Everything You NEED to Know About Buildings in CK3

This video will cover everything that you need to know about using building properly in Crusader Kings 3. I discuss the four different buildings types, economic, fort, military and the economic and military combination buildings. I also give some tips and strategies you can use in your CK3 games.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
1:02 - Economic
3:21 - Fort
4:23 - Military
5:31 - Building Upgrades

[@valipunctro]

You know you're in the right place when the spreadsheets come out.

[@svingvejv3593]

Economic buildings don't take as long as this video says. Taxes are modified by a bunch of modifiers including development, stewardship and your stewards collect taxes. Also worth to mention is that events that give you gold are based on your income as well as asking the pope for money. My conclusion is that with a little micro most buildings pay of within 15 years or less.

[@kailyn6114]

In these graphs, the main thing you should look at is the performance of the buildings relative to each other.

[@007Hutchings]

Also what about buildings that increase development? I'm sure that makes a difference as well.

[@jesusrios2360]

@@007Hutchings Tradeport is one of my favorities

[@iandick1364]

@@jesusrios2360 It's the best common special building.

[@rockmcdwayne1710]

These calculations hold water if you use only gold that is generated by your domain. If you happen to take the gold from your neighbours, raid, blackmail etc. its essentially free building/upgrade so these graphs are irrelevant! And lets be honest, you make most of your gold by robbing other people anyway lol. Especially in early game and if you invested in your MAA to boost them into crack squad of space marines AND you have the battlefield looters, you can rake up extreme ammounts of gold by picking a fight with everybody!

[@erutz5190]

Man, these are usefull. You're the stefan anon of ck3. Wish you would have talked about duchy capital buildings though.

[@Zieley]

Thanks man! I really need to make a video with Duchy buildings they are very useful

[@declanlong4676]

my strategy for duchy capital buildings is just get the ones that increase max knights and knight effectiveness, knights are very very strong with high effectiveness and prowess, pair those buildings with the perks from the right side of the gallant martial lifestyle tree and you can get very strong knights if you have high prowess characters in your court, or matrilineally marry off your daughters/female courtiers to high prowess characters to get them to join your court

[@matty1094]

thanks man, your ck3 videos are really the best. very concise, well organized, understandable. you are deadass the best ck3 guide youtuber on youtube, your guides have really helped me to get into this game, thank u! ^^

[@Zieley]

Wow, means a lot my guy. Thanks!

[@intrstellr3792]

Wow. I just stumbled across your channel, and all I can say is that your quality is on the same level as Reman's Paradox. Seriously good stuff right here, and extremely underrated. Keep it up man, with content like this your channel will gain popularity in no time.

[@Zieley]

You're too kind my dude, means a lot

[@transsylvanian9100]

Tradeports are by far the best to build since they give you a massive bonus to your development speed on each tier built. Some like the farms are only useful up to level 4 where they max out their dev bonus, others up to level 6, but all of those require massive investment for a relatively tiny boost to dev speed. Econ buildings without dev boost are not worth it. Accordingly, you should also build as many city holdings as possible and invest into their guilds and tradeports as well since those dev growth bonuses also stack onto your provinces. As for military buildings, only build them after you have built your tradeports and farms, and build specifically those that will provide bonuses to the men at arms you use most. Bonuses to archers and skirmishers are objectively worse than bonuses to heavy infantry or spearmen however since the former two have lower stats to begin with. Bonuses to light cavalry can be very strong since light cav allows you to inflict pursuit casualties, however depending on the terrain you mostly fight in light cav may not be the ideal choice for you. Finally, fortification buildings are almost never worth it, your personal domain holdings will almost never be under siege except in the case of peasant rebellions and those are easily dispatched. At most i can see building one fortification building on your coastal capital out of an abundance of caution, though if you fight wars correctly it should not be required.

[@WhipDarling]

I thought that as well until I played with Gwent and the Great Heathen Army raided my capital killing my marshal and kidnapping my son!

[@iceykid2]

Awesome read thanks a lot man

[@willroth7521]

I think fortifications can be useful if you’re really focused on playing tall and only have a couple counties, besides that though I agree with pretty much everything you said. One thing I would personally recommend is that people prioritize their capital county, unless you’re planning on switching your capital, Because that’s the only county you’ll be guaranteed never to lose when your character dies. Also if you’re playing tribal I think you should prioritize war camps above everything else but we aren’t really talking about tribal.

[@banana-vd7jm]

the best building in the game is the mines (the good ones in mali, the one in east india and the one in germany), which take only 5.5 years to pay its self off (this includes the 20% boost, not just the gold per month of 5. the 20% boost makes it 6 gold).

[@Zieley]

The gold mines in Mali are so OP 😍

[@ingold1470]

There are some worse ones in Sweden & Bohemia too that can still fund a few MAA regiments, if you can't get the others.

[@banana-vd7jm]

@@ingold1470 there are also ones in greece and south sardinia.

[@loungekiller]

@@banana-vd7jm the one in Sardinia is rather good too. Plenty of gold to be made if you focus on developing Cagliari

[@wadehisle9175]

What about the mine in Sardinia? 5 holding dutchy all coastal and farmable

[@loungekiller]

Bro, you have the best videos on CK3, period.

[@Vegentiy]

Thanks for the video. It is interesting to see the return of investment per economic building but you do not take into account the development level boosting. For each level of development in the county, you get +0.5% taxes and levies from it ( it also "spills" over to the neighbouring counties with lower development). Ports greatly help with boosting the development (stating with +5% for the development growth and up to 40%). So in long run, you will get more with ports or any other buildings that either boost the development or reduces the army/men at arms upkeep.

[@Zieley]

It would be a bit complicated to go into with all the possible levels of development, but that would be super interesting to do

[@ingold1470]

@@Zieley It looks like the multipliers are additive which makes it easier, but sometimes it doesn't quite add up, I haven't found out why. Checking if some parts are multiplicative doesn't get a matching answer to what the game says either. There's lots of little modifiers besides development and stewardship, nearly all of them positive, for example baronies can build fields that increase taxes from the whole county by 1% and as far as I know they stack. I'm not sure if it's enough to make economic buildings beyond tier 4 worth it (unless you're in Constantinople) though.

[@ChemySh]

Yeah, but honestly if I've reached the cultural tech level/game time where buildings are high-level enough to provide development, at that point in the game money is less of a concern. A case could be made with buildings that provide development since their early levels, like tradeports. I build them whenever possible instead of other economic buildings. Playing the long game, baby

[@jasonreed7522]

I think that even though you could find the true values, just knowing the baseline ROI of buildings is the most important point of the video. (Because this is how you prioritize what ones to build) Other modifiers like say +5% dev growth are unlikely to have a rapid pay back, and some like +100 levies are game specific and hard to calculate how much you really got from those 100 levies across the entire game. Basically its much easier to consider the other modifiers as separate bonuses and not economic pay back. (Obviously if you could know the true opportunity cost and benefit of every modifier it would be the most useful for optimization, but just knowing to build in a certain order for max money return on investment is huge)

[@Terror_Official]

I watch a lot of videos like these for CK3 to try to find small tips to learn, and am a big fan of your vids. One thing that I don't know if you included in your calculations are the fact that specific farm types reduce the cost of temple buildings, or just building speeds/costs in general. If you play like I do where you have a castle, a city, and like 5 other temples filling out your county then stacking these farms reduces the time to pay back the next building you make. Specifically the Wetlands and Forestry buildings do this well, and later (think it's upgrade 6) of regular Farms improve the costs of temples you own. Stack that with perks from the Stewardship trees and certain traits you can make building out a smaller county or duchy area more fruitful and much stronger than a neighboring Kingdom. I don't know off the top of my head if any special buildings speed/reduce cost of making more buildings, but you can stack bonuses of Holy Site buildings, monuments, Universities and such with the Tax Office duchy building as well as Mines to get insane money for the building costs you put in. One example I preforming is stacking entirely money-making buildings in Thessalonika combined with said tax office. In the end, if you pay attention to combining the effects of different sources, the income to build a building comes second nature when starting a new campaign or going back to play an older save. It is also a rather hidden thing that many might miss, but a Theocratic Councilor's buildings on Temples actually apply all the direct bonuses to you as a ruler. So you also don't have to be dependent on using temples for money. You can stack powerful buildings onto Temples such as the Regiment Grounds to get all the army bonuses to your units. Keep doing what you're doing, great vids as always. o7

[@TheTitFlop]

Nice video! Good explaining!

[@Helmet_Von_Moldy]

You’ve probably seen this but steppe is pronounced “step”

[@Robochuck]

Was not expecting the Mtl Impact joke! nice one

[@PavelQuiteGood]

Cool channel, great video!

[@soulfulnick]

Awesome video thanks!

[@prawojazdy858]

good tips :) for the duchy buildings id suggest spamming the siege works (20% effectivness at lv 1) if u stack it a bit u will almost always outsiege enemies and shorten wars and as a bonus it makes all holdings in the duchy more defensible. honorable mention would be the extra knight one (+2 knights +25% effectivness/level) all other ones seem a bit underpowered, especially the income one, and the men at arms ones never really tried stacking but i feel the knight bonus outshines them all as all compositions have knights and theyre preety op. Also try to prioritize getting all your faith's holy sites in your personal domain and build great temples there as soon as u can, will give you a ton of piety, gold and renown for your dynasty (quite easy to do in the 800 byzantine start)

[@Zieley]

Duchy buildings are so important, I want to do a video highlighting them all

[@ingold1470]

Jungle tiles allow for elephantry buildings, which also add knights & improve effectiveness of them. IMO knight effectiveness is best early game, but late game the MAA catch up due to all the bonuses they receive from military buildings and technology. Or you could just start with Huscarls, each regiment will, baseline, inflict the same damage as a 25 prowess knight with Chivalric Dominance!

[@WillFly4Food23]

It's really just about what your Culture is good at and if you should invest in making it better or not. For example Arabia has some of the best armored warriors because they counter other armored warriors, so the question is do I need to really make them better, probably not because when you head into battle the enemies army is going to be at such a ridiculously low output percentage with their armored footmen but steppe riders get archer cavalry, and they are cheap, and very useful for much of the terrain surrounding the steppes. So utilizing buildings that improve them can absolutely destroy other armies. Just focus on what your culture is good at and think logically. Am I really going to waste 90% of the game with these buildings that will eventually make my war elephants better.... mmmm probably not. Will I absolutely merc with my archers early game, and late game with crossbowmen, probably! Okay build archer things.

[@michaelhallii3322]

Good work, thank you.

[@mortache]

I fill my domain with levy buildings because money I can get from vassals and can inherit upon succession, but my own loyal levies are super useful in deterring factions. Plus they also buff men-at-arms

[@Zee3po]

Thanks, this video helped me

[@Vashimu]

Can you do an upgrade to this vid bcs they changed so much with Tours & Tournaments?

[@mitchellsmith5389]

I think you have more than 200 subscribers now! XD

[@charlesnope9921]

Sweet Montreal Impact remembrance! 😉

[@sayarkin]

Hope you remake this video with new building system in mind

[@benperry1080]

So not ready for the Montreal impact meme I made me actually laugh out loud in surprise

[@Daniel-qr6sx]

I agree with this in one way, however in your pursuit of only looking at gold payback time. You neglect the fact that tradeports increase development aswell, with enough development you will win the game, especially if you are a small isolated culture.

[@Zieley]

That is true, the increased development would raise the gold income as well

[@jasonreed7522]

I don't think the dev growth rate is that impactful, it takes a steward around 8yrs per dev assuming normal stats all around. In general it would earn you an extra 5% of dev time multiplied by the bonus per point of dev multipled by provence base income. Without going all in on the math it saves you 4.8 months on dev time for a level 1 port, which is only 5 money ticks from the provence at the slightly higher tax income every 8years. (I know this isn't the exact math but i think the point stands that the main income from a level 1 trade port is the .3 gold per month) A bigger impact of dev time is just getting techs faster buy having a higher average dev culture. Which lets you do more things faster to get a higher income. (Like having siege weapons or escaping Confederate Partition)

[@movssx]

Can you please give some tips on the best starting strategies?

[@DummyUrD]

I am flabergasted that you only in the end mention that the +% works on the tax generated by buildings it makes them so much better. C-

[@finalchapter24k]

The Reman's Paradox of CK3

[@gillesmeura3416]

Thanks ! ;-)

[@TrueXyrael]

You forgot to mention the Lunatic trait and the special building Glass Monument, which gives that incredibly good bonus building slot.

[@gaberobison680]

What do you prefer: holding only counties or only 1 or 2 counties with lots of baronies?

[@sirturd2954]

I think with the economic buildings you should’ve taken a look at upgrades as well.

[@Zieley]

Ill have to do that one day, I would be interesting to see if some really pay off in the long run

[@vortex9064]

Ty

[@dianabialaskahansen2972]

I am not sure the graph for economic buildings take other bonuses into account. Trade Ports are IMO by far the best, as they boost development considerably.

[@christopherrivera9827]

That impact edit 😂

[@Zieley]

RIP 💪

[@Yuki_Ika7]

Some buildings in Iceland in 867 for my character were only 75 gold, but that might be because of my high stewardship skill

[@Zieley]

Could be, there are some skill perks in the stewardship tree that give you 5-10% discounts on buildings

[@Nikwunu]

i know this game is ancient now but if you go with stewardship and set your spouse to assist you with domain, then you can make buildings quickly and cheaply. having a large personal domain is key because unlike in ck2, your vassals only give garbage levy type instead of a colorful variety of units. In this game they are separated into levies and men-at-arms, which vassals do not provide. So getting the the most efficient economic buildings in your demesne in the order of the best time and boost in direct income to the worst, is key to wracking it up. large demesne means you can go for all of your different building slots simultaneously. with this i managed to get a late-game emperor's income as the duke of Bohemia, vastly exceeding my overlord.

[@Zieley]

Yeah, I love having my spouse on domain, I pretty much leave her with that all the time

[@deusvult6920]

When is a good time to upgrade stuff?

[@alexmannen1991]

also tribals have huge gold income from raiding u can easilu make more in 900ad than all fedual and get free change when switching in 1000

[@rcrhinehart66]

One thing that took me a while to figure out is that your long term Domain Holdings should exclusively be Duchy capitol counties(Preferably ones with special buildings and/or 5 buildable slots). A vassal can hold the duchy title but you hang on to the capitol and it's special building(s). Makes a huge difference long term.

[@KnufWons]

You can’t use the powerful duchy buildings unless you hold the duchy yourself, unfortunately

[@rcrhinehart66]

@@KnufWons I wouldn't play this game without mods. There's a nice one that lets you hold more than 3 dutchys.

[@justinmalangoni9467]

i guess the steppe is straight gangsta, economy is for the civil.

[@Cvusmo]

Buy early, reap the big economy Mid game. I split my buying by buying a building then building my men at arms then another building etc

[@harryrimington9698]

This guide overlooks development, which is a modifier on gold income the 0.5 gold is only 0.5 gold if the development was 0

[@Zieley]

I just wanted to show how these different buildings compared when looking at the payoff times, but yes with more development you would get the money back faster

[@AbdulHannanAbdulMatheen]

👏🙂

[@dannyholwell3273]

Is there a meta for when you want to go heavy on cavalry?

[@Tarkin55]

Regimental grounds

[@cakdwik2050]

Barack or camelry spam is op 😂😂

[@europeanpatriot8031]

Where's the 720p option?

[@GDPanda69]

I was so sad to see how badly my beloved port buildings betrayed me in CK3, I could have sworn you would get fast cash from them as there's only so much coast line, but alas... I suppose it's balanced as you are guaranteed an additional economic building in coastal holdings, so there's that.

[@Zieley]

haha I was surprised too. I think you're right, the fact you can have two economic buildings in costs can be already pretty powerful

[@KnufWons]

I think their hidden value is the boost to development, which increases your overall income in that county. That being said, that development boost is going to take a long time to put a dent in the investment as well!

[@mustoskiff1321]

The steep??

[@ivanamatijas8624]

I have a problem, I can't build a castle. is not hold by you. what to do / pls help

[@einsibongo]

Are you tribe or feudal?

[@Graknorke]

Good video but I feel like talking purely about the time to payback misses a benefit that's partly psychological and partly not which is being confident in running increased costs. it's just a lot more secure feeling to be in positive income rather than rationing out how much you pull from a limited treasury. like sure you look at supporting your army with buildings and think "well if I saved the gold I could afford that for ~25 years anyway" but the difference is if you get the income you could do it _forever_, plus there's the fact that realistically you're never going to actually save the money lol. human psychology isn't it, you see you have thousands in the bank and even if you tell yourself that's money you're keeping to offset upgrading your holdings, you're probably going to end up splashing it about more freely than you would be if it was tied up in a building and you had less in pocket. the higher level buildings should be more carefully considered I suppose but the tier 1 buildings are basically a no brainer unless you're really desperate in the short term for money to spend on something or you're expecting an expensive war in the immediate future or something.

[@alex37k]

Steppe is pronounced like “step” apparently. I used to think it was “steppie”…

[@Phobos1483]

Strange that you have to be in a train to build buildings. Even more strange that the type of train matters as well.

[@PreistofGHAZpork]

Fyi steppe is pronounced like step

[@Jigachader]

you failed to take into consideration the fact that PB time is heavily reduced by all kinds of bonuses

[@Zieley]

yeah, but this is to give you an idea of how all the different buildings compare. Best case you have all the stewardship perks

[@Hydra360ci]

27 years aren't crap when you're talking about this game... especially if you start in the 800's

[@jlmc3447]

Tradeports are fucking overpowered and if you just use the Dev focus on your steward you can get a county with higher Dev and therefore higher tax you can use to build more cities for tradeports

[@unovasfinest2623]

Then theres me just smashing gold in London and doing literally nothing else for 500 years :]

[@theorixlux2605]

Steppe

[@pfilth49]

Upgrade your kingdom into a lucrative realm just to see it all squandered by the AI after your succession

[@chavezmitchin3066]

I remember when building used to give points instead of percent 🥺 sad

[@Zieley]

good old days

[@neonnsteel]

Pretty sure Steppe is pronounced Steppe not Steep

[@eksadiss]

Steppe...it's pronounced Step

[@thegermanicus9354]

Steep? C’mon man.

[@freddekl1102]

Yeah I cringed while hearing that, if english is his first language then triple yikes

[@zlayd5146]

it is pronounced "step" not steep

[@harmondaniels5108]

My favorite buildings are the ones I take from the pope for free

[@sperinity1539]

The pronunciation of Steppe made me suicidal