Game Breaker / Crusader Kings III

Uniquely, many of Crusader Kings 3's game-breaking features in early builds were discovered even before release thanks to Paradox handing a preview copy to The Spiffing Brit. Several of his strategies are still eminently breakable in-game, while others are since fixed.

• Catholic and Orthodox rulers (as well as any monogamous religions with a religious head) can divorce their spouse for 100 piety, and gain up to 300 Fame (which gatekeeps access to the more advanced Casus Belli) for marrying again. In the early game, where teching up your Fame is a lot more useful than piety, becoming a serial divorcer (often of the same character) is an extremely lucrative exchange. This has since been fixed.
• The "Golden Obligations" feat from the Avaricious tree (the first one obtainable) allows you to blackmail people for their hooks, granting you gold (usually up to 100, scaling with titles). Given the AI's enormous fondness for seductions in the base game, parking a halfway-decent spymaster with a good intrigue in the court of a nearby king^note The Byzantine court in particular is chock-full of sex fiends can easily net you hooks worth several hundred gold a year.
• Being head of a new Christian faith is even more broken. Vassals will regularly seek indulgencies with you paying 100 gold each time. And if you either/both have a big Empire and/or your new Christian religion is spread far and wide, you'll have plenty of adherents seeking indulgencies on a regular basis, thus netting you yet even more money.
  • This applies when creating any faith with Communion Tenet, Temporal Head of Faith while holding at least one Holy Site of the religion (faiths are subsets of religions, like Catholicism is a faith of the Christian religion), and it's even better: each Indulgence nets you either 100 gold or a few months worth of the character's income, whichever is higher. Base value is higher - 150 - if the character is getting rid of a sin (they lose the negative trait instead of getting Piety).
• Crusader Kings II's infamous "North Korea mode", wherein a player simply doesn't bother with vassals and holds everything directly, was back and still powerful in the release version of III (1.0). Since the over-domain penalties on taxes and levies were capped at 90%, it remained a net gain at ten times the normal domain limit, and allowed absurd stacking of man-at-arms bonuses, allowing one's Men-At-Arms to be able to annihilate armies dozens of times their size with no effort, at least until they became so powerful that they hit an integer overflow and cause negative casualties. Eventually fixed by Obvious Rule Patch in 1.1; the penalty cap was raised to 100%, and buildings (including those that provide the man-at-arms bonuses) deactivate if a player is far over their domain limit for longer than the one-year grace period for handing out newly-conquered titles.
• Similarly to North Korea mode, III transplanted the initial issue II had when it comes to opinion. Upon a ruler's death, the heir gains only a small fraction of the opinion penalty/bonus their predecessor had from their vassals, allowing the player to pull all sorts of nasty and tyrannical moves when the ruler is already on his death bed, up to a whopping 100 tyranny, without any ill effects. Bonus points if your ruler is Callous, since that decreases tyranny gain. Sure, the heir will be hit by the blowback of it in the form of an Opinion of Predecessor penalty, but it's only by a quarter (it eventually became half in II) of the opinion of the previous ruler, which is perfectly manageable, even if it went into negative values. And in the case of feudal government, it's further broken, as your taxes and levies don't depend on opinion. And if your heir happens to be a daughter with any sort of attraction-enhancing traits, your current ruler can go right down to -100 opinion before dying.
• Abduction schemes initially allowed some notoriously broken exploits. One could very easily use it to win wars against far more powerful foes by starting a kidnap plot against the ruler and declaring war right before the plot fired. After the target had been taken to the player's dungeons, they could be forced to come to terms, letting the player win the war almost immediately. This was also fixed via Obvious Rule Patch in 1.1; foreigners, especially foreign rulers, have greater resistance to the abduct scheme, and this is raised even further if the ruler is at war with the schemer. While it's still possible, it's a far cry from the effective "I win" button it was before the patch.
• Certain religious tenets are either very strong on their own or add a very handy option to your gameplay
  • Any tenet that increase lifestyle experience. Astrology offers a 25% experience increase to a random lifestyle for a decade, Alexandrian Catechism grants a permanent 20% increase to Learning lifestyle experience and depending on your form of Hinduism, Bhakti can grant a whopping 20% increase to all lifestyle experiences.
  • Pursuit of Power is essentially the "World Conquest" tenet. Not only does it allow conquering land at any possible excuse, it also helps with being a ruthless autocrat, by halving tyranny gain.
  • Religious Law offers an option to revoke any titles from sinful vassals without any repercussions. This can easily translate into stripping half of your empire of their titles, then redistributing them - especially when you park your spymaster in your vassals court and discover or outright fabricate some dirt on them.
  • Monasticism doesn't sound like much, but can be very helpful. Unruly vassal? Terrible (future) heir? Split of the realm on your death? Just make sure the characters that cause such problems are in the cloister and all the trouble goes away. And compared with other ways of thinning the crowd of heirs, this one is almost completely free of any negative repercussions. If you are reforming a pagan religion, it's worth including it, for this option alone, especially when replacing something even more generic.
• Controlling Malta. Regardless of who you are playing as, if Malta is within your diplomatic range, you can greatly extend your diplomatic range thanks to the island's location. Malta is usually held by a complete pushover, so it shouldn't be any problem for just about anyone to take it over and then keep it, since the AI is uninterested with the island, while this move can offer deceptively big benefits, such as access to the Byzantine court from Western Europe or contact with Egypt from Iberia (and of course the reverse). This means countries that would normally be out of your diplomatic range can be made into allies or simply be used to farm Renown via marriages. To a lesser extent, Bornholm can play this role in the Baltic region if you are an outsider that wants to meddle in local affairs. On the other side of the map, an India-based character who owns the Maldives can reach Socotra, and a character who owns Socotra can reach all of the Middle East and a good chunk of Northern Africa!
• Planned pregnancies. Not in sense of maintaining celibacy for your character, but realising that any interaction with a spouse or lover that ends with intercourse will lead to a guaranteed pregnancy and one that will last exactly 9 months. You know the child is yours, you know when it will be born. This also prevents random pregnancies from happening and there is a cooldown after each pregnancy, too, which further adds to control of the dynastic line. And if one doesn't shy from Save Scumming, knowing the exact date of birth allows to simply save a day before and then reload as many times as desired to get the "right" child, be it gender or traits.
  • This also allows the player to work around characters that would otherwise almost never get a child, like a combination of traits decreasing fertility or being homosexual.
• Certain decisions to create new kingdoms or empires offer extra bonuses that significantly affect gameplay. The most notable examples are "Unify Italy", "Form the Archduchy of Austria" and the absolutely broken "Elevate the Kingdom of Mann & the Isles".
  • In the case of Italy, you instantly unlock three innovations. The thing is, it doesn't matter which year it is, so in the case of the 867 start, you gain technology that's potentially two eras ahead of time and even in the 1066 start, that's a significant boost to your power projection. For extra brokeness, it is technically possible to pull this one as the Byzantine emperor if one converts to any Italian culture.
    • Unifying Italy is also one of the paths that leads to the "Restore the Roman Empire" decision. Pull it off by fighting and conquering all the necessary non-Italian lands and you get the strongest base for the new empire and a permanent casus belli to all former Roman lands (i.e. a quarter of the map). No scheming or innovations required, just relentless duchy conquest in every possible direction.
  • In the case of Austria, all you really need to do is to exist and either make yourself or a dynasty member the emperor of the HRE (a task much easier to do than it sounds). The resulting new kingdom title would be completely ignorable, if not for a small detail: it grants you primogeniture succession, regardless of innovations, current year or tech era. Normally, you can forget about having primogeniture before the 1210s, and that assumes beelining for it with normal innovation research. The decision has a few additional de jure changes, but it's that very early access to primogeniture that makes it broken. Unfortunately, creating the Archduchy before you have the primogeniture succession innovation automatically kicks you out of the succession method the day you become the archduchy.
  • In the case of Mann and the Isles, it turns the tiny island of Mann and its castle into one of the best holdings in the whole game, with an instant +20 development, a huge, inheritable army of special troops, a bunch of dynastic bonuses, instant government reform from tribal to feudal (which also converts your vassals) and an obscenely powerful -200% time and -50% cost of construction modifiers for said island. It also gets extra building slots, ending up with more than any other holding in the game. Oh, and your dynasty gets 2500 Renown for taking this decision. Early on, that's enough to unlock 3 legacies up-front.^note So enough to get the extremely powerful first three perks of the Blood legacy path, opening the path for eugenic snowballing in your dynasty. Just like in the case of Italy, this isn't year-locked and in fact, you must take the Decision before your culture enters the High Medieval era. For a tribal, Norse and pagan character, fulfilling the requirements for this decision shouldn't take more than a decade in-game.
• "Establish Norman Culture" decision is an "I win" button for any Norse ruler that manages to control Neustria-soon-to-be-Normandy. You keep all the Norse cultural innovations, leaving you with powerful Men-At-Arms, while at the same time gaining whatever innovations that are known to the French culture at the time, including those from the Early Medieval era, even if you are a tribal. All while you start a new culture that's restricted solely to your own realm, so your innovation research isn't hindered by poorly-developed lands that' located outside of your domain. And the best part to taking this decision, is that you can stay as an unreformed Asatru, keeping your war-focused religion and raiding.
  • In a similar vein, Jarl Haesteinn of Montaigu (sic!) in the 867 start is even more broken than his counterpart in CK2. He's Norse, he's Asatru... and he's feudal, instead of tribal. This overcomes all the hardships of playing as a tribal pagan, offers the option to skyrocket in military might and income and thus making raiding all that easier, fuelling your economy. Normally, a tribal pagan faces a choice: convert to an organized religion and feudalise or reform your own religion and feudalise. Both remove raiding from the picture. Haesteinn is already feudal, while still being allowed to raid. Given his real-life legacy as one of the most notorious and successful raiders, this might be intentional. If you play as his successors, you can keep the ability to raid all the way until the end date, despite running a feudal empire. And there is nothing stopping you from going after Neustria and becoming Norman right from the game start, catching up technologically^note Most importantly grabbing the French culture's Public Works innovation, but also Onagers, Bannus, Crop Rotation and Ledger and keeping that edge forever, since you are no longer hindered by the terrible research speed of Norse cultures, while also already having the vast majority of Tribal Era innovations unlocked^note with the sole exception of City Planning and that assumes the French culture didn't discover it in the meantime , allowing for a swift advance to the Early Medieval era come the year 900. Also, as long as Haesteinn is alive, he has an extra retinue of 3000 troops, which also includes Huscarls and Varangian Veterans. That's enough to conquer France at the start of the game, given that it can barely muster 5000 weakling levied peasants. Haesteinn is so broken, the majority of multiplayer games have a rule against playing as him.
  • With Royal Court, these gamebreakers become general to Norse characters. Anyone can make a hybrid culture - but the Norse do it even better, thanks to their Malleable Invaders tradition. And more than that, any Norse character below king rank can claim a duchy for themselves through the Varangian Adventure war - and if they do this to a feudal or clan duchy, they become feudal. Combine those, and you can easily find a duchy with a culture with the innovations and traditions you want to steal, take some land, and hybridize. You now have an advanced culture ready to enter the Middle Ages, and you can still fill your war chest by raiding for as long as you remain an unreformed pagan, using a feudal state's more powerful armies. And since Varangian Adventure war gives you a duchy, you won't lose an ability to raid (it is restricted to dukes and lesser).
• For Catholic and Orthodox characters, the Pope/Ecumenical Patriarch is best looked at as a piggy bank in a very nice hat. Both take a cut from the income of every Catholic/Orthodox temple holding on the map, which means they usually have lots of money to give away (especially the Pope), and will do so readily for 250 piety and a small opinion hit once per decade. Asking the Pope for money will give you enough to buy your way out of having to go Crusading as well. Patch 1.1 mitigated this somewhat by making it impossible to ask for gold if you're at war with the Pope/Patriarch.
• The dread mechanic becomes hilariously broken once you realize that non-faith prisoners cost no piety to execute, or worse yet, some religions gain piety by executing heathens. Due to the wonky fervor mechanic at launch, it's extremely easy to acquire heathen prisoners because heretical faiths prop up everywhere. The piety cost is the main bottleneck against executing prisoners, and with it gone, you can easily max out your dread and be completely safe from factions.
  • This becomes especially useful for securing a smooth succession, as new rulers are the most vulnerable to factions. An elderly ruler can launch a holy war against heathens for the explicit purpose of taking prisoners (some faiths even allow a "Raid For Captives" casus belli), and the successor can then execute them en masse to instantly max out dread and terrify vassals into submission.
  • Fixed by the 1.5 patch, as executing unlanded characters usually provides no dread, and even executing rulers produces much less.
• Dynasty legacy lines range from "utterly useless" to "completely and utterly broken on multiple levels". And the broken ones can be combined for combo-breakers.
  • Blood. Enhances, reinforces and makes positive inheritable traits more common, while decreasing the chance of inheriting negative ones. Up to the point where LEGO Genetics allow you to pick a single trait to be more common within your dynasty. The final perk extends the life expectancy of all dynasty members by 5 years. Even the first perk of the whole line is broken, but the ride never stops. Combine it with a Divine Marriage religion and marry the best to the best.
  • Kin. Better education results, safer pregnancies and gaining extra skill points with age, while never losing Prowess.
  • Pillage for Norse cultures. More prestige from battles, larger capacity for heavy infantry retinues, more prisoners with higher ransoms, higher fatal casualties of enemies and +25% siege speed. Oh, and you gain extra gold for fatal casualties. The best part is that your dynasty doesn't even have to be Norse or stay Norse - all it takes is one future dynasty head being raised Norse to start the legacy line upon inheriting, then you can convert to any other culture.
  • While Fate of Iberia is often scoffed off as a gimmick DLC that makes the game worse, rather than better, it still comes with the absolute juggernaut of an economic bonus in the form of Metropolitan legacies. Even the first level of it is well worth it, offering an insane 20% development bonus per city holding^note For comparison, the only other legacy with such capacity is Erudition - not only it is lackluster otherwise, but it's just a single 20% development growth and only at 3rd level. Meanwhile, Metropolitan doesn't take into account the tier of the city holding, just that it exists, while cities and their guild line of building provide their own bonuses to development, too , which can easily snowball to over 100% bonus even during Tribal era. This is followed by unlocking a great Stewardship trait, then a discount on building things and a 15% bonus to city vassals taxes (which are normally a fixed value and are very hard to increase) and if one is willing to unlock the 5th level, an ability to open a new building slot in all cities of given county.^note While it's very late in the legacy and players still can't play as city republics, making it far less viable, it's still an extra building slot in up to 4 baronies. Considering what sort of backwater Iberia starts as, picking this legacy as the very first one for anyone in the region offers massive returns, allowing to not just catch-up with the most developed regions, but eclipse them. It works especially well with other game-breakers that are possible to pull off within the region and general development-related tricks. Furthermore, with changes introduces by patch 1.9, building slots are further limited and their full capacity can't be reached until about 1080s, making this ability far more potent and important, as it offers extra building slots way ahead of time.
• Since the speed of unlocking innovations is tied to the average development of all counties within a given culture, there are a few tricks to break the whole system entirely:
  • Find a character from a "dead" culture^note Ones that currently doesn't have a single county on the map with that culture - Jewish ones are the best example, but there are others. Convert your capital to their culture and make sure to have high development. Regardless of how much catching-up said culture has to do with innovations, there is only one province of it: the highly-developed capital of your realm. Reaching 35 development (so innovations take 100 months each) and higher for just one county is a very easy task, as opposed to developing 10 or 50 counties to such a high level.
  • Find the most poorly developed land within your culture, preferably on the fringes of its region. Hand it over to vassals of a different culture. They will eagerly focus on converting that land into their own culture. Not only does this rid your culture of poorly developed land (boosting your own rate of research), but also hampers innovation progress for the culture of your vassal, since their average now has to account that poor land of yours.
  • Alternatively, play as a culture that splits. Visigothic culture in the Iberian Peninsula splits into seven different cultures, so what would otherwise be a huge, poorly-developed realm of a single culture naturally separates into a bunch of very small ones (down to a single duchy) and thus makes it much easier to develop them and kickstart research. In the case of Iberia this comes with the added benefit of having universities there, further boosting innovations. Another such place is Scandinavia, which splits Norse culture into Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Or cultures like Norman, Sicilian or Outremer, emerging locally under specific triggers and always contained within a very small area.
• Gold is inheritable, prestige is not. Say you made your fortune with a particularly good monarch, rising from a duke to a king, with plenty of duchies. Or, even better, you elevated yourself to an emperor. This means throughout your lifetime, you amassed an absurd amount of prestige, most likely by creating the corresponding titles for the duchies, kingdoms and empire you control now. As your ruler is in his old age, dismantle them all, except the one related to your highest rank. It will cost you a metric ton of prestige, but you're going to lose all of that anyway when you die. Once your successor inherits, they can use their inherited gold to recreate those titles, earn prestige from each of them, and since there were no titles to divide, your other children couldn't inherit them, and are thus stuck as counts at best. For extra control, either have a specific perk from the Learning lifestyle (so you are forewarned when your character is going to die of old age within the year) or even commit suicide once you are done with it. ^note Destroying titles also incurs opinion penalties with the titles' de jure vassals, so ensuring that succession takes place quickly is important. However, committing suicide decreases the Splendor of your dynasty.
• While patch 1.9 reworked how structures provide bonuses to your Men-At-Arms, it is still possible to stack just the right things in a single holding, going as far as tripling the stats of certain unit types. It is nowhere near as broken as the original system, but since the AI can't properly use stationing bonuses, it's still more than enough for the human player.
• That same patch introduced chivalric accolades, which provide a variety of bonuses once properly established, always two per accolade. They come in two particularly abusable flavours: stacking combat modifiers and offering extra slots for retinues of a specific type. Done right, one can get an extra 6 regiments of any given type with a matching bonus (or maybe two extra retinues), regardless of any other factors. This is particularly broken in the 867 start, where your options to get retinues and increasing their stats are severely limited.
• Set your marshal to train knights. Then, forbid low-Martial, low-Prowess characters from being knights and commanders. Enjoy your already high level knight getting all the training, since he's the only candidate to receive it. At the same time, look for three new candidates that by default will have half-decent stats. Rinse and repeat with a couple of guys (remember to forbid the already trained one from the pool) and you can quite literally gain a handful of One-Man Armies, that combine high Martial and very high Prowess (their main "killing" stat) with a plethora of good traits and perks. Whether they are used as a fighting force or as commanders (or both), they will punch far above their own weight. And since your knights are now highly trained, they can advance accolades much faster.
• Crossbowmen. They come up relatively late (High Medieval, which is no sooner than 1050), but once you have them, you've nullified the worst threat you can face: heavy infantry, heavy cavalry and knights (who for the purposes of the counter system are treated as heavy cavalry). Crossbowmen have advantage against all three, while in the same time being far superior to regular archers for minimally higher upkeep.
• Combine the power of all four factors listed above: Men-At-Arms with proper infrastructure, accolades and high-skill knights and crossbowmen support. You now can have an army of less than a thousand troops straight-out murdering an army ten or twenty times bigger, making levies (and their massive upkeep for zero combat power) pointless. Bonus points for brokeness if you have access to some culture-specific version of Men-At-Arms, since those tend to have additional advantages over the already strong base version.
• Once you did the above, you can then have 2 or even 3 regiments of siege engines of mangonels or trebuchets, turning sieges into "less than a month" waits. And even if you didn't, having two regiments of siege engines makes conquest a breeze. The best part is that you can have them sitting in a besieged castle with only minimal protection, as soldiers present barely count toward siege efficiency when compared with the sheer power of siege engines. So once you defeated the main body of enemy forces, you can simply disband almost all your other troops, cutting on the costs of fielding your army. The level of brokeness becomes ridiculous once you have bombards, as those can besiege whatever within just a few days.
• Various cultural and regional types of Men-At-Arms check for the current culture of the ruler, but only upon being hired, never to check again. And they are inheritable. With a bit of patience and maneuvering, it is perfectly possible to keep an entire slew of culture-specific retinues, despite not being part of said culture. For added bonus,, the AI will disband all the "wrong" regiments it has^note This is particularly egregious with siege engines. If culture A has trebuchets and culture B only has mangonels from the previous era, An AI ruler on switching from culture A to B will disband his superior siege engines and replace them with its much weaker mangonel counterpart. And unlike cultural retinues, siege engine types are universal for everyone, further strengthening the position of a human player. A combo of Turkic Horse Archers, Norse Varangian Veterans and Iberian Caballeros? Why not!
• The Human Sacrifices tenet allows characters to easily blast past various piety gates, such as for reviving a dead faith. Converting from an organized faith to an unorganized dead faith (one that has no counties or living characters that follow it) can cost upwards of 100,000 piety when under normal circumstances, an extremely pious and long-lived character would be hard-pressed to break 10,000 piety. Even after converting from an organized faith to an unorganized faith and getting the apostate perk, converting to a dead faith often costs over 30,000 piety. Human Sacrifices allows characters to go to war for the sole purpose of gaining prisoners to sacrifice and gives piety for each prisoner sacrificed, and larger amounts of piety for higher rank characters sacrificed. Playing aggressively and sacrificing everyone you can get your hands on, it becomes easily possible to amass tens of thousands of piety to revive a dead faith and reform it immediately.
• The 867 start is a game-breaker by itself, at least if you intend to play as some backwater. There isn't much of a difference between your starting situation in such regions, be it 867 or 1066... but if you start in 867, you gain an extra 199 years to expand your realm on your own, along with developing it and getting access to better technology. And if you play as an unreformed pagan, then reform your religion, too. On top of that, everyone starts with Tribal Era technology and thus there isn't much disparity between various cultures yet, allowing for far easier conquest - while in the 1066 start you can have countries already going for the High Medieval era, while next to them are ones that are still stuck in the Tribal Era.
• The good, old, EU3-era exploit of "conquer provinces with universities for massive benefits" is back. Your job is to get the handful of provinces that either already have an university in them (tough, but doable), or get yourself some backwater early on that will later get a chance to build a university. This is especially potent in case of anyone in either the Iberian or Italian Peninsula (4 close-by spots each). How are universities broken? Each of them provides +0.25 renown for your dynasty, as long as the head of it is controlling the holding with the university. For comparison, being a king is +1 and an imperial title gets you +2, and both scenarios assume that you don't have dynasts as vassals (if not, the renown gain of the dynastic vassals is overwritten). ^note In any case, being a count gives your dynasty +0.25 renown. On top of that, they of course vastly increase your Learning for the purpose of discovering new innovations, plus the option of sending your offspring to the university, giving them additional points from education. If this wasn't enough, university also provides a bonus to lifestyle experience - all of them, rather than just the one related to the education trait. And multiple universities stack that bonus.
  • The downside of a university is that you need to have 30 development in the province that can build them. This can take about a century to achieve and requires to have at least Urbanisation innovation to even reach that high level, so good luck achieving it prior to 1050s. But it's perfectly worth the effort.
  • If generic universities are broken, the unique ones are even worse in this regard. They provide much stronger bonuses, all but one are already constructed in the 1066 start and two of them (Al-Azhar in Cairo and House of Wisdom in Baghdad) are within the same de jure realm and happen to provide in tandem a bonus equal with controlling five universities, along with a neat Diplomacy bonus. University of Siena is also a good example, as it has lowered requirements to construct (making it possible to get it earlier than any historical European university), along with providing an unique bonus to Intrigue - the only structure that does so in the whole game.
  • Italy as a whole is absolutely packed with universities. There are currently eight of them, often even bordering each other, so one can even accidentally have two or three of them while still being a duke. Italy is also one of the most developed parts of Europe, making it just as easy to develop the necessary counties to a sufficiently high level.
• If you are playing as any of the Andalusian Arabs, it is of your utmost priority to get to Fes anyway, due to it having not only a university spot, but also a holy site for your version of Islam, allowing you to declare a caliphate once you have both it and Cordoba under your control. You can thus have a broken combo of an imperial title (Iberia is piss-easy to conquer or at least gain enough land for the title), all four local universities and the title of a caliph. And then you can go after Italy, since fighting the papacy is one of your main goals anyway, while netting you more spots for even more universities. Still not enough? Since you are a Muslim, you can have 4 wives in total. This means filling up the cap of 100 living members of the dynasty (another +2 renown) or marrying to every possible ruler within your diplomatic range (for which controlling a foothold in Italy is highly beneficial) for another, uncapped bonuses to renown, is absurdly easy to achieve. This way, your dynasty can gain a value in range of 15 or more renown per month, a value almost everyone else will get per year and only if they try really hard for it. This means that the dynasty's splendor rises up at an obscene pace and allows you to buy a variety of legacies, further making the dynasty ungodly powerful and removing a whole lot of undesirable effects from it.
  • The brokeness continues. As a caliph controlling all of Iberia, you are very likely to amass enough Piety to declare either a "Holy War" on a Kingdom level or simply declare "Invade Kingdom" against France, allowing you to swallow it whole. Why France in particular? Because you are the only Muslim country with a realistic chance of qualifying for the "Avenge the Battle of Tours"^note controlling both Iberia and Southern France decision. Massive direct benefits aside, the main appeal is the 33% chance of every vassal and even county in Western Europe instantly switching to your particular version of Islam. You've just conquered France, turned it into your vassal and the main obstacle - them and their population being Catholic - just ceased to exist. Eurabia was never this easy to achieve.
  • All of above is even more broken if you play as either a Catholic Visigoth or a Basque. In case of Visigoth, make sure your realm is in either Aragon or Catalonia and only there as soon as only feasible, so you can flip to related culture. As Basque, simply exist. Once you have access to Visigothic Codes innovation, convert to Muwalladism by any means. Congratulations, you now have a combo breaker of all the benefits of following Islam with Feudal government and because your culture has access to Visigothic Codes, you can have both High Partition and Equal inheritance some 200 years ahead of date (rather than being locked into the default male-exclusive for Islam), making succession piss-easy to manage despite the existence of royal harem - and any daughters you will have can be then married out to other Muslim rulers. If this wasn't enough, your native culture is contained in a very small region (a single duchy), so it's obscenely easy to highly develop it on your own and reap the benefits of speedy research, further compounded by the fact that if you conquer Fes, as a Muwalladist, you can built a Grand Mosque there for a unique, +10% cultural fascination speed bonus - that's twice the bonus Cathedral of Cologne provides to Catholics. Just absolutely make sure your culture are either Basque, Aragonese or Catalan first, or else you will flip to the generic Andalusian culture after adopting Islam - but once your culture is any of those three, the sky is the limit.
    • Additionally, if you time your conquests right, you can get the Consecrate Bloodline decision as a Catholic after building Grand Cathedral in Santiago, granting an inheritable Consecrated Bloodline trait to all of your offspring. Then marry your daughter matrilineally into any of the (now unlanded) Umayyads for the Muslim-specific Sayyid trait. You don't even have to be Muslim to get it. The end result is having two exclusive opinion bonuses and a big, hidden bonus to conversion rates that comes from Consecrated Bloodline. And with changes introduced in 1.5 patch, throw into your culture Philosopher Culture tradition or Bureaucratic ethos (you should be easily able to afford the prestige prices by this point), because why not making things even more broken with four universities, Muwalladism traits and bonuses from two holy sites.
• In the 867 game start, if you play as a Muslim in Iberia, your top priority is to have every single Visigoth faction on the peninsula under your heel prior to 920, optimally prior to 900, and generally, the sooner, the better. Enforce Islam on the conquered Visigothic rulers. As a result, they will culture-flip into Andalusian culture, rather than the mosaic of the Spaniard cultures, making the region far easier to control and unify in the long run. Of course this is a double-edged sword, since all of Iberia will be following the same culture, which will significantly slow down innovations until the land is properly developed, but you kill any ability for Catholic re-emergence or reconquista in its bud, simply by preventing the variety of Spanish cultures to emerge and completely alienate any possible rebels, for they will no longer have access to crusades or the help of other Catholic realms.
• Dismantling the Papacy as any non-Christian, but especially as a Muslim, is one of the cheesiest ways to neuter the standard issue of dealing with crusades, especially when done before crusades are unlocked at all. Even if ultimately Catholics will manage to somehow reconquer Rome and re-establish the institution, it will take them decades, if not centuries of trying to do that. The religion suffers a debilitating -100 fervor, so heresy and "conversions to other faiths" galore, while at the same time, the "Ecumenism" doctrine is removed from it until the Papacy is restored. In the meantime, any other Christian faith will now consider Catholics "Hostile" rather than "Astray", allowing Holy Wars against them. This means that the Orthodox Byzantine Empire will gleefully charge into the Balkans and the rest of Europe, because it will have no religious restraints against doing so. If you ever wanted your game destabilise into complete chaos, simply send a viking raid to Italy and go medieval on the pope.
• "Dynasty of Many Crowns" modifier requires from a dynasty to have in it at least 10 independent kings or emperors, in turn providing substantial bonuses for the entire dynasty. Sounds tough? It doesn't check how big said kingdoms are, and places like Crete and Cyprus,^note kingdoms only require two de jure counties. But, you do have to deal with the Byzantine emperor for the independence part... Cornwall, Wales, Sicily or Sardinia all come with kingdom-tier titles; Italy in particular is chock-full of tiny kingdom titles. ^note The kingdom of Sardinia can be formed with just five de jure counties, while Romagna and Sicily need "just" 8 and 9 respectively. Italy, the largest kingdom, requires 15. Not only you are branching your dynasty like crazy (cadet branches still count toward your total dynasty renown, but very quickly become distant enough to freely intermarry without the usual consequences, all while providing benefits of kingdom-tier marriages), but by spreading it across various "pocket kingdoms" across the map, you can be sure the dynasty won't end up fighting a house-divided scenario against main branch. Hell, if you don't mind the offspring of your current ruler fighting against each other, you can even split your empire into bunch of smaller kingdoms, leaving the imperial title for your primary heir, then re-integrate the land by sword (or scheming) once the dynastic modifier is acquired.
• Fishing out a relatively small culture group that also comes with innovations increasing development limit. Regardless of how backward your starting position, you can easily increase the average development of counties within your culture up to 13+ (with Public Works in the 867 start) or 27+ (with Communal Government in the 1066 start). This in turn allow to drastically increase your research speed, while also providing higher taxes and bigger armies. And goes on overdrive if you vassalise bunch of provinces, so every county is developed separately, by entire swarm of stewards - being the direct counterpoint to the eponymous North Korea mode.
  • Ethiopian culture in the 867 start is a particularly good example of this in action, since Solomonic dynasty can easily vassalise the entire de jure kingdom of Abyssinia within the first few weeks, while having both Public Works and Currency, providing it with the ability to turn its land into some of the better developed part of the map by 900, despite starting as a semi-tribal backwater. With the rework on cultures in patch 1.5, Ethiopia also gains a 10% bonus to developing on hills (while everyone else has a -10% penalty), their home terrain.
  • Irish culture in the 1066 start is another good example. Ireland itself is so small, it is possible to achieve great development levels even without delegating to other petty kings. If you are looking for something truly small, Cornish (2 counties, in a single duchy) and Breton (6 counties, in 2 duchies) cultures are even better, as they can be used reliably in 867 start and have favourable terrain, too. Rework on cultures provided Irish with ability to build tradeports an era "ahead", which means extra development and money, century or so before it's even feasible to get the right innovation.
  • Yemeni is another example, and works in both start dates. Not only does it has the means to develop itself further, but unlike the two above, Yemen is one of the best developed parts of the Muslim world. And it has an endless possibility to expand, because no matter where you go, the land you conquer will be of a different culture than your own, so the expansion won't hinder your research effort. With culture rework, Yemeni gained a combo of better ports (same as Irish) and significantly decreased penalty on developing desert, bringing it to bearable values.
  • With the changes introduced in patch 1.5, Czech culture joins the club due to the culture traditions it starts with, making it significantly easier to develop the realm (bonus to hills and the broken Industrious tradition, along with general Bureaucratic bonus giving them both development and innovation speed bonuses). And that's without mentioning the other reasons that make this a very potent pick.^note Having access to a very handy succession law and either one (in 867) or two (in 1066) mines for extra income, bunch of counties with 6 holdings with farmland terrain, along with synergy between Industrious and Castle Keepers tradition.
• Related with the above is how the penalty against development is applied. Each innovation related to increasing the unpenalised development must be known to the steward, instead of the ruler. This means that your goal is to invite, kidnap or conquer a member of a culture that has specific innovation(s) already unlocked and has passable Stewardship, then make that person your steward - the bonus from being made a councillor will easily outweight the cultural difference penalty to opinion.
• Raiding provinces offers tribal rulers a way to both elevate themselves and keep their current and future enemies on their knees. Aside from gaining money and prestige from raiding, there is a relatively high chance of sacking. This can provide substantial income... or extra development progress in the raider's capital, up until it reaches 15 development, a pretty high value in the 867 start. By itself it's a handy mechanic, but the trick is to simply move your realm's capital to another province once you get to 14 or so development and simply keep raiding some more. And this includes all of your vassals too, so you should have as many as possible direct vassals raiding other realms. It is particularly potent as a pagan Norse, since they can raid far further and the AI is particularly eager to sack holdings, as it can provide captives for Blót sacrifices. At the same time, sacking generates a strong debuff to the development of the affected county and it directly loses a point of it, meaning the affected culture will research at a slower rate, leaving the tribal rulers with a breathing space, as it will take longer for feudal and clan rulers to reach Early Medieval era.
• The Byzantine Empire, while historically in the middle of its decline from the heights of Justinian where it ruled most of the old unified Roman Empire, is far more likely here to halt the fall and remain a significant power. It has one advantage over all other realms: even in the 867 start, it has Primogeniture succession. Most other nations tend to be stuck with Partition until later in the game. While their expansion in the east is usually checked by the Muslims, they do usually happily expand into the Balkans and into Russia.
• While the introduction of cultures and their specific traditions and granting bonuses was predicted as a potential trainload of game-breakers on announcement, patch 1.5 went beyond any expectations. Certain traditions provide an edge so big in a specific field, it allows you to overcome whatever normal obstacles the game throws at you and laugh. Warlike cultures are near unstoppable in combat, which also causes both a massive jump in Viking raids and a proliferation of tribal kingdoms in general. And of course you can mix and match those traditions by fulfilling the right conditions, spreading your realm to the right places or even simply marry to the right spouse. Some of the more prominent examples:
  • Marital Ceremonies makes your spouse even better at helping you with court affairs, while the "penalty" to it is penalty in name only, as it only affects adulterers and people looking for divorce - why would you want to divorce a good wife that is essentially an even better councillor than your actual councillor?
  • Well, except maybe the Chivalry tradition. It's a minor bonus to heavy cavalry, but the real kicker is that it provides +50 Renown per successful romance. Romance scheme takes about 7-8 months to finish. Unless your dynasty is spread over few thrones or you have an entire bunch of daughters all married to kings and emperors within your diplomatic range, nothing will generate same amount of Renown as your romantic adventures, for which you can even use your own courtiers. And of course, nothing prevents you from doing both, farming Renown at accelerated pace. The downside is that if you follow a religion that doesn't take adultery lightly, things can go downhill really fast, while you will be a father to dozen or so bastards.
  • Industrious provides a +25 flat development growth^explanation You need to reach 100 to gain an actual 1 point of development, meaning that in every 4 finished constructions you gain a point. On top of that, that +25 development growth is still affected by various positive multipliers when a building is finished, along with shortening the build time by 15%. Throw in some other construction time bonuses and nothing comes even close to this pace of development. Not even a really good steward will be able to keep up with this, unless developing a complete backwater and having the right innovations and local structures. And once you can afford it, this tradition allows to simply continuously cycle a building slot, paying money, instead of using steward for development. This one was eventually recognised by the dev team as a game-breaker and nerfed to work "only" once per year per province - outside super-specific circumstances and stacking modifiers to construction time, you will be hard-pressed to finish any building in less than a single year. All it does is prevent doing it simultaneously in all holdings within the same county. Which is still meaningless to cultures that benefit the most from the tradition: Tribals. Tribals only have a single holding within the county and are the most desperate to get development growth by any means, so the nerf does nothing to them and their catch-up attempt. And there is even a touring event that makes Industrious cheaper to embrace by your culture, as long as your character is travelling through a land with that tradition already present.
  • Philosopher Culture provides you with an just as absurd 5% cultural fascination progress per Learning education level (totaling at 20%) and an additional 10% if the culture head has the Scholar trait and 20% Learning lifestyle bonus.^explanation You thus have a good bonus from your education and tradition to unlocking Learning traits and to even get the Scholar trait, you must pick Scholarship path - providing your realm with a solid 15% bonus to development growth, making an even better deal, while also having +3 Learning, making innovations even faster If this wasn't enough, children are far more likely to be Pensive, aka a trait needed for good Learning education and there is +1 Learning per level of Fame, which is equal with an university bonus. Unless you actively roleplay against it, you want to be a culture head and have a high Learning and Learning education, solely to get innovations fast. This tradition offers just that, all in a single package. Any culture that starts with it can also get faster innovations regardless of poorly developed provinces or being behind the tech curve.
  • Recognition of Talent is very powerful by itself, allowing to easily recruit prisoners to your court and granting a Strong Hook on them, too. This makes things like kidnapping people and then recruiting them as your friends or even romantic partners an easy task. Or just getting a specific claimant without relying on RNG. If this wasn't enough, it also makes it feasible to fill up your knight counter when spamming Camelry building. Normally, while Camelry offers big bonus to your knight cap (up to +4 per building), it's nearly impossible to fill it up and benefit from massive swarm of quality knights.^note Since Prowess goes down with age, by the time you would be able to recruit 40 or so knights, some of them would be too old for the job or even die out of their age With Recognition of Talent, you can recruit any given knight you captured in the battle, and then kidnap some more, too. Or gain them from sieges and raiding. Even if all of this is ignored, it's the easiest and most reliable way of getting Strong Hooks and improve relationship with someone.
  • Metalworkers makes an already broken duchy building, the Blacksmith, even more broken. And if you don't start with it, you can gain it by simply taking over a barony with a mine, aka one of the most profitable places possible.
  • Practiced Pirates allows you to keep (or gain) the option to raid. Sure, if you are a non-tribal, you will get a prestige debuff scaling with loot, but this allows you to harass your enemies even outside of war or even during truce. And if you ignore the loot, but focus on killing whatever tries to take down your raiding party, there is no real downside, while keeping the target without ability to replenish troops and granting optional prisoners to be ransomed. Or even taking the small prestige hit from looting, then recoup it with sacking, which grants bonus prestige (and extra, unpenalised, gold), nullifying the debuff. This was broken enough to get hit by a nerf hammer, locking the option for characters that are either kings or emperors, but for a "mere" duke or count, the extra income is invaluable.
  • Eastern Roman Legacy, a Byzantine-specific tradition, increases the size of every Heavy Cavalry and Infantry regiment by 2 and also provides a -15% Men-at-Arms recruitment cost and maintenance bonus, all for the small price of decreasing your levy size and reinforcement rate by 25%.
  • Parochialism and its Latin-specific counterpart, Republican Legacy, greatly improve cities ability to generate money and levies. On top of that, both provide free development and in the case of Republican Legacy, you can form republic vassals from cities, which in turn provide an even bigger income when granted higher titles than baron.
  • Forest Folk or Forest Wardens, along with Hill Dwellers and Mountaineer Ruralism, gives respectively Forestry and Hill Farms, the default economic building of baronies with forests or hill-land, with an additional military bonus. Per building. Per level. It scales really, really fast. They also provide a development bonus that overcomes standard penalty for related terrain types, developing faster than they normally would.
  • Culinary Artists provides both +50 Renown and a significant bonus to prestige gained from feasts. Though it’s almost nothing in comparison with others on this list, it still makes feasts over twice as good by default and the extra Renown is always handy.
  • An entire slew of Warfare traditions differs only on how your troops are composed and can further add a bonus to them. Sure, you get a penalty to a counter-troop, but why would you recruit those retinues in the first place, if the goal is to stack bonus on your specialty?
  • Warrior Priests is an excellent trait for any of the crusading cultures, offering a massive bonus of Prowess from religious and scholarly traits, while also making priests viable as commanders and knights - and very good at that, as they can easily stack a +10 bonus. Stacking Prowess aside, you can also use it for Uriah Gambit against people you usually can't elect yourself into their office, because even if they are potent knights, sending them to fight alone against an enemy army has predictable results. And even then, you can consider your priest-based knights to be a good combination of Cannon Fodder and Elite Mooks - even if they die in combat, the game will auto-generate a half-decent replacement instantly and free of any charge.
• There is exactly one court language you need to know to easily get by in a quarter of the map: Arabic. No other language has this much spread and coverage, both in terms of territory and various realms. This also allows you to easily pacify whatever Islamic population you will conquer if you start with or learn Arabic, as you already share a language. Considering the Islamic world is a mosaic of cultures, but uses almost entirely the same language, it greatly ease things up and a ruler of a spread-out realm doesn't have to convert other places to their own culture. This synergise particularly well with the above mentioned Yemeni culture.
• Tours and Tournaments DLC introduced tours and tournaments. Both are equally broken due to ability to abuse their related mechanics. And the best part? It's intended, rather than accidental:
  • Since one can customise their routes, this allows to often artificially extend each journey, going through places you would normally avoid, and offering a chance to get things done. A week-longer regency isn't that much of an issue if you can solve local pasture problems, befriend your vassal (or liege) or get some neat trait.
  • Once characters earn the "Traveller" trait, they gain additional bonuses from visiting all special buildings, royal courts and religious sites - even those of other religions - providing them with a free lifestyle experience. It is entirely possible to go on a pilgrimage or a tour through your own empire and unlock 3-5 new perks, often in lifestyles you aren't even currently pursuing.
  • Travelling around your realm, even for a feast in the next county, offers a chance to trigger a travelling event. The vast majority of those are positive or can be at least turned into a non-issue. From the positive ones, they offer a huge variety of modifiers to either your ruler, the county they are in, or the realm capital. They are random, but trigger so often, you can provide a whole set of boni, along with the original goal of going into the journey in the first place.
  • And there is touring your realm, as a dedicated action, when you can quickly increase control, put your vassals in their places, earn money, and solve all sorts of issues the realm is currently facing. The only thing keeping it from being utterly broken is a five-year cooldown till the next tour, but even once per decade is more than enough to make touring a ridiculously powerful tool. It is most useful for freshly conquered regions, as you can within a few months achieve levels of stability that would normally take decades.
  • Depending on religion, pilgrimages can be a way to simply farm Piety, along with bonuses from the journey itself. Unlike any other activity, there is no limit on how often you can travel, so you can go on your next pilgrimage the moment you return from the last one. Sure, you won't get the full bonus from revisiting the same site so fast, but the point is to roam your realm and trigger travelling events, with Piety and/or cultural acceptance being just the icing on the cake.
  • Having a Military Academy duchy building opens option to "Train your knights" when setting up a journey. Not only does it provide a big protection during travel, but it also obviously increases the skill of the knights in your entourage. A lot. And often. Simultaneously with your Marshal training the knights. And it's free of charge, unlike a "normal" group of guards. A single journey with your knights can easily net you anywhere between 5 (at the worst) to... pretty much unlimited gains in Prowess, turning your knights into One-Man Armies. This even includes such short trips as going for a feast in the neighbouring county.
  • This is further combined with the option to take your knights to a tournament, where you can train them, advance your accolades (often getting a few levels of them during a single event), and do all sorts of activities yourself, as long as you can participate. Tournaments offer bonuses just for participation, and in the case of victory - a valued prize and a much stronger version of the participation bonus. Continuously going for tournaments quickly stacks up, granting huge gains in Prowess, free inventory items, and, in the case of victory, large Renown and Prestige gains. And you don't even need to participate yourself, sending your champion instead.
    • A pretty common event is stumbling on a foreign female, dressed up as a man, with high Martial and Prowess stats. You can expose her for minimal progression towards victory... or simply recruit a free, highly skilled knight into your own court. Regardless of the settings, or your culture and religion, she will always be viable as a knight, and a pretty decent one, too. It is entirely possible to end up with an Amazon Brigade consisting of a Cadre of Foreign Bodyguards this way. This can be further combined with being on the tournament for the goal of recruiting new knights, too, offering you swarm of new, young, highly-qualified candidates. You can recruit new knights once per five years, but you can go on tournament as often as there is one nearby.
    • Hastiluder trait, gained from participating in tournaments, is all-around decent trait. However, the Bow line of experience is what makes it so interesting even for characters that you don't even plan to develop into knights or military masterminds. The very first level of it offers a permanent, big bonus to the character's health. You can gain it either by winning a single archery competition or by merely participating in 2-3 of them, depending on events. Health dictates how long your character will live and how easily they recover from wounds and illnesses.
  • When your character is a guardian for a child, said child is always taken with them. This in turn allows them to gain both Traveller and Pilgrim baseline traits while they are still underage, making their own touring once they are adult significantly faster and easier.
  • With the rework on feasts, it is now possible to befriend a few people during a single event. All you have to do is set the goal of the feast to "Befriend" and select the person you want to be your friend. With a bit of luck, it will happen on the first check, opening the option to simply select a new target. Even if it doesn't work and you won't make a single friend, you can still controllably increase your relationship with a specific person.
• If starting as a count or earl with relatively few vassals, single female courtiers are a valuable resource. Finding a spouse offers you the greatest minds from across the world to serve on your council, so long as they are lowborn and agree to a matrimonial marriage. On your very first day of a new game you can potentially have a full council with level 20-30 in their respective skills, without needing to spend gold on finding or recruiting them.
• The Elder Kings mod has some powerful options if you chose to go with certain traits and mechanisms.
  • Vampires, elves, and daedra do not die of old age. While immortality does impose a major penalty to lifestyle experience gain, this can be offset by using events and other sources of experience which are not subject to the penalty, such as a strong spouse to assist the ruler.
  • The Necromancer trait lets you summon an undead army in exchange for magicka. The army is bound to your ruler and will last until succession. If you have an Immortal ruler, you're effectively creating permanent, upkeep-free armies that ignore supply limits.
  • Clan Volhikar combines both of these above traits along with very high Arcana, giving Lord Harkon a huge magicka pool that rapidly regenerates. He can assemble large, permanent armies of undead on top of his overpowering magical abilities create a terrifying early-game force that, with patience, can snowball into an unstoppable army thanks to his immortal nature.

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