YMMV / Crusader Kings III

• Accidental Aesop: Vast empires require strong foundations in law and institutions to remain intact. Otherwise, they are prone to splitting up. Said laws and institutions also require time to develop.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Among the scripted hybrid cultures is New English, which requires a combination of West Germanic heritage and ruling over Mongolic or Turkic peoples. As outlandish as that particular combination sounds, it's a reference to an alleged medieval New England (or Nova Anglia) formed by Anglo-Saxons who fled the Norman Conquest and, with the blessing of the Byzantine Emperor, settled in Crimea.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: For many players, the rich and complex system by which you can convert or even found your own religion boils down to, "You can see boobies," since you can pick the Natural Primitivist tenet that makes all the religion's followers permanently naked. And this is what people will mostly discuss about those religions. Which is somehow still an improvement for Jainism, given its reputation from II. Jainism and the new Adamite Christian faith join the club with Zoroastrianism and the Messalian sect. Additionally, a preview video for the game showed incidentally that nudist characters would not be Nipple and Dimed. ^note The devs later clarified there's an option to change this, and fig leaves cover the genitals, though some previews used Barbie Doll Anatomy instead. Attention was not deliberately drawn to it, nor was it explicitly mentioned in the preview, and the character seen naked was an elderly woman with a physique appropriate for her age. Still, many of the top comments, second only to complaints about the new naval system, were variations on, "Boobs!"
• Broken Base:
  • On the status of city holdings, their taxation and co-related development. Depending who you ask, cities are either nerfed to the ground, their income is lackluster and the replacement of raw profits with development modifier is a complete deal breaker... or cities (at least in the right counties) are the most efficient and reliable money-makers, always paying their dues no matter what, while the snowballing development modifiers they bring cause a rapid accumulation of wealth and technology.
  • On the status of the Royal Court DLC and related to its big patch. Or to be more specific, the time it took to make it. Part of the base is glad it finally arrived, adding badly-needed content to the game. The other part is thoroughly disillusioned with the direction the game is already taking and turning gameplay into piling up modifiers. Then there is the main content of Royal Court, which is essentially a 3D slideshow that took almost a year to make, without adding anything to actual gameplay beyond visuals and thus leading the split of base what should even be the focus for the "fluff" part of the game. There is also a related debate whether or not the 30 dollar pricetag is way too expensive for the amount of content provided, especially since most of the gameplay-altering content was released free for everyone as part of the patch. Unsurprisingly given all this, the DLC's Steam reviews are settled on "Mixed". The later development cycle would show this as a sign of things to come, with massive frustrations over a very slow development pace for features people didn't ask for. As the result of all of this, the active playerbase in very short time after Royal Court release nearly halved and the base was never the same, with people openly mocking the glacial pace of development and misguided directions and focuses the sparse DLCs are taking.
  • Shared with its predecessor and Hearts of Iron IV, the policy of including content deliberately appealing for Memetic Mutation, Best Known for the Fanservice or out-there Alternate History. This includes many of the aforementioned features such as nudity or the option to found your own religion, including potentially an incestuous devil-worshipping nudist witch-cult, but also such things as the Easter Egg in the Northern Lords DLC allowing you to turn the Isle of Man into a Purposefully Overpowered pirate kingdom. To some, this is Paradox choosing marketability over actual improvements of the core mechanics and historical accuracy, while others enjoy the flavor and feel it adds its own kind of longetivity to the game. Came to a head with the Royal Court DLC, as many feel its main feature of holding court was used primarily as a vehicle for fart jokes and overly wacky/horny events in an attempt to be more like The Sims, rather than providing interesting storylines or new strategic opportunities. Flared up once again with the Friends and Foes event pack, particularly the event where your rival fires your pet cat out of a catapult, which was prominently advertised with a screenshot.
  • The scale of the map and rulership. While this was already an ongoing dispute with previous entries to the series, CKIII got particularly divisive. Part of the fanbase is complaining about everything being too big and in the same time there being no real point playing at any rank below king. The other part points out it's a game called Crusader Kings, so your goal by default should be being one. This overlaps with the issue of the game using baronies, and not counties, as the basic division of land. In case of CKIII, unfavorable comparisons with map from Imperator: Rome are often made to pin-point the issue: despite covering almost twice as big of an area, CKIII has half of territories of Imperator. This means there is upfront less land to split between characters and as a result, you can only go for high-end titles, with simply no room for playing as a small fry.
  • The lack of options to play as a merchant republic, city-state or anything similar, along with steppe nomads, which were some of the hallmarks of II. Part of the base disowned the game right at the launch for removing those options; part considers it a blatant DLC grab to "re-add" a pre-existing element^note Especially since a variety of DLC-only mechanics from II got added to the baseline of III; part is increasingly inpatient about DLCs adding regional or even cosmetic features over what they consider the most vital additions; and part couldn't care any less, as they weren't using those features in II or simply never played it in the first place.
  • Tours and Tournament greatly increased the number of special buildings around the map, especially in the form of universities and significant mining sites. Despite that, France barely got Sorbonne (itself after nearly three years of complaints from the playerbase), making it a pattern of yet another expansion in the game neglecting France with any sort of flavour and/or historical content. This is a particularly contentious issue, because there are at least four factions on the subject: people who are thrown off by how bland playing anywhere within France is; people who accuse them of "French nationalism" (regardless of their nationality) and being tired with regional focuses direction the game is taking; people who cynically point out to wait out for the inevitable Lillies and Frogs DLC; and, finally, people who would rather have functional, decision-based mechanics that come from player actions and gameplay outcomes, rather than sticking to the system of special focuses for specific regions - or at least restoring CK2-style monument construction.
  • The Harm System, which will occasionally give characters random events with an 80% chance to die instantly or become incapable in a freak accident unless they happen to have a specific associated trait which gives much better odds of survival. Some players are just happy something is being done about the overly-generous natural lifespans compared to the historical timeframe and lack of general danger especially with the game's (nominal) focus on surviving in a lethal world and succession crises, while others are really annoyed at their characters being killed out of the blue through no fault of their own and find the whole thing to be a band-aid solution with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
• Come for the Game, Stay for the Mods: As with the predecessor, some people just come for the total conversion mods. Notably, the game's launch was accompanied on day one by a very well-developed Vampire: The Masquerade Game Mod, invoking this.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Players playing as non-tribal characters without a full demesne will revoke barons holding onto castles and/or temples (in the case of Muslims, or any religion with the Lay Clergy doctrine). Revoking baronies incurs no tyranny, and barons cannot have councillors.
  • There are exactly four innovations to bee-line for in each era: new development cap, new succession law, new economic buildings and increased building slot. The exact order might vary depending on your situation, but those four are the most important and everything else is an afterthought except maybe new fortifications (which gate the new economic buildings for castles). And if your culture has some specific, more convenient succession law from the start, then that removes the need for researching succession law innovations entirely until Late Medieval's primogeniture (which is no sooner than 1210s).
  • Getting and then maintaining any of the good intelligence traits (Quick/Intelligent/Genius). They are not only great congenital traits by themselves, offering large bonuses to all stats, but they also play a massive role in a variety of calculations done for events and educating the next generation. Other congenital traits are good, but intelligence traits are a must-have.
  • Not landing your heir prior to achieving High Crown Authority and once it is done, landing him and instantly hiring him as a councilor. The first part prevents the heir from getting into a civil war your vassals can freely fight at lower Authority and thus potentially getting slain or captured in battle. The second provides him with extra money, prestige and piety from being landed, and, more importantly, provides extra lifestyle experience from being a member of the council.
  • Aiming to become your cultural head and in the same time focusing on Learning (along with looking for a wife with as high Learning as possible). This allows you to control which innovations are actively researched and makes them progress significantly faster. In any other scenario, ignoring Learning entirely, since it's only useful for the cultural head for the sake of directing research.
  • Earning (and having) lots of gold helps a lot, be it for creating a higher-tier title to prevent the realm from splintering, building more buildings or baronies (often to earn more gold as well as to gain other benefits) or spending gold on various events to boost various parameters.
  • Tweaking vassal contracts as soon as possible after their succession and your own. Vassal contracts can be changed once per shared lifetime (with some exceptions for certain events, such as may be seen on a grand tour) and importantly, vassals may initiate negotiations just as well as lieges may, and if a vassal gets a hook, they can and will cash it in to force a change in their contract, often something really annoying like a guaranteed council seat, and since that's the only negotiation that the vassal contract can see until you or the vassal dies, it can't easily be changed back. Conversely, making a token change immediately after succession prevents vassals from doing this.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Mount & Blade: Bannerlord. Both are medieval sandbox RPG/strategy hybrids with a ton of Game Mods putting them in nearly any setting imagineable, so there's a considerable overlap of fanbases. There's even mods putting Crusader Kings content in Bannerlord and vice versa.
• Game-Breaker: Now with their own page.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • City holdings went from the most profitable to the most useless type in the game. Unlike previous entries to the series, in CK3 cities specialise in development now (which is a scaling modifier to a county's income), rather than raw money income. On top of that, cities have fixed, non-negotiable taxation, which has a relatively low baseline and can only be increased by small handful of innovations and lifestyle perks. Furthermore, since the economy was reworked, each holding type generates the exact same amount of money from economic buildings, meaning cities provide the only slightly money than temples when it comes to raw tax value generation due to some economic buildings only available to cities (and offset by republic vassals' aforementioned lower tax rates). For comparison, castle holdings can be directly controlled by any given ruler regardless of government type (providing 100% of produced taxes and levies) and when given to nobles, they have a negotiable feudal contract, meaning heavier taxation is possible. Temple holdings, depending on religion, can either be held directly like castles, or provide a substantial 50% tax and 100% levies to the liege if he's on friendly terms with the archbishop - all while also giving piety to whoever controls them. Cities end up being best ignored, beyond the mandatory "1 of each type" in counties that can have more than three holdings.
  • The Glory path of legacy perks. It was terrible in the release state of the game, offering meaningless, outright useless bonuses and the later rework to rebalance and bolster the weaker legacies unintentionally made Glory even worse. While the whole line went from completely useless to somewhat-sometimes-situational-generally-still-bad, due to the fact that legacies now operate under steadily increasing price with each one unlocked, you will be hard-pressed to even look toward the Glory line, thanks to the costs.
  • Certain cultural traditions are nearly completely useless or offer "bonuses" that are are at best questionable. All while specific individual traditions are impossible to get unless starting with them or the costly hybridisation/reformation/divergence options. Caravaneers is probably the most prominent example: it offers diplomatic range increase (not bad, but nothing special) and makes idle courtiers leave your court sooner, which is outright detrimental.
  • Any buildings that serve primarily to add levies, as well as the entire levies side of vassal obligations. Levies have an extremely low combat value of 10 damage and 10 toughness with no pursuit or screening. While this is almost competitive with some of the less-powerful men-at-arms like skirmishers at their base level, men-at-arms are subject to a wide variety of buffs from buildings, traits, traditions, holy sites, and other modifiers, while levies are subject to few or no buffs anywhere in the game. About all they're good for is swarming tribals and carpet sieging and employing them even for these tasks generally requires a fair amount of micromanagement to keep the stacks appropriately sized to not exceed supply limits. Buildings that provide large numbers of these are giving little military value and make a lot of work and wind up often used only for whatever man-at-arms bonus they give. Levies are also the only part of a vassal's military they send, whether it's a Clan vassal who loves you or a Feudal vassal with maximum contractual obligations, making their military obligations arguably more of a hindrance than a help. This is further made worse by the fact that AI only checks the raw number of troops, so it sees levies and levy-increasing buildings as the best possible choice, neglecting the economic side of things (particularly egregious when AI builds levy-increasing buildings in farmland and flood plains, instead of manoral estates and farms) or enhancing its men-at-arms, making majority of AI armies into Paper Tigers.
• Memetic Loser: Just, Diligent and Forgiving rulers are portrayed within the playerbase as complete pushovers that everyone bosses around and who keep getting heart attacks from the burden of their crowns. This comes from the release state of the game, where those traits were genuinely detrimental, but even after a bunch of reworks and re-balances, the fandom sticks to the Being Good Sucks meme.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Had a duel with a pope. And lost"^explanationIf you are a rival with someone, you can call them to a duel to settle things once and for all. This includes even the pope, a character that routinely is an old man with Learning-related education and traits. That doesn't mean he can't beat you, either due to blind chance or because he simply has high Prowess stat.. This is made further funny if you call him into a duel as a pagan, since it means Battle Strip - but the pope keeps his mitre on.
  • There is a variety of memes regarding the stress mechanics, covering both how arbitrary stress levels feel after a while of playing and how weird it gets when you end up gaining purely positive traits from them. "Haha, Athletic goes neigh"^explanationAthletic trait is represented by a galloping horse and provides bunch of purely positive and desirable bonuses is a particularly popular one in few different meme formats.
  • While cannibalism was always a Crusader Kings favorite, this PC Gamer article turned "Eating the Pope" into the chief goal of all cannibalism-minded CK3 players.
  • "You forgot Malta!" ^explanationThere are four decisions that require complete control of the Duchy of Sicily (Secure the Mediterranean, Unfiy Italy, Empower the Sicilian Parliament, and Restore the Roman Empire), and because of its size and distance from Sicily itself the county of Malta is often overlooked and forgotten, leading to a slew of posts on the r/CK subreddit asking if something is broken.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • While it's expensive to do so (costing both prestige and valuable family renown), you can now disinherit an Inadequate Inheritor to immediately boot them out of the line of succession.
  • II had some infuriating mechanics when it comes to your council. Whatever task the councilors were doing was instantly made void and stopped at their death. For example, if you were proselytising in a province for a decade and was almost done, but your chaplain died, it removed all progress and you had to start all over again. Same with fabricating claims. CK3 makes those tasks separate from the people doing them, so upon the death or departure of a councillor, their current task is simply paused until a successor is appointed. Additionally, their tasks are now deterministic, rather than MTTH based. Your chaplain will eventually convert whatever county they're tasked with so long as they're making non-zero progress, and it will take a fixed amount of time, rather than having a certain chance to succeed every month. On top of that, tasks had a cooldown in II, meaning that once sending councilors for a job, even if they've finished it in a single month, you couldn't send them to other task, because. Since it was seen as obtuse (not to mention annoying in Iron Man mode when you mis-clicked), the cooldown was scrapped.
  • Stress triggers were not distributed evenly across traits, with some traits having fairly lenient and logical conditions of what gives or loses you stress, and some not so much. Meanwhile, other traits effectively locked your gameplay choices, like 'Shy' ruining any social situation or 'Greedy' stressing you out when doing any spending. Never mind positive traits, like Just or Compassionate, which screwed you out of any intrigue (not to mention Intrigue education), making it flat-out impossible to play as The Good King. This was gradually fixed over a number of patches, until mostly solved by 1.4.
    • Eventually later patches took it a step further: whenever embracing the The Good King personality while having positive traits by itself turned into a big Stress relief, shaving off large amounts of it whenever the character acted kind, just or diligently, putting an end to Being Good Sucks the release state of the game suffered from and making it more than feasible to just play a nice character.
  • In CK1 and 2, there was nothing worse than being cursed to end up with an entire string of daughters, particularly as a Muslim. All you could do with them was send them off to marry someone and then forget they existed. Now, however, there is nothing better than being blessed with an entire string of daughters, especially as a Muslim. Their main role is still to be married away, but thanks to greatly expanded focus and game mechanics for the dynastic aspect of the game, it is well-worth having as many marriages as possible, building alliances and dynastic renown in the process. As a Muslim, this is especially potent due to polygamy. Your daughter might not be the queen consort (yet), but she's still married to some powerful (or even less powerful) person for benefit of the entire dynasty. You can go as far as marry all your daughters to the same ruler. This is especially potent when marrying into the Seljuks or another Muslim imperial house, as it counts as 4 emperors by marriage, bordering on a Game-Breaker.
    • And on top of this, daughters are usually exempt from inheriting titles, unless there is no male heir (and sometimes not even then). In the early game, where partition is the only succession option, having a single son and a ton of daughters is the best possible outcome - lots of alliances and dynastic marriages, while having just one heir to your own realm. Even if you end up with a situation where your son dies before you and one of the daughters ends up as your heir, the rest of them are still outside the line of inheritance.
  • Tours and Tournaments DLC reworked hunts and their related mechanics, making them now far more useful and, more importantly, with just 2 years of cooldown instead of 5. This also made Prolific Hunters and Sacred Hunts cultural traditions significantly more useful, as both of them add bonuses to hunts and halve the cooldown, meaning you can embark on a new hunt every 6 months, while scoring massive rewards. Thus, mostly roleplaying activity and traditions became viable gameplay elements.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Seduction mechanic is back from its original form in Way of Life for the second game, and now that every AI character can use it, expect everybody to get seduced nearly constantly. Worse yet, unlike in II, there's no option to disable AI seduction. Moreover, being Lovers or even Soulmates no longer results in a Seduction-Proof Marriage, making it immersion-breaking when your chaste, shy, and honest wife has an affair. It can be especially demoralizing when your wife is unfaithful every single generation.
    • A Reddit user looking into the matter discovered that the game is actually coded so that discovering a love affair can retroactively change a child's parentage from its actual parent to the lover, which is fairly immersion breaking for players wanting to roleplay a family tree. It's especially jarring because said event ignores Incompatible Orientation - even homosexual or asexual women can be retroactively revealed to have had an affair with another man and passed off a child born of that affair as the player's. And also deleterious to those seeking to maintain a positive congenital traits, as the character's ancestors are considered in inheritance as well as the character themselves and this event changed the "true" (read: biological) parent, and thus actually altered trait heredity. This bug was mostly fixed by patch 1.1.
  • If you think Seduction is annoying, behold any vassal that picks Skulduggery and has an intrigue education. They will either find some skeleton in your closet or plant one and use a resulting hook to get themselves a seat in your council. For 25 years. And you can't fire them! This means that to get back your previous, potentially highly-skilled council member, you may have to plot a murder of the idiot who usurped his spot. ^note If the vassal's title rank is two or more ranks lower than yours, you can grant him away as a vassal to another vassal, removing him from your court, but that in turn means loss of income and levies. Bonus points of annoyance if they've fabricated a hook on you, forcing you to commit a real murder to get rid of them, leaving behind fuel for any future digs for hooks. And to add insult to injury, this action is pretty much the only thing your vassals can do with hooks, since they are unlikely to have the perk allowing monetary extortion. To make matters worse, there are a variety of situations where you can refuse to accept a person using a hook... but not when they use it to get themselves onto your council.
  • The implementations of Innovations means that in 867, Feudal and Tribal characters often can't use de jure Claims to declare war, or even revoke titles. Tribal characters at least get the 'county conquest', 'duchy conquest', and 'invasion' CBs for free, but Feudal characters often get stuck having to fabricate claims for everything or taking the Diplomacy tree for its 'vassalization' CB unless they neighbor religious enemies or follow a faith with the Pursuit of Power or Warmongering tenets, which enable feudal characters to use the CBs that are normally only available to tribal characters. Worse, innovations are tiered, with strict dates when they can be accessed at all, with zero ability to "rush the gun" - even if you clear all innovations from given era, you still have to wait until the start date of new era is reached^note If you start with a well-developed realm or simply play from the 867 start, you will easily unlock new innovations fast enough to clear both Early and especially High Medieval innovations decades before having access to the next era. This change also renders Learning into an utterly useless stat for anyone that isn't your court chaplain or equivalent, or your Cultural Head (which could be you; it determines how long it takes to unlock innovations, such as those that let you stop being tribal. )
  • And God forbid you are at the mercy of an AI Cultural Head deciding which innovation is currently picked for active research or if said cultural head has awful Learning - even the best developed land won't help when there is only a 10% chance of any research happening. Even outside of this, you're always at the mercy of pure randomness for your cultural exposure (a second innovation that is developed without input from the head's choice of fascination or learning stat). It may be something useless like Armillary Sphere while you're landlocked or something so useful it would be your first pick for fascination, and since fascination and exposure don't stack, it would essentially waste progress.
  • Fervor, which replaces Moral Authority from II. Unlike Moral Authority, which went up when anyone of your faith won a holy war and down when they lost in what was admittedly a case of Unstable Equilibrium that often caused religious collapse spirals, Fervor goes down on winning or losing as the attacker in a holy war and increases on losing as the defender in a holy war (winning as the defender in a holy war has no effect on one's own Fervor). As Fervor goes down, outbreaks of heresy become more common and the realm priest's county conversion task becomes less effective. Additionally, passive Fervor growth is negatively modified by the size of a faith. When compounded by the Sinful Priest event (which also naturally fires more often for faiths that have more land and therefore more priests) and the lack of other easily available CBs for feudal rulers, this commonly results in Catholicism (and to a lesser extent, Ash'ari Sunni Islam) imploding into heresy as its massive size stymies Fervor growth and its numerous rulers burn away its Fervor on numerous individual holy wars with further hits from sinful priests. Also, with little ability to religiously stabilize their realm after a Crusade (a Crusade leads to a 60 point Fervor shift between winner and loser), Crusader states have become infamous for swiftly converting to the local religion (or simply being overthrown by religious rebels), leading to several successive crusades for the exact same kingdom to depose the previous winners.
  • Elective Gavelkind ^note where your non-primary heirs automatically get any highest-tier title you could legally create for free, and become independent if those titles are the same tier as your primary one returns as the non-elective 'Confederate Partition', is as annoying as ever, and is the only available succession option for anyone until 900 (when 'normal' Partition becomes available). Unless you usurp the Byzantine Empire (which has Primogeniture by default) or belong to a culture that can switch to an Elective mode of succession^note Norse, Saxon, Celtic, or Feudal realms (but not Muslim Clans or Tribal realms), and even then you aren't guaranteed your counties will go Elective so your domain will still get split up, expect your realm to get divvied up into independent states every time your character croaks it. Single-heir inheritance isn't available before the High Middle Ages, and even then only Seniority. Primogeniture/Ultimogeniture is only available for the last 250 years of the game, provided you can instantly research and implement it. Pre-1.1, this was even more annoying as the title of Dynasty Head, as well as any unlanded titles (like religious head) would still get passed down the main line of descent instead of being given to the player's primary heir.
    • However, just like in CK1 and 2, the easiest way to prevent your country from imploding in a pre-primogeniture situation (the law isn't accessible before 1220s, no matter what you do) is to willingly hand out titles to your children, thus fully controlling the shape of your country after the current ruler dies, rather than being at the mercy of the game's attempt to fairly divide titles automatically. This is something that a lot of players struggle to understand, trying to keep their entire country united, unable to differentiate between the concepts of ruler's domain and kingdom/empire and the actual focus of the game: your dynasty, not your "country". Thus, partition becomes easy to handle once you make sure the best bits go to your primary (playable) heir, while your 4th son is made the Duke of Faraway, with his capital in Bumfuck. ^note Manually handing out titles also reduces the number of claims junior heirs have on each other's titles, reducing infighting. Not to mention the reworked game mechanics mean you want to have as many titles within your dynasty anyway, so giving titles to your kids is far more beneficial than ever before, especially when they eventually go independent, as they are still strengthening your dynasty. However, there are still disadvantages, especially if the descendants who go independent have a weak domain and are saddled with powerful non-dynastic vassals.
  • Unlike the previous two games, the number of holdings is pre-defined and hard-coded into the map itself. You can build new holdings only in counties that have pre-defined free space for that. Development, control or just about anything else doesn't affect it and you simply can't get more holdings within a given county. Due to how baronies are displayed on the map itself, it's impossible to simply gain new holding space by any means, as each of them has to be presented graphically on the map, rather than within the county menu. This issue is complicated by a tech rework which links the number of building slots in a holding to technology, making it pretty much impossible to get going prior to High Medieval era, date-locked as no sooner than 1050.
  • Due to weights of various innovations, in the Tribal Era the AI is far more eager to focus on the military ones than civilian. This leads to an entire Cycle of Hurting: the AI never has the necessary innovations to develop its land, it takes longer to be able to build cities or temples, and if a particular county has empty holdings while a single city and temple already built, it will be filled with castles, since that's all the AI can build. As a result, AI-controlled realms end up being underdeveloped and with a terrible economic base, which has a lasting result on the rest of the game. Gets extremely annoying if the AI mismanages land you plan to conquer, because you won't be able to do much about it once you take control. Buildings you're unsatisfied with can be torn down and replaced, but holdings cannot and holdings you can't personally hold can't have their buildings adjusted.
  • The way the royal footstool event in Royal Court is coded tends to drive players up the wall and conjures up flashbacks of the aforementioned retroactive parentage change event. It selects a random ally of yours and has them instantly deposed by their child. Then they appear at your court seeking aid, where you are given two options: Backstab them and sell them out to the new ruler, or let them stay at your court but humiliate them by forcing them to serve as your footstool from now on. This was ostensibly meant to be a lighthearted Black Comedy event, but is usually considered the worst case of Rail Roading in the game, not just because the player is given no option not to act like a Jerkass, but also because it completely bypasses the game's normal mechanisms of how power is maintained, instantly forcing the loss of a valuable ally with no check for how logical it would be for them to lose their throne like that^note they could be extremely well-entrenched and universally beloved among their court, while the usurper might not have any power to speak of and no chance to prevent it, all for the sake of a joke.
  • The Legends mechanics of the Legends of the Dead DLC tend to frustrate players. Legends, rather than just existing as, well, legends, that persist over time and are spun into many variants, are created by rulers at an investment cost and must be "completed". Once completed, they grant significant bonuses over the area they've spread to. However, they fade again, at an extremely rapid rate, often making the rewards not worth the investment. Additionally, once the ruler dies, the legend dies with them; their heir reaps none of the benefits and the legend seed can never be reused. Aside from the mechanical issues, this is considered extremely counterintuitive, as the game presents legends as a long-term investment towards the future of your dynasty and a tool to ensure that your current rulers or their legendary ancestors will never be forgotten, even drawing parallels to historical dynasties of rulers whose members consistently justified their kingship by claiming descent from the same historical or mythological figure, but instead the mechanic exclusively serves to grant a brief spike in power during their lifetime to the rulers that engage with the legend-making process. Also, the actual chronicle of your legend is entirely generated by the game, with very little option to influence it player-side, commonly resulting in text that arbitrarily hones in on irrelevant minor events in lieu of major legend-worthy things you may have actually accomplished, with the writing often perceived as generic, repetitive, and sometimes downright nonsensical.
  • Since feudal contract negotiations can be initiated by ruler or by vassal and can only be negotiated once per lifetime, a vassal with a hook can be absolutely infuriating if their contract hasn't already been negotiated, as they can spend their hook for a guaranteed council appointment or reduced taxes and as their lord, you can never re-negotiate until either you die or they do.
  • Holy Order leases - founding a Holy Order leases them a city or castle, and unlike vassals or temples leased to a realm priest, you as lessor can no longer fund any improvements in the holding and Holy Orders generally have very low income and can't readily afford to improve their holdings even if the right building lines are seeded. This means Holy Orders create a development growth black hole and fail to buff their own men-at-arms meaningfully.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Compared with its widely popular precedessor, the game streamlined countless mechanics or outright removed them entirely, making it far easier to get into the game, but also with far less to do in it. It's perfectly normal to snowball to the point of establishing a kingdom starting as a count, or, with particularly lucky RNG, get to the empire level. Just don't expect keeping it together to be easier.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Just like in CK2, there are only two possible starts for the early Medieval period: either you start in 867^note Macedonian dynasty in charge of the Byzantine Empire or in 1066^note William the Conqueror gains his nickname by taking over England. This means you are choosing between having Europe divided into five massive blocs (West and East Francia, Lotharingia and Italy^note also just a couple of steps away from forming the Empire of Italia, along with a strong Byzantine Empire in 867) or you have it even worse with just three massive blocs (France^note also just a couple of steps away from (re)forming the Empire of Francia, the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire in 1066). The period between those two, circa 950, which would have no Space Filling Empires except for the Byzantines, and thus making for far more interesting gameplay of being able to rise into one is completely absent, not to mention the variety of pagan and/or tribal states being one step away from turning into new Christian kingdoms. This leaves players with a choice between what sort of massive political entity they want to face (or play as), rather than helping to build one in the first place, unless one plans to pick one of the Karling kingdoms (already a major power) and build the HRE. To make matters worse, the official reasoning behind this decision for both CK2 and 3 is that "no easily recognisable events happened in that time-frame".^note II did eventually receive a (free) 936 start date with Patch 3.2 (subtitled "the Iron Century").. The devs have tried to explain that it is time-extensive to work on new bookmarks, doing research and planning out titles and rulers for many parts of the map, which was why they only added two for the initial release - but it came of as a terrible excuse, as the data is already there, gathered by Paradox for CK2.

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