I have only a passing understanding of CK2 mechanics, but I am liking your approach to the game.
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Now that I have an empty realm disposed of its money, I decide to re-populate it for long-term stability and my personal convenience. I need about 100 courtiers for all the counts that I want, so hopefully it won't be too expensive.
It's not. However, that's still a waste of money, so I acquire the courtiers in a different way. I take direct control of a province and its bishopric. I generate a new bishop using the right-click menu, imprison the bishop, and then banish him. The banished ex-bishop actually arrives at your court, meaning you can have as many free courtiers as you want. Oh, and you gain a net +5 piety each time you do this. In fact, the free courtier is a side effect. The main point of this trick is that is gives you infinite piety. Maybe I should have mentioned that first.
I use the courtiers to repopulate the realm with counts, each one owning 2 counties. This is about as much as they can take before going above their demesne limit, which would cripple their troops if exceeded.
All of them absolutely hate my guts due to tyranny, of course. So how do I handle that? No matter how strong I am, enough counts will form factions against me and rebel. The solution is actually simpler than it seems.
They can't revolt from prison
. Now it's almost time to do some actual combat for the first time in this AAR. I use my money to purchase some mercenaries.
But before anything else, I think I'll go ahead and swear fealty to one of the pagan tribes in the East. Let's go with the Pechenegs, as they look the least scary.
You might be asking why the heck would I do that, but it was all simply so I could use this decision.
So I can pay 200 prestige to change my culture to the Altaic group. This is utterly useless for our current situation, but will be essential later on, so it's best to do it now. Previously I gained prestige by creating duchies, essentially turning ~200 gold into 200 prestige. Even though we have a lot of money, it's not endless, so this method is out of the question. We've managed to cheese our way into vast lands, vast money, and infinite piety, but prestige so far has remained untouched. Is it the single pure attribute which we cannot exploit? Well, actually, no. It's not quite as bad as piety -- it's only practically infinite. You see, winning wars give you some prestige. Specifically, you gain 50 when you defeat a rebelling vassal. We also know we can trigger a vassal to rebel by failing to imprison them. This would require you to actually fight the war and defeat them, of course, but when happens if you do it again? And again? to the same holding, which had no time to replenish its garrison?
They have 0 troops. That means you win the war within a single day, with no casualties, using any number of soldiers you want. In practice this means you earn a 50 prestige each day. After 10 days you get 500 -- a whole year and you could hypothetically get 18,250. As it happens, prestige will matter a lot to us later on, so I use this trick whenever I have spare days that don't require peace. Now, after using a faction to gain independence from the Pechenegs, I declare holy war against the nearby pagans.
The purpose is to gain control of a slavic-religion province.
And the purpose of that? Well, Rajas of India introduced some new useful decisions. One of them is to change your character's religion to that of your capital province, at the cost of a steep 1000 piety. But we have infinite piety, don't we?
And so we become the pagan, Altaic-cultured, Duke of Holland (of the Karling dynasty). This is the very the apex of the strategy I came up with, and the goal we were aiming for since the beginning. What abilities does this give us? First, we gain a new wonderful CB to use against pagans.
Second, we get this even wonderfuler CB to use against all non-pagans, the infamous tribal invasion.
These CBs are the reason why pagans are traditionally known as the best WC candidates. Holy war, the next best reliable CB, targets duchies, which go up to 8 provinces. For comparison, both subjugation and tribal invasion target whole kingdoms, which go up to 39 provinces. The Magyars are considered overpowered because they have access to tribal invasions and start with huge amounts of troops. But now our army dwarves that of the magyars, we hold far larger tracks of land, we have a superior pagan religion, and all the while we have the same overpowered CB. Life is great.
It's not. However, that's still a waste of money, so I acquire the courtiers in a different way. I take direct control of a province and its bishopric. I generate a new bishop using the right-click menu, imprison the bishop, and then banish him. The banished ex-bishop actually arrives at your court, meaning you can have as many free courtiers as you want. Oh, and you gain a net +5 piety each time you do this. In fact, the free courtier is a side effect. The main point of this trick is that is gives you infinite piety. Maybe I should have mentioned that first.
I use the courtiers to repopulate the realm with counts, each one owning 2 counties. This is about as much as they can take before going above their demesne limit, which would cripple their troops if exceeded.
All of them absolutely hate my guts due to tyranny, of course. So how do I handle that? No matter how strong I am, enough counts will form factions against me and rebel. The solution is actually simpler than it seems.
They can't revolt from prison
. Now it's almost time to do some actual combat for the first time in this AAR. I use my money to purchase some mercenaries.
But before anything else, I think I'll go ahead and swear fealty to one of the pagan tribes in the East. Let's go with the Pechenegs, as they look the least scary.
You might be asking why the heck would I do that, but it was all simply so I could use this decision.
So I can pay 200 prestige to change my culture to the Altaic group. This is utterly useless for our current situation, but will be essential later on, so it's best to do it now. Previously I gained prestige by creating duchies, essentially turning ~200 gold into 200 prestige. Even though we have a lot of money, it's not endless, so this method is out of the question. We've managed to cheese our way into vast lands, vast money, and infinite piety, but prestige so far has remained untouched. Is it the single pure attribute which we cannot exploit? Well, actually, no. It's not quite as bad as piety -- it's only practically infinite
. You see, winning wars give you some prestige. Specifically, you gain 50 when you defeat a rebelling vassal. We also know we can trigger a vassal to rebel by failing to imprison them. This would require you to actually fight the war and defeat them, of course, but when happens if you do it again? And again? to the same holding, which had no time to replenish its garrison?
They have 0 troops. That means you win the war within a single day, with no casualties, using any number of soldiers you want. In practice this means you earn a 50 prestige each day. After 10 days you get 500 -- a whole year and you could hypothetically get 18,250. As it happens, prestige will matter a lot to us later on, so I use this trick whenever I have spare days that don't require peace. Now, after using a faction to gain independence from the Pechenegs, I declare holy war against the nearby pagans.
The purpose is to gain control of a slavic-religion province.
And the purpose of that? Well, Rajas of India introduced some new useful decisions. One of them is to change your character's religion to that of your capital province, at the cost of a steep 1000 piety. But we have infinite piety, don't we?
And so we become the pagan, Altaic-cultured, Duke of Holland (of the Karling dynasty). This is the very the apex of the strategy I came up with, and the goal we were aiming for since the beginning. What abilities does this give us? First, we gain a new wonderful CB to use against pagans.
Second, we get this even wonderfuler CB to use against all non-pagans, the infamous tribal invasion.
These CBs are the reason why pagans are traditionally known as the best WC candidates. Holy war, the next best reliable CB, targets duchies, which go up to 8 provinces. For comparison, both subjugation and tribal invasion target whole kingdoms, which go up to 39 provinces. The Magyars are considered overpowered because they have access to tribal invasions and start with huge amounts of troops. But now our army dwarves that of the magyars, we hold far larger tracks of land, we have a superior pagan religion, and all the while we have the same overpowered CB. Life is great.
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Hum, the Tribal invasion CB is actually worse than you described: If you win the war with it, you get all the kingdom of the CB ( vassals of your religion are retained, the ruler gets the rest IIRC ) and your ruler gets all the counties you captured atleast one holding of, regardless of where it is . Using your example of Great Moravia above, if you won the war with battles and the capture of Nitra and Trencin top holdings, you would get all the Bohemia kingdom and the counties of Nitra and Trencin, even if they aren't in Bohemia...
That is to say that you can use this CB to conquer whole countries in one gobble if you only lose the time to siege the top holdings of all counties of it, no matter the size of the country ( say, Bizantium or the Abbassids ). And, with some fiddling, you can actually use this CB to destroy the Papacy, preventing Crusades on you ( and making that the hordes of the east to not come, but I'm positive you will not take that long ). No wonder that people say this CB is clearly over the top
That is to say that you can use this CB to conquer whole countries in one gobble if you only lose the time to siege the top holdings of all counties of it, no matter the size of the country ( say, Bizantium or the Abbassids ). And, with some fiddling, you can actually use this CB to destroy the Papacy, preventing Crusades on you ( and making that the hordes of the east to not come, but I'm positive you will not take that long
). No wonder that people say this CB is clearly over the top
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What you are doing is awesome, breaking the game like this. I need to be taking notes here, so I can try this for myself.
Here's to even more messed up madness on your path to global conquest! Go Dutch Pagans!
Here's to even more messed up madness on your path to global conquest! Go Dutch Pagans!
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It works with Tengri, Aztec and .... anyone with Altaic culture that is not a Christian Hence maxirage detour to capture one Slav county just after he gets his ruler to be of a Altaic culture ...
Hence maxirage detour to capture one Slav county just after he gets his ruler to be of a Altaic culture ...
It works with Tengri, Aztec and .... anyone with Altaic culture that is not a Christian
Not exactly. Tribal invasion actually has 3 different versions.
1) Altaic version. Requires Altaic/Magyar culture, targets everybody except for pagans, costs 500 prestige. Only works if you are a pagan yourself (reformed pagans are fine).
2) Mongol version. Requires Mongol/Aztec culture, targets everybody (including pagans), costs 500 prestige. Works if you're not Christian.
3) Manifest destiny. Only available to specific event-created dynasties, targets everybody, zero prestige cost. Works no matter what religion you are.
The only one I have access to is the Altaic version, as the rest do not exist at gamestart. But it's still very strong.
Yeah, I was mashing #1 and #2 :/ . And saying that version #1 is "still very strong" is quite a understatement ... a CB that allows to eat a empire in one bite is not "very strong" , is completely off the charts
Your images are down because of bandwidth cap.
I suggest using minus over photobucket. Minus has galleries, thumbnail support, unlimited bandwidth and you can upload files up to 10MB without compression being applied.
Or use Imgur if you're not interested in that stuff. Either way, you won't have to worry about a cap taking them down.
I suggest using minus over photobucket. Minus has galleries, thumbnail support, unlimited bandwidth and you can upload files up to 10MB without compression being applied.
Or use Imgur if you're not interested in that stuff. Either way, you won't have to worry about a cap taking them down.
....I just saw a Slavic Pecheneg Karling Empire. I have no words to describe how awesome is that.
By the way, aren't you worried that Gavelkind will break apart all your work when your character dies?
I will definitely follow this one.
By the way, aren't you worried that Gavelkind will break apart all your work when your character dies?
I will definitely follow this one.
If there is only one heir, gavelkind will not break inheritance *wink* And if by accident the ruler dies whith two or more sons, simply assasin every one of them except the better one to make the stuff go united again ... the OP already done far worse in terms of body count to reunite the Karling realms , right ?
If you've ever tried to do a WC, you'd know one of the major roadblocks are the pagan lords. Normally, foreign invaders suffer enormous attrition in their lands; it's so harsh that it's impossible to siege the provinces without being getting attrition damage. This is not something you can just brute force through by throwing more mercs -- you need a solution. The normal solution is to advance in technology to nullify the penalty. However, that takes time, which we don't want to waste. There is a second way to nullify the attrition, and that is to become pagan yourself. Well, any pagan besides Tengri or West African. Those two branches suffer from all the downsides of paganism while also being wounded by the attrition. Absolutely horrendous. In our case going pagan is the only viable choice. However, this brings forth a problem in our CB choice. Pagans cannot holy war other pagans unless they reform, but reformation removes the precious attrition immunity. The only good CB that you have available as unreformed pagan is subjugation, but that is limited to one use per lifetime. Perhaps there is a way to exploit subjugation, to make it just as versatile as holy war? Well, since this is a breaking ARR and I just asked it as a rhetorical question, of course there is. I previously explained why being an Altaic pagan was so important to this strategy, but I passed over why I went through the trouble of downgrading into a duke. Being a duke is a handicap in most situations -- you're stuck at low crown authority and are limited to vassal counts. There's only one reason why I want to be a duke.
And that is this ambition, "become king," which is only available to counts and dukes. As the description says, it allows pagans to use subjugation with no limits, as long as it's within a single kingdom. But how is that single kingdom chosen? It's based on your capital province. Ha ha, an idea is now being hatched: what if we changed our capital? Well, the devs thought of that, and disabled manual capital changes if you have the ambition selected. But I know that there is another way to change your capital. Ever wonder what happens if you try to give away your capital to a vassal?
It changes your capital. This method works even if you have the ambition selected, and unlike the normal mechanic, you can do it as many times as you want. You're not limited to one switch a lifetime, and this is huge. Basically, we now have the unlimited subjugation CB available for every kingdom in the world. It has become a super CB against pagans, even better than tribal invasions. Instead of saving them for last, as in normal strategies, we're going to take down the pagans first.
Because we have unlimited prestige, we're going to be breaking truces all over the place. We could also get around truces by assassinating the target, but money is more valuable than prestige, so the choice is a no-brainer.
As far major game-breaking strategies, I think I've explained them all. From here on out it'll be military strategy and logistics. The main limiting factor when it comes to speed of conquest is troop movement, so we're going to be basing everything on the path our troops take. I'm going to be dividing the war effort into three fronts: west, north, and east. The western army is going to take Brittany and then move onto to British Isles. The northern army is going to fight the norse in Scandanavia. The western army will advance through the slavic pagans with the goal of reaching the tengri in the steppes.
As I mentioned, troop movement speed is the limiting factor. To maximize it, I want to stick generals with organizers on all my stacks. Manually changing generals is not allowed due to low crown authority -- probably the biggest downside of us being a duke. However, you can get around it.
You can still reorganize your army. Your retinue is owned by you, so you can always choose what general leads it. You can mix mercenary stacks and retinue units, and by making sure the organizer has the highest martial out of the generals in the center flank, he'll automatically become flank leader. As for the type of retinue, I always go with the skirmish 400 archer / 100 heavy infantry. It's the best at sieging, and that's what we're going to be doing most of the time.
While trying to steal technology, my super-spymaster was arrest by the Byzantine Emperor. Luckily, he was released soon after.
Unluckily, he was blinded. He still has the highest intrigue in the world, so I keep him as spymaster. This time I keep him away from stealing tech. We don't really need that anyway. In other news, if you're curious at how I deal with rebels, this is how:
I banish the vassals around the rebels and raise their levies as my own. After the battle is over and levies are dismissed, I create new vassals in those provinces and re-imprison them. I make sure to use vassals with the same religion as the provices, as that keeps the revolt risk down to 2%. Same-culture same-religion vassals aren't worth the revolt risk.
Here's am interesting bug. This guy hates me so much he actually loves me. People say love and hate are two sides of the same coin.
Alas, good Emperor, we must bid you farewell. It's hard to believe it's only been a year since we've met. If we take his only province using our pagan county conquest, all his titles get destroyed. The HRE is thus no more.
Along the way I decide to become Romuva. This is purely so I could generate Romuva courtiers to populate the Baltic lands I'm conquering.
Here is the current realm, at October 9, 868. It's going along quite nicely.
And that is this ambition, "become king," which is only available to counts and dukes. As the description says, it allows pagans to use subjugation with no limits, as long as it's within a single kingdom. But how is that single kingdom chosen? It's based on your capital province. Ha ha, an idea is now being hatched: what if we changed our capital? Well, the devs thought of that, and disabled manual capital changes if you have the ambition selected. But I know that there is another way to change your capital. Ever wonder what happens if you try to give away your capital to a vassal?
It changes your capital
. This method works even if you have the ambition selected, and unlike the normal mechanic, you can do it as many times as you want. You're not limited to one switch a lifetime, and this is huge. Basically, we now have the unlimited subjugation CB available for every kingdom in the world. It has become a super CB against pagans, even better than tribal invasions. Instead of saving them for last, as in normal strategies, we're going to take down the pagans first.
Because we have unlimited prestige, we're going to be breaking truces all over the place. We could also get around truces by assassinating the target, but money is more valuable than prestige, so the choice is a no-brainer.
As far major game-breaking strategies, I think I've explained them all. From here on out it'll be military strategy and logistics. The main limiting factor when it comes to speed of conquest is troop movement, so we're going to be basing everything on the path our troops take. I'm going to be dividing the war effort into three fronts: west, north, and east. The western army is going to take Brittany and then move onto to British Isles. The northern army is going to fight the norse in Scandanavia. The western army will advance through the slavic pagans with the goal of reaching the tengri in the steppes.
As I mentioned, troop movement speed is the limiting factor. To maximize it, I want to stick generals with organizers on all my stacks. Manually changing generals is not allowed due to low crown authority -- probably the biggest downside of us being a duke. However, you can get around it.
You can still reorganize your army. Your retinue is owned by you, so you can always choose what general leads it. You can mix mercenary stacks and retinue units, and by making sure the organizer has the highest martial out of the generals in the center flank, he'll automatically become flank leader. As for the type of retinue, I always go with the skirmish 400 archer / 100 heavy infantry. It's the best at sieging, and that's what we're going to be doing most of the time.
While trying to steal technology, my super-spymaster was arrest by the Byzantine Emperor. Luckily, he was released soon after.
Unluckily, he was blinded
. He still has the highest intrigue in the world, so I keep him as spymaster. This time I keep him away from stealing tech. We don't really need that anyway. In other news, if you're curious at how I deal with rebels, this is how:
I banish the vassals around the rebels and raise their levies as my own. After the battle is over and levies are dismissed, I create new vassals in those provinces and re-imprison them. I make sure to use vassals with the same religion as the provices, as that keeps the revolt risk down to 2%. Same-culture same-religion vassals aren't worth the revolt risk.
Here's am interesting bug. This guy hates me so much he actually loves me. People say love and hate are two sides of the same coin.
Alas, good Emperor, we must bid you farewell. It's hard to believe it's only been a year since we've met. If we take his only province using our pagan county conquest, all his titles get destroyed. The HRE is thus no more.
Along the way I decide to become Romuva. This is purely so I could generate Romuva courtiers to populate the Baltic lands I'm conquering.
Here is the current realm, at October 9, 868. It's going along quite nicely.
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Good God. Johan is currently weeping tears of bitter blood. I am going to try this monstrous strategy next time I play.
When someone with a minimum programming skill sees something like that, it is clear what is happening below the hoodmaxirage said:
TBH the devs never considered that someone would get 32K of good or bad opinion ... BTW do you knw the logic of changing caps besides the defaulting to the main title one ? It seems critical to your strategy of going pagans first ...
When someone with a minimum programming skill sees something like that, it is clear what is happening below the hood
Yeah, it's a variable underflow. Not sure if this one is tracked with integers or floats. It looks like positive values are tracked for more than the visible 100 when you reach it from the other way around, as it takes a while for it to become negative again.
It mostly follows the order of provinces in the menu for handing out titles to vassals. But that doesn't really matter; I keep my demesne small and banish the temporary vassal I use to move the capital.
It works with Tengri, Aztec and .... anyone with Altaic culture that is not a Christian
Hmm, can Jewish characters use this CB too?
UPD: They can't. :-(
Oops, sorry :/ When I said "not Christian" , I meant "Pagan" . Old habits die hard
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