One of the rival families in my Venice game built trading posts in Byzantine lands, and when the Byzantines declared war to seize them (at the behest of the Genoans) I couldn't hit surrender fast enough. Protip: don't build trading posts somewhere unless you can personally kick their arse. <16-year-old heirs cannot get elected, period, so if the RNG fucks you you will lose control of the Republic. Your income is huge, but you get frequent +/- gold events, that seem slightly slanted towards minuses - so you can find yourself in the red if you don't have a buffer fund, which will fuck you over if you're depending on mercenaries to fuck someone at that time. At least you get prestige for days for marrying them off to princes. Nobody will ever marry your daughters matrilineally, and it's all Agnatic all day, so daughters are about as useless as they are as an Islamic nation - sorry, feminism. They'll even get piety for it if they're of a different religion. Your riches depend on the largesse of your host nations, and if you give them a reason (or if they're given a reason by your rivals) they will take all your shit and boot you out. So marrying your way to power is a lot harder. You're nowhere near noble, so nobody will marry their daughters to you unless you pay them a fuckload. The downsides? The other Patricians will stab you in the back. You quickly get into the habit of snipping cities off rebelling coastal provinces - in my Gotland game, I've got Aberdeen. If you have a city, you have a CB to seize the province. Oh, and if you have a trading province somewhere, you get an automatic CB to seize a city in the province. Started as Gotland in 1066 - and mind you Gotland is much poorer than the Italian republics, but it has no competition for the region - and by 1086 I was bringing in ~25 gold per month. Merchant Republics DROWN in money once they get rolling. Which inevitably means you'll use the capital's tax income to enrich your own holdings instead of furthering the goals of the city, because your heirs may not control the city but they'll keep your manor and counties. What being the ruler of a Republic means is that you get control of the vassals and capital city of the Republic. The controller of a given Republic is determined by who has the most 'respect' when the old one dies - you get a big bonus for age (~3000 or so if you're 60), a middling bonus for prestige (1:1?) and 50 respect for each 10 you sink into an 'election fund' - you can put money in and take money out freely, but once the elections happen the gold is gone whether you won or not. Plus a bonus if it's linked to your capital by sea tiles you 'control' - you control a sea tile if a Republic's families control the majority of the trading posts in coastal provinces on it.
#Crusader kings 2 plus province map upgrade#
The trading post gives you a base income of 6 a year, plus additional income for each trading post boarding the sea tile, the upgrade levels of those posts, plus the number of cities on those coastal provinces. It costs 150 gold times a multiplier for distance and relationship with the province's owner - building one in Sicily from Venice would probably cost you ~300, to give you a vague idea. Furthermore any kingdom or higher can create one by giving a duchy to a mayor.Ī Patrician can build a trading post in any coastal province that doesn't already have one. I assume Lubeck shows up early, but haven't checked. There's five Patrician families to a merchant republic, and four merchant republics at the 1066 start - Pisa, Genoa, Venice, and Gotland (Swedish island in the Baltic). Note: This is with the help of the HRE, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Scotland, Moray, Hungary, Poland, Wales, and a few other nations thrown in. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough of my troops reach on time, so I'd almost lost the duchy to the Aztecs by the time I could muster enough in one spot to take them on. Loading back a year, and actually pulling all my troops across the Empire in preparation for this invasion, I thought I'd prepared for the attack. Pissed off beyond belief, I drop in a 30k retinue stack before realising that I misread 120.K as 12.K somehow. Completely forgetting about the Aztecs, I play my way around for a while before, suddenly, I get a notification that they took a county in Brittany.
I start as a count in France, and manage to luck and strategise my way into controlling two empires (Frankish and Roman), mending the Schism through having my line pass through the Byzantine's, and having a total of 29 Kingdom titles either as vassals or under my belt. So I started playing this game again with Aztecs and CKII+ enabled.