How to invade a whole kingdom in Crusader Kings 2?

Question

I'm am playing as England. I wanted to invade Scotland and Wales. When I try to fabricate a claim I only get a claim on a county, not a whole kingdom. It takes a lot of time to capture a kingdom that way and when I try to fabricate a claim on the Capitol of the kingdom it doesn't work.

Is there a way to declare war on a whole kingdom?

Answer 1

There are a couple of things that make conquering a kingdom hard.

1. Getting a casus belli (cb).
2. The truce waiting period. (You can break a truce, but the penalty is harsh)

Ways to literally invade the entire kingdom at once

1. As mentioned by svick, if you are an emperor, you can press a claim on the kingdom title for a relative or vassal, and upon winning, the claimant will be your vassal.
2. If you are invading realm that is larger (more holdings) than yours, you can use the Invasion CB
3. If the target king is a heretic of your religion, your religious head might declare a crusade against the king.
4. If you have a claim on the kingdom, you can press your claim.
5. If you are playing as a pagan (requires The Old Gods expansion), the become king of [kingdom] ambition gives you a CB against realms inside the de jure territory of the kingdom.

Ways to use Love, not War to gain a kingdom

Beware, an untimely death can spoil your plans. On the other hand, you may be able to use assassination or a plot to arrange a timely death.

1. Position a future heir of your kingdom to inherit the target kingdom.
   • The most direct way: If the target kingdom is ruled by an unmarried queen, your male heir (or you, if you are male and do not have a male heir) can marry the queen. Assuming a child is born and compatible succession laws, your heir will rule both kingdoms.
2. As mentioned by svick, position a future heir of your kingdom to inherit a claim on the target kingdom. For example, have your male heir (or you, if you are male and do not have a male heir) marry a princess with an inheritable claim.

With claims, you may have a choice between

1. Pressing the claim of your heir's parent, setting up your heir to inherit both kingdoms
2. Waiting until your heir inherits both your kingdom and the claim on your target kingdom, and can press the claim playing as your heir.

Dividing and conquering

1. If vassals of the target king are rebelling, you can declare war on a rebel. You still need to find a CB. The significance is that you can declare war on rebelling vassals without penalty even if you have a truce against the liege (king, in this example)
2. Especially if you cannot marry into a claim on the kingdom, consider pressing claims on duchy titles in the target kingdom.
3. Once you gain more than 50% of the de jure counties in the target kingdom, you can usurp the kingdom title. This tends to make conquering the rest of the kingdom easier because
   • The remnants of the old kingdom will probably be fractured into different realms
   • You get a de jure CB on the rest of the de jure counties
   • Rules in the de jure realm, especially counts, may agree to become your vassal without a fight

Answer 2

As far as I know, there is no quick and easy way to do this. You have several options:

1. Invade county after county, until you have enough counties to usurp the title.
2. • Find someone who has an inheritable claim to the kingdom.
   • Marry them, have a son
   • Wait until you die and become that son.
   • Now you have a claim to the kingdom and you can invade it. (If it's a weak claim, you will have to wait for the right circumstances.)
3. If you're already an emperor, invite someone with a claim to the kingdom to your court, grant him land and press their claim. This will make the kingdom part of your empire, but not personally yours.

Answer 3

I have found it best to not press claims immediately upon fabricating them. You can fabricate claims on multiple counties in a kingdom, and then when you declare war on the king, you can press all claims at once. You just have to balance that with the likelihood of your ruler dying, which would make you lose most, if not all, of your claims. The benefit of going this route is that you don't have to face the resources of an entire kingdom and its allies multiple times at a gain of one county per war. You also don't have to wait for truces to expire one county at a time.

When you start getting multiple kingdoms, you quickly learn that keeping your kingdoms is actually a lot harder than gaining them. I prefer elective monarchy, so you can have a larger demesne than primogeniture, and you can select the best member of your family to be your next playable character. This gets tricky when you have to rig multiple elections, though. An untimely illness or assassination before you can get your ducks in a row could be devastating. A nice trick is that if your preferred heir doesn't look like he has a chance of being elected in one kingdom, you could just grant the kingdom to him as a landed title before you die. The biggest threat here would be your king outliving the preferred heir, which would trigger another election in the kingdom that is more or less outside of your control.

If you want more than one kingdom, you need to become emperor as soon as possible. That way, even if you lose a kingdom, the new king will still be your vassal and the kingdom will still be in your realm.

Answer 4

There are 2 ways, the easy way, and the hard way:

1. The Easy Way Find someone with an inheritable claim on the kingdom and marry them to your heir or yourself. I was King of Ireland and married the Queen of Sweden. When she died, my heir became King of Sweden (by this time, he was already King of Ireland) automatically, without any fight.
2. The Hard Way Fabricate claims, or find people of your dynasty who have claims on the target kingdom's individual counties. Go first for those counties that are in large duchies (duchies with 4 or 5 counties), as once you have 3/5 duchies, you can take the rest of the duchy through de jure claims. De jure claims are great as they go to your demesne (if you are the duke). You want the large duchies as its quicker then to get to 51%, and then press for the whole realm in a de jure claim on the kingdom. To speed it all up, you need to either assassinate or plot to kill the king of the target kingdom whenever there is a truce. Also, fermenting dissent in their kingdoms helps break them up (when their vassels rebel, you immediately conquer them before they have a chance to go back to their old king).

Personally, if it is a large kingdom, the first way takes a fraction of the time and effort (maybe 5% of the effort).

You want to think carefully about which Kingdoms you go for. I was king of Ireland and conquered Scotland, Wales, Brittany and England - all of them. Then I died and my heir inherited just Ireland, Brittany and Wales. I only inherited Brittany and Wales as I had never created the titles, so they were de jure part of Ireland. The others were gavelkind, so my 3 kingdoms were divided between my sons. This caused a phobia of gavelkind to develop and I then got Sweden (primogeniture), and conquered Scotland (renamed to Alba as I'm Irish) before converting it to Primogeniture. Primo is great as succession wars are few. I still haven't got England on Primo, so when I get old, I save up a war chest of money and then win a brutally fast succession war upon succession. It must be fast as you want to continually upgrade to high authority so that you can convert to primo (kill your brother -the king- if you can't start a war). When you lose the kingdom, the first thing the bastard does is downgrade crown authority, so that you will never get primo! Get in before the laws are passed!!!

I could go for an emperor title but then I risk losing the kingdoms in successions. Ultimately, I try to convert my kingdoms to primo, then downgrade crown authority so that my vassals don't rebel every 2 minutes.

Answer 5

If you do not mind the prestige/gold hit, you can always destroy a kingdom title and recreate it (if not primary) to force the kingdom to have the same laws as your primary (unless gavelkind). Pretty useful for forcing higher CA quickly without multiple successions. Also, if you do not mind being a little gamey, you can destroy all duke titles so only you can vote for your heir. Although you take a net -25 vassal opinion and have to manage them all, it is better since you can choose the best successor and never have a succession war. For me I never had to bribe anyone as they are all too weak to do anything and I periodically remove some vassals to replace them. At the same time during times of truces and waiting for stuff to happen, it is also good to make sure none of your vassals have more than 1 county. If they do, excommunicate + imprison and hope you fail (if you don't execute and try again with the heir). That one vassal is going to be weak and no one is going to bother to help him. I currently have the empire of brittania with close to 100 direct vassals. The highest faction power I ever get is like 48% and they don't even send an ultimatum. Pretty easy to deal with IMO.

If you are powerful enough though, you can always consider going heretic and have CBs on everyone :). Fast expansion, but have to deal with some internal issues until you can make the transition.