I've set myself a challenge in CK2. I've got a fairly good plan, but I'd appreciate other people's input on it.
The challenge is to start from the worst possible starting position in vanilla CK2, and conquer the whole world. So far, the worse starting position that I can find is as the count in Zaozerye, but if anyone knows of a harder one, let me know. I chose Zaozerye because:
-You start as a count, with only one province, that does not share your religion/culture
-Your province only contains a single castle with no upgrades (this means no court chaplain), and a base income of 4/year
-You start without any tech of any kind
-Moving armies from provice to province takes ages, often more than
-Your neighbours fall into two categories: pagans and ruriks
--The pagans are also counts/dukes with a couple provinces each. However, each of them starts with stronger armies than you, and if you holy war one, the rest love to join in
--The ruriks (your liege is one) are russian and orthodox, but they all share the same dynasty, so they tend to ally together no matter what
--The pagans are shortly replaced by the catholic scandanavians, who have large ally networks as well as being very strong
-If you start as a custom character, allying with you is worth nothing and you have nobody of the same dynasty (and hence no allies)
The strategy is as such:
-Start as early as possible
-Create a custom ruler for zaozerye
--Give your ruler excommunicated, depressed, greedy, patient, genius, content, decietful and midas touched, so you have 19 stewardship at age 16
-Once you start the game, have your steward collect taxes from your province and your marshal suppress revolts
-Shortly after the start, your liege will distribute a couple novgorodian provinces to others. Send your spymaster and chancellor to one to blackmail and fabricate claims.
-Your income should be at least 8/year and you should be getting almost 2 piety/month
-Use this opportunity to change as many laws as you can so you can make the most of when you have vassals. Start with city taxation to maximum.
-Your ambitions should be the following:
--get married (and find a wife with high stewardship and genius trait)
--become liege's steward (gets you another stewardship point, and you don't want to lead one of his armies and get killed)
--paragon of virtue (I like to go for this because it gets you a title, and it's easily doable with your high piety income)
-By early 1068, you should have 50 piety, and be able to lift your excommunication
-Now that your excommunication is lifted, people will finally start liking you enough to come to your court. However, at 20 gold per bribe, you don't want to do it lightly.
-I would get a good spymaster, a good steward and a good chancellor if you do not already have them.
-Continue to save money until you have about 100 in the bank (the cheapest mercenaries are 70 to hire, and you need to be able to pay for several month's upkeep)
-If you want to speed up this process, a good approach is to sort all people by how much they like you. Find one that like you, dislikes his current liege, has some money and low intrigue. Invite them to your court, and plot to kill them, so you regain your bribe and however much they had originally
--check on your chancellor every now and then. If they've suddenly gained a lot of money, they've been bribed. Kill them, and get another
-Once you have 100 gold, it's time to look for a target to invade. If you have a claim within novgorod, I would press that. Otherwise, the best candidate is usually the duchy of bulgar - because the duke is a muslim, and there are no other muslims around, you can holy war him and he won't get allies. You may want to wait until he is at war with someone else before launching your attack.
-Once you have enough territories to form a duchy, it's time to rebel from your liege. Keep in mind that the neighbouring dukes of ruthenia and galich are his allies, so you'll probably want to beat him quick, and maybe wait until his allies are fighting another war.
-Once you are independent, declare yourself duke.
-Once you are duke, it's time to aim for king. This is almost always Volga Bulgaria. All you need is to get the rest of the bulgarian territories under your control, and you can be king.
-The biggest problem at this point is usually ruthenia. While you're doing this, the duke of ruthenia like to invade the surrounding pagans, accumulating enough territories to form the kingdom of rus.
--Having a good chancellor here is vital. One way or another, you need to get his territories under your control. Fabricating claims is a good way to go, but you can also press vassal claims. Since you're just a duke, make sure you only press the claims of someone that has a count-level claim.
-Once you have the kingdoms of rus and volga bulgaria, press your de jure claims as much as possible. At this point, you should be strong enough to take on the pagans to the north without much hassle. The scandanavians like to invade finland, but hopefully you can get bjarmia and the territories in perm (even though you won't be able to form perm). Once you have these territories, it's a matter of chipping away at galich until you can form the empire of russia.
-Once the empire of russia is formed, attack Cumania. They're normally the last pagans in the area, so they shouldn't have too many allies, and in my experience they normally suffer lots of civil wars.
-At this point, the catholics to your west are too powerful, so the only way forward is south. Hopefully the muslims have been beating the byzantines, so you can expand south without fragmenting your empire.
This is about as far as my runs normally get. Around then, the Mongols come, and I tend to be their biggest target, which is why I've modified my plans to expand into georgia and no further east than necessary. However, I'm considering changing my culture somewhere along the line. I want to keep orthodox religion so I can usurp the byzantine empire and turn it into the roman empire, but I might at some point change culture to greek. The mongol hordes are very powerful, and I think having access to cataphract retinues (which would require Alan, Armenian, Greek or Georgian culture) would be necessary to stop them.
Also, anybody see room for improvement in my plan? If I could find a way to expand early (so I can get to king of volga bulgaria before ruthenia get king of rus) that would be swell.
Author
Topic: Crusader Kings 2 is released. (Read 2116097 times)