Marriage is no picnic for Muslims in Crusader Kings II add-on

Posted by on June 26, 2012 in Games

The Sword of Islam add-on for Crusader Kings II is out today. When Crusader Kings II came out, I thought it was an oversight that you couldn’t play Muslim dynasties in a game about the Crusades. But it turns out Paradox wanted to either a) take time to do it right because the systems in place to game European dynasties wouldn’t be a satisfying representation of medieval Islam, or b) make money from DLC. Probably a little of both. And frankly, given that they’re right about a) and given the quality of most of their DLC, I can’t complain.

In the list of main features, alongside things like the new decadence concept for Muslim rulers, more countries, culture specific interface elements, the addition of Shia and Sunni Islam, and reworked combat, you’ll find this:

Wife wants to become first wife

That’s a “main feature”. Sure, you wanna-be caliphs can have four wives, but don’t think it’s going to make your life any easier.

  • Nightwish

    My campaign uniting the kingdom of Ireland is going slowly enough (1120s) that I’ll definitely have time to wait for another sale. Mercenaries are brutally needed to keep Scotland away.
    Nice game, very addictive, even if I only half know what I’m doing.

  • Peter Michelsen

    A game that actually dares to touch Islam beyond “Them’s the terrorists”? That’s just nuts!

  • Ryan

    I have the game and really want to play it. I wish there was a 5 min video on everything I need to know to get started. I’m fairly familiar with Paradox style games, but this one seems different enough to keep it in my back log.

  • Nightwish

    Maybe if you said 5 hours…

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Sören-Höglund/799188495 Sören Höglund

    CK2 was my first paradox game, but you really don’t need to know everything to dip in and play it. Military movement and understanding how inheritance works is about it what you need, the tooltips are informative enough that you can figure the rest out as you go. Besides, this is one of those games where watching everything spiral out of control is almost more fun than winning.

  • HighPriest

    I don’t know if this will change your mind, but the expansion adds a lot of empires, including Britannia. Forget uniting Ireland, go for the full empire.

  • MikeO

    While there are a lot of youtube vids that help explain the game, in my opinion, the vids by a guy named SeeKayEm99 are the best, especially as far as explaining the game systems. I learned a lot of things about the game by watching these.

    http://www.youtube.com/user/SeeKayEm99

  • Steve Parsons

    Just do the basic tutorials, and then just play. That’s what I’ve done and had a blast, despite having no damn clue what I’ve been doing. There’s a very handy guide on the Paradox forums you might want to look at.

    Today I started a new game, took over the northwest tip of Africa, Tangier. Started with a son and no wife. (And he seems to have no mother which is weird…) So I took a wife, Aisha. Knocked her up immediately. I had never looked at the ages. She was 17. I was 77. WOW! I wanted a daughter as an ambition and lo and behold, daughter. Result! Then she got pregnant again. And again.

    By this point I’m 84 years old. A courtier has been looking at me. I go to her bed chamber and have a tumble as the game eloquently put it. Decide to do the decent thing, asked her to marry me and be my second wife. She agreed. Married me. At age 85, she became pregnant.

    My first ruler died aged 87 having married two women and fathered 5 children in his final ten years.

    Sadly my eldest daughter currently has Typhus and is rather unwell.

    I went on a trip to Mecca early on and the amount of stuff that happened when I did so was really interesting and really added to the game. Bandits were involved.

  • thebigJ_A

    http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?678-Crusader-Kings-II-FAQ

    There you go. If you can play EUIII, HOI3, or Vicky2, you can play CK2. (These aren’t about the new DLC, since it just came out, and you’ve got more than enough to do with the vanilla game anyway).

    Sorry it’s not exactly what you asked for, but if it were possible to make a five minute video, it wouldn’t be a Paradox strategy game.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Kelly-Kintner/740129373 Kelly Kintner

    I am diving into this game as well. I wanted to play for a while but have taken my time to stock up on courage. This game is intimidating. But, I’ve found if I just open it and play it I get sucked in quite easily without having to understand every nuance. Winning in this game seems to be simply playing. I find it comforting in a way I can’t explain that over on muslimgamer.com they love this game too. It somehow validates the sense of goodness and borderline realism I get when I play.