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.

DotA 2 : It's mostly a numbers game

As I previously mentioned, I'm a big fan of using numbers as a way to understand things. For that I have been collecting a lot of numbers from the games I play, mostly all pubs. After gathering enough that I feel that I may be able to draw some conclusions or at least some patterns.

The first aspect I compared in my games was to see whether gold collection or XP collection actually produce a good indicator of which team will win a game. I used the total gold accumulated to make a ratio where I divide gold accumulated by the winning team by the gold accumulated by the losing team. A ratio of 1 means both teams accumulated the same, anything above one represents the winning team having more gold than the losing team.

All the data below is based on my last 131 matches. As you can see it appears pretty obvious from looking at these ratios that both are indicators on average to what team will win, and it is obvious that the team to get the most will tend to win. However looking at the individual numbers, I do see that there are 8 out of the 131 matches where a team with less XP actually managed to win. Most of them are quite close to 1, however there is a 0.84 and a 0.86, which sort of suggest that in general the rule works but there are circumstances where the cumulative XP isn't the only indicator.

Interestingly however, is the fact that the gold ratio is a much much better predictor. Only one game in my records has a 0.99 ratio, which is basically 1. While it does appear that gold might be the more important number here, it did make me wonder what kind of effect towers have in this. How much of this gold is actually coming from towers, in which case the late game, especially when the other team is doomed in their fountain, produces large amounts of gold, that are hardly useful for the purpose of predicting a winner. I suppose it would be much more useful to look at numbers excluding tower gold, or numbers up to the last 5-10 minutes. Another option which is probably more verifiable is to look at last hits, since this will potentially be less biased, however the late game can offer a large amount of creep killing as well.




Another cool little graph I produced was looking at the same gold ratio vs the duration of a game. I figured that games that last longer will generally have a more even gold distribution as teams are probably more balanced. From plotting these 131 games, it is pretty clear that this trend is accurate. For the most part games with a gold ratio close to 1 tended to last 45-65 minutes. As an aside, the average duration of my 131 games was 40.6 minutes.

My last comparison involves looking at my performance and how much I contribute to team gold in my wins and losses. Basically I divide my total accumulated gold by the gold accumulated by my team. Initially this sounded like a good comparison and I have a 20.7 ± 0.6 % during my losses, and a 19.0 ± 0.4 % participation during my wins. While there may even be a statistical difference suggesting that I do seem to be less important of a player during games I lose, I think not accounting for my role adds a lot of noise to the data. I mean this is an obvious stat to look at, but I wanted to see how much of an impact I actually have. A much more meaninful comparison would be to isolate only the gold I contribute in games I play a particular hero or a particular role.

So that's what I did. If I make the same graph but only look at my Furion games this is what it looks like. I did 22.3 ± 0.7 % of my team's gold during my losses and did 19.7 ± 0.8 % during my victories. Showing a slightly less noisy graph despite it having less than a quarter of the data points.

Anyway, I just wanted to post some interesting graphs for now, even if they are not terribly insightful. I will be looking to post more impactful graphs and information later on, as I learn more about this deliciously complex game.