[CK3] The Extremely Overpowered "North Korea" Strategy

hello ck3 players my name is riemann and today i want to discuss a strategy that's almost certainly one of the most overpowered playstyles that's been discovered so far it gives you more levies and much more gold than traditional feudalism it'll also give you more prestige and piety than you ever need rebellious vassals will never be an issue and as if that all wasn't enough it gives you a bunch of other bonuses like making your men at arms and knights practically invincible and ensuring your schemes always have max chance for success all this allows you to achieve whatever goals you might have such as extremely rapid expansion as you can see from my game in progress here in 100 years i've restored rome's historical borders and conquered alexander's empire and even exceeded both of them in several areas that's right it's the infamous north korea strategy from ck2 brought back to life in the sequel and if anything it's even more powerful than it was in the original game the basic gist is that you ignore feudalism entirely pay no heed to the domain limit and hold everything yourself this might sound crazy at first since exceeding the domain limit is so painful but if you set things up correctly it can actually be absurdly powerful today i'll show you what the strategy is how it works and how to do it yourself so first i'll go over the math about why this works being over the domain limit gives penalties that quickly rise up to a minus 90 multiplicative modifier to both taxes and levies in other words you get one 10 of the output you'd normally receive this sounds like a harsh penalty and in small to medium-sized realms it is however in empires that are sufficiently large it can actually be significantly stronger than regular play normal feudal vassal obligations give you 25 of your vassals levies and 10 of their income for small realms like a duke with count vassals this is easy to understand but once you get to the higher tiers like emperor levies and taxes will need to pass through multiple tiers of rulers before they finally get to you say account gives 25 of his levies to his duke overlord then the duke gives 25 of this amount to his king before the king finally gives 25 of this amount to you that means only 1.5 percent of the counts levies will finally arrive to you it's even more severe for money city obligations give 20 of their cash to their overlord but then those fetal overlords only transfer 10 of this up each tier if the cities of your realm were collectively producing a whopping 10 000 gold per month but they had to go through the counts dukes and kings before they got to you then you'd only be receiving two gold per month now in reality it'll never be quite that severe because the dukes and kings each have their own domain with direct vassals and personal holdings which means some of the money in levies won't need to go through all those hoops however it is still pretty bad which makes the baseline of 10 output that you get from ignoring the domain limit entirely look a lot better by comparison in practice by doing this strategy you can expect a huge increase in income and a moderate increase in levy size although levies won't really be that relevant after i detail how to get invincible men at arms a bit later in this video to set the strategy up you'll want to begin the game by playing as you would normally since domain holdings provide 100 of their output in traditional play you'll only want to start thinking about transitioning when you have 10 times as many counties in your realm as you have in your direct holdings and even this is on the lower side really the bigger your empire is the better in the meantime there are several things you can do to prepare the first is to set up a religion that has the clerical tradition of late clergy instead of theocratic this will let you hold temples directly which provides the obvious benefits of more money in levies as well as copious amounts of piety while you're setting up a religion it might also be best to make sure it's pluralist so you have fewer issues with separatists the next thing you can do is maximize your control gain counties will lose some control when you take them for yourself and bumping that number back up asap is pretty important you'll want to at least have the serve the crown part taken at some point and you'll want to be on the authority focus when you make the transition if you've gotten some renown by this point taking the first two legacies of the law branch can be useful to get plus five popular opinion and another plus point to control a month the final point of preparation is that you'll want to make sure you don't have many king tier vassals refrain from handing out kingdoms and if some already exist you might want to find ways to revoke them somewhere between your first and second empire title is a good point of when you can start thinking about transitioning to this strategy for this to happen you'll need to get rid of all your existing vassals now you could do this by revoking their land directly and fighting a bunch of tyranny wars but if you're willing to break the game by using this north korea strategy in the first place then you might as well use exploits for the transition as well this purge trick that'll detail subsequently works because of three unrelated game mechanics one imprisoned vassals can never rebel nor refuse title revocation two you can transfer vassals and titles to people in prison which wasn't the case in ck2 and three if you take the last county off a higher tier vassal that has vassals of their own they'll auto usurp a county from one of their vassals the trick in action looks something like this first get a zero entry character and make him into account next throw him in jail you can give him a gift to increase your chance if you want but even if you fail and he rebels you can just squish him like a bug since he's only a count once he's safely in your custody give him a kingdom then transfer every single one of your vassals to him this is why it's prudent not to have any existing king tier vassals as you can't transfer a vassal under another of equal rank once your entire realm is under this one man start revoking titles one at a time when he loses a county he'll just take another from one of his subvassals since he's in prison he'll never be able to refuse letting you revoke every single title in the realm without anyone ever being able to raise a sword to stop you sometimes you might encounter this weird occurrence where a county doesn't show up for revoking for some reason i think this is due to counties not being revocable if they've changed hands in the last year or something but i'm not entirely sure in any case speed 5 for a bit and this should resolve itself shortly once the realm is in your hands you'll want to stabilize a bit lower control will cut into your incoming levees so you should wait a while for that to go back up you might notice that the levies have gone up massively but this isn't actually true the ui presents this number as though you had 100 of the output from the newly seized domain but this will go down to its true number when you actually raise the levees comparing the before and after on the left is the result of this land being held by king tier vassals and on the right is the result of direct control you can see that the amount of levies more than doubled while income increased by a factor of 5. as you get bigger these numbers will continue growing much faster than in normal games you can also see how prestige and piety per month have increased as well in ck2 large empires of any sort could reliably generate a lot of prestige since vassal holdings gave their lease prestige innately this isn't the case in ck3 only direct holdings get prestige now making prestige gain one of the best benefits of the strategy considering how important it is for things like declaring war you also get a good amount of piety from all the churches you hold even if they only have the level 1 building in them making this ideal for declaring lots of holy wars or reforming religions what's more this strategy presents a great opportunity for generating renown what you can do is set up one of your dynasty members with a county that's completely surrounded by a u on all sides so nobody can touch them then you give them a kingdom or an empire title which is really no skin off your back since you already have so much prestige already and then you grant them independence each king will generate one renown per month and each emperor will generate two if your land was controlled by vassals then these independent realms would likely be destroyed quickly as the ai can be pretty aggressive when it comes to weaker countries but that's obviously not an issue here you only need an average of around 15 renown a month to get every dynasty perk by the end of the game that's pretty easy to achieve and even this number is inflated a bit since there are plenty of unique buildings which give you percent modifiers to renown generation which brings me to the final and possibly strongest aspect of the strategy bonus stacking from buildings normally you'd construct most buildings for money or levies but neither of those are very good with the strategy since all their output would be reduced to 1 10 making the time it takes to get a return on your investment stretch into multiple centuries but there are other effects to buildings which certainly are worth pursuing first are the normal buildings which can give bonuses to men at arms such as extra damage or toughness normally you'd be limited to around 10 copies with normal domain limits but now you can build them practically add infant item and the bonuses just keep on stacking pretty much without limit then there are the big unique buildings on holy sites and historical sites like the call salem in rome the pyramids in egypt or the house of wisdom in baghdad these only provide their realm effects if they're held in your personal domain which of course they will be using this strategy finally the most powerful of all are the special duchy buildings these have effects that are fairly powerful because in normal games you're only supposed to get two of them but with north korea mode you can have hundreds and they are very powerful even at just level one for example build 50 military academies and you won't have to pay your army at all and you'll get an extra 100 nights that will have their effectiveness multiplied by a whopping 1 250 percent build a bunch of siege works and single artillery regiments will knock through the toughest walls in days build 20 leisure houses and all your schemes will get plus 100 success chance it's pretty crazy and you can just keep spamming these buildings over and over and over again as for other optimizations the only thing that's a threat at this point are rebels and they're only ever threatening as a nuisance more than anything i'd always just acquiesce to the tax rebel demands as losing a few levies or gold temporarily doesn't mean much after you get the ball rolling a bit the separatists can be annoying though but they're usually a non-issue if you have a pluralist religion and don't let war exhaustion tick up too far the popular figurehead perk is one of the most useful for the strategy since that plus 50 popular opinion it means you can let war exhaustion go up much higher and still have rebels under control you might also consider converting to an eastern religion as their holy sites have temples that reduce the popular opinion penalty from having a different religion all the way down to zero in fact if you control them all now before i end the video i should mention the downsides of the strategy of which there are four main ones the first and most obvious is that using this strategy completely breaks the game all the tension and difficulty is obliterated like you're playing with all the cheat codes turned on so i wouldn't recommend playing every game with this i'd only use it if i wanted to power trip or if there was some particular goal or achievement i was shooting for the next issue is that without any direct vassals you won't have anyone to convert provinces or build buildings themselves although neither of these are really issues per se since conversion is actually bad with how religious fervor works and you definitely don't need more money or levies than you already have the third issue is that there can be an annoying amount of micromanagement with revoking titles one by one although i really didn't find it that terrible after the initial realm purge counties are rather large in ck3 bigger than they were in ck2 and the revokes are spread out enough that i didn't find it too tedious finally by holding everything directly the game will suffer a performance drop now ck3 is pretty shockingly well optimized so i didn't notice anything until i owned half the map but at that point i started giving extra holdings to a single vassal that i always just kept in prison so i couldn't do anything i found that as long as i stayed below 1500 holdings that performance was acceptable by which i mean it was better than an average late game stellaris map although the power of your cpu may change that a bit in any case i hope you enjoy the strategy yourself it can be a fun variation of how to play the game that makes for a refreshing experience every so often until next time my name's raymond and thanks for watching you

Channel: Reman's Paradox

Views: 385,976

Rating: 4.9482355 out of 5

Keywords: Paradox Interactive, Crusader Kings 3 North Korea Mode, Crusader Kings III North Korea Mode, Crusader Kings 3 North Korea, Crusader Kings 3 North Korea Guide, Crusader Kings 3 Extremely Overpowered, Crusader Kings 3 Extremely Overpowered North Korea, Crusader Kings 3 Guide, Crusader Kings 3 Overpowered Guide

Id: UCcZq8WxWJs

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheOnlu]

Oh no my strategy is found out. Tbh it’s the best way to play due to the large amount of troops and taxes you can acquire and the detrimental effects to over domain is literally useless