Crusader Kings 2 and a bunch of DLCs are on discount at Steam, so I grab the bundle. Now I am facing the daunting task of…playing the game. A friend of mine loves the series, and the way he describes it to me, Crusader Kings 2 is like the Rogue-like of turn based strategy games. One wrong move, one random mishap, and you can kiss your dynasty bye bye.
So…how do I get started? There are so many types of laws, characters, factions, levies…etc. etc. etc. Any hints for a complete newbie?
Subscribing to this thread 'cause I’m in the same situation. It seems so awesome… and so daunting at the same time. I’ve heard starting out as a lowly minor duke vs a king is the best way to start out.
My general advice for dealing with Paradox games. Start a game, play for a little bit. Try to figure out one place you went wrong. Start over. Repeat as necessary.
Particular advice for CK2. I would definitely advise against starting as a king. My recommendation for early games is Earl Murchad of Dublin. You only start with a single county, but will soon inherit Leinster from your elderly father. (You can learn about the intrigue system by hastening his demise). You are unlikely to face any major threats in the short term, so you can concentrate on gaining the titles and lands necessary to be crowned King of Ireland. From there, you can choose which way to go, but you’ll probably be strong enough to either obtain land on Crusades or to make a run for Emperor of Brittania.
The tutorials were actually pretty good, in terms of learning how the interface works. With recent updates, I understand they’ve become less useful as some of the buttons have been moved around.
Nearly everyone recommends playing an Irish earl, which is a fine choice. For my own first game, I actually started out as Duke of Bohemia. You’re a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor with a reasonably-sized territory, so you’re relatively secure from being instantly obliterated. Most of your own vassals are loyal and happy, except for a couple of troublesome ones who are easily mollified. You’ve also got an immediate objective of forming the Duchy of Moravia, so you can get a handle on how titles are created. For territorial expansion, you can look to Poland or Hungary, who will be faced with some early rebellions.
Good choice on an excellent game.
AS mentioned Ireland is a good choice to start off with, you can learn the ropes without too many threats to you.
The most helpful tip is to look at the tool tips that come up when you hover over things, they explain a large amount of the game.
One of the first things to look at is your succession law. You generally start with gavelkind where your titles are split between your children. This is a difficult law to work with, and although there are ways of dealing with it you are probably best off at first changing to elective or primogeniture. With elective you can choose the best candidate, do you have idiot children but an amazing uncle? Then choose him. However you need to keep good relations with your vassals otherwise someone not of your dynasty might be chosen. With primogeniture the succession is more stable, since someone of your dynasty will be chosen, but you had better hope that your first born son isn’t an fool, in which case you might need to arrange an “accident”.
To expand you are going to need claims. You can marry into titles and claims but to start with it is easiest to send your chancellor to fabricate a claim.
Hope that helps somewhat.
Some extreme basics:
You control your demesne. This is your personal holdings, and you only get so many even if you’re the grand high mega-Emperor. Economic action only takes place on the Barony or County level.
Counties are individual map bits; baronies are the individual squares in them that represent cities, monasteries, or castles. Each County also has it’s “top-level” holidng that represents the County itself, which is almost always a castle, but can be a city in rare cases - you see this around Italy especially.
In most cases, you want to control as many holdings as possible before hitting your demesne limit. If you look in the top-right portion, you’ll see a number like 3/5 or 7/8 or something. This says how many holdings you have, and how many you can posess without hitting nasty economic penalties. Always aim to control as many as possible unless you really know what you’re doing.
On the intrigue screen, you can unleash plots. These are good for getting yourself up to the county maximum, because you almost always have access to a plot if it would net you a holding instantly. (I have no idea how the hell the game designs plots, as it’s something of a sore point for me that I can’t create my own at will). It’s easy to use - just pick the plot and start adding people to the party. You want to get your evil schemes over 100% in most cases.
If you intend to keep control over a holding, it can be a good idea to invest in making it more profitable. You can invest in each holding to add structures, and each structure gives you more money, defensivness, soldiers, or other special bonuses. The money-gaining ones are a really good investment until it starts costing 200 - 300, and then they’re worth it for the long haul only. As you invest in the cash some more, you should also start buying troop-producing structures to get more soldiers.
When it comes to warfare, there’s some odd bits to understand. You get Levies and Garrison troops. Levies are dudes you can roll around and kill with. Garrison troops just sit there until they get beseiged down. The more Garrison troops, the longer it will take for an enemy to defeat you - defenses like walls and such affect this as well. In order to even start beseiging, you need to outnumber the garrison, plus any levies still sitting at home.
Usually, wars follow several patterns: once war is declared, both side try to raise as many soldiers as possible, then the AI goes completely bonkers and makes as many possible Epic Fails as it can. It’s especially bad at handling big stacks of units in hostile territory.
In any case, what you want to do is concentrate your forces ASAP, and hit the enemy with everything possible. Try to run around smacking little units and avoiding their big troop concentrations - attack when you have them outnumbered as least two-to-one if possible, and hire mercenaries if you can afford them to wear down the enemy without really costing you any soldiers, then disband the mercs after slaughtering the enemy armies. Then settle in and seige anything vulnerable or which is the object of your war effort. Take the slow way and seige targets instead of atacking unless you have an overwhelming advantage (like 10-to-1). Depending on the war, the AI will usually surrender at between 80%-100%.
Beware of things like Holy Wars - they sound great and can net you huge territorial gains, but the AI can and will rope in shocking numbers of allies. I think I once had to wipe out about three times my numbers in better-tech’d enemy soldiers, and only managed it through the use of Holy Orders, calling up every single soldier I could lay my paws on, keeping them active dangerously long, and chewing the enemy up peicemeal. That said, remember that you don’t have to win the war if it’s going against you. Just surviving it often enough.
Not entirely true. You can always create a plot to assassinate someone by going to their character screen. This is different from assassination button, where you simply pay money for the chance at killing them.
While war is the most straightforward way to expand your holdings, one thing that hasn’t been made explicit is that you need a valid casus belli to go to war. Some of these relatively easy to understand, like the Holy War against non-believers. Or a territory could be de jure considered a part of yours. You could send your chancellor to outright fabricate a claim. Someone in your court could have a claim and you can go to war in their name. Be careful in this last instance, because the other person gets the holding, not you. This is fine if you are a king and they are (or will become) a count; when you win the war, they will still count as your vassal. But if you are a duke and are waging a war for someone else’s claim on another duchy, they will be released released from vassalage when you win the war, since a duke can’t be a vassal of another duke.
There are several things I reccomend you do regularly in CK2. Do it day 1 of your campaign and every few months thereafter.
(1) Identify your resources. How many soldier do you have? How much money? What are your titles and possible claims and such. How good are your advisors? Do you have several potential heirs and are they safe (i.e. hostile and weak or loyal and strong?) or can you make hostile and powerful ones safe with gifts?
(2) If you’ve got any simple weaknesses (bad advisors who won’t be too miffed if you drop them, patch it. Invest in expanding your resources and buy buildings.
(3) What are your external threats? Whom should you be scared of? Who just plain doesn’t like you? Who might have claims on your land? Where are your opportuinities - is there a bright, sexy young Duchess with land bordering your kingdom? 
(4) Work it to your advantage. Send your daughters to marry their sons and/or vice versa. Build some worthwhile alliances with nearby states; even small ones can be surprisingly helpful if you get into a tough war. Even a thousand soldiers can swing things in your favor. Don’t’ forget that you can use Betrothals to snatch up good matches years before ityou need them.
(5) What are your internal threats? Which vassals are dangerous disloyal? Who needs to be cut down to size? Do you have any family members with shocking levels of Intrigue, the Ambitious trait, and a murderous disposition?
(6) Improve relations. Butter up your vassals with gifts, release any prisoners who can be soothed, send your spymaster to end any Factions rising and displmate to build relations with vassals. Rearrange provinces if necessary and if you can avoid pissing off other vassals.
It sounds alike a lot, but it’s surprisingly easy once you get into the habit. And checking regularly will usually be all you need to avoid disaster and to slowly improve your position.
I would actually disagree with this somewhat. Compared to most other grand strategy type games, CK2 is actually quite forgiving of mistakes or bad luck early on. The game ending events of dying without an heir or losing all your titles are fairly easy to avoid and short of that there’s not much to stop you from clawing your way back up. In fact, some of the most satisfying games I’ve played are ones where I’ve gone from a count to a king and and back again. There’s a few sort of pigeonholes you can get stuck in, especially with the (IMHO) overly powerful HRE, but otherwise playing straight through and just rolling with what happens is pretty fun.
Resurrecting this thread to mention that this game and most of the DLC is on sale on Steam for 75% off until May 30 ($9.99 for the basic game, $19.99 for everything). I’m downloading it right now.
Yeah, I just picked it up as well.
There’s a slighty more recent, active thread about the game over here:
I dunno if it’s worth merging these.
So I’ve watched a YouTube tutorial video, I played some of the in-game tutorial, and I still have no fucking clue what I’m doing, but I’m still having a pretty good time fooling around with it.
I’ve started watching a YouTube series on it as well, and it’s been helping me be more efficient on what I do. For example, declaring war doesn’t mean I have to fabricate claims all the time. I can look at the naturally-occurring duchies/kingdoms and what not and use those as a casus belli. I need to get better with familial relationships, though. Who should I be marrying off, and when? Also, I get the feel that I’m very ham-handed with my economy/taxation.
Yeah, the YouTube vids are extremely helpful, and pretty entertaining as well. I’ve watched the first few by Eviscerator03. They’re quite long (up to an hour) but he describes everything in good detail, without getting into a ton of boring minutiae.
I’m finding that basic gameplay is a lot simpler than it appears to be; learning everything takes a while but most of it is just small steps. Kind of reminds me of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games; while ROTK’s warfare is a lot more important and in-depth, it’s the politics and scheming in that game that I like, and that seems to be what CK2 is all about.
Now, a question for people more experienced with this game: how important is it who I marry my vassals and court members to? I’m kind of willy-nilly about it; when someone comes to me and asks me to help them get married, I just pick pretty much anyone off the list. If I set up a marriage between, say, one of my vassals’ sons and, I don’t know, the daughter of the King of England, is that going to bite me in the ass somewhere down the line (I’m currently an Irish Duke, and slowly working my way towards becoming King of Ireland)?
Getting good marriages for your vassals and councilors and so on is important for a few reasons.
If your guys have an ambition to get married and you set up a marriage for them, they’re going to like you more.
Traits are semi-hereditary. If your marshal marries some courier who is also a skilled warrior, the odds are pretty good that their kid is going to be a pretty good warrior. There’s a lot of randomness, though. Plus, your courtiers having kids is how you keep your court going strong through the generations.
Marriages bring females into your court, and they can educate your children (thus passing on desirable traits and skills). Be wary of marrying a useful female courtier off, though, since she’ll leave you for some other ruler’s court.
The best I can tell, marrying into important families has a few affects. First is that you might end up getting some weak claims on their lands that you can press down the line. Second is that you might end up in an alliance. That seems to be bad more than good, since I get turned down a lot when I want help in a battle, but those big kingdoms are constantly trying to get you to participate in a war.
I found this LP very helpful to get me started: Crusader Kings 2
They’ll help you assuming you don’t get into a really stupid war, they’re not overburdened with one already, and you have decent relations. And there’s nothing which says you can’t ally, go to war on your son in law’s behalf, and do nothing whatsoever to fight it.
Ah, but a powerful ally that’s constantly asking you to join their tiny wars can be very helpful. You get +25 relations every time you join one of their wars, so once you’ve joined a few, you’ve got a very reliable ally that’s practically guaranteed to join the next war you call them into.