- Ck2 Knight Retinue
- Ck2 Best Cultural Retinue 2019
- Ck2 Best Culture Retinue
- Ck2 Best Retinue Combination
A blog is a great tool for keeping me motivated and recording my various hobby projects. It can be a bit of a double edged sword. Two weeks after my last ‘Workbench update’ and I have very little progress to record!
Lord Callan’s Retinue – first three figures
This is an edited version of Sketchy Cheat Menu that is currently working with CK2 2.8.1 and AGOT Mod 1.6 and has many fixes and changes! How to use: To enable cheats in your game, right-click on your character portrait and click 'enable cheats'. Compatibility: Has an separate file that is compatible with AGOT Should be compatible with CK2+. Ck2 best events, Events to do with AGoT dragons. Event dragon.1 = find an egg event dragon.3 = choice to hatch an egg event dragon.5 = successfully hatch an egg, works with dragon eggs born from previous dragons you have or your kinsmen may have given you. At 2.5% per month, a retinue normally takes 40 months to fill. It may be slightly faster due to rounding. List of retinues. Retinue regiments can be divided into three types: Generic retinues are available to all rulers except tribal rulers. Cultural retinues are specific to the ruler's culture. Tribal retinues are exclusive to tribal goverments. With the latest Holy Fury DLC, Paradox Interactive's 2012 grand strategy game, Crusader Kings 2, now has 15 major expansions, and for someone who's either just getting into the game today or wants to pick it back up, it can be terribly daunting to try and figure out which, if any, of those expansion packs is worth the money and which ones are just going to add features that you'll never use.
My main focus has been to start on Lord Callan’s retinue. I did have the retinue assembled and they are now primed and painting has started.
Before I write any more of this blog, I must acknowledge the influence of a certain ‘Captain Blood’, AKA Richard Lloyd. You can see most of Richards work over on the Lead Adventure Forum and I provide a link below. Richard combines some very clever conversion and modelling work with superb brush work and a choice of colour and livery that is simply sublime. Add to the clever way he has blended actual historical retinues to some of his own and it’s fair to say that he has produced the best units that I have seen. Oh and his basing work is pretty damned good as well.
So having painted the ‘Lord Callan’ model from the Wargames Illustrated Giants in Miniature collection, I thought that I would give him a small retinue of Bills and Bows to lead into battle. Having seen the way Richard has produced his units, I have done my best to take some of his ideas to give Lord Callan’s units a slightly different feel from the rest of my army.
Retinue definition is - a group of retainers or attendants. How to use retinue in a sentence.
The next three figures on the bench!
Lord Callan’s Colours are black on red and his main Coat of Arms being a white lion over a golden wheatsheaf. In case anyone is interested in the provenance of this Livery, it is based on the two best pubs in Bingham, The White Lion and the Wheatsheaf! I decided that I would give Lord Callan the White Lion as his main Sigil and just use the Wheat sheaf on the Banner when I get to it.
The three figures above are very much a work in progress with their faces and bases still needing to be finished! You can see that I have stolen some of Richard’s ideas, with the pole of the halberd in House colours and the helmet and buckler also painted. I’ve also done quite a bit of swapping of heads and arms from the various Perry sets to get a ‘Veteran’ look to the unit, allowing me to claim an upgrade in the Bill Hooks game.
More of the retinue in progress
Once the Billmen are completed, the plan is to add a unit of Veteran archers and at least one more banner man to stand along side Lord Callan, although I may use the horn blower below…
The next batch on the work bench
As you can see, I also have some other distractions that I am working on. The sharp eyed reader may have spotted three genestealers….
They wont be making the retinue! I found them half completed in the loft when getting down the Christmas decorations, so decided to finish them ready for the next time we play Space Hulk….but that’s another entirely different subject!
If you would like to have a look at Captain Bloods original work on the Lead Adventure forum, here’s the Link:
If you are not on the Nevermind the Bill Hooks face book page you can see some very inspiru=ing work here as well:
THE COMMERCIAL BIT
Almost all of the paints, miniatures, bases, basing materials and anything that you are likely to need for your hobby are available POST FREE at the time of writing, from my shop. The Links will open in another tab on your device.
Perry’s WOTR plastic range are here, including some nice army deals!
You can see our Woodlands scenics range, including water effects, here:
Gamers grass tufts can be found here:
Vallejo plastic filler and Milliput is available here:
MDF bases can be found here:
You can find all the Vallejo Model colour paints here. If you don’t want to browse, just enter the paint number into the shop search bar;
The full Sarissa range can be found here.
Happy Modelling!
I adore developers like Paradox Development Studio that provide ongoing support for their games many years after launch. I also adore Crusader Kings 2. It’s among my Top 10 Games of All Time, easily, and I’ve played around 1100 hours just in the retail build. But I think it’s time for it to die.
Before CK2, Paradox strategy games would get maybe a handful of expansions and the franchise would be shelved until it was time to start thinking about a sequel. I wouldn’t advocate going back to this model. Using DLC to fund ongoing feature development and bug fixes for a much longer time after release is, overall, a great idea. We’ve seen every PDS game since CK2 benefit from it greatly. And they continue to benefit.
But as the proverbial lab rat for this model, I just don’t think the foundation of CK2 was ready. It’s a brilliantly-designed game that remains wholly unique from anything else I’ve played, with its emphasis on characters, dynasties, and the way human interactions shape history. But it was never meant to be stretched as far as it has been. Even back in summer 2015 when Horse Lords was announced, I mentioned on the Three Moves Ahead podcast that it felt like a focused, feudal Christendom simulator was continually being hacked and modded to include unfocused and distorted representations of steppe hordes, tribal pagans, and auguste empires.
At this point, it’s sort of a lumbering, gestalt behemoth that has far outgrown so many of its initial core concepts, it seems silly to even call it “Crusader Kings” anymore. And while it can be fun to play as Turkic conquerors or the great dynasties of the Islamic world, they’ve all had their identities shaved down like square pegs to fit a round hole. The very foundations of CK2 are not ideal to support all that’s been placed upon it. And while I still find it enjoyable, I’ve come to a point where I am deflated rather than ecstatic with each new expansion that’s announced. Because I don’t want to see more Crusader Kings 2. I want to see what visionary designers like Henrik Fåhraeus (who has led the charge for most of CK2’s development cycle) could do with a clean slate and a proper sequel.
If we just take a peek back over the last several expansions, the diminishing returns become clear. Conclave (February 2016) is the last among them I would consider wholly essential. The Reaper’s Due (August 2016) was admirable in its attempt to represent the Black Death and disease in general, as they were major forces that shaped the Middle Ages. But where it fell short was in modelling the sweeping social changes that came as a result of the Black Death - simply because the engine isn’t set up to handle them.
The marquee features in its most recent DLCs are far from essential. Monks and Mystics (March 2017) sold well on the back of its meme-friendly Satanist cults, but the actual effect on gameplay didn’t hold up especially well. Since each society has a limited amount of pre-written narrative content and none of them are especially dynamic, it’s wholly possible to see all that most of them have to offer in only a few generations. When a single game of CK2 can last dozens, I start asking myself why I’m even bothering to join the Hermetic Order again. Likewise the latest Jade Dragon expansion adds China as an off-map force that can exert indirect influence. This is due to limitations of the bones of CK2 to hold up a fully-fleshed China, and another great argument for a total refresh.
When I look at a game like Europa Universalis IV, I can nod in agreement when Paradox’s Johan Andersson says there will never be any need for a sequel under the new model. EU4 has all the pieces in place to be almost infinitely expandable and introduce new concepts that bring flavorful immersion and interesting gameplay to its era. But it was partly built after CK2 had demonstrated the earning potential of the current DLC strategy. CK2, itself, was not - and it will always be held back by that. I lament because I know how much potential its concepts have to go so far beyond what’s possible in the current codebase. It’s the odd hybrid of Old and New Paradox games that just barely missed the train it was responsible for launching.
Ck2 Knight Retinue
When I interviewed Fåhraeus way back in 2014, before the release of Rajas of India, he said “I have a long list of stuff that I want to fundamentally change that is not going to happen in one of the expansions. I can't really reveal any of these, but I expect that if and when we do a sequel, that's when we'll do these changes.” Watching his GDC Europe talk that same year, I felt like I could catch some glimmers of those big ideas. And they get me really excited. Far more than any announcement of new content for CK2 could, at this point.
You might rightly say, “Of course you’re sick of it after 1100 hours!” And that much is fair. A newcomer to CK2 could still be playing it happily in 2022. But if we don’t have a CK3 by then, it will be a tragedy given its potential to push the conceptual boundaries of strategy games forward just as CK2 did in 2012. At the very least, we deserve a Crusader Kings that was written from the ground up to be as indefinitely expandable as EU4, Hearts of Iron IV, or Stellaris.
As so often happens in the dynastic conflicts at the heart of this game, I must narrow my eyes and proclaim: “I loved you like a brother, Crusader Kings 2. But now, you must die.”