Kobavelli's The Prince : a guide to breeding the perfect statesman.

[Kobal2fr]

Only the governor. Else 'twould be too easy

[heynow21]

How do I avoid the "bad trader" traits early? Make sure theres a grain exchange before hes in? Or market?

[Kobal2fr]

Yup, build the first, 600 florins corn exchange before you even consider sending a governor in a given city.

I tried bringing them on the last turn (to offset the "is in town without a corn exchange" trigger that gives -1 points with the "completes a market-type building" one that gives +2) and it doesn't work either : they still end up Bad Traders that way.

[andrewt]

Nice, I avoided leaving governors in any settlements since early on because it was broken and I just kept getting the bad traits. I'm going to consider leaving them in now. I don't want to bother actively training them, but some of the stuff looks easy (i.e. leaving governor on a town with the religious building line).

I'm still getting bad traits right now and I'm wondering how to avoid them. This should be the focus of your next update.

At the start, though, I definitely focus on chivalry and the cheap buildings first. I've found that with a quick, good start, you won't have money problems later on even with crappy governors. When I started my Moor campaign, I created Jihads to get Ghazis and get +5 chivalry on a governor. I put him in Granada. I made 3 more and put them in castles and some newly conquered provinces to grow them early on. The reason is that the cities that start small usually run out of stuff to build before they hit 6000 pop. I move the high chiv governors to new provinces once I hit a population level that I feel the city can upgrade to the next level without wasting turns building stuff I don't need. I think setting the taxes to low gives some bad traits to my governors but I like growing cities fast.

The upside is that I got 5 citadels at around turn 70. I'm going to have 5 dismounted christian guard capable citadels before turn 80 and it'll take another 11 turns before they are capable of making christian guard.

Another question is how do you get the + to law traits? Once your empire starts getting big, they are probably more beneficial than the good trader, etc. lines.

[Shahed]

Excellent work Kobal !

[ninjahboy]

very nice post - only i start off slow no matter what i do :P

[Kobal2fr]

I'm still getting bad traits right now and I'm wondering how to avoid them. This should be the focus of your next update.

Pretty much all bad traits triggers fire up either

1) If you let your treasury get higher than 50.000 florins (with increments at 100.000 and 150.000). Spend that cash. Get yourself some knights or sumtink :)

2) if you end your turn in a settlement that has high level cultural buildings or inns, and you haven't moved during the turn. You could very well avoid them entirely by moving your generals around every turn, but then you'd forfeit some good traits and many ancillaries who also check the same parameters. Better to make sure your governors have the appropriate AntiTraits to those bad traits : Sober, Prim, Upright, Austere and any Skill (Maths, Rethoric, Logistics, Strategy, Tactics) are the ones that counter the most common threats.

Other ways to get bad traits include :
3) When being the target of something bad. Military defeat, inquisition, disaster, assassination attempts all have chances to turn them into Cowards, Superstitious or even Insane in the case of assassinations.
D) At random. Or rather, you can have generals born/married/adopted with the "seed" of a bad trait (1 point in it) but not see it because the trait's threshold for the first level is at 2, or 4, or even 8. These traits usually have a 4% chance to gain 1 point every turn, meaning they'll just appear out of the blue sometimes.
I like to call those "boobytrap governors" :)
The second son of the Milanese starter king is a good example of this : he's clean at first glance, but he'll always become "Generous" (bonus to popularity, malus to tax and trade IIRC) overtime because he starts with that one point in it.
Many of those traits also have a chance to be passed down to offsprings, with a high chance if it's a genetic trait (fertile, ugly...), and a lower chance plus a chance for the opposite as well if it's a mental trait (paranoia, miserly etc...)

[Shahed]

Kobavelli are you using vanilla 1.20 btw ?

[Kobal2fr]

Nope, I recently switched over to LtC (with it's increased build times and costs which frustrate my optimization urges to no end ), but this is based on the vanilla files so it applies to 1.2 as well as any mod that doesn't fidget with the traits and ancil files too much.

[Hermann the Lombard]

Hopefully this will be added to the Guides section! Thanks for the labor of love!

[alpaca]

How do I avoid the "bad trader" traits early? Make sure theres a grain exchange before hes in? Or market?

If you absolutely can't build a grain exchange first, a nice exploit is taking the governor out of the city for the end of the turn.

Kobal: Well the best way is probably to go dread first, get the slaver, then go a-saint with jihads, etc. in the later game
StrategyDread and so on are all reversible, so getting less than -3 chiv and later more than 5 isn't too hard (you should avoid battle dread though, as you have to flee to get rid of it again). Just build assassins and such and kill some of your opponent's diplomats or faction leaders, furthermore set your tax level to very high

[gardibolt]

So given the bad trader trigger if there isn't a corn exchange, shouldn't the sentence

Untill your faction has a few of these young bucks, don't build anything except military buildings and armorers.

read

Until your faction has a few of these young bucks, don't build anything except military buildings, armorers and a corn exchange.

But other than that, an excellent guide with lots of good pointers. I never would have dreamed piety was tied to finances---and it makes all those 0-piety generals from 1.0 and 1.1 serious liabilities.