FIVE DIRTY TRICKS IN CRUSADER KINGS 3 | Beginner's Guide 07 

Had a lot of fun with this one! Something a little different than the rest of the playlist... which you can find here - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-AbGDKTBQrHI.html

Another cheesy trick: When you get an event with a skill challenge you can increase the odds for the good outcome by temporarily switch your Queen to focus on that particular skill and then choose the decision.

I did the fifth tip as king of Ireland to rid myself of a useless heir. Sent him off on a suicide mission in the war for Jerusalem. Ended up accidentally winning the crusade and being crowned king! My first proper holy macaroni moment in CK

Thanks Steve Buscemi. Love that you could find some time in your busy hollywood schedule to make this tutorial.

Soo my favorite one was discovered for pagans/any religion with concubines. Was playing as rurik and was trying to get my last piece of land to make Sweden. The guy I was trying attack allied with a rival kingdom above me by marrying his daughter. So I took and went raiding till caught his lovely wife. And instead of executing her made her my concubine which avoids option issues with other kingdom and nulls his marriage and alliance. Then took his land and used his wife's claims on rival kindom to usurp the throne of the other kingdom like a boss.

The abduct scheme is so helpful lol. It's hilarious when you're down -90% and the abduct scheme finally fires and you win the war

Holy smokes a tip video with tips that are actually good from someone who clearly played more than 5 hours?

On my Spain playthrough, Queen of France had a son, which holds the King of France title as well, but after him, there was no one. So I checked the title succession and found out title goes to another dynasty which doesn't have any impact. So I found the 3rd successor and marry my daughter with him with a matrilineal marriage. Ofc they accepted because the boy was no one and she was a princess. So I started a murder plot against the son of the Queen of France. And when he was done, the succession was at the boy, my son in law and indeed after Queen died from old age, my son in law become the King of France. Funny enough since it was a matrilineal marriage. Their son was from my dynasty and soon my grandson was going to be King of France.

6:05 "But, at least you won't have to deal with the repercussions of being seen as a tyrant." Me, who plays every single character with 100 Dread: "Oh no, wouldn't that be terrible..."

Imprison unwanted heirs in the dungeon which will cause them to be killed by you without giving you the kinslayer or murderer trait so that your entire realm is yours to control when you die

Played Harald Fairhair. United Norway, took Sweden and gave my ambitious, intelligent grandson the Duchy of Uppsala to train his governing. Two years later he declared war for the county of Urbino. The Pope's county of Urbino in Italy. My ten year old just dragged me into war with the pope.

"Golden Obligation" is my favorite. Especially if I can gain a strong hook on someone. Since the gold scale up depending on your income, you can get them to buy you a new castle every 5 years because a strong hook is not consumed, but rather repeatable every 5 years

The thing about forcing your knight on suicide mission because you hate them was actually portrayed by hebrew bible in story about David and Bathseeba, so the ancient jews were actually exploiting the glitch in the matrix since long ago.

I know this comment will likely never be read, but I just wanted to say thanks for all these guides! You've made my first real playthrough (after doing the tutorial) a lot less overwhelming and much more fun! This is my first CK game, and though I've played a couple Paradox games in the past (mostly Stellaris), this game is far more confusing than I had expected at first, and the tutorial basically taught me nothing. So seriously, thank you.

This games so deep, and all i do is blob my way around every time i play.

I had a lot of fun using this dirty trick and can highly recommend trying it out. Using the abduct sceme to convert the religion of a hugely powerfull neighbour to your own will cause rebellion in his realm. Not only making him occupied fighting internal wars, but eventually his realm will fall apart into smaller managable chuncks. Used this trick to extreme effect in a playthrough as a small dutch count with the asatru faith, surrounded by catholics including my liege. One after the other, the huge realms fell into chaos. It also triggered a very strong independent faction against my liege, which I only needed to join, shattering the kingdom without a civil war and leaving all individual former vassels as easy pickings for me. Basically 3 abductions (West Francia, Lotharinga and East Francia) caused the entire bit of north west europe to be in civil war. I then continued to do the same for Great Brittain, going from a count in Frisia to the emperor of Brittania within a livetime.

Excellent tips and I completely agree that these are NOT cheese but actual things a ruler could have accomplished. This is such an open ended game with multiple overlapping mechanics, a lot of these won't work in every situation and the best ruler will be flexible and use whatever advantages they have to get the job done for the good of their realm.

Perfectly timed, I'd been thinking of how to eliminate my problem primary heir, but motherly love prevents murder plots...

"Cell your victory" is best used for smaller, earlier wars. It often won't work with kingdom and emperor level because their scheme resistance is too high, even with strong hooks in their courts.

For one, I'm commenting for the RU-vid algorithm. And the other is thank you for this! I'm super new to the game and any info to help me become an insightful tyrant is greatly appreciated

Once you have a bigger realm keep scanning the territory for peasant uprising/seige. Use diplomacy card with the vassal and offer to join peasant war - raise the smallest army nearby and kick the peasant army like a boss.... You get good piety/prestige without a losing much of the troops. Mostly they get routed in early battle phase. Real bounty is the peasant leader who has better tactics and prowess than some champions... Recruit them from the dungeon for free... Instead of calling champions every five years.

If you're catholic you can always excommunicate your archbishop, imprison, then banish to get all his gold. It can be a pretty big source of income, and it won't get you any tyranny, nor do you have to worry about the bishop after banishment since he doesn't have any gold or claims.

That gives me some ideas!

Tip 1 was extremely useful, thanks!

Awesome video, just what i was looking for. Please do more like these.

Great Videos as always! Thank you

As a ck2 veteran, I agree to all of this.

8:46 this dude is rallying the entire realm to go to war with a baby

Thanks! So many new ideas😎

Wow. I've been playing for so long and these are new tricks I will definitely use. Thanks. Great video.

These are some actually useful tips no other guides from other content creaters have given so far have given me

Very helpful tips friend,thanks a bunch

I always use the last one with my discontent vassals. It's also great for breaking up factions formed against you if your vassal is a male.

Thanks alot. That county conversion trick is going to help me with The Mother of us All Achievement.

what is this i was looking for elvis videos this isnt ellvis this is crusader king.......

What a helpful video! I don't have the game yet but I'm planning to buy it so I'm watching all the videos I can so my first time playing isn't overwhelming. I'm super excited!

That first tip was worth the like, thanks my dude.

Recently discovered this series. Really helpful advice and I am definitely going to try the 'abduct the ruler you're about to go to war with' scheme.

Man these are clever and underhanded. Can't wait to try them

Learned a lot thx :)

My favorite method to continuously go to war with the same realm it to just murder the ruler you have a truce with to null the truce

If you become pope of your own heresy you can circumvent tyranny by just excommunicating your internal enemies

That was dope thank you

Awesome video!

currently having fun in my run 1st time to do so after the tutorial. started with leon now i control 2 kingdoms. my lands are the barrier between france and HRE

This is some GoT schemes. Nice

If you have land directly neighbouring the capital of a realm you plan on attacking you can move your rally point to the neighbouring barony and immedietly send your man-at-arms into their's when you declare war before they assemble their levies. Only really works when you have more man-at-arms than them though. There's a lot of shenanigans you can pul with rally points actually, teleporting armies for example.

Interesting stuff. I was messing around as a count last night with intrigue and trying to snake my way up the ranks, but didn't work out too well as I was still trying to figure it all out. Was fun tnough as I kidnapped the queen of France and forced her to get a hook on Philippe and I made his daughter marry my lowly count son into my dynasty cause he was a deviant (Phil's secret). Was going well until his daughter died of a sickness before Phillipe died so that scheme fell apart. :P

Aweesome, thx a lot! 👍🏼😊

Not showing my premade buddies this video, thats for sure. Knowledge is power

I've always enjoyed revoking titles as punishment for crimes; yes, CK3 actually lets you specifically "punish" if they are marked as criminals. You see, if you hover over those criminal icons, the tooltip will describe a list of possible punishments. If some of them have already been meted out, it will show the text "(already punished)"

Wow the two tips just blew my mind, i would have never thought about this. The abduction just after declaring a war is one of the coolest strategies there is, but its kinda weird how your knights will just blindly follow your orders for a suicidal mission over and over again, it is kind of overpowered.

Honestly these are great tips for the more...evil...rulers out there. I’ve actually used the last tip to get rid of excess sons so that my lands don’t get split up during succession. This works beautifully with the perk that lets you know you have a year to live.

That last one was very King David of you.

I just did that second one this morning. Lost my run on my next heir though. :P

Tips 2 and 4 work really well if you combine them. Abduct your liege before you make your demands as a claimant faction, and you instantly win. Since with claimant factions it is technically the liege who declares the war on the faction (if he choses not to give in to their ultimatum), you can even press your demands when he is already in your prison cell. For any other kind of war, the kidnapping trick has been severely nerfed though since this video came out. Ruler characters now have a huge scheme resistance bonus against kidnapping schemes from foreign realms, so you need to be an absolute master schemer to have a decent chance of success (which is a good chance, because kidnapping used to be OP). Tip No 1 also doesn't work anymore, counties don't convert alongside their ruler if their ruler converts on demand of their liege. The better tactic to speed up county conversion is giving counties to zealous (or at least not cynical) vassals of your own religion and have an organized religion that considers itself at least as righteous (not pluralist). Unless your religion is at very low fervor, this will cause your vassals to task their own court chaplains with converting their domains, so you don't have to do all of them one county at a time yourself.

Wow. These are some of the sneakiest, vilest schemes that I've seen in CK for a while. Now going to go and try them all out...

Here are 2 tricks I use often that give me great results but require more waiting to reap the benefits. 1-get your dynasty in charge in someone else's domain. Depending it can go from a lowly count up to the byzantine empire. The idea is not to get them as a vassal or get heir lands, you just want someone of your dynasty to reign over that domain to give your dynasty more prestige. Find a ruler that is old and already has a grandson. His grandson shouldn't be anyone's heir (so the father can't be landed himself), sometimes the grandson might even be in someone else's court making it even easier. Marry that grandson matrilinearily to one of your daughters, you need to have a high enough rank, the right religion (compatible with his not necessarily the same) and a nice daughter (not a sadistic maniac nobody wants) and it should work, easier if he's at someone else's court as his liege won't have any investment in him (not his heir/family etc). He'll come to your court, try to keep him there until it's time for him to inherit. You can give him a place at your council or as a physician. you would have access to his children and could educate them and make them. You could also give him a barony (not a city !). A barony is good as he will be more inclined to have children securing your dynasty's claim on his title and as he'll be married to your daughter no risk of him being allied to someone and dying in a war. But once he's a baron you lose control of his children so try to take them as wards. A county is not safe as he could go to war and die. On top of that you would lose all his lands once he inherits and becomes independent from you. If you are a polygamous religion and he is not be very careful not to ask him to convert ever, you don't want him being able to marry and have children of his own house. Now it's just about waiting for his sons to inherit his title. Doing this I have 2 kings 1 duke and 3 counts of my dynasty that are not my vassals and that gives my dynasty a huge boost of prestige every month. 2-Getting lands from one of your allies. Say you got an alliance with some powerful ruler but there is a duchy that has counties divided between your two realms and you want them all. This works best when you have the duchy title but it can work even without. You can't go to war against him because he's your ally, if you don't want/can't kill him so the alliance dies with him or if the alliance is though your children being married and would continue with the next ruler the idea is to encourage one of your vassals to get that land for you. It has to be a vassal that already has a big army and allies, ideally he should be allied to you. He can't be craven or content, even better if he's brave, greedy and/or ambitious, just make sure he's your ally in that case so he doesn't become a problem later. Grant him the counties that are part of the duchy and the duchy title if you can, it'll make it easier for him to want to get the rest of the counties and get a casus belli for them but it's not mandatory for the trick to work, just longer. If he's poor give him gifts to build up his treasury and wait for him to go after the contested counties. If you are allies you can even join his war without penalties with your other ally.

Playing as a female ruler you can use marriage to gain prestige in exchange for piety. Just pick someone prestigious to marry and keep divorcing him.

A trick to avoid confronting a scary large stack is to use geography near your capital to trap the enemy AI in a loop. Leave your capital empty until the enemy moves towards it then return your army to defend. When the AI commits to moving away, leave your capital empty again and repeat until enough of the enemy has starved. Arguably an exploit i guess but only of the limitations of the pathfinding and you can headcannon it as outwitting a very stupid enemy ruler.

God, you're a legend

awesome series. i'd like to see more on family matters in the sense of strategies marrying someone, educating your child with wards etc. i dont think this aspect has been covered yet.

The jail trick works perfectly.

Game is so deep. You have tips for rome Imperator too?

This takes some time to setup but I found it incredibly broken to amass power on a small kingdom and even duchy, get yourself a province that can hold over 5 holdings as a capital, the best one I've found is the somewhere where modern Kosovan is located, this one hold 8 holdings, since you need to have a temple and a city holding as minimum, this means that you can build up to 6 baronies there, which the capital barony allowing for 4 buildings plus the duchy building and the rest of the baronies allowing for 3, you build 1 army building, 1 defensive building in the capital (defender advantage in a mountain city is ridiculously strong) and the rest of the holding will hold mines in this case or other money and development buildings, your steward will always be increasing development, as long as you're not ruling over an empire on your first inheritance, in this county alone you will have at this point 3 or 4 holdings, which makes it so you don't get screwed by succession laws early on, I started this in the Viking start, and at around 1074 I had as many levies as the Byzantine emperor while only holding the De Jure lands of the Kingdom of Croatia, 100 years later with almost the same lands I have 17K levies and make +40 gold, at this point I could easily expand into an empire and all my heirs will be strong enough to hold into the title, provided they're not imbeciles.

Does the conversion trick always Work or is it just the primary county of the Lord in question that get's converted?

Funny enough, I was curious if abduction would work to win a war. I am currently playing as Ireland. Scotland has pushed into some of my land, but they had insane levy size so I couldn’t really fight back. I killed off the current king, and the new queen was only 3. Abducted her, started the war for land and immediately imprisoned her. Won with a landslide. 😉

Does he have a video about how to deal with powerful vassals ? If not it would be cool if he would make one. In general it would be good to know all possibilities around vassals. Often my vassals want a place in the council, but they have very bad stats and therefore no use for my council. What should you do then ? Have a nice day.

Another cheesy bug: If your army has the "recently disembarked" debuff, simply split the army. The new army doesn't have the debuff. Merge the armies again and the debuff is gone completely.

the art of war : best case scenario is not to have to fight at all

Question: Does the first conversion trick only work on direct holdings, or can I make someone king with a bunch of vassals and then convert all in 1 go? I'm assuming only direct holdings, just want to confirm!

Yeh, I wish there was a way for the stuff to like auto convert stuff. Like, build a church and it will start to autoconvert stuff inside the duchy or county. Doing a Northkorea playthrough and are like 1000 holdings over limit xD

Really nice tricks, great video! I think It would be better if you took out the bgm and use one consistent bgm throughout the video, it doesn't break the flow.

in my game, the patriarch for the byzantine empire had almost 18K gold! so got a hook, invited him over, imprisoned, banish, insta rich...

I regularly use the kidnapper trick too.

The kidnapper one works I was a count who became part of my liege's council as a spy master , took the meritocracy perk and created a claim to the throne, then basically declared war and kidnapped him to become the emperor. Well I had hooks on, or befriended, his entire family and court to do this just to make it seem more fair from a role playing perspective but you don't really need that if you are proficient enough. The entire plan took about 15 years in game.

I just started playing this a few days ago. I went from not being able to do anything at all... I mean nothing, I could fight no wars or raid, or even marry... and I got immediately attacked and lost the game... in like 20 minutes of play, or less. I still suck at it though, but from not being able to do anything, to having a very slight idea of what I'm doing in like 3 days is not bad... I think. 🤔 😁

Hey, Trick 5 worked for David with Uriah. Why not you?

Hey, great video mate. Would you be willing to make a follow up video? I'm not sure what, but my buddy who got me into this game said that a few things have been patched out since launch, so I'm not sure what does still work and what new tricks there may be now.

Awesome sauce for playing dirty Has there been one about utilizing "commanders &to Max potential"

Another classic trick for revocation without tyranny is to force a revolt. If you have your own realm under proper control and good men at arms forcing a vassal into an impossible revolt war is an easy way of getting at least 2 titles without tyranny.

These aren't cheesy at all. These are examples of exactly the things that were done in those days. Therefore I'm glad it is possible.

I was expecting a bit on what I refer to as "crotch diplomacy". You may have already covered it elsewhere, but it belongs in a "beginners guide". Steps are: -Pick a title you want that is of a lower tier than your own main title -Browse the claimants, in search of someone who would be vulnerable to a seduction scheme, if multiple are available, pin them all for the next step -If you can find an unmarried one, that's easier. Otherwise, check the likelihood of a murder scheme against their spouse. -Murder is a hostile scheme, while romance is a personal scheme, therefore they can be made simultaneously. -Invite your lover-widow to your court, and press the claim This saves time when rapidly expanding. If for example, you are an emperor, and want to take an entire kingdom in 1 war, instead of a series of wars for whichever claimants show up in your court plus a series of de jure wars, you can use this to go straight for the top title.

Loved the vídeo. When do we get more maghrebi madness?

I am playing prussia right now and my main rival in the regen was poland who had a massive empire. So i looked at thier current leader and saw that he had two daughters and a son. And he was willing to marry my oldest grandson (And future heir of his father, who was my heir) to his youngest daugther. Shortly after i killed him and his two other chiildren so that their son would become king of both regions. It did take a long time to take effect, but my empire was around 150 dutchies bigger after the polish queen died due to old age.

Didnt know you could fabricate a claim to revoke the title thanks dude!

when you're old and about to die, just don't givve a damn about your honor, just break truces, alliances etc it'll help a lot, also, when it takes month to gather your army, you can still push the button "split off new army" move them into a new one that can be moved while the old one is still gathering... so, just disband your army at one side of the map and regather them on your desired rallypoint. it won't be that many when it's too far away, but oftentimes you can save months of travel and your army is resupplied.

by matrillinealy marrying the heir of another kingdom's heir you can make that country your own dynasty, but they often like to form a new cadet house

I've done #2 once so far haha quickest war ever lmao

Not sure if it was misssed by developers or I am missing something but with a new DLC if you conquer a feudal realm using 'Viking adventure' casus belli, not only you get feudal without fulfilling the requirements, but you also keep the raiding ability.

1:04 does it work with the Norse religion? I have been giving land to people with the same fate as the territory, then getting the hook and converting them, but the province didn't convert, some one has an answer?

The last one is exactly what they tried doing on "El Cid"

I've made one I call it "Friendly merge" let's say your king doesn't have a lot of time lest but... Has a strong hook on a king who's lands could be better used added tho the empire, well all you need to do is arrange a marriage whit there heir, if they are kids and you can get their guard better, then you just muerder the king/father of your new son in law and congratulations on a lifetime you will have someone on the succession line merging both kingdoms...

“Glory in battle, or death”

i would like to let you know that the first tip mentioned in the video with religion blew my mind. i really thought it would take centuries to convert my now viking england danelaw to asataru.. but now it can take merely seconds muahahahahahhaa

OK could someone maybe help me with this. I got some vassals who have their own little patch of land. Then I convert them with/without a hook but the land itself still stays the same faith, even thought I followed nearly all the steps of the video. The only difference that I had is, that I took over a nearby country that was bigger then myself

Awesome

How do you get the 3d view

That's it. I'm naming my next heir 'Party'.

These all seem within the framework of the game - provided they are not combined with restarts when they fail. Who said life was fair? It's good to be King. Another classic I like is to remember that in feudal times all statecraft is personal. If my enemy has a powerful ally through marriage, well it would be terrible if something happened to the happily wedded couple, wouldn't it?