Chivalry and dread; explained and compared.

I'm sure you've wondered, as I have, exactly what the difference is between chivalry and dread? What do they do, which one is best and how do you increase either or both of them? If so, then this guide is for you!

Generals

First, we need to understand that chivalry and dread affect both the campaign map and battle map. The general section will cover the effect of chivalry and dread on the battle map.

Chivalry

A general with high chivalry will boost the morale of his troops on the battlefield, making them stand and fight for much longer against enemy forces. For a general with maxed chivalry, troops will practically never rout unless you're fielding peasants.

However, I'm not entirely sure whether this is a flat boost to morale map-wide, or only for troops near the general.

Dread

Dread has the opposite effect. It doesn't affect your own troops in any way - instead, it lowers the morale of enemy troops. Again, I'm not sure if this is map wide or only in the vicinity of the general.

Personally, I prefer the effect of dread to that of chivalry on the battle map. With a max-dread general, like those fielded by the Mongols, troops will sometimes scatter before your general's bodyguard even impacts them with their charge.

It's much, much easier to start a chain-rout with a high dread general than otherwise - and routing troops are essentially free kills!

Governors

This section will explain the effects of chivalry and dread when a general is governing a city or a castle.

Chivalry

For every point of chivalry, the governor will boost his settlement's growth rate by 0.5%.

In my opinion, this effect is superb. A governor with a maxed chivalry will boost the growth rate of his settlement by a total of 5%. Incredible!

This is very, very useful as growth rates in Medieval 2 really leave a lot to be desired. Who doesn't want to tech-up their settlements as fast as possible?

Dread

This time, dread gets the short end of the stick. You see, in the case of governors, one point of dread will only boost public order by 5%.

It isn't completely useless, but you'll likely only start noticing its effects once you start conquering areas that don't share a religion with you. The religious unrest penalty to public order can be rather severe.

However, for the most part, I've found that it isn't too hard to maintain good public order in my settlements.

How to increase chivalry

Now, we get to the juicy part.

As you've seen, chivalry can have profoundly good benefits in the case of governors. There really is no reason for you to not want your heartland cities and castles to be governed by the most chivalrous governors you can get your hands on in order to maximize growth!

The thing is - how exactly are we going to increase our governors' chivalry? It's hardly as if the game provides us with solid information on how to do it.

Fear not, as I am here to aid you. With this information, you'll be able to boost your governors' chivalry through the roof!

Please note that chivalry and dread subtract from each other. In other words, you will want to avoid gaining any dread if you want to increase your chivalry, as the gain in dread will be deducted from your chivalry!

Guaranteed ways to increase chivalry

Firstly, please note that this has been simplified a lot. By that, I mean that each of these increases are because of traits that generals or governors gain or lose. I will not be listing the exact names of the traits and how they change level by level, as that is simply too much work for me. When these traits reach max level, it will no longer be possible to increase chivalry by performing the corresponding actions.

Also important: when your general or governor performs the actions below, they stack up 'points' which are invisible to the player. Different actions award different amounts of points, and chivalry will only increase when the amount of stacked points exceed a threshold. If you perform these actions, and chivalry doesn't increase, take note: it is not because the process is random, but because you haven't accumulated enough points.

Without further ado:

• A governor gains a point of chivalry when he builds a small church or better.
  
  
• A governor gets a point of chivalry when he trains a priest.
  
  
• When a governor with one or more levels of chivalry finishes a town hall or better, he gains a point of chivalry.
  
  
• A general who joins a crusade gains 2 points of chivalry. A general on crusade who arrives in the target region gains 2 points of chivalry. A general who assaults the crusade target gains 2 points of chivalry. A general who takes the crusade target gains 3 points of chivalry. (As you can see, a crusading general has the opportunity to increase their chivalry by a whopping total of 9 points!)
  
  
• On coming of age, a general gains a point of chivalry if his father has four or more ranks of chivalry. He gains another point if his father has seven or more levels.
  
  
• A general who occupies a settlement gains a point of chivalry.
  
  
• A general gains a point of chivalry when he releases more than 80 soldiers captured in battle.
  
  
• A general gains a point of chivalry whenever he pays a ransom greater than 1000 for more than 80 soldiers.

The following method is a great way to get five levels of chivalry easily:

Destroy and rebuild a small church four times. This will get you +3 chivalry. Make sure to step your governor out of town when you destroy the church, as he will lose chivalry if you keep him there. After you destroyed the church, put him back in. He just needs to be in the town when the small church finishes.

Note that this will lose you some favour with the pope, but for the most part I found it pretty easy to regain that favour on any difficulty except very hard.

Next, destroy and rebuild a town hall three times. This will get you +2 chivalry. Again, make sure to step the governor out of town or he will lose chivalry instead.

The next easiest way to gain chivalry is to go on a crusade/ jihad. This gets you by far the most chivalry through traits and retinues, as well as truckloads of money from sacking and free upkeep.

How to increase dread

In the case of governors, this is more a warning of what not to do as increasing your dread will cause chivalry to be lowered.

For generals, increasing dread is naturally a lot more beneficial.

Guaranteed ways to increase dread:

• The faction leader gains a point of dread on any successful spy mission.
  
  
• The faction leader gains a point of dread on any successful assassination mission.
  
  
• A general who exterminates the population of a conquered city gains a point of dread.
  
  
• A governor who creates an assassin gains a point of dread.
  
  
• A general gains a point of dread when he executes more than 80 soldiers captured in battle.
  
  
• A general gains a point of dread when he does not pay a ransom of less than 5000 for more than 80 soldiers.
  
  
• On coming of age, a general gains a point of dread if his father has four or more ranks of dread. He gains another point if his father has seven or more ranks.

Other ways to gain chivalry or dread

There are many, many ways to gain both chivalry and dread aside from those that I mentioned above. However, because they are chance-based, I didn't include them. You should be able to use your intuition to figure out what would cause your general to gain an increase in chivalry or dread.

There is an exception to this that I think is worth mentioning.

Generals gain both dread and chivalry for participating and performing well in battles. It doesn't matter whether or not you chase down routing enemies or anything like that - that action is still rewarded with both chivalry and dread.

The thing is, the dice roll for gaining dread in battle happens before the dice roll for gaining chivalry; and when the dice roll for dread succeeds, the dice roll for chivalry gets cancelled.

Also, when a general has gained dread from battle, it becomes essentially impossible for him to gain chivalry from battle in the future.

The only way to stop this from happening is to get really lucky, or for the general to have gained chivalry from battle before... ever fighting a battle.

What?

This can actually be done in a simple way: when marrying or adopting a general, check if he has chivalry. In particular, you want him to have the 'fair fighter' trait. If he does, then he qualifies as having obtained chivalry from battle. This is likewise the case for dread.

In conclusion: it becomes much easier to gain BattleChivalry/BattleDread if the general starts with either chivalry or dread. Adopt/marry accordingly.

Conclusion

With this, you should be able to develop your generals and governors according to which trait you judge to be more beneficial.

The credit for discovering the chivalry and dread mechanics go to this article https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/931592-medieval-ii-total-war/faqs/50116.

Have fun, and thanks for reading!

[Basket of Warm Kittens]

Very good

[randomschizo3699]

great tutorial. thanks !