Indeed, bigger stacks does not always mean victory. It is amazing what the right leaders in an army flank can do to route the opposition. In saying that, I will weigh up army size before going to war, but size doesn’t always matter. The actual combat side of the game is very weak however, and I do wish more was done to address the whack a mole system, on top of the army tactics that are used. Even smaller things like setting up the army composition.
Pressing claims for other people will lead to them being independent, unless they are either of your dynasty, or a vassal of your realm. Furthermore, it must also be of a title lesser than your own. What generally happens is people grant a landed title of a county to a claimant, then press a claim to secure a duchy or other such title.
Putting down rebellions is a method to having vassals like you more due to the opinion bonus for suppressing a revolt (+25, max of +50 if I recall). If you want to cut the infighting, then switching to medium or higher crown authority stops vassals from fighting each other. Of course, that means the chance of rebellion instead grows more, and as a result, it pays to keep an eye on the relative size of the various dukes and counts under your realm (assuming you are king or emperor).
The only times I’ve seen where size didn’t automatically win was on island invasions where I was forced to go in low morale.
Otherwise the defensive bonuses and unit compositions are of little importance. Maybe things have changed(for the worse) since you guys played it.
This was me initiating war on a claim from one of my vassals. Who should have stayed my vassal as it was a simple duchy title vs my king title. I get the feeling they have a choice to go independent now and thus gain the “usurper” trait.
They don’t tend to go outside because they usually aren’t powerful enough, and the AI knows this. Remember - if you want to take a county off of someone, you have to declare against the top-level liege. Rarely does a vassal strong enough to do so, and you as a top-level liege usually don’t want vassals that are that strong.
Vassals that think they can win will go and do things. I have a tendency to land alot of family, so that a hundred or two hundred years in, even though an individual vassal isn’t that strong, it’s not uncommon to see a branch of the family declare war and have all the family alliances kick in and half the realm march to kick some dudes teeth in.
Not really. Light infantry is bad, for example. Those peasant uprisings and such are easily dealt with smaller armies of actual units. This is also why tribals and the Aztecs are weaker then they look - lots of light infantry. This is also why the Christian holy orders and some mercenaries punch above their size.
Next, for real battles involving actual units, RNG tactics have a big role. This is why the Mongols are so damn scary even beyond the size of their event stacks, because those stacks are singularly focused enough to repeatedly roll horse archer appropriate tactics that multiplies their effectiveness. In addition, some tactics counter other tactics. If you ever see a flank that was doing OK completely disintegrate, that’s what happened. It’s true, however, that you usually do not have control over unit composition, which is a big part of RNG tactics.
But the portions of combat you do have control over - generals, are also really important because they are multiplicative with tactics. Having non-crappy generals with appropriate battle traits (note that high martial does little by itself - they need to have combat traits for that martial ability to bring the big bonuses) is actually a really big deal. Like a yummy 60% bonus damage from a 20 martial holy warrior. Or if you see that you’re going to fight on some plains, swap in a lower martial dude that has flatland specialization (say 12 martial for 32% bonus damge) rather than your hills guy (say 30 martial, but no bonus!), etc, etc.
And attacking into a mountain across a river is never a good idea - enjoy your 30% lower combat effectiveness, and the increased chance of the defender setting up a “narrow” front eliminating the size advantage.
You just need to try to tilt the odds in your favor with choices, if you can. Of course it’s true that some of the time, especially when small, you won’t have those leaders or terrain that lets you do that.
And wait until you discover retinue composition min-maxing (eg/ 6 skirmish : 1 shock : 1 defensive lead by Welsh or English leader). Enjoy murdering armies twice your size =p
Though that’s definitely made the game much easier.
Vassal management can make a huge difference here. There’s probably something upsetting them if a replacement immediately wants to rebel. Make sure you’re not holding any of their de jure territory, for example. Wrong-culture malus is also an issue that’s easy to overlook (a pretty big -20 without tech!)
Big enough vassals do take care of revolts in their territory (though they don’t do so until the rebels take land). And vassals will never help you in your wars - they give you their troops and that’s that.
Participating as an ally does actually give you a share of the peace offering in terms of prestige and gold if that’s relevant to the war, dependent on your war contribution score - you don’t get any notification though. If you don’t care, then don’t bother sending dudes - no penalty. Alternately, if you want to participate, but don’t want to actually manage dudes, find an ally army and attach your army to follow it (there’s a button to do this).
You do get a valid imprison reason, you just can’t take their land. I think that’s fair.
It varies here. Tribal rulers tend to require a serious beatdown before surrendering. Normal rulers tend to capitulate easily enough if you wipe their armies and then siege their primary holdings. Are you mostly fighting tribals?
The entire point of this is diminishing returns on realm size. The game would not be remotely balanced without it (and this was much more problematic at launch).
I don’t know what is going on here, I manage the Scandinavian empire as emperor and king of Sweden. Norway, Finland, Denmark aren’t doing anything. Best I’ve seen was Denmark taking one tile in Britain and a few tiles in Germany over the course of 100s of years.
Norway has done nothing and the same goes for Finland even when they had claims on small independent counties in eastern Europe they just sat there.
I’ve checked out videos on army composition but I haven’t done any min maxing as I simply haven’t seen any need to do so. My bigger stacks, regardless of composition win 95%+ of the time when morale is even. As I mentioned I invaded an island that had a huge stack of defenders and got my ass kicked but that was purely due to the lack of morale.
I’ve tried putting in ambitious and greedy leaders and I’ve hand picked docile and content leaders with no claims on anything as well. I see disappointingly little difference between them except that the more ambitious ones obviously rebel more but neither of them are doing much of anything.
Yes, this was more of a criticism on the way it’s currently implemented. There’s no loyalty to the empire, they pay their crappy taxes and you have to go and micromanage boring stuff.
Good idea about the follow button, I haven’t tried using it yet.
I can’t even execute them without a penalty. Guy Fawkes didn’t blow anyone up but he was executed anyway and rightly so. Pretty sure people felt it was justified. High treason should give you carte blanche to do whatever you wanted to the perpetrator(s)
No, right now I’m taking land in the British Isles and it’s late enough in the game that none of them are tribal. They still need me to destroy everything before they give up. Say there are 12 holdings in the duchy, they need me to kill off 11 before they react. Also, if they were on the fence on becoming my vassal why aren’t they quick to propose that when they’re getting slaughtered? I feel the numbers and AI behavior is way off here.
I don’t like the fact that if you have only one county but you’re the emperor of 4 kingdoms, your income is still terrible. You have to max out your realm size to have any real income and I don’t see much logic to that. The game is tilted towards negativity with most of everything you do. There’s a huge downside to stuff that should be rewarding, right now holding 4 kingdoms is much more trouble than it’s worth. You have to deal with 4 whining kings who generate very little income for you. Again, there’s no loyalty to anything in the game, everyone wants more power and want to see you dead regardless of how benevolent a ruler you are. The best you can expect is for them to grudgingly shut up and do nothing. This may be done for balancing purposes but to me it takes away from the experience of climbing out of that single county to eventually lead an empire. There’s no “I made it” mountain to climb, it’s all shit.
Keep in mind, every time you imprison someone, take their land, or do something else that nobles don’t like, it generally tends to make the rest of your vassals not very happy, even if they didn’t like the guy (because they’re worried they could be next). If you have been doing that a lot, they will all get pretty pissed off, even if they like you for other reasons. If you’re calling up your vassals’ levies, that also pisses them off.
One of the reasons to give vassals higher titles is so that you don’t have to worry about pleasing 40 dukes, you can worry about pleasing two kings. But kings also chafe at being told what to do by an Emperor, and tend to have designs on higher titles…there’s no free lunch here.
That’s a huge part of my criticism. In an age of murder and power there are too many limitations to your rulership, this isn’t a democracy. If I have an empire and Norway keeps acting up I should be able to go over there and kick their asses without penalties, after all they’re only there because they LOST. I have 4 times their strength and I have to sit and take repeated assassination attempts and give them a slap on the wrist for being naughty. The AI at this point should realize that it cannot fight me and go fight something it can beat instead.
I have to take so much crap while being “nice” with low taxes / low - medium levies and having given them back all their de jure vassals. Imagine how much bs you need to take if you actually play hardball with them? It’s too much right now. There needs to be a sense of purpose and loyalty built in when you’ve beaten them down hard enough for long enough. It needs to feel like an empire at some point and not just a loose assembly of disgruntled mercenaries.
I’m actually finishing the second book I’ve read on Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries this month, and honestly I’m struck by how–well before the Magna Carta–Kings were being held in check somewhat by their nobles and vassals, though. I can’t speak to the 9th century on forward to the 11th (that’s next month’s reading fun!), but I get the impression that being King was great and all…but you were lucky if 60-75% of your noble subjects were absolute in doing what you ordered them to do.
If you are personally much stronger than your vassals they won’t give you much crap, and that plus the long reign and prestige bonuses are there to emulate the effects of a powerful, stable ruler. If you want to also be a prosperous ruler, making everyone rich, then keep taxes low and send out gifts.
To some extent, I think your complaint is just asking the game to be a different topic/era. This is a game about managing unruly, inept, selfish vassals. The stories of the game are takes of kingdoms won and lost, not just a steamrolling conquest of the world. Nationalism, as a motivating force, didn’t really exist in this period - it was about dynasties and religions.
Centralized government didn’t really exist in most cases during that time frame either. Not only that but the limits of physical travel made it really hard to directly control more than a few days travel distance. Even the Roman Empire had to undergo periods of decentralization, and frequently had revolts and splinter kingdoms forming within.
Even great kings had major issues. Look at the progress of the Francian kingdoms. By all accounts Charlemagne was a highly competent ruler, able to consolidate massive amounts of power. Yet look what happened after his death, they rapidly dissolved. So the mechanics that make it hard to form an ever expanding, stable, and centralized nation don’t really exist. It is simply trying to create mechanics that mirror the real life pressures. Still if you know what you are doing it is possible to create more stable kingdoms, but it is rightly very hard.
Triggercut if you want something to explore the post Roman world I’d recommend the British History podcast. They’ve just gotten to the end of the eight century, and Charlemagne is on the scene to the south. It is a fantastic podcast. While focused on the British Isles it does a good job of exploring the political realities of a post Roman world. Lots of usurpers and war.
This is actually pretty realistic; part of the feudal contract was precisely that your vassals provided military service, and not taxes. And in some social systems, the King couldn’t even count on that. CK reflects this reality fairly well.
The game is tilted towards negativity with most of everything you do. There’s a huge downside to stuff that should be rewarding, right now holding 4 kingdoms is much more trouble than it’s worth. You have to deal with 4 whining kings who generate very little income for you.
Again very realistic. There is a reason why it took around 800 years after Charlemagne before another powerful European empire was established under the Habsburgs. CK actually allows Emperors too much power; except for a short period under the Carolingians, there were no medieval emperors in Europe with as
much power as the HRE in the game often wields.
Again, there’s no loyalty to anything in the game, everyone wants more power and want to see you dead regardless of how benevolent a ruler you are.
Agree - the behavior of characters can feel a bit negative/arbitrary at times. Would be nice to see even more personality.
I just like to imagine whatever tilted kook who coded up Gandhi’s AI in Civ 1 didn’t find work in the industry again until Paradox freelanced out the Vassal AI in CK2. . .
Yeah, I picked up Susan Wise Bauer’s books. She’s actually written a nice survey history trilogy, beginning with the ancient world, then on into medieval world, and then medieval into the Ottoman capture of Constantinople. They’re very much survey histories. She does definitely provide plenty of local color along the way, but it isn’t meant to be a narrative history at all.
What’s great about them is that while they do tend to focus fairly heavily on Europe (because we’ve got so much written documentation, obvs), especially in the Renaissance book (which will nicely take you through late Crusader Kings 2 period right on up to EU4) she casts a much more global net. She covers the Mongols, India, Sri Lanka, the various Chinese kingdoms, Southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, South and Central America, Africa, and central Asia and the middle east. Let me put it this way: I used to be the “I’m going to play European kingdoms or nations” guy because that’s what I’m familiar with. Now my next game is definitely going to be as a Sultan or Rajah.
Despite it’s age, R. H. C. Davis’s “History of Medieval Europe” is an excellent introductory book to the time between Constantine up to the coming of the Mongols. I think he does a good job of describing the development of the Church and the feudal system.
Robert Bartlett’s “The Making of Europe” is another good read. He looks at the Middle Ages from the POV of Latin Christendom as conquerors and colonizers of the rest of Europe, essentially arguing that the latter conquest and colonization of the 16th and 17th centuries were basically the continuation of a culture created while enforcing uniformity on Europe. In addition to being an interesting read in its own right, it’s also an excellent source for further reading (100+ pages of notes and bibliography).
I’ve got Legacy of Rome, Rajas of India, Sword of Islam, The Old Gods, and The Republic. If I decided to learn how to play should I not even install the DLC or doesn’t it really matter if I’m just picking someone in Ireland to start?
Everything I’ve read says you’re fine to leave all DLC on except Sunset Invasion (which you don’t have). Just don’t pick a really early start date as mentioned above and get saddled with a tribal start when you aren’t expecting it.
Awesome! Thanks for this great post. I just ordered The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire by Edward Luttwak and his Rome book as well, but this is right up my alley as well.
