First, thanks to Terminus Est for gifting me a copy of this crazy game, though I foresee many hundreds of hours wasted ahead. Tonight I spent six hours clicking through menus, most of the time completely baffled by what I was looking at. Anyway, I tried a bit of intrigue that didn’t have the result I was hoping for, and I’m wondering if there’s a way to salvage the situation or if I should restart from an earlier save. Here’s the situation.
I’m playing Gudrød Crovan of Søreyar, with an eye to taking over Scotland and possibly the rest of Britannia (every damn tutorial/let’s play that I’ve seen starts in Ireland or Wales, so I wanted to try something different.) After pacifying my uppity vassals and consolidating the Duchy of Gallaway, my eyes turned towards the counties of Moray & Ross for expansion. Both counties are owned by a single lord, who’s currently rotting in a Scottish dungeon due to a prior rebellion, so his sister (Princess Grouch) is his sole heir. Seems like a perfect opportunity to marry into her line of succession – except for the wrinkle that she’s married and has an infant son. But no matter, I’ll just whack 'em both. Problem, solution…right?
The husband’s murder went swimmingly (literally – his carriage “accidentally” crashed into a river and he drowned – Princess Grouch herself even joined in the plot!) But there’s a problem – despite being single again, she’s not available for marriage. The issue may be that my four princes aren’t yet of legal age (or maybe I’m not checking the proper menus) and I was thinking, maybe it would’ve been better to wait and hope she conceives a daughter, who I could betroth into my dynasty, and whack her son at my leisure? Would that even work??
Meanwhile, Gudrød was horribly maimed while hunting wild boars for his winter feast (which didn’t go very well) so it’s probably a good idea to reload anyway…
I never understood why sometimes I’d have the list of every eligible woman in Christendom (and beyond) for my betrothal options and other times I’d only get one or two.
Age shouldn’t be a problem - you can usually do a betrothal even if one or both sides of the party are too young to be immediately wed.
It’s a puzzlement. If you go through the diplomacy screen, you’ll get one list of eligible fiancé[e]s, but if you go through the character list you might get another. I’ve never been able to figure it out.
Maybe you can marry the sister yourself? After getting rid of your current spouse, of course.
Is she just not showing up if you try to arrange a marriage or is it just greyed out when you try to actually send the proposal?
If it’s the former, try arranging the marriage via the diplomacy menu that comes up when you right click on the portrait. If that doesn’t work, I dunno.
If it’s just greyed out when you propose it, you should be able to hover over the button and it’ll tell you why. It’s quite possible that her brother won’t agree to the marriage for “political concerns.” That’s usually an issue with trying to marry an heiress. Also if you are trying to marry her to one of your underage sons, it can be difficult to get them to accept a marriage with a big age difference.
That’s kinda why I’d like to reload and try something different – her current ambition is to have a daughter, so if she succeeds, I could marry into her line with one of my many many sons and/or nephews. (I’m dreading the eventual succession crisis…)
Another question: How effective is, umm, “breeding” for desirable traits?
After reloading, a mysterious young courtier has shown up with several excellent traits, esp. “Genuis”! :drool: I’m thinking of betrothing her to my 8-year-old nephew, who is also a Genius. Does having two parents with the same trait guarantee their children will inherit it? I am a tad bit concerned about the prestige hit – the courtier will gain 300, but I couldn’t determine how it would affect my nephew’s reputation.
According to the wikis, there’s a 15% chance of congenital traits like genius being passed on, and so with both parents it’d be about double. Breeding for the good traits can work well if you’ve got elective succession, but in general having a guardian with good stats and a good education trait (i.e. skilled tactician, midas touched, etc) is more influential for getting a character good stats.
Elective has the advantage that you can (to a certain extent) hand pick your successor. So, for example, you can pick the one son that did get the genius trait. The major drawback, though, is that all your vassals with a title one tier below yours get a vote (so, i.e., if it’s a kingdom all the dukes get a vote), and so there’s a chance they can elect a non dynasty member at which point you lose that title and your heir has to muck on with just the lower tier and demesne holdings.
Elective succession in practice isn’t too bad because your vassals will usually vote for your hand-picked candidate if their opinion of you is pretty high and simply having elective succession creates a pretty big opinion boost. It is always risky, though, especially if you catch a bad break and have a short reign. Another problem with it is if you have two titles of the same rank (like in your case, maybe Kingdom of Scotland and Ireland) it can be tricky to get both sets of vassals to vote for the same candidate.
Heh, at this rate it’ll be centuries before I’m king of anything. My badass chancellor w/28 diplomacy unexpectedly died, and his replacement only has a 6% chance to fabricate [del]evidence of WMDs[/del] claims against neighboring counties. :smack: Also, I went ahead and betrothed that Genius courtier to my nephew (who was my chancellor’s son, that’s how he got the Genius trait) and all of a sudden she’s PREGNANT with another courtier’s child!!! That hussy! :mad:
I’ve got a question about elective succession. In one game, I played in Ireland as is suggested for new players. I managed over time to conquer Wales and Scotland, and then managed to maneuver myself to be elected Queen of England, so I formed the Empire of Alba (which I guess is what the Empire of Britannia is called if an Irish ruler forms it). Through some bad luck, I had two rulers die in short succession, and while I kept Wales, Scotland and Alba, I lost the Kingdoms of England and Ireland. But not only did I lose the Kingdoms, I also lost all of my holdings in those kingdoms, which effectively crippled me. Is that normal? Is there any way to get around that?
That probably happened because you had high (or absolute) crown authority, which makes it so lower titles can’t pass outside the realm through inheritance.
I would have assumed so long as you held onto the empire title that you would retain control over the kingdom-level ones, but I guess they become independent? I’ve only really played with elective succession in the HRE, where I think all the kingdom-level titles are normal inherited succession, so I’ve never had that situation of lower titles being elective.
Each kingdom you hold has its own set of inheritance laws. This is true even if you’re the emperor; the empire will, I believe, follow the laws of your primary kingdom, but the laws for your other kingdoms are independent. If your empire (and primary kingdom) is elective and other kingdoms are primogeniture, then the various titles may well pass to different successors.
It’s a pain to have to coordinate all the different laws of succession and crown authorities. What I like to do when I become emperor is to consolidate my holdings into a single kingdom, retaining the allotted two duchies, then give away the other kingdom titles to other family members or loyal courtiers. Then I only have to worry about the laws of my one kingdom and the others can worry about their own demesnes. This also gives me fewer vassals to worry about.
Hey, how in the world do you change who’s leading the army? I’m tired of getting maimed in battle.
Also, is there a way to make your dissatisfied vassals revolt faster? I can’t switch into Primogeniture because the Count of Clydesdale totally hates me (-100) but if he doesn’t revolt soon, before the Count of Mann dies of old age, I’m really gonna be in a bind. (I’m tempted to just strip his title and swallow yet another Tyrant penalty just to get it over with…)
Alternatively, the nuclear option of CK2 is the “realm purge”. The idea is that you imprison and/or strip the titles of every vassal right below you. Then you invite a bunch of new vassals to your court and appoint them, they don’t have the “tyrant” penalty since they weren’t there when you did it, and they also tend to have bonuses for “granted me a title.” Since the only vassal opinions that matter are your direct vassals, you’ve just made everyone like you.
Edit: Yes, this is absurdly broken. Aside from some heavily luck-based starts CK2 is really an easy game once you spend enough time to learn exactly how broken its systems are.
That’s not gonna work, because his heirs hate me just as much if not worse, and for some reason assassination only has a 25% chance of succeeding. Besides, I want his county outright, so I control all the land in that duchy – I heard that’s the best way to maintain control of titles. Your “nuclear option” does sound intriguing, though it’s probably more work than reloading the save before I banished my other rebellious counts – at the time, I thought that was the only way to take over their counties. (d’oh!)
But yeah, this game does have its moments. Especially the moments that involve adultery.
You can’t always decide who is leading your army. I think it depends on crown authority (I don’t remember for certain. But I’m sure there are situation where you can replace army leaders and others when you can’t).
That’s okay, I figured it out. (This game really needs an in-game tutorial…)
Is it possible to fabricate [del]evidence of WMDs[/del] a claim against one of your own vassals? It says the player will take a diplo hit if I revoke a title “if you do not have a claim” – does that mean I can send my chancellor there to fabricate [del]evidence of WMDs[/del] a claim on his county? That would certainly solve my current problem.
To be able to appoint generals, you’ll need at least Limited Crown Authority (i.e., anything but Autonomous Vassals). If you’re able to revoke titles then you also have the authority to appoint generals. Click on the army stack then click on the name of the general to assign another one. You can also assign generals to each flank as well as redistribute units between flanks. You can only do this if the army is not in a battle or a siege.
I found the game…difficult, to say the least. The who controls what and why bit is a bit opaque to me (for example, the talk of controlling who leads your armies and why).
And yet I feel a bit compelled to try and keep playing because I picked a ruler who birthed a firstborn son who adopted a heretic religion and started speaking in tongues. All my other sons are lovely guys (they have better stats than my original ruler at least…and are sane) but because my ruler is a simpleton who doesn’t have enough influence to get a good spymaster for his court or gather conspirators, I have 0% success in plots. Hell, he doesn’t even have the smarts to think up plots like “murder my insane firstborn son who will inherit my title otherwise”. I can’t wait until my son takes the throne and his stats of 0 across the board makes the whole thing collapse.
Crusader Kings II feels kind of like either rock climbing without a safety line, or a slow-motion train wreck, depending on what’s going on.
