Crusader Kings III Preview

From its first developer diary, Crusader Kings III was touted as an evolution of the series which was always an ambitious claim, considering its predecessor’s complexity. Paradox grand strategy titles are known for their staggering amount of moving parts, but after spending some hands-on time with its upcoming entry during a preview event earlier this month, we were left impressed.

There’s plenty that’s familiar: you play as a ruler tasked to ensure their dynasty persists through time, interacting with many other characters who are doing the same while pushing their own agendas forward; you can use a mixture of military might, marriages and devious scheming to further your plans, groom heirs, set off on pilgrimages or suck up to the Pope for cash. But there’s also plenty that’s been drastically changed making the whole experience feel fresh and expanding upon the series’ potential for emergent storytelling.

Right off the bat, we noticed the cleaner UI. The buttons helping you manage your realm have been moved to the right side, while the number of interactable elements has grown quite a bit, offering more shortcuts that ease navigation around the game’s menus. The stylized characters and colorful interface stick out, granting the title a lot of personality. A neat aesthetic touch is the inclusion of detailed 3D renders of rulers, dressed in appropriate garb that differs from region to region. You’ll be able to distinguish at a glance the Byzantine Emperor from a Norse king or someone afflicted by smallpox from a character with a nasty wound.

Crusader Kings III no longer features a minimap, tying different map views to levels of zoom. When fully zoomed in, you see each barony under your control depicted as its own chunk of land, menus also relaying information about its development status, how well you’re liked by the locals and which buildings you can construct. Zoom out and you’ll see entire realms, each with its own color, which should be a familiar sight to anyone who’s spent even a bit of time with the series.

Interestingly enough, the map itself is depicted as an actual paper map, reminding us of those from the medieval period. Map modes for faiths, de jure kingdoms and the likes also remain available. In terms of presentation, Crusader Kings III has the potential to be the most varied Paradox grand strategy title yet.

Dynasties are no longer just a name you have to perpetuate. The actions of the Dynasty head and its members can increase their Renown which lets leaders unlock Legacies. These are long-term bonuses that aim to shape a Dynasty’s identity. Where one of the tracks focuses on increasing the likelihood of children inheriting a positive trait while reducing the likelihood of inheriting negative ones, other tracks might focus on making characters more chivalrous or devious. Characters play a central role in Crusader King III and they’ve seen a series of improvements that help better define them as individuals.

Although fewer per character than in Crusader Kings II, traits remain a decisive factor in who people are. They’re also two-way streets, influencing how your ruler views others but also how others view your ruler. Martially-inclined characters excel when leading or training armies but less so when it comes to helping a vassal organize their mansion in an attempt to sway them. Stress is a new addition that increases as you perform actions not in tune with your character’s personality. If your ruler is a villain and you force them to be compassionate, he’ll sooner or later suffer a mental break, looking for a means of coping. This can be anything from visiting a brothel to becoming a drunkard or confiding in someone; all these having potential consequences of their own.

Lifestyles further cement what your character excels at. You can lean heavily into the lifestyle associated with your main stat or start fishing for perks from other lifestyles, although you’ll earn experience much slower. Each of the five available choices lets you pick one of three focuses that offer instant bonuses and go down three skill trees that hold powerful traits which take time to unlock. Characters focused on learning can lean into the theological aspects of life, significantly reducing the time it takes to convert counties to their Faith. These perks are specialized yet varied, being able to reduce the number of losses your army takes while retreating or even unlock new Schemes or types of Cassus Beli (reasons for war). Needless to say, shifting from a Martial-focused leader to one that excels at diplomacy is always noticeable, asking you to change your strategy as options are given and taken away from you. If your military might isn’t enough to vassalize a nearby kingdom due to existing alliances, a different ruler that’s not just liked by the neighbor but also a master of diplomacy could have them bending the knee in no time.

The Council plays a vital role in managing your realm, its members being able to perform actions such as fabricating claims on sought territory, raising your control of counties, converting them to your faith or collecting taxes. Each Councilor has three tasks, which are all useful at the right times. Assigning these roles to the right people can make a huge difference in how efficiently tasks are performed. That being said, powerful vassals will end up demanding spots on your Council and, should you have to accommodate one with a particularly large army but no real skills, you can end up with a dent in your finances thanks to them “accidentally” promising your vassals a more lenient feudal contract. The addition of the spouse councilor is another great move. Aside from ensuring that your dynasty moves on, spouses play a fairly important role, being able to complement a ruler’s weaker stats or take a more general role in helping them manage the realm. They can also improve the stats of some councilors, through events, or ask you to fire your excellent Steward because they gave them a funny look.

Events are also back in Crusader Kings III. Some of them are one-offs that determine, for example, the quality of walls built in a county based on your choice of action. If you’re the guardian of a child, you’ll also get to directly influence their traits by guiding them through different situations as they grow up, like nudging the way they treat or think of a caught criminal. Your own traits, personality and lifestyle play into the events you can get. One of our Catholic kings was particularly lustful – a behavior we would never encourage – and, upon discovering an incestuous relationship between two members of his family, had the option of partaking in some sinful threesome incest fun. Overall, the events we encountered were not just varied and well-written but also did a great job of creating a strong impression of a living medieval world around us.

Schemes, the main avenues of pursuing Intrigue in Crusader Kings III, rely on longer event chains. They’re also a powerful tool that can help you deal with bits of your realm breaking away in partition succession (formerly Gavelkind). While playing as the successor of the recently deceased king of Ireland, the county of Leinster ended up in our brother’s possession, becoming independent in the process. Our king was the next in line, so we started a Scheme to murder our brother. This triggered events that offered different avenues of proceeding towards the deadly climax. Agents – other characters who pool their efforts towards the same goal – and assigning the Spymaster to bolster our schemes made the process even smoother. A couple of successful events later, the king’s dear brother was beset by bandits while traversing dark woods, killed, and his lands transferred to their rightful owner.

Having your loyal Spymaster sniffing around different courts may discover not just that your Spouse has a lover in one of your best knights, but that several of your vassals are deviants. That can have an adverse effect on your relationship with these characters and vice versa. Secrets like these can later be leveraged in different ways as Hooks. To name a few options, they can let you raise the amount of taxes or levies you gain from a vassal without being viewed as a tyrant, or force someone to accept a proposed marriage. Secrets and Hooks can also be used against you, instilling a powerful sense of vulnerability to Crusader Kings III’s characters.

Army movement in Crusader Kings III feels smoother, unit models benefitting from improved animations. Naval levies no longer exist as separate entities, armies automatically embarking and traversing over bodies of water. To counter this newfound freedom, long voyages add to your maintenance costs and can lead to soldiers suffering from attrition. Combat has received quite a few changes under the hood, armies usually being made up of expendable levies, professional men-at-arms and powerful knights. Men-at-arms come in different types – some of which are culture-specific – and counter each other, while Knights are actual characters from your court whose Prowess stat determines their ability in battle.

In our experience, most fights still resulted in the side with the higher numbers winning, however, as we pushed towards the latter periods of the game we also saw larger armies losing to smaller armies that had the right amount of counters and terrain advantage on their side. Rally points are another great addition, letting you set up multiple spots in your realm where you can raise armies. This makes it easier to start wars with a unified force, rather than having to wait for multiple armies of 200 people to join up with you from all corners of you realm. These can be set both inland – for defensive purposes – or in a freshly-conquered border county to fuel future conquest attempts. Additionally, the UI more clearly informs you of the size of an opponent’s armies. Crusades play out very similarly to those in Crusader Kings II. Our experience with them was rather chaotic, the preview build not featuring an option of linking armies to one another. This meant that we constantly had to micromanage our small band of Irish peasants, which often led to it being intercepted by more organized enemy forces.

Religion is another area that has received a serious overhaul, rulers now belonging to one of multiple faiths. Each faith belongs to a larger religion but determines its tenets – major principles – and doctrines individually. Provided you’ve enough Piety, you can branch off and form your own faith, Crusader Kings III’s system letting you heavily customize it. You could, potentially, decide to create a branch of Christianity that has Tenets increasing naval speed, allowing syncretism with Islam and vows of poverty, while being perfectly okay with female adultery and kinslaying but not with marrying your relatives. That doesn’t mean other Christians will like you, though. We only managed to fiddle a bit with the system, spreading the Briainist Faith across Ireland – thanks to one of its Tenets actually increasing conversion speed –, but there’s huge potential for defining new Faiths, both from a roleplaying and stat-crunching perspective.

Technology in Crusader Kings III is based around individual innovations split between different eras that trigger with set years. These can differ from culture to culture and range from ones unlocking new types of buildings or men-at-arms, to granting new succession types or increasing your ruler’s domain limit. Contact with other cultures can speed up the acquisition of certain innovations while the Cultural head – the ruler holding the most counties of a given culture – can also designate one Innovation as that culture’s Fascination, greatly reducing the time it takes to unlock it. Overall, the new approach to this system feels much more involved and lets you better target specific improvements for your realm, the long unlock time adding extra weight to your decisions

Crusader Kings III is well on track to become an engrossing medieval sandbox that prioritizes player freedom far more than its predecessor did. Although numbers continue to govern most interactions, its systems intertwine with writing and art style to successfully instill a sense of character actions being the driving force between your various pursuits. The potential for crafting your own stories, or have them crafted by events not under your control, also remains strong. Needless to say, we’re eager to see what the full version has to offer when it launches on September 1.

Lastly, Crusader Kings III also marks a huge leap in terms of tutorials and player onboarding, which you can read more about in our dedicated article.