Genuinely infuriating, be it your house and dynasty head being changed from you to your brother you granted land to be your vassal or your independence war being invalidated because a claimant faction pushed their demand, or a whole other assortment of things, the glaring issues add up. CK2 has far more depth and is simply the better game as it stands.

Updating my review, the game has significantly improved and I've had fun playing it however when compared with CK2 at the same point in its development cycle CK2 had more depth at this point. There's neat concepts but the game feels very surface level

All that said though, it has potential, it has fun moments, it just needs MANY glaring issues fixed

The above was as of January 2022, and is a picture of the game in an earlier state. It's now almost been 2 years and the game has certainly improved with far less infuriating bugs and such, however it must be said that the game is still very shallow when compared with CK2, even shallow when compared with CK2 when it was around as old as CK3 now is in the dev cycle. Which doesn't mean CK3 is currently a bad game but I really feel like it lacks the depth necessary to be a proper successor to CK2. Take for example that there's still no college of cardinals in vanilla, you need a mod for that. There's no establishing Crusader States like in Holy Fury, religion in general feels very surface level in the name of modularity which I think is a shame. I do like some concepts like travelling and I like pilgrimages but I don't think they make up for the lack of overall depth and they don't feel all that distinct. The netcode is a markedly huge improvement over CK2, and the MP experience is far more seamless since you can hotswap chars easy so you dont have to reset if someone dies, so praise where praise is due I appreciate how easy hotswapping characters is and how much faster the netcode actually sends the savegame. I'm not yet changing my thumb from red to green but I'd consider making it yellow if that was an option, while there are neat concepts the game lacks the depth I would hope it would have at this point when compared with its predecessor. If you are looking for medieval strategy fun, I would still recommend 2 over 3. I still think 3 has the potential if taken in the correct development direction of increasing depth of existent faiths (such as Catholicism) which is currently done mostly by modders, but I do not know that the devs will do this. I mean, we don't even have investiture laws here and all your bishoprics under theocratic just end up being effectively run by your court chaplin which is a massive loss in depth compared to CK2 where you could set your investiture laws and nominate appointees to the Pope if you had Papal investiture.

Genuinely infuriating, be it your house and dynasty head being changed from you to your brother you granted land to be your vassal or your independence war being invalidated because a claimant faction pushed their demand, or a whole other assortment of things, the glaring issues add up. CK2 has far more depth and is simply the better game as it stands. Updating my review, the game has significantly improved and I've had fun playing it however when compared with CK2 at the same point in its development cycle CK2 had more depth at this point. There's neat concepts but the game feels very surface level All that said though, it has potential, it has fun moments, it just needs MANY glaring issues fixed The above was as of January 2022, and is a picture of the game in an earlier state. It's now almost been 2 years and the game has certainly improved with far less infuriating bugs and such, however it must be said that the game is still very shallow when compared with CK2, even shallow when compared with CK2 when it was around as old as CK3 now is in the dev cycle. Which doesn't mean CK3 is currently a bad game but I really feel like it lacks the depth necessary to be a proper successor to CK2. Take for example that there's still no college of cardinals in vanilla, you need a mod for that. There's no establishing Crusader States like in Holy Fury, religion in general feels very surface level in the name of modularity which I think is a shame. I do like some concepts like travelling and I like pilgrimages but I don't think they make up for the lack of overall depth and they don't feel all that distinct. The netcode is a markedly huge improvement over CK2, and the MP experience is far more seamless since you can hotswap chars easy so you dont have to reset if someone dies, so praise where praise is due I appreciate how easy hotswapping characters is and how much faster the netcode actually sends the savegame. I'm not yet changing my thumb from red to green but I'd consider making it yellow if that was an option, while there are neat concepts the game lacks the depth I would hope it would have at this point when compared with its predecessor. If you are looking for medieval strategy fun, I would still recommend 2 over 3. I still think 3 has the potential if taken in the correct development direction of increasing depth of existent faiths (such as Catholicism) which is currently done mostly by modders, but I do not know that the devs will do this. I mean, we don't even have investiture laws here and all your bishoprics under theocratic just end up being effectively run by your court chaplin which is a massive loss in depth compared to CK2 where you could set your investiture laws and nominate appointees to the Pope if you had Papal investiture.