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Deacon’s rambling thoughts on The Glory of Kings
First steps:
1) Figure out your character. Who are you? If the Glory Fairy Godmother came down and let you have anything in-game you wanted, what would it be? If you don’t have an idea of who you are, and what you’d like to accomplish in game, you’ll probably tread water and end up bored. Kingmaker talks about 5-year plans and I think something like that is a good idea. You can very seldom do everything, so it helps to have a goal to shoot towards.
2) Figure your friends and your enemies. Write letters and talk to people. The conversations may go nowhere, but you can find surprising common ground sometimes. If nothing else, you might figure out what their in-game goals are, and maybe you can trade help.
The game has two kinds of resources, recruits and currency.
Recruits are often the hardest to get your hands on, so think carefully about how you use yours. My view is it is almost never best to use them in investments. An investment with recruits is invested at full value, without recruits at half value. One recruit and 10 pounds is 10 pounds of investment. 10 pounds of investment is 5 pounds of investment. So simple algebra tells you that this values a recruit at 10 pounds. Really large positions can get 100,000 recruits which at this rate are worth maybe 1M pounds, but they can get 10s of millions of pounds of income.
The one time you will need to spend recruits is when you’re starting an entirely new crop or investment. Then you must spend at least 1,000 recruits to jumpstart the investment. If you don’t have recruits on hand you will go negative recruits, and that will damage your EH quite a bit. (ask me how I know!)
Save your recruits for your military adventures, or if you really don’t have a use, you can probably sell them at a stiff price to someone else.
The game has two kinds of currency: honour and what your mint produces. Take care of both. While honour is often frustrating, it is mostly a reflection of your inert nobles. Part of the fun of the game is the period it is set in. Honour is the GM enforcement/reward mechanism to make sure you toe the line. You build it up by doing things your nobles like, such as opening churches, holding banquets, lowering their taxes, not taking away their privileges, etc. You spend it when you actually want to effect a change in your nation that your nobles are not going to like. Richard's perspective on this can be opaque, but at least it's a basis for thinking about it. For instance, in my case, trying to get rid of the inquisition. If you want to turn your democracy into an absolute monarchy or vice versa, you’re going to ‘spend’ a lot of honour! This also is Richard’s way of slowing you down. If you build up to the change, rather than just doing it, you can probably get by with less of an honour hit. The slow pace of the game can frustrate, but things took a while to accomplish back in the 1700s, so don’t expect it to happen faster in game just because you order it so.
I also think you get a bit more honour when you write things for the paper to take the load off Richard. If you’re hosting a banquet, or opening an opera house, you might as well write up the description of the event as if you’re reporting on it. Richard may well change it, but I often find he takes it just as is and I get the advantage of describing my own actions and character. I think there is a base ‘reward’ for just doing the action, (hosting a banquet, opening a church, giving alms, etc.), but you can get bonus honour on top of that for describing it well and making it properly period. While honour, like EH, is displayed in whole numbers, I think most of these actions are fractions of honour points, and you only realize what you’ve gotten when you tick up.
Taking care of the cash currency, leads me to the 3 development challenges of the game: Economic, Military, and Scientific
Economic:
This is the foundation of the rest. If you don’t generate enough income, you can’t pay your military and you can’t invest in research advances. Unless you’re a large and rich position, be careful about investing too much in military and scientific work until you have the revenue to pay for those and still have money to put back into your economy. They are a double drag, in that you spend money on them that you could have invested, and they also require upkeep every year and so consume more of your cash flow into the future.
How you divide your investments probably depends on your strategy, but I think for a long-term outlook, you want to keep adding significant new investment every year. Some small positions may have a neighbor that they can gobble up, making military investment a better early choice.
My understanding of the economy is that EH reflects how well your tax base grows, and probably domestic trade. More general trade, I believe, is more a function of the average EH of the region. So your economy could be in the tank, but your overseas trade investments do well or vice versa.
I also believe that your trade is impacted by what others are doing and that there are natural market limits. So if you and somebody else both invest a lot in a particular commodity, you’re probably producing more than the market needs and you both will get poor returns. I notice that for honour income you are only allowed to invest back as much as you make a year and that any more would be ‘wasted’. This leads me to believe that you can do the same thing in economic investing and that overinvesting can lead to wasted investing. So even if somebody else isn’t investing in something, your own over-investment may end up wasted.
So taking these two things together, my view is that diversification of economic investment is a good thing. Even if you can mine gold or silver, if you do too much of it, you will likely cause inflation and damage your economy over the long-term. I try to pick 5 to 10 markets or products to invest in to make sure my investments are spread around and I’m not as affected if one market or economy craters. It can be good to dominate a section of trade, but if you put all your investment into one egg, you better hope nothing happens to that basket! (That said, I imagine an annoyed Richard may punish you if you try to make a bunch of tiny investments.)
There are a number of ways that you can improve you EH, and I think these are usually worth doing as soon as feasible. Get a good minister of trade and ask for advice if you want tips.
Military:
This depends mostly upon your goals, but is probably the second most important development goal to think through. I have some opinions here, but not much experience, so I’ll defer to others. My general view is that in most cases you want to solidify your defenses before you start building an offense. Exceptions would be small nations that want to rush to swallow a neighbor.
Research:
I view Research as a force multiplier. When you research water wheels in game, they tell you 10% more power, or maybe 20% more power. Exactly how that translates into your mills functioning only Richard knows, but if you think about it as a multiplier you’ll start to see the advantage.
If you’ve invested millions in a particular area, then getting that investment to perform 10% better can really add up. So if you’re doing mining, it’s probably worth investing in an academy of mining to work on those advances and so forth. I think these are less important early, but can be a much more cost-effective investment as you build your trade base. If you've got 10M invested in something, then a 10% improvement in that is worth a lot more than the cost of the academy to research it. But, of course, research takes time. Note here that The more specific the academy the better. You'll have better luck researching weaving advances at a textile academy than a more generic trade academy. The advantage of the latter is that you can research more different topics, so it's going to be more useful, longer.
Similarly, many of the military advantages play out the same way, I believe. Each one makes one part of your military better in some way. The more military you have, the greater the net impact.
That said, I don’t believe all the research advantages are the same, and some may not do much, if anything. I think Richard isn’t adverse to dead-end research or investments that really return you nothing. Another reason not to get too committed to any one idea, investment, or research project.
First steps:
1) Figure out your character. Who are you? If the Glory Fairy Godmother came down and let you have anything in-game you wanted, what would it be? If you don’t have an idea of who you are, and what you’d like to accomplish in game, you’ll probably tread water and end up bored. Kingmaker talks about 5-year plans and I think something like that is a good idea. You can very seldom do everything, so it helps to have a goal to shoot towards.
2) Figure your friends and your enemies. Write letters and talk to people. The conversations may go nowhere, but you can find surprising common ground sometimes. If nothing else, you might figure out what their in-game goals are, and maybe you can trade help.
The game has two kinds of resources, recruits and currency.
Recruits are often the hardest to get your hands on, so think carefully about how you use yours. My view is it is almost never best to use them in investments. An investment with recruits is invested at full value, without recruits at half value. One recruit and 10 pounds is 10 pounds of investment. 10 pounds of investment is 5 pounds of investment. So simple algebra tells you that this values a recruit at 10 pounds. Really large positions can get 100,000 recruits which at this rate are worth maybe 1M pounds, but they can get 10s of millions of pounds of income.
The one time you will need to spend recruits is when you’re starting an entirely new crop or investment. Then you must spend at least 1,000 recruits to jumpstart the investment. If you don’t have recruits on hand you will go negative recruits, and that will damage your EH quite a bit. (ask me how I know!)
Save your recruits for your military adventures, or if you really don’t have a use, you can probably sell them at a stiff price to someone else.
The game has two kinds of currency: honour and what your mint produces. Take care of both. While honour is often frustrating, it is mostly a reflection of your inert nobles. Part of the fun of the game is the period it is set in. Honour is the GM enforcement/reward mechanism to make sure you toe the line. You build it up by doing things your nobles like, such as opening churches, holding banquets, lowering their taxes, not taking away their privileges, etc. You spend it when you actually want to effect a change in your nation that your nobles are not going to like. Richard's perspective on this can be opaque, but at least it's a basis for thinking about it. For instance, in my case, trying to get rid of the inquisition. If you want to turn your democracy into an absolute monarchy or vice versa, you’re going to ‘spend’ a lot of honour! This also is Richard’s way of slowing you down. If you build up to the change, rather than just doing it, you can probably get by with less of an honour hit. The slow pace of the game can frustrate, but things took a while to accomplish back in the 1700s, so don’t expect it to happen faster in game just because you order it so.
I also think you get a bit more honour when you write things for the paper to take the load off Richard. If you’re hosting a banquet, or opening an opera house, you might as well write up the description of the event as if you’re reporting on it. Richard may well change it, but I often find he takes it just as is and I get the advantage of describing my own actions and character. I think there is a base ‘reward’ for just doing the action, (hosting a banquet, opening a church, giving alms, etc.), but you can get bonus honour on top of that for describing it well and making it properly period. While honour, like EH, is displayed in whole numbers, I think most of these actions are fractions of honour points, and you only realize what you’ve gotten when you tick up.
Taking care of the cash currency, leads me to the 3 development challenges of the game: Economic, Military, and Scientific
Economic:
This is the foundation of the rest. If you don’t generate enough income, you can’t pay your military and you can’t invest in research advances. Unless you’re a large and rich position, be careful about investing too much in military and scientific work until you have the revenue to pay for those and still have money to put back into your economy. They are a double drag, in that you spend money on them that you could have invested, and they also require upkeep every year and so consume more of your cash flow into the future.
How you divide your investments probably depends on your strategy, but I think for a long-term outlook, you want to keep adding significant new investment every year. Some small positions may have a neighbor that they can gobble up, making military investment a better early choice.
My understanding of the economy is that EH reflects how well your tax base grows, and probably domestic trade. More general trade, I believe, is more a function of the average EH of the region. So your economy could be in the tank, but your overseas trade investments do well or vice versa.
I also believe that your trade is impacted by what others are doing and that there are natural market limits. So if you and somebody else both invest a lot in a particular commodity, you’re probably producing more than the market needs and you both will get poor returns. I notice that for honour income you are only allowed to invest back as much as you make a year and that any more would be ‘wasted’. This leads me to believe that you can do the same thing in economic investing and that overinvesting can lead to wasted investing. So even if somebody else isn’t investing in something, your own over-investment may end up wasted.
So taking these two things together, my view is that diversification of economic investment is a good thing. Even if you can mine gold or silver, if you do too much of it, you will likely cause inflation and damage your economy over the long-term. I try to pick 5 to 10 markets or products to invest in to make sure my investments are spread around and I’m not as affected if one market or economy craters. It can be good to dominate a section of trade, but if you put all your investment into one egg, you better hope nothing happens to that basket! (That said, I imagine an annoyed Richard may punish you if you try to make a bunch of tiny investments.)
There are a number of ways that you can improve you EH, and I think these are usually worth doing as soon as feasible. Get a good minister of trade and ask for advice if you want tips.
Military:
This depends mostly upon your goals, but is probably the second most important development goal to think through. I have some opinions here, but not much experience, so I’ll defer to others. My general view is that in most cases you want to solidify your defenses before you start building an offense. Exceptions would be small nations that want to rush to swallow a neighbor.
Research:
I view Research as a force multiplier. When you research water wheels in game, they tell you 10% more power, or maybe 20% more power. Exactly how that translates into your mills functioning only Richard knows, but if you think about it as a multiplier you’ll start to see the advantage.
If you’ve invested millions in a particular area, then getting that investment to perform 10% better can really add up. So if you’re doing mining, it’s probably worth investing in an academy of mining to work on those advances and so forth. I think these are less important early, but can be a much more cost-effective investment as you build your trade base. If you've got 10M invested in something, then a 10% improvement in that is worth a lot more than the cost of the academy to research it. But, of course, research takes time. Note here that The more specific the academy the better. You'll have better luck researching weaving advances at a textile academy than a more generic trade academy. The advantage of the latter is that you can research more different topics, so it's going to be more useful, longer.
Similarly, many of the military advantages play out the same way, I believe. Each one makes one part of your military better in some way. The more military you have, the greater the net impact.
That said, I don’t believe all the research advantages are the same, and some may not do much, if anything. I think Richard isn’t adverse to dead-end research or investments that really return you nothing. Another reason not to get too committed to any one idea, investment, or research project.
I am a bit believer in the need for in-game plans and tend to have a detailed 5 year plan as well as an outline 10 year plan...and a fantasy wishlist plan too 
