Crusader Kings 2: Starting moves with Leon

 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.

Steam Crusader Kings 2: Elder Kings runtime error

This will be a brief post, but I just wanted to share an issue I had last night installing Elder Kings on my CK2 install on Steam. For those that don't know Elder Kings is a mod that changes the game so you can play in the fantasy world of Elder Scrolls in CK2. As a big fan of the TES series I felt I needed to try this one. The mod is great, but my post is about a runtime error I got when trying to play the mod.

Basically the game would crash as soon as I started it with the mod activated. Turns out the solution was to install all options when you run the .exe, don't leave the selection on default. I learned this from http://steamcommunity.com/app/203770/discussions/0/810921274049313559/

So if you are having your game crash just reinstall the mod and this time select all the available options, ie. run the full installation not the default one. This solved the issue for me and I hope I help a few folks running into the same problem.

For thoroughness, I'm running it on steam on my Windows 7 machine. I'll try to post a bit more on this mod later once I get to play it a bit more. I will say though, great job to developpers, this is a solid, polished and through mod... well done

Slesvig AAR pt.10 - Burnt

So, apparently I was killed in this next little stretch...

I can't say I'll lose much sleep over it. My new leader is just so much better.
King Wilfred I of Denmark was 32 years of age when he assumed the throne. He is married to Queen Roza. He became King around April of 1170.

Soon after, it also happened that my friend of the Holy Roman Empire decided to invite me to pick a fight with Sweden with him. I did, we pretty much spent the whole time protecting our land, until the emperor got tired and declared peace again. Aside from that, the children are continuing to grow. Princess Ida became a Grey Eminence (22,8,4,4,6).

Later in 1171, I declared that despite my German roots, that I identify more with the Danish people I rule. Or so he said.

Finally, here is a tree of the House Silenieks at this point in time, after the death of Leto.

Here is how the world looks today...

Later in 1173, Princess Trude also became of age, turning to be a Naive Appeaser (16,2,3,6,4). Similarly Karin became a Misguided Warrior

Slesvig AAR pt.9 - King Sceadwian the first assumes room temperature

 

Well, it was a great long run with this King, and I must say it was a good part of the dynasties history. We shall see which new King will be able to top this fellah. King Sceadwian I died on July 28th, 1159 at the tender age of 69. This leaves the Kingdom of Denmark to King Leto I, age 23, heir to the Barony of Schlutup and Husband of Queen Karin.

Not long after I found out how terrible this new king is. His attributes are actually pretty horrendous and it was very difficult to make friends with him. Which led to another conflict, where a fair number of my counties decided to rebel in an attempt to gain independence of Lybaek and a few other counties in the east. I was far from having enough troops to fight this war off, so I ended up hiring some mercenaries. I was glad at this point that I had so much cash saved from before around 2K, which was enough to pay for my mercenaries up until I ran out of money and was fortunately able to call for a white peace.

During this period I also managed to gain the title of King Leto the Fat. Not quite the Honor I was looking for but hey, it's better than nothing. So once this war ended I actually had to imprison the perp, Lord Mayor Branislav of Lybaek.

I am almost hoping now that the war is over that I could get King Leto dead so that his brother Baron Wilfred of Schlutup (yes I gave him the title) could take his place. As you can see he has much much better stats.

Finally around 1169 some of our vassals decided to fight each other. I decided this would be a good time to sit and watch them get weaker, I may decided to steal some of the land for myself before I die, that way my successor will inherit the land but not the infamy, hopefully. Oh oh, I can't forget, I actually fullfilled one of Leto's aspirations, to have a son, little Sceadwian, who may even become a King one day.

Slesvig AAR pt.7 - Diether

Unfortunately I seemed to have erased the original post #7. Not sure what happened. Anyway, here is the script until I manage to recover the post.

--

I made some progress since the last post, but have not yet managed to take over Denmark. I was, however, made Chancellor of Denmark by the King. A nice ego booster for my character, and it definitely helps me accumulate prestige (which is at 1547 at this point). I also thought it may be a good idea to post a picture of the new acquired land of our Kingdom, a good chunk of the Baltic region.

fig.12

My toon's children are also getting ripe. Impiastra Silenieks for instance turned 16 in 1148, becoming a Detached Priest (6/10/7/4/12 - Dip/Mar/Stw/Int/Lrn). I thought I could get Impiastra do something for me...

fig.14

...Marry the King of Denmark, why not.

Here is a picture of the new Queen Impiastra of Denmark. Proud father tonight.

Next along came Martha, the Charismatic Negotiator (15/4/4/6/11). This daughter I planned some other special plan...

fig.17

.. to marry the Prince Diether of the Holy Roman Empire. Not too bad, I may be getting my foot on the Kingdom of Denmark and the Holy Roman land. It's been a good day. However, to offset the good, our revered Mayor Gotfred of Lykstad died at the age of 48 from Camp Fever. There was a funky bug running around that killed also a few of my courtsfolk.

Slesvig AAR pt.8 - Denmark is mine !

Some development since last post. All my children are now married as I married Prince Leto to the now Princess Amalia Caetani, an attractive italian noblewoman. Prince Wilfred got married off to Baroness Roza of Schlutup. Princess Benedikt married Neiniad ap Ednowain, mostly so they can spawn some good members to our dynasty. More than ever now we need some good genes in our pool. Karin was also married to Archambaud de Lusignan, a 35 year old with good genes and not enough prestige to say no to a matriarchal union.

In this last little bit I also managed to accomplish my current biggest goal, which was to take over the Kingdom of Denmark. On July 8th of 1153 King Jorgen I was sadly found dead due to misterious causes, it is a tragedy for sure :) but I think the only thing I can do now is to try and be a strong leader for my Kingdom.

Unfortunately, my appropriation of Denmark caused one of our new vassals to grow discontent. Duchess Birgitta I of Skane declared a civil war because she wanted me to "Lower crown authority". Bitch please ! If you want my throne now, as it is still cold, say it. We'll sort it out like civilized people, by slaughtering each others vassals. Which I did with the help of my good friends of the White Company and the Great Company.
 

Well, after such a bloody and costly conflict, we managed to offer a white peace to Birgitta. I just wanted the kingdom to go back to peace so we can build Denmark up. Then down the line force some claims on some other counties and duchies. Unfortunately, on our treck back to Slesvig, I encountered some rebels fighting in the Swedish province of Wolgast. I barely wanted to intervene, but in the cross fire I was actually hit in the head, causing me to become a cripple :/ Not really a nice thing to happen. My lovely wife decided to take of me, and now she is running the show until I pass.

Slesvig AAR pt.6 -

I made some progress since the last post, but have not yet managed to take over Denmark. I was, however, made Chancellor of Denmark by the King. A nice ego booster for my character, and it definitely helps me accumulate prestige (which is at 1547 at this point). I also thought it may be a good idea to post a picture of the new acquired land of our Kingdom, a good chunk of the Baltic region.

My toon's children are also getting ripe. Impiastra Silenieks for instance turned 16 in 1148, becoming a Detached Priest (6/10/7/4/12 - Dip/Mar/Stw/Int/Lrn). I thought I could get Impiastra do something for me...

...Marry the King of Denmark, why not.

At the bottom there is a picture of the new Queen Impiastra of Denmark. Proud father tonight.

Next along came Martha, the Charismatic Negotiator (15/4/4/6/11). This daughter I planned some other special plan...

.. to marry the Prince Diether of the Holy Roman Empire. Not too bad, I may be getting my foot on the Kingdom of Denmark and the Holy Roman land. It's been a good day. However, to offset the good, our revered Mayor Gotfred of Lykstad died at the age of 48 from Camp Fever. There was a funky bug running around that killed also a few of my courtsfolk.

ps. I think I forgot to mention on my previous post, but I switched out of Gavelkind some time back, and now have an elective system... kind of a big deal for my little Duchy, since I can safely hold my land without having to murder my children. I just felt it was needed after murdering my son a while back.

-- -- --

After Action Report #5

Just a little bit more history of house Silenieks... 

The first member was my first Duke Sceadwian I of Sleslvig, who married Ingegerd, a Norwegian noblewoman. This union produced a healthy 6 offsprings.

1. Amelia - 2 children, (Magnus, Gerhild), which are now in house Billung
2. Juri - He was supposed to be my first heir, the second generation of my dynasty. Unfortunately died misteriously at the age of 24, two children, including my current top guy, Sceadwian II.
3. Tea - Great pius daughter.
4. Ernst - Married Grethe Ragnarsdatter, died abrupty *wink* *wink* at the age of 18. Perhaps this was a mistake in hidsight.
5. Grethe - Married a duke and had 8 children.
6. Mira -  Married a count and had 6 children.

As mentioned, now I play Sceadwian II. Married to Adheleid who was older and died. Then married Princess Marghret of Scotland and so far I have 6 children, 4 girls and 2 boys in the middle. I was definitely worried after 2 children that I wouldn't have a boy, and I was getting older. Fortunately ...

 --

Since then, I had some great ideas. First, I decided it may be a good move to marry my 9 year old to King Jorgen I, who is 12 years of age. I figured, my next big move should be to take Denmark for myself. I feel that in my two generations, I managed a solid, conservative game. I got a good hang of the game, but now is time to get myself some land. I think the lowest large hanging fruit is my own kingdom of Denmark, which is now being led by a pre-teen. On top of this, I have sent my spy to his island conty, to see if he has any vulnerabilities. You know, for SCIENCE mostly.  I have recently been helping my other Danish friends, to a point I will be the next King if something was to happen to our glorious king. Oh, I also managed to collect another 7 other claims, mostly from picking up people to join my court. So due to this I actually did some reading into courts, and even had some folks on reddit help me understand the role of courts in CK2. Here are some of their posts:

[–]OseOseOse 11 points 1 day ago

You can marry any two of your courtiers to each other, matrilineally if you wish. So if you can get a person with a claim to join your court, you can marry him/her into your dynasty, then press his/her claim. Then the children of the couple will be of your dynasty and eventually inherit the title you pressed.
Alternately, you can invite a claimant to a title that is lower than yours, land him, then press his claim. Because he's landed, he's already your vassal, so if you win the claim war you he will get the lands and remain your vassal, so the lands become part of your realm.

[–]The_Grand_Duke_of_S 1 point 5 hours ago

Also bear in mind that the resulting vassal will be of the same type (noble, clergy, burgher) as his existing title. So if you press a claim for county on behalf of a mayor he will become a lord mayor. I'm not sure how this acts with republic formation as I've not done this on a duchy or higher since the Republic DLC was released.

[–]TheChoke 3 points 23 hours ago

The landed part is very important, being the absent minded person that I am I have often pressed a claim only to realize that I did not gain any ground..

[–]drew12 4 points 1 day ago

You can go to the intrigue tab and have the game randomly generate a noble, holy man, or debutante (woman) and place them in your court. You can also right click on your picture, then right click on the icon that pops up on the left, then click 'Go To Character Relations'. A window pops up that allows you to look through every character in the game and sort them in various ways.
I look for people for my council or people that have claims to nearby places that I want to conquer. I also occasionally look for people to educate my kids but only if they're the same religion and culture as me.
A good way to gain lots of land quickly is to find someone with a claim that can be inherited and invite them to your court, then have them marry in a way that has their children be of your dynasty. Then wait until the invited person dies (or kill them) which will cause their claim to be passed on to their successor, which will be someone from your dynasty. Then press that person's claim, which will result in them becoming your vassal as long as it's for a title lower than yours.
Or if you're the de jure liege of an area you can skip the middle steps and just invite someone with a claim to your court and then press it.
You can see who has claims on each title by clicking the title from someone's character screen (for example, the title holder) and then clicking 'Claimants'.
I realize that I went off on a tangent but you said that you just started playing recently so this is something you may not know.

[–]zoah1984[S] 3 points 1 day ago

no, this is great information, thank you. I'm just about to start trying to expand my domain and have been struggling to find ways...

[–]darkmuch 3 points 1 day ago

Point 2 I have been wondering about myself. Depending upon where you are in game, the size of your court holds varying worth. When your nation consists of just one court, yours, you need to have it as large as possible as I see no repercussions.
I was surprised when I created my first vassal and had almost a fourth of my court leave. Seeing this, I think there is no real repercussion to a large court, just the fact you will constantly lose members.
Though minor IMO, more people means more management. This is basically the only real 'negative' I know of regarding your own court. Unlanded courtiers have almost no power in the political/intrigue system, so the plot against me aspect doesn't seem to be a major issue. Maybe having more people in your court allows plots against you to get more plotters, but in my experience the spy master uncovers most plots.

[–]forgotmyusernamegrr 4 points 1 day ago

More courtiers means more people to plot against/with you. Meaning that if you are a tyrant try and prune down your court to only people that like you. If you are a saint and everybody loves you invite those claimants and breed them into your dynasty.

Slesvig (pt4) : No exactly my plan

Alright, there were some big developments since last time. Firstly, as my succession laws are gavelkind, and by having 2 boys I would eventually have to split my titles between the two. However, a "terrible accident" occured to my youngest son Ernst of Lybaek, fortunately leaving all his claims to my first son Juri. Everything seemed to be going in a great direction for me, until my kind son Juri died unexpectedly at the age of 23. I have no idea what happened there, but the natural causes don't often affect young man of that age. However, I don't think any scheme will ever be elucidade here.

Later in 16 of August 1102, Duke Sceadwian I passed away leaving the throne to his heir, Duke Sceadwian II, son of my beloved Count Juri and his wife Princess Adelheid of the Holy Roman Empire. At the time he was not able to take the throne due to his age.

The next thing that is going to happen is I will marry Sceadwian II to a 40 year old woman from the HRE, mostly because she has great stewardship skills, and will probably die while I'm still young enough. This way I could remarry later and start having children as an older man, we'll see how that compares to the strategy I took with Duke the first, which was to have lots of children while young.

Slesvig (pt3) : They grow up fast

So a few things have happened since last post. Including the arrangement of a wedding between Amelia and King Radulf I of Scotland. Although Scotland isn't that great of a kingdom, it still adds quite a bit of prestige to my Duke and could potentially create an ally around the British Isles, which aren't super far from Denmark anyway.

Aside from that we also had Juri Sceadwiansen become of age. He turned out actually quite great with 22 diplomacy, 9 martial, 5 stewardship, 4 intrigue and 6 learning. Not too bad, sort of a less well rounded version of my Duke, he might actually make a very good Duke or king one day. I just need to find him a solid wife, ideally with some claims.

Slesvig (pt2) : Jylland is ours

Just to demonstrate what happened to my game since last time, I had one more daughter added to my line, Mira Silenieks. To top that off I was given the province of Jylland from the king and now I possess almost the whole Danish peninsola. I'm very curious to see what happens when the king dies. On a side note, the King of Norway, father-in-law, just passed, and I did not manage to assassinate the heir. Oh well. What can you do.

Crusader Kings 2: A review

So, I have only recently really given a try to this great game from Paradox. Crusader Kings is a Grand Strategy type game, somewhat like other Paradox titles, like Europa Universalis 3 and Victoria 2. In this one however, the theme are dynasties.

I started my game as duke in modern day Denmark in the province of Slesvig. Duke Sceadwian I of Slesvig, owning the provinces of Holsten and Slesvig initially. My first few moves were to select my council, which I got some good people for the job and getting married. The options were unfortunately not the greatest, so the obvious pick for me was the (once) lovely Princess Ingegrad of Norway. Daughter of the king of Norway, as well as being a great steward, which complemented my character very well. In terms of stats I have 14 diplomacy (which is fairly high), 8 martial, 18 stewardship, 9 intrigue (good for plotting, which I may need to employ a lot), 11 learning (I am a scientist afterall). In terms of perks I've got Scholar, Quick and Charismatic Negotiator. Overall, my Duke is quite the package.

Ah, another reason for picking my lovely queen, is the fact that there were rummors running around that she liked to have some fun behind closed doors... Yes, supposedly, she is an eager girl... I soon discovered that the rummors were truthful. She spawned 5 children in a span of 7 years or so. The children of House Silenieks are Princess Amelia (11 years old now), Prince Juri (10 years old and growing to be a good steward, much like his father), Tea (the pious prodigy of the bunch, 9 y.o.), Ernst (second boy, 7 years old and growing to develop a keen sense of intrigue, may cause our Gavelkin succession system some trouble, but we shall see). Finally came the lovely Grethe, 3 years of age at the moment. The only one still requiring a tutor.

This game is really cool once you start to get more involved with the characters and their important life events. For instance, recently me and Juri both contracted measles. The one good thing about the experience was my character's recovery, which he did exceptionally well along with Juri. It's amazing how much I am cheering for some of these characters now. It's almost like playing a medieval aristocratic soap opera. The best part of this, is that it is supposed to be random like life, no scripts involved, and I can't wait to see what happens next. My Gavelkin system will definitely make things difficult for me.