The ability to perform some actions in bulk on prisoners, like ransoming or executing everybody.You can now give orders to allied armies in wars(provided you're the war leader, of course).Those items are kept in your treasury, which, much like the societies system, is a part of the free patch, not of the expansion itself.Īpart from those most other features are oriented towards quality of life improvements: The expansion also contains various event chains that let you embark in adventures in search for relics or hire craftsmen to make you fine weapons and jewellery, granting you various bonuses. It even lets you take hashish!ĭo note that the society system itself is not part of the DLC, so you don't necessarily need it to play mods that use custom societies. Hashashin: available only to Shia muslims, this society revolves around intrigue and murder, making it easier for you to conduct assassination plots, letting you abduct and intimidate other characters and even letting you raise an assassin army and fleet.Devil Worship: lets you summon familiars, curse other characters, desecrate temples, sacrifice prisoners, possess other characters and much(really much!) more.Hermetic Society: you can build a laboratory, do research in alchemy and astrology, raid other characters laboratories, cure stress and depression with potions, go search for ancient texts or ingredients and more.Monastic Orders: lets you become a monk and do things like taking vows of celibacy, pray/meditate and perform charity.The types of society unlocked by this DLC are: By joining one your character can receive missions which grant favour with them once completed, which in turn can be used to perform special actions or climb in rank.ĭifferent societies will be avaiblable to different religions, most of them having at least one available. Global FeaturesThe big feature of this expansion are societies. You can also pick one province to be a crown focus, netting a boost to the time it takes to prosper. Last but not least there's the prosperity system: just like provinces can now be ravaged by disease and destruction, in the lack of those they can thrive and enjoy benefits such as greater wealth and lower revolt risk. Prisoners can also be dealt with in more ways, such as humiliation and torture, and the already existing ways were enriched with more flavour, like new texts detailing the exact means by which your prisoners were executed. The chief feature this time is a big overhaul to all aspects involving health: diseases have been fleshed out, causing a series of symptoms to appear before a diagnosis makes their nature fully clear, court physicians can be appointed to treat them in a variety of ways, sometimes with gruesome results, epidemics(including the black death) have been reworked and new ways to deal with them have been added too. Because of that, the general recommendation I give is: get most or all of the predominantly global DLCs and only the local ones that deal with character types you'd like to play.Īnother almost completely global expansion. While Paradox never explicitly endorsed this model, I find it describes CK2 and its extra content fairly well, with most DLCs containing almost exclusively features localized to a particular group of characters, and a few containing mostly global features and little to no localized ones. Global: this applies to features that are either available to all characters or that I find reasonable that a player, whatever start he chooses, will eventually be able to use, such as actions only available to kings(my condolences if you like to play as a count for the whole campaign length).Local: this applies to features that unlock or enrich some group of playable characters, such as muslims or nomads, and have no effect on everybody else.My method relies on classifying each DLC feature as belonging to one of two scopes: The remaining titles provide only additional graphics, music or some other kind of content and will be dealt with only in passing. The first thing that should be noted is that only about a dozen items in CK2's DLC page actually add to the gameplay, those are the focus of this guide. In this guide I attempt to provide a view that is more nuanced and player-oriented than the highly-objective information on the wiki, (hopefully) easier to find and more up-to-date than most forum posts out there but still text-based, for those who want something more in-depth than an image guide but don't have the patience for the video format. While the game wiki documents each DLC's features exhaustively and answers to the question "Which DLC should I buy for CK2?" can be found all over the internet in countless forums' threads, at least a few diagrams and probably many other materials made by the community, the question still arises surprisingly often whenever the game goes on sale.