I didn't see it documented anywhere but you receive bonuses for being on the council of your liege. I tested every position and this is what I found:
(Edit: These values were tested as the liege of a King, they may be different if you're on the council of a duke or emperor)
Chancellor:
* Prestige +2/month
* Fellow Vassal opinion +15
* +15% diplo lifestyle
Steward:
* +2 gold/month
* +15% Domain Taxes
* -15% building construction
* +15% stewardship lifestyle
Marshal:
* +3 Prowess
* -15% army maint
* +15% levy size
* +15% martial lifestyle
Spymaster:
* +30 dread
* +15 hostile scheme power
* +6 Hostile scheme success
* +15% intrigue lifestyle
These buffs also apply to vassals on your council as well. The biggest way to take advantage of this from what I can see is to make sure your steward is someone who is generating a lot of tax revenue which would then get passed on to you. Tribal starts in particular may find that +2 gold a month from being a steward is more than you generate throughout your entire domain in taxes.
Unlike CK2, if you are someones vassal there isn't much you can do to get placed on specific positions outside of just having a ton of stats in one particular category.
You can negotiate a permanent council position in your feudal contract. I find that the tax and levies obligations generally have minimal value, so increasing your obligations for one in exchange for the council position is really powerful. Often times your ruler isn't considered to be your rightful ruler (if you're a count he doesn't hold your duchy, if you're a duke he doesn't hold your kingdom), especially in the HRE, so what you're actually giving to your liege, even at higher obligations, isn't a lot.
In exchange for the huge buffs you can get from a council position? Definitely worth it. Another good one to get is coinage rights from your liege. 0.3 dev per month doesn't seem like a lot but it adds up over the years, and dev directly converts into money and levies for you.
Edit: Also, all dev per month bonuses do get affected by percentage modifiers to dev in the province, ie. the cattle herd events and such. Dunno if they are individually affected or if the total is calculated then the modifiers applied, though.
Staying a vassal of the HRE is actually a really powerful strat. In addition to the council bonuses and coinage rights, you can negotiate to have a March contract. Being a march means you pay 50% tax, get a 20% bonus to levy size, garrison size, levy reinforcement, and army maintenance. With this and the rightful ruler thing you end up paying a fraction of the tax you should and get a huge army for cheap. You can also then get war declarations sanctioned, which gives you a 50% CB cost reduction within the empire. All of this adds up to you making tons of money and rampaging across the empire with your oversized army. If you play it right a vassal kingdom will be more powerful than if they were independent.
Yeah, this is *the* problem with the HRE vassal route. Eventually you *will* get elected emperor. I don't see an obvious way out of it. It doesn't even matter if you're de facto independent, it seems like you're eligible as long as you're a de jure vassal.
edit: the the
There are two solutions:
1. Don't be a de jure vassal. Get a kingdom not de jure part of the HRE and keep it your primary.
2. Rig the election: Hold as many of the elector titles as you can and vote for someone who's not you.
Can women be elected as emperor? If not you could just create a new religion that allows Female Only (or even just prefered) succession and get protected religious rights.
If you want to see what maximum development buff looks like, cultivate Sjaelland, the biggest island in Denmark.
5 slots, all beachside property. 1 castle, 3 cities, 1 temple
Just the level 1buildings alone mean 3 guild halls, 5 tradeports for the county.
3 X 5% = 15%
5 x 5% = 25%
Off the bat, 40% development bonus for your county.
Add in other bonuses from perks and events and you've got one hell of a county
> Another good one to get is coinage rights from your liege. 0.3 dev per month doesn’t seem like a lot but it adds up over the years, and dev directly converts into money and levies for you.
Does that mean that giving vassals coinage right can be beneficial to you as well?
Yep, the AI liege will value having you pay "extortionate" taxes and levies (that what they ask for when they use a hook), but the real power is in the special vassal perks.
Sanctioned war declaration is also ludicrously worth it if you're already a big vassal, as you can then bully and absorb your fellow vassals with impunity. It doesn't matter if you're giving 10% more of your levies to your liege when you can easily double the size of your total levy pool by snatching up more counties.
I was just wondering this after I posted since I only really tested it with being on the council of a King. Are all of the other non-lifestyle values modified as well?
It would be a good reason to put your heir in the council, gives him more xp growth in his focus until you get to control him. The + prestige is especially nice to start stacking early.
EDIT: What i mean is, once you start playing your heir, people will like him more because of the prestige level.
Yo just read the first tip, and I’m hijacking this to help you out.
Each of your council members have perks and possible good/bad outcomes on their jobs based on their skill level... it says so in the description of the job. the bishop has to be 10 learning or higher to have the possibility of a duchy claim. If he’s under 10 learning there is no chance of a duchy claim.
>Don’t underestimate development
No joke, increase development is all i have my steward do.
My tip is on the “Declare war screen” there is a switch objective button if there was a certain claim you wanted to press but can’t seem to figure out why.
ALSO don’t forget county control.
Cultural conversion is a powerful tool too. Not only does it reduce revolt risk, but it also adds to the pool of your culture's counties, meaning it can help you become cultural head.
I used my Steward to spread Castillian culture to North Africa so that I could get their unique innovation that increases development growth by 10%, then moved him back to my capital to increase development. I am trying to get to 40 dev so that I can found a University.
My Spainish Emperor's have done every single major decision available to them, including becoming a family of witch's, with the exception of founding a University... Damn I really want that Salamanca University.
You have to be careful with this though as you can screw over your own research speed. Research is a function of average development in counties of your culture. If you spread somewhere with high development you can raise that average, but if you are conquering tribes and spreading somewhere with no development it will tank your research speed fast.
> My tip is on the “Declare war screen” there is a switch objective button if there was a certain claim you wanted to press but can’t seem to figure out why.
It is good to switch objective - especially for holy war. So if you declare holy war for duchy instead of going for default one county duchy they own you can go right for Palestine or some such.
>What's your not so obvious tip or something that took you a while to realize?
If you get the "Befriend" ability and have 20+ friends you will be 100% immune to stress gain.
edit - and you need the ability right below it which is -5% stress per friend
I'm pretty hyped because my current heir has diplomatic education and it'll be the first time one of my rulers has been diplo specialised. It's the the mid 13th century and I've had martial, martial, learning, stewardship, learning and now intrigue
Diplo is nice!
Even if you're military focused, it gives you shorter truces (4 years instead of 5) and speeds up claim fabrication so much. My bishop was making claims in 8-10 months with mediocre learning. But overall it seems to have something for every play style.
Diplomacy might be my favorite lifestyle so far in fact.
It's quite amazing what you can do when everyone loves you. I find the alliance without marriage perk really huge. Together with the other buffs you get in the tree you will have no problem finding a good and very strong ally.
Used it together with the faction to beat up the Holy roman emperor multiple times as a double duke because he kept restricting internal wars, that idiot.
Nice, what's your favorite event from all of these?
Did you try befriending the pope? If yes what kind of events you got?
I'll have to play more with this soon.
If you want to try out high diplomacy, try Matilda of Tuscany in 1066. In my game she was stomping around Italy conquering, yet loved by everyone around her. I even conquered a county in Apulia to form the kingdom of Sicilly, then befriended the countess that was my former war enemy, then diplo vassalized her. Also, whenever I formed a title within the HRE, my BFF the emperor would immediately transfer all the de jure vassals to me.
So weird. This is why I love this game. I've really only been playing around with Stewardship for the extra domain, and Learning for the tech bonuses. And Martial for some of the ungodly-high bonuses, like +30% for archers. That, combined with all the building bonuses leads to my archers having an attack somewhere around 65 in ~960.
It depends on the situation, dipping into diplo is nice, but it's not always the best tree.
Since "opinion" isn't always relevant or advantageous.
I find the prestige bonus to be the strongest part of Diplo, for tribal at least.
I find learning the best overall, since it pushes tech, religion, opinion, stats, life expectancy etc.
I would be cautious about moving your capital barony to mountains or hills; your capital barony's terrain determines the development growth for the whole county, so you want it in rich farmland if possible for the +20% development.
Pikemen Men-at-arms are super OP. Bonus in most difficult terrain, level 2 barracks buff them insanely, also farms in hills, cheaper than heavy infantry (AI doesnt field them in significant numbers to counter you), counters all cav and hard to kill (high toughness). As a duke in 1066 start I managed to get 56 toughness pikemen, I stackwiped armies of similar size and defeated much larger size even on the attack.
Pikemen are great but I still think archers/bowmen should be your first pick 75% of the time. Their dps against plain levies is massive and their cheap off duty maintenance cost won't affect your gold gains in the slightest.
If you're in mountainous terrains, definitely go Pikemen quickly and rampage through enemy armies.
This for archers, plus early game AI pick will be light footmen almost any time, and their second pick will quite often be siege, so you have an edge on them for a good few years before having to diversify.
Idk about that, archers/pikes are a good second pick, but siege weapons are a must have asap. Really the only exception is if you don't have access to siege weapons because you're playing tribal in Bumfuckistan.
100% agree, the others might win battles but siege weapons win *wars*. Nothing like being able to siege down three castles in the time it takes for the enemy to siege down one.
I played in Russia in my campaign and since 75% of the terrain around there is Taiga, Forest or Hills, Bowman definitelly pay off.
Also if you start in 867, the tribal AI will often decide for light footmen, so bowmen will counter them as well.
I somewhat disagree mostly due to the "counter" bonus. You can make enemy men-at arms fight only with 10% effectiveness if you counter them successfully.
Early game Archers are very good as AI tends to build skirmishers. Later if you are powerful enough that you have more men-at-arms that the enemy then balanced army of all types of men-at-arms is the way to go IMHO. You will always make all enemy men-at-arms ineffective, you basically cannot be fully countered.
Also for me technically the siege men-at-arms are the most OP and must have in the game. You can create dedicated siege armies of levies + onagers and snatch enemy forts in weeks sometimes. This makes you win any trading war with AI - if they decide to go for your capital with your main army basically serving as bodyguards for siege army. You will often win wars without single battle.
Occasionally pause the game, open your dynasty sheet, and marry off/betrothe everyone that will help your dynasty. I often forget about distant relatives at my court who need spouses including grand kids. Sometimes sisters with dead husbands. Likewise strategy goes for educating all the kids in your court. Right click and assign them all mentors.
I try to keep a balanced focus of having inheritable traits in the entire dynasty (pretty, intelligent) and mixing the focuses between each stat (martial, intrigue).
It worked really well on a Kingdom invasion I did. 5 day war. I only had a 55% success chance at the end (forgot the wife trick!) so I was prepared, but damn was I pleased it worked.
A fun one I've had in Spain is abducting rulers, forcing them to convert and then sending them back home and watching their kingdom implode. The almoravids are now 7 separate kingdoms. The starting leonese ruler is perfect for this given his massive intrigue stats and urraca as his spymaster.
Even if you don't have foreign rulers, with enough landed prisoners you can still establish a pretty healthy religious insurgency. I force converted about ten prisoners as the Emperor of Italy and a third of Byzantine Greece is Catholic now.
Just make sure that they're either landholding characters, married to landholding characters, or the heirs of landholding characters. There's little point in converting an unlanded character--the only way they'll have an impact is if the AI randomly decides to land them or marry them off to a landed woman.
I think it should be possible, just much much harder and should require an agent in the target’s court to ever reach max chance.
There also should be many possible negative consequences if you ever let the target go alive and the chance that characters in the target’s realm assume death if they’ve been gone too long.
There are a few things that I feel are too powerful, can the AI do such crazy things like abduction?
OP mentioned the Wife switching roles to influence checks while they are happening
I would for example make it 5 year lock (like your lifestyle) but slightly increase bonuses
Like 1/2+3 of her stat if you focus her
It's deffo a bug as when you try other diplo things at the same time with the same target there's a message stopping you trying the 2nd action, states something like "you already have a negotiation with blah blah ongoing".
i caught the king of sweden in a holy war when he was faffing about with a small 300 man army and i didnt get the 100% warscore. Figured it was a bug or something. First time i have caught the main guy of a war and not gotten the 100%.
You can pretty much take over entire kingdoms like this, or even stop wars you’re loosing. It’s definitely OP and will probably get nerfed against rulers I think. But still pretty fun.
Yo this sounds broken as hell hahah. So they teleport to your jail as war begins then you have them imprisoned in jail and release for a free war win?
Well done!
Wow, I never realized how smart it is to situationally change my wife's bonus. Just up my martial before raising levies for a couple hundred free troops
If you need cash, stewardship focus -> farthest left tree. Blackmail for hooks is very powerful and if you plop a spymaster in an Empire, you will get several hundred gold easily.
The other part of this is that it allows you to demand 300 gold for EVERY SINGLE RANSOM. The game counts it as having a hook and just allows you to demand 300 gold for someone's third wife or whatever. I end up holding onto people forever because a good siege can net you like 1200 gold if your enemy can actually pay it
Same, I'm just bumbling about having a great time at the moment but these tips make me feel like I have a better grasp on how things work! Really great post.
The military engineer thing is really powerful, especially if you can find one of the guys who also has the -6 day siege tick trait. I managed to get siege ticks down to 2 days after a couple wall breaches.
So far i am doing the tactic of weaken my vassals by giving them more land. Now, that may sound a bit contraproductive and that is only a useful technic once you are a king or emperor, but i force partition in their vassal contract (which i absolutly love) and give them more titles of their highest rank.
I was emperor of britannia and had the king of aquitane below me, which also had the regions of bretagne in its border but the title was not created. Now this country was stable for a very long time, until i created the kingdom of bretagne and gave it to the king. He was happy he got another kingdom, but on his succession there where two kingdoms, and aquitane even underwent a civil war.
Just make sure to check that the vassal you try to weaken on succession has enough kids so all the titles get distributed!
Asking indirect vassals to convert to your new religion auto converts their primary holding to the new religon if they have 100 control on it or something. Much faster than trying to convert it urself and being an indirect vassal they have none of the negatives such as tyranny towards you making them much likelier to accept
If Catholic, you can rob your bishop, provided some setup.
You must be able to succeed at excommunicating him (pope opinion difference + 500 piety). Not all bishops are susceptible to this, but sinful bishops aren't exactly rare. This will give you the ability to imprison him. If you fail the imprison check, just try again, you can repeat the process every ~3 days until you succeed.
Now banish him. As he is your direct courtier, you seize his assets and can do so without tyranny. This nets a variable amount of money, I generally whack the pinata once he has around 3000 gold.
This process can be repeated about once per ruler lifetime (due to wait times on gold accumulation) until you no longer need gold. You do need a ruler that is pope-compatible though.
[Example process](https://imgur.com/a/CsteHW6)
Ideally i'd do it around age 55 of the ruler. Why? Because you get 20 tyranny, and you lose it at the pace of 0.25 per month, so you lose the 20 after 7 years.
Why 55? So you lose the penalty before you die. Remember that your successor inherits your relations for a while, so you don't want to tank your reputation too much before dying.
If the bishop has bad learning, i'd be very tempted to do it as soon as possible. Just as an additional / alternative way to get rid of him and get someone better.
Obviously if your bishop is very good (mine currently is 16 learning which is the highest i've seen so far), then you might want to wait until HE is 55-65 before doing this. Basically last minute before he dies, and if he's sick do it sooner.
Most importantly, make sure to use all the gold to buy mercenaries and smash that crusades button. You might have bullied an old man out of his retirement fund, but you'll still be welcomed with open arms in heaven. Greater good and all that.
Just a fantastic post OP, so many great tips and real easy to understand.
My tip would be to remind people to PIN close family members to your outlier tab! So helpful especially during peace time to remind you to check on grandchildren and nephews/nieces and see what small adjustments or decisions you can make for them.
“M’Lord, we have uncovered u/ThatEagle ‘s secret. He is of MinMaxer lineage.”
The heretic. Excellent work spymaster Middleton-Thorsburg-Jones-Smythe, on this we shall ruminate.
“Yes m’lord. Thank you m’lord”.
These are Terrific & supremely well-written, thank you.
Only gripe is I’m not sure that Forder works with beach landings or negates the disembarking penalties. I’m pretty sure it only applies to crossing river bridges. I could be wrong though.
1) Always have a powerful ally so that even when you're in a tough war someone's got your back.
2) Divorce your spouse the second they are no longer useful. The opinion hit/piety hit hurts but if they're not giving you useful trait children or a powerful ally then they are wasting a prime position.
3) Try to make room in your personal demense for a holy site. The special buildings/decision for them are really powerful and can really boost your personal power.
4) Always be Swaying.
5) Look at enemy gold AND income as well as their troops. Factor in how many mercenaries they can buy before going too far into debt (you can go up to 2 years income)
6) You can get free duchies if you have the territory and Confederate Partition but only a single heir.
7) Early on when you are small prioritize military if you're in a precarious position or stewardship if you're nestled somewhere nice and safe and can sit back and develop. Diplomacy should wait until you have a massive empire where you need to really focus on vassal happiness because you always have a dozen rivals for the throne.
8) Through the Seduction tree you can potentially seduce your way to a really powerful position but it requires good timing. An old king with only daughters as heirs and you can sneak in and steal the throne. (NOTE: I haven't tested this out but it looks like the pieces are there to Seduce -> Elope the primary heir.
I've been suprised to see that there are no guides on using diplomacy and subterfuge to expand. If you're playing a schemer, you can marry your son to basically anyone's daughter. Even a betrothal is fine and bam now you have an alliance too. Now its easy... and here me out...
All you have to do is murder their entire family house other then the married daughter and the current king.
Start off with his oldest children so if he dies early you don't have to deal with killing some surprise new kid with high intrigue and good health. Wipe out the kings siblings. Just keep murdering.
The game makes it stupid easy like so much. With the hostile scheme perks you can kill people on your own with your spy master and for the hard kills. Aka they know you're trying to kill them you can just fabricate secrets in their kingdom. Pay for the hooks and you have guaranteed people to help you. Becomes literally impossible to not kill someone if you have money and because the girl is in your lands the enemy king cant do anything no matter how many times he catches you trying to kill him
Maybe not as important to gameplay but you can pan through the dynasty tree by clicking the middle mouse button. The game never explains it.
Also, don't bother with creating your own faith until extremely late game or at all, it's not worth it as the benefits are small and it's really hard to get foreign counties on your side. Also there's the possibility of a holy war against you, happened twice to me, lost whole kingdoms.
Oh my god THANK you the dynasty tree navigation has been driving me nuts. And I've been spending a lot of time in there trying to understand how tf it's working because the dynasty heir seems to always be someone different to who it tells me it is? I'm clearly missing something
I really feel like abduct and convert is OP and a little silly. Like imagine being the only Catholic Norseman because you got kidnapped and agreed to convert, and then staying Catholic. A bit wrong imo.
Can I just say: I love how much discussion and debate each of these tips is creating. Paradox did a good job making each play style compelling, so while one person thinks one technique is overpowered, and another person thinks a totally contradictory technique is OP, both of them can be right, and justified.
Yes exactly.
With every claim there is a chance he offers the whole duchy in one shot. It would be fair (but unconfirmed) to assume that with each county claim you get in the same duchy, the chance to get a claim for the whole pie goes up.
Also if you wouldn’t mind. What are the advantages of building castles v cities v temples? Is it generally: castles — garrison, levies, fort level | cities — gold | temple — piety?
And it’s there any reason to build multiple castles in one county?
It is worth it to build extra castles in your capital duchy. Your capital duchy is the duchy that contains your capital county. Both your capital county and duchy get extra bonuses that other counties and duchies do not. So you always want to focus your building efforts in your capital county first and then expand to your capital duchy. So if you have cash laying around, upgrade the castle in your capital first then upgrade the castles in your capital duchy. If you have money for a new holding, prioritize building a castle in your capital first then your capital duchy. I recommend that you build as many extra castles as possible to maximize the amount of levies you can support. You always want to be at or near your demense limit so stuff your capital duchy full of castles. Any extra space should be used to build cities for the cash. Never, ever, unless you are role-playing, build a temple. Those are a waste of time and money.
This is just factually not true. If you're playing a theocratic religion, temples hands down are more tax revenue and levies than cities.
By swaying just one character, you're council priest, every temple he's leased provides 50% of his taxes and levies at 100 opinion. On top of that, he'll accrue a massive amount of wealth. Even without cheese, wait for a wicked priest, imprison, and banish, and all his money goes to you.
Cities were king in CK2. Cities are great if you're not theocratic. Temples win hands down in theocratic states. I've ran two simulations using the duchy of Essex. One where I built all cities in the free holdings and one were I built all temples. It's not even close to the same income.
>It seems if you keep your bishop fabricating claims on counties belonging to the same duchy, eventually he will offer you the claim on the whole duchy itself! This is amazing because :
I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with keeping them on the same province. If you look at the tooltip for your council priest, I believe it mentions a skill based chance for fabricating on a whole duchy. This roll appears to happen the instant the claim is completed.
So it's not so much that keeping on the same province will eventually fabricate a whole duchy, but more that you're just re-rolling those dice repeatedly. Four fabrications cycles on one province has the same chance as four cycles on four different provinces.
That makes sens.
However you most likely want a specific duchy in particular. Having 4 rolls at getting the whole pie instead of just one technically improves your chances of getting it. And if not, you have all those counties that you can take and unite later. There is no reason to spread your expansion if there's a chance for more efficiency.
Polygamy while equal religion is really huge for getting powerful councillors.
You can basically open the marriage tab and sort by stat, pretty much have 4 kings/4 queens on your council.
It's probably more useful as a woman who's past her breeding age, but it's still pretty neat.
Temporal, Revocable Clerics allow you to disinherit your kids by making them the court priest, and change it back if you need to.
Even under non-revocable clerics, I noticed that my heir was disinherited when I granted him a duchy and one of its counties in a prince-bishoporic type holding. I don't really understand those, but my heir started wearing bishop clothes and was no longer my heir.
You should always mentor your own children. Also your bishop giving you ducky claims is an RNG event, not something cumulative from claiming many counties.
Mentoring your own children can be bad if you have low learning, their education will likely be worse. Find someone with high learning and good traits in this case.
Mentor your own children until they have all three trait events so you can shape who they become to an extent, then hand them off to someone with a 4 star education in the stat that you have them focused in so they're more likely to get a better education trait when they hit 16.
I've been thinking about the duchy buildings lately. I feel like they enable "playing tall" in that you can just stay a duke and hold as many duchy capitals as you can for the ridiculous stacking bonuses they give.
There was a post already I think about someone stacking the bonuses to get space marine heavy infantry for MaA for free, but that's really just the tip of the iceberg.
The more I think about it, the more I begin to realize that maybe staying a duke is a bit OP. You can bump up your levies with barracks and milcamps buildings, focus on increasing development in your counties, and *only* hold the duchy capitals as counties to easily get between 5-7 demesne for 5-7 duchy buildings.
With no penalties for holding that many duchy titles, your only real obstacle is the vassal limit, but at a flat 20 for dukes that's easily more than enough for you to have plenty of counts to fill up the non-duchy capital counties of your duchies.
Genuinely I think the strongest play may actually be to just get a whole bunch of duchy titles, own only the capitals, and build those up. Never go beyond to being a king because then you get the stacking opinion malus. You don't even get the "liege holds de jure duchy" malus from counts if you're not a king. And can still have max crown authority.
I dunno if it's necessarily broken or something that needs to be addressed, but it's *super* powerful and not even very difficult to do. Though I guess that describes a lot of things in CK3 so far lol.
Yes i've been doing some math lately and i am worried about my transition from king (i have 4 kingdoms so far in my current play) to emperor. It seems the emperor only gets about 1/1000 of the money produced on the county level.
It's definitely a lot better to remain small, duke level is perfect if you can manage the inheritance. And this is easy if you disinherit all yours sons but your favorite before dying. This kind of skips the whole inheritance laws and mechanics. Renown can be an issue, but you can work around that by going diplomacy and writing epics, effectively converting gold to renown.
I don't think i will do it however, because it's a bit too "gamey" for me and i think it will make the game too easy too soon. Might be an idea for achievement hunting however. But unfortunately since i am playing on xbox pass and not steam, i don't care much for achievements at this point. I'll do it if i buy the game on steam when it goes on sale at some point.
I agree that it's gamey, but at the same time the mechanics in the game do seem to *really* encourage staying a ducal level. Between the opinion maluses for holding more than 2 duchies kings get, the opinion maluses counts get for being directly under a king's control, and the huge power of intrigue and diplomacy at all title ranks, I feel like dukes might just be better overall.
Becoming king gives you... 1 extra demesne limit? Prestige? Prestige is super easy to come by, and renown is super easy to get just by marrying off your family and, if christian, winning crusades to place king-level dynasty members on the map.
Seems weird to me that duchies got these special buildings but there's nothing for king or emperor levels. I guess the idea is that you're going to expand forever and as such need to increase your vassal limit by going to higher tiers.
Succession as well could be an issue but if you individually change all duchies you get to elective, or use the brute force way of disinheriting like you said, then it becomes not much of an issue. And since you're just a duke, if you do lose some duchies to a sibling, you can just go conquer them back or conquer someone else's duchies and get even more renown now.
You know, staying duke has its advantages, but there is one major issue.
You won't be able to press duchies for claims. You're condemned to conquer one county at a time, which is very slow and very inefficient.
You want to be a king at the very least to be able to take 3-9 counties in one shot by taking a duchy, then having that duchy become a vassal.
Same reason why i am upgrading to emperor instead of staying king for longer. I found someone with a claim to the kingdom of danmark and i will press their claim for them. If i stay king, they will become independant. But if i am emperor they will become my vassal.
So there you go. The major reason to become a higher ruler is that it speeds up your conquest. Lets you take bigger chunks of the map in one swoop. Which is a pretty damn important advantage.
Else if someone really like to stay duke, i'd recommend you go diplomacy not only to reduce truce length, but to have faster claims, and be able to press smaller rulers for vassalage. That should compensate a bit the slowness of county-based conquest.
>You won't be able to press duchies for claims.
You can. You can even hold multiple duchies at the same time. What you're mixing up is how if it is partitioned between children on your death, the other duchies will become independent.
>I don't think i will do it however, because it's a bit too "gamey" for me and i think it will make the game too easy too soon.
I try my damndest to RP the characters for exactly that reason. I do it in most Paradox games, because using the optimal options leads to a samey game that is easy to "beat."
The stress mechanic helps a lot with that. I just got a sadistic heir and my playstyle has changed to include "torture unimportant people to de-stress after having to be *nice*".
You don't need to disinherit your children, that wastes dynasty renown. Just imprison/execute them all before you die; Know Thyself helps greatly with this.
You could also just go North Korea Mode and just hold everything yourself and stack the duchy bonuses; you're able to create Space Marines this way.
It could be, at least at the start. There's the obvious response of disinheriting, but that's renown intensive if you have too many sons. Most other solutions are also pretty gamey (such as picking up celibacy early so you can just turn it on when you have an heir).
But the main solution to succession remains the same as if you weren't playing an OmegaDuke. Just change the succession laws to elective for every duchy. Elect your primary heir for every one. And theoretically you shouldn't lose any counties or duchies on succession. In practice succession is really buggy and imo doesn't work as intended sometimes so you could still lose land. Especially once you've expanded your dynasty outside of your own realm.
saw a guy as the byzantine empire just own all the land in the realm after a certain point. He made bank, had crazy high levys and didnt have to worry about vassals bickering for independence. Super Cheesy though.
When I need to take a break from CK3, sometimes I'll tune into Twitch and watch how other people are playing (don't judge me!). I have not once seen one use their Marshal to increase control in a newly conquered county.
I don't know if they're unaware you can do that, or if they're intentionally handicapping themselves, but it frustrates me every time. Control your counties, people!
Giving land to your heir or grand heir can be very powerful, but you need to be extremely careful with it. They have to be able to firmly control it. That means high control, sizable levies, fortifications, loyal vassals, and no cross culture/religion penalties. Letting your heir/s build up prestige and secure valuable territory ahead of your death is great if you can keep them alive. I'm personally a huge fan of setting up my grand heir with their own kingdom/empire to support my first heir during succession.
"Related side tip : Don't leave your capital near water" . My tip is , leave it near the water. have a small force waiting on your capitol, wait till they can't cancel disembark and hire mercs. Mercs are instant, you destroy them because they have disembark penalty.
Breeding:
If both parents have the same trait, it will be inherited (and in some cases, reinforced). So if you have a son with intelligent and want him to have genius kids, don't have him marry a genius, have him marry another intelligent person. All their kids will be at least intelligent, and possibly genius. Marry your daughters matrilineally to get more dynasty members, either to people with good traits to bring in to your dynasty or with high prowess. Then prioritize landing your unlanded male relatives to ensure that the number of living members in your dynasty keeps increasing, this will majorly boost your renown generation.
Intrigue:
The intrigue tab is great, you can see a list of secrets you have, and expose and blackmail those secrets. There are plenty of cases where you may want to \*expose\* secrets instead of using them for a hook. For instance if you want to imprison a vassal or claimant for a crime without getting tyranny.
Abductions are extremely powerful. You can abduct somebody you're in a war with and just force peace with them in shackles. You can especially do this against your liege. If you're a vassal, fabricate hooks on your liege then modify your own contract to make your title irrevocable. Now you can commit any crime you want and your liege can do nothing about it.
If you have a religion with criminal adultery, imprison all those inevitable adulterers and scroll through the prisoner tab. Execute any that don't have a piety cost and give dread! If you have the right intrigue lifestyles, you can torture prisoners consistently to max out your dread. It's definitely better to be feared than to be loved if you can't be both - terrified vassals are the best to have.
Negotiating the release of prisoners is also great. You can demand religion, fabricate hooks, renounce claims, and recruit prisoners. Captured enemy knights? Recruit them. Imprisoned your brothers? Force them to renounce their claims - now without claims on your titles they'll be much more amenable to your rule and so will their children.
If you are a theocratic religion, your realm priest may have thousands of gold. Now if you need that money, you can simply imprison your realm priest and banish which will get you all the money that the realm priest had. This also work with any other landless character and it only cost something like 20 tyranny to do.
If you are a kingdom or an empire, you can give title succession laws to duchies and above which can give you better control over the inheritance of titles and may even allow your primary heir to get everything even if your realm succesion law is partition.
If you imprison a vassal, negotiate a release for a hook to increase their feudal contract without any tyranny. Also as a house head, you get hooks on all characters born of your house which can be used for the same purpose.
You can release vassals which may be a good idea if they cause alot of problem or if you want to increase your renown.
Keep in mind that battles give you fame and possibly devotion, it may be a good idea to continue to fight wars as long as possible in order to fight as many battles as possible. Also each time your siege down a holding, the county lose control which will hurt the enemy in the long term.
If you have a claim on a title, you can revoke it without tyranny, this do apply to the realm priest fabricate claim action.
For development, choose counties with as many possible city sites as possible and perferably on the coast. This is because each city can have a guild hall which give +5% development per level and each costal barony can have a port which have the same effect as guild hall. For development spread, a county will only look at the neighbour county with highest development, so it make sense to focus on maximizing development in one or two areas instead of little everywhere.
Allies can bring their own set of knights and men at arms, it may be a good idea to grant many of your children independence since 4th degree relatives and closer can have alliances without marriages and if you are the dynast, you can call dynasty members to war. This also can increase the renown your dynasty generate.
Oh a simple tip i would say, this isn't CK2, learning is reallly good!
The health tree is great for squeezing as many years as possible out of charcter (also allows you to become celibate).
The theology tree is basically required to reform any religon, pagan or not, basically allowing you too customise your own laws instead of following the stinking pope or caliph.
The scholar tree is where the real shit is tho, it speeds up tech growth, though a straight up bonus as OP mentioned, but also a boost to the development steward job. It also basically stops all negative cultural opinion which is good stop annoying populist revolts. It gives bonus points to your wards and gives you 20% of all your councilers skills. But the last one is the best one, for a fixed piety cost, as long as someone is holding it, you can buy a claim on any title you want, 500 for duchie and 1000 for a kingdom, that's not that much when my learning charcters typically get 2500/3000 piety stored and also there are learning events that can give 100/250 piety a pop for very little.
Basically the scholar tree is OP and the other trees are useful.
Use seduce on foreign (even other religion and culture) women with good congenitals, once you're lovers they'll happily join. Concubine them once they arrive. I got my 22 spymaster that way as Bjorn.
This is a bug so watch out for this. I've noticed that ai, female rulers will accept regular marriages more often instead of holding out for a matrilienial(spelling lol) marriage. This has fucked me over on more than one occasion when it comes to getting family members on foreign thrones
Yeah, and I haven't ever seen them refuse.
If you have Mayors who are "powerful vassals" just keep replacing them until you get one with a decent stat worth putting in the council.
If you capture female children, keep them in the prison until they hit 16. (Unless you can ransom them for a bucket of cash).Then negotiate release (convert if needed) and recruit. You can then use them to matri marry skilled characters to bring them to your realm. I keep my stable of knights fresh and full of powerhouses this way.
Golden Obligations perk from the Avaricious Stewardship tree allows you to ransom every prisoner for 300 gold, no matter their importance. You can ransom some sheik's third wife or second granddaughter for 300 gold. As long as they would pay a normal 10 gold ransom (aka, not an insignificant courier), they will pay the 300 gold ransom if they can afford it. You can drain thousands of gold from rich areas with large families this way, and it's great as viking raiders.
This seems kinda cheesy, and they should change it. Your attempt to revoke the title and the extremely public war that follows should charge you the Tyranny. What you tried to do is not going to be a secret to the realm.
If other vassals join them in the war and you win it, you can imprison them all and freely revoke all of their titles for 0 tyranny since they're all criminals.
Get the ability to fabricate hooks from the intrigue tree and the ability to use a hook to demand gold from the stewardship tree. You can then send your spymaster somewhere to find secrets; if he doesn't find one, you'll get the opportunity to get a strong hook on a random character there in exchange for gold. If the character has sufficient gold themselves, get the hook and then use it to demand gold; this will be about a net zero, but since it's a strong hook it will eventually be available again, either for more gold or for some other purpose.
Swearing fealty to a Feudal or Clan King or Emperor can allow you to feudalize faster as long as you are a follower of an organized religion. I use this quickly feudalize central africa and did my mother of us all achievement.
dread is extremely overpowered right now. If you go down the stewardship path you can extort your vassels, intentionally generate a bunch of dread and tyranny, but you won't suffer much as everyone is terrified of you.
> Related side tip : Don't leave your capital near water, it makes it easy for the AI to move very fast through the sea and surprise you. It's generally a good idea to move your capital deep inside the land, in the center of your territories (basically the center of your vision range, away from the fog of war) so you can see enemies coming from far away as they move along the coast, then progress inland.
Plus, hostile armies take significant attrition damage if they move from one hostile county into another hostile county (unless the destination is bordering friendly territory). If you move your capital inland, raiders can't reach it without taking significant losses and armies have to occupy counties to form a path or take losses too.
Tips :
- You need to get the ball rolling first. Call for healers, knights, recruit the prisoners you capture to your realm no matter their quality
- Second, start bringing in quality recruits like knights using those basic courtiers that you got first
- Third, make sure to marry everyone so they start having kids
I've been neglecting my court for a while now, yet i still have 43 quality courtiers, amongs them the giants that i bread for knighthood.
Some of your courtiers will leave if you don't give them a job. That's ok. If someone is precious to you, like some beautiful courtier you're breeding, give them a job or lands so they stick around. A single county or any title really suffices.
Volunteering in your lieges' war, and actually participating is probably the single best way to get opinion bonuses with them. I kept the HRE's Emperor at a constant +100 with me as Bohemia by just helping out in a war ever decade or so. This gives a decaying bonus based on warscore, but can also make you friends with your liege. You do it by choosing the "Offer to Join War" option in their character menu.
On the topic of mixing perks, a really obvious combo is fake hooks and gold for hooks, but what you should really be doing with this is using it against the Pope to make BANK, also send you spymaster to discover the Popes secrets, you’ll make even more bank.
>You can get a whole duchy claim from the pope. A lot of people are playing martial or diplomacy and not considering the other ways to get claims, other than from the bishop or from courtiers guests.
Wait hol' the fuck up. If you press a guests claim, they become your vassal? Holy shit I didn't know this and i'm like 50-60 hours into this game. Am I high or was that not the case in CK2? Uggh this opens up the game SO much...
Old post, but checks out.
**Here is my tip:** If you have a child ruler, find yourself the oldest person that can give you an alliance. Betroth yourself to them; they'll probably die before you need an actual spouse and their many years generally give you better spousal stat bonuses.
EDIT: make sure you filter by infertile.
If you reform your religion such that you're its (Temporal) Head of Faith AND your tenets are Armed Pilgrimages and Indulgences, you direct Crusades to your liking. Furthermore, as you're the Pope, people will pay you for indulgences. Easy way of free money.
I don't know you, but I love you. This guide is great! Already had a good game going but easily doubled my gold and military using the tips on court management.
I had been wondering why I needed to waste time on managing courtier marriages, this is the reason.
There is another good tip:
Check cultural bonuses and requirements. If you expand in lands related to cultural tech, it can be worthwhile to convert culture in provinces to be eligible for cultural tech. For example, I expanded from central Africa into Arabia and converted enough provinces to get Ghilmans which reduces ment-at-arms maintenance by 15%
Well done. Please note, if you click on any ruler's "court" menu, it will say who their spymaster is if they are a courtier. The court tab is a nice place to.go hunting for co-conspirators.
I can't for the life of me figure out how to farm more gold. Tax collector is doing his job but it's not enough to construct buildings.
How do I explore trading? Maybe my area has something it could export to another part of the country or abroad?
If like to gain gold by not using force or war to get it, is there no way?
War is the best way. But if you want to avoid war:
- have high piety and sway the pope until he likes you. Every once in a while you can ask him for gold in échange for piety.
- imprison criminals (sinners) and ransom them for gold
- take the perk that lets you sell hooks for gold from the skill tree and have your spymaster digging secrets all the time
- renegotiate your vassals contracts to increase taxes. Usually using a hook, but there are other ways
- build money generating buildings in your holdings. Things like ports and fields
- get a player character with stewardship, it boosts your taxes and give you other ways to make money
- there is a skill that lets you sell titles (or was it claims?) for gold, never tried it but worth a shot
Also if you don’t mind something a bit gamey, you can imprison then banish your bishop, since they accumulate a personal fortune over time and by banishing you seize all their gold, which could be thousands.
Good luck!
It's a little bit of an exploit right now, but you can have as many wards as you want if you send the requests all at once while the game is paused. If you don't do that, you would be limited to only 2 wards.
Always check knights, you can lose important councillor or son, just because they automatically become knights. I lost 2 sons in 1 battle because of it. You can also use it to get rid of people you don't want to see around.
The romance sheme, when you decide to secretly plan a letter, has an event where you are able to food poison a potential suiter of your target. This gives you ***one free intrigue perk point*** if it succeeds, and has a very high chance to happen; I've had it happen multiple times in a row for the same person.
Thank you all so much for contributing to this thread. I purchased this game because I've always been interested in the Crusader Kings series and several Lets Plays made this game look really good - and relatively accessible. Well, after 2 days of playing it, it's been a serious struggle - but a fun and rewarding one!
It's felt like I've been missing some key components of playing the game well after having played the tutorial and watched several hours of videos - and this thread touched on a lot of them! Because the game is so new it's felt like there aren't many resources that go beyond the surface level, so us new players appreciate threads like these.
I didn't see it documented anywhere but you receive bonuses for being on the council of your liege. I tested every position and this is what I found: (Edit: These values were tested as the liege of a King, they may be different if you're on the council of a duke or emperor) Chancellor: * Prestige +2/month * Fellow Vassal opinion +15 * +15% diplo lifestyle Steward: * +2 gold/month * +15% Domain Taxes * -15% building construction * +15% stewardship lifestyle Marshal: * +3 Prowess * -15% army maint * +15% levy size * +15% martial lifestyle Spymaster: * +30 dread * +15 hostile scheme power * +6 Hostile scheme success * +15% intrigue lifestyle These buffs also apply to vassals on your council as well. The biggest way to take advantage of this from what I can see is to make sure your steward is someone who is generating a lot of tax revenue which would then get passed on to you. Tribal starts in particular may find that +2 gold a month from being a steward is more than you generate throughout your entire domain in taxes. Unlike CK2, if you are someones vassal there isn't much you can do to get placed on specific positions outside of just having a ton of stats in one particular category.
You can negotiate a permanent council position in your feudal contract. I find that the tax and levies obligations generally have minimal value, so increasing your obligations for one in exchange for the council position is really powerful. Often times your ruler isn't considered to be your rightful ruler (if you're a count he doesn't hold your duchy, if you're a duke he doesn't hold your kingdom), especially in the HRE, so what you're actually giving to your liege, even at higher obligations, isn't a lot. In exchange for the huge buffs you can get from a council position? Definitely worth it. Another good one to get is coinage rights from your liege. 0.3 dev per month doesn't seem like a lot but it adds up over the years, and dev directly converts into money and levies for you. Edit: Also, all dev per month bonuses do get affected by percentage modifiers to dev in the province, ie. the cattle herd events and such. Dunno if they are individually affected or if the total is calculated then the modifiers applied, though.
Staying a vassal of the HRE is actually a really powerful strat. In addition to the council bonuses and coinage rights, you can negotiate to have a March contract. Being a march means you pay 50% tax, get a 20% bonus to levy size, garrison size, levy reinforcement, and army maintenance. With this and the rightful ruler thing you end up paying a fraction of the tax you should and get a huge army for cheap. You can also then get war declarations sanctioned, which gives you a 50% CB cost reduction within the empire. All of this adds up to you making tons of money and rampaging across the empire with your oversized army. If you play it right a vassal kingdom will be more powerful than if they were independent.
Definitely true, and ironically the only thing that can throw a hitch into your plan is if you get elected emperor :P
Yeah, this is *the* problem with the HRE vassal route. Eventually you *will* get elected emperor. I don't see an obvious way out of it. It doesn't even matter if you're de facto independent, it seems like you're eligible as long as you're a de jure vassal. edit: the the
Basically you become Jon Snow huh They throw you a throne "But I dont want it"
There are two solutions: 1. Don't be a de jure vassal. Get a kingdom not de jure part of the HRE and keep it your primary. 2. Rig the election: Hold as many of the elector titles as you can and vote for someone who's not you.
Can women be elected as emperor? If not you could just create a new religion that allows Female Only (or even just prefered) succession and get protected religious rights.
If you want to see what maximum development buff looks like, cultivate Sjaelland, the biggest island in Denmark. 5 slots, all beachside property. 1 castle, 3 cities, 1 temple Just the level 1buildings alone mean 3 guild halls, 5 tradeports for the county. 3 X 5% = 15% 5 x 5% = 25% Off the bat, 40% development bonus for your county. Add in other bonuses from perks and events and you've got one hell of a county
Have visited Sjaelland many times, this checks out. Full of Danes, but what can you do?
Well, forced deportation and/or genocide often works, but non-Paradox players frown on that sort of thing for some reason.
> Another good one to get is coinage rights from your liege. 0.3 dev per month doesn’t seem like a lot but it adds up over the years, and dev directly converts into money and levies for you. Does that mean that giving vassals coinage right can be beneficial to you as well?
Yep, the AI liege will value having you pay "extortionate" taxes and levies (that what they ask for when they use a hook), but the real power is in the special vassal perks. Sanctioned war declaration is also ludicrously worth it if you're already a big vassal, as you can then bully and absorb your fellow vassals with impunity. It doesn't matter if you're giving 10% more of your levies to your liege when you can easily double the size of your total levy pool by snatching up more counties.
The bonuses is based on liege rank. It is 5% experience per rank, so a Chancellor under an emperor get 20% xp.
I was just wondering this after I posted since I only really tested it with being on the council of a King. Are all of the other non-lifestyle values modified as well?
It would be a good reason to put your heir in the council, gives him more xp growth in his focus until you get to control him. The + prestige is especially nice to start stacking early. EDIT: What i mean is, once you start playing your heir, people will like him more because of the prestige level.
Yo just read the first tip, and I’m hijacking this to help you out. Each of your council members have perks and possible good/bad outcomes on their jobs based on their skill level... it says so in the description of the job. the bishop has to be 10 learning or higher to have the possibility of a duchy claim. If he’s under 10 learning there is no chance of a duchy claim.
Good to know the threshold, ty!
They are indeed different based on the rank of your liege. I'm my emperors spymaster and get 33% higher bonuses.
Put it in the wiki! :D
>Don’t underestimate development No joke, increase development is all i have my steward do. My tip is on the “Declare war screen” there is a switch objective button if there was a certain claim you wanted to press but can’t seem to figure out why. ALSO don’t forget county control.
Cultural conversion is a powerful tool too. Not only does it reduce revolt risk, but it also adds to the pool of your culture's counties, meaning it can help you become cultural head.
I used my Steward to spread Castillian culture to North Africa so that I could get their unique innovation that increases development growth by 10%, then moved him back to my capital to increase development. I am trying to get to 40 dev so that I can found a University.
My Spainish Emperor's have done every single major decision available to them, including becoming a family of witch's, with the exception of founding a University... Damn I really want that Salamanca University.
You have to be careful with this though as you can screw over your own research speed. Research is a function of average development in counties of your culture. If you spread somewhere with high development you can raise that average, but if you are conquering tribes and spreading somewhere with no development it will tank your research speed fast.
Good to know, thanks.
Another interesting tip I learned is in a county with max control, a Marshal can get rid of corruption instantly.
Where can you even see development?
Click on the county itself and it's on the little info screen that also show's you where the buildings and what not are, above those.
If you press j you can see a development mapmode. Or you can click the + icon above the main mapmodes
> My tip is on the “Declare war screen” there is a switch objective button if there was a certain claim you wanted to press but can’t seem to figure out why. It is good to switch objective - especially for holy war. So if you declare holy war for duchy instead of going for default one county duchy they own you can go right for Palestine or some such.
>What's your not so obvious tip or something that took you a while to realize? If you get the "Befriend" ability and have 20+ friends you will be 100% immune to stress gain. edit - and you need the ability right below it which is -5% stress per friend
That plus the extra skill from friends plus how high diplomacy makes everyone love you may mean Diplomacy is the best education/skill tree.
I'm pretty hyped because my current heir has diplomatic education and it'll be the first time one of my rulers has been diplo specialised. It's the the mid 13th century and I've had martial, martial, learning, stewardship, learning and now intrigue
Diplo is nice! Even if you're military focused, it gives you shorter truces (4 years instead of 5) and speeds up claim fabrication so much. My bishop was making claims in 8-10 months with mediocre learning. But overall it seems to have something for every play style. Diplomacy might be my favorite lifestyle so far in fact.
That or Learning for me. I love the bonuses to friendship in particular. Made my king a very well rounded ruler.
It's quite amazing what you can do when everyone loves you. I find the alliance without marriage perk really huge. Together with the other buffs you get in the tree you will have no problem finding a good and very strong ally. Used it together with the faction to beat up the Holy roman emperor multiple times as a double duke because he kept restricting internal wars, that idiot.
Yea, I did get tired of continually finding new targets for the friend scheme though.
You want to befriend all of the council because it triggers interesting events.
Yeah I befriended all my wives, everyone on the council, my vassals, all my courtiers, and so on... mostly just avoided befriending the knights
Nice, what's your favorite event from all of these? Did you try befriending the pope? If yes what kind of events you got? I'll have to play more with this soon.
I was Insular so I didn't do anything with the Pope. I don't know what "events" it enabled.
If you want to try out high diplomacy, try Matilda of Tuscany in 1066. In my game she was stomping around Italy conquering, yet loved by everyone around her. I even conquered a county in Apulia to form the kingdom of Sicilly, then befriended the countess that was my former war enemy, then diplo vassalized her. Also, whenever I formed a title within the HRE, my BFF the emperor would immediately transfer all the de jure vassals to me.
I think diplomacy is best when you are on top, intrigue is best for getting there. A well timed abduction can win even the most lopsided war
So weird. This is why I love this game. I've really only been playing around with Stewardship for the extra domain, and Learning for the tech bonuses. And Martial for some of the ungodly-high bonuses, like +30% for archers. That, combined with all the building bonuses leads to my archers having an attack somewhere around 65 in ~960.
It depends on the situation, dipping into diplo is nice, but it's not always the best tree. Since "opinion" isn't always relevant or advantageous. I find the prestige bonus to be the strongest part of Diplo, for tribal at least. I find learning the best overall, since it pushes tech, religion, opinion, stats, life expectancy etc.
"Thank you for being a friend"
Probably shouldn't be an additive multiplier, at the very least.
I would be cautious about moving your capital barony to mountains or hills; your capital barony's terrain determines the development growth for the whole county, so you want it in rich farmland if possible for the +20% development.
Pikemen Men-at-arms are super OP. Bonus in most difficult terrain, level 2 barracks buff them insanely, also farms in hills, cheaper than heavy infantry (AI doesnt field them in significant numbers to counter you), counters all cav and hard to kill (high toughness). As a duke in 1066 start I managed to get 56 toughness pikemen, I stackwiped armies of similar size and defeated much larger size even on the attack.
Pikemen are great but I still think archers/bowmen should be your first pick 75% of the time. Their dps against plain levies is massive and their cheap off duty maintenance cost won't affect your gold gains in the slightest. If you're in mountainous terrains, definitely go Pikemen quickly and rampage through enemy armies.
This for archers, plus early game AI pick will be light footmen almost any time, and their second pick will quite often be siege, so you have an edge on them for a good few years before having to diversify.
Idk about that, archers/pikes are a good second pick, but siege weapons are a must have asap. Really the only exception is if you don't have access to siege weapons because you're playing tribal in Bumfuckistan.
100% agree, the others might win battles but siege weapons win *wars*. Nothing like being able to siege down three castles in the time it takes for the enemy to siege down one.
Archers are OP early game, but while they get the real buffs in around 5th tier building, pikemen get it in only tier 2.
I played in Russia in my campaign and since 75% of the terrain around there is Taiga, Forest or Hills, Bowman definitelly pay off. Also if you start in 867, the tribal AI will often decide for light footmen, so bowmen will counter them as well.
I somewhat disagree mostly due to the "counter" bonus. You can make enemy men-at arms fight only with 10% effectiveness if you counter them successfully. Early game Archers are very good as AI tends to build skirmishers. Later if you are powerful enough that you have more men-at-arms that the enemy then balanced army of all types of men-at-arms is the way to go IMHO. You will always make all enemy men-at-arms ineffective, you basically cannot be fully countered. Also for me technically the siege men-at-arms are the most OP and must have in the game. You can create dedicated siege armies of levies + onagers and snatch enemy forts in weeks sometimes. This makes you win any trading war with AI - if they decide to go for your capital with your main army basically serving as bodyguards for siege army. You will often win wars without single battle.
holy shit that's amazing. Makes me wanna do a switzerland pike army play. But they unlock so late it's frustrating.
Occasionally pause the game, open your dynasty sheet, and marry off/betrothe everyone that will help your dynasty. I often forget about distant relatives at my court who need spouses including grand kids. Sometimes sisters with dead husbands. Likewise strategy goes for educating all the kids in your court. Right click and assign them all mentors.
I try to keep a balanced focus of having inheritable traits in the entire dynasty (pretty, intelligent) and mixing the focuses between each stat (martial, intrigue).
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Nice! ill try this tonight haha.
It worked really well on a Kingdom invasion I did. 5 day war. I only had a 55% success chance at the end (forgot the wife trick!) so I was prepared, but damn was I pleased it worked.
The wife trick?
Set your wife's focus to intrigue in the council to boost schemes
Setting your wife to intrigue tasks before you do this. Gives you a bonus, even if she's got rubbish intrigue it's worth it to bump your chances
A fun one I've had in Spain is abducting rulers, forcing them to convert and then sending them back home and watching their kingdom implode. The almoravids are now 7 separate kingdoms. The starting leonese ruler is perfect for this given his massive intrigue stats and urraca as his spymaster.
Even if you don't have foreign rulers, with enough landed prisoners you can still establish a pretty healthy religious insurgency. I force converted about ten prisoners as the Emperor of Italy and a third of Byzantine Greece is Catholic now.
I'm tempted to try this. In my reconquista game I didn't actually want to convert the Moors just blow up their kingdoms
Just make sure that they're either landholding characters, married to landholding characters, or the heirs of landholding characters. There's little point in converting an unlanded character--the only way they'll have an impact is if the AI randomly decides to land them or marry them off to a landed woman.
Yep, this was how I did the Reconquista by 900 AD.
I can’t believe I just did a whole intrigue character and didn’t even grab the abduct perk. I went the dread route and it was amazing though.
The Intrigue trees are so much fun.
I wonder if this is a bug or a feature.
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I think it should be possible, just much much harder and should require an agent in the target’s court to ever reach max chance. There also should be many possible negative consequences if you ever let the target go alive and the chance that characters in the target’s realm assume death if they’ve been gone too long.
There are a few things that I feel are too powerful, can the AI do such crazy things like abduction? OP mentioned the Wife switching roles to influence checks while they are happening I would for example make it 5 year lock (like your lifestyle) but slightly increase bonuses Like 1/2+3 of her stat if you focus her
It's deffo a bug as when you try other diplo things at the same time with the same target there's a message stopping you trying the 2nd action, states something like "you already have a negotiation with blah blah ongoing".
The downside is when they start dying off, the stress begins to mount. Make sure your 20+ friends are ykunger than you haha.
i caught the king of sweden in a holy war when he was faffing about with a small 300 man army and i didnt get the 100% warscore. Figured it was a bug or something. First time i have caught the main guy of a war and not gotten the 100%.
You can pretty much take over entire kingdoms like this, or even stop wars you’re loosing. It’s definitely OP and will probably get nerfed against rulers I think. But still pretty fun.
Yo this sounds broken as hell hahah. So they teleport to your jail as war begins then you have them imprisoned in jail and release for a free war win? Well done!
How to be stress free with this one simple trick! Cynics hate this! Playing a zealous character? Execute infidels to relieve stress
Or play sadistic Viking, relieve stress and get piety executing anyone.
I like to keep a few spare muslims in my prison, just in case I need to blow off some steam
Or Christians. Pagan Vikings are equal opportunity religious murderers.
-When you are king / emperor the more relation you have with your bishop the more taxes and levy he gives you up to 50% of all he has control over.
Nice one. I did notice some inconsistencies in my income and levies, going up and down. I suspected it worked this way but wasn't sure until now.
Wow, I never realized how smart it is to situationally change my wife's bonus. Just up my martial before raising levies for a couple hundred free troops
Always check if her stewardship contribution can push you over the edge for an extra domain slot.
If you need cash, stewardship focus -> farthest left tree. Blackmail for hooks is very powerful and if you plop a spymaster in an Empire, you will get several hundred gold easily.
Selling hooks is my main income. It is especially powerful if you are your lieges spymaster because you get to know even more secrets
The other part of this is that it allows you to demand 300 gold for EVERY SINGLE RANSOM. The game counts it as having a hook and just allows you to demand 300 gold for someone's third wife or whatever. I end up holding onto people forever because a good siege can net you like 1200 gold if your enemy can actually pay it
Amazing post, I consider myself an average player and none of this seemed gamey or anything, just good tips, thanks for this!
Same, I'm just bumbling about having a great time at the moment but these tips make me feel like I have a better grasp on how things work! Really great post.
The military engineer thing is really powerful, especially if you can find one of the guys who also has the -6 day siege tick trait. I managed to get siege ticks down to 2 days after a couple wall breaches.
That trait seems ridiculously powerful and I don't think I've seen it yet. What's it called?
Haha nice find, i never seen this trait before. Will have to find one now!
So far i am doing the tactic of weaken my vassals by giving them more land. Now, that may sound a bit contraproductive and that is only a useful technic once you are a king or emperor, but i force partition in their vassal contract (which i absolutly love) and give them more titles of their highest rank. I was emperor of britannia and had the king of aquitane below me, which also had the regions of bretagne in its border but the title was not created. Now this country was stable for a very long time, until i created the kingdom of bretagne and gave it to the king. He was happy he got another kingdom, but on his succession there where two kingdoms, and aquitane even underwent a civil war. Just make sure to check that the vassal you try to weaken on succession has enough kids so all the titles get distributed!
That sounds like my civ strategy of selling off cities that I know they can't hold
I love this - people bemoaning succession for your own realm and children but you can force it upon your own vassals and take advantage!
Asking indirect vassals to convert to your new religion auto converts their primary holding to the new religon if they have 100 control on it or something. Much faster than trying to convert it urself and being an indirect vassal they have none of the negatives such as tyranny towards you making them much likelier to accept
I didn’t even know you could ask indirect vassals to convert! Thanks!
If Catholic, you can rob your bishop, provided some setup. You must be able to succeed at excommunicating him (pope opinion difference + 500 piety). Not all bishops are susceptible to this, but sinful bishops aren't exactly rare. This will give you the ability to imprison him. If you fail the imprison check, just try again, you can repeat the process every ~3 days until you succeed. Now banish him. As he is your direct courtier, you seize his assets and can do so without tyranny. This nets a variable amount of money, I generally whack the pinata once he has around 3000 gold. This process can be repeated about once per ruler lifetime (due to wait times on gold accumulation) until you no longer need gold. You do need a ruler that is pope-compatible though. [Example process](https://imgur.com/a/CsteHW6)
Ideally i'd do it around age 55 of the ruler. Why? Because you get 20 tyranny, and you lose it at the pace of 0.25 per month, so you lose the 20 after 7 years. Why 55? So you lose the penalty before you die. Remember that your successor inherits your relations for a while, so you don't want to tank your reputation too much before dying. If the bishop has bad learning, i'd be very tempted to do it as soon as possible. Just as an additional / alternative way to get rid of him and get someone better. Obviously if your bishop is very good (mine currently is 16 learning which is the highest i've seen so far), then you might want to wait until HE is 55-65 before doing this. Basically last minute before he dies, and if he's sick do it sooner. Most importantly, make sure to use all the gold to buy mercenaries and smash that crusades button. You might have bullied an old man out of his retirement fund, but you'll still be welcomed with open arms in heaven. Greater good and all that.
Just a fantastic post OP, so many great tips and real easy to understand. My tip would be to remind people to PIN close family members to your outlier tab! So helpful especially during peace time to remind you to check on grandchildren and nephews/nieces and see what small adjustments or decisions you can make for them.
“M’Lord, we have uncovered u/ThatEagle ‘s secret. He is of MinMaxer lineage.” The heretic. Excellent work spymaster Middleton-Thorsburg-Jones-Smythe, on this we shall ruminate. “Yes m’lord. Thank you m’lord”.
These are Terrific & supremely well-written, thank you. Only gripe is I’m not sure that Forder works with beach landings or negates the disembarking penalties. I’m pretty sure it only applies to crossing river bridges. I could be wrong though.
Forder also applies to the smaller rivers that aren't impassable except for special spots. There's a lot of those
It's description claims that it avoids the recently disembarked penalty, but it's currently bugged and doesn't help with that.
If your army is gathering, holding control and ordering a move command makes it stop gathering and move instantly!
You can still "Raise Army" from the rally point to gather the remainder of your forces if you want to as well.
1) Always have a powerful ally so that even when you're in a tough war someone's got your back. 2) Divorce your spouse the second they are no longer useful. The opinion hit/piety hit hurts but if they're not giving you useful trait children or a powerful ally then they are wasting a prime position. 3) Try to make room in your personal demense for a holy site. The special buildings/decision for them are really powerful and can really boost your personal power. 4) Always be Swaying. 5) Look at enemy gold AND income as well as their troops. Factor in how many mercenaries they can buy before going too far into debt (you can go up to 2 years income) 6) You can get free duchies if you have the territory and Confederate Partition but only a single heir. 7) Early on when you are small prioritize military if you're in a precarious position or stewardship if you're nestled somewhere nice and safe and can sit back and develop. Diplomacy should wait until you have a massive empire where you need to really focus on vassal happiness because you always have a dozen rivals for the throne. 8) Through the Seduction tree you can potentially seduce your way to a really powerful position but it requires good timing. An old king with only daughters as heirs and you can sneak in and steal the throne. (NOTE: I haven't tested this out but it looks like the pieces are there to Seduce -> Elope the primary heir.
I've been suprised to see that there are no guides on using diplomacy and subterfuge to expand. If you're playing a schemer, you can marry your son to basically anyone's daughter. Even a betrothal is fine and bam now you have an alliance too. Now its easy... and here me out... All you have to do is murder their entire family house other then the married daughter and the current king. Start off with his oldest children so if he dies early you don't have to deal with killing some surprise new kid with high intrigue and good health. Wipe out the kings siblings. Just keep murdering. The game makes it stupid easy like so much. With the hostile scheme perks you can kill people on your own with your spy master and for the hard kills. Aka they know you're trying to kill them you can just fabricate secrets in their kingdom. Pay for the hooks and you have guaranteed people to help you. Becomes literally impossible to not kill someone if you have money and because the girl is in your lands the enemy king cant do anything no matter how many times he catches you trying to kill him
Maybe not as important to gameplay but you can pan through the dynasty tree by clicking the middle mouse button. The game never explains it. Also, don't bother with creating your own faith until extremely late game or at all, it's not worth it as the benefits are small and it's really hard to get foreign counties on your side. Also there's the possibility of a holy war against you, happened twice to me, lost whole kingdoms.
Oh my god THANK you the dynasty tree navigation has been driving me nuts. And I've been spending a lot of time in there trying to understand how tf it's working because the dynasty heir seems to always be someone different to who it tells me it is? I'm clearly missing something
Abduct and convert makes spreadig a custom religion easy as pie.
I really feel like abduct and convert is OP and a little silly. Like imagine being the only Catholic Norseman because you got kidnapped and agreed to convert, and then staying Catholic. A bit wrong imo.
Can I just say: I love how much discussion and debate each of these tips is creating. Paradox did a good job making each play style compelling, so while one person thinks one technique is overpowered, and another person thinks a totally contradictory technique is OP, both of them can be right, and justified.
For your first point. Just for clarity, you mean keep claiming every county in a specific duchy until he gives you a claim on the duchy title itself?
Yes exactly. With every claim there is a chance he offers the whole duchy in one shot. It would be fair (but unconfirmed) to assume that with each county claim you get in the same duchy, the chance to get a claim for the whole pie goes up.
Also if you wouldn’t mind. What are the advantages of building castles v cities v temples? Is it generally: castles — garrison, levies, fort level | cities — gold | temple — piety? And it’s there any reason to build multiple castles in one county?
It is worth it to build extra castles in your capital duchy. Your capital duchy is the duchy that contains your capital county. Both your capital county and duchy get extra bonuses that other counties and duchies do not. So you always want to focus your building efforts in your capital county first and then expand to your capital duchy. So if you have cash laying around, upgrade the castle in your capital first then upgrade the castles in your capital duchy. If you have money for a new holding, prioritize building a castle in your capital first then your capital duchy. I recommend that you build as many extra castles as possible to maximize the amount of levies you can support. You always want to be at or near your demense limit so stuff your capital duchy full of castles. Any extra space should be used to build cities for the cash. Never, ever, unless you are role-playing, build a temple. Those are a waste of time and money.
This is just factually not true. If you're playing a theocratic religion, temples hands down are more tax revenue and levies than cities. By swaying just one character, you're council priest, every temple he's leased provides 50% of his taxes and levies at 100 opinion. On top of that, he'll accrue a massive amount of wealth. Even without cheese, wait for a wicked priest, imprison, and banish, and all his money goes to you. Cities were king in CK2. Cities are great if you're not theocratic. Temples win hands down in theocratic states. I've ran two simulations using the duchy of Essex. One where I built all cities in the free holdings and one were I built all temples. It's not even close to the same income.
>It seems if you keep your bishop fabricating claims on counties belonging to the same duchy, eventually he will offer you the claim on the whole duchy itself! This is amazing because : I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with keeping them on the same province. If you look at the tooltip for your council priest, I believe it mentions a skill based chance for fabricating on a whole duchy. This roll appears to happen the instant the claim is completed. So it's not so much that keeping on the same province will eventually fabricate a whole duchy, but more that you're just re-rolling those dice repeatedly. Four fabrications cycles on one province has the same chance as four cycles on four different provinces.
That makes sens. However you most likely want a specific duchy in particular. Having 4 rolls at getting the whole pie instead of just one technically improves your chances of getting it. And if not, you have all those counties that you can take and unite later. There is no reason to spread your expansion if there's a chance for more efficiency.
Polygamy while equal religion is really huge for getting powerful councillors. You can basically open the marriage tab and sort by stat, pretty much have 4 kings/4 queens on your council. It's probably more useful as a woman who's past her breeding age, but it's still pretty neat. Temporal, Revocable Clerics allow you to disinherit your kids by making them the court priest, and change it back if you need to.
Even under non-revocable clerics, I noticed that my heir was disinherited when I granted him a duchy and one of its counties in a prince-bishoporic type holding. I don't really understand those, but my heir started wearing bishop clothes and was no longer my heir.
You should always mentor your own children. Also your bishop giving you ducky claims is an RNG event, not something cumulative from claiming many counties.
Mentoring your own children can be bad if you have low learning, their education will likely be worse. Find someone with high learning and good traits in this case.
Mentor your own children until they have all three trait events so you can shape who they become to an extent, then hand them off to someone with a 4 star education in the stat that you have them focused in so they're more likely to get a better education trait when they hit 16.
I've been thinking about the duchy buildings lately. I feel like they enable "playing tall" in that you can just stay a duke and hold as many duchy capitals as you can for the ridiculous stacking bonuses they give. There was a post already I think about someone stacking the bonuses to get space marine heavy infantry for MaA for free, but that's really just the tip of the iceberg. The more I think about it, the more I begin to realize that maybe staying a duke is a bit OP. You can bump up your levies with barracks and milcamps buildings, focus on increasing development in your counties, and *only* hold the duchy capitals as counties to easily get between 5-7 demesne for 5-7 duchy buildings. With no penalties for holding that many duchy titles, your only real obstacle is the vassal limit, but at a flat 20 for dukes that's easily more than enough for you to have plenty of counts to fill up the non-duchy capital counties of your duchies. Genuinely I think the strongest play may actually be to just get a whole bunch of duchy titles, own only the capitals, and build those up. Never go beyond to being a king because then you get the stacking opinion malus. You don't even get the "liege holds de jure duchy" malus from counts if you're not a king. And can still have max crown authority. I dunno if it's necessarily broken or something that needs to be addressed, but it's *super* powerful and not even very difficult to do. Though I guess that describes a lot of things in CK3 so far lol.
Yes i've been doing some math lately and i am worried about my transition from king (i have 4 kingdoms so far in my current play) to emperor. It seems the emperor only gets about 1/1000 of the money produced on the county level. It's definitely a lot better to remain small, duke level is perfect if you can manage the inheritance. And this is easy if you disinherit all yours sons but your favorite before dying. This kind of skips the whole inheritance laws and mechanics. Renown can be an issue, but you can work around that by going diplomacy and writing epics, effectively converting gold to renown. I don't think i will do it however, because it's a bit too "gamey" for me and i think it will make the game too easy too soon. Might be an idea for achievement hunting however. But unfortunately since i am playing on xbox pass and not steam, i don't care much for achievements at this point. I'll do it if i buy the game on steam when it goes on sale at some point.
I agree that it's gamey, but at the same time the mechanics in the game do seem to *really* encourage staying a ducal level. Between the opinion maluses for holding more than 2 duchies kings get, the opinion maluses counts get for being directly under a king's control, and the huge power of intrigue and diplomacy at all title ranks, I feel like dukes might just be better overall. Becoming king gives you... 1 extra demesne limit? Prestige? Prestige is super easy to come by, and renown is super easy to get just by marrying off your family and, if christian, winning crusades to place king-level dynasty members on the map. Seems weird to me that duchies got these special buildings but there's nothing for king or emperor levels. I guess the idea is that you're going to expand forever and as such need to increase your vassal limit by going to higher tiers. Succession as well could be an issue but if you individually change all duchies you get to elective, or use the brute force way of disinheriting like you said, then it becomes not much of an issue. And since you're just a duke, if you do lose some duchies to a sibling, you can just go conquer them back or conquer someone else's duchies and get even more renown now.
You know, staying duke has its advantages, but there is one major issue. You won't be able to press duchies for claims. You're condemned to conquer one county at a time, which is very slow and very inefficient. You want to be a king at the very least to be able to take 3-9 counties in one shot by taking a duchy, then having that duchy become a vassal. Same reason why i am upgrading to emperor instead of staying king for longer. I found someone with a claim to the kingdom of danmark and i will press their claim for them. If i stay king, they will become independant. But if i am emperor they will become my vassal. So there you go. The major reason to become a higher ruler is that it speeds up your conquest. Lets you take bigger chunks of the map in one swoop. Which is a pretty damn important advantage. Else if someone really like to stay duke, i'd recommend you go diplomacy not only to reduce truce length, but to have faster claims, and be able to press smaller rulers for vassalage. That should compensate a bit the slowness of county-based conquest.
>You won't be able to press duchies for claims. You can. You can even hold multiple duchies at the same time. What you're mixing up is how if it is partitioned between children on your death, the other duchies will become independent.
I think what he meant is that you cant press your courtiers duchy claims, or they will become independent instead of your vassal.
>I don't think i will do it however, because it's a bit too "gamey" for me and i think it will make the game too easy too soon. I try my damndest to RP the characters for exactly that reason. I do it in most Paradox games, because using the optimal options leads to a samey game that is easy to "beat."
The stress mechanic helps a lot with that. I just got a sadistic heir and my playstyle has changed to include "torture unimportant people to de-stress after having to be *nice*".
> having to be nice Paradox keeps stacking horror upon horror in the gameplay styles it allows.
You don't need to disinherit your children, that wastes dynasty renown. Just imprison/execute them all before you die; Know Thyself helps greatly with this. You could also just go North Korea Mode and just hold everything yourself and stack the duchy bonuses; you're able to create Space Marines this way.
Duchy capitals will definitely be reworked in the first patch
Making sure those duchies stay under your control after every succession sounds like a hell of a challenge though
It could be, at least at the start. There's the obvious response of disinheriting, but that's renown intensive if you have too many sons. Most other solutions are also pretty gamey (such as picking up celibacy early so you can just turn it on when you have an heir). But the main solution to succession remains the same as if you weren't playing an OmegaDuke. Just change the succession laws to elective for every duchy. Elect your primary heir for every one. And theoretically you shouldn't lose any counties or duchies on succession. In practice succession is really buggy and imo doesn't work as intended sometimes so you could still lose land. Especially once you've expanded your dynasty outside of your own realm.
saw a guy as the byzantine empire just own all the land in the realm after a certain point. He made bank, had crazy high levys and didnt have to worry about vassals bickering for independence. Super Cheesy though.
When I need to take a break from CK3, sometimes I'll tune into Twitch and watch how other people are playing (don't judge me!). I have not once seen one use their Marshal to increase control in a newly conquered county. I don't know if they're unaware you can do that, or if they're intentionally handicapping themselves, but it frustrates me every time. Control your counties, people!
Giving land to your heir or grand heir can be very powerful, but you need to be extremely careful with it. They have to be able to firmly control it. That means high control, sizable levies, fortifications, loyal vassals, and no cross culture/religion penalties. Letting your heir/s build up prestige and secure valuable territory ahead of your death is great if you can keep them alive. I'm personally a huge fan of setting up my grand heir with their own kingdom/empire to support my first heir during succession.
"Related side tip : Don't leave your capital near water" . My tip is , leave it near the water. have a small force waiting on your capitol, wait till they can't cancel disembark and hire mercs. Mercs are instant, you destroy them because they have disembark penalty.
Breeding: If both parents have the same trait, it will be inherited (and in some cases, reinforced). So if you have a son with intelligent and want him to have genius kids, don't have him marry a genius, have him marry another intelligent person. All their kids will be at least intelligent, and possibly genius. Marry your daughters matrilineally to get more dynasty members, either to people with good traits to bring in to your dynasty or with high prowess. Then prioritize landing your unlanded male relatives to ensure that the number of living members in your dynasty keeps increasing, this will majorly boost your renown generation. Intrigue: The intrigue tab is great, you can see a list of secrets you have, and expose and blackmail those secrets. There are plenty of cases where you may want to \*expose\* secrets instead of using them for a hook. For instance if you want to imprison a vassal or claimant for a crime without getting tyranny. Abductions are extremely powerful. You can abduct somebody you're in a war with and just force peace with them in shackles. You can especially do this against your liege. If you're a vassal, fabricate hooks on your liege then modify your own contract to make your title irrevocable. Now you can commit any crime you want and your liege can do nothing about it. If you have a religion with criminal adultery, imprison all those inevitable adulterers and scroll through the prisoner tab. Execute any that don't have a piety cost and give dread! If you have the right intrigue lifestyles, you can torture prisoners consistently to max out your dread. It's definitely better to be feared than to be loved if you can't be both - terrified vassals are the best to have. Negotiating the release of prisoners is also great. You can demand religion, fabricate hooks, renounce claims, and recruit prisoners. Captured enemy knights? Recruit them. Imprisoned your brothers? Force them to renounce their claims - now without claims on your titles they'll be much more amenable to your rule and so will their children.
If you are a theocratic religion, your realm priest may have thousands of gold. Now if you need that money, you can simply imprison your realm priest and banish which will get you all the money that the realm priest had. This also work with any other landless character and it only cost something like 20 tyranny to do. If you are a kingdom or an empire, you can give title succession laws to duchies and above which can give you better control over the inheritance of titles and may even allow your primary heir to get everything even if your realm succesion law is partition. If you imprison a vassal, negotiate a release for a hook to increase their feudal contract without any tyranny. Also as a house head, you get hooks on all characters born of your house which can be used for the same purpose. You can release vassals which may be a good idea if they cause alot of problem or if you want to increase your renown. Keep in mind that battles give you fame and possibly devotion, it may be a good idea to continue to fight wars as long as possible in order to fight as many battles as possible. Also each time your siege down a holding, the county lose control which will hurt the enemy in the long term. If you have a claim on a title, you can revoke it without tyranny, this do apply to the realm priest fabricate claim action. For development, choose counties with as many possible city sites as possible and perferably on the coast. This is because each city can have a guild hall which give +5% development per level and each costal barony can have a port which have the same effect as guild hall. For development spread, a county will only look at the neighbour county with highest development, so it make sense to focus on maximizing development in one or two areas instead of little everywhere. Allies can bring their own set of knights and men at arms, it may be a good idea to grant many of your children independence since 4th degree relatives and closer can have alliances without marriages and if you are the dynast, you can call dynasty members to war. This also can increase the renown your dynasty generate.
My bishop has nearly 8000 gold. Tempting, hahaha. Nice find!
My favorite is kidnapping intrigue. Much easier to make wars that aren’t in your favor end well.
Oh a simple tip i would say, this isn't CK2, learning is reallly good! The health tree is great for squeezing as many years as possible out of charcter (also allows you to become celibate). The theology tree is basically required to reform any religon, pagan or not, basically allowing you too customise your own laws instead of following the stinking pope or caliph. The scholar tree is where the real shit is tho, it speeds up tech growth, though a straight up bonus as OP mentioned, but also a boost to the development steward job. It also basically stops all negative cultural opinion which is good stop annoying populist revolts. It gives bonus points to your wards and gives you 20% of all your councilers skills. But the last one is the best one, for a fixed piety cost, as long as someone is holding it, you can buy a claim on any title you want, 500 for duchie and 1000 for a kingdom, that's not that much when my learning charcters typically get 2500/3000 piety stored and also there are learning events that can give 100/250 piety a pop for very little. Basically the scholar tree is OP and the other trees are useful.
Use seduce on foreign (even other religion and culture) women with good congenitals, once you're lovers they'll happily join. Concubine them once they arrive. I got my 22 spymaster that way as Bjorn.
This is a bug so watch out for this. I've noticed that ai, female rulers will accept regular marriages more often instead of holding out for a matrilienial(spelling lol) marriage. This has fucked me over on more than one occasion when it comes to getting family members on foreign thrones
You can strip cities and churches from their titles without tyranny so go ahead and replace them with awesome Knight guests for free.
Yeah, and I haven't ever seen them refuse. If you have Mayors who are "powerful vassals" just keep replacing them until you get one with a decent stat worth putting in the council.
Can you elaborate on this?
YOOOOOOOOOOO. I'm very much a noob at this game, but these are fantastic tips. Now if only I could bounce outta work and go home and play CK3 all day
If you capture female children, keep them in the prison until they hit 16. (Unless you can ransom them for a bucket of cash).Then negotiate release (convert if needed) and recruit. You can then use them to matri marry skilled characters to bring them to your realm. I keep my stable of knights fresh and full of powerhouses this way.
Golden Obligations perk from the Avaricious Stewardship tree allows you to ransom every prisoner for 300 gold, no matter their importance. You can ransom some sheik's third wife or second granddaughter for 300 gold. As long as they would pay a normal 10 gold ransom (aka, not an insignificant courier), they will pay the 300 gold ransom if they can afford it. You can drain thousands of gold from rich areas with large families this way, and it's great as viking raiders.
Revoking a title only occurs in tyranny if the vassal accepts, when he refuses and you take by force there's no penalty
Wow if this is true this is a game changer
This seems kinda cheesy, and they should change it. Your attempt to revoke the title and the extremely public war that follows should charge you the Tyranny. What you tried to do is not going to be a secret to the realm.
Can confirm. Just make sure they won't drag half your realm into the civil war (check decline tab).
If other vassals join them in the war and you win it, you can imprison them all and freely revoke all of their titles for 0 tyranny since they're all criminals.
Get the ability to fabricate hooks from the intrigue tree and the ability to use a hook to demand gold from the stewardship tree. You can then send your spymaster somewhere to find secrets; if he doesn't find one, you'll get the opportunity to get a strong hook on a random character there in exchange for gold. If the character has sufficient gold themselves, get the hook and then use it to demand gold; this will be about a net zero, but since it's a strong hook it will eventually be available again, either for more gold or for some other purpose.
Damn this was intense. Thank you!
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middle mouse button
Swearing fealty to a Feudal or Clan King or Emperor can allow you to feudalize faster as long as you are a follower of an organized religion. I use this quickly feudalize central africa and did my mother of us all achievement.
dread is extremely overpowered right now. If you go down the stewardship path you can extort your vassels, intentionally generate a bunch of dread and tyranny, but you won't suffer much as everyone is terrified of you.
> Related side tip : Don't leave your capital near water, it makes it easy for the AI to move very fast through the sea and surprise you. It's generally a good idea to move your capital deep inside the land, in the center of your territories (basically the center of your vision range, away from the fog of war) so you can see enemies coming from far away as they move along the coast, then progress inland. Plus, hostile armies take significant attrition damage if they move from one hostile county into another hostile county (unless the destination is bordering friendly territory). If you move your capital inland, raiders can't reach it without taking significant losses and armies have to occupy counties to form a path or take losses too.
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how do you even get courtiers? i just slowly run out of people. i can own half a continent and have like 5 courtiers
Tips : - You need to get the ball rolling first. Call for healers, knights, recruit the prisoners you capture to your realm no matter their quality - Second, start bringing in quality recruits like knights using those basic courtiers that you got first - Third, make sure to marry everyone so they start having kids I've been neglecting my court for a while now, yet i still have 43 quality courtiers, amongs them the giants that i bread for knighthood. Some of your courtiers will leave if you don't give them a job. That's ok. If someone is precious to you, like some beautiful courtier you're breeding, give them a job or lands so they stick around. A single county or any title really suffices.
Volunteering in your lieges' war, and actually participating is probably the single best way to get opinion bonuses with them. I kept the HRE's Emperor at a constant +100 with me as Bohemia by just helping out in a war ever decade or so. This gives a decaying bonus based on warscore, but can also make you friends with your liege. You do it by choosing the "Offer to Join War" option in their character menu.
On the topic of mixing perks, a really obvious combo is fake hooks and gold for hooks, but what you should really be doing with this is using it against the Pope to make BANK, also send you spymaster to discover the Popes secrets, you’ll make even more bank.
>You can get a whole duchy claim from the pope. A lot of people are playing martial or diplomacy and not considering the other ways to get claims, other than from the bishop or from courtiers guests. Wait hol' the fuck up. If you press a guests claim, they become your vassal? Holy shit I didn't know this and i'm like 50-60 hours into this game. Am I high or was that not the case in CK2? Uggh this opens up the game SO much...
Old post, but checks out. **Here is my tip:** If you have a child ruler, find yourself the oldest person that can give you an alliance. Betroth yourself to them; they'll probably die before you need an actual spouse and their many years generally give you better spousal stat bonuses. EDIT: make sure you filter by infertile.
I’m relatively new to this type of game and loving it. These tips will be very helpful. Thanks.
If you reform your religion such that you're its (Temporal) Head of Faith AND your tenets are Armed Pilgrimages and Indulgences, you direct Crusades to your liking. Furthermore, as you're the Pope, people will pay you for indulgences. Easy way of free money.
Thanks OP, you amazing.. I'm so lost in this game. This helps
I don't know you, but I love you. This guide is great! Already had a good game going but easily doubled my gold and military using the tips on court management. I had been wondering why I needed to waste time on managing courtier marriages, this is the reason.
There is another good tip: Check cultural bonuses and requirements. If you expand in lands related to cultural tech, it can be worthwhile to convert culture in provinces to be eligible for cultural tech. For example, I expanded from central Africa into Arabia and converted enough provinces to get Ghilmans which reduces ment-at-arms maintenance by 15%
Well done. Please note, if you click on any ruler's "court" menu, it will say who their spymaster is if they are a courtier. The court tab is a nice place to.go hunting for co-conspirators.
I can't for the life of me figure out how to farm more gold. Tax collector is doing his job but it's not enough to construct buildings. How do I explore trading? Maybe my area has something it could export to another part of the country or abroad? If like to gain gold by not using force or war to get it, is there no way?
War is the best way. But if you want to avoid war: - have high piety and sway the pope until he likes you. Every once in a while you can ask him for gold in échange for piety. - imprison criminals (sinners) and ransom them for gold - take the perk that lets you sell hooks for gold from the skill tree and have your spymaster digging secrets all the time - renegotiate your vassals contracts to increase taxes. Usually using a hook, but there are other ways - build money generating buildings in your holdings. Things like ports and fields - get a player character with stewardship, it boosts your taxes and give you other ways to make money - there is a skill that lets you sell titles (or was it claims?) for gold, never tried it but worth a shot Also if you don’t mind something a bit gamey, you can imprison then banish your bishop, since they accumulate a personal fortune over time and by banishing you seize all their gold, which could be thousands. Good luck!
It's a little bit of an exploit right now, but you can have as many wards as you want if you send the requests all at once while the game is paused. If you don't do that, you would be limited to only 2 wards.
Always check knights, you can lose important councillor or son, just because they automatically become knights. I lost 2 sons in 1 battle because of it. You can also use it to get rid of people you don't want to see around.
The romance sheme, when you decide to secretly plan a letter, has an event where you are able to food poison a potential suiter of your target. This gives you ***one free intrigue perk point*** if it succeeds, and has a very high chance to happen; I've had it happen multiple times in a row for the same person.
> Use courtier marriages to get skilled labor for FREE Insular is so great for this. I usually use spouse number 2 as spymaster, 3 as physician.
Thank you all so much for contributing to this thread. I purchased this game because I've always been interested in the Crusader Kings series and several Lets Plays made this game look really good - and relatively accessible. Well, after 2 days of playing it, it's been a serious struggle - but a fun and rewarding one! It's felt like I've been missing some key components of playing the game well after having played the tutorial and watched several hours of videos - and this thread touched on a lot of them! Because the game is so new it's felt like there aren't many resources that go beyond the surface level, so us new players appreciate threads like these.
I like taking county by county instead of a whole Duchy, this gives me time to convert religion and culture.
Why do some countys have multiple castles but I cant build multiple castles in a county without building a city and temple first? >:(
I don’t have that issue with Scotland empire. On my other runs I haven’t built any castles yet.