Crusader Kings 3

New Crusader Kings 3 players tend to arrive worrying about gold, and gold is almost never the thing that stops them. The currency this game really charges in is time. A castle is a five year commitment. Persuading a county to worship the way you do is closer to a decade. Nothing in your realm improves on the timescale of a decision, which is why a plan that looks obvious in 1066 is still half finished when the ruler who ordered it dies.

That leaves you three ways to pay, and this hub is organised around them. You can build something and wait for it. You can conquer something that is already standing. Or you can open the debug console and refuse to wait at all.

Your realm is bigger than the part you control

The first thing worth separating is the map you rule from the map you own. Your realm covers everything held by you and by every vassal beneath you, but you can only construct in your domain, which is the much smaller set of holdings in your own hands. A County caps that domain at two, and the only reliable way to raise the ceiling is Stewardship: every six points buys room for one more holding. Our Crusader Kings 3 holdings guide is the place to start, because almost every other number in the game is downstream of how many baronies you personally answer for.

Three holdings, five years apiece

There are three ordinary holding types and the game makes you build one of each before it will let you double up on any of them. They are not interchangeable.

Castles carry a rule that decides sieges: a county cannot fall while you still hold a castle inside it, so two castles in two baronies means an attacker has to take both. Cities and temples work the other way, and a feudal ruler who tries to keep one personally is holding the wrong type of holding, which is punished with no tax at all and a token levy. Hand them to a mayor or an archbishop instead. If your faith allows a theocratic realm priest, that hand off is genuinely the better deal rather than a consolation prize, since the priest returns half the tax and the whole of the levy from every temple leased to him.

Tribal holdings are the fourth type and belong to clan and tribal governments only. They stop at two levels, and the second one waits on the Planned Assemblies innovation.

Then the buildings, which cost you years all over again

Filling a holding is a separate bill. The economic buildings are the ones most players want first and they are all tied to terrain, so what your county looks like decides what you are allowed to build there: Manor Houses are the expensive standout at 900 gold and five years, while Tradeports finish in two. Military buildings mostly buy levies, and the two worth the slot are the ones that also do something else, since Militia Camps push Control growth and supply while Camelry adds monthly tax on top of its soldiers.

Duchy buildings are the other tier and they are cheap for what they do: 300 gold at the first level, five years, one per duchy, and only in a duchy capital held by a feudal or clan ruler with the title to match. Military Academies, Marches, Jousting Grounds, Blacksmiths, Archery Grounds and Leisure Palaces all reach across your realm rather than one county, which is what makes that single slot per duchy such an awkward choice. Worth remembering too that innovations in this game come from culture rather than from your rank, so Fascination is the lever that eventually unlocks better buildings and extra slots.

The buildings you take instead of building

The fastest construction in Crusader Kings 3 is somebody else's. Scattered across the map are counties that already contain a finished wonder, and taking one is worth more than any amount of optimising which holding type goes where. Our Crusader Kings 3 special buildings guide lists every one of them with its holding, county and realm effects, and it is best read as a target list before a war rather than as reference afterwards.

They fall into recognisable families. The holy sites, from Notre-Dame and Canterbury to the Dome of the Rock and the Great Mosque of Mecca, hand out piety, renown and opinion. The fortifications are the ones that change a siege, and the Theodosian Walls at Constantinople are the most extreme entry on the page by a distance. The mines are pure income, with the Kollur Mines paying the most of any of them. The universities are their own group, each granting Learning per level of Fame plus one other skill and a monthly boost to lifestyle experience.

Two things about that list catch people out. The Theodosian Walls and the Aurelian Walls at Rome occupy a duchy building slot, so conquering either one quietly costs you the Marches or Military Academies you would otherwise have put there. And not every entry is a conquest at all: the Hall of Heroes is a decision available to pagan rulers, a university can be founded by decision at Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna and a handful of others, and the Sicilian Parliament is a decision whose modifier runs for a hundred and fifty years.

The slowest clock in the game

Conquering a county is the easy half. A population that does not share your faith or your culture pays you less, musters fewer men and looks for reasons to revolt, and there is no way to fix that quickly. Sending your councillor to preach is roughly a ten year assignment. Putting your steward on culture conversion runs five to seven, and a steward with a poor stewardship score will take longer still, which is the practical argument for not appointing that seat on loyalty alone. Our Crusader Kings 3 faith and culture guide covers both jobs and what each one buys you.

The upside is that it is permanent once it lands. A county that shares your faith rarely rebels, which turns the whole exercise into an investment in never having to reconquer the same ground twice.

Making the ruler look like yours

Not everything here is strategy. Crusader Kings 3 ships a Portrait Editor that lets you rebuild a character's face and body from scratch, but it is hidden behind debug mode and it expects you to be comfortable opening a save file in a text editor. The process runs through the gamestate file inside an unpacked manual save, where each character's DNA string lives next to their ID. Our Crusader Kings 3 character appearance editor guide walks the whole loop, including two things that are easy to get wrong: copy the persistent DNA when you are editing an heir, a spouse or yourself, and go easy on the gene sliders, because pushing them hard is a reliable way to crash the game.

Switching the clock off entirely

Every timer above has a command that ignores it. Turning on debug mode, either through the launch options or with a small batch file, gives you a console that can finish a holding in a single day with instabuild, resolve a pregnancy overnight with instant_birth, hand you gold, piety, prestige or renown on request, and make every AI ruler accept every proposal with yesmen. Our Crusader Kings 3 console commands guide has the full table with parameters and worked examples for each one.

It is worth being honest about what that does to a campaign. These commands are cheats and they will hand you an advantage no opponent can answer, so they are best treated as a sandbox tool or a repair kit rather than as a way to play. If the appeal of the game is watching a plan survive three generations, the console is the one button that removes the plan.

A reasonable reading order, then. Sort out your domain and what is standing in it, decide which counties are worth a war for what they already contain, put your council to work on the populations you have taken, and only then worry about what your ruler's face looks like while all of that is happening.