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[hector13]

Muslim Merchant Republics. You also get larger-but-lower-quality armies. There’s no reason to stay tribal though, so you’ll generally be trying to get that fixed quickly. Expand to what you want, then convert to feudal or MR.

Don’t all the tribes start with regular gavelkind though?

[Cipactli]

Muslim Merchant Republics. You also get larger-but-lower-quality armies. There’s no reason to stay tribal though, so you’ll generally be trying to get that fixed quickly. Expand to what you want, then convert to feudal or MR.

Don’t all the tribes start with regular gavelkind though?

I've tried to my horror to attempt to a Perm Kingdom at the 762 start. As a player-nation starting as one of the Duchies (forgot the name of it), I've expectantly did exceeding better than the AI controlled ones, but me and my neigbhors became equal in strength. All of De-Jure Kingdom of Perm was in my control. Problem is that I had an OP Khazaria to the south, a VERY strong Slavic nation to the west, and a fellow Suomenskuo nation to the south of me. It was to the point I couldn't readily farm prestige in Extort Tribute wars since my neighbhors gobbled up the more weaker tribes.

The Khazar marche sent some Sunni Imams to preach in my main Nenet tribe a couple times allowing me the choice to convert..I didn't want to take huge maluses from my vassals and converting all my realm would take decades so I rejected everytime. Luckily I received a two Liberate cassus bellis on my Slavic neighbor, but the idea of it was shot down when the tooltip listed that ALL Slavic faithed nations would get involved.

All that was left to do was raiding, but my army kept getting whithered down in equal battles. Eventually one of my vassals in the Khanty was so incompetent it sparked a peasant rebellion of 2k. I held up for awhile, but eventually my ruler died in a skirmish. Decided to just start another playthrough.

Any advice on how I could've done better?

[pisskop]

take your bretheren put early.  subjugate your fellow sumoksikns asap, or while watching other wars.

tribals get the option to burn prestige or piety for 2500 and 2000 a pop, with no upper limit on that if you met the reqs for more (500 prestige, any war / 200 piety, defending against another religion) and ai will use it too.  use these to intelligently dow.  get attacked by a nomad, dow the slav, then fire off your piety.  just check the targets prestige and piety.  and allies.  slavs are infamously bound up together.

eventually the slavs in Russia will falter or face rebellion, thats when you can alternatively hit them. khazaria, if you have nomads, will split and fragment upon the khans succession.  just bide your time and remember that the strength of the nomads is oppressive levels of skirmish ability.


in short, build up prestige and piety, wait for a weak succession or rebellion, and count the strength of their allies.  tribals focus on light infantry, and skirmishes (the start of every battle) means a lot.  morale and defensive bonuses from terrain and religion mean A LOT more.  a cruel light infantry leader with impaler and rough terrain traits will wipe the floor with his pwnage as he assaults everything.  morale bonuses and proper terrain use make or break early game tribal war.

[Cipactli]

Should I just use Sow Dissent to my advantage nominally instead of rarely? People deem it as a useless council mission, but I can be useful if an enemy realm has an almost equal strength vassal. Could it honestly be useful in the Tribal scenario?

Gonna try another tribal game. Do you guys have any advice for education? It seems so RNG that I completely ignore the traits of my guardian since I never know which is compatiple with which and just focus on the highest statted educator possible. Is this a good idea?

[EnigmaticHat]

Sow dissent turns vassals' opinion bad toward their liege and good towards you.  It has two main uses: really early in the game you can use it to lower someone's levy size.  Then at all points in the game it can be useful to flip people in someone else's court that are close to joining a plot against their liege.

I'd say using it rarely is about right.  The two other options your diplo dude has are better, but sow dissent has its niche.  In most cases instead of sowing dissent you might as well just use the other option that makes people like you.

[lordcooper]

Manually stopping plots sounds like a lot more work than just beating the crap out of your vassals when they revolt.

I like to have a strong merchant republic vassal (typically King level once I'm an Emperor) on either side of my realm for the crazy income boost.  These fuckers are dangerous and tend to loathe you, so they'll join/form factions at the drop of a hat and their seemingly infinite money for mercs can be a huge problem.  The ideal situation is to have every new ruler imprisoned ASAP to prevent them screwing you at inopportune times.  Luckily they love to plot.

Is there any reason to do a Tribal playthrough at all? Elective gavelkind makes me went to gouge my brain out. Gavelkind I can handle, but Elective gavelkind is killer. Even when your vassals like you, they never choose who your truly want, EVER.

There's no real reason (other than roleplay or self imposed challenge) to stay as a tribe permanently.  That said, they are absolutely fantastic at gobbling up large amounts of territory and banking prestige + gold for the mid-late game.  Starting as a tribe (preferably Norse or Irish) in the earliest start date can mean that you have a ridiculously strong foundation to work with by the time you're ready to convert to feudalism or a republic (ideally prior to 1066).  Convert to Christianity around the same time, embrace a heresy ASAP (secretly until you've converted a decent amount) and move into France* to trigger crusades**.

My latest run like this is in around 1180 AD atm.  I started as an Irish Count and currently hold the British Isles, about 80% of France, all of Iberia (this was a mistake in hindsight, the Muslims slowed me down quite a lot), all of Italy, all of Scandinavia and am currently chipping bits off the HRE.  There have been 7 Crusades to date, every single one focused on me.  Good times.  Vanilla settings (other than disabling threat, which is the worst feature ever implemented IMO) with all DLC.

*Ideally you'll do what you can to avoid the formation of the big blue blob and keep them fractured throughout the early game.

**Provence, Toulouse or Paris being held by a heretic or other non-Christian after 900 AD will enable crusades. 

[pisskop]

plots prevent other plots and provide imprisonment reasons.

imprisonment also offers either exile (if they run) which removes a negative value, capture and detainment/ransom, or good ole fashioned wars of tyranny, which are usually fought singularly instead of  as a faction.

[hector13]

I’m not sure what the rules are regarding tyranny wars. I refused to give up a barony to my liege in an India game, ended up as the leader of a massive tyranny rebellion.

Convenient, since I won and they were forced to abdicate, allowing me to murder the shitbag for burning my heir at the stake.

[pisskop]

unhappy vassals will co-rebel, and factions may fire their claims if the leader is imprisoned.

the ai seems to handle this facet of diplomacy under the hood, kind of auto-inviting people.


you ever get a request to join a war from a random rebel under your liege?  i swear i once got a heresy revolt asking foy help

[EnigmaticHat]

Manually stopping plots sounds like a lot more work than just beating the crap out of your vassals when they revolt.

The intel tab is well organized, there's a tab to see all active plots in your realm.  Vassals who like you can be convinced to stop with nothing but stern words.

Checking the intel tab occasionally also solves that problem where you imprison someone for something minor/grab then in a siege, and then 40 years later get a message that they died of old age in prison.  If nothing else you miss out on that sweet sweet ransom.

One thing that's always been funny to me is "fining" my vassals for their misdeeds, by imprisoning them and then making them pay their own ransom.  Not necessarily a wise thing to do since they'll be at full power and resent you, and I'm not sure if money fines were ever a thing in feudalism.  But entertaining, and profitable.

[Tawa]

Dev Diary 78 - Polishing Up the Map

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Greetings!

We’re working away, and we’ve been working away for quite some time now - it’s just much too early to go into detail on what we’re doing yet, but rest assured that we have a lot of interesting stuff going on!

Without spoiling the theme of the upcoming expansion, we want to give you something to look at and discuss. In addition to all the theme-specific features we’re making, we’re also slowly working our way through some of the more neglected areas of the map, correcting mistakes and increasing the granularity of the playing field. Here’s one such area, Poland:

Code: [Select]

- Map Update to Poland
    - General overhaul to the De Jure territory of the Kingdom of Poland
    - Vistula (major) river tweaked to be more geographically accurate
    - (Minor) river Oder tweaked for more geographical accuracy
    - (Minor) rivers Warta and Bug added
    - 6 new provinces, mostly improving granularity in Mazovia and Lesser Poland
    - All old provinces moved and reshaped for more consistency
    - Some updated provincial Coats of Arms
Later this spring (date yet TBD) we’ll release a bug-fixing patch, so remember to head over to the bug forums and report any issues you find.

Please note that the time between Dev Diaries will be irregular, as we’re very early in the development cycle.

Not sure what the upcoming expansion will be, but I think that one safe guess is a portrait pack to cover the hitherto un-portrait-pack'd Poland-Hungary-Balkans strip.

Any bets as to what other parts of the map they'll change? I'm putting my money on West Africa, Russia, and the Baltic.

[Loud Whispers]

I can support a map change that turns 50% of the world into granulations of poland

[Micro102]

Started playing again but need some help figuring out what happened. Ended up leading a faction revolt for lower crown authority against the king as a duke. The faction list said we had ~59% of the king's troops. I look up his numbers and he has ~10-11k troops. I see he has -60 gold and his armies are getting the -25 morale modifier. I see he has -14 "raised levies" negative modifier for nearly everyone. I attack...

It starts off disappointing but well. I don't get the 5k+ troops the faction list told me I was going to get (more like 3400), but I did get ~450 troops from an event. We made our way to the capital and were able to hold it against their 5k troops as their armies buckled under morale. Twice. We ended up killing over 2k of them and lost ~1500 ourselves. I try to clinche the war by hiring mercenaries to make sure they couldn't get lucky or anything. Then they appear again, probably via boats, next to my capital with 6k men... I've been checking the guy's coffers constantly to make sure he had that negative morale modifier, he always had it. And as I ended in white peace I tried to take hope in the fact that if my vassals got pissed off going from a 0 to -16 modifier for levies raised, he would probably be close to -30 by now. Nope, his vassal's levy modifier actually went down.


- Why didn't I get all the troops promised by the faction screen?

- How did he go from ~3k troops to 6k in such a short time? I don't think he could have used mercenaries as he had no money, and it looks like he didn't use vassals.

[EnigmaticHat]

If the war went on long enough he could have dismissed his levies and then called them up again.

Its also possible that a loyalist vassal raised their own troops.  They AI doesn't do that to interfere in its liege's wars (although that's totally possible, and a realm with every count and duke raising their levies alongside the king would be terrifying) but they could have done so as a result of their own war and then happened to kill you on the way there.

[Loud Whispers]

Started playing again but need some help figuring out what happened. Ended up leading a faction revolt for lower crown authority against the king as a duke. The faction list said we had ~59% of the king's troops. I look up his numbers and he has ~10-11k troops. I see he has -60 gold and his armies are getting the -25 morale modifier. I see he has -14 "raised levies" negative modifier for nearly everyone. I attack...

It starts off disappointing but well. I don't get the 5k+ troops the faction list told me I was going to get (more like 3400), but I did get ~450 troops from an event. We made our way to the capital and were able to hold it against their 5k troops as their armies buckled under morale. Twice. We ended up killing over 2k of them and lost ~1500 ourselves. I try to clinche the war by hiring mercenaries to make sure they couldn't get lucky or anything. Then they appear again, probably via boats, next to my capital with 6k men... I've been checking the guy's coffers constantly to make sure he had that negative morale modifier, he always had it. And as I ended in white peace I tried to take hope in the fact that if my vassals got pissed off going from a 0 to -16 modifier for levies raised, he would probably be close to -30 by now. Nope, his vassal's levy modifier actually went down.


- Why didn't I get all the troops promised by the faction screen?

- How did he go from ~3k troops to 6k in such a short time? I don't think he could have used mercenaries as he had no money, and it looks like he didn't use vassals.

Wiki says faction strength is calculated like this:
 ( ( sum of member troops * 2 ) / ( sum of liege troops - sum of member troops ) ) * 100
Thus the strength of faction members is actually inflated relative to their actual power versus the sovereign. It is best not to use the faction strength thing as an indicator for troop numbers I guess