Enablers, is there any point to arranging marriages for your vassals, courtiers or brothers not in line to inherit titles? The last one makes sense in case your heir meets an untimely end. Does marrying your brothers to women with weak claims give your dynasty a shot at pressing those claims?
Gracias.
Well… it all depends doesn’t it.
So here’s the things with subordinates, you can press their claims too. Some courtier has a claim to a province on the Breton coast? You can press it on their behalf. If you play your cards right, it’s a way to expand your realm. If you are a Duke, for example, and a count below you had a county claim? Well pressing that can certainly help you.
Just be aware that if you make them too strong, then they may break free. Also that a courtier may not have a claim that puts them under you. If your the duke of Naples, and you press a courtier claim in the duke of Tuscany, well, they go away.
It may still be worth it though! It may allow you to create a friendly ally, after all they owe their position to you. It may simply be an excuse to depose or weaken a rival. I mean consider the time period, we have records of Byzantine emperors being installed by the neighboring Islamic empire. And visa versa. No territory changing hands, simply trying to change the leadership of an erstwhile rival.
If they’re in your realm, you can arrange a matrimonial marriage into your family to either pass an inheritable claim and war then, or dow immediately and hope their familial offspring is a little on your side (if they’re close and 2 ranks lower, you can probably get them to accept vassalage). FYI, wars for claims of your family always join under you (I think? I’m out of practice) if they’re smaller, the others don’t.
For the most part, it’s not a big deal, but I enjoy spending too much time doing it. I suppose it always gives me a few opportunities, but if you don’t like it, don’t bother. Maybe do it when there’s a chance to inherit a big realm, but the AI isn’t keen on letting you if the claimant (current or potential) is on their realm.
One problem with marrying your courtiers is that they’re eager to leave. Even when you marry a girl matrilineally she might want to live with her new count husband.
Since I always find myself in the quest for breeding the kwisatz haderach (and having people with good stats on the council), I tend to spend a lot of time arranging marriages for anyone I can. Completely optional though. Just be sure they don’t end up doing something really stupid (for instance, I’ve seen vassals arrange matrilineal marriages with rival realms.)
In addition to eugenics (marrying people into the court/landless family), I also marry shit courtiers out to clear out my court. Family members always get an appropriate eugenics marriage if possible though if they aren’t needed for something more important (alliance or NAP).
Weak/strong and inheritable/non-inheritable are different conditions. You can have a strong non-inheritable and a inheritable weak. In other words, yes, as long as you pay attention (and you may need to manufacture the conditions for a weak claim to be usable, i.e. stabbing).
Haha. I love to do this too. If someone hates me on the court, I try to marry them to the worst possible spouse as far away as possible from my homeland. “You think you’re unhappy now? Ha! I’ll show you what real unhappiness is like!”
It seems to have gotten harder to do this in later versions of the game, but it’s oddly satisfying when you can pull it off.
I came across this Pagan LP by Enigmaticrose4 and after getting through the first episode of it I’d say it looks like a good starting point for people like me. It also has all DLCs enabled so I’m hoping it will cover options that are usually omitted from beginner guides.
Also, a Great Works patch comes out tomorrow for anyone interested.
The Old Gods DLC is on sale on Steam. Can I play as Alfred the Great?
(furious googling) As a count, under his brother’s duchy of Wessex.
I don’t think so. There are no start dates between Charlemagne and 1066, which would put Alfred out of reach without mods.
@Perky_Goth really? Been a while since I played, but last time there was only a 796(?) start then 1066. Must have added one.
The Old Gods DLC adds 867, the name of the “scenario” is The Viking Age, I think.
Apparently, playing as him was a reddit challenge at time, which shouldn’t really have surprised me to find out.
Only because there is conflicting information, I want to chime in and say yes, you can play as Alfred. It was one of my longest and favourite playthroughs, and I mentioned in briefly in the other thread (see below) I started my playthrough as Aethelred, he died childless in battle and Alfred took the reigns. Looking at the game now just to fact check, I find it interesting that Wessex now has a stronger start. I do not remember having the eastern duchies from the beginning. So much so I remember one of my immediate goals beyond defending against the Norsemen was to acquire the Duchy of Essex and move capitals. I think maybe Paradox had to make the changes because the Norse just steamroll otherwise. A stack of 25,000 troops is punishing, I want to say that it is possible to come out at the other end and roughly follow history.
Yeah, I took a bit longer to win against the Vikings in that game. I also distinctly remember the Dukes of Mercia having it in for me at every turn. Like some sort of ongoing family rivalry.
The Old Gods bookmark came first, then Charlemagne followed up with the earlier bookmark.
Ohhh, this looks great, thank you.
I recommend 1.25x speed. She’s very knowledgeable about the game but tends to veer off into these little anecdotes and bits of roleplaying with her voice (lol) and the higher speed helps get past that.
What blows my mind is how easy her campaign seems to be to follow, yet when I tried to play my own game it’s pure unfiltered chaos. Random troops walking all over my land, hard to tell where my holdings end and I have absolutely no clue how to go about usurping my liege or even gauge if his liege would come to help him or not.
Just for lulz I declared an independence (my liege is a high chief/Duke) and after I got properly reamed by his forces and was on the verge of getting wiped out some other faction took over all our lands and we all became part of this new empire and I have no idea how or why it happened lol. And despite sending an invitation to join independent plot to my chief tier neighbour I did not get any feedback for like 2 years.
It’s a little frustrating not being able to tell if some action I wanted to perform isn’t being executed because the other party is still considering it or because it didn’t work.
Fwiw I tried playing as Chief Hraber of Stajerska in 769 AD (Eppenstein main holding iirc) because I like the name lol. If anyone’s got tips on how to start playing as a count I’m all ears.
I’ve given up on Tribal rulers for now, there’s not much point when I still don’t have a solid grasp on the basic mechanics.
I’ve opted for a 1066 start in Ireland as a petty kingdom of Mumu and I like that most of the vassals opinions are actually in the green for a change lol. The only thing that seems to suck here is the choice of societies, the only two I’m eligible for are Benedict and Dominican order and they both seem to go counter to what a power hungry ruler wants.
Also, I will never be able to pronounce the names of my holdings or the people in my court. Never.
Since this is apparently the CK2 thread now, this is where I get to complain that to access old patch versions you now have to have a linked Steam to Paradox account, and then hit a button to get a key to input into Steam to get the old versions list back in the Betas tab.
Apparently GDPR is blamed for this.
How did the old system work?