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I test the reigns down in Africa: A Crusader Kings 3 diarySheer Benin brass
Sheer Benin brass
If I hadn’t got in onCrusader Kings 2shortly after it came out, I would have taken one look at its list of DLC (currently going for£184.65 on Steam, and that’s with a discount) and noped right the hell out. Fortunately, the base game was already outstanding enough that I gladly supported it for ourbest games of the 2010slist. Most of the DLC was cosmetic after all, or was for realms I wouldn’t play as.
But anyway. ANYWAY.Crusader Kings IIIis out now, and while it couldn’t possibly incorporate eight years of add-ons, I wanted to see how it compares to vanilla CK2. Does a non-feudal ruler play any differently? Is it possible to thrive outside the default setting of kingly Europe? What’s it like to start out as an obscure chief at the distant edge of the enormous world map? Let’s find out.
A mildly annoying random event where I can’t just tell the merchant to get lost.
You can’t rely on intrinsic authority, legality, or feudal politeness. If a town has money and their army is small or distracted, you can just raid it. If you want to control a province, you can just take it. Tribal powers have a directness that rewards the bold and the covetous.
That’s not to say they’re brutal (any more than other government types) or stupid, though. Survival in West Africa takes more than violence, and if anything alliances are more crucial, because anything you take can be taken back. People respect intelligence, faith, and plain likeability, so it pays to be a wise chief. Skulduggery is certainly an option, but down here in Oyo, my people’s religion leads to large families and lots of heirs, so murdering my way to victory would kill off half my own house.
Tribes rely heavily on specialist soldiers. Ours will lose some edge outside our forest homelands.
Crusader Kings 3has a religion system so exciting that I’ve had to write two piles of notes about it to get them out of the way. There aren’t just religions now; there are enough religions to make Richard Dawkins tweet himself into a liquid. Each character has a faith, which is a specific denomination of a larger religion (Christianity, Buddhism, Kordofan, etc. Some have only a single faith until someone - perhaps you - invents a new branch). Each faith is a combination of three tenets, of which there are dozens, each changing several aspects of the game.
Oyo and most of its neighbours have the Orisan (I am told “Òrìṣà-Ifá” is more correct, but will stick with what I hope are acceptable transliterations) faith, initially the only Yoruban religion. One of its tenents is Ancestor Worship, which gives us extra benefits for pilgrimage, and lots of extra prestige from getting married and banging out sprogs. Ancestor worship also means we’re a slightly more tight knit family than most.
Orisa is also an impressively equitable faith. Men and women of Oyo inherit equally, with nobody batting an eyelid at female warriors, chieftains, or priests. Anyone can divorce, homosexuality is fine, clergy are duty-bound to take care of the poor, and we’re pluralist: although we still consider other faiths hostile, we’re less of a dick about it than most. Oh, and rulers can have concubines or consorts.
Between his wife and three concubines Nana Oyo ends up withfourteengoddamn kids, but our succession laws mean they’ll all inherit equally, so they’re all prone to liking him. Thus, the high chiefdom of Oyo is set up with a family of friendly rulers at our back, and both weak and strong neighbours. It’s time to start playing Agar.io with these suckers. My marshal Ayofemi is young, hot, and chill, so I make her my first concubine before sending her off to conquer the chiefdom of Bussa, capturing the chief’s wife Lambu Debo in the process. According to the war progress screen, “no important prisoners” have been taken. Harsh. Experimentally, I take her as a concubine too, and then it begins.
Ayofemi and I bond over her killing a dude and become soulmates, and eventually bash out six kids together. I want my kids to get a good education, so I send him to the most skilled person within emissary range, the High Chieftess Daurama of Kano, for her to raise.
Warfare is far less hassle than before. The whole family go to war frequently, and joining in is a good source of prestige and friendly relations.
For now I focus on security. Between Nana Oyo’s progress through the “intrigue” skill tree, and my spymaster’s constant efforts to dig up everyone’s secrets, I’m able to blackmail my hostile, powerful northern neighbour, Duke Farbas Baadindiye of Borgu, into an alliance. This way he can’t attack me without widespread condemnation (and of course I’d then tell everyone he’s secretly humping his vassal’s shaman), so I can focus on conquering the weaker lands around him until we’re big enough to take him too. I also unlock a perk that lets us extort people for money if we uncover an embarrassing or criminal secret about them. I proceed to do this to Duke Farbas for the next 20 years.
Incidentally, the shaman’s daughter is also boffing the vassal, for which Farbas could simply lock them both up if he knew. Even if you don’t use them, sitting at the centre of a web of secrets provides its own entertainment. Meanwhile, I too have been screwing around, but unlike Farbas I don’t deny it. My wife and concubines aren’t happy, but they get over it. Besides, I’m the High Chief of Oyo. Who’s gonna arrest me?
Some friendships pay off politically, but they can also simply make your character happier. Things like a character summarised in a tooltip as “Your sister, champion, and friend” can generate some lovely moments.
Despite Oyo’s flaws, his family adore him all his life, with +100 opinions across the board. They would make an extremely powerful Clan, a form of government built entirely on family unity.
I search once more for Zaynab, the daughter of Lambu Debu, the concubine I took prisoner from a neighbour. She is holed up with her father in Kano. The guy I kicked out of his land just HAPPENS to show up in the court where my son is being raised? There is no way he isn’t up to something. I have someone kidnap the girl, which I’m told has an 85% chance of failing. The arbitrary gods of Chaos Mode reward my devotion, and she is finally reunited with her mother. All three of them now hate me, but I don’t care. Catching on to the mood, my dear concubine and soulmate Ayofemi accidentally whips herself to death while indulging in a fetish.
She bore six heirs and conquered multiple lands before ruling one alone for decades. Ayofemi was definitely our MVP. It feels fitting that the only person who could defeat her was herself.
My scheming is not without a downside. The new “stress” system punishes Nana Oyo (now Ajapada Oyo, having raided, taxed, and extorted enough money to form a duchy) for going against his nature so often. Although he has the “Deceiftful” trait, he is also “Just”, which I’ve actually adhered to, being conniving but mostly fair. But each time I’ve done something underhanded it has stressed poor Oyo out, and this has caused him to suffer a few mental breaks. He’s picked up an unseemly habit of visiting brothels to relax, and spends a few years as a recluse.
For the rest of his life, Oyo consolidates, going on pilgrimages and developing the land. Tribes get minimal benefit from this, but I like to think it makes life better for everyone. It pleases me to look at the global map of development level, where Yorubaland is forming a little orange hub in a lake of purple. We’re slightly behind Ghana, but we’re almost level with a fair chunk of Europe, and are beating Ireland at least. Of course, most of South Asia and the Muslim world are, accurately, centuries ahead of everyone else, but that’s a problem for my great-great-grandkids.
Oyo’s granddaughter Bolade becomes the new High Chief of Oyo. She is an impatient lesbian who will go on to double our landmass, beat cancer, and take a giant peasant as consort who leads her armies and trains her daughter to fight, who in turn goes on to avenge his murder and kill the queen’s heir in a duel. She also takes to wearing the sick face mask seen in the header after a botched operation.
Bolade spent five years sending letters to this random woman in Bejaia after picking her out from all the hot women in Africa, an attempt at seduction that she probably took for the first ever Nigerian Princess scam.
So. This playthrough has been great, and answers the question of how Crusader Kings 3 handles Africa as best I can. The tribal powers' looser rules about conquest, and ability to bash out armies with prestige can make a big difference if you lean on them. None of this is specific to Africa, mind. There are tribal powers all over the world, from Alba to Zhetysu, some immensely powerful.
What distinguishes them more is their religion. Orisa’s rather enlightened interpretation of the divine, and tendency towards large and loyal family made for a different mood than I’m used to, and I was happier to spread it than I usually am the more dour, backwards 10th century Catholicism my previous games lumped me with. A fair part of it is, for lack of a better word, psychosomatic, but the series is firmly a roleplaying game to me, not an exercise in efficiency or powergaming. It provided a welcome new layer of character.
The religion system is far more exciting than a game about staring at a map for 300 hours should be. Sure, most of Africa is resolutely Pagan, and thus doesn’t get anything as dramatic as the crusades or jihads, but I can hardly fault a series called “Crusader Kings” for placing emphasis on the Mediterranean (plus there’s an option to start with all religions randomised. Want a world with a Tengri Duke of Capua and Vaishnavi Middlesex? I have seen it).
Aside from anything else, it’s a pleasant change to play a game on what feels like a whole new map, rather than invading Normandy for the jillionth time.
I don’t believe you could play as an African ruler and come away with an understanding of what it was like there a thousand years ago. I also don’t think that people should be grateful for any representation at all even if it’s poor. But I think Crusader Kings 3 does a good job of representing, not just including, Africa as a place full of cooks, poets, drunks, warriors, masons, priests, inbred kings, and big gay cancer patients like anywhere else. I haven’t found the specialised depth I was hoping for (and didn’t really expect to), but nor do I feel like I’m just playing as England with African names. It makes West Africa as interesting to play in as anywhere else. The chiefs of Yorubaland have immensely improved my week. They’re an excellent place to start out.
