Citadel Takeover Strategies

The Order of the Citadel

Takeover Strategy
by Tan d'Serrai



Friendly Takeovers: Are very similar to Friendly Takeovers. I'd like to cover Friendly Takeover first:

Whether one can be started depends at least in part on relative sympathy. My cousin has seen regions with 63% sympathy where it was possible to start one, and regions with 69% sympathy where it wasn't. The former had loyalty to its realm around 80%, the latter around 100%.

So to start a Friendly Takeover, you need sympathy of (rule of thumb) above 60%, and a relative difference of less then 30%.

Whether a Friendly Takeover succeeds is a different matter. My cousin has seen a Friendly Takeover succeed in 2 turns (90% sympathy to the taking realm, 20% loyalty to the previous owner). Another rule of thumb would be that for a Friendly Takeover to have a good chance of success, loyalty should be higher to you than to the owning realm, thought this is shaky information at best. Note that the realm taking a region via FTO can do civil work (!), raising their chances of success.


Colony Takeovers: I assume that all the above applies to a CTO as well. Add to it that a TO force needs to bring enough gold and food (higly important!) for the colony to survive as well. SO a CTO is very difficult - but if pulled of, it is the gravest possible blow to your enemy. Note that there are two other ways to take enemy regions besides running TO's....though they require darker deeds.


Defeating a Takeover: Smashing the army running the TO is the best way to break a TO. Other ways depend on the type of TO run:

Against a Friendly Takeover it helps to raise loyalty to your realm (this is no hard fact, but a moderately confirmed assumption). Region lords, the judge and priests can do that. As long as they command no units, the enemy cannot do anything against those nobles, short of assassinating them.

Against Hostile and Brutal Takeovers raising realm control seems to help. Again, region lord, judge and priests serve in this role.

For both the above both morale and realm control (Friendly Takeover) and loyalty (Hostile Takeover, Brutal Takeover) seems to have an effect as well, though considerably smaller one.