And I'm not talking about following your heart, becoming a Waldensian, having a few kids married into the family from the Byzantine Empire, getting one of them called back and putting said kid, now converted, on the throne. No, that is actually not that far out, given the game. Likewise rowing out to visit scenic R'lyeh is par for the course, if you just make a few of the right... or wrong... decisions while watching the stars. Actually that stuff isn't that strange.
What is strange? The monetary system.
Remember that back circa 769 to 1456 AD there was no standard coinage in Europe or much of anywhere else. What was put in place was the gold piece system, that fantasy RPG players have come to know and utilize across so many games, starting with D&D, that it is just commonly accepted. Yet the GP in CK2 isn't a gold piece, but represents a much larger quantity of gold than the normal Player Character in any RPG would tend to have in their pockets. And the cost of getting things built is way out of whack...I mean, seriously so. And it is to be remembered that this is in the era before the discovery and exploitation of gold resources in the New World which caused some major economic problems for those doing the importing as the value of gold dropped.
Coinage tended to center around varieties of copper, bronze, and other metals, including silver. The silver mines at Joachimsthal that became the source for minting the Thaler, from which the name 'dollar' is derived, but that was in post-CK2 times, just a fun little tidbit. Within the CK2 time there was a currency that was locally well known in England and that was the pound (£) which was minted from a pound of silver, back in the old Anglo-Saxon days, and the Hanseatic League didn't debase their coin, the Easterlings, so tradesmen asked for payment in pound sterlings, shortening Easterling up a bit. The Anglo-Saxon coin had 350g of silver, and serves as a ready basis for coinage in the era of CK2 which starts just after the Saxons getting to the British Isles in numbers after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. After William I conquered his way in with the Normans, his son, Henry I, guaranteed that coinage would not be debased as well as following all the other traditions set in place for the rights of the nobles. With the Hanseatic League (as a concept, they might not show up in CK2 at all) that helps to span the CK2 timeline with at least on reliable currency, the pound sterling.
Now in the British Isles, just prior to 1400, came the offensive use of castles in Wales that would drain the budget of England for about a decade. The smallest of these castles for cost was Conwy that ran about £ 15,000. The most expensive, reported to be the entire budget of England for the year, was Caernofon at about £ 25,000. At 1400 the first of the gold coins in England was produced, which was the noble (9g of gold), which had a conversion rate of 3 nobles for £ 1. The noble coin was not in great circulation but steps in the direction of the first gold pieces produced in quantity that is readily convertible with a known coin for the era of CK2 (though just at the end of it, to be sure).
The cost of those castles included land surveying (at least as much as there was in the era), working to clear, drain and otherwise get the site ready for building, and then the start of actual construction for a modest castle that would hold 100 to 300 men-at-arms. This wasn't for a castle complex with multiple wall systems and such, nor was it a stand-alone Keep (or Keep integrated into a castle), but the actual relatively low walled fortified structure that allowed for quick staging of forces, warning of emergencies and passing information about enemy troop movement to friendly forces. This could be built out over time and get rather complex with support camps turning into small towns, and then the expansion of those and the castle itself over time. A few castles would actually become the start of cities that surrounded them and then became separate civil organizations as the castle wasn't meant to handle that sort of administrative work (by and large with many exceptions). Basically this was a castle that would be seen in many variations before and just after that era. Some were cookie-cutter, others evolved in style and quite a few no longer served a purpose and were abandoned as politics and trade shifted across the landscape.
In CK2 the cost of building a castle varies greatly, with the lowest I've seen around around 400gp and the highest around 900gp (the last spot in a highly built up and prospering area with other cities, temples and castles already there). Now as the places in Wales were not highly built-up, that variation of £ 15-25,000 seems pretty good...but what is that in actual gold? I mean if we convert it into nobles, then that is 45-75,000 noble coins. For ease of comparison lets say that the initial castle clearing, building and such in CK2 is 500gp for something the size of Caernofon, and that would make 1gp = 150 nobles. Great! There is a 1400 equivalence for a generalized mid-range built-up area slot in CK2 with a currency in circulation just after the building of a castle that can be used to Wild Ass Guess on the rest of the game, but with some actual backing. Who knew? Is this a 'good' coin to choose? Probably not, but it is easily convertible with known weights and comparisons to a known coin that (though slightly debased by this era) was still supposed to represent a weight of something widely accepted in the timeframe of CK2. It is convenient and can be readily adjusted up and down, but has some actual comparison basis to start with.
So the cost of getting the walls beyond the basics to Level 2? Well that is around 66gp, which is 9,900 noble coins or £ 3,300. A bargain! And a Keep for a castle, basic, runs about 250gp, which is 37,500 noble coins or £ 12,500...pretty much the cost of Conwy castle. Ooops!
Now what isn't factored into this is the slot system CK2 uses, which is a generalized pre-determined place ready for building a temple, a city or a castle, because they are all the same, right? Note that in the real world, things don't work like that. So the cost of those castles in Wales INCLUDES the equivalent of slot clearing in CK2, because reality doesn't work like CK2. How much does that cost? Well, from what I've seen in discussions and by in-game use, it is 150% of your annual budget to open a single slot in a single province...from lowly Count to Emperor, this number SCALES to the size of your economy for a SET PIECE OF LAND CLEARANCE. By setting it at the cost of what you have as net income plus 50%, the cost of clearing a slot in CK2 is greater than the cost of the actual building to be built on it. In other words first you pay for the generalized slot and then you pay for the thing to be built on it. So that use of Caernofon had the 'slot' cost built into it and the entire thing came out to the entire net income of England for a year. If there is no pre-cleared 'slot' then you will pay more for the equivalent of building slot than you will for the real life cost of clearance and building COMBINED.
So that readily convertible amount? Yup, doesn't work, though it should. In fact, by scaling costs to the economy, the game is intentionally trying to force you to keep a large amount of cash on hand to deal with the other, non-building effects of CK2. It is a game of nickel and diming the player CONSTANTLY. Your Steward wants roads? Pay up. Want a better harbor? Again, pay up and be prepared to keep on paying, periodically and NOT set up an office to do that work FOR YOU. Yes in real life the Liege would set up an office with some minor functionary who is DELEGATED the responsibility and a tiny fraction of the income from the port (or city or whatever) that would leave a lower net amount in revenue but ensure that the roads are kept up, the harbor properly administered and cleared, and generally do the things in the background that someone in power DELEGATES to others. You, as the player, are not allowed to do that. Period. And your Steward is obviously too damned busy to do it which is why you get nickel and dimed to death constantly.
This is important as CK2, at its heart, is a game done at the margins. Every single hundredth of a percent of research counts as it builds up over time. Every single expansion for increased income means that after all the upkeep is removed, you get a net percentage and if you have a vassal in-between then you get a percent of a percent. Those capital expenditures are not something where you can set up a physical lock box to hold a bit of spare cash and keep a bit of change in it. That gold amount is always staring you in the face and there is so much that needs to be done that the natural inclination is to spend it and pray. Then get nickel and dimed into debt. CK2 is the game that accurately reflects the poverty of the era, true, but offers none of the advantages of tribal, feudal or other systems that allow for delegation of duties and responsibilities with accountability. Sure your Court Chaplain can be caught selling favors, ditto for those other Council members, but those, strangely enough, aren't the main concern. Getting people to run the daily affairs, and oversee things that are generally small enough to be handled by someone who isn't the Liege, that should be much of the point of it. That would mean scaling back the entire economic system to reflect the actual poverty of the era but allows for the systemic advantages that certain types of government and religions allow.
Lets say you are a Catholic Heretic that doesn't recognize the Papal authority, and devolves power down to the local level. Great! Yet you will still get Bishops asking if they can increase the tithe or put on an extra one...but that is no longer in the hands of the Liege, is it? Go ask your parishioners and local priests for it...but you can't say that. I would actually expect the locals to do up the temples better than what the bishop or Liege could do, though donations would always be accepted, of course. A decentralized religion means things are handled at the local level for religious affairs: that is the advantage of a heresy and you can stop paying the Pope, as well. While you do get the latter benefit, true, the former of local control doesn't seem to have made it into the realm of what is and is not passed up to the player for decision-making. This might mean lower revenue from such temples, yes, yet it would have the benefit of the locals investing into it with their own money and labor.
If a religion is decentralized then the point of it is: if you take it up then you figure out the basic tenets on your own and start putting them into practice at the local level. When outsiders hit the player up for wanting to convert to such a thing, then why isn't the answer: "Sure, go right ahead, I'm not stopping you because I can't stop you and that's the point"? In many ways it sounds like some precursor of Lutheranism before Luther, and the great heresy is that you will follow Christian doctrines as laid out in the Old and New Testaments, but for that you don't need a head of the religion but locals willing to preach to their neighbors by choice or local assent. To the Pope that is damned dangerous, of course, but for local concerns the overhead and worries (including conversion of other kingdoms) should disappear as a game mechanic.
Economically the Liege can kick in some funds to build things he or she considers necessary, but that is, and should be, mostly left up to the locals. As temples/churches don't have a large amount of troops or tax revenue attached to them, and their size is very limited, their actual utility in warfare is slim. Marginal, at best, and this is a game at the margins, so if that investment is going to happens locally it is for just a slight increase with some ready cash on hand to spend. For some of the additions like to the main temple or walls, the revenue would go up, marginally, and the oversight of it would be local (by and large). By having the locals put money into the temple the result is some small amount of cash to be put into the annual budget that becomes the cash on hand for the player.
Cash on hand if you have it. New roads, apothecaries, enlarging a harbor, paying for book materials to write a book that scales with the size of the domain (thus its 50gp if you are a Count and north of 300gp if you are an Emperor, more or less, as it scales with your economy so it is a rough ball-park on this). Then if you need some specialized skills that you can't find via inviting nobles to court, you then have to pay for things like Asking a Holy Man to court, finding a good commander, presenting a debutante...and the cost with those ALSO scale to the size of domain. And the amount you pay to fabricate a claim on a county also scales to your domain size, so it is cheap at the low end and prohibitively expensive at the high end, yet the job is just the same for your Chancellor. Greedy buggers the lot of them, huh? And no paying a pittance to uplift some lowborn who has decent skills you need to your court, either, which was something that was done in the era.
The economic considerations of CK2 are weird, to say the least. Mods can help in this respect, true, and a few address each point of the above concerns to an extent. The Court Physician recruitment can also scale although it can be damned near free for a few of them, so that isn't as bad...and if you have someone with high enough learning at court you can actually just appoint them to the position as the 'Renowned Physician' trait actually only boosts the learning skill by a couple of points and doesn't give them any, you know, actual skill at what they are doing. If that trait boosted them to the next rank of skill (and that is in there, somewhere, as at the highest level of learning you can get some pretty good treatments that you won't see with the skill at less than 30), so even with mid-level learning they can be practicing at a higher level of skill. So, yeah, that girl who is great with the books? Make her the Court Physician. At anything over 18 learning skill you won't notice much of a difference between that and the mid-20s which are rare.
In CK2 you must save money. Period. And you must spend money to improve the buildings in the kingdom, too. Plus pay out for the random events that will nickel and dime you to death. And some Secret Societies start to have any costs with them scale to your domain size, which is weird, as the best tools for an experimental lab should be the same since you are generally getting them through trusted intermediaries at Court or via the society. But that isn't the case. Now the technology trees in CK2 are a mess, which is why you'll want a learning or stewardship based Secret Society as the cost of buildings is high, and any little bit your character can do, personally, to gain any advantage to anything related to the military, economics or culture matters. Choose wisely. Even Societies that just concentrate on self-improvement and then improvement of close kin or courtiers, can really help (and means you might be able to forego some of that hiring if you can't find someone good to import to Court). You will be punished for spending, even if it is defensively in response to random events. And when you need to build a hospital...expect the cost to be astronomical for all the parts inside of it (or its complex but the game doesn't actually go into that until the highest level of building). And, no, you don't get to appoint someone to run the thing, either.
Disease is a real concern in CK2 and even before the Plague, if you are prospering you'll find that all that trade is making a county vulnerable to diseases and disease spread. Plus depopulation if it is a really bad or long-lasting epidemic. Hospitals are purely defensive against such things and can mitigate spread and depopulation. And that is it, though it is great in concept, and hospitals were relatively rare in those times as they were expensive. Luckily it has its own slot that you don't have to clear! And the base building, with nothing in it, is useless, though relatively cheap. Now a Court Physician can ask if they can oversee the place, but in multiple runs I've had that happen twice. It does beg the question of why it isn't a position that can be appointed. And ditto that for the University (if you have the whacking large amounts of cash to build one) and, no, they don't work with each other because...well, that is never explained in the game but is due to game mechanics separating out Economic venues so that there is no way to bonus off of a University AND a Hospital in the same Province.
If memory serves the University at Bologna, back in the middle ages, was also a teaching hospital that was quite well known and people educated there were highly sought after. These are separate things in CK2, and those sorts of capabilities must be built into the hospital with higher tech...they also don't come as a freebie when upgrading a University from Level 1 to Level 2, and if you thought the original cost money...well save up for a few years for THAT upgrade, you'll need it. Since investment in one doesn't help the other, the player will get hit separately for getting a hospital high enough where people want to train there. And hope that a plague doesn't drain your economy dry either through mortality or building hospitals or building universities: choose wisely. Or that you need to build some structures to get more troops. Or to improve the economy, like expanding that market to Level 2 after you've built it at Level 1. And if you don't have enough troops to fight a war then you'll probably need to hire mercenaries, which has an up-front cost and then a monthly cost. And they can take months to arrive, too! Heck, its possible to think you need mercenaries, hire them, have the war going on, win the war and then have to cancel the contract even though the mercenaries never showed up and get nothing but loss for it.
Oh, and actually calling up your troops means you pay them more. And it is expensive, though not as expensive as calling up your fleet (if you have one). Yeah, if you want to kill your economy, go to war! Now some groups get raiding, in which the troop cost is put at 10% and the troops can raid and send back goodies if there is a continuous line of supply for them or load up boats with loot if you got those in the sea/river area. You won't be liked for it, very much, but it isn't a cause to go to war, so there is that. Raiders are cheap to maintain, effective, and the only thing they can't do is settle in troops after a siege, as that isn't their job. Luckily that is only for a few Pagan groups and Muslims. Morally upstanding Christians don't do that, though they will loot a place for petty stuff as any army does that has decent conduct: sticky fingers has always been the rule in warfare, but more civilized people limit it. You might get someone you can ransom off for some cash, though! Piddling amounts for lowborn and even up to Counts, but Dukes and beyond can get some nice ransom if they are rich enough or have a Liege willing to pay for their release. That actually makes a lot of sense for the period! The low rate of capture of those holding up on the inside after the siege is won, that is strange as a decent siege means all the easy ways of escape are blocked off, but I guess a Baron is willing to forego dignity to being captured and leave via tied together sheets off a relatively unguarded part of the wall. For those performing the siege, the monthly cost in troop maintenance is high, which is why any technology that can be researched to improve the effectiveness of a siege are paramount. The shorter the siege, the shorter the drain on the economy. Now having a slot based system means that the first slot is always the first thing put under siege, then following in order slot by slot. No going around that well defended castle with few people that can sally out and going to take over that nearby city! For shame if you think you can do that! Even Pagans can't do that! Why? Game mechanics.
And since all the troops are paid out of the coffers of their liege, well, just what does that mean in the terms of real money? Yeah, we're back to that since it wasn't established in the first place and game mechanics run contrary to the way the actual world worked in that era.
Outside of a few principalities that were somewhat forward looking, who grades out, drains and etc. an area and then doesn't build on it immediately? Wouldn't that cost tend to be bundled in with the thing you are building? It is understood that some places just beg to have something substantial built there, and yet even the best sites still need that care and attention to detail that the creation of a new slot would entail. Mind you a small city with just a thousand or so people might not start out in the best of places, but as they grow they will improve their surroundings (at least to their technology level, so don't expect those open sewers to disappear any time soon). If that were explicitly stated in the cost of new buildings, then it would be fine, yet the way it is presented conceptually is that the initial cost of clearing the land to make a slot then makes it open to anything from a castle complex, a temple complex or major city to be built there and the cost of the first few buildings is from the cost of founding the place. After that? Hey does that castle need to have a Barracks for Heavy Footmen? If the answer is 'yes' then be prepared to spend a lot of money for it, and then to have new troops trained up to what the Barracks can hold. Of course you'll need to improve the walls of that castle...or temple or town to do any expansion. Walls are cheap! Even the lowest of buildings, say a town market or castle town, costs more than a good wall. So much for the open air markets one would expect and, instead, you will get nice buildings for a few wealthy shopkeepers, and that means it is possible to tax them at a higher rate! That more or less works, if the basics of what the costs actually are were nailed down, yet there isn't even hand-waving for that.
What is overlooked is that some feudal societies actually had agreements between the population and their liege to allow for labor to be used from the local population for a percentage of the year for each person. Yes you had free labor which, although it didn't involve everyone all the time, was something that would tend to defray cost of construction. This is a purely regional affair by culture, which the game diligently tracks, so there is no reason not to have implemented it to give either a lower cost or time to construct buildings (or both) for areas that are under those cultures. While something like slavery is not unknown in the medieval period, it did exist, though usually not at the level of the State (be it County, Duchy, Kingdom or Empire) which would use them to its own purposes. That sort of thing went out with the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire doesn't reflect the changing values of slaves from objects (property) to subjects, which happened in the time period of the Early Medieval Start in CK2. Mostly slaves or thralls were household in nature during this era, not part of the economic backbone of a State like in the Bronze Age of Greece or later Roman Empire where slaves started to outnumber freeman. Labor in CK2 also does not account for labor that can typically be contributed by men-at-arms, who are already being paid for their jobs. By making a very generalized system of building, CK2 handles the regional, ethnic, cultural and religious differences across the Middle Ages in a way that doesn't lend to specific understanding of locales and having their advantages and disadvantages show up in game play. Perhaps if a CK3 is ever made, it will delve deeper into these areas.
Another surreal bit is defaulting of inheritance to a kind that was extremely limited in geographic extent and not widely practiced: Gavelkind. Gavelkind, as opposed to something like Primogeniture, is a system where when the Liege dies the first eligible child gets the highest title, and then the rest are distributed among the rest of the children. This was generally practiced in a few and select parts of England and Wales, and suited the generally poor households all the way up to modern times. Outside of a few established Kingdoms and Empires, this is the DEFAULT mode of inheriting in CK2, and the main job of every Liege is to research how to get the hell off of it so that there can be continuity of government between generations. Primogeniture or Seniority were well established methods for passing down multiple titles so that they would remain in the hands of one person in the family which should allow for continuity at the highest level of government for non-elective systems. These were the general standards and should be the default ones in CK2, yet they are not as it puts a game structure imperative on the player to quickly move up in power so as to be able to perform more research and then, as quickly as possible, shift to something reasonable before death.
That is more than just surreal, but it is changing the very foundation of historical game play to suit a game mechanic to put a hard and fast limit on players so that they are driven to seek more power to do more research. Something like Gavelkind might make some sense at the Nomadic or possibly Tribal level of society depicted in the game, but it has very limited historical scope as a feudal method for property inheritance. Taking something practiced in a few Counties in England and making them the global default is insane and surreal, both. For all the things done well in CK2, this is the one place it falls short of the goal of putting together a viable depiction of Medieval society at the upper levels of Nobility. Mods are available to address this, but those are to fix something that shouldn't have been in the game in the first place, outside of those few places that used this as a legal framework for inheriting titles and goods. For families where there might be few survivors, this makes some sense. At the level of a Kingdom it is surreal as no one would ever attempt to run a Kingdom with that hanging over their heads. Assurance of who was in line to inherit was of paramount importance at anything above the level of a County so that there were no questions about it at lower levels of society.
Naval combat does not exist in CK2. Period. Piracy is something that impacts cities with Ports for trade, but aren't treated in any real way via game mechanics: suffering Piracy at sea is something you can point fingers at potential candidates, but you can't send anyone out to confirm just who is doing the actual Piracy. Raiding on land is a main point of the game, so having some Pagan show up to start looting and pillaging is all part of the game and anyone uncivilized enough to do it has game mechanics attached to it. That sort of raiding cannot be used a Casus Belli against the group sending them, but only gain generalized hostility to the sender for 180 days after last contact. Vikings can be a real terror force, able to go far up rivers and loot out counties around those rivers if they have sufficient numbers and time. As this is a form of Personal War, the game restricts what can be done: it isn't possible to declare war against that person, as an example, and put all their holdings at risk. While rarely done (as real forces from opponents that didn't raid tended to be the main problem), the idea of being able to hunt down an individual and put an end to their ways would be in keeping with the spirit of the eras involved. Going beyond the plots to kill should be the retribution Casus Belli: your warring ways are at odds with civilized peoples and action will be taken against you and all who aid you in your ways. That is what happened in history and wars were started over this sort of thing, though minor wars, to be sure.
Yet all of that is the lust for gold that is done in a system that doesn't properly handle the actual mechanics and costs of building anything with its gold based system. Paying troops is a variable amount by era, and what might be a good pay in one era (say paid in salt, which is the basis of what we call a 'salary') might be too much or too little in another. Similarly troops in the field had widely varying costs, and that would often include the cost of the supply train necessary to keep those troops fed, clothed and resupplied. That is handled in a generalized way by the concept of how much supply a County can sustain going through it, though that can be augmented by a separate fort made to help bolster the supply lines. The actual supply train, itself, requires some troops and were often a target of a shrewd commander who might seek to detach part of the main force to go around the enemy and go after their supply train. That is not part of the game mechanics for CK2 yet is part of the history all the way up to the modern day. The reason it isn't implemented is that the game is, at heart, a Grand Strategy RPG that will whitewash a number of smaller tactics to serve the greater component of Strategy over all the tactics. Thus troop pay and upkeep is generalized to such an extent that morale only gets low if the liege has gone deeply into the red and can't pay those fighting in the field their normal field pay. That is a large scale concern, and one handled relatively well.
The icing on the gold piece cake is that the game engine cheats, and horribly so. The personal experience of having a decent sized military and sending them against a smaller organization, usually a Duchy or Petty Kingdom that has lost most of its land, has been one in which the listed forces available and the cash on hand available to that opponent are known before declaring war. Yet the game engine can and will ignore those to grant an opponent mercenaries that they could not pay the up-front cost to hire, not to speak of actually keep those forces paid in the field. And this is no small thing when the amount of combat effective troops that can be fielded by levy of home troops is under 1,000 and the cash on hand is under 200gp, yet this organization can pay for mercenaries in the 5,000 combat strength range that would eat up all the cash on hand...and do that with more than one group at the same time. The Pope usually has huge coffers to fund this sort of thing for himself, so that isn't unexpected. A Petty King or Duke, who has the exact same problems the player has, does not have the actual ability to suddenly whistle up an entire annual revenue in a few days. Period. This is doubly true if they have no external large allies supporting them: there is just no way to get that revenue in fast enough to hire large mercenary groups. Thus in one day a land holder of 3 to 5 Counties can call up the revenue that even a proper Kingdom 5 times that size couldn't bring in, even in an emergency (unless it cheats, of course). And then, after that, even when its territory is getting sieged out and looted, the income remains STABLE and doesn't drop. The ability of in-game AI to handle just what a player can do is lacking, and thus the game engine cheats for the AI NPCs it controls and that means they are not bound by the same rule set as the player is. In theory it is, yes, and much of the internal game mechanics is the same for the AI and the player, right up to the point where the game cheats, which means there are other game mechanics available to the AI that the player doesn't have available.
This form of cheating is part and parcel of nearly all Grand Strategy type games from multiple companies, and its an expected part of the game class. The RPG elements, however, add something to it that most other Grand Strategy type games don't handle well or at all. By having a firm NPC back-engine to determine what happens to each NPC every single day, CK2 transcends most other Grand Strategy games as it puts in more than just flavor of the era, but actual mechanics that have real-world foundations. The most important of those, indeed the over-riding one, is that Personnel is Policy. What ever you do for individual from marriage to giving honorary titles to making them a councilor to granting land: all of that is done on a personal basis, and the individuals have a general history and running game mechanics behind them that are then CHANGED by what the player does or does not do.
There are a number of full-blown RPGs that don't handle this well, and rely on pre-scripted stories to deal with events. To a degree that is true in CK2, yet each and every individual has their own Focus and Ambitions, along with their Stats, Traits and Skills, plus membership in a religion or religions, and Secret Society membership all playing continuously in the background. While a series of events may be pre-scripted, they each have decision trees to them, and this is as true for the player as for all the NPCs. When 10s if not 100s of NPCs are each doing their own thing, and can respond to what the PC does but in a manner only known in a general way by the player, the concept of 'immersion' moves to the forefront. This is not an immersive town, country or 3D landscape, but is, instead, the social and inter-personal immersion that so many RPGs have drifted away from to move towards visual immersion. The truly surreal part of CK2 is that it has good RPG game mechanics, beyond mere elements, built into the game and an essential part of it. Those game mechanics MUST work with the general combat, overhead and maintenance AI used to run everything else for the NPCs. For all the fact the player never gets to see a 3D rendering of anything, the individuals the player works with as NPCs begin to get their own back-story and the more you interact with them (which is slow, given the era) the more you understand them. Of course much of this is built up by the player, but the foundation for that building is in the game play and RPG mechanics.
CK2, at its heart, is still a Grand Strategy type of game, never doubt it. The player must have good conceptual understanding of how a hand-waved economy works that had difficulty tying itself back to actual world costs and functions for the era. The generalization is huge, and the defects are plentiful, but then that is true of nearly every other Grand Strategy game on the market. By putting in more than RPG elements but having an NPC game mechanics system (all dice rolls in the background done on a daily basis) the actual game, itself, blurs the line between Grand Strategy and concepts of working relationships normally relegated to the RPG world. While the player may only have some scattered instances of direct interplay with an NPC, their character sheet can be brought up so that it is easy to piece together just what is going on with that individual. Get to know them via their character sheet and their interactions make sense (unless they are Possessed or a Lunatic, of course, but even those have their own way of doing things).
A good strategy gamer may miss the RPG aspects and just put them to the side and ignore them, by and large, until they get hit with personal matters that have finally forced themselves into the forefront. At that point the player must move from strategy and move to personnel and policy of how to deal with individuals, far beyond the 'Leader of another Country' deal that most Grand Strategy games offer. No it is necessary to deal with a spouse, children, who you need with decent skills for jobs necessary for your domain that you want to remain in the family bloodline, and then there are marriages, seeking to arrange long-term superior positions by marrying well and shrewdly, and, of course, paying strict attention to dynastic dynamics. Not doing so will cost a Grand Strategy player dearly.
Similarly an RPG player may yawn at the lack of instant do something now or fulfill this quest as fast as possible game play, as those aren't available in the Middle Ages. Interpersonal concerns, particularly where what you do as a player will have profound implications for long-term game play, which means trying to plot out a different methodology that goes far and away from 'shoot this, kill that, reap reward' style RPG games. By not paying attention to infrastructure, troop disposition, which Vassal is getting powerful and finding a way to deal with it, and then not paying much attention to going to war, n pure RPG gamer may find themselves overwhelmed with the strategic aspects of CK2 that are a MUST in game play.
That is surreal. Very surreal.
Vast 'open world' games do not have the sort of variability for NPCs that CK2 offers, as they must cater to storylines, quests and pre-set characterization. For all the grand number of individuals that show up in the typical 'open world' setting, only a handful of them are ones you can interact with and all of those have their own world design and story purposes. Everyone else is window dressing. In CK2 the window dressing is removed and the pre-scripted plot is generally removed as well, and what actually happens is put to chance and so many types of events that it is impossible to tell just what will happen, save that it will be setting appropriate for the individuals involved. This is something that NO RPG will attempt because if it did then the story designers would need to take the high degree of variability into account. By focusing in on the day-to-day mundane activities of a player the amount of variability for the NPCs is limited in scope. Yet a couple of months in CK2 demonstrates that even with extremely limited time-scales a lot of events can happen that will change the disposition of individuals across the entire game. This is a time frame that would include most RPG settings, and some settings are worthy of a year or two of in-game play, which would readily see shifts in CK2 for individuals (births, deaths, marriages, and all the affairs of state including wars). This is not a 'living world' concept, but rather one with such a high degree of scope for the individuals involved (with limits then put on each individual) that the ability to predict who does what over a given span of time is nearly impossible, yet stories do get told within all of that.
This concept of creating a world-based theme based on the actions of those in charge of governments at multiple levels, along with the lower-tier individuals at the courts of those in charge, is one that typically is outside the scope of a tightly scripted RPG experience. A compelling story, a narrative, story, plot, characters and all of that are the traditional realm of RPGs as they are the genre for that sort of story telling experience. A loosely scripted set of stories with generally open-ended game play that would feature multiple ways to go through the story would require a lot of storyboarding, scripting, addition of NPCs and so on based on the older methods of story telling in RPG game mechanics. A truly 'open world' wouldn't feature a tightly woven narrative with single ending, but would feature a tightly created story for the player to discover as they chose the means and methods to play through their game experience with other goals in mind. This doesn't mean that the tightly created story is unimportant, far from it, but that story must exist among many others that are on-going in the game, and some of those may have compelling reasons for players to play the game and treat the actual narrative as something to be discovered that will offer meaningful content and change to the character, NPCs, or game world as a whole. That story may be the one that drives the character at the start of the game, but is quickly moved aside as it becomes apparent that there is no easy way through it: the complexity of the changing cultural and social landscape means that the player cannot expect to find a 'golden path' left for them, although key points of discovery can and should be left for discovery.
In the game play of CK2 there are no assurances that what a player sets out to do will actually be the thing that matters most after game play starts. Each player gets to determine how certain events and changes in their character and game world effects them, and those choices have short, medium and long-term consequences. Just choosing who to marry can alter the entire course of the game as marriages can create non-aggression pacts that can be developed into an alliance. Choose a different spouse from a different family in a different government and the impact of that will change the entire direction of game play, and there is no assurance that the individual you found to marry in a prior game with the exact, same start will be available in a new game.
Within CK2 are narrative events that require work, investigation, PC investment of time and resources, or just personal contacts to help aid in achieving the end of that narrative cycle. Many of these are repeatable, but with variations that allow for different outcomes. Some outcomes may be a set-back, in which the goal isn't achieved, and that can have ramifications as well. The idea that there could be a tightly created but loosely available story in such a setting is par for the course in CK2, which sets it apart from standard RPGs that invest more in individual characters within a given setting and planning a number of paths through the game to guide the player along. This requires intricate and complex story design, that can be huge in its overall scope. Many game design companies have decided to remove most of that complexity to fit the console market, thus removing background depth and immersion from RPGs as individual games and as a genre. What CK2 demonstrates is that such removal of complexity need not be performed if a good game world with multiple game states can be created at the start or as something the PC moves in certain directions during the course of game play. By not emphasizing the story, and putting it into a string of longer decisions, each with a constrained set of choices based on the PC's stats, skills, and background, the pure number of decisions can be increased but not presented at a single point. By charting out paths within a narrative tree, the interior and end-points can change game variables and thus alter game play. Stories may be a bit generic, to be sure, but the sheer variety of them and the circumstances that invoke them means that game play will never be the same twice, even in the exact same starting setting.
What CK2 achieves in its grand strategy RPG concept is something that can and should be emulated by AAA game producers as it allows for a much wider 'open world' game concept and would allow for the insertion of multiple stories into a game that can be developed indefinitely based on the game engine. One of the most daunting aspects of CK2, as a game, is the amount of new and varied content that has been added as DLCs over the years: it is huge and expensive if bought as a single package. Yet by creating a compelling game with game play mechanics that remain the same in conception, each of those DLC packages expands on the depth of game play, puts in new decisions for players that have dramatic long-term consequences and, generally, refresh the game periodically with updates to the core game system and mechanics for both the core game and how it uses each of those DLCs. The CK2 with all of its DLC content today is not the game that was brought out originally, yet the core game mechanics are, essentially, the same though with greater variation and additions to them. By interacting with their players at a fundamental level as a game design company, Paradox Games remains involved with a core development team that takes input from the player base so as to fix bugs and adjust content while at the same time developing new content and refreshing older content. This is far more than most RPG game development companies do in the RPG genre in the AAA section of the market, and most AA companies can't afford that sort of involvement due to overhead costs. Yet to retain an active and vital player base willing to buy new content, it is exactly what such companies must do to retain market share.
The concept of 'games as a service' brings into question: who is the main beneficiary of such 'service'? Without deep and meaningful interaction with a player base, and acknowledging that bugs need to be fixed while working with players to understand their criticisms of the game and its design, a game company that pushes new content out may find that its 'service' model isn't meeting the player base. Enticing a few individuals to spend lots of money for such content can be lucrative, but that also means that the function of the game is no longer geared towards interesting game play but towards those few individuals who spend the majority of money on a regular basis for new 'content'. This is self-defeating in the long-term, though lucrative in the short-term: without wider player interest the compelling reason to play a game for more individuals will die off and it is those individuals who feel ill-served by this service that will leave such a game as its actual play content becomes static but 'features' that a player must pay for become more numerous. 'Features' that don't add fundamentally to a game means that game play becomes static: a few new pieces of loot or a recycled plot story as an 'addition' do not actually add to game play as they do not tinker with the fundamental aspects of such game play.
By restricting the genre but opening up game design within the genre and involving the player base in long-term discussions and encouraging modification to their games, Paradox Games has hit upon a long-term, sustainable formula for multiple game titles. CK2 is one of the better examples of this, and it has had more 'legs' than many other franchises that feature RPG game mechanics. While highly abstracted for CK2, the ability to have players run across new events, find different means to address older ones and broaden game play scope all mean that CK2 retains a player base AND adds new game play and features on a regular basis. Few if any 'games as a service' can sustain game play for as long as CK2 has been around. It doesn't offer huge monetary rewards or income for the designers or publisher, but it does offer a steady monetary stream, year on year, as new players come into the franchise from discovery of it from other active community members. This is a goal that many 'games as a service' titles aspire to, but never achieve, thus that 'service' based game will, eventually, get closed down or just die out due to lack of players. By not making that a primary goal, Paradox Studios achieves it.
That is just surreal. We could use more of it in the gaming world.
