Thank you for engaging it in good spirit / faith. I sincerely appreciate it, and hope my tone comes off as good faith in return. (It is intended to, which is why the rest will be so long.)
Strategically, I guess Ck3 is about pilling up your dynasty's influence on the world.
This is a good answer, and better than many. Now, how do you measure that?
No, really. What is the metric for strategic success that separate's dynastic influence from realm influence? World conquest map painting? Gold? Military victory advantages?
The reason I ask this is because if your answer to any of the above is 'no'- that these aren't the game's strategic success for dynastic influence- then the fact that they can be easily achieved in and of themselves doesn't actually mean a failure of the strategic system. The strategic challenge isn't realm success, but dynastic success, and so what's good for one isn't good for the other, in the same way that gold maximization doesn't mean military power maximization.
Going further, I'll share my own perception of the intended measure of dynastic influence- monthly renown generation.
Renown is a fundamentally pro-tall (as opposed to anti-wide) system, as you can generate a lot more renown by simply landing / releasing an Empire's worth of counts compared to conquering the world in a single empire. Further, various systems- Court Grandeur, expected Legitimacy- mechanically favor tall play, as characters of smaller realm / lower rank can get more benefits more easily than Emperors. The system allows for Emperors to get some benefit, but a King can be much higher above expected renown generation than just their rank.
While there are renown artifacts, the overwhelming majority of monthly renown comes from having dynasts
outside your own realm. Placing them underneath you is not enough, as a Dynastic emperor smothers the monthly renown potential of the dynasts under them. 1 Emperor = 2 Kings = 4 Dukes = 8 counts.
And that, in turn, means that many of the game's 'easy' systems- such as the ease of conquest- aren't the end of the strategic challenge, but the start. Whether you catch-and-release or use marriage game or anything else,
keeping family on seats is where the game's strategic balance starts to kick in, as the player's ability to protect family starts to sharply decline the moment an alliance is no longer a practical guarantee.
It's a problem, in other words, that you can't just conquer your way through. And if you invest more things than you need into the military side, you're passing on tools for the non-military issues.
The game, as a strategy game, starts to make far more sense design-wise when you realize a lot of the mechanics aren't about you, the player, overcoming the challenges of an individual ruler, but the multi-generational challenge of keeping relatives from acting like inbred idiotic shortsighted nobles to the dynastic detriment.
For the developers, according to the Vision - Dev Diary 0 from Oct 2019, Ck3 is about catering to "all player fantasies" and experiencing "memorable, emerging stories" - does it sound like a goal of a grand strategy game?
Sure. As much as a game about managing armies / wars / realm succession sounds like goals of a Sims game.
CK, as a franchise, is and always has been an awkward fit that doesn't really fit well into any particular genre. Despite the occasional rose tinted glasses, CK2 wasn't a particularly good strategy game either, once you got past the user interface. In some areas it was even easier than CK3, such as how the tributary system allowed functional/superior vassalization of same-size realms or how you could trade religious artifacts you couldn't use to China to shatter any realm on the map.
What CK as a franchise does- and what Paradox does in general- is bring in a lot of factors together in ways that no one else does, for experiences no one else provides. There's a reason that the criticism that CK3 is a Sims game is made by people who aren't playing the Sims for their medieval dynasty simulator experience.
The Ck3's core game loop - as the core game mechanics or the main, repeated actions that players engage in repeatedly, in a looping sequence - in this case on a ruler to ruler basis:
Marry. Create heir. Beef up your ruler with stats and traits. Gather resources - strategize/ set up objectives ( f.e. acquire land - build buildings - build relationships/befriend (deal with vassals) - climb up in ranks - deal with challenges / events ...)
You forgot the most relevant point of the player's lifecycle, and part of why I'd say you need to pull back your perspective- death, succession, and dealing with the consequences of the previous generation.
If you approach CK as a game about a single player character's lifetime, then sure- the gameplay loop is the events / resource gathering / using resources f a lifetime for a goal.
But CK is designed as a
campaign of a
series characters. Just on the loop structure, the core loop can't be within a character's lifetime, but the loop between characters. The gathering resources/events/actions are sub-loops of those larger loops, with those larger loops being the stabilization of the realm upon assuming power, what you do when stable, and then preparations for the end.
This paradigm matters because your core loop strategies aren't about what happens within a single life, but how one life shapes the next... and in many cases, makes the next loop harder.
For example, Crusader Kings' primary strategic challenge
on a realm level is domain partition. Partition fractures a player's direct income base, empowers claimants who can start civil wars, reduces the ability to deter vassals, and provides early-lifetime distractions that prevent the ruler from focusing abroad. It's a major strategic detriment to the realm,
even though it increases the dynastic renown, i.e. the game's strategic challenge. Partition is so important to the game's design that Primogeniture 'one child inherits all' is locked to the second-to-last tech era, and entire eras after Absolute Crown Authority's 'pick your primary heir' of the second era.
In turn, there are many, many ways to mitigate partition. However, the crux of succession management is that these ways have their own tradeoffs and require preparation, whether you count on elective, clan harmony, disinheritance, fratricde, and what have you. Sometimes these come with implicit expectations of lifestyle commitments (use of the 1-year-before-death warning to set affairs in order versus pre-emptive landing), but the character-life loop involves trying to set up the conditions for a smooth transition, and dealing with the consequences if you don't.
But it's not just succession that one life can set up / ruin for the next. The transition from tribal to feudal is notoriously hard if you don't (over)prepare, since it's much easier to trigger the transition than afford the aftermath. Pacifying a vassal for one generation via friendship doesn't mean that vassal won't start eating your realm out from within, removing your dynasts you'd been keeping under protection and requiring ungodly amounts of tyranny to uproot entirely. Raise a child for an intrigue-centric next generation, and don't be surprised if their sins lead them to a bunch of blackmail scandals or loss to various pope-favors.
You can deal with them, sure. But if you're dealing with those you're not doing other things, and maybe you wouldn't have had to with a different strategy. In CK, strategy is not 'how does one character conquer the thing,' but 'how does character 1 set conditions for character 2.'
I'll give an example I was just playing today. Have you done an Alfred the Great playthrough?
Alfred is listed as a 'hard' start, but that's a misnomer. Alfred is a beast of stats, and depending on his wife's semi-random stats can have 7-8 county limit as a duke, which is godly in a part of the game where the average is like 4. He starts with one of the fan-favor Eugenics traits (Intelligent). He has amazing martial, and with some luck (and if you ditch your own starting MAA to inherit your brothers), you can plausibly crush the great heathen army in the first five years of the game, removing the primary military threat from the UK. Alfred starts with such high legitimacy that he really just needs 500 gold to form the Kingdom of England, and he has such high diplomacy (and, again, legitimacy) that he can credibly diplo-vassalize the Catholic parts. Alfred is eligible for the Legend of Arthur legitimizing legend, which at max gives him claims to
all of the British empire. Alfred has a virtue and good learning and it's very easy for Alfred to cozy up with the Pope for Pope-gold and claims on some of the regional, usually sinful, Kings.
Alfred is arguably one of the strongest characters in the game to start as, despite his bad intrigue / high-stress traits / a wife with no eugenics who's almost impossible to divorce because she has two Catholic virtues, meaning you have to embrace a Romance-Elope scandal to marry someone else without (trying) to kill her..
Alfred also has really, really bad laws, and can easily out-militarize his economy.
Alfred's starting culture doesn't have the tribal Plenary Assembly tech, which means Alfred can't raise crown authority. Because Alfred can't raise crown authority, Alfred can't revoke titles from vassals, which lets them conquer eachother and grow strong. It also means that Alfred can't pass Feudal Elective, which means Alfred
has to deal with confederate partition the hard way if you can't get the tech in your first lifetime. Further, while Alfred inherits a lot of territory from his brother, the
best counties- nearly all the unique buildings of Southern England- are given to AI vassals who, again, you can't easily revoke from (and who Alfred really isn't in a position to kill with his mediocre stats and without threatening his diplo-vassal potentail).
Moreover, Alfred can build a military even he struggles to afford. The Anglos start
without the MAA-boosting innovations, but due to the Hirds innovation they can hire the Huscarl MAA, which are just below Varangian Veterans in cost. Two full stacks- especially if boosted in size by a Vanguard accolade- can basically consume your entire income in upkeep. Yeah, they're incredibly useful in taking down the levy doomstacks of the Heathen Army, but this econ challenge is made worse when the rank-scaling of the activity econ means that your activities are even more expensive.
Further, diplo-vassalization is a bit of a double-edged sword. It's a massive potential expansion... but the starting Britain is dominated by large Dukes. Meaning you are going to have multiple, powerful vassals conquering eachother inside your borders and with considerable domains of their own, especially if you got their allegiance via low vassal tax conditions. It also requires you to be a King, meaning that Catholic Scotland up north can't be rolled up the same way, but can be a tribal raiding roadblock which- even if you do conquer / get an earlier claim- leaves you a tribal-unhappy-with-feudal dynamic to sit on.
And this is without addressing the Saxon Elective in the room. Alfred's culture
does have access to a form of Kingdom/Empire-level elective, meaning that you can conceivably even make your primary heir your eugenics-success son... but powerful vassals can vote for themselves, and adding this law to the Kingdoms basically guarantees you are locked into county-partition.
What this means is that it's
really really easy succeed your way into a very awkward second generation, where Alfred was all-powerful and all-beloved, and then the heir has a fraction of the domain, is barely able to afford their inherited MAA, are sitting atop powerful vassals who they can't disempower, and oh yeah election setup. Across 3, even 4, different types of elective.
But that's experience
Alfred will never get, or anyone who just plays Alfred to the top of the British Empire and calls it a run, even though Alfred's entire life determines how that experience plays out (if it does).
The question is how engaging, challenging, and satisfying this looping fundament is. I am not asking to thrash CK3. Rather hope to see it in a different light; perhaps inspire changes to it.
I believe you, and this is why I'm going to say it like this- I think you're missing the forest for the trees, in a game where shaping the forest is a large part of the game.
At a design level, while the strategic
challenge of CK3 as a strategy game is on the dynasty, there is no strategic
victory. There is no Civ-style 'you were too slow and someone else won the game' victory condition, or a Total War 'the game ends when someone conquers everything.' All renown-scaling is in and of itself is just a competition between yourself and your own goals / how well others do.
The
objective of CK, in turn, is whatever the player wants it to be.
CK is, and always has been, a sandbox game. This is why map conquest is not 'wrong,' even if it's not the goal- it's just another thing a player can do, just like a player can do a eugenics simulator, or try to spread the one true faith, or the meme faith, or get everyone speaking the same language, or make a custom culture-religion combo to survive and thrive.
The fact that there are different ways to get the same results is its own question. Say you want to tailor an ideal culture. Well, that requires prestige. How are you getting prestige? You could do that by doing nothing but romance schemes, or feasts, or getting involved in wars... but depending on how you do it, you could choose a really safe, easy, boring way to grind it. Like, say, doing nothing but gold-for-hooks to fund feasts to simply press the prestige-awarding buttons, instead of getting a defensive alliance to fight in other people's wars.
So when you ask if those mechanics are engaging/challenging/satisfying... well, your satisfaction depends on what you choose to pursue, and how you choose to go about them.
The rules you play by- both imposed by the game (such as game settings) but also self-imposed- are the 'forest' by which specific mechanics (trees) can make or break the experience. If you're familiar with the expression optimizing the fun out of the game, CK gives you the tools to do that because these are the exact same tools that let other players mitigate the parts of the game they don't find fun, but which a min-maxer would look at and not see a reason not to do so.
Don't do that. CK's mechanics are at their least engaging or satisfying if you try to min-max grind with them.
