[TL;DR - Strongly recommended at full price; other than some minor bugs, there are a bunch of companies who need as big of a kick in the pants as this is]

I never played Imperator: Rome and didn't hear good things, but I was underwhelmed when Crusader Kings III was announced. I thought II was a really interesting concept but was really confusing for me to actually play; I thought Stellaris' game design was too simple in the same way a lot of people didn't like Fallout 4 (I think Stellaris would almost have made a genuinely great party game), and I figured this was going to be yet another Paradox DLC farm.

After a friend got this game near launch, I bought it on the spur of the moment and fell in love. My biggest criticism of Crusader Kings 2 — I've already put many times its total hours into 3 — was not that it had a lot of information but that I had a hard and often overwhelming time finding it. This game's menu interface, while noticeably imperfect and still with a lot of hidden pieces it's all too subtle about (I'm still finding new things hundreds of hours in) feels by comparison much easier and cleaner to use, which was probably the single biggest obstacle I'd had to enjoying the game. II's tutorial was not only rather shallow but so buggy I couldn't finish it. III's, which takes you through conquering Ireland step by step and is the game's closest thing to a standard campaign, doesn't have either problem except for a minor money bug and feels like a much gentler introduction to a very deep strategy game than was going on YouTube to learn how to play II (which is still an option here and is even welcomed in the main menu). As a heads-up for streamers or the squeamish, the sexual overtones and depictions of disease, some of them truly terrifying like the bubonic plague, and war injuries are a lot more blatant here than they were in II, though the most extreme aspects of both can be disabled in the game options.

For those who didn't play II despite it now being free, imagine Risk but with Toy Story's or The Sims' premise, with thousands of pieces who are alive and have their own ambitions, personalities, relationships, and lifespans. You play as a specific ruler whose decisions and influences impact your realm and others', from deciding how and by whom your children will be raised; to deciding where and with what excuse war will be declared (earning or faking those excuses normally takes a long time, which will still turn a lot of players away); to managing relationships with your vassals that might one day turn them against you. The game takes place over a much larger scale, from Iceland to northern Africa to what is now Myanmar, than II did out of the box. I love being able to play as my native India without needing to buy DLC, and the world map is now so large that entire crusades might pass by without your noticing. Most of your interaction is through a complicated series of menus, but the results and consequences feel a lot more deeply personal than just being a standard bird's-eye war game. Characters are identified through a combination of mix-and-match personality facets; aptitude stats across many categories from diplomacy to army management, each with their own subdivisions of skill trees; and traits that affect a person's health, abilities, and popular reputation. Every character in the game has a religion, whether conservative or eccentric, and you can heavily customize what yours believes.

From a design perspective, this is my favorite implementation of religion that I've ever seen in a game. Stellaris started its matches with a culture designer that was fascinating but felt too front-loaded, and Crusader Kings III's religion system works similarly except you have to earn it through a really specific style of gameplay. Along with gold, you also juggle Prestige (how famous are you, even if other people might not individually like you; you use this to declare secular wars), Piety (religious reputation), and Renown (family esteem; you use this to buy savegame-wide perks but also to prevent unwanted successions). Gold and Renown can be passed down to your heir; fame and piety cannot. Piety, and you will need a lot even with specific discounts, can be used for reforming religions and making new sects, from major details like the morality of warfare to smaller details like whether your clergy and lineage are gender-restricted. A lot of modern cultural freedoms (homosexuality, fornication) get placed in an interesting light when it's sometimes in your best interest to have your people act in a very specific way or put them in jail. Your actual "Culture" (French, Greek, etc.) is basically just a tech checklist, divided up into chronological eras so you can't just rush end-game tech, but being able to change your culture through rare events leads to some really interesting loopholes that would unbalance the game if they didn't take so much work.

The Stress system, which penalizes you with health and stat restrictions for playing in ways that contradict your character's on-paper personality, makes for really interesting role-playing since it can penalize you in ways that narrative-driven games can't get away with (imagine BioShock if refusing to harvest Little Sisters could cause you to ADAM-starve to death). You can influence which traits your children pick if you're the one raising them (you often have to delegate this), and thankfully the game generally doesn't have your children rebel against your choices unless you had no say in them. Thanks to an update, there's also a nifty Dungeons & Dragons-like character designer that lets you pick your own traits, religion, and starting stats, with certain limitations if you care about achievements (by and large worth doing even as some are really difficult or luck-based), though purists can ignore this. If you're new, make sure to turn on Ironman Mode, which auto-saves the game and disables save-scumming.

I didn't understand II's combat system, but I got the impression something interesting was there. Stellaris' combat felt too simple by comparison except for the awesome spaceship designer, and while III's combat also feels simple (click your army on an enemy's and see which one dies first), the rest of the game makes getting to that point a lot more interesting. Note that unlike in II, you can choose to spawn your entire military in one place instead of having it realistically coalesce and be vulnerable to having individual portions gobbled up, which is balanced out by armies sometimes taking a really long time to spawn in depending on circumstances. Along with your thousands of peasant soldiers, you can also recruit a variety of units (bowmen, cavalry, etc.) with a basic system of strengths and weaknesses that also takes terrain into account, which you can mix with siege units for taking forts.

Most of the game's mechanics are really simple, usually clicking a button or watching a timer expire, but even if you'll see a lot of the same events through the generations and across campaigns (albeit with cultural and religious variations), there's still a ton of variety that a lot of games don't come close to approaching. If you're unsure about the whole concept, I'd still watch a few videos since this isn't going to appeal to everyone, but if you wanted something more complex than Stellaris but more clearly designed than Crusader Kings II, this is a very welcome surprise. There's enough content in the base game to make this the first Paradox title in a very long time where I'm genuinely excited to see what gets added next.