best cultural loadouts?

[snuggleform]

What traditions/ethos are you guys shooting for in the long term?

Only a few caught my attention

- reverence for generals - I don't know exactly how it works, but it says it gives the abilities to transfer military traits from guardian to ward. I'm trying it right now to see if it's 100% guaranteed. This should make it a lot easier to have good military traits like organizer on your best military leaders

- metalworkers - +5% army toughness in exchange for +5% army maintenance. Gold tends not to be an issue later on, and there are few if any traditions that just boost all your army's performance without some other drawback.

- gardeners - the royal gardener position can really speed up development growth in your capital which in turn lets you tech up faster

Most of the other traditions are very narrow in scope or have tradeoffs I'm not willing to take (like reducing maintenance but also effectiveness of certain MAA, I will not take deals like that since I usually am pretty good at making gold and don't want to weaken my MAA).

[Benedicter]

See which terrain types you got in your domain (or counties you plan to keep in your future conquests planned) and get the appropriate traditions, for example Mountaineers and Mountain Homes if mountains is your thing, Agrarian if it is floodplains and so on.
Also what is your playstyle, for example if you don't plan much warfare you might consider traditions like Pacifists and Philosopher Culture.

[snuggleform]

I don't like the terrain ones that much, I don't get much use out of them. I did try out wetlanders for the Irish and it helped me in one battle but I eventually fought a lot of wars in places not in my home court as I expanded all over the world.

I definitely plan to do a lot of war, but I don't like a lot of them because the tradeoffs are not favorable or the terrain ones are too narrow.

[Benedicter]

My terrain suggestions were meant so you can squeeze more from your domain; more tax, more levies, more development growth, cheaper\faster construction times and so on. Even if you fight all over the world, your domain should stay the same (from some point at least) If you plan ahead. For example if you plan to conquer Egypt and have your domain there on their Floodplains, the Agrarian tradition can benefit you immensely and be a game changer.

Beside terrain imo is more about your playstyle like I said; You like artifacts? get Expert Artisans. You like high development counties and stacking modifiers? get Garden Architect and\or Industrious, and so on.
Go over the list here[ck3.paradoxwikis.com] to get some ideas.

[snuggleform]

But my domain is going to change over time, since I hunt for special buildings all over the world like baghdad, patapalutra, tiraka, so sticking to one terrain type for the bonus isn't a good idea.

I thought about the artifacts thing but the vast majority of artifacts you get are from cultures that are not yours - use the character finder to find who has inspirations and the vast majority of them are not from your culture, so improving your culture's artifact quality just seems more flavorful than useful.

I'm going to continue to examine respect for veterans, there's potential there for handing down super useful military traits generationally. Sure garden architect is one I mentioned, but I didn't really see much else that made a lot of sense.

[¡ardito!]

it varies from playstyle. If you play tall, terrain and social ethos are the best, maximising taxes and development. If you conquer, just go with the warfare ones there are a lot of cool buffs

[snuggleform]

But which of the martial ones are actually good, I read through them multiple times and as I have said, only respect for veterans pops out as well as metalworkers for a martial build. Too many of them have a tradeoff I don't like, like debuffing your heavy cavalry or knights in order to boost up something I don't care about like skirmishers.

[titanopteryx]

Just to test out cultural traits I used the console to give myself a bunch of prestige and then made a save and then tested out some different loadouts.

There's one that boosts the pasture buildings. It says it raises the prowess of each culture member. The tooltips for members of that culture on their prowess stat didn't show that culture trait as increasing is by 1 after picking that. Next, I picked the one that is supposed to make each castle holding owned by a culture member increase renown gains. picking it didn't change my renown gains and I had 4 castles in that save. So some of the culture traits don't seem to be working, which is what makes answering your question hard.

I do want to point out that one martial one says it makes permanent injury traits give bonuses. If you play norse and get that legacy trait that lets you send dynasty members temporarily to the byzantine empire, they often come back with permanent injury traits. So for norsemen, that culture trait looks beneficial.

[snuggleform]

From what I can tell from training 5 heirs under reverence for veterans, only one of the guardian's commander traits are passed on, but it does seem to happen 100% of the time (small sample size I know). I still think it's one of the best traditions if you get into wars a lot since you can guarantee your heir has something like Organizer on a high martial person which isn't always that easy to have on hand, or whatever other martial trait you think is best.

A couple more thoughts:

- it's easier than ever to recruit Organizers (or whatever other military commander trait you like) because if you set your Lodgings to the highest rank, you get +50 to acceptance. Prior to royal court it was really hard to recruit strangers to your court, you had to basically befriend or abduct them, but now it's pretty easy just to invite them.

- even though it's easy to have organizers in your army, you may still find it hard to find one that has a good martial skill which means a lot of micromanaging finding the right army leader for the right task which is a nightmare with the UI, so there is still value in making your martial-trained heir an organizer through reverence for veterans. Just make sure to have his guardian be someone who has exactly 1 commander trait which is organizer or she might get the other commander trait you weren't looking for.

One other combo of traditions which I am going to try is the better feasts + faster feasts under rituals. That sounds pretty synergistic. I feel like you'd be overflowing in opinion that is maintained at a quick rate (doesn't have much time to decay since you can spam feasts twice as often), plus you get some renown as a small added bonus on top of that.

[snuggleform]

Ah there are 3 traditions I like quite a bit: caravaneer (bedouin/assyrian heritage), horse lords (mongolic/turkic), saharan nomands (regional to Sahara). Each gives +5% movement speed. That's something you can definitely take the bank if you're warlike, which I am.

[Athmet]

Originally posted by snuggleform:

One other combo of traditions which I am going to try is the better feasts + faster feasts under rituals. That sounds pretty synergistic. I feel like you'd be overflowing in opinion that is maintained at a quick rate (doesn't have much time to decay since you can spam feasts twice as often), plus you get some renown as a small added bonus on top of that.

Would you not have more risk to get obese by doing so many feasts ?

[snuggleform]

Originally posted by Athmet:

Originally posted by snuggleform:

One other combo of traditions which I am going to try is the better feasts + faster feasts under rituals. That sounds pretty synergistic. I feel like you'd be overflowing in opinion that is maintained at a quick rate (doesn't have much time to decay since you can spam feasts twice as often), plus you get some renown as a small added bonus on top of that.

Would you not have more risk to get obese by doing so many feasts ?

use the lose weight decision to counter that, sure you get more stress but it's manageable

[snuggleform]

Ah so here are my current thoughts for a warlike

Saharan movement speed
Caravaneer movement speed
Horselord movement speed
Quarrelsome for conquest casus belli (assuming you're feudal)
Elephant Lords (best specific MAA buff)
Metalworkers (+5% armor in exchange for gold upkeep)

Last 2 dunno, maybe just leave them open as it takes a while to get the maximum slots anyways.

The Saharan one is pretty easy to fulfill, you just need 1 county in the Sahara region. If you chase this one right after hybridizing or diverging, you can convert 1 region in the sahara region and you'll meet the optional requirement since you'll have more than 30% of your current culture there so it only costs 2k prestige which is a steal.

The caravneer and horselord are going to require hybridizing as they only come attached to specific cultures.

Quarrelsome will take some work, and possibly by the time you worked that hard to get it you don't even need it anymore.

So one way to streamline this is to start as an ohguz for the horselord, then aim to hybridize with the bedouins for their caravaneer, then after hybridizing get the saharan one. With the delicious +25% movespeed from these traditions you will feel some oomph when moving your doomstacks across the world.

[Razorblade]

Originally posted by snuggleform:

Ah so here are my current thoughts for a warlike

Saharan movement speed
Caravaneer movement speed
Horselord movement speed
Quarrelsome for conquest casus belli (assuming you're feudal)
Elephant Lords (best specific MAA buff)
Metalworkers (+5% armor in exchange for gold upkeep)

Last 2 dunno, maybe just leave them open as it takes a while to get the maximum slots anyways.

The Saharan one is pretty easy to fulfill, you just need 1 county in the Sahara region. If you chase this one right after hybridizing or diverging, you can convert 1 region in the sahara region and you'll meet the optional requirement since you'll have more than 30% of your current culture there so it only costs 2k prestige which is a steal.

The caravneer and horselord are going to require hybridizing as they only come attached to specific cultures.

Quarrelsome will take some work, and possibly by the time you worked that hard to get it you don't even need it anymore.

So one way to streamline this is to start as an ohguz for the horselord, then aim to hybridize with the bedouins for their caravaneer, then after hybridizing get the saharan one. With the delicious +25% movespeed from these traditions you will feel some oomph when moving your doomstacks across the world.

If you're a warmonger, you'll definitely want "By the Sword" for unlimited Kingdom-level Holy Wars.

[snuggleform]

Oh snap good eye, will keep tabs on that one. Who needs the greatest khan when you can be greatest popemaster?

[Obi Hung Kenobi]

There are so many so it depends on where you are in the map

like others said go for your terrain