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I tried the game when it was originally released. I thought it was kind of interesting, but I didn't stick with it long. Anyway, I wanted to take a look at what the expansion added, and found the following list:

The much awaited expansion Deus Vult brings:


A graphical overhaul to increase player experience

Various added inter-character relations, representing loyalty inside courts, relations between countries, as well as friends and rivals for all characters. No longer will realms just fall apart, a beleaguered King will always have friends who will support him. Also beware as your smoothly running realm could run into trouble when your nice loyal vassal becomes your rival.

Introductions of new gameplay aspects like the stability affecting realms, numerous traits for characters and options for diplomacy, such as the possibility to send fosterlings to other courts. In addition an all-new system for children has been added. No longer will a 3 year old be able to run a realm effectively. Children are all now born with 0 stats and then develop over childhood. You'll never know how good your heir will be until he matures.

A revised interface to streamline gameplay, with several completely redesigned windows. Immediate alert icons highlight immediate problems with your realm and a full ledger with more than a dozen detailed pages.

A variety of new events as well as a substantial amount of changes and improvements to the tools used by modders.

Now, that's a pretty underwhelming feature set in my opinion. I took a look at some screenshots, and the 'graphical overhaul' wan't readily apparent to my eyes. It looked like a few new details.

This looks like a good patch, but not a worthy expansion. Still Paradox wants to charge you $15 for it. I would even think it's okay if they simply re-released CK Deus Volt as an updated version of the game at the new low price of $15, but that isn't so. You still have to buy the original game at full price, and then the expansion too.

Needless to say, I'm not interested in giving this expansion a try. What do you all think of what Paradox is doing here?

*enter generic Henry D. P'dox rant here:___________*

Seriously though, there was a link to a 8-pages PDF somewhere @ P'dox, which gives more details on the improvements. They seemed not quite so small as Your quote makes it look like.

Still, if the whole thing is worth 15$ remains debatable, IMHO...

Regards, Henry

I am not sure myself....CK is one of my fav games but the expansion does seem like a bigger patch...

I've had such discussion not so long ago with pocus himself in private but it was a bit deeper than just a pay 4 patch issue. It was involving patch + expansion + account auth system + stat tracking + tournament.

I think the concept around patches is to make the original game sell but the way you describe it... quoting their text that's more of an expansion.

My personal XP with Paradox: EU3 1.3 then NA bringing the game from 1.3 to 2.0. I haven't seen much of a change...perhaps just the auto-send merchant feature. The AI is a bit dumb and in vanilla...pffff

I'd save them for NPC but i guess u're talking about 15$ to spend *after* buying npc.

I've been playing DV a lot recently. It has two major flaws (plus some other things of varying severity) as it stands at the moment:

1. CTDs - these were eliminated for the most part in 1.05 but are back again in DV. Unlike the original CK though saves seem not be permanently corrupted, so it could be worse. In my SP game my last 100 years of game saw no CTDs at all. Still it needs to be fixed and as I understand it Paradox are working on a patch.

2. Random pledging of vassals. If you get to a position where you have a pile of prestige you'll get people pledging allegiance from all around the map, usually with no sense at all. Original CK was a bit too static due to depending solely on historical titles, but this is way to far in the other direction. I would hope that this is going to get fixed, but I haven't seen anything from Paradox about whether its a bug or WAD.

Now, that's the bad. The good news is that there's a lot more going on in CK V. First of all you get a ledger which was completely absent from CK. Just by itself this transforms gameplay as now you have the information at your fingertips to try out all sorts of different tactics of varying degrees of subtelty. There's a whole range of new actions you can take - sending and receiving fosterlings, forcing rebelling vassals to re-vassalize, making friends and rivals and so on. Graphics have improved for me as you can now set a higher resolution for the map screens.

Personally I would qualify it as a big patch, but it does genuinely transform the game dramatically - which is more than I can say for a lot of other add-ons and expansions. If you liked CK then its worth the money. If you almost liked CK but didn't like the incredibly clumsy interface (ie lack of a ledger for things like finding brides, checking inheritance orders, assigning court positions, etc) then it's also well worth the money. Basically it transforms the game into what it probably should have been in the first place. Now if you find that morally abhorrent then I'd say it's definitely not worth the money. I'd also say that really they shouldn't be selling vanilla CK any more and should probably make an all-inclusive 'gold' version, but as its an old game I'm sure picking up a CD of CK isn't going to be very expensive.

Have fun
Finn