Crusader Kings 2 Suicide
Discussing Real event for ruler suicide on Crusader Kings II PC message board and forum (page 1). Guest post: One hour with Crusader Kings II, by Rachel McFadden; Crusader Kings II: Feudalism: domain thing? How to lose Crusader Kings II: a very short guide; On the importance of swooshing cameras (or, personal meanderings how minor details add up to significant effect) Crusader Kings II: The Old Gods, As Told in Classified Ads.
4th February 2013Connor BeatonPosted on 2:28:22 PM PST byAlthough we’ll be waiting a short while for the release of The Old Gods, the upcoming DLC for Crusader Kings II that will allow players to “officially” control Pagan characters in the game, there’s still a little trick that lets you do so anyway. Essentially, despite the world map giving players the option to select Catholics, or Muslims (with the Sword of Islam DLC), or Doges (with The Republic DLC), they can only hover over Pagan characters’ land impotently, while a tooltip reads: “Can’t play Pagan characters!”Is this tooltip lying? Well, only sort of. You can’t start as a Pagan, but if you start the game as a Catholic or Islamic character, you can later become a Pagan and carry on playing.
It’s not easy to do without modding or cheating, but I decided to give it a shot to find out exactly what it’s like to play as a Pagan without any mods, cheats, or the Pagan expansion. Consider this article a mix of an “After Action Report” (a write-up of what happened in your game) and a tutorial for playing faux-Pagan. I chose to start out as the Catholic King of Scotland, and then began to put my clever plan into action. While there are a few flavours of Paganism in mediaeval Europe from which to choose, I decided to go with Norse, because there are only a couple of tiny Norse states at the start of the game in 1066, and I wanted to try to make a giant one.It took me over a generation to finally coax a Norse person into my court; branding me an infidel, nobody was prepared to accept an invitation. Fortunately, I lucked out and convinced a Norse woman to come over and marry a random male courtier of mine. Next, I had to actually line up a Norse heir. I already had a couple of older kids, but I didn’t have to worry about knocking them off; a faction had already insisted I implement elective monarchy, so I basically only needed to convert one of my kinsmen into a Pagan, and then ensure that he was the most popular choice for king.
I had my Norse courtier educate a roughly fifteen-year old son of mine for the last year of his childhood. No dice; he was too old, and obviously quite set in his Catholicism. I gave her a few more of my kids, infrequently checked their religion, until suddenly – the Norse woman died. Mid-swear, I checked the youngest of her former wards, and there I had it: a sole Scottish Norse pretender to the throne.Little did I realise that curious socio-political events were taking place not only in Scotland, but in France. Somehow, the French king had become Lollard – a Catholic heretic. Most surprisingly, France remained relatively stable despite this; from the look of it, most of the French populace was rapidly converting to the heresy. These events, barely forty years into the game, brought on a fairly ahistorical response: the declaration of war by the Pope, who prompted all good Catholic nations to join him in a crusade for the Kingdom of Aquitaine, which makes up most of the southern end of France (especially with England holding the Duchy of Normandy).
Meanwhile, my young Norse son became married.I figured I may as well throw myself into this war while I was Catholic, so I did. Keep in mind, Scotland is no major player early in the game. The introduction of factions in a previous patch made the country much less stable than it was before, and the House of Dunkeld is usually displaced from the throne relatively early on if you let the AI take the helm. Nevertheless, I managed to rally a few thousand soldiers, put them on fleets, and sent them to Aquitaine. I assaulted the first holding I came across, losing a few hundred men in the process, and picked up that lovely “Crusader” trait for showing up in person, but Venice was rapidly outstripping me in the contribution leaderboard. Therefore, I deployed a cunning tactic: suicide.Sending three thousand men to fight ten thousand is a really bad idea if you’re not King Leonidas. This particular battle, which took place on unfavourable ground, with poor leaders, and a poor distribution of soldier types, was brutal.
Most of the Scots were killed, and my decimated, demoralised army ran away from the victorious Lollard force. And I cheered. One of the most appreciated contributions in these crusades are human lives; sending thousands of my men to die tipped the scales in my favour, putting me far ahead of the other Catholic nations in having contributed the most to the fight. With the warscore looking increasingly bad for France, and increasingly good for the Catholic collective, it seemed fairly certain we’d win without Scotland needing to throw another punch. A year or so passes, and the King of France concedes the war. I divide my new holdings between my Norse grandsons: two one-year old twins. Moments later, I die, and my throne is inherited by my Norse heir.In one swift move, the Kingdoms of Scotland and Aquitaine switch from de jure Catholicism to Norsedom.
If this had happened in real life, I could only imagine the sectarian conflict that would probably have echoed down the years from Aquitaine’s Lollardism, Catholic liberation, then Norse occupation – but, nevertheless, I was pleased. Now began the slightly more daunting task of stabilising these kingdoms. Aquitaine wasn’t so much of a concern, as it was now ruled entirely by Norse vassals, who would surely begin the process of converting the population on their own initiative. Scotland was a bigger problem, but one I tackled by showering my vassals with gifts of gold I’d collected during the crusade, and then demanding their conversion. Only a few of them obliged, but certainly enough that a violent uprising against me could not succeed.Playing as a Norse nation is ultimately not yet that different from playing a Catholic nation. The gameplay will diverge significantly once we finally see The Old Gods released, since that’ll add unique religious gameplay a bit more significant than the Court Chaplain simply becoming a “Chief Diviner”.
Interestingly, Norse nations in the current version of the game can’t declare holy wars, but have an arguably more useful tool: the “Conquest” cassus belli, which will be familiar to players of Muslim characters. With this, you can declare war for any county that borders your own land (sometimes even across water). Given that Scotland is a short strait away from the island of Ireland, I set my sights across the water and conquered it, one county at a time. Although each declaration of war carries a small piety hit, I managed to conquer the entire island in only a few years without much resistance.
My dream of creating a vast Norse nation was almost realised with the combined kingdoms of Scotland, Ireland, and Aquitaine.I’ve reached the conclusion that even in an unpatched, unmodded, cheat-free version of Crusader Kings II, it’s not impossible to create a formidable Norse nation. I’d argue that the current version of the game is even imbalanced in Norse players’ favour, given how easy it was for me to conquer Ireland without opposition; none of my neighbours, not even England or the Holy Roman Empire, dared declare holy war on me during my reign, except on rebelling vassals which were technically outwith my protection.
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I played nothing close to a a whole game (1066 — 1453) as a Pagan character, and it was fairly uninteresting given the lack of expansion through DLC, but there’s something oddly pleasing about seeing “Norse” spread out across the religious map. Hopefully, I’ll have another shot at achieving a huge Norse empire after The Old Gods launches.TOPICS:KEYWORDS. Although we’ll be waiting a short while for the release of The Old Gods, the upcoming DLC for Crusader Kings II that will allow players to “officially” control Pagan characters in the game, there’s still a little trick that lets you do so anyway.Sending three thousand men to fight ten thousand is a really bad idea if you’re not King Leonidas. This particular battle, which took place on unfavourable ground, with poor leaders, and a poor distribution of soldier types, was brutal. Most of the Scots were killed, and my decimated, demoralised army ran away from the victorious Lollard force. And I cheered.
One of the most appreciated contributions in these crusades are human lives; sending thousands of my men to die tipped the scales in my favour, putting me far ahead of the other Catholic nations in having contributed the most to the fight. With the warscore looking increasingly bad for France, and increasingly good for the Catholic collective, it seemed fairly certain we’d win without Scotland needing to throw another punch. A year or so passes, and the King of France concedes the war.
I divide my new holdings between my Norse grandsons: two one-year old twins. Moments later, I die, and my throne is inherited by my Norse heir.In one swift move, the Kingdoms of Scotland and Aquitaine switch from de jure Catholicism to Norsedom. If this had happened in real life, I could only imagine the sectarian conflict that would probably have echoed down the years. I figured out how to keep the game going past 1453 and ended up ruling Ireland, Scotland, Norway, France, Acquataine, most of Spain, and parts of North Africa. I had the game down but used the save game option frequently.
My heirs started dying and I suspected my son in law with a high intrigue level. I tried killinghim with a plot but all of my heirs died. Once they were gone I had to legitimize my bastard son. He took over and then when he had a son the game would not allow him to become heir and the royal line of Eire was over after 22 rulers and a thousand years.
Started a 2.5.2 game in 1204 as the Sultan of Rum to get used to the new council mechanics. My first king dies abruptly at 25, leaving his 5 year old on the throne. The 5 year old gets the 'Wolf's Blood' event chain, which I've never seen before.
A lot of martial upgrades, and OOOOOH +2 Health! I put down a few council-lead revolts upon my ascension to adulthood, howl at the moon a little, and expand my borders.And then, in what may be a regular turn of events for this dynasty, tragedy strikes at age 25. I am knocked senseless in battle and rendered incapable. Cue 44 years of council-lead tyrrany until he dies at age 69.
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I had a new regent almost once a month. Each one, in their turn, redistributed titles, stole from the treasury, increased council power, and refused to let me imprison decadent relatives (which led to some awfully scary revolt stacks!).Screw you, +2 Health, I thought you were my friend. Health is a ridiculously unreliable stat.
Very frustrating.I've started up a fresh game, and have returned to CK2+ - time to see if they've recaptured the magic. I like having more provinces without HIP's stupid naming issues, and the rest of the feature list is promising. More plots and ambitions!
Trade routes!What I'm REALLY liking is the 'revert to pagan' option. It completely replaces all the Christian and Muslim flavors with a more or less appropriate pagan predecessor. I've started up in Flanders, which is the right on the Celtic/Germanic frontier, with Nordic friends across the seas. And since I'm Celtic, I'm required to use Tanistry as my succession law. Please don't throw me in the Tanistry patch!
Anything but that!The problem with starting as a minor character (such as a Duke in 769) is finding viable spouses. I'm glad I rolled my own character with a couple of kids - now I just have to stay alive till they grow up. I had a third son (who didn't make it past age 3) with my first wife, Leelo, but she. I wasn't involved, for once.
Her replacement is a bit on the old side, but she came with some free prestige, unlike EVERY OTHER AVAILABLE WOMAN IN EUROPE.The political scene is. Not what I expected. Not sure how much of that is from CK2+ changes, and how much is from the pagan thing. We start with the Frankish territory divided into Neustria (my liege) and Austrasia (including Burgundy); Karloman kicked the bucket real quick, so right now Karl has Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy. However, there was a successful independence revolt (during which Karl inexplicably assigned the high priest of Trier as my vassal), so the kingdom is a giant patchwork of pathos. Despite this, Karl decided to push his claim on fully unified and stable Lombardy. At least I'm not on a border this time.
Downloaded the demo. Attempted to make it through the tutorial. This thing feels borderline impenetrable. It's explaining all these things I can do and I'm just sitting here with a line of drool flowing from my mouth with my eyes glazed over. I think I need to watch some videos or something.The usual advice to new players is to just play as an Irish count in 1066.
It's called 'Tutorial Island,' and for a reason; the special mechanics that can apply in other starts don't affect Catholic Irish counts, you're basically at one side of the world with no nearby players that are much more powerful than you (yes, there's Scotland and England, but in 1066 they'll tend to fight each other or their own vassals, not you), and you have obvious goals (forming Ireland, for example). I suspect this would work better than watching videos, since a lot of the interface isn't really understandable until you've actually started playing the game a bit, and because it would probably take a long time to watch enough videos to understand everything. Downloaded the demo.
Attempted to make it through the tutorial. This thing feels borderline impenetrable. It's explaining all these things I can do and I'm just sitting here with a line of drool flowing from my mouth with my eyes glazed over. I think I need to watch some videos or something.The usual advice to new players is to just play as an Irish count in 1066. It's called 'Tutorial Island,' and for a reason; the special mechanics that can apply in other starts don't affect Catholic Irish counts, you're basically at one side of the world with no nearby players that are much more powerful than you (yes, there's Scotland and England, but in 1066 they'll tend to fight each other or their own vassals, not you), and you have obvious goals (forming Ireland, for example). I suspect this would work better than watching videos, since a lot of the interface isn't really understandable until you've actually started playing the game a bit, and because it would probably take a long time to watch enough videos to understand everything.Although if you do take to watching some videos, make sure they're fairly recent.
The way these games change with expansions can drastically change the interface and tactics. One big CK2 example: you used to be able to pay a fee to attempt to have someone assassinated, regardless of potential backers. Now you have to use plots - fairly safe, but can be harmful to your reputation if discovered - or be in a position to imprison them - which is likely to be extremely detrimental to your reputation, due to tyranny penalties after which you can execute them and incur even more penalties, usually. A few things to do starting off:1: get your council to work!upper left corner, next to your portrait, is the Council button.
You can also access this screen by pressing F3, or by clicking on the council section of the outliner box on the right side of the screen. Anyway, quickly review who your councilors are. The game usually picks the best choice by default when starting, but double check - there will sometimes be a much more skilled option hiding in your court. Each role corresponds to a primary stat. You'll sometimes want to have a less skilled but important vassal as a councilor to make them happy, but starting off this doesn't matter.
Now, about getting them to work - if you don't assign them tasks, they won't be doing anything for you.Chancellor: to start, Improve Diplomatic Relations with your liege, your least happy vassal, or your most threatening neighbor.Marshall: Train Troops in your capital county. This holds for 90% of the game.Steward: Collect Taxes in your capital.Spy Master: Study Technology. Anywhere that it lets you.Chaplain: Improve Religious Relations with your least happy bishop (check the Religion tab in the upper left to see who this is). If you only have one bishop this obviously won't work.2: Check yourself, before you unpause yourself.click on your portrait. Are you married? Do you have an ambition?
Do you have a Rulership Focus? Do you have kids? If you're not married and don't have an ambition, set your ambition to Get Married. Now click the rings icon, and pick a wife! You want someone high ranking, with her own land, strong potential political ties, no other kids, great stats, and not too old. Since Mathilda of Tuscany will never (ever) marry you, check out the options. Good luck, and don't marry an ugly chick.Now, about that rulership focus - each of the eight focuses will have different tradeoffs, and will prompt different events.
Personally, I go with whatever gives me the most Stewardship, but they all have their uses. You can change this every few years.Do you have any unlanded sons (and a succession law that cares about this)? Sucks to be you! You can either give them land, or marry them off to a landholder that's not your vassal. I'm 3 hours into the learning game, and I'm totally confused.The tutorial had me press a claim against a distant island, which was successful. I hired 20 mercenary ships so I could invade, but could not load my troops because I did not have enough ships. Is there a way to load up as much of the army as possible?Eventually I had all of the land in the kingdom of Leon and Castille.
Is there a way to combine these into one Kingdom?An invader was sieging one of my territories (county?). I sent in my army, but nothing happened. The invader continued the siege.
The defenders were not reinforced, and the army I brought in did not attack the seige army. How to you help out a territory under siege?I think I gave away too many landed titles while trying to make my vessels happy.
My demense is 2/6.Speaking of unhappy vessels, I've been raising levies from the unhappy people. I figured I might as well use up their troops first. I don't know if that's a good strategy, but it felt good.I'm off to try a new game.
When I first saw the Dev Diaries for the Reaper's Due, I thought they were parody. Wow, finally an expansion focused on the Black Plague and leeches! But little did I know they were deadly serious. I just grabbed it and intend to futz around soon. I really like the extensive options to tune parts of the game, like turning off the AI use of the Seduction focus or allowing Mongol or Mesoamerican invasions to come at more random times. You can even turn off the EU4-style shattered retreats.Anyhow, we'll see what sort of terrifying nonsense is to come. An invader was sieging one of my territories (county?).
I sent in my army, but nothing happened. The invader continued the siege. The defenders were not reinforced, and the army I brought in did not attack the seige army. How to you help out a territory under siege?Sounds like one of your vassals started a war, maybe with an enemy, maybe with another one of your vassals. Rules for vassal-level wars are confusing at first.
Unless you were called to war and have the little circle with swords in the bottom right of the screen, you cannot directly assist. You could give the defending vassal a generous donation to buy mercenaries, though. It's been a while since I last played CKII, but something caught my eye on another forum that I thought you all would be interested in checking out - Someone made a massive randomized map generator and historical generator for ck2:Per the description on Reddit:OVERVIEWBasically the tool will generate, from scratch, a completely new history of humanity from its first exodus from Africa as a new mod to be playable in CK2 (and now optionally an entirely random map!). A random culture and pagan religion is formed (as in completely random, using all the parameters available for religions and cultures in CK2, as well as forming a unique language used to name characters, provinces, kingdoms, gods, religions. These cultures will then spread throughout Europe, mutating and changing as they spread, words and language, religions, ethnicity, cultural ideals, laws, looting, river sailing, incest, religious heads, holy sites, wives, concubines and everything, all morphing, mutating and branching off as humans spread through time and land, and form a completely unique world with absolutely none of the vanilla cultures, religions, provinces, de-jure duchies or anything found in the base game.Haven't played around with it yet, but it sounds like fun: like Dwarf Fortress spawned with CK2. Mine turn out reasonably ok.
A few duds, but most of the time I get a positive outcome.Meanwhile, I've found myself in that peculiar spot where I say 'no, I don't want to inherit a kingdom, it's time to reload so I can stay a Count.' Ugh.My previous character was married to the King of Annonia. Just before she died, I changed my vote for successor from one cousin to another. And while things reshuffled, my daughter briefly became the heir on the day I died. Which was great, till she inherited the unstable shithole next door, taking my holdings with her.
Rather powerful realm I was part of before is apt to want them back. Man, I never realized how cruel I could be until I became a satanist.Rival me? Abuct you and your whole family and sacrifice to Satan.Want to be on the council? Sacrifice.Deny my advances? Sacrifice.I don't know if I'm missing something, but I can't find a downside to the abduct/sacrifice option. It almost always works and so far nobody has figured out that its me.And yes, I got sucked back in. Something like close to 20 hours the past couple days.It raises your suspicion level.
If you get outed, the confirmed Satanist reputation hit is pretty severe, and I believe it's supposed to give you a pretty good chance of getting excommunicated if you're Catholic. Also, not directly related to the abduct options - but your fellow Satanists can throw some pretty good monkey wrenches into your plans; they're not generally a very nice bunch.