Starting Your First Campaign in Crusader Kings 3 (Beginner's Guide)

crusader kings 3 is an immensely dense game filled with mechanics nested within other mechanics and it can truly be daunting for even the most seasoned of strategy game veterans the game does offer you a really good tutorial that walks you through the majority of basic concepts to get you off on a relatively good foot but in this video today i want to help give some perspective on those concepts so you can truly start your very first campaign in crusader kings 3 without as much confusion or perhaps clear up some if you're already lost and we aren't going to go through a bunch of turns or sweeps through the campaign on fast forward nay instead i'm going to only cover the game right from the second you press start and you're paused allowing you to set up your first initial moves to help you right out of the gate as is the tradition with my videos i'm going to front load the information so if you came looking for a specific mechanic or explanation please look at the chapters in the timeline to find the point you need the most help with i'll be doing these videos on more dense subjects so if you still have some questions don't be afraid to ask in the comments and i'll get around to help asap before we get started i want to just quickly remind you guys though that this is entirely okay to crash and burn this game is built that way i had to restart my first two or three campaigns because i just didn't get something that made my kingdom spiral out of control don't worry we've all been there so stick with it and we'll get through this together if you do decide to pick the game up after watching this please feel free to use my link in the description i do get a lovely commission but as of the creation of this video there is a 12 discount and you'll get a steam key that you just simply place into steam but let's get started on your first campaign in crusader kings 3. and here we are you've just pressed new game and you have the screen before you so you're ready to start your campaign so if you have in fact not played the campaign at all yet you've not even touched it please press this button and play it i know no one wants to play through a tutorial trust me i'm always like i don't need this but it is this game can be very punishing and this will at least introduce you to every mechanic on a very base level that you can at least understand what you're doing before jumping into your first actual campaign so if you haven't done that please do it now from here you get to decide are you do you want to play in 867 that year or the year 1066. no matter what year you start in the end date for the game is 14.53 so it doesn't matter which one you go into what really is going to make the difference here is what innovations are active at the time and which innovation level you're starting off in in 867 you're in that early tribal period and in 1066 you're in the early medieval period and to select your first campaign if you don't really know much about history at the time you don't really know a specific ruler you want to start with choosing anyone that says easy is really not a bad option like for instance here uh duke ferrarislav he starts as a vassal of the holy roman empire that's a bit of a double-edged sword because you can't pull the holy roman empire into a bunch of conflicts but no one's going to be declaring war on you because you're part of the holy roman empire which is huge it's massive so if you don't really know who you want to start with just find someone that says easy there's always going to be some way that the game will play with you very well and it'll be very easy to kind of deal with stuff or you'll be at such a huge advantage here like with the the the precursor to the cuban roofs empire with rurik rurikid um you get the advantage of just being so strong one thing to note though between 867 and 1066 in 867 you're dealing with smaller armies and weaker forts just in an in general just technology has not advanced as much so if you are a rating faction like say for example uh novgorod here then you don't have to deal with um a making any claims to anything and you won't have to deal with as much opposition because forts haven't leveled up as much so being a rating faction earlier in the game is much easier than being one later in the game where it starts to get more and more difficult as people get better and better defenses but let me show you some rulers that are not on this list that i also recommend for people that are freshly starting the game to do that we're going to go down to play as any ruler in 1066. 1066 is my personal preference of starting date you can choose whatever you so wish um but there are two on this map that i really want to point out and they're actually pointed out by another viewer medicine man medicine 55 i believe now the first one here is dublin so the game's recommendation is to do petty king marshad well dublin has got earl marshad and the reason i like earl marshad is that he starts out not as the head of his dynasty and family but as a uh not a claimant but he is the son of this guy earl dearmate and i'm sorry if i mispronounced that um basically this guy's 71 years old he's going to die and you're going to inherit that title so what the nice thing about dublin is that is it's going to grant you access to a lot of game mechanics quickly and piecemeal so you won't have to be overwhelmed with them all at once you're not going to be trying to to determine how inheritance even works because it's going to work for you right at the start of the game for the most part the first like 10 20 years so the nice thing about dublin is you're going to get used to so many things so quickly because they're going to be thrown at you one at a time in a nice good pace even dublin itself is of norwegian culture versus everything else being irish so you can deal with converting a culture in a very relative safe vacuum so i think dublin is a really really good one here now for those of you that want to start as a king and not as say a count or an earl of the sword then king bolisov the second the bold is a very good option it's a relatively safe one you do have the holy roman empire at your back that you could probably just ally into and you already start at a very commanding position and you have a lot of really great characteristics going for you the big thing i would say that that is at your disadvantages you are a king so there's a lot more to manage and deal with because take a look at this you have all these little tiny duchies that you're going to be worrying about and dealing with so it might not be the first thing that you start but if you want to try being a king this is a really solid one because it gives you a really good safe place to start but now that we have a good idea for some recommended campaigns and some of the ones from the overall menu let's go ahead and actually jump into the game to dissect some of the menus to help us we're actually going to play as king boleswolf and go through uh his campaign so we're gonna press play and that's it this is where we're stopping for the rest of the video this is again aimed at showing you how to set your campaign up from the start or help explain some things that you maybe got a little lost on and the best place to start is by pressing tab to bring up all of your issues and by pressing f8 to bring up all of your decisions these two menus are going to give you so many context clues on where to really expand or what you really need to do or what things need the most i guess clever eye on so taking a look at just our suggestions first we can grant a title here to this duke we won't really deal with that but my point is use those things as a i guess an idea of what how to move forward sometimes it'll say sway this character stuff like that it's basically taking a look at what your current situation is and making some suggestions based off of it in your current situation well if you could press this button don't bring back anything you've dismissed obviously but it's going to show you stuff that you can do like create some certain specific titles after you've won a war and taken over duchies um declaring wars on certain people that you have a casus bellies for or an actual uh claim to stuff like that or even a holy war now it will also give you stuff like powerful vassals demand council positions your online inherit titles negotiate alliances so the this tab is so crucial to your initial part of the game because it gives you a good firm direction on how to progress with your campaign you can use this to get an idea for how you're going to declare wars maybe for these inherent titles who you're gonna kill by murdering them with a scheme to get first in line well in this case from first line for this for this county or negotiating some alliances or it might say here on here that you have some members of your family that you need to marry off or you have some guardians you need to appoint so this is such a huge tab that really is the driving force behind a lot of things in your campaign now for decisions this will have you kind of getting a good idea for what you want to do in the overarching goal of your campaign with the major decisions such as say unite the slavs united slavic people and found the empire of slavia i'll scroll out here close this menu and i'll press empire and these are the big empires that you create so you can use these decisions to kind of help you craft how you want to move forward you can even select them and it'll show you specific things that you need to do which primary titles you need so on and so forth consecrate your bloodline unite the west slavs you have a lot of options here now this is mainly just to kind of talk about the decisions menu and let you know how important it is and things it's just something you should be constantly checking and looking back on to make sure you're moving in the right direction for either your goals for your major decisions and you don't need to do any of these by the way you can do whatever you so wish or these minor decisions which are pretty important to do right out the gate and we'll get into them in their respective areas over here in some of these menus but let's talk a little bit about land and titles so this is something that i feel like the tutorial doesn't do a really good job of explaining so here we have obviously our kingdom of poland and this little icon on the left is obviously our flag relative to our ruler but the icon above it tells us what we are that says we're a king so if i click this button over here on the right and then click counties i can see all of the counties that make up poland now i think that the game again like i said doesn't really explain this too well over in ireland but then if i click this button or just press u all the duchies now exist so to give you a frame of reference here looking at greater poland the counties overlay on i can see that any one of these makes up greater poland so to get the du jour title of each one of them you need to hold a portion of it so i say oh you know i want the duchy of greater poland i need to own portions of greater poland to get that de geur title and that will push you into a kingdom title which is this larger chunk of land which is comprised of duchies though counties filled duchies duchies feel kingdoms then kingdoms fill empires and again i think that this is just kind of poorly portrayed in the tutorial because it shows you this portion of land over here where okay you've got foam and ormond and desmond you press dutchy titles and then you get monster i just feel like it wasn't as easily portrayed as looking at a larger chunk of land with more duchies looking at the kingdom and the empire progression into that because it's a little confusing um kind of knowing what is what and how it all kind of fits together these does your titles are really what you're going to be working on the most in crusader kings 3. it's really a game not about land but title acquisition and moving those titles back and forth strategically to your heirs and your sons to make sure that those titles stay with the character that progresses when the character you're playing dies for example i have all these titles and claims to many more and my player heir has plenty of titles as well and tons more claims i want to make sure that when i die that succession that that inheritance goes over to my air and we'll cover that in a little bit when we talk about uh the realm management but i wanted to kind of go over the land real quick uh before jumping into realm because i feel like it's such a huge portion of the game that isn't really explained very well right out the gate now here's where things get juicy we're going to start navigating through the menus on the right side because you should be looking at these right when you boot your game up to get an idea for what you need to do to help out maybe your vassals or what you need to do for your military so on and so forth so our first step here is realm management so we're going to press f2 bring that bad boy up but we can see now all of our vassals and why this screen is so important is that we're going to be getting a lot of information from it throughout the entirety of our playthrough but just by bringing it up we can see just our first duke right here you can see his opinion of this it's pretty piss-poor but we also can see he's a powerful vassal he expects to remain on the council that he's currently on we also get his feudal contract which tells us his tax levels are both normal as well as his levees it can be edited through a hook which the tutorial pretty well explains but then you can say okay i want high or low on some of these things and if they get a hook on you they will request that their tax or levy level be reduced um if they have a poor opinion of you so on and so forth but there's two things that are really important here that that the tutorial never touches on it is taxes paid to you by your vassal here it is taxable income it shows us the tax from the domain itself and the vassal's taxes and then it shows you contributions so normal taxes mean that it's con it's going to con contribute uh 10 and it equals 0.4 gold a month but if i take a look at levies i'm going to get the amount of levy contribution again same thing full amount of levees in this in in the duchy here is 546 he's contributing 25 of them to you which is 136 hence these two colored bars here right the light blue gives us that that that's how much he's contributing and that's the total amount that he can contribute but if i move down here to this count i see this levies and taxes are reduced as you are not count accounts rightful liege and this is important because you're going to deal with a lot of these depending on which campaign you play if you play dublin you won't trust me but this is important because you will as you expand in any campaign so he wants his leads to hold the duchy of greater poland that's right here so he wants me to create this title if i haven't already or if i cannot create the title get the lands that allow me to create the title and if i hover over the taxes here you can see i'm only getting seven percent and why this is this is is because not rightful liege times 0.75 some nations only have that at 0.5 it just depends on the nation you're playing you can see that i'm getting a 75 percent cut on the amount of taxes i would get from this count because i'm not his rifle leech same thing goes here with his vassalage i would be getting more vassals but i'm now getting 75 percent less which equals two measly vassals coming from this count i cannot stress how important this is in getting a really good bead on how well your kingdom's doing you can get a good idea for how much this is basically the average of all of your vassals this is the sum of opinions that will affect all your vassals this value is low it is likely you have many factions opposing you then you get an idea for dread and how it's influencing it your total vassal limit and then you get a breakdown of your domain which are all the lands you personally hold and the taxes from them as well as the levies then you get a break out of all the taxes from all of your vassals which you can hover over and get a good a detailed uh breakout here and all of the levees from all of your vassals so again a very powerful menu but there's some other portions of this menu i want to very quickly touch on and we will expand upon succession especially in its own video but it's worth talking about so you have got buttons up here and these are your crown authority and you progress them by letting prestige and as you progress them you're allowed to do certain things for example limited every single one by the way starts on autonomous vassals or at least the very first of your crown authority then it's past limited crown authority rulers can now change between partition succession laws titles can be provoked vassals can be retracted and clan government vassals will provide at least five percent of levies and two percent of income this allows you to get more out of your vassals without influencing their feudal contract that feudal contract which will more often than not piss them off you know you gain stress because you're generous but it also means that they are mad at you and you gain tyranny so there's all these things that you can do to increase the amount of tax in levies without touching your actual funeral contract there are also different types of vassals that are feudal or these are all feudal vassals um they're also theocratic vassals and they for the most part you can't really do much with them because they're theocratic then you've got your republic vassals again you can't really do much with them because they're republic that might be something that changes in future dlcs i don't know but our next tab here is succession and just to real quick do this domain like i said is all of the domains that you personally hold and this gives you an idea of the tax level and the levies coming from the domain development is basically the how well-developed that domain is the higher the value than the better the infrastructure and also it says increases levees tax and supply limit gained from a county then your control is pretty much how happy the people are if it's a lower percentage then they will give you less taxes and levies and this is not just true of your domain only it's everyone's domain so you always want to be checking the relative control by just jumping on the lan and clicking on holdings and seeing okay good control good all the way around the last tab here is with succession now succession is important because you've got laws and gender laws so this succession law is telling us that it's on partition meaning that all children inherit equally and we're all male preference meaning that we choose that we prefer males but it can be female that inherits if need be and an important part of this menu right here is that it says from realms partition this prints since there are no other claimants or our children to the throne for the most part there's no other heirs he's going to get everything which is actually pretty good sometimes if you're not king that can be pretty spicy and i'll show you a situation real quick if i just press switch character i can jump over here to the holy roman empire press play i can go back to that round menu back to succession and this is the big one titles lost on succession though there's people that are not part of your dynasty there's all these issues with titles like i was saying before so i will expand upon this in its own video but for the most part you really do want to keep an eye on succession especially as your your king your your character gets older this will probably be changed and you want to move things around to make sure that the titles lost on succession is either zero or very minimal right now the holy roman empire is going to lose nine titles on succession and that's pretty brutal so you would want to influence this by doing some marriages uh maybe even changing succession laws or swapping your capital there are a lot of things you can do and that's why such a dense subject that will wait for another video let's jump into military and get a little bit more about that military is something that i've actually had a lot of questions about so let's dive into this so to start off you've got levees and you've got knights if i were to just press raise all armies now i would just pretty much have an army consisting of levees and well knights and now you can also add man at arms regiments now these minute arms regiments are pretty great because they do a number of things and depending on the culture that you are or which kingdom you are also depends on these metadata arms that you have available and your innovations that you have active so anytime you select a minute arm you're pretty much going to pay an upfront cost 150 just to get them recruited and then you're going to slowly reinforce them up to their total amount which is 100. now um what's important to look at are these four characteristics damage toughness pursuit and screen they will be influenced by the terrain effects either plus or minus depending on the situation take for example again in dry lands it's a plus 10 damage so 40 becomes 50 damage or in hills um your damage goes from 40 reduces by 15 it becomes 25 and just as a real quick context clue anytime you select a land that you're about to walk into to do a conflict there is the type of um land terrain type that is that land so just clicking around you can see that that that little icon is going to jump around it's a plane it's a plane it's a plane oh my god it's still a plane there we go mountains so you get those different benefits or disadvantages depending on a demanded arms and that terrain type but so let's just say um we'll go to light footman one of the important things to also see is what these are they are type skirmishers and lightfootmen counter these type heavy infantry so if i were to click bowman bowman don't say that they counter lightfootmen it says that it counters skirmishers so you want to look at this type as what it is going to be countered by for example i don't know how to pronounce this word i'm just going to say kony they are a type light cavalry so i go to pikeman and i see that the pikeman will counter not coney but light calf and heavy calf so be very mindful that when you're selecting your minute arms uh what is suggested by a number of people is that light footman is the best bang for your buck in the very early portion of the game and i actually find bowman to be very strong as well because any of the early armies you're going to encounter will have bowman and or light footman and you'll you'll get a lot of benefit in my opinion from both if not one or the other now once you've selected them let's just say we'll select some light footmen here they will slowly start to create themselves but what's important here is if i press raise all armies right now i will get my levees and my knights and my metted arms if you decide to make minute arms after the fact you will have to rate them in arms that you want and then press raise all armies again to get a secondary army that will only consist of those met at arms in which case you would just simply move the armies together and press merge to armies now your knights are another very interesting scenario so you've got a number of nights that are dictated by a number of circumstances one of them would be your prestige that's that's one of the big ones here so level of procedure no effects but if i come i go up to distinguish i get more knights yay and there's other situations like your title will dictate your nights and so on so forth and you have the ability to invite more knights to your court which we'll go over when we talk about the court but going through this list you can do one of three actions or bid meaning that the knight will not be on the battlefield allow which will mean that they will of course be a knight or horse now what's nice about this is that you can force someone that you maybe want to kill off that you're not really you don't really want to do a murder scheme you don't have the manpower to do it or you maybe are just kind of um uh locked up but you can force a knight now let's just say i'm gonna go all the way to the bottom of the list somewhere um let's just say my brother he's just he's really not doing it for me and it's gonna go and or your knights are selected in order of their prowess but if i press force it will automatically be selected and then it will go in order of prowess so this is a good way to say oh i want to get rid of someone quickly or you want to maybe make sure that i always want this knight there this is what's going to allow you to do that now these numbers here are their prowess like i was saying earlier and that prowess is important because each point of it represents like this 100 damage or 10 toughness so this guy this count would be 1300 damage with 130 toughness and how this really translates is the night effectiveness now that effectiveness will also increase their prowess so take for example i go over here night effectiveness it says that at 100 percent knight's fight is normal but at 200 percent they fight at as if their pro s was doubled so at 75 percent they're going to fight at 75 bonus on top of that so rather than just having 13 they would have that 75 bonus there i guess for a good easy math example is this would be 17 so or i don't know if it would round up or down in this scenario so i guess 17 and a half but that gives you an idea of how prowess works because prowess will mean that if you have an army that is lower in number which you have really strong really powerful knights with good night effectiveness you can actually defeat an enemy army very easily because those knights will kill the enemy knights lowering the overall fighting capability of that army and it is just i've seen i have had my army completely wrecked by a higher knight army and it is very punishing um another portion of this list though is your rally point and i know this is a really big one so let's look at krakow here and we can see that this is our rally point right so maybe i want to do a war with let's say prussia and i don't want to rally my soldiers here and have them travel all the way through poland just to get to prussia to start a war well if you zoom into the map go to rally points click this button it's going to show you where your rally point is you can raise local armies all that kind of action well instead press this button move rally point and you can see on the map where you can move your rally point to it's going to be red here because you can't really point there already so boop you just move it right there and you're good to go that is a huge portion i know a lot of people had questions on that's how you move your rally point in addition you've got monthly reinforcement so if you were to shut this off it would reduce the amount of money that your army would cost you so by turning it on it increases that amount but your army will be reinforced they won't just stay static which is very nice last little tab here is also the mercenaries tab uh this isn't just a single band of mercenaries in the sense that you're recruiting a single man at arms is what you might be confused by when you look at this you're actually getting an army consisting of 783 troops with two champions and a high quality with 446 levies and this men at arms so if i go to the very bottom the band of arrow rain i'm getting all of this so be mindful of that if you do decide to choose any mercenaries you're not just simply getting a single band you're getting an entire army to go with there's also holy orders but that kind of requires a little bit further detail and information if you guys want a video on that i'm more than happy to do so let's jump now from military into your council you will be spending a lot of time with your council to try and manipulate the map as best you can so it's a good idea to kind of really have a good sense for what's going on so to start we're going to talk about your queen and you might be lucky enough to have a really solid queen out the gate but let's go over this real fast if i click her i can see all of her skills stats over here on the left now she's got diplomacy of 10 marshall 8 stewardship 10 intrigue of 7 and learning of 6. now what this really means is that if i go to assist ruler she can use all of her skills to assist any one of these positions that you need to have her assist and you can see this value here it's basically your skill divided by two rounded down if it's an odd one so take a look at intrigue it is three so it's seven divided by two is three point five round it down to three for court intrigue so if you're ever wondering where these numbers come from simply look at her stats and divide by two to get an idea of how she would assist all these other positions you do have this ability though in which case she can just simply assist the entire thing but she can just pretty much help everyone so she'll give a little bit of her skill to everyone two one two one one so not a whole ton but it's enough to just kind of maybe bump someone from average to good or good to excellent depending on what their skills at which brings up another point these icons in the upper right will denote how proficient that they actually are and what they're doing and it's pretty cut and dry of who's the worst here prince vladislav is not great with a rocking diplomacy of three which the game even tells you is terrible um and usually that's influenced by any of these skills or traits that they've got as a part of their character and we'll talk a little bit about those when we talk about marriage um but your this clergyman your your your individual in this section your theocracy is maybe a good way of looking at this uh this individual can influence religious relations so you can increase your piety and give you additional piety per month they're usually set to this by default also you've got the ability to convert faith in a county so if i click this i can convert a faith everyone though is is catholic in poland so i don't have to worry about that but let's just say i was down here in apulia where these portions are actually islam well you would use this character to convert the faith of this location also you have fabricate claim now why this is so important is because claims pretty much dictate your expansion in crusader kings 3. though if i want to expand into prussia i better have a claim on some sort of county or have a title that my character just has by whatever nature or marriage that granted in that title so in order to fabricate that claim i would select this then choose one i already have a claim on these it tells me right off the gate but it'll also tell you your progress so it's color coded for the most part but let's just take a look at this this is a monthly crop progress of plus 15.6 and it will complete in a year or if i can go over here this will complete in six years because it's got a monthly progress of six so you can take a look across the whole map what you have a likelihood of claiming quickly or slowly now there are three types of claims i'm going to bring up my character to express this there is the pressed claim which is a pretty good legally strong claim if you have a son or an heir or pretty much anyone who it's actually related to children when you die that child will have what is called an unpressed claim now the unpressed claim is not so great meaning that if your child were to die without pressing that claim and pressing it makes it valid for the most part then that claim is lost you have to refabricate it or create it again through marriage however you got in the first place so basically look at it from a hierarchy standpoint press claim is the best unpressed claim means that it's got it's on a little bit more of a timeline you better use it this generation or you lose it um followed by implicit claim which is kind of in between these two so if you have a pressed claim then you and you have a child then it they have an implicit claim towards say i i don't want to mispronounce something again i'm so bad at all these polish names i'm so terrible i'm so sorry guys let's say i had a pressed claim on greater poland well my child would have an implicit claim on greater poland because when i die he would then gain an unpressed claim so hopefully that doesn't confuse you too much moving over to your chancellor we have the ability to increase foreign affairs or domestic affairs and this is just pretty much going to increase the opinion of those situations domestic of course or foreign now one thing to note with every single one of these actions you'll see possible side effects muscle side effects possible side effects well you might actually result if you have terrible skill you might actually butcher your opinion with someone domestically or worsen a feudal contract meaning like we said earlier you get less levies or taxes or a loss of crown authority so you really want to make sure the people in these situations don't have well terrible skill because that increases the likelihood of a bad result take for example just just looking here at um domestic affairs possible side effects are all negative here well this guy this archbishop he's got good learning so possible side effects here are all positive so take those things into into effect but also note that swapping a chancellor or a steward or spymaster marshall any one of your counselors is going to infer an opinion penalty on that individual at the same time though if i take a look at this opinions of you um it will also increase some individuals take for example this guy count marion he wants a seat on the council well if i make him a council member it's going to give him 40 immediate uh opinion but it's going to knock down prince vladislavs down to uh probably by 40 as well it'll even tell you if i press this button see oh so principality slab will lose 20 opinion of you for 10 years because he also wants a seat on the council so know these things before you press the button make sure that the as they say the juice is worth the squeeze there's also your your steward they can collect taxes for you which is probably the way you want them for the most part they can help out in developing your country or your county and honestly i wouldn't really worry about buildings too much until you get a good amount of income and majority of the easy campaigns make it so your lifestyle goes kind of defaults towards military so until you have a high amount of income don't really worry about developing your holdings the the tutorial campaign allows you to really go crazy with this uh but i wouldn't do this just yet keep them on collect taxes there's also promote culture so let's say for example um everything here is polish but again just to use let's just say over here this is czech well if i control this land i'm probably going to want to influence these cultures to polish so i don't deal with any kind of control issues that will then influence my levies and my taxes everything this game is like painstakingly interwoven and as you play and get acquainted with the names of everything this will all make a lot more sense to you but i just want to try and connect the dots that you get a good idea of what's going on with these cultures with this control with this levee with these levees these taxes all this stuff now your marshall is going to be used a lot in your campaign as he has this ability increase control and county this will basically make it so that any county with low control and like we said earlier control will dictate your levies and your taxes you can use him to increase that control popular opinion will also affect that that uh your levies and taxes and that can also be caused by a crisis of culture or faith that's when your steward will come in a control is going to be influenced by your marshall your marshall also can do two other things one is organize levees which is going to help out your levy size garrison size and reinforcement rate which is great but here's a really good one train commanders so this will make it so that my minute arms cost less per month and he has a chance to find new commanders or knights each month so that you don't have to constantly be inviting knights in the realm tab which we'll go into in a little bit so those two are pretty important but i would use train commanders if you're not already trying to increase the control of someone or some specific county lastly we have the spymaster who is going to be pretty crucial here to pretty much making sure nothing goes wrong in your in your realm disrupt schemes is probably what you'll have him on by default and he'll find out any kind of schemes that are going to be working against you and they'll be cataloged in this intrigue menu which we like i said we'll go over in just a little bit we can also support schemes so if you have say a murder scheme he can help boost it and increase the chances of it and he can also find secrets if i press this button brings up this really cool map and i can see my likelihood of finding secrets throughout the map now what secrets are are basically say let's say i did um a murder scheme here on the archbishop and the scheme went through and i killed him well that's a secret that's a hook that i now have in my intrigue list the find secret ability allows you to find that secret and use it to leverage and blackmail against whoever you find it so maybe if you find your own vassal secrets you can blackmail them and influence your social contract i'm sorry not a social contract your your feudal contract or you can even uh extract money from them so there's a lot of power to be done with the find secrets button now we've gone over your counsel let's jump in to your court so your court's pretty important because it's all of your guests your courtiers it gives you the ability to invite knights which will allow you to get three able-bodied men with 12 or more prowess will arrive as guests at court with in the coming months so this is important if you want to really increase the amount of knights you have or just get better ones in general but they'll be from all over the place they won't just simply be polish knights they could simply be um italian nights it could be french nights it could be anything from across the map so be mindful of that when you press the button you might have to appease and help and really kind of soothe the the temper of a certain night but you can also invite claimants and claimants are individuals who will have claims to anywhere on the map it doesn't it's not going to simply be oh you're going to invite claimants and you're going to get a bunch of people from prussia that have claims it's not going to be that case you'll get individuals who will have claims that you might be able to use or expand into or try and leverage it's a pretty cool way to get some some nifty claims also search for a court position which i cannot stress enough you should be doing this immediately because once you get a court physician you will a have the ability to repel diseases a little bit easier and b they'll help out any time you go to war and your knights get maimed or or wounded uh for instance my air was maimed and wounded and he lost an arm and then he died so also as a further point uh make sure your heir is not going to battle for so for example here my brother i would forbid him from going to battle um unless he's really really good at it but the the position is a crucial one you should be getting right out the gate and i think that the game doesn't tell you enough that you should be doing it we even see right here this guy is a novice physician and he's got 14 learning learning influences very well into physician skill and as you scroll through this list you'll also find individuals here okay so this guy's a competent steward and also a renowned position by the way what's his learning skill not as high only nine but still you go through this list you've got your guests which you would invite to court and it costs you money to do so and you gain opinion with them immediately if you already have a hook you can use it to kind of get them in a little bit easier but then you've got your courtiers here which are basically people that are already in your court like your wife your knights your vassals your archbishop stuff like that and these individuals will be able to be recruited as nights or maybe made as your physicians stuff like that but let's say you want to be able to search through a very vast court because you're gonna your court system is going to increase exponentially as you do so you can press this button you can press find character and this is going to allow you to search the entire world your top realm which is poland your realm in specific all of your vassals and then all of your court so it allows you to kind of drill down and say okay well let me see um i want to find someone who has the quick trade i'll type it in properly and select it okay well these are the people in my realm that have got the quick trade so using this is a really powerful tool to navigate through all of your vassals your core tiers your guests everyone in your court to find out maybe a specific trait you're looking for for someone to get married with certain things that allow you to kind of navigate through outside of your court there's this button which is prisoners and anytime you go to war you might claim prisoners or you might see to castle and get some prisoners they would be in here and you'd be able to either execute them negotiate them or negotiate their release torture them ransom them you have a whole bunch of options but that's where your prisoners would reside now we've gone through your court let's quickly jump through your the intrigue menu because it's going to be pretty fast there's not a whole ton to talk about right there but i just want to give you a quick rundown of it the intrigue is divided by two scenarios your schemes and then your hooks and secrets you've got hostile schemes which are obviously you making a murder uh personal schemes which are you trying to sway someone or maybe you're trying to oh well seduces another one so it basically breaks them down right here by personal and hostile but anything like that would go into these relative scheme selections then discovered as secret schemes so going to council going to disrupt schemes any schemes that he discovers are then going to be catalogued right here and once he discovers them i'm going to just press murder on this guy you'll see the person that it was against and you'll see the predicted success rate and the predicted secrecy and both of these values will be reflected in your discovered seems scheme section here and this gives you a really good idea of who it was against and what the likelihood of it of succeeding is it'll probably be like four or five percent after you've discovered it but i just wanted to give you an idea of what goes there lastly you've got hooks and secrets so as you play through the game and you release people you'll start to get hooks from them you'll start to learn secrets as you deploy your spy you'll have hooks against you and then you'll have your own secrets which are basically hooks waiting to be hooked so like i said if i were to kill my archbishop that would become a secret of mine if i dealt with a certain dilemma it would create a secret and that would then create either a lesser or a weak or a strong hook against me depending on the severity of the secret and then of course the secrets that i then discover by my spymaster so the intrigue menu not too in depth but i want to just quickly brush through it talk about it real fast here so you had a better idea let's quickly talk about lifestyles and we'll talk about probably the largest portion of this video in marriage and alliances before closing things out so lifestyles are pretty much like essentially choosing a specific experience path for your main character so to start let's look over here at our um skills line learning is nine intricate seven stewardship is good marshall is 21 and diplomacy is 11. like i said the majority of campaigns that are noted as easy will have a very high marshall skill for your starting character that's not a bad thing i think learning the game through military is pretty fun and also easy it gives you a really good foothold but you can press this button up here or the one down here now this they went through this in the tutorial so i'm not going to go too crazy with it but marshall is pretty much the way that the uh tutorial wants you to go and it pretty much says hey this is what we recommend because your character has such a high martial ability but some things you should really look at are these other branches because they are very important and not all characters are going to be really good at marshall at the gate especially your air is not guaranteed to be an amazing martial military combatant but diplomacy is a really strong one and also stewardship is amazingly strong look at this if i choose wealth focus oh no don't don't press the button i'm already getting 10 increased income and one of the strongest ones of the wealth focus is golden obligations so rather than taking my hooks and using them to influence feudal contracts or maybe uh my schemes i can use it to just get money i can extract money like crazy from people and it really can get out of control fast i think it's something like 100 gold per scheme uh i know that a spiffing brit did a video about this i'm not sure the entire details of it but i know the golden obligations is a really great way to get a lot of really early money very fast but really take a look at these before you choose your lifestyle don't just default to marshall unless you're really confident in that being the the step that you want to take with your campaign i don't want to influence your decision too much outside of what i think i already have with stewardship and golden obligations but make sure you're choosing ones that play well with your skills and your traits that you have in mind for your character like this guy is a skill tactician force fighter strong okay well maybe he should be martial but your lifestyle is really pretty much how your character is going to progress for the next five years you're locked into this right can only be changed every five years and it's not gonna tell you to change it after you get this gauge i'm gonna go ahead and select strategy focus this little bar here will start to fill up all the way around and at that fifth year even says wait until september 15 20 10 71 to select another one you'll get hey you have a talent point you can use at that point you can now switch your focus so if you want to stay on that track go for it it's usually good to kind of get all the way down to the specific perk you can pick it up for example a gallon here actually uh the strata just will go here chad just would have given us uh one diplomacy three more martial enemy fatal casualties plus 25 percent and crosses water without advantage penalties yes so you do get a lot of really great advantages here you can also reset your perks if you so wish but this does give you stress and i haven't touched on this but just a real quick um stress levels as they go up each time you tip into the next tier you will be dealt with a dilemma that is way more catastrophic than i thought it would be basically you the dilemmas are reduce your stress which will actually drain your coffers or affect all of your vassals or your entire court even or ones that will just simply increase your stress if you decide to ignore it leading to another mental breakdown so really manage your stress as best you can that's like a hard and fast tip before we jump into our last subject here in marriages and alliances so to do this we've actually jumped over to sicily to talk about the normans in apulia and calabria so we've got our uh son here beaumont and we're going to talk about how to really deal with marriages and um i wish it was this easy in real life but you simply press a button and it boots this thing up and you can pretty much take a look at all of the available um marriages that you have you know at your disposal now you can sort this by a number of other things like the tutorial outlines but you should really kind of look at your alliances to nations that are relatively close to you for example we can sort this by alliance power and i can choose normandy and basically marry into um the duchy of normandy and and really get this going with our you know our original um homestead but okay if i get into a war they're gonna have to abandon their fight with england and it's also gonna pull me into that war and i'm gonna have they're gonna have to charge all the way from normandy down to apulia um for example in poland you wouldn't want to have sweden as your ally that's actually not too bad norway is your ally because it's going to be quite a hall for them to get to any of your enemies in poland so when you're deciding for your spouse alliance general location is important if you're trying to strictly marry for alliances what i would say to do for all of your kids especially the ones that are going to be in your direct lineage in your direct dynasty the the the faction that you've started basically look for the traits that they've mattered the most so what i'm going to show you now are a series of traits i'm actually going to bring my main character up to show you this real quick so you have different traits you've got personality traits you've got education traits you've got lifestyle traits and then lastly you've got congenital traits a physical trait as it were congenital traits are the important ones here because these are the ones that get passed on between two people so i think does she have any no she does not so there are no congenital traits between my wife and myself but my spouse or not my spouse sorry my son also no congenital traits but if i were to marry zenia here she has the congenital trait of robust meaning that it would transfer into my children now there is a random chance that there are multiple congenital traits it will just simply choose one at random and i believe i believe it has a chance to upgrade it so i'm going to bring this rule this filter button up real quick and i want to sort this real quick as well so let's do age or let's do fertility the fertile um let's select traits there it is inheritable traits this will show us a list of individuals that have inheritable traits now all traits are not created equally now each one of them kind of depends on its level i guess more or less you've got quick which is the base trait that is related to genius which i think a lot of people would say is probably the best trait so you've got quick then you've got intelligent and then you've got genius you can see the progression here one to all of these abilities monthly lifestyle experience plus ten percent well this is now three to all of them monthly lifestyle plus 20 or genius five to all skills 30 lifestyle monthly experience gain so what you want to look for basically is finding a spouse that ideally if you can has genius to make super children or you look for some of the other traits like um there's pretty and handsome and beautiful there you go there's comely which is the bottom of that one and then beautiful which is the tier three and each one of these affects fertility and attraction and fertility does change depending on if you're male or female females have a lower percentage chance of fertility as they approach either 35 or 40 i believe it's 40 in crusader kings 2 and 35 in crosshair kings 3. but as they approach that final age they no longer can produce children and their fertility rate drops to around 70 percent around 30 30-35 so having these higher percentages even increases it above 100 percent chance allowing them to just churn out kids like a factory that's terrible sounding but still you can use a lot of these really great abilities or there's even herculean which is like your top-end one i think um i don't remember what the other ones are but basically you huge pro s boost health you pretty much want to look at these when you're trying to determine your wife more than anything alliances are really strong and i'm not going to lie to you you should definitely try to find a good one or two i believe in my puglia campaign we are um the count vitale of pharamo we have a alliance with him and he's been one of my best companions through my journeys because he's been so close to my lands he's jumped in he's been able to help me out and do a lot of really great things but really think about the future for your campaign and for your dynasty you're not just simply marrying to alliances because those alliances can dissolve if you're if that character dies of of old age or if they die of say um getting killed in battle whatever the situation is so if you marry um if it's you have a male child marrying a woman then that woman has the chance of keeping or she'll keep that alliance going as long as she doesn't die randomly or your your child doesn't die randomly so alliance is not a surefire thing so making sure that you're basically breeding for the future as it as it were um is what is really going to maintain things like for example if i did this my character would probably start to make some super babies once they once the character comes of age so keep that in mind and on top of it once you've created your super genius baby uh there's another thing to take into account it's guardianship because remember like i said there are these personality traits and personality traits you are not born with in fact i think of this character as characters too see this character's got zero skills and zero personality traits and they don't have a disposition yet a personality trait as it were what you do is open this up close this and your daughter or your son and air bowman he needs a guardian well he's gonna be my heir maybe i want him to be taking a look at him now he's already wrathful cynical and brave well i can choose a character that either counters those things or one that maybe makes him a better combat like mine brilliant strategist which is an education trait um uh gallon here which is that a lifestyle trade that he can't inherit but still you can use these education traits and these personality traits to influence your kids and that's really important because yes the congenital ones are massive they're going to give you a huge skill bonus but using the ward system the guardian system can help you influence that child overall they're going to help the skills as well so let's say i wanted to choose here this guy this guy's got a great military ability high martial skill he's got brilliant strategists and flexible leader he's brave he's content he's deceitful but that is what that is he will pass these things on to my son and on top of that another little caveat here is that let's say i have married let me just choose randomly a polish woman and my entire culture is norman and catholic well let's say that my child has a child with this woman i'm sorry my child goes to eugena eugenia to be trained to be warded to be educated well then that child has a chance to become polish so whoever you're assigning your ward to make sure it fits with the religion and culture of the child that you want to keep following the religion culture you are otherwise they have a chance of secretly even becoming that culture and you won't find out until you take over control of that character if they are your heir or whatever the situation is so setting your dynasty up for the future is so important and you do that right here in your betrothal portion and in the ward portion and making sure they're going under the right people for education and they're getting the right congenital traits right out the gate with all that being said hopefully you now have a better understanding of crusader kings three and you honestly you're not gonna get it right out the gate you're not gonna like i said you're not gonna jump into this and be able to know what to do you you're just gonna stumble through a lot of things and you're gonna fail and that is okay like i said before do not get frustrated don't let the game beat you it's it is complex but once you can start to put things together something will click and you'll just get it it'll just make sense very quickly and i know it seems so daunting right out the gate because you've got all of these buttons suppressed and all this crap in your way i'd even go into like titles and claims and how much of a headache that can be but play through it learn it fail in it and you're gonna learn how to play very quickly it took me really like failing this apolia campaign like two or three times before i finally got it off the ground working the way i wanted to don't be afraid to just kind of crash through stuff and if you don't understand something press save games save it and press the button and find out what it does and if you oh okay well now i understand how that works reload and just try it again like if there's no shame in in safe scumming a little bit when you encounter decisions or certain things that you want to do with your your campaign to discover what actually comes of it or what the results are how it actually influences the game so play with things as much as you can break it and then rebuild it in the way that you want it that's the best way to go about crusader kings three but as always guys thank you so much for watching here today if you want to know some more about crusader kings 3 or you have any other questions go ahead and leave a comment below if you do like these types of videos i will be doing another deeper dive onto probably inheritance and succession laws i think i think that's probably one that people are very stuck on but go ahead and let me know anything else that you are stuck on in the comments section and i can hopefully do a whole video on it if i can't explain it quickly in a quick little typed up comment but as always thank you so much for watching here today don't forget to like subscribe comment below all that fun action but have a good one and take care

Channel: ItalianSpartacus

Views: 765,664

Keywords: campaign guide, Crusader Kings 3 guide, Crusader Kings 3 beginner's guide, crusader kings 3 tutorial, how to get started, noob, newbie, essential tips, tips, gameplay, campaign, lets play, live stream, new player, get better, HD, 2020, release, launch, crusader kings 3 gameplay, crusader kings 3review, crusader kings 3 pc gameplay, crusader kings III, let's play crusader kings, crusader kings 3 tips, playthrough, paradox, crusader kings 3, first time playing crusader kings 3

Id: i9P248pkgYI

Length: 61min 6sec (3666 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheItalian567]

Following up with my previous quick beginner's tips, I wanted to make a guide on starting your first campaign in CK3. This is more of a supplement to the actual tutorial to help give you perspective on a lot of the points you learned, or at least help blend things together to give you a better idea of how they operate.

This video ONLY takes place in the initial portions of the game after you press "start" and the game is paused. SO Much early set up is done there, so I wanted to use that time to best explain the menus and how to approach things.

Here's the table of contents, as always, to see if this video is even worth your time ;)

• Starting Year
• Recommended Campaigns
• Initial Decisions & Issues
• Land & Titles Breakdown
• Realm Management
• Military Breakdown
• Council Actions
• Court Management
• Intrigue Menu
• Lifestyle Selection
• Marriage, Guardians, & Alliances

[u/SpotOnTheRug]

Prowess is pronounced PROW-iss, just fyi.