Ck2 How To Make A Merchant Republic
- Ck2 Merchant Republic Empire
- Ck2 How To Make A Merchant Republic
- Ck2 Become Merchant Republic From Tribal
So I’m a King and I cajole a foreign courtier – call him A – who has a claim on an independent duchy D to come join my ever-so-much-more-prestigious court instead. Following roughly the guide in this question, I want to press this claim, so I look at what land I can give the claimant. A city C happens to finish construction in county B (which is about 6 counties away from the target duchy – totally unrelated, even a part of a different de jure kingdom) right around this time, which gives me a ‘Wrong Holding Type’ and ‘Demesne too Big’ warning. So I figured let’s kill all these birds with one stone. I make the claimant duke landed by giving him the city, declare war with his casus belli and am off to the sieges.
The Republic of Ragusa (Croatian; Dubrovačka Republika) was an aristocratic maritime. In 1191, Emperor Isaac II Angelos granted the city's merchants the right to trade freely in Byzantium. It could enter into relations with foreign powers and make treaties with them (as long as not conflicting with Ottoman interests),.
- Get it early to make raiding and warfare viable, and then slowly condense your realm back to your capital. This will make the levy hit from upgrading miniscule - you'll go from 2k levy from each tribe to 1-1.5k from each castle (assuming a good marshal training troops - he affects all your castles in the county!).
- Boom, he became the head of a new merchant republic part of my empire! Iv) make your case for a duchy, then nominate yourself to rule, faction for elective rule if need be. CK2 + ALL DLC is 9.99 on Amazon right now.
A short time later I finish squashing the independent duchy into the dirt and win the war. Much to my surprise, a new merchant republic is formed in the formerly independent duchy. The Lord Mayor A is still mayor of C and remains my vassal, but the Duchess of D is still around as a countess of her duchy’s capital. Lord Mayor A doesn’t control any counties, just a city and a duchy.
First real question: how did this happen when most merchant republic vassalization guides say you need to have the same character hold a city and a county in their de jure duchy before giving away the duchy title?
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The downside is I already have a vassal merchant republic! What’s more, they already have trade posts up and down the coast, including in the county seat of the new duchy. I gather this is a bad situation, as trade empires compete with each other? And get a stronger bonus from controlling a longer swath of sea lanes?
Second real question: is it so bad to have multiple merchant republic vassals? I should do everything I can to keep them from competing with each other, including total dissolution of the new one, right?
Third question: How can I best accomplish this? Can I revoke the city title and turn Lord Mayor A into a regular vassal (somewhat like this question says)? Would that dissolve the new Republic? Would I need to revoke the former Duchess of D’s barony and give it to the Lord Mayor?
Edit: I don't think any of the answer's given so far will work. Here's the options the game won't let me do.
- Revoke the County of D. The former Duchess is now a Countess and it says I'm her liege, but the option doesn't appear when I right click her portrait. I do have a truce with her for the next 10 years: the title screen for the county implies I might be able to revoke it when the truce expires.
- Revoke the City of B, which is where A is the Lord Mayor. Oh, well technically it says he's the Grand Mayor of D now. Right click him -> Revoke: no titles. City of B title screen: revoke button says 'Not Revokable'.
- Grant A any other county. My entire kingdom is only 19 counties, so now that I have 2 counties under republic control, I can't grant a 3rd as I'm over the 10% limit.
- Usurp or revoke the new Republic of D title. It's no longer a Duchy title; apparently this is not allowed for the primary title of a republic.
On a cheerful note, the Republic of D doesn't yet have any trade posts. I'm pretty sure there was a post belonging to my older republic in county D before the war ended (it was sieged a few times - not sure if that destroyed it or the creation of a new republic in its backyard did). Another positive is that having pressed A claim on D gives him a crazy good opinion boost towards my King, so I could probably slap him around without making him hate me, if I could find an option the game will allow. Of course, that opinion boost will probably also expire as soon as my King kicks the Royal chamber pot.
So for now it seems like my options are to live dueling republics, wait 10 years, quickly acquire more counties to grant an additional one to republic control (which I'm now thinking won't actually elevate Grand Mayor A to a feudal vassal status) or back the game up to an earlier save and find a different holding to grant to A to press his claim on D.
New question: do truces expire on succession? Because that will probably happen a lot sooner than 10 years..
2 Answers
Clever, you found a way to create a merchant republic I hadn't considered before.
First, I think the only reason you need the soon-to-be Grand Mayor a county before granting a duchy is because the game won't allow you to grant a Baron-tier character a Duchy directly. Apparently you can get around that with claim wars. The city doesn't actually need to be in the county, nor the city or county in the duchy, it just makes for cleaner maps and less arguments between vassals over who should control what.
Ck2 Merchant Republic Empire
Second, unless crown laws (Medium or higher) prohibit it, the Grand Mayors are likely to try declaring trade wars on one another and possibly get Feudal Dukes (or even outside powers) to Embargo the other republic. They will also likely be plotting to steal each others trade posts and if the new republic gains enough posts they could threaten the old republics trade zone bonuses. That kind of internal strife costs money (and thus is inefficient), so it's probably better to quietly smother your fledgling republic.
Third, I don't think the game will let you revoke the city if he holds no other county or baron tier titles. You might be able to revoke the city if you grant him a feudal county then strip him of the city title. Of course, then you've created a Duke with a reason to hate you, and the two unjustified revocations will give you a -40 relation penalty with all your vassals. The simpler option, which will offend your vassals less (-20 instead of -40), would be to simply revoke the Duchy directly. The former leader of the republic will go back to being a regular Mayor and you will have a Duchy to hand out as you see fit.
Yes, you can remove the merchant republic. Revoke the lord mayor's duchy. If he controls no duchy or higher level titles, his republic will be destroyed. You can then give the duchy to a feudal character- most likely one of the other counts in that duchy.
Whether you need to do this depends on the situation. In the long run, one enormous republic will be stronger than two competing ones. However, in the short term, you will lose a lot of income. All the trade posts from the destroyed republic will be destroyed with it and it will take a lot of time and money for the second republic to replace them. It also depends if the second republic is even in a position to do that- if there's another republic, outside your control, they will also take territory from this.
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I mod pretty much all games I play. Some of the mods I publish on Steam Workshop or on this blog, but mostly they're for my campaigns.The main problem with publishing them is that CK2 architecture makes it fairly difficult to run large number of small mods - there's a number of files which are responsible for pretty much everything (like religions.txt or landed_titles.txt or defines.lua) and two mods trying to do seemingly unrelated changes which just happens to affect same files will likely conflict, and game won't even inform you of it.
I use mod builder to bundle all these minimods into a single one to avoid such issues. Without it, you probably won't be able to easily choose and mix minimods you want.
Then again, a lot of minimods would work just fine standalone, so if there's anything you find interesting here, just ask and I might publish it too.
This isn't a coherent mod like Fun and Balance for EU4, just a loose collection of tweaks. I used to have a collection for CK2+ as well, but that was many versions ago.
Other people's minimods
I found a lot of nice mod written by other people. Currently I use these from Steam Workshop:- Anime Portraits - I thought I'd run this for lulz, and I'm not terribly weeaboo or anything, but it's some amazing quality work and it makes the game looks so much better
- Blue Duke - new portrait frames are dreadful UI, especially in how difficult it is to tell counts from dukes. This mod makes duke frames blue, and solves this problem completely.
- DLC music for every culture - in game music gets boring after a while, so that increases the pool a bit. Often I end up turning off game music and using external music player instead anyway.
- Invitation Traits - it gives people (do nothing) traits showing if they'd accept your invitation or not. It's a hack, but it makes UI so much nicer.
- Heir Traits - it gives people (do nothing) traits showing if they're heir to some title. Huge UI improvement.
- Show Council - adds action which target's council, commanders, and other key figures. I spent so much time trying to find people's spymaster with game UI, it's huge pain in the ass. This is a huge time saver.
- Notify on Adulthood - notifies you when someone comes of age. This is probably the most useful of them all. Getting notification when someone becomes of age, and can be married without their regent preventing such arrangements, or allowing your spies to reach them more easily now they're not tutored somewhere inaccessible, or knowing when a duchess reaches age when you can seduce her so your bastards can inherit her lands. It's a huge win. One thing it doesn't do is notifications a few weeks before adulthood, which would be nice for last minute guard swap tricks.
- (there are two more minimods there but I didn't need them)
- Suez Canal - adds Suez Canal to the game, making areas like India, Ethiopia, and so on actually relevant
- No Localized Ranks - uses consistent English names for all ranks instead of all the 'walis', 'exarchs', and 'rajas'. Game really should have option to turn this crap off.
- No Localized Landed Titles - uses English title names, so it's 'Denmark', not ridiculous nonsense like 'Danmark'. Game really should have option to turn this crap off as well.
- No Dynastic Names - uses country names based on titles, not dynasty names. So It's 'Persia', not 'Abbasids'. Another thing which should be in game settings.
- Become Republic - if you're male feudal ruler with coastal capital, it allows you to become a merchant republic. I used it in Republic of London campaign.
- Switch to spouse dynasty - Crusader Kings is supposed to be about playing as family, but game actually wants you to play as family name, which I don't like much - and for that it introduces a lot of silly mechanics like matrilineal marriages. It would make much more sense if you just wanted what's best for your children, and who cares whose name they'll carry. I used it in Matilda of Tuscany campaign. This allows you to continue playing without game over as woman in regular marriage.
- Make marriage regular / make marriage matrilineal - some hacks to change marriage type. There's some glitch that makes it trigger royal aid duty sometimes. For use when you want to play as your family, but your heir married wrong way.
- Educate close kin - I just like educating all my kids myself, so I made a mod that allows educating all dynasty members regardless of 2 limit. To be honest I probably don't need this and I could just as well send my daughters and extra sons to vassals for education, but I got used to it.
- Banish traitor - you can banish imprisoned vassal traitors seizing all their lands and money, and people are OK with it. This probably goes too far into easy mode territory, but current situation is just silly (can't seize money, can't banish, can't execute, can only take one title, and often cant' take any titles as truce blocks revocations), with traitors risking pretty much nothing as they'll just claimant faction whoever you give their title to and get it back in zero time, and then you have vassal who hates you forever. I might come up with something more balanced someday.
Mark decisions as high priority sensibly. In EU4 you can choose which decisions you want to be notified about in game UI. In CK2 that's hardcoded by 'is_high_prio' flag. Which would be acceptable, unfortunately is_high_prio flag is really dumb, and asks you stupid decisions nobody ever wants like 'conscript merchant ships' or 'ask help to manage titles', but won't tell you that it's finally the month to have a feast, summer fair, or grand hunt. I made all decisions which are specific to peace time or particular month or Jews as high priority.
100% hereditary 'Hunie' trait. This actually used to do something, but now I just add it in ruler designer (or via console). It's a 100% hereditary trait which does absolutely nothing except telling me which people are descendants of my original character, no matter which culture or dynasty names they end up with. Combos with seduction focus a lot (that's why the name).
Really disable fucking hints. There's option in game to disable hints. There are hints (mostly one at campaign start) that are explicitly set to ignore this flag. Seriously, what the fuck where they thinking? When player has explicitly chosen to disable all hints, maybe take a hint and stop showing hints?
Show all CBs in diplomatic map mode. Game decided that you don't want to know when you can tributary CB someone. I very much want to know that, as that's my favourite CB, so I want it displayed too.
Don't call dukes 'kings' ever. A duke is a duke. Mercia is not a kingdom. It's modern silliness to call all such petty rulers 'kings'.
This one change surprisingly has more impact than everything else put together. Made AI always prefer high tax and levy laws. Since Great Vassal Levy Nerf you absolutely and without exception should have high feudal taxes, as you'll be relying on (now a lot more expensive) mercs/retinue and your demesne troops. Non-Muslim AI in vanilla is hardcoded to go for zero feudal tax, which is ridiculous and it's according to a bunch of AI games the main reasons why Muslims are so OP - they just so happen to not do this dumb shit.
Making AI actually go for high taxes and levies makes AI realms way more powerful, without touching came mechanics in any way, just ai_will_do blocks.
Made AI stop joining elective succession faction unless it's Germanic. AI just loves this faction, and I've seen elective Byzantine Empire one too many times. Historically it was Germanic silliness, and it really doesn't belong in rest of Europe. Rulers can still pass such laws if they want, but AI won't join elective faction unless it makes sense for their culture.
Disabled overthrow khan faction, made nomads join independence factions instead. Hordes are totally OP, and big part of it is that they never have any internal problems whatsoever. Even if you weaken a horde the worst thing it can get is new khan. Not any more, now it can - and will - fall apart without strong khan to hold it. It doesn't come close to making hordes not OP, but now you have some tools to deal with it.
Easier title creation. Some titles have rules preventing AI of wrong culture from creating them. This just means that AI ruling over whole de jure kingdom will stubbornly remain a duke. Weirdly in case of Hungary it applies to player too, so if you holy war all of Hungary you can't recreate it as vassal kingdom in any way. Most of such restrictions are removed. (the must-be-republic restrictions remain)
In the end I increased vassal limit to much higher numbers, especially for emperors (25, 40, 50, 100 for duke, double-duke, king, emperor). Reasonable alternative would be to keep it where it was but reduce penalties drastically, in addition to not counting rebels and giving you more options, but I find this to be totally unfun mechanic, so I prefer to just get it out of my way.
Faster de jure drift - 100 years is ridiculously slow. In theory it would be reasonable to wait a bit if requirement was just that title is vassal under you for 100 years or 51% controlled, but given typical levels of border gore it's close to impossible to control 100% of any kingdom for 100 years, and in typical vanilla campaign the only drift that ever happens is duchy of Latium to Papacy.
I reduced times to 50 years for duchy to kingdom (as fully controlling duchy is reasonable), and kingdom to empire to 20 years (by the time you control every last county your empire was probably dominant power there for generations).
I'm somewhat tempted to just throw drift completely and make de jure changes happen by decisions which you can (and AI would do too) use by spending some prestige and gold, just like creating custom kingdoms/empires (which already de jure changes in zero time).
Preserve cultural buildings. Vanilla automatically destroys all cultural buildings if ruler is wrong culture, which nerfs parts of the game which is already too weak. For example if you inherit some title from one Dutch vassal and German emperor, you don't even have a chance to give it to another Dutch vassal - it will get autodestroyed in a day before you have a change.
It's all just dumb, so I allow constructing buildings based on either province or ruler culture, and never get autodestroyed. Now in theory you could go through 20 cultures and build ridiculous number of buildings in your capital, but if you want to do so, sure, have fun.
Removed -30 foreign conqueror penalty. This is a silly thing they did to make Anglo-Saxons hate their Norman conquerors until everybody becomes English and happy about it. Unfortunately it really screws up rest of the world, where you can't have mixing cultures, so your vassals of wrong culture will keep hating you 200 years down the line or not, depending on how you got to get the realm. Holy War? Totally awesome. Claimant Faction (like Bohemian faction for HRE)? Hated forever by everyone in the realm. Of course the easiest way is to just get rid of vassals of wrong culture on first opportunity, and be done with it. It's also the only way, unless you're specifically England.
You still get the usual foreigner, wrong religion etc. penalties. This just removes this extra silly one. It would be reasonable if it only affected people who were conquered, and had a timeout like 20 years, but it last until end of the game and affects people twenty generations down the line.
Removed divine blood fertality penalty. For Holy Xwedodah!
Increase republic trade post limit by about 3x. Trade posts are what makes merchant republic merchant republics, and while they used to be overpowered, retinues and mercs got nerfed so much that republics are now a total pushover.
Allow trade post seizing plot in merchant republics with fewer restrictions - you think doges would not plot against patricians? This might be a bit too powerful, but vanilla blocking this completely is just silly.
Norde reinforcement speed reduced to normal speed. This means nomads when they get wrecked stay wrecked for a few years instead of miraculously recovering in zero time. This goes a good deal towards balancing nomads.
Ck2 How To Make A Merchant Republic
Allow all religions to seduce. If you're going to sin anyway, what do you care she's an infidel?
Ck2 Become Merchant Republic From Tribal
Give everybody river access. People have been using rivers this way since forever. It also makes Central Asia somewhat more relevant.
Allow most minor decisions while at war. Feasts, summer fairs, pilgrimages etc. can now happen also when you're at war. It's silly that some peasant rabble in periphery of your realm should stop you from having a feast. The problem is that game treats even very petty squabbles as 'wars', while only major ones should block such decisions.
Allow joining (almost) all wars of characters of your religion. What could be more fun than supporting rebels trying to overthrow a king you don't like? It also makes religious wars more intense as you can no longer use de jure wars to prevent other nations of same religion from joining enemy side. This is one of the best changes i've made.
Ruler designer reset. All traits free. It's up to your roleplaying choices to create characters you want.
Other changes
Kingdom of Italy is de jure HRE. CK2 de jure map is generally silly, with all kinds of imaginary de jure realms (Wendish Empire) and relations (Croatia de jure Byzantium, well..). This one on the other hand, is the most factual de jure statement of all - if 'de jure' means anything, kingdom of Italy is de jure HRE. As a bonus this removes the eyeblight of one-kingdom 'empire of Italia' from the map, as Venice and Sicily as de jure Byzantine Empire (which actually makes some historical sense). With 2 Roman empires already in the game, the idea of having separate teensy 'Italia' is just painful.Made culture conversion event not require neighbouring province of same culture. It still happens, just much more slowly, with discontinous territory.
Interested in any of that?
As you can see, these minimods are too disconnected to turn into one mod, it would take a lot of work to publish them all, and without mod builder to resolve conflicts a lot of these minimods wouldn't work together. But if you're interested in any of these mods, just message me, and I might publish it on Steam Workshop or elsewhere.Code for all of them is on github, but probably not in the form which would be terribly useful.