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Author Topic: Crusader Kings 2 is released.  (Read 2116162 times)

ollobrains

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2925 on: May 12, 2013, 01:29:30 am »

if youre small align youreself with someone big, or pick youre targets well.  Muslims are always good if they are indepdant and u can weild a bigger army ( make sure u got coin though)

Other option is produce lots of offspring and marry wel to get succession inheritance
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cerapa

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2926 on: May 12, 2013, 02:36:16 am »

One thing I still havent figured out is how to win war against anyone whos not noticeably smaller than you. My neighbours always seem to have bigger armies than me, even if I upgrade the castles with barracks and the rest. Does get the ai get boost to their unit production? What would be good level for the levy laws?
Ten bucks says you aren't using your marshal to train troops.
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forsaken1111

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2927 on: May 12, 2013, 06:59:53 am »

One thing I still havent figured out is how to win war against anyone whos not noticeably smaller than you. My neighbours always seem to have bigger armies than me, even if I upgrade the castles with barracks and the rest. Does get the ai get boost to their unit production? What would be good level for the levy laws?
Ten bucks says you aren't using your marshal to train troops.
Or he's just not got the correct castle upgrades. With the right upgrades your castles can support THOUSANDS of troops each in levies.
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scriver

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2928 on: May 12, 2013, 05:58:39 pm »

Or he's trying to fight Northern Pagans ;)
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Catastrophic lolcats

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2929 on: May 20, 2013, 01:27:06 am »

So I've been playing CKII and decided to test out VIET instead of just plain old PB. Been quite enjoying all the flavour events.

Started as the count of Orvieto with the idea of being the most pious christian knight ever. That went out the window as soon as the Pope started awarding lands to prince-bishops instead of myself. Managed to expand under Papal protection in northern sicily and due to myself investing heavily in city upgrades soon found myself flooded with cash. Managed to fabricate a claim on Rome by mistake and took it when the Pope was fighting the Merchant Republic of the Catalan Company (Genoa didn't pay them). Took Rome and had a great capital since thankfully the Pope didn't fuck it up by building a whole bunch of temples.
Expanded further into Sicily defeating the Normans who were slowly converting to Sicilian culture. I've now got the Titular Kingdom of Naples and are working towards the de-jure kingdom of Sicily. I've got a nice little Scottish slum enclave in Benevento and Apruntium which I use to conscript leaders for my pikemen retinues making my armies near immortal.

So now I have to ask where should I advance? I want to become an emperor so I can vassalise an anti-pope (the Orsini dynasty deserves that much) but the choices are fairly limited for an Italian. There's Italia and the HRE both of which I would have the combat the behemoth that is the HRE. To the east there's byzantium but that's another uphill battle since they're massive (Seljurks failed to take Rum) and I'll have to combat different culture malus.
Currently my plan is to wait for an Italian rebellion against the HRE and try to grab up as many Italian provinces as possible, uniting Italia. Although Italia isn't exactly the most impressive thing sprawled across Italy. Taking Byzantium would allow me to reform the Roman Empire ... hmmm.

Got a claimant on the throne of Byzantium, elective succession just makes things too damn easy. Going to restore Rome and mend the schism as a Catholic (mod).
« Last Edit: May 20, 2013, 08:34:47 am by Catastrophic lolcats »
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ed boy

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2930 on: May 20, 2013, 11:12:56 am »

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.
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Mongol13524

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2931 on: May 20, 2013, 01:03:39 pm »

Posting to watch and hopefully get a clue as to what to do.
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Mipe

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2932 on: May 20, 2013, 02:39:38 pm »

So I was playing as Duke of Iceland with 27 martial skill and mountain fighting skills (after a few generations of random skirmishes and judicious marriages/tutoring). Small army, about 800 men, mostly heavy infantry at that point. Crusade starts, it's Jerusalem (gee what a surprise), so I figure, why not land my troops there for the crusader trait and stuff?

And so, I scrounged whatever galleys I could find, embarked the Duke's army onto it (no retinues yet, damned cap) and sailed for Jerusalem. As soon as I arrived, I noticed there was some pretty hot fights going on. The usual 9k doomstacks chasing tiny christian armies all over the place. So I spied a tiny muslim province, landed and briefly captured it for some sweet money (them cities yield pretty nice money). Cha-ching, Crusader trait.

Meanwhile, some of those tiny armies flocked to my army and tagged along. On their tail, a battered army of that italian duchess with pissed-off large muslim army on their tail. I was like oh shi-, the duchess' army was likely broken and demoralized, so even with combined forces of 3k we weren't going to be able to stand up to the 9k stack.

But wait. We were on the coast AND in mountains anyway, so I thought I could flip them muslims one or couple. So yeah, stood my ground and closely monitored the battle. First few days, the usual skirmish happens, their horse archers cause a lot of damage, as expected.

Then the melee begins. Oh boy, does it get interesting. My housecarls, the norwegian heavy infantry, take the central flank with my skilled duke at their front. To the side, the duchess with her decimated army, to the right, some random europeam schmuck. And the opponents? A single army. We had defensive and flanking advantage. I watched it closely, the muslim army was chipping off at my heavy infantry a little by little, however their numbers began rapidly depleting.

In the end, the doomstack hightailed, demoralized and halved in strength. I seized the opportunity and chased them - to finish them off with the remaining 600 high-spirited troops.

Right there, the war score jumped big time and I reaped ample prestige + piety.

That was one hell of a battle. Well, soon another doomstack appeared and the crusade was doomed, however the Duke sailed home all decorated and with full coffers. In the next few years, the little dukedom would benefit from this huge boost in gold, prestige and piety.

I guess even failed crusader can be beneficial to small states!
« Last Edit: May 20, 2013, 02:42:16 pm by Mipe »
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Micro102

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2933 on: May 20, 2013, 07:26:26 pm »

Is taking over the world even possible when not aying something already massive? I started as ireland, and half way through the game I get them united. A few more decades and I've gotten a hold of Scotland. I can't see myself take over everything by the end of the game. As I get more vassals I'll have to decrease the crown law, as even with 52 total diplomacy people seem to always hate my heirs, and I have to bribe everyone and hold a tournament just to keep every faction from having 50%+. It feels like it would be hell trying to maintain a world of vassals.


Also, I won a weak claim on scotland. Put my brother on the throne. The thing is, the tooltip says that if they are part of my dynasty, I would be their liege. But I wasn't, so I had to declare war on HIM too. It was quickly won but cost a bit of prestige.
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Descan

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2934 on: May 20, 2013, 07:30:51 pm »

Can't vassalize kings if you're a king, so...

And "halfway through the game"? I've united Ireland consistently within the first few decades. In one characters lifetime, at least.
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Catastrophic lolcats

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2935 on: May 20, 2013, 08:14:34 pm »

One of my prefered games in multiplayer is having an Ireland battle. Each player starts as a count of Ireland and the first to unite the kingdom wins.
Multiplayer really drags down the rate of expansion and there's a habit of finding your perfectly groom heir dead in his bed with the window open. While I can usually unite Ireland in singleplayer in a single generation, in multiplayer it can drag on centuries until the stalemate is finally broken and someone has a couple duchies up their sleeves.
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umiman

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2936 on: May 20, 2013, 08:17:09 pm »

One of my prefered games in multiplayer is having an Ireland battle. Each player starts as a count of Ireland and the first to unite the kingdom wins.
Multiplayer really drags down the rate of expansion and there's a habit of finding your perfectly groom heir dead in his bed with the window open. While I can usually unite Ireland in singleplayer in a single generation, in multiplayer it can drag on centuries until the stalemate is finally broken and someone has a couple duchies up their sleeves.
The games I've done with that always end up with England, Scotland, or Norway coming in and burning us all hehehe.

Micro102

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2937 on: May 20, 2013, 10:15:52 pm »

How do you unite Ireland in one generation? Where do all of the claims come from? And what if you end up in a war with someone really big, like England?
« Last Edit: May 21, 2013, 08:49:10 am by Micro102 »
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forsaken1111

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2938 on: May 21, 2013, 05:56:32 am »

How do you unite Scotland in one generation? Where do all of the claims come from? And what if you end up in a war with someone really big, like England?
I'm wondering this as well. I tried to unite Ireland but it took so long to get valid CB on the other provinces that two generations passed before I had most of it.
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Maldevious

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Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« Reply #2939 on: May 21, 2013, 07:05:14 am »

Been a while, but last game I remember having a lot of success with the "find claimants, invite to your court, marry them to some random niece or nephew in your family (in the way that puts them in your dynasty), wait til they have children, then press the child's claim" method. Since the child will be of your dynasty, the land will come under your control. Takes a bit to come to fruition, but it is a nice supplement to the falsify claim method.
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