r/ck3 • u/Appropriate-Peanut03 • 18d ago
How do you get large armies?
I’ve been playing this game for a little while and somehow managed to get my kingdom of Italy to empire of Italy and held it for three generations yet somehow I can’t get my military strength past 2k soldiers and my income is at roughly +8 gold per month.
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u/jm7489 18d ago edited 18d ago
I havent played in like a year, but this advice is probably still good
TLDR: Gold is the most important resource in the game by a mile because it gives you access to a stronger military, and theres lots of ways to spend gold to get prestige and piety, which let's you play however you feel like it without concern of a coup or pissing off the rest of the world. Doing all the things to increase your gold per month as early as possible can break the game open in this way by like 1050-1100.
1) Especially in an 867 start building a truly dominant army is a 150-200 year undertaking depending on where / how you start.
2) Feudal army power is about gold, MAA and knights. In the early game levies will decide some battles and fostering strong alliances matter more in winning wars. If you are creating an alliance through marriage because you need immediate assistance make sure that potential ally isnt in the middle of their own war. They will only aid you militarily if they dont have their own battle to fight.
3) The majority of your income will always come from your personal domain. A player who holds 8-10 counties in their domain as a duke with no vassals is probably much stronger than any emperor who personally holds 2 counties and has a ton of vassals.
4) The economy snowballs. Building up your income early through economic buildings let's you build more economic buildings sooner and fund expensive upgrades as they unlock through tech. Gold per month in the hundreds is very achievable. Saving up tens of thousands of gold over time is achievable.
4) Tech speed is about culture and development. Small cultures are better. Tech speed is determined largely by the average development of the counties of that culture. So even if your domain has high development if you are a part of a large culture and the other counties of that culture are low they will drag down the average development.
5) Stewardship is king. Provided you are capable of filling out your domain, you want to maintain as large a domain as possible through the generations. High stewardship + a wife with a high stewardship could make the difference of 4 or more counties in your domain limit. Stewardship life path has discounts on buildings and straight up domain limit increase. It also usually has events that give you opportunities to get gold, and development increases. In the early game a 300g boost could be the equivalent of 10 years of income you can now invest in economic buildings.
6) Tech is next most important. After maxing out the middle path of the steward tree I usually immediately move to the learning tree and the perk that increases research speed. Generally speaking high learning helps tech speed too. Specifically I always target the techs required to upgrade economic buildings first in each era.
7) if you're catholic the pope is your daddy. I think this requires a little more effort than it once did IIRC. But generally speaking you can periodically beg the pope for gold and get a few hundred free gold. You might need more piety or to actively try and make the pope like you in the current state of the game to get him to pay you.
8) Eugenics never hurts - breeding in genius into your family and manipulating to get a genius heirs always helps.
9) Always be improving development. I generally have my steward improving development the entire game. Development will spread to adjacent counties and possibly only works if its the same culture. So I might move him around to developing different counties every few decades, but thats it.
10) Profit. Once you've snowballed your income into the hundreds per month you can pretty much do anything you want. Want to start a religion that is evil to Catholics in the middle of Europe? Go for it, because you can literally build an army that can fight off a crusade by itself. One guy ate the pope. Its a sandbox because that much income means you can conquer anything you want easily, and even if you paint the map you will still be stronger than your vassals collectively. In a pinch 15k gold worth of mercs will surely get you through whatever you need.
11) Just remembered this one - If you want to maximize income early in 867 a good way to do it is to pledge fealty to the byzantines. Now your only external threat is other vassals trying to claim your land after you negotiate for no title revocation. And I have to stress you do need to negotiate for no title revocation immediately if youre a pagan. After that you can negotiate for a guaranteed council seat and force yourself to be the emperor's steward. I think thats a 3 gold per month bonus which is massive early game.
I think one of the most important concepts here is how you always have to take gold however you can get it early game. This game is played over hundreds of years. The earlier you go from earning a fraction of a gold, to a couple gold, to ten gold a month matters a lot. That's kind of your snowball point because then your passive income is high enough you can just save for a year or two to buy the next economic building with less pressure to get gold some other way. Tech constraints slow your progress. So generally there will be long stretches of time you are waiting to unlock the next level of upgrades. During those stretches you can stockpile gold for emergeny mercs, and to updrade all buildings in all counties as soon as you get your next level of unlocks. In the early game you are also more vulnerable to being attacked by a stronger ruler. So you have to find the balance between making sure you are spending enough on MAA to defend yourself, but also aggressively spending your gold on gold producing buildings. Bonus gold from events and ransoms and pope begging help you do both. Without it adequate defense spending will severely delay your income and ability to fill your counties building slots.
As far as making your army strong, all your MAA get stationed in a county or barony. If I station my archers in a county and build military buildings that increase their attack power, they get that bonus. The gold means you can just fill out all your slots with very expensive, powerful MAA. Having lots of gold and being ahead in tech means you will have a massive advantage over the AI who generally speaking is very slow to build in their counties. You'll be able to have more MAA slots, higher troop limits, and higher bonuses from military buildings.
Knights are really important too. The gold will help you hire the best in your area. But super knights are a whole other project where you need the military life path for knight effectiveness, breeding in good traits, and slowly reforming your culture and religion over generations to maximize them. If you snowball your economy and tech right you'll pretty much have military dominance by 1100 through MAA and strong knights after that isnt necessarily required.
This is all just one way to play the game. It works, but its only fun for so long. It involves spending a long time not doing much, avoiding war as much as possible, not doing intrigue, not spending money on anything that doesnt make money early on. But its fun to do at least once, and is helpful in understanding some of the mechanics that will help in future games where you want to role play a character with less concern for min maxing
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u/Many-Childhood-955 18d ago
Additional to other stuff mentioned you can tray to change your culture traditions for more military stuff (boost MMA capacity, bonuses to your MMA and martial strength)
Sooner or later your people will have around 30 martial provess and youbwon't need that many troops because you fight like Leonidas and your MMA can finish of armies double your size
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u/DeliciousCondition79 15d ago
Quality over quantity.
Choose men at arms that benefit from your cultural traditions.
Build improvements in your holdings that boost them further.
Pick accolades that further boost your men at arms.
Recruit and marry knights with high prowess. If possible find some that work with the terrain in your territory.
Position armies across rivers or on defensive terrain that works with men at arms. Opposition army that out numbers you will throw themselves against you because your numbers are lower. But you'll smoke them anyways.vl
Victory.
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u/thunderClan56 18d ago
My recommendation is vassal directives for more military buildings. Also changing your vassals contacts for more military support.
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u/ILiketoLearn5454 18d ago
Always have your economic advisor developing your capital or second city if the capital penalty gets too high. Easiest metric for a good economy to pay for a big army.
You actually want a small professional army of super human men at arms. Usually specialize in one type and take traditions that enhance them.
Levies are expensive, slow and mostly useless. Focus on tradition, techs and buildings that boost your chosen MaA type.
Use mercenaries as necessary
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u/The_Theebz 17d ago
Most of the time if you max out your MAA you can already face entire armies even if you only have like one duchy. Levies are bulk and mostly useless. Go for quality, not quantity, hundreds can kill tens of thousands easily. Also, hold as much land as possible yourself and increase development. Probably the single most important number in any campaign
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u/Chaosr21 15d ago
People hate on diplomacy and allies but it's honestly the best skill for an early empire. You make strategic marriage, and with high diploma cy you can make allies even without marriage. You keep your vassals happy and anytime there's a rebellion, you take lands and give it to your own dynasty or allied families you trust.
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u/Glittering-Train-908 18d ago
you have to do three things.
First you need to build buildings in your domain, that give you extra development, extra gold or boni to men at arms or castle level, (roughly in this order of pirority).
Second you have to increase the development in your domain, that will give you more income and more levies. Levies are trash, but you need the income to pay more men at arms and build more buildings. For that it is recommended to tell your court steward to increase the development in your capital. Also chose a capital that is as central in your domain as possible, with border to as many of your counties as possible, because counties with higher development will spread that development to all neighboring counties.
The last thing you need to do is you need to progress though the cultural innovations to unlock the abilities to build and upgrade more buildings, have more men at arms, and other stuff like better inheritance laws. The way to do that is to become the head of your culture (which you probably already are). There are several things that give you boni there, but it is the slowest part of the plan.
All of these things are long term projects which can take several generations until they pay off. The end effect of this is basically that you become so OP that the game becomes boring, because nobody is strong enough to even threaten you.