Reviews by Antonio A.6

Crusader Kings III: Royal Edition
 – 

Bundles the game with the first few major DLCs, cheapest way to complete your collection

Crusader Kings III: Royal Edition bundles the base game with its first Expansion Pass, which in turns features the game's first major expansion (Royal Court) and two flavor packs (Northern Lords and Fate of Iberia).

This is the edition you want to purchase if you want to eventually get all the CK3 DLCs and save yourself some money, as it costs much less than purchasing things separetely.

At the time of writing (April 21st 2023) the only DLC you won't get by purchasing this edition is the minor Friends & Foes event pack. The upcoming Chapter II Bundle, starting with the Tours & Tournaments DLC, will release next month.

While Crusader Kings III as a whole is great, my rating here is impacted by the quality of the DLCs included in this package.

Northern Lords and Fate of Iberia are solid pieces of regional contents, adding much needed flavor to regions that would otherwise play the same as others. Where they're lacking is mainly in historicity: compared to similar CK2 DLCs there are pretty much no historical events that can trigger (this is particularly glaring and disappointing with figures such as El Cid, that exist in the game but do nothing), and the starting setups (characters, realms, laws etc) could be much better. Northern Lords also doesn't do enough mechanically to distinguish Scandinavia from other tribal regions, and Fate of Iberia, despite the interesting new Struggle mechanic, suffers heavily from a lack of polish.

Royal Court, the first major expansion, is generally regarded as a disappointing entry given how long it took to come out and its cost. The Court related mechanics are often repetitive and uninteresting (if not downright annoying because of poor event weighting and bug fixing), and the Artifact system, while fun to play with at first, is marred by an awful UI and tends to trivialize other aspects of the game. The best aspect of this DLC is the revamped Culture system, which is partially included in the base game, and that, well, has little relation to court life.

As a whole all these DLCs do a good job at improving the vanilla experience, particularly in featured regions, but the various issues I mentioned mean they're too expensive for what they bring. The Royal Edition solves this with its lower price, and WinGameStore adds to that with their usual competitive offering.

by Antonio A.6, - Apr 21st 2023

Crusader Kings II: The Reaper's Due Content Pack
 – 

Small cosmetic DLC that mainly improves African cultures

The Reaper's Due Content Pack for Crusader Kings 2 is one of the few extra cosmetic DLCs you can purchase on top of the various expansions. It doesn't come with its related expansion, and its content has actually nothing to do with what the The Reaper's Due expansion actually adds.

This DLC unlocks portraits for characters of East African cultures, 3D models (these are the ones that show up on the map when you assign a councillor to a task in a specific province) for African councillors and also for female characters of Eastern cultures, and also new clothes for characters of Byzantine cultures when they reach later dates.

In my opinion the East African portraits are well done and a good addition, whereas the extra 3D models are hard to even spot, and the extra Byzantine clothes while okay are really niche because of the requirements and with portraits displaying only a character's head and shoulders there isn't much being shown.

As I said in other reviews the various Content Packs for CK2 don't offer enough for most people to justify their price and this pack is no exception. However on WinGameStore they are much more affordable, and if you're heavily invested in the game the ability to replace the ugly vanilla portraits is something you might want since that's what you're looking at for most of the time.

by Antonio A.6, - Sep 8th 2022

Crusader Kings II: Horse Lords Content Pack
 – 

Minor cosmetic DLC that improves the Steppe experience

The Horse Lords Content Pack for Crusader Kings II is one of the few extra DLCs you can purchase on top of the various expansions. More specifically, it doesn't come with the related Horse Lords expansion.

This DLC nets you a few culture-specific (Mongol, Frankish, Germanic and Italian) 3D models for the military units on the map that represent armies, plus custom portraits for characters of Cuman cultures, and finally Mongol / Steppe themed music that plays when you're playing a ruler of those cultures.

The 3D units are from my experience barely noticeable, whereas the portraits and extra music do an okay job in enriching the experience when playing in the Steppe.

I probably wouldn't recommend this DLC on its own given the price (you need to purchase 2 more Content Packs, namely Conclave and The Reaper's Due, to replace all of the ugly vanilla portraits), but WinGameStore constantly has great prices for Paradox DLCs, which makes completing your CK2 DLC collection much more affordable.

by Antonio A.6, - Sep 6th 2022

Crusader Kings II: Conclave Content Pack
 – 

Cosmetic-only, get it to replace base game portraits

The Conclave Content Pack for Crusader Kings 2 is an optional cosmetic-only DLC for the game, which confusingly isn't included in its parent expansion Conclave.

With this DLC you get extra 3D models for councillors (for example, a woman Spymaster would show up as a man on the map when placed on a province without this DLC), new portraits for characters of specific cultures (Finno-Ugric ones), and a few historical buildings have now unique 3D models (e.g. if you look at Gyza in Egypt, you'll see small 3D pyramids there).

From personal experience and general opinion I've observed, you usually want this DLC for the Finno-Ugric portraits. Not only they are well done, but they also replace the non-culture specific portraits that you get in the base game which are ugly to say the least. The remaining features are stuff you hardly notice.

The price of this DLC is on the steep side, particularly because it's 3 of them you have to buy to finish unlocking all unique portraits (the remaining ones are the Content Packs for Horse Lords and The Reaper's Due). However, WinGameStore consistently offers the best prices for Paradox DLCs, so here you can get them for what they're actually worth.

by Antonio A.6, - Aug 31st 2022

Buy with confidence!
MacGameStore / WinGameStore is an authorized retailer of digital products through relations with 1000+ publishers & developers. No gray-market worries here!
Doing business for decades
Originally began by shipping games in the 90s. Much has changed over the decades, and getting games into the hands of Mac & PC gamers is still our focus!
Ways to pay
Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American ExpressApplePayPayPal