Looking for a new strategy game fix I decided to pick up CK2 since RTW2 seems to need some time to ferment. Anyone play this? I don't see much in the way of threads so I'm guessing it's not so popular around here.

Just looking for any opinions, thoughts, starter tips and the like if anyone is in to this game.

I'm looking to start off as say a Duke in Ireland or something similar to get a feel for the mechanics.

Have you played any other paradox games before? I recommend the Paradox Interactive forums for tips and help.

My opinion about the game: it's the best game that paradox interactive ever produced, it's fun, and it's very deep. Playing this is like the first time you play a Sim City game: you can't stop lol.

I was a Total War series player (read Medieval 2 with Stainless Steel mod) then, one day, I bought Europa Universalis 3 Collection for me and my cousin... dude, seriously, you grow used to Total Series ubersh*t diplomatic AI then you play EU3... it's simply amazing... the same mechanics (with lots of improvements) is found on CK2. Every time you play is a unique experience.

There also lots of mods in the Paradox Interactive forums (you need to register the game first to see the threads), like the Game of Thrones mod for CK2.

CK2 was worth the full price even at launch (min you: some patches - free, obviously - to CK2, if made by Creative Assembly, would be sold as DLC).

In resume: been playing strategy games, from civilization to starcraft 2, for a long time... CK2 was the best experience that I had.

Thanks for the reply. It's my first Paradox game, and I also have played alot of the TW series and like you the Stainless Steel mod. Plus quite a few other strategy games, but this is the first Paradox game.

I'm enjoying it so far. I've been a PC gamer since the early 90's and I must say that I don't think I've ever played any game where I had less of a clue what to do or how to go about it. I thought I had a good grasp of Medieval history but no, I didn't. The terminology alone is enough to spin your head.

But I've stuck with it and am carving out a little dynasty in Ireland. Well if 3 counties could be considered a dynasty hehe.

One of my main issues is consequence of action. I suppose I need to play a long time to figure it out. For example I get a message saying so and so has smallpox. Or my son wants to duel his rival. Or I give a land title to someone. Or I started a war with my neighbor who was excommunicated only to have the claim terminated when I was less than 2 days from winning the final siege. What will it all mean down the line?

Despite my cluelessness, these are the sort of games I really get in to. Complexity and depth are what makes for a truely great gaming experience for me.

And I've been reading the Paradox forums, but frankly those posters know what they are doing, and I don't. Reading the threads helps some, but for the most part I'm too new to really understand. I don't remember any game or sim I've ever played that made me feel this way. And that's the sort of challenge I like!

I'd highly recommend trying out Aragon for one of your first "learning" nations. I too was a little weirded out by the CK2 style, and that even as a veteran Europa Universalis player, but I found Aragon to be one of the most straightforward experiences possible. You start with one province, one King with no direct vassals (just loyal kinfolk), a wealthy section of Spain with a decent army, and surrounded by loyal Spanish allies in a target rich environment. It's about the best nation I found to play the role of a slow tutorial.

As for the game in general, I absolutely love it. Still one of the better games to come out in the last few years IMHO.

Thanks for that Santhonax. I will give Aragon a go once I am done with this Ireland game. The Taran King I am, though King of Ireland is the ambition. I believe if I am able to achieve that I will likely be ready to begin anew with any knowledge I may have aquired.

I am also a big fan of CK2, but there is an awful lot I don't understand about it as well.

What helped me a great deal when I first started out was watching some video tutorials on Youtube. Generally I can't be bothered with this, but in the case of CK2 I really found that investing a couple of hours watching the tutorial videos has paid significant dividends in my enjoyment of the game. It's not the type of game where you can just wing it; you have to have some idea of what causes what in order to really get anything from the game.

This is the first of the video series I watched. I didn't watch them all, but I think after about the first 4 you'll have a good idea of what's going on.

http://youtu.be/kMzAXqOqV5k

Thanks for the link. I had watched a few videos which help but there is a long way to go.

In this Dublin start I had increased my holding to 4 neighboring counties. That was my original goal, at which point I planned to turtle for a while and build up some cash reserve for a few years or until the heir took over. My character was approaching 60 years old and I had a very promising heir who I had married to a very good wife. My character got ill and I was pleased as I would soon have a great leader in the succession. But then he got better. Darn it. Then he got ill again. Then he got better. Just die already you old coot. And at 67 he was still kicking and essentially chewing up the prime of the heir's reign.

Then suddenly there was a revolt in Dublin due to my oppressive rule. Say wut? I suppose it has something to do with the fact that Dublin has Norwegian culture. Regardless I didn't see it coming but maybe there had been some way to know of the unrest. In which case I could have deployed my Marshall to quell it.

But still I am generally clueless as I didn't know if I should have created a second duchy when I took that 4th county. I just don't know enough to know if these actions are desirable or will more quickly lead to ruin. Still, I'm having a good time with CK2. Never played another game quite like it and that's refreshing.

It's a great game!
I actually started off by playing as Scotland with a king I created with the dynasty creator. It actually turned out pretty well, and by the time I figured stuff out I had the Empire of Britannia.

As to creating the second Duchy - every Duchy you hold gives a penalty to the nobles' opinion of you.

And if I give a duchy say to my son I suppose it increases his power and opinion of me? But if he is the traitorous or ambitious type then the increased power can be used against me? I've already dealt with a brother who formed a faction to bring me down so I know you can't really trust anyone.

I am getting along better now as I learn the mechanics and have increased my holdings to 7 of the 13 counties in Ireland. I would think this puts me in position to ascend to King of Ireland? I've tried to vassalize the remaining rulers but they aren't willing. I had read somewhere I would need to amass 400 gold and 200 piety, and I have more than enough, but I haven't discovered the route to the throne. I'm sure I am overlooking something or maybe 51% isn't enough.

So I just created another duchy and was able to become King of Ireland. Now I will try to vassalize the remaining counties or go to war I suppose. It took 41 years to become King from the Dublin start. I will try to unite the country.

Cool game I'm glad I decided to pick it up. And for a tenner on Steam I'd say it's going to be a hell of a good value.

After I watched those videos I managed to get myself crowned King of Scotland...in about the same amount of time.

So I'm sitting there feeling pretty pleased about the whole thing and then some disgruntled guy starts a "so-and-so for King of Scotland party" and breaks from the country and declares war on me.

Unfortunately this guy has some big friends and so I seek a white peace, not entirely sure what that is. But the upshot is that I end up in a dungeon for the remainder of my life, my heir is assassinated, and the whole house comes crumbling down rather quickly!

The game is great. You really have to stay on your toes, though!

I posted this over at Grogheads several months ago:

I can't do an AAR nearly as well as UG, but in my current game, I started out as the Duke of Moray and I had the King of Scotland as my liege. I married a 17 year old somebody who died of syphillis in like the first year of the game.

So, I got betrothed to the 0-year old (yes, zero) princess of the Holy Roman Empire thinking that might give me an in to the HRE in the later game. Meanwhile, my heir is my sister and I have a good 16 years or so to go before I can start working on my own heirs with my 2 month old wife-to-be (I know, sick).

Meanwhile, the King dies, leaving his 5-year old son as heir. I had a strong claim on the kingdom so I pressed a du jure claim and recruited like 3 of the counties to my side. Now my 24 year old Duke is at war with a 5 year old and betrothed to a 2 month old.

As the war progresses over several years my Duke gets bored and has an affair with a mistress (+20% fertility, looking at the long game here!), he has a #%&*$# daughter that I legitimize. Score! now I have an heir even if it is a chick.

My "wife" comes of age, my mistress dies of "mysterious circumstances", and I catch pneumonia...but fortunately live. I decide this little brat king of Scotland needs to go and I plot to murder him. My brother-in-law from my first wife(my Marshall) gets excommunicated by the pope due to a plot by a Norwegian duke (jerk) and then gets drunk and lets out my plot about killing the king! Everyone's opinion of me goes down.

Finally, I have every territory of Scotland except one beat and don't you know my plot to kill the king actually works? So, of course the next little brat takes over which destroys my du jure claim, all of my captured territories revert to the new king and I end up right where I started from 20 years earlier! Fortunately I had a save game right before the murder plot worked so I re-loaded that game, withdrew the plot, and then finished up my war with the original king and got all of Scotland. It was a little cheat, but I didn't realize that by killing the little #%&*$# I'd lose 20 years of work...lesson learned!

Now I'm sitting as King of Scotland, a young son and two daughters (one #%&*$#) as heirs, an 18 year old wife, and a minor claim on some Muslim territory way down south somewhere. Life is good!

Does that sound interesting to you? Well, that, my friend, is Crusader Kings 2.

The rest, with some screenshots is located here:

http://grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=2473.msg53062#msg53062

...about 30 game years later...

Ok, so we're quite a few years later. Last year I totally cleaned house and imprisoned all of the folks who had plots against my various vassals and courtiers.

I betrothed my son to the Princess of Hungary with an eye towards building an alliance against a potential move against the HRE. I have a couple of outstanding weak claims there, so I have du jure claims I can press later.

Also, I betrothed my two daughters; both to HRE to keep minor claims coming in.

BUT...the Hungarian princess I betrothed my son to is currently 9 y/o (I think) whereas my son is now 16 and of age. I (King of Scotland) finally died on 11 September, 1105 leaving my son as my heir, but no other heirs to the throne. How did that happen again?! So, if the game ends now I lose and Scotland fragments.

Tough decision here. Do I break my betrothal to Hungary in order to get a child-bearing chick in the sack with my son immediately, or do I "hope for the best" and wait it out another 7-8 years or so, assuming Hungary has a son? Crap, I should have seen this coming, I was like 57 or something.

Maybe I missed something with respect to succession laws, but I think I (again) screwed up. I need sons!

Close one!

I forgot that my wife was pregnant. Fortunately, she had a son so now I have two male heirs, one 18 (now) and one 2 y/o. My 18 y/o's betrothed is 12 so I'm going to let it ride. Also, my daughter married the King of the HRE, so I'm sitting good there as well.

I joined a war with Hungary against some scrub country but the Hungary dropped the ball and we're getting shwacked over there. I raised my personal levies to participate, building that whole alliance thingy, not realizing until we got into fighting that I (King of Scotland!) was leading the damn army! Woops! Luckily we won, and then I beat feet out of there.

It's now late 1108. Keeping fingers crossed for more male heirs in a few years, and that nobody knocks off the King or little Prince.

Great read. CK2 is like a story generator isn't it?



Same here. I discovered that making minor changes to the laws of the land combined with a bunch of vassals is bad for the health of one's dynasty. After becoming King I was able to quickly vassalize the remaining counties to unify Ireland. Now for some peace and prosperity.....

Or maybe not. My heir's first wife had died young and he married some woman who thought the way to the heavenly afterlife was through chastity, which won't do when their are no heirs, so I had to have her knocked off. Then my brother formed a faction because he didn't like having to pay taxes or maybe it was the succession law or maybe the weather, so he got thrown in the dungeon since his opinion of me was maxxed and I couldn't buy him off. And then his co-conspirators also found themselves imprisoned.

Then another guy starts it all over again. Soon the whole Kingdom sees me as a tyrant, an attempt to throw him in jail fails, he revolts, and so does EVERYONE else including my second son, my spymaster and marshall (both with 23 ratings). Stacks of men carrying swords converge upon me from all over the land and soon I find myself back to presiding over the Kingdom of Dublin and tending swans.

On Santhonax's suggestion I am now ruling Aragon and am looking forward to the treachery and mayhem that is sure to ensue.

Just an update. Love this game. The Aragon game went great as I learned the mechanics and began to understand the game more fully. Eventually had 80 percent of Iberia. As much as I like the game I wasn't crazy about the fact it could all come apart so easily. That is to say I like the fact the game has those events, but it wasn't much fun to have my young king killed by assassin's arrows and then suffer through 14 years of regency. It's not that I don't think this should be part of the game, quite the opposite. But with limited gaming time I want to have a more consistently engaged experience.

I have a shed load of time in Rome TW and especially Medieval 2. The more I played though, the more I found myself enjoying the strategic layer and less and less the tactical level. So I always wanted to get a game that was like Medieval 2 TW strategic layer but much more fleshed out. And I have found exactly what I wanted with Europa Universalis 4. I have found my perfect strategy game. I am a Paradox convert, full stop. Even now at work I am planning and plotting for when i get home tonight. What a great game!

Nice to see some more people getting into the Paradox Interactive games I've only seen one game from them that didn't totally infatuate me for months and that's March of the Eagles, as it has a very small scope/timeframe and victory conditions.

CK2 is still my favorite, I'm currently playing the Game of Thrones mod, I highly recommend it to fans of the series, somehow I find that I take a lot more pride in upholding the family name if I'm playing a house like Stark, Baratheon or Lannister than if I'm playing some random historical house. I will be posting a Stark AAR soon starting from the Greyjoy rebellion, a decade before the events of the books.

Yeah I'm a bit late to the party. I had known of games like Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis for years, but for whatever reason never picked one up. But hanging out at TW Center I would occasionally catch a reference to Crusader Kings and it sounded good so I picked it up and I'm glad I did, even though EU IV has become my game of choice at the moment. But one led to the other. After seeing how engaging, complex and polished CK2 was I was hooked on the Paradox formula.

I love how interwoven all the mechanics are. Trade, economy, politics, diplomacy, warfare, religion and more are all seamlessly interconnected. The open-endedness is also appealing. I will start a game with an overall goal in mind, and though I will keep working toward that goal, the way the games unfold will send me off in tangents which keeps it interesting and fresh.

It's not to say these games don't have weaknesses or flaws, they do. But the overall presentation of such deep and complex games is excellent.

Currently I am playing an EU IV ironman game with Portugal. In my previous Aragon game, after uniting all of Iberia I went heavily in to colonization of the New World and had painted it Aragon from Maine to Venezuela with outposts in Brazil, East Indies and Africa. It was a formidable empire and I was cashing in bigtime. But on Tuesday they released the 1.4 patch which turned all of that hard-won and expensively built-up territory in to the new Colonial Nations. Not a big problem really as it allowed me to return my focus (as well as my armies and navies) to Europe. But it was all a bit over the top and my empire was just too powerful and rich. This was obtained partly through skill and clever maneuvering, but also partly through re-loads and unsavory console commands as I learned the mechanics. Still a blast though.

Another addition to the 1.4 patch is the new Western European Trade node, which in effect greatly reduced the importance of holding territory in the New World and instead placed great importance on naval power in order to control this node.

So rather than compete with England, Spain, the Dutch and everyone else for a share of the New World lands, when overwhelming naval power is all that is needed to reroute the riches to Iberia, my focus in the Portugal game is to turtle in Europe all the while hoping my ally Spain will keep the French and Austrians at bay while Portugal monopolizes the riches of the East Indies, Asia and Africa. So though I did grab some holdings in the US, Brazil and the Caribbean just to have a foothold, we are instead focusing on making Africa Portugese. Partly this is to protect our southern approach, partly it is to gain control over Ivory, gold and slave trades, and partly to wall off the Far East from my competitors by denying them the stepping stones they would need to get there while I gobble up the Spice Islands. If they want to get in on the Far East gravy train they will need to walk there.

Anyway to make a long story longer.... The lack of clear game-defined winning conditions allows the player to pursue any goal he wants. It's a (hi)story generator and it's a hell of a lot of fun to play. Now, how to annex Algiers....

Well that didn't work exactly. World is round innit? I tried to prevent anyone intruding on my Indian Ocean playground but they're crafty bastages. By 1650 Spain had made the leap from St Helena to Madagascar and they were in. And Great Britain, those cheeky buggers, went the other way 'round, coming from Argentina by way of Fiji, Tahiti and finally colonizing Australia. It became obvious the AI doesn't suffer sea attrition or they wouldn't be there already. Russia and the Dutch are grabbing a slice of the East Indies pie too.

Is anyone else playing EU IV version 1.4, what are the Ottomans doing in your game? In mine, the lack of coalitions has enabled The Ottomans and Russia to take over half the world. The only thing standing between me and certain destruction at the hands of the Ottomans is Algiers and the silver tongues of my Diplomats. They have a standing Army of a quarter million while I have 65,000. So I pray they don't have designs on my digs.