Has anyone a good guide how the battles at Crusader Kings work?
I mean...more Infos then the manual gave me...
I played EU I+II and i always knew why i won or lost ...at CK there's most the time a big ?

I am playing Denmark and i mixed some norse goals/dreams for my personal goal..retaking at least the central part of england, creating 1 strong norse kingdom and conquering both italys.

For the later i planned a somehow early attack at sicily, i took the catholic Messina through bribes as a bridgehead and prepared to conquer the muslim countys by force.
I gathered my three strongest armys 12k and two times around 6 k, my marshal with martial 20 leaded the strongest army, my king (martial 15) and a courtier(martial 10) leaded the other two, all armys where at 100% moral

The first battle took place at plains, the defending army was only 2100 man strong, their leader had only 10 martial...
i attacked and the morale dropped to zero at the first phase..i lost only 89 man the other 378...i couldn't explain why i lost the battle, rested the army until at 100% moral again and attacked again..this time the enemy brook.

The next battle took place at plains again, the defending army was only 800 man strong, their leader had only 6 martial, i attacked and the moral dropped to zero at the first phase...i lost 38 man the other 720, resting and attacking again i was driven back again^^...i lost 4 the other 68..and i needed a third attack to destroy the defenders.

The other two countys where worse...hills, stronger defenders,...

What was planned as a fast and quick "Blitzkrieg" turned into a resource draining conflict that forced me to slowly draining the enemy strengh away...

Well...it happens but i wan't to know why :)

Found the reason for the lost battles myself, it seems...there's a morale debuff after loading a save, even if you just restarted the game after a break, that lower the max morale. The debuff is slowly reduced over several month until it disapears ( i was told told i last max. 6 month).


I am still searching some kind of deeper explantion of the battle-system..so if someone knows a nice guide...please send me a pm.

Can be closed aside from this...

I spent a lot of time serching for online resources/documents/tutorial/whatever detailed explanations about the combat mechanics for this game (for example how are resolved the six phases of a combat engagement, how the terrain will affect units performances and movements on the world map, morale and casualty calculation and so on...

I foud nothing (maybe I'm bad at searching, but usually I'm very good at it)!
Also many search results are for the more recent Crusader Kings II, not the older game.

I suspect the best suorces for these informations is buried in the Paradox forum plaza BUT!
When I enter the forum section about Crusader Kings, It looks like some sub-sections (for example the Crusader Kings FAQ section) is empty, no topics at all (and that's odd because the statistics of the forum for that subsection clearly shows me that there are many topics, and in fact I can enter and read the topics there but only if I click on a link from inside a post of the forum... I can't understand why).

The many many wikis and wikia about the game I found are almost useless because usually they provide the same level of informations you could get from the game manual or a little above that, but not much more...

That's my main concern regarding "games totally overshadowed by its sequels" and such.

If you go to the Paradoxplaza CK I forum and scroll down then you see a small link in the bottom "Thread display options" - click it. Menu will open. Find "Threads with last post from:" and select "forever" from the drop-down menu. Finally click "Set Options" at the right hand side and it will refresh the page with all the topics showing up.

This page from the manual describes it clearly enough. Favor the nobility that creates militia instead-of pursuing wealth and church.