A Crusader Kings 3 player complained that the Aral Sea is too big – and got a lecture on the USSR and the Mongols in response

Historical strategy games are used to complaints about inaccuracies: wrong coat of arms, wrong dynasty, wrong border. But accusing a game of showing reality better than a modern atlas is a different level entirely. Especially when the catastrophe in question hasn't happened yet in the Middle Ages.

On Reddit, a player asked with a straight face when the Crusader Kings 3 developers would "fix" the Aral Sea, since it's much smaller in real life. The post carried the Meme flair, but that didn't stop some readers, and replies poured in with NASA links and lectures on Soviet irrigation. Poe's law in action: without an explicit marker, irony online is almost impossible to tell apart from sincere ignorance.

The joke itself rests on a very real tragedy. In the 1960s, the USSR began diverting water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya to cotton fields in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The Aral, once the fourth-largest lake in the world at around 68,000 sq. km, lost most of its surface area within half a century. Only the northern Small Aral was partly saved, thanks to the Kokaral Dam that Kazakhstan built in 2005.

The funny part is that the Aral really did dry up in the Middle Ages. After the Mongols destroyed the Khorezm dams in 1221, the Amu Darya changed its course and shifted toward the Sarykamysh Depression, and by the 14th–15th centuries the sea had grown very shallow. The proof sits on the seabed: researchers found the ruins of the Kerderi mausoleum and medieval settlements there. Strictly speaking, in a Crusader Kings 3 campaign that runs until 1453, the Aral should shrink noticeably.

The catch is that the Paradox engine can't handle that. Terrain and provinces are locked in at the start and don't change during a playthrough. For the same reason, the map has no gradual formation of the Zuiderzee after the devastating medieval floods, and the makers of the Tolkien-based Realms in Exile mod have never managed to set a start date before the fall of Numenor. The complaints about landscape don't end there: Ireland in the 11th century, for example, should clearly have far more forest than the game offers.

The sea in the game is frozen in time, while the real one managed to dry up, refill, and dry up again.