Crusader Kings 3: All Under Heaven – Now, that’s a big sandbox

You can define Crusader Kings 3 as a grand strategy game with RPG elements the same way you could define Dwarf Fortress as a colony-builder. It’s not wrong, but it misses a big part of what makes these games special: They are massive sandboxes to create your own emergent stories, from deeply personal adventures to monumental showdowns involving entire empires. 

To stick with the sandbox theme, all of these stories require space, tools, and material to be built. Usually, these sandboxes are expanded bit by bit: A fresh tool here, some gravel there, and a hole with water for good measure. Well, Crusader Kings 3: All Under Heaven doubles players’ building space with shiny fresh sand and provides them with an armful of new tools — all in one glorious package. 

It can’t be overstated how massive this DLC is. Where the map previously ended on the most Western outskirts of China’s sphere of influence, All Under Heaven literally moves the horizon towards the Pacific Ocean, expanding the map to include all of China, the vast Mongolian and Siberian steppes, the Korean peninsula, Japan, and all of the archipelagos of South East Asia.

There is no Total War: Empire-esque trick to divide the map into different parts that are played separately — it’s all one big world and you can walk from Lisbon to Kyoto without any loading screens. Which brings us to the elephant in the room: performance. I’m running a i9-14900KF CPU with a RTX 4080 GPU and 32 GB RAM with the game being installed on a SSD. For the most part, I was fine running the game on the third and fourth speed level. Things got dicey on the highest speed level with freezes being a risk. Did I encounter bugs? Certainly. I even had several saves bricked by glitches that were patched out ahead of release. There were typos, the tooltips for some mechanics were wrong, and I suspect that some of the new mechanics were incorrectly interacting with perks found in the Lifestyle trees — pretty much the usual stuff for CK3 expansions, but not the apocalypse some players feared. Again, though: My system is pretty high-end, so this may not at all reflect someone else’s experience.

Paradox clearly made an effort to differentiate the newly added parts of the world from what’s been available previously in visual terms with a different color palette, rice paddies dotting the landscape, and the pink of cherry blossoms surrounding towns. But it feels like the studio wasn’t able to go all-in on the effort. A Grand Tournament held in Japan won’t feature a unique set of architecture, for example, and players won’t campaign among pillar-esque mountains in China, so the visual flair is not quite where it could be. The musical one is, though.

Any worries someone may have had about the CK3 formula not fitting into East Asia can safely be laid to rest. In fact, if you like political maneuvering and intrigue, the two grand empires of the area – China and Japan – are probably more fulfilling than anything Europe can offer.

Politics in Japan are dominated by blocs – groups of houses with similar ambitions – and much of the maneuvering done at Festivals, a new Activity type, serves to coax families into your fold or alienate them from their current friends. But blocs can become disunited and fall apart, if the houses within are feuding or developing other goals, so diplomatic tact is a must.

Japan offers interesting choices for any local ruler, as you can either seek a way to power by working through the Administrative system or work towards smashing the fragile government, championing the cause of feudalism, and seizing supreme command by force. Sometimes, a coup like that can even be bloodless — when my bloc was finally strong enough to challenge the current regent (the actual emperor is a ceremonial figurehead in Japan’s government and therefore of little importance), he gave up his position without a fight.

Really, the regents should have smashed my family two generations earlier when I declared the land I was given to govern my personal fief and started conquering my neighbors. But with how damn nice I always was to the regent, external threats looming, and other families choosing to undermine the central government for their own purposes, they never dared move against me. Following the coup, my ruler – ironically nicknamed “the Kind” despite starving one of her own children to death in a dungeon – was prestigious enough to declare the Shogunate, crowning the efforts of her ancestors with the ultimate success. And the emperor can still dress as the emperor, that’s fine.

Chinese politics is a whole different beast. Where Japan is a strange mixture of the Feudal and Administrative government systems, the Celestial government type is Administrative on steroids. The only family who gets to inherit anything is the ruling dynasty. You and me? We have to go to school, pass an exam, kiss important people’s butts, and then we may hopefully get a job that allows us to work our way upwards, giving our kids a headstart when it’s their turn. Unless they get killed by a flood, which is a thing now.

Similar to the Administrative government, everyone is landless in China, aside from the usual Family Estate. County, Duchy, and Kingdom tier titles, which come with domains, are all on an appointment-only basis. You can even get appointed to Empire tier titles, which don’t have any domains associated with them. These are the imperial ministries, the councillors of the Son of Heaven. They have cool powers like being able to steal money from everyone else, begin the work on Great Projects, or control the emperor like a puppet, if you’re the Grand Chancellor.

But where Influence and Gold steer politics and appointments in the Byzantine Empire, in China the main resource needed to land those jobs is called Merit. The more Merit you get in your life by successfully governing domains, participating in Activities, and so on, the higher your Merit Rank will climb, unlocking higher-tier appointments. No matter if you’re choosing a military or a civil career, this provides a clear and obvious goal to work towards in what could otherwise be a massively confusing environment for players. Unlike in Japan, there is very little room to work outside of the system.

It’s super refreshing, too. In Europe, my games inevitably end up in an attempt to restore the Roman Empire, so I wage a lot of war. On my way up the ladder of China’s bureaucracy, I’ve spent hours without having to fight a single battle — it’s all scholarly banter at Examinations, throwing shade at Debates, and the occasional murder. The most powerful man of China ended up being an old, weak scholar who embodied the virtues of Confucianism… while plotting with the other ministers to remove the emperor, but hey, that’s a trope for a good reason. The poor guy even made me his Favored Minister, giving me extra Treasury income to work with, and was among my Disciples.

China’s destiny is closely intertwined with the Dynastic Cycle mechanic, reflecting the rise and fall of ruling dynasties over the centuries. Some periods will favor stability and peace and make it easier for the central government to control its vast territory. But every negative action taken, any attempt to undermine a local governor for a bit of power, any insult to the emperor slowly pushes the empire to the brink of a new era — an era of chaos and dissent… and opportunity for internal and external forces. I’ve seen China break apart into kingdoms, mend itself under a new dynasty, and repeat the cycle, but this time losing land to forces encroaching from outside.

In my Shogunate game, I began conquering smaller breakaway states on the Chinese coast, bringing myself into the Dynastic Cycle mechanic as an outside force — the next time China weakens, I might be able to pounce and seize the Mandate of Heaven for myself. Holding the stolen pieces of the empire in the meantime is another matter, though, because united it is a formidable foe.

The Dynastic Cycle is by far the best Situation mechanic Paradox added to CK3. There are clear objectives to work towards depending on your current ambitions and even a governor that’s yet to become a real powerhouse can start turning the wheel and climb up to become leader of one of the cycle’s Political Movements.

From a lone Japanese swordmaster who rises to the Shogunate by the power of his blade and charisma to plotting the downfall of a dynasty as China’s Grand Chancellor or becoming a bona fide god king in the jungles of Angkor, All Under Heaven would be a strong offering on its own, speaking to fans of Shogun and Three Kingdoms alike. But tagged onto CK3’s foundation it’s something of a multiplier: What if the lone swordmaster ventures West along the Silk Road? What if you want to be Marco Polo? How about a nomad world conquest run that starts by taking care of China? Could you defeat Genghis Khan through an alliance between the Holy Roman Empire and the Son of Heaven?

Once the different parts start to interact, you’re more than ever a part of a living and breathing world that’s capable of generating some truly fun stories in which you can take on whichever role you want.