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-Henry V, Shakespeare
Alrighty then. You have your elaborate system of vassals and subvassals. You have verdant and bountiful lands that stretch as far as the eye can see. Then the Mongols show up: what now? Much of a medieval lord’s life revolved around fighting; fighting his neighbors, fighting invaders, fighting for fun. With this clearly in mind, the EU combat engine has needed and gotten a bit of a rework. The combat is still on the dry side for those used to games which require immediate control of the troops, but the system is richer than that found in previous titles.
Each county has its own indivisible body of local troops, whose composition is entirely based on the local tech level, the culture, and the society in that province. The different troop types are knights, light cavalry, horse archers (generally only encountered, not employed by Christian states), pikes, archers, heavy infantry, light infantry, and militia. If the county has a powerful noble class, you will see a high proportion of knights. A dominant middle class of wealthy burghers and successful merchants will muster a complement of mostly foot troops, but they can also afford expensive armor and training meaning that they may likely be pikemen or archers. These troops are mustered and dismissed as a body; as the overall lord you can either directly call out any county’s troops in the realm (as long as the local noble’s loyalty is high enough), or ask your vassal to do it – probably the more politic method, but he or she always has the option to refuse. This in particular is why it’s always good to hold onto a few of the fatter counties for yourself: you always have some troops available for anything, and the loyalty cost of ordering around your vassals’ soldiers is far less if your own troops are already in the field.
Combat is handled in rounds, with each troop type being employed in whole or in part, depending on their specialty. During the initial maneuver round the various sides’ light cavalry forces are applied. Then comes the advance when archers fire and light troops skirmish with each other. Finally the melee arrives, with heavier troops slugging it out while the cavalry again skirmishes around the flanks. Men die, troops’ morale rises and falls (as do that of individual commanders; a regiment may have many soldiers left to fight, but if they are led by a Count whose personal characteristics include “coward” you can bet he is not going to stay for the whole fight!), and eventually the slugfest ends.
If aggressive war is your forté, the whole process combined goes something like this. Once you’ve set your heart on an attractive county or duchy, you first must establish a cause for conflict. Like the Casus Belli that were so sought-after in EU2, you essentially pay some prestige to manufacture a competing claim on that lord’s title. With a competing claim, you can cheerfully move the troops in and declare war. His provincial troops deploy (and hopefully his liege lord is either too busy or too weak to come to his assistance), and after a short battle – you did invade with overwhelming force, didn’t you? – and a subsequent siege, you control the county. If his liege and/or neighbors are showing martial annoyance at your blatant grab for territory, you can start frantically making peace offers to them individually and hopefully isolate your victim or you may end up with an unpleasantly large war on your hands. Generally you need to achieve some sort of battlefield superiority in order to get them in any mood to abandon their efforts. If your victim is a duke, he’s going to then have other counties that need capturing before he feels the need to start making peace overtures, either in terms of monetary tribute or territorial concessions of part of his domain. If all goes well, you’ve defeated him, and he’s conceded the ‘right’ of your claim on his title. Frequently, you’ll end up with a partial victory: he may cede to you the title of Duke of Brandenburg, for example, but then he’ll return to just being the plain old Bishop of Anhalt…a bitter, resentful, and frankly disloyal Bishop of Anhalt who is supposedly now your vassal.
Like every other EU title, this sort of activity is acceptable to your neighbors to a certain degree, but excessive and aggressive expansion will hurt your reputation as well. With so much of the politics of the situation and your whole vassal structure resting on your personal prestige, this can hurt. Get too high of a “badboy” rating, and every one of your vassals will start to question their loyalties. Higher still, and you can get excommunicated – nasty, because then anyone and their brother can attack you freely.
After recklessly conquering Western Poland, and seizing a number of attractive counties I noticed that my reputation was “You are hated by the entire world.” Whups! A quick check of my character’s vassals showed them deserting like rats from a sinking ship – losing 8%+ of their loyalty every month meant even the most dedicated (in this case, my two eldest sons) were at levels of 20% and lower. Counties recently added were leaving me and becoming vassals of other lords! My youngest son even tried open revolt, so I had to regrettably crush him as an example to the others. This bought me enough time to bottom out my Crown Duty (tax) and Scutage levels to practically nothing, and to dump a host of titles on both of my remaining sons – keeping them happy long enough until their net loyalty each month was positive. Now, a dozen years of very good behavior later, my character is 69 and has two devotedly loyal sons on whom once again securely rest the laurels of royal inheritance.
So I learned my lesson. If you want to expand your demesne without the terrible effects of a bad reputation, take it out on the pagans. In order to increase my reputation and prestige, I found that not only is attacking pagan kings easier (you need not mess with the idea of manufacturing a claim on their title), it’s helpful because rather than negotiating with the conquered lord, you simply annex the lands onto your own. Much simpler, much quicker, and your reputation climbs with every success. So naturally we’ve come around to the Crusades. It is not too far into the game when you start looking south at the vast, lucrative spaces occupied by the infidel and start to think “Maybe those Crusader kingdoms in real life just didn’t do it right…” and you might decide to try it for yourself. You can wait until the Pope calls for one, or, if you are interested you can turn some of your counties into Bishoprics and try to leverage them into being elected Pope themselves.
Apropos the Crusades, you might be faintly surprised that I haven’t talked more about religion. After all, we all know that the Church was pervasive, political, and powerful during that era – don’t they have an impact in-game? Sure they do, but religion’s role in the Middle Ages (and thus CK) was more like that of another secular state. A far-reaching, wealthy, and powerful state to be sure; but religion in that time was not a voluntary thing. You won’t find options for voluntary conversion, because such an option just wasn’t conceivable for most European peoples until the Reformation several hundred years in the future. You do what the Church says, you don’t piss it off, make sure you’re making your payments, and you’re pretty much fine (it might in fact seem strangely similar to another modern day Italian organization…coincidence?).
“Up to this time, there had been little point, from the peasants' point of view, to producing a surplus except to build up a reserve of food as insurance against crop failure, marauding war parties, or any of the other dangers of the time. The need of the new and growing cities and towns for food and raw materials changed that situation completely, and many villagers now strove to increase their production and to sell their crops in the urban centers. Now able to devote their full energies to producing and selling more than had before been possible, such peasants were able to accumulate still more money and to use this money to purchase the land rights of their less fortunate neighbors. … [this] made it possible to make medieval agriculture still more profitable for those who controlled the land.”
-Lynn Harry Nelson, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History, U of Kansas
While you have a great deal of minute control over the complicated structure of your government, and a thorough if less direct control over troops and where you employ them, there are other elements of ‘classic’ EU games that are rudimentary at best in Crusader Kings. This isn’t to suggest that there were things that Paradox or Snowball didn’t simulate thoroughly; rather, the nature of society, economics, and technology were simply less ‘tweakable’ at the whim of the government. CK presents you with the tools appropriate to the power you would have wielded in 1066, no more, no less.
You do have some minor measure of control over the society you command. Certainly it’s not the far-reaching social and political programs of Victoria, nor even the rudimentary developments of Europa Universalis 2. In CK you have only four segments to society: Peasants, Burghers (the middle class), Clergy, and Nobles. Your only tool for managing them is to increase one power level in relation to the others, and it’s a zero-sum game. Increase the power of the clergy, and your piety will increase but you will lose the love (and wealth) of the burghers. Increase the power of the peasants and you will soon have angry nobles’ loyalties dropping with frightening speed. Keeping them all happy is your goal, and it’s not always easy.
One thing you do have direct control over (as befits your position) is the law. You control completely the rules of inheritance for your realm. With typical Paradox thoroughness they offer you a broad range of historically accurate options from the classical Salic Primogeniture [inheritance to oldest son, and only through the male line] to Semisalic Gavelkind [titles are divided amongst male heirs in order of inheritance]. These games are always educational.
You also control the relationship between your ruler and vassals, and your character and the Church. Want to assert the primacy of the secular over the temporal? Set aside the dominance of the Clergy in your domain? Go ahead, try it. Of course your decisions don’t take place in a vacuum. Any changes you make – especially to the rules of inheritance – can quickly bite back. Dispossessed inheritors suddenly desert you, taking their provinces with them. At worst you can offend some so badly that they are willing to declare war to depose this king with the Mad Hatter policies, and depending on whom you’ve offended, they may be supported by the Church. Likewise, economics in the Middle Ages are crude and clumsy. Deficit spending? Nope. You can certainly spend yourself into a hole, but you cannot buy anything new until that’s been resolved. Your entire economic management toolbox – which was a large part of EU2 and a huge element in Victoria – is a total of six sliders. The nobles pay scutage, and Crown Duty. Census tax is the Peasants’, and tolls are taxes on commerce of the Burghers. Army Maintenance is self-explanatory, and Church Donations allow you to buy your way into holy favor. That’s it, and at first it felt very much like I didn’t have adequate control over my own financial stability. But over time, I started to realize that it was pretty atmospheric for the time and didn’t prove to be as much of a hindrance as I’d feared.
Technology is also less of a major element in game development than in the other EU games. Even the most enlightened states didn’t have directed technological development programs. More likely, there was the occasional discovery here and there, the eccentric genius that might stumble onto a breakthrough, or the learning of a (particularly military) technology from invaders or invaded provinces. So your tools are crude – you can select the field of development you wish to promote in general areas, and hopefully this is the next one that comes up. My only unhappiness with the tech system is probably one that will be gone by the time the game is released, and that was that the base techs available to every county are (in the build I was playing) way too rudimentary and force players to develop their ways through technologies that were (in the real world) widespread by 725, much less by 1066.
I think in fact technological development is one area that would have been more realistic with LESS control to the player, but I like very much the fact that technology is not widespread. Tech advances occur generally in your capital county, and disseminate from there. Farmers in Plzen might realize the benefits of the 3-field system, while the farmers in neighboring Praha are still running their farms with the old 2-field way. This can mean that troops from one county are significantly better-equipped than their neighbors.
Reviewed by Steve Lieb.