Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Wiles]

I never form kingdoms as emperor. To me the benefits are outweighed by the negatives.

I've always liked forming Kingdoms, I find it to be very useful as long as you don't make them more powerful than yourself. It helps with the handling of revolts, it helps with expansion and it makes handling factions much simpler. It also makes it easy to gather your levies.

One thing I've wondered though is if forming Kingdoms is useful for tech reasons? I know having dukes is much better than having count vassals because tech will spread through your realm much much faster. 

[Catastrophic lolcats]

One thing to consider is that you lose a massive amount of tax and levies the higher the chain goes. Due to the AI being incompetent they'll almost always have the lowest level of taxation and levy obligations. Factor into this that AI finds it hard to maintain good relationship with their vassals and you're looking at a huge loss. Run this through two levels of the chain (duke and king) and it's pretty bad.

If you really want to fully milk your vassals for all their worth keep them as counts. There's a post on the Paradox forums comparing count/duke/king levels of obligation loss and it's just insane. Tech spread isn't all that great if you consider that only your own lands need to be technologically advanced in anyway. The tech expansion doesn't make up for the loss from the chain.

Keeping your vassals as counts with internal peace is generally much better. You can exploit this further with elective succession and a couple arch-prince-bishops in the smaller two province duchies so no dukes form.

And for some strange reason England never used the name Emperor though the Queen and King still have all their "King of blah blah blah" titles even today.

Pretty sure Victoria was, at least unofficially, Empress.

Protestant England. They didn't need to claim legitimacy from the Papacy and therefore didn't have to claim legitimacy from Rome such as was the case in CK2 timeline.

[Rolan7]

I'm not quite so eager to overtax since I realized my vassals were spending their personal fortunes to improve their holdings.  I'm pretty sure bishops and burghers do that pretty often.

[Fniff]

I'm having trouble getting into this. I'm not sure what I should do at the start apart from "marry ruler off and wait". Any suggestions for nations that help you get into the game? I have all the DLC except for Old Gods.

[majikero]

Ireland is the noob land of choice. Learn the ins and outs of the game.

[Fniff]

Okay, what should I do when I start out, then?

[majikero]

If your a count, try to fabricate a claim on your de jure duke. Revoke the city and church so you get more troops than him. After you're a duke, either play the marriage game or repeat the fabricate claim method. Just try not to get excommunicated.

If your a duke, fight your de jure vassal and imprison him. When the truce ends, banish him and everyone else but your heir. Get new courtiers. Your heir will hate your guts but the new courtiers won't.

After you form Ireland, Europe is yours for the taking!

[Rolan7]

The council tab is important, each council member can be sent on missions which are mostly self-explanatory.  There's a button to search for people, use it to invite high-stats courtiers to your court, then put them on the council (though current council members don't like being fired).

You can change a law every 5 years, you might want to change the succession law away from gavelkind (particularly if you plan on having multiple children and territories) or adjust taxes.

Your spouse helps you govern, so good stats are good in a wife.  Marriage can be complicated but it's probably the best way to expand at first.  I started as Dublin in 1066 which meant I inherited Leinster after about 5 years when my father died, so I was able to expand through war and marrying claimants instead of heirs.

A lot of these changes will make people unhappy, so a big part of the game is appeasing vassals.  Things to do will generally pop up at the top as icons.  Oh, and choosing the ambition to improve a skill will result in special events which raise the skill.

[Fniff]

Out of curiosity, what do courtiers bring to the table? I'm not exactly sure as to what their purpose is.

[umiman]

Out of curiosity, what do courtiers bring to the table? I'm not exactly sure as to what their purpose is.

Just think of them as free agents.

You can give them titles if you need to or hire them as councillors and spymasters or what have you.

[Rakonas]

They can potentially be on your council, can be married, can potentially be claimants, and so forth.

[Wiles]

Tech spread isn't all that great if you consider that only your own lands need to be technologically advanced in anyway. The tech expansion doesn't make up for the loss from the chain.

I guess I don't fully understand the worth of the tech system when it comes to vassals. Is it not beneficial to get better levies through tech spread to your vassals? Or do their levies get your tech bonuses when they are under your control? Count level tech spread seemed pretty abysmal, especially in isolated provinces. In one of my recent games I noticed the Iceland counties were still 1/1/1 when I was 20+ in everything.

I could understand wanting to milk your vassals for all they're worth in a multiplayer match, but once you hit emperor the difficulty seems trivial against the AI and losing levies/taxes for less micro-management seems like a decent trade off.

[UristMcDwarf]

I want this game so bad. 

[umiman]

Tech spread isn't all that great if you consider that only your own lands need to be technologically advanced in anyway. The tech expansion doesn't make up for the loss from the chain.

I guess I don't fully understand the worth of the tech system when it comes to vassals. Is it not beneficial to get better levies through tech spread to your vassals? Or do their levies get your tech bonuses when they are under your control? Count level tech spread seemed pretty abysmal, especially in isolated provinces. In one of my recent games I noticed the Iceland counties were still 1/1/1 when I was 20+ in everything.

I could understand wanting to milk your vassals for all they're worth in a multiplayer match, but once you hit emperor the difficulty seems trivial against the AI and losing levies/taxes for less micro-management seems like a decent trade off.

An Emperor with any form of good succession is essentially ultra boring easy mode. I don't recommend playing it unless you're MPing the HRE vs Byzantine which can be quite fun.

Tech doesn't grow very well in this game. Not only do you have to reach the research levels needed to gain the tech, but you have to spread the tech too which is almost impossible to manipulate other than with some arbitrary percentages from assigning council members or creating universities. I wouldn't focus on it too much and concentrate on improving relations with vassals to get more troops.

[Digital Hellhound]

I want this game so bad. 

It's 20e for the base game, 40e with all expansions on Steam (and similar low prices in whatever heathen currency you may use). What's stopping you?