“Nodes represent dynasties and vertices represent a killing...”

December 4, 2017 5:25 PM

Crusader Kings 2 player records 700-year NPC game to find who gets “most kills” and “most children”. [Rock Paper Shotgun] “Royal incompetence simulator Crusader Kings 2 is one of the best games ever. Over hundreds of years, sultans and kings create new empires and murder their families. Today a data science man gets in touch to say he recorded a 700-year game in ‘observation’ mode, pulled out all the data like a big reel of cassette tape, shoved it through some kind of magical process I won’t pretend to understand, and came up with statistics on several rulers. This also resulted in detailed “networks” of kills and marriages. The important thing is: this lets us see who had the most babies. James Nagle is a data scientist. He’s previously mapped relationships between figureheads of the Easter Rising in Ireland using documents from the National Archive. This time, he dived into CK II, writing a script to pull out all personal data about the thousands of in-game characters – births, deaths, marital status, etc. Basically it was like doing a giant census for 691 years in a row. He’s since done a write-up of his project and produced various visualisations of the data.”
posted by Fizz (10 comments total)

*reinstalls Crusader Kings II*
posted by Fizz at 5:29 PM on December 4, 2017 [6 favorites]

I refrain from boasting about how many people I’ve killed, mostly because my lawyer told me not to do that. I suppose that sort of thing wasn’t as much of a problem for medieval monarchs.
posted by Anne Neville at 5:58 PM on December 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

I read it networking the Easter Rising post and it was really cool. I wish I could see a companion piece that presented a brief history of those events.
posted by latkes at 7:18 PM on December 4, 2017

I have played 270 hours of CK2 according to Steam. I can't remember how many people I have plotted to kill, executed or banished, but I have never succeeded in this feat: That Time A Horse Became Empress Of Rome.

For more CK2 stuff:

/r/CrusaderKings
/r/ShitCrusaderKingsSay
posted by Pendragon at 1:34 AM on December 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'm just glad that /r/ck2 has mostly stopped doing the "remove kebab" thing. Although I'm not especially thrilled that that Glitterhoof converting to Zoroastrian to marry his sister is what replaced it.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:41 AM on December 5, 2017

Yeah, it's still a subreddit, so it has it's troubles.
posted by Pendragon at 12:20 PM on December 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm just glad that /r/ck2 has mostly stopped doing the "remove kebab" thing. Although I'm not especially thrilled that that Glitterhoof converting to Zoroastrian to marry his sister is what replaced it.

I had to unsub because of all the constant incest jokes a few months back. Still play the game but that subreddit is mostly shitposting and memes anyway.
posted by nathan_teske at 3:57 PM on December 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

And everything of use (patch notes, mostly) gets reposted on /r/paradoxplaza anyway, yeah.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:04 PM on December 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

He’s previously mapped relationships between figureheads of the Easter Rising in Ireland using documents from the National Archive.

"Figureheads" seems a poor word choice.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:39 PM on December 5, 2017

I also recommend going to the official Paradox forums for more useful conversations.
posted by Pendragon at 11:59 PM on December 5, 2017