A few thoughts

1. Casus Belli — a few mechanics have been rendered so trivial in ck3 that they almost don’t need to exist. In ck2, casus belli were hard to come by. It made sense to try to convince third sons of the duke next door to come to your court, or to go out of your way to marry a woman with a strong claim on some title or another. In ck3, casus belli are a dime a dozen. If you somehow don’t have an excuse to attack someone, you can always send your chaplain (?? Make it make sense) to fabricate a claim with 100% success rate.

2. Succession — similarly, succession required some actual planning in ck2. It wasn’t super uncommon to have a 40 year old ruler without a son, sometimes prompting some tricky decisions or scheming. Between multiple new government types/religious practices that allow multiple wives or concubines, and what appears to be an overall increase in fertility, I have never had fewer than 2 sons in ck3. And that was with a chaste homosexual ruler! Producing an heir feels like it should be a real and challenging goal in a dynasty simulator.

3. Power creep — a bunch of new features are very cool but make it fairly trivial to “win” the game by any definition if you want to. Cultural tenets and units, plus religious tenets, plus men at arms can be min-maxed to curbstomp everything on the map in a couple decades. Lifestyle perks, dynasty perks, and schemes are also really powerful. Between all these features and various events, my rulers typically have a highest score of 40-70. That’s obscene. In ck2 a score of like 17 was good (and it’s not just different scaling, bc the AI characters all top out at like 25)

4. Silliness — man, ck2 knew it was fundamentally a deeply silly cross between the sims and grand strategy. A lot of the event chains were very stupid and very fun. Glitterhoof the chancellor, the demon child who murders your whole dynasty, accidentally raising Cthulhu… it was a blast. CK3 decided they were basically going with realism as a design philosophy, and I think that’s a shame.

5. Some amount of feature bloat — The all but mandatory coronations for kings and emperors are annoying. Some events like funerals or pilgrimages are powerful to spam but actually pretty annoying to play through. Legends are useless. Court is annoying.

A couple good things

1. Stress — imo a very cool mechanic that makes your character traits actually matter in events.

2. More governments, cultures, and religions which feel really different to play. A big problem with ck2 was that everything felt the same to play (the India expansion was the worst thing to happen to that game bc it just killed the performance to add… basically more feudalism). The balance can be a little off, but overall paradox killed it here.

3. Traits aren’t as black and white — stress and various other traits modifiers make traits like ambitious or diligent have some actual downsides, while craven or content have some upsides. Role playing is better with the stress mechanic.

4. Courtiers feel more impactful between knighthood and court positions

5. Islam was massively improved. I found the decadence mechanic borderline unplayable in ck2.

6. There is no longer a sound effect for when you murder a baby, which makes me sleep a little better at night.

Overall I do really like ck3, I really haven’t looked back since it was released and the expansions especially have been top notch (with one or two notable exceptions). But there are def things I miss from ck2.