You have a chance to fund inspired courtiers and visitors, as well as take a decision to have something manufactured… You can also steal items that you have a claim on, or declare wars based on these claims. The artefacts system is as quick to slurp it away as the pilgrimage/Hajj trips will. While the court grandeur effects, and the new roles, take away your gold at a constant, predictable rate. Once again, most of this costs a lot, but by levelling up the grandeur of your court you unlock a string of perks that can really change the game. It all adds a lot more personality to the game, and makes player-to-player and region-to-region experiences feel varied. You can also see characters standing around and mingling your spymaster might be looming around in the background, a flamboyant and generous courtier might be entertaining some of your guests ahead of the throne, and much much more. It’s an area that you can visit, take (five-yearly) a series of decisions, decorate with artefacts, specify your court culture and splendour levels, and more. That’s all tied to the Throne Room mechanics. In fact, in my latest, 22-character run I was about 60% Stewardship focused throughout, and spent a lot of time bringing appropriate guardians and courtiers in to keep my future player characters well aligned to that playstyle. Combine this with the fact that you can flick your spouse over to simply boosting your stewardship, and rulers under you essentially share their own benefits through boosting your leader’s stats… well, let’s just say that Stewardship as a main trait actually becomes one of the most important of the statistics at play. All of these roles have a salary though, in fact, if I had to say that there’s one area of Crusader Kings III that’s massively been shaken up by Royal Court, it’s money.Įach courtier role, each level of court, and each Artifact - either placed in court, or equipped on you - add modifiers, and while each of them costs, a lot of them can quickly avalanche together and double-or-more any of your areas of speciality. For example, with Bodyguards they decrease the success chance of plots against you, assuming they’re not involved in them, meanwhile, Antiquarians slow down the decline of your items and artefacts. Each of these roles have modifiers attached to them. It adds in 21 roles that can be granted to courtiers, these range from bodyguard through to court jester as well as adding in roles that specifically tie into a lot of the new mechanics. Both of these have been addressed with the new Royal Court DLC. One of the biggest things that didn’t make it through from CKII was the court and the extra roles for courtiers, another was the artefact system. But, some things were definitely missing, and Crusader Kings III: Royal Court is the start of filling in (and expanding beyond) those gaps. I was happily wrong, I’ve only booted CKII about four times since III launched, and a couple of those were simply for comparison’s sake. ![]() The visuals were bound to be vastly better, and a lot of the mechanics and designs were bound to be refined, but it felt incredibly obvious that a mass of content was going to be stripped out of the frankly bloated Crusader Kings II for launch. As such, I had middling expectations for Crusader Kings III. Crusader Kings II had been an experiment in expansion-pack led, live-product redesign for Paradox… in fact, it was a case of The Ship of Theseus, where almost every area of the original game had seen so many overhauls that a Day One player wouldn’t recognise the initial product - it was so different. ![]() When Crusader Kings III launched back in August 2020 it launched more feature-complete than I had originally expected.
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