How long does a truce last then? Cause I couldn't strip Breifne's current holder of his title after 5 years or so I think it was (I could be wrong on the amount of time though).Originally Posted by SmoothPancakes
How long does a truce last then? Cause I couldn't strip Breifne's current holder of his title after 5 years or so I think it was (I could be wrong on the amount of time though).
Truces last 10 years. When it becomes that case, my favorite, imprison the ruler, assassinate him, and then strip the title from his heir. The truce is only between people, not counties/kingdoms. So if you kill off the ruler that you have a truce with, you can immediately strip his heir of the title.
With all the imprisoning and such, how the hell do you keep people happy? There are only so many titles to go around...
Oh yeah, and there are some cases you might have to resort to fabricate claims and going to war. Some duchies, over in Wales for instance with the duchy of Gwynedd, it's made up three counties, Powys, Gwynedd, and Perfeddwlad. If you want to declare war on Powys or Perfeddwlad, you have to declare war on the Duke of Gwynedd because Powys and Perfeddwlad are the vassals of the Duke of Gwynedd.
So if you don't have the option to strip the title from someone, even in your kingdom, it's because that guy is either a vassal of one of your vassals or the vassal of someone else. So ultimately you have to take over your vassal's titles and lands to gain the county you want or declare war on that guy's liege to be able to go to war for his county.
Well, I should rephrase that. You can assassinate him, or you can imprison and execute him.
As for keeping people happy. Giving them gifts (gold), granting them honorary titles, have a good chancellor with high diplomacy, have an honorable reputation, high piety, high prestige.
In trying to find specifics, I found a CKII wiki page detailing a lot of what we're talking about. Some great and much better detailed information than I have been able to give.
If you've played Crusader Kings II for any decent length of time, you've almost certainly encountered what happens when vassals get too strong and dislike you.
If any single vassal gets strong enough to challenge your power, you're at constant risk of rebellion. Everything you've worked for could be undone in years. Thus I'll be going into how to prevent this from happening, concentrating on keeping your vassals weak.
The Basic Concept
To prevent sizable rebellions, you have one primary goal: Prevent your vassals from having more power than you. This is achieved in multiple ways.
First, you have to keep yourself strong.
Second, you don't want your vassals to hold a lot of titles.
Third, you don't want your vassals to have a lot of vassals.
Fourth, you want to keep your vassals happy.
Keeping Yourself Strong
Keeping yourself strong in the long term primarily relies on two factors: Number and concentration of holdings, and construction.
You want to hold every single county in two duchies you own that are either bordering each other, or very close to each other. These two duchies should together have 7 to 10 counties so that you can use most of your demesne limit without having to construct holdings.
By keeping your entire demesne in two duchies you avoid the penalty from having more than two duchies, and you avoid the penalties for vassals desiring your duchies. No vassals will thus be able to plot for your duchies, thus keeping your powerbase secure.
The advantage of keeping your demesne limited to a small geographical area is that you can now gather up your army very quickly, so you'll be able to respond quickly to any rebellion with very low risk of your units being picked off separately.
Second, you want to upgrade your holdings as much as possible. This is covered in further detail in the installment on construction.
By upgrading your holdings you'll have more money available, and more troops. You'll also refill your levies faster, so you'll be able to recover from wars faster.
As your vassals will seldom be able to upgrade their holdings to the same extent as you, construction can give you a large advantage.
Keeping Your Vassals Weak
The other side of the coin is keeping your vassals weak, and reducing their powerbase when possible. If you expand via conquest, you'll often have titles that you need to give out. You should be quite careful about who you give these titles to, as it is easy to end up with a single vassal holding many titles, and eventually being able to challenge your power.
The strategy I recommend for giving out counties goes like this: Search for characters that are not rulers, are of your religion, are male, and are of your culture. You should then sort by dynasty, and scroll down to your own. You should now find someone who is not heir to anything, and who's heir does not own anything. You then give that person a single county with all its holdings (if applicable). The new count will then soon make the holdings in the county into vassals, and will be of no threat to you.
For duchies you do much the same. Search for characters that are rulers, are of your religion, and are of your culture. Sort by dynasty, and scroll down to your own. Find someone who owns a single county or barony. One county and one barony is also fine, but only a single holding is preferable. This person should get the duchy. It does not matter if (s)he actually holds any counties within the duchy; that is their problem, not yours. By following this strategy you'll end up with dukes who hold a single duchy and a single county, and will be unlikely to ever be able to challenge your power.
Whenever a vassal rebels and you beat him, you should strip him of his primary title. To do this you will need Limited Crown Authority. You can then follow the strategy described above to give this title to someone else.
Further, you can deliberately make strong vassals rebel so that you can imprison them and strip them of a title. Simply give them the court jester honorary title, and raise their vassals and just leave them there. Eventually they will rebel, and then you can crush them and take a title from them.
Another way to make them rebel without incurring tyranny is imprisoning them with a just cause. They'll rebel approximately half the time, and upon crushing their rebellion you'll be able to strip them of a title. If they don't rebel you can just ransom them, thus taking a bit of money from them and giving it to you, and you'll likely end up with another reason to imprison them later.
Beyond how you distribute county/duchy grants, and stripping of titles, it is very important to attain Medium Crown Authority.
Medium Crown Authority will prevent all intra-realm warfare with the exception of rebellion. This will make it near impossible for your vassals to expand via conquest, and they're thus much more likely to remain weak. They'll also not be using up huge amounts of levies on pointless internal wars, so you'll have the levies you need when you go to war.
Keeping Your Vassals Happy
Finally, you should do your best to keep your vassals happy. The two most important ways of doing this is keeping your vassals the same culture as you, and keeping them the same religion as you. This lets you avoid the large 'foreigner' penalties, and you get -15% risk of rebellion for each. Having all your vassals of the same religion is especially simple, as at Medium Crown Authority you can revoke any title held by a Heretic or Infidel without incurring tyranny.
For culture you should simply make sure to never give titles to people of a different culture unless you have a very good reason to, for example so as to push their claim on some other title. You can also like described above, deliberately make them rebel so that you can give their titles to someone else.
Further, you should groom your heir yourself. Unless you have good reason not to, your heir should always be your ward, not someone else's. This will let you make various choices throughout his childhood, thus having him end up with good traits. A few good traits can make a huge difference both when it comes to chance of rebellion, and the levies and taxes he can get from his vassals.
Finally, apply bribes and honorary titles strategically. Unless you actually want someone to rebel it is usually better to pay them off with a bribe than to have to crush their rebellion. Do note that honorary titles only expire upon the recipient's death (or rebellion); they'll even persist beyond the ruler's death. As such you should be careful about when you give them out, as there's a rather limited number of them.
Summary
Keep your vassals happy and weak, and yourself strong, and it becomes much easier to hold onto the throne.
My tips are as follows:
When giving out a county, give it to a dynasty member who holds no other titles
When giving out a duchy, give it to a dynasty member who holds a single county or barony
After crushing a rebellion, strip every member of the rebellion of their primary title. You'll need Limited Crown Authority
Revoke the titles of any infidels and heretics. You'll need Medium Crown Authority
If any vassal is getting too strong, induce rebellion then strip him of a title
Avoid having vassals of different cultures and religions. Inducing rebellion can help
Get Medium Crown Authority, it will stop vassals from expanding via intra-realm conquest
Hold every county in two bordering duchies
Upgrade your holdings as much as possible
Be your heir's guardian
Give out bribes and honorary titles to prevent rebellion
http://crusaderkings-two.wikia.com/w...r_Vassals_Weak
My only problem with that guide (which I've read before; it's from the user made 140 page manual) is it assumes that you're a King and have the ability to have and change crown authority.
Being a Duke, it's much tougher to deal with some of the things he brings up in the guide.
From a cinematic designer for Bioware
Ah, my bad. I haven't actually gotten around to actually reading the user made 140 page manual.
No, if you're not a King, a lot of that becomes somewhat worthless being unable to do things. But as a Duke, you're not going to have to worry too much about Crown Authority and your vassals doing other stuff on their own. Ireland is such a mess in the early years, it's just all the dukes (and counts) trying to grab land. If anything, keep all provinces under your complete control early on. Don't start handing out titles to people until you are able to create the Kingdom of Ireland and become King.
You won't have a whole ton of provinces under your control, so it should all remain under your demesne limit, and I have never experienced a revolt until after becoming King, so keep every county and title under your sole possession and control, there's no real concern or penalty to worry about early on. After you have created the Kingdom of Ireland, beat down every remaining province and unified the entirety of Ireland under your control, then look at start handing out titles and raising Crown Authority.
This is quite interesting though:
http://crusaderkings-two.wikia.com/w...ing_of_Ireland
Any recommendations for 128GB solid state drive? I've looked around on Amazon and Newegg but can't decide which one would be best. I mainly just want to use it for faster initial bootup and faster launching of games. I'd really like to spend less than $120 if possible. It's for a laptop, by the way.
Keep an eye on SlickDeals .... they post deals on solid state drives ALL the time.
This is what I would buy if I were to do what you're doing. Kingston is an awesome company from the products I've bought from them before (RAM mostly).
Edit: Didn't notice that you wanted a 128gb one instead of a 120gb one. Not sure if 8 gigs is gonna make a difference for you, but here's a 128gb version Sandisk one for the same price.
Last edited by morsdraconis; 07-26-2012 at 02:47 PM.
Yeah, 8GB wouldn't make a difference. I'm not planning on having a bunch of shit on it. I did see Amazon is selling the Samsung 830 Series 256GB solid state drive for ~$200 which is a good price and would pretty much replace my current hard drive as I will never use that much storage. May just go that route so that I don't have to worry about it in the future. I also have to upgrade my RAM, but that's probably a future project. I probably should have just had Dell put in a SSD and more RAM when they were building it, but they wanted outrageous prices for that kind of stuff. I think 8GB of RAM was a $150 upgrade.
If anyone has a SSD, is there a noticeable all around performance increase or is it mainly just noticeable for boot up and program launching?
I don't have one, but, my understanding of the performance increase is it can be RIDICULOUSLY fast compared to normal IDE HDs and it's still pretty damn noticeable compared to SATA connected HDs.
HOLY SHIT. Thank you for getting me to buy this game Smooth. I started over as the Count (Earl?) of Dublin and I've already unified close to a 3rd of Ireland as I'm the Duke of Leinster and the Duke of Meath. I control the countries of Leinster, Dublin, and Kildare is controlled by my son and heir to the throne. I have a strong de jure Ducal claim to Ossory, that I'm just waiting for my forces and money to restore to claim and I already have a weak claim on Galloway in England as well, but I'm gonna wait until I unite Ireland first and declare myself King.
It's 1088 and I'm well upon my way. Just gotta get a claim for the northern part of Ireland and I should be in good shape.
I gotta say, at first, I wasn't having fun with this game at all, but it was because I didn't know what the hell was going on most of the time. Now, I have a pretty good grasp of what I'm doing and it's working out pretty damn well. Can't wait until I get home from work tomorrow and have more time to play more!
$90 for 120GB SSD
http://www.beachcamera.com/shop/prod...ltime&omid=113
Sandisk is also a good brand.
Yeah, I'm going to go with the Sandisk you posted or the Kensington Mors posted. I'm just not sure which yet. I had looked at that one somewhere else but it was $105 so the cheaper price is definitely nice.
Just saw that Stellar Impact and all it's DLC are 50% off until August 2nd on Steam. I was just looking at it the other day and was intrigued.
I knew you were. That heavy sigh you heard while reading my post was more about the fact that I hate how I utterly lack the time for additional games, even if I had a quality PC again.
I would love to spend a month solid playing EVE Online again, if I could.
Twitter: @3YardsandACloud
I have now hit 50 hours on Tropico 4 and I just started the 10th (out of 20) missions. It amazing how quick time passes with that game. I need to get in some time with Grand Ages though as I only have THREE hours with that game thus far. In other news, I have seen more SIM CITY footage and it looks awesome.
http://www.simcity.com/en_US
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/media/video
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/media/s...ms-fight-fires
I really love the look and feel of the sim city pics. I will need to get a new cpu for February in order to run this game. Has anyone heard of the specs yet for this game?
Last edited by jaymo76; 07-27-2012 at 08:26 PM.
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