In the strategy epic “Crusader Kings 3,” the new expansion went live a week ago. MyMMO author Schuhmann has already spent more than 110 hours with “Legends of the Dead” on Steam and has quite a bit to share.
Why have I played so much Crusader Kings 3 again? Crusader Kings 3 is my favorite game on Steam and I have already spent 1,200 hours on it, even before the new expansion.
I had the opportunity to play the new patch before the release of “Legends of the Dead” and I made the most of it: First 2 weeks just the patch without DLC; then one week with the patch and activated DLC.
In the last 2 weeks, I spent 100 hours with the strategy game and repeatedly tried to seize control of England and Scandinavia as a small Jarl of Rogaland as a pirate king.
Even though the game tends to get out of control after 10 hours, you quickly lose track of things when your realm gets too large, and the contact with your family
becomes looser, the first 10 hours of gameplay in Crusader Kings 3 are always great and exciting for me. Especially with the new expansion.
Paradox instills fear of the Black Death
What is the feature that the expansion promotes? Paradox primarily promotes the DLC with the “Black Death”, the most dreadful plague of the Middle Ages.
However, it appears so late in the game, around 1350, that I have never encountered it and probably will never encounter it: I always start in the year 866 and I believe I have never progressed beyond the year 1250, because the game eventually gets out of hand and there is no challenge to keep playing when you have covered alarge part of Europe with war and have one of your descendants on every throne from Dublin to Istanbul.
So, the “Black Death” that Paradox constantly talks about and scares people with will never affect me.
The plagues make Crusader Kings 3 more dangerous and cruel
What feature did I notice? The plagues. Because even 500 years before the Black Death, plagues are rampant. They vary greatly in their effects on players.
A “Welsh cough” somewhere in distant parts of the realm is hardly noticeable, but when your capital is hit by typhus and half the court is gasping for air, older council members and family members die like flies.
This can be frustrating when you have painstakingly filled every position in the council and castle with excellent staff, who are slowly aging, and typhus wipes out half the staff within a few game minutes.
I found it hard to keep up with filling positions as bodyguards or in the court, as people were dropping dead so quickly.
Even seemingly harmless plagues like measles become noticeable in the game when suddenly half the noble lineage loses their sight and the chosen successor to the throne appears with an eye patch and the nickname “The Blind”.
Plagues are definitely a serious new gameplay element in Crusader Kings 3 and you are strongly inclined to combat them with buildings and population traits like “Water Rituals”.
A nasty incest bug can hit entire branches of the family tree
What else has changed? I don’t know if the patch changed this or something else, but Crusader Kings 3 now takes “inbreeding” much more seriously than before.
Whenever I marry cousins or siblings, I am clearly told there is a 48% or even 98% chance of an inbred baby, and they are serious about it.
When I carelessly married my son to my daughter (such things are possible in my own religion), I had to watch in horror as my dear sister-wife produced a number of inbred babies in the next generation – and they come with a significant penalty, not only for stats but also for health.
When typhus broke out in London, my capital, seven of the little inbred babies died in quick succession – you could really notice the health penalty here.
In my memory, Crusader Kings 3 has never been this strict about inbreeding. If you otherwise kept a little too close to your own gene pool to breed the Kwisatz Haderach, you might get an occasional lisple or a descendant with a hunchback, but not seven inbred babies in a row.
I then researched this in the context of the article and it turned out it was not intended for there to be such high chances of “inbred babies”: The 96% chance is apparently a bug (via paradox).
When I tested it again for the article, I was able to marry my own daughter and had “only” a small chance of about 5% for an inbred baby. So, the operation Blood Father
can continue as planned.
The Viking sons of Ragnar can finally shine
What I noticed with the DLC: Large empires are significantly more stable than before: Especially the sons of Ragnar, known from the TV series Vikings: Björn Ironside (Sweden) and Ivar the Boneless (Scotland) can repeatedly rise to powerful empires in many playthroughs.
It rarely remains that isolated counties and duchies stay independent for long: The blobs of large nations form quickly and sustainably. Especially Björn Ironside quickly turns his Uppsala into Sweden and seizes power in Scandinavia.
Additionally, I have seen a massive Roman Empire in the western part of Europe in some playthroughs, where West Francia used to be. That’s something I haven’t seen before.
Legends are nice, but rather technical
How are the legends? The other major feature of the DLC, the “Legends” in Crusader Kings 3, feel like a gimmick:
- In theory, they work like a special reward for particularly cool heroic deeds like thwarting a crusade, sanctifying the bloodline or rising to become a pirate king
- In practice, it is just another system that runs in the background and which you don’t really care about.
Even though there are some exciting triggers for what activates a legend, the rewards are rather mundane: There is always a powerful but expensive book artifact at the end, but you can only use 2 at once anyway, and an expensive special building for which it is difficult to gather nearly 1,000 gold.
Overall, this is a technical feature that definitely deserved more variety in the rewards.
The new expansion revives Crusader Kings 3 and makes it harder
This is my impression: The DLC is good and rich for €20. It revives Crusader Kings 3 anew. The plagues make the game significantly more chaotic, frustrating, and harder. Also, the “large empires,” which prefer to form alliances with other large empires, often declare war at the most inconvenient time, forcing you to muster all resources to withstand the attack.
After a relatively quiet year in 2023, Crusader Kings 3 is back on a much more exciting path. I can hardly resist playing Crusader Kings 3.
Even if I would like to wish the damn Björn Ironside the plague – and not just in 1350.
More about Crusader Kings 3: I started as a lonely Viking – 400 years later, I have half of Europe, 12,300 descendants, and a problem
