Rise of the clans
Is world conquest possible with Crusader Kings on Very Hard difficulty under patch 1.02? Was it possible under patch 1.01? – Well that one we’ll probably never know, but these are questions that have been asked yet so far I haven’t seen accomplished. So what factors are going to limit world conquest and perhaps prevent it? There are four main areas in my opinion:
1. Prestige – On very hard difficulty it can cost anywhere from 600 to 1700 or more prestige to claim a single Christian province depending on how rich the province is. Considering how many provinces are Christian that’s a LOT of prestige that needs to be generated during the near 400 year campaign.
2. BadBoy reputation – Conquering Christians, assassinations, declaring war when your troops are in enemy provinces, generating claims - all these generate badboy points. Gain too much BB and the loyalty of our vassals will start to drop followed by inevitable revolt unless drastic actions are taken. A serious problem under patch 1.01, but less so I think with 1.02 when we can lose BB simply by granting titles.
3. Piety – Pieties main function is to reduce badboy. You need it under patch 1.01, but I wonder if it’s going to be strictly necessary under patch 1.02? We will shortly find out!
4. Succession – Well the game is lost if we don’t have an heir, so a good breeding scheme is going to be necessary so we never reach such dire straights.
As you’ll have gathered my own feeling is that world conquest should definitely be much easier under 1.02 due to a couple of changes. The first is the BB reduction for granting titles, which should eliminate any badboy problems via a judicious granting of titles. The main benefit however to running with 1.02 is that the Mongol Horde can now potentially conquer half of Europe for us removing the need to generate prestige to claim it, though it may still be tight claiming the rest. Of course the big risk to letting the Horde conquer much of Europe is that we’ve then got to defeat them afterwards, but lets take one thing at a time.
Now I'll always be playing with the latest patch so it’s possible that some of the assumptions I’ve made so far will change over time as exploits are closed and balance decisions made. This is a risk I’ll have to live with. It is also possible that a new patch will render my old save games unplayable. If such becomes the case I will sadly have to abandon this attempt, or possibly start again if I’ve got the energy.
So, the setting:
I’ll be playing Scotland in the 1066 scenario.
Difficulty is Very Hard.
AI aggression is Furious.
Scotland starts with mappower of about 2700, not a great deal, but enough I think for our purposes. To begin with all of our conquests are going to be against muslims and pagans. Getting even 600 prestige at this point is not an easy short term project, though as the Scotish king I can claim 5 initial duchies which we’ll do as soon as basic infrastructure has been built in our starting provinces.
So, Muslims and Pagans it is. We have a couple of routes we can take, either down into Spain and then North Africa, or east into the Pagan Baltic.
A couple of things are going to influence my direction. Firstly the Iberian muslims generally take out Christian Spain after a few decades so I’ll be cheering them on wholeheartedly and don’t particularly want to damage them before they’ve done this. However Iberia is also highly developed and rich – much richer than the pagan lands so I still want to conquer Spain long before the Golden Horde arrive. Now the Golden Horde are going to hit Russia and drive on west into Poland and the Baltic states which is where all the Pagans are. However I need to conquer to Pagans because Scotland is too weak to take out Spain without the added strength they’ll give me. They’ll also generate a lot of prestige in the mean time from all the Duke titles in the region so to begin with we’ll be heading east!
The first step on our road to world domination is to take out Mechlenburg and so expand our realm by 4 provinces. We can each field about the same number of men, but our superior consentration of forces soon defeats the pagan armies though losses are still heavy, and the enemy provinces are sieged, if somewhat slowly, one by one. I really must improve my siege tech, but then every tech field for Scotland seems to be at zero! Perhaps this would have been easier with a more eastern-based power. Anyhow at the end of the war as seem in the picture below the kingdom has a recruitable army of barely 1600 men left due to losses so it’s time to let that recover a bit and rake in some money to develop our four new provinces!
Is world conquest possible with Crusader Kings on Very Hard difficulty under patch 1.02? Was it possible under patch 1.01? – Well that one we’ll probably never know, but these are questions that have been asked yet so far I haven’t seen accomplished. So what factors are going to limit world conquest and perhaps prevent it? There are four main areas in my opinion:
1. Prestige – On very hard difficulty it can cost anywhere from 600 to 1700 or more prestige to claim a single Christian province depending on how rich the province is. Considering how many provinces are Christian that’s a LOT of prestige that needs to be generated during the near 400 year campaign.
2. BadBoy reputation – Conquering Christians, assassinations, declaring war when your troops are in enemy provinces, generating claims - all these generate badboy points. Gain too much BB and the loyalty of our vassals will start to drop followed by inevitable revolt unless drastic actions are taken. A serious problem under patch 1.01, but less so I think with 1.02 when we can lose BB simply by granting titles.
3. Piety – Pieties main function is to reduce badboy. You need it under patch 1.01, but I wonder if it’s going to be strictly necessary under patch 1.02? We will shortly find out!
4. Succession – Well the game is lost if we don’t have an heir, so a good breeding scheme is going to be necessary so we never reach such dire straights.
As you’ll have gathered my own feeling is that world conquest should definitely be much easier under 1.02 due to a couple of changes. The first is the BB reduction for granting titles, which should eliminate any badboy problems via a judicious granting of titles. The main benefit however to running with 1.02 is that the Mongol Horde can now potentially conquer half of Europe for us removing the need to generate prestige to claim it, though it may still be tight claiming the rest. Of course the big risk to letting the Horde conquer much of Europe is that we’ve then got to defeat them afterwards, but lets take one thing at a time.
Now I'll always be playing with the latest patch so it’s possible that some of the assumptions I’ve made so far will change over time as exploits are closed and balance decisions made. This is a risk I’ll have to live with. It is also possible that a new patch will render my old save games unplayable. If such becomes the case I will sadly have to abandon this attempt, or possibly start again if I’ve got the energy.
So, the setting:
I’ll be playing Scotland in the 1066 scenario.
Difficulty is Very Hard.
AI aggression is Furious.
Scotland starts with mappower of about 2700, not a great deal, but enough I think for our purposes. To begin with all of our conquests are going to be against muslims and pagans. Getting even 600 prestige at this point is not an easy short term project, though as the Scotish king I can claim 5 initial duchies which we’ll do as soon as basic infrastructure has been built in our starting provinces.
So, Muslims and Pagans it is. We have a couple of routes we can take, either down into Spain and then North Africa, or east into the Pagan Baltic.
A couple of things are going to influence my direction. Firstly the Iberian muslims generally take out Christian Spain after a few decades so I’ll be cheering them on wholeheartedly and don’t particularly want to damage them before they’ve done this. However Iberia is also highly developed and rich – much richer than the pagan lands so I still want to conquer Spain long before the Golden Horde arrive. Now the Golden Horde are going to hit Russia and drive on west into Poland and the Baltic states which is where all the Pagans are. However I need to conquer to Pagans because Scotland is too weak to take out Spain without the added strength they’ll give me. They’ll also generate a lot of prestige in the mean time from all the Duke titles in the region so to begin with we’ll be heading east!
The first step on our road to world domination is to take out Mechlenburg and so expand our realm by 4 provinces. We can each field about the same number of men, but our superior consentration of forces soon defeats the pagan armies though losses are still heavy, and the enemy provinces are sieged, if somewhat slowly, one by one. I really must improve my siege tech, but then every tech field for Scotland seems to be at zero
! Perhaps this would have been easier with a more eastern-based power. Anyhow at the end of the war as seem in the picture below the kingdom has a recruitable army of barely 1600 men left due to losses so it’s time to let that recover a bit and rake in some money to develop our four new provinces!
