What should you be working towards as a nomad? How do you get your resources? How to conquer your enemies? The answer to those questions, and most other things as a nomad, is herds. Herds give you your income, your armies, your tier progression, and even your prestige indirectly through hunts. As a nomad, everything is about your herd. There are several ways to gain herd, detailed below.

Having fertile counties may be your only viable way of getting herd at the start of the game, and it will remain relevant through midgame. At weak dominance, the main way of managing fertility is migration. Find a herder with a full fertility county and migrate to it. Repeat whenever your fertility gets low. Keep doing this until your military is strong enough for other ways to get herd. Once you get limited dominance, you're going to start looking towards permanent settlement. For permanently held counties, you can increase herd by having good counties, which is to say ones with lots of steppe or farmland terrain holdings, through decisions, court positions, and buildings, and by having more counties. You want to always be filling your domain limit, but do not go over it. Going over your domain limit is devastating for herd growth.

Once you have a strong enough army, you are going to start getting subjects. Herd growth from subjects will start as a pittiance, but will eventually become your main source in the mid to late game. Firstly, you want to have vassals up to your vassal limit. This isn't possible on weak dominance because you are a count, but after that you want to prioritize conquering land and giving it to vassals, as opposed to subjugating that land as a tributary. Herd income from vassals can be massively increased via the court yurt. It is also increased by millet storage, which is an excellent building because it also boosts fertility. Ideally, all of your vassals should be dynasty members. This is because the renown bonus from the family yurt stacks.

Tributaries are a great way of getting herd, but are inferior to vassals because they are not stable. A tributary can migrate away, and it can also get attacked by someone else to remove you as its liege. Multiple tributaries can fight each other, subjugating each other and taking away the loser from your direct taxation. Herder tributaries give more herd than nomad ones, and also raise fertility and as such can be used to shuffle domain for high fertility without migration. However, herder tributaries are even less stable than nomad ones. This is because nomads can easily migrate to take their lands, and you frankly should consider it to only be a matter of time before any herder tributary gets replaced. The new nomad tributary will pay you less than if you had forced them into being a trobutary through war. The exeption to this is herders in non-nomadic regions. Nomads cannot migrate outside of nomad situation regions. As a result, you can conquer and raze holdings in non-nomadic areas into becoming nomadic, and then release a herder tributary for consistent herd taxes. If you do this, be sure to leave some sort of direct border to the neighboring conquest targets, because if you release your entire border as tributaries, you may lose the ability to use the conquest cb on them.

In summary, conquer land and give it to vassals up to your vassal limit, and then make many of your other nomad neighbors tributaries.

While the prior methods are great for stable growth, by far the fastest way of getting herd is by taking it from someone else. The first, strongest way of doing this is through humiliation wars, which are wars you can take against someone higher dominance than you and you take a portion of their herd and lower their dominance if you win. Fight humiliation wars as often as possible, assuming you can win. One thing to note is that the ticking warscore comes entirely from who controls the defenders capital. As such, you can make humiliation much easier by raising your army in advance and moving it to a county close to their capital, instead of you having to siege through a bunch of land to get there for little gain. As nomads, you can declare war with your army raised and you should learn to make use of it.

Raiding is another incredibly powerful way of getting herd. When you raid as a nomad, you also get herd instead of the prestige tribals get. Now, why did I put raiding in the taking other people's herd section? That's because, outside of a couple edge cases like raiding constantinople or pillage raiding with a coastal raiding culture, the main way you get herd from raiding isn't by raiding civilized peoples or even by the direct herd gain from raiding at all. Instead, it is from prisoners.

Prisoners are a not immediately obvious, but incredibly powerful way of getting herd. When a nomad ransoms a prisoner from another nomad, they have the opportunity to ask for herd instead of just the usual gold or hook. Whenever you are fighting your wars against other nomads for subjects, tributaries, or humiliation, always check and ransom anyone for herd you can. Sometimes its even worth it to random a captured war leader and just let the war go on a little bit longer. When you aren't fighting wars, raise an army of raiders, set them to adventure raiding, and send them through the steppe raiding nomad capitals for prisoners to ransom.

Next is a walkthrough of how I play nomads, ordered by dominance

At the very start, your goal is to get strong enough to be able to start abusing your nomad neighbors and weak sedentary folk. Migrate for fertility until you have a big enough army to start raiding and making tributaries. Use the humiliation CB whenever you can. In your nomadic capital, you want millet storage for fertility, family yurt for the tutor court position, and square of the tumen for heavy horse archers and movement speed.

At this point start looking for your future permanent residence. Good locations are ones with lots of good raiding targets and ideally high holding count steppe counties. If you want to do culture hybridization cheese, this is the best time to do so because you should be strong enough to defeat whoever's land you're taking, but not too established to add opportunity cost.

Once you have secured your new permanent home, conquer your neighbors up to your subject limit, and look towards making tributaries as desired. Aggressively fight humiliation wars, and raid constantly whenever not at war. It is important to do all humiliation wars you can, because you are unlikely to do them ever again once you go to the next dominance tier.

You should start building a court yurt in your next building slot.

At this point, you should look towards building a proper realm and leaning into vassals for getting herd. Conquer such that you have duke tier vassals up to the vassal limit, and then aggressively raid. For buildings, the other ones are nice, but you'd be better off upgrading the ones you already have.

At this point, it is only a matter of time before you get unrestricted dominance. If you want, get a headstart on your upcoming world conquest by conquering any small neighbors. Spend the rest of the time raiding.

You are about to start playing on easy mode. To win the war to become greatest of khans, remember that it is a defensive war. There isn't much point in sieging down enemy land. Just defeat them in battle, and liberate any of your land they occupy. Once you win that war, you've basically won the game.