This basic guide is to help prevent the DLCs from messing with your court as much. this guide includes game play topics up until the (not including) Jade Empire and doesn't include horse lords because I don't own them.

This is just a basic guide to help old and new players get used to running a tight ship that doesn't haemorrhage court members.

This image shows the search person button which is crucial to keeping a kingdom in line, it can be found in the far bottom right-hand corner. Most people click on the portrait button and then try to manage the court like this. I recommend learning how to search for wives, people who want to leave their court, and cultural and religious people that match your empire.

I suggest saving searches for men and women in the same culture with the same religion. This is important unless you are marrying a high-ranking person if so then you need to watch them more closely and assimilate them into your ways. If you don't get your courtiers married they usually get depressed and like you less and you will have no loyal strong court members when their siblings would normally reach maturity.

If you marry your court to people outside of your culture or religion you will find it almost impossible to keep the court in line as there will be many more heathens and spies in your court, people will constantly try to change your religion, corrupt your family members and generally influence your empire.

Not many new players are aware of this mechanic and blindly marry anyone they want, it is not recommended.

You will encounter some powerful people at various events and they have excellent skills in various areas, usually over 20 which is very high making them good marshals and councillors, etc. Just because they have a different culture or religion doesn't mean you have to kick them out, you have several options to convert them.

• One of which is to place your Chaplin in their county of residence with the convert faith task (you can find out which county is their home by hovering the mouse cursor over their portrait). This gives them a chance to be converted every so often.

• Another option is to befriend them and get them to like you up to 100 and demand them to change their faith to match yours. The final method and a part of the second method is to begin to befriend them and at some point, providing your king has reasonable learning, an event takes place that allows you to sympathise with their religion. and an event takes place after sympathising that can lead to many different outcomes but ultimately leads to having good friend status and 100 friendship and being able to ask them to change religion.

You need reliable church members and i have found that if you have all kinds of religions wandering around the Chaplin nearly always says 'I've found a smashing religion' and imprisoning him does nothing as the next Chaplin will say the exact same thing.

Most skilled Chaplin become physicians and you don't want your family doctor in the dungeon in an epidemic or for that matter not liking you. Now more than ever it is important to manage the faith of your court.

It is important to have a good doctor and be on 100+ terms with him or her so shower them with gifts and titles, more so than any other player, and always be as close as possible to them

It is OK to find a doctor on the intrigue screen but keep in mind there are more powerful and wise holy men. if you use the intrigue screen and the doctor comes up with less than 17 in learning look for another unless you are desperate.

The intrigue kind of a doctor usually costs 10 gold for 5 years of service, you need to promote your Chaplin on the minor titles screen as soon as you get one over 20 learning.

Some secret societies provide immensely powerful holy men some with 30 in learning and they won't leave your court and are very easy to be in a good friend status with as they usually share your secret society. so it's worth keeping this in mind.

simply using the intrigue screen to recruit new court members is no longer a very efficient method of getting skilled court members it simply becomes too expensive, at the game start I would say it's essential but after you have developed a few relationships use the search person button (pictured earlier) and look for people with your religion and culture.

it's very common now to be able to invite people you have befriended through secret societies who also have land inheritance but keep in mind they won't marry lowborn if you need to get them married they will want to marry your family or another family with landed inheritance.

I would be as friendly as possible to people in secret societies as they will always be good friends and have amazing skills.

While using the search person button pictured and described earlier If a portrait has a crown it means they have a landed title or an inheritance also, a thumbs up will mean they will join your court without further persuasion. So recruiting people with both the crown and the thumbs up is great for your court and costs no money, they are usually more skilled than intrigue persons. Recruit these persons into your court but keep in mind they may need further influence to change your way of thinking.

This part of the guide contradicts the searching options i have explained previously but it works especially well if you think your kingdom has unmarried men or women.

It is easier to right click on your portrait and then look for unmarried men or women in your court, if you do it this way a list of all women or men already in your court will be displayed, this is great because sometimes husbands or wives die naturally and marring within the court is fine providing it is not incest.

This guide has been a quick how-to on keeping your courtiers happy and non-rebellious.

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