Crusader Kings 2: Interesting Characters Guide | Hacker News Reader

Crusader Kings 2: Interesting Characters Guide

ck2.paradoxwikis.com

41 pointssmacktoward15 comments

Crusader Kings 2 is like a cross breed of The sims (PC game) and Game of thrones (tv series) , but more sinister. You bend the rules, or even change the rules, kill people, and start wars, in order to gain power and influence. It has a very long learning curve, but I imagine once you've learned all the rules it will be very enjoyable.

The learning curve is my gripe with this game. In a 4-5 hour session, I learnt very little of how to actually play the game.

A second 4-5 hour session yielded the same result.

I bought it on sale to play with my SO, and we are both avid gamers, but this was rough. I doubt we'll manage to get into it one day.

Stellaris on the other hand was a lot "simpler" to pick up.

I found watching let's plays the best way to get into it and learn the mechanics. There are quite a few streamers who put out newbie guides for it.

Paradox games are notoriously difficult. I remember, when I bought Europa Universalis 4, I went through 6-7 hours of tutorials on YouTube only to get started. It's still really difficult and I don't understand everything.

While the mechanics are certainly complex, I think a big part of the learning curve is the lack of a concrete objective to focus everything around. It's not just that the game is complex, but that it doesn't even really point you in a particular direction.

Brilliant game, though.

Give a try at playing one of the minor single-county Irish nations, and for your immediate goal, just try to conquer the rest of the island and form the Kingdom of Ireland. It's probably the most toe-in-the-pool area on the game map, since you've only got your immediate neighbors to worry about for the first few hundred years.

I (used to) play this game a lot and that is precisely what is interesting in it imo. In the game you can have some influence on events/characters by doing specific actions: choose the warden of your children with care, try to cultivate alliances with your neighbors through alliances (dynastic alliance etc...) but this is inherently a dynamic system in which the sheer number of factor make it really hard to have a total control of "history".

I frequently find myself playing the game at regular speed and watching events unfold in the neighboring kingdoms, plotting how I could take advantage and by the time my plotting is ready (whether it is engineering a casus belli, assassinating somebody or something else) more often than not the target either changed / disappeared or some more interesting event is taking place (crusades !). Also playing in "watch mode" let's you take the time to read the bios of all the "interesting characters" and learning a lot of stuff.

While enjoying the game... what does it have to do on HN?

The same as anything that makes it to the frontpage - it's of interest to a nontrivial number of members, as determined by the algorithm.

It's not like HN has a mandated theme, it's just a bunch of people interested in somewhat similar stuff.

How does HN even know that there are enough people interested in CK2?

Nevertheless, CK2 is an amazing undertaking. I never really played CK2. I used to play KOEI's Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Those games are focused on relatively short spans of history, and there are not nearly as many "characters" as you can play in CK2. So when I compare, between CK2 and KOEI's games, the amount of effort given in historical research, in trying to find interesting historical figures for people to play as, and in coming up with all the different game mechanics for the characters' stories, it's just unfathomable.

People submit stuff and if "hn finds it interesting" it will be upvoted and rise. Of not, it will just go away. Honestly it's a lot more on the people that browse the new section that most of the public.

> determined by the algorithm

This sentence makes me shiver

Why?

All sorting is algorithmic. Sorting by submission order is an algorithm.

Regardless, we don't have to speculate since the site is open-source. You can see the sorting algorithm, and a breakdown of it, here[1]. It's just number of votes and time decay.

[1] https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news-ranking...

The references are based on actual historical figures. We've been known as a community to enjoy bits of entertaining historical trivia now and then. And that page is very, very entertaining.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com