Ck2 You Are Threatening
I’ve written in this space before about how impressed I’ve been with the latest strategy game from Paradox Interactive, Crusader Kings II, and its first expansion, Sword of Islam. Those posts led to a discussion on Facebook asking me to expand on them a bit, by taking them down to a more concrete level: strategies for how to play them and win. So, here’s a post that will do just that.
By vassalizing the pope you could ask him to declare crusade all 30 years. Another exploit is to ask your vassalized pope a lot of ducal revendication inside a kingdom and declare war to all on them; since you can only win 50% threat per war for 1 duchy or like i did, 17 duchies at same times. From Count to King in Crusader Kings 2 - Part 2. In this series I’m attempting to take the house of Northumbria, which rules in Northampton, England, from small counts to the kings of England. I have no idea if it’s going to work, or whether the house of Waltheof of Northampton will sink into obscurity. It’ll be fun to find out, though. Crusader Kings 3 can be a bit too real. It's a game where you can forge empires and build your own religion, but all your plans can be unravelled because you got too stressed, too sad and then died. Assuming it'll work like previous Paradox games there are technically hundreds of start dates since you can start at any year within the range of the game, with CK2 you could only select specific years after 1066, but maybe they are adding the years between 876 and 1066.
I should preface this with a couple of notes. First, the tips below all assume you’re playing a Christian king; Sword of Islam allows you to play as a Muslim, and introduces some new mechanics for Muslim characters, but that’s a subject for another post. Next, I’m hardly one of the world’s foremost experts on CK2. There’s lots of people who have delved far more deeply into the game’s mechanics than I ever have, and you can find them all in one place: the indispensable Paradox forums. The community that posts there is thoughtful, respectful, and really, really smart. If you’re interested in talking CK2, you should definitely create an account and join the discussion there. There’s also a Wiki where players are gathering information to make a comprehensive reference on how CK2 works. Finally, if you want more of a tutorial walkthrough than a collection of general tips, there’s an excellent thread at Something Awful that walks you through the game in great detail.
That being said, on to the tips…
Start small. New players have a natural tendency to want to start the game playing one of the larger empires — France, say, or Byzantium. The assumption they’re making is that it’s easier to play a big, powerful kingdom than it is to play a small, weak one. But in CK2, the opposite is true. CK2 is a game about relationships, and when you’re running a huge empire, you have a lot of relationships to manage all at once, which can be overwhelming. Choosing a smaller nation lets you learn the ropes by dealing with a much smaller cast of characters.
There’s lots of opinions about which kingdom is the best for new players to start with, but the consensus in the forums is that (if you’re starting the game at its earliest start date, 1066) any of the provinces of Ireland are ideal “starter kingdoms.”
Ck2 Lower Threat Console Commands
There are several reasons for this. Most of them only have a couple of provinces you need to manage, which reduces the number of variables you have to juggle to the absolute minimum. In 1066, Ireland is divided pretty equally among several small kingdoms, so you don’t have a big, powerful neighbor threatening you right away; all your neighbors are just as weak as you are. There are powerful nations in the region, like the Normans; but they’re all separated from you by ocean, which makes it harder for them to invade you and thus defers the day when you’ll have to deal with them. And all the Irish provinces have a natural goal — unification of the island into a single Kingdom of Ireland — that makes for an ideal “tutorial quest”; once you’ve learned the game enough to bring the rest of Ireland under your control, you’ll have learned all the essential skills you need to run a kingdom of any size.
Think like a Godfather, not like a President. If you’ve played strategy games before, or really if you grew up anytime after the year 1648, it’s natural to think of your kingdom in terms of a nation — a cohesive political entity that has a unique identity transcending whomever happens to be ruling it at the moment.
To be successful in CK2, you need to rid yourself of that notion, because it didn’t exist in the medieval world. Back then, the concept of the state was inextricably mixed up with the concept of the ruler; the state, and everything in it, were the personal property of the king and his family. Or at least they were as long as the king could keep another king from coming along and taking it from him. It wasn’t a nation as we understand the word today; it was the king’s “turf.”
Take the example of the Irish provinces, mentioned above. Let’s say you choose to play as the duchy of Connacht. That might sound like you’re choosing a nation to play as. But really, you’re choosing a family — specifically the Ua Conchobair, the family from which sprang the historic Kings of Connacht during that period.
The reason this is important to understand is that your job in CK2, if you go down this road, is not to work for the greater glory of Connacht. Let me say that again: as Duke of Connacht, your job is not to protect and expand the power of Connacht. Your job is to protect and expand the power of the Ua Conchobair family. Connacht is merely the raw material you use to make that happen.
This means like the road to success isn’t to think of yourself as “leader of Connacht.” It’s to think of yourself as the Godfather of the Ua Conchobair family, in the same way that Michael Corleone was the Godfather of the Corleone family in the Godfather movies.
Adobe video editor. This particular example, in fact, is instructive. If you think back to the first Godfather movie, you’ll remember that it’s established that the “turf” of the Corleone family is in New York City, and has been ever since the original Godfather, Vito Corleone, carved it out after arriving from Sicily at the beginning of the 20th century. At the end, though, we see Michael pick up the entire Corleone empire and move it to Nevada, because he judges (correctly!) that the future of organized crime is going to be found there. Lieutenants who want to stay in New York for sentimental reasons are ruthlessly cut loose from the family. Crime figures in Nevada who stand between Corleone and the “turf” he wants there are gunned down.
This is how you have to think to be successful in CK2. Playing as Connacht, for instance, it’s possible to win glory for your family by taking on your immediate neighbors, wresting their kingdoms from them, and taking them as your own. But it’s equally possible to win glory for your family by marrying your children strategically into the dynasties of a distant, powerful kingdom, yielding children of your own blood who grow to rule it, or by taking the cross and carving out a Crusader kingdom in the Middle East, planting crowns of sandy kingdoms upon the heads of your children. It’s quite possible for the family Ua Conchobair to grow to great power, in other words, without Connacht growing any further on the island of Ireland. It’s even possible for the family to prosper without any holdings on the Irish isle at all.
Play dynastically. This leads to a related point, which is that if playing as a family rather than a nation is the way to go, ensuring the continuance of your family line is of the utmost importance.
What this means, at the most basic level, is heirs; specifically, male heirs. You must have male heirs for the family to continue.There are lots of ways to lose a game of CK2,but the easiest is to get so wrapped up in other things that your character never gets around to fathering any male children. Whoops! Game over.
Image from Something Awful’s CK2 tutorial thread (click image to read)
And it’s not enough to just produce male heirs. You have to produce decent male heirs — “throne-worthy” male heirs, in the terminology of the time. Here is where understanding of character statistics and traits comes in. Statistics are the numeric scores that are attached to a character — things like “Diplomacy,” “Intrigue,” “Martial,” etc. Traits are the character attributes displayed as icons — things like “Brave,” or “Drunkard,” or “Hunchback.” Together these define a character.
How they affect what the character himself does is pretty obvious; a character with a high Martial score and the “Brave” trait will do well on the battlefield, for example. What’s less obvious is that a character’s statistics and traits also affect how other characters perceive and react to that character. So if your male heir has that “Brave” trait mentioned above, other “Brave” characters will admire his courage, raising their opinion of him; but characters with the “Craven” trait, importantly, will envy his courage, lowering their opinion of him.
This means that whether or not your heir is accepted by the rest of your court will depend in part on his raw stats, and in part on who exactly the other people in the court are. Some traits are seen as more “kingly” than others — an heir who is Charitable will generally have an easier time picking up his father’s crown than one who is Greedy. (In CK2’s taxonomy of traits, these are known as virtues — trait icons with a green background and a number on them. The opposite of virtues are sins — numbered trait icons with a red background.) But a Charitable heir in a court full of Greedy vassals and advisors may find that his virtue alone is not enough to ensure his succession.
The less “throne-worthy” your heir is judged by your other vassals (including his siblings!) to be, the more likely it is that upon your character’s death they will launch bids to wrest the crown from your heir’s hands into their own. These bids can lead to long, destructive civil wars that break up a mighty empire, so it’s critical that you do everything you can to ensure that when your character dies, a strong, capable heir is waiting for you to play as next.
Breeding is important. There’s three ways you can affect the likelihood of producing a throne-worthy heir.
The first: marry the right person.Parents can pass some of their traits on to their children, so if you marry your character to a paranoid, lunatic hunchback, you should not be surprised when your kids turn out to be less than ideal. Similarly, a child who has the “Inbred” trait has huge negative modifiers applied to their stats, so you don’t want to marry within your own family if you can avoid it.
The second: have lots of kids. Having too many kids can pose a problem, since kids (especially male kids) tend to expect Dad to give them a province to run when they reach adulthood at age 16, so having more kids than provinces can cause disputes within the family. But those problems are usually easier to deal with than the ones that come from not having a decent male heir.
The third: educate your kids well. When a child is born in CK2, his or her initial stats and traits come from the stats and traits of its parents. But as he/she grows up, his/her “personality” is shaped by the people you surround them with. This gets more pronounced at age 6, which is the age when a child can start their education. “Education” in the world of CK2 doesn’t mean sending them to school, though — it means assigning them a guardian, another character from your court, to whom they become a sort of apprentice. The traits of a child’s guardian can be picked up by the child, so for your oldest kids, anyway, it’s worth taking a little time to find someone with good, throne-worthy traits to educate them; there’s no guarantees the kid will learn from their example, but it can’t hurt to try. (Note that you can choose to make your own character your child’s guardian if you wish; this gives you the chance to mold the child’s character directly by choosing how to react to events in the child’s life, but if your character has negative traits, it’s possible you can pass them on to the child as well.)
Note that guardians don’t just have the opportunity to pass along their traits to the children they educate; they also have the opportunity to pass along their culture as well. That means that if you’re an Irish king, and you give your oldest son to a character from France to educate, there’s an outside chance that when the kid’s education ends he’ll come away acting a lot more like a Frenchman than an Irishman. This kind of cultural difference is a huge turn-off for vassals — no self-respecting Irishman in 1100 would want to live under a Frenchified king! — which can make passing the crown to them quite difficult, as vassals revolt left and right to install a “true Irish king” instead of your weird son. Similarly, a guardian can pass along their religion as well, and heretics have a hard time rising to the throne of a Christian kingdom; so if there’s a guardian who looks great except for the minor problem that they belong to an heretical church, think hard before handing your kid over to them.
Know the law. The last piece of keeping your dynasty alive is making sure that the laws of your kingdom make it easy to do so. Different kingdoms in CK2 have different laws governing which children can succeed a king. You can change these laws to better suit you, but you can only do so once in each character’s lifetime, and only after that character has held the throne for at least ten years; and changing it can have major negative impacts among those characters who are affected negatively by the change (like children who used to be in the line of succession, but now are not). So it’s worth thinking carefully about which approach you want to take to succession over the long term.
The relevant laws fall into two basic categories: gender laws and succession laws. Gender laws determine how (if at all) women fit into the line of succession; succession laws determine how the line of succession is organized. Not all cultures have access to all the available gender and succession laws; while it is possible to have a gender law that makes women equal to men as candidates for succession, this option is only available to a small number of cultures.
Gender laws break down as follows:
- Agnatic: Only men can succeed to the throne.
- Agnatic-Cognatic: Women can succeed to the throne, but only if no eligible male heirs are available.
- Absolute Cognatic: Women and men have equal eligibility for succession.
Succession laws break down like this:
- Seniority: The oldest member of your dynasty inherits all your holdings. (Note that this doesn’t mean your oldest child inherits; it means that the oldest dynasty member inherits, who might be your character’s younger brother, or second cousin, or even his father.)
- Gavelkind: Your holdings are divided equally among all eligible heirs.
- Primogeniture: Your oldest eligible child inherits all your holdings. If that child has died, their oldest eligible child inherits, and so on down their branch of the family tree. If they died without having any children, the process repeats with your second-oldest eligible child’s branch of the family, then the third, etc.
- Elective: You nominate a successor, who can be anyone in your court (not just your children), for each of your titles. Others can put themselves forward as candidates for succession to one or all of your titles as well. Your vassals vote on which candidate to give each title to when your character dies.
You will note that, from the player’s perspective, none of these laws are perfect; all of them carry a degree of risk to the continuation of your family line. To a lot of new players, Gavelkind succession seems like the fairest choice — why not give each of the children a slice of the pie? But when you try it you quickly discover the answer to that question: because it takes your vast kingdom and turns it into several smaller kingdoms, each with a child on the throne scheming to take over all the others. Elective seems fair to our modern, democratic sensibilities, until you realize that each of your titles gets voted on separately by the vassals who belong to that title, so if your heir is popular everywhere but one corner of your empire, it’s entirely possible for that corner to give the title to a Favorite Son of their own, peeling it off from your kingdom. And so forth.
Because of this, there’s no one “best” succession law that you should always go with; the choice depends on your play style and the makeup of your court. Personally, I tend to go with Elective — it gives you the flexibility to put a more-capable younger son up for your throne if your oldest is a drooling idiot or a heretic, and it’s usually possible to bribe or strongarm difficult vassals into voting the way you want them to. But your choice may be different.
And that’s where I’ll wrap this set of tips up for now. If you have questions about other elements of CK2, feel free to ask in the comments or on Facebook/Twitter/etc. and I’ll be happy to answer them there, or in a second post if they’re complicated.
If you are interested in data science in video games and eSports check out my article From Zero to Heroes Never Die which analyses player performance in Overwatch.
Crusader Kings 2 was the last PC game that I bought on disk before surrendering fully to the Steam Gods. I played much of it in the days when I had a severely limited internet connection which is why I have 'only' 190 hours clocked up in game. Unlike other Paradox titles such as Stellaris or Europa Universalis 4, or other strategy titles like the Civilisation series, instead of playing as the abstract notion of a 'nation' CK2 puts you as the head of a landed dynasty in the medieval world. Time passes day by day, the character you are playing marries, has children, fights wars, contracts diseases, has affairs, appoints councils and eventually dies. The titles this character held pass to the next in line through the often complicated succession laws of the time and you take control of that characters heir who may have inherited some or all of their predecessors land. And so the game continues. You lose the game if your starting dynasty loses all its counties or all members of the dynasty die out.
The long form game lasts from the year 769 until 1453. There are over 1300 individual counties in the game, all ruled by a Count, and these merge in various ways into Duchies which merge into Kingdoms which merge into Empires, all of which rise and fall and are fought over throughout the 700 or so years that the game lasts. The starting conditions are true to real world history; if you take the 1066 start then William the Bastard is Duke of Normandy and can be chosen by the player. Once the game starts and runs for a few years things often diverge dramatically from real world history and there is even one expansion for the game in which the Aztecs invade Europe and North Africa from the West. The game has its own subreddit which is full of awesome images and stories that players have experienced, and lots of memes.
Like all Paradox titles the game contains a massive amount of data. Clicking on a character in game allows you to see portraits representing their parents, spouse, siblings and children. Clicking on any of these allows you to do the same for them. You can click on any county and get a chronological list of every character that held it and the same goes for Duchies, Kingdoms and Empires. I realised that the game must be storing these details in the save file and in a relational format that could be used to build a network. I had already done a project in which I pulled data from a Caves of Qud save file and I wanted to see if the same could be done here.
A non-Ironman, uncompressed CK2 save file can be opened with a text editor. Each character is represented by an entry that includes a unique identifier and values for the unique identifier of their father, mother and dynasty if those exist. It also includes details like how the character died, if they were murdered or died in battle who was responsible and data on their religion and culture. There are details on all dynasties such as their culture and religion and for each title there are details on who held the title, how they got it (inheritance, election, conquest etc) and when their reign started.
I wrote a script that would pull out this data and store it in MongoDB. This script and the ones used for the below data can be found on my GitHub account. I allowed a full game to play out in observer mode from 769 but the game doesn’t end at 1453 in this mode so I stopped on the 1st of January 1460. You can click here to download a zip of the save file I used to make these networks. The save file is from version 2.7.2, the version before the Jade Dragon expansion released in November. I decided to use the previous version of the game as with Jade Dragon China tends to expand quickly and creates a lot of dynasties in the Western Protectorate that tend to die out in a generation or two.
I was able to build 2 main types of networks from the save game data; marriage networks and kill networks. Links to interactive versions of all of the networks built with linkurious.js can be found here. Due to the size of these networks they can take a few seconds to load.
Ck2 Threat
Marriage is a very important tool in CK2 for a number of different reasons, mainly to provide legitimate children to succeed your current ruler and to secure alliances with your inlaws. Unlike in other games where you can sign treaties with those you are on good terms with you can often only form alliances with those you have close marriage ties with in CK2. Marrying members of your immediate family into the powerful dynasty threatening your border may make them like you more and forming an alliance may stave off an invasion and provide you with an ally to attack your rivals.
I wrote some code that took all characters in the game who had a dynasty and a spouse and built a network of all the dynasties with weighted edges existing between those where a character from each had married each other. Clusters form in the network around geography and religion and the below image shows the network colored using the modularity statistic in Gephi. The Indian subcontinent is isolated in the top right and Europe is in the bottom left in orange with Italy splitting out into a cluster of its own just above it. The brown cluster above this is the Greek dynasties of Byzantium which converted early in the game to Islam and expanded massively. The light blue cluster represents the dynasties of the Middle East and North Africa, the dark green cluster to the right is Spain and West Africa and the light green cluster in the middle is the pagan dynasties of Eastern Europe and the Steppes. An interactive version of this network can be found here.
This is the largest connected component in the network and consist of almost 10,000 of the 29,000 dynasties that appear in the game. There are many smaller components consisting of only a handful of dynasties and they do not appear here. Dynasties will cluster closer together if there are more edges (marriages) between them and will be far away if there are less. While there may be few marriages between Irish dynasties (on the right of the bottom orange cluster) and the Italian/Lombard dynasties (the smaller orange cluster to the left) they both marry into French and German dynasties and are therefore closer to each other than they are to the dynasties of distant India in the top right. There is also an interactive verison of this network colored by culture and by religion.
The above network shows all marriages between all dynasties but I wanted to see how the most powerful dynasties acted. I wrote code to find every character who had held a Kingdom or Empire level title and then got all their children. I then built a marriage network for them and an interactive version can be found here showing dynasties that held titles in orange and those that didn’t in blue. Again Europe and India are separated on the left and right. The nodes are sized by PageRank, a measure of the nodes popularity. The large orange nodes have clusters of blue nodes connected into them but there are no large blue nodes that provide spouses to the reigning dynasties often. There are few blue nodes which sit between the larger clusters but there are a number of marriages between ruling dynasties that cross religious divides. In the central column of clusters the top are the pagan dynasties, in the middle is Greece on the left and the Middle East on the right, on the bottom is Spain and North Africa.
Characters can also be killed in the game. Battle, poison, a lone arrow or a basement full of manure and a lit match can all bring a life to an end early. When assassinations are carried out there’s a chance that the character ordering the killing will go undiscovered. Even if this happens the save file still registers, in the victims data, the unique identifier of their killer. The kill networks are built using this data. An edge exists between two dynasties where a member of one killed a member of the other. While it would make more sense for this to be a directed graph, indicating which dynasty did the killing and which the being killed, this caused difficulty when trying to pull out the largest connected component using networkx. What I should have done is build the network undirected, taken out the largest component and then rebuilt a directed network using only these nodes and this is something I might do in future.
The kill networks (colored by cluster, by culture or by religion) follows along the same lines as the marriage networks. India is isolated in the top right, Europe in the bottom left. Greece is to its right and many of the pagan dynasties are above it to the left. Spain is in the centre, the Middle East is above them and North Africa is to the right. These networks take in all killings and a lot of killings are carried out due to rivalry or spite. Religious leaders will demand their liege to burn heretics alive or often prisoners constitutions will not prove up to the task of surviving prison. Here is the code I used to focus just on those killed in battle. During a battle there is a chance that a named character on one side will kill a named character on the other side. On occasion kings will fall in battle, as happened with Conlang De Vannes, the founder of the Kingdom of Ireland. I built a network showing the connections between dynasties who killed a member of another dynasty in battle, again this should be directed to make more sense, and took the largest component. Click here to see the network colored by culture, here by religion.
India forms a closed circle in the top right while small clusters form around the rest of the network, mainly consisting of multiple religions. Religious wars break out when a member of a religion declares a Holy War to take land belonging to a different faith. Members of both religions can flock to the aid of the attacker or defender. As the name of the game suggests the Pope can call Crusades for the conquest of lands not in Catholic control and it is in this fashion that the Republic of Greece, after electing an Islamic leader, was conquered by England in this game. Members of the same religion will also go to war with each other to enforce claims.
There are generally only a small number of characters involved in a battle and only a small change of a killing happening so it is rare to rack up multiple kills during a military career. Here I pulled out all characters who had been killed in battle and grouped by their killer. Both Mahipala Mahipalid and Samir Samirid had 4 kills during their lives. The Ayudha of northern India had the most kills of any dynasty with 18 but suffered heavy loses along with the southern Vengi Chalukya dynasty. There is also a list of all the knights who killed and were then killed themselves in battle, a number of them achieved 2 kills before falling.
While building out the kill networks I also looked at the top killers in the game. Jochi Jochid, the Emperor of the Mongol Empire was responsible for the deaths of 36 people, most of them dying in his prison. Not to be outdone his son and successor Bilge finished off another 42! The save file also contains data on a character’s father and 'rfat' or real father in the event that they are born out of marriage. That sort of thing was important back in the days of hereditary titles. If a character has both a fat and rfat value it means the person bringing them up, their father, isn’t their real father. In this notebook I got details on which characters had the most children. Uways Abbasid was bringing up 17 children who had an rfat value meaning he wasn’t their father. On the other hand Abdul-Razzaq Hasan had 22 children with married women and the children were being brought up as belonging to the husband. Amaneus de Carcassonne had 19 children, either with unmarried women or with women who were married but the affair was discovered. In total Muhammad Aleppo was the father of 44 children with 34 mothers and Angilbert Bouvinid had 41 children with 35 different mothers. It must be hard to remember all those birthdays!
Women don’t tend to have as many children as men but Piratamatevi Ay found time to have 10 children in between conquering south India and establishing the Ay as a major power. Amalfrida Liutprandingi had 6 children and was married to the Bishop of Oderzo. Chlotsuintha Lambertingi married the Mayor of Genoa and had 6 children. In both cases the husbands were not the fathers.
Finally, I’ll end where I began. At the start I aimed to focus mainly on the Irish dynasties in the game (and did up marriage networks of them). When I was writing out the code with only a few years worth of data there weren’t any powerful Irish rulers and so I used Charlemagne to test if what I was trying to do was even possible. There are 2 notebooks based around using MongoDB’s $graphLookup on Charlemagne. The second one takes a full count of all his direct descendents through the male and female lines. By the end of the game almost 50,000 characters have been born who are descendants of Charlemagne. Over 700 of them are members of the Italian Alachisling dynasty, 613 are members of the Greek Isauros that ruled Byzantium before its conversion to Islam and 506 are members of the Penikis dynasty that controls Finland, Rus and much of North Eastern Europe. There is also a few cells of code that find all descendants in common between two characters. I chose Charlemagne and Cobthach of the Eóganacht-Locha Léin dynasty, count of Thomand (Clare/Limerick) until his death in 789. Cobthach has over 14,000 descendants himself and he and Charlemagne share 10,000 in common.
Crusader Kings 2 has a wealth of information that can be used for building networks and finding out interesting statistics about a game. While I mainly let the game run away on its own in observer mode I did watch the progress of the Kingdom of Italy and the Knights Hospitaller who controlled most of Germany. The networks and statistics pulled from the game tell that there was an interesting story going on in India.
I’m happy with the way the networks turned out. It was my first time using Sigma.js and I don’t have much experience with Javascript. The colors don’t look great; bright colors looked fine in Gephi but where much too bright when drawn with Sigma.js. The culture networks had over 80 nodes which each needed a distinct color so I got the palette to auto generate colors for a dark background. While I’m happy to have gotten to use Sigma.js I needed tooltips for the nodes and could only get these working by using linkurious.js which is a fork of Sigma. Linkurious is deprecated and is no longer being developed and Bokeh in python doesn’t have as much functionality as Sigma for drawing networks so I’m not fully sure what to focus on next.
I’m going to amend the code in the notebooks shortly to work with Jade Dragon as well. I’m also going to see about rebuilding the kill and battle networks as directed networks. I started this project on the 2nd of October so I have been working on it for a long time and am glad to be finished. The Social Network of the 1916 Rising project I did before this was a great help and I reused some of the code for getting the centrality measures.
Crazy chicken kart 3 free full version pc. If you have any suggestions on improvements or on other measures or statistics that could be drawn from the data please suggest them. I’d love to hear about other video games that have save files which allow for data science to be applied in a similar way.
Crusader Kings 2 Command Console
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