Crusader Kings 2 Redux

[Solmyr]

Solmyr, that's not what I meant. It shows *your* alternative heirs if your primary heir dies before he can inherit. It doesn't show who will inherit after him.

Generally, it's still the same people, no? I mean, if your son has sons of his own, they will show up as next after him.

[ulmont]

Solmyr, that's not what I meant. It shows *your* alternative heirs if your primary heir dies before he can inherit. It doesn't show who will inherit after him.

Generally, it's still the same people, no? I mean, if your son has sons of his own, they will show up as next after him.

Nah.  If you have 3 sons, it'll show them as the first 3 in line, I believe, instead of it being your oldest son then his oldest son and so on.  I'd have to doublecheck that though.

[Faeelin]

I guess I just suck at this game. My vassals always revolt, except I don't know how to keep them happy, and they seem to have far more units than I do.

Is there a bridefinder in this game?

[ulmont]

I guess I just suck at this game. My vassals always revolt, except I don't know how to keep them happy, and they seem to have far more units than I do.

A couple of notes on revolts:

1) You're always going to have some.  It's part of life.  Any vassal that picks up the "ambitious" trait (-50 relationship modifier) in particular will always hate you.
2) Make sure you are *never* over your desmense limit.  It fucks up your vassals' loyalty badly.  Get rid of extras.
3) Make sure you are *never* holding wrong government type holdings (cities or bishoprics).  Get rid of them.
4) Make sure you aren't holding too many duke titles as a king.  Check the modifiers.
5) Note that if you have a female heir that's a problem.
6) Or a short reign.
7) Release a prisoner if you must (+10 modifier to all vassals).

As to them having more troops, make sure to build in your holding (the one at the top of a county) in each province you control (and the lower holdings, if you control baronies directly).  And buy mercs.

Is there a bridefinder in this game?

Yes.  A couple of ways.  From a character you want to marry off, if you're on their character screen, there should be an image of 2 rings you can click to find characters willing to marry.  This is the easy way.  Alternately, from the characters tab (the last icon in the row with court, laws, military, etc.) you can run a full character search on a number of criteria.

[Faeelin]

Gotcha, thanks.

I started a game as Scotland in 1187, which which has low crown authority and a king with only 2 demesne provinces. Does it make more sense to start revoking titles or building up crown authority?

[Viking]

I guess I just suck at this game. My vassals always revolt, except I don't know how to keep them happy, and they seem to have far more units than I do.

Is there a bridefinder in this game?

No bridefinder yet, but it doesn't matter. There are more important concerns (traits, culture etc.)

Vanilla in this game is broken. The only stable countries are empires.

If your laws allow your vassals to wage war on each other they form superduchies (3 or more duchies without the malus') and these superduchies eventually challenge you for your title. Your vassals will revolt. The only stable kingdom is one where all the duchy titles are held by your mother, your heir and imprisoned dukes.

In one case as england after a long period of revolts after I was designated a tyrant after a superduchy formed and revolted I crushed the revolt, released the duchess and demanded another of her titles; apparently you don't get a malus for merely demanding a title, only getting after demanding; rinse repeat until she was a super count. I offloaded all the superduke's titles on my unmarried mother and had to banish the superduchess after the superduchess went to war with my mother and took back all her titles. So, I was reduced to the royal demesne of the duchies of bedford and kent after crushing all the post-banishment wars and giving the duchy titles to my mother. She had the rest of england, scotaland, wales, normandie and brittany.

Basically you have to assume that in each generation you will need to swap out the entire nobility of the kingdom except for the few cases where a duke has precisely one duchy and has the trait content (+50 relations).

[Crazy_Ivan80]

there's a bridefinder of sorts integrated in the game itself. call up the portrait of the person you wish to marry off, click on the rings-icon and you'll get listed all the single women/men in the christian world.

[ulmont]

Vanilla in this game is broken. The only stable countries are empires.

Duchies are pretty stable.  I ran Apulia for 200 years, ultimately had 80 vassals or so, and it was fine.

[Habbaku]

My Duchy of Apulia -> Kingdom of Sicily game had a significant level of stability.  Yes, there'd be a ducal revolt every so often, but they were always rather easily crushed and their titles assigned to someone more trustworthy.

[Viking]

Vanilla in this game is broken. The only stable countries are empires.

Duchies are pretty stable.  I ran Apulia for 200 years, ultimately had 80 vassals or so, and it was fine.

The game is broken when a duke holding 10 duchies has a more stable holding than a king with 10 dukes under him. But yeah, I'll add independent duchies to the list of stable countries.

[sbr]

My Duchy of Apulia -> Kingdom of Sicily game had a significant level of stability.  Yes, there'd be a ducal revolt every so often, but they were always rather easily crushed and their titles assigned to someone more trustworthy.

Mine too.  Most of the revolts I have seen have been succession related, but even those seem to make sense, either a female or other horrible person taking over from a long-reigned popular king.  I have a ruler die 5 times in 140 years.  The first 2 transfers of power were very peaceful, the third would likely have been, but the heir was 10 years old and his great uncle usurped the kingdom, which isn't exactly far-fetched.

EDIT: I am now dealing with my first superduke, he has been expanding inside the kingdom pretty aggressively and I don't see any way of stopping him.

[Habbaku]

The best way to stop the superdukes seems to be to strike early on.  Be wary of a duke gaining more territory than you in the first place and make sure you keep your personal holdings built up to provide enough troops to squish him.  If possible, deliberately piss him off (Court Jester!) and provoke the smaller duchies into revolts in order to seize a county or two from them.

Of course, the easiest way to avoid the superduke problem is to simply raise your Crown Authority to Medium.  That is actually rather easily done if you've managed to keep your vassals relatively content.

[katmai]

So if Viking sucks at game it's broken?

[Jaron]

I have tried playing a kingdom or empire yet, but it seems Viking is the proponent that the game is broken in its current states due to never ending rebellions. Others disagree, most notably Marcinek (For what thats worth).

I had fun in my Anjou game. The game gets boring if you're a duke and your kingdom reaches high (absolute?) crown authority - at that point I can't even declare war on Muslims.

I don't think I really understand succession laws completely. I changed mine to male only, eldest child inherits and some time later my duke's second son was set as heir and his eldest was skipped over - he wasn't a bastard, so I'm not sure what happened there.

The only thing was the duke's wife became duchess of Iceland and the eldest became heir to Iceland, and I'm not sure why that would disinherit him from receiving Anjou as well. It didn't all consolidate until the time of his grandson, who inherited everything.

The game is pretty zany sometimes. Its a little after 1400 in my Anjou game and France is a massive bloc stretching from Belgium down to southern Spain. The King of Wales married the Duchess of Aquitaine and used her armies to conquer parts of England..Ireland somehow owns most of Denmark.

In general, kings feel way too powerful early on, dukes launch endless revolts they have no hope of winning, France and the HRE especially seem way too aggressive in expanding outside their borders. A bit of that would be okay, but France overrunning Iberia by 1200 feels far fetched.


I think I'm warmongering too much. It feels like each one of my dukes is excommunicated by some random ruler. And by random, I mean someone I took a title or two from at some point.

[garbon]

The only thing was the duke's wife became duchess of Iceland and the eldest became heir to Iceland, and I'm not sure why that would disinherit him from receiving Anjou as well. It didn't all consolidate until the time of his grandson, who inherited everything.

Well this could be based on the level of crown authority. At some point, titles can't be inherited out of the realm.