The most significant change in Conclave is the new council system. While a lot of blood is still shed, Conclave’s most important confrontations are fought not on gruesome battlefields, but in close quarters as characters try to out-think and out-wit their enemies, in typical medieval fashion, with self-serving schemes, petty quarrels, and endless jockeying for titles and positions. It is not a particularly action-packed expansion. The limited setting and the high political stakes both work in the game’s favor, retaining the freedom of the grand strategy genre, while also providing a tight focus that places internal politics and personal interactions front and center. On the other hand, Conclave is a more concise expansion that benefits a great deal from its concentrated focus. On one hand, many of the same mistakes and problems from previous versions are present here, still carried along by sheer inertia and repetition it also adds several new problems to the mix. The latest expansion for CK2, Conclave, demonstrates all of these well-established virtues and a few of the same flaws. Too many expansions began to feel cluttered and disjointed, and Paradox had the tendency to add new time periods and locations before fixing the older ones, but the underlying mechanics were always solid. CK2 had plenty of issues, of course, particularly from Rajas of India onward. When those risks failed, as they sometimes did, I could forgive them, because the degree of difficulty was so high that it made other games seem somewhat amateurish by comparison. The fact that Paradox would sometimes take enormous creative risks with its expansions was admirable. The release version was merely the set-up for the superior versions that followed, in which the mechanics were deeper and the entire game was more refined. Crusader Kings II, at its launch, was a well-made and wildly entertaining game, thanks in particular to a clever blend of grand strategy and character-driven RPG.

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