If you take the reins of a petty king of Ireland, you’ll be surrounded by lords with small domains squabbling over counties that can be absorbed one by one into your lands, either through skilled diplomacy and violent conquest. It’s good to be the king, they tell us, but the job will always keep you on your toes.ĭepending on who you decide to play as the experience will be vastly different. It has a heavy RPG element where you have personal traits, talents, and relationships that define how the other characters of the world respond to you and you’ll always have just as many enemies at home as you do abroad, if not more. Unlike many others in the genre, you are not the nation that you lead, but the individual at the helm. Kings and Queens (Who Are Sometimes Crusaders)Ĭrusader Kings III is a character-focused strategy simulation of being a ruler during the middle ages. As much as I had concerns about it requiring DLC to reach the depth of the previous title in the series, I found myself already enjoying it and fully engaged with a game with many innovative improvements over the last with shockingly few losses. There aren’t enough hours in the day to put as many hours into these as I want to and now we’ve gone and added Crusader Kings III to the mix.Īfter putting around thirty hours into this latest entry, I can happily say that it doesn’t disappoint. I’ve even put a few hours into Imperator: Rome, a title that gets the short end of the stick with its public image, though admittedly, it does have some distance to go to compete with its aforementioned peers. Stellaris is another that’s become a perma-install in my Steam library with well over a hundred hours of customizing a species and empire while kicking off a purge or two with (or against) so friends. I’ve put far more time into these than I have just about any other game out there and yet I always seem to learn and improve with every playthrough. Crusader Kings II was my point of entry for them, followed by Hearts of Iron IV, and finally, Europa Universalis IV. Paradox strategies are probably my favorite games out there on the market.