I have thousands of Prestige and no idea what to do with it. I have read that you can spend it on actions, but I can't figure out which actions those are or where I find them.
1 Answer
The main purpose of Prestige is to add to your Dynasty Score: this shows how powerful and successful your dynasty is. If your final Dynasty Score is higher than your buddy's Dynasty Score, you're a better ruler than him. You are usually going to get a lot more Prestige than you can spend over the course of a ruler's life.
That said, there are a few things you can spend Prestige on, though none of them are particularly expensive, unless you're a new ruler of a young dynasty or otherwise poor in prestige:
- Creating an Antipope costs 500 prestige.
- Marrying one of your kids to someone of lower rank than your kid reduces your kid's prestige; it costs -100 prestige per difference in rank. Marrying a commoner with awesome skills can be worth it, but those skills had better be good!
- Fabricating a claim costs around 150 prestige, in addition to the gold required to bribe the locals to "remember" some facts about your claim.
- A White Peace (if you're the aggressor) or surrendering a war will cost you some prestige, but you don't need to have prestige in those cases.
Though it's not an action, remember that you get an opinion bonus of +1 per 100 prestige, that applies to everyone. It caps at +20, but it's still quite useful!
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1The Holy Roman Emperor takes a -200 prestige hit for marrying a daughter to a duke or below. (I am currently playing Holy Roman Emperor and have six daughters!)– user37917Commented Feb 27, 2013 at 21:29
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I stand corrected! From the forums, it looks like patch 1.09 increased the marriage prestige bonus/penalty by a factor of five, so marrying up is very hard (the AI doesn't like losing prestige!), and marrying down is more expensive. Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 7:07
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1Not sure if that was already the case when this answer was posted, but when you play a Tribal ruler in one of the earlier start dates, then prestige can be just as important as money. The rank-1 upgrades for Tribal holdings cost no money but several hundred Prestige. Also, tribals at war can pay 500 prestige to "raise a tribal army" (instantly spawn a 2500 men army at your capital).– PhilippCommented Sep 3, 2016 at 11:17