Civil War And How to Prevent It

**Boris of Bohemia** · 02-27-2006, 19:21

Originally Posted by Advo-san

-But then again, life is a bitch...And you are dead.... Your heir haven't fought a fight in his life, he is a medieval total ass, but he became King because he was your son! Well, that is not enough to gain him some influence..

Build armies while a king has high influence, because they have more loyalty; when a low influence heir takes over, those armies seem to retain most of the built-in loyalty. I try to avoid building armies while a king is new, and instead rely on dad's old-age spamming for a while.

**Vladimir** · 02-27-2006, 19:42

Has no one mentioned trying disloyal generals for treason?

**phred** · 02-27-2006, 20:42

Another way to prevent civil war:

Don't play as HRE

**yesdachi** · 02-28-2006, 17:45

sorry

**yesdachi** · 02-28-2006, 17:59

crusades are the best for gaining influence, even a short one to an easy mark is a good deal.

**hlawrenc** · 03-03-2006, 22:01

All of this discussion on Civil Wars got me wondering if rebels ever have problems with civil wars or rebellions? I had a theory that if rebels could have "rebellions" in their provinces it would be a free way to gain extra troops.

I decided to test they hypothesis in BKB, playing rebels, knew that a cheat allows you to play rebels .conan. so tried. Hypothesis proved incorrect, rebel lands all have 100% loyalty, no more no less even at very high tax and even with no units in the province at all. BUT... since I was there thought would try playing rebels and see what happened.

If you like playing desperate defensive battles and get bored with your usual factions try playing rebels once. EVERYBODY hates you and comes after you. Obviously you have no faction leader but can pretty much raise decent armies if you can survive. Oh... and don't wipe out a faction if you can help it. They always come back in massive numbers! Have to run them into some corner province, beseige them till you get the message that the last fort is about to fall, then back out, let them have the province back and then re-invade every couple of years to keep their numbers down! Ended up having to manuever Novegrods into Finland then let them rot. Same with Kievens in Crimea.

Other bad point is that rebels start at 2000 florin so you are pretty poor initially. Have only played about 15 years playing BKB early but it is one tough fight after another.

On the positive side, in addition to the existing rebel lands you start out with at the beginning of the game, anytime any other province rebels you suddenly become the rebel leader.

Most of the early rebellions are impossible to fight... you get two archers and a vanilla spearman against a full stack of opponents, but a couple actually had a decent numbers of troops in the rebellion stack to have a good fight. Plus if you lose it doesn't matter that much because you did not have that province in the first place.

I can't see playing it too much further without having to do some serious modding (no shipping, etc. ) but can tell you from a defensive battle standpoint it is awfully challenging. AND... no rebellions or civil wars or princes to try to marry off!

**Horatius** · 03-05-2006, 02:31

Why does sending your King to take the abandones/unconquered place hurt your king/you?

I would think that the easy victory and newly gained glory would advance your cause.

**Ludens** · 03-05-2006, 14:45

Originally Posted by Horatius

Why does sending your King to take the abandones/unconquered place hurt your king/you?

I would think that the easy victory and newly gained glory would advance your cause.

There seems to be a bug which causes a king invading enemy territory is considered cut-off from his own countries (even though he just in the province next door): this can cause a big loyalty drop if your king has high influence. It is especially bad, when invading an island province because oftentimes the port gets destroyed so the king is completely severed from his homelands. Many an English king lost his kingdom to rebellion while he was stuck on Ireland (in game, not in history).

**Deus ret.** · 03-05-2006, 21:12

when talking about CW: in the meantime one of my favorite ways of taking down powerful enemy empires is to trigger a CW in them. the best way is to decimate the ruling family with assassins, especially a successful assassination of the king often spells disaster for them. CW is nice because all kinds of once-lost factions reappear and harrass their former oppressors, which are not beaten into oblivion but reduced to a more manageable threat most of the times -- which is the best state for an enemy faction since there's definitely no danger of THEM reappearing.

however the internal scaling of the 'built-in' influence level seems to be more sophisticated than the juxtaoposition of 'byzantine' and 'normal'. I use the XL mod, and most of the new, smaller factions have an extremely low generic influence (similar to the HRE); I watched portugal conquer the whole of western europe and then fall into CW amidst a small break in this expansion drive. apparently not taking a province for two or three years had been sufficient to reduce their king's influence from 4 to 3 (they even didn't lose a province in that time) at which point the CW erupted and left their empire in pieces.....hell and even if they had lost a province, their king's influence should be higher than 4 after a successful 10-year campaign!
then there are the 'medium' factions, those that are not under a constant CW threat when they don't keep expanding. most of the medium and greater powers fall into this category, and at the top --no doubt-- byzantium.

I may me wrong but that's what I can draw from my observations.

BTW this may be off-topic but is it true that the higher a king's influence is, the better his heirs are?