Crusader Kings II Spirit-all

Have you considered assassination?

I'm playing as Poland and doing the same with the Holy Roman Empire. It's good to have a huge allied force at my back while I march forward through the Pagan hordes.

Seems to be a common problem for people, so I imagine it will get looked at whether by Paradox or the community itself.

I loaded the patch and tried William again. 8 months into the Conquest... He died! No notice, no reason why. My screens changed to reflect the new ruler and that was it.

I think if the war lasts that long, you'll need mercenaries or allies. It takes years for a province to rebuild it's cadre (at least as far as I can tell, it actually gives you the progress somewhere.) You'll even see after a bloody war that the captured provinces won't give you *any* troops for a few years.

Warfare is not that bad. You've got personal levies and realm levies and your vassal's levies. You pay the costs for your personal and realm levies when you call them up; your vassals pay for their troops if you call them up. So vassals don't like it if you make them call up their private forces, because they are out gold at that point. Call out the level of troops you need to win the war.

If you want, try calling allies. Never works for William the Bastard, but there might be a good reason for that.

Ships carry 100 troops each. If you don't combine fleets, then you have to break up your land troops to get them to move on. If you have 600 capacity in ships, and 500 troops, they can go on the ships. But if you have 300 cap and 300 cap in two fleets, and 500 troops in one force, they will not load up.

When you move into a province, you will start besiege the province and it's holdings. You will siege them sequentially. You have to capture all holdings in a province in order to claim it as yours. Until you do that, it will have broken occupy stripes. When you get them all, it will have solid occupy stripes.

When you are ready to disband ships, put them in friendly ports. Disbanding at sea will cost you many ships.

Your vassals will get upset as you keep them in the field. Keep an eye on their loyalty, especially if it started low, and do nice things for them if they get pissed off.

You can't declare war if you have troops already called up. Unlike EU3, you're fine with just your garrisons. Having no troop icons on the map is fine.

If a unit strength indicator is not red, it's not *your* enemy. This will puzzle you when your vassals get involved in wars without you. They'll fight other vassals, they'll fight neighboring counties, they generally chew the scenery and you can't intervene in those fights. Your vassals might lose wars with a neighboring duchy, or they might gain you territory, or they might decide to take over another vassal's lands. Just keep an eye out, as if this happens while you are dealing with something else you might not notice it.

This is the answer to most problems in life.

Also, I am SO glad to hear the positive reviews for CK2. Only the pile is preventing me from rnning out and picking this one up ASAP.

Nice post by Troy

One thing - don't forget to check your dungeons periodically, otherwise someone's wife or husband might be dying in there, and them getting more and more pissed off with you. Check the plots, too - justified imprisonment is a great way to break up an argument between vassals or stop someone attack an ally's favorite Duke's daughter. Or, conversely, you might find that Count you don't like is someone's target. Heh. Too bad my spymaster is incompetent. Unfortunate, really. Nothing we could have done to prevent it.

This game has an *amazing* number of ways to leverage your desires for or against someone. Direct rewards and actions are just the surface. If you can conceptualize something, you can probably do it, from taking lands from your vassals to imprisoning potential rivals to dragging down a too-powerful Duke with a marriage to your deceitful, greedy daughter, the one who spent her childhood at the knee of your spymaster... And I have not even broken into the international side of things.

Oh, one interface note. When you look at unmarried characters, the Diplomacy options will only cover in-faction marriage arrangements. If you want to tie your people to other kingdoms, look for the linked wedding rings to the lower right of their portrait on their main screen. That's for foreign entanglements.

And you can't move a capitol to a county you don't personally control.

Nice guide with some good information about some of the more esoteric parts of the game, like construction, tech, succession laws, etc.

Yes. When you open up a County that you own, if it's not your capitol, there is a crown in the top bar (on the right, I think? One of the crowns.) which will let you move your capitol to that County. If you *don't* directly control the County (as opposed to a vassal controlling it), then the crown does not appear.

Tricksy hobbitses.

Sweet Lord this game...

I once again started as the Earl of Some Ditch on the outskirts of the Middle of Nowhere, in southern Wales this time - Glamorgan, to be precise. Home of a nice cricket club in the 21st century, a thousand years earlier it was home of a nice wooden club and not a lot else.

First steps early on were just to consolidate position and to try to not annoy anyone too much when I was weak. Not annoying people is really hard for me, as I can't think of anything I like more, but with repeated counselling sessions I managed to rein in my need to f*ck with people. I set about marrying some likely looking lass, picking the firstest, youngest, lustiest lady I can find in the hope of churning out tiny Glamorgans, but this leads to little more than awkward fumbling for two years before Earl Cadwgan finally works out what goes where and when and Countess Aenor falls pregnant.

Cadwgan's ambition is to have a son, Aenor's to have a daughter, so someone is going to be disappointed.

It turns out that the Countess is the "winner" here, as daughter Rhiannon is born in January 1069 and it takes the Earl another two years to remember where he left his groove and have another go, making another Daughter - Marared. Then it's another two and half years before Aenor falls with baby number three - Cadwgan still has the ambition to have a son, (or a name that wasn't drawn out of a Scrabble bag), while Aenor has the ambition of throwing herself out of a tall window, as living in a rain-filled garbage pile with a dull Earl who can't work out how to take off his pants has her depressed. Fortunately even depressed lusty people still like sex, so they come up with another baby and this time it's a girl with a winky, finally fulfilling Cadwgan's ambition and giving him a proper heir, as previously it had been his "kinsman" rather than his son. The kinsman are annoyed, but whatever.

With the future of the dunghole finally assured, the Glamorgan chancellor finally comes through and manages to fabricate a claim to the county of Dyfed, (for non crazy people that's pronounced "Duff-ed"), and the Glamorgan armies are up Dyfed's drainpipes before the ink is dry on the fake claim. Things look like they're going to go a little wrong and we won't have enough men to successfully siege, but Cadwgan cracks open the coffers and buys in a mercenary army who waltz through Dyfed's forces like they're not there. Dyfed surrender and I've doubled the size of the realm.

The Earl of Dyfed was four years old. So yay me, I'm reading military tactics at a kindergarten level.

I use the new county to create a Duchy and promote myself to Duke. I have a soup du jour claim on the third and final county in the Duchy - Gwent - but annoyingly the Duke of Shrewsbury has already waded in there and taken it and going after him would involve declaring war on his liege - some guy called "The King of England." I'll give that a miss.

Things calm down from there until Cadwgan manages to have a fourth child - another boy - and then dies, bringing the 14 year old Duke Meurig to the the throne. Or rather his Mother, Aenor, for 18 months until he turns 16. Roughly the first thing he's asked to do is to decide if he should go to war in support of one sister against the other - a family feud he politely declines. Instead we set sights on the Welsh counties of Gwynedd and Powys. Even though that Duchy is also missing a county due to English aggression, holding four Welsh counties will allow me to create the Kingdom of Wales and make my favourite Welsh duke the new King.

This will be where my Chancellor lets me down, again, by taking forever to create a legal claim. Eventually I find someone who already has a claim to Gwynedd, invite them to my court and then arrange a matrilineal marriage to a kinswoman, in the hope that that will bring him into the dynasty. Then I press his claim to the Counties, declare war and go in hard with two blocks of mercenaries, meaning I barely have to even raise my own levies. We win, I install the new guy and then offer him an attractive vassalisation, while going off to Crowns R Us to get my head measured for the new shiny hat.

Except the new guy that I manufactured and then installed turns down my offer. WTF!? Dude! Duke... Dude.. whatever. Dude! I made you. Now I must break you. Or rather I must get my chancellor to fabricate a piece of paper saying I'm allowed to break you.

I sit and wait for the Chancellor to do his stuff. And wait. And wait.

Meanwhile I have to deal with this kind of nonsense.

"Iestyn Ap Gwrgant wants to get married."

Firstly, I can't find anyone drunk enough to want to marry into that stupid name. Secondly, you're SEVENTY NINE years old. The average life expectancy is about... four, or something. You're so old that eighty per cent of your children are dead. Just die already.

I arrange a marriage to some old French lady with a lisp and a hunchback, who is listed as "maimed" and an imbecile. Don't say I never do anything for you, Iestyn Ap Gwargledangle.

Four weeks later Iestyn dies and now I'm left with some mad old French hag wandering the halls of the castle, drooling and smelling of cheese.

I try to marry her off but surprisingly no one will have her.

Finally there comes news from my Chancellor. I open it excitedly and read it, expecting details of how I'm the Duke of Powys' Cousin's dog's Aunt's Sister's Uncle, but instead it just says "I have died of old age."

I find a new Chancellor and send him in with instructions to just write something down and he's there about four days when he's faked a claim. I consider digging up the old chancellor and punching him in his dead balls, but instead pay for the mercs again. Go on the offensive again. Kick over the tables again. Capture Powys and Gwynedd again.

Yay me.

Paying for the mercs has dipped me down to 200 gold coins. I need 350 to make myself King and start stamping my own face on the money.

While I try to wring as much tax as possible out of anyone who jingles when I shake them, the Duchess of Kent wanders through my realm and fakes a couple claims because, you know, her Chancellor isn't useless. This is sort of annoying as the Duchesses sister is married to my fourth son, so you'd think they'd pick on someone else. But they're on completely the other side of England, so I'm sure it'll be fine.

Ten minutes after that thought a declaration of war is delivered by the Kentish councillor. Followed by a 1,400-strong army wandering into Gwynedd. I leave it undefended save for the weak garrisons there and hope the Kents wear their army down. By the time they've taken Gwynedd and Powys their army is down under four figures, so I raise a merc unit and my levies and meet them in Dyfed where I take a pointed stick and wedge it in their Kentish holes. I pull together every vassal unit I have now and send it into Gwynedd to try to recapture immediately, but Kent pull another 800 strong army out of nowhere and drive me off the field. I appeal to some allies in Scotland and Norway for help and they both turn me down. That's not what "ally" means, you buggers.

In a fit of desperation I send my spy master to Kent to have a couple words with the Duchess. Words like "knife" and "in the back while you sleep", followed by a practical demonstration that she doesn't enjoy too much. She's succeeded by her sister for some reason and she won't accept peace, so I stab her too. That "her" would be my Daughter in Law and I was expecting her husband, my son, to step up to the big chair at this point, but instead succession goes to their son, with some old bag as regent. He's four. I know how to beat four year olds. So I have him stabbed too.

I'm now spending almost all my time watching the Kentish court and no time watching my own. My Granddaughter is next up to bat as leader of the Kents - she's two. I sit watching the bottom corner of her portrait for news of which inbred knuckle-dragging mouth-breather will be next in charge if something dreadful should happen to her when a face pops up that I recognise instantly. Mine.

To recap, at this point I've spent 150 pieces of gold to kill the Duchess, then my Daughter in Law and then my Grandson and now I still have Kentish armies on the borders and I'm only one small stabbing away from being able to call off my own armies in my war against myself, thereby gaining control over the counties I need to make myself King and picking up some prime real estate in the south of England to build my summer home...

Way to turn stabbing from a chore to a hobby.

But there's bad news - the two year old's regent has noticed a worrying trend of people accidentally stabbing themselves while shaving, so she's clearly called the spymaster back into the county to discover plots, because my chances of successfully stabbing a two year old girl are apparently not very good.

If they'd just given the crown to my son we could have had a nice little chat and no one would have had to have been stabbed. But noooooooooo.

With stabbing temporarily off the table I decide to bust out some diplomacy instead. I invite a bunch of new debutantes to my court until I get one who is both attractive and lusty and young and virile. And smells like vanilla. I then go off to the Kentish court and find the spymaster. His wife has sadly recently suffered a fatal stabbing, so he's back on the lookout and happily accepts a marriage proposal that will see him hook up with Miss Wales 1136. He also happily accepts a small amount of gold coin and suddenly his frown is turned upside down, his red middle finger becomes a green thumbs up when I invite him back to my court and so he goes from being Duchess Two Year Old's Spy Master to being my Master of the Cups.

Completely coincidentally Duchess Granddaughter Wasserface has no other serious candidates for replacement spymaster and, I mean, really... who let a two year old play with a knife? Now there's blood everywhere and I suppose I'll have to split time between being King of Wales and Duke of Kent. I didn't want the job, but someone has to do it.

I only hope I can find out who's behind all these stabbings.

That's my duke!

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.

What I can't figure out is how to get the troops on the ships. I get that the ships have a capacity of 300 per group of three, so I move all five fleets of ships to one area in Sicily, and figure that should give me enough capacity to move about 1500 troops over. Except I can't get anything other than a single army of 50 dudes eligible to climb on the boats. I also can't figure out if it's possible to group the five fleets into a single fleet. How the heck do I get the dudes on the boats so I can go knock some peasant heads in?