Are you fan enough for Crusader Kings 2?

Games
1703

I’m having a good run as the Duchy of Meira in the west of England. The first two dukes brown nosed our Norwegian king and were given two duchies taken from his disliked vassals. Sadly they were a little too macho and both died in battle with rebellious vassals. That left the dynasty in the hands of a four year old girl. She survived five assassination attempts from her regent and threw him in the oubliette for payback. Coming of age she ran things with an iron grip. I think I wound up putting eight counts caught plotting in the oubliette over her reign. She also defeated three rebellions and filled the oubliette some more. Any time she had a rival they were married off to someone with lover’s pox. She’s stone cold.

Norway’s power fell apart fighting five wars at once and that bastard the Duke of Essex took his chance and became King of England. We were under his rule and the jerk started consolidating power. He was excommunicated and I guess he took it personally. I found him with his army all the way down in Italy. His force was heavily battered so I took a chance and declared a war of independence. It went well at first but he quickly rebuilt a force in England and counter attacked and routed my army. I was able to hire a mercenary band and they harassed his army while I rebuilt mine and laid siege to the capital. We got the war score to a 100% but as I was going to click the icon to claim victory the Duchess died at the age of 70 and the war ended unresolved. Bah!

1704

Awesome, thank you for reaffirming my decision!

1705

You really are missing out. One of the most enjoyable experiences on PC. Its not for everybody but a bit of effort yields an awful lot of reward. One of my best entertainment to dollars spent ratios behind only Starcraft.

1706

As fdsaion points out, the tutorial was broken by a fairly early expansion, and has been broken now going on 3 or 4 years. We even have a thread about it:

1707

I believe the Stellaris and EU4 tutorials have been updated along the way, I don’t know why the CK2 team doesn’t seem to want to bother with it.

If they decide the tutorial isn’t worth their time, that’s fine. It should be removed from the game, though, and they should point users towards resources people do use to learn the game. Including a tutorial they know is broken is just kind of… stupid beyond words.

1708

It is a mess of an interface, but it kind of comes with the territory of having a lot of choices that are usually not strategically useful, but provide a lot of immersion. Modern design would, say, strip most of the laws and succession options, but it really wouldn’t fell like the same game at all and I wouldn’t care about people around me as much.

1709

Bad idea: Being Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire and accusing your spymaster of heresy.

Really bad idea: Being Kaiser and accusing the spymaster that assassinated the previous ruler of heresy.

Spymaster: “Shocked! Shocked I am! These murderers will not escape justice!”

1710

It’s that time of the year again - some newly acquired dlcs (seriously, why do I this for a game that I’ve played for like 15h tops) and a renewed will to finally conquer this complex game.

So yeah…any good up to date guides available? :)

edit: I have all the dlcs except for the Horse Lords and Jade Dragon. Mentioning it just in case some guides expand on the mechanics introduced by the last few mainline dlcs.

1711

I don’t think there is much in the way of guides. CK2 has a tax that has to be paid, and the only way to pay it is time. The tutorial is apparently broken, so unless you go back to a previous CK2 release from a few years back, then it might work. Similarly, Arumba had a youtube playlist to help people learn to play, again the same thing which might necessitate going back to previous builds of the game (available via Steam).

My attitude to this game is to play it. Keep your expectations and your goals manageable, appreciate the game as a ride. You can get off at any time. There are bumps. Ride the highs, persevere through the lows. As a start, ignore Ireland, it’s safe yet boring. Being a count learning the game is not particularly fun, especially when spending 2-3 hours looking at the same provinces over and over again wondering if you’re doing something wrong (or right). I started with Ireland, then I moved onto the Duchy of Toulouse in 1066. That was when I appreciated the scope of the game and how much things can change from the beginning. One game I was invaded by Valencia and lost horribly, another game was constantly keeping them at bay, a third game meant becoming king of Aquitaine and having power surging through my veins. Old Gods start, King of Castile I think it was (Northern Spain) keeping the Umayyads from invading Europe is a tonne of fun. Highs and lows. Lots of lows, but sticking with it, celebrating with glee when that green blob below me fractured and I could contest their military and reclaim old lands was one of the best gaming moments in my life.

I don’t think any guide can help you beyond the wiki. Other than that, a few thoughts:

  1. Try to get to your max demense limit. Demense is a number next to ducats, prestige and piety in the top right corner of the screen (eg: 1/4). It means you have one holding (ie: castle, monastery, town) to your name out of 4 total you can have. Playing as a Feudal lord, you should only ever have castles.

  2. Prepare for death. It comes at any time. Succession crisis is difficult to deal with and can fracture a nation you’ve worked hard for.

  3. Keep people happy, or get rid of them. The latter option is riskier but much simpler at the same time.

  4. Feudal European lords is the place to learn the game. Vikings, Horse Lords, Islamic and Merchants (the formal name defeats me right now) are variations that introduce additional challenges and ways to play the game, But being familiar with Europe and the vassal system first is the way to go in my opinion.

1712

Ireland is the “Tutorial Island”. Just use one of the early starts, choose one of the Irish provinces and try to conquer the island. An east way to get an edge on the competitors is to research ship building asap (send your spy to Constantinopole) and use a small army to raid the infidels in Spain. As long as you’re careful to run before getting attack, you should have a nice income that allows you to upgrade faster than your neighbours.

1713

Believe it or not, I have a really bizarre problem with the Irish - their names. I legitimately found it hard to keep tabs on people in that area.

@Strato: Thanks. Would you recommend Ironman to learn the game? I’m definitely gonna end up playing on it, but I figured I might learn better if my game has real consequences too.

1714

You could go like a pseudo ironman route. Start an ironman game, then if you reach a point where you might have a difficult decision (eg: war) or change in capital, or just try anything out/experiment without ruining a decent run, then grab the save files and copy to desktop. Otherwise, there’s no harm really in non-ironman so long as you can accept that given the length of a single game (20 hours plus) there will be definite road blocks in your way.

Personally, I always play ironman. One key reason is that riding out the bad runs brings some great moments. In one game where I started as the Wessex petty kingdom in the old gods start, I had my genius character die prematurely, having just taken up the crown and held for a few years. The genius trait is one of the most sought after in the game thanks to +5 to all stats, and he was godly in my opinion, the one who would force the Vikings to kneel before me. Instead I was greeted with an event, the outcome was his death, my reaction was one of “nooooo!!!” and rulership went over to an “ugly” trait, low stat ruler who seemingly lived forever. Yet he was one of the most successful characters in that game managing to acquire a number of English titles and developing his demesne beneath him.

The game giveth, the game taketh away.

One window useful to look at if involved in a kingdom (ie: anything bigger than Ireland) is the realm window. It is on the right hand side of the character window, just below the family tree. That gives a good breakdown of the levy size of everyone in the realm the character belongs to. It is worth tracking that, especially if some vassals start to look powerful. I do suggest starting as a Duke. Learn ways to acquire titles in your duchy from your counts, or look to expand by acquring a neighbouring duchy. The jump to becoming King means there’s a lot more work involved, and the realm window gives an insight to that. As a Duke, keeping Counts happy is easy enough, managing lands in the duchy is straight forward, especially if you have no Counts under you. But a Kingdom is a whole other story, watching Dukes that threaten to blob, viable threats to your crown. And that’s just from within, not to mention the external problems.

What I don’t like about Ireland is that there is one Duchy from the start (assuming 1066 start date). Everyone else is a count, so it becomes a matter of getting claims on lands one province at a time. Then there’s the matter of forming the Kingdom of Ireland which is fairly easy to keep thanks to the restricted power the Dukes have. The reason being that most duchies in Ireland are two or three provinces.

Edit: And it would be criminal if you didn’t create your own family - Dolvich and name the first character Ivan :p

1715

Lol I might just do that, I have the Ruler Designer dlc after all.

Would you recommend any font/map/portrait mods? I read that these generally don’t lock out achievements (which I know you only get in Iroman).

1716

I haven’t loaded any mods in CK2 for a long time now, my workshop is empty of mods I had. I used to have a keyboard shortcuts mod, but I think that mod in a sense got integrated into the game. Another mod I had thickened the borders on the map. But honestly, no, nothing that I can recommend.

1717

Tom’s warning went unheeded.

1718

There is a pretty recent video up on YouTube about learning CK2 in 20 minutes. I started with Ireland myself a few months ago to get the hang of it and now have RSI from playing Mongols razing all of Europe. Had a lot of fun getting the Alladin achievment and learning large empire management, but does require Jade Dragon I think. Overall I am finding it not as difficult as EU4.

1719

EU4 is my favorite strategy game of all time and I thoroughly enjoy HOI4 and (controversial Qt3 opinion incoming!) Stellaris. CK2 has been the one game of theirs that I just haven’t been able to get into. I really do need to give it another shot sometime, I haven’t really played since the Merchant expansion.

1720

I enjoyed CK II, the Reconquista was a blast. An intense game going from the duchy of Barcelona to the king of unified Spain. I can’t tell you how many times the kingdoms of Leon and Asturias broke free, reintegrated, rebelled, etc. Playing a disloyal duke that breaks the kingdom up in order to move up ranks is exciting.

But like you @KevinC I’ve got an order of magnitude less play time. Because the EU IV mechanics just constantly call to me.

1721

Link?

1722

Think this is the one I used, but hard to tell on phone. It is still a year old, but better than a lot of the L2Ps I was looking at before.

https://youtu.be/VgcwfLt6sfY