Crusader Kings II Spirit-all

Chaz wrote:

Okay, I have confuse about navies and armies.

I started a game in the mid-1100s as the Duke of Sicily, so I own the toe of Italy, plus all four counties in Sicily. Within a few years of the game starting, a 1200 peasant revolt kick off on the mainland. Okay, I raise my personal levies. This pops up as 433 foot soldiers in each of my five counties and three ships per county.

How the heck do I get the dudes on the boats so I can go knock some peasant heads in?

The following sentence is not intended as a snark : This is covered in the war section of the tutorials.

You can split the stack by opening the big army and clicking the "create new unit" button. This will give you an empty army that you can transfer units into.

I had all the ships in the same port, and I tried splitting the armies, but the smallest I could seem to get was one of the 433 man armies split by itself, which was too big for a 300-capacity ship group. Maybe I missed a way to split off chunks of 300 men, or a way to merge the ships (though it seemed like the ships' "merge" button was greyed out, even when I thought I had the whole stack selected)? I was playing on my lunch break, so I might have overlooked something.

Mr Bismarck wrote:

The following sentence is not intended as a snark : This is covered in the war section of the tutorials.

I ran into crashing/freezing problems with a few tutorials and finally gave up on bothering with them; they were more frustrating than educational for me, sadly.

It especially puzzled me because in my nearly 20 hours with the game so far, the tutorials are the ONLY thing that I've had technical problems with. Weird!

But yeah, in my case, I'm sure there's stuff I still don't know how to do that the tutorials explain.

I'm enjoying my time as Duke of Munster where all of my family comes down with consumption every ten years followed by a rousing bit of typhoid fever. If only I could pass the disease on to my neighbors.

Hockosi wrote:

I'm enjoying my time as Duke of Munster where all of my family comes down with consumption every ten years followed by a rousing bit of typhoid fever. If only I could pass the disease on to my neighbors.

Can you marry one of the plague-bearers off to someone next door?

Having my most successful run yet. I took the mantle of King of Leon and decided that my unwed brothers didn't need their incompetent heads. Being their heir, I *cough* humbly took on the responsibilities of their kingdoms. I quelled unrest among my large power base by handing out landed titles like candy and they all loved me for it. I let Portucale break off into it's own kingdom, as it seemed like the only way to resolve the distrust.

Having married to a princess of the Holy Roman Empire, I was feeling a bit confident about expanding south with a crusade for Toledo. Now with a sizable military and bankroll, I took 3400 troops and led an unopposed siege. When they rallied forces into my lands, I called on the Kaiser-in-Law who brought the might of 5000 troops. Soon after Toledo surrendered and I gave my men a well deserved rest.

I had to act quickly to rest control of my newly acquired lands and sent bishops to do the clean up. Learned men were granted titles over all of the new counties and duchies. The Pope took notice of my power expansion, inquiring as to my faith and allegiance. I settled his doubts for now as I brood and fortify my position. With a southern flank surrounded by hostility, each month brings the threat of war and uprising. Let them come!

tboon wrote:
Robear wrote:

Best. Paradox. Game. Yet. My new favorite.

+1.

Me too.

Mr Bismarck wrote:
Chaz wrote:

Okay, I have confuse about navies and armies.

I started a game in the mid-1100s as the Duke of Sicily, so I own the toe of Italy, plus all four counties in Sicily. Within a few years of the game starting, a 1200 peasant revolt kick off on the mainland. Okay, I raise my personal levies. This pops up as 433 foot soldiers in each of my five counties and three ships per county.

How the heck do I get the dudes on the boats so I can go knock some peasant heads in?

The following sentence is not intended as a snark : This is covered in the war section of the tutorials.

You can split the stack by opening the big army and clicking the "create new unit" button. This will give you an empty army that you can transfer units into.

Instead of splitting armies, you may find it easier to try combining all your navies into a single force. Click and drag around them (they'll need to be in the same place), and you should see a blue button with two arrows pointing toward each other. The pop-up tip for it should be "merge units". That'll combine the capacity cap of your ships, and should let you move your whole army onto them.

You can dock the navy, and have them board ships, but you also can march your army into an adjacent sea zone if your ships are there.

So the various sicknesses killed off my duke and left a 2 year old son as heir. Well he's grown to the age of 14 now and I've noticed a hilarious trend. I set his uncle up as his tutor and frequently the little duke has evil thoughts and gains a bad trait. It is followed immediately every time by a 'story' of how the uncle beat the young duke and then the kid learns his lesson and loses the trait.

I didn't know you could load in port, that's new. And it probably led to the problem above, by not encouraging the combination of fleets.

I love the stories, and Bismarck's AAR was great.

And lo, there was much rejoicing.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/GAcsj.jpg)

I took five minutes off of stabbing people to celebrate.

Looking a little...old...aren't you? Never ask for whom the dirk stabs. It stabs for thee!

IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/281072/fromwales.png)

I'm fine with being old, because I got the thing done before death. The game being the game, I fully expected to die five minutes before they put the gold hat on me and then my sons would piss everything away falling out with each other.

Now Meurig can happily pass on the ceremonial bloody knife.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/vPGY9.jpg)

ParadoxianLP will be doing a series of short videos about the concepts in the game. He's starting off really basic, but I assume he'll get into the meatier stuff soon.

What do the difficulty ratings actually mean when you're selecting a leader at the start of the game? Is it simply related to how hard it would be to win the game? The reason I ask is I just want to play as a little guy -- some count or other -- rather than as a major power, but most of the counts are rated at 80% difficulty, which is scaring this noob.

I've always taken it as just a measure of how easy it will be to get wiped. 1 county means that you are one conquest event away from game over. Also means that you have little money and few resources to keep said even from happening. But not necessarily how "hard" the game is. Note that counties far away from anything ominous (like in Ireland) have the same "difficulty" as those that are right next to the hordes.

It also means the game can be a lot more boring because there's less for you to do. Starting out as a new player you might want to balance the two, which is why people like to start out in Spain. You and your family have split up the north part (so, there's room for growth by marriage, intrigue, etc.) and the Muslims are to the south (can fight them whenever you want), but none of the kingdoms are so large as to overwhelm a new player.

Thanks for the tips and clarification.

garion333 wrote:

It also means the game can be a lot more boring because there's less for you to do. Starting out as a new player you might want to balance the two, which is why people like to start out in Spain. You and your family have split up the north part (so, there's room for growth by marriage, intrigue, etc.) and the Muslims are to the south (can fight them whenever you want), but none of the kingdoms are so large as to overwhelm a new player.

I want to ditto this. I felt that Spain was, of my initial forays into the game, the best balance between being "easy" to get into but with enough danger and craziness to keep me on my toes as well as opportunities to get into the complexities of the game too.

Are saves and whatnot still plain text? My favorite part of CKI, perversely, was writing save game parsers so I could search the world for genetically superior breeding stock to use in my program to breed the Kwisatz Haderach. (Or the most paranoid and manic hunchback ever to sport a harelip.) It looks like there's a User Mods subforum at paradoxplaza, but it's private. Hopefully everything is as open as it was in the original game.

CK has always been my favorite Paradox game, I might as well just go pick it up and find out myself. I mean, it has anti-popes, what could be better than anti-popes?

Yes, everything is in plain text - saves, names, values, etc. Everything.

edit: also, the mods forum is open if you register the game with Paradox.

Wow, Giant Bomb did a Quick Look.

garion333 wrote:

Wow, Giant Bomb did a Quick Look.

They have a lot of Quick Looks for niche PC games. Usually with Dave and/or Drew.

I know full well that this is not a game that I will enjoy but just seeing the map made me want to buy it.

I need to pay more attention to what I'm doing in this game. Last night I married my Duke to a very nice courtier. Then when I checked on their relationship, I saw that he hated her (like -74) and discovered that she was a leper. D'oh! They still had two kids together, but she later died from consumption and the Duke married a Hungarian princess.

This game is great.

PS: As a side note, I just want to add +1 to those who said they want to know how people in their county/duchy/kingdom have died. Did the dude die from old age, or consumption, or assassination or what? That detail would make a world of difference.

I also want to be able to play as a pagan/Muslim. Do you think these are being saved for DLC?

When last we saw Sir Stabbaslot he was curled up in a darkened corner of his room, whispering softly to his favourite knife "Soon, my lovely. Sooooooooon..."

Then in March of 1138 Duke Meurig I of Deheubarth and Kent had to put the knife down for ten minutes to be crowned King of Wales. This meant he had to employ a serf to stand next to him to wear the Duke of Kent's crown, as he couldn't figure a way to wear both that didn't look garish.

King Meurig I of Wales (also; Duke of Kent) looked out over his lands from his castle's highest tower and thought "Wow, Wales is awful" and thus began plans to pick up and move to Kent in the middle of a winter night like a bearded 12th century Baltimore Colts.

Fortunately any potential issues about how he was going to deal with an unruly Welsh populous from all the way over in South Eastern England were solved very quickly when an arrow came through the window with an attached note saying "we are now at war."

It was from the King of England and was followed up rather quickly with several thousand more pointed messages, as a five thousand strong army appeared on Welsh borders and proceeded to remind me why I liked stabbing so much.

With no chance of winning directly against the English army, King Meurig I, (also; Duke of Kent), raised his levies and drove East from Wales into Gwent and Gloucester, hoping to force the King to abandon his sieges on my lands and come south. When they finally assembled, my Kentish levies were instructed to push west into Winchester in a move that completely unintentionally set events into motion that would force a war lasting eleven years.

That war wasn't the one between England and Wales, however. The King finished his siege in Gwynedd and paused to gather in some smaller armies, so I recalled my levies from their largely ineffective siege in Gloucester and threw in 1,500 mercenaries and positioned myself on the hills in Powys.

The King brought his 4500+ men south to meet me and after a nasty fight in which I had all of the defensive bonuses, he drove me from the field , my broken forces rushing south to Glamorgan behind our castle walls.

I hadn't expected to win that battle, but had hoped that I'd be able to write down the English forces enough to force a pause and hopefully cause the King to spend himself into wanting peace. Sadly this hadn't worked, so before they crossed the borders into Glamorgan I surrendered, giving up the three English counties, Gwynedd and Powys, but keeping Glamorgan and Dyfed.

Surprisingly, I was still considered King and from certain angles in the highest tower I was still King of all I could see. Like that cupboard and the table with the plate on it.

Meurig's loss and sadness were compounded when Princess Cecilia died, thereby breaking his heart and shaking his confidence, daily.

Somehow Meurig I, King of Bits of Wales got over his bereavement with the aid of a 19 year old French Woman and, as we can see here, he also got over a 19 year old French Woman, (thank you, I'll be here all week!)

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/QX73y.png)

I can only hope I'm so active at 63 years old.

At the start of the one-sided war with England I had attacked into Winchester with my Kentish levies and this had apparently triggered a chain of events that would let me make with the stabby-stabby again, as I was approached by the Prince of England, (also Duke of Winchester), who wasn't mad at me for attacking him, but rather mad at his Dad for not riding to his rescue.

He offered me the chance to join in on a plot with him to claim the crown of England and I readily agreed. It turned out that the King of Navarre was also in on the plot and Navarre had a good opinion of me as he once had an ancestor who was once married to one of my sisters.

The plot exploded early in 1140 with an uprising of the Prince's men in the south and a landing of large Navarre forces in the north east. I waited for the King to react to this and then raised my own levies and struck north back into Powys.

What followed was eleven years of war where all parties involved were, at times, apparently one step from victory, only to find themselves shortly one step from obliteration.

At first the English King lost several battles as he seemed to be unsure of which of his three new enemies to deal with first. Eventually he settled on a tactic of punching his son in the face as often as possible, as I presume he worked out that I was too weak to be anything but a nuisance and Navarre would be crippled as his new territories offered no taxes and plenty of revolt risks.

I recaptured Powys and Gwynedd and then struck east and took Gwent, finally reuniting all of the Welsh counties, and then further east to take Gloucester. I then tried to relieve pressure on my ally by moving north toward the King's home county, Lancaster.

The King reacted violently to this, with two armies swinging toward me, pushing me back into Powys and severely bloodying me there before the English had to rush away to meet a Navarre push into Norfolk. The King routed Navarre from the field and then rebels began to spring up in the recently captured counties of the Spanish King, forcing him into a purely defensive mode.

This was the point where Meurig decided to make rapid exit, stage left, as he passed onto the next life while sleeping, raising Prince Francisco to lead the Welsh forces against the impending wrath of the English King. Francisco reached out to the King of Scotland, inviting him to invade south into England now that the King was so weakened and broke after a decade of war, but the Scots politely declined.

The King then faced his own son in Bedford, capturing the Prince and leaving only one enemy facing the music.

My two small counties were now economic powerhouses, as I'd been investing in +tax improvements whenever possible for about eight decades, so with no forces raised I was quickly rolling in money enough to raise two large mercenary armies alongside my levies.

Francisco waited for the King to approach, then raised 4,000 mercenaries and added his 1,800 levies and struck out into Hereford. The King took the bait and attacked, having to cross a river to do so and although the fight saw massive casualties on both sides, with the advantage of chosen ground Francisco held and the English King blinked first and retreated, leaving behind two nobles - the Mayors of Shrewsbury and Hereford to be captured and ransomed!

Now, in 1151 with the Prince Captured, the King of Navarre bottled up by rebellion and the King of England bested, peace was finally agreed on all sides and King Francisco celebrated with his new counties of... nowhere. With "inconclusive" peace announced, King Francisco got no rewards for his efforts or the efforts of his father.

Two weeks later the King of England and his Queen Consort were found dead in their beds. Their death certificates said "stabbings" or, as we like to call them in Wales; "Natural Causes."

Mr Bismarck wrote:

Two weeks later the King of England and his Queen Consort were found dead in their beds. Their death certificates said "stabbings" or, as we like to call them in Wales; "Natural Causes."

Loving these.

The AARs in here and the fun that I had with EU3 last year has me seriously considering taking the money I had set aside to buy an Ipad 3 and using it to buy better PC hardware so I can play this instead.

Buying a pc for one game does give the possibility to play a *few* other ones...

Mr Bismark wrote:

Now, in 1151 with the Prince Captured, the King of Navarre bottled up by rebellion and the King of England bested, peace was finally agreed on all sides and King Francisco celebrated with his new counties of... nowhere. With "inconclusive" peace announced, King Francisco got no rewards for his efforts or the efforts of his father.

This was an unexpected problem, and has affected me pretty severely in my first game (Scotland, which now includes all the northern islands due to a timely marriage and subsequent assassination). Apparently occupation of a county's holdings doesn't matter at all. In two different wars, I had a neighbor declare war on my enemy, proceed to beat him up, and then take a county as a victory spoils ... that I had just spent a year sieging and completely occupied. Poof, gone, just like that, with my army left standing on the county wondering what to do. I don't expect the game to put all the weight on occupation, but I"m pretty sure historically that possession was at least half of the law.

I've also had a bizarre problem with Ambitions. Two of my kings have become Exalted, but once the current king did that, he had no ambition options left except killing his wife. It's been that way for almost 30 years.

Aetius wrote:
Mr Bismark wrote:

Now, in 1151 with the Prince Captured, the King of Navarre bottled up by rebellion and the King of England bested, peace was finally agreed on all sides and King Francisco celebrated with his new counties of... nowhere. With "inconclusive" peace announced, King Francisco got no rewards for his efforts or the efforts of his father.

This was an unexpected problem, and has affected me pretty severely in my first game (Scotland, which now includes all the northern islands due to a timely marriage and subsequent assassination). Apparently occupation of a county's holdings doesn't matter at all. In two different wars, I had a neighbor declare war on my enemy, proceed to beat him up, and then take a county as a victory spoils ... that I had just spent a year sieging and completely occupied. Poof, gone, just like that, with my army left standing on the county wondering what to do. I don't expect the game to put all the weight on occupation, but I"m pretty sure historically that possession was at least half of the law. :)

Yeah, don't go into a war expecting anything unless you are one of the primaries. The only reason to heed an ally or liege's call is to avoid the reputation hit with whoever called you (and I think there may be a prestige loss for ignoring a call to arms as well). But I never go fighting unless I am sure to get something out of it.

Aetius wrote:

I've also had a bizarre problem with Ambitions. Two of my kings have become Exalted, but once the current king did that, he had no ambition options left except killing his wife. It's been that way for almost 30 years.

Well, once you have everything, what else is left to which to aspire?