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Based on feedback, I edited and expanded my guide a bit.
If you find it valuable, feel free to sticky it.
Deacon’s Guide to The Glory of Kings
Welcome to the Glory of Kings. This is a rich game, with great detail. But it can be challenging for new players.
First steps:
1) Figure out your character or position’s goals. Who are you? What do you want to be when you grow up? 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. You may not know what you want immediately, but setting goals and directions are important, particularly since very little is accomplished easily in the 18th century world of Glory of Kings. So if you don’t stick to a plan, you can just end up frustrated. These can be simple (have a court full of artists and musicians) or complex (conquer a big neighbor). I find it often helps to have short-term goals and long-term goals. So I can gain a sense of accomplishment for moving forward even as I work on the longer-term projects. Larger positions have a lot more to work with, so can have more and grander goals. For smaller positions, you are often quite resource constrained, so it helps to plan accordingly.
2) Figure out 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.
3) Figure out your assets. What do you have a lot of, what don’t you have a lot of? What can you do with the resources at your disposal? This plays into your goals since it helps to have the resources you need to accomplish that goal. Some nations with colonies, for instance, have access to rather unique investment opportunities.
Glory of Kings is not that much different from many type of ‘civilization’ games. It’s a balance of resource management/development and resource use.
So let’s talk about resources. I view that the game has two kinds of resources, recruits and currency(of which there are two kinds).
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. This makes recruits the rare resource compared to cash, so use appropriately. The only way to build military forces as well as accomplish certain position upgrades is with recruits.
The one time you will need to spend recruits on an investment 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!). This fact could be useful if you’re up against the wall militarily, but I’d be hard pressed to think that going negative is ever a good idea (maybe necessary, but not good!)
Save your recruits for your military adventures, or if you really don’t have a use, you can probably sell them to a neighbor. Along those lines, most nations forbid recruiting by foreign powers on their turf. This _will_ negatively impact your economy somewhat, but given the value of recruits, most players view it as necessary.
The game has two kinds of currency: honour and what your mint produces. Take care of both. Some don’t view Honour as a currency, but I think it is better to think about it that way so that you can better manage the ups and downs that honour has in the game.
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 and act in period. Yes, the military tactic of burning your enemy’s cities to the ground may be effective, but most with think you a monster and a barbarian for doing it! (Unless your culture has a history of such things!)
You build up honour by doing things your nobles (mostly) and your people 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 (and people) are not going to like. 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. Societies don’t change overnight and even absolute monarchs must occasionally bend before the combined resistance of their subjects. 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. That said, what an interesting challenge to say engineer the French revolution some decades early?
Note that some positions do gain honour in a different way. Pirates gain it for being notorious and wicked. The Chinese positions typically give gifts to the emperor and gain honour depending upon how well the gift is received. The key point to remember is that if you’re acting historically, you’re on the right track. If you’re not, you aren’t.
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. It is your chance to bring your individual characters alive. While honour, like Economic Health(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.
Purely speculation on my part, but in Scramble for Empire that are subtle benefits to having a higher honour. Some of this may translate into Glory as well. Even if it doesn’t, it is nice to have a good stockpile of honour so that if you feel you must act like a despicable wretch, you will survive. If you allow honour to dip too low, you may well find yourself subject to revolts and the like.
The other kind of currency, cash, 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.
On regional/interntional trade, the rules suggest trade missions help. I would beg to differ. They don’t help, they’re vital. My experience is that not having trade missions is just a bad, bad thing. You need to balance the cost of the missions against the income, but do make use of them.
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 are competing with each other, so you both probably 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 over-investing can lead to wasted investing. So even if somebody else isn’t investing in something, your own overinvestment may end up wasted if you pour too much into one thing. This is speculation on my part, so you follow it at your own peril!
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!
The economic part of the game is perhaps one of the most opaque aspects, so take my advice, and anyone else’s, as just that. None of us really know how this part of the game works, which is by design.
There are a number of ways that you can improve your Economic Health, 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 on this. There are also suggestions in the rulebook.
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. Also, what you want to build depends a lot on what your military objective is and who you are. Different nations have different military strengths. Military research and advances can help shore up your weaknesses and make you stronger, but you’ll likely do best if you exploit the natural historic strengths your position had.
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. On the other hand, if you’re a small nation, with a small income that has diversified, a 10% boost probably will cost more to run the academy than you’d get in benefit from the advance, so perhaps better to wait some years before focusing on that. For a smaller nation, research academies can quickly eat up a lot of money!
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.
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, or that are useful only in uncommon circumstances. All of which is another reason not to get too committed to any one idea, investment, or research project.
Research academies are more efficient the more specific they are. So if you really just want to invent one thing, then you can make an academy for that. The “academy of left-handed smoke shifters” will do the best job of inventing a left-handed smoke shifter. The downside is that once that’s invented, you might as well close the academy, since it isn’t going to be successful researching anything else. So strike your own balance on what you think is the right level of specificity.
Also, academies can train people for professions and that is necessary for a number of the social advances you may want to implement. But if your only interest is in training people, you can open training academies. These can train 2,000 recruits a year instead of the normal academy’s 1,000. The downside is that they can’t do any research at all.
Final Tips:
Richard has a number of add-on rule books for the game. They are worth investing in. They include new troop types, possible research and social advances, and other ideas on how to improve your nation.
Feel free to research your nation in period and propose new ideas to Richard. A number of the advances listed in previous rulebooks came from other players doing exactly that, so the fact that it isn’t in a rulebook already doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It can be a bit of a feather in your cap to see a new rulebook issued and recognize one of your contributions in it.
Expect failure. Richard is a tough GM, if things come to easily, the game overall would be unbalanced. Richard has also implied that the bigger you are, the harder it will be to expand. So while small nations may be able to gobble up a neighbor, larger ones are going to have to work a long time to accomplish that kind of goal.
Your advisors will sometimes give you bad advice. Don’t take everything they say as truth. They’re fallible too.
When writing orders, I have found simple works better. When I started, I liked writing long-winded pieces from my ruler. I have since found that I have better results when I keep the orders simple, and out-of-character. I save the in-character writing for things that really require it. I also think it helps to group orders when possible. I’m sure everyone develops their own process, but when I get back my turn, I write all the orders I’d like to do. After I’ve done that, I go back and figure out which ones aren’t that important to me right now, and I move them into another file which I label for the next game month. Orders that will take more money than I can afford this year, I move into a file for January of the next game year. The following month then, I can open up the ‘next month’ file and repeat the process. If I’ve moved an order forward for several months, I will typically decide it isn’t that important and just delete.
If you find it valuable, feel free to sticky it.
Deacon’s Guide to The Glory of Kings
Welcome to the Glory of Kings. This is a rich game, with great detail. But it can be challenging for new players.
First steps:
1) Figure out your character or position’s goals. Who are you? What do you want to be when you grow up? 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. You may not know what you want immediately, but setting goals and directions are important, particularly since very little is accomplished easily in the 18th century world of Glory of Kings. So if you don’t stick to a plan, you can just end up frustrated. These can be simple (have a court full of artists and musicians) or complex (conquer a big neighbor). I find it often helps to have short-term goals and long-term goals. So I can gain a sense of accomplishment for moving forward even as I work on the longer-term projects. Larger positions have a lot more to work with, so can have more and grander goals. For smaller positions, you are often quite resource constrained, so it helps to plan accordingly.
2) Figure out 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.
3) Figure out your assets. What do you have a lot of, what don’t you have a lot of? What can you do with the resources at your disposal? This plays into your goals since it helps to have the resources you need to accomplish that goal. Some nations with colonies, for instance, have access to rather unique investment opportunities.
Glory of Kings is not that much different from many type of ‘civilization’ games. It’s a balance of resource management/development and resource use.
So let’s talk about resources. I view that the game has two kinds of resources, recruits and currency(of which there are two kinds).
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. This makes recruits the rare resource compared to cash, so use appropriately. The only way to build military forces as well as accomplish certain position upgrades is with recruits.
The one time you will need to spend recruits on an investment 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!). This fact could be useful if you’re up against the wall militarily, but I’d be hard pressed to think that going negative is ever a good idea (maybe necessary, but not good!)
Save your recruits for your military adventures, or if you really don’t have a use, you can probably sell them to a neighbor. Along those lines, most nations forbid recruiting by foreign powers on their turf. This _will_ negatively impact your economy somewhat, but given the value of recruits, most players view it as necessary.
The game has two kinds of currency: honour and what your mint produces. Take care of both. Some don’t view Honour as a currency, but I think it is better to think about it that way so that you can better manage the ups and downs that honour has in the game.
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 and act in period. Yes, the military tactic of burning your enemy’s cities to the ground may be effective, but most with think you a monster and a barbarian for doing it! (Unless your culture has a history of such things!)
You build up honour by doing things your nobles (mostly) and your people 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 (and people) are not going to like. 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. Societies don’t change overnight and even absolute monarchs must occasionally bend before the combined resistance of their subjects. 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. That said, what an interesting challenge to say engineer the French revolution some decades early?
Note that some positions do gain honour in a different way. Pirates gain it for being notorious and wicked. The Chinese positions typically give gifts to the emperor and gain honour depending upon how well the gift is received. The key point to remember is that if you’re acting historically, you’re on the right track. If you’re not, you aren’t.
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. It is your chance to bring your individual characters alive. While honour, like Economic Health(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.
Purely speculation on my part, but in Scramble for Empire that are subtle benefits to having a higher honour. Some of this may translate into Glory as well. Even if it doesn’t, it is nice to have a good stockpile of honour so that if you feel you must act like a despicable wretch, you will survive. If you allow honour to dip too low, you may well find yourself subject to revolts and the like.
The other kind of currency, cash, 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.
On regional/interntional trade, the rules suggest trade missions help. I would beg to differ. They don’t help, they’re vital. My experience is that not having trade missions is just a bad, bad thing. You need to balance the cost of the missions against the income, but do make use of them.
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 are competing with each other, so you both probably 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 over-investing can lead to wasted investing. So even if somebody else isn’t investing in something, your own overinvestment may end up wasted if you pour too much into one thing. This is speculation on my part, so you follow it at your own peril!
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!
The economic part of the game is perhaps one of the most opaque aspects, so take my advice, and anyone else’s, as just that. None of us really know how this part of the game works, which is by design.
There are a number of ways that you can improve your Economic Health, 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 on this. There are also suggestions in the rulebook.
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. Also, what you want to build depends a lot on what your military objective is and who you are. Different nations have different military strengths. Military research and advances can help shore up your weaknesses and make you stronger, but you’ll likely do best if you exploit the natural historic strengths your position had.
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. On the other hand, if you’re a small nation, with a small income that has diversified, a 10% boost probably will cost more to run the academy than you’d get in benefit from the advance, so perhaps better to wait some years before focusing on that. For a smaller nation, research academies can quickly eat up a lot of money!
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.
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, or that are useful only in uncommon circumstances. All of which is another reason not to get too committed to any one idea, investment, or research project.
Research academies are more efficient the more specific they are. So if you really just want to invent one thing, then you can make an academy for that. The “academy of left-handed smoke shifters” will do the best job of inventing a left-handed smoke shifter. The downside is that once that’s invented, you might as well close the academy, since it isn’t going to be successful researching anything else. So strike your own balance on what you think is the right level of specificity.
Also, academies can train people for professions and that is necessary for a number of the social advances you may want to implement. But if your only interest is in training people, you can open training academies. These can train 2,000 recruits a year instead of the normal academy’s 1,000. The downside is that they can’t do any research at all.
Final Tips:
Richard has a number of add-on rule books for the game. They are worth investing in. They include new troop types, possible research and social advances, and other ideas on how to improve your nation.
Feel free to research your nation in period and propose new ideas to Richard. A number of the advances listed in previous rulebooks came from other players doing exactly that, so the fact that it isn’t in a rulebook already doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It can be a bit of a feather in your cap to see a new rulebook issued and recognize one of your contributions in it.
Expect failure. Richard is a tough GM, if things come to easily, the game overall would be unbalanced. Richard has also implied that the bigger you are, the harder it will be to expand. So while small nations may be able to gobble up a neighbor, larger ones are going to have to work a long time to accomplish that kind of goal.
Your advisors will sometimes give you bad advice. Don’t take everything they say as truth. They’re fallible too.
When writing orders, I have found simple works better. When I started, I liked writing long-winded pieces from my ruler. I have since found that I have better results when I keep the orders simple, and out-of-character. I save the in-character writing for things that really require it. I also think it helps to group orders when possible. I’m sure everyone develops their own process, but when I get back my turn, I write all the orders I’d like to do. After I’ve done that, I go back and figure out which ones aren’t that important to me right now, and I move them into another file which I label for the next game month. Orders that will take more money than I can afford this year, I move into a file for January of the next game year. The following month then, I can open up the ‘next month’ file and repeat the process. If I’ve moved an order forward for several months, I will typically decide it isn’t that important and just delete.
