Patrician 3 versus Capitalism 2 versus Crusader Kings: you decide!

The Game Room
1

I’m debating getting a nice 2d strategy game while I save up some money for a computer I can put a decent 3d card in. After pursing the files in gog.com and gamersgate.com, I’m looking at a few options.

First, Patrician 3. This looks pretty cool: medieval trade and so forth. WOuld be nice to have mroe of an exploration option, but still fun to build a huge fleet, take over everything through money adn wealth and so on.

Capitalism 2: I’ve only played a demo a long time ago, and this struck me as being somewhat overly complicated, with too much involved in setting up simple chains and relatively little competition or reward for the mess. I included it because I’m amenable to changing my mind and I like the idea of the game at least.

Crusader Kings: a pricier option (the x-pack is more than the original game!) and every reviewer says that the x-pack is such an improvement that it’s simply not worth playing otherwise. A 2d game based on the EU/EU2 engine , but where you try to expand your family lineage and dynasty with random family memebrs and officials. This sounds pretty cool, to say the least, and apparently they improved and simplified the control scheme from EU2.

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I have Crusader Kings without the Xpack and though I haven’t played it in a few years, it is a blast. I definitely recommend it. Every game is a unique story. I had one where I started as the duke of two counties off the coast of scotland, and ended up being King of Ireland and Scotland and wiping out England, after a lot of troubled conflicts in my realm and so on.

In another game, I played as Bavaria and ended up going on a personal crusade against the Muslims in Spain, gaining and losing territory over time, but it was hard to gain an advantage and the Muslim world was becoming much stronger than the Christian world. In that game I traced my starting noble’s lineage through the generations and noticed that one of the descendents married a Spanish muslim ruler and there was a whole other group of descendents from there on. I discovered, later on, that a distant cousin of one of my rulers at the time became ruler of a significant part of Spain, so I tried to strike up an alliance with them.

Crusader Kings has a huge amount of variety and like I said, every game seems to tell a story. It is definitely a game that has a significant amount of detail too it, and its not one where you can drastically change the world in a hurry. It takes patience, definitely a thinking game not a fast paced one, and its easy to get carried away with armies and tank your economy.

Here is a link to an After Action Report of my campaign as Bavaria. Knight Mages of Bavaria. I didn’t finish all the way to the 1400s but I do cover quiet a bit of the campaign. Of course, I added in the fantasy-themed bits when writing the AAR, its all historical in the game itself.

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You’ve sold me, buddy!

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Some tips and notes for Crusader Kings, just for the heck of it. Just talking about the game makes me want to start another game.

  1. You start out by picking a county, duchy or kingdom, and a campaign. I recommend picking the 1066 campaign so you can play the full length the game covers. I also recommend starting with a Duchy the first time. Counties are challenging and kinda boring at first. Kingdoms can be overwhelming until you get used to it. Also you will hopeful grow into your first Kingdom title after you get more powerful as a duke. You can play until 1440 or so. That is a huge amount of game time. Even my longest game to date only lasted until about 1350.

  2. The game map is based on counties, which is a similar idea to provinces, but at a smaller scale than in most games. The map covers Africa, Europe, Middle East, and maybe a tiny part of westernmost Asia. There’s a lot of counties on the map. At least 500. The larger entities such as Duchies and Kingdoms are based on titles. You can create new titles that don’t exist at the beginning of the campaign if you do things like unify Ireland (not too hard) or unify Italy (hard). You can also take titles as prizes of war, or destroy an enemy, removing their title from the game, and then recreating it.

  3. Vassals are a huge part of the game. You will want to move up the scale to Duke and then King, because a Duke can only have counts as vassals, and a count can’t have vassals. Also you can hold more lands in your own demense as a King without penalty than a Duke and a Duke can hold more than a Count. If you try to hold a ton of counties personally, you will get killed by economic penalties and unrest that increases the more you personally hold. This is forcing you to give land to vassals, as was the habit back then. You can’t conquer the world without building a huge structure of vassals. In fact, conquering the world is considered a major challenge, and isn’t really the goal of the game.

  4. On the other side of the spectrum, you could be a vassal of someone else. Often you will start a game out as a vassal of a King or Duke. If your liege calls for your armies, if you don’t recruit them yourself, they will be recruited and controlled by your liege. If you’d like to join in his war controlling your own troops and taking territories for yourself, preemptively recruit your counties’ soldiers before you think he’s going to call from them. You have to pay for them being active even if he has control of them. This can cripple you, and is a big reason to go independent.

  5. You get a lot of your income later from your vassals. A king gets about 1/2 his money from his vassals who pay taxes to him. You need to give up a county or two to your sons if you can, otherwise you get a prestige hit if your sons don’t have any land of their own after a certain age. They become vassals, and once they leave your court, they will get married and so on without your consent.

  6. Which brings up marriage and courts. You can control marriages of anyone in your court. You can strategically marry off your daughters, or just random courtiers. Unless you arrange a marriage between two members of your court, the married couple will move to the guy’s court. If you are proposing a marriage between courts, the ruler of the other court needs to approve.

  7. You can appoint members of your court to 5 positions I think. Marshal, Diocese Bishop, Steward, Chancellor, Spymaster. Marshal and Bishop are both male only. The others can be fulfilled by anyone. Check their stats for the relevant position. Your effective total stats are the total of your leader’s stat and the particular appointee for that stat. So for intrigue, its your leader’s intrigue plus your Spymaster’s intrigue that matters.

  8. The pope has a big influence on the game as well. The pope can excommunicate a noble or any courtier based on their actions and his whim. There is also a position that exists in Crusader Kings called the Papal Controller. Based on whoever has the most religious influence on the papacy, they become the papal controller and can push the Pope into doing certain things. Your diocese bishop is in very rare circumstances promoted to Pope.

  9. You control the education of your children and children of the court. Its important to educate them the way you want to make use of them. Especially your sons, as they will take over and become the new ruler when your current ruler dies. If your ruler doesn’t have any sons when he dies, rule goes based on old medieval rules. You can change the rules of descent in your Kingdom if you want too, but if at any time, your lands are under the rule of someone with a different last name, you lose control of them. You can take over where someone with your last name owns another land, but you will lose what you have built up if you lose your grip on inheritance rules.

  10. War consists of pitched battles, when both armies are in the field, and sieges, which are the main part of CK war. There is no navy in CK, unlike Europe Universalis, so you can sail your forces from England to the Baltic sea for just a flat cost and the time it takes. You can travel on land through any lands of friendly religious counties, and lands you are at war with. Mostly war is a matter of trying to finish off the enemy before they finish off you. If you have the forces, you can weaken the enemy, but losses from battle aren’t usually critical. Moral is the key thing, so don’t send soldiers that have poor morale into battle right away.

  11. You recruit soldiers as a county by county force. Each county has a different composition of knights, infantry, etc in its force. You can combine your county armies into a larger force but if you get too big of a force in one county, you will have a lot of attrition from just moving around. Only recruit soldiers if you plan to use them, don’t recruit them just to stand around as deterrent unless you expect to be attacked very soon. Soldiers are very expensive, and you can lose a lot of money in hurry from keeping them in the field too long.

  12. You can build economic improvements in your counties, and research new technologies like Crossbows. Techs are held county by county as well, as spread slowly to neighboring counties. You will have some counties that are significantly more advanced that others, but during normal gameplay, techs are not a major consideration except in extreme cases (such as way outclassing your enemy in tech.) Unlike EU, CK is not really a tech driven game, because progress was so slow during the time period. Also, economic improvements don’t really make a huge impact, they are merely nice to have.

  13. One last note, games get a little slower later on, performance wise, and saves take up more space then also. Crusader Kings keeps track of your entire family tree from the beginning of the campaign. This can start to make save games pretty big, so I don’t recommend saving constantly later on. But on the plus side, you can trace all of your family’s descendents. Its fun seeing just how widely your first ruler’s genes have spread.

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Now I want to play Crusader Kings. I love Paradox (I can’t wait for Vicky 2) and I usually wouldn’t get a game so old, but I still play Victoria a lot and that game came out in 2003!

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Thanks a lot, Mindwanderer. I oplayed all last night and I figured out msot of the basic mechanics involved.

Here is a brief summary, and why I’m having trouble still. Skip down below for the actualy question. And yes, to other people, this is actually the condensed version. The full story woiuld take a long time to tell.

[STORY]

I chose the “Kingdom” of Aragon, which gave me a whopping one province. This was OK, since it let me figure things out. It was basically a Duchy with a single province and no vassals.

It sucked. The very first thing which happened was that I got hit with a Poverty event in my single province, and it shows no signs of abating (it is now 1079). There wasn’t a whole lot of options, as all the territories around me were in the Duchy of Catalonia or the Kingdom of Navarre (and the latter are my relatives), or are French and in their Duchies. This meant I couldn’t just get an excuse to attack and do so, since I would be facing down a much more powerful opponent, with two or more provinces’ worth of soldiery. I mitigated this by dropping Scutage taxes down to 0. This gave me more troops, and I wasn’t getting any money from Scutage anyway.

OK, I notice after extensive cliocking EVERYWHERE that my next-door neighbor is my Queen’s brothers. My Queen’s underage brothers. Sadly, I’m well down the line of succession. After her own son is born, however, I note she has the Flamboyant Schemer trait. I decide she’s a nasty, vicious woman and she sends assassins to begin killing her brothers. She succeeds, and eventually kills them off, putting her infant son on the nominal seat of power.

However, I get into some awkwardness when the Emir of Seville invites me to ally with him for some daft reason (him being on the other side of Spain). He is way more powerful than me, so I agree. (There was previously a profitable war with Valencia, so I have a truce with Valencia and decide not to attack the sole Muslim state around me, though I want it BADLY). Somehow or another, soldiers come all the way from Morocco and sneak around southern France to attack me. I kick their butts across every county I can find, until I get bored and they run away.

However, this actually knee-capped me, though I didn’t realize it. I still had plenty of money even after building improvements, but… my brother the King of Navarre attacked me. This might have been survivable, even though he had two counties (his and his vassal). But my King got a Severe Wound two seconds into the fight, and then they had a huge Military skill advantage.

Well, battle back and forth a bit, and my King gets killed. BUT! This immediately puts his infant son on the nominal throne, and with this I take control over the county he’d previous inherited after his uncles were killed. I sue for peace and get it by renouncing my claims upon the King of Navarre’s lands.

So, after some more time, I have two counties, sizable troop numbers. I build up some stuf, claim the title of Duke of Spanish Marche, and am mostly waiting for my King and his two brothers (both half-siblings, though only one is recognized as a bastard). All are brilliant men and likely to establish the family power, and I am trying to look for good wives even though the eldest is 12.

BUT! After some minor misfortunes the Burghers in one province get angry. I can either cave in (screw that!) or give them the finger. Since I didn’t want to piss off my Knights, I give them the finger. They start a Revolt.

[/STORY]
Here is the basic problem: their revolt isn’t something I can fight. It’s simply a trait of the province, and I don’t know what to do about it. I’m not making any money and I have a full complement of troops there. It’s kinda killing my chances.

Furthermore, what can I try and do to get more provinces? Basically, I need to somehow insert myself into the line of succession. Is there a way to get rid of other claimants short of murder, though? I don’t want my entire family lineage to be made up of psychos and killers! I can also conquer them in some ways (I think I get how this works, because I played EU2).

Finally, the option that made the Burghers revolt did something I think was odd: it seems to have changed not only the relative strength of each group, but the total amount available. It’s like there’s a maximum of, say, 70% power balance instead of 100%. Am I just crazy or am I misinterpreting the symbols? (hearts are happiness, swords are strength, right?)

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I recommend Crusader Kings above the others but it might be not enough to just get the expansion pack. The DVIP mod not only fixes bugs, improves realism and balance, but adds a lot more events to make things interesting.

There are important things to know about the game before you get deep into it though, and you should visit the official forum FAQ section for to learn what effects your reputation and how technology works and spreads. The game is in some ways less and more deep than you might assume.

Official forum:Crusader Kings | Paradox Interactive Forums

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Crusader Kings can take a bit of time to get used to, which is why you may have to restart and try a new game as someone a bit more powerful. Did you get the latest patch for Deus Vult (I think that’s the name of the expansion?) and download it?

Its cool to hear of a few more people getting interested in the game. I may have to pony up for the expansion. Ok, for your frustration, I definitely DONT recommend playing as a country with only one province, its not that fun until you get a lot more acquainted with the game.

I recommend trying the Duchy of Apulia, or maybe play as one of the big powers, so you don’t have to worry about getting defeated quickly. You could try England. I started a new game last night and picked Apulia without knowing much about them.

One note: when you load a save game in CK, you need to pick the country you want to play as again, and you can play as someone else than you were playing before, if you want to.

Your questions:

The event you got called itself a revolt, but what it actually did was make your Burgher’s loyalty decrease in your only province. An actual revolt would mean that the rebels have formed an army that you can fight. Depending on how your lands are set up, the burgher’s loyalty should go up gradually, back to 100%. I believe hearts are loyalty. But read the numbers in the little pop up box that shows up when you hover over one of the four classes (peasants, clergy, nobles, burghers).

70% burgher loyalty won’t hurt much. But that poverty event will. Nothing you can do about that. That’s one reason having only one province is tough, anything that happens to the province hurts a lot.

In order to get more provinces, your most common option is going to war. I will describe the process I use to find SAFE targets for conquest in a bit. War is a lot different in this game than in most others, in that you don’t get everything you conquer.

You can try to arrange marriages and manipulate succession to take over, but its difficult and really an advanced topic, which I’m pretty bad at myself.

Example game

To give an idea how I go about conquering lands as a mid-range power. I started a game as Apulia last night. Clicking on the portrait in the top right of the screen. I noticed I had 3 vassals, a bunch of children, none of them near coming of age, my family name is “de Hauteville”, my parents are dead, and I have 3 brothers left alive, the rest of my siblings are dead (as indicated by a greyed out portrait in the parents, siblings, or children, etc sections).

Next I clicked on the shield below my portrait. Whenever you see shields, you can tell if its a count, duke or king by the shape of the shield. A triangular bottom to the shield means its a count. A square bottom to the shield, with no crown on the bottom, means its a duke. And a square bottom with a crown means its a king. A circular shield means a muslim ruler, or pagan ruler.

When you click on your own shield, you go into the management screen. I clicked on the picture of the crown and scepter, which takes you into the Law and Technology screen. On the law tab, Apulia showed that it followed “Elective Law”.

Very bad for me. Elective law means if I have a vassal who is not a “de Hauteville”, and is stronger than my sons are, then that vassal will take over and I essentially lose the game. So I immediately changed to the best succession law, Salic Primogeniture. Its very hard to lose your dynasty with that law in place. You have to have no male-line relatives at all in order to lose it.

Changing the law of the realm meant all of my vassals became distrustful. If you click on the shield of one of your vassals, there will be a loyalty line in there, and if you hover your mouse over that line, it gives a percentage. All of my vassals become under 50% loyalty when I changed the law. However, times were good, so their loyalty quickly moved back up. And I saved my money for a while. Got a few marriage offers.

Byzantium wanted to form an alliance with me, but they were in a war already (find that out by clicking their shield), and they get into a lot of wars. So I said no.

If you form an alliance with someone at war, you are essentially joining the war right them. If they go to war after you join an alliance, you can opt out of going to war (and get a penalty in relations with them).

There is an island just southwest of the bottom of italy, and I had enough money after a while. So I clicked on the shields of the muslim rulers on that island. If you go to war with muslims, you won’t get any penalties in diplomacy (except with the Muslims of course.) Going to war with Christians can get the Pope involved.

I looked at the Shiekdom of Palermo first. They had no liege but they were in an alliance with the Kingdom of the Fatimids. The Muslim Kingdoms in this game are not to be trifled with, so I didn’t even consider fighting Palermo.

The Sheikdom of Siracusa had no liege, and was in an alliance with the Sheikdom of Trapani. I checked out Trapani, it was on the same island, and had no liege. So, if I went to war with Siracusa, I would only have to face that sheikdom and Trapani.

I recruited soldiers from all my counties, but not my vassal’s counties (I could have asked them to contribute also). I ended up with a little over 4000 troops. Decent for a small war, not nearly enough for a major war (which can get into 20k and up.)

I had a vassal who owned a county on the island (Messina). So I moved all of my troops by sea to Messina before declaring war. So that they wouldn’t have a chance to siege Messina or mess up my Italian counties either.

I declared war on Siracusa, and Trapani declined to honor its alliance with Siracusa. So it was just my 4000 troops vs. Siracusa’s 1000 troops and its one county.

I moved my troops in, won the pitched battle, and started the siege. My troops were more advanced and more numerous, so I had hurt Siracusa’s army pretty badly. The siege took a while, and my coin was already headed towards negative.

Next, Trapani decided to go to war with the Count of Benevento, one of my vassals, in the Italian mainland. I went to war with Trapani, in defense of my vassal.

I conquered the county of Siracusa, and I immediately owned it since its ruler was of a different religion. (Conquest works a bit different for same-religion versus different religion.) Next I moved my army to Trapani, and conquered that county a bit later on.

Then I personally held 7 counties, and my leader was only good at managing 4 of them, so I was getting heavy penalties from having so many counties myself. So I gave Trapani to the Count of Benevento, who was one of my 3 vassals. I kept Siracusa.

Counts aren’t able to manage that many counties easily, so the Count of Benevento ended up creating a “Bishopric” in Trapani. That means he granted the county to one of his religious courtiers, and told the courtier to run it as a religious domain. Essentially as an entire province as a religious domain, ruled by the new bishop.

So since the Count granted that land to someone else, and he’s a count, he can’t have vassals. Thus this new bishop of Trapani became my 4th vassal instead. If the Count of Benevento had been a duke instead, the bishop would be a vassal of his instead of mine.

So, by the end of the war, I had called the Estates General (an event that shows up in war to give you money, at a cost in other areas), but I still was at about -75 gold.

Going a bit negative in gold won’t kill you, but going way negative will. Since I had good earning power, I’ve got back to 16 gold now, and its March 17th, 1069 in game. Only 3 years have passed.

Clicking on my leader’s shield and then the sword, there’s an option called Create Title. I checked that last night and realized that already, the De Hautevilles and their vassals together control 11 of the 17 counties that are part of the historical Kingdom of Naples.

I need 66% of the counties included in the title, as well as 250 gold and 250 prestige, to make the title. Taking 66% of 17, I get 11.22, so I assume I only need one more county in the list to be able to create the title.

If I end up creating the title of King of Naples later on, I would then become a King, and if I get more duke titles, I could start handing them out to loyal vassals so that they can become dukes. You can’t just make a Count into a Duke, you have to own a title that you can grant them. Then they gain the vassals that exist in that area as their own. So you end up with a list of vassals who can have their own vassals, when you are a King.

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Thanks. That doesn’t asnwer all my question,s BUI’ll give it some more work. This is a fun game, so I’m willing to play around with it 9I’d quit and restart as someone else, but damned if I don’t want to see if I can’t expand some more, maybe grab some tender num-nums from the Boys From Baghdad*

*Historical Disclaimer: the Spanish Muslims were primarily immigrants from North Africa, although b a curious historical accident I believe many native pagan Spaniards converted directly to Islam.

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Oh, here’s another odd question…

Why the bloody hell does the center-north state on Sicily have a 7000 man army?!

Where then hell did they get that from?

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I’m not sure which state you’re talking about, but some provinces are wealthier and have more troops than others. Also if you develop your provinces you can get more troops out of them eventually.

They could have vassals that they draw troops from. Or it could just be a really rich and populous county.

7000 is a lot. As Apulia, I was only able to get about 1000 per county, so about 4000 from my demense counties (personally held counties that is.)

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It’s Palermo. For whatever reason, they have a 6500-man army just from their home county somehow (any vassals are more, and they were able to support it way into the negative numbers and without much attrition. Anyway it’s 1066 era Palermo, north-central Sicily.

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Since I finished Mass Effect 2 today (which was awesome!) and I wanted to get back to my strategic roots, I bought CK tonight since you guys are making it sound so good.

I’m easing into it, but since family lines are so important, I’m missing something obvious: how does one get a bride? I’ve married off female courtiers to other nobility, but I can seem to arrange a marriage for myself. Enlighten me!

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Never mind, I’m an idiot.

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When I restarted, I noticed two things:

number 1, I clearly have no iea how economic management works. Apparently you can get the Theater only with income 10 or higher. The highest I’ve seen so far is three, with various stuff built in the province. Also, I’ve had to cheat for gold, because even brief wars without total mobilization drain decades’ worth of money. The AI seemed to be able to sustain larger armies in the field for far longer with no thought about income.

Two, Palermo starts with a relatively small army, but for whatever reason when I didn’t attack it grew fast. I was able to beat them by kneecapping the isolated Palermians.
In another question, what good is Church Supremacy? It apparentely makes some buildings cheaper, which is nice n’ all, but it seems to hurt me everywhere else. No money, no troops, and what does “strengthen church authority” mean? More conversions? I got some early conversion events and then nada. I’m thinking about moving to the mixed authority to get money and troops since I’m planning to totally go invade the Holy Land.

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Nitpick, native Christian Spaniards. Christianity was well established in Spain by the time of the Muslim conquest, and paganism pretty much wiped out. There was a major conversion to Islam in the 9th and 10th centuries. The term in Muslim Spain for native Spanish Muslims was Muwallads or Aljamiados, and most Spanish Muslims were native Spaniards, even though most of the leadership of Muslim Spain wasn’t.

One notable exception to that rule was the Banu Qasi, which was a Muslim Basque (or possibly Visigoth) dynasty that had an Emirate around the Ebro river.

And in addition to cheaper churches, I think Church Supremacy gives you a piety bonus.

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Actually, I was under the impression that southern Spain in particular didn’t have an extremely large Christian population at the time of the Berber invasions.

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I’m not playing with the Deus Vult expansion (yet), but Church Supremacy’s big value is in giving you piety. I’m pretty sure that your church contributions slider is locked so that you have to be giving enough to get a piety bonus (as Apulia/Naples, I’ve kept it at the minimum and you get +0.4 piety/month).

This game is really fun. I’m glad I stumbled into this thread. The way the story lines unfold is really cool. For example, I started as Richard (some R name), Duke of Apulia. He dies early and Roger Borsa takes his titles at around age 5. Roger does some good things while he’s a little kid, like conquer most of Sicily and take that title. Then as he grows up, he makes good on his claims in Capua and Napoli and becomes the King of Naples. All the while his vassals in southern Italy (his uncles) love his even-handed rule and granting of titles.

He gets married to a nice girl from Denmark, but he keeps having girls. Because of church supremacy, Roger’s such a pious dude that he doesn’t lose anything by not going on crusade. So the money and the improvements build up. Then it’s time to have some fun killing infidels. Roger finishes taking all of Sicily and takes out the Beni Halal (sp?) kingdom in North Africa.

All is good except still no heir. And damned if Roger’s going to let his sister’s kid from Flanders inherit his kingdom. His wife’s in her 30s and it doesn’t look like any more kids are coming, so it’s time to knock her off so he can get a younger, more fertile wife. After two expensive attempts, the Dane is killed. He marries a young woman from south Italy and voila, a son, Godfrey is born. Alas, Roger paid no heed to his wife’s bloodline and Godfrey has the inbred trait, which mean all of his stats suck and he’s at a -5 for fertility. 5 years later, Roger Borsa dies and Godfrey is now the King of Naples as a child, just like his father. The big question: will this inbred child be able to hold the kingdom together and will he be able to continue the family line? We’ll find out tonight. :slight_smile:

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I don’t believe that’s true. Southern Spain had enough of a Christian presence to host a synod in the late 3rd/early 4th century (Synod of Elvira), and a bishop active in the Arian Controversy (Hosius of Cordoba). And southern Spain was more urbanized than northern Spain, which would suggest it would Christianize first (Christianity spread faster in urban areas.) Then, of course, as the Roman empire in the west started falling apart, Spain was occupied by first the Vandals, and then more permanently, the Visigoths, who were both Christian.

20

Well, I might be wrong about the SPanish, though fo course the Christian and Muslim groups were unusually mixed up and a lot of people found it rather easy to go from one to the other. The fact that the more barbaric Berbers who periodically invaded proved to be extremely by-the-book and extremely unpopular may have helped change thigns, too.