After some time distracted from this wonderful game, I decided to give
it another go. Unfortunately I didn't get as far as I wanted with my
Danish dynasty game. This time around I will be playing the kingdom of
Leon in the Iberic Peninsola. To start, I thought it may be a good idea
to lay out what my initial moves in this game are. Just a sort of rough
guide of what I have to remember to do when I start a new game of CK2.
This will be useful in the future when I decide to return to this game
again and maybe other people may also find this useful when they are
starting to learn the game or getting back to it. Let's face it, while
this game is incredible, it has a pretty unfriendly interface. Maybe
it's just me, but paradox tends to make games that to me are very far
from intuitive when you first start, and their interfaces are fine for
when you know your way around the game, but not so fine if you don't.
Anyway, here are my first actions in Crusader Kings 2 when I start a new
game.1. Make sure you don't unpause the game before doing a couple of things. These are some of the aspects you need to consider.
2. Are you married? In my new game I am not married so I made sure to find a suitable wife. I must say I'm not an expert in this game so if I do things that aren't necessarily super efficient, please leave it in a comment. In terms of what I looked for, I wanted a wife with good stats and traits to compliment my own. Using the ruler creator DLC, I made my King Sebastian I of Leon to be strong in stewartship (14) and diplomacy (9). I wanted decent Learning (7) as well. I picked a Norwegian lady with 17 intrigue and 11 Martial. She was a really nice girl who managed balance me out. She was pretty cute too, which should go well with my "attractive" king.
3. Make sure your council is filled and fill it with the best possible people for the job.
4. Once your council is filled, give them jobs.
5. Your chancellor should likely either help you ensure good relations around your territory however in some cases if you feel your guy will be ready for a fight soon, might not hurt to start fabricating claims to lands that may be easy first targets.
6. For my Marshall, I tend to put him on research duty unless there is any reason not to at this point.
7. My Stewart tends to also work on reasearch for the most part. If I have extra cash and decide to build an improvement right away, perhaps he can help with that, otherwise research is likely your best bet.
8. Spymasters are also quite important, but at first I tend to leave him to do research as well since it may take me a little bit of understanding the political situation before I can either send him/her on a defensive or offensive mission.
9. Lastly, my religious dude tends to go first to any duchies that I need to improve relationships with bishops and so forth. Read point 10 to understand why.
10. Make religious vassals like you better than the pope, otherwise they don't pay you taxes. Basically if they like the pope better than you they tend to give everything away to the pope which means less money for us.
11. In fact, try to make all your vassals as happy as you can. Ensures you will wake up the next day and has the added benefit of increasing your income and levy capabilities. Considering this game is about maintaining a dynasty, keeping your vassals happy will be a big part of what you do in CK2.
12. I often also try to marry my council with people with good traits. My thinking that may produce good traited council folk, which can be very useful in the long term.
13. Find suitable mates for children. Perhaps will help ensure a legitimacy claim in the future.
14. I also like to bring in some new people to my court. I do that usually to bring in talent near me. In the case of males, they can later be used as councilors when your dies or if they suck. In the case of females they may not be as useful right away, but they can be used to marry other people around you in the attempt to produce children with good stats and traits. The way to get people to join your court is a bit crude. There may be a nice and simple way to do this but I either basically sort people through the people finder, which is really not very efficient, even if you only show people with no holdings, or you can surf around different duchies and click on "claimants". You can look through the list and see if anyone has a "small green thumbs up" icon next to their photo. This means that the person is indeed willing to join. This method is much better than the people finder simply because it takes less clicks to find who's available to join you. One word of caution however, avoid inviting people that really dislike you, especially if they have high intrigue. This could easily turn into an assassination given the right conditions.
Just another piece of advice, which I wanted to add but really isn't so much something you need to take care of in the beginning of a game. That is, once you have to give away a duchy due to your vassals being jealous or whatever, one good way to do it is to find a vassal of yours with only a city, temple or castle and give it to that vassal. I go even further and try to find someone that doesn't have kids and is likely to be too old to have them still. This way you can have the holding back once this character dies, which gives you once again control of who's going to be running that piece of your kingdom.
