Content Pack - Crusader Kings II: Horse Lords DLC

While CK2 music is already really good, I did found the new Songs of the Steeps to be among the best and does improve a lot on immersion and does felt very different from the rest of the game soundtrack. The pack also come with a lot of new sprites for units (many for early frank, german and italians and off course, mongols) along with a new Cuman portrait pack. Which make this pack really worth.

Portrait and Unit skins are decent enough. Shame there's not more of them - very doubtful that there's enough content in this pack to justify buying this at the full price. As long as you're buying this during a Steam Sale, however, there are far stupider things out there that I've spent $3 US on. Tentative recommend as long as it's on sale.

Why wasn't this included in the base expansion... Does Endless Legend release an expansion pack and make you buy the graphics or music or unit packs! Terrible DLC policy...

Purely cosmetic. The portrait pack is one of the best in the game, IMO. Music and unit packs are also decent. If you care about that type of stuff, consider buying the game on sale.

i bought this because i mistakenly thought it was the expansion. thanks paradox.

Paradox, you are lucky that I love you more than my wallet Overall, worth buying if you love the game and would like an extra level of immersion.

I know many of the DLC have gotten crap as of late but I recommend this one alone for the music tracks because they are so good. Currently I am playing as Wessex and purposely incorporated in Bolgar into my bloddline just to have the tracks appear. The portraits are great as well and adds flavor. If money is the problem, just add it to your wishlist like I do and wait for a sale. It always comes around sooner or later. Thumbs up for sure for sales!

Because why sell all the content for Horse Lords in one dlc when you can split into TWO dlc? Hahaaa, genius

TL;DR: Paradox is like a merchant that sells you the box of a puzzle containing only the 4 corner pieces, and then procedes to tell you that if you want to see the rest of the puzzle, you need to pay individually for each one. In exchange, they promise you to work hard each week for a new puzzle piece, ensuring you they are hard to create and time-consuming. Each week, you pay the price for the new piece. At first, you are excited to see how they fit and what will it look like. Then some weeks pass and you start feeling like this wasn't such a thrill after all, playing with an incomplete puzzle. By the time you don't enjoy the game anymore, you're already hooked and can't stop paying the price of each piece until you can finally have all of it, all under the promise that it will get better once it's complete. By the time the final pieces start arriving, you've already assembled the puzzle multiple times with the pieces you had. It's at this point you realize this felt very much like a scam and feel extremely stupid for trusting someone that sells you a game in pieces. Let me put you in my personal perspective about Paradox's marketing ways: Mount and Blade: Warband, a game created by Taleworlds on a very poor engine and featuring a very poor campaign in it's release state, is nothing more than a base for the community to use it to create the best thing imaginable within the boundaries of what the engine lets them create. Taleworlds, being a tiny studio with a mediocre budget, successfully ensured that the core mechanics of every M&B worked as best as possible and that the game was ridden of bugs to ensure that not only multiplayer worked but also that content-creators would perfect the game by letting the community decide what was the best direction for it. There's only so much a dev can do to a game before it becomes too expensive to create, thus reflecting it in the final price. This in turn results in rising developers creating projects for their portfolio to help them in their future careers. [Grand Strategy game name placeholder], created by Paradox, is a game made on an engine that, after 4 years of development, still struggles to accept/run mods, can't run multiplayer without crashing or desynching constantly from other players (and don't even think on mp rounds using mods), until last year still lagged a lot when played at full speed and was prone to crashes. It took almost a year for it to even have decent loading times on an HDD. Paradox believes that they should be the only ones to decide what direction to take in a mostly-singleplayer game, and their unwanted/unexpected changes come to a heavy cost to your wallet. Paradox is a company that releases a game in a state that could easily be called "alpha" due to the lack of any noteworthy mechanics, and charges the player base every 6 months which is when a major patch is released, all while hiding behind a mask of underfunded, indie devs who need their fans' support to keep developing the game. They lie straight to your face by claiming these are "expansion packs", ignore your suggestions and delete your complaints on the forums, ruin every mod that is ever developed by constantly changing the version of the game and ultimately dismiss you as a customer. They won't even let you roll back to a previous version of the game because they released an extremely useful/required mechanic contained in their newest expansion pack, instead of within the patch that contains a bug/balance-fix, to play the game the way it was meant to be played from the start. In resume: don't buy from those that promise fullfillment at the end of an expensive road. Buy from those that give you that fulfillment since the beginning, or let YOU tune their product to reach that fulfillment.

It really is pretty baffling that you pay 15 bucks for HORSE LORDS, and then they ask you to pay 6 MORE bucks for the portraits and unit graphics. Seriously. That's like me going to the grocery, buying a loaf of bread and they ask me to pay an extra 50 cents for the bag that the bread is in. Or buying a car, getting it home and then getting a bill a month later for the paint job.