Crusader Kings III 3 Beginner Guide | How to Play CK3 | Walkthrough Tutorial & Tips

hey what's up everybody i'm praetorian and welcome to this crusade of kings 3 beginner guide now before we get started i'd like to highly recommend that you go play the in-game tutorial before watching this video while it only does a a fair job i'd say at teaching the basics of the game it is helpful and it does uh give you a chance to kind of learn the ui of the game and and the tooltip system if you haven't played the in-game tutorial yet i'll show you how to do that so when you first come into the menu here you're going to start a new game there are two different start dates in ck3 and these different tabs up here just showing you some of the interesting characters that you might want to play as however in ck3 you are free to play as any character you so desire well with a few exceptions which i will highlight here in a minute but for those of you who have not played the tutorial yet the button is up here in the top right corner of this screen also when you first come into this they will recommend that you play it but if you've already said you didn't want to and you need to access it again it's right up here so let's say you don't want to play as one of these recommended characters you can just click on this button to play as any ruler in the game again with the few exceptions you cannot play as republics they are not accessible right now unlike ck2 which got a dlc to play them we cannot play republics in the launch version of the game and we can also not play theocracies but you are free to play as any futile character in the game with the lowest rank being a count barons are not playable so play as the king of france if you want to play as the king or you could say play as a duke or perhaps a count the different mechanics that are going to be open to you are going to be highly dependent on one the start date you play as the later start dates do have some different things opened up that aren't available in the earlier start date and then also is going to be very much dependent on the religion and culture of the character that you select there are also different map modes these are the same ones that are going to be available when you are actually in the game and this will just kind of give you some information on the characters cultures and religions and all that kind of good stuff because again these are going to affect the mechanics that are available for you finally last thing that we'll cover here in this screen is the game rules here in the game rules you can of course do something simple like changing the difficulty however it also allows you to select different settings for your campaign to make adjustments to such factors such as how often diseases appear so you see them happening a little too often for your taste you can have them appear less often you can also do such things as affect the gender equality mechanics you can affect when mongol invasions happen whether it's random it happens at a default time or they never happen you can change how quickly or how slowly culture and faith are converted so you can make a lot of adjustments here to kind of uh customize your campaign the last two things to mention are iron man and achievements iron man is when the game is saved automatically and you will not be allowed to switch characters or use the console when you can't have iron man in multiplayer and the purpose of this is two parts one for those people who can't help but but cheat and want something to restrict them and then the other purpose is that achievements are only unlocked if you have iron man enabled and you don't have any modifications to it so let's go ahead and go back to the main menu because we're going to be loading up a game that i just recently started all right so welcome to the kingdom of aragon so before we get started i know there's going to be some ck2 vets that are going to be wondering why my kingdom is so sneaky and looks like this uh that is because i did start here in southern france as a duke here in southern france eventually i gained my independence from the king of france and then the muslims had arrived at my borders after in conquering most of iberia so i decided to start pushing forward into their lands using the holy war seabees eventually i got enough land to usurp the king of aragon title and so that is why i'm the king of aragon despite being a french monarch then i started expanding up into french territory and i've been slowly going both ways kind of rotating who i attack based on who i don't have a truce with and so that's the reason why this is so snaky and then uh the the kingdom of akatwain the reason why they are free from us and we haven't attacked them is because they are actually a long time uh ally of mine as you can see we share a great grandfather duke gilham iv who was my first character that i played as and he has spread his dynasty over here and eventually they they are no longer part of our dynasty uh but we had a long term alliance with them and that's the reason why uh this looks like that because there's so much depth to this game so many things to talk about to you know make sure that you know everything you need to know to play it effectively this tutorial series is going to be split into three separate videos this first one is going to cover all the basics really go through mostly everything you need to know well the second and third videos are going to be covering the combat military system and the intrigue espionage system both of which are areas that i feel like have a lot more stuff to talk about and i'd really like to go in a little bit more detail with those so i feel like they deserve their own videos so other than those two matters which we won't talk about much we're going to be going over everything else in this here video so let's go and start by talking about the top bar where you can see all of your different types of values of course we have our gold and underneath all of them you'll see another number that's how much you're earning per month so we have 640 gold this is our prestige which we'll use for many different mechanics and i'll show you some of those in this video but we also have fame so essentially for every point of prestige you earn you also earn a point of fame and sometimes there's other ways to just earn fame outside of prestige such as such as certain events so while prestige is used like a currency fame on the other hand the entire purpose of it is to progress to the next level of fame hovering over this we can see the different levels and hovering over this one will show us exactly which level we are and the benefits that we get the primary bonuses from each level of fame is getting secular opinion so opinion with uh non-uh theocratic rulers along with that you'll also get additional nights which is a mechanic that we'll cover in the military tutorial so while the primary purpose of getting additional level of fames and filling out this bar is to get those bonuses there are also other reasons that you'll want higher levels of fame uh there's different mechanics that require you to be a certain level so piety is essentially the equivalent of prestige and then we have levels of devotion which are the equivalent of fame so similarly you're going to have a bar that you have to fill up and these are different levels of devotion and the primary purpose of devotion you can't see it here but when we get to faithful you'll notice that it is increasing our opinion with the clergy and that's the primary purpose of it but again like the fame there are different mechanics that will require a certain level of devotion and we have one more value that uses a similar mechanic and that is renown renown is essentially your dynasty prestige this is a dynasty based game it's all about spreading your dynasty and making it more powerful and it also has levels and these levels are called splendor has quite a few more levels than you'll see for the other one since this is one that will stick with your character with your dynasty i should say as you play different characters and prestige and piety on the other hand are associated with just the character that you're currently playing as the bonus you get from the level of your splendor is primarily the amount of prestige that children of your dynasty will start with you also get more prestige from marrying into dynasties that have higher levels of splendor and they will get more prestige from marion into your dynasty finally your ruler's maximum long rain bonus which they get for having been the ruler for a certain amount of time that will be increased but the higher this gets so for right now we can only get a plus 20 opinion bonus with other rulers we'll eventually be able to get a plus 25. next you'll see we have a number of troops here this is the total number of troops that you have under your command this is the most that we can pull up not counting mercenaries or holy orders over and over this also shows a breakdown of your military this is all something that we'll talk about in the military tutorial on the last number up here along the top is your domain this is the maximum number of holdings that you are able to hold you also see why we're able to hold that many being a king has given us a plus three then we have a few other benefits that are increasing our domain limit but one of the primary ones that's going to affect your domain limit is one of your character skills which we'll touch on when we start looking at our character page but last thing i would like to mention is exactly what a holding is when we zoom in on the map here we'll see that each one of these areas is a county so each one of these is the county and within the counties they have different holdings the number of holdings that a county has can vary quite a quite a bit you see that this county here only has two holdings while this county here has a total of five and then there can be three different types of counties well four three available to us there's also a tribal holding that we'll have to take a look at later since we do not have tribal holdings and we'll be taking a look at holdings a little bit later in the video first let's go to probably the most important tab in the game hitting f1 or clicking on your character's face right here will open up the character tab so this is king bernat etsy of aragon sorry if i mispronounced that but this is the character that we are currently playing as and there is a wealth of information on this tab up here at the top we'll see our spouse if we have one we'll also see our direct heir this is the character that we will play as when we die and is primarily determined by your succession laws we'll take a look at that a little bit later this is our character's age hovering over it you'll see the tooltip that'll tell us exactly when he is born now the tooltips on this game are incredibly helpful they also can have tool tips within tooltips within tooltips so it's like inception or something like that so if we hovered over one of our our traits here we could have our own diplomacy you know tell us all about that and from there we're gonna hover over to learn about skills or opinions so a lot of this stuff is already explained in the game so i'm not going to insult your intelligence and explain every single little mechanic because you can easily read it yourself actually our character's age will see our health we see our character is fine but it also tells the sources that are affecting that so we've had a venomous encounter and that's hurting our health a little bit but we've also had a re reinvigorating friendship so it will not tell you exactly when your character is going to die but it will tell you when you're getting close to death and then finally we have our sexual orientation we are heterosexual you could be heterosexual homosexual bisexual or asexual now if we move along here we'll see our characters three primary personality traits so in addition to the benefits or the negatives that we get from the personality trait this will also highly determine how our character gains stress the things that might stress it out as well as the the many activities that might relieve stress are very much dependent off these character traits so you certainly want to pay attention to those for your particular character next you'll see your education trait we'll talk about education a little bit later in the video but you'll notice that the star here tells us how good that education trait is it goes from one to four with one being the worst and four being the best as you can see our character our king did not do very well in his education despite having pretty high stats here he just didn't do very well learning stewardship so these are the four traits that every character will have they'll all have three personality traits and one education trait after that they may have additional traits as our king does for instance we are handsome this is a physical trait which is congenital which means that it can be given to any children that he happens to have and we'll talk about breeding and traits when we get into the conversation about marriage next you see we have the eagle reveler this is a lifestyle trait we gain this particular trait because we like to go to feast feasts that we happen to throw as well as the feast of our her vassals and the last one is a pilgrim trait which i gained because i completed a pilgrimage to a holy site and that's something we'll look at a little bit later as well next we have the different skills of your character skills can be affected by a variety of things and most importantly they all have their own effects that you can see down here on the bottom i'll hover over them all so you can see them we won't discuss them because i think they're pretty self-explanatory uh next to that you'll have your character's religion and your character's culture and we'll talk about culture and religion a bit later and then these are the little modifiers that aren't traits they're temporary modifiers typically temporary that are affecting your character you see many of these are positive however we can also get negatives such as this venomous encounter that is affecting our health next you'll see the shield that represents our dynasty clicking on the shield will open up the dynasty tab from here you can see who your dynasty head is the dynasty head is the most powerful character in the dynasty and gets several powerful benefits also see any house modifiers you have we have the crusading house which is increasing our piety because we have gone on crusade members of our dynasty have gone on crusades we can see our total splendor which is again also available up here and we can click on this to see all of the members of our dynasty from here we can also access our dynasty tree this will show us all the living and dead members of our dynasty you can close any window with the escape tab let's go back to our dynasty and we'll take a look at legacies so once you get a certain amount of renown you can purchase these legacies these legacies apply to all members of your dynasty and their benefits that you can gain from one of seven different trees each legacy costs more as you move to the right here they get more expensive but the benefits are often more powerful than what you'll see here in the beginning as this character i'm currently saving up my renown to get our dynasty's first legacy we haven't gotten any legacies prior because i've been using my renown for a few other things that we'll talk about a little bit later when we talk about character interactions so this is again the dynasty tab so the next thing that we're going to want to look at is the fact that we can from here also access our primary title and this is the the title screen the screen will show you a variety of information including everybody who's a claimant to that particular title uh any uh other titles this is a part of this is the kingdom of aragon so it's part of the empire of hispania and it'll also show you any titles that can be created that are inside of this kingdom so in this case it'll be these two dutchies which i could create if i so desired creating that title would then make me the duchy of aragon and there are reasons to do so and reasons not to do so the primary reason to create a title besides just having more wonderful titles is because any vassals that are within that land that you don't have a title to will get an opinion penalty to you until you do get the title of course there are reasons not to create a title uh for instance you can only hold two dutchy titles before your vassals will be unhappy with you so i already have uh one dutchy tunnel if i create it i could create another one but if i created a third one then i would start getting that opinion penalty so always remember that that having more than two duchy titles will affect your opinion with all of your vassals another reason not to create a dutchy title is if you have certain types of succession uh where all your titles are handed out to your your children in which case you could be creating very powerful uh vassals that will be you know the brothers and sisters of your next ruler uh when all those titles are are given out another thing i should mention in here is that you'll notice that because it's this is a duchy it also shows us that it is part of the kingdom of aragon if we were to click on a county here and i'll show you that it's part of the duchy the kingdom and the empire here so let's go back to that kingdom title the kingdom of aragon now you can click on this button to go back or you can use the hotkey b which is probably my most frequently used hockey very very useful for instance and it's not just within any tabs up here you can also use it say down here and click on this character and now i want to go back and now we are back to the kingdom of aragon title screen here here we can see the capital you can see the realm succession laws as well as who's online to inherit this title with my son in air being the primary heir we can also add specific laws only to this title should also be mentioned that there are some succession laws here that are not available in the normal succession laws and the last thing we could do here is destroy a title you cannot destroy a primary title but we could destroy say this duchy title if we so desired and of course you'll notice that does cost prestige and it will affect the opinion of any vassals that are with inside that duchy because most of those counts would prefer that i gave that title to them rather than destroy it so very useful screen here we can also rename our title if we wanted to uh but we're not going to do that right now let's go back to our our character next you'll see a variety of values for this specific character of course when it's our own character most of this is all easier seen up here our troops piety prestige and gold but for characters other than yourself that's gonna be the primary way that you find out these values for them most importantly this is the best way to see how many troops a character might have available for him for example if you were planning on maybe declaring war on them soon now here in the middle this is the list of all of our current titles they are sorted by their rank with the kingdom titles being here further to the left or i should say emperor titles if you have one would be further to the left and then any bereni's that you happen to have would be here on the furthest right and then down below this is all of our claims we only currently have one claim on that county right there hovering over any of these titles will show you exactly where the title is on the map you can also click on them and that'll show you where that title is as well so we have one claim here and claims will allow us to declare war to try and get that county duchy kingdom allow you to get that title and on the right here you'll see any diplomatic relations we have as right now we just have an alliance with our neighbor here we also see any wars that a character happens to be in you'll see any truces that you have as well and then lastly down here at the bottom we have four different tabs the family which will show you all of your family of course relationships the court these are all the people that are currently in your court including guests and courtiers the difference being that a courtier is in your court and they work for you you can give them jobs they can fight as knights you can hand them titles while a guest on the other hand is somebody just visiting they can be visiting for a variety of reasons but you can always request that a guest be recruited to court often that does require a bit of money it does also result in them having a higher opinion of you for a time and then when you recruit them they'll become a courtier that you can then make use of the last thing i'd like to cover on this character tab is the differences that you might see if your plane is a different religion so right now we are a christian but if we were to say be a muslim you notice we have a new category here our secondary spouses muslims are able to have additional spouses and if we were to say go over to a pagan country like lithuania you'll notice they have the concubines and of course you can hover over that to see the the difference of of concubines and and the secondary spouses so those are the very basics the currencies and your character screen now probably the most important button in the game is the current issues button this will show you all the things that might need your your attention in your realm uh so these are all the possible wars i could declare these are all characters that i have cbs on cass's belly which casts as ballet is a cause for war you cannot just declare war on whoever you want in ck3 you do have to have a reason for that let me also tell you if a powerful vassal demanding a council position that's something we'll talk about when we go into uh vassals in in council positions uh we can change a a duke's contract here another thing we'll discuss a little bit later titles that can be created as well as any uh titles we happen to be online to inherit so we're third in line to inherit all these titles here which happens to be our brother's land this button is incredibly important you're going to use it all the time if you're ever wondering if there's anything you missing you just need to click on this you can also hit the tab to open it up as well that is the hotkey you'll notice that sometimes you'll have blue ones blue ones are more like suggestions the game suggesting some of the things that you could potentially do you can easily dismiss those if you don't want to be notified of a certain thing you can always dismiss it and then you can refresh it reset all this to get all of those those uh notifications that you happen to dismiss in the past so next we're going to go over all the different buttons on the ui here what they do all the different tabs on their hotkeys and again what you'll be doing inside of those tabs we're going to start down here on the bottom left of the screen so this is our stress as we talked about before the traits of your character uh will often impact what they feel comfortable doing and what they enjoy doing if you ask your character to do something that they really don't feel comfortable doing for instance you have a compassionate character and you ask them to do something that's cruel or if you have a forgiving character and you ask them to imprison somebody then they won't they won't like that though aren't stressed from it because they would prefer to forgive the character so your traits will heavily impact what you gain stress from getting in a little bit of stress is a normal part of the game and not something you should worry about as long as you can keep those levels low once you get to 100 stress though then you get to the first stress level when you get to a new stress level there'll be an event that will pop up of your character having a mental breakdown these mental breakdown events are mostly negative they're going to result in you getting some type of negative trait typically or some other form of penalty now you can decide to not do anything for your character and just let them keep the stress but the purpose of course of that event is to allow you to reduce your your stress level in addition those mental breakdowns will often give your character an outlet for reducing stress so for perhaps they become a drunk and then they're always able to take a decision which is something we'll take a look at later when we look at the decision tab they'll take a decision to go drink or maybe they'll be somebody who likes to frequent brothels and they'll be able to take a decision to go to the brothel and that'll reduce their stress or perhaps they like to spend money so get a decision to go to the marketplace and spend some money to reduce their stress overall those decisions while they do help you reduce stress they have negatives associated with them as well of course you know going to the marketplace your character spending money going to the brothel though could result in your character getting some type of std let's say you choose not to reduce your stress level and it gets up to 200 which is the next level once again you'll have a mental breakdown and the this time it'll be even worse and then finally with the third one is is the worst one when you get 300 stress so gaining a little bit of stress is not something that you want to stress out about but it is definitely something you want to watch make sure it doesn't get too high and take any actions you can to reduce that and when we go into the decision tab we'll show some of the different ways that any character is able to reduce their stress next we'll see our primary title down here clicking on that will open up the screen we've already seen the title screen uh and then next we have our lifestyle focus which we will look at that here in a minute first let's go over these three tabs because they're a little bit easier to cover and we've already covered a couple of them so with this one this just opens your dynasty tab it's one more way to access it next we have our religion tab so this tells us what our current religion is and it'll tell us all the beliefs of our religion every religion will have different tenets and these can drastically affect all characters that follow that religion can give you some benefits and give you some negatives open up whole entirely new mechanics so if you're playing as a religion for the first time in the game one that you've never played as then you definitely want to come and take a look at the religion screen to see the different tenets that you have again because those are quite important below that you will see all of the the traits that your religion considers to be sins and virtues and these can be quite different based on what the religion is and you'll also see that when you look at any character so we're looking at our ruler here he doesn't have any but deceitful for christianity is considered a sin so therefore it is red it is highlighted red and let's say we're to look at our mother here she was compassionate and it is highlighted green because that is considered a good trait a virtue next is doctrines these are religious laws that determine what is acceptable within your faith so you can hover over each one again great tooltip system really does explain everything for you we see all of our doctrines here you know whether divorce is allowed and if it must be approved how we treat bastards the different types of marriages you can have you know whether you can have more than one marriage for instance as well as what crimes are actually considered criminal whether they're shunned or whether they're allowed clergy doctrines which is very specific to the clergy and then lastly here at the bottom there's special doctrines if your religion happens i have any and in this case we have the teachings of jesus as catholicism you'll see your current head of faith if you have one for your faith this of course for catholicism is the pope each faith also has holy sites if your faith owns these holy sites then you'll get these benefits all characters who follow this face will get these benefits if the holy site is held in our campaign catholicism owns all the holy sites so we're getting all of these benefits if we didn't have one holy sites then it would be marked red indicating that we do not get that benefit finally you'll see that we have the button here to look at other face so just say you're curious let's say an event pops up that says a heresy is spreading and you are given the option to adopt that heresy and maybe you want to take a look what the benefits are what the tenants are what the sins and virtues are you can always just click on these to see those specific faith i should also mention fervor which you can see the value up here at the top for us is ten percent fervor goes from zero to 100 percent it is unique to each religion they each have their own fervor level uh fervor impacts quite a few mechanics with low fervor you'll see more rulers creating new face creating heresies i should say you'll also notice that it's easier to convert a province or a character that has a faith that is a low fervor and then higher fervor does the exact opposite you're less likely to see the heresies because it's more expensive to to create new religions and it's also more difficult to convert them the primary factor that influences fervor is the holy wars as well as the heresies uh when heresies happen uh fervor will increase so by creating a new faith for instance you would increase the fervor and then having a holy war declared on you will also increase the fervor of your religion and if you declare a holy war then that will decrease the further fervor of your religion notice i purposely avoided the create new faith button you can always click on that to create your own christian faith here choosing a name and icon and and all the tenants and doctors and stuff everything that we already went over and that we can create that faith and it's gonna cost a certain amount of piety so that's one of the things that we can spend piety on is creating a new christian faith this is a super cool mechanic to play with it gives you a lot of options you really get to create something unique and it's one of my favorite parts of the game it's something you're probably not going to do on your first playthrough but it's definitely something you're probably going to do at some point because it's a lot of fun creating your own faith so that is the religion tab on the last tab down here at the bottom is our culture one so this is essentially technology technology works a lot different than in ck2 for any of you previous players so which technologies and their bonuses that you get will be entirely dependent on your culture there are four different stages each with their own technologies so if you're to start with that first start date you would be here in this tribal phase the next phase is early medieval the next one is high medieval and then we have the late medieval you cannot start researching these until you've gotten to that year and you've also fulfilled the other requirements so we are currently in high medieval we just entered there not that long ago so we don't actually have any of these technologies yet you see a little progress bar when we hover over it and then go into the tooltip it'll show us exactly how long we're expected to get this and how long it's going to take for us to get it in this case it's 261 years it is impacted mostly by the development of any counties of your culture now you may be saying yourself 261 years that's quite a long time well the head of culture which similar to the dynasty head or the househead our houses are something i didn't talk about when we had our discussion over dynasties but essentially dynasties are are a collection of several different houses each house will have its own head and house heads do have their own interactions they can do with members of their house similar to the dynasty head but again they can only use those interactions with members of their house and not with somebody who's just a member of their dynasty so houses essentially represent cadet branches of a dynasty so unlike dynasties and househeads where you know dynasty head is the most powerful ruler in that dynasty and the househead is the most powerful ruler in that house the culture is not necessarily the most powerful ruler of that culture instead it's the ruler that has the most counties of course they do have to be the same culture but it's the ruler of that culture that has the most counties of that culture so in our case we have 19 counties of our culture so therefore we are the cultural head the benefit of the cultural head is that you get to pick a fascination and that'll use your learning towards getting that fascination so the fascination is one technology that you pick to focus on and so in this case i am focusing on guilds so that i can increase our domain limit from seven to eight so that i'll be able to hold more counties under my direct control and because i am selecting this as my fascination we are going to complete it in 22 years and you can change which tech or innovation that you are fascinated with at any time so if we wanted to change over to land grants we could do that we'd get that in 24 years and we can go back to guilds so the final tab that we need to discuss down here in the bottom left screen is the lifestyle focuses so there's five different categories of lifestyles diplomacy marshall stewardship entry and learning our character is currently working in the stewardship tab and we have three different focuses for each one of these types which are each one of these broad categories so in the case of stewardship we have the well focused domain focus and duty focus and you'll see the different benefits that you get here and each one has a different benefit so well focus is focused on getting us more money domain focus is getting us more stewardship and the duty focus is going to give us these benefits down here and each one of these has their own focuses so you pick which one you want to do if i wanted to say switch which i don't think i can right now because i just went to this not that long ago and you can only switch it every so often but if i wanted to switch then i could switch once i had waited long enough i could switch to say authority focus now you notice that all focuses in a category have one similar benefit and that is that they are granting experience within that category so all three of these are going to give us 27 experience per month and it is always the same for the focuses so it doesn't matter which one we pick we're always going to get the same amount of experience within that category and one thing you will notice is that our marshall experience per month is only 25 while our stewardship is 27 per month we hover over the stewardship experience here we'll see why that is so we have to get to 1 000 experience and then we'll be able to select a new perk and that is because it has taken us three years with the 27 per month the base is 25 per month again that's for every category but because of our education focus we're getting a plus 10 percent the number of stars you have on your education you know how high a level it is will determine how much experience you get so if you have the level four for a particular education trade or uh you know martial trade if you're in that category then that will grant you 40 percent bonus here so quite a bit more so your education trait is incredibly important and while you can work on getting experience in any one of these categories that you so desire it is technically more efficient to make sure that you're doing the category that your education pertains to so in our case it's only slightly better because of our terrible education level but it is better for us to stay within stewardship so the focus is here are your primary way of getting experience but sometimes you'll get experience from events as well but regardless of how you got the experience once you get enough to unlock a perk you'll then be able to select one perk from with any of these three trees you do have to go in order so in our case we can go all the way down these three and we'd have to go down both of these in order to get this popular figurehead and we are not required to complete a tree in order to move on to the next if say there was one over here that we really really wanted we wanted to clean the throne against our leaves we could always go and get that however it is often beneficial to try and complete the tree because at the end of the tree you get a very very nice lifestyle trait so in our case we'll get the architecture increasing our stewardship and allow us to build uh buildings and and uh holdings much faster and for cheaper gold cost so i'm not gonna go over all the different trees here that's something that could make up its whole entire video but needless to say there are some very good benefits that you can get here very powerful benefits and i haven't found any trees yet that don't have any purpose any reason to go down them some are clearly better in most situations but there's none that i've seen that are completely useless one of my favorite i should mention is intrigue has some some fantastic bonuses here that are really fun to play around with and these focuses can often unlock like entirely new mechanics like different uh decisions you can take uh different character interactions you can do so definitely want to carefully consider what would be most beneficial to you before you select a perk so next we're going to go ahead and take a look at all these tabs on the top right corner of the screen take a look at what information they contain and and what you can do in them so hitting the f2 key is going to bring up our main realm uh tab so from here we can see all of our vassals you can see all the different types of information we might want to know about them the realm size whether considered a powerful vassal their stats currently what kind of levees and taxes we are getting ours are reduced because we are not the rightful liege of uh the prince here and that's something i mentioned before that has to do with the titles you hold i do not hold his duchy or his kingdom title i don't hold the kingdom of accutane and i don't hold the duchies that he's in so therefore the levies and taxes i get from him are currently being reduced you can see his tax levels his levy's level and exactly what he's paying us here in these bars so we're getting 0.3 per month and taxes being paid by the prince and 496 levies again the levies and all the military matters is something we'll talk about in that respective tutorial however one thing we do want to talk about here is the modification of fetal contracts so this is the feudal contract screen from here we can make many adjustments to their taxes or to their levies and there's also a lot of special options here so the taxes this is what you'd expect it to be determines how much money we are currently getting from this vassal uh with the the levees this determines how many levies we're getting you can see them increase and decrease there and both of these will impact the opinion of the character so and this is always going to be the case as long as you have this in place so if i increase taxes on him then you'll see that his opinion is currently being reduced by negative 15. turns out the vassals don't like having to pay more taxes likewise if we were to reduce it we'd get a plus five opinion boost and then we have the different special contracts options many of these need to be unlocked with certain technologies and innovations i should say cultural innovations and then we have some other benefits down here again these are all explained in the tooltips but some of these are more beneficial to you and others are more beneficial to them so for instance we could do the succession rights a forced partition if we do this then it doesn't really matter what his succession law is we are forcing him to partition all of his lands out between his children so this is a negative one that would reduce his opinion however we can also do one that has both benefits and negatives this one here will result in us gaining less development but our vassal gaining more development which perhaps might be beneficial if you're wanting your vassals around capital to increase the development unless this one does not have any opinion increase or decreases no opinion effects so one that might be beneficial to the vassal is war declaration we can sanction war declaration so they can declare war regardless of what our crown authority laws are something we'll look at here in a minute and uh this is is a positive one so it's going to increase his opinion now you may have noticed that when i attempted to increase his taxes we got a notification here saying that this is considered an act of tyranny you cannot just increase taxes and increase levies and give negative feudal contract modifications to your vassal without all of your vassals considering it to be tyranny tyranny is a mechanic that represents you doing things that vassals don't like that they consider tyrannical and outside the realm of your authority this increasing the taxes on this vassal would be considered outside the realm of our authority so therefore it's going to result in all of our all of our subjects losing 20 opinion of us there's two ways you can modify a feudal contract without getting any tyranny the first and typical one is to give them something beneficial for the negative that they're getting so let's say we need more money so we're going to increase our feudal taxes and let's say we have plenty enough men we can reduce the fetal levies and now you'll notice that we are not getting tyranny because we are giving him something in exchange and that does also work for here so let's say we wanted to give him the war declaration being sanctioned well now that will also let us increase the feudal taxes without getting any tyranny now the second way that we could change a fetal contract in a way that benefits us without getting tyranny is if we have a hook now this is something that i'm going to talk about more in the espionage tutorial but hooks are essentially you know you get them from secrets you know about the the character maybe the character owes you a favor if the character such as in this case was born of your dynasty and you're the dynasty head one of the benefits of being the dynasty head is that you get a hook a weak hook as soon as that character's born now there are two different types of hooks weak hooks and strong hooks and again i don't want to go too much into this because we'll talk about this in another tutorial but essentially strong hooks never go away you'll better use them multiple times they just have a cool down on them while we cooks once you use them once they will go away and certain weak hooks will also go away after a certain amount of time you'll lose them after you know maybe after 10 years most important aspect of a strong hook is that when you have a strong hook on a character they cannot take negative actions against you so they cannot join uh say a faction again another mechanic we'll be going over a little bit later in the video and they also can't try and assassinate you so if you have a hook on a character then you can use that hook which again if it's a weak hook then we will lose it we could use that hook to change up their fetal contract we could make his feudal levees massive you'll see we're gaining tyranny because we haven't given him anything in return however if we click to use our hook then that will not happen and then we can increase the levees without getting tyranny now that does not change the fact that we're still going to always have this negative 25 opinion with this vassal because of how high our feudal levees are on him so let's go back to our realm view here but the most important thing on this screen is your crown authority right here up at the top what your current crown authority is will highly determine what you are allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do what's considered tyrannical and what is not now this is going to be different your crown authority is going to be different if you're a tribal country so if you were say starting that first start date and you're over here in denmark uh and you know the 9th century then you're going to have very different tribal authority benefits overall they're going to be much weaker because you're tribal hovering over each one will show you which benefits it gets we are currently at high crown authority however we can pass absolute crown authority now these are kind of determined on the innovations so you can't might not always be able to go up to a higher level but we could do it for this character by spending some of our prestige to increase our uh crown authority which will give us a variety of of benefits but you'll also notice that there is a key negative here that the vassals do not like us increasing crown authority so they're they're going to have this negative 30 opinion of us at all times as long as we have the absolute crown authority law which is different from the negative 10 that we're currently getting so it's a pretty big jump overall our vassals are not going to be happy with us changing it to absolute and we'll use prestige to do so it costs 432 prestiges for us to change that now with our vassals we can sort them based on feudal republic or clans we do have one clan basel he's right over here and then we have the republics and the feudals now when we look at the counties we'll talk about the differences between uh the types of of vassals now down here is a good summary of our lands here we have the total sum of opinions that are affecting just our vassals so we're getting a plus 27 to all vassals we also see our dread down here this is one thing i did forget to mention that is currently on the uh it's on the character screen as well it's next to all these other values that are up here for our character and dread is essentially how much people are afraid of you so doing certain things torturing characters arresting characters defeating a character that rebelled from you these are all things that are going to increase your dread and if you have a high enough dread a certain character would be afraid of you now how much dread you need for a character to fear you is is highly based off of their traits so a brave character is going to be much more difficult to you know get them to fear you so for example we have our count here uh he's not a coward but he is afraid of us despite the fact that our dread is only eight and you can see that right here we have him intimidated so because he's intimidated he fears us and he's less likely to oppose us directly however we can get that even higher like say with a a child who is you know he's only 14 years old and he is absolutely terrified of us he's trembling before us and he will never oppose us directly so dread can be incredibly helpful for keeping your vassals in line and you can see how you know doing tyrannical actions you know reduce your opinion with all your vassals by quite a bit where they'll attempt to oppose you in many different types of ways but if they fear you then it doesn't really matter if you have high tyranny because they're too afraid to do anything about it so it's it's just one of the many different ways that you can play in ck3 where you can reign as a terrifying tyrannical lord who everybody's too afraid to act against also see our vassal limit down here vassal limit is sort of like our domain limit except for this applies to how many vassals we are allowed to hold it's heavily dependent on your your current rank so as king we're allowed to have 40 vassals i think as a duke you're only allowed to have 20 vassals and so right now we are nowhere near that but yeah we do not want to go over our vassal limit the best way to avoid doing that of course is to have higher tier titles so if you're a king then you want to give out some of those duke titles perhaps create duke titles and then put the counts that are in that duchy's you know area and put the counts there underneath the duke and that is how you reduce your total number of vassals so that you can stay underneath that limit and finally down here at the bottom you'll see the total taxes and levies that we are getting this is how much we get from our domain our own seven holdings there that's the number of taxes and number of levies we're getting there and then this is what we're getting from our vassals so that is everything on this screen so now let's look at the next sub tab in the realm tab and that is the domain sub tab so these are all again all of our holdings that we have this is one way to access them if you don't want to have to go you know look for them on the map and from here you can click on them and that will access them for you to build there do whatever you want to happen to do in that county able to see the development again these these are factors that we'll talk about when we look at the county view you know but you can see the development the control how much money you're getting from how much levies you're currently getting them from them this is really useful when you have a lot of holdings my previous character i think had 13 total holdings and so it was very helpful to scroll through here and not have to look for them on the map from here we can also see if any of our holdings are constructing something as well as their current progress on that we can see if we have any empty holdings that we might want to build in again something we'll take a look at when we go down to the county view and we still see the same tab here which shows all the the domain stuff highlighted finally we have the succession sub tab so this is how we determine who succeeds us as air and there are two parts to it the first is the actual succession law and there's two types of succession laws we have the multiple air one and the single layers so with multiple errors this results in your all of your titles being separated and given out to all of your your possible heirs all your children and there's there's three different types here again i won't go over exactly what they all do because you can hover over it look at the the tool tip and it'll explain to you what they do and what benefits they have and who will inherit those titles so these are the multiple air ones overall these are negative you would prefer to have a single error where just one person gains control of all your titles of course primogeniture is the one that we see almost all of europe eventually develop this is often the one that you'll want to get this is your oldest child inherits however sometimes you might want to have the youngest child inherit or maybe you want the oldest house member to inherit but overall the single air one is much better since it doesn't result in your land being constantly broken apart every time you you die your character dies one thing i should mention is that your primary title will always go to your primary heir so i'm going to say in the case of us our our king title kingdom of aragon is going to go to our primary heir if we were to have another son because again this is based on our gender laws which is something we'll look at here in a minute if we had another son then they would inherit titles as well now with the high partition law that i have enacted it's not what we started with this does result in the majority of our titles going to our primary error while any other errors that get a lot less land but most countries start with partition which results in your titles being divided equally between your children so just for an example when my previous ruler died which was the queen here queen cecilia when she died most of her titles including the kingdom of aragon our main duchy title went to our new character the eldest son however his brother also inherited quite a few titles so our younger son inherited this other duchy title who is now our brother and that's the reason why i don't have two duchy titles since our brother here has the other one that i was currently holding so of course i could create an additional duchy title now let's say that the the queen here was not a queen let's say she was the duchess then what would end up happening you cannot have a vassal of similar rank so our current character would have became a duke and he would have got one of these dutchy titles while our brother would have gotten the other one and thus would have completely separated from our realm he would no longer be our vassal and directly under control so we lose control of that land so that's one thing to consider you could end up losing uh you know huge parts of your your empire with this multiple error succession types last thing i want to mention on this succession tab is that you cannot change a succession law unless all of your powerful vassals support you they all have to have a positive opinion of you so in this case this count doesn't like us in negative three opinion which wouldn't be hard to change and increase uh but because he does not support us we could not change our succession law and we'll talk about powerful vassals when we discuss the council so the next tab is f3 the military tab again this is something that i want to to talk about in a different video since again there's a lot to this and a lot of detail that we can go over here so i'm not going to go into a lot of detail just kind of show you the basics you know your total soldiers your levees your knights you can click on this here and this will show you who your current nights are from here you can you know force somebody to build a night or forbid them again these are all things i'm going to talk about in the the next video uh inviting new nights of night effectiveness all that stuff we're going to talk about same thing here with the men of arms regiments but the important point is here that with this tab the military tab f3 you will be able to to see all this information you can set rally points set if you're reinforcing troops and there's an important factor here you can see how much they're going to cost you once they're all raised up right now they're costing us negative 5.5 per month and when we hover over our expenses we can see that uh if we had raised them up during war then it cost us a lot more money in fact it put us in the negative we'd actually be losing money every month because of how expensive our very large military is from here you can also access mercenaries and of course you have holy orders here if you happen to have access to any of them again all these are things we'll talk about in that military video let's go and move to the next tab f4 the console tab so these are the people who are helping you rule your realm so here at the top left corner is your spouse this will always be a spot reserved for your spouse so using this button here you can see all the different jobs you can have your spouse do the first one here at the top is just to assist the ruler this is essentially kind of what the spouses did in ck2 where they just gave you some of their skill points and that is entirely based off of off of their skills let's actually close this and and open up her skills uh so we can see that uh we're getting the most stewardship and intrigue because her stewardship and intrigue is highest so you can do this one to get the uh just bonuses across all of your skills and and they're not going to give you huge bonuses but this is a good generic one when you don't really want anything specific you can also though have your spouse he or she focus very specifically on one skill type and this will result in you getting a lot more of that skill type now what i noticed is assist ruler typically results in you getting more overall skill points but again they are so spread out that the the benefits are are not that much uh when you really think about it so for our current spouse she has a very high skill rating and i should mention that it's half of whatever they have as you notice we're getting a plus eight for our stewardship because she has a 16. while court entry we're only getting plus seven because it's 15. so if her court intrigue went up by one point then it would be plus eight like the stewardship and so we can have her focus on this one area and just give us that one flat bonus and because you can change this at any time you can you can change it based on what you currently need so i could change this over to focus on managing my domain if i wanted to and that will drastically increase my total stewardship rating there is an additional effect of these spouse jobs they will also often result in you getting these i wouldn't say events because they don't pop up they pop up down here in the right as a little message where your spouse will get you a variety of bonuses sometimes they increase the skill of one of your one of your other council members perhaps they improve a province and start improving the development there maybe they find somebody secret there's a lot of different things they could do and it is uh based off of what you currently have than working on so while the spouse is always at the top left corner here your current religious leader in your country your highest religious leader in our case this is our archbishop it's over here in the top right corner so the archbishop essentially in control of all of the the temples all of the churches whatever your religious holdings for your your particular religion whatever they're called they manage all of those for you and so this is a lot different for you ck2 vets who are probably used to having you know a a bishop for each one of your religious holdings it results in you having like a ton of religious uh vassals that you don't interact with much and they just end up increasing your vassal number by quite a bit so this is a very nice change because it's just one religious vassal that you have to deal with of course that does mean that unlike ck2 these vassals are incredibly powerful because he manages all of your religious holdings so if you want all the taxes and levies that are available from those religious holdings you have to keep your opinion high with the archbishop here and if you hover over if your round priest endorses you again if he has a negative opinion he won't be giving you anything if he has a positive opinion then you'll be getting these taxes and these levies so it's very important that you keep the archbishop and your realm happy so you get all that money and all those levies now you notice that with this counselor as well as all the other counselors a little bit different than the spouse we have three different jobs that they can do here so the religious relations job here will increase our piety every month as well as increase our ruler opinion with any theocratic catholic rulers we can convert faith into county which is what i'm currently doing we have a muslim county here that we are converting this takes a very very long time to do especially if you have a low learning archbishop unfortunately we cannot appoint our archbishop here in catholicism certain religions will get that benefit where they'll be able to appoint their archbishop i cannot the the pope appoints him so therefore i don't have any control of the fact that i have a a poor archbishop he's not he's not very learned and so therefore i'm not getting uh very good bonuses here and then the last one here is to fabricate a claim on the county this is one of the more important ones that he's going to be doing this will be one way that you can get claims on counties to declare war so next we have our four main council members these are all the ones that we are able to appoint that's the count the chancellor the steward the marshall and the spymaster and we can see that they each have a particular skill that they make use of to do these jobs now these ones you can change and appoint whoever you want however you'll notice that i have the duke here who's not a very good spymaster and yet i have him on my council position now this is something that we've already seen multiple times in this video and that is the powerful vassal mechanic down here next to any character that is a powerful vassal in fact we'll go and take a look at the duke here he's our cousin uh he's a member of our dynasty and overall he loves us so he is a a powerful vassal you'll see that on all the characters and and the fist could be this color here or it could be red because all powerful vassals expect a spot on your council now if you are a duke position or lower then you only have four powerful vassals which there happens to be exactly four spots so with that you can appoint all your powerful vassals to a spot on your council to keep them happy however when you become a king you will get a fifth powerful vassal so a total of five and that is why you might have noticed in here we have a powerful vassal that demands a council position this vassal the one who we've already seen doesn't like us he has a red fist because he's upset about not being on the council but as a king you are always going to be upsetting one of your powerful vassals with the exception of uh if one of your powerful vassals happens to be a child children will not desire a position on your council uh but other than that uh you're gonna have as a king you're gonna have a powerful vassal that's always gonna be unhappy because you just don't have enough positions for them that result in you kind of having to choose which one of the powerful vassals you want to irritate now of course it is your choice whether you want to appoint powerful vassals to this position honestly many times your powerful vassals are just not very good uh so in this case because i want to keep the duke happy i have him here but he is a a poor spymaster so he's just not doing very good at that job well in the case of this chancellor he's fantastic so we're happy to have him here but maybe we don't want to appease powerful vassals we are free to assign whoever we want here again though every powerful vassal that doesn't have a spot on the council is going to be quite upset with you and we're getting a pretty big hit here with the negative 40 uh for not having him on the council plus i happened to fire him from the council earlier so we're getting a negative 60 total there that's one of the many things you need to consider in ck3 whether you want to appease powerful vassals or focus on getting a high skill rating so that your counselors will be better at their jobs so the chancellor uses the diplomacy skill he can do foreign affairs which increases your prestige every month and also results in the independent rulers having their opinion increased we have the domestic affairs which this results in all our direct vassals having an increased opinion you also notice that they say possible side effects here and we mentioned this with the the spousal events for little little missions again they're not full events that are gonna pop up and block your screen uh but little uh events that can happen uh kind of help you out some of them are negative all the ones in this case happen to be green and positive but these are additional things to consider but for the most part you're going to base it off of the direct benefits so for instance i was a change to foreign affairs here you notice that my opinion with all my vassals has dropped because he currently increases the vassal opinion by 13 so that's immediate as soon as we change it it'll drop all of our vassal's opinion by 13. so domestic affairs is really useful for increasing opinion of any of your vassals and trying to keep your realm stable integrate title allows you to integrate counties into your your title so the kingdom of aragon here we hold all this land here that is not part of the kingdom kingdom aragon's just this so we could select this and then pick a county to have you know slowly drift towards the kingdom of aragon a little bit faster now i believe that this happens already that it slowly happens and i think this just speeds that process up by a lot so we could make it so that these counties are brought into the kingdom of aragon which as we discussed uh any vassal that is not under your direct title or one of your direct titles gets an opinion penalty so that's one way to add those titles to our current primary title now we look at the steward their main skill is stewardship and their three abilities are collect taxes which just generates more money increase development accounting you have to actually select the county you want to have that happen and that will have those following benefits with the main one being development and that's again something we'll look at when we go down to the county level and then we can promote culture to try and uh change the culture of a province to our current culture so next we have the marshall here and as you expect their primary skill is marshall and the jobs they can do is organize levees which increases the total number of levees that you have next you have the train commanders this one is also quite useful uh it will reduce the maintenance cost of your managed arms which can become quite expensive you'll see we're paying negative 5.5 right now but if we're at war that would be even more expensive so that is uh very helpful to have reducing the cost especially if you have a very good marshall and then also it improves the marshall skill of all the knights that you happen to have in addition to increasing martial skill it also increases prowess which is your ability in battle as a knight it's pretty useful to have for improving your commanders and your knights and the last one is increase control in accounting and that'll slowly increase the county control up to 100 percent again something that we'll look at when we look at counties the last but certainly not the least council member he's very important is your spymaster primary skill is intrigue and the three jobs he does is disrupt schemes which will make it so you're better at resisting any hostile schemes again that's something we'll look at in that in the intrigue video and helps you discover schemes and then you have the support schemes this will result in you having more scheme power and success chance for your hostile schemes uh very specifically your hostile schemes again we'll take a look at the differences in those uh later and then we have the find secrets this is one where you'll click on a particular county and he will attempt he or she will attempt to find any secrets in that county you can use that against your own vassals you can also use that against foreign rulers if any secrets on characters will allow you to get hooks on them which can have a variety of uses so this is your council next is the f5 key the court now we already looked at one way where we could see our court of course we can do that in our character tab this is an additional way to do it and it also allows you to recruit recruit any any guest right from here clicking on the button so it's a little bit less buttons than it would be if we did it through the the character screen and these are all our guests it is sorted by guesting and courtiers so these are the current guests that we have and also it was just easier to kind of see their their stats and their traits and skills and all that kind of stuff and then we can see all of our courtiers here at the top we can see our physician we can appoint a physician if we don't have one there's two ways to do that you can do that through here or the decision tab where you say that you want to look for a physician you'll get an event that will pop up where you can select who you want to be your physician typically there's two choices and one's a little bit more expensive that has better skill at being a position while the other one would be cheaper but won't be quite as skilled the primary skill that determines how good your physician is would be their learning uh so you'll notice that uh out of our our four council positions they use these first four skills but none of them use the learning again the archbishop does of course but that's not one that you could typically appoint this is where you'll use the learning skill a high learning skill character this is our stepfather he was married to our mom and uh we can scroll through here and see her there now this is i didn't show this before because we didn't have this button but this is how you look at any previous spouses that you happen to have if you got divorced or if the spouse died so you can use the search for physician button or you can just select any character and use this uh character interactions to either hire as a court position or fire them and we haven't looked at character interactions yet that's something we'll be talking about after we finish going through these tabs actually i'm here you can also invite people to your court inviting knights this is just one of the many ways to do this you can do this on the military tab you can also do this on the decision tab so you typically probably won't use it here you can also invite claimants now inviting claimants is inviting people to your court that are unlanded but have a claim on a land and that essentially gives you a casus belly on you know whoever the holder of that title is where you can declare war on them for that title but rather than you getting the title the claimant will get the title and if that title is lower than your top rank so if you're king then if that title is a duchy county or a barony then that character will become your vassal so it's one way to extend your lands is by inviting claimants and you can extend your lands by a very large amount if you say our king and you're inviting people who have claims to a duchy title to your court the secondary tab here in the court screen is the prison our president is currently empty it's a shame we have no prisoners right now because i always quickly deal with them because we don't have any prisoners i can't show you the interactions so it seems like to me we must get ourselves a prisoner so let's go into our court it's just easier to arrest a courtier than is to arrest a vassal they're just going to find somebody we'll rest this knight he's also my commander he's pretty good i use him because he has a good siege face time he's a holy warrior as well and he's a skill tactician so he's my he's my commander he's also my knight and he's uh very good but we're going to betray him and imprison him now because we have no reason to imprison him which if we did have a reason then under his character we would see a little prison icon that tells you that you have a reason to rightfully imprison him now just because you have a rightful reason to imprison him it doesn't mean that he will willingly allow it you'll have a percentage here that determines how successful you're likely to be right now we have 111 chance so there's no way that he can resist this that's again it's fairly easy to imprison courtiers but if we were say trying to imprison like a powerful duke then this may be much more difficult we might even have a zero percent chance to secede if you try and imprison somebody and you fail then that does result in them going in rebellion now if they don't have any land then they'll just leave the realm uh they'll basically be be banished from the realm now again you rarely ever fell in trying to arrest somebody who doesn't have lands but when it comes to land of characters if you fail then they will go into rebellion and you'll have to fight them and uh subdue them in order to imprison them defeat them in a in a war now let's say you have a hook on a character having a hook on a character just increases the chance that you will succeed as at a prison in them so it is helpful having a hook if there's a character that you want to imprison but you have a lower percentage now because we don't have a reason to imprison him we will get tyranny that's going to anger all of our all our subjects and of course he's going to anger him he won't be too happy about this so let's go and imprison him and uh we will have to let this play for a second for that to happen for just to be able to fully get him in prison doesn't take a minute and there we go and now he is arrested and clicking the f5 key we will now see him in our prison now you see three different things we can do down here at the bottom we can use this screen here or we can just use our character interactions if they're in prison they'll have their own little interactions down here at the bottom and in addition you'll have some that you might not have over here over here we just have the ability to execute and so if we were to click on that we could kill this prisoner and these are the different benefits we'll get of course we'll get dread for killing him as you'd expect and more tyranny and it does cost us piety as well now we'll ignore this middle one negotiate release for right now the next option is is ransom this is ransom for a certain amount of money how much money you can ransom them for is based off of their rank as a unlanded character that's just not very important we would ransom him for 10 gold so for 10 gold he could get out because he does not have 10 gold this option is grayed out and we cannot ransom him other interesting information you may see on here is how long they've been in prison for currently clears this guy's been in prison for zero days we click on him we'll see a couple different additional options as i said we can torture him and we clicked on that kind of shows you what happens here and he'll get that penalty to his health and we can also put him in house arrest so when they're in your prison there's two different types of you know being imprisoned you can be in the dungeon which is where this character currently is they're currently in her dungeon and if they're in the dungeon then they'll have a little icon here that tells you so this tells you all of their penalties such as reducing their diplomacy but most importantly they're going to get their penalty to their health uh so his health is now poor because he's in the dungeon the dungeon is not uh the most healthy and safe of places if you have a character whose health you don't want to be reduced then you'd put him into house arrest instead also you'll get an opinion bonus for doing that with all his family members so then we have the last option which again we can do through here negotiate release or we can do it here now this will give us many different things that we can demand from the character in our prison in order to release him now if we don't check any of these benefits we don't uh you know say that that's what we want then we're basically just releasing him as a form of compassion it's mercy so because of that we will lose dread we're just releasing him but we will also increase the opinion of the character and then he'll leave the prison other things that we can do we can demand his conversion to our faith he is already our face so we cannot demand that from we can banish him which would kick him out of the realm and it'd no longer be our problem so using this uh gaining a hook this is one way you can do additional forms of negotiation because let's say i wanted to change the feudal contract of a landed character but i can't do that through here but if i gain the weak hook by releasing him then after that i will be able to renegotiate his feudal contract and give myself some benefits using that hook the other thing you can do here is have them take the vowels in this case this would force him to be a monk he will not be happy about that but that's one additional option there's a few other options that can pop up too that you don't see here but it depends on again many of the mechanics that you have available to do depend on your religion and your culture so that is essentially everything on this this tab here we're going to just release them because i never wanted to rest them in the first place is good man and now we're going to go into the next tab which is the f6 this is the intrigue tab this is where we see uh all matters regarding intrigue espionage we can see any hostile schemes that we are doing right now our personal schemes any uh secret schemes that we've currently discovered now again these are all things that we're going to discuss in that separate video because this video is already going to be very very long so there's a there's a lot to it so we will not talk about that in here i just wanted to very briefly mention that you can do two different types of schemes and you can run them at the same time personal schemes are are primarily trying to either sway them and improve their relations of you and prove their opinion or trying to romance a character make them into your your lover so those are the the two primary personal schemes well hostile schemes there's a lot of different types of murder schemes abductions claims fabricating hooks these are all possible hostile schemes however i should mention that almost all of these with the exception of the murder scheme do require you to have a certain perk so if you want to abduct or claim a throne or fabricate a hook you do have to have specific perks as your character in order to do that there's also a perk that will allow you to have two hostile schemes going at the same time so you can be attempting to murder one person while fabricating a hook on another so for instance maybe you need to fabricate a hook to get them to join your scheme to murder somebody again these are all things we're going to talk about in another video but i did want to mention that these are available and this is where you find them here is all the hooks and secrets that you know here's all the hooks that you hold hitting this arrow here will open this up so you can see in this case most of the hooks i hold are on children that were born in my dynasty because i do start with the hooks because again i am a dynasty head and then we have any secrets that are currently known to us any hooks that people have on us so somebody has a hook on us uh that'll be available here and then any secrets we have again we just started playing as this character a few years ago so we don't have any secrets now if we did happen to have any secrets that we knew of then we'd get two options on what to do with those secrets one we could reveal them or two we could blackmail the character we could do that through this screen here again check out that intrigue video if you want to see how that all works and uh we'll make use of them we'll try some about and i'll explain how all that works and and also go into some of the tactics that you can utilize through that so the next tab is factions this is uh basically people in provinces in your realm who stand against you so in this case we have uh this faction that wants to gain independence from us you'll notice that there are no characters that are part of this fashion these are all peasants in this realm here most of which are in muslim provinces that are not happy being under my rule now because there's no characters involved with this their mechanic is a little bit different than when there's characters involved so with these guys because they're just provinces they have to get their power up to this line here and once it does then they're going to send an ultimatum after a certain amount of time and that is very much determined by their current discontent so in seven months this faction is gonna send a ultimatum to me uh in this case they're gonna demand their freedom and i can either grant it to them or tell them no in which case they will rise up and i will have to fight them next we have the liberty faction down here now this is the faction that actually has a character involved in it they are too weak to send an ultimatum they haven't gotten up to this this line here and their goal is to lower my crown authority now it's really just this one member here she doesn't like me i do try and focus on getting all members that are in factions out of factions and that's the part that you're going to notice right down here at the bottom vassals who cannot join fashions now there's four main reasons why a vassal wouldn't be able to join a faction the first one is one we see for most of these characters or all these characters actually is because they're under age underage characters can't join fashion so you don't have to worry about them they're not a threat to you until they come of age and characters come of age at 16 in ck3 so once they're 16 year olds they're an adult and these characters will then little joint factions so yes that does mean if you have a vassal who is being particularly irritating and all the other methods to get them out of the faction it's been ineffective and let's say they have an heir who is a young child so killing them would result in their young heir becoming the new ruler and since they can't be in a fashion that would eliminate that ruler until they become become of age another way to stop characters from joining factions is if they are very close to you so if they're a friend uh or a lover then they will not join factions against you if you get a very high opinion of them with you then they're very unlikely to join a fashion they aren't completely prevented from doing it even with a hundred opinion i think they still could technically join a faction if they so desired but i don't typically see characters with high opinions joining factions i think the highest i've seen is about 55 opinion and they'll join a they'll still might join a faction but every time i get them above 60 right around 60 they they typically leave any faction that they might be a part of so increasing opinion is very is one very effective way for getting them out of factions so again to do that you do have to get the opinion somewhat high which can be difficult to do with a particularly disgruntled vassal so that's two of the methods a third method is if they're in prison they cannot join a faction so arresting a faction member uh would allow you so for instance if we wanted to rest this this countess here would allow us to keep them out of the faction the final method for keeping uh vassals out of factions is to have an alliance with them and there's a couple ways for getting alliances that's something we're going to talk about in a little bit when we go into character interactions which will probably be one of the last things that we deal with here uh so the last tab on the right here is the decision tab so the top here these are the major decisions these are things that we aren't going to do very often you can click on them at any time to see the requirements to see what you need to do and most importantly you can use it to kind of see the benefits that you're going to gain here so in this case we're going to gain the strong blood and this is strengthening our bloodline uh consecrating our bloodline another option here that we can do and you see the different benefits we're going to gain from that uh dynasty have many crowns you know there are many different options one of the the really useful ones here is one that we've already taken and that was creating a holy order and that's something we'll look at again when we go into the counties we can create a holy order in one of your baronies so that's a a major decision so all these decisions are ones you're not going to take very often and they're they're very important we're often not you're only going to take them take them once and uh there's something that you have to work pretty hard towards getting and when you can do them this will no longer be checked red these decisions on the other hand are you know ones they're going to take all the time they're lesser decisions now we've already seen that there's other buttons for inviting knights and inviting claimants but you can also do that in here next we'll see that we can borrow gold from our holy order uh we can't actually do that because our holy order which is the knights templar doesn't have enough money to do that but uh that's uh one option here we can revoke the holy order lease since the templar knights are in my lands i can evoke that lease in which case they will then try and get land in another realm you can go on a program ridge which you already saw that our character has just done that and got the the pilgrim trait there and that's because i this character started with really low uh level of devotion so i wanted to get that a lot higher uh so that i could use that for holy war cbs but because we just recently did a pilgrimage can't do one again anytime soon these are the two most common ones uh i will mention this search for physician when you can do this and that's can also again be accessed through up here if we didn't have a physician there'd be a button for us to click on to do that but you can also do it through the decisions but these are the two main ones that every character has access to we can host a feast both of these will reduce your stress so they're one tactic that you have to use to reduce your current stress and the feast will also increase your opinion of your vassals so it's very important for a new ruler typically when i get a new ruler one of the first things i do if i have the money is throw a feast so that way i can increase the opinion of all of my vassals you'll notice that i'm actually able to decrease this by a lot of stress and that's because i have this trait here i like having feasts so therefore i get a lot a lot more stress reduction than i would and what this will end up doing if i was to to take it as it would hold a feast here in my capital and uh different characters go there we have some events associated with it and as you can see you can only do it every five years it does cost money to hold that feast as well and that money is different based on you know how much power you have is much cheaper back when i was a smaller duke so the other option that we have is the ability to call a hunt and this will reduce stress because we're diligent and while the main thing you're getting besides you know stress reduction with the feast is an increased opinion with the vassals the main thing you're getting from a hunt is the ability to increase your prestige so that's just one way to increase your prestige and of course because prestige also affects your fame that's also going to increase your fame these are just two of the generic options that we have here that will allow us to decrease our stress and get some other benefits but again as i said if you get some of those stress traits that allow you to have additional options for reducing stress and those will also be in this decision tab here now the bottom right corner here these are all our different uh tabs for the map modes uh now the map does change based on how far zoomed out you are the furthest zoomed is this nice little paper map and as we zoom closer we get the political map and then we get the details map as we get even closer and then we can also change up the different map modes so these are the kingdom rings and so on it's pretty self-explanatory different cultures and face and so on so that's all of the buttons you should now know how to do just about everything with one exception very important exception uh interacting with characters so if we were to click on our queen here you see all the different options we have with her we could request a divorce if we so desired of course we would have to ask the pope for that and whether you can request a divorce whenever you want to and whether you need approval that is all based on religion we already took a look at that pre earlier in the video so then we have the different personal options here let's say we didn't like that our queen's opinion wasn't at a hundred and so we want to get that full as high as possible then we could start that scheme we have 80 chance of success and 10 months is how long it's going to take for us to complete that and that'll increase her opinion by 25 if we are successful now this is a personal scheme personal schemes will be in here and you'll be able to look at this this is again the intrigue tab f6 and uh the personal schemes you cannot invite people to help you with this this is again it's a personal scheme and that the two primary ones are swaying to increase their opinion or attempting to seduce somebody so other options we have is sending a gift sending a gift is the quickest way to increase the opinion with somebody of course it does cost money to do so uh we can ask her to educate a child for us character education is one thing i would like to take a look at now we've already seen you know our character trait here you know as i said it goes from one to four stars with four stars being the best and one star being the worst uh so this is our daughter and we can select what we want her education focus to be which one of the type of of education we want to have ours was a stewardship one we looked at our wife she was also stewardship but she has two stars over our one star and let's say we're to take a look at her brother here his focus was military so he has the skilled tactician one now we have our daughter here and we can select which education focus we wanted to do now which one you should select will be heavily based off of your character's childhood trait each child will get one childhood trait and it will very much determine what education they'd be good with so with this character she is bossy so because she's bossy she will do well in a martial education however there's often more than one option bossy children are also good with stewardship and then you you can do other ones uh but if you don't pick the one that they're good at then they're less likely to get a good education trade uh with this one we don't have any penalties but and same with this one without you penalties but if we went with the diplomacy one well bossy children just struggle with diplomacy education so it results in this character being less likely to get a good character trait so for our daughter here we're gonna keep it on marshall education now in addition to selecting which education focus a character is going to go with you're also going to want to give them a guardian a guardian will also help that character get a better education trait now when you're selecting a guardian for a child you will of course want to pay attention to that potential guardians education trait and their and their learning ability um but another factor to consider and this is what we're going to do with our own child here is whether or not you just want to make your own uh character the character you're playing as to be the guardian specifically for your heirs we're going to put that in there and now our guardian and we might need to change the character quick now the guardian is ourselves and one reason why you might want to be the guardian for your heir is that uh the guardian will get several events uh during the characters the child's lifetime about certain traits that they have earned they'll earn you know a trait and then an event will fire where you have the option to potentially counsel them away from that trait that's one reason why you might always want to be the guardian of your air so that way you can keep them from getting potentially unwanted traits however if you get one of those events ask you if you want to you know potentially counsel them to to get a different trait than the one they got it does cost stress so you do need to consider that that's one of the many ways that you get stress is uh by the the guardian events now let's say we no longer want to be a guardian maybe it's just too stressful for us we can go through the character interactions which again is right clicking on the character and then we can remove the guardian from this child let's go back to our wife here and see what other options we have available now we can only run one scheme on a character at a time so therefore we cannot seduce a romance let's say we did want to do that well we could always cancel this scheming abandon it and then go to the seduce or romance now the the tooltip does kind of tell you the difference here between seducer romance we're gonna try and romance our wife we have a 95 chance of success it's going to take 15 months certainly it takes a long time to get to get that romance ruin and so now we can do that there's also the option to ask to take vowels you cannot do this with a married character but this is one way to get characters into a holy order or the clergy if you do ask for somebody to take the vows then they will lose the ability to inherit any land so it's just one one of your many tools available for for dealing with potentially unwanted inheritances so these are personal schemes there's a few other ones that will pop up based on uh you know the different mechanics that you have available to you then we have the hostile schemes we've already looked at in prison we have the murder scheme which we can't do against her wife because we are already scheming against her we'll take a look at that with another character and then we have the request excommunication where we ask the pope to excommunicate our wife which will give us many advantages if she is excommunicated it is considered a crime because we are catholic so that's one way that we could potentially arrest somebody uh that's otherwise we wouldn't be able to arrest uh so or without getting tyranny i mean so that's one way to deal with you know a vassal who maybe the pope doesn't like and then we have the vast legend court options you know we can grant further titles and we'll look at this with a vassal let's in fact look at our very powerful brother here who has inherited all these lands so we'll look at the different options that are available to him so nothing really different here just offering the guardianship that's offering him a child to be the guardian of have you noticed that because our brother is in our dynasty and we are the dynasty head which any uh dynasty head options will have this little icon here because we're the dynasty head we have these additional options here and that is to disinherit and denounce so disinheriting will completely remove the prints from the line disc session and we can do that to any member of our dynasty because we're the dynasty head however doing so does cost the renown points and that's the reason why my dynasty has not gotten any of the different uh legacies uh because i have spent so much of my points uh disinheriting people and then re-inheriting them uh to essentially have an elective monarchy uh where i elect whoever the next era is so i use that a little bit too much i think in this play through so that has resulted into me not getting any legacies but it is a very powerful tool that is available to the dynasty head of course this will grant him the the disinherit trait all members of the dynasty will have a negative opinion of them and he won't be able to inherit any lands and as you'd expect it would decrease his opinion of us and this also causes prestige quite a bit of prestige so that's one thing you have to consider and you're utilizing that one other option that you're not seeing here is to re-inherit to basically reinstate their inheritance if you happen to have disinherited them or a previous dynasty head disinherited that character and we can also denounce them and they'll gain the trait denounce and that decreases the diplomacy and the prestige and this is also a crime so we're able to do this and then we'll be able to arrest the character in addition to that it will reduce the opinion of any catholic characters and as you'd expect he will not like this this will cost a bit less renown uh and a bit less prestige so that's one additional option that we have because we are the dynasty head we notice that we'll have a lot more options here for the vast religion court than we did with our wife so we can grant him any additional titles we can do that by clicking on the map uh to give him to him or we can use this here to click on titles so for instance we could give him this county right here as well as the duchy title if we so desired grantee titles does drastically increase the opinion of whoever you gave the title to so it's very useful for increasing opinion and you'll see here the new domain size that we'll be at once we give up this land here so the main purpose of of course of giving up land is when you are above your your total domain limit also see the option to revoke titles so we can take a title from him this is considered tyrannical unless you have the right to take it a title from them typically because they committed a crime or something like that so as of right now this would be tyrannical however we can also use a hook to do it that's another option for taking titles next we can modify the fuel contract through here of course we saw we could do that through the other tab but this is another way to do it we can grant him a vassal so the difference here is we're not giving him any new titles we're just putting one of our vassals underneath him so perhaps you have a very rebellious vassal that just is never going to like you and it's just causing you a lot of problems and joining factions that's one way to get rid of them is put them underneath somebody else and they will no longer be your direct vassal of course if we give up one of our vassals then that does result in us losing the taxes and levies that would instead be going to his new lord but they would still be in our realm because of course they're still underneath one of our vassals they're just no longer a direct vassal the other options that we have here is we can grant independence to him and then he'll become completely free or we can retract a vassal so we can take one of his current vassals from him and put them directly underneath our self of course this is like tyrannical act but you'll notice it's not that big of a deal it's only five opinion so they don't consider that as bad as as directly taking their territory from them so those are many of the different character interactions with the domestic characters the ones in our own realm however if we looked at another realm we'd seen some different character interactions so with that previous character we didn't have the ability to arrange marriages because he was already he was already married but we could do that with other characters in our land i didn't really show that we'll take a look at that when we when we talk about marriages with a foreign character we can declare war i'm gonna pull up this screen again this is all something i'm gonna be going over in the military video because again this one's really long so uh we're gonna have that in a separate video but this is how we declare war on characters and we'd use one of our cast as ballet we'd have to select one uh i cast his belly select the objective for that and and uh then declare war and again this is all stuff i'll go over in that next tutorial other unique options that we're seeing here is that we can join his war if he was in a war and we are ally and he didn't ask us to join then we could ask him to uh to help him out in that conflict so now let's dig a little bit deeper into diplomacy we've talked about you know war and character interactions but one of the primary diplomatic actions that you're gonna be taking is arranging marriages now you can arrange a marriage for any character within your realm uh if you want to and typically you'll really only arrange marriages for your own children maybe your maybe some of your other family members too but the most part you want to arrange marriages for your children now this is a very important element of crusader kings 3. there's a lot of different factors to consider when you're trying to determine who you want to arrange a marriage with now the four primary factors you need to consider are one inheritance two alliances three the characters skills and traits and then the fourth and final one is the so-called breeding game of the crusade king series these congenital traits so let's go over each one of those different factors that you need to consider when you're arranging marriages one by one so the first is of course inheritance so we have arranged a betrothal for our son so if we're arranging a marriage between two adult characters then as soon as everybody agrees then the marriage will happen immediately and those chara two characters are now married however if one of the two characters is not yet of age which remember means that they are under the age of 16 then you instead arrange a betrothal and that's what we have with our son here and again the first factor that we need to consider is inheritance so i've had this independent land here bordering my realm for a little while and i think it's finally about time that we bring this land into our own control and so the way that we're doing that is through inheritance so this is the character that our son is betrothed to so when they're both of age which she right now is 10 well we are four years old so it's going to be about 12 years before these two characters can actually marry but once they are of age then they the marriage will happen you'll have uh the option of course to actually do the marriage that doesn't have to happen if you uh don't do it though then you will get a opinion penalty because you broke a betrothal so this little girl that we betrothed our son to she rules this land this is all under her control now when these two get married 12 years from now this land will not become our land she will not be under our control she'll still be an independent ruler uh under direct control of her own lands and that's not going to change during her lifetime however if these two have children as we hope they do then those children would be the heirs of not only our lands but also her lands so after we become our current heir our son and he becomes our playable character then his primary heir will also be her primary heir as right now it's her her sibling her brother but once they have children together again they do have to have kids or else this will not work but as long as they have kids together then that child will inherit all of our lands as well as all of her lands so that's one of the primary factors it's the main part of marriage is trying to inherit further lands and if not inherit further lands then at the very least inherit claims now when we were looking at claims before i never really discussed this but there are different types of claims implicit claims press claims and unpressed claims and again this this video is getting pretty long so i'll just let you guys read that for yourselves they're pretty self-explanatory uh but yeah i did want to mention that since i hadn't said that before that there are different types of claims so the second thing you're going to be arranging marriages for are alliances now even with betrothals if you're sent to get an alliance you get the alliance immediately as soon as the patrol is agreed to you do not have to to wait for the marriage to get the alliance because these two characters have the troll we do have an alliance with them now you don't get alliances for every marriages it's primarily the marriages of your children to the the children of another ruler you also have a line says what closely related characters especially like independent characters or characters in other realms that that are related to like siblings and and uh your mother and father you might might be allied to them as well any allies again we talked about this when the diplomacy you'll see any allies that you have here so allies when you go to war you'll be able to call them into the war to help you out now they do have to agree to to help you but they typically do unless they have some you know really specific reason not to calling in an alliance does cost you prestige so if you're planning on calling in allies and you're about to go to war make sure you have enough prestige to pull in those allies you don't want to be stuck in a position where you're in a war where you thought you were going to have your ally helping you but you couldn't pull him in because he didn't have the prestige available so it's a very important part of arranging marriages now let's go and take a look at actually arranging marriages for somebody we're going to look at our daughter here we have not arranged a marriage yet for her now you'll notice that there's two different tabs here to do this the first is arranging a marriage which is arranging a marriage between two characters at your court so this is just looking in your own court for potential marriage candidates what you'll typically want to do is find a spouse finding the spouse here says arrange patrol because of course our daughter is only 12 so she's not old enough to marry just yet now one of the most important parts of this tab is the filters so from here we can specifically search for a character by name dynasty trait culture of faith so we could use that or we can use these other filters here so maybe we want to make sure that it's nobody above the age of 25 maybe we don't want the age difference to be too far we're looking somebody's only five years younger or five years older we can do that make sure that they're adults if you so desire or just say anybody we can want to make sure that they're fertile and we don't want to see infertile characters because we want to see a child to come out of this maybe we don't want to see a child come out of this and so we're looking for infertile characters which have traits here uh that make it very unlikely that they're going to have children uh we can look at their health so maybe we want somebody healthy we want to make sure they're not somebody who's about to die maybe somebody specifically catholic or specifically our culture within our culture group maybe we're looking for those inheritable traits which is something we'll talk about a little bit later maybe we want to make sure we get an alliance since that's what we are talking about here we are talking about alliances so using this we can say that we specifically want an alliance maybe we want to make sure we gain some prestige which we'll talk about when we actually look at the marriage uh we want to marry somebody landed or somebody a ruler unlanded the dynasty we might not want any low-born people to come up in this search here and maybe we're looking for certain types of claims which is another option in here once we close that we'll have all of those filters are now applied all across the world to all the characters that are potential marriage candidates now we can sort these now we sort it based on a skill let's say our character was garbage marshall now our daughter here is actually pretty decent at everything but let's just say she wasn't good at marshall so we're looking for uh somebody has a good marshall skill to complement that then that'd be something we'd look at here again that's something we'll talk about a little bit later here this is how we would uh sort it by other specifics such as the alliance power this is more uh specific to what we're talking about here so we have it sorted by alliance power this is going to be the most powerful alliances on top and so this prince here is a prince of the holy roman empire so therefore a marriage between the prince and our daughter would result in alliance with the holy roman empire which is a very powerful empire so obviously that is the most powerful alliance and it would make a lot of sense for us to go that route especially if we were say wanting to fight france or aquitaine now there's the hungarians or scotland you can kind of go through here but let's say we want to go ahead and arrange the marriage here so scrolling through here will tell us all the information that we need to know uh for instance the the chance of children is medium so average here uh the children that are born in this marriage are not going to be of our dynasty they're going to be of the prince's dynasty and we'll look at one way that we could change that if we wanted to these are the possibly inherited traits again this is congenital traits and we'll kind of dig into that a little bit more here in a couple minutes but this is mentioned here and any negative ones would be listed as well and below that you'll see the prestige that each character is going to gain which is largely based off of the current splendor of your dynasty and that is mentioned when we look at it here you get a plus 200 for marion into our dynasty so that's what the prince will get we're getting 300 since their dynasty is a little bit more notable than ours we're also getting 200 because we're marrying a close relative of the emperor so that's how much prestige each character will get from this marriage and then finally at the bottom here we can see the potential alliances that we will get from this marriage and we'll get an alliance with the the emperor heinrich vi of the hre and also shows what his current military strength is which is similar to ours he's got 9 659 so a little bit less than us so this is helpful for determining how useful that alliance will actually be based on those those troop numbers lastly you'll see that there's two little buttons down here that we can make use of first of all we could use a hook if this character was not willing to accept and the character you're needing to accept it is not necessarily the character you're arranging a marriage with it's with their liege now of course if they are their own liege or you know if they're able to arrange their own marriages so if you're say arranging a marriage with a duke then you don't have to ask the king for permission the duke will arrange that marriage for themselves but if you're arranging the marriage for the duke's son or the son of the emperor then it's not going to be the child that's just going to you know decide on that that marriage is going to be the emperor himself now if the child happens to be uh the king uh that you're arranging a marriage with then they will uh have to uh decide on it themselves and so if you have a hook on the character up here in the top right corner the one that you're actually arranging the marriage with the one that needs to agree then you can use that hook to force them to accept your marriage now you notice at the top here that these children are not going to be of our dynasty and this is not a particular issue since this character is not our heir we're just trying to get an alliance out of this but you do have to consider this is very important to say she was our only heir and that we were going to be playing as her because what would happen is that any children she had would be of his dynasty and then they would inherit all of our titles and since we play as a dynasty in this game not as the country then we would we would lose all of our titles we would lose the game more than likely now we could potentially play as one of our other dynasty members but we're going to lose all these titles instead they're going to go into their dynasties hands so in this case as a woman if she was say going to be our heir and this is who we are going to play as then we would instead want to do the matrilineal marriage the natural lineal marriage changes that so that all children in the marriage will be born of our dynasty now it's interesting that they're willing to accept this i'm assuming it's because this is not his direct heir yeah his direct heir is his oldest son here and this son who we're arranging a marriage with is his third son not likely to get a ton of land he you can see that he's the heir of a county uh so he's not getting a lot of land and so that's the reason why he's willing to agree to a matrilineal marriage which would result in that county falling outside of the hands of his dynasty he's okay with that because again this is his third son but if we were to say want to arrange a marriage with his primary heir then he would tell us no he would not be willing to accept that but we could use a hook to force him to accept that marriage even though it's not in the best interest of his family so using hooks to force marriages that are only beneficial towards you is one uh potential use of a hook so always keep that in mind when you're doing alliances specifically when you're trying to do alliances that are going to result in titles going into your hands or into the hands of a member dynasty because remember when it comes to renown and is heavily impacted by how many members of your dynasty are living as well as what titles they have with the highest ranking being the important one the fact that we have some dukes in our dynasty is not helping us at all here but if we were to say get an emperor into the hands of our dynasty well i would drastically increase the amount of renown that we're getting each month so again i don't want to talk about intrigue too much in this one but this kind of shows you one way that you could perhaps maybe get an emperor into your dynasty for example if we were to force this third son to marry our daughter which in this case they're willing to to do it without us using a hook which is good since we don't have a hook on the emperor so they would be betrothed with all children being members of our dynasty and then let's say something terrible was to happen to his two older brothers potentially we were to do a murder scheme which we haven't looked at yet so if we were to do a murder scheme for both of his two older brothers and they both died then he would now become the heir and of course all his children would be of our dynasty as they win or i should say if if he becomes the emperor and then all his children and if they became the emperor would be of our dynasty and that'd be one way to get our dynasty onto the throne of the holy round empire so let's go and take a look at this real quick just do the start scheme here just so we can take a look at something we haven't seen just yet again something i'm going to dig into a little more in a different tutorial but this is the hostile scheme to murder and because it's a hostile scheme it does have the ability to invite agents you can use any hooks you have to force somebody to work as your agent if they say that they can be convinced and you don't have a hook that's because you can bribe them instead and it's 300 gold here to bribe this member so why do you need agents well you can see our success chance here is sixteen percent it's not very good uh we're most likely going to fail uh we also have a 31 secrecy which means that even if we did succeed most likely this guy's gonna find out that we are always family i should say the whole world will find out that we're the ones who murdered him uh so we don't have very high secrecy so more than likely people are gonna know what we're up to in addition to that we have the scheme progress which is heavily based on the scheme power so we're not getting a ton of scheme power so it's going to take eight years for us to do this and part of that is again not just our scheme power but our scheme resistance here this is the resistance to hostile schemes we saw that our spymaster can assist with that this is also heavily based on the intrigue and so with the high scheme resistance here this has resulted in this taking a very long time so we'd probably want to invite some agents to help us out and how useful those agents are going to be as shown here so this is how much increases success chance and this is how much it increases scheme power so let's go ahead and invite this guy to help us out here and he's willing to do it for 300 gold so it won't be cheap uh what about this guy how much does he want he wants 150 so by inviting those two this is going to drastically increase the chances of succeeding now we have our first event here for attempting to romance our wife so we have different options of what we can do here we're gonna sing i love ballet i don't know if that's gonna work or not uh we did increase the steam power that's what that did so the agent has accepted our offer to join us and so now we click on this we can see that agent is here and now our success chance is 48 while the secrecy is 63 well now it's only going to take 13 months so it went from 8 years to 13 months this count has also joined us so now we're looking at a 95 chance of success and 95 chance of secrecy and that's as high as it gets guys i don't think i've ever seen any higher than 95 percent so that means we're very likely to not only succeed but also keep it a secret and now it's only going to take 11 months to complete this so this is one reason why you might want to to gain hooks in an area uh that you plan on doing a hostile scheme against a character i see that we would now be able to uh to take him out and then we'd do the same thing against his brother and and before you know it our dynasty is moving towards taking over the holy roman empire the third factor to consider is traits and skills other than than traits that affect the chance of a baby being born to that that uh marriage this isn't really all that important for characters you're not going to play as now for our daughter here we don't really care too much about the any of the traits maybe if we're role playing then perhaps we won't want a a terrible husband for our daughter but otherwise for gameplay purposes the the skills and the the traits here are just not very important to us however if this was a marriage for our son let's say we couldn't find any possible good inheritance marriages you know there's just nothing that we're going to gain from it we can't find any alliances we need maybe nobody wants to ally with us because we have too many allies once you get a certain amount of allies then other rulers will not consider your marriages uh to be as worth it because you have too many alliances it drastically impacts their acceptance rate so maybe you just can't get a good alliance and you can't get a good inheritance marriage so instead you decide with your son or your heir whoever your heir is let's say our daughters are heir and in this particular scenario we want a character that's going to help as a as our spouse so maybe we want very high skill points so they'll be better at doing these spousal council jobs perhaps we want good traits uh that you know again might impact how uh that character acts when they're our spouse it's always something to consider you know maybe they're ambitious and and that we don't know exactly what that spouse is gonna do for instance maybe we already have an error from our previous spouse well do we really want to marry a woman or a man who is ambitious and who might want to somehow remove our our current heir in favor of any children they happen to have with us and again you definitely want to consider any traits that are going to impact the chance that a child is born so then the fourth and final factor that we want to talk about here is one that we kind of briefly mentioned and looked at and i guess we could look at it here with ourselves first uh in our current marriage so our character is handsome so this is a physical trait these physical traits have different rankings uh so they i think they go up to five rankings i believe it's one through five uh for each different type of physical trait so this is the attractiveness one determines how you know beautiful or handsome the character is and this one increases their diplomacy increase of their fertility and increases their attraction opinion so any character who is attracted to them so they have to be of a sexual orientation that likes that gender then we would get an opinion boost with them so because our character is handsome anybody who finds men to be attractive would get a plus 20 opinion boost with us so when i married my wife this was my primary consideration is the fact that she is a genius that is the level five intelligence skill it's about as it's as high as it gets for the intelligence physical traits and so you'll see she's gonna plus 5 and everything and then also her monthly lifestyle experience is plus 30 so essentially a character with this will get perks a lot faster and overall will get far more perks in their life than a character without this trade so very very good trait so i wanted to combine the attractiveness of my king with the intelligence of our queen here into our children so that's what we are attempting to do now if we look with our princess here she gained the level 5 genius trait from her mother now when it comes to the attractive trait unfortunately she didn't get the level 2 attracting the straight from her father she got a level 1 uh attracting this trait you don't always gain the same level now you can increase the chance of getting a higher level by having both characters have the same trait so let's say our handsome king had married a queen who also had a level two uh trait here which i'm not sure what it's called for women maybe beautiful but let's say she's beautiful and i'm handsome and so we have a much higher chance for our children to gain this level 2 physical trait there's also a chance that we'll what we'll call level it up we will level this trade up and those two level two traits would result in our child having a chance a higher chance of getting a level three trait uh so it's it's the the breeding game where you can breed these very good congenital traits into your children likewise there are negative congenital traits that you are going to want to avoid breeding into your dynasty that's also something you need to consider uh in this in this case you know our daughter she got the level five from her mom when she only got level one from the father she didn't get the level two now we look at her son despite the fact that he has the same mom and same dad or at least we think he does uh he could of course be a secret bastard that's something we'll talk about here in a minute he didn't gain any of them uh so that's really unfortunate because this is the the character we're gonna be playing as so sometimes a reading game doesn't exactly work out the way you like so for our religion any characters born outside of marriage will be considered bastards and they will not be able to be able to inherit any land now we can legitimize them they'll still have a trait to being a legitimized bastard so it's still a negative trait but they will be able to inherit so that's one way to to deal with not having a legitimate error as you could just legitimize one of your bastards now with a woman she always knows that any kids that she has down here are hers but with father if there's a secret if she happened to cheat on us with another man and we did not know that she had a secret lover then we would see him as being our son until that secret was revealed of course that secret might be discovered by somebody else and later revealed that our son is in fact not our son and is a bastard so that's marriages last thing we're going to talk about here i mean we'll briefly go over the war system the last thing we're really going to spend any time on is the counties taking a look at all the stats for the counties just going from top to bottom here of course you can look at all the titles it belongs to you know this is the county here and that's the duchy kingdom and empire that it belongs to this is the control rating the control rating is very very important once it drops below 100 you start getting a lot less levees in taxes so you want to try and keep control at 100 at all times now we already saw that we have a marshall job to increase control that's your primary method of increasing control in the counties sometimes you'll have other ways to increase it as well and you'll notice that here that we have a few different factors that are increasing the control growth now you'll notice that it goes very very slowly without using our marshall with even with all those increases that we have if we were at say zero control which sometimes you do have counties that start at zero control when you conquer them then it would take 200 months for us to increase control up to 100 so in that case we definitely want to assign our marshall there to you know drastically speed it up now whenever you conquer territories through war the control will typically not be at 100 it'll be much lower i've seen it at 60 i've seen it start it at zero that's one of the penalties of of conquering territory however if you get territory legitimately through inheritance then it'll keep its current control rating as that's often the better way to extend your lands if you can so while control reduces the amount of levees and taxes you get the next stat here is development which increases the levy in taxes that you get and development can go up to 100 this is something that you slowly increase through the game if we look at the current development of our capital here and is sitting at 21. now it does grow on its own if you have some factors that will do so that are then increasing it but it's very very slow it's meant to be very slow now we do have a job that we can assign just like with the control and this is the steward and we can assign them to increase development here and that will drastically increase the rate that development goes up but it's still pretty slow now the important thing about development is you'll notice that we're getting a bonus from neighbors this does affect all of the neighboring counties even those that aren't yours you look at this county here that neighbors it is currently getting 1.2 per month point eight of that is from the neighbors so because it neighbors this province which much higher development as well as a few other counties that probably have higher development it is getting a much higher boost than what this province is getting which is only 0.1 so development does spread throughout your lands so essentially what you can do is focus on development on your capital and then it'll spread out or you can also focus on a county that maybe has a lot of counties that surrounds it so if we were to focus on increasing development here then it would affect all the surrounding counties next you'll see popular opinion this is how the people who live in this province feel about you for the most part it's it's really only important if it gets below zero if it goes below zero then you'll start to see rebellion problems which we saw on our factions here you know we have all these these potential rebellions here these very unhappy people that is because we do have some lower popular opinion here so popular opinion is primarily decreased from being a different culture group you see we're getting negative 10 here and from being a different religion who sees your religion as evil so catholicism is considered as evil here so we're getting a negative 45. we also get many different modifiers here that might also affect popular opinion so we have increased autonomy in this province so it's actually increasing popular pending by 30 offsetting some of these negatives that we're getting so again the primary thing to consider here when it comes to popular opinion is that dropping below zero will result in factions forming and more provinces going into that faction and also better see the culture and religion again that mainly affects your opinion but you know does affect a few other things as well such as how many uh provinces from your culture affecting who's going to be the cultural head and like these other county stats we have different ways to impact the culture and faith which again we already looked at we can convert faith here with the archbishop and of course we can also change the culture with our steward so we do have options for changing those so that we can make sure we get rid of any popular opinion penalties that we might be having such as the ones that we're having in this area down here now next you'll see supply limit i didn't i don't think i mentioned this but development also increases the supply limit that's how many troops this province can supply so if you have more troops than that in the province and it doesn't matter if they're your troops enemy troops allied troops so there are more troops in the county than this overall number and that will result in the all the armies taking attrition which does re reduce their overall numbers now all the stats down here are for the holding the particular holding that we are looking at now as i had mentioned before there are four different types of holdings um we won't talk about the tribal one that's specific to tribes tribes are a bit different that would probably need to be its own tutorial since again this one's pretty long and most uh you know most of the characters of the game aren't tribal you'll see them up here in the initial the first start date the early start date 9th century one over here throughout both start dates you're going to see a lot of tribal countries tribal characters i should say but over here in the west these are for the most part all going to be one of these three main types the first one being a castle so the castle is a barony so let's say we have one right here that we don't personally own you'll notice that all the ones that we personally own have the name here with how much how much taxes and how much levies we're getting from that this one here is not in our hands this is under a baron and so a baron is a very low level vassal they won't have their own quartz although you can have a spouse of course but that is about it they are very simple characters you cannot play as a baron as a feudal ruler we can only hold the castle realms without a penalty the other type is a temple of course this is all under the control of the archbishop all temples in your lands will be under the control of the religious leader which again as a catholic that's called an archbishop and his opinion will determine whether we get the taxes and the levies from these provinces and then the last type is the cities the cities are under the control of a mayor and these mayors like the barons can be used as any other direct vassal that you have uh you can appoint them to councils they can lead your armies they can you know be your knights they can all be utilized uh the same as any other character as long as they are your direct vassal now cities are very good at earning money that's their primary benefit while the castles well castles are harder to take they have a fort level which means that in order to take control of this province an army is going to have to siege that fort down in order to get control of the cities and the temples they have to get control of the all the castles that are in the county so they'd have to take these two castles so that's one way to kind of delay an enemy from taking your lands is by building further castles am i building those castles up higher through the building system i will take a look at buildings in a minute here you should first talk about these other stats here obviously these are the taxes you're getting these are the levies that you'll be getting and that's the supply limit all that's been mentioned and then down here we have the fort level and the garrison how many troops are garrisoning it and this will all increase the time it takes for an enemy to take over the castle it's going to make it take a lot longer with the higher fort levels so last number here is the loot in the province you can get this in two different ways the first is to win the siege in which case you'll get the loot from it and the second way is through raiding which is something we will talk about in that military tutorial rating is something that we can't even do as our current character will actually have to switch to another character that is able to raid so then we have the current terrain here these are the planes that doesn't have any real effects but when we look at other provinces that have different territory i guess we'll look at the forest here you hover over and see the bonuses there and so like we have the hills here and you'll notice that it gives a defender advantage now one important thing that i'd like to note here and i'm definitely going to mention this in the uh the military tutorial uh one thing that you should know is that the army that gets the defender bonus is the army who controls the province so if somebody was to attack our fort on the hill here and we were to attack that army that was sieging them down then we would get all the defender bonuses uh likewise if we were to go into enemy territory then they would get the bonuses even if they were attacking us if we are the besieging army and they control the province then they get defensive bonuses and if we take that province from them and then they attack us then we would get the defensive bonuses because we control that particular province so terrain can be very important when it comes to warfare it can also be important for the types of buildings that are unlocked to you you'll see that we have different buildings based on where that holding is so if we were to say look at a province that has the mountains or hills and they would have different buildings based on that so the buildings are very much affected by the terrain in the province so now let's discuss the buildings we have four building slots here that we can build in and we can upgrade these you see they all have level two and we can upgrade them of course you can have the money to do so you also have to have certain innovations uh to in order to to upgrade them further and uh each one of them have different buildings different lines if we were to say look at somewhere that hasn't been fully built out if we look at this county here we can now construct a new building since we have an open slot here so through here we can see what the bonuses that we're going to get with this current level we can construct it this is how much money it's going to cost this is how long it's going to take and then we can do a preview to see what we'll get when we get to the higher levels so that's what these four slots are so the realm capital here has four well if we looked at these ones here we only have three so a good example here both of these are castles but this one only has three because it's not the county capital so it only has three buildings available now you may have noticed that some of our provinces have five uh building slots this is the duchy slot so wherever the duchy's capital is if you hold that dutchy title then you can build a special building in this province which not only will affect the holding but also might give your entire realm certain benefits so this is the only county where i hold both the province and the duchy title so for this province here we have the province where the duchy building can be built however we do not have the duchy title so we would not be able to construct something here as you can see it says we do not have the duchy title in addition we don't have the money these ones do not have upgrades but they are incredibly powerful again you can only build one in each duchy you have to have the province and the title now from here we can also grant this specific title to somebody if we wanted to and then i did want to show the fact that i had granted this to the knights templar by using that decision and i selected which one of my baronies i was going to give them but i can always revoke that lease to them if i want to retract the title and then they'll have to move out and it'll re-grant it to us now last thing to discuss is warfare i don't want to go into too much detail here because again i'm going to go into it in a separate video and again this tutorial is already quite long but let's say we wanted to take advantage of the civil war that our neighbor is having here go ahead and select to declare war i don't have any casus belay on her right now not available for myself however we do have some people in our realm who do have claims on some of our titles such as the mayor here he has a claim on that title there so we could declare war take advantage of the civil war that is happening to try and gain control of that county when we declare war the raise all armies buttons will pop up we'll just click on that it'll go to wherever we set our rally point to again i'm going to talk about all this in in the next video so i don't want to talk about it too much we could have moved it though so it was moved a little bit closer if we if we so desired it'll take a certain amount of days for our army to be ready here uh to gather up let's go and let them gather and once they're all ready we'd probably want to split this army up it's got 10 000 men far too many men uh you know to have in one province as you can see we are way above the supply limit so we would definitely want to split this army up but because we're not uh not really trying to go too much into this we're just going to move them just uh select things with left click move with right click the same as you do on most strategy games and just some of the buttons that are here this is changing the commander this is to split off a new army which is what we'd want to do split these off and start a new army we just straight up split in half here we can split off certain types of troops we can disband the army we can also uh reorganize if we have multiple armies selected here we can change up their composition or we can merge those two armies if we had more than one army mixed together here and then all the different stats here again i'm not going to go into this just wanted to essentially show how it works how you declare war and specifically how to raise up your armies and disband them so we can expand them here we can also disband them in the military tab with this button this allows you to raise all armies too so that's gonna be all for this beginner's guide it's ended up being a lot longer than i expected i do apologize for that i should have split this up into more videos than i thought i didn't expect it to to take this long but the game has a lot of depth to it there's quite a bit to it and i did want to kind of go into detail about all of the different mechanics again i am going to be doing two other videos to go in a little bit more detail when it comes to uh the warfare obviously which we didn't talk about that much here in this video we'll discuss that a lot more in the next video i'll also be doing a video on intrigue kind of show some of the different tactics how you can utilize intrigue to get what you want i do hope that you found this video helpful as a guide but if you have any questions feel free to post those down in the comments below either i or perhaps another viewer will hopefully be able to help you out we have a pretty good channel a lot of interaction so hopefully so somebody will be able to uh answer your question for you i do hope you found this video helpful though if did make sure you leave a like on it subscribe to our channel hit that notification bell and again leave a comment tell me what you thought of the video and if you have any questions i'd love to hear them and i'll try my best to to answer them for you now all these tutorials can be very good for kind of showing like what to how to do things and why you should do things they're not very good for showing the the day-to-day play as well my opinion that let's plays are far superior for teaching that part of playing a paradox strategy game so maybe go check out my let's play i'll be doing a let's play i should be releasing around the same time as this video here might be a little bit before it because i think this one's going to take a long time to edit but it should be releasing somewhere around the same time so it'll definitely be out when this video is out so maybe go check out that let's play or check out somebody else's let's play if you'd prefer their style of play i'm going to be doing a role play style so it might not be your cup of tea plus i do play a little bit slower and as you can probably tell from this i'm a rather talkative person so maybe my style isn't for you but i do suggest that you check out a let's play on somebody's channel if you're still struggling with the game and and exactly what you should be doing uh when it comes to day-to-day matters so that's going to be it for this one i do hope to see you on another video whether it's that let's play series or one of the other tutorials or another video on my channel which you can access on the front page of the channel we have three thousand videos all sorted by genre we play a lot of paradox games a lot of strategy games so you should be able to find something to watch if you like other games then we play a lot of other genres as well if you're looking for any links check down in the description of any of our videos you'll find links to our patreon and paypal as well as our teespring store if you'd like to help support the channel and also find links to all of our social media twitter facebook instagram all that good stuff you also find a link to our discord if you like to join our community and so that's going to be it for this one again i do hope you enjoyed it i do hope to see you on another video and until next time thanks for watching

Channel: Praetorian HiJynx

Views: 248,208

Keywords: Crusader Kings III, Crusader Kings 3, Crusader, Kings, CK, CK3, CKIII, CK 3, CK III, HD, gameplay, playthrough, walkthrough, grand, strategy, game, RPG, middle, ages, medieval, tutorial, guide, tip, tips, beginner, how, to, play, Praetorian, HiJynx, P+J, episode 1, ep. 1, ep 1, part 1, pt. 1, pt 1, arranging, arrange, marriages

Id: 0kOY5BREekM

Length: 135min 23sec (8123 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020