Hello, welcome to Strategy Games podcast three moves ahead.

I am your host this week, Rowan Kaiser, and today we will be discussing Crusader Kings three two years on.

There are two main thrusts to this discussion.

The first one is that Crusader Kings has had two years of patches and expansions,

and we want to check in on what's changed, what's good, have some of the issues that we've had

been fixed. Have they figured out new ways to do exciting things? And the second one is that

Crusader Kings 3 is a crossover kind of game that gets a lot of people that don't necessarily play a ton of strategy games or don't necessarily have their noses out into the strategy game.

Critical universe or haven't guessed it on three moves ahead terribly often. So we wanted to get

some new voices on. But first of those is someone who's not totally a new voice. They

guested on our Ethics in Strategy Games podcast earlier this year, Ruth Cassidy.

Ruth, welcome back. Thank you.

And we are also joined by Kat Manning, narrative lead from Faraxis, and all around systemic and

emergent, narrative, expert, designer, all kinds of things. Welcome, Kat. Hi, yeah, it's great to be here. I think

aficionado probably works. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, excited to be here. Yeah. One of the ways that

I wanted to start here is just talking with you all about your sort of

general history of Paradox games and Crusader Kings 2 and 3.

I feel like you would be good to have starting here because it is so directly connected to

your aficionado expertise.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, everything pre-pandemic is a little bit of a

blur. So I'll try to do the best that I can. But, you know, I really got very, very heavy into,

you know, what I would call emergent narrative games, more and more over the tens.

I have played strategy games, you know, basically for as long as I've been playing PC games.

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