By now, Paradox has become a master of pithy event text—it grabs you quickly, and then just as quickly it lets you move onto your next scandal. You can tell the writers had the most fun with the salacious stuff, but even mundane correspondence with bishops can be worth a read. With characters being more tangible, skimming their letters just seems rude.

Lifestyles let you chisel away at your rulers without having to rely on random events. They're effectively classes, each representing one of the game's skills. Through their education, everyone has an inclination for a specific lifestyle, but you can pick whichever one you want and reset all your progression if you change your mind. Each lifestyle is split up into areas you can focus on, giving you a persistent passive bonus and letting you start to earn XP that can be used to unlock perks from the lifestyle's three trees. Where its predecessor took a lot of inspiration from RPGs, this is a full RPG progression system that's fuelled by stories rather than kills and quests.

The intrigue lifestyle is what I've found myself gravitating towards the most. It gives you a leg up in the murky world of secrets, schemes and hooks, as well as spawning events that let you explore your shady side. I often start with good intentions, but it never takes long before I'm spinning my web. Or at least trying to. On more than one occasion, I've realised too late that I was really the fly.


The lovely Mediterranean powerhouse I'd spent a lifetime building ended up ruined when my big mouth of a brother outed me for killing our other, stupider brother. I did the deed, I'll admit it. I sent my spymaster to dig around for secrets I could use as hooks to make people do my bidding. I seduced my brother's vassal and bribed one of his knights to join me in the plot. And when he was dead, I used the secrets I'd gathered to force my cowed nobles into making shitty deals and giving me more cash. So when my surviving brother found out about the deed, he tried to blackmail me and, failing that, he told everyone. All my vassals with their bruised egos rode up against me, naturally. I met a nasty end. That's what I get for dragging my 70-year-old ass into battle.

My fixation with intrigue ended up killing me, but it was also responsible for a lifetime that's stuck in my head. Lifestyles help turn the cavalcade of pop-ups and events into a cohesive story, setting the tone and making sure the drama you become embroiled in gives you the chance to develop the skills you're interested in, or at least builds on your past. And yeah, sometimes it will lead to your death.

The most insidious threat to a ruler, however, is stress. It's what keeps you honest. Or cruel. Or greedy. You gain stress whenever you act against your personality. If you're chaste and you start rolling around in the hay with a courtier, you're going to be wracked with guilt. It's sneaky. It got me once just because I thought about my deceased best friend. Boom—I'm feeling stressed. I hit the bottle to push down those feelings, and then I kept hitting the bottle until I looked like gammon. And then I died, again.


Sometimes I'd talk myself into taking the hit—it's just poisoning one guy, it's fine, just do it—but it quickly ramps up. There are so many ways that it can kill you or just make you utterly useless, so the prospect of getting stressed in a game made me extremely stressed in real life. It's awesome. There's more weight to these choices, more risk, and the price of free will is the constant threat of an existential crisis.

I've always had a problem with RPGs letting you make completely out-of-character choices without any real consequences. You can play Commander Shepard as a paragon of virtue and then turn around and be like, "I'm super racist now, guys", and nobody thinks that's weird. It's fine. Here's some red karma. Crusader Kings 3 will kill your ass if you try that shit.

While you can spend incalculable hours wrapped up in roleplaying and intrigue, there's a huge simulated world to paint in your colour. It's a sprawling, kaleidoscopic map that stretches from Iceland to Nigeria to Tibet. What were often tiny bits of land with few identifying features in Crusader Kings 2 are now large regions with their own character.


Diverse terrain, unique geographical quirks and special buildings set these areas apart and make some of them very tempting prizes for would-be conquerors. These are also considerations that you'll need to take into account if you're the conqueror. Maybe the fortress you're besieging has monumentally tough walls, or the terrain might put your cavalry-heavy army at a disadvantage. The expanded map also means expanded tactical wrinkles—welcome ones—that make fights less of a pure numbers game.

OK, a lot of the time it does just come down to who has the most people willing to charge into battle. And you'll usually need to chase them and fight them again until they're completely wiped out. It's still Crusader Kings. There are more opportunities to get an edge, though, like using knights and more high quality, specialised troops. Knights are like regular members of your court who want titles and legacies and a litany of other things, but they're also brilliant warriors who will wade into battle alongside the army's commander and slice their way through the peasant levies. They're badasses, but as they grow more influential they'll have greater expectations, and your greatest knight could also become your greatest rival. It's all very Arthur and Lancelot.

There are other ways to conquer the world that don't come with the responsibility of managing an empire that spans continents. You can expand your dynasty to every corner of the map without gobbling up every county, using marriage and inheritances to place your relatives in seats of power outside your own realm. Powerful members of your dynasty might also decide to form a cadet branch, getting out from under your influence and gaining control over the family members in this new house.


You're not sacrificing power; you're dividing responsibility. Other houses and independent rulers contribute renown to the dynasty, and as the head that means you're able to throw your weight around and spend that renown on dynasty-wide legacies—think perks, but they're permanent and for the whole family. Eventually you can build a dynasty of warlords or ensure that all the realms under your dynasty's umbrella run with machine-like efficiency. These are long-term goals, but you can get your first legacy fairly early on, laying the foundation for your specialised dynasty.

It has been a huge relief to let some other characters do some of the heavy lifting. Leading a dynasty to immortality is exhausting, but now it's a team effort. Some branches will wither and die, while others might embed themselves within a foreign empire and then one day rule it, but I'm happy as long as I'm getting that sweet renown. Spreading your dynasty lets you enjoy the hit of power and rush of expansion but doesn't ditch you with a whole host of new administrative problems. All of the glory, but not quite as much of the hard work—it's the dream.

The loftiest ambition, of course, is to make everyone agree your god is the best one, or you could get in on the medieval era's biggest craze: heresy! Yes, if you're bored of Catholicism or another established religion, you can just make your own faith. This can cause a lot of instability, piss off the dominant faith and requires a lifetime devoted to piety to pull off, but it's entirely worth it.