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Here's an interesting character in my current game: In case you can't tell from her appearance, that's a female, Catholic Queen-bishop (although called a King-Bishop since I'm assuming the title probably doesn't have gender variation) of Aquitaine. She gained that position completely legitimately through the vanilla game mechanics with no heresies or anything involved: Basically, when she was a child France and Aquitaine were both controlled by her mother. I had Martinga here betrothed to my own heir and assassinated her older sister which put her front of the line to inherit both titles (she had no brothers) and thus eventually pass them along to me. Apparently her mother was having none of that and changed the inheritance law of France to seniority, which took her well out of the running, but I guess after doing that it pissed off enough of her vassals that she couldn't change the law in Aquitaine as well. So eventually her mother dies and the kingdom splits with France going to an uncle or something and Aquitaine going to Martinga. However, since it wasn't a gavelkind split, she didn't actually inherit any titles BESIDES the kingdom, so she needed to automatically revoke a subordinate title in order to actually be able to hold it. Somehow, the title she revoked was the Prince-Bishopric of Agen, automatically putting her in charge of a theocracy and making her into a priest. This of course annulled the betrothal I set up since priests can't marry () but that's CKII for you. I'm kind of hoping she ends up Pope somehow but she's not even a cardinal at this point so it seems unlikely - being Frankish gives her a pretty huge disadvantage, and I'm not even sure the game would consider her a viable candidate as a woman anyway. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Jun 9, 2015 |
# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 05:18 |
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# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 05:03 |
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Funky Valentine posted:For the first time in all my hours plaything this game, I finally inherited a kingdom from the outside using Elective. I didn't ultimately win it, but I did have one game where as some random duke I was first in line for the Byzantine empire for a little bit. I have no idea why they were voting for me of all people.
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# ¿ Jun 11, 2015 00:04 |
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garth ferengi posted:geheimnisnacht is really good I was wondering how that mod handled cross-race marriages/children. I'm guessing by this screenshot that it pretty much doesn't.
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# ¿ Jun 11, 2015 07:43 |
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beedeebee posted:This may sound weird, but do you guys also have periods where you do...nothing? Right now I'm waiting for some kids to grow up so I can marry them and get some new claims etc. Everyone around me is too strong to try and take over, I don't like shipping my armies over the world to take some small piece of land. So at the moment I'm just waiting/keeping vassals happy. Yeah there's a reason why a lot of CK2 LPs are screenshot based rather than video. The thing about "strategy" (as opposed to "tactics" which is a more appropriate description for most RTS games) is that it's mostly about setting up conditions for a long term goal and then waiting for it to play out, making adjustments/back-up plans along the way. It is absolutely normal to just sit there on speed 4/5 for a while just waiting for events to fire and not really doing anything significant - especially if you're playing a Christian character (other religions tend to be a bit more action-packed because you have so many targets available and tend to have conquest CBs that basically allow you to invade a neighbour for no reason). Once you've set up betrothals/marriages for your current generation, there really isn't a lot much else you can do except wait around for kids to be born or people to die to pass on claims. You can probably kill some time fabricating a claim or two but after a while that ends up not really being worth the trouble since expanding by a single county won't really do much for you once you're a king or queen (leave that to your vassals). That's one of the reasons why way of life added little social options like carousing or spying on people - it gives you something quick and relatively low risk to do while you're waiting on bigger plans to fall into place. If your current focus doesn't really suit sitting around and waiting for a while, then it makes a lot of sense to switch to something like carousing or seducing or hunting to give you something to do while the years roll by.
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# ¿ Jun 11, 2015 08:03 |
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Node posted:The start date sucks. It only makes AI blobs blob even blobbier. I mean, the entirety of western Europe sans Iberia is under only two kingdom titles. It absolutely never lasts though. Charles AI is terrible at forming the HRE (I've seen it happen all of once), and he never lasts long enough to change the inheritance away from Gavelkind, so it's going to quickly splinter into west/mid/east Francia and tends to become a huge clusterfuck. The bigger issue with the start date is the huge Abbasid and Umayyad blobs in the east and west. The Umayyads aren't insurmountable but will probably take over the Iberian peninsula. The Abbasids are just insane though. If they don't crush the Byzantines they'll go all the way over to India. Tribals are pretty cool; playing as a Norse merchant republic is amazing. I think it's worth getting but the start date does have issues.
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# ¿ Jun 12, 2015 00:48 |
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Freakus posted:I just started playing a merchant republic. You want to try to maximize the number of posts in each zone before you start working on neighbours - trade posts within the same zone all give each other bonuses so it ends up being a greater net effect to build a new post in a zone that's got 4/5 posts built than to put it in a fresh zone next to that one. The main thing about trade zone connectedness is you want all your controlled zones to lead back to the republic capital (NOT your own personal capital - in case you have one that's different from the republic) - any posts connected to the capital in that fashion get a flat "connected to capital" bonus to their income. If you're the doge you shouldn't worry too much about the AI outpacing you and grabbing the more valuable zone before you can get to it. Even without really trying you'll be building trade posts at a rate of about 5:1 compared to the AI.
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# ¿ Jun 12, 2015 02:39 |
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Since he was already the primary heir under gavelkind, he probably didn't actually consider the secondary title gains with the law change. So from his perspective you just changed the law for essentially no reason, which dynasty members usually don't like.
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# ¿ Jun 12, 2015 12:18 |
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Alfred P. Pseudonym posted:Doesn't Charlemagne give you viceroyalties? That's a fairly big deal if you ever play as the Byzantines. It also lets you play as tribals. Charlemange's big thing is the start date but there's lots of little features in there as well.
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# ¿ Jun 12, 2015 17:07 |
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MMM Whatchya Say posted:So I know Bad Stuff happens if you borrow money from the merchants and expel them, but what happens if you borrow money and your liege expels them? Nothing. You just got a free 300 gold.
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# ¿ Jun 14, 2015 23:02 |
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Goofballs posted:What I find off is when you can imprison someone for a legitimate reason a lot of the time you can't banish or execute them without taking a hit to your reputation. The issue with imprisonment is that generally when you can do it, you get one "free" action against that person - and imprisonment itself counts. So you can throw them in jail but then you're stuck because you've used up your freebie so you either leave them to rot or just let them out (or ransom them if they have a title). Banishment is basically never "free" because even when you do get cause to revoke a title, banishment counts as a revocation for EACH title you strip from them. Execution oddly enough is considered less tyrannical than banishment most of the time.
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# ¿ Jun 15, 2015 04:27 |
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Goofballs posted:I haven't played a trade republic before, what should I be getting up to as a general order of business? I assume I shouldn't take as much land mass as possible? You can seize land if you want it (Trade republics have two unique CBs - one that lets you take control of a city in a province where you have a trade post, and one that lets you take the whole county if you control a city there), but your main source of income is going to be from trade posts, and for those you're going to need a lot of unlanded male dynasty members in your court. So your priorities should be: 1) Build trade posts 2) Arrange marriages for as many male dynasty members as you can (so they can have sons which will allow you to do more of 1), don't give them landed titles. 3) Win elections, which should be fairly trivial since you'll have more than enough money from trade posts alone. 4) Build more cities in your capital county if you have room. 5) Seize other counties, build cities or baronies there. 5 is more or less optional - Republics CAN be played as a big empire, but unlike Feudal realms, don't really HAVE to. You can continue to increase your income without acquiring more land, and you can hire mercenaries to serve as your military protection. Hell you'll probably be making enough money that you can just keep mercenaries around as a standing army. Your estate provides a pretty decent amount of troops on its own, too. Also, if you've got the Legacy of Rome DLC, Merchant Republics can get a lot of retinue points by building garrisons at your trade posts. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Jun 16, 2015 |
# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 00:49 |
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T___A posted:Ok, I have no trouble converting lands under my control, I was just wondering how to convert foreign pagans. Basically just keep sending chaplains until you get lucky and convert the realm leader. There's no real trick to it except to just keep trying.
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# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 13:28 |
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What year is it? The rivers start closing off after a certain point.
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# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 16:45 |
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You can use mercenaries too, but retinues are generally better since they have stat bonuses and more importantly allow you to stack a flank with one or two types of troops max - tactic choice is based on the composition of a flank, and stacking them like that guarantees that the commander will pick tactics that will boost the entire flank at once rather than buffing some of it and nerfing another bit of it. They also won't pick tactics that nerf the entire flank and benefit nobody - tactics that will only benefit troop types that aren't present in a flank will be removed from the table before choosing (except for the special "bad" tactics, which are generally a nerf to everyone, but only get picked by commanders with low martial or in flanks with no commander).
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# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 20:50 |
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Goofballs posted:I have legacy but it never got to that point for me, I had the HRE kicking my poo poo in within the first 20 years. I think it was just bad luck. This is basically the most you can do 95% of the time. Battles in CKII generally boil down to "more mans = win", with maybe terrain factors giving one side an edge if they're closely matched. You have very little control over your levy composition, especially when you call up vassal levies (which will be the bulk of your army in any large realm), so you can't really do much in the way of fine-tuning your army aside from assigning commanders with high martial skill. The battles themselves are kind of complex but you don't really have any control over how they actually play out - tactics can potentially make a huge difference but in practice tend to cancel themselves out unless you specifically stack an army with retinues and a commander to take advantage of a particular cultural tactic. If you're interested you can read the wiki page on tactics, but honestly that information is far from necessary to do well in the game. At most what you can take away from it is that you really want to avoid using commanders with martial below 7, and traits like lisp, stutter, and craven are also bad (all stuff you could probably have guessed yourself anyway).
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# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 21:44 |
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Eric the Mauve posted:* Don't lead your army yourself, and don't have your awesome heir do it. It doesn't matter if he has a 21 Martial score. Just. Don't. The advantage 21 Martial provides over 11 actually isn't that huge, and your great character will get killed because this is CK2. (And, because again this is CK2, if you send your rear end in a top hat oldest son with a 6 Martial to lead your army he will never, ever get killed or injured.) No he won't get killed, he'll get hit in the head with a stray rock and become incapable, thus staying in the line of succession but guaranteeing a regency for life when he inherits. Excelzior posted:I thought we had settled on a mix of infantries backing a core of just under 60% archers? Wouldn't want to give your opponent the chance to automatically trigger melee with a Charge on undefended flank. Yeah this is important - you absolutely do not want a full flank of archers because the opposing flank will get a special tactic they can fire off immediately that changes the phase to melee, rendering the archers more useless than even light infantry. Ideally you want about a 50/50 mix of archers/infantry - pikemen are the best since they have the most morale and good defense, but heavy infantry are decent too and will be more effective if the flank lasts into the melee phase. A good mix of retinues is 1:1 skirmish/shock, or if you're English or Welsh, 1:1 longbow/defense.
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# ¿ Jun 17, 2015 02:58 |
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kingturnip posted:You don't need to break a siege to change Commanders. Is Paradox ever planning to change this? I don't quite understand why you can't edit commanders/flank composition without this little workaround. It seems like a bunch of pointless extra clicks for something that should just be a button right on the army bar.
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# ¿ Jun 17, 2015 07:07 |
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Bitter Mushroom posted:Can't say I agree with that, feastings fine as it is, and costs gold like it should. Plots dont cost any gelt. Carousing should be reworked a little maybe, with an invite all vassals button or something its a pain in the arse when youre a kingdom or empire to get everyone involved. Plots are also for hostile, covert stuff. Feasting and carousing doesn't really make sense as something that should block out planning to murder someone or fabricating a claim on a title. One nice thing that I think HIP does with feasts is that it changes the decision to something you can activate at any time, and then it fires when October rolls around - same with hunts and summer fairs in their respective time frames. Basically rather than having to watch the clock for the right date to roll around, you just queue them up whenever you want and the game handles it for you. A "carouse" decision could also be added that would basically just invite a bunch of random vassals or courtiers, for when you don't really care about individual relationships and just want the carousing diplo bonuses. Hadaka Apron posted:I was actually thinking of starting as one of the existing Republics in-game without being tribal first, but I'll give Ireland a whirl. Venice is usually a safe bet - being an island makes you ridiculously defensible so long as you get your levies up BEFORE enemies arrive, you get 6 holding slots and are surrounded by wealthy territories, and you can pledge allegiance to the Byzantine Empire and take it over from the inside if you want to since you're a de jure vassal of theirs. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jun 19, 2015 |
# ¿ Jun 19, 2015 17:33 |
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Baron Porkface posted:Is it possible to establish the Novgorod republic seeing as Novgorod isnt coastal? Anything can be a Republic if you just create it as a vassal, but it won't be playable unless it's got coastal access. Something that just occurred to me - can Muslim merchant republics use any holding type without penalty? I mean feudal Muslims can use temples without the "Wrong holding type" penalty, and MRs can use both cities and castles. Or does one override the other?
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# ¿ Jun 20, 2015 00:17 |
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Culture conversion is kind of weird because there's a bunch of restrictions on when it can and can't happen and how long it takes. For inherited titles, culture will NEVER convert unless there's already at least one adjacent province with your culture (with the exception of event-triggered culture flips like the Norse culture split or new cultures being created like Norman or English). For titles gained through wars, it can flag a "conquest culture" on the captured lands which allows them to flip to the conquering ruler's culture without any adjacent provinces. I don't know if this is applied universally, though, or if it only relates to certain CBs or cultures. You can do culture conversion through councilors as a tribal with the "settle tribe" stewards get, but make sure you get that done before becoming a feudal or republic leader. Provincial culture doesn't really have a huge impact on the game anyway - cultural buildings and retinues are based on the culture of the ruler, not the county, there aren't any "liberate X" CBs (although there are liberation revolts) and I think even creating new vassals or courtiers is based on the ruler's culture, not the land. Having mismatched culture really just means there's a small revolt risk penalty.
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# ¿ Jun 20, 2015 17:02 |
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Veryslightlymad posted:My game does this, there should be a way to change the message priority for every message. I thought pausing the game for this one was the default. It's probably because it basically never happens. AI will only break a betrothal if something invalidates the marriage entirely (like one of the members taking the vows or being castrated). Even being at war with a betrothed spouse's realm won't break a betrothal - it just prevents you from honoring it until you make peace. This is why betrothals are a great tool to arrange absolutely terrible deals for the AI - they'll never let you marry their first in line to the empire son matrilineally to your daughter but they'll happily matri betrothe a 4th in line son to her and then still accept the marriage arrangement after you murder the three people in line ahead of him.
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# ¿ Jun 21, 2015 05:42 |
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Toplowtech posted:It generally involves wifes/mothers with high intrigue murdering people to favor their husbands/sons or your spymaster getting killed before s/he can reveal a plot. There is some random CRAZY and/or PARANOID factor at works too. They often like to plot to assassinate rivals as well. Sometimes it's just the AI can see a potential inheritance setup that you might not - typically because it's incredibly minor (like a barony or something). The AI doesn't play to win like the player - they play based on the character's own personal interests. Often those interests are fairly petty or pointless from a larger perspective but enough to get them to want someone dead. If they're a lunatic then they'll basically just plot to assassinate people at random.
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# ¿ Jun 25, 2015 00:50 |
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Chaotic Flame posted:I still haven't really grasped the inviting claimants to court since most people don't want to come to my court. And don't they have to be your vassal for their claim to become part of your territory? They do if they aren't kin, but "vassal" can be anything - give them a barony and it still counts even if you press their claim for a kingdom (at least as long as you're an emperor - even if they are a vassal if you press a claim for a title equal or higher than your own they'll still become independent). I believe they'll also be a vassal if the title is de jure part of your territory, although you don't really need to invite claimants for those anyway since you already have a CB. The real pro way to do it though is to marry a claimant to someone of your dynasty, and then press the claim when their child inherits it. Not only will they still be your vassal since they're a member of your dynasty, but you can raise the child yourself to ensure they're content (or at least, not ambitious), making them unlikely to cause trouble with their new power.
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# ¿ Jun 25, 2015 04:05 |
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Torrannor posted:July 14th, excellent. Iqta. They've mentioned it in a couple of the dev diaries I think - I know I've seen it before somewhere. It's basically just the name for the government type Muslims have where they can hold both castle and church holdings without penalty.
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# ¿ Jun 25, 2015 15:51 |
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kingturnip posted:This seems to be the code for the event: Yes, you can have that event build you a castle even if you wouldn't normally be able to do it manually - I've had it fire in a province where I had no cities built. The actual code there only checks if there's an empty holding. I'm not sure how global flags work compared to character flags, but from the look of it you can only get the event once (if you accept), even if your character dies and you take over as the heir. If you reject it that specific character won't get the event again but their heir can.
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# ¿ Jun 30, 2015 00:27 |
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Eric the Mauve posted:Are you using the More Realistic Battles mod? I installed that and like it but the one annoying thing about it is that 75% of the time a Crusade is called it quickly ends with the Pope storming into battle with like 4000 dudes like a retard before the rest of Christendom has time to assemble, losing badly and getting captured. Now I actually save and reload without that mod whenever a crusade is called (for some reason this doesn't happen nearly as often with jihads, I guess caliphs aren't quite as as popes?) It's probably more that Caliphs tend to have way, way bigger armies than Popes so they don't tend to lose many battles they're personally leading.
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# ¿ Jul 1, 2015 03:21 |
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Eric the Mauve posted:It's the latter. Vikings are raiding pretty much all the time and there are a lot of them. The big thing about vikings as well is that most of the time the AI won't bother to deal with them, so they might have already hit half a dozen other counties before getting to yours.
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# ¿ Jul 3, 2015 03:27 |
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Moreau posted:Is anyone able to explain the mysteries of battle resolution? I just lost 7000 men, and got a -20% warscore malus. I then promptly destroyed the opposing 12000 army, and got a +1% warscore malus. This seems a little unfair! The warscore reward for defeating enemy armies is based on the proportion of the total enemy force that army represents. I think it's based on the maximum number of troops they can have, rather than their current available pool, so even if that army of 12,000 is their entire active levy, if their maximum is say, 40,000 or something, it will still count relatively low for warscore purposes.
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# ¿ Jul 4, 2015 23:04 |
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beedeebee posted:Wow, I was dicking around in the religion tab and turns out I accidentally funded some guy's campaign to become pope. Yeah it's nice when that happens, although the AI always seems to bump up their cardinal candidates at the last second and get them in before the interface updates which is very annoying. One thing that is nice is that it's a flat bonus regardless of how much you actually spent on making them a cardinal, so if they're ALREADY in first without your help, you can just chip in 10 gold or something and still get the huge bonus if they end up as pope.
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# ¿ Jul 7, 2015 00:23 |
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You can hold as many empire titles as you want but I think Italia has a few special requirements.
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# ¿ Jul 7, 2015 07:31 |
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beedeebee posted:Married my character to some duchess so my sons would inherit her lands and mine and thus double the size of my realm. However, the duchess died pretty early, meaning my son left my court and is now duke. Meaning I can't control him I think dynasty members in general will get upset if you change succession laws even if they never stood to inherit anything - they just don't like changes from how things are traditionally handled. The modifier is probably bigger if they DO get disinherited by the change but even people who get bumped into first by the change will sometimes still get the negative modifier (Although it is somewhat cancelled out by the positive "heir" modifier at that point).
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# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 10:21 |
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Torrannor posted:If you play a high martial character and use him to lead your troops, administration is suddenly the best focus you can get because it's a mini-organizer trait. Not really surprising they'd want to put more focus on horse archers just before horse lords comes out. It'll be interesting to see how much the archer nerf hurts in practice - one thing that has bugged me a lot is battles that are over before even making it to the melee phase because archers were so devastating. It just didn't really seem to make a lot of sense that the least deadly phase of the battle is when people would be breaking and running. On the other hand, archers should at least do SOMETHING, and while they're still better skirmishers than most other units, the gap is a lot smaller, and they still become useless outside the skirmish phase, so it raises the question of whether they've lost their niche entirely now.
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# ¿ Jul 9, 2015 06:19 |
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Torrannor posted:How will the pagan subjugation change work? Currently, if you use the CB on a character who has holdings outside the kingdom you are subjugating, you get his holdings in the kingdom and all vassals of that kingdom, while he retains his possessions outside the de jure kingdom. Does the change mean that you will subjugate his whole territory? That could be very powerful if used right. From what it sounds like, you'll just vassalize the subjugated lord rather than take his land, so you'd pretty much have to gain all his land unless it splits off the stuff that's not in your de jure kingdom under another lord somehow (I imagine they'll just bring everything with them into your realm though). quote:How does this work now? Literally nothing happens because they can't declare war on you as you aren't their direct liege. So essentially you can just keep retrying forever until it succeeds. quote:Boo! Also, I've never seen such a thing, how does it work? I think the option only comes up if you're lustful or have the hedonist trait or seduction focus or some combination of those.
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# ¿ Jul 9, 2015 14:15 |
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alcaras posted:Created a Custom Empire. It should have inherited the succession law of whatever your primary kingdom title was beforehand, but maybe there's some other factor confusing it? Are you an unreformed pagan and somehow got your Kingdom titles as elective anyway?
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# ¿ Jul 12, 2015 11:48 |
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If the kid is treated as yours, then the real parent won't get any claims or anything like that. If the kid isn't treated as yours, then they won't inherit any of your claims anyway because they aren't your kid (although they will inherit your wife's claims if you're trying to get some of those, so you'll have competition there).
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# ¿ Jul 13, 2015 15:38 |
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Hadaka Apron posted:Anyone have advice for converting pagans? I know that leaders having the Cynical trait makes them more receptive, but they still usually imprison my chaplain. It's mostly pretty random, but the main factors aside from the liege that you're trying to convert's traits are the current year and which religion you're trying to convert them to - pagans are more hostile to missionaries in the earlier years but will become more receptive after about 1000 AD or so. Also, certain pagan types are more receptive to missionaries of particular religions - Germanic pagans are more receptive to catholic conversion, while west Africans are more receptive to Muslims and I think Slavic and Romuva are more receptive to Orthodox.
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# ¿ Jul 14, 2015 08:06 |
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Civilized Fishbot posted:Can I play Jewish horselords as the Khazars, or do they stop being horselords once they start being Jewish? Religion and government type are totally disconnected (except for Iqta which is the Muslim specific government), so you should be able to be nomads of any religion.
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# ¿ Jul 15, 2015 02:07 |
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alcaras posted:When should I use viceroys? Basically whenever you want. The penalty with non-viceroy lords is tiny. It's a pain to have to hand out the title again every time the current holder dies, but it's a good way to manage a powerful kingdom and keep it in the hands of content vassals. I don't really think duchy viceroys are worth the effort, but if you find you've got a particularly troublesome dynasty controlling a duchy it might be worthwhile to take the tyranny hit to revoke it and then hand it out as a viceroyalty.
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# ¿ Jul 16, 2015 05:57 |
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I think there might be a bug with the ongoing prestige costs for horde retinues - I've only got 6 retinues total, 4 of which are skrimish units (so pay their upkeep in gold), and the other two are Maurader units - yet I'm actually losing prestige because those two maurader units are apparently costing me 2.6 prestige per month. It SHOULD only be 0.2 total. Even if the cash ones have a prestige cost too, I certainly don't have enough units to be spending that much. I think it might have something to do with inheriting retinues because I just succeeded and it seemed to be working correctly before my heir took over. *edit* actually I figured out what the issue is and I think it's still a bug, but not the one I thought it was. Essentially, that 2.6 was the reinforcement cost of the retinues because they weren't full, but my heir had negative prestige. The problem is that with negative prestige, the retinues won't reinforce, but you're still charged the full cost of reinforcement. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Jul 16, 2015 |
# ¿ Jul 16, 2015 06:45 |
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# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 05:03 |
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My most recent game before the update was a Feudal - trying to play Basque from the Charlemange start date (it's very hard - there's basically one guy to pick, who starts right next to the Umayyad blob. You have to conquor your way up into Aquitaine and pledge yourself as a vassal to them just to survive). It does seem like playing a feudal lord ends up being less interesting than most of the other options now. Although Catholics and Orthodox christians have at least got some interesting mechanics with Sons of Abraham and Legacy of Rome.
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# ¿ Jul 17, 2015 01:57 |