THE GUIDE
PDF Guide With Pictures:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5yz1vyvy1bz1z64/CK2%20GUIDE.pdf
(THIS IS MOSTLY ABOUT ADVANCED TIPS & TRICKS NOT GAME BASICS)
*Warning! This guide might contain a lot of spoilers / cheesy tactics that might make your gameplay experience undesirable (due to becoming excessively easy) if you apply some of them*
MARRIAGE – SPOUSE SELECTION
• Marry your daughters to either the rulers or heirs of the strongest realms in the world. You must aim for a good alliance and a good prestige in the beginning. But as you grow stronger, you might go for inheritance (will be detailed in following sections) or genius.
• If you are strong enough, don’t bother choosing your wife from high ranked kings’ daughters. Instead select a Genius (or if you can’t find, Quick or Strong) trait young wife and stay married till she is 40. When your queen is 40, divorce or kill her and get another wife. Stats of your heirs are much more important than a weak claim-weak alliance.
• Or if you are planning to get your grandson on the throne, you can get your sons marry Genius wives and you can marry just for the alliance.
• When marrying your daughter (to get a grandson claim), be careful not to have celibate & eunuch traits on the potential groom.
EDUCATION - HEIRS
• Assign a guardian for each children priority being your heirs, kinsman and courtiers. Each year check your family and courtiers for education. Assign guardians for your close family and give a child for education to all 20+ stat courtiers –in all stats– and let them educate potential reserves for themselves.
• Never give your sons a title until they are 16 (to decide for their educations yourself)
• You might think giving titles to your heirs when they’re young helps with Prestige, but that way I have no control over his education. So it’s better to let all your heirs stay unlanded till they are 16. You can reserve the creation of many Kingdoms/Duchies to boost his prestige on the day of his coronation anyway. (Especially Kingdom of Jerusalem, which gives 5k prestige bonus on creation).
• Prefer to have an adult heir, especially if your king is old. Kids don’t have much control over many things. Also they won’t have a wife to benefit from her stats.
• Soon as you grant your heir a title, send him a few high intrigue men (by marriage) so that he can protect his life much better. (Be careful though, he might plot against you...)
• When an heir gets to 16 and doesn’t have good traits and you have optional heirs, just make him a bishop.
• Good traits for a ruler (hence your heir) are: Diligent (+10), Kind (+10), Strong (+10), Brave (+10), Just (+10), Genius (+5).
• Bad traits for a ruler are: Lunatic (-25), Leper (-20), Hunchback (-5), Imbecile (-10), Inbred (-20), Weak (-10), Slothful (-10), Arbitrary (-10), Cruel (-10).
• It’s imperative that your heir should have at least +30 bonus among the above traits. To accomplish this, select guardians for your heirs which have the positive traits (genius & strong are just genetic, so it won’t be learned through education).
• You can also select your Dukes and educate their first heirs with content-high stewardship guardians, so that when they get on the throne they would have an automatic +50 with you and manage their lands well.
• Be careful not to assign different religion guardians to educate your heirs. Be careful about different cultures too. You don’t want a -10 to -20 foreigner penalty from vassals. (You might also consider the same for your Vassals’ children too).
• Contrary to the popular belief, unless your diplomacy and/or intrigue stats are high, don’t educate your heir yourself. Educating your son yourself lets you select traits during bringing up. But a very low stat heir is just not worth it. Instead, you can select a good stat-good trait guardian to raise your heir. – I disagree with this now. 3 good traits are better than 20 diplomacy. Thus it’s best to raise a child %50 yourself and 50% a good guardian –.
• Below is a good sample of heir upbringing. I married a genius mother to get that trait in the first place. I raised him myself for the first 5 years and let some other high stat guardians raise him for the rest of the years.
SNATCHING
• I use this term to get someone to my court. You can use different methods for snatching, first and easiest being to invite a courtier of someone else who has a high opinion against you.
• You can invite someone if his opinions against his liege and against you have a difference of ~100. (i.e. he might have 50 to you and -50 to his liege and you can invite him).
• If victim’s opinion for you is low you can gift him to increase his opinion against you, but if his opinion for his liege is greater than 12, you won’t have a direct invite chance (unless he has claims that you can push for. In which case he would accept an invite for ~10-15 difference of opinions).
• In the above case, your option is inviting victim’s wife. If the wife also has 12+ opinion for her liege, you won’t have a direct invite chance unless you kill the wife.
• If victim is not married, offer him to marry with a woman who hates victim’s lieges’ traits and invite the wife afterwards (preferably your culture, your religion, admiring your skills and hating the heir’s liege’s skills **not content but envious etc ..OR.. Just arrange a cousin to marry, because your close kin has +++ to accept your court invites ..OR.. Send a different religion wife (heretics are good) to his way.. You should aim for a wife to have at most +10 opinion for his liege. If her opinion is also low for you, you can bribe him for 20g. But you can’t bribe to lower her opinion for her liege).
ADMINISTRATION-COURT
• Collect anybody you can from all courts, by either inviting high opinions, inviting claim owners or snatching (by marriage). Do this regularly once in a few years and after each ruler switch (character opinions vary against different rulers). (Although it might take ~5 hours to select and invite 1000 courtiers among 10.000 realm population. So you might concentrate on heirs and high stat-ducal claim owners.
• To find ducal claim owners, you can click on the Duchy icons on the map and select claims and select the ones that might accept. – OR – you can open Ledger page 5 and order list by realm size and select duchies one by one and check claimants.
• Request all your court members (Except bachelor heretics, which I will explain later) to convert to your religion. Do this regularly by ordering your court based on religion.
• You can use your piety to create hundreds of courtiers, but they seldom arrive with high stats.
• If you conquer land, you can create a vassal out of nothing (by right clicking on the holding), but don’t do that. It’s better to give holdings to claim owners in your court (1 holding for each), starting with Kingdom, Duchy, County claim owners. So that when you fight and win over their claims, they’ll still be your vassal and you can own their lands too.
PLOTTING-ASSASSINATING
• If you plan to assassinate someone and some of his heirs afterwards, plot against the heirs first. Because they would be easier to kill before they inherit a title. Easiest to kill are the people in your court, then the Counts-Dukes of your Realm, then the Counts-Dukes of large realms. etc.
• You can arrange women of high intrigue (who also have positive opinion against you) from your court to marry someone from the target's court. When they go to the target's court, you can offer them to join your plot. Target will be dead in no time. (Be sure to send a courtier of ~12-18 intrigue and not so good overall stats. Don't sacrifice a valuable courtier for just one plot. Although you can re-invite some of the courtiers, you can’t do that when they love their ruler.)
• You can also arrange marriage for lowborn males of 12-18 intrigue to someone in the target's court matrilineally. Just be sure that you don't arrange marriage for your potential plotter to a sub-ruler of the target. If you do so, your potential plotter just goes to a sub-court and can’t be used for plotting.
• For a plot in your lands, you can also convince your spymaster and other Dukes-Counts (lots of them actually) to join the plot, making the job much easier. (Though they might not appear in the plot page, you can contact them personally).
• For plotting against a ruler of another country, select a Duchy of that country on the map and open diplomacy. Then click all the other Duchy-County icons and see if you can invite the rest of the rulers to your plot.
• Although it won’t show in the plot list, you can try to invite all the Dukes-Kings and some of the Counts-Barons of the target ruler’s empire-kingdom to the plot. (Therefore, it’s much easier to kill a Duke of HRE as you can find lots of potential co-conspirators).
• After conquering a County, you can use this opportunity to plot easily. Just assign high intrigue (and of course high opinion against you) rulers to that County and transfer those vassalages to the target. Then you'll have potential plotters in the target's entourage.
• Another free and safe way of assassination is ordering the victims to command an army and pray they would die in some combat. You can also send them to their deaths by sending a small army against a large one. (Be sure to be at least %5 of the opponent army, otherwise there won’t be a fight, you’ll just lose the combat).
• If you are plotting against a foreign ruler and you can’t bribe his Spymaster, try pulling the spymaster to your court either by gifting-inviting him, or marrying him with a courtier (as described in the conquering section) and inviting the wife to your court. You can send a good intrigue man to his court at the same time (whose religion-culture-traits you’ll chose in order that he’ll hate the target liege but love you), so when you pull the Spymaster to your court, your other man will be the new spymaster, killing the ruler easily.
• You can also use assassination to get rid of a ruler if you are really in a hurry or if you have a lot of gold. You might have to try a few times and most probably get discovered but as that’s a foreign ruler, you won’t care for his close families having -30 opinion (for murdering) and -10 for each unsuccessful attempt with you. Use your spymaster to `Build Spy Network` on the Duchy of the Duke you want to assassinate. You can also take care of their wives and spymasters (to lower their intrigue) and assassinate them afterwards. Your chances of discovery might easily drop to 0 and success rate might rise 80, allowing you a safe assassination.
• Chance of discovery is based on the skill of the Spymaster of the person you want to assassinate (if he’s a courtier, the Spymaster of his liege). So you might want to get rid of the Spymaster first if the skills are too high. (Assassinating a Spymaster doesn’t have much prestige effects). If you kill the spymaster, stats don’t register in the game unless you save the game and reload (possibly a bug). But if you snatch him, his stats register, so you might prefer the second method.
• You can just assign another Spymaster to change the duty of your Spymaster for fast assassination swaps. (Although this gives a negative opinion penalty to your Spymaster, if your disposition is high, just use it as you wish).
• When you discover plots, you might want to allow the “Wants to see the Duchy ... granted a new ruler” plots, because this will allow you to revoke one Duchy of a strong Duke without angering other Vassals (you’ll still get the -80 for that Duke anyway).
RELIGIONS-POPE
• If you plan on invading a kingdom larger than yours, request excommunication from the pope for the ruler of that empire. You can use your Chancellor to improve Diplomatic Relations @ Rome to get a boost to Pope’s opinion against you. -OR- You can put your Anti-Pope @ the Papacy.
• If you plan on an Anti-Pope, select a young bishop, which is zealous and has a lot of heavenly virtues (to make sure he has low opinion about many people – mainly sinners).
• Keep Free-Investiture and be sure to have all your Bishops have a higher opinion for you compared with their opinions against the Pope.
• If you go heretic, you won’t care for the Pope anyway. You can conquer his lands and go on your way.
MAKING GOLD
• Best gold gain method is “Imprisonment”, which will be detailed below.
• Second best method is Siege gold (Yes you get gold on each siege you win, [Gain=Base Tax + Fort Level of the sieged holding]). This will also be detailed below.
• Third but a rarer gain method is embargoing Trader Nations (of Mediterranian & Scandinavia, such as Sicily, Venice & Genoa, Denmark etc).
• Also don’t bother with tax and demesne incomes. It’s really unimportant after a while. As you can’t pass Feudal Tax laws most of the times, even a 1000+ holding realm won’t give you much gold as income (See below for a 1000+ realm with 100 direct Vassals, out of which only 35 pay some tax due to the rest 65 being conquered in the last 10-15 years).
• Tax from Direct Vassals is not that much important and you might just distribute most of your holdings and let your Vassals collect the Tax themselves. Because the gold they gain will mostly (unless they hire mercenaries or create titles) stay in your realm, ready for you to usurp it through imprisonment / banishment / revocation / heresy / excommunication etc. ways.
IMPRISONMENT
• Imprison and ransom every plotter who can pay their ransom. (For important Vassals, make sure they have 100+ opinion against you).
• If you want to imprison a Vassal and don’t want to lower his opinion, just give him some land and imprison him afterwards. 145g is worth giving out a County to even out the damage. (145g is ~20 years tax income of a Barony, so you can even give your own Counties if you need cash. Otherwise, just give out some land after you conquered some).
• Ransom gold is based on prisoner's title. 250g for Kings, 145g for Dukes, 70g for Counts, 25g for Barons, 10g for courtiers. (And yes, I imprison Kings… 250g is too good to pass for. Just steal their spymaster before trying to imprison them, lest you allow a King to rebel.)
• Be sure to check their gold on their character page first. You can also send gifts to people who can't afford their ransom, to aid in their ransom gold. (i.e. A Count is plotting but has 50g. Gift him 20g to raise his gold to 70 and imprison him and ransom for 70. His opinion would even be higher this way. But sometimes it’s better just wait for them to raise their gold themselves).
• Sometimes you can give out a County to a plotting Baron, who has 70+ gold and you want to seize that gold (Due to Barons paying 20g and Counts paying 70g ransom). I did that when I had dozens of Counties to distribute and not many people who needed a County gift (claim owners or discontent vassals). Same is true with Duchies, but you might want to keep Duchy titles for heirs especially.
• Raise the Dukes’ & Counts’ army levies on their home-town before trying to imprison them. This way, you can easily siege, subdue the rebellion & get both siege & ransom gold.
• If you don’t want to hassle with a rebelling Duke due to imprisonment, just steal their spymaster and imprison them on the day you stole the Spymaster. (Success rate is related with state intrigue level of the target). Although you might want to get extra gold sieging a rebel and ransoming him afterwards.
• Be sure to ‘snatch’ all rich courtiers to your Court and pray for them to plot against each other. (You can check gold amounts of all people from the Ledger page 5 easily).
• Imprison and banish courtiers who have large amounts of gold. If they don’t plot against each other, you can request excommunication for them.
• If the plotter is not a ruler and is not your Courtier and has some gold (20+ preferably), invite him to your court first (or ‘snatch’ him) and then imprison and banish him, getting all his gold for free. (You can imprison and try to ransom a courtier of your Vassal, but ransom is 10g for a courtier and even if the Courtier has 1000g, his liege won’t pay that 10g for him. But if you get him to your court, you can get all his gold by banishing him).
• You can also imprison and ransom your Vassals’ sub-vassals (if they can afford the ransom). They can’t rebel if you fail (although game will say they rebelled), but each time you fail, they’ll get -50, which you won’t care because they are not your vassals.
• Imprisoning someone (based on a just cause) gives -50 with the imprisoned person and his parents and nothing else. So Vassals won’t care if you imprison their vassals, courtiers. Just don’t imprison the son of HRE Emperor and you’ll be fine.
• For example, if a Duke has 300g and is excommunicated: If you imprison and execute him, his gold will be left to his heir. If you imprison and try to banish him, you’ll get a large penalty with all your Vassals. But if you imprison and ransom him twice and execute him on the third imprisonment, you can get most of his gold and get rid of him afterwards (You wouldn’t want a -100 opinion penalty Duke on your lands. Executing an excommunicated ruler doesn’t have penalty too).
CASUS BELLI
• Best reason of Casus Belli is Holy War. So it’s best to invade opposing religions first and go heretic afterwards, when you got tired of finding CBs for your own religion members.
• You can raise one of your sons as a Catholic Heretic, another as an Orthodox Heretic, another as a Muslim etc. and whenever one of them gets on the throne, he can wage Holy War to his opposing religion easily.
• If you have people in your court that have a claim on a particular Duchy but you can’t start a war, that might be due to your courtier’s being way back in the line of succession. You can assassinate the leader and see if you get higher, so you can push the courtier’s claim through war.
• If you can’t start a war based on a claim, it might be due to you have a weak-claim owner. In that case, either kill the ruler till a female ruler or a child gets on the throne. (You might also kill a few heirs and get higher up on the line of succession, making your claim a strong one).
DEMESNE
• Demesne becomes unimportant after your country grows large enough, but it has importance in the first few years, so the below tips are for those first years.
• Choose your counties from seaside, so you’ll have your own fleet ready to carry your army anytime.
• Your Demesne size depends on Legalism Tech Level @ your capital (Your Stewardship & Your Wife’s Stewardship also has effect on this), so carry your capital to the highest Legalism Tech county. (Also make sure other tech levels are high too. Muslim countries are usually much higher @ tech levels).
• With so high amounts needed to construct anything, construction becomes totally unnecessary. It’s much better to use the gold for gifting or assassinating or hiring mercenaries.
• You can also carry your capital to a central point to be a springboard of conquest.
• Late game, (as far as I’ve seen) your capital’s only importance is that your tech level is based on the capital and your retinue and mercenaries summon there.
• One way of changing your capital is, granting all your counties to some heretics (and revoking them afterwards) but leaving the only one that you wish to keep as a Capital. (You might not have to grant all. Grant your capital and if the County you desire to be capital get crowned, you're done. If not, just continue granting the rest).
TECHNOLOGY
• Technological research is mostly unimportant, due to its very slow rate of advancement. I was still crawling in Tech when I finished the game. But existing Tech Levels of your capital are important in the beginning.
• Early game, Culture and Economy are important but late game Military becomes more important.
• You might want Legalism (better demesne size) and Trade Practices (better city tax) early game but late game, Military Organization becomes important due to “Global Supply Limit” increase, which makes your conquests much easier with a larger force and the rest of the Military advances for a stronger army.
VASSALS
• Make sure most of your Direct Vassals (you can see these in a Transfer Vassalage window) have a good opinion of you. Otherwise they won’t pay you any tax. (Feudal tax is for indirect Vassals).
• Also vassal levy (army) sizes depend on their opinion against you. Vassal Levy size can easily double if their opinions about you goes from an average of 40% to 80%.
• To increase vassal’s opinions against yourself, you can imprison and release someone (rightful imprisonment among preferably lowly courtiers) each year to keep the +10 bonus opinion. (Best option for this is people who marry without your consent).
• You can also use plotting to get rid of pesky Vassals, without incurring any negative opinion on other Vassals (if you are successful).
• You can also transfer a problematic Vassal (Baron-Count etc.) to a higher Vassal (Duke-King etc.)
• You can also offer vassalization to rebel/independent vassals as a cheap way of conquering.
• Another way of getting rid of a problematic Vassal is, sending a few courtiers with a heretic religion to their courts (you can arrange marriages) and pray that they convert the Vassal to their religion. You can just revoke the titles afterwards without any penalty.
• Another way is changing your title (i.e. being Kingdom of France instead of Kingdom of England by making France your primary title) if you can and treat the Vassals by the rules of the currently selected title (For example, I could switch to Byzantium Empire title, revoke a few Duchies without any penalty and switch back to HRE in the same turn).
• Your Vassals might fight with each other. I have not seen a drawback to this other than being unable to change succession laws, so I let them sort out their problems among themselves. (In fact, after a while, the wars were only among my Vassals – i.e. 41 of 47 wars –).
• You can also Grant Independence-Offer Vassalization for a +50 opinion bonus to your Vassals, who would accept a Vassalization. (1- You should be powerful. 2- You should be of the same religion. 3-He should either be same culture with you or you should be his de-jue liege (which you can check by clicking his Duchy icon and clicking ‘de-jure’ to the top-right))
BUILDING ARMY
• If your levy size is low (early game) use mercenaries and don’t disband them unless you plan a long period of peace (Which I don’t advice. Better to wage war as long as you can support it financially). Keep your fights to easy-fast conquests, so the mercenaries pay for themselves by the gold gained during their sieges.
• Use Vassal Levies to invade some place anytime you can. They are free to use, so not using them is a loss. If a particular Vassals opinion gets low or his levy is reduced in size (due to being killed in large numbers during wars) leave his levies to rest and use them next year again.
• Use your personal levies as much as you can. Their monthly costs are cheaper than mercenaries and they don’t incur vassal penalties. (Becomes unimportant late game).
• Check if your retinue size increased (based on your land size) and be sure to keep your retinue filled and fighting all the times. They refresh themselves on the go, and their refreshment cost is cheaper than mercenary recruiting costs. They also have no monthly costs.
• You can also use the ‘switch title’ feature from above. Because different laws of different Kingdoms allow for different sizes of armies to be summoned. You can switch title, summon armies and switch back.
• Use Holy Orders as soon as they form (~1110s) against Muslims. They are cheaper than Mercenaries and cost only Piety to hire and you don’t pay them anything as long as you are attacked by other religions or infidels.
• To exploit the above, whenever you are attacked by infidels, you can just crush the enemy but not accept the peace offer, extending the war indefinitely and keeping the Holy Order armies with you for free.
RETINUE
• If you newly raised a retinue of 1 soldier, wait till it fills up its numbers a bit. Otherwise, if the stack dies, you’ll lose the initial investment amount of 40-80g.
• Due to the attrition problem (supply limits-hunger of the army) only raised mounted troops as retinues. Because 500 mounted troops eat as 500 soldiers but count as 1200 soldiers. I personally use %30 heavy cavalry (500 cavalry = 1200 unit) + %70 archer cavalry (500 cavalry = 1000 unit). (Pity that they don’t move faster than the infantry).
• Don’t use your retinue in a fight of where you might suffer large losses. The cost of refilling a retinue is too high when compared to gifting a Duke to use his levy for a longer time.
LOGISTICS
• Don’t ever use `raise all levies` button. Instead, just click the shore counties one by one and summon your armies wherever you need them. If a Duke has 4 Counties, manually you can summon his armies on any of those 4 Counties, but if you ‘raise all’ they might spawn far away mid-land.
• Carry your army by ships as much as you can. Even if you are going to a neighboring county, embarking a ready ship and disembarking to the neighbor county would be faster on nearly all occasions.
• If you are going to conquer an island and move on to someplace else, land on the island at the nearest point and move the empty ships to the other side after unloading soldiers. After that, embark the ships by moving the army into the sea. You’ll gain a few (precious) days this way.
• Identify and know `Organizer` trait commanders (Orange trait with book like icon). Give the command of center to them during marching, to cut down the marching time and hence cost.
ATTRITION
• Don’t use armies more than the supply limits of the lands you’ll pass through or invade. Your army will take too much damage due to attrition (hunger). You can see the supply limit at each County Page as “Supply – 12k”. This limit is ~70% higher for your own lands or allied lands. Also attrition is calculated after 30 days. So you can use a 20k army to fast invade a 14k supply County and the moment you own the lands, your army will be safe from Attrition.
• %10 of your army commanders’ martial stat is deducted from the attrition. So you can use a high martial commander to go a few percent up the attrition limits.
• Use high strength, low number Retinues and Mercenaries (Cavalry mostly). 100 Heavy, 400 Light Cavalry has the strength of 1200 men, but they eat as 500. (Keeping a low size-high strength army is very important when conquering deserts etc. –which is half the world- due to the attrition-hunger limit, which can very quickly degenerate armies over 8-10k).
• Attrition doesn’t affect armies at sea. BUT if your ships are shored and the armies are still in them, the army numbers will count to attrition limit but your soldiers won’t be harmed. This way, you can diminish large armies very fast by gathering a large force to their shores. (%30 each month – an army of 10k goes down to 1.2k in 6 months. Although this is only useful in rare situations such as when you need to help some enemy against an ally).
CONQUERING
• Presence of an ally increases the chances of your enemy to surrender earlier with a lower score, so call your allies to aid when you need them. But be aware that each Call of War causes -25 to your ally, so call allies only when you really need them.
• Check the status of Independent States to see if they are in a war with a larger state. IF they are also fighting with a strong enemy, it will be much easier to conquer their lands, because they’ll want peace even at 20-30% war scores. You can conquer even a huge empire very fast this way (assuming you can wage Holy War on them and don’t care the opinions of their rulers). You can also regularly check strong nations like HRE, Seljuks, Byzantium etc. and see if they are fighting against someone. If they are, you attack the same enemy too.)
• You can use this as a tactical way of conquering large empires too. For example if you wish to conquer Seljuks, give piece of land on the border of the Seljuks to the son of HRE’s Emperor and kill the son with a plot, making the border county Emperor’s own land. After that, wait for the Seljuks or HRE start a war. When the war starts, don’t accept the alliance offer of HRE, but instead start a holy war against Seljuks, for conquering a bit southern states of Seljuks. This way, you can cut the connection between the lands, so HRE & Seljuks can’t attack each other. Thus they will stay in a constant war for 5 years, during which time you can conquer Seljuks totally, starting war after war (Holy Wars) by seeing them surrender at 30-40% war scores due to their continuing fight with HRE.
• I couldn’t verify the above for sure; but I sometimes the enemy wants peace when he’s in trouble or I have allies and sometimes he just doesn’t.
• Don’t accept your allies’ aid requests, unless your ally is much stronger than his opponent, and you don’t have a current claim on the enemy. Otherwise, your ally might get crushed to -100, and you might have to pay huge amounts of reparations due to losing. (Although you’ll get a -30 opinion from that Ruler due to dishonoring the alliance if you refuse the call).
• Base your conquests on the weak kingdoms of the opposing religions first. If you are a Christian kingdom, go fast for North Africa, because if you delay, other Christian kingdoms might conquer those lands before you. (Which is bad, because you would need a Casus Belli and 10 years of delay for each Christian Duchy-County to re-conquer those places.)
• Don’t be afraid to wage war after war against opposing religions. You won’t care if all of their rulers have -100 opinion against you. You’ll fight with them anyway.
• When you start a war, start a few wars at once. For example if you’ll wage war for a far kingdom, also wage war for a few nearby Counties and Duchies. Because it’ll take time to gather all your army at one point to attack the kingdom, your advance forces can conquer some Counties and Duchies beforehand. (This is because you can’t start a war after raising any levies. And as forward armies will have to wait till the others reach them, it’s better to conquer some land in the meantime.)
• You can attack independent ‘rebels’ of kingdoms / empires and conquer their lands without angering their former ruler. But be careful, if their lands are being sieged already, you can’t siege the same land. And if you siege another land piece, you might enter into a deadlock. (If both you and his former ruler siege each County of a rebel Duke, both of you might have 50% war score, and you can’t change it. So the war would finish in draw – Although I have yet to see such a deadlock. For such situations, the enemy surrendered at much lower percents when I conquered all his remaining lands –). So it’s best to attack a rebel immediately, before his former ruler attacks him. (Check independence map regularly).
• In case you decide to invade rebels of an independent kingdom, be careful. Even if the country is divided into 5 duchies and you declared war to all of them, if you put out the leader of Independence faction by mistake, all the rest of the duchies will be a vassal of the king again, making your Casus Belli against them invalid. You wouldn’t gain anything except using lots of resources to siege a lot of duchies.
• If you started a war based on a claim, go and conquer those lands first. It gives a positive boost to the surrender if you do so, and a negative boost if you don’t.
• Don’t go conquering Mid-Africa (Mali etc.) or Southern Middle East till you have nearly the whole world. Though it might seem a safe backyard, it’s too much time-gold-army consuming and totally not worth it. (Also you can’t deal with rebels easily).
• If you decide to conquer those hard to reach places, do it by “sieging nearby lands for faraway claims” method. (will be explained)
• You can also offer vassalization to rebel/independent vassals as a cheap way of conquering, but it’s a very long shot and you will find very few willing to be a Vassal.
• Gather all heretic women and marry them to nobles of lands you wish to conquer and pray that they become heretic too (Reason for holy war).
• You can break truces with Christian Rulers too. Those who’ll get angry with you are only the leaders of the independent states (not their vassals or anybody else). This doesn’t have much effect in the game if you are strong enough. If you are in a hurry, just start a war after another. Who cares about 10-15 king’s opinions anyway? (This also affects the Pope, but if you have an anti-pope @ Rome, his opinion is probably ~250 with you, so even 6 wars might not bring his opinion below 100).
• If you are going to conquer a large country, kill the ruler first. As a new ruler won’t have prestige + long reign, Vassals will rapidly form an independence faction and divide the country, being easy prey to your armies. If the new heir has a lot of good traits (just, kind, brave, diligent etc.), kill the heir first and make sure the new heir has bad traits (arbitrary, slothful, cruel, lunatic, imbecile, weak etc.) or a heretic / infidel in the eyes of his Vassals.
• When you are going to attack an enemy, chose a County with the largest tax output for maximizing the gold gain and war score (cities, then bishoprics) – war score for occupation is also proportional to (Base Tax + Fort Level) –. Or chose a County with the lowest garrizon-levy to minimize the loss and time of war (bishoprics, then cities). Best option is, selecting low garrison (main holding) Counties which have max number of cities in 2nd, 3rd and 4th slots.
• Gavelkind Duchy-Kingdoms are divided between the sons after the liege dies. So if there’s a King who has a lot of sons on a Gavelkind Succession state, it might be a good idea to kill him and conquer his divided lands easily.
• When you want to conquer a large state, claim the farthest lands first and invade the closer lands. Even though not invading your claim will start to give you negative war scores after a year, you would gain months of travel time when you invade the near lands. You’ll also have the advantage of invading a depleted garrison/levy when you wage war again (in the near future). So to speak, if you are going to invade Seljuks, instead of claiming Syria etc., claim Asian lands, but invade Anatolia/Syria. Next war, claim Middle East lands, but invade Anatolia/Syria again. Best approach is invading shore Counties using again and again, while claiming inland Counties (Shore invasion is fastest due to logistics speed).
• As a second example to the above: For all the claims you make against Byzantium, just invade Constantinople over and over, but never claim Constantinople till the end. Counties like that are gold mines that you exploit each time you siege them. It’s also a central County that you can stack armies very fast and invade very fast.
• Another good option is, leaving the single Baronies (City-Bishoprics too) of large enemies intact and not conquering them till the end. Such as: You own the County of Rouen, but France owns the City of Arques inside the same County. Give that County to a King or powerful Duke and don’t claim that City until the end. Each time you start a war, just raise the army of the Duke on the County and invade the City fast. You can also instantly disperse your army without any loss. This tactic is the fastest siege tactic for invasion. So fast that, if your enemy had ~10-15 single baronies in strong Counties, you might conquer a large Kingdom just in a few weeks game time. (It’ll be just instant raise levies, 1 day wait for siege (depleted garrison), siege for 0-3 days and win the war gaining a Duchy).
CONQUERING BY WAY OF INHERITANCE
• This is the easiest way of conquering. You can invite Heirs of Duchies and Counties to your court, give them a Duchy or County and kill their fathers.
• Give land to all Duchy-County Heirs in your Court. This way, when they inherit a land, they’ll stay your Vassal. Be careful though, if they are a Count in your country and they inherit a Duchy, they’ll leave your country for their Duchies, taking your County along. But if a Duke of yours inherits a Duchy from another kingdom, that Duchy becomes yours. Also be careful about the heirs of these heirs. If the heir of an heir (child) is in a foreign court, you’ll lose both the Duchies when the heir (father) dies.
• Same is true with Heirs to Kingdoms. Never give them any Duchies; else you’ll lose the Duchy when they become a King.
• To determine the potential heirs, open the Ledger from the icon below the minimap, open page 5 – Characters, order by realm size and start checking from top. Click on a Duchy, click the Ruler and check his heir. ‘Snatch’ the heir if you can and give him an appropriate title (i.e. if he’s a heir to a Duchy, give him a Duchy).
• To mass-invite all heirs, order people by rank in ‘Find Characters’ and get to Dukes and click them one by one. (you can see the heir on their character pages).
• Be careful about heirs of Patricians; when you steal the heir, the ruler may designate another heir. Also this method doesn’t work well with Gavelkind Succession type holdings.
• After getting the heir, either plot against or assassinate the father or if the father is old, wait for him to die himself.
• If you can’t get the heir for some reason, get the 2nd or 3rd heir and kill the 1st heir. You can see the heir list when you mouse-over the Duchy icon. I’ve killed up to 4 heirs in line to get a suitable one for invite and get that Duchy for free.
• If you can’t ‘snatch’ the heir (the victim is already married and both husband-wife have high opinions to the liege), either kill the wife and offer a better wife (easier than killing the heir), or kill the heir and try to get the next heir.
• If you can’t get the heir due to him being reluctant to accept any bride you offer due to “Desires a Better Alliance”, just try to get a daughter of a ruler to your court and offer her as a bride. (In “Desires a better alliance” case, the groom wants to be close relative of some powerful ruler in -order to have an alliance- and he won’t marry even princesses if their fathers are not rulers.) Unless you are willing to give your own daughter, just check independent states list from the ledger page 10 and see if any of the rulers have an unmarried daughter that you can invite. (I also think that you can snatch and marry daughters of your own Dukes too).
• If you can’t get the heir due to him being reluctant to accept any bride you offer due to “Prestige Effects”, just try to ‘snatch’ the daughter of a King or a member of a famous family, so that he won’t get negative prestige when marrying.
• If you can’t find any available daughter for the above case, you can kill your daughter’s husband and offer her or you can steal a married couple and kill the husband and offer the wife as a bride (if ages are below 40). As it’s very easy to plot someone in your court, married or not, if you can invite a girl (or her husband) to your court, she’s yours to offer as a bride.
• If the heirs are female, you don’t have much chance unless you are Cognatic. Even if you marry the female heir and make her an Empress, when she inherits the Duchy she’ll be an independent Duchess too and you won’t own the Duchy. Also if you get the husband of a female heir and make the husband a Duke, the same happens and again you won’t get the Duchy.
• To protect against inheritance warnings, you can give a higher holding to the problematic Vassal. To give an example, if Count Alfonso’s heir is Count Hugo of a different country, when Count Alfonso dies, Hugo will inherit the county and you’ll lose it. BUT.. If you make Alfonso a Duke, when he dies, Hugo will inherit his land, but as he also inherits the Duchy, he’ll become YOUR Duke, bringing with him his old County. This way, you won’t lose a county but win another county. (You’ll still get the inheritance warning, just ignore it).
• Also give a holding (mostly city-bishopric-barony) to the heirs of your Dukes and Kings, so that they can’t be invited to another country. (minor importance).
• Also if the inheritance warning is about an unmarried ruler, you can marry him with a Fertile (yellow traits) young woman and pray that they make a child (heir).
COMBAT
• You can just use `Auto Balance` feature on the Organize Army page. This is easiest and mostly efficient.
• If you don’t want auto and don’t have any knowledge about fights, collect your army @ the center and don’t use flanks. Because even if you have 10k army and attack to 5k army, if your flank distribution is not parallel to the enemy, your flanks might be crushed. To give an example, the enemy might have 4k-0.5-0.5 army distribution (left flank-center-right flank); whereas you might have 2-6-2 distribution. In such a case, their 4k would crush your 2k and you’d lose a lot of soldiers in an easy fight (although it’s better to use a distributed army in most cases).
• IF you know about fights, put Flanker commanders to Flanks, Center commanders to Center. Use horsemen and archers at flanks, heavy infantry at center.
• Be aware of your terrain, especially River Crossings and Mountains. Don’t attack while passing a River and against Mountains. If the enemy is attacking you, go to a mountain with a river crossing. You can easily beat 2 times the size of your army that way.
• Be aware of the combat traits of your commanders. For example, when you fight in plains, pick a commander who has plain bonuses (Flat Terrain Leader) + High martial stat.
• Concentrate your armies and attack. If you have 20k army and need to conquer 4 counties, instead of dividing the army to 4 armies of 5k, use 20k if the supply limit of the target County allows it; if not, divide the army as 2 x 10k. The point here is, using assault all the times you can and losing as few units as you can while assaulting. And if you assault with 5k against 1k, you’ll probably have to wait for 30 days even to start an assault and lose maybe most of your army. If you chose not to assault, you might wait as long a year to win the siege. But if you use 20k, you’ll start the assault in 4-5 days and lose ~0.5 – 1k. As sieges are the main supply of gold and armies are the main gold sinks, the faster you finish the sieges, the better.
• Don’t assault a holding if you don’t have at least 6-8 times larger army than the defenders (Unless you are in a real hurry). Assault anything when you have 10+ times larger army. (You can check the “Outnumbered” amount when you mouse-over the `Defenders` tab during a siege. Unless it’s more than 1.4, don’t ever assault. I advice more than 1.8-2.0 for a safe assault).
• If you fight a huge army and win, put an Organizer trait commander to the center of your army and move to the County the fleeing army is going to. If you reach there before them (which you will due to the Organizer), you’ll most probably get a defender bonus for Mountains/River Crossings etc and win the fight easier. (They won’t have a chance to re-route when fleeing).
• If there’s a rebellion, you can change view in the same city and raise the levy of that city for a quick defeat of rebels. Although it’s a nuisance, rebellions are good, because defeating them gives you an opinion bonus with that holding’s ruler.
• Also don’t send armies to suppress the rebels without a commander. They might be crushed badly (such as 1k-1k fight might end as 900-0). If you can assign only 1 commander, put all the units at the center. Otherwise, assign 3 commanders.
• If you can’t assault the siege due to not being the leader of the siege, you can bring an army which will bring the soldiers on the land over the Supply Limit and see the other army start to move out, leaving you the siege (Doesn’t work all the times, but mostly works).
• If you are not the leader of the siege and you have 10k army, the leader has 1k and suddenly he starts to assault (AI considers the total number and decides to siege), you can just start moving out, leaving him to die during the assault. He mostly would start moving to avoid losing the troops, so you can stop moving and start sieging. (Sometimes he just stops the assault..)
• Siege time starts to count as soon as your army lands on the target County. Therefore, if you can start sieging even with a small army, start without waiting for the larger army. To give an example, if you have a 100 men army and a 10k army, if your 100 men starts sieging before the 10k army arrives, the siege time counts as total. If your 10k army arrives and joins the siege in 15th day, you’ll be considered to siege that land with 10.1k army for 15 days and be able to start an instant assault.
• Overwhelm the enemy as much as you can. Even if it means double the Supply Limit. (There doesn’t appear to be any attrition during combats).
• When the enemy surrenders, don’t accept it blindly. If you are in no hurry to put down your levies or mercenaries (for example you are still waging war against a few other countries) and you can still siege a few more holdings of the surrendered nation without much loss, just continue that. Remember, all easy sieges are easy gold.
HOLDING DISTRIBUTION
• When you conquer a land, start holding distribution from bottom to top. First give out Baronies, Bishoprics and Cities, then Counties and then Duchies. This is very important.
• If you don’t do the distribution as above, you might get -20 to -25 for each barony-county outside of their de-jure (original) lands. To correct this, if you see a Duke etc. have -25 opinion due to “Desires ... County”, just Transfer the Vassalage of that County to the Duke. Don’t worry, you’ll still get the army levies from those counties (Although you’ll lose indirect taxation, it’s worth it. Better to keep a content country than a rich country in turmoil). (Don’t think that you can get rid of the Vassal and have a content heir. The heir will want the same too. I’ve also tested and confirmed that a proper distribution also produces content heirs.
• Also this is a major reason of war between your Vassals, so keeping each City-Bishopric-Barony in its De-Jure County and each County in its De-Jure Duchy prevents a lot of wars between Vassals. If you see them fighting with each other for the control of a County, know that (most of the times) one of them is holding a County which is not his de-jure land and the other is trying to take that land (what is rightfully his) by force.
• “Revoke”s made by the Counts-Dukes to their sub-vassals are also mostly related with these de-jure boundaries.
• Also fights between Vassals is related with claims among them. You can prevent it by very carefully planning whom to assign where, but it just doesn’t worth it. It’s better to let them sort it out among themselves.
• Distribute holdings to the court members who has a claim on a duchy that you don’t own (and can fight for in the near future). To know which claim owner is good, just select rulers from ‘Find Characters’, order by rank and check to declare war on each of them, and see the claimant list on the “Declare War” page. Chose the ones who own a claim to a Duchy (if you are a King or more) or a Kingdom (if you are an emperor) and grant them a simple holding. (You can discern between Kingdom-Duchy-County-Barony claims by looking at the shape of the crown over their heads @ Declare War page or personal page).
• Give holdings to your own religion/culture and `content` trait vassals as much as you can. Especially higher tier holdings such as Duchies, Kingdoms. – Give Duchies to Heirs of other Duchies as soon as you snatch them –
• For Baronies and Counties, give max 1 holding to 1, so as to maximize vassal #, so as to maximize plot #, so as to maximize prisoners, so as to maximize ransom gold...
• Above Counties, you can you can grant lots of Counties, Duchies to Kings / powerful Dukes to keep powerful Vassals & large armies that you can summon anywhere on their lands.
• Don’t destroy Duchy titles to keep a problem-free land. Just keep them for granting to proper people. You’ll need them. (You don’t need to create a Duchy until you need them). Duchies also have the advantage of levy army concentration and transfer. If you give a European County to a Duke of Middle-East, you can summon his armies on Europe too.
• This is especially useful if you went on a conquering spree in Russia or Middle East. Just give some counties that you conquer to the Kings/Dukes that have the largest armies. Afterwards you can summon their armies in the newly conquered Counties and have fresh fighting troops. (I gave nearly all my Dukes a County in Middle East, so I could summon armies and invade Asia & Middle East very fast).
• Also try to give a shore County to each Duke. So that armies won’t have to walk long distances to get your army on a ship.
• Give a Mayor a County and make him a Lord-Mayor and grant him a few Cities. Patricians will appear in those cities, each with 500g. After that, pray those Patricians try to plot or go Heretic and just usurp their gold. (VERIFY!)
