Are you new to this game and have no clue how to handle your dynasty?
Do you struggle to keep a steady stream of money and influence going into your purse?
Do you often fail to keep up with other dynasties, especially in the early game?

This guide is for you!

I won't go over the Do's and Don'ts of large-scale political intrigue or using your romantic conquests to hinder your adversaries. Those are mid to lategame endeavours and not neccessary for setting up shop in our new town.

This guide assumes you're playing on normal difficulty and while the number of other dynasties doesn't really matter, i'd advise you to go for <10 other dynasties to keep everything from becoming crazy too early.
At first you could also think about playing a smaller map (Like Heligoland, Augsburg or Magdeburg). Bigger maps have more markets but also longer travel times which we don't want all the time.

I would advise you to choose either a yellow Food preparation class (like the Fisherman or the Farmer) or a blue scholarship one (Barber, Preacher, Healer).
The reason for that is that you don't have to rely on buying expensive resources early on and can instead create your own products from scratch and basically for free!

So Handicraft businesses are very costly in comparison, especially in the beginning when you don't have a big income and need every single gold coin.

Roguery makes your beginning also slower.
You have to choose early on if you want to go full outlaw or performer. The first one will eat you up in fines and punishments while also making everyone hate you. The second one (albeit being one of the safest ways to make some coin) is the absolute slowest way to get money in the beginning.
Waiting for your minstrels to gather the 1000 coins neccessary to get your first title will be incredibly slow

So in general you don't want to min/max right away while you're learning the game.
All the attributes have nice effects and in the beginning you can use almost all of them nicely.
But since we're not going to war in this guide, i like to put one point form strength into charisma to increase my odds in finding a partner quickly.

So you created your Character and started your journey in this new old world.
You will find yourself in some village on the outskirts of a town with a hut, some coin and your avatar.

IMMEDIATELY press "Ctrl" and "-" to slow the game down to Slow-Motion, we want all the time we can get.

Now take a look around and explore your new neighbourhood. Are you close to a market? At the edge of the village? Are already any other dynasties right next to you?

Now open the map and let's have a look at the green markers



What's most important now depends on your chosen profession.

If you're a fisherman, look for fishing spots


If you're a farmer, look for wells


And if you're an Orchardist (or barber, or healer) look for the closest grove


Now go to the building menu ("b" on your keyboard or the hammer icon in the lower right), select your first business and build it as close to your natural resource location as possible.

While you're waiting for your business to finish building, take a look at your home, opening its "inventory" by pressing "i" while having it selected (the hotkey for your current residence is always "v").

You will see that you have some resources at home. with those you should be able to make 5 flower bouquets and 10 washing cloths (if your're playing on normal difficulty). Add them to your production line and "hire" your avatar and increase the speed to hurry him or her along.

Those 15 items should be ready shortly after your business is finished building.

(The following steps will work on most occasions a long time in the game)

Go into your huts inventory again and give your avatar 1 washing cloth and 1-2 flower bouquets.

Select your avatar, make him use the cloth (the right-most bag icon in the characters' UI will let you use your inventory) and wait until that's finished (This gives you +1 Charisma).

Now let's shop for a spouse.
Click the heart menu and then the heart action (Begin a Romance).
You will see a list of potential suitors listed in no order i could figure out.
Your priority should be to find the youngest candidate with the highest level that is closest to you (you can see where they are by double-clicking their picture)

Hint: This is a game and your avatar is only 18, so it's fine if you go for the 15-19 year olds here ;)

PSA: If you haven't managed your business by now, go Slo-Mo again (Ctrl+"-") and do that!

When your Character has reached their hopefully spouse-to-be, a message will appear that you started a conversation.
Be quick to click that message to jump to the conversation. Otherwise your character will choose the first option, regardless of what will work the best.


Click the option with the highest percent chance next to it (if you put your strength point in charisma like i suggested and used the washing cloth, it will almost always be the middle option) and see how it plays out.
If it works, awesome, go right ahead!
But there's always a chance that your advances are rejected. So be a jerk and try again as soon as possible! You can pester them until they finally admit to liking you (Don't try this at home, guys!). Just be careful to wait long enough to remove any rejection debuff you might have gotten in the process...


Now it's time to woo your new sweetheart! Since young people are very simple creatures (old ones as well, age itself plays no role in courtship), you can usually get to your goal and in their pants with this action-loop:



1. Give them the flower bouquet you made just for them from your inventory
2. Give them a compliment (again choose the most successful option)
3. Sweettalk them
4. IF everything worked so far, you should have almost perfect favour with them (The bar under their portrait when you choose who to act on is almost full) by now.
Now you can Propose marriage and it will most likely have high 80-ish % or even 90-ish%, so they will surely accept!
5. Marry them, right there! You don't have to give the church some of your already small coin and you don't need the ~10 influence for now.

If any of the previous steps failed, wait for any debuffs to disappear and try again (I get the feeling that your sweetheart doesn't want to hear the same compliment 10 times in a row, so switch it up from time to time, but that's just my impression).

If you're married, congratulations!
Give your new spouse a kiss, dance with them and the go on and make your heir!

So your first business right next to the resource field just finished building.
Slow down your game again and open the businesses inventory.
Hire 2 workers (your family members have more important things to do) and one transporter.
Then go to Add-Ons and get the additional worker, which you hire right away.

Now go back to production and my recommendation is to simply set up automatic production



Automatic production will be your best friend while getting to know the economy of guild 3, but there's one major disadvantage in automatic production in our chosen professions (the ones that don't need to buy resources).
The game isn't optimized so far that your game can handle the automatic production of raw goods. At one point earlier or later your business will be flodded with the raw goods because you can't use them quick enough.
So i recommend to switch back to repeated production after getting the items from automatic production and simply deleting the raw goods from your production line like this


Now you will still gather raw material, but only as needed to produce your more advanced products.

And that's it! Your first business will now run on its' own. Your workers will make your goods and your transporter will sell them at the market that's offering the most for it. Now you can turn your attention to more family matter.

IF you get a message at some point that production is halted because of a full storage in your resource producing businesses, the only workaround i know of right now is also to uncheck the raw material in the task list


This way, your workers will no longer collect the raw materials, which means that your warehouse will buy and ship them there. At some point that kind of money won't matter anymore, so you have to choose between money or manually empyting your overflowing storages from time to time

So your business is running, you have a spouse with a child on its' way, now what?

Now we want to make your family (a bit more) famous i.e. bulk up on influence and reputation.
Go to your residence ("v" on your keyboard) and open the inventory, let's set up the production here as well.

Look at this juicy 5 influence reward right here:


This will be your most used action in the early-mid game, keep it on repeat until your family-members puke (They won't but whatever)!

Now to increase the frequency of your relatives spamming this, add a specific area for them to work in by clicking the point below the action:
:

And (at first) set the area to be the same where your residence is:


This way they won't have too far to walk, which wastes time they could better spend working!
And they are closer to each other to make your offspring action also spammable.

Now that you set this production on repeat(!), you could also already add some work for your (future) children

Which will also grant you some influence

So your family and your business have been busy.
You remember to keep making new offspring every time someone new is born (the chances drop the older the spouses get and the more children the woman has already born up to a maximum of 6 children) and as soon as your children become 5 years old you employ them at your residence.

Great, this means you now have a steady, albeit small stream of both influence and income.
So now what do you do with these 2 currencies?

Your first 1000 gold should be invested in the new titel of Commoner. With that you unlock your first diplomatic (see next section) actions and a second business.

After you gained your new title (and started with your first diplomatic efforts), i would recommend to invest in your already existing business in the form of addons.
Unlock the next hireable worker (if possible) and increase your productivity, where more workers are more important than increased productivity.
Even though you can only increase productivity in 5-10% steps, do it! This makes your workers produce significantly(!) faster!

So you're a Commoner, your business is set up, your family is busy and your spouse and you are expecting,
Perfect!
Now let's start getting touchy with our competitors.
So far you probably haven't had any contact with other dynasties, apart from seeing more and more buildings with a family crest popping up, but that will change soon enough and we want to get ahead of the others.

So open up the dynasties menu (F5) and look at all the different families and remember which ones are owners of roguery businesses, because we want to cozy up to them first


So remember their family surname and select your avatar (only he can use most/all of your diplomatic options) and select the awesome "Praise" action


This bad boy can be used on any family member that isn't from your family. Look for any of the names of the dynasties that are dabbling in roguery and praise them as much as you can (If you don't see any names you want to see, try again later, some actions the AI can do prohibits them from being praised).
It costs 8 Influence per action (you should be able to make >20 in the cooldown phase so no one cares) and increases your reputation with the chosen dynasty by 10 (most of the time)

You can check your reputation by hovering your mouse over the colored bar above every crest (so not only in the dynasties menu)


As soon as that thing reaches 30 or 40, select their family leader and make a pact. A reputation as high as 30 or 40 will guarantee that they accept an alliance without any other incentives like money or buildings.


If the dynasty is especially picky, just increase your reputation to 50. At 50 the other dynasty will start to make you offers of an alliance by themselves which is also nice but takes a bit more time which can be spent on other dynasties.

So far i found no reason for other dynasties to break this alliance and the only time i got close was when i killed a different dynasty member. So if you play by the rules those alliances should last you until the end of days.

Do this until most or all dynasties are allied to you and you won't have to worry (as much) about pamhplets or being robbed as before (and you will be favored by those dynasties in elections and court hearings, unless their own family member is up against you)

SO you have acquired a new title and are wondering, what business you should get next?

That totally depends on your playstyle and individual preferences.
But since you're reading this guide i will show you my way of deciding what do do next:

If this is one of your first businesses (let's say until you become a citizen) i would advise you to get a business that's a part of your original profession you chose at character creation simply to save your influence.

So if you started as a fisherman you could next get an orchard or a farm.

Even though you can unlock the windmill and the butchery before becoming a citizen, i would recommend you don't take one of them FOR NOW because they need resources from other businesses.
If you now think "but i have a farm that produces grain, why shouldn't i get a windmill that can turn my grain into flour?" you're absolutely right.

But if you don't want to make a custom route for your transporters that brings your grain to your mill, your mills transporters will go to the market and buy their (or probably your) grain there, thus severly stunting your profits.

But there's a convenient solution for that:

The storage barn is unlocked at the last title before becoming a citizen and getting access to the city, the Resident.

While not looking very interesting, the storage barn is a really powerful building.
As soon as you get it, all of your other businesses' transport routes will be automatically changed to deliver all goods to your storage barn.

While this means on one hand that your businesses themselves won't turn a lot of profit anymore, all of your goods will be centralized here.
So your farm will deliver all their grain and animals here.
All goods that can be used in other buildings will be automatically kept at a min amount of 20 in your storage barn. And only stock above that amount will be sold.
So the next time your mills or butchers transporter comes along, they will grab some grain or animals from there instead of buying at the market!

And your warehouses' workers will know when you need a resource that your businesses don't produce and they will buy that from the market so they always have some in stock!

And you don't have to set up any of that!
Only build the storage barn, hire some transporters and it works automatically!

So praise your new god, the storage barn / warehouse and get it as soon as possible (or rather as soon as you want to build more complex businesses that you ideally produce the raw materials for)!

"My family members don't have to sleep and work through the night, why shouldn't i put them to work in my businesses?"

That's a wonderful question, thank you for asking!

I personally am not a fan of using family members in businesses. But let's have a look at some arguments:

• Pro
  
  • They don't get salaries, it's cheaper
    
  • They work 24/7, thus producing more than normal workers
• Con
  
  • Your employees already make more than enough money, Your family members are more useful in getting you more influence
    
  • If your family member holds an office or is approached by another dynasties member, they stop their work. e.g. A judge is super busy and rarely has time to work

So in my opinion you should focus on getting more influence, especially since the social skills are getting more and more expensive while being so useful, you can't afford to pass up on them.

But if you have some stupid cousins who can't talk to other people but are good with their hands?
Give them a business and let them work their asses off.

I myself like to use 1 or 2 spouses of my family members as transporters for my warehouses. That way they can sell and buy stuff all day long and usually at some point your businesses get so productive, that your warehouses and storagebarns struggle to keep up selling all the stuff that's coming in.

After you become a Free Citizen (Title 6) you can send your dynasties members on trade missions to the trade posts for 2450 gold.
They will become unavailable for some time but there's a good chance that on their return you unlock that trading post.

From time to time those trading posts make some interesting offers for some hours. Like selling weapons and armor super cheap. Or buying building materials for great prices.

(And you get a nice amount of influence).

So if you have the coin, send someone there and hope for a successful trip to unlock some pretty sweet deals!

In contrast a long distance journey (or all the other variants you will unlock) will not open new markets. But the better your chosen family member the better are your odds to not only get them back alive (I once had my heir die on the first long distance trip of that playthrough) but they will also probably return with some shiny and expensive goods in their inventory.
If you're willing to risk the death of a family member for some profit, you may like these trips.

So you want to have a try at the world of false friendliness, nepotism and some backstabbing?

The easiest way for this to work is to engage in some Nepotism yourself (the relevant skill is unlocked at title 8 - Nobleman - and lets all of your adult family members run for office instead only your head of family.

So if you have at least 3 adult family members, you can have all of them apply for the same job position. Since only 3 applicants are allowed (you may have to run against the current office holder but they change all the time and are often vacant anyway), someone from your family is almost guaranteed to make it into office.

And as soon as you got some better positions this way, your own family members can vote on lower jobs and put your cousins into their (not so) well earned positions.

Holding a job at the city council has several advantages.

On one hand, you get a "salary" each round, mostly being some influence that increases the higher you climb the political ladder.
On the other hand you get some new actions with some jobs...

Some can take rights away from other citizens, thus making every illegal action taken against them not result in proof against your family.
(Killing someone still harms most of the other dynasties' opinion of you so while you may not be prosecuted for that, it may turn families against you, thus inviting a lot of other problems in).
Others can put a halt on your adversaries' business(es) for some time.
As a judge you can decide whether someone is guilty or not before the hearing even starts, giving you the opportunity to either help friends or make things even worse for your enemies.

So depending on how you want to play you can go for different jobs in the city and have your fun that way.

So your family member reached a new level and you can use some points to increase your attributes?

Just think about what you want and skill accordingly.
Do you want a mighty warrior or skilled craftsman? Invest more in Strength and Agility.
Or do you prefer a silver-tongued politician who can woo men and women alike? (Just joking, coding same-sex relationships apparently wasn't of concern for the producers. Maybe some modder will make it possible in the future) Invest more in Charisma and Intelligence.

Or find your own way by hovering over every attribute on the character sheet, see what it does and how it increases (Being a good talker won't help you in a swordfight)

Also keep in mind that the parents' skills will play a role in determining their childrens abilities so if you want to raise a strong warrior, don't put all the parents' attribute points in intelligence and find a spouse that already leans into the physical attributes.

So your warehouse / storage barn is wonderfully bringing your farmed grain and animals to your butchery and the barn that isn't producing anything at all already earned you 100.000 Gold (happens faster than you think)? (Only an example of how you could set this up)

You're allied to all rogue dynasties and maybe even some others or even all of them?

Your family is healthy and you have several children who might already have children themselves while tirelessly working for the glory of your dynasty?

Now you're almost totally free to climb your way to the top of society.

• You have enough money and influence? Buy a new title or invest in skills to improve your businesses and family
  
  • You bought a new title? Get a new business
    
    • Got a new business? Set up production and improvements
      
      • Set up production and improvements? Lean back and wait for your employees to generate your new profit
  • You bought a new skill? See if you can upgrade an existing business or change your familys production line
• Your child reached age 5? Put them in school or hire them at your residence to work for you
  
• Your child became an adult? Look for a new spouse for them, put the spouse to work and make some babies
  
• There are openings on the city council?
  
  • Run for Office!

• Get familiar with changing the speed of the game. If anything happens your first instinct should be to go into slow moition and analyze the situation since almost everything is time sensitive.
  
• Before investing money or influence, always think ahead and plan what you want to do with your investment
  
  • Do you want to buy a new title? Check if you unlock new buildings and how to use them or if a new tier of skills becomes available
    
  • Do you have enough influence to unlock a new social skill? Check what you need mostly. Money? Go for skills that increase productivity or bartering. Influence? You can get almost +20 Charisma for your whole family AND workers just from social skills. That's definitely worth considering!
    
  • Do you want to branch out into a new line of business? How are your competitors? Are already 3 bakeries in town but only 1 tavern? There's less competition in the tavern business for now so go for that rather than the oversaturated bakery market (And if you have enough money, why not consider buying the one already existing tavern so that you have a monopol?)
• Most actions that your family members can take can't be automated, you have to select a member of your family and order them to do it manually. Like trading trips or your old friend, Praising someone else, so remember to put that to use (and send your relatives back to work after that!)
  
• A lot of businesses produce items that you can use or equip yourself. Do you have a Turnery? Safe some Axes for your henchmen and family members (you can manually set their min amount in your warehouse to 5 e.g.) and equip them with that. Or as soon as you have an Estate Farm you can produce your own riding horses. Equipping your family members with them will drastically increase their movement speed and thus increase their work speed (since most family actions require running around)

I hope you enjoyed this guide!
My motivation to write it was my frustration that there are almost no (real) beginner guides out there that cover the big span between the complete basics and some extremely detailed aspect of this game.

If you have ideas on what else i could add here or if you think i was wrong somewhere, please let me know and I'll try and add/fix it.

GL&HF