The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Being the Follies and Exploits of Duke Bernard II The Compassionate [CK3]
MrMonroe
passed outon the floor nowRegistered User regular
passed outon the floor nowRegistered User regular
Crusader Kings Three is a game about Duke Bernard II of Barcelona and his wife, Duchess Ermengarda:
Duke Bernard is temperate, shy, and compassionate. I suspect that last one will cost him dearly before his story his through. I've created this game with all normal rules except that the most common sexual orientation is now bisexuality as god in heaven intended.
Quick plug for the game before I continue the story:
CK2 was widely acknowledged to have a basically vertical learning curve that prevented a lot of folks from enjoying it, but Paradox has actually made some serious improvements to the way things work and to the UX to make things easier and more obvious. The map itself is even better now, with several different modes that help you understand the many complex interrelationships between the great houses of the world. I'm a particular fan of the "paper map" that you get when you scroll all the way out. They've also put in a lot of "hey consider this" notifications that help guide new players to engage with the various systems if they haven't yet. There's also lots of little UX improvement that just help you understand the implications of your actions.
Like let's say you get it in your head to conquer one of these nice counties in Bordeaux. Would probably be helpful to know who that guy reports to to see who's gonna get angry about your war, right? Click on any character and you get their chain of command displayed on the map:
Ah yes, the king of West Francia. Possibly a bad idea.
Confused about a game concept? Yo dogg, I heard you like tooltips:
Hover over basically anything in the game and it pops up a tooltip with an explanation, which is itself full of Highlighted Text that opens another tooltip.
The most common thing I hear is "ok what do I do now, I don't get it". Be not afraid! Remember this maxim: CK is a game about interpersonal relationships. Go look up people who have things you want and look at their relationships with each other. Right click on people to take actions to change your relationship with them. Experiment. The best way to take advantage of someone might be through a relative or courtier of theirs. The big thing to understand about war if you're a Feudal power is that you must have a reason to declare war, but you can craft such a reason by marriage or diplomacy or just straight up fraud.
Ok back to the CK3 official storyline:
Chapter One: 867AD: Putting the Realm to Rights
I have a few housekeeping items to take care of right off the bat: I choose Chivalry as my lifestyle focus as I've got a good martial score and am the official Marshall of the court of my liege King Charles II, so it seems wise to play to my strengths and also pick up a personal defense buff if I'm to be off fighting his wars. He's also my cousin but I'm not in the same "house" as him so I'll need to find an inventive way of effecting a merger at some point. I also note that Chivalry gives you an attractiveness bonus, (I guess swordsmanship lessons are probably pretty good HIIT) which I'll want to counteract my wife's chaste nature if I want to make more babies.
A helpful notice informs me that I'm short on Knights, individuals with a high personal combat score that fight in your armies and I think generate some story moments during combat, so I invite a few of the higher scoring guests in my court to become permanent courtiers and fill out the ranks.
My son Guillaume is without a tutor! He's only two but frankly I'm sick of the lad already and I'm sure you would be too:
More like son and hair, am I right? I send him to study with the smartest person in my court: a lowborn woman whose primary skillset is lying and being miserly with money, not to mention she's a stubborn and lustful visigoth. I'm sure all of this is fine.jpg
Conveniently, I've chosen a character with a number of strong claims on several other titles, and with my approximately... six hundred armed fighting men hmm gonna have to do something about that, I have the option of doing any of the following:
Stay tuned for Chapter Two: IBIZA: Best Suzerains Tripping (a spiritual prequel to the 2018 Netflix comedy)
(I got all of this by hitting "random character" a few times until I found someone interesting and then just dealing with all the notifications. You too can (badly) rule a medieval age realm!)
Duke Bernard is temperate, shy, and compassionate. I suspect that last one will cost him dearly before his story his through. I've created this game with all normal rules except that the most common sexual orientation is now bisexuality as god in heaven intended.
Quick plug for the game before I continue the story:
CK2 was widely acknowledged to have a basically vertical learning curve that prevented a lot of folks from enjoying it, but Paradox has actually made some serious improvements to the way things work and to the UX to make things easier and more obvious. The map itself is even better now, with several different modes that help you understand the many complex interrelationships between the great houses of the world. I'm a particular fan of the "paper map" that you get when you scroll all the way out. They've also put in a lot of "hey consider this" notifications that help guide new players to engage with the various systems if they haven't yet. There's also lots of little UX improvement that just help you understand the implications of your actions.
Like let's say you get it in your head to conquer one of these nice counties in Bordeaux. Would probably be helpful to know who that guy reports to to see who's gonna get angry about your war, right? Click on any character and you get their chain of command displayed on the map:
Ah yes, the king of West Francia. Possibly a bad idea.
Confused about a game concept? Yo dogg, I heard you like tooltips:
Hover over basically anything in the game and it pops up a tooltip with an explanation, which is itself full of Highlighted Text that opens another tooltip.
The most common thing I hear is "ok what do I do now, I don't get it". Be not afraid! Remember this maxim: CK is a game about interpersonal relationships. Go look up people who have things you want and look at their relationships with each other. Right click on people to take actions to change your relationship with them. Experiment. The best way to take advantage of someone might be through a relative or courtier of theirs. The big thing to understand about war if you're a Feudal power is that you must have a reason to declare war, but you can craft such a reason by marriage or diplomacy or just straight up fraud.
Ok back to the CK3 official storyline:
Chapter One: 867AD: Putting the Realm to Rights
I have a few housekeeping items to take care of right off the bat: I choose Chivalry as my lifestyle focus as I've got a good martial score and am the official Marshall of the court of my liege King Charles II, so it seems wise to play to my strengths and also pick up a personal defense buff if I'm to be off fighting his wars. He's also my cousin but I'm not in the same "house" as him so I'll need to find an inventive way of effecting a merger at some point. I also note that Chivalry gives you an attractiveness bonus, (I guess swordsmanship lessons are probably pretty good HIIT) which I'll want to counteract my wife's chaste nature if I want to make more babies.
A helpful notice informs me that I'm short on Knights, individuals with a high personal combat score that fight in your armies and I think generate some story moments during combat, so I invite a few of the higher scoring guests in my court to become permanent courtiers and fill out the ranks.
My son Guillaume is without a tutor! He's only two but frankly I'm sick of the lad already and I'm sure you would be too:
More like son and hair, am I right? I send him to study with the smartest person in my court: a lowborn woman whose primary skillset is lying and being miserly with money, not to mention she's a stubborn and lustful visigoth. I'm sure all of this is fine.jpg
Conveniently, I've chosen a character with a number of strong claims on several other titles, and with my approximately... six hundred armed fighting men hmm gonna have to do something about that, I have the option of doing any of the following:
- Declaring holy war on the Umayyad Sultanate, (like the entire Iberian peninsula at this point) a neighboring giant with ten times the fighting strength whom I would very much prefer not to poke at the moment
- Pressing my personal claims on a geographically distant rival within West Francia whose relationship with the king is quite a bit better than mine at this point
- Pressing my personal claims on a neighboring rival within West Francia who has ~2x my fighting forces and many more allies than I
- Pressing my personal claims on Count Johan of Mallorca, a rather isolated fellow who controls Mallorca and Ibiza and who has no allies to speak of and only a modest fighting force, about half the size of my own. Fascinating.
Stay tuned for Chapter Two: IBIZA: Best Suzerains Tripping (a spiritual prequel to the 2018 Netflix comedy)
(I got all of this by hitting "random character" a few times until I found someone interesting and then just dealing with all the notifications. You too can (badly) rule a medieval age realm!)
MrMonroe on
+16
Posts
Turns out I am here for gameified international gossip and drama
3DS Friend Code: 0216-0898-6512
Switch Friend Code: SW-7437-1538-7786
whoops
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
There's a bunch of exceptionally cool game rule options, but in order to earn achievements you must be on ironman mode and you can't select many of the interesting alternatives. The ones I care most about are the gender/sexuality ones:
I'm kind of two minds about this. On the one hand, I think people who want to play with different environments should be able to go after achievements and it doesn't matter that they did it on an "easier" setting to me one iota.
On t'other, I notice that they're treating legally institutionalized gender equality as a gameplay buff, like assuming that a society with gender equality will naturally perform better than a society without it, while also seemingly asserting that whether most rulers are men vs women and what their sexual orientation is is basically irrelevant. I think this is kind of great in the context of a game series that has a pretty significant alt-right following which they've taken flak for not handling before.
I'm definitely going to do some other playthroughs with folks who rule kingdoms outside Europe and see if they're still nerfed all to hell like they were in CK2.
I did the tutorial completely blind without ever touching a CK game before, and I had a lot of fun! it’s a lot to take in but I figured out the basics and had conquered about half of Ireland before the king of Scotland killed all my friends, gave me a heart attack and I ended up with my eight year old idiot granddaughter in charge, so I think that’s the end of that bloodline
the main thing I’m struggling with is how to get what I want without just going to war with everyone and fabricating claims to back up wanting to go to war with everyone
how do I do diplomacy, what’s the best way to marry people off, etc etc
I do also like that if you get powerful enough you can shift your cultural norms in the framework of the game apart from just altering the starting conditions.
It does help to pick a goal. In my old CK2 run it was to form the Brittanic Empire, once I'd done that I kind of trailed off.
You might be able to ask the pope to excommunicate him for that one, if you ask real nicely
Managed to spread grab a large portion of territory. Working hard at making sure the bloodline doesn't die out anytime soon. But probably need some more boys making boys in this region for that to really stick.
Piety and prestige being essentially currencies in this iteration is a nice change, I like it as a limiter on expansion
Game is much bigger on partition succession than CK2 - good overall I would say
Generally things seem to be built around having known durations instead of having mysterious hidden mean time to procs, which I'd also say is a positive
There's some UI things that I think need to be smoothed over and the dynamic music cues 100% need better transitions, though
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Sounds like treason to me.
now i'm on husband #3, and I've made him both my lover and my soulmate, but we still haven't had any kids
am i doing something wrong? I have one daughter from volcel king but i'd really like to have a backup heir or two
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Sometimes it can be due to bad traits, it may be influenced by how much they like you, too
My son found out and decided he hated me.
Then his wife turned out to be pregnant and he hated me more.
Then she died in child birth.
Eventually he tried to poison me but I lived, pumped out 8 other kids then died during a crusade.
This game rules.
I can understand no one else knowing, or not knowing the status of your wife, but you'd think if it were you you'd have some notion of it, like a "haven't had my monthly in like a year..." notification.
Generally speaking can't have levies raised when you declare war. This doesn't (or at least didn't in ck2) apply to event troops
My starting character did really well expanding and securing some territory in his first decade but has sort of hit a wall, because it's tough to declare holy wars when your Piety is -200 and dropping.
This is the kind of Yelp review that really helps when you're picking out a new church.
What can happen that way is raiding, where they drop in with an army specifically to rob you then leave. But also if you have another town or territory you can setup a new rally point to pull together your own forces. They just can’t spring out of a town already being raided.
I'm not really clear on what the point of that is? Like it seems weird that on some level the game "knows" that the Italian peninsula is destined to be organized into the kingdoms of romagna and sicily
http://www.audioentropy.com/
The start of the map is going to blob into duchies then kingdoms really fast. It'll stabilize there because of hereditary rules.
Sweden ends up everywhere because they are the biggest start with coastal conquest.
The Khazars are a particular long term threat since they start with an empire title which means they don't split on succession. In my current game they are bigger than the ERE and the Karling Kingdoms.
Overall it's been fun to play Dauri in Africa (tribal with equal rights, polygamy gets out of control, my dynasty is nearing 400 people) but the challenge was definitely at the start, now that I am huge all I fear is a quick chain of successions, and perhaps the instability when we become feudal.
Being able to plop stacks out of a rally point makes me so dangerous.
Also Witchcraft is spreading, but I'm not sure what it does.....
you can also possibly use it as a Hook to coerce him into doing things
I find that Ibiza cannot be directly assaulted just yet after I take Mallorca, as I've just declared a peace with the owner. (Or at least not at a large piety cost for offending god for doing a war too frequently I guess) However, I realize there are actually three counties in the duchy of Mallorca and I only need two to create the duchy title for myself, which might allow me to bring the Ibizan count into my fold... so to war with Count Petro of Minorca!
As I sail towards glory and destiny, I somehow receive a letter I guess from my son:
Quite the precocious lad but I'm sure I pay someone to handle this for me.
Count Petro really should have taken the time to make more friends. Our army crushes his pithy resistance in less than a week, and the siege of their ill-equipped castle a mere twelve.
I attempt to ransom off the prisoners I gained in the conflict but end up just setting them free with "hooks" on them, tokens of "you owe me one" that can be cashed in in the future for help with a scheme or to force agreement with a proposal. I let one of them go bc he seems useless, maybe he'll show up in an enemy court at some point and will become useful. I burn the other hook and most of the rest of my war money to bring this 19 diplomacy skill lady on staff to make her my chancellor. I hope to fix my fucked up inefficient council where everyone is in jobs not suited to their skills but would be if I could just fire my bishop and rotate everyone else over one, but I find that Catholocism has burned me twice: I can't appoint women to the position of Chancellor, and appointments to Bishop are lifetime appointments.
Well, one of those problems I can solve.
(Internally, I'm vowing that one of my great granddaughters will be pope someday)
My wife joined the scheme completely without prompting. I'm turned on enough by this that I begin a concerted effort to "seduce" her. (I thought being married would be enough for the kids thing but hey couldn't hurt right?)
Unfortunately ordering the murder of a Bishop and longtime friend conflicted with my "compassionate" nature, causing me to take 60 stress immediately*, and throughout all of this I'm over my limit of counties in my direct control**, which is hurting my income in all of them and negatively affecting the opinion of my vassals. It'll get worse in one year when the limited-time waiver for Minorca runs out and I go up to 7/5. I need to find some way to make up another hundred gold so I can create the Duchy of Mallorca and give it to my son, as none of my current vassals are in my dynasty and therefore cannot be trusted with additional lands, especially not one that will prevent me from creating the Duchy title. Hmmm... how to make gold fast in a world of rich assholes all scheming against one another while pretending to be pious?
I send my spymaster to the court of my liege and king, King Charles II The Bald, whose many relatives, vassals, and other various hangers-on all congregate at court with little better to do than eat drink and speak uncarefully on matters of state and rumor.
Tune in next time for Chapter Three: What is Man But a Miserable Pile of Secrets?
* I'm given to understand that stress can cause insanity or other negative effects if it's too high for too long, but I don't see anywhere that it's tracked and I don't know how fast I'm losing it.
Edit: ah well, there it is:
I guess I'm confused why none of the options for solving this problem are "get my dick wet"
** I notice they dropped the use of the term "demesne", which is good because there was no reason to make people google every god damn thing in the UI
My first ruler died with like 4k saved up and that felt like a real waste
http://www.audioentropy.com/
I just learned that if you ever want to sneak attack an ally it'll cost you 500 prestige, give or take some modifiers. So that's an option. The hit you take to your reputation is remarkably short.