Here are some fan tutorial vids:
Part 1
Since it seems like some fellow gaffers are using these videos I figured I'd give them a once over to work out any corrections that I could find.
At around
9:00 he's looking for a potential wife and remarks that her lustful trait will affect
your piety and points out the piety in the top right. This is incorrect. Character traits generally only affect the character they're on. So in order for a prestige or piety trait to affect those stats in the upper right it would have to be a trait on
your main character. For example my current ruler has the 'Proud' trait.
Since my ruler has this trait it will directly impact my prestige in the upper right corner. If my wife or another character had this trait it would only affect their personal prestige.
He also talks a bit about the 'Study Technology' ability of your Spymaster around
16:00 but he doesn't really show what you should be looking at when thinking about placing your spymaster somewhere to siphon technology. There are two ways of determining where to place your spymaster when using this ability. First, the quick, and more scattershot approach is to click on a province, like he does in the video and look at the number of advances in that province. Below you see the advances in Paris highlighted with a red box.
From left to right they are the Military, Economic, and Cultural advances made in that province. The more advances you make in each area the higher the associated number will be. If you hover your mouse over the specific icon you'll be given more detail on your progress in that area.
The second, and more focused method of determining where to send your Spymaster is to use the Technology tab on the top left.
Once open you'll see something like this:
In the above example I have pressed the button to the left of Siege Equipment and it colors the provinces based on their level of advancement. This allows you to easily choose where to send your Spymaster based on what technologies you want to prioritize.
A quick tip, the two yellow provinces in the above picture are the only two provinces in the world that have stage 2 siege equipment in the William the Conqueror bookmark. If you started at the start date, Nikomedeia, a province a few north of the lower yellow province will be the only outside source of stage 2 siege equipment. It also happens to be one of the best choices for all around advancement in that start date.
If you're starting your game in the early periods, like the start date of September 16, 1066 (bookmarked as Stamford Bridge) or the William the Conqueror bookmark, do
NOT bother using your Spymaster to Study Technology in most of Western Europe. The Muslim world and the Byzantine Empire are far better sources for higher technology in this period. Just so you can compare here is the province that I sent my Spymaster to. Note the
much higher number of advancements.
Awesome! I was contemplating getting this, but the demo had me thinking it was too daunting. Will pick it up now, armed with these tutorials!
If you have any questions feel free to post them here. I'll check this thread occasionally and try to answer any questions I happen to know the answer to. I'll also be going through the rest of those tutorial videos and providing any corrections I can here so that GAF can use those as a guide.
