Crusader Kings III – How to Win War Without Even Fighting

Ever wanted to win offensive war so you can gain your claimed title? Or you maybe want to declare independence from the Emperor of HRE but you afraid to get crushed by his army? Worry not! Because with intrigue you can cheese your way through every offensive war.

Winners Guide

All credit goes to SubSeven!

How The Hell Did You Cheese Every Offensive War?

Well, most guide would say that the martial skill is the most important skill regarding to warfare. But, its perks is not OP enough for you to exploit it completely. Moreover, the AI also have access to this mechanic and possibly can use it against you!

Intrigue, The Most OP Skill

While you can certainly roleplay as anything, if you want to be efficient in your quest to paint the map then intrigue is your best bet. Not only it boost your scheme power, the lifestyle and perk trees also open up a whole new scheme at your arsenal. You can fabricate hook, kidnap someone, and even it allows you to prepare 2 different hostile scheme at the same time!

The Neccesary Step to Prepare

Now that you know that intrigue is more important than martial skill in regards to war, here’s what you need to pull this exploit easily:

• Choose the intrigue lifestyle, and choose Skullduggery focus.
• The bonus from Skullduggery focus is a whooping increase of +3 intrigue skill points! Enough to increase your hostile scheme success rate.
• While choosing what perk to unlock, rush the Kidnapper perk as soon as possible.
• The importance of Kidnapper perk is that it allows you to kidnap everyone without needing to imprison them first. That means it could be used against your vassal who is joined in a faction without the penalty of failing to imprison them. But… for now it is a useful tool that will help us later.

Basically, that is all you need to pull this exploit, but there are several non-essential steps that you can take to improve your chances:

• Increase your ruler intrigue skill as high as possible.
• You can instruct your spouse to increase your ruler intrigue skill by choosing the Court Intrigue task for your spouse. Because of that, marrying a spouse with very high intrigue skill is also recommended
• Appoint character with the highest intrigue skill as your spymaster and set his/her task into Support Scheme to increase your scheme success chance.
• Unlock all perks from the Scheme skill tree.
• Apart from improving your success chance, there are also a perk that allows you to plan another hostile scheme at the same time so it is very worthwhile to take.

The Execution

Congratulations, you have everything you need to prepare to win every offensive war you could possibly declare! But, do you have what it takes to accomplish it?

The next thing you want to do is:

• Start an abduction scheme towards the character you’re about to declare war.
• Wait for it to gain progress, choose all the option that will increase the progress accordingly.
• When the scheme is ready, do not execute it yet, instead immediately declare war against the said character with you preferred casus belli.
• After declaring war, execute the abduction scheme and hope that it succesful.
• Unpause the game.
• If you manage to abduct the enemy ruler (your war target) then congratulations! You instantly gain 100% war score and can enforce your demand(s) even without fighting a single battle, or even without raising a single levy!

How this works is that the game give you an instant 100% war score bonus for capturing enemy war leader. In normal circumstances, this can only be accomplished by:

Defeating enemy army that is commanded by the war leader, or Capturing enemy’s realm capital through siege but by kidnapping them, you can skip all those tedious parts and win an instant offensive war against everyone, even the Emperor of HRE himself!

Note: Keep in mind that if you are the defender, then you are at a slight disadvantage because you can timed your declaration of war with abduction scheme progress. It is possible, however, to start abduction scheme after someone DOW’d you but in that case, you might’ve not enough time before they crush your defense. Hence, this strategy is only effective for offensive war.