f13.net

The demo is out, and the final game will soon be shipped as well!

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?495150-Other-info-about-the-game-(previews-trailers-demo-etc.) (http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?495150-Other-info-about-the-game-(previews-trailers-demo-etc.))

Finishing the install right now! Let the bugs come, I will enjoy it anyway!

Fuck yeah, CK is probably my favorite non-EU2 Paradox game.

Oh good! It's been at least 24 hours since I felt like a complete gibbering idiot.  But the king dude bro clips on youtube have been awesome.

Holy shit, a Paradox game that properly detected my desktop resolution!

EDIT: And it has 27 tutorials.  :awesome_for_real:

I've been watching this one for about a year now; Crusader Kings is my favorite Paradox game and has consumed hundreds of hours of my life.  The demo is really good too.  It's looking like this might be the most polished Paradox release yet.  Also, they didn't scale back the complexity at all, and may have actually added a few layers.  The 14th can't come soon enough.

Yeah I've had my eye on this one for a while now and I've been playing the demo nonstop for a couple days. I'm incredulous at how bug-free this is for a Paradox release, so I ended up pre-ordering it.

The demo does have a few subtle bugs, alongside some not-so-subtle ones, such as a plot event bug whereby one of your vassals forces you to abdicate your throne... to yourself. They mostly seem to be mixed-up results in events/decisions, which are controlled by text files, so I expect most of these can be fixed promptly with a fan-patch, if Paradox doesn't get around to it before release.

Word is that there's a day-1 patch, though.

Also, the manual's out and is available here (http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/content.php?857-Crusader-Kings-II-Manual). It's not incredibly useful as it doesn't really go deep into most of the more obscure mechanics, but it has some clever jokes.

Basically this, yeah. Skipped the demo so i can get full experience from get-go, but really looking forward to the release.

How neckbeardy is this compared to, say Victoria 2?

Worlds less. It's still intricate and complex, but it's more about having and executing long-term diplomatic and martial plans rather than fiddling with sliders. In fact, I can't think of a single slider in the game.

Thanks to the focus on characters, it feels a bit like an RPG mashed together with EU3.

Excellent. I keep looking at Victoria 2's tutorials and going "oh god", I guess this could be the proper middleground then.

I'm hoping it'll crop up on steam at some point in the near future, though?

Already there. (http://store.steampowered.com/app/203770/)

...I was searching for Crusader Kings 2. Not II.

Sigh. Oh well, putting it on the list, thanks.

Victoria II seems a lot more daunting than it actually is.  I successfully played through several games, and almost never touched any of the market sliders.  The market pretty much runs itself.  All you need to worry about is the budget slider (just like in EU), upgrading your countries infrastructure, how you spend your few focus points on developing your country, and what tech you research.  Really enjoyed playing the game overall.

I saw this thread last night, did some googling, and blew some of my tax return on this. It sounds like a game I'd really enjoy. Spent about 15 minutes with the original last night, but did not get very far. I've been googling around for some walkthroughs/AARs/guides. If any of you have one you find extra helpful, please point me at it.

Victoria II felt more like a spreadsheet than a game to me, and I'm a pretty big Paradox fan.  I liked the original more than the sequel in that case, just like I enjoyed EU2 more than EU3. 

Bann: the original Crusader Kings is great fun once you get the hang of it, but it can be quirky and the ai is as dumb as a pile of bricks.  I don't know of any guides, but I would advise playing a mid-sized kingdom, or a strong duchy that can become a kingdom, to start.  I started my first game as the de Hauteville dynasty down in Naples, which through some crusading in Sicily and the claiming of the title of King of Sicily can become a strong power as long as you don't piss off the HRE.  Alternatively, the spanish kingdoms are a lot of fun, but they require a little more savvy because if you anger the muslims to the south too much you're toast; you have to choose your moment and then backstab your fellow Christians afterward.  The fun often comes in uniting a lot of counties/duchies into a cohesive kingdom and then seeing how long you can hold it all together before some inbred halfwit becomes your heir and you endure 20 years of civil war (unless you kill him before he takes the throne...).

I must be weird I find Vic2 to be less neckbeardy than Hearts of iron and Crusader Kings... Less scheming involve, you're just riding the waves of the 19th century and tuning certain things as you go along. A lot less scheming involved.

This new one seems SIGNIFICANTLY more complicated than CK, which was really the simplest of Paradox games. Not sure if I like that they amped it up quite that far, but we'll see.

It's hard to tell right now because while they did add complexity they also streamlined some things.  On one hand they've added baronies/cities, which brings up the complexity a bit, but they've also removed a lot of the buildings and added the ability to transfer fealty so kingdom/empire management is now immensely streamlined.  As a king, being able to transfer a count's fealty to a duke makes life much easier, and that's an option that was always sorely missing from the first CK.

Been playing with this game for a good day now. Been a good fun ride. There are bugs, but it feels like there are less then normal for Paradox games. Not Starship Troopers level through. Like the whole feel I am getting from this game so far.

Played with Poland. Murdered my brother and another magnate(duke). Gave me more land then my demesne level could handle. Made a few Prince-Bishops in the poorest of counties. Then I build up my economy and let my army grow, before planning my campaign against the heathens of the east. Plundered, pillaged and raped my way through the Baltic countries in the name of Christ - making them mah medieval wrenches. Good times were had. Until first retarded son came along. Shook him until he stoped crying and my disappointment had evaporated. Wops. Second son was just as retarded and suffocated on his pacifier. Rumors circulated about their unfortunate ends, and Prince-Bishops revolted. Apparently they like their boys alive and not dead. Time of troubles insured. Fucking church..

I do like the plot system. You choose one from a list of possible objectives which usually involve either murder or usurping someone's power. That goal becomes your major objective, which seems to influence a number of the events that will come your way. You have the ability to add willing participants to the plot to increase it's chances of success, and of course those participants are more likely to want to join if they stand to gain something from the event.

In my last game my wife had gotten past the fertile stage, and I was still looking to win the baby lottery. Of course killing my wife became my plot objective. I immediately had the support of my low born mistress (Foolish girl - like I would marry a commoner after all the trouble I had gone through.) My brother's wife had some kind of falling out with my wife, so she was quickly added to the plot. Finally when the children from a previous marriage came of age I managed to get one or two more recruited to the cause - I guess they never quite warmed up to their stepmother. One dead wife later, I was a happening middle-aged despot browsing the people finder in search of the perfect alliance/baby factory.

I am a little disappointed that there was less fallout afterwards. Maybe I just managed to do things correctly with a fairly high intrigue rating, but my mistress did not complain, my children did not seem put out by anything, and I was not suspected of the murder. It might be total coincidence, but my brother's wife did try murdering someone else a few years later. I could have put her in prison, but she did me a solid back when I needed it.

I was lukewarm on this game, never having played the first, until I read Dtrain's post.  It has graduated to must buy.

There may be a full release already out there. I'm not advocating piracy; I already bought it weeks ago.

I played Robert de Hauteville trying to create the Kingdom of Sicily. My only son, Richard, had a hunchback, leprosy, and was gay. It didn't work out very well.

Had a game as Galicia. The Reconquista is a breeding ground for villainy and backstabbing. I was at war with al-Andalus, doing well, when Leon (ruled by my first cousin) attacked me. Two thirds of his vassals promptly pledged themselves to me, giving me the Kingship of Castille to go along with Portugal and Galicia.

As the Count of Vermandois (direct line to Charlemagne) I stumbled upon a crack in the earth which led to hell. I kept following it down and heard the wails of the damned. I sacrificed my infant son to close it.

I've been waiting nearly ten years for this game and it really does not disappoint. It's dense but don't let that put you off. This thing is fucking awesome.

You need to radicalthon this shit. I wanna get this game, but i don't wanna drown in paradox games...maybe wait for sales discount.

Does the steam version give you a manual? I may buy this.

Manual's up on their forums for everyone!

Playing a really good game as Croatia. Married the (now) Queen of Poland. Our kingdoms will be united in our heir. Hungary's suddenly gotten REALLY jumpy about this and keeps fucking with me.

The AI feels extremely opportunistic in a good way. You have to scramble to make wars work if you're anyone smaller than France.

DOWNLOADING NOW BITCHES!

Oh dear god.  :awesome_for_real:

I had my aunt, who was second in line to the throne of Croatia after whatever child (any child, male or female) I spit out. She proceeded to kill every one of my six kids before they reached the age of eight. I could never quite pin it on her but it was pretty fucking obvious who was doing it.

Glorious.

Oh my God that is awesome.

Downloaded the demo. I have no idea what I'm doing. How do I invade France?

Too easy.

Gave it about an hour last night. It reminds me of EU Rome more than Crusader Kings 1. Not really grokking everything yet, I guess I better do all 27 tutorials...

No no - that was a serious question!

I'm having a lot of fun with this. Started out as a poor count in the northwest of Ireland, and then manipulated and conquered my way to becoming King of Ireland. Now I'm getting into regular scraps with the King of Scotland whenever he's out crusading (easy conquests for me) and it looks like my current heir will also gain a claim on the crown of England if all goes well.

Here's to the coming Great Irish Empire! :awesome_for_real:

Update:
Yeah, my big plans have to be delayed for a bit. Everything went great until a quick combination of deaths put my gay son on the throne. Honestly you wouldn't know it, considering he and his wife produced five kids in ten years, but it was still reason enough for everyone to hate him. And then, just a month into his reign he got excommunicated on top. So my vassals rebelled. All of them. :ye_gods:

It took all my effort (and a lot of mercenary money) to keep swatting those uppity counts and dukes down. Even giving the titles to new people didn't help much since with all his negative traits my king got at least -60 opinion from everyone. He hung on long enough for his oldest son to reach 16, then got himself killed. Lucky.

Great game.

Ireland is next on my list so I'm glad to hear a success story.  I am currently playing a game as the Danish dynasty, and after thirty years of manipulation and pagan stomping I've accumulated claims on the kingdoms of England, Norway and Sweden in addition to making the Baltic a Danish lake.  My first son, however, has taken to killing his nephews.  I've placed a lot of my sons as dukes hither and thither throughout the kingdom, but pretty much any time one of them has a son he winds up dead.  The reason being that their crazed uncle will inherit his brother's lands if he has no heirs, and so my conquests have occurred against a backdrop of dickery and kinslaying as my eldest son vies for greater power behind my back.  My paranoid, murderous first son even got himself excommunicated, which I had to plead to get reversed, because once the current king of Denmark (who is 70 years old and infirm) dies I'll be playing him, and being excommunicated sucks.  I plan to continue his misdeeds, however, and try to play this game a bit like a roleplaying game.

Very fun stuff.

Update: My eldest son went too far and tried to kill me, and I'm pretty sure he tried once before that as well, but he wasn't caught.  So I had him imprisoned and executed, and then the head of the dynasty died two weeks later anyhow.  I now have his very pious son in charge of everything and Denmark has entered into a kind of golden age of pagan bashing.  It's almost Shakespearean.

I just had my Irish empire (kingdoms of Ireland and Scotland) dissolve. My nefarious son killed my eldest son, leaving my 50 year old ass to die and pass the titles on to my infant grandson. Things immediately went to shit. I very quickly granted the Scottish kingship to said nefarious son (now my nefarious uncle) and asked for help with the alliance, which he did. I'm going to have to go grab Ulster back at some point, because I couldn't keep everything together, but I'm still king of Ireland and mad as hell.

What a neat game.

So how neckbeardy is this. Could a girl who got in a fight with the Guild 2 and eventually came out vaguely knowing how to play it handle Crusader Kings 2? Ingmar shrugs helplessly when I ask him. Because on the one hand, I eventually sort of figured out The Guild 2, and I loved all those Patrician III type games, on the other I have the temper of a four year old and my least favorite part of most games of this nature is the fighting.

To be fair to Ingmar, we have long since determined he's not very good at figuring out if I will like a game or not. He wasn't sure I'd like DA:O.  :why_so_serious:

Paradox is pretty neckbeardy, but CK2 seems to be trying to be a bit more accessible.

I should give them money though, just for the awesomeness of King DudeBro and the deadly sins

Wroth - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpAYY3BvviE&list=PLCB814FDDE7BDF1DD&index=16&feature=plpp_video
Greed - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xIxrx5i1To&list=PLCB814FDDE7BDF1DD&index=18&feature=plpp_video
Lust - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1BVW14qXNE&list=PLCB814FDDE7BDF1DD&index=19&feature=plpp_video
Envy - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cle3Vxjl5Vc&list=PLCB814FDDE7BDF1DD&index=20&feature=plpp_video
Pride - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCQRIl9McAU&list=PLCB814FDDE7BDF1DD&index=21&feature=plpp_video
Sloth - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kX5ggw5AIU&list=PLCB814FDDE7BDF1DD&index=22&feature=plpp_video

It seems harder to get the idea about your situation than in Guild games, and it can include many more characters so it's harder to keep track on things that happen all around. On the other hand the focus on these characters and their relations is strong enough it may be able to outweight the drawbacks, hard to say.

Probably best to check the demo, it has a bunch of mini tutorials to guide around the UI and explain the basic concepts, if i'm not mistaken.

I enjoyed the demo, but it didn't give me an idea of the potential scope of the game.

Also, warfare is an integral portion of the game, but it's pretty simple and I would say that it doesn't occupy the majority of my decisions or gameplay.  In fact, I would say that it has the simplist warfare component of any Paradox game, barring, perhaps, CK1, and I've played every game developed by Paradox since EU2.  The game doesn't have much of a "net" though; things go pear-shaped regularly, and entire kingdoms can collapse into a pile of feuding siblings at a moment's notice, ruining decades of scrupulous management. 

I really don't think they needed to put more little vassals inside the counties. And then have every single one of those have 10 different buildings to build.

I do like the concept, but there's lot of extra clicking around the UI because of this extra layer. Some sort of bigger window maybe with tree-based navigation through the infrastructure, that'd be handy.

The biggest problem I have with it is it bloats your list of characters even more.

I mostly ignore the barons/bishops.  They're there but I never play around with them.  They're all just potential stewards/marshals/etcs to me.  Also, if they have enough money they build those buildings by themselves.

I will say though, I was far more interested in my vassals in CK1 than I am in this one.  I think part of it is that they die rather often, but another part of it is the ui.  In CK1 vassals were right on top of the character viewer, and in this ui I have to click another tab to see them, and they're displayed in such a way that one has to scroll around to see them all.  I think that does take some of the character away from the game.  That said, I tend to spend that extra attention on family affairs, which I spent less time on, comparatively, in CK1, so it's a give and take.

I've put a few tens of hours into this game now, and the largest irritation I've found is that my vassals are complete rubbish at improving their holdings.  Over 150 years after game start not a single improvement of any description has been built in any castle while owned by these lazy bastards.  Yes, really, not one.  I haven't specifically checked their towns or bishoprics, but none of those are looking at all impressive either.  Am I doing something wrong, or is this just standard?

As the King of Castile, Leon, Aragon, and Portugal I've been at war more years than I've been at peace ( :drill:), does that hurt development so badly?  My vassals all love me and I've opened up noble taxes, is this hurting them?  Any input would be wonderful.  The enormous difference in development between the Islamic duchies south of me and my own pathetic vassal levies is really starting to show, my personal counties just can't carry the kingdom forever.

Out of interest how much personal gold do they have? I've noticed cities and churches upgrade over time, but castles seem to do that less frequently (which could be caused by getting like 2-3x less income to begin with, possibly compounded with having to spend on active levies if you have these raised)

War does keep fief owners from upgrading because when you call up their levies they are the ones paying for them, and thus they'll have less money to upgrade their territories.  That goes for nobility, mayors and clergy alike.

As an Iberian though your nobility also face the problem of having very unprofitable territories until they've been converted to Christianity.  Really, until they turn Catholic, a lot of those Spanish territories do more harm than good.  So those years in which they aren't earning any significant income from taxes can put them back a ways in upgrades.  Due to that, and constant warfare, Spain actually has a lot going against it in terms of your vassals finding the money/time to upgrade facilities.  I often see Iberia lagging behind the rest of Europe, and that isn't necessarily inaccurate, historically.

Edit: Yeah, tmp, that's how I've seen it as well.  Barons have higher expenses and lower incomes so castles tend to upgrade much slower.  I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing though; it's kind of a neat repercussion of being bellicose that your economy develops at a slower rate due to higher expenses.

I like this a lot, didn't play CK1. One thing I've struggled with so far is what I'm supposed to do if I get the alert that there's a title that I can press a de jure claim to--the county interface pops up when you click on the alert, but I don't see any way to press the claim in that interface or via diplomacy with the current holder of that county. It's not the same as when I manage to fabricate a claim to a territory via my chancellor.

I wish there was some way to see when another faction was trying to get a casus belli against me. I was playing Croatia. pretty much minding my own business besides eating up Serbia and marrying my kids to the Polish king's family, and the Holy Roman Emperor suddenly came after a province on behalf of one of his neighboring vassals. I assume that their chancellor was fabricating a claim to it, because all of the vassals in that province were pledged to me. But I'd had my spymaster there looking for plots--plot detection doesn't seem to cover a chancellor doing claim fabrication.

Ducal de jure claims don't allow you to add the county to your demesne, but to vassalize that count. You can either directly ask the guy to become your vassal or force him to agree in a war. I don't think there is a way to do anything with the de jure claim if the holder of the county title is a duke or king.

Ah, that's probably why I couldn't do anything the one time I got it so far: the holder was a duke.

If the holder is a duke, you can declare war on his king, and demand that title in the war.  You can't declare war on lower vassals, you have to declare war on that vassal's lord.  If the duke was independent, however, you could declare war on him directly because he doesn't have a king.

Generally, de jure claims are used to get casus bellis in order to start a war with another Christian kingdom/country.  In fact, it's one of the easiest ways to grow your kingdom/duchy in christendom: get half of the counties that comprise a duchy --> usurp or create the ducal title --> get de jure claims on the rest of the duchy and go to war with the owners.  It makes Ireland pretty easy to conquer because three of the ducal titles are only two counties so if you get one you pretty much automatically get a claim on the other.

So, what scenarios/people are you guys finding fun to play? As others have stated upthread, Any Irish county in the earliest timeframe is pretty cool. You are on an island with a bunch of counties similar to yourself. My only games that have gone anywhere have all been in Ireland. I've tried a bit up in Sweden or down in Spain, but have never gotten off the ground.

Who do you like? Why?

I've picked duchy of Greater Poland in the early starting game -- it's in the interesting spot, with plenty of lands right north and east of you that you can expand into as part of long term plans. Then you have Denmark nearby that's easy to work your way into and take over in the long run. You can also try to take Poland itself rather than play nice with the king, or work on expansion to the east, bide your time against the Roman Empire to the west, or have fun around Norway. Or play with Hungary in the south... really, plenty options.

Anything in Iberia is interesting, but it can be a challenge; especially once Mauritania really gets fired up.  Poland is a good game, especially if you're able to ally with Denmark and the HRE early, and then backstab them later.  Sicily was great in CK1, but it is a much greater challenge now.  I haven't played Hungary, but that'll be my next game; it looks like a lot of fun with early expansion opportunities into Pecheneg territory, and then later dominating the Balkans/challenging the HRE and Byzantium.

You also have the option of playing at a later start date than 1066.  Any start date, in fact.  Your starting options are amazingly varied once you take that into consideration.  Taking up Byzantium at a later date and trying to bring them back from the brink looks like it could be a ton of fun.  Also, starting in Naples/Sicily after Sicily has been brought into christendom could lead to a really good game; probably sometime just before the third crusade, around 1170 or so during William II's reign, the last real king of Sicily before it became a part of the HRE under Henry VI and Constance d'Hauteville.

I'm trying Scotland now. I'm vying for a very tight dynastic alliance to France with the hope of making a big move on England later.

In my Scotland game I have been an underhanded bastard who marries well and then assassinates with reckless abandon.  If I could rename my dynasty "Macbeth" I would.  I've ended up inheriting large portions of England (Somerset, Oxford, Essex and Lancashire) and from there it's been pretty easy to gobble the rest up. 

My current Scotch king, Roderick the Great, also had an illicit affair with his father's third wife, producing a bastard that is now the duke of Sicily.  Roderick also has a brother who married his late brother's wife after I assassinated him and their four daughters; he revolted shortly after and I like to think she had something to do with it, even though I'm sure that's not really the case.  I should've radicalthoned this, really.  I even have an advisor named named Fergal MacFergus.  Come on, that's comedy gold.

Thanks for the replies upthread, I didn't even realize that you could check how much gold your worthless slaves vassals were holding.  Ran some max sim speed tests, the constant high crown authority levies were definitely a killer for them.  Combine that with crappy counties and noble taxes and they were all pretty broke.

On the subject of good places to start, the King of France is actually pretty interesting in 1066.  His vassals are completely out of control, the Duke of Aquitane and William of Normandy (particularly if he loses the war for England) are far stronger than the crown initially.  Could be an interesting exercise in politics.  Spain was a great start for learning how to fight larger and more advanced forces to a stalemate, and how to kill your relatives to inherit their land.  :oh_i_see:

Next up is going to be one of the dukes of the HRE, to see if I can break that monster up or take it over.

So, I picked up the game based on all the good stuff I was hearing, but now that I've gotten through the tutorial and face starting up a game....I feel a bit overwhelmed at it all once I look at the map.  I never played the first one.  Is there a good spot for someone who's learning the ropes to start? 

This thread is making me consider buying a full priced game even though I have no time to play it just to send a signal to Total War...

$40 eh...

It seriously is good, but you also have to be able to make your own fun.  The ai often makes it easy on the player and it is the punitive nature of events that make the game suddenly challenging when you encounter civil wars, though the ai really does know when to take advantage of you when you're at your weakest.  Other than that you have to be able to set your own goals for success and strive for those in order to measure your achievements.

In my current Scotland game I didn't even start as Scotland, I started as Brittany, but my game was dull because I lacked a strong England to ally with and I saw Scotland getting something interesting going so...I saved the game, resigned, and then loaded and started playing as Scotland.  Not only are your choices amazingly diverse in terms of when to start your game, but once it is going you can take the reigns of any dynasty currently in play in your save.  It's like a medieval Europe simulator with a million permutations.

My main complaints so far: leaders tend to die or become incapacitated too often in combat, children don't die frequently enough (from natural causes), and the HRE/Byzantium/France are too stable.  In over 70 hours of play I've yet to crash at all, and I haven't encountered any game-breaking bugs.  Pretty amazing for a Paradox developed game.

My brain broke from the demo and this guy's videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJhoyHE26lg) are slowly picking up the pieces: 6 videos where he's explaining how he plays from the start of a game.

edit - I really liked this official release trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzkVTDfxIUI) where the narrator describes how everything can go wrong in a game but then you can turn it around (in discussing questionable action taken by a character believing he's possessed: "This will destroy your reputation of course...or rather it would do were you not already known to be under the devil's sway.") in addition to those king dudebro videos.  Hope I get smarter to play.

Pick something small to start then just begin hacking away. You will probably mess up a lot and maybe even get crushed but it's better to look up stuff as you encounter it than try and figure it out before you unpause your 1st game, you will just be overwhelmed.

Scotland won a war against Norway after a de jure opportunity opened up in Orkney. Then I got played by one of my five sons who tricked me into trying to imprison a loyal vassal. One small civil war later, I'd claimed that vassal's land for my own demense and given it to my first-born loyal son, who I suspect is getting a bit impatient for daddy dearest to kick the bucket. Phew! Time to relax.

OH SHIT ENGLAND JUST INVADED WITH 7000 troops. My nobles are surly, I'm low on funds and I'm in my fucking 70s. Where's William Wallace when we need him?

So far on three runs, I'd say the AI is actually pretty good at taking advantage of weakness.

Maybe, if my nobles didn't revolt against me every 6 months. I've been using them to fill my coffers by holding them for ransom.

So this has multiplayer yeah? Has anyone tried it?

So I tried the demo, did most of the tutorials, and picked the lady ruler Matilda in northern Italy.

She has, like, no living relatives so I figure first thing to do is marry some semi-useful dude and get some kids.  I send a letter off to another Italian ruler over to the west a bit, he accepts, and bam, pregnant, and bam, out come some twin daughters.  The dynasty is underway, right?

Except... wait, they are of HIS dynasty not mine, so the warnings are still telling me when Matilda dies, the game is over.   Dammit!   So, uh, is there a way to change the kids' dynasty or is Matilda basically screwed?

You're semi-boned. You could use a plot or assassination attempt to kill your husband, assassinate both kids and then re-marry someone else matrilineally.

Keeping an eye on the line of succession and judiciously using matrilineal marriages is super important. My main rule is to always try to marry off the first and second daughters matrilineally, unless I have an asston of sons. Daughters seem to live longer, so this is also insurance against the occasional brotherpocalypse, where 5 sons all start knocking each other off in a bid for the throne.

Ah, I sort of read matrilineal marriage as 'keeps the dynasty of the person's mother' which now I see makes no sense.  Well, the demo doesn't let me save anyway so Matilda gets a fresh start regardless.   Which is good because someone totally invaded Corsica before I saw what was happening - which I am still not sure even belonged to Matilda but I had a vassal there under siege.  Maybe he was visiting?  

I am kinda having a hard time with the map - the first selection down after 'natural' view shows the empires, which is not so useful when Matilda is part of the HRE and everything around her is HRE gray, so I tried the 'direct vassals' view which seems to show MOST of her stuff in yellow, but also some other guys' stuff in yellow.  Maybe these other guys are underlings to her?  This is a pretty involved game.   :headscratch:

It can be pretty difficult figuring out exactly where you stand in terms of vassal-lord relationships when you are part of a larger kingdom/empire.  Easiest way I've found to be completely certain is to go through the "vassals" list in your character page and just track down individually all of their holdings to build a mental image of what you own.  Another way is to raise your realm levies, anyone who is a vassal to you should pop out troops in their territory, which makes it nice and easy to see where they live.  You can immediately stand them all down again (assuming you don't have hostiles in your territory), costs you nothing.

For a quick overview, notice the dotted line borders around your contiguous territories when you're in terrain view.  Those only show up if you own the county capital, so it is possible to miss some holdings in the odd split county situations, but it gives you a good idea at least.

The diplomatic map view works very well for managing your realm once you get used to it.  It's one of my most used map modes.

Well, rebooted Matilda got her full 20 years of game in before the demo time limit.  A matrilineal marriage proved to be much much less attractive to potential spouses, but she finally found someone who would deign to let her children keep her titles - Giacinto, the lord mayor of Ancona, which is conveniently close to her lands, and he even counted as a 'ruler' for her personal goal of 'marry a ruler'.  Giacinto didn't ask for any positions on the council or anything, so he basically seemed to stick around his home county continuing to rule it (it remained separate from Matilda's lands, though both are part of the Holy Roman Empire).

Meanwhile, Matilda's mother starts begging to be made head Spymaster, but she didn't seem to be any better than the guy currently in the job, so, sorry ma, stick with your knitting.  I get a notice at the top of the screen that says I can create a new title, Duke of Modena, and I think that would be a nice thing to make Giacinto so he won't seem like such a loser, so I start saving up for that.

Matilda's lands seem to be barely barely profitable, so this takes a while.  Meanwhile, she squirts out the first kid, a daughter, who is named heir, and then a second kid, another daughter pretty shortly thereafter.   Now there's enough money to make that title, so I do that, and it turns out that is assigned to Matilda (I thought it would give me a prompt of who to give it to, but either I missed it or it doesn't do that).  Oh well, it can go with her other collection of titles (there are seriously like a half dozen of them).

The pope, in nearby Rome, decides he has a claim on one of Matilda's counties, Spoleto, which is way the hell down in the south of her lands.  I send the military advisor down there to start training the militia and start counting up the troops.  To nobody's surprise, the pope's army suddenly charges into Spoleto.   Unfortunately it is WAY bigger than I was thinking, like 5000 guys.  Aieee!

Almost immediately, Matilda's lands are COVERED in soldiers, as, apparently, the Holy Roman Emperor has taken over this little spat and raised a bunch of Matilda's troops for his own.   Each little group of soldiers is like 40 guys so it's not going to be anywhere near 5000.  I go around to each county and summon up the county militias and spend some time grouping them all up, and it is around 1500 troops.  Not very good odds.

The pope's army starts sieging the three towns in Spoleto one by one.  Then I see, coming down from the east, a giant HRE army of like 7000 guys.  Help is on the way!  But they are pretty far off, so I charge my shitty army into the pope's lands to distract him.  It actually works, as he breaks off the seige of town #2 to chase me.  We spend quite a few weeks running around in circles while the HRE army gets closer and closer and finally arrives and beats the shit ouf the pope army.  Ha ha, take that, pope.   I run my army back to Spoleto and free the towns that got captured and we live happily ever after.

Time passes, in which I repeatedly build up to 50 gold and immediately spend it to start constructing some town improvement that will result in more tax income.  The money does seem to be coming in ever so slightly faster, so this seems like a good plan.  There is a minor peasant revolt which is quickly dealt with, but for a few years it's pretty quiet.

Then, for no reason at all, Ancona decides to declare independence from the Holy Roman Empire.  I look down there to make sure Matilda's husband got out of there ok and isn't imprisoned or something and find out, that, in fact, he has lost his goddamned mind and in CHARGE of the rebellion.

Well, she raises the troops and plops them down on the border between Matildaville and Ancona to protect her lands from her idiot husband while, again, a giant HRE army comes creeping down the coast and eventually arrives and completely destroys him.  Giacinto is hauled off in chains to HRE prison, and, checking Matilda's stats, somehow the Holy Roman Emperor doesn't seem to have held this fiasco against her.  Pshew.  Unfortunately, she is only 30 and still married, and some more children would be nice.

Time to ponder assassinating Giacinto to clear out her dance card!   It tells me there is a 25% chance of success and a 25% chance of being discovered.  Matilda rolls the dice and fails, but is not discovered.  Since her stats say she is very religious and such, I decide one try was enough, and we return to the previous activity of improving the lands.

Fortunately Giacinto soon dies all on his own.  I blame those 9th-century prison conditions.  A new husband is found and this guy is a COMMONER (gasp), but he's got super-high military stats and I am still paranoid about that pope.  New husband is put in charge of the army, and Matilda is almost immediately pregnant with kid #3 (she has a 5% fertility bonus from being a Charismatic Negotiator, but it sure seems more like a 100% bonus). 

Kid #3 turns out to be a boy, so he's the new heir.  Sorry, girl #1, you lose.

A few years pass uneventually and then a message pops up that Matilda has realized she is in LUUURRVE with her husband.  Good thing she's married to him, huh?  There are two options presented, I forget what they say exactly but one is something like 'yay' and the other is something like 'I MUST REPRESS THESE URGES'.  I pick the first one, of course.

A fourth child arrives, this one is another girl.  The older three kids are now apparently being tutored in Ancona (how or why I have no idea, this seems like a terrible idea).  The lands are getting more profitable and nothing too exciting happens and then BAM.  Twenty years are up, and the demo is over.


So.... it was fun... I think?   The game was oddly sort of passive, though.  I dunno, I sort of sat there for a lot of it both hoping and fearing something would happen.  I'm not sure if the economy of this nation is typical, with its teeny tiny profit at the start.. 

The different sub-town/castle/church things in each county seem overly difficult to get to to check their statuses or see what's going on.

I think I like it, but not ENOUGH.  I'll probably get it when it's on sale.  I might change my mind in a week or two, though.  It's definitely a weird game and different from anything I've played before.

If you put your mouse on the far right-hand side of the screen a little bar will pop up with a lot of helpful stuff.  It lists all of your armies, your advisors and what they're doing, sieges, and the progress of your constructions.

This is why Queen Elizabeth I never got married, I bet.

Yeah, I had that locked and out, but it wasn't telling me everything for some reason.  It seemed like only the constructions in the 'main' town of each county were showing and the ones in the other castles or towns or churches weren't.  Dunno if there is a filter somewhere to tell it to show everything.

The matrilineal marriage thing got me into a bit of a bind yesterday.

I was playing as a duke in Ireland whose dynasty has a bit of a habit of popping out kids, particularly daughters. Now, these are halfway useless, but I'm keeping very sure to matrilineally marry at least two daughters from each generation of each closely related branch. Eventually I get a son, he matures, and I notice that there's a child-countess of 14 years in a nearby county in Wales.

Aha, I think. I can marry off my primary male heir to this countess; when I die, he'll get all my titles in Scotland and his children will get both the Irish titles and the Welsh titles from the mother. Free land!

The countess comes of age and is compelled to accept a regular marriage, ensuring that the children remain of my dynasty. That first son fucks off to the county in Wales where his wife is, in order to uphold the family tradition of banging her a lot. Things putter along for a while and they crap out three kids; all daughters. After a while, the first daughter comes of age.

I go to the interface, all set to marry her matrilineally, as she's now second in line for all the Irish titles, which my long-reigning duke has consolidated into quite the rich chunk and expanded considerably.

No marry button.

I check, and I realize that, since the Welsh wife is a ruler, she's at court in her home county. My son is there too, as he has no other titles yet. Which means all three granddaughters are in that court. Which means their marriages are under the Welsh wife's control.

Fuck!

I continue to watch the situation and, to my horror, the Welsh wife marries off my primary granddaughter to the King of Scotland in a regular marriage and they immediately have a son. A son not of my dynasty, who is, nonetheless, third in line for all my titles.

I start saving for assassins immediately, to little avail, as the strain is too much for the poor old Duke and he croaks. Suddenly, the son is now me, and I'm the Duke of Ireland again and have returned to my native homeland. My wife has stayed behind and kept all our daughters; the daughters hate my guts because I'm Irish instead of Welsh, so they won't leave their mother's side for my court.

Out goes the spymaster, to build an assassination network in Wales. Almost immediately, my wife's titles in Wales are usurped and she gets kicked back to my court. The two unmarried minor daughters come with her, but the primary daughter, my heir, goes to her husband's court in Scotland with her snot-nosed grandson in tow.

I now have a two-pronged plan to preserve the throne's lineage: kill off my wife and remarry in the hopes of popping out a son, and then eliminate my first daughter and her Scottish grandson to ward off future claims to the throne and assassination threats to my other children. The spymaster gets sent in and my wife's assassination goes off without a hitch. While he's cooling his heels for the six months between moves, I find, marry and impregnate a 16-year-old Irish courtier of no distinct lineage but who happens to really enjoy a roll in the hay. She fits in well with the rest of the family.

The spymaster moves up to Scotland and my first daughter immediately has a small accident involving some stairs, thus making the Scottish grandson first-in-line for the thrones of Ireland. A hundred gold later, I've drowned the little bugger in his own bathwater and nobody's the wiser. My second daughter is now first-in-line and I marry her matrilineally to a genius soldier from a very distant branch of the family, just in case. A few months later, I pop out my first son, and my second daughter pops out a son by the soldier.

And so the family lineage was preserved.

It will only show the constructions, tax income and levy size in your own personal demesne. If you build something in one of your vassals lands you won't see it in the outliner.
Also the small income increase you experienced is likely due to the fact that you were upgrading vassals cities, cities who with the default laws only pay you 20% or so in taxes and then only if they like you, a mayor that hates your guts won't send a single copper your way...
If you decide to try Matilda once more focus on building up your own castles first and don't be afraid to seize a city or three for your own demesne despite the whole "wrong holding ruler" penalty (in which case you'd want to build the income boosting building there before going back to upgrading the castles). And try to keep some money on hand to hire mercenaries with in case the pope decides to get all uppity again.

Any time you create or usurp a title it goes directly to your current ruler/self.  You can move it to whatever vassal you like by going into diplomacy with that person and granting it to them, the same way you would a holding or county.

Oh, thanks, you two.  The interface is a bit, uh, murky.    I'll have to try Matilda or another sub-ruler like her (not that Poland guy, he's got everything under him, that's too simple!) at some point to try and straighten all this out.

And in case you didn't know there's a glitch with the demo that lets you play any character in game without having to mod anything by selecting one of the 4 selectable ones, hit play and then click the ruler you want to be. This way you could try out some place like Polotsk, an independent 5 province Duchy without any major vassals, far removed from HRE politicking and plenty of pagans to attack, should give you an easier time to learn the ropes.
At least as long as none of your dear cousins don't decide your duchy would look better as part of their realm, who the heck needs enemies with families like these...

Ha, this trick actually worked.  I squeaked in as King Antso of Navarra, a nice little two-county place with no higher authority.  This guy had a million sibilings (a couple of them have nearby kingdoms) and two bastard children to start off with.  It took a while (real time, not game time) to find a willing spouse for him and he ended up with the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, which didn't sound like too terrible of a choice.

All his relatives turn out to hate him, and I looked him up on wikipedia and in real life his brother and sister shoved him off a cliff, so I guess that's fitting.  The game was a lot quieter than Matilda's run.  Not as much money either - though I did only improve his own holdings for a better return, he only had two.

A few years into the game and the cliff-pushing brother openly rebels in the non-capitol county.  I summon up all the troops in the main county and kick his ass and throw him in jail.  He starts whining and plotting in there, so I execute him, and now all the relatives REALLY hate me.  The new wife gives birth to a son and a daughter who also really hate me.

I figured out how to assign kids to tutors, so I keep trying to set up the kids with various mayors or advisors who at least have a positive impression of Antso, and it seems to help a little bit, but they are still really negative.  Oh well.

The chancellor forged a fake claim in one of the adjacent counties and when I went to declare war it said I already HAD a natural claim there from some title or something.  Whoops.   Matilda's chancellor never actually succeeded at this, so this was progress at least figuring out this procedure.  Anyway, that province fell easily and no nearby nations complained too much.

Frankly I'm surprised this dude was still alive at the end of the 20 years.  Especially with his bastard son with an opinion of him at -60 (which was IMPROVED by gifts and positions) in the position of spymaster.  And somewhere along the line he got called 'the Accursed', though it didn't really say why.

Edging toward buying this.   My new question is what do you do with all the random courtiers.  There were seriously like twenty of these yahoos hanging around, and other than putting the capable ones in council positions, and using a couple as tutors for your handful of kids, what exactly do you DO with them?

I'd recommend tutoring the heir yourself as you get several choices during his/her childhood that let you tailor them for the role with trait gains. Though it could still be worthwhile to send him to some important ruler to foster as they get a +25 or so bonus to relations with their mentor, can be quite useful if you want to bring say the King of France into your war against the infidels in Iberia during your heirs reign of terror.
And you know, making someone that hates you that much into a spymaster usually isn't the brightest of ideas... It's not like he'll report any plots against your own life if he's the one masterminding them after all.  :oh_i_see:
As to the courtiers, nothing really. Basically they're just a bunch of wimpy freeloaders there to supply a source of councillors and to parcel out land to to avoid going above your personal demesne limit. You can use the women generated to arrange matrilineal marriages and bring some better councillors to your court though that option was limited quite a bit in the last patch for the released game. Or marry the useless ones out in the same manner to get them out of your court and go pilfer some other nobles silverware.

Once your kingdom is growing pretty quickly, like when you're crusading, you'll need a lot of random courtiers around to put into new positions of power as counts or even dukes.  It's a good idea to get them married early and let them start building families.  That way when you do find a role for them they'll have ready-made heirs.  Optimally, land you take over will be given to relatives, but that doesn't always work out; good to have a pool of loyal talent laying around.  In my last Scottish campaign I was actually using the option on the intrigue menu to invite more nobles into my court because I had run out of male relatives to distribute Africa to.

Also, as Seraphim said, tutoring yourself is a great option.  However, children have a reasonably good chance of gaining the education trait of their tutor so if you can find someone in your court with one of those really nice education traits like Midas Touched or Grey Emininence, choose them instead; I think you'll still be able to make the maturing decisions if they're in your court, and you'll get a nice trait at the end.  Also, children can potentially become members of a different culture through their tutor, and you definitely want to be the same culture as your vassals.  The exception to that is if the tutor is a different culture, but in your court; in that case you get to choose whether they become a different culture or stay their old culture.

There's another way to get more male nobles. Look around at neighboring or close-by provinces and click their coat-of-arms. On the province screen there's a button marked "Claimants", with a list of all the nobles in the world that have a claim to that land. Nobles that would be willing to come to your court are marked with a green thumbs up. Bring up their diplo screen and "invite to court" and voila, free nobility with usually better stats than the bought ones. This has the added bonus that you now have a Casus Belli against the lord of said province, the only drawback being if you use it and "press" the claim of your courtier, they automatically get it as your vassal, you won't be able to claim it outright as a demesne.

I prefer for my nobility to be of the same culture as my king, and a lot of the time the random claimants I find aren't.  Otherwise, yeah, that's another good way to get more nobility.

Unless that invited courtier shares your last name, i.e. they are part of your dynasty, OR you have granted them a holding of some sort and made them your vassal, or sub-vassal, they will become independent after you press their claim.  They'll be very friendly to you, and depending on the circumstances may accept a vassalage offer, but frequently will not.

Additionally, if the title they gain after you've pressed their claim is greater than or equal to your own highest title, they will be independent no matter what (I think, haven't tested this much).

They don't always become independent either.  They will join your former enemy if the claim was within someone else's realm.  I made the mistake of going to war with England to support a courtier's claim, and upon completion the courtier simply became the new count of that fief and was a part of England.

It works best when you invite the claimant to your court, give them some land (preferably near their claim), and then press their claim.  And you're right, if the title is equal to or higher than your own title they become independent or join the realm within which the title currently lies.

Note that unlanded kinsmen will also become your vassals should you press their claims, and the claimed title is below your own. It's one way of playing the Long Game to get other thrones, but requires a lot of matrilineal marriage jiu-jitsu on fourth sons or disinherited brothers.

Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube (Let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry)

So I would say that way to play the game is historically accurate as well.  :awesome_for_real:

I really don't know I can hold off buying this till the 50% sale. It sounds really intriguing once you get used to the UI.

They really need a marriage Power Search screen. I don't often do the marriage thing once I have a decently powerful realm because it's so hard to figure out who's where in what line of succession and who has what claims with what degree of heritability, without clicking through fifteen screens.

Once things get going, I tend to marry sisters/daughters off to counts or dukes in less-powerful realms so that the realms' leaders don't decide to press their fucking claims on my crown. Because then the spymaster has to get out his knives and do some wetwork, and that's unpleasant.

What I really want is, say, "find me an unlanded, unmarried nobleman between the ages of 12 and 25 who is not within the first three positions in a line of succession but who has heritable claims on at least one title".

Sometimes this game turns into a bizarre medieval version of Match.com.

There are a few ... UI issues in the game which can be pretty fucking annoying sometimes, like when you replace your advisors. I've lost count of how many times I've wanted to just check the stats of some guy, and I end up choosing him instead.

There are also lots of times where I want to choose women from various other counties next to me (I'm currently working to take over Ireland; I'm failing.), and it... well, it could've been easier. But at least it's not as bad anymore as when I started initially.

I'm fairly certain that when you click the two rings round button to the lower right of your portrait the results are auto-sorted by strength of claim/line of succession of heirs.

Game finally clicked for me, and I started a game as King Salomon of Hungary, starting in the first playable year.  I managed to early on conquer Wallachia and some of the other lands to the southeast, though the filthy Rus snagged some of the lands as well.  And managed to fight off some civil wars/plots by my cousins and brother to gain the throne.  While my attempts to fake a claim on some of the smaller holdings around me never panned out for whatever reason, I settled into an overall peaceful and long reign, strengthening the crown's power, getting rights to more taxes and levies, and establishing several duchies.  Overall not much rebellion or infighting. 

I need to work on better arranging for a good heir though.  When a false claim finally bore fruit and I was marching my armies to seize it, Saloman the Great finally died of old age after about 45 years of rule, and then the knives came out.  He had a lot of kids, and the sons among them were apparently also pretty fertile.  In the course of about 5 minutes I jumped between 4 playable characters before finally ending up with one who managed to not get assassinated right off.  Unfortunately, it was an unmarried great grand-daughter in regency.  Thanks to everyone deciding Hungary should be theirs, 4 different wars started up, and now my nice, stable country has been permanently split by civil war, and the filthy Rus took advantage of the turmoil and snagged some land as well.  Plus my current playable character had to surrender to her great uncle, since all her armies were now gone.  So now I've got to piece it all together starting with just one duchy. 

I finally bought it too, mainly because I couldn't stop thinking about it.  

Started a game as the (basically independent) duke of Barcelona, about 10 years in.  Fighting the Moors is pretty entertaining - fortunately they have remained pretty disorganized and the ones squatting in Barcelona proper have been removed and the next batch adjacent to the west were just crushed by a four-prong invasion which began when they declared war on me, I called on my best bud the king of Navarra and he was all WOO YAY, and as things started to turn south for the Moors the king of Leon and some dudes from France swooped in.  So that part of the map is all checkerboarded with various occupied markers, and my chancellor is furiously trying to forge up papers for the closest county.

Both the kings of Navarra and Aragon have popped off early and been replaced by 6-year olds, so there is some good opportunity here I think.  My Barcelona duke also dropped dead near the end of my play time so far, but he was replaced with an actual adult, ha ha.

The AI can be pretty vicious in the game.  When it senses blood, everyone's willing to swoop in to take advantage.  It's pretty hilarious how quickly my kingdom fell apart once the king died.  Pretty much every county revolted, and there were probably 15 assassinations while I was trying to pick up the pieces before finally having my current character throw in the towel.  Even the peasants seem to know when a good time to rebel is.  I've had several happen while most of my forces are concentrated elsewhere. 

EMERGENCY!

I tried to take a screenshot but it grabs the desktop underneath, lawl.  Basically Barcelona has a bad case of the Moors, my previous allies all dropped dead, and I need some help stat (4500 Moors rampaging around sieging everything and what was left of my army just got wiped out in the mountains).

Too poor for mercenaries so I figure I'll marry my son to some France princess and get help from that direction.  However, the option to marry him is absent for some reason.

Here all all the things I can think of that might be pertinent:

- Barcelona is a Duchy, currently at war (obviously).
- I have two sons, the younger is still a kid and betrothed to one of my vassal Count's daughters. 
- The heir who I am trying to marry (Pere) is not promised to anyone and just turned 16.  His portrait is an adult.
- Pere has title to two cities (does he need to have a county or better?)
- Nothing in his traits seems to disqualify him.
- The county he is currently located has all of its holdings occupied by Moors, but it doesn't show Pere in jail or anything.
- I am currently sitting in my perfectly unoccupied capitol, adjacent to Pere.

Any ideas to help poor Pere and by extension, me?   :-P

I've now sieged neighbours 3-5 times, and I still can't seem to manage to actually capture them to the point where I control them. I'm sort of starting to dislike starting as pretty much a loner down in Ireland, getting up in the world certainly isn't easy.

Proudft: if he isn't in your court you can't choose his spouse.  Since he has his own territory now he'll choose his own.  At least I think that's the source of your problem.

tgr: Why aren't you able to siege them and control them?  Once you capture the castle it's all downhill, usually.

Probably simply because there's some mechanic I haven't grasped yet. I'm assuming it's mostly because I'm an earl, and I'm attacking dukes. Honestly, I'm going to just have to bite the bullet and actually read up on this instead of just winging it like I do everything else in this game, because I've ended up capturing everything, and still not getting the control I expect when I offer peace.

This is, after all, a bit different from most strategy games I've played, so I'm not that surprised it's catching me out.

If you get your warscore to 100% to *will* get whatever you specified in your declaration of war. If you were fighting a duke, you may have to occupy more than one of his counties though.

Or maybe you mean that your siege is not progressing at all? If the enemy siege bar is not shrinking you might have less soldiers than the garrison of the enemy castle in which case you are SOL unless you bring in allies or hire mercenaries. (Tip: Using mercs is a really good way to get started, if you can manage to save up the money)

No, I believe I took over his entire collection of counties, and I had taken over everything. I saved just before I did the siege, I'll have to redo the whole thing and pay more attention to exactly what's happening.

Are you actually capturing his town/castle/churchthing, or just placing it under siege? You need to have more people outside the walls then they have inside, or you make no progress. As a guy who has mostly played around in Ireland, I often got into a situation where I would declare war, wipe his army, but incur enough losses that I didnt have enough to effectively siege. Once you take a castle/town/church, you should see his territory gain some crosshatching. The more you outnumber him by, the faster the siege goes as well.

I was able to be effective as various Irish counties by fabricating some claims, saving up for 2 months of the chepest mercs, and then rolling a neighbor. Once you get that second territory, you can mass enough troops to take a 3rd a few years later without having to rely on mercs.

Yeah, I did capture them, at least I had my shield in the middle of all cities and castles etc. I did hire mercs to roll the first county, then roll in my forces, roll the second until I had captured all of them, then roll the third until I'd captured all of them as well.

I don't seem to be able to fabricate claims of my own for some reason, though, even though my guy has 19 or so in intrigue, I've had to rely on inviting someone from that county to my court to get the casus belli, but I'm not sure if I actually replaced the ruler at all, actually.

I'll restore and try again, see if I can't find any discrepancies, and maybe *gasp* read the manual some. :why_so_serious:

Oh. In that case you fought a war on that courtiers behalf. You got the title for him, not for yourself. If you want to own the county, you must have the claim first.

It's a little different when you are a duke or king, as in that case the guy you won the title for might become your vassal under certain circumstances, but as long as you are a count you can't have other counts as vassals, so that's not much use to you.

You have to siege all the holdings in a space, not just the main one. They go one at a time.

Doh.  Ok, so I can either strip his lands away and piss him off and arrange a marriage.... or de-betroth the younger kid and get him a useful/hot princess instead.  I'll try that option (I'm assuming you can break this promise somehow)- after all, his future wife's father's county is currently up to its ears in Moors, I'm sure he'll understand.  :oh_i_see:

I've never broken a betrothal so I have absolutely no idea regarding the mechanic for it.

Even if you lose the war with the moors you may not lose everything.  They may just be aiming for one or two provinces.  Sometimes it is better to cut your losses if they're reasonable.

Never had to break a betrothal either but worst case scenario her pops won't like you as much after and if he's knee-deep in Moors it won't be a long-term issue any way. :grin:
That sounds like a plan though, also how's your papal relations? Might be worthwhile calling a crusade down on the local Caliph and keep your own troops at home to pick off some weakened neighbours in the aftermath, or if you have 50g simply try and assassinate whomever attacked you to force a white peace if you're loosing badly.

My son's wife was plotting to kill him, so I tried to arrest her, but she got away, back to her dad in Germany. Fine, whatever, presumably she can't do so much damage from there. So I then assign a county to my son, check back in a few months and he apparently invited her back! And she's still trying to kill him! So I tried to arrest her again, and she got away AGAIN.  :angryfist:

The obvious solution being killing her off before she gets your son and pray the father never finds out if he's got a decent enough income to hire his own assassins...

The father is the Holy Roman Emperor.  :awesome_for_real:

What could possibly go wrong? :grin:

Turned out to be -30 reputation, not a concern at this point.

I managed to squeak my way through this war.  Broke the betrothal of second son to count useless's daughter, promised him to someone useful.  No ally help pops up... ohnoes, betrothals don't count apparently.

Tragedy is averted when the Moors decide to spend months and months sacking cities, during which some children previously-promised to marriage with with the noble families of Navarra, Galacia, and some random place in Hungary conveniently age up and bam, allies are on the way (well, not the Hungarians).   My Spanish cousins show up with 400 and 500 soldiers and manage to get themselves killed BUT I now have enough money to hire a (small) mercenary company and they take out one of the giant stacks o' Moors.  Then another kid grows up and this one has been engaged to the King of Leon (man, Leon got big when I wasn't noticing), and BAM, 2000 Leon soldiers come charging over the border.  Between them and the mercenaries, Barcelona is freed and the people rejoice.  

Except the heir, who suddenly pops up a warning about a 15 % chance to revolt.  Ungrateful cur.  If he gets uppity, we know what to do.

Man, I'm glad I had those kids set up like that.  Entirely unintended but it saved my ass.

Alright, game. We are going to throw down. It took me three days to figure out Guild II's way of placing farmland, but I eventually figured it out. So surely I can figure YOU out. Right?



Right?

I still have no idea what I'm doing but I am ruling Scotland and waiting for current dude to die so his son (who is currently ruling Ireland because his mother, the Queen of Ireland, died) can take over what might wind up being a giant clusterfuck.  :why_so_serious:  The People love the shit out of King Neil I, though, I tell you what. He's even known as "the Kind." He's even in love with his rebound wife. Everyone fucking loves the dude. Rep scores of 100 all the way down, baby. Even his loser fourth son loves the shit out of him, even though he'll get nowhere near the throne.

Oh God, everyone is going to freak out when his son rolls in and is all HI EVERYONE I'M BACK FROM IRELAND, aren't they.

I usually end up with everyone hating my heir compared to how they like me, so I always end up having to drag my royal nuts across everyone's faces until they get back in line, until next time.

It's very likely that your heir will start out worse than your current ruler. You exchange your long rule bonus for a short rule penalty and lose every single bonus for titles granted, vassals transferred, gifts given and whatnot.

Oh, I figured they will dislike him more than they dislike his dad (seriously, everyone loves the shit out of him), but all my changes of king thus far have been pretty smooth. One dude will revolt, I put an army up his ass, he goes "sowwy" and everything's cool. This time around, though, I just have this feeling everyone's going to get all pissy.

Try having a retard for an heir.

Seriously, the next retard heir I get, is getting killed. With a vengeance.

Yeah all my heirs have been pretty decent, really. This current king has two hunchback daughters, but who gives a shit about daughters, rite?

Actually, that reminds me. This game makes me blame the patriarchy a lot. It seems like I ALWAYS have ladies hanging about with awesome stewardship scores that I can't do anything with because they don't have penises.  :heartbreak:  I seem to have a habit of finding wives for my king with gigantic intrigue scores, though, so at least I can have THEM be useful. I need to bring feminism to Europe.



Actually I would totally use a mod like that, even though it would probably make the game way easier.  :why_so_serious:

You can institute Absolute Cognatic succession if you're of the Basque culture, which makes women inherit on the same basis as men, so you can at least do that for rulers.

Thing is, getting Basque culture and then getting rid of it again (to avoid the "wrong culture" penalties) is a bit of a bitch.

Oh, the inheriting shit isn't an issue for me, it's the "goddammit that woman would be AWESOME as my steward LET ME PICK HER DAMN YOU" part.  :why_so_serious:

Just use her to educate the next generation to be awesome stewards. Not your own kids though, you should always raise those yourself so you can pick their traits.

Things that seemed like an OK idea at the time but of course turned out terribly: Giving my son & heir Scotland to dick around in while I fucked around in Ireland, because a) I wanted to see what would happen, b) I was annoyed I magically switched everything to "Ireland" once my Scottish king died and his heir (who had taken over Ireland because his Irish Queen mom died) took over and I wanted to magically switch back to everything being "Scotland," and c) I had no land to personally dick around with over there anyway, having handed it all out to my sons and brothers because I'm nice like that.

AT FIRST it actually went fine, my son thought I was the best dad ever and none of his little territories seemed to give a fuck. But then the stupid dipshit decided HEY I FEEL LIKE FIGHTING WITH ENGLAND. And he lost (I had family on BOTH SIDES, omg). So OK, he lost one little territory as penance, no big. Then the dork (who at this point I'm wondering was just jealous that his dad was now known as IRONSIDE) decides "woo, crusades!" And dies! So his son takes over, and ALL OF SCOTLAND goes "HEY FUCK THAT GUY" and breaks into like. Five pieces. Scotland isn't that big, guys!

Meanwhile MY king is in his 70's and probably wondering what on earth possessed him to hand over Scotland like that. Sorry, dude, you're being controlled by an idiot. :(


EDIT: Also, in my game, Denmark has eaten all of France while I wasn't looking somehow and is about the same size of the HRE. For some reason this amuses me greatly.

I'm still playing my Barcelona game at a nice leisurely pace.  My third (I think) ruler got enough territories to call himself King of Aragon, and crowned himself King Pere.  He lived a nice long life and had a son with his second wife that ascended to the throne about age 8 or so.  King Pere II took until about age 16 to stabilize things and then, after some practice repelling various Moor assaults, began the process of uniting all of Spain.

He declared the first war on Leon when Leon was severely weakened by some Moor attacks and Leon was basically on the ropes when three of Aragon's dukes rebelled in rapid succession.  As Pere II was only about 24, he made a truce with Leon and returned the troops home to deal with that situation.

A few years pass and Pere II gets his sister married to the son of the King of France.  France immediately asks for help invading Navarra.  Navarra is only two counties, so what the hell.  The Aragon troops march over there and are soon met by the 18,000 French troops to totally overkill Navarra.  Staring at the 18,000 troops RIGHT THERE, and since the old king of Leon just died, and Castille has currently revolted from the kingdom of Leon, Pere II declares war again on Leon, and crosses his fingers that France will come along for the ride.

They do, and Leon is completely murdered in about two years.  Getting the formerly-Leon dukes in line takes a REALLY long time, about a decade, and France helps with some of them, though by the end the Giant French Armies (tm) head off to deal with problems at home.

Finally, though, Pere II achieves stability.  Everyone is happy enough, the money is rolling in, peace is across the nation, and even the Moors are quiet.  He settles in for a nice long reign of prosperity.

And then, at the age of 38, Pere II, king of Aragon, Leon, and Castille drops dead, leaving his 6-year old son Pere III as his heir.  I remember how Pere II came to the throne as a young lad and the first thing I look at is the popup for who is going to be likely to revolt.  And wow... this is going to get interesting:


Spain is awesome, though.  So much fighting.   :grin:

That's a fine looking Iberian peninsula.  Any trouble from Mauritania?  They usually end up being real dicks unless France marches back and forth all over Algeria/Morocco.  I spent a good thirty years fighting them in my Leon game.

Off and on, but the holy knight orders have been good at the standard HEY CUT IT OUT defense.  Basically once a decade or so they'd invade, then I'd bring up 14k of rent-a-popes for 300 piety or whatever and then go sack a few of their cities until they saw reason.  And then I get 400 gold or so in the peace settlement, so it was quite the moneymaker!

Africa was a more frequent attacker, I frankly lost count of the number of wars from them.  Mauretania and Kabliya and another of those SW Moor nations (Seville maybe?) were actually fighting each other quite a bit, which I am sure was helpful for me.  Aragon currently has all of Kabliya off the bottom of the screen there, though I doubt that will last with the current... situation.

Irish kings apparently LIVE FOREVER. Every single one of these assholes have made it into their 80's and wind up having a great grandchild taking over.

Pro-tip:  Starting on an island you need boats to leave makes for a really challenging game.  If you build up for 200 years you'll be able to support enough navies to ferry a big enough army to the neighbor's place to establish a toe-hold.  Good luck holding it.  I'm looking at you Count Botstain of Gotland.

Ireland was really easy comparatively, even getting excommunicated twice.  I ran out of time before I could spread all the way across England, but I could probably play more aggressively in the future (and not screw around attempting to capture the holy land... from Tyrconnel.

I'd like more tactical impact to city building or combat, but it has been a very good game in the 60 hours I've given it so far. 

My last game starting with an irish count ended at year 1316 when the game difficulty fell to 0% (pointless) much of it thanks to a couple of long-lived rulers (I think one ruled over 60 years).

Yeah one of my kings got on the throne at around 20 (he was the grandson of the previous king) and proceeded to live to be 82 or so. People lost their shit once he died, I guess they were sad about it.  :awesome_for_real:

My kings and heirs usually end up dead with an assassin's knife in their back well before they reach an advanced age, or at least walk with a limp for the rest of their lives due to a failed assassination attempt.  I don't know what kind of boring kingdoms you all are running, but you can keep them; I'll maintain my internecine hellscapes of treachery and bastardy, thank you.

The meanest thing I've personally done, which really isn't so mean, was pointedly ignore all the plot warnings I'd been getting about people wanting to kill my uppity brother (he was a duke, who also stole the duchy I had given my heir ... and also my marshal) until they finally murdered his ass and solved the problem for me. His heir rebelled against me, I put a boot up his ass, and banished him.  :heart:

No one cared much, I guess that's the benefit of GENERALLY being nice, you can afford the giant rep hit you take when you banish someone who really fucking deserves it.

I usually have a nice family tree trimming every decade or two in the game once I can spare the money (and the spymaster) for it. It keeps the line of succession nice and simple most of the time. Even if you fail a few attempts and get caught it just gets the most unhappy of your subjects to rebel so you can rightfully imprison them (and strip them of a title or two if the crown authority is high enough). Just be sure to assassinate enough people or your king will be the one who needs to worry about getting stabbed in the back...

So my king's asshole uncle got him excommunicated. My king put his foot right up his uncle's ass for rebelling, but while he was doing that, the HRE went "DO I SMELL A HEATHEN?!" and declared war on me. I immediately surrendered, apparently the terms were "your king ain't king anymore, so your sister is queen now." Against my better judgement, I ransom my asshole uncle instead of banishing his punk ass (I needed the money due to HALF THE COUNTRY REBELLING ON ME).

So I'm almost done putting out the fires of half of Scotland and half of Ireland pitching bitchfits, and my motherfucking uncle gets my queen excomminicated I knew I should've banished your stupid ass arghghghghgh. So naturally half the world declares war on me, because I have like no money and not enough troops to fend off EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, so I finally go "fuck it" and give up.

Assholes!

Fernando, my two year old dwarf bastard son just inherited half of Spain after a few well-placed assassinations from my younger brother.  This won't end well.  I really need to stop legitimizing bastards; it's nothing but trouble.

I usually legitimitize the girl ones, and merely acknowledge the boy ones. I did make one legit because I had like 6 daughters and NO SONS STILL. Then my wife promptly popped out three sons in a row, so I felt a little bad (my kings all have a gazillion kids).

Marrying into the HRE is bad.

Succession wars with the HRE are brutal.

Background information: I am the King of England (and Scotland, and Bynthiam, and Leon, and Castille).  The Duke of Savoy gets upitty and has me excommunicated resulting in some nasty little revolts with half my empire. I put those down (for the most part, looks at Spain) get the excommunication lifted and then immediately the Emperor of the HRE declares war and starts fucking my shit up in Spain with TWO THIRTEEN THOUSAND man armies.  Fortunately my empire is large enough that I can ignore those two armies laying siege in Spain and proceed to add some beat down sauce to the remaining vassals at war and then drop that army down, wait a few months as the HRE armies move on then run back in quickly retake the provinces fight a few battles against smaller armies and then drop the army again.  In the process I capture the heir to the HRE.  At the same time I'm holding on to about one thousand gold for the thought of hiring pretty much every single army I can, and then I get mad.

I realize after five years this war is going no where fast, and execute the heir. I follow that up with sending assassins after everyone in the family and a couple weeks later the war is over.  So I kill off the only family with more points than me and probably earned quite a few "don't fuck with England" points, in the process.  Pope isn't happy though, I think the Duke of Savoy is next.

So apparently the cure for teh gay is a really fucking horny wife.  Who knew, my gay horndog of a ruler made it to 72 and had his numerous wives pop out a total of seven sons.  It wasn't until i started banging my grandsons 22yo wife that i finally fulfilled my life long ambition of having a daughter.  I died a year later knowing all my titles were safe, specially the "worst homo ever" trophy.

You know, if you are like me and thought about reading a "general discussion" topic, and instead clicked on this one while your mind was wandering and tried to figure out why stuff like this happens in the real world and only then realize the author is talking about a game, you would find the above post hilarious  :grin:

Has anyone gotten a game to last more than a few years starting in Southern Italy?  Capua, Cagliari, Napoli, etc. as an independant?  The degree of difficulty rating is misleading given the first thing that happens is an invasion of southern europe by the infidel.  Many 'equivalent'  starting points (for an independant Count) seem much easier by comparison.

May you be sewn up alive in the belly of a dead camel. 

I'm pretty sure i lasted several generations in Capua.

I had a pretty epic game down there in CK1 but I haven't tried to recapture that yet in 2.

1.05 sounds juicy. I think once the update hits, I'm going to start a game as a smallish duke or multi-count in the HRE just to play with the new plotting options.

Nice update

http://store.steampowered.com/news/7753/

This is a much better "Game of Thrones" game than the actual Game of Thrones game.  That would make a hell of a mod too.

There was a really great Westeros mod for Cruader Kings.  I'm sure someone is working on one for CKII.

Ouch, there goes my favorite expansion method (especially against England which seems to have a civil war very often in the first half of the game)

The guy who did it said he's not going to do one for CK2.

Another expansion apparently came out this week and I totally didn't notice because of all the Blood Bowl excitement.  If you were as oblivious as me, the overview is here:

http://www.crusaderkings.com/news/2012/8/crusader-kings-ii-legacy-of-rome-expansion-announced

I loaded up a Sweden game this evening that was from before this, so I didn't see any of the Byzantium-specific stuff, but the new ambitions are kind of cool.  I was tangled in a bunch of holy wars in Iberia (don't ask), so I was totally poor and unable to really try out the new retinue button, but that looks interesting too. 

Plus you can apparently blind and/or castrate people if you are Byzantine.   :ye_gods:

I still have an irrational dislike for the band Kings of Leon because of this game.

As a 60 year old king of Ireland and Wales you pass the kingdom of Wales to your eldest son so that both kingdoms will stay in your grasp once the nearing inevitable death comes (otherwise Wales would have been inherited by the second son)
Next thing you know the new king of Wales is asking for your support in war against England he started in support of some minor noble's claim on an english county as if the few thousand men Wales can muster could do anything against England's 15k man stack of doom :uhrr:

Sometimes this game just infuriates me so much (but atleast it keeps being interesting)

I enjoy this game but at the same time I'm always sure I'm playing it wrong. I mean I just marry off people for amusement but its like I don't have any goal I'm trying to really accomplish.

Just tell Junior he can take care of his own mess. It's not like losing an offensive war will cost him any land.

No, you're doing it right.

it's just that the Junior is making a pretty bad impression on a neighbor who will probably return the favor (with interest) sooner or later instead of just continuing to focus on France (which will mean that I have to more careful when making a move on Scotland since England might actually side with them)

tl;dr:pissing off a big neighbor is bad 

One of the benefits of being an emperor is that you can pass on king titles and not really worry about about it.  That is until someone becomes the king of France and Scotland :ye_gods:. Thankfully the poor 7 years old kid is 2000 florins in debt and fighting three different wars.

I'm not sure if it warrants its own thread, but they've announced the next expansion, titled The Republic (http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/crusader-kings-ii-the-republic).

It's the third expansion for CK2 so it doesn't need its own thread since this thread is still pretty short.

(but I will buy this just like I've bought everything else for this game except for some music that I forgot to add but will once this hits steam)

Fourth. Nobody noticed the Aztec Invasion one? :D

Dunno if he's the same guy, but I've just taken a couple pics of this thing....

 :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real:  (they will include Essos once Paradox releases the Republic DLC)



Link:
http://ck2agot.wordpress.com/

I finally bought this on the Steam sale and booted it up tonight. HOLY FUCK. This game is dense. Like super dense. Should I have jumped right in or should I go back and play the tutorial?

The tutorial is useless. Read the Internet or learn by mucking about.

or watch some videos on youtube.

http://lparchive.org/Crusader-Kings-2/  is a pretty good overview.   

My Sweden game finally crashed and burned in about 1415, with not really enough time on the clock to fix it (failed assassination, my guy got reprisal assassinated (he murdered two babies, so I GUESS he deserved it), then HIS heir died, and the whole half-an-empire I had left and was trying to reunite just sort of became the crumbs of Denmark due to lack of actual heirs, oh well).  But just in time to start a new game when the Republic DLC comes out, I suppose!

Also, Haemish, feel confident that a lot of the fiddly stuff isn't really that important to fiddle with.

I play the game wrong, though, it's basically just a matchmaking simulator for me.  :why_so_serious:

Play the tutorials, they're not useless for learning your basic "how do I navigate to someone I want to facestab?" stuff.
Don't play as Ireland or England at the 1065 start dates.  Ireland is a fucking wreck, as you can probably tell if you look at the map, and England is in the middle of war with no less than three declared kings.
Learn your succession laws.
Abuse the fuck out of ships.  They move faster than ground armies, and the embark/disembark time is very short.

Had a pretty epic moment a couple of weeks ago before I went on vacation, playing Kingdom of Trebizond. was doing OK, Managed to carve out a duchy out of Turkey during their civil wars, full Duchy of Crimia, and also conquer Bulgaria & Wallachia but that was a load of trouble half the land & dukes were a Nestorian heresy, so major work in progress. The ERE was doing OK too so I wasn't in a position to challenge them yet (keeping Serbia, Greece, Nicosia, and Georgia together).

So on a succession, there was a predictably a huge crisis when a weak heir tookover. The rebel faction was not independent minded but pressing the claim of my brother, or nephew or something, so I don't even know if I woulda gotten game over or if he would become a playable king since he was of my dynasty.

The war was going poorly I'd managed to disperse some of their armies in Bulgaria but another significant one was taking turf in my homeland in Trebizond and my armies were at their last strength, all that remained relatively intact was my household retinue of 2500 cataphracts. So I start transporting them back home, land them in a neighbouring province and facing 3:1 odds launch the charge hoping for a divine victory, disperse this army and maybe raise some new levies, but still facing a fairly hopeless situation.

Not only do the Cataphracts win, tearing through the greater rebel levies, they capture the ducal leader of the rebellion! The crowns are saved, glory to the Komnenos! The rebels are releasedto buy some temporary peace, and less than a year later, the sickly, weak and tyrannical king dies a natural death and a more capable  young man replaces him, resolved to bring these heretic dukes to heel.

Only the direct lineage of the ruler are heirs iirc. If you don't have a child/grandchild prepare for game over.

Nah, it can be anyone from your dynasty I am pretty sure. As long as the last name is the same you should be safe.

Yeah, I've had brothers inherit before, and I've had uncles in line for the throne and it not be all WARNING: HEIR NOT OF YOUR DYNASTY or whatever.

I desperately want to like this game. I liked reading the LP posted earlier.

Then I go and try to play the demo and last about 5 minutes - I guess there's just way too much going on for my tastes.  :oh_i_see:

I picked some duchess in Italy to start as. I had her propose to some priest (how you can marry a catholic bishop I'm not sure), and then saw I could create the duchy of Modena...I quit when faced with having to somehow pick someone to give the title too.  :uhrr:

Catholic priests weren't necessarily celibate in the Middle Ages. Many were landholders as well as married.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Borgia

In my latest playthrough I had a bishop as my Spymaster at one point.  He was excellent at arranging assassinations.

The Republic DLC will be released today, $9.99; patch 1.09 already published (with a shitload of notes :D):

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?657220-1.09-Patch-Notes

http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/crusader-kings-ii-the-republic

100% certain that as long as your heir is from anywhere within your dynasty (same last name, same dynasty coat of arms) it's not a Game Over.

Try the Seniority succession law for example: In that one the oldest person in the world who is part of the dynasty inherits (excepting bastards, I think), no matter how many degrees removed they are. And that's not a Game Over. In fact, this makes Seniority the "safest" succession law, since you can't lose as long as you have some living relative somewhere, but it's balanced by getting random old dudes on your throne and permanent short rule penalties.

Looks like it's got serious balance issues, everyone's posting pictures of republics with off the charts income.  Paradox really rushed this one out the door, balance to be patched later.

Have you tried it? I was thinking of getting this DLC, but if its no fun, I will wait some time.

I've played Venice a little, like 30 years,  as the start ruler and his heir.   His heir got de-Doged when my starting guy died so there was some fussiness to figure out there.  It appears control of Venice itself goes to whoever is Doge, so the improvements I had built there are not helping me until I get re-elected.  And the new Doge promptly declared a bunch of stupid wars, which he is losing.  So the game might be doomed.   :grin:

Marriages are each costing 100-400 gold which is eating up a ton of money.  The main complaint I have seen in forumses is that if you can Plot to take someone's trade post reliably (at 150% success), you can take ALL of them.   My trade post taking-over plots are at like 30% so I have not experienced this yet.

Next DLC announced: http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/crusader-kings-ii-the-old-gods#about_game-tab

 :awesome_for_real:

The DLC will include playing as a pagan :inluv:

Looks like a great DLC.  I haven't played any of the others, but I might bite on this one if I can create a Zoroastrian empire in the middle east.

Ooh, I will buy that one. <3

Finally got back to this over the weekend. I started back on my Byzantine Prince Michael play. One of my vassals apparently hates the fuck out of me (opinion of me was -100). I've been trying to put together a plot to gank his ass since I started but haven't been able to get enough weight behind it for it to come off. So he fucks me. I appoint one of my courtiers to the Count of the holding north of the dickhead and he gets my Uncle to send me an ultimatum. Remove the new count or go to war. Fuck him, I go to war.

And lose. To the point where I am now in prison and my holdings are being run by a regent. My father, the head honcho of the Byzantine Empire is my heir. So if my guy ends up dying in prison, that means I get to keep playing as my old-ass father right?

Assuming you share a dynasty name, yes.

Has anyone tried out March of Eagles?

http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/march-of-the-eagles (http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/march-of-the-eagles)

The map and few minutes of video I watched made me think it was CK II: Napoleon edition, but I dunno. I'd like to hear your opinion if you have played.

How so? Seems very closely like Hearts of Iron: Napoleon edition, but that's almost the completely opposite focus from CK2. Where Crusader Kings focuses more on peace-time scheming and long-term planning, here you are working with short-term wartime strategy.

Mind you, I'll probably want to try March at some point, but I'd hesitate to recommend it to a pure CK2 fan for that reason.

All the Paradox games are broadly similar in terms of the engine and such so if you're not familiar with the whole range of them I can see being reminded of CK2. My expectation is mechanically it would be more like an EU game than anything else, but I haven't looked at it in detail yet.

Fuck yes, won the game.

I admit, I can't continue playing it anymore. Too much shit to manage. I'd end up hating it, but man. what a ride. What. A . Ride.

I actually inherited the Byzantine Empire from my brother (who I was plotting to kill) early on - like 1076 or something. I lasted less than a year as Emperor. I go to imprison one of my 3 brothers who ALL hate me and have dishonored me (making their imprisonment righteous) and he rebels. No problem, he only has 3 counties to suppress. Then my other shitheel brother rebels before I can put the first one down and he has a SHITTON more troops. Like every province is full of his troops from out of nowhere. Fucker sieges Constantinople with 10k troops and the most I can muster in one place is 1k. I surrender and he imprisons my bitch ass, where I still sit, 10 years later.

For someone looking to buy this shortly (if steam sales don't hurry the f up...) should i bother with the dlc and expansions?  do they add alot to the base game or can they be skipped for the sake of saving a few dollars?

essentially im comparing to original civ5 compared to g+k, i find that the extra civs and religion, more wonders really add to the depth of civ5.

hi , schpain.

whatever you do - do not  - i repeat - do not buy ass-tec invasion DLC.

1. Republic DLC - Adds playable merchant Republics as playable govt type - Money powered that focus on generating bucket of gold to hire mercs as military power. Not essential and can be unbalancing.
2. Legacy of Rome - Adds more Byzantine flavored events and retinue mechanics (standing army) - Highly recommended.
3. Sword of Islam - if you really care about playing as Islamic Kingdoms with different set of events and mechanics (decadence - multiple wives) this could be worthwhile. But since I have no desire to lead the Religion of Peace - I skipped this.
The rest you can ignore .
Up and coming expansion - Old Gods lets you play as Pagans with deeper raid mechanics. Vikings that use human sacrifices and pillage europe annually. I'm waiting for this.

Human sacrifices and pillaging of Europe?

My body is ready. :drill:

Keep in mind that the expansions only make their respective ruler types playable. The AI nations will have the added features even if you don't buy the expansions, so republics were OP (they were toned down a few days ago) even if you didn't buy it.

That said, I also recommend Legacy of Rome as the best of the three expansions yet. The Byzantine empire mechanics and story events are really fun and make a nice difference from your average catholic ruler. Republics have a ton of new features but were too OP to be fun when I tried then, maybe that's different now. Islam is the weakest expansion of the three, and only worth it if you find a 50% off sale or are really into that part of history.

And we do not speak of That Other Expansion.

I can't really compare the expansions to the vanilla game, as I bought all 3 of the expansions (and ignored the Aztec one) and only played a little as anything other than Byzantine. I will say though that the Byzantine empire is fun as fuck with tons of civil wars and intrigue options.

Cheers everyone, much appreciated.

The most important part of the game is having a good successor.
Marry a genius and pray for a good child. If not, go for Quick / Strong. Mix and match Genius with Strong spouses - for the ultimate ubermensch.
Spread the smarts around and suddenly your dynasty's fortune can turn around just like that.  :drill:

Diplomacy = Relations Bonus
Martial = Military Warfare
Stewardship = Economics
Intrigue = Good for Plotting and Defense against Plots.
Learning = Tech research Bonus

Watching the Old Gods stream right now at http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

They've put all CK2 stuff 75% off at http://www.paradoxplaza.com/shop , so if you still don't have it you can get the base game + the 3 main DLCs at about 16$ total. No idea how long the sale will remain up though.

Thanks for the heads up on the sale. I have been reading about this game here for a bit now and man it is much more fun than i anticipated.

It is really complicated though.

FYI, this sale gives you Steam keys so if you are using the Steam version - presto chango, very easy. Got the Republic for $2.50, immediately activated it through Steam.

I wish the Ruler Designer DLC was also on sale.

Also, I get jacked up pretty quick, even when I set the game to very easy. Bitches be taking my throne fast.

picked all DLC except for azztech. Good find!

Where the fuck did the last 6 hours of my life go?

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/715562/hangman.jpg)

 :awesome_for_real:

A taste of Essos (Game of Thrones mod). And no, won't be released along with Old Gods

http://ck2agot.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/dev-diary-essos-1/

Release the Vikings!  http://youtu.be/Y53_GV2aAg8

So awesome. Trying to decide if I should wait for a sale or not.

I got it today but unfortunately it doesnt do much if you're resuming from a save file. I think to get the full experience I need to start a new game.

Empire of Scandinavia  :drill:
(image spoilered due to size)

Actually even from a save file there are some interesting changes in the interface.

Oh yeah that's true. Things like the redone tech tree are there but my Vikings were still all civilized Catholics and I'm far enough along that the mongols weren't a real threat either.

edit: Cathlics? sheesh!

Yeah, I'm going to finish out my current Poland game and then really see what's new.

Gavelkind inheritance is fucking annoying.

Gavelkind is the woooooorst. I was playing Sweden, and I ate Denmark, but whoops I had two sons, ONE OF THEM GETS DENMARK SUCK IT SJOFN. So then I had to take it AGAIN. Very annoying.

Gavelkind is manageable with the right preparation.

Extra sons? Well, time to conquer somewhere and give each son I don't want inheriting a church -- it'll remove them from the inheritance pool. Can get a bit risky if your chosen heir dies, though.

There are really only so many churches, dammit! Also I am not sure if that works with the new Norse shit. Probably does, but I was playing conservatively and not pillaging as much as I should've been.

Also has anyone else started in almost-sweden? For some reason it was straight up refusing to let me select Upland. Everything else was working right, but I'd click on that county and nothing would pop up. Makes it hard to improve. ><

It still works. Its how I avoided having most of England get divvied up amongst my four heirs when Half-Dan died. Sons two through four? Churches. Worst case scenario you can just revoke a church title or two to give to your kids. Sure, it'll make your vassals hate you but all a civil war means is more land to hand out all over again, especially if you're an asshole like me and all your count-level rulers already hate you because you keep the towns/churches in their counties as your own vassals, leaving them with none (anywhere from -25 to -150 relation hit, but all their vassal money is mine!).

I started out as Half-Dan. Most of England and Ireland are mine and if there's a ruler in France, Spain, Italy, Byzantine Empire or the Muslim world who hasn't loathed me for my raiding I'd be surprised. Only had one internal war so far and will likely turn on the other rulers that are descended from Lothbrok now that Half-Dan is dead and bring all of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland into the fold. Then maybe unite the old lands under my banner as well. I'm gonna need a big land soon.. The lands of Charlemagne are getting united and they don't like my pillaging Norse pagan ass one bit.

Probably doesn't help I've made most of their wives/daughters into concubines at one time or another.. or sacrificed them to the Old Gods.

Probably give land-locked Rurik a go next game. Sack Constantinople.. take the Byzantine Empire and then Rome. The fun stuff.

You can select free-investiture law and just appoint your sons as heirs to a church. free-investiture even makes your vassals happier. The pope might get after you to change it eventually or get ex-communicated but you can always flip it back again later.

The Dynasty of Skald (Empire of Scandinavia)

I've been playing proto-Sweden. They don't work like that, given their religion is Norse.  :oh_i_see:

The Empire of Scandinavia is trucking along. I don't really raid much, I'm too busy making sure the HRE never really forms. Also human sacrifice is the best.

The Old Gods can be had for $12.00 at green man gaming with voucher:    GMG20-LLASD-D8WBQ

Not liking some of the changes. The whole retinue starting with zero morale is kinda dumb. It makes it even easier for player retinues to dominate the mid to end game.

I like it since it means that I can't just raise nearby levy to quickly crush any peasant revolts, raiders or adventurers instead I have to take the time to send my standing retinue to deal with it or let the raised levies get to high enough morale while the enemy is free to do what it wants.

Not really.
It makes merc army with cheap retinue combo really overpowered vs the pitiful AI stacks.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/OG/ZORO/01/09.jpg)

I started as the Zoroastrian count. Captured some adventurer with 600 gold. Gathered 300 gold merc went north, usurped Georgia and never looked back.

I never actually used retinues.  :why_so_serious:

I've started to now, though, because of the morale thing. But my empire is so goddamn big now, it can take them a while to squish the baby rebellions, so I use levies anyway most of the time. It also seems like every time one of my kings get uppity, WHOOPS ALL THE MERCS ARE HIRED OR DEAD FROM BEING RECENTLY HIRED BY SOMEONE ELSE. Which is fine, it's just sort of funny.

I love retinues. Free (outside of when they're getting back to full strength) and you can build them to take advantage of the strengths of the unit types (especially if you have access to a good heavy cav retinue choice, like the Byzantines). In my current Norse game (where I'm fending off a massive invasion from Lothringen, Western Francia, Eastern Francia and Aquitaine -- thankfully, as England, they can only send their troops in smaller waves allowing my retinue and levy army to mop them up) I'm going for a Huscarl heavy retinue army, but sprinkling in the archer/heavy infantry, light cavalry/heavy cavalry retinue units to round it out.

Not being able to raid is annoying, though.. can't afford to take the men away from the defensive whack-a-mole war unless I resort to mercs and the cost of mercs versus looting profits just isn't there in my game (the only real good looting target that isn't defended heavily is Venice and they still haven't recovered from the last time I looted and sieged down their cities).

Really liking the tech changes.. being able to choose where I invest is much better. Let's me focus on the techs that matter instead of the near worthless ones.

The retinues also contribute to liege army strength when doing the faction army comparison. Keeping on the low garrison levels in 800 AD, I didn't even waste manpower on expensive ones, I went for cheap skirmish and got what I wanted, a powerful siege army and stack big enough to scare the enemy levy from taking me head on when keeping the mercs on permanent hire.

Bulgaria couldn't stop my army.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/OG/ZORO/01/10.jpg)

Just gonna taxi to victory. Westwards.

Have decided I want to play some really complex strategy game and am torn between this and EU3. Any suggestions?

IMO, this is way more fun than EU3.

EU3 doesn't really have "personalities" like CK2 does so it's more of a cut and dried simulation.

Even if you were inclined to play an EU instead of CK2, I would play EU2/For the Glory over EU3, personally.

CK2 is by far the better game, but like Ingmar said, I think EU3 was a step back from EU2.  EU3 just never felt like it had any personality at all.

EU4 is coming Q3/2013 (http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/europa-universalis-iv) so I'd wait until that if you really want to play EU  :why_so_serious:

I got CK2, played twice as Ireland and still don't really understand what's going on. I have read through a lets play on the lets play archives but its obviously from some time ago and doesn't explain in enough detail what's going on.

So, I'm finally trying to get seriously into this game; not easy, I've always found Paradox games (and the strategy genre in general) quite hard, but it shouldn't come as a surprise.

I would like to ask a couple questions because I think I'm approaching the passage of time in this game incorrectly.

I'm starting with a simple Count because I want to start small: naturally, you have to plan ahead, and the "ladder", so to speak, must be climbed slowly.
---

- so, for certain councillors tasks, like "Sow dissent", you should keep the chancellor well past the potential "recall" time in order to see results?
- If I accelerate the passage of time, I get this sense that I let it skip it ahead too much, while instead I should micromanage more; what's an ideal equilibrium? I imagine that the most important thing is to setting up goals for myself and let the time pass according to that. I say this because, for now, the highlights for me is having a wild hunt in october and a summer festival in june :P

For stuff like sow dissent or research just leave it there until you need it elsewehere. Other stuff like speed up building or fabricate claim you should keep it there until the building is done or the claim has been fabricated. The recall time is really just the earliest you can switch the councillor's task/location.
As for speeding up the time it gets easier to judge it once you get experience with the game. Most of the time it's enough (unless you are actually using troops) to keep up to date with the important messages (in the top right corner) as long as you also make sure every now and then that your vassals aren't getting too unhappy or that there aren't any dangerous plots or factions in the making.

Oh, nice!  Yeah, I hated EU3, but 2 was awesome.  If they take all the good things they've learned from CK2 and Vic2 the game could be epic.

Normally in a game like this, I would be completely pissed off by how confused I normally am. However, I am so gloriously bad at this that by the time I lose, there has been so much hilarious shit that happens to my play through that I don't care so much that I barely understand the game.

That's pretty much how I feel about it.

Yeah I had a FUUUUUCK moment last night when the game throw a 70k stack at me.
I saw my levy cap has 80k. I have JUST enough to beat him.
BUT ONLY and ONLY if I'm willing to micro all that shit across my empire, gather them for one final battle.

AI was like: Problem, rk?

...It's 1 AM, I have to go work tomorrow...but fuck off, I'm gonna win, asshole. YOU CANNOT DEFEAT THE ZOROASTRIAN BASILEUS! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=KdtLkEF9KX0)

Alot of the troop micromanagement can luckily be avoided by transferring vassalages and titles to people (as long as you have a title that is above all others under your rule and you have a frim grip on it) so for example instead of having to raise levy in about every single county in England you just get a single 75k stack from the King of England when you call upon the levy there.

That 75k is his when he revolts too.
So yes, I like to keep them sub 10k.
And some vassals de jure is different. I like to wait they're properly assembled, and grant a King title to a new guy who'd love me to death.
Having a child take over when he's barely 15 is gold.
The long reign bonus is awesome - 10 years passed - and not a single faction formed even if my empire stretch from North Africa all the way to Khiva.

I keep all the king titles for my ruler.  Generates a lot of daily prestige that way.  Whats the advantage of giving them away?  Seems like everytime one of those king titles ends up belonging to somebody else, they always end up revolting.  Also, I'm god emperor of this place damnit, all the kingdoms are mine!!!

In my current Poland game, my successful old king died in the middle of a rebellion. His 20-year old son was assassinated by a plot while leading troops to crush the rebellion but got his wife pregnant with a son about two months before getting killed. Rebel aristocrat is proclaimed king, but doesn't have the stones to execute the baby heir. So I'm still in it. Baby heir is now just a duke, but his uncle the bishop is still around. When a plot forms around the bishop uncle to replace the unpopular usurper, I instruct the regents to join the plot. Eight years of civil war later, my uncle is king and I'm almost of age. My uncle lets me out of jail. I become of age and marry a princess of Hungary. I start a plot to against my uncle, fire it off, and eight years of civil war later, I'm king again. I execute my uncle immediately.

That is awesome stuff. Really not possible in a standard 4X.

Advantages:
1. Army Management
Before you give them away,
Raise levy from Kingdom A
Collect 500 levy from duchy 1 , 2 , 3 and 4

After you give them away:
Rise levy from Kingdom A
Collect 2,000 levy from the Kingdom capital.

2. Faction management
Before you give them away:
Please four dukes. Worry about their heir being a retard ambitious.

After you give them away:
Please one King. Give them a Kingdom and it's a +300 relations for a long time.
Worry about his heir? Educate him yourself.

(http://i.minus.com/iP4B1jA6g9gdf.gif)

For the HRE I see the value in having king vassals. For the Byzantines however the free duchy revocation they get is far too useful to miss out on.

Duke doesn't like you? Just take his title and give it to someone else without anyone minding. Except for the old Duke, but he's no longer your direct vassal now so who cares.

Elsewhere, I'd rather be a Mega-King than an Emperor for the quicker De-Jure-Assimilation.

For me, my kingships went out in the EMPIRE OF SCANDINAVIA because of good ol' gavelkind succession. So that was sometimes an issue, because of course that means all the kings are related to the emperor and man why did HE get to be emperor instead of meeeeee TIME TO REBEL.

That just kept things interesting, though.

The first goal I set for myself when starting a game is to get enough authority to change succession away from Gavelkind.  Then I start worrying about other stuff.

I survived just fine with Gavelkind for 100 years as Zoroastrian.
The severely decreased birth rate played to its 30% demesne advantage.

For Example:

It's harder to do as an Old God country 'cause you have to reform your religion first, and that can take a while depending on how you go about it. You can't mess with your authority before that.

It's not SO bad, though, because you can decide YEP TIME TO TAKE A NEW COUNTY at the drop of a hat, so there's usually at least a decent amount of land to share, it's just the titles issue that can be irritating.

Holy mother of fuck, how did you get that big as Zoroastrians?

Mercs. I beat an adventurer attack and got 500 from banishing him, hired 300 gold worth of mercs and go to town. Hitting Georgia and Russia.

Just saw this is listed as 75% off today only on Steam.

That includes the all the dlc as well, FYI.

Except Old Gods.

And you can get by without Old Gods for a good long time.  You'll want it eventually but chances are it will start going on Steam sales by the time you need it.

I got this during the Amazon summer sale thing and then got all the DLCs and add-ons during the Steam summer sale.

Uh. I've lost so many hours of my life to this game. It's just insanity. Soooo good.

My current fascination is starting with King Rurik (he of one of the many splinters of Rus) during the Old Gods era, reuniting the Kingdom of Rus, and then converting to the Zoroastrian religion. Then, I wage a holy war south towards Persia. Not easy so far, but fun nonetheless.

The Old Gods expansion, the main game and all the DLC is on sale on Steam today for anyone (like me) who hasn't gotten it all yet.

I now have them all since the celtic unit/portrait and dynasty shield III were on sale too
All DLC on sale except Songs of Byzantium :why_so_serious:

"The final pre-order bonus for Europa Universalis IV has been revealed, and it’s a doozy: if you purchase Europa Universalis IV before its release, you get a free full copy of Crusader Kings II. What’s more, you also get an exclusive converter program that lets you take your beloved CKII kingdom, and import it into your EUIV game!"

Guess I'll have to pre-order EU4 now  :drill:

The converter is actually something I have zero interest in and disappointed see as the third pre-order bonus. That said, they tend to be popular fan creations so I understand where they're coming from.

Also, looks like when the game releases I'll have a copy of CK 2 to give out to someone here.

I'm playing a game where I am trying to become king of Ireland. I'm not exactly sure how I'm supposed to grab more land. I'm guessing it has to do with fabricating claims, but then everyone gets all pissed off.

The converter is a mod for eu4 (even though it's a dlc for ck2). What this means is that not only will you be able to move finished saves over but if you want to play countries or religions that will not exist in eu4 they'll convert those countries with unique missions, national ideas and bump the save to 1444 regardless of the year you were in in ck2 (so for example even if you didn't want to play a ck2 game but wanted to play with the Norse religion you could start as a Scandinavian minor in the old gods start and instantly convert to a 1444 eu3 game).

This also means they'll probably update it as more dlc is released for both games.

What I want to see is how it would handle the aztecs in europe at game start  :drill:.

maybe they'll all die suddenly from small pox?

I hope there's another DLC that improves that catholic religion dynamics. It's really how poor the church mechanics are. Pope generated at random, no college of cardinals, excommunication mechanic is weak, crusades mechanics weak & random, etc.

Can you play *as* the Pope? I never even tried that. But yeah, the game more or less treats the papacy as a random event like weather or your sovereign getting the clap.

And you can sack Rome or even take it over and convert it (to norse for example) without any catholics reacting (you'll just have a new papal seat somewhere else)

You can't play as anything labelled a theocracy so no counties in Romagna/Umbria, no Bishoprics. That I don't care so much about, would just like some decent mechanics for a very important aspect of European politics.

Yeah, if they do another expansion, I'd like it to be religious themed.  Make it so that you can play theocracies, upgrade the pope mechanics, ect.  I just want to play as the Teutonic Order dammit!  Why wont you let me!!!   :cry:

I have a copy to gift away on steam (got it from the EU4 pre-order but I already own CK2 on steam). First come first serve.

Playing this now. 15 minutes in, and my son is trying to murder me.  Maybe not the best start for Ireland.

He wouldn't be much of an heir if he didn't have the initiative to try to murder you, would he?  :awesome_for_real:

Praise be to the Divine! Crusader Kings II: Sons of Abraham is announced (http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/content.php?1625-Praise-be-to-the-Divine!-Crusader-Kings-II-Sons-of-Abraham-is-announced&s=01e6eab177151a1c7938af8037e7e459)

Nice to see that CK2 hasn't been totally forgotten now that EU4 is out  :grin:

edit: especially the part "Plunge into the powerful and profitable world of Papal politics" has me excited about this dlc  :drill:

I really liked the last viking age dlc, so I will definitely give this one a try. It might just flesh out the whole game to make it feel perfect.

I like that with the expansion it sounds like you will always have some incentive to improve your relations with the pope even further (monies, choosing bishops under papal investiture), whereas until now there was no real reason to care once you reached +30 or so. I hope there's also some goodies for the Orthodox crowd in there, even if it's just a bunch of events.

Also it makes me happy that the devs mentioned that they have another big (Old Gods-sized) expansion lined up in the pipeline after this one. This game deserves being kept alive with fresh content for a long time.

Paradox just did a mega patch 2.0  :awesome_for_real:
Weekend will be burned once more.


LOG CHANGES:
As promised in the dev diary yesterday, here is the (virtually complete) change log for patch 2.0:
Old save games should be fully compatible, but we will provide a 1.111 branch on Steam if anyone should want to complete a game on the old patch level.

MAJOR
- Ironman mode
- Steam Achievements
- Steam Workshop support
- Religious (non-heretic) rebels
- Support for the metaserver dropped
- Women can now die in childbirth, and there can be other complications, like illness and sickly infants

GAMEPLAY
- Waived the creation conditions (culture, religion) for most kingdoms and empires for human players
- Having a marriage alliance now increases opinion by 30 (quite useful vs liege or vassals)
- Reduced the overall revolt risk
- Fixed a bug where you could not fire the leader of the right flank if the left flank had no leader
- You now get and lose the -1 "raised troops" opinion penalty from vassals every 61 days instead of every 73 days
- You no longer get any liege levies from vassals with a negative opinion of you
- There is now a +50 opinion bonus when a liege is the primary defender in a war against foreigners
- Increased the opinion bonus to +75 when a liege is the primary defender in a holy war (and improved the check)
- A Holding owner's personal martial skill now affects the levy size (exported as HOLDING_LEVY_SIZE_OWNER_MARTIAL_BASE and HOLDING_LEVY_SIZE_OWNER_MARTIAL_MULT)
- Armies on ships are capped at 50% morale
- Levy maintenance costs increased by 50%
- Mercenary maintenance increased by 20%
- Increased the cost of reinforcing retinues by 20%
- Levy sizes now depend on the de jure region they are in (the most in the capital county, the least outside the capital empire.)
- No longer allowed to retract barony tier vassals from their de jure count
- Murderers are now revealed in Observe mode (no "suspicious accidents")
- Non-theocracy lieges are now only allowed to create single county or barony temple vassals (bishoprics)
- Non-theocracy lieges can no longer create neighboring county tier bishops
- You are now only allowed to have a certain percentage of counties under theocracy vassals (MAX_THEOCRACY_COUNTIES_IN_REALM)
- You are now only allowed to have a certain percentage of counties under republic vassals (MAX_REPUBLIC_COUNTIES_IN_REALM)
- Added major events for the enabling of Christian Crusades (the CB) and Holy Orders
- Added major events for the enabling of Muslim Jihads (the CB) and Holy Orders
- Added major events for the enabling of Pagan Great Holy Wars (the CB)
- Added some more detail to many heresies (Cathars can have female priests, etc)
- Added heads of religion for five heresies: d_fraticelli, d_iconoclast, d_yazidi, d_ibadi and d_hurufi
- Added major decisions to create the Fraticelli and Iconoclast religious heads
- Can now elect females as bishops in versions of Christianity scripted to allow that
- Fixed a bug with mercenaries and holy orders not disbanding their special troops
- Rebalanced the Volley Harass combat tactic
- Pagan festivals now provide the advertised opinion boost to vassals
- Heirs denied the chance to join the Varangian Guard no longer get the event where they return home upon inheriting
- The Saoyshant Descendant trait is now properly granted to grandchildren when becoming the Saoyshant
- The Saoyshant Descendant trait is now granted to all descendants regardless of gender
- Removed the checks in certain events for the obsolete Duchy of Oxford
- The heretic_friend_timer modifier is now properly hidden in event 100180
- Councillors in Republics now use titles appropriate to their religion and culture
- The Pentarchy events will now only trigger for Orthodox Byzantine/Roman rulers
- Baron-tier Patricians are now able to fabricate claims
- Eunuchs will no longer ask to be given a title
- Concubines will no longer have marriage ambitions as they cannot get married
- Concubines can now have the ambition to have a daughter
- Added non-Christian/non-Muslim option to event 4140
- Characters of a religion where priests are not allowed to marry will now divorce their wives if ordained
- Traits blocking inheritance no longer apply for Temple titles
- Fixed some bugs with how dead spouses are handled
- Most rebel units now disband if they win
- Fixed a bug with the 'potential' check of traits after a religion change
- Made adventures a bit less common
- Corrected some minor errors in various pulse events
- Increased the default bishop opinion of the Pope
- Increased the opinion of their liege for invested bishops
- Lowered the opinion bonus for bishops vs their liege under Free Investiture
- Slightly lowered tax rates from bishops to both the Pope and antipopes
- New randomly generated bishops and mayors now get the local liege's culture rather than the top liege's
- Installing an antipope as Pope now makes him like you a lot more
- Added event where rebels kill random characters after taking a holding (TOG.1190)
- Cut the Bektashi Shiite heresy
- The decisions to create Hungary and Leon can no longer be taken when at war
- Norse Pagan Reformed barons now use the correct title
- Event 100180 will no longer trigger for heretic characters
- Event 39001 will no longer trigger for heretic characters
- Fixed a bug where minor baronies could go independent when they should not
- Fixed a bug with the war score in revoke vassal title plots
- Reduced the amount of non-claimant adventures out of player empires
- Female rulers can now always get married, even in religions with polygamy and concubinage
- Made prepared invasions by AI vassals in player empires rarer
- Fixed a crash bug with real fathers set from event effects sometimes being deleted
- The Aztecs, Mongols and Seljuks now spawn with more but smaller regiments
- Added more severe opinion penalties to assassination plots being discovered
- Fixed a bug where counties could be deprived of _any_ holder through 'gain_settlements_under_title' and related event effects
- Fixed a bug with the subjugation CB where the winner could become the vassal of the loser
- Fixed a bug with event 3686 where you could fall in love with close relatives
- Fixed a rare memory leak in diplomatic actions
- Fixed a minor glitch with the Aztec emperor appearing in and leaving your court on arrival
- Fixed a bug where the grant minor title message would always say "REGENT"
- Fixed a bug preventing the granting of bishoprics to females even if the religion allows it
- Fixed a bug where the "cousin" relation would not always be correctly calculated
- A character's original birth name is now shown in the tooltip if he or she has a regnal name (e.g. popes)
- Tweaked the outcome of the Improve Relations chancellor job. The effect lasts longer, but is less powerful and somewhat harder to get.
- Fixed a potential CTD in declare war interaction
- Fixed a CTD caused by attacking siege leader dying while siegeview was open
- When ransoming a courtier that has money, that character's money will now be used towards paying the ransom, and if they have enough money for the whole ransom their liege will not have to pay anything at all
- Opinion boost for releasing a prisoner is now +5 opinion per tier of their primary title (so +5 for a Baron, +10 for a Count etc).
- Entering observe mode will now automatically lift FoW
- Charinfo console command is now a proper toggle and does not require additional input
- Added a bottleneck logic to battles where the defender benefits from the surrounding terrain to make the opponent fight on his terms.
- Failing flank is much more punishing now, a surrounded flank or a failing mmid-flank are catastrophic.
- Tweaked Teutonic order to be more infantry oriented.
- Holy orders and Mercenaries are now split into several sub units which can be put on different flanks or different units.
- Now generates courtiers to mercenaries and holy orders so they can be put as leader for the sub-units.
- Fixed some bugs with the customization DLC's renaming of landed titles with cultural names.
- Fixed a bug where fabricate claims plot wouldn't end when the title was destroyed
- Fixed a bug where all constructed settlements were counted as trade posts
- Fixed a bug for multiplayer character selection which enabled multiple people to play as the same character
- Fixed a bug where invaders of the same kingdom weren't hostile towards eachother
- Fixed a bug where removal of certain traits caused the game to stop responding
- Fixed a bug where attached units would remain attached even if the leading unit was an enemy
- Fixed a bug where AI didn't invite people to the fabricate claim plot
- Fixed a bug where you could having a landed title with zero holdings under it's control
- Fixed a bug where character attributes for characters were in some cases incorrectly read
- Fixed a bug where all baron subvassals were transferred upon title usurpation

INTERFACE
- Fixed a bug where titular titles would hide certain other titles
- Fixed a bug where character editor property values went out of range
- Family tree now shows dynasty relation
- Fixed a bug where dead popes would have the incorrect character portrait
- Fixed a bug for the title loss notification for republics.
- Fixed a bug with the ruler consort title being shown for the spouse a day after the ruler dies
- Fixed a bug in some messages with duplicate titles ("King King Karlmann")
- Fixed a bug with some dynasty names of event spawned characters
- Dying a "natural death" below the age of 45 is now called dying of "poor health" instead
- Added a missing tooltip for why you cannot nominate a bishop successor if the current bishop is not of your religion
- If there has only been a single ruler by a certain first name, the regnal number is no longer shown
- Improved the entry texts in the title history view a bit
- The black bastard blood drop is now shown correctly with the new bastard dynasty system
- Lowered the priority of faction messages to reduce spam
- Lowered the priority of heir choices under elective monarchy to reduce spam
- Added 'Random Character' button when selecting character
- Added 'Split in Half' button for units
- Player will no longer get a notification of being besieged if the besieging army is too small to take the settlement.
- Support for native clipboard functionality.
- Support to select text using keyboards
- Added Quick-Split icon menu to quickly split army based on mercenaries, holy orders and retinues.
- Tweaked amount of ships and shipbuilding tech for merchant republics.

DATABASE
- Changed some time period inappropriate names in Serbia
- Changes to the bastard children of Antso IV of Navarra
- Added the missing mother for Jeanne de Beaumont
- Various title corrections in the Latin Empire bookmark
- København is now called Hafn when held by Norse characters
- Changed some time period inappropriate names in Malta and added Greek versions
- Changes to the Plantagenet monarchs
- Corrections for the Dukes of Silesia and other related characters
- Changed some time period inappropriate names in Estonia
- Louis II of Italy now has the correct Wikipedia link
- Fixes and additions for FitzAlans and early Stewarts
- Additions and corrections to the Roman Emperors of the Byzantine Empire title history
- Eudokia is now the Byzantine Empress for six months in 1067
- Added additional names for Ecumenical Patriarchs to choose from
- Fixed the dynasty of the several bastards belonging to the de Barcelona dynasty
- The Duke of Portucale now has an heir in 867
- Fixes to several Slavic dynasty names
- Character 217501 now has the correct Wikipedia link
- Updated Counts of Gilan to ensure proper regnal numbers
- Corrections to Wladyslaw II the Exile and his close family
- Added a dynasty for Grand Prince Feodor of Novgorod
- Hubert de Burgh is now correctly the Earl of Kent and Baron of Montgomery
- Miscellaneous Capetian/Valois fixes
- Anglo-Saxon England now has feudal elective law
- Added new Coats of Arms for Dregovichs, Severians and Radimichs
- Reduced effects of terrain on movement speed
- Battles in Crusade-type wars now only have half the normal impact on warscore

AI
- Powerful kings and emperors will now sometimes set up antipopes
- Cynical rulers may now sometimes switch back to Free Investiture law
- AI characters will now hold Pagan festivals
- Magyars are now more willing to convert even before 930
- Fixed a bug where the AI would sometimes not marry at all if the only suitable candidates were of too low rank
- Fixed a bug that was causing AI armies consisting of a single large regiment to endlessly split off and reabsorb empty regiments
- AI: Will no longer split a stack if the split would create a tiny useless army
- AI: Now takes culture, religion and province wealth into consideration when choosing capitals
- AI: Much higher prio on holding to to the counties in its primary duchy
- AI: More prio on keeping its demesne concentrated in a few duchies
- AI: Will no longer accept a matrilineal marriage if the betrothal was non-matrilineal and vice versa
- When marrying betrothed characters, the AI will now always propose the type of marriage agreed upon in the betrothral
- Fixed some inconsistencies in AI battle odds evaluation
- Increased AI prio on building shipyards
- Fixed a bug that was preventing the AI from starting wars against characters with only barony level holdings
- AI: Higher prio on helping friendly armies in battle
- AI: Better at coordinating attacks together with their allies
- Fixed a bug that was causing the defensive war AI to not work correctly
- AI: Will no longer accept giving away women as concubines to characters whose religion they will not intermarry with
- AI: Will no longer destroy King titles if AI_EMPEROR_CREATES_KINGDOMS is set to 1
- Fixed a bug where the AI would incorrectly calculate retreating units as potential combatants when deciding to move to a province
- AI: Fixed a bug where two AI armies from the same country would change their orders back and forth due to reacting to what the other army was doing
- AI: Will no longer retreat from incoming enemies if it is already moving to attack those enemies
- AI: Muslim characters no longer consider prestige effects when determining who to marry
- Fixed a bug that was preventing the AI from reinforcing allies in battle if the enemy army was moving before starting the battle
- AI: More prio on besieging contested provinces when the enemy has ticking warscore
- AI: Better at coordinating its armies between fronts
- AI: Better at coordinating its armies with allies
- AI: Will now keep imprisoned characters that they don't want to execute/banish/revoke locked up for a while instead of instantly releasing them. The minimum lockup time depends on the importance of the character.
- Fixed several 'lockups' in army AI where armies would get stuck bouncing between two destinations
- AI: Will now consider the actual composition of an army when determining its strength, rather than just looking at numbers
- AI: Now factors in effects of terrain when determining whether to attack with an army
- Rationality now affects how well AI will calculate odds of success when attacking with its armies
- AI: Will no longer overcommit when pursuing small enemy stacks
- AI: Less priority on pursuing small stacks when there are more important targets
- AI: Will now prefer fighting in its own territory when in a defensive war against opponents of superior or equal strength
- AI: Will now consolidate several armies into a large HK stack when fighting a defensive war against a superior opponent
- AI: Will now create Hunter-Killer stacks to chase enemy armies
- AI: More prio on keeping its armies close together when advancing in enemy territory
- AI: Will now lift sieges to attack enemy armies when appropriate
- AI: Will now split up its armies into medium-sized stacks to avoid attrition
- AI: Will no longer assault unless it has at least 10:1 numbers

MODDING
- Added support in traits for tolerance of other religion groups
- Added 'on_vassal_accepts_religious_conversion', which now basically handles all the logic of the Demand Conversion interaction
- Added "evil_god_names" to religions, to be used in event texts
- Added a priest title to religions, that can be used in text
- Added trigger 'is_father_real_father'
- Added trigger 'any_spouse_even_if_dead'
- Added 'priests_can_inherit' to religions
- Added trigger 'historical' (character)
- Added 'score' console command cheat
- Added trigger 'score'
- MTTH in on_action events should now be written 'weight_multiplier'. Added log error.
- Added proper event id system for errors logs, including the namespace
- Added 'family_palace' event target
- Added 'on_become_doge' on-action
- Added trigger 'republic_total_num_of_trade_posts'
- Events with 'hide_window' now fire a valid event option if there are any
- Added system for events marked 'notification' to be shown as messages rather than full pop-up windows
- Added on-action 'on_county_religion_change'
- Added trigger 'has_heresies'
- Added event target 'parent_religion_head'
- The event target 'religion_head' now also works in province scope
- Added trigger 'any_province_holding'
- Added effect 'any_province_holding'
- Added effect 'random_province_holding'
- Added succession law 'Appointment' for feudal vassals of Holy Orders (titles revert back to the liege on death)
- Added event effect 'banish_religion = X'
- Added 'can_retire_to_monastery' flag to religions
- Added 'jewish_opinion' to traits
- Added 'dynasty = culture' possibility to the 'create_character' effect
- The trigger 'has_empty_holding' now also counts holdings under construction
- Exported LEVY_MAINTENANCE_FACTOR to defines
- Added 'monthly_income' field to landed titles for extra income
- Temporary modifiers can now be inherited
- Exported some AI raid parameters to defines
- Added 'hold_election' event effect for merchant republics
- Added support for female versions of event pictures
- Added 'force_picture' field to events, to ignore cultural, religious, and gender variants of event pictures
- Fixed a bug with the effect 'random_sibling' (it included dead siblings)
- Fixed some bugs with the 'can_marry' trigger
- Added 'GetFromFromRelation' text
- Added on_action 'on_adulthood'
- Added battle_warscore_mult setting to cb_types, this modifies the warscore gained from battles in wars using that CB
- Increased the number of galleys gained from shipyards
- Exported define AI_ALWAYS_CREATES_DUCHIES
- Exported define BASE_AI_ARMY_SIZE
- Added prevent decadence trait value.
- Fixed so titles can have their own graphical culture type.
- Added support for any triggers to count matches.
- Added various new on_action hooks to support the achievements.
- added like_better_than trigger
- Added event scope text hooks for dates.

CONVERTER
- Fixed trigger issues for the default national ideas from EU4. Now you should get national ideas based on your culture.
- Added Jerusalem Ideas.
- Added Knights Templar Ideas.
- Added Israel Ideas.
- Added Jewish religion.
- Added Jewish cultures.
- Added support for major heresies to be converted to EU4.
- Added missing horde files.
- Fixed bug where Aztec became eastern tech group.
- Now the Holy Roman Emperor no longer gets cores on his old vassals in EU4.

I'd be sure to start a new game in CK2 after this patch if the dlc wasn't coming next week already (so I'll hold off until then)  :drill:

Finally the martial stat will have a more important effect in the game! The whole reworking of combat is definitely also looking good. This makes me look forward to having to restart  my games once again, when the new dlc hits us.

100 Martial Lustful Lunatic Possessed Viking named Oglaf.

 :drill:

If you call him Korgoth of Barbaria and write a Radicathialon I will read it :D

(Reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep65rr-9qjQ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep65rr-9qjQ)

I didn't really like the old gods, raiding was too much tedious micromanagement.

They should add a way to automate it: set your army/fleet out, set auto-loot on with initial target destination, then they loot around until they fill up, auto retreating to ships the moment defenders march an army towards the province.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/daily/18/must-not.jpg)
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/daily/17/must_not_fap.jpg)

Jew DLC is out guys.
Bought it last night.
Playing Orthodox now and noticed several new options under intrigue:
- Go on Pilgrimage, much like Muslims. Once in a life time.
- Borrow money from the Jews.
- Remove all jews from your lands. (This cancels the debts at diplomacy cost  :why_so_serious:)

What do you think of the new levy system and combat system?

My only complain so far is that the iron man mode doesn't allow the use of ruler designer even to name your dynasty etc. (I like naming the dynasty and the first ruler as something different and then seeing how those names pop up along the way during the game in the next generations)

Vast empire is no longer capable of rofl-stomping that easily due to increased levy upkeep cost and reduced levy amount if you are raising troops outside of dejure territories.
I've not experimented enough to go in-depth, but in general there's a marked loss of power for traditional 'blob' that would form in game.

I'm definitely itching for a restart, but my current navarran-bulgarian kingdom game is too interesting to abandon.

Also, don't skimp on martial skill. 0 Martial = -50% levy.

If you haven't gotten Sons of Abraham yet, it's on sale for 10% off on Green Man Gaming (http://www.greenmangaming.com/) plus they have a 25% off coupon code (use code GMG25-DW6L1-6XGZ9) this weekend - total price is $6.75.

Catholics are broken.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/Rayray/012/02.jpg)
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/Rayray/012/03.jpg)

Man I have such a love/hate relationship with this game. I will play the shit out of it and I'm doing really well. Then I get one or two bad rulers and my country blows up. I ragequit and don't play again for a few months.

The fun part is dealing with adversity otherwise it's too easy. Ironman mode is great for this it really removes the temptation to save scum.

I do this too, I'll have a bad run of kings dying early (or occasionally, REALLY LATE, such that it's his great goddamn grandson taking over at age 3) and everything goes sideways and the AI of course smells weakness so EVERYONE IN THE WORLD declares war on me and then it's just a huge catastrofuck and I ragequit and sulk for a while.

On the other hand, when the rolling UR NOT THE BOSS OF ME revolts time themselves right, it feels pretty good to crush a bunch of them in a row.

I actually love it when things go bad, even if it sometimes means I just have to start a new game. It feels right.

I started a new game with the new DLC, picked the little kid in Alexandria under the theory that SOA has some new Muslim stuff.  He inherited a bunch of Egypt when he dad died after a decade or two.  Game's been going pretty well, on leader #3 or 4, and we have the Empire of Abyssinia now and it is just about the year 1000.  Best Muslim game I've had by far - usually I get stomped by Catholics immediately after starting.  So I expect it to fall to pieces soon.

I'm racing my Persian empire for the prospects of the Mongolian invasion while trying to purge the Muslims from Middle East as Persia.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/Rayray/021/persia.jpg)

By the grace of Jesus Christ, the Sole Protector of Man, the Blood Ravens shall not falter.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/Rayray/021/blud.jpg)

Just had the work of 2 generations of rulers go down the drain when playing a variation of Venician merchant. I conquered Sicily and when my current head of the family died and I lost the seat of the patrician I declared independence but unfortunately the new patrician was really rich and could roll out lots mercenaries. As I was forced to accept defeat and my leader was imprisoned the final blow came when Italy suddenly declared war the following year (conquest of Sicily) and the patrician was powerless to stop them (and so I watched from the prison as Italy took all my holdings).  :awesome_for_real:

I'm looking forward to the Mongolian invasion myself.
I've grown attached to my Empire and reveled in backstabbing every other neighbors and interfered with faraway Pagan affairs.
I just went Free Investiture to spite and install my own. Mwahahahaha. Soon, soon.

Yeah, I REALLY need an ironman mode.  I am a save scumming addict.  I cannot help but save before important decisions, and go back to reloads when things go badly.  I cannot understand how you guys could rage quite the game before they added it in.  When things go bad, reload!  

I always keep telling myself I'll play a game where I don't, but then that always falls apart when things get rough.  Need to keep forcing myself to play Ironman modes only in all games if I can.  I was trying that with xcom, but after about 70 to 80 (no joke) failed Ironman classics, had to resort ot just normal classic so I could reload when I fucked up.

The most challenging part (and the most rewarding) of CK2 is when things go really wrong (and you are able to salvage a hopeless looking situation... though sometimes it takes many decades to climb back into power). Atleast for me the hardest part of learning to play CK2 was to learn to accept defeats and keep playing (instead of restarting).

Oh I agree.  The most interesting games are ones where you accept what happens and dont reload.  What I'm saying is that I've come to the conclusion I'm physically incapable of doing that.   :awesome_for_real:

oldie but goodie

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/fool.png)

Well it would not be first time in Byzantine history that a loyal but popular underling was prosecuted by the Emperor.. He should be glad that it was only his balls that got cut.

You get the best moments like that. Most epic was a trebizond/byzantine game, everything falling to pieces in a civil war, my levies shredded, heartland under siege, all I had left were my cataphract retinues, charged them into one of their armies at 1:2 odds, routed their center, and captured my brother the rebel leader, saving the day. Wouldn't of happened if I just save scummed to before the revolt started.

Sometimes we get too fixated on expansion, expansion, expansion and take any setback event too hard, just fixate on taking a bee line route from count to emperor in 3 generations. This removes a large part of the gameplay, and ultimately fun.

I'm usually content to be king (I only made one empire ever, the VIKING HORDES needed an emperor, obvs). The most fun I had recently was making Poland. I kept waffling on making it Catholic or not, though. I decided reforming our pagan selves was too big a pain in the ass eventually, though. Then I ate Hungary. Then I had three kings die in about four years. Didn't really hold shit together after that. :(

The silliest thing I did was give my heir Scotland (I was the ~queen~ of Ireland and Scotland at the time) just to see what he'd do. And he decided to declare war on England like a genius, which resulted in him getting a righteous ass kicking. Good job, dumb ass.

The most family murder I did (I don't usually murder shitty heirs/extra heirs/whatever, I try to roll with it instead) was when I was Croatia. There is some sort of moron gene in that family line, because my first heir was slow. His sister murdered him (after offing her other idiot brother, presumably as a warning shot) and became queen, which I was fine with because she was normal. But she had two idiot children and one normal one. Deciding that since she was ALREADY a kinslayer, I murdered the shit out of the two idiots and married the third one off to a GENIUS in the hopes that maybe the next generation wouldn't be stupid. This hope was futile, however, as her son's first son was also an idiot. So he got murdered too. That kid's brother was a genius, though, so he got to live. Clicking around in her family tree during a slow part, I noticed a LOT of people in her family seemed to be married to their cousins, which may explain why so many of my heirs were morons in that game.  :oh_i_see:

She eventually became THE GREAT and the Pope totally forgave her for being a kinslayer, so obviously she went to heaven. She was the best.  :heart:

Stories like this are why I can't really get into Europa Universalis (4). The characters and all the weird stuff they get into is what keeps me coming back to CK2 alot more than just the basic (by the numbers) empire building.  :grin:

I just broke 5 truces in a row. Like a bawse.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/Rayray/027/19.jpg)
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/Rayray/027/20.jpg)

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/Rayray/024/sodoge.png)

The  real :uhrr: is that it has gotten 112 replies.

It just got locked by a mod.  :grin:

It's a joke on the paradox forums to make these sorts of troll posts. Well done.

I've had this game for awhile but I just started playing it awhile ago. I feel like I'm doing something wrong; I'm playing the ez mode Holy Roman Empire but everything goes to hell fast.

How do sieges work? The AI can land grab quickly but the only way I've managed is to just sit there and wait them out. I don't think the tutorial went over that, but I'll check again.

Sieges: Attacker needs numerical superiority to accelerate the siege. If Defender > Attacker - you can never win the siege.
If you have more than 3-5 times the number, it might be a good idea to call an assault.
This will inflict high casualty but accelerate it.
Keep in mind that sieges favor archers. So if you have a high archer count, you'd notice sieges go quicker (projectiles how do they work?

To assault, click on the county under siege, next to the attacker is a red button. Click to assault.

Managing a large kingdom is actually pretty hard until you get used to it. Even though the difficulty looks low on HRE, it is actually easier to start as a count. Ireland is popular for a beginner.

If you have old gods dlc then an early start as some petty chief in Scandinavia is probably the easiest and lets you get into expanding your territory early on (compared to having to get a de jure claim as an Irish count etc)

If I have king of Ireland as an ambition it says I get to use the Subjugation Cassisus Belli. However, I can never figure out how to use it as it doesn't come up in the options to attack my neighbor.

That ambition only works against rulers of Irish counties who are not of your religion. So if you are Christian you can only use it on the Norse rulers in Ireland. 

So how the hell do I conquer Ireland?

fabricate claims, or get claims through marriage, eventually usurp/create ducal titles and then subjugate counties with du jure claims.

Ok time to start my game over then. I got murdered by my bastard son way too early.

Aw, claw your way back up from whoever you are now!  It's the CK2 way!

I refuse to play as the son that murdered me when I didn't know what I was doing.

^Yeah I would recommend just keep going unless it's game over. Stick with ironman mode too.

Pay careful attention to who you marry, and your also your sons (also brothers & nephews). Through the wives inheriting claims from their mothers and fathers is a great way to get them into your dynasty. Be ready to press them at succession event. So in Ireland, don't bother marrying foreign princesses, or duke's daughters. Marry the daughters of Irish counts.

But THAT guy knows what he's doing!

Starting over, and going from there. Marrying in Ireland. Will do.

Another possibility if you are a duke with spare counties or baronies, is to invite claimants and give them one of your spare titles. Then use his claimant to attack and conquer whoever he has a claim on. Afterwards you could revoke his title(s) at your leisure, or let him rule in your name. Rinse repeat ad nauseum. It does require good diplomacy and/or a bag of money to get them to join once in while.  

I actually generally prefer to marry for alliances rather than inheritance.  Alliances are (potential) help right now this instant to do whatever, inheritance is possibly free land 20 years in the future if all your plans go right etc etc.   Granted, alliances sometimes flake out on you, and you are relying on the computer's ability to bring help when and where you need it but they are often very very useful.

I don't remember what, if anything, the tutorials tell you about alliances but when you're looking over marriages, a little blue flag in the corner means this will get you one.

use your daughters for alliance

When you first start a game as a single county ruler, don't pick this ambition. Instead, if you are unmarried, go for marriage ambition. Pick a good bride.
When you first start, prioritize Stewardship. Find genius/quick wife if you can - hopefully it will go down to your descendants, leading to a brighter future for your dynasty.

Once that's done, pick ambitions to improve every ruler statistics to 8, to get that sweet prestige pops.
Prestige boosts relations - and absorbs prestige hits if you chose to marry your children to the lower houses.
Obviously going to negative prestige is going to hit your vassal loyalty down, so try not let it happen.

Don't unpause till you set your council tasks too.
Chancellors (Diplomats) don't really have much to do early on. You can try fabricating claims if you wish. But the gold cost is prohibitive and he might die from counter-assassins.
Marshall should stay home and train levy for the time being.
Stewards should definitely collect taxes, it will improve your income just a teensy bit - but sometimes he got a payoff event and give you a sizeable sum.
Spymasters - there's no better task for them than to steal tech. Send them faraway to a county where the liege has weak intrigue for more success.
Court Chaplain - he's better on research duty. Once you conquer heretical lands, his conversion needs to be called upon.

Going conqueror mode is tempting at the start, but in my experience it's best to accumulate wealth first as a weak count.
Wait a year and see how the norse raid patterns are like, should they assault in great frequency, try to build up levy boosters to beat them back.
Nothing is worse than having less levy and getting pillaged by raiders every year. They may even take your wife/daughter and make her their concubine!
So you have a pile of cash and wonder - what else is there in this game if I can't engage in military campaigns - well another good way to spend gold is to go for events. Hunting, feasting, etc. These generate prestige/traits but may lead to other bad things.

Have fun!

Ok, so I switched to Ireland, but the pace of army building is really slow, to the point it's suicide to attack another area 3 generations in. I'll try to build up wealth and steal tech and see if I do any better.

Afternoon gents,

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/BB/MD03/PRE/02.png)
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/BB/MD03/PRE/03.png)

Reporting live from Paradox Forum.

Kind of weak trolling since the earliest starting date is late 800s but nice to see people are still trying  :why_so_serious:

This is inspiring me to go troll the war thunder forums about the lack of muslim nations in the game.

Ok I apologize. The tutorial appears to be broken and my eyes are too old (yes just my eyes  :why_so_serious:) to wade through posts looking for specific answers. I'm having the the following issues:

1. Naval deployment/management. This is the most frustrating thing in the game IMO. I try to play it like I would any Civ game: stack my ships and stack my army, load up army, then away I go. I can't for the life of me get my ships where I want them to go. I thought I had it figured out that you can only direct ships to go to physical port, but that doesn't work either. Right now what I do is just levy fleets, try to divide my forces to fit into each, and then take off, but that is so time consuming. Is there a better way?

2. What exactly do I need to do to get higher crown authority? (I want to get to medium I believe so vassals can't fight each other)

3. I don't seem to have as many troops in a county as the pc does, despite having more advancements in just about everything (in some cases i have 50% defense forces).

4. I believe the answer to number three is low Martial. My heirs are usually high Dips with low Martial. Do I need tutors with high Martial?

5. Are the amount of holdings a county has set in stone? (if one starts off with 2, is there a way to increase it to 3?)

Ok that's enough for now. I really love this game, maybe too much lol.

I'm still not the greatest at this game but I can probably answer a few of them:

1. Are you joining your fleets? You can see how many troops each fleet holds to make sure you have enough room. Once you get to where you want to land, just select the troops and click on where you want to go.

2. There may be some other mechanism I'm not aware of, but you can raise or lower crown authority once in your leader's lifetime. Bump it up one, wait until he dies, bump it up again.

3. There are a lot of factors here. The improvements you have built in your holdings, your other laws, I think even how well your vassals like you could all make a difference.

4. I always go for diplomacy, especially for a larger kingdom because it makes vassals easier to handle. I specifically marry someone with very high diplomacy because your spouse will add to your overall score.

5. You can increase the number of holdings in some counties. If you look at the main screen, you will see an empty box that can be clicked on to create another holding. They are expensive, and probably not worth it in the early game.

I don't know how to join the fleets. For example if they come from different counties, for some reason I can't get them all in the same place. If I could that would solve 90% of my problems.


I'm fairly certain it's not available in the early game but I'll double check.


I think I see what I've been doing wrong on these: I've been assuming that when you click on the county, the barony on the top right was the accumulative of the entire county, not a separate holding on its own.

Also: why do some holding auto improve and others don't?

You join fleets just like troops. Send them all to the same spot, select them all and there is a button at the top to do it. Not having the game open I forget exactly which one. I think it is blue and has arrows pointing in at the center or something.

There may be other conditions that allow authority changes. It might be that no vassal can have a negative opinion of you.

As far as holdings go, I believe the screen you are looking at shows the number of defenders in the hold. For overall troop numbers you can raise, you find that in the military tab. I think some holdings auto improve because your vassal pays to have them improved. If you own the hold, then it won't improve unless you do it.

In order to join the fleets, they have to occupy the same space right? What I'm saying is I can't get them all into the same location if they start in different areas. Maybe I need to re-install or something but it's a hassle.

1) Raise all fleets
2) Select all of them (easiest way is to zoom out, hold Alt and drag a big rectangle over all your lands)
3) Right click a sea region just off your coast
4) Wait until all ships arrive, then click the merge button

At which of those steps does it break down for you?

How much your vassals like you is a huge factor in how many troops you get from them.

step 3, bringing the ships close enough to the coast. I can never get the ships close enough to land in order to embark. I try to click near land and it either doesn't respond at all or the ship goes off in some random area (usually in general vicinity, but again not close enough to (un)load.

There are marked zones on the sea. Any one of them that borders on land can be disembarked from. I suspect you're doing something wrong but I haven't played recently enough to give you a step by step on it.

Ships can only dock onto port that you own. You cannot dock in a foreign port unless your troops have controlled - AH FUCK IT

Heh, I never bother docking. I always make my guys swim.

Making them swim is the only thing I do right.  :why_so_serious:

So in my last attempt, I managed to limit myself to only 3 reloads. In hindsight I wish I had been more disciplined, because there were multiple opportunities for me to restart, but I played it out anyway and it worked out. Right now I've solidifed Ireland and Wales and trying to take over Scotland by breeding them out.

England is going to be a major problem though. I was hoping I could take advantage of infighting but they seem to have an inexhaustible amount of troops, civil war or no.  I blew over 2k in gold on mercs, brought in allies with 10k armies (I had 20k by myself) won almost every major engagement, and for some reason I was still losing. 

You need to capture territories.
Enemies capital cities are worth more War Score.
In general I hate fighting huge wars and prefer to take out my enemy piece by piece.
But it gets too easy yes.

I'll probably pick this up since it's 75% of on steam right now.

Any "mandatory" DLC I should pick up as well ?

All the DLC except for the Aztec (The Sunset Invasion) is good.  Since all the DLC is on sale (well, except for the latest one) along with the game, just get everything except the Aztec.  Its cheap and its worth it.

That's for the actual dlcs. You can skip all the song packs, unit packs and stuff like dynasty shields unless you are really into the game and even then it's just fluff. Also the eu4 save converter is useless unless you have eu4 and actually plan on doing a mega playthru.

Yes, but all that extra stuff is so cheap anyways, and almost nothing with the 75% off, may as well grab it all anyways.   :awesome_for_real:

And if you are planning on getting EU4, the save converter is actually pretty cool.  Amazed it actually works so wel!  I'm going to see if I can setup an EUIV game based on the screwed up world of my Empire of Scandavia CK2 game.

Just finished a Pomerania playthrough, I tried Romuva pagan religion - it was a chore, nothing works, got no boats to raid, defending against infidels is a bitch with the allies being intentionally stupid or something.
Hence, I told myself to just go Catholic - the Jews are willing to lend money to the followers of the Cross - the temples no longer send their tithes to me, but with the Jews and Papal funds as safety, I managed to repel 5-6 Pagan invasions from Norse and Slavs. Eventually I formed the Kingdom of Pomerania and slowly took most of Lithuania and Denmark - forming the Wiendish Empire.

Once that is done - I decided to exploit the Karling Konnection to the west - at first I thought of claiming the Rus while the rest of the west squabble among themselves - but I decided why bother?
I sourced for a Prince Robert Karling with 3 claims to the Kingdom of Italy, Lothangaria and France - grant him a minor city and went all out with 2 merc companied and 5000 retinues and 10,000 levies.
The result? A three Serene Republic owned by a single Karling. His levy is too low to challenge me and it's easy to please him with gold and educated heirs etc.

Stopped Game Screenshot since this is pre-1000 AD and I know for sure nothing will stop me once my liege dies and I install an Anti-Pope.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/Pomerania/Wiendish%20Empire.jpg)

Was fun.

Mongols Arrival - Kingdom of Georgia

1254 AD
They said King Davit VI lost his mind, but the Great King's title is well earned.
Depressed at the current state of Orthodox's downfall and Byzantine's decline - the King enthrusted everything to his 16 year old prodigy. Prince Khaikhosro the Strong, Ambitious, Kind, yet Patient youth who is Brave and Temperate.
King Davit banished two of his vassal, expelled the Jews before committing suicide. He was only 44.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/grogie/Hero%20of%20Georgia.jpg)

The Prince rose to the occasion, and married his dead father's 30 year old second wife, Queen Sigrid Sunesdotter.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/scotland/03/19.jpg)

And finally, in 1255 AD - the inevitable happened...

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/CK2/grogie/Farewell%20to%20a%20Great%20Empire.jpg)

An Empire ceases to exist.

So, I totally bought this when it was on sale. I could never figure out the demo, but maybe someday I'll be able to make the full game work for me.

Is it possible to repel the Mongols or do they just trample over everyone? Right now I'm using the "All Beyond Reach" defense.  :awesome_for_real:

It's possible. The Mongols have been nerfed.
Now they gave them split stacks of 15k each.
So it's possible for the AI to spread itself too thin.
Previously they just drop 100k army stack and let it roam around, taking no casualty.
Now, I just bait them and can outmaneuver them with Organizer trait.

for what its worth, i've got 3 50% off CK2 coupons in my steamventory.

PM me if you want one.  i dont think the coupon is going to help you with the masses of DLC and expansions however.

I also have a -50% CK2 coupon up for grabs.

I also have 3 of those. What's the deal?

I also have one of those coupons if anyone wants one.

Aside from that; recently gotten back into CK2 recently (picked up the new expansion and such while I wait for the EU4 expansion to hit later this month) and have been side-tracked from the main game by the Game of Thrones mod. Really surprised at the quality in the mod, given its a 0.5 beta version. A lot of nice ideas to it that would fit into the base CK2 game very well (duel system, education system, traits being more important and so on).

Funny, I assumed one of you guys anonymously gifted me one last night.

Sooo... I just vassalized the Shia caliph. As a Catholic.


Anyone have a nice idea on what to do with him? I'm the heir, but I think the caliph title would be automatically destroyed if I got it, so the first thing that comes to mind wouldn't do much good.

NEVAMIND, it turns out I can be Caliph instead of the Caliph. :why_so_serious:


Unfortunately, it doesn't allow me to call Jihads. :heartbreak:

Wonder how long it's going to take for the game to remember that I'm not supposed to have this...

I don't think this is supposed to be possible under normal circumstances, but war resolution got a bit wonky:
 - I joined an early crusade for Aragon
 - At the same time the Shia uprising also targeted Aragon
 - Crusade won, giving me the crown and all lands there. I filled it with vassals of course.
 - Then a few weeks later, the Caliph won his war and someone took Aragon and all vassals from me even though I was not the target of his war (I would say this is the problem)
 - After he lost his event troops the catholics I landed started a faction war to put me back on the throne, leaving the caliph my vassal

I have a 50% off coupon for Crusader Kings 2 on Steam good until Feb. 1st if anyone still doesn't have this excellent game.

The excellent Game of Thrones mod for CKII (http://ck2agot.wordpress.com/) got a huge update as well, adding in the Essos continent.

Patch 0.5 Notes

I've been playing that a bit lately. Fairly good, though there are still a few irritating bugs (the added education system just stops working entirely a few decades in, as an example). Mod has a lot of additions that really work well, though. The dragons, duel system, and the basic idea of upgrading castles, etc., are all pretty good. I'd probably still be playing it if I wasn't getting ready for the EU4 expansion by trying a world conquest game as Muscovy.

Just don't have Sunset Invasion turned on if you play the mod. Ruined one of my games as Robb pretty spectacularly when 40k+ Aztecs suddenly decided to show up in the North, followed by another 40k+ in the North controlled Riverlands.

^LOL

What scenario for this GoT mod has the most flavour worked in?

I've only played the Clash of Kings scenario, personally.. as its the only scenario I was familiar with (I haven't read the books; I tried and found them rather shitty). It has a decent amount of scripted events.. but they won't always fire. My last game, where I played Daenerys, Renly never got killed and became King, executing Cersei, Tyrion, and Tywin, then losing the North and the Riverlands to Robb, which then saw Stannis' daughter take the Iron Throne through the war started by Stannis, Jaime becoming an independent King of the Westerlands, and setting the stage perfectly for me to swoop in after rebuffing some guy named Aegon (who eventually became kindling to my dragon).

Oh, and then the Iron Isles conquered the North. So Greyjoys became Kings of the North, and somehow Rickon Stark, who converted to the Drowned Gods, became King of the Iron Isles before waging a massive war to becoming King of the Riverlands (which he won, against his mother), before launching another large war to re-take the North.. which he won (against Theon). He then died trying to take the Iron Throne from me.. but did manage to kill two dragons ridden Daenerys's twin children (who were, of course, married to each other).

After awhile the scripted stuff stops completely.. but knowing a bit about the characters can lead to some hilarious moments due to natural CK2 mechanics (my favourite in that game was Jaime ended up married to Arya, who fell in love with each other, had four kids, two girls, two boys -- who ended up pairing off with each other, and were so godly stat and trait-wise that it helped them eventually topple the rule of Daenerys' grand-child because they all had 25+ martial and no stat below 15, were all duelists and formidable fighters.. and the two boys ended up having Valyrian swords which aided them both in taming dragons of their own).

Thanks, maybe I'll wait for a hotfix or two before I try a campaign.

Best name for an Anti-Pope, ever.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/715562/popemkii.jpg)

I wonder what upgrades the mark 2 comes with..

(http://i.imgur.com/XMuOmAw.jpg)

Haha that made me smile. It's way better than the fragile pope-mobile - especially for modern crusades against evil.

Paradox relations at work.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/BB/MD04/15/yhatemebro.jpg)

This cousin/nephew of mine isn't gonna last long as Georgian Basileus ruling over Greece.
Not sure whether to back him. Heheh.

Alright, I picked this up during the winter sale, and I'm going to give it a whirl.

I'm starting off very basic, and probably easy-mode, as King Harold II of England.

Right off, the game is giving me the following things to deal with:
- My Demesne is too big, 8/4. It is affecting tax efficiency, and vassal attitudes. The hell is my Demesne, and how does one alter it?
- I can create 3 titles. Is this related to the Demesne issue? If I create titles, to whom should I give them? Vassals? My un-landed adult sons?
- Oh yeah, I have two "adult" sons (i.e. 16+ yrs) who don't have land.
So I'm thinking these first three are related? Is it as simple as creating the titles, and dividing them among my vassals and/or offspring, et voila, Demesne is back under control? Should I wait a year until my 15-year-old son becomes an "adult"?
- Additionally, I can press a de jure ducal claim on Cumberland.
- And I need to pick an ambition.
The ambition choices are pretty straightforward. Become a "Paragon of Virtue", i.e. Piety 500+, or improve one of my three "poor" traits.

Also, the Norwegians are assaulting York. I have an army in Leicester. Is there any intricacy in going to war in this game?

Any hints, advice, anecdotes to share? Thanks in advance :)

Historically you will lose.  :grin:

England is definitely not easy mode for a beginner. Everyone always says to go with someone in Ireland. Pretty isolated in the early game and you can become King of Ireland fairly easily.

- Your Demesne is the land you control directly. Everything else is for vassals. You take a vassal opinion penalty if it is too large. The game really comes down to managing vassals, so I leave my demesne large if I can afford the penalty hit. As a beginner I would probably get it as close to what you are allowed as possible.

- Regarding titles, big question there. It really depends on what the title is. Sometimes I create titles, sometimes I don't. It is not directly tied to your demesne, however if you create ducal titles and such you could get a penalty hit.

- Regarding sons, you get a prestige penalty hit if your sons do not have land. I control my sons until I can arrange there marriage and then go from there. Maybe I give them land, maybe I don't.

- Regarding pressing ducal claims, if you feel like you can take a county, I press ducal claims whenever I can.

- Regarding traits, I always improve my poor traits first and move on to other things afterward. Not sure how others do it.

There are all kinds of intricacies to going to war. You need a Casus Belli to begin with (cause for war). Do you have enough troops to defeat the opposing forces? Do you have an unhappy duke who may rebel at the most inopportune time?

Stick with it. It is a complicated game, but once you get it and it clicks, it is a lot of fun. I have sunk hundreds of hours in.

Regarding ambitions that improve stats, it depends on my realm's situation. Is it large with lots of vassals? Then it's diplo. Is it small and rather peaceful and I hold many counties directly? Stewardship all the way. Am I in a rough neighborhood where you get killed for just looking at them. I need my martial stat high for the troop boast, and If I don't have any alternatives for leading my men, I can also use him as a general. The 2 others I find less useful, and can be put on low priority.

Even with 8 martial skill u still get 10% penalty.
Diplomacy seems to be the best for all situations.

Even if you hold all lands directly in a rather small and/or centralized realm? The extra money provided by each stewardship point seems a lot more enticing. 

Levy size is 50% + (5% * Martial). So you need 10 to get the base size. This is unbounded, so a huge martial score also means huge armies.

Also, to actually respond to the discussion at hand :grin: happy vassals help a great deal with everything and state diplomacy may also keep your stronger neighbor from attacking you, so Diplo generally comes first unless your lands are small and stewardship is close to getting a demesne size upgrade, in which case that will probably help you more.

Doesn't your levy scale with the positive relationship? I haven't played a campaign in a while, but unless they changed it I remember getting a relatively larger levy from someone with a +100 opinion of me than someone with just a +15.

Yes, this is true.  I believe it's a penalty situation, where a low opinion reduces your levy from max, but ultimately a high opinion grants a larger levy.  Diplo is #1 for sure.

Yeah by far best for your immediate survival/expansion. Unless you are in a situation where you have no enemies, and no expansion plans, so just prefer to sit around and upgrade your own lands.

As a general rule I find if I'm small (like one kingdom title or smaller) then I usually go for Stewardship so I can control more land and so raise larger levies and ducats, however any bigger then that and it's best to go diplo all the way. Although I tend to always educate heirs in the martial line since It's the only one (I've found anyway) that I can upgrade after their 16, but +diplo traits all the way.

Next DLC announced: Rajas of India  (https://twitter.com/search?q=rajas%20of%20india%20%23pdxcon&src=typd) (announced at pdxcon)
-3 new religions
-300 new provinces

 :drill: :drill: :drill: :drill: :drill: :drill: :drill: :drill: :why_so_serious: :heart:

Holy shit.  :awesome_for_real:

Very ambitious...wonder how this will play out because some of these expansions have been kind of unbalanced. Vikings had a cool theme but the micromanagement of looting was tedious. The huge amount of gold earning was also unbalanced. Same with republics. SoA not so bad since it mostly just added flavour not major economic mechanics. I have a feeling that adding so many new provinces, wealthy ones too, might be pretty blobtastic plus people will expect a lot of flavour from these exotic locales and I am not sure pdox will be able to deliver since it's just considered and xpac.

Holy shit is right!

More on Rajas of India from rock, paper, shotgun (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/28/opening-the-passage-ck-ii-rajas-of-india/)  :drill:

"Also expect war elephants."  :Love_Letters:

as long as the dlc doesn't jump the shark á la sunset invasion

Just noticed that the rivers in India looks navigable.. I am so gonna raid, plunder and conquer India as a viking!  :drill:

I wonder if we'll get a "Suez Portage" to connect the major bodies of water in some way or if the indian ocean and the atlantic/mediterranean seas will remain completely separate beasts. (Problem with the latter is that they used to say that the AI can't work out separate sea areas, which is why the east coast of Africa has no boats at all)

It looks like their are seazones, so I assumed that the reason must be that boats will work there. But who knows.

If you hold the Aztec Empire title in ck2, will you gain control of their land in the Americas in eu4 if you use the converter? Screenshots I've seen suggest that they're the same country, but thought I'd ask here first before I tried it myself.

The new dlc should be coming out next week. (http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/crusader-kings-ii-rajas-of-india)  :awesome_for_real:
Unfortunately I'll be too busy to really get into it for a while  :oh_i_see:

edit:link to the date announcement (http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?763101-Crusader-Kings-II-Rajas-of-India-to-Release-March-25th&s=b123e27acdd75fb1d5d9f6d38f5219f7)

not really interested in playing india, but the free changes and map expansion would make a revisit worthwhile.

Anyone else pick this up? I feel like it is more of the same, just in India. The Indian portraits freak me out. Maybe I haven't found the differences yet.

Buggy piece of shit.
Didn't buy this, but still got shafted.

Yeah was not in a rush to get this. Maybe when it's 2$ on a steam sale.

I have played too much CK2 anyway, not much fun anymore. Getting from count to king is fun, but once you get that it's way too easy.

They release so much of RoI anyway in their usual patches that I'd just skip it and technically play it anyway, the biggest draw for me is the map expansion and that's already bundled in.

For people who play CK2 on and off this patch breaks save compatibility, although who needs an excuse to start again? Time to carve out a nice little Persian empire without having to resort to european expansion.

Seriously? That means my last save from a month or so ago is borken?

Yeah, the expanded map means the save just couldn't be mapped meaningfully to the new world. Because of this the 2.0.4 version will be available indefinitely through the beta tab on Steam.

Amazingly this fucking DLC & Patch broke a lot of shit, so you actually get a worse game after this DLC is released.
Reverting the game to Pre-DLC state gets you better performance, less bugs and no curry eaters to bother with (HAHAHA WHO CARES ABOUT THAT ANYWAY)

And I've discovered that if you have a stand-alone client, ha-ha, fuck you.

I bought it from Gamersgate, where I'd purchased the original game and all the expansions and DLC to date. All you get is a Steam code. Better go buy it all again on Steam, loser! :oh_i_see:

There's no way you can register the stand alone parts with Steam?

From what I heard, you were supposed to get a steam key for each piece of DLC too. If you didn't you should contact Gamersgate support about that.

Had the base game and it's DLC's through Gamersgate as well and they added a separate "DLC collection" item in my games section with a steam code after the move to Steam, easy to miss if you're not looking for it.
Do believe there were a few of the DLC's I still had to add seperately after it but everything I owned was moved over just fine. Or take Cironians advice if it's not there, either way no need to re-purchase any that you had.

So basically I should just stay the fuck away from this until they've patched up some shit?

If you switch to the new beta patch on Steam, it's mostly fine. Muslims are a bit OP once more due to new mechanics, but otherwise no big problems.

Under no circumstances play the non-beta patch version though, that one's one of the most buggy releases they put out in a long while.

Absolutely.

http://steamcommunity.com/games/203770/announcements/detail/1858040849881676750

rofl

Gamersgate's customer support got me Steam codes, and I should be happy and grateful, but at the moment I'm annoyed by the fact that I had to get them all by scrolling through their dodgy game library UI, selecting each one infividually, clicking "show serial key," and then cut and pasting each into Steam's series of "activate product code" popups.

I did this 22 times, for the game and every piece of DLC. -_-

Rajas of India and all the other DLC for Crusader Kings II is on sale on Steam until Thursday, 66% off, as well as the main game if you haven't already gotten this.

Thanks, I hadn't gotten around to buying the Rajas one yet!

Yeah, that got me.

New DLC (Charlemagne) just announced at the Paradox fancon.  :drill:

Wow this game must be still hella popular for them to still be miliking it. It's inferior AI to even EU IV becomes apparent once you reach a rank of (stable) kingdom unfortunately. From count to king it can be fun but after that easy mode. Pdox needs to work on an engine upgrade.

Crusader Kings II: Over 1 Million Copies Sold (http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?801671-Crusader-Kings-II-Over-1-Million-Copies-Sold)

:ye_gods: :drill:

I have significantly more than that.   :grin:

I've only got 46 hours but I lost my last save games when my hard drive crashed last month, so I'll have to start over at some point. Did they ever fix the wonkiness that the Rajas DLC added?

Same here. I've skipped the Raja dlc so far (maybe next sale) but I'm really looking forward to spending too many hours in the game again once the Charlemagne dlc is released.

Just looked and I have 519 hours.

I tried Raja's out, thought it added nothing to the game and haven't been back. Still having fun with the Old Gods expansion. Recently became Emperor of Scandinavia that encompassed all of Scandinavia, a good chunk of northern Russia, all the British Isles, and Holland. The only Christian kingdom left with any power is France. Playing with Gavelkind really sucks early on.

I have 362  :oh_i_see:, I think the whales are inflating this one.

What wonkiness did RoI add? The new dlc looks like a huge waste of time, Old Gods and Legacy of Rome still the only DLC's worth buying.

We so need to do a succession radicalthon  :drillf:

The initial release was super buggy, but that's all fixed now except for really minor stuff like some retinues using the wrong graphics.

680 hours

Not anywhere near my numbers for Team Fortress II

...

...

1477 hours.

I'm glad I'm not the only sick one, though mine is Civ V - 1398 hours. Probably actually worse since 100% of that was single player.

Well, to be honest I think that's 7 years of TF2 play.

Ck2 is going to have a free weekend on steam this weekend. No excuse for people who have been umming and arring for two years to give it a crack  :grin: .

I started trying to play again, but the font just kills me.  The better-font-in-tooltips mod helps a bit, but it's just painful that such a text-heavy game has such eye-gougingly bad text.

I should play some more anyway, but I keep getting distracted trying to figure out how to fix the ui and then give up and play something I can read with less pain

I'm playing two different saves now, one at work and one at home, and remembering how much I love this game. And as bad as the font is, it's better than Europa Univeralis 3. I've been trying to play that for a while but the font just kills me.

Anyone buy Charlemagne? I saw a video that mentioned the dynasty chronicle that keeps track of the important things that happen like wars and marriages and such. I thought this sounded really cool.

Even if you haven't bought the Charlemagne DLC, your interface is now changed, BTW. They improved just the game loading a bit and the maps now seem to have weather effects on them based on the season.

Crusader Kings II: Way of Life DLC coming on December 16. (http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/content.php?2061-Crusader-Kings-II-Way-of-Life-Dev-Diary)

So basically more of the stuff that makes CK2 different from EU4. I'm kind of excited but falling behind since I haven't even gotten the Charlemagne DLC yet. Seems like I'll have some serious crusading to do once the Christmas holidays start.  :drill:

I'm just happy if they can somehow add a more 'believable AI' update.
Right now hearing people's story about slut and pervs of  Europe confirms that there's been no changes.
The AI is just doing things for the sake of spamming shit.
With the f-100 opinions from slut-fucking each other's wives the diplomacy is permanently hostile without a single army being marched...
Why bother going into intrigue anymore when your enemies are too busy hate-fucking each other?

In Vagina, Penis
Paradox, QA better ffs.

Not sure I really understand this, but I think you mean that I shouldn't buy it?

Yeah it's cheap DLC, but the add-on is poorly tested leading to most of Europe liege n vassals screwing and seducing each other wives till one of them gets jailed.
Sexually transmitted disease spreads quickly, as bastards appear in almost every corner of the land.

A player can unfuck themselves eventually but I doubt paradox AI can cope.

So has anyone played this with Way of Life being used that can tell me if it's fixed?

My Scandinavia game seems to be running fine. rk47's opinions are valid, however this is Europe during the middle ages, everyone was hate fucking everyone.

Not really--dynastic regimes are normally pretty careful about fucking, at least the kind of fucking that might make babies.

Well, teleportation technology that supports cucking is not invented in 800-1400 AD.
I always laugh when I discover affairs that spam from one end of Europe to another.
How the heck do you even meet each other in the first place?  :why_so_serious:

That applies to more than screwing in CKII, though. Like, how did a local noble in Ireland manage to send his spymaster to Constantinople just like that? etc.

New "Horse Lords" Expansion Coming to Crusader Kings II (https://www.paradoxplaza.com/news/Hot-Mongols-Are-In-Your-Area-And-They-Want-To-Talk-To-You/).
I'm kind of interested in playing the Silk Road but not sure if expanding the map even farther is a good thing.

Didn't they start to run into performance issues because the engine was not built to handle that much?

Horse Lords release date: July 14 (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads%2Fhorse-lords-ride-into-camp-on-july-14.865865%2F).

The map just keeps expanding... :oh_i_see:  (though I am actually waiting to see how they implement the Silk Road into the game).

They've already explained it here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/weekly-dev-diary-7-silk-road-and-raiding-adventurers.865367/

It seems China is coming to CK2 (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/ck2-dev-diary-61-the-dragon-throne.1038599/) (but no map extension). It might turn out pretty interesting if they also add some flavor to the small kingdoms at the edge of the map.  :grin:

Holy Fury DLC (https://www.paradoxplaza.com/crusader-kings-ii-holy-fury/CKCK02ESK0000057-MASTER.html) launch date announced as November 13.  :drill:

...and as a bonus a music video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI1-bnevowA) from the official rock band of Crusader Kings.   :why_so_serious:

Stoked for this. Just finished my playthrough to get the SPQR achievement. My god the revolts I had to deal with...

This might be the first dlc I pay full price for.  :grin: