A few questions for Castles & Crusades players

I'm possibly going to be starting a lunch-time gaming group at work, and I think C&C might be a good choice for our purposes. The only C&C experience I have is reading the Quick Start rules and the adventure I picked up at Free RPG Day this year.

I've run or played (A)D&D 2e through 5e, Fate, Numenera, and Dungeon World and enjoyed the hell out of all of them.

I'm thinking C&C is good for the following reasons and would like a little bit of feedback:

The group will, at the start, be mostly new players with little RPG experience, and it's not too difficult to get started with.

It doesn't require a ton of equipment: keep a set of dice and a character sheet in your desk at work, and we can sketch out stuff on paper as needed. No grid or hex mat, no minis, just show up in the breakroom and get going.

Good unified mechanic in the Siege Engine, pretty easy to pick up how most actions are resolved. Not a lot of screwing around with a million rules.

So here are my questions:

Is combat fast? If we only have an hour at a time, I don't want it to be the case that all of that hour is swallowed up by a combat that we might not even finish. I almost dread combat in my current Pathfinder campaign. About how long do fights take in your games? Are players generally cool with theater of the mind for it?

From what I understand, the C&C character creation/advancement process is much less complex than other systems, and while I find the huge numbers of feats and resulting crazy-*** math in 3.5/PF grating, I don't want a higher level character to just have more hit points and a bigger sword. Are mid to high level characters sufficiently different from low level characters?

Those of you who run C&C as a GM, is it reasonably low-prep? If this is a lunch group that meets once a week, my prep time won't be as high.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

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Combat is fast. You don't have to worry about tons of different modifiers so players aren't slowed down doing a bunch of math and the Siege engine is simple.

The poster is a spammer.

C&C lends well to theater of the mind and combat can be quick, especially for low level characters. Prep time for the CK can be minimal for a casual session. I am currently playing a weekly game via Discord chat and theater of the mind…rolling dice at my desk and keeping track on a paper character sheet - as old school as it gets without being at the same table.

Once you and your group get into the game more, the CastleKeepers Guide adds a ton of optional rules to tweak as you wish, if you want more detail or in-depth options. IMHO, C&C is a great game!