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[Teneb]

It will send a Chile down the collective spines of Europe.

[Broseph Stalin]

So after a couple hundred hours in game it just occured to me how badly a martial character sucks comparatively. I mean diplomacy makes everyone easier to deal with, stewardship means more gold which you can sling around for bribes and all sorts of events, and if you can't take over a country purely through intrigue you aren't thinking crazy enough. Martial, to the best of my observation has no significant effect on the outcome of battles, maybe you can shrug off being outnumbered by a couple soldiers but you're never going to see Thermopylae.

[Sheb]

Martial influence the amount of demesne troops you get. It's one of the top characteristic IMO.

[Rolan7]

Yeah, I tend to prioritize stewardship first, then martial and intrigue equally.  The intrigue is mostly for defense, though I guess it's more offensively useful in a normal Catholic run, compared to pagan or trade republic. 

I'm not sure how useful diplomacy is really.  I prioritize it in my advisor, but mainly for the actions.  The opinion bonus with vassals doesn't seem as important as having a strong personal army and resisting assassins.

Learning is the last concern, of course, except when you want it really high for an unusual ruler.

[Loam]

By usefulness I'd rank them Stewardship--Martial--Diplomacy--Learning--Intrigue. Stewardship gives you more money but also more demesne, which means more troops as well; and money can but mercs which also means more troops. Martial is just more troops, but that translates into a few things: easier to win wars and take land, and deterrence against foreign attacks and faction rebellions. Diplomacy gives higher vassal limit, which isn't usually a problem, but it provides good passive bonuses to opinion. High Learning lets you tech like crazy, with all the benefits that provides, and with the Hermetic Society you can get artifacts and bonuses to other stats as well; but for anyone other than a Learning-focused character it's not extremely useful. I find intrigue the least useful, myself: it's good for plotting and imprisonment, which I never have much trouble with, and as for passive defenses I find that a competent spymaster and wife do that job just fine (as long as they like you).

But, I think any character can succeed on the virtues of a single stat, if they play their cards right. One of my best characters started with 11 or 12 Martial and every other stat below 10; in the course of his life his martial went up to 30 while none of his other stats ever got above 10, and he managed to conquer Scandinavia, form an empire, and raid everyone.

[scriver]

Intrigue is best if you are a vassal and only if you have the highest intrigue in the realm, so that you can become Spymaster.

I guess plot defence is kind of important too. But yeah.

[ChairmanPoo]

Immortal god-emperors benefit a lot from high intrigue because you tend to get lots of murder attempts, I can tell you that much.

I think thats why the one who joined the assasins and became grandmaster was so successful. You get practical plot immunity from that

[hector13]

Martial and Stewardship, for troops and money. Intrigue or diplomacy, with a preference for intrigue. It’s easier to deal with threats you can see, after all.

Learning is a bonus. Basically once I have my lifestyle trait (I think that’s what it’s called) get all the little modifiers for learning, unless I need to get rid of stressed or something.

In saying that, I usually choose the “thrift” education thing, ‘cause curious is OP.

[Descan]

Martial in early game where every little soldier matters (I usually start as counts or maybe a duke if I HAVE to, like if I want to play as an early slavic ruler) and then later, when you have more vassals and more lands, it's a toss up between diplomacy for relations boosts, stewardship to hold more land*, and intrigue to prevent uppity vassals and second-rate sons I've stabbed once or twice from trying to assassinate me. I barely ever pay attention to the intrigue one though, usually I'll either focus on martial to increase my troop count even more than the strategy below goes over, or I'll focus on diplomacy if I have particularly bothersome neighbours or vassals. Though I normally try to keep my vassals as weak as possible, filling out every single county with a ruler and giving the weakest in terms of holdings the dukedom, and if I need to hand out king titles, starting with the smallest/shittiest. My old holdings are more than enough to wage war and pay for improving as often as possible, that I don't feel any need to have strong vassals that could turn against me. And I don't really want them expanding on their own, it messes with my minor need for clean borders and makes them stronger, which just feeds back into the whole "Don't want strong vassals."

So what I end up doing usually is figuring out if I'm gonna be expanding in the next few decades/rulers or building up, and going with a martial education/focus or a diplomacy/stewardship education/focus. Learning is usually a bonus, I don't often fiddle with the Hermetic society; the game is easy enough to game at this point with book writing, I don't need a hundred more stats from building ten guns or whatever.

*(I've been using that less-so though, since I started merely holding a 7-holding county as my capital and filling it with the maximum possible 5 castles, and personally holding them; any additional stewardship means I can hold a strategically important county somewhere else, but the capital + marshal training + steward tax collection bonuses that apply to all of those castles means I have more than enough money and troops to deal with everyone I need to just with that one county)

[MorleyDev]

I think they nerfed my favourite start xD I like to have ever growing goals, and starting in Europe just overwhelms me with neighbours/enemies on every side. So I found I quite enjoyed starting with Ireland, earliest possible time as Tir Eoghain. Gives you an immediate goal: King of Ireland, and then a next goal of forming Britannia before finally starting to encroach on Europe.

Tir Eoghain is the only Irish Count to start with two counties instead of one, and you're in the lines of succession for quite a few of your neighbours. Used to be that Tyrconnell's Spymaster hated his liege, so you could easily get over 100% plot power. Then he'd hate the guys kid even more, and by the time you've chain assassinated your way to inheriting Tyrconnell you'll be doing so with 500% plot power.

Fabricate a claim on Ulster you could control all of Northern Island before your elderly count dies and passes it on to his son. Then it's very easy to curbstomp the rest of Ireland, one county at a time.

Now, the Spymaster doesn't hate his liege. Currently trying to adapt my strategy via the POWER OF SATANISM to abduct all the guys children so I inherit when he dies.

[hector13]

Trying to do a Scottish Shia run, starting in 767. Converted to Germanic first, not really sure why, and then the Assassins popped up at some point in the 900s, making my conversion to Shia a bit easier.

It is... interesting. There's no moral authority, and I can't really get boats to get down into the Middle East to get it back. Even if I did, my main holdings are almost the furthest they can be from there to defend it if I do manage to become the Caliph, 'cause the Caliph is gone now

I also have some holdings in Italy, after some interesting inheritances.

I also also almost had my dynasty control the Fylkir(ate?) after getting some matrilineal marriages on the kingdoms of Norway and Denmark, somehow. Unfortunately they both passed away before having any kids of my dynasty

[Flying Carcass]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So I noticed the independent count of Cordoba is a polar bear. Not sure how that happened, or how he managed to father some human children... all I can think of is the bear is impersonating the actual count with its high intrigue skills.

[scriver]

How dare you insult good and noble Sir Filips with such base accusations!

[Putnam]

Decided to try starting a game of Elder Kings as the colovian estates, seeing as they somehow always manage to take a huge chunk of Cyrodiil in any of my other starts. Took over all of Tamriel way more easily than usual due to their OP-as-fuck government (more on that later). Switched to observe. 300 years later, Tiber Septim killed+replaced the emperor and a revolt made about half of the continent independent. 400 years later, everything was back together (including vvardenfell, bafflingly; unless something's changed, vvardenfell is nigh-impossible to invade because Vivec gods up million-strong doomstacks if you try, though I guess since the AI did it it's possible now). I decided to mess around a bit and interfere, so I took control of a duke, made him a worshiper of Mehrunes Dagon using the scholarship focus (if you study Oblivion with your observatory, you get the opportunity to hire a daedric scholar, who can make you cult of whatever daedra you want), then added enough offmap currency ("ardor") to ask Dagon to start the Oblivion crisis. After that, I switched back to observe.

They took care of it just fine. At the end of the crisis, the duke ended up controlling half of Solstheim, then that got swallowed up too. Tamriel endured.

Now, the reason for all this is that the Colovian Estates has a government type called "confederacy". They're essentially feudal, except the top-level title has these changes (all vassals are feudal):

- Liege has -2 to demesne limit
- Feudal Elective is the only available inheritance
+ Liege has +10 to vassal limit
+ Vassals cannot have their armies levied, instead being called to war like tribal vassals.

That doesn't sound like a +, but holy shit is it good. The minor disadvantage of not being able to control your vassal levies is outweighed greatly by the massive advantage you get from having all of your vassal's liege levies available and the total lack of opinion malus from calling them to war (in fact, you get angry at them if they refuse). This also allows you to set the noble obligations to tax-shifted as far as you want without any disadvantage whatsoever.

Feudal Elective is a bit of a boon, too. Elective is, of course, pretty amazing if everyone loves you, since they all vote for who you want anyway, but in observe elective meant that the realm was insanely stable, with only Tiber Septim (an event usurper) causing any trouble. The only other revolt I saw was approximately the size of two dukes, and was quashed within the year.

Anyway, Septim's dynasty died off after one generation and the character I used to create the emperor's dynasty ended up becoming minor barons and a single duke. This was all well and good; I mostly just wanted to see 1. how the "call to arms" mechanic affected wars (see above) and 2. I wanted to get a nice observe game with the empire of tamriel to see how stuff could go wrong. All of the empires after were descended from my first guy (a dragonborn emperor, since that or the Amulet of Kings are required to create the Empire of Tamriel title, and the Amulet of Kings suuuuucks, it's got an MTTH of 50 years or so and I'm actually not sure it even works in this update, so I literally just cheated the event in since after three or four attempts at getting it with immortal controllers of sancre tor in various saves I never got a single event from the council job that ought to give you them, even ones with MTTHs of something like two years), so they all had dragonblood, which was interesting.

I can't overstate the stability, it was almost disappointing. Last time I'd run an observe game to the year 4200 as I ended on this time, Valenwood had somehow become the Bosmeri Dominion and most of Tamriel had become Green Pact religion, with only pockets of ALMSIVI in Morrowind and Eight Divines in High Rock. This time, the Eight Divines faith got to 100 moral authority (it usually starts around 50) and stayed there. My first emperor would have become Talos, the Ninth Divine, but Tiber Septim event murdered him so it didn't happen. Maybe I should have killed him before starting the observe, I don't know, having an immortal emperor is a bit boring for stability reasons. Hindsight is 20/20 and all.

I'm baffled at the Oblivion crisis failing to cause any issues. Seriously, it spawns 45000 attritionless (!!) troops on your capital, then opens more Oblivion gates all over Tamriel with even more event-spawned troops to mess up the place, all of which have separate warscore, but it didn't even make a dent. I guess the emperor at the time had over 30,000 in retinues and the vassals were no slouches either, so it's not particularly surprising, but god damn.

[misko27]

So there was a new Dev Diary...

They finally did it. They may have finally fixed Africa. It's finally, finally, not boring. Not pointless, not unnecessary. Many new counties, duchies, Kingdoms, and even a new empire. They also added a new trade route, and a special gold-mine building that massively increases the value of the trade route, so Mansa Musa lives at long last. And a culture mapmode indicates that they have added many new cultures (including Coptic to Egypt). And new CoA for African pagans. It's some cool stuff. I strongly recommend taking a look at the diary, it's quite a lot of stuff. (And a LOT of stuff in dev replies, like some new reworks of the steppe and Greek/Anatolia).