YMMV / Crusader Kings

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The "Cadaver Synod" global event that pops up whenever a Pope with the "Wicked Priest" trait dies, in which his successor digs up his corpse and puts him on trial for his crimes posthumously, is sometimes assumed to be yet another of Paradox's tongue-in-cheek gags by new players — but the inspiration is entirely historical.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Averted insofar as you might think that most players only pick powerful rulers or make their rulers powerful; many players actually enjoy playing as a relatively weak realm, partially because these can actually, depending on the location, be easier to manage, partially because Underdogs Never Lose. However, what you'll see incredibly rarely, is somebody playing as someone who is a vassal to an AI ruler, at least permanently, because the AI is often suicidally reckless, both in goals and the means to achieve them, not to mention, occasionally an Ungrateful Bastard, even if you loyally support them.
  • However, when playing as a weak feudal ruler, what is considered standard operating procedure to strengthen your rule is to first conquer the counties in the duchy your capital county belongs to, and then hold said ducal title.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Due to the Video Game Cruelty Potential and Video Game Perversity Potential in Crusader Kings, horrifically villainous player antics invariably elicit hysterical laughter.
  • One player discovered that he could farm money by finding rich landless men, matrilineally marrying them to his daughter, then excommunicating, imprisoning, and executing them. The forum collectively lol'd, and one guy even made a sweet fake tabloid cover of it◊.
  Kurblius: I used my daughter to entrap 6 old men, collecting over 6K. She is just 17 and she's been a widow 5 times.
  • Another player created an infamous Reddit post asking "How can I encourage my depressed menopausal daughter-in-law to commit suicide?"
  u/Fart_Gas: I married my son off to a Byzantine Princess for the alliances. However, she was 12 years older than him. She did give birth to one child for him, but now she's 48, and I want him to make more legitimate children, especially considering he has the attractive trait. However, I can't get her to be murdered, because she has the Genius trait, and has an intrigue score of 25. That's why I want her to kill herself or succumb to depression ASAP.
• Ending Fatigue: It's entirely possible for a player who knows what they're doing to achieve their goals — up to and including World Conquest — well before the game ends. The rest of the game then becomes about protecting what you've already gained from being conquered or breaking under its own weight, which is usually not quite as compelling as the initial goal.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The d'Hauteville family, the Norman rulers of southern Italy and later the kingdom of Sicily before their country was inherited by the Hohenstaufens, are a very popular choice among players. Reasons for this include a very convenient geographic position in the middle of the Mediterranean, proximity to both several small and easily conquerable nations of various religions which make it easy to expand your territory, an interesting diplomatic partner in the neighboring Papacy, the absence of a Muslim superpower that tries to curb-stomp you from the get-go, and a huge number of (mostly male) family members convenient for both political marriages and diminishing the risk of interfamilial rivalry. They basically have lots of exploitable options in every aspect and don't start overpowered enough to make your achievements seem ordinary. The fact that it is reasonably easy to trump their real-life achievements certainly helps.
  • Haesteinn of Nantes is a very popular start character because of his good starting stats and event troops and his unique position (a Germanic pagan in France, and one of the few feudal pagans in any start date) that can take him almost anywhere on the map in a single generation. He's especially beloved by Achievement hunters.
  • Pick an Irish count, any Irish count. Everybody on the island begins with relatively equal strength, and nobody off the island has any claims to its territories, so the only real foreign danger is from Viking marauders. In earlier dates Ireland is also tribal (one of only two Christian tribal regions in the game, the other being Scotland at that date), allowing you to raid and to choose between feudalism and merchant republic.
  • Zunism, an obscure pagan faith in Afghanistan revolving around the sun god Zun, got quite a lot of interest following its introduction in the Charlemagne expansion of Crusader Kings II, due to its association with the "Praise the Sun" memes from Dark Souls. This is also in spite of the fact that the depiction of Zunism in-game is based entirely on memes, and bears little resemblance to the worship of Zun in real life, who was the chief Indo-Iranian deity worshipped by the Zunbil dynasty of late antiquity Afghanistan. In reality, Zun was of possibly Iranian Hunnic or Hephthalite origin, and may or may not have had Zoroastrian and/or Hindu influences. Still, the fact that more than a few people know about the existence of an obscure Eastern Iranian deity is quite impressive.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Abbablob". No, it has nothing to do with ABBA, it's the Abbasid Caliphate that controls the Arabian Empire (the bulk of the Middle East and a large chunk of North Africa) at the two earliest start dates. About the only thing that can reliably stand up to them is the "Byz", or Byzantine Empire (also called the ERE, for Eastern Roman Empire).
  • "Charlie" is King Karl I Karling of West Francia, the historical Charlemagne.
  • "Bordergore" is the common term for messed-up borders between realms (often a result of gavelkind succession splitting them between multiple heirs), which in early European starts especially tends to leave the continent looking like a patchwork quilt of exclaves of various kingdoms, causing unending AI-on-AI wars over de jure counties. For example.
  • Ireland is commonly known as "Noob Island" due to being one of the easiest starts in the game. New players are regularly recommended to start as a count or chief there to learn the basics of gameplay.
• Friendly Fandoms: With the Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress fandoms, due to the sort of incredibly horrific antics that players of these sort of sandbox games can get up to.
  • The Crusader Kings fanbase are also in good terms with the Age of Empires II fanbase since both are strategy games that focuses around the medieval time period.
• Game-Breaker: Enough to them have their own page.
• Less Disturbing in Context: Due to this game's cruelty and perversity potential, rather strange topics and questions can pop up on the game's subreddit and forums, such that posts asking about "How do I murder my retarded inbred heir so that his attractive strong genius brother can inherit?", "How do I destroy the Vikings? They're annoying me", and "Should I divorce my sister-wife to marry our daughter?" are not seen as unusual at all.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Screw your sister" is considered a valid answer to virtually any gameplay question.
  • "DEUS VULT." Latin for "God wills it", it was a common Western Christian motto and appears frequently in the games (up to and including having the expansion pack for the first game named for it).
  • With the importance of the Crusades in-game, CK also inherited the "Remove kebab" meme spawned by Polandball. However, due to the fact that it originally referred to the ethnic cleansing of Muslim Bosniaks during The Yugoslav Wars, Paradox does not allow it on their official forum.
• Moral Event Horizon: Given the amount of cruelty potential across the games, it’s entirely possible to cross the Moral Event Horizon AND Cross the line twice at the same time, to the point where there is an entire CK 2 subreddit dedicated to cataloging player “feats” as the most sadistic and horrible rulers in existence. Where the line is crossed varies from player to player, but most of them agree that castrating a child or rendering them blind (Or both at the same time) for no reason other than fun is pretty horrifying. Or taking a royal family as prisioners and forcing the wife to become your concubine while throwing the husband into the oubliette. And that’s without taking into account the mods...
• Narm: Most of the time it is averted, but the extremely Purple Prose other rulers will convey their messages in to you is solidly this:
  Random ruler: To the vile scatterbrain XXX: Your low character is the subject of Greek plays. / Tales of your misdeeds are told from Ireland to Cathay.^note  Which can even be said by the ruler of some sub-Saharan country who has likely never heard of any of these nations. I accept your peace offer.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Being thrown in a oubliette. Trapped in a dark pit with no way out... it almost makes a regular dungeon look cozy.
  • Related to the previous example, everytime you as a child ruler get killed in a plot you not only get one of the aforementioned death sounds (the sound of a baby choking to death, which is nerve-chilling in itself), but also a frighteningly chilly first person experience of the events leading up to the character's death. Examples include stuff like getting pushed off the branch while playing in a tree, and getting taken out in the middle of the woods and then left to fend for themselves, practically guaranteeing that they'll get eaten up by local wildlife in the process. And the game doesn't shy away from making the soon to be dead child you're playing as scared as any child would be in any such situation.
• Paranoia Fuel: From time to time, you'll encounter interesting unlanded individuals, lowborn or from minor families, who offer unique and potentially useful event chains. Sometimes they're also assassins.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Kind of a given since the game is a Wide-Open Sandbox with no set victory conditions. Among them is trying to recreate certain actual historical occurrences, trying to convert all of Europe to some minor spin-off of Catholicism such as Catharism, and simply choosing to play as a very weak country.
• Shocking Moments: If "From Holy Kingdom to Unholy Nightmare" is any indication, Sons of Abraham does this for the second game. Having your children and heirs to your realms be the spawn of Satan (complete with insanely high stats) will do that for anyone.
• SNK Boss: Basically the entire point of the Mongols, particularly in the first game. An absurd amount of free event troops (who suffer no attrition damage) plus the ability to invade anybody at any time and, in the first game, no demesne limit are just the ways in which they cheat. The Aztecs in Sunset Invasion follow a similar model, though given their emphasis on infantry as opposed to horse archers, they're somewhat easier opponents if you have a cavalry-heavy army.
• Spiritual Licensee: A Rock Paper Shotgun review of the second game calls it "the best Game of Thrones game you will probably ever play." Unsurprisingly both games feature A Song of Ice and Fire mods.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The original game, while it had its fans, was definitely a flawed game, with a Troubled Production and quite a lot of bugs. Crusader Kings II, on the other hand, has received by far the smoothest launch of any Paradox game to date, and received almost universal acclaim from the fans. Expansions like Sword of Islam, Legacy of Rome and The Old Gods have only served to make it even better.

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