survival Instinct and die out more often because of idiotic choices instead of losing wars, plague and strife. They completely ignore their direct line from time to time.
• As well as AI Rulers lack drive in certain cases. I know that ambitions were mostly for the player in CK2. But that is something the AI could really use in CK3.
• Stress is still barebones and I can think of at least 20 more Stress traits and mechanics to make these scaleable in a day (if I had enough time I would make a Mod, trust me)
• Warfare is still clunky. The Crown Update did Wonders but it could still be better. But many others explained the issues better than me.

My Overall opinion is, that CK3 heads into the right direction and did it since Fate of Iberia actually. But the biggest problems lie in the Base Version of the Game (Well aside of Feuds, but that is a can of worms for another time).

 

[tilly]

r2p was extremely good, but it didnt completely remove the sour taste lotd left in my mouth. so much shit is broken in dumb ways and the ai remains dogshit ass incapable of navigating core parts of the game. whether or not i bought chapter 4 rode entirely on how good that q1 patch was, and honestly? if the best we can expect for fixing the game is every 4-5 years they spend months on a patch of that calibre, i dont think i can justify dropping 40-50 bucks a year so they can add more rushed and unfinished garbage to the pile

so, you know, i cant say im super jazzed with the dlc direction overall. even when the concepts are broadly good, implementation sucks ass. khans of the steppe looks interesting and i completely will not be buying it, because i expect no change on this front whatsoever

 

[guiskj]

I truly believe that CK3 had the right intention of how DLC content should be handled but failed in its execution.

I truly applaud the idea that core mechanics should be free, with DLCs then fleshing those mechanics up and adding flavour. The idea being that these would not lock DLCs from building on each other.

Except that is exactly what we have anyway.

Here is a list of core mechanics that were added for free and were fleshed out by a single DLC, and then were totally forgotten about.

1. Duels (Northern Lords)
2. Language (Royal Court)
3. Wards (Wards and Warden)
4. Legitimacy (Legends of the Dead)

Travel has been the single thing that CK3 has consistently built upon.

And then we have the team reverting to CK2 ways of completely locking core things behind DLCs.

1. Struggles (originally herald as a free mechanic, it has truly behaved as a DLC locked one)
2. Admin Gov
3. Nomad Gov
4. East Asia Govs

To me, it feels like Tours and Tournaments was the one true example of what the DLC plan of CK3 was supposed to be, and then everything after has been a slow return to the CK2 mean.