Expansion - Crusader Kings II: Jade Dragon DLC

Fundamentally poor game design harms an otherwise decent DLC Some features are nice, but no feature can really compensate for the fact that, for some reason, china can flood india with waves upon waves of soldiers, destroying entire nations in the process. If tweaked it could work, but since its not tweaked and the mechanics are basically: "Suck up to china or die" i have no interest in it. Get on sale or not at all.

Well, as a Chinese player I would like to recommed this DLC to other players... From the simulation of colthes (and helmets) to the ruling system of Ancient Western Chinese provinces, I am sure the develop group has surely done a lot of research on Chinese history. Hope this DLC will bring more attention on ancient China. (Though it is a good DLC, the price... Oops, traditional Paradox style)

I played this expansion for some time. And after playing with all the gimicks it adds, It gets pretty boring easily. The first few times I saw those events about the "Dragon", I was pretty excited, but after seeing the same events time after time I got pretty bored. It's just so underwhelming. Only a few providences are added, and the new government type isn't even playable. I barely saw any toaist or confucion rulers or courtiers even though they are the new thing. And the handful of rulers that were taoist, they just had a feudal government so there wasn't any new playstyle. The tiny amount of new artwork was pretty dodgy, the new character models look rough and unpolished, though the new event images were pretty good. I loved the new artstyle for them. The new government type added was pretty interesting, IF ONLY IT WASN'T UNPLAYABLE. I swear to god paradox is probably going to make a mini dlc making the new government type playable somehow. I did have fun sending off people I hate as eunuchs to the emporer though. All in all, I feel ripped off but I did have the time of my life making all the rulers of india chinese through carefully planned imperial marriages and title giving.

I am really enjoying this expansion, but I have a few gripes First, I think there should be Tibetan and Chinese councillor models as I dislike having the horse lords councillors for Tibetans and then the Court Chaplain councillor model for the Taoists. I also think there should be a way to become leader of the Western Protectorate as a whole, with a system similar to the Republic but involves exams due to Confucian Bureaucracy not being a dynastic system. However, on the whole a good expansion. The Chinese off-map empire is a good system on the whole.

Absolutely not. It might makes the Far-East more interesting in the sense there is more things added to the region, but most of the mechanics are hollow shells. [b]Interactions with the emperor of China[/b] are interesting on paper, but everything is very binear : expansionist or not, I like that one kind of gift but hate that one of another kind... Nevertheless, I like that you can plot your own autonomy by waiting the Chinese empire to be unstable or worse. It's a bit passive as a system however. Seeking the emperor to shatter an empire is also too easy and non-sense. Poor Abbassids or Seldjuks stomped so many times by China in so many games... All in all, interactions are just okay. [b]The tributary system[/b] is actually cool enough to not just limit China to an interface character. Not the invasions however. It just doesn't make sense and if it is just a challenge you seek there is way more interesting features elsewhere rather than a [i]Deus ex machina[/i]. Consequently, I am constantly restricting invasions. Moreover, sending Chinese armies in Europe, as far as Poland or the Byzantine Empire is a big no. And it's not (always) small companies that could be seen as lost mercenaries or adventurers. It just adds another blobbing factor in the game, which is something really hard to avoid in "grand stretagy" games from [i]Paradox[/i] since several years. [b]Chinese artifacts[/b] are cools, but it is also really easy to acquire them. And like other artifacts, they stay easily in the game so it ends up bloating it. On some occasions it can completely ruined a roleplayed game or the immersion. [b]Silk road[/b] is also available with [i]Horse Lords[/i], which is a better DLC in my opinion even if you dont plan playing nomads. It just adds more to the world you're taking part of than Chinese interactions and expeditions. [b]Rally points[/b] shouldn't be part of a DLC. It's just a quality of life (QoL) and basically add nothing to the "Jade Dragon". Other [i]Paradox[/i] games have it for free in a way or another. [b]The new casus belli[/b] are easily the thing I hate the most. I don't like blobbing at all and I do not like AI blobbing simply because 9 times out of 10 its empires will never fall. So you end up with a game with a few dozen colors and three or four massive empire in Europe and a constant, long and painful snowball to do, watch or endure. The casus belli make all of this worse. I worked hard to found game rules that limit blobs and make it eventually fall apart without preventing the formation of empires by the AI, with dozen of hours of running games as an observer. And simply having the [i]Dragon Jade[/i] casus belli enabled ruined everything. Just them. Those casus belli are not even interesting or justified. They are just here for the sake of expansion : no legitimacy or stakes behind it (Me big empire, you too, let us make war) or a useless cost that can easily be afforded, mostly by the biggest empires which makes the blobs even more powerful... One of them really makes sense, unifying a [i]de jure[/i] ducal title that you own. But sadly, most of the casus belli are free chunk of territories granted to the player. It diverts from the original state of mind of wars and casus belli of the game : the fact you have to work to get the most, mostly through your family members. As someone said on reddit, it "is just nation-state b*llshit". [b]In the end[/b], I just disable half of the features of [i]Jade Dragon[/i] in the game rules. Even with all of them enabled it isn't a good DLC. I avoided it for a long time (we are at the end of 2022 when I buy it) and decided to give it a try because I thought I was too harsh with it. Well... However, I could recommend it for someone that really like to play in the Far-East or somehow like China. Probably not for well informed or "nerds" of the history of China though.

I hate to do this when CK3 is already on the way but I can't recommend this DLC. If you for whatever reason haven't picked this up yet, just don't. The price isn't worth the 4 or 5 achievements that this DLC unlocks, the features it adds are fairly negligible, and if you're mainly interested in playing for fun or you usually prefer to play as a European power (after all it's called Crusader Kings, right? Not Invasions of the Western Protectorate?) then having this DLC enabled can be pure aggravation. For one, and as has been mentioned numerous times, China is not even on the map. There is a button so that you can bring up a menu and have limited interactions with the Chinese emperor, which, as a European power during this time period, is ridiculous and irrelevant. There is an incredibly annoying faction called the Western Protectorate that acts as a sort of viceroy for the Chinese emperor which does actually have some limited garbage territory way on the eastern side of the map at the very edge of the CK2 world. This territory amounts to basically a petty duchy or petty kingdom, it's underdeveloped and hardly has any soldiers or gold income. And yet somehow, even if You are an illustrious emperor with a ton of gold, a 100K strong army, the character that runs this faction, the Protector General of the Western Protectorate, will send you some random message while you're going about your business telling you that it's time for you to become a tributary to them (???? what) and that "it's only the natural progression of things"? Lol, again, what? Of course you decline, you're a mighty emperor, you've put hundreds of in-game years into ensuring the success of your chosen dynasty and you may even be working on getting some achievements, why would you ever want to be tributary to some rinky dink Chinese guy on the other side of the world who doesn't even have a fraction of the numbers you can raise? Suddenly the Western Protectorate declares war on you. Doesn't matter if you're in the midst of a crusade, a rebellion, an adventurer invasion, a conquest of your own. Baffled, you bring up the Protector General's menu and see he has 166K troops and they're heading towards you. The first time this happened to me I was actually in a crusade + getting a couple rebellions and he actually got me for a moment, I had to dismiss all my armies so I could declare war to free myself, which was fairly easy after he lost 3/4 the event spawned army he got. Having thought I was all good I got back to my western empire affairs. Literally within a couple years I got the same message about the Western Protectorate wanting me to become their tributary, which makes no sense whatsoever. I got this stupid, outrageously overpowered invasion 4 times all in all, in very quick succession, each time with the invading army being 160K+, and after successfully defending myself the last 3 I finally sent off a couple family members and an artifact for enough grace with the Chinese emperor to get a 50 year peace treaty. This wasn't fun, it wasn't challenging, it doesn't make sense historically or from any other aspect. Not only that, it costed me a great opportunity to press a claim so that I could get closer to the achievement I was going for, which had been a 200 year build up. There really are times when the game is working entirely against you and I don't understand why they would put in such a mechanic to ruin what you're trying to accomplish. Maybe someone at Paradox thought this was a fantastic way to throw a challenge at players who are big and powerful enough in their current game while they're seemingly at peace and trying to bring in gold. It's not. I'll make sure to not have it enabled from now on.

The Jade Dragon DLC does a great job of making the eastern half of the map far more chaotic and interesting. However, there are serious problems with scaling and how dealing with China is balanced that can quickly make China a boring novelty. Worse, there are serious issues with how Chinese wars and Chinese expansion function that can easily result in China becoming a silly map spanning superpower. The Chinese empire adds a lot to the game as it influences the map through the silk road, direct exchange, interventionism and expansionism. Benefitting from the silk road just requires owning key provinces along the silk road trade route, but this can be improved on through trade deals with China acquired with grace. Grace points are acquired through events, kowtowing to the Chinese emperor to exchange prestige for grace and sending relatives and/courtiers to serve as commanders, eunuchs or concubines. These points can also be exchanged for artifacts, books and specialists that provide excellent buffs for basically free. The points can also be used to ensure a peace with China, and call China to shatter large empires. China influences the map in so many ways and this can greatly spice up the east. It is unfortunate, but China becomes a boring novelty very fast due to the way it is handled. Raiding China is not very profitable, strips the player of the ability trade for advantages and makes the player a primary target for invasion so the only reasonable option is to be nice to China for all of the benefits. China has the same sized military the whole game (172k attrition-Immune stack with an occasional 50k reinforcements with minor variations depending on whether China is in a golden age, normal or in a civil war/famine) and this results in a very simple meta. China is easy to appease and easy to greatly outnumber in the mid-late game so one should just wait until the late game for an invasion or just permanently be nice to China. War with China can be difficult, but it can also be easily avoided. China can be conquered, but this is just a normal China war with a malus to reinforcements that ends with the player getting free grace, and unique artifacts. The conquest is very risky, but it can also be very easy as Chinese armies remain the same the whole game and can be manipulated into attacking easy to defend provinces. China can get boring, but it can also just be annoying. An aggressive China will declare wars to force random countries into being tributaries and this includes wars against major powers. With the 769 start date the Chinese can easily defeat the Abbasids and force an empire stretching from Tunisia to India into being a tributary that gives up 40% of its manpower and income. China can easily defeat giant empires by simply gobbling up provinces in the far east and steppe where attrition is high and winning battles against attrition drained armies with their attrition immune armies. The worst example of this is the Chinese spoiling the Mongol invasion by making them a protectorate. The defender fighting China gets no points for holding all of their territory so these wars favor China who gets a regular reinforcements of 50k soldiers. The Chinese can then use the borders of the states they have made tributaries to spread even further until they have a comically large empire of tributaries possibly stretching into west Africa and even western Europe. States that are tributaries of China are defended by giant Chinese armies and are impossible to raid for no particular reason. An aggressive China can be insanely annoying and even ruin games. China makes the eastern half of the map far more interesting and chaotic for both good and bad reasons. In this case the bad reasons simply outweigh the positives. Dealing with China is very straight forward to the point of being boring and an aggressive China outright spoils games.

To be honest, unlike most, I'm fine with the concept and them not expanding the map. However, I am not fine with the way the troops are handled. The aztecs and mongals are are one thing, they are supposed to be able to make an empire in the late game that can contend with well established ones. China does not have this excuse as they are present from the begining. Additionally, with poor war score scaling, they can conquer even a europe spanning romen empire by only capturing a single, small duchie after transversing siberia in the winter with out any attrition, with rome on being able to defend itself because of attrition. Until both are adressed, I can't like this expansion except for the additional casus belli.

The most important thing to say is that China itself is not added to the map with this DLC. Instead of slowing down the game with a humungous, unecessary land edition, the developers came up with something much more workable. Simply put, Paradox added a Chinese empire screen/tab which allows you to enter into negotiations with the Emperor of China - you can trade with and even become a tributary state to the titan of the east. While not present on the map, the Chinese army can appear and reign destruction down on you. In the end, I'd say this wasn't the best DLC Paradox has done and I wouldn't say it was particularly important in terms of overall gameplay to the core game. I would say that the sort of person that should get this, is one that knows the game and pretty much has everything else DLCwise. Good luck and happy conquering.

Unfortunately I cannot recommend this DLC in its current state. Adding China is a really cool idea that's poorly implemented. China does not exist on the physical map, and it's impossible to interact with the Emperor in any way other way that's not an option added by the DLC. Ultimately, the Emperor feels more like a placeholder, who will exist for so many years, before being replaced by another placeholder. My biggest complaint is about how levies and the Western Protectorate are handled. China's levies scale to your own, meaning you can get some absurd scenarios where China spawns 200,000 troops if you attack a small holding under their protection. Worse yet: Expansionist China. In my most recent ironman game, China managed to subjugate the Byzantine Empire and a united AI India with over 120,000 levies. It does not seem that China suffers from the same penalties as the players or the other AI, so they can just march 100,000 death stacks across the map with minimal deaths. Honestly, this DLC plays more like a poorly balanced mod, than professional content. I certainly wouldn't recommend using this DLC in an ironman playthrough, as it feels way too unpredictable and unbalanced. Perhaps it could work in a fun modded game, but even then it still suffers from the above problems.