CK3: From Beginner to Average (Ironman Tips)

So you've played the tutorial or a couple of gameplays and you understood the general mechanics of the game. This guide is a summary of tips and strategies to guide you through your first ironman play and don't let your first empire fall into chaos and be shattered into tiny pieces.

Introduction

So you've played the tutorial or a couple of gameplays and you understood the general mechanics of the game. This guide is a summary of tips and strategies to guide you through your first ironman play and don't let your first empire fall into chaos and be shattered into tiny pieces.

The most important characteristic about Ironman mode is that you can't make big mistakes or take huge risks like messing with the succession of your empire since that could easily mean losing more than 20+ hours of gameplay. You don't have second chances in ironman.

Think of Ironman as being a character of the Games of Thrones novel: try to be a good and compasionate leader and die. Be a jerk killing or sabotaging everyone who oppose you and you'll go pretty far. The perfect ruler in this game would be a Tywin Lannister guy.

Quick Successor Training Manual

The subsystem of education is long and trying to explain all the variables that take part in it would be just overdoing it. It's best if you learn the specific variables or attributes you need when you actually need more details during your play.

Always train/educate your primary heir yourself. If you are beginning and you don't know much about training your successor or primary heir here is a quick personality trait guide you can look up to when you need some guidance.


Please note that this is not an authoritative tier, but there are definetely some traits you will want to avoid, like:

• Forgiving: Argably one of the worst. When you have a rebelion you definetely don't want a character who have problems decapitating people or revoking their titles. And believe me: heads will probably have to roll from time to time either from your vassals or your enemies.
  
• Shy: you won't be a able to go to feasts to relieve some stress and socialize with your powerful vassals. It's pretty straightforward why you don't want a shy king.
  
• Craven: Almost the same as before. The play in this game even in intrigue mode it's aggresive, you don't want a character who will have moral problems.

Hardest Time in your Realm

The hardest time in your realm won't be just one. It will repeat (hopefully) every 20-40 years and it's the succession. When your character dies and the primary heir will have to fill your character shoes it's a criticalmoment for your realm.

Unless you are an expert you can't certainly predict what will happen when your heir gets the throne and this uncertainty will be bigger as your realm increases in size. It's the time when you receive a painful relationship penalty with all your vassals called "Short Reign Period" and the powerful vassals might see it as a perfect opportunity to try to either directly take you down or take one authority level of the crown (if you are lucky and don't want other thing like independence).

Like I said, it's not enough with having a ruler that has a lot of good traits either personality or educational. You'll need something more. I elaborated a checklist of some things you need to be prepared to handle your empire in a relatively order manner to the new heir:

• A huge amount of money: this is the most important point. If vassals join against you they will probably hire some mercenaries. You will want to do the same thing. Besides, one of the first things you might wanna do is send a gift to your realm priest to get the bonus income as fast as possible.
  
  
• At the beginning of your game: make sure your heir will be able to form quick alliances to get help from outside your realm in case things go south.
  
  
• Authority of the Crown enough to be able to revoke titles and punish those rebelious opportunists.
  
  
• Stable relationships with your vassals because if you were hated, they will carry that resentment to the successor.
  
  
• Related to point number two: it's best if your primary heir has some sons unmarried to form quick alliances. As the game progresses and you are one of the most powerful realms in the region you will want to consider forming internal alliances with your most powerful vassals just so you don't find a knife in your back when you turn them your back to focus your attention in other things.
  
  
• Use the Reset Perks button of your new character in case you didn't get the branch you wanted: for example, if you trained him in stewardship you might wanna have the branch of the administrator path since it gives you key advantages to manage the relationship with your vassals. This is a perfect use case for the reset perk.

Managing the Realm and Expanding

There's a very important matter that both relates with a more swift and peaceful succession and the expansion of your realm and it is the de jure structure. When you conquest without a care in the world without respecting the de jure relationships of the titles you own it's going to bite you in the ass in the long term.

There's a penalty when you are not the correct liege of a vassal, for example: if you granted a duchy and the kingdom holder is a different person than you then that vassal even if it has 100 relationship points with you eventually will want to become independent. If on the contrary, that kingdom title is not created or you own it meaning you are the rightful liege of that vassal, then it will be less likely to rebel against you.

When you want to expand you need to do it in a meticulous way or if you don't do so you'll get into trouble way faster than you think or you will be facing sudden rebellions without completely understanding why that +100 relationship vassal wants independence from you.

Understanding the above is key to more peaceful successions and stability in your realm, and we can summarize and add some things.

• If you want to expand your realm, first you should do it internally: that is, from your highest level title make sure that you hold every kingdom/duchy/county.
  
  
• If you hold every de jure titles from all your titles, then focus on one objective like a duchy or a single county and get it. Once you get it focus on building your expansion from there. Example: if you just got a duchy, go for another duchy of the same kingdom instead of trying to conquer a duchy elsewhere. As soon as you get a jerarchy in which you are the rightful liege of all your vassals only then you can "call it a day" and focus in other geographic direction.
  
  
• Vassals of the same religion are almost mandatory. If you are catholic you can easily revoke their titles if they refuse conversion. If you are not catholic you can at least try to demand their conversion without a very significant penalty: remember that if you success the bonus of the relationship will be greather than the current penalty you are probably holding.
  
  
• Vassals of the same culture are not mandatory, but if you have a chance (i.e: imprison and revoking titles oportunities without incurring in tiranny) you might want to replace them with someone with the same or less realm size who shares both your culture and religion.
  
  
• It's very frecuent in the latest years of your current ruler that your vassals are way more tolerant to him/her due to long rule period and good prestige modificators so it's a good thing to take advantage of these golden stability years and hold on to give the rightful vassals to their rightful lieges and creating and giving duchies until your ruler dies so your primary heir can do all these things and start making friends.
  Most of the time this will buy him/her enough time to get in a stable position.

Money from your realm priest

There's a way to get quick money from your realm priest in theocratical religions. It's based in the mechanic of banishing someone in your prison: when you banish your realm priest when you are negotiating his release he will give you all of his money.

This is a very useful mechanic to get a good injection of money specially in mid game, when you probably have upgraded your temples and are still upgrading your cities. You can banish your realm priest when you don't have a dangerous amount of tyranny penalization to get quick money which you can use to reinvest in your temples, so the next priest you will banish will have more money. It's a cycle in which you are going to get richer.

You'll want to check how much money has your real priest from time to time, and when he/she reaches a good amount (relative of your realm size of course) you can imprison and banish him. You can even use his money to start a good relationship with his/her successor with a gift.

Asatru and other religions

Asatru is one of the religions you should play at least once to understand how adopting an awesome religion completely changes your experience. Asatru is in my opinion the best of the already adopted religions (at least the best of the most popular) in the game for the following reasons:

• You can execute whoever you want and instead of losing piety you gain it.
  
• In exchange of gold you can start an event which will give you piety and a very good relationship bonus with your fellow asetru vassals. Specially in late game, this is an awesome bonus for your internal realm stability.
  
• You can wage war to everyone you want, saving you money (and a lot of time) from fabricating claims.

If you want to reform the faith it's also very easy since you can gain insane amounts of piety declaring wars on members of other religions and executing them, holding sacrifices that will make your vassals glad and pilgrimages.

To add to all of this, the holy sites you need to reform your faith and gain bonuses are all very easy to hold even since the start of the game (867 or 1066).

[Centipede]

I tried banishing the priest and did not get the money he had.

[Panda BaoBao PL]

I invite you to my new ultimate guide about millitary
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2846475771

[Amumununu]

@Deace
There's no way to play a game where *only* Ireland/GB are being simulated. There may be a mod for that. But that shouldn't be necessary. Just start a game in whatever year you like, and pick whatever character you want in Ireland/GB, and focus on trying to gain control of whatever island you opted for. Ireland counts are actually really popular beginner game starts in Crusader Kings. My very first game ever back in CK2 was an Irish count and it was a blast

[Deace]

Please forgive me if this is a dumb question as a newbie.... Is there a way to just play a game for control of lets say England or Ireland? Just as a stepping stone to a larger game!

[Valist]

SoulCatcher, you should be careful about only considering the skill points of traits. They have a HUGE effect on how you can operate and what decisions can be made without taking on stress. It's not good that your ruler is going to have a heart attack due to stress because he's Just, Compassionate, and Forgiving and you need roll heads of the vassals that rose against you. Especially if his heir is only a baby; you can quickly spiral from a firm grip on your realm, to your heirs having a short life expectancy until you find your empire has been chopped up. The authors comments stating that a jerk ruler is a effective one is VERY true. Nice guys finish last

[atleer]

Can you link that tiermaker, as I don't know all of the icon images and would be helpful to see.

[Vegreth]

Thank you for your comment! I definetely will keep updated the guide, and I'm planning to update it with more detailed information about securing succession because I've seen a lot of people asking different questions regarding that part of the game when you are stuck with confederate partition. Surprisingly for me, a lot of people don't use the dishinerit decision. I'm going to suggest that explicitly and give tips on how to keep your realm even when you don't have enough points to dishinerit (specially at the start of the game).

About the traits I think those are more situational traits depending of your playstyle. I almost never played the martial lifestyle since in all my campaigns as muslim, asatru, insular christian and spanish christian after my first or two generations I gather enough power to cut every regional power, and if I can't I can always use alliances.

I think the whole dinasty-DNA-engineering sub-plot of every campaign is pretty straightforward.

[SoulCatcher]

I hope you add more to this, it was pretty concise. I look at traits more from the standpoint of how many many net skill points it gives for its costs, So I try different traits I think are good and adjust the skills (pay attention to the incremental costs up and down:

Level 3 Lifestyle, Level 3 Leveled Lifestyle, Shrewd, Ambitious, Raider and Gallant should get honorable mentions to get bumped up.

And your first perk should be the one that adds +30% to pass on passable traits to your children.