Yeah, the entire point of recommending the 1066 Ireland start is to get players focused on a small area that sees little outside interference with a clear goal to become the King, to get themselves familiar with the baron/county/duchy/kingdom levels of rule, the feudal claim and de jure systems for expansion, the difference between your desmense and your realm (of vassals), management of said vassals, and small scale warfare.
And because you are inexperienced and playing a one county count, this will (probably) be SLOW. Maybe becoming king will take you a century and 5 or 6 rulers if you’re inexperienced. Don’t be afraid to sticking the speed up to max while you have your chancellor fabricating claims or your son with the strong claim is growing up.
And regarding this, I would emphatically say, NO, this is not the way to look at things. Or to be more precise - examining lines of succession is NOT something you should be constantly doing, only in pursuit of a very specific goal. However, arranging marriages to try and take advantage is something you will be doing.
How do you do this without examining lines of succession? By playing the game enough so that you can recognize at a glance an advantageous situation. Or by using the titles screen -> claimants menu to see existing claimants you can invite, land, and press their claim (or intermarry and press the offspring’s claim).
And I want to point out that as count of bumnowhereland, you should not be doing this because you don’t have the resources for so the “recognize at a glance an advantageous situation” will almost never fire. So don’t even bother right now.
Former not really a game-breaking issue, and it certainly won’t affect anyone playing far away from the Muslim blobs, and the latter is not really an issue anymore now that the AI has it toned down alot (although the player can certainly abuse it into the ground)
OK, this is silly but what is the best way to figure out how many levies/soldiers I will have vs. the guy I want to attack? Specifically:
I am King of Mumu, started in 1066, it’s now 1099, and my son is in charge. I want to take over the county to my south, Deashmhumhain.
When I click on my ruler, and click on the Military icon, and look at that screen, I see my Army Levies. It appears I can raise 1941 personal levies, from the info at the top of the screen (the button to raise levies.) It says for the line for raising Vassal Levies I can raise 379. So that would indicate I can have a force of 2320, right? OK - first confusing thing, below, it lists my Vassals, and the first one says the one Earl can provide 255 of his potential 888 troops. It says the Mayor can provide 64 of his 263 troops. And the Bishop, it says he can provide 91 of his 177. But that adds up to 410 - shouldn’t it add up to 379? Aren’t those the details of the 379 of the Vassal Levies it says I can raise right below how many Personal Levies?
Then I click on the county of Deashumhain. What numbers do I use to determine how many troops (outside of allies and mercs) he can raise? There’s a box next to his profile, when I click on his county, that shows a pic of the county capital, and if I float the cursor over the red bar below it, it says Levy 2085. Then the two boxes below, for his Bisophoric and City, the red bars show 1246 and 586, respectively. Does that mean his army will be 2085 + 1246 +586? And then when I click on MY counties, Tudsomething and Ursomething, I also get those boxes for County Capital and City and Bisophorics, for each county, and Levy numbers that don’t seem to match anything in the numbers under the Military info for my ruler! I am SOOO confused! LOL!
If you click on the character who rules Deashumhain, he’ll have that soldier icon (I think that is what it is) which shows how big his levies are. I’m pretty sure the tooltip will break it down so you can see his levies and those of his vassals.
I also saw the same thing as you - the numbers don’t always seem to add up. I mentioned this upthread and was told that it happens. The 2 are usually very close and not to worry about discrepancies.
The figure on the military screen appears to include ships. So that’s why 255 + 64 = 410 != 379. Presumably there are 31 ships there.
The county figures are somewhat meaningful, kinda not really. They essentially indicate how many troops the holding owner can personally raise (aka their personal levies), but that gets filtered down by by the time it reaches the top level guy that you will be declaring war on, so what the character sheet of the top-level liege and the military screen reports are what you want to look at. What the military screen says “can provide at most XXX” has XXX calculated as:
50% x Total Vassal Levy (these are the sum of the red bars on the county screen) x Modifier
The modifier is lower depending on where the vassal’s capital is in relationship to your own, to represent the diffuse control of larger realms.
Again, this stuff may be interesting to lookup, but don’t worry about the details if you just want to know if X>Y. Just look at your character screen and the enemy’s character screen.
On their character sheet, there’s an icon in the yellow list of gold/piety/prestige that displays it, I think? But googling for images of “crusader kings 2 character sheet” to highlight one for you I can’t see any screenshots with it on. Hover over everything. :P
You can also get it on the ledger. (There’s a button for that in the bottom right. Hopefully you also see the (+) there that can open the log?)
You can also see it on the realm tree, which is found on a character sheet in the top right. (It’s the button to the right of the tree button, to the left of the dynasty shield)
So, in my No Nothing campaign, in which I don’t really know what I’m doing, I’ve basically just held on to my two counties in Ireland and fought off attackers. Some intrigue here and there, throwing a nephew in prison who had a plot against me, seduced the wife of the SOB who runs the county below me and against whom I could never raise enough troops to defeat him. About 3 generations down the line, then I see I can call a Holy Order and have about 5000 troops, which seem like more than enough, so I declare war against my southern neighbor.
So - what the heck? I move my army of over 5000 into his county, and they move in, then immediately leave and go back to my home county. His 1700 come into my county, I move my 5000 into the same county, and it appears he is sieging me and my army isn’t doing anything to him. I keep trying to get my bigger army to take him out, they keep moving away, and he ends up winning the war!
Argh! no idea what happened. So, shortly thereafter my nephew, who is duke of the county to my east, my vassal, attacks me. I have about the same number of troops as him, yet I quickly lose battle after battle and next thing you know, I’m in prison. Apparently I am still leader of my county, though. I try to get ransomed, he’ll have nothing to do with it, and then eventually I die, and my daughter takes over (he killed my son.) So now, she is waiting to strike back, though we don’t have the troops yet…
I think holy orders can only be used against heretics and infidels. If he’s catholic, they won’t attack him. I think if hes excommunicated they might but I don’t know if you would receive land for winning a war of excommunication.
Because a Holy Order will only fight people of different faith. Those 5000 troops would do their job if you had a Holy War CB for instance, or if the county/duchy was converted to a heretic Christian religion.
Never saw any indication , just saw that the huge army would go into the southern county and then immediately march back out. Very frustrating. Anyway, my current dynasty is about to end. I successfully fought off a couple of invasions, made it to my 3rd generation after a lot of Interesting intrigue, never was able to expand, then my nephew, who I had given one of my counties to after imprisoning the guy who had it (for plotting against me) decided to take me out. He apparently killed my only son, then invaded and I was unable to defeat him, even though I had slightly more forces. He threw me in prison and left me there to die, refusing to accept ransom to release me. Interesting that I still was able to make governing decisions while there. I died and my daughter took over, but the county is now weak enough and she has no sons so I think she will only try to focus on retribution: killing my nephew for killing my son, then maybe assassinating him or at least trying to sabotage him as much as possible. Then start over. ;)
All of this without knowing at all what I’m doing and without reading any tutorials. I do now need to read some if I can find some that are applicable with all of the current DLC like WoL.
So it looks like Gamersgate is having a sale on CK2 and the DLC, which I would like to pick up. I have the Steam version of the base game. Is everything going to play nice if I buy the gamersgate version of the DLC?
Edit: Whoops, never mind. Looks like it’s the steam version. Woo-hoo! Btw, big sale on Crusader Kings on Gamersgate!
So I am 20 years away from finishing up my disastrous first game. My dynasty at one point united Ireland, but through a series of missteps, poorly timed aggression and general exprimentation and dicking around, I am now nominally King of Galicia, with only one county in northwest Iberian peninsula.
So what would be a good second game? I now have most of the expansions, but I think I want to stick with something Christian rather than try out any of the new mechanics. I’d also like to try my hand at holy wars and other things I was sheltered from in the backwoods of Ireland.
I’m also thinking something Spanishy since my wife and I are going to go there for our honeymoon.
