Quick Links
With every new update and DLC forCrusader Kings 3comes new systems to wrap your head around. Sometimes these are simple, building upon existing mechanics. Sometimes they change them entirely, or introduce brand-new elements for you to figure out. With the Royal Court came quite a few new additions.
One of these systems was Court Grandeur. The Royal Court itself was enough to manage, but each piece of the court itself has a system to manage, too. How does the world view your court, or even your own subjects? There are a lot of systems at play here, so here’s how to figure out what they mean and how to turn them to success.
What Is Court Grandeur?
Every ruler of a sufficiently large domain in the game has a Royal Court, though the greatest of its extent is shown for rulers with the title of King and above. But this scale goes both ways. The larger you are, the more people expect you to have a grand court. This is what Court Grandeur measures. The higher your Court Grandeur, the better the effects offered by your court, and the more your vasslas will support you.
Within your Royal Court, you will havemultiple amenities you may modify. These include:
Each of these have unique effects in their own right, such asbetter food offering more stress relief during feasts, but they also work to improvethe baseline of your Court Grandeur. Court Grandeur can increase from one-off events, though will decrease over time. You want a strong baseline that you may’t go lower than.
This is why increasing the level of your amenities is so important. While it can end up being quite expensive, there are massive benefits to it as well. Your Royal Court can take on many different forms, such as diplomatic or Warlike. Higher levels of Court Grandeur will ensure the powerful effects of these courts will be activated. For example,a warlike court with level four Court Grandeur will give your knights +10% effectivenessand +10 more levies from your powerful vassals.
To that end, you want to keep your Court Grandeur as high as possible, with benefits comingall the way up to level 10, the maximum.
How To Manage Court Grandeur Expectations
However, with a great court comes expectations. Your vassals expect greatness of their leader, after all, and they will make this clear to you. This is where your Grandeur Expectations come into play. Based upon your own titles and the land within your realm,your vassals will impose a Grandeur Expectation upon you.
This can be pretty strict, andcomes with negatives for ever falling below it, with those negatives scaling downwards the lower you are below your expected level. Being at the level itself gives no benefits, though going above it does provide some. Like being below it, this also scales upwards,granting more and better benefits the more above you are.
For example, if your vassals expect you to have a Court Grandeur of level six and yours is currently level eight,you will get more monthly prestige as well as opinion with your courtiers, guest, and vassals. The negative for being just a level below isn’t awful, but it is definitely better to keep it above. Even little negatives can start to pile up.
How To Increase Court Grandeur
We know what Court Grandeur is, now we just need to increase it. There aren’t a lot of ways of dong this, but they are all thankfully quite consistent. The easiest and most important are byincreasing the various amenities. Each of them willadd to your baseline of Court Grandeuras long as they are active, meaning you can never fall below them. This is great in general, but is very helpful during succession so your vassals don’t hate your new ruler even more.
Other ways in which you can increase your grandeur are limited. The most frequent you will encounter isholding court, which gives a nice chunk of Court Grandeur.This does decay over time however, so don’t rely on holding court too much to boost your level higher exclusively. Building a strong baseline is always better.
