An assumption: if you’re reading this review of Horse Lords, Crusader Kings II‘s most recent expansion, you’re at least passingly familiar with the game and the quirky legends which have built up around it. The fact is that a full overview of everything about CK2 that has come before is outside the scope of this review; Paradox’s most successful title is, at this point, a sprawling epic of betrayal, strange marriages, and backstabbing nobility which would make George R. R. Martin blush.
Into the already complicated DLC basket of CK2—a basket which has added everything from Muslim caliphates to Zoroastrian satrapies to the base game’s Western European feudal shenanigans—Horse Lords revamps the play of steppe nomads to make them more unique and historically accurate. This primarily means the Mongols of Genghis Khan, but also includes groups like the Magyars and Cumans. There’s a pretty wide variety of cultures to pick from if you want access to the new nomad mechanics, probably more than I was expecting.
Those nomad mechanics offer a pretty big change from what CK2 has offered up until now. Everyone built buildings in largely the same fashion and went to war in the same way. The titular horse lords play very differently. Where everyone else has to build and improve castles while juggling the loyalties of vassals on the feudal pyramid, nomads are mostly after empty land for their herds.
This means invasions of neighboring countries, which have a nice carrot in the nomadic ability to gain an invasion casus belli if their population hits a certain percentage of its max. Or, in game fiction terms, you get too cramped in your corner of the steppes so you go get more land. Combined with the stability hit you get if you’re at peace for too long, it essentially forces your hand to keep spreading ever westward.
The land that you gain isn’t managed like feudal societies. You can only manage empty land, and of that you can only build improvements in your capital province. You can change capitals periodically, as you continue your migrations, and everything you’ve built comes with you. Troops you build start out in your capital, so it behooves the enterprising khan to keep the center of governance near the action.
Those troops are all on horseback, a super powerful retinue numbering in the thousands. To represent the more professional, always ready nature of nomadic armies, Horse Lords cribs from the Europa Universalis series’ manpower mechanics: a percentage of your population is there to both build and replenish your armies.
This replenishment happens even in the field, which is in marked contrast to how every other army in the game works. Other armies don’t replenish losses without being disbanded and raised again. This gives nomadic armies a strategic flexibility which is honestly way out of whack with the balance of the rest of the game. I’m not much of a “conquer the world” type of guy but I’ve swept through anyone I’ve cared to without any real effort.
That’s historically accurate, of course, but it brings up the fundamental tension in grand strategy games which aim for verisimilitude: history isn’t balanced and, for a lot of long gone people, it wasn’t very much fun. How Paradox addresses this hasn’t always been consistent and the tweaks haven’t always come at a rapid clip, but they usually get it mostly right. My worry is that the nomads of Horse Lords are so massively powerful in even the AI’s hands that it may be too big a task without depowering them into historical irrelevancy.
That caveat aside, Horse Lords is a blast. It’s freshened up the game quite a bit for me. On top of that, you get the traditional hefty free patch which accompanies Paradox’s DLC even if you don’t own the expansion. This particular patch is a lifesaver; performance issues have been an ongoing issue since they first expanded the map and, on my machine at least, the game now hurtles forward at the highest speed settings.
While I can’t say that I consistently prefer the new nomadic gameplay to the cutthroat family dramas of Europe and North Africa, it’s been a great change of pace in the short term. The feel of nomadic governance in Horse Lords seems right, from the way armies are composed to the option to settle down and make a new nation to juggling the land demands of competing clans. If Paradox can get the inevitable balance passes right—which is going to be no small feat—then I see Horse Lords ranking right near the top of Crusader King II‘s now long list of expansion packs.
Crusader Kings II: Horse Lords was developed by Paradox Development Studio and published by Paradox Interactive. It is available for PC.
Ian Williams has written for Salon, Jacobin, The Guardian and more.