Crusader Kings 2 enablers thread - come and convince us to tackle this behemoth

Games
21

You can look at the loyalty of his vassals or who has claims to the throne and how strong they are.
…
OP asked about DLC. I’d recommend these (I’d consider the highlighted ones almost mandatory.)

Holy Fury - vastly improves most pagan religions
The Old Gods - earlier start date and easier to play as a pagan as there are simply more pagan realms to choose form
Way of Life - easily the best bang for the buck given what it adds
Monks and Mystics - Adds secret societies, relics and heirlooms. Can get supernatural events with the demon worshipers. (Pagans can join warrior lodges and duel their way to the top. Very powerful stuff, especially if your liege has good military stats. You do not need Monks and Mystics for this though.)
Legacy of Rome - allows retinues (standing armies) which can be really strong

General advice:
Marriage - generally you’re marrying for stats, non-aggression pacts/alliances or claims. The smaller, less powerful you are the harder it is to secure a marriage. Daughters are good for alliances - the flip side is you can get dragged into wars and/or the other realm can now get claims on your lands.

Female heirs - you must marry them matrilineally. It’s easier to do this by inviting the potential suitor to your court. As ruler you get to decide who marries whom.

Succession - try to get out of gavelkind as quickly as possible. This form of succession can fracture your realm (there are ways to deal with it or you can just fight your siblings for their lands.)

Expansion (within your own Christian religion.)
You can expand your kingdom through conquest which requires a claim (there’s also de jure claims - basically lands that belong to your realm but owned by someone else.)

You can get claims by having your chancellor forge a claim. This is expensive and can be time consuming.

Inviting claimants to court and then pressing their claim. By far the ‘easiest’ method. Just be sure to grant the claimant a title first (and the title must be below yours - so if you’re a Duke, they can only be counts or barons.) Certain conditions have to be met before you can press the claim, but the tool tips will explain it.

Inheriting titles - without intervention, this is random. A lot of people “stab” through way the line of claimants (i.e. assassinating people in line to the throne you seek.)

The Pope can grant you the right to a claim, including entire kingdoms. Holy Wars also work and you can gain entire duchies and kingdoms through them. (n.b., everyone who belongs to the opposing religion can join against you.) Crusades can be very profitable with Holy Fury. Reforming pagan religions is really fun and you get to shape the nature of your religions Vikings are pretty good to play for new players since they’re relatively strong with the early start by the Old Gods. Tip - if you are pagan raid Christians. A lot. It’s your primary source of income.

All that said, once you get the hang of the game expansion isn’t all that difficult; generally I find it more fun to ‘roleplay’ and expand my dynasty. As always, YMMV

Damn how’d this post get so long. One last thing - always keep enough cash on hand to hire mercenaries should the shit hit the fan (invasion or rebelling vassals.) Managing vassals isn’t that hard but can be challenging for new players. Either keep them happy or keep them weak. Things tend to go smoother if they’re happy but have to be careful not to allow them to grow too strong. It’s important to develop provinces you control, not only for the additional income but for the troops you can raise.

22

That’s the right approach.

One thing I’d recommend would be playing at 1066 start date and be someone from Christian world. If you start on borders of civilization you’re at risk but if you’re fellow Christian that even losing some major war will probably mean that you’re a vassal of some other dude now.

Vseslav the Seer is a cool guy to start if you want someone in Eastern Europe.

No point in worrying about your performance. And no point in expecting anything specific. The game goes off rails.

23

This is the way I recommend people playing the game. Just start it, pick a medium sized place, e.g. Saxony, and unpause. Go with the flow. Hover the mouse over everything. When the game offers you a choice of stuff, you pick arbitrarily. Eventually you’re either get invaded, or end up googling “how do I raise troops”? ;)

And at leat this time was spent playing the game rather than studying some 22-video long youtube playlist like you’re swatting up for your end-of-year finals. Frankly the only way to know what makes someone a good marriage candidate is experience in playing the game and therefore knowing what you want the marriage to do for you. So just jump in!

edit: And just to echo @alekseivolchok’s advice, even though what I’ve said is already identical to what he said: Stick to 1066, with someone from Christian Western-Europe. That’s “the original” game and the best place to learn, and you’ll soon but up against Islam and Chiefdoms etc and so learn about what they can do when playing.

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With the marriage game, only advice I’ll give is to be careful of marrying daughters away to rulers more powerful than yourself. The alliance might be nice, but that daughter might also have (strong) claims that can be pressed later on if her offspring are feeling a little greedy and things just align… Of course, as a player, you too can exploit that, and valuable way to expand is to press weak claims if able.

Otherwise, to echo the general sentiment with CK2, ride the highs with the lows. Not even a video can hope to cover all there is in the game. Even after a single playthrough, there is much to learn. The game will always manage to find ways to stuff the player around. I don’t have children, but I think I learned what it meant to lose a child in one game sometime back when a genius, brilliant strategist son ready to take the throne at a young age got himself clobbered in the head and ended up dying at the ripe old age of 20. Heart wrenching it was. I’m pretty sure there was a passionate “No” from my mouth when the dialogue box came up. Power transferred to an uncle who ended up being an ugly, deformed character. Yet despite that, he was also the most successful, longest living character in that dynasty line of control.

CK2 giveth, CK2 taketh away. And everything MrGrumpy said. If you’ve read it, re-read it. Some excellent advice there.

25

Hey thanks. :)

You’re not kidding. No kids IRL either but in game as King of Brittany I matrilineally married my bright, attractive daughter to a Norman with good stats (made him a general) and gave him some lands in Ireland with the hope he’d start expanding on his own (he had the ambitious trait.) Instead the fucker murdered my kid and married some loser wench from Sicily. I was livid. I ate the tyrant penalty, banished his wife, took his lands, took his money and threw the bastard in the oubliette where he rotted for the next 30 years.

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I’ll probably end up doing this, but I hate playing games without knowledge of the underlying systems. Are there at least any good resources to read up on the basics like economy, research/culture proliferation and combat bonuses (due to terrain, army composition, etc)?

Other more ‘fluid’ stuff I can just wing it, but I’d love to have a good handle on the hardcoded rules, to avoid any obvious blunders.

And on that note, why are tutorials in this game so useless or outright broken?

27

On his character page, look at the vassals tab for their opinion. If he’s a minor or female, he’s vulnerable to weak claims while having minor opinion penalties that decrease his levies somewhat, so relatives married to other rulers may strike as well.

That he did, that he did. The game has a pretty detailed wiki, so I could look it up. It’s always a personal preference, as it’s sort of a roleplaying game, though. Sons of Abraham and Holy Fury add a lot of events and a few mechanics to the christian game, monks and mystics a little less so (though that comes with OP supernatural events that you can turn off). Conclave turns your court and a little less your vassals into whiny, power seeking roadblocks that have the potential to upheave your absolute rule. Way of Life adds nice roleplaying options that can completely break the game if you want to (seduce everyone into liking you), but it’s good flavor if you control yourself. I’m not sure I care about retinues to recommend Legacy of Rome, and they’re mostly ahistorical to boot - yes, so is the game, shush. I had forgotten Old Gods puts teeth into rebellions besides allowing pagans, so there’s that.

The wiki is pretty good (economy, research, combat), but the flow of the game is kept purposefully simple. A couple of Mods change that heavily, but I haven’t dabbled in it.
Economy - cities make the most money, castles have the most manpower, temples are somewhere in the middle. Investments take a really long time to pay off, but you might as well use the money. Invest in keeping your capital’s duchy to your heirs and invest there. Be careful if your heir has a different culture, the cultural buildings go away.
Research - Stick your spy in Constantinople when he isn’t busy, and it’ll siphon a bit now and then. There really isn’t much to do here, it wasn’t a time for big progresses. Culture and religion just kind of spread eventually too, make sure the guy in charge has what you want.
Combat - I need to relearn a lot of this, but, for the most part, numbers win. Avoid attacking across rivers or from a boat, only assault a holding if you outnumber it by ~x10, unless it’s a city or temple with little fortification. Be careful of spending too long with levies raised, your vassal wants the men available to him (even if farming isn’t simulated).

The game keeps changing a lot, and they’re not trying much to sell to new players anymore.

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Thanks, looks like I have some wiki reading to do before I dive in.

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Disagree! Just dive in. The best way to learn these games is to just play. Running your kingdom/duchy/county in the ground and being assassinated by your bastard son-in-law is part of the fun.

30

I very much agree with the “jump in” advice, but …

… I was very frustrated when I first tried this with CK2. I found that watching a good Let’s Play (of a similar size/start) for 30 minutes or so was incredibly helpful. There are a handful of “things you do” at the start of a game that are good to watch someone else do, and just getting a sense for the general structure of play turned on so many light switches in my head. That gave me just enough of a foothold on the game that I could actually start playing.

31

And a few days after you’ve done so, and have a basic idea what to do, you’ll find yourself doing deep dives into the wiki reading about the function of different succession laws and de jure kingdoms.

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Yeah, if @Bateau is going to call me out on my enormous Steam backlog, that’s the path I’m headed down. Let that bastard try!

33

Is the best way to start with CKII. All the best stories come out of things going wrong because you’re a clueless fuckup of a leader.

34

Historical accuracy!

35

I found this a pretty good quick intro to the basics of what to do. Doesn’t waste much time on the UI.

36

Yeah, that’s ideal for a start with a small feudal realm. There are a couple of places that might not match up so well because of all the DLC, but the video does a good job of covering the core startup tasks and then the keys to getting moving with the game. That’s nicely done.

37

This is a great video, thank you.

38

So I dove back in today and, like in the video, chose some Irish fellow in 1066 with a couple of vassals, apparently medium difficulty, according to the scale.

I basically mostly reacted to alerts, but I also did a few things in the video, like falsify war thingies. So far, having a great time, though I stilllll don’t know what I’m really doing, I’m having fun bumping along.

Also my wife is getting fat, but our kid is happy, so yay.

39

Listen, I’ve played the beta of CK2, got every expansion, play the game now and then.

I still don’t have a clear understanding of how everything works, especially with mechanics being switched around all the time. I never played in India or Nomad. I rarely played on the earliest start dates except as Slavic Pagan. I have only played Muslims a couple of time. And I have clocked more than 400 hours in this game. I have 600 hours in EU4 and that game I do understand, but I have never played as many countries with unique mechanics, or haven’t revisited them since they were changed.

Those are huge games. You’re not supposed to understand everything. The clue is also in the scope: the fact that right now some Aragonese noble has a royal marriage with someone in Scotland might be very important later for you, an Irish lord, and you have an access to this info. But you can’t even try to control things like that. You get some ideas of where the world is going and that’s it.

40

One of the remarkable things about this game is its ability to create story. It’s often below the surface, though, and you come across it by chance, when looking at the personalities, relationships, and actions of the people in the game.

Flying through the game, it can be easy to miss, so there is something to be said for stopping now and then and spending time exploring the various characters connected to your realm.