izigame.me

This is at best as meme-generator, that has very little to do with being a medieval ruler. Developers say a lot of big words, but it all amounts to pig feces.
First of all a few positives (compared to Crusader Kings 2) -
+ The concept of stress is a welcome one that, in theory at least, pushes the player to behave correspondingly to the character traits.
+ The 3d framework for creating characters and sceneries is great step forward.
+ Crown authority is handled in a more believable manner. It is no longer a "law" of the realm but earned via the prestige of the ruler.
+ Hooks are a great idea, allowing you to influence other characters in meaningful way to a certain degree.
The rest is all bonkers.
- Warfare is this game's weakest point. One of the developers recently went on a longwinded rant about how this game is about characters not warfare. Yet this game fails utterly at representing warfare through the point of view of a character. The ruler must nonsensically micromanage the movement of every army, but he can't do medieval fundamentals like calling their vassals to arms with their household guards, knights and their own vassals. He can't give simple commands to a vassal to defend their territory or conquer a province. And while no one needs this to be total war, when the ruler is commanding his own army, he should have at least some simple strategical choices. it is so weird that they sponsored videos like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2cm-rsDfjw to promote their game yet failed to take note of any of their contents.
- Developers make a lot of big claims about characters. Yet characters are most underwhelming. Their speech never corresponds to their personality. They often engage in nonsensical behaviour. Their inter-relations do not influence how they react to events in court. For instance, if you revoke a vassal's title, his rival vassal does not react in a positive way, but rather hates you for being tyrannical. Characters basically are little more than a collection of numbers, and rarely provide unique or memorable or organic interaction with them.
- Characters don't earn nicknames like medieval figures often did. Let's just look at William the Conqueror, who was the son of Robert the Magnificent, son of Richard the Good, son of Richard the Fearless, son of William Longsword. Here you are lucky if 1 out of 10 of your rulers earn a nickname no matter how pronounced some physical feature they have or how (in)famous their achievements are. Instead, nicknames are mostly gained via lifestyles, which often do not match with their activities (e.g. a ruler with a martial lifestyle may not actually even fight a war), and random events, leading to hilarity where a bunch of characters for instance get called XX "the Impaler".
- There is no concept of influence (besides hooks). You can be the most powerful vassal in a kingdom, or hold important positions in your liege's court, who could be your infant nephew, yet it does not alter your gameplay in any way, and you have no say in the running of the kingdom. You can conquer a neighbouring realm and make your idiot brother its figurehead ruler, but you will have no control over that kingdom.
- Factionalism is another important historical feature that is designed in a half-baked manner. Factions only crop up in certain circumstances. As per history, factions should have been persistent power blocks, typically formed around prospective heirs, or around powerful vassals each with a common agenda and mutual interest. Each faction would try to push the ruler to a specific decision such as designating a particular heir, banishing a rival vassal, or declaring war on a neighbour that will net new lands for the faction members. Sadly little of that happens here.
Some discontent lords can form a faction to replace one king with another, then the faction disappears without said lords getting any tangible benefits such as lands of the supporters of the previous king. < Compare this to history when Henry Tudor took the throne of England. Some lords can form an "independence" faction, but they do not have any shared objective, e.g. Scottish Dukes trying to form an independent Kingdom of Scotland out of lands currently controlled by the Kingdom of England. < This is an actual historical event that happened, as fans of history would know.
It is a recurrent problem with the Paradox game design formula that historical events can not be recreated using in-game mechanics. Instead we have meme worthy cases where peasants from the entirety of your multi-cultural realm from Aquitaine to Greece form a faction and rise up in a coordinated rebellion using their 5G communication network.
- For a game that is heavily reliant on events, events are very few and far between. You are likely to run out of all possible events in a couple of generation, and the rest just becomes rinse and repeat.
- Courts is another potentially amazing feature that was completely butchered by the developers. For some arbitrary reason you can only hold court once in 5 years. And the events during court are not very interesting, or very definitive, or have any great consequence for your kingdom. They are also mostly random unrelated to underlying matters of your kingdom (e.g., two rival vassals fighting over a common claim to some land). You court is a generic looking interior based on your overall culture, that you can customize with a paltry number of artifacts, irrespective of whether you are the ruler of a small kingdom or the restored Roman Empire.
- No matter how many hackneyed nonsensical anti-historical balancing measures the developers put in to prevent "snow-balling", the fact remains that the only sense of variety, engagement (however tedious), and progress comes from conquest. You have these "end-game" decisions like restoring the Roman Empire, or mending the Christian Schism, destruction of the Holy Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire, that all push the player towards conquest...
- ... because playing historically sized kingdom for prolonged time becomes boring and repetitive very quickly, due to overall lack of content - events, activities, character variety. If you read medieval chronicles, or even read / watch historical fiction, very little of that can be relieved in this game. Besides all that has been already mentioned, there were so many other things medieval rulers regularly did can not be done in this game - such as travelling around your realm, or organizing and participating in tourneys etc. Other activities like hunts, feasts, pilgrimage, holding a court can only be done after large intervals, and offer very little uniqueness upon repeating. You will spend large amount of time just staring at the screen fast forwarding. Medieval lives of rulers were not so uninterestings.
Developers tried to cover too many playable cultures in the vanilla release. We have everything from Iceland to Central Africa to India, without any of the realms offering much flavour or content. Instead, they should have only made the European realms playable and fleshed them out to offer more in-depth and varied flavourful experience, then gradually increase the roster.
And there are fundamental problems with their approach towards game design. They are too busy focusing on some arbitrary notion of fun and balance, and trying way too hard to be funny, and thus have lost all connection to the subject matter - medieval history. IMO they should watch some Tudors, some Game of Thrones (season 1 to 4), some Les Rois Maudits. Read the Alexiad, Froissart's Chronicles, Book of Contemplation, Book of Chivalry, Gesta Francorum etc, and get back to the drawing board.