Crusader Kings 2

Step-by-step "Tutorial Island" guide by Nerdorama

Part 1: Uniting Éire

Welcome to Crusader Kings 2. You’re probably reading this because you impulsively picked up the game
during the free weekend, took one look at the interface and, like most sane human beings, noped the
hell out before getting anywhere because it’s insanely complicated and badly explained. I’m here to try
to explain a few things and hopefully take the edge off the madness. This will be a step-by-step
screenshot tutorial on some of the basics of Crusader Kings 2, following along with a game using the
most popular “newbie start” which you were probably recommended on social media or by the
Crusader Kings 2 wiki. Speaking of the wiki, if you decide by the end of this that you’d like to continue
playing Crusader Kings 2, please bookmark https://ck2.paradoxwikis.com/ as it is an invaluable and
constantly updated resource on CK’s game mechanics. In fact, if you get bored of my style and want a
quick summary rather than a step-by-step, https://ck2.paradoxwikis.com/Beginner%27s_guide
specifically is an excellent place to get started. But I’m going to give you the details.

Furthermore, this guide is heavily - directly, really - inspired in both style and strategy by Kersch’s Let’s
Play Crusader Kings 2, available on the LP Archive at https://lparchive.org/Crusader-Kings-2/. We’ll be
using the same start and a similar strategy, but updated to the more “modern” build of CK2.

Starting the Game

I’ll start by loading up the game with No Downloadable Content or Mods Enabled. DLC for Crusader
Kings 2 can change the gameplay quite a bit, and if you started with the free base game and didn’t buy
any additional content, your experience will be pretty different from someone with all of the expansion
packs. I’ll add notes about how specific DLC affects things as I think of them (for the scenario of “Catholic
Feudal person waaaaay in the west of Europe, Way of Life, Reaper’s Due, and Sons of Abraham are the
most relevant ones I own, with Conclave, Monks and Mystics, and Jade Dragon being chief among the
ones I do not). But the basic assumption here will be a complete vanilla game in version 2.8.1.1
(checksum ISRM).

First thing’s first, let’s do the obvious and click Single Player to start a new single-player game.
Clicking on the default High Middle Ages bookmark gives us a list of interesting characters. While I’m a
big fan of Robert Guiscard in particular, we’re going to focus on a minor player in the 11th century today,
so click Custom Game Setup

Here’s the map screen that allows you to select a character:

All the filters in the top middle can help you narrow down who you want to play, and the list of handy
bookmarks on the left let you skip around to different periods of time. We’re going to leave the latter on
default for the moment (I highly recommend doing this even if you bought DLC that gives you “earlier”
start points – 1066 is easily the most stable for a brand newbie game). The man we’re looking for is a
tiny two-province Duke in Ireland, labeled on the map as “Mumu”. Don’t laugh, Irish is a proud
language. Incidentally, we can change game rules to have all territory names stick to our version of the
game’s default (in which case Mumu would have its modern English name, Munster, on my computer,
instead of the Middle Irish name its owner would call it) but I’m leaving as many options as possible
default since this is a tutorial.
There we are, the most exciting man in Ireland: he’s one of two in a position to start a war immediately
and the only one with playable vassal…but I’m getting ahead of myself. You can see some data for him
on the right-hand pane:

 His full style, King Murchad of Mumu (IMPORTANT NOTE: he calls himself a King but for game
rules purposes he is a Duke, which I will explain later. If you turn off Cultural Title Names in the
next step, he will be Duke Murchad of Munster)
 His Dynasty. You are not playing as this man, and you are not playing as the Petty Kingdom of
Mumu. You are playing as the Ua Briain dynasty, a notion that makes CK2 very different from
other real time strategy games. That’s why this guide will be more concerned with titles and
succession than wars and building.
 The dynasty coat of arms and his portrait
 The proper name of his primary title, Petty Kingdom of Mumu
 His status, Independent (as opposed to Vassal of another character)
 His culture, Irish
 His religion, Catholic
 The supposed difficulty of this start, which is complete nonsense and should always be ignored
 His vassal(s) of Count tier and above: Earl Ragnvald of Urmhumhain (or Count Ragnvald of
Ormond if you turned off Cultural Title Names)

Let’s click Play and get started

But first, let’s specify some game rules. I’m going to leave everything at its default for this tutorial except
for Ironman Mode. Ironman Mode restricts you to a single save file which is updated every time you
manually save, exit the game, or automatically every few months, preventing “savescumming” (going
back to an earlier save to change an event) and console commands while allowing achievements. I
recommend that you play your first several games with Ironman Disabled so you can experiment and
make incremental saves. Games can go down the toilet extremely quickly and having an “undo” button
is nice. I’ve also scrolled down to where you can find the “Cultural Title Names” rule mentioned above.
That and “Titles Named After Dynasties” can be confusing while you’re learning, but I’m leaving them on
for screenshots in case you just clicked through this without reading the paragraph, or you are already in
the middle of a campaign.

Now we are ready to Start Game

The game will give you two successive splash screens on startup that explain the basics, and then any
special effects you’ll notice from your character’s specific combination of Culture, Religion, and
Government Type (I completely failed to screenshot the former but it’s the same every game, you can’t
miss it). I recommend reading this all thoroughly, it’s a lot but it definitely gives you a good idea of
what’s going on.

(It also lies; Irish Culture has one special effect I’ll get to later, and I think the second to last bullet point
under Catholicism is a DLC feature. Could be wrong though.)

Important Note: From here on out, my experiences will be unique to my game: Crusader Kings 2 uses
randomization heavily and is an open-ended sandbox where almost anything can happen. You can
follow the general steps, but don’t be surprised at all if the specifics are very different.

Before I say anything else: DO NOT UNPAUSE THE GAME UNTIL YOU ARE SURE YOU ARE READY. This
sort of thing requires a lot of setup, and I am gonna explain some stuff laboriously before we do
anything.
Okay so here we are and man that is a lot of tiny little buttons! Since this is a step-by-step guide, I’m
going to go over them as needed rather than just dumping everything on you all at once.

By the way, if you don’t have the little kajigger under the message window (it’s called an Outliner) press
your mouse up against the right side of the screen and it will appear. Click the lock symbol to get it to
stay. It’s really handy for keeping track of events within your territory.

One thing to note is Map Modes (the buttons above the minimap in the lower right). They’re all useful
except maybe Terrain which is hilariously the default, but usually when I play an independent ruler like
this one I stick to the Realm map mode for most gameplay (top second from left, or press the “w” key).

A quick and dirty rundown of Feudalism and how CK2’s Map works
This didn’t fit anywhere else so I’m going to give a quick summary of CK2’s most basic mechanical
feature here, namely how its map is divided up and what that means for characters.

CK2’s world map can be thought of as a map of thousands of Holdings – individual Castles, Cities,
Temples, and Tribal Encampments, each of which is “held” or owned by a character. A Christian
character who owns an individual holding and nothing else is called a Baron if it’s a Castle, a Mayor if it’s
a City, or a Bishop if it’s a Temple.

Holdings are grouped on the map into component pieces of Provinces, the smallest subdivision visible to
the player – and the smallest plot of land a player character can own without getting a game over. The
precise name for Provinces depends on its capital holding. For the purpose of this guide, we’re only
worried about Provinces whose capital holdings are Castles. These are known as Counties, and the
Christian characters who rule them are usually called Counts – thanks the cultural title names, though,
they’re sometimes called Earls. In game terms, Earls and Counts are exactly equivalent – as are Sheikhs
in Arabic territories, etc.
Provinces are grouped into Duchies on the map, which can also be ruled by a single person, called a
Duke by default. An Independent Duke in the area we’re concerned with today is called a Petty King –
they call themselves Kings, but they are Dukes for game purposes. This is very important.

Likewise, above Duchies are Kingdoms ruled by Kings, and above Kingdoms are Empires ruled by
Emperors.

The important thing to remember in the game is the concept of the feudal contract – a ruler can run a
few Holdings directly, called their Demesne, but the can also rule over a lesser ruler, called a Vassal. For
the sake of the vanilla, no-DLC game, assume City and Temple holdings must be held by Vassals, while
Castles (and Counties, Duchies, etc.) can be held by the player character. The game comes in large part
in managing your own personal territory and the opinions of your vassals, who are often fractious, but
always necessary for a large territory – most Kingdoms and basically all Empires are Realms made up of
both Demesne and Vassals.

One final quirk is that only a character of a lower “rank” than you can be your vassal – Dukes can have
Counts as Vassals, but not other Dukes. Counts can only have Barons/Mayors/Bishops as vassals. So tl;dr
IF YOU ARE A DUKE OR A PETTY KING DO NOT GIVE OTHER PEOPLE YOUR DUCHY TITLE(S) OR THEY
WILL BECOME INDEPENDENT FROM YOU. Thank you.

Our Character and his Relationships

Back to the game, the first thing you’ll want to pay attention to after the map itself are the circular
buttons in the top-center. These are Alerts that tell you when something important might need your
attention. Hover over the leftmost one and it explains itself: Ruler Unmarried. Our character does not
have a wife! This is a problem because the Middle Ages were even more distressingly obnoxious about
pushing marriage on people (well, nobles, which we are playing) than people born in the 20th century
are. Click the alert.
This takes us to our Character Page, which is the same thing that clicking on the big portrait in the top-
left or pressing F1 would do. We can arrange a marriage for Murchad here, but let’s take a look around
first.

Most of the pertinent information about Murchad himself is arranged here. Highlights that we did not
already know from the character select screen are the Heir who will inherit his titles (clicking the small
portrait of him or anyone else on here acts as a hotlink to their own Character Pages, which is damn
handy), his Titles (the land he personally owns, in this case the Duchy of Mumu and the County of
Tuadhmumhain – once again the tiny coats of arms act as hotlinks to the information page for that Title,
which we’ll talk about later), his vital Ruler Stats, and his Traits. The bottom of the page is dedicated to
subtabs that we’ll talk about as we need them.

Important things to note are his ruler stats: his personal stats are 6 Diplomacy, 9 Martial, 10
Stewardship, 6 Intrigue, 8 Learning. Not very good, but not unplayable. The numbers in parentheses
after these stats are our “state” values, which is Murchad’s stat added to the relevant stat of the
Councilor in this position. Once he gets married, we’ll also add half of his wife’s stats to all of the state
values, which is why it’s important to marry skilled consorts when possible, or at least have someone
there to help manage the castle. He’s also got a mediocre “Education” trait that gives him bonuses to his
Martial stat and his Traits are a mixed bag: Just is great and Patient is even better, while Lustful and
Greedy give bonuses while also reducing our vassals’ opinion of us. Hover over any Trait for details on
what it does, or any Stat for details on how it’s calculated.

Speaking of marriage (and Lust), let’s go ahead and get hitched. The easiest way to do so is to click the
double ring icon above our titles.

This brings up a character chooser consisting of all the eligible bachelorettes within our “Diplomatic
Range” (an arbitrary distance you can set in the game rules away from Ireland) who would be willing to
tie the knot with our current character. And by “willing” I mean “their liege and/or father would be
willing to arrange it” because this is the Middle Ages.

There’s several important things to consider when selecting a spouse in Crusader Kings 2. Age, Claims,
how closely she’s related to someone we might want to form an Alliance with, ruler stats, traits that
effect personality and fertility…it’s a tough choice. Now, we don’t need to worry too much about
producing extra heirs since Murchad starts with one (and we noticed he was randomly generated with
the Lustful trait in this game, which increases his own fertility, so we’re probably going to get extra kids
regardless) so we can focus on ruler stats and who she’s related to. Ingegerd Yngling is strong in
Diplomacy where Murchad is weak, and she’s the daughter of Harald Hardrade, the large Viking who is
presently kicking the crap out of our Anglo-Saxon neighbors in England (historically he died on the day
the game starts, but that almost never happens in-game, and he, Harold Godwinson, and William de
Normandie will spend the next several years hashing out who gets to rule England instead of the war
wrapping up by Christmas. If you don’t like the idea of Norse England, consider the 25 December 1066
start instead). Historical aside aside, you can hover over that sword with a line through it next to her
portrait to show that a marriage to her will grant us a Non-Aggression Pact with the Kingdom of Norway,
which is great to have just in case Harald gets greedy. Let’s right-click Ingegerd to send the proposal to
the King of Norway.

Note there’s also a significant benefit to Prestige to marrying up in the world (a Duke equivalent
marrying a King’s relative in this case) – Prestige is part of how Crusader Kings 2 keeps score and having
a lot of it also naturally makes people like you better because you’re famous.
Our Heir is also unmarried and clicking the second alert circle from the left lets us know that our Heir is
absolute garbage what the hell. Characters have randomly generated traits every time you start a new
game and Brian O’Brian here got some of the worst you can start with: Gluttonous (you get fat-shamed),
Slothful (all your stats get a penalty because you’re just so damn lazy) and Cruel (which is actually a
tradeoff but it’s bad on a ruler because it gives opinion penalties from vassals). Ugh. Well, this is a
tutorial and I already spent like half an hour writing so I’m not going to try to re-roll. Anyway, do the
same thing for him you did for Murchad. He’s our son and in our court so we get to pick who he marries.
The Patriarchy: oppressive for everyone.
(Note the Search Bar at the top you can use to search for names of Traits or titles. Try using it to search
for “Genius” or “Strong” later in the campaign as those are congenital traits that are great to marry
into).

So, here’s another thing you can base spouse choice on: Claims. Characters have or can inherit Claims to
rule certain areas, which are used as justifications for war as I’ll get to later. Nest Seisyll here, in addition
to having some good traits this game, also starts every game with inheritable claims on 75% of the
Kingdom of Wales. It’s a good investment to marry her to your heir in this situation because then your
Heir’s kids will inherit the claim on these provinces. I’ll get to how to take advantage of this exactly later.
For now, just marry her to Brian. Since she’s not an adult yet (the age of majority is universally 16 in the
game world of Crusader Kings 2) this will form a Betrothal, i.e. a promise to wed when both parties are
adults. It will still get you a Non-Aggression Pact with the Petty King of Powys, Nest’s uncle, immediately.

As a quick aside, you automatically form a Non-Aggression Pact with anyone you have “Marriage ties”
with, so in our current case the families of Harald Hardrade and Nest’s uncle. You can upgrade these
non-aggression pacts to Alliances (you can call on each other to assist in wars) by right-clicking the
applicable ruler’s portrait and selecting Form Alliance. You can check your NAPs and Alliances at any
time from the “Pacts” tab of your character page.

Now, let’s click on the third icon: Ambition. Every character in CK2 has an Ambition, some short-term
mission that gives benefits when fulfilled. You should make sure your character has one at all times.
Right now, we’re going to be slightly cheesy and pick “Get Married”: click the thought bubble in the
middle of Murchad’s character page and click on the paired hearts. We’ll be fulfilling this one shortly.

 DLC Aside: If you have the Way of Life DLC, this is probably also a good time to pick a Character
Focus, which gives your character a boost to one of your character stats and an event chain with
interesting happenings, butt can’t be changed for five years. If I had the DLC enabled, I’d
 probably pick the Martial focus for Murchad since I plan to do some serious fighting early.
Characters who don’t start with an Heir should pick Family Focus to get on with making one.
 DLC Aside: If you have the Conclave DLC, Ambitions are completely changed. I don’t own that
one yet though, so check the Wiki for details.

The next icon, the little green thingy that looks kinda like a flower or an agate but is actually a stylized
map sectioned into green and red provinces, tells us about a particular justification for war we have.
We’ll ignore it for now. The little trophy icon informs us that there are Minor Titles in our court we really
ought to think about filling, specifically a Designated Regent – if our character cannot rule for whatever
reason, his Designated Regent takes over for the interim. If we don’t have one, the game picks for us. As
a general rule, never let this game make choices for you unless it’s just ordering something by
numbers. Clicking on the icon takes us to the Minor Titles subtab of our Council page where we can pick
our Designated Regent. In this case I would normally pick my Heir but I misclicked and chose my
Chancellor instead. It probably won’t really matter on this specific character.

 DLC Aside: this is also the point where you would want to pick a Court Physician if you have The
Reaper’s Due DLC, either in the same way you pick a Designated Regent or by going to the
“Intrigue” tab and clicking the Decision to search for one, which will fire an event that generates
a new character.

The Council

Clicking on our rightmost alert takes us to the main tab of our Council page (which would normally be
the little crown icon to the left of our character portrait or F2). Your Council is your cabinet, your
advisory board, and your lackeys (unless you have the Conclave DLC, then they are the enemy and are to
be cowed mercilessly). They do the things that make the government of your fief run while you handle
the Grand Strategy. Each one is associated with a particular ruler stat, and the game automatically
assigns the people in your court or among your vassals with the highest trait in each stat to the
respective positions, and you can then assign each of them to perform one of three tasks (four with
Monks and Mystics DLC) out in the world.

Our Council, incidentally, is garbage except for our Court Chaplain who is, ironically, totally superfluous
in Ireland at this stage of the game. I’ve seen versions of Toirrdelbach mac Tadg (who inherited the Petty
Kingdom after Murchad’s death IRL, pretty interesting guy) with 20 Diplomacy, but apparently this
version just wants to chill out and cram his face full of nachos with Prince Brian. We’re going to do a
trick here, because the Chancellor is far and away the most important position for this particular start
and we want someone with a minimum of 15 Diplomacy in the role. You can skip this next step if all your
Councillors are great (15+ stats) but it’s incredibly useful to know about anyway so please read it.

This is the Character Finder, one of the most powerful tools in the game. You can access it through the
little head icon on the bottom right of the screen or by pressing “.”. It allows you to filter and sort every
character who currently exists in the game: right now, we’re looking for Men who will Join Our Court
from anywhere in the world, and sorting them by Diplomacy. Looks like the Chancellor of the County of
Léon is highly skilled and willing to abandon his existing court for ours, so let’s right click on that guy and
Invite him to Court. That will take a couple days to fire and we’re not ready to unpause yet, so let’s
return to the Council screen.

The rest of these jokers aren’t as vital to the cause as a good Chancellor so we’re just going to put them
to work. Starting with our Marshal (since we’re going to replace our Chancellor in less than a week), I
assign each of them a job in a particular province. Very early on, you’re usually going to want to do the
following:

 Marshal: Train Troops in your Capital (Tuadhmhumhain). This increases the total size of your
Levies (troops you can call to war) and has a random chance of increasing your reinforcement
rate significantly. You do this and taxes in your capital first because you can only do them in
 Counties you own personally but more importantly because your capital already has Levy and
Tax bonuses and you want to stack them.
 Steward: Collect Taxes in your Capital. This adds a percentage modifier to your income from that
province and gives you a random chance at free money (as well as a smaller random chance and
peasant mobs beating him up. No one likes taxes.)
 Spymaster: Unless you have someone you want to murder immediately (we don’t), send him to
Study Technology in a province that turns green when you click on the Study Technology
mission: he’ll give you a technology point generation bonus with a random chance for free tech
over time. Italy and Iberia are the only places in range with better Tech than us right now so I
send him to go bother the Pope in Roma.
 Court Chaplain: this guy’s main use is in converting provinces from other religions to our own
through the Proselytize mission. Since Ireland is religiously unified in this era this is useless to us,
so instead I like to have him also go to Roma to Improve Religious Relations with the Pope,
granting us random opinion boosts with Il Papa over time. This becomes less effective later
when Roma is flooded with bishops and the bonus applies to any random priest in the province
but for now it’s fine. It’ll also be nice to have someone on hand to “apologize” if the Pope
catches me spying on him…

One more thing that’s not in the Alerts before we move on (and also that I didn’t screencap). You see
the Laws tab (a hammer or F4). Let’s go there and go to the Realm Laws tab for now. We’re planning on
rapidly expanding our personal holdings and are nowhere near our vassal limit, which means it’s
beneficial to change that “Centralization” law you see there from Min to Low. Law changes are on a ten-
year cooldown so it’s best to mess with them immediately if you want to.

 DLC Aside: Conclave completely changes how laws work. Again, consult the wiki on that one.

Are we ready to unpause the damn game yet??

Yes! Well, just about. You can definitely click around and explore some more but I’m going to get things
moving as per the motif of this guide as a step-by-step. Now’s the time to look at all the fun tabs and try
to figure out the less immediately relevant stuff for yourself, so have at it.

When you’re ready, press spacebar or click the date in the upper right to start the clock. You can pause
again at any time and I recommend you do so with extreme frequency in your first game. You can also
increase the game speed to 2 or 3 with those + or - buttons or the equivalent keys on your keyboard – I
don’t recommend much past that for your first game.
The results of our diplomatic activities will begin to arrive.
When your king gets married (as most religions anyway), you get an option to accept monetary “gifts”
from your subjects or show off by not doing so. I like Prestige – like I said, it’s the game’s way of keeping
score. A day or two after this the game will declare our “Get Married” Ambition fulfilled and prompt us
to pick a new one. I picked “Have a Daughter” because the fertility bonus while that’s active is nice to
produce a few backup heirs. I don’t trust Brian to rule his way out of a burlap sack so it’s probably good
to have spares just in case an accident happens.

Okay so we got our son and ourself hitched and our new Chancellor arrived. Time to fire our cousin and
put him to work.
We’ll click on Appoint under Chancellor to put someone new in Toirrdelbach’s position. As you can see
he’s gonna be pretty mad about this, which would be a problem if he had any power whatsoever.
Fortunately, he doesn’t, so off with him. After clicking Appoint, your best-qualified candidate for that
position should be sorted to the top of the list, so go ahead and click him to give him the job. We can
then assign him some work:

 Chancellor: Chancellors have two equally important uses, but this early in the game Alan’s main
job is going to be Fabricating Claims on neighboring Counties. Click Fabricate Claims and put him
in Osraige (English: Ossory) to give him a random chance to give us a Claim on that province. I’ll
cover Claims in detail when we get to warfare but for now just know that they’re vital for
expansion in a religiously homogenous part of the map.
 DLC Note: The Jade Dragon DLC gives access to additional “casus belli” that somewhat obviate
the need for claims that we’re going to rely on for the rest of the guide. Rather than waiting on a
random chance to forge a Claim for a cost of Prestige and Gold, we could simply spend Prestige
and gold directly to get the right to subjugate them. That doesn’t give us direct control of the
county, though, which is something I like to have as much as possible.

Consolidating Mumu
So now that that’s squared away let’s have a look at consolidating our position here. We style ourselves
a King, but we control only 2/3 of a single Duchy in the backwater end of Christendom – only Iceland is
more remote than us. And half of that is controlled by a vassal whose services we don’t appear to
actually require. Let’s have a look at that vassal, Earl Ragnvald of Urmhumhain (Ormond). You can find
his character page by right-clicking on Urmhumhain, or by checking the “Vassals” subtab on Murchad’s
page.
Ragnvald’s a decent sort. Not particularly competent or incompetent, and notably Norwegian in culture
– he’s a holdout from the Vikings who settled on the coasts of Ireland in the past few centuries. He has a
positive opinion – barely – and is therefore a loyal vassal, but he still needs to go. Note his “levy” – the
number next to the little helmet on the page. 486, which is significantly less that Murchad’s current
count of 772. That means if we pick a fight with him we’ll probably win barring bad luck, and more
importantly the AI knows this too, which affects how it’s going to respond to this next trick.

We’re gonna steal the county from him. Sorry Ragnvald, Mumu belongs to the Ua Briains.
Go to your Intrigue page (the dagger and letter symbol or press F7). At the bottom of this page click to
the My Plots subtab and you’ll find a convenient dropdown of all the nefarious stuff you can do. At the
top of the list is a plot to “Revoke the County of Urmhumhain”. This plot requires very specific
conditions but suffice to say that as long as we don’t have a truce with one of the Counts in our Capital
Duchy, we can pick this plot to have the rest of our vassals gang up on him and demand that he hand
over his title to Murchad, which he’ll have to either do or go to war. Click on the plot to start it.

We start with a whole lot of “Plot Power” which gives a rough indication of whether the plot will fire,
but we need to make sure we have at least a couple others on our side. Tick the little “Auto-Invite
Plotters” box, or click the little + sign to invite them manually. We’ll need to do that this time as no one’s
immediately going to leap on helping us.

IMPORTANT NOTE: PLOT POWER IS NOT PLOT SUCCESS CHANCE. Remember this when we’re doing
nastier plots later. A plot needs 90-100% power to “fire”, that is, execute its eventual conclusion. Plot
success rate is highly random, although it does go up significantly for every 50% of percent of power
over 100.

My other two vassals, the mayor of a city and bishop of a church within Tuadhmumhain, are willing to
join in maybe, but they’ll need a little persuasion in the form of a bribe. Right-click on both of their
portraits and choose Send Gift. Gift/Bribe amount is based on the target’s income and its effect is based
on your Stewardship – they’re pretty cheap early-game but bribing these two still takes most of my
pocket money. Oh well. They’ll join eventually once they’ve been bribed if auto-invites are on.

For the record, Send Gift is good for a temporary boost of anyone’s opinion of you, and whether a
character joins a plot is based on their opinion of both the plotter and the target. Bear in mind you can
use this for oher purposes too, like temporarily mollifying an angry vassal.
While we’re waiting for our accomplices to formally join, let’s talk about your army. Go to the Military
Tab (F6 or the sword and helmet). This will give you a breakdown of your “levies”. Unlike most Real Time
Strategy games, in Crusader Kings 2 you don’t build individual units. Instead, each holding (province,
castle, etc.) that you own contributes troops to your “personal levy” that you can raise with the button
I’m hovering over there. As a feudal character, each of your vassals will also contribute a certain number
of troops – not many, early on, as you can see, but it’s better than nothing. Now, you shouldn’t have
your levies raised at all times – troops cost you significant amounts of money over time to have raised,
because you have to feed them when they’re not farming for themselves. Troops from vassals usually
cost you increasing opinion penalties over time with your vassals because your vassals have to pay
them. Also, you can’t officially declare war while you have levies raised anyway. So, nine times out of
ten, make sure your levies are not raised unless a war has just started.

This is the one exception in ten, though. We’re going to raise our levies and park them on Urmhumhain
before demanding Ragnvald hand over his title. Just to make sure he gets what he’s up against.
Note the little head icon on one of the armies. That means my ruler has been assigned to it as a
Commander (commanders are pulled from your ruler, your Marshal if they’re not on a mission, and
anyone assigned as a “Commander” on the minor titles page). This is risky but helpful early since
Murchad is almost competent militarily. Since he already has an adult heir I’m not super worried about
him getting offed by a lucky shot on the battlefield (as happened to the historical Murchad. And Harald
Hardrade. And Harold Godwinson. And Richard the Lionheart. Warfare is very unsafe for kings, so make
sure you have a backup!)
After a couple of days our paid lackeys will join our “plot” to Revoke Urmhumhain, which will prompt us
to click a decision on the top part of the Intrigue tab to let Ragnvald know he’s being downsized.

And we shortly get a notification that Ragnvald is giving up in the face of our overwhelming support. He
could have declared a civil war, but he chose the smart route this time, so our show of military force was
unnecessary. Click through the messages and then go back to your military tab to Dismiss both your
personal and realm levies.
We now have the County of Urmhumhain as part of our personal Demesne (titles we hold ourselves),
and we also add Ragnvald’s former vassals (a Mayor and a Bishop) to our list. One of them doesn’t like
us much because he’s a Norwegian Priest and we’re a dirty Irish sinner but honestly, I don’t worry too
much about Bishops in this game. We’ve also taken control of Ragnvald’s personal levy from the castle
of Port Lairge, increasing our troop count significantly.

Now let’s click on that last little alert at the top of the window…the one that tells us we have claims we
can press.
Earl Muiredach Mac Carthaigh of Deasmhumhain (Desmond) controls land that is de jure (legally) part of
the Petty Kingdom of Mumu, but he does not de facto (in fact) swear fealty to us, the Petty King. He’s
also a lazy, arbitrary, gullible petty schemer who has half as many troops as we do now. You can right-
click on him to offer him Vassalization peacefully, but he’ll refuse as he thinks we’re not a big enough
deal (we’re only one “rank” higher than him, Duke vs. Count, and he doesn’t like us much.)

So! We’re going to beat him up and force him to be our vassal. He’s such a failure militarily we
outnumber him two to one without really trying. I’m just going to declare war immediately, with
another right-click on his face.
Note that you cannot Declare War if you don’t have a reason for it (we do, which I detailed above) or if
you have any levies raised (apparently that’s just bad form). So, make sure to have a reason to declare,
then declare, then summon your army.

Also note that our choice of casus belli (cause for war, also known as a CB) directly affects what the
results of that war will be. We only have one possible CB right now, and it will make Muiredach our
Vassal. That’s the only result a win will have, so keep it in mind.

I recommend combining your armies in your capital before doing anything else: numerical superiority is
worthless if your troops are divided (Click and scroll to select all troops in a province, then click the
inward-pointing arrows or press m for Merge). He may summon his own troops and try to gank you
before you can combine your stacks, just move everyone into whichever province his moving toward if
you see a little crossed-swords icon there indicating an impending battle. You might end up playing
footsie with this a few times as he changes target, but the important thing is just to get all your troops
into whichever province there’s gonna be a fight in, even if some of them arrive after the fight starts.

Once you combine all your forces, remember to manually assign the best (right now, highest Martial,
worry about specific Traits later) commanders to each flank. The computer is really bad at it.
Battle is joined and we’re just immediately wrecking him for various reasons but mostly because I
outnumber him and both of my “side flanks” can immediately attack his “center flank” and pile on the
damage. Battles are actually quite complex and interesting in how they’re modeled but for the purposes
of this guide you will probably win if you outnumber him and he doesn’t have a 22 Martial commander
or a defensive position in the mountains or something (Ireland has no provinces which count as
mountains btw).

We killed about a third of his whole army, while the rest are retreating. This gives us about 22% War
Score as well as making his army too small to be a threat for the rest of the war. We need close to 100%
War Score to force the enemy to concede, though, and the way we’re going to get most of the rest of it
is through siege. Go park your army on the enemy’s single province (ignore the retreating enemy stack,
you can’t fight it while it has that white flag unless you changed the game rules to disable Shattered
Retreat. We could have, and it makes wars quicker and easier, but like I said, defaults).

We are now sieging the enemy capital. Basically, you leave an army there and wait for the defenders to
give up. Medieval warfare! Exciting! You can only siege a holding (in this case a castle) if you have more
troops in your stack than the enemy has garrisoning the building (therefore we can leave our own
castles undefended for now – we have more troops in each of our garrisons than Muiredach has in his
whole army after that battle. The more troops you have, the faster the enemy morale ticks down, and
since Ireland has plentiful supply limits we can just put our whole army here, increase the game speed,
and wait.)

Incidentally, despite having levies raised, we’re making more money now than we were before we went
to war, since our boys are looting the province as they siege it. It’s handy, but not an infinite source of
money, as every province has a limited amount of loot, and certain amounts of it are “protected” by
unsacked castles. If I was playing optimally, I’d have waited to replenish my coffers before attacking…
Note the icon indicating Muiredach doesn’t have enough troops to siege us back. That’s why I’m not
bothering with another field engagement yet. It’s much more important for me to take control of the
“war goal” (the province I want) than slaughter his men.

I get a random flavor event while I’m camped out around the enemy castle. I could get some church
benefits, but…nah. I want daughters.
Bam. 32% more war score because I took his castle (by the way, you can right-click on this message and
set the game to auto-pause every time you win a siege. I recommend that so you can issue your army
new orders. You can do this with basically any in-game message, try it out). Sometimes you can get a lot
more from capturing his family or heir. Unfortunately, Muiredach doesn’t have family or an heir in his
court. Isn’t it sad?

Then I march north and wreck his army again.

Sometimes commanders randomly die in battle. Be careful with them, huh?

This is why we outsourced for a Chancellor with a great Diplomacy score – fabricating a claim is super-
important for early expansion. Accepting this claim will take us to negative money which is Very Bad, but
it’s important enough I’m going to accept it and deal with the consequences.

 DLC Aside: with Sons of Abraham you can take a single loan of 300 gold from “Jewish
merchants” in exchange for paying them back 350 gold whenever. This is exactly the kind of
situation that’s useful for.

Back to the war, finishing the battle takes another half of Muiredach’s forces and bumps me up to 85%
War Score so let’s just go loot his stuff. Since I occupy a holding in the “War Goal” I’ll get gradually
increasing war score over time, but I need money now, so looting is important.

Stealing buckets of gold from churches: not just for Vikings anymore!

I’m now at 100% War Score so let’s click on Muiredach’s face down there at the bottom, then Offer
Peace. Then – and this is important – click Enforce Demands before you click Send.
He mad, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He’ll be our vassal from now on, or until we decide to
get rid of him.

War is done, we won, but Extremely Important note: DO NOT DISMISS YOUR LEVIES IMMEDIATELY. If
you dismiss levies in territory you don’t own, you’ll lose half the men in that army. If you acquired new
territory and your armies are standing in it, you look safe, but you sometimes have to let the next day
tick over before the game realizes it. I have started more civil wars by accidentally dismissing my levies
in “hostile” territory than I care to admit, so please be aware of this rule/bug, for your own sake.
Expanding Beyond Mumu

Now that we have a claim on Osraige, let’s have our Chancellor start fabricating on Cill Dara (Kildare)
instead. You can left click on him on the map and then right-click on his new target if you don’t want to
go through the Council screen again.

Also, take a look at the map. While we’ve been consolidating our de jure duchy, the Earl of Dubhlinn
(coincidentally our nephew through our half-sister) has also expanded by different means – he inherited
the County of Laigin from his father. Inheritance is a very important means of acquiring territory later in
the game, and I’m pointing it out now so you’re aware of it.

Now what we’re going to do ourselves is going to start getting a tad repetitive. We want to do
approximately the same thing to Osraige that we did to Deasmhumhain (and the same thing to
Deasmhumhain we did to Urmhumhain), but we’re going to let our cash reserves and levies recover a bit
first. Then soon after that we’ll repeat the process with Cill Dara, then (with luck) Earl Murchad of
Laigin’s two counties. For now though, let’s just let the game run and our economy recover a bit…have a
look around the map, make sure your vassals don’t hate you (other than Muiredach who will be
throwing a tantrum for about 12 years, honestly just ignore it) and if they are in the negative opinion of
you, hover over their opinions to see why.
Looks like William de Normandie won the throne of England in his historical war, but he’s still fighting
our father-in-law. We could meddle in this war by forming an Alliance with Harald Hardrade (since we
have a marriage tie to his family), but honestly, we’re a mouse among giants right now, or perhaps a
small housecat at best. Best to just let the chips fall where they may, I’d say. If Harald wins, at least he
can’t move on to eat us even if for some reason he wanted to. If William wins, I plan to marry into
England’s dynasty regardless, so.

(Shortly after this, Harold Hardrade was knocked incapable (comatose) in battle and basically lost all
chance of winning. Long Live King William!)
The Decisions tab has some decisions you can fire at certain times of the year that generate event
chains. Right now, we’re trying to save money, but if you’re at peace and better off financially than I am,
check it out.

The Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire is basically scripted to start screwing with the Pope around now,
as he did historically. Don’t worry about it, it never goes anywhere with the AI, although it does have the
knock-on effect of encouraging Catholic provinces to convert to various heresies. We’ll worry about that
if it happens.
…

Okay I hit 50 gold and I’m bored, let’s go conquering.

You don’t get notifications for your personal claims that can be pressed, but you can see them on your
character page. Note that unlike ducal claims, pressing a personal claim on a title means you (or
whoever has the claim) takes the title directly, rather than vassalizing it. That’s why these are so nice for
building up your personal holdings early game.
Anyway, let’s check our target before attacking (always do this). He’s significantly more militarily
competent than Muiredach (or Murchad), so his single county is pretty impressive. However, we still
outnumber him by a wide margin, so let’s…hey wait, I see a problem here. A little blue problem with a
red dragon on its flag.

Whoops! Let’s not attack yet. Domhnall is allied to one of the petty kingdoms that comprise Wales – one
that will probably come to his aid in a defensive war, even though we have a non-aggression pact with it
through my son’s fiancée. Osraige + Gwynedd have around a thousand more troops than I do, so this
war is not worth pursuing right now. Let’s back up and see if I can break up the Alliance.

You can look at a character’s Pacts in his character page, as seen above. We can see that Domhnall’s
Heir, Donnchad, is married to King Bleddyn’s niece Sioned. Isn’t feudal family politics fun? We can right-
click on both people and attempt to plot to kill them (thus breaking the alliance) buuuuut we’re not
going to get any good plot power against either of them without spending lots of money so let’s just
wait this out and come back another time. War delayed on account of I don’t declare wars I’m not
positive I can win. I really recommend you have the same policy in the very early game, you can really
get in a spiral of screwed with a small realm if you lose a bunch of levies and money to a bad war. Also,
it's basic Sun Tzu. We’re just going to enjoy a few more years of piece.

I swapped my chancellor to fabricate in Laigin and he got a claim almost immediately. I’ll add it to my
collection but I want claims on both Dubhlinn and Laigin so I can press them at the same time.

Btw you can only change Councilor jobs every few months, so he just gets to vacation for a bit before I
can swap him back to Cill Dara.
This is the end result of that first random event chain I got. In a game with the Way of Life DLC this
would be gated behind either the “Carousing” or “Seduction” Focuses but as it is I just get it randomly.
Hedonist is a good trait overall despite some problems with Church Opinion but what the heck, it’s good
to be the king.

In the meantime, Brian and Nest also get married. It’s pretty much the same thing as Murchad getting
married but hopefully they’ll produce kids faster than I’m giving Murchad half-siblings.

I also have a grand-nephew in my court hit Age 6 in the meantime, which means he needs a Guardian to
give him an education. My steward has good traits for a vassal, and in the interest of maybe landing this
little guy later I assign that guardianship contract

 Conclave, once again, changes childhood education entirely. I should probably make a separate
guide just for that thing’s features…or I would if I wasn’t broke, anyway.

By the way, Cill Dara is incredibly vulnerable and I’d love to attack it. But I can’t, because I have no claim
and therefore no cassus belli (cause for war). It’s sad. I’m sad. I miss you.
My first grandkid. Since my Succession Law is “Agnatic-Cognatic” and women can inherit, that means the
succession is safe for another generation after Brian. Although my vassals would still prefer a male
ruler…but we’ve got plenty of time.

Got bored and decided to see if I could kill the weak link in Osraige’s alliance. I can’t quite get to 100%
plot power even with bribes, so I’m not going to start inviting people (plots can get outed when more
people are involved with them and I don’t want to risk that unless they have a chance of actually
succeeding). We’ll just keep an eye on this. I assign my Spymaster to Build Spy Network there to help a
bit.

Good news, everyone! Her husband decided he could be bribed into helping and now this ironically
named Bishop is going to give me a chance at breaking the alliance with murder.

Success is never guaranteed, though.

This happens all the time. I hate Vikings. Raise your personal levies and have them converge on the
raiders if this happens. If you do so immediately they should have low morale and retreat quickly.

Around this time, I also learn that my half-brother is plotting to kill my heir. While Brian is fairly useless, I
still consider this bad form and press the little red X to ask him politely to knock it off.
After another false try (in which I was implicated, causing my global opinion penalties), my murder plot
succeeds. Looks like the Alliance is off, and even better, the new Earl of Osraige apparently murdered his
father in a fit of lunacy and everyone hates him. I’m sure it was quite Shakespearean. Time to move in
and restore order, hm? I declare war immediately.

The war goes identically to the one against Muiredach except even more one-sided, and the result is
that I take the madman’s title because I’m pressing my own personal claim on it rather than expressing
my authority as a Petty King over my de jure territory. Really, if you have more counties/castles than the
other guy in the first twenty years of the game, you’re about 90% likely to win.

And now we’re back to the waiting-on-claims game. Honestly, if you’re bored now, I don’t blame you.
Go play a King in Spain, it’s much more exciting. If you like this safe, slow expansion though, we’re 2 or
three more wars away from finishing this segment.

Oh hey finally. I was beginning to worry. Since this fulfills my Ambition, I’m going to make my new one
to become King of Ireland. You can’t cancel this type of Ambition, but it will make the claims come in
faster which I really want right now.
My eldest granddaughter hits six and I do decide to assign myself as her guardian, since she’s currently
my Heir’s Heir (Heir Presumptive is I believe the IRL term) and I like being able to micromanage my
whole line of succession’s education.

For the record, the way Education works without Conclave is that children fire a series of events for their
Guardians that can add or remove particular traits or change their base stats. AI guardians tend to make
choices that give children the same traits they have, and of course Player Character guardians let the
player make the specific choices themselves. That’s why it’s important to assign guardians with good
traits if you’re not raising an heir yourself…unless you have a reason to deliberately sabotage a kid’s
education. Once they hit adulthood they’ll also get an education trait in the same genre as the
guardian’s (usually), so Affraic here will learn a Martial-boosting education from us.
Speaking of Succession! I’ve reigned for 10 years now which means it’s time to talk about succession
laws.

Most Christian rulers in the game start off with “Gavelkind” succession, which tl;dr splits their titles up
amongst their eligible heirs. This doesn’t make much of a difference right now because, having one son
and one daughter, my titles won’t be split at all. Even if I had two sons, Brian would get Mumu and
everything in it and my hypothetical second son would get the County of Osraige and still be Brian’s
vassal. No real problem there. The problem would be if I owned two titles of my top level and had two
sons, which would split my realm in half, which is obnoxious. That’s why you should change succession
laws in 1076, or earlier if the game lets you, and certainly before forming or becoming part of any
Kingdom, which complicates things. I’m choosing Primogeniture, the classic Eldest Son (or daughter if no
male heirs) Inherits Everything inheritance, because it’s easy to demonstrate and keeps my line of
succession basically the same. However, almost anything is easier to deal with than Gavelkind, so feel
free to experiment with Elective, Ultimogeniture, Seniority, or the Celtic Culture Group’s special
succession type Tanistry outside the context of this tutorial. Just remember, each ruler can only change
Succession Laws once, so choose wisely.

Changing to Primogeniture gives me an alert for “Unlanded Sons” since Primogeniture carries a small
monthly prestige penalty for having sons without titles while it’s enacted. I don’t really care, though.
Hey remember how I nicked the title of Urmhumhain off of Ragnvald like a decade ago? My truce with
Muiredach is up and I can do the same thing to him now.

It goes exactly the same as it did earlier. (Palpatine Voice) I love Feudalism. I love the Kingdom.

This does mean I’m personally holding too many counties, though (“over my Demesne Limit”). I still
want to concentrate power at the moment so rather than do the normal thing and hand one off to
Brian, I’m going to increase my Centralization law again.
Btw Demesne Limit is calculated based on your Stewardship + your wife’s Stewardship, which means
boosting both of those should be a priority if you want a lot of personal holdings (you do, especially
early).

Wow, William let one of his Anglo-Saxon Dukes get way out of hand. Looks like he’s pacifying that
though.

Anyway, my claim on Cill Dara finally fires and I can repeat the same process I used on Osraige but with
slightly less poison because they have no allies. I had allied Gwynedd in the meantime as insurance and
they called me into an Excommunication War against Scotland. It’s painful to decline calls to war in this
game so I just went with it. Scotland was dealing with two other wars at the time and eventually ended
the war by getting his Excommunication revoked, so I didn’t even have to participate, technically.

As a side note, letting your king fight in wars does have benefits as well as risk: Murchad has so far
gained a point of Martial and the excellent Brave trait from participating in combat, as well as the
Martial-boosting Zealous trait from a random event.

It’s also at this point I finally Grant Brian a Title by right-clicking on his face, choosing Grant Landed Title,
and giving him the County of Osraige. Since a County is lower tier than a Petty Kingdom/Duchy, he now
serves as my vassal until he inherits the rest of my titles. I chose Osraige because I want to keep all of
Mumu for myself, as well as the duchy containing Cill Dara and Dubhlinn, but more on that in a minute.
One more claim and Phase One will be as good as complete.
By the way, you see this little checkbox here? You want it checked on your line of succession if they’re in
another Court, as Affraic will now be once she becomes an adult. Otherwise my idiot AI son might do
something stupid like marry her patrilineally when he doesn’t have a male heir lined up.

While I’m on the subject: a default or patrilineal marriage means all children of that union are the
father’s dynasty; a matrilineal one means they are all of the mother’s dynasty. Since I have no guarantee
I’ll have a male heir two generations from now it’s extremely important that if I’m playing as a woman,
her heirs be of my dynasty. If I’m going to keep Primogeniture, this is vital.
This event happens with fairly incredible regularity. The fallout from having a bastard (which is very
likely from it) is mainly opinion maluses so pay attention to who her husband is and whether you care if
your wife hates you, or just click yes because you’re roleplaying Murchad’s Lustful trait like I am.

Then she rejected Murchad anyway, ha.

At Age 57, Murchad fathers a second son. This is exactly why I turned Gavelkind off, things like this just
make it awkward.
While I’m thinking about succession, I matrilineally betrothe Affraic to this guy, the bastard prince of
Denmark who inherited a claim on England. Am I ever going to be in a position to realistically press it?
Probably not. But sometimes longshots are worth it. This is exactly how William became King of England
to begin with, after all.

We finally get a Claim on Dubhlinn and I use this button to make sure that I only have to fight this war
once. Truces are a pain in this game since so often you can only take a single county at a time and then
have to wait out a ten-year truce timer.
Anyway, you know how wars go by now. I have twice his troops even without calling Gwynedd in. As a
double Count with good martial this could have been a pain if I didn’t have four castles of my own. As it
is, I have to alternate between sieging and swatting his army to keep him from taking my castles.

If you get this option, I recommend Heavy Infantry. Those guys tend to be the damage dealers in
combat. This doesn’t matter much without the Legacy of Rome DLC though.

 The reason it matters more with Legacy of Rome is a DLC feature called Retinues, professional
army units you can hire with gold, instead of using levies or mercenaries. In particular, Irish-
cultured rulers have access to an incredibly powerful retinue that consists of pure Heavy
Infantry rather than a mix of various unit types. Making a single flank of your army entirely
Heavy Infantry and giving them a competent Commander is like having a blowtorch when
everyone else’s army is composed of soft cheese in this game. Retinues are great).
During the war, Nest dies of pneumonia 3 months after giving birth to a son, my new Heir Presumptive.
As you can see both he and his sisters inherited Nest’s claims to various Petty Kingdoms. Rest well, Nest.

I assign myself as the boy’s guardian immediately since I wouldn’t be notified of it when he turned 6
otherwise. Brian, as a landed ruler, can technically decline on his behalf, but he loves me for granting
him a title so he doesn’t. I also order Brian to get remarried to the highest Stewardship single lady I can
find to help out with Demesne limit when he inherits. Brian also got maimed at some point. What is in
the water in Osraige
The inevitable happens, and here’s where the fun begins.

Side note, but there’s a very short term debuff to taxes and levies for every new holding we conquer.
Normally this lasts like a year but the province of Dubhlinn is of a foreign culture (Norwegian). That
makes it last a lot longer, and that’s why overseas conquest is a pain in this game.
High King of Ireland

We now control more than half of Ireland – that is, the de jure Kingdom of Ireland that does not de facto
exist. That puts us in a position to form it, but we have to do some steps first:

1) We need money. Since we can’t borrow any without DLC that means we have to let the game
run a bit (I’ve been spending money on improving my castles which I shouldn’t have, otherwise
I’d have told you to. My bad.)
2) We need a second Duchy-tier title. Since I want to keep the Duchy of Meath (Dubhlinn and Cill
Dara), we form that one. Click on one of those provinces, then on the coat of arms next to
“Meath”, then Create. Note that getting a second Duchy increases our Demesne limit by one,
which is nice.
3) We need to build up even more money to make the Kingdom title, fortunately our Ambition cuts
the price in half so it’s only about the same as a Duchy.
And there we are. No mere petty King, but the High King of Ireland, like our grandfather Brian I. Creating
the Kingdom makes it our primary title and we go up in rank, and now we have a whole host of new
options. First I’ll go ahead and also give Brian the County of Laigin. It doesn’t matter to me if he forms
the Duchy of Laigin now, as since I’m a King he will remain my vassal.

The second thing I’m going to do is Offer Vassalization to everyone within de jure Ireland – this will
peacefully make them my vassals without my having to fight them. Petty King Aed of Connachta here
(still alive from the beginning of the game and he was old then) is the only one liable to hold out, as he is
only one rank down from me, but my immense armies convince him that joining up is the smart thing to
do. All the individual earls in the rest of the island are also on board.

And bam – unified Éire (or Ireland). That wasn’t so hard, compared to…every other point in history. It’s
beautiful (especially the map color)…but it’s still just one Kingdom, and half of it is still full of fractious,
feuding clans. There’s a big world out there, and we’ll need to make some adjustments starting
immediately.

Since this document is now 62 pages long (!) and we’ve reached a stopping point, I’m going to call the
first segment of this tutorial finished. There will be a part 2 for how to manage your new unified
kingdom, focusing on such matters as:

 Dealing with Vassals (and not just taking their stuff for funsies like I did to Ragnvald and
Muiredach)
 Crown Laws
 Inter-Kingdom Diplomacy and Warfare
 Pressing other peoples’ Claims, and the difference between Strong and Weak Claims
 Maybe we’ll touch the Religion, Faction, and Technology tabs
 Crusades!
 And if we’re lucky, the creation of an Irish-led Empire of “Britannia”, centuries early.

Thanks for reading. If you have any questions, you can reach me on Reddit at u/Nerdorama09 or on
Plurk at Nerdorama.