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Poor User's Manual hurts a good game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 32 / 33
Date: November 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

So far this is a very good game, but very frustrating, because the user manual is pathetic. I'm still not sure what some of the information icons mean. This really detracts from the play, since the first three days I had the game, I was still trying to figure it out.
If you don't mind trying to figure out how the game actually works, and you enjoy strategy games, then this is a pretty good buy.

There are several new nuances that are new to the strategy game genre - how to keep your blood lines going during the plague. What happens if your only son is Schizo, or your wife is infertile.

Do not expect to dive into the game and take over the world - It is not a military strategy game. Just like in real life, you aren't going to conquer everyone. It is a game of nuances.

Not cancelled

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 26 / 27
Date: February 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The game has not been "discontinued" at all, and according to Johann (lead programmer) on the Paradox forum, should go gold in March 2004 and ship late March or early April 2004.

Not sure why Amazon won't offer it, could be a Euro-$ conversion problem.

But it has not been discontinued, and looks to be a great game for those who like deep strategy like Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron or Victoria.

Epilogue:

I bought the game when it was released in Europe. The version here I am sure is 1.03 which is very stable and represents an imporvement over an already fun game.

In CK you play any one of numerous Kingdoms, Duchies or one of an vast supply of Counties. Want to play Ireland> Start as Duke of Meath (recommended) or Ulster (much harder) and do not upset William the Conqueror.

Marry your children off well and you could end up with claims on much of Europe. You play a dynasty, not a geograpic place, so make sure you have an heir and a spare. When looking for a bride for your #1 son, I'd suggest getting a very bright girl (to get bright grandkids) over a girl with connections, but the choice is up to you.

Like nearly all Paradox games, CK offers virtually unlimited replayability. Although you cannot play Muslim dynasties, you can play families from Ireland to Poland, from Sweden to Sicily.

CK is a fun game. After you're done you can convert your savegame into a scenario for Europa Universalis 2 (you need version 1.08). So you could conceivably play from 1066 until 1819 between the two games. That's plenty of time to conquer the known world.

New patch makes a WORLD of difference...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 14 / 14
Date: March 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

As pointed out, this could have been a great strategy game at release. Unfortunately, it didn't make the cut due to poor execution of certain ideas (like Crusades) and many bugs.

Now that the 1.05 patch came out, I bought it and it's a great game now. The bugs are 99% gone, and many of the other problems have been fixed / tweaked.

The depth of the game is staggering, which is great if you are a medieval history buff. all of the famous dukes/kings are there, as are their families. The system could still be improved further, but as I said the downloadable patch makes the game enjoyable (finally) and very addictive!

Great game ruined by a poor company follow-up

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 19 / 24
Date: September 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I won't lie - "Crusader Kings" is a fun game. I've spent hours playing it, and have enjoyed my time.

What's so fun about it? Well, it's quite different from your average strategy game, and especially those based in the Middle Ages. You can play any European nation (READ: Christian) from 1066-1419, but there's more to that. You don't have to be just the king of the nation, you can be a duke or a count as well, depending on who runs what. That's right, embroil yourself in feudalism. Forget the king...it's good to be the duke! As you rule, you have to keep in mind not only how much you're making and how big your army is, but you have to remember to watch the loyalty of your vassals. That is a major asset to the game - loyalty loyalty loyalty. It's basically like the badboy rating in "Europa Universalis II" and "Victoria" - you get too greedy, or your ruler gets bad traits, and your vassals start to tire of your rule. Empires get difficult to manage when you lose them faster than you build them. You also have a court, filled with courtiers who can be assigned roles such as marshal, diocese bishop, steward, chancellor, and spy master.

That brings me to another interesting point: there are traits attached to your rulers and court members, and they affect how well they perform tasks or how other rulers will react to them. These traits include lustful, cruel, zealous, the list goes on. These were a very nice touch, as they add personality and flavor to the people behind the throne. Another interesting system in the game is the gene system: characters' have their own pictures, and if you marry two people together, their children will bare resemblence to their parents. Someone summed up this game perfectly when they said it was like the Sims meet Medieval Total War.

However, Crusader Kings falls short of it's real potential. It's really not a complete game, and suffers from a crash-to-desktop (CTD), most often occuring during saves. And, of course, the manual is about as helpful as if they had stuck a wad of toilet paper into the game box. Players are recommended to throw out the manual (or eat it if you're low on cash and get hungry) and go to the forums or online for help from other players. Also, Paradox Entertainment has, as usual, been very slim with their after-release help with the game. Victoria, for example, has stopped being fixed after four patches, and Crusader Kings' latest two patches were only in the beta stage. Thus far, no further updates have been announced, and players are banned from asking when the next patch is at the forum. Even funnier, however, was when I tried opening an inter-game movement to fix the CTD problem. My thread was locked and the administrator said to go to the tech forum - problem is, every game has it own tech forum. When I brought this up the administrator claimed that not only do players make up CTD's, but that since not every single CTD is reported it probably isn't even a problem. Of course every single CTD isn't reported - you'd need an entire forum just to discuss the CTD's in Paradox's games. I find this, and the lack of patches for past games despite the pleas of players, Paradox Entertainment basically clogging their ears and saying, "We can't hear you! La la la la la la..."

To be truthful, I would not spend too much money on this game. It's not worth $40, as it is not the finished version of a game I expect when spending that kind of money. It is a fun game, but corporate laziness ultimately limits what we really could have had. If Paradox Entertainment tried to go through the Game Design major at my school, they'd probably get a D+.

Middle Ages come to life

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 17
Date: July 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I ordered this from Paradox themselves in Sweden. It arrived within a week.

Based on the Europa Universalis game system, this truly strategic game is engrossing.

Its twist to that well respected game system is in its dynastic components. At the heart of this game is building relationships and alliances through marriage pacts, and providing for the continuation of your dynastic line through history by making good marriages for your own character and producing capable offspring. Each character in the game has strengths and/or weaknesses. The player must take into account the personal relationships they forge for good or ill.

It isn't easy for a petty nobleman to conquer a neighboring province, especially if a major power owns it as one of their many holdings. To accomplish land expansion takes long, careful planning - much as it did in real Medieval Europe.

For anyone who is an aficionado of the European Medieval Era, this game gives the best sense for what it was like to be a member of the noble class of that day, if not one of the monarchs. Take care, though, because true to history many of the Dukes and Counts are actually more powerful than some of the Kings. There's even features in which to designate the particular laws that govern inheritance for your own lands, selecting between primogenture (as became the norm in most of Europe), the older Frankish custom of division among all sons, even allowance for females to inherit, as occurred in some lands.

For those who would berate this game or any other because it supposedly has bugs, my suggestion is that you upgrade your hardware. It isn't capable of running modern software if it crashes trying to run some. This game, and every other, runs perfectly on my PC. Usually, it's a matter of installing a more modern video or audio card, with sufficient memory to handle all that the program asks of it. (I am the president of a computer software company.)

Ignore the crank post about Paradox

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 16
Date: March 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The person complaining about Paradox's frequent updates doesn't seem to understand what they're about.

I've played EU II for quite some time and I love the frequent updates, which are based largely upon input from players. Most of the updates are not bug fixes, but tweaks and enhancements to the game to make it even better. For example, many EU II players are history buffs, and they suggest events to be added to the histories of the more obscure countries. Or, if a majority of players thinks a certain element of gameplay needs to be tweaked to make it more realistic, Paradox listens and incorporates it into the game. How many software publishers can you name that go to such lengths?

EU II is an outstanding game, and I'm greatly looking forward to Crusader Kings. But don't take my word for it, check out (...) and decide for yourself.

Great concept, lots of potential, but incomplete execution

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: November 14, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Crusader Kings is a game where you play a dynasty - not a nation. Hence a lot of your time is spent thinking about issues such as advantageous marriages, etc - just like real medieval rulers. The combination of dynastic interplay and direct combat is interesting and unusual. Also the event system is driven by circumstances, and not (with some significant exceptions, such as the Mongol invasions) by historical happenings.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is not well balanced as yet (it is too easy to conquer the whole of Europe, especially if you start off Byzantine), though Paradox are working on improvements. Paradox have a history of continuing support for games well after release, and development on this game is active. Some users (though not I) have also suffered significant crash-to-disk (CTD) problems with this game, which is also being addressed.

I have enjoyed playing this game for many hours, but have given it away as lacking a certain spark at present. If you find the concept at all interesting, I would suggest checking out the Paradox forums (at http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/) to see what development progress has been made. There has been a major public beta towards building the 1.05 release, which I suspect may produce the "zing" that will tip me back into playing again.

Buying this game at present you are paying for the potential, which is very high, not the current status which is mediocre.

Coulda shoulda woulda

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: October 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This could have been a good game. This should have been a good game. This would have been a good game if the designers had bothered to finish it before releasing it. But they didn't, and the game is deeply flawed.

There is a very active forum on the Paradox website, where you can read in detail about all the problems that users have reported, and what the game developers are planning to do about it. Suffice it to say, they are in the middle of making their fifth cumulative patch. The latest patch is a year old, and is still riddled with problems; they have some beta patches available, but those are problematic too.

The most serious problem, as people have said, is that the game just crashes unpredictably, and if it happens while you're saving (or autosaving), you may as well start over, because the game file will be corrupted. At first I thought turning on autosave was the solution, but it's not, because the autosave can trigger the crash (especially since the saved-game files get longer and longer over the course of the game--eventually around 50MB).

The other problem is that the game is not nearly as realistic or profound as the earliest reviews suggested. A well known problem with the game is that once the Pope calls the Crusades, they won't end until every single Muslim nation is eradicated from the map--and that's just not very likely ever to happen. (Unless you do it yourself. Have fun.) Meanwhile you suffer growing penalties to your "piety" score each month the Crusade is in force. That doesn't make sense and is not how the Crusades were waged. The other problem is that attrition and troop-transport costs are just too light. You'll find Muslim armies from North Africa carrying out amphibious assaults on territories in Scotland--and then conquering them--in the 11th century! Meanwhile the character-development aspect is not very meaningful. You'll get notifications of what the game calls "events" (nowhere are these explained very well, certainly not in the manual) asking you, for example, how you would respond if your child rides roughshod through the woods. Your choices have a chance of affecting the character's development--but it's only a small chance, and the effects are not tremendous anyway. It's fun the first couple of times, but eventually the events become repetitive (those children sure ride roughshod through the woods a lot), and you'll find that your responses really don't make a very big difference. (If the child in question is a daughter, it won't be long before she marries and leaves your court anyway.) There are "events" that can have a major effect on your characters and your domain, but those tend to be the "events" that you have absolutely no control over (like going insane, being appointed as a crusader, and so on).

All in all, this game's crash bugs are very frustrating, the gameplay is not particularly realistic--and it takes an obscene amount of time to get through one game. (Micromanagers: this game is for you.) After one or two nights with it, with about 300 more years to go before the "scenario" ends, anyone with a job or other real-world responsibilities will be inclined to give it up.

May become great if it is ever finished.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: September 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The idea of a historical strategy game set in the Middle Ages is very appealing, but the implementation should have been better.

The game feature a variety of bugs, most of which can be grouped into two categories--design flaws and crashes. Crashes are the most annoying, since the game has a relatively long loading time (on a 1.6Ghz AMD). So even with autosave on, I sometimes had to abandon the game for a few days because of the frustration of having to reload it over and over again. Worse yet, one of the bugs caused the game to crash while autosaving, resulting in corrupted save files, and no ability to reload.

In addition to the crashes, the game also features several major design flaws. The most serious one is the ahisorical (and not particularly fun) way of implementing the Mongol invasions. At present, the Hordes will always do one of two things: conquer the entire map or get completely wiped out.

Many people at the Paradox (the developer's) forums reported these bugs and many other bugs, so I am definitely not the only one who has experienced them. Problems like these are almost always the result of faulty code, and not the user's hardware. It is reasonable to expect software to function properly on a system that meets (and exceeds) the advertised requirements. This software does not do that, at least not in the present version (1.03).

The game has plenty of enjoyable qualities, but the various bugs often make playing it a frustrating rather than enjoyable experience. Paradox usually releases a series of patches for a game, gradually fixing it. If you wait for patch 1.05 or 1.06 before you buy it, you will probably be getting a great game.

Good, will get even better

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: May 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

There's already a very good review of the game that describes what the gameplay is like, so I won't get into all of that. This review will concentrate on the bugs involved. I initially started playing the game after the 1.01 patch came out, and have now upgraded to 1.02. Though many people had CTDs on the 1.00 version, I have not had a single CTD on the newest patch. And my computer seems especially prone to CTDs. Purely anecdotal evidence, but I think any CTD problems have been fixed.

Most of the remaining bugs relate to gameplay issues. For instance, how the game determines which noble controls the pope does not work as its supposed to. Some character traits of the noblemen/women and their courtiers never show up: hare-lip, hunchback, stutter, and more. The AI never seems to go on crusade and leaves all the Muslim-bashing to the player. Regional titles do not exist as they should. (for instance, the game calls the lowest level of playable noble a Count in England instead of an Earl) Your courtiers will not get married on their own, but with the 1.02 patch you can no longer arrange marriages for them. Many other issues also need fixing.

With all of that said, however, my score of four stars relfects the game as it currently stands, version 1.02. This is the first game I've played that attempts to simulate the feudalistic relations of medieval Europe with any success. A lot of the game involves challenges such as rebelling vassals, finding suitable marriage partners, and knocking off your nasty younger brother so that he doesn't interfere with your son's inheritance. When all the bugs are fixed, the game will deserve a 5 stars in my mind. And Paradox, the developer, certainly will continue tweaking the game. They just came out with a new patch for their flagship game, Europa Universalis II. Since the game is three or four years old, this at least shows their commitment to getting things right.

One final note: Crusader Kings will be released in North America sometime in June, but the game can be purchased now at Paradox's website: www.paradoxplaza.com. You'll pay about $45 including shipping because of the crappy Dollar-to-Euro exchange rate, but will get the game at least two weeks sooner. I ordered directly from them and received the game four days later. From Sweden to Colorado, that's pretty good time! Certainly better than Super-Saver Shipping! ;)

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