Can't Grasp the Game

Pushing claims is pretty easy.

Go to the top liege of the person who currently owns the title (in this case Norway) diplomacy, declare war and there should be the option. If there is not there are a couple of reasons you cannot push it:

• The person is neither in your court, nor a vassal of you
• The target is in an alliance with you and you do not have the prestige required to start a war

Additionally you have little control of your vassals in general, but in the case of Scottland you start on Minimal Crown Authority. You are essentially a king in name mostly with little control over your vassals. In order to gain more benefits to being a king you need to raise your crown authority (which carries its' benefits and cons) under the law section.

Also, I started as Scottland at 1066, but none of his brothers have a claim on Caithness. They do have a de Jure (legally recognized) claim on it (different than a fabricated claim).

A duchy is a set of 2-5 counties that are all controlled by one person through a ducal Title (i.e. Duke of Kent, Duke of Galloway etc.). A duke generally can either exert his own control over the de Jure area of the duchy or have vassal counts in his stead controlling counties under him. A typical kingdom consists of 4-5 duchies, but variation in this number exists.

Let me try to help.

First, understand that a Kingdom title > Duchy title > County title > Barony title. Baronies are the secondary holdings in counties.. some counties have many, some have none. For example, Rome has 6, while a random county in say, Finland may only have one. Each of these has a Baron (or bishop/mayor, depending on the type of holding. You will always rule as a baron.) who rules over it. These baron-level people are usually vassal to a count, who is ( in a perfect world ) vassal to a duke, who is vassal to a king, who is perhaps vassal to an emperor. As King of Scotland, you should have several of these vassals. As their liege, you can raise taxes from them, command their levies, and all that great stuff.

To press your brother's claim, you should be able to simply declare war upon Norway with the Casus Belli of Claiming Caithness for your brother, simple. Just go to Norway's King's diplomacy menu and press "Declare War" and select the relevant Casus Belli.

I tried. Did that help?

EDIT: I think zeress did a much better job of answering.

Just as an fyi, the guy who has a claim on Caithness is not your brother, he doesn't like you very much, but he is a prince.

As King of of Scotland, you can press two claims on Caithness, first for Prince Máel-Snechtai for his ducal claim on Caithness as he is the Duke of Moray, second is Scotlands de jure claim on Caithness as part of Scotland.

If you chose the ducal claim, the duke will like you 100 points more than he already does, this will keep him very happy for a while and he will gain the county.
If you chose de jure claim as part of Scotland then you will gain the territory of Caithness and the Duke will dislike you a bit more as he desires the county of Caithness.

Either way, you will have to declare war on Norway to get Caithness, which can be tricky depending on what is going on at the time.

As the King of Scotland on Min. CA while having 1 county, you are about as strong as a duke (even weaker if your vassals don't like you!). First step is get that Crown Authority up to minimum (can only change that once per king, under the law tab top left corner second button). You might have to "grease" the wheels so to say and appease some of your vassals. When you start a vote for crown authority you can see a button in the law window (bottom part) that lists opposers. I suggest sorting by oppinion and picking those that like you the MOST and giving them either gifts (gold, only works once) or giving them honorary titles (or both).

Once you are on low crown authority you can start revoking titles. Here is where it gets tricky. Everytime you revoke a title, all your other vassals will get pissed off (-20 malus for I believe 10 years. Per title). Since you are incredibly weak I suggest saving some money (at least 100g, ideally 150g) to be able to hire a merc band. Most likely the vassal won't approve of you taking his title.

As to which titles to start revoking, switch to de Jure duchy mode, bottom right corner, the top right most button and see what counties are part of your duchy. In the case of Scotland, Albany has a total of 4 counties and I would suggest Fife. Why? Fife is a coastal county with a max potential of 4 holdings. Coastal is important because town holdings on the coast get a LARGE bonus in money, which you can tax if you are directly controlling the county.

Generally I would also suggest increasing town taxes to max, because as long as you don't have count or higher level mayors (which are very rare, mostly North Italy and 1 county in Ireland) you can take the crap out of them at no real recourse.

Click on declare war, it will list your Casus Belli (aka CB, Reasons for War). You choose from that point. Norway will be a very tough fight for you btw. if you do it too early since they are fighting England at the start for England. You'll want to wait for that war to be over first (as they get a scripted army that is much larger than what they normally could field)

Just like he said. Vassal contributions to you are in part controlled by law, but mostly dependant on how much they like you. You, as the King of Scotland and Count of Fife and Gowrie can raise the top 100% of the levies. Whereas the count of Fife as a vassal at the start of the game will only give you about 20% of the levies. Ideally you want to always max out your demesne size (the holdings you control) for maximum troop size and taxes.

Take a look at the tooltip to see what I mean (last line especially)

BroodingMonarch said:

Thanks, both. I can't seem to just declare war on Norway/Caithness, which is what confused me. I have a notification saying my brother has a claim on it, but no way to get a war going over it. I guess because I haven't met other conditions.

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If you go to diplomacy and the "declare war" box is greyed out you can hold your mouse over it for a second to get a tool tip telling you what the conditions are for declaring war and which ones you have/haven't met.

Off the top of my head the two main reasons you might find yourself unable to declare war are:

1. You are not declaring war on an independent character. In this case, as pointed out already, you need to declare war on the king of Norway, not the count/duke who holds Caithness.
2. You have levies raised. You cannot declare war if you have raised levies.

scotland is already one of the harder realms to start with, as your INCREDIBLY weak with a 1 county demense. i'd pick a diffrent relam, like france, or poland

If you want to master Crusader Kings II the first thing to do is do away with the EU3 mindset. There are no nations in CK2, only characters and titles. You do not play as the Kingdom of Scotland you play as Malcom of the dynasty Dunkeld, who happens to hold the title "King of Scotland". When he dies, you will continue playing as his heir. Wether that heir is still King of Scotland is irrelevant. The glory of Scotland, or any other realm you choose to play as is only of secondary importance. Of primary importance is the glory and survival of your extended family, i.e dynasty.
Diplomacy, politics, warfare - in CK2 these do not play out between nations but between individuals. You get alliances by marrying other landholding noblemen, you can lose wars instantly by having the person on whose behalf you started the war die prematurely. Also, to even think of starting a war you will need a casus belli. And wars will be fought only over that particular casus belli, so no go turning a purely defensive war into an offensive war where you annex an aggressive neighbor that underestimated you.
Unless you play as a really small kingdom like Navarre or Brittany, get used to not controlling every part of your kingdom directly. It is not preferable and trying to hog all land for yourself is a surefire way to crash and burn, since provinces will not be as effective when you control too many, and vassals and family members will be angry at you. How many holdings (note: not provinces/counties. You can control more than one holding/barony in any given province) you currently hold and can hold is listed in the upper right corner. As the poster above me say, try to hold as many as you are allowed. They are your powerbase.

People above me speak of Crown Laws and other Realm Laws. Before you go fiddling with them unknowingly, take your time to look them over. Just about everything in this game have a tooltip. Higher Crown Laws restrict what vassals can do, and what you can do against your vassals. If all your vassals hate you, might not be such a good idea to enact laws that lowers their opinion of you even further. A vassal that dislikes you supplies smaller levies in case of war, and is more likely to plot and revolt. If you click on a character and hover over the opinion numbers a tooltip will tell you exactly why he/she hates/likes you. Also note that opinions are bilateral, meaning that, for example, your wife may adore you but you hate her.

This post is a bit of a rant, I know. Please forgive.

As someone who never had CK1 I found this game incredibly hard to get into and I even had a brief moment of regretting to have bought it, but once I got that "a-ha!" moment it all became clear and epic. CK2 is a very rewarding game.

I've got that "moment of regretting to have bought it" right now, it was less than a month ago when I started to play.

What should I do? I know the game, I think, but it's simply not very fun right now. All is so very slow and depressing. I fear I played all too much (24/7) in the beginning.

Voy said:

I've got that "moment of regretting to have bought it" right now, it was less than a month ago when I started to play.

What should I do? I know the game, I think, but it's simply not very fun right now. All is so very slow and depressing. I fear I played all too much (24/7) in the beginning.

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That's called burnout, and relates to gaming more in general than any one game. Play another game for a while and come back to it refreshed.

zeress said:

That's called burnout, and relates to gaming more in general than any one game. Play another game for a while and come back to it refreshed.

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You're right, I feel almost the same for all my games. Time for a break, I guess.