Crusader Kings

Well, moving on to what I've been playing.

I dove, as I kind of spoke about last week, I dove a little deeper into the Crusader Kings three new expansions that they just came out.

All Under Heaven was the Chinese one.

What was this one? It's called like something God because it's religious.

Until that comes out, I may switch over to another game after that.

But yeah, it's pretty good.

I mean, if you want a big-ass expansion to Crusader Kings, again, I think that it...

The big issue I think some players may have with this one, depending on what you like to play, is, like, it really focuses more on, like, Europe, you know? And, like, so it kind of...

The Great Wave kind of completely reworked how the naval system worked in Victoria 3 and added a lot of new features that really changed the dynamic in a way that I thought was really cool and interesting.

Well, another Paradox game, this time Crusader Kings 3, is also having a major update and expansion with the new By God Alone DLC.

I had reached out to Paradox and asked, like, hey, would it be possible to have another developer on to talk about this? I really like the different story elements and some of the new religious mechanics that are being implemented in this expansion.

And although they weren't able to set up a... developer interview for me this time they were able to provide me with a review copy of the dlc so i could give it a playthrough and oh my goodness i have loved it this is one of the most fun gaming experiences that i have had with a paradox game So even though I wasn't able to pick the brains of a developer today, I'm going to do the next best thing and kind of talk about all of the cool things we can learn as game designers from this new expansion through the lens of some campaigns that I played with By God Alone, talk about the new features, talk about what works, and talk about how, as designers, we can kind of rebuild an element of something we have built and improve upon it, increase the complexity, and make it more fun without completely reinventing the wheel of the game.

More information about that in the episode description.

With all that out of the way, let's get into the actual review of By God Alone and let's learn why this is such a really fascinating piece of game design.

So let's start by just covering really quickly what Crusader Kings 3 actually is.

since we usually talk about Magic the Gathering on this channel, it's a bit of a different type of game.