Overview
Knowing how to breed a bloodline into your heir is one thing, but knowing how to create as many bloodlines as you want? Now there’s a fun challenge. This guide will teach you the various methods of producing as many bloodlines as you can, and what best ways to build your superhuman dynasty.
Introduction
Bloodlines and acquiring them is a whole lotta fun. Sure, there’s a Steam achievement for getting 5 historical bloodlines in you, but even just seeing a regular 12 year old with 50 combat skills is a reward in itself.
But at some point, you’re going to run out of bloodlines to merge into your superpowered baby. You’ll be scanning the ledger and realizing that every bloodline with surviving members all have you in it. So where do you go from here? What could you have done differently, so there’s never an end in sight for your quest for godliness?
Don’t worry, because this guide is going to tell you about all the ways you can generate as many bloodlines as you can possibly need.
Keep in mind, this guide is NOT about the basics of bloodline and how to get it in your dynasty. There is already a guide for that right here:
[link]
In fact, I strongly recommend you check out this guide first so you have a good handle on the basics of bloodlines before reading this guide. After all, I’m not here to teach you how bloodline inheritance and breeding superhumans work, I’m here to tell you how to get more ammunition for your quest.
In this guide, I am going to be covering several methods of generating large quantities of bloodlines and the various methods of perfecting your craft. I am also going to be using several screenshots from the Crusader Kings II wiki right here: [link]. Feel free to reference it throughout the guide.
Sainthood and Ancestor Veneration
If you are playing as a Christian character, or perhaps a reformed Pagan with Ancestor Veneration, you are well familiar with saints and ancestors and their bloodlines. And you might be well aware that it’s really easy to go into the religion tab to check out all the bloodlines you can potentially breed into your dynasty.
But of course, there is always a downside to relying on the pope or the fylkir to tell you who is a saint and who is not: it takes a really long time. And the more saints/ancestors there are, the less people become saints/ancestors. So past a certain point you may be waiting a long time before the next bloodline appears for you to assimilate into your fleshy body.
So what can you do to get around this? How can you make yourself the pinnacle of divinity with the blood of a thousand saints flowing through your veins? Well, there are two strategies.
Blood of Infidel Saints
If you are a devout Catholic, so devout that you have already consumed the blood of every Catholic saint, why stop there? You can always incorporate the saintly bloods of other religions into your bloodline as well! You might think “well, it’s just going to be inactive, so what’s the point?” That may be true, but with a little PDX programming, sometimes even inactive bloodlines can have tangible effects.
As you can see, despite me being a devout Germanic pagan, I still benefit from a Catholic bloodline that’s clearly inactive. I don’t actually know how many bonuses work despite the bloodline being inactive, but it is clearly still worth a shot merging as many infidel saint bloodlines into your body as possible.
Obviously, not being able to view the blood of other religions’ saints in your religion tab can make this a bit finnicky, but it really should be no different from simply looking up bloodlines in the ledger to find out which bloodline you have yet to conquer.
Ancestor Veneration
If you’re tired of waiting around for the fylkir to declare the next ancestor, you can of course BE the fylkir with temporal leadership and do it yourself. Of course, there is the downside that you won’t be able to declare the character you just played as as an ancestor, but not having to rely on a finicky AI to do it for you really makes up for it. Besides, you can declare your own dynastic members ancestors anyways, sooo.
However, there is a caveat to Ancestor Veneration that you might not know about. In addition to the 1000 prestige you need to be nominated as a candidate for ancestry, you also need a certain set of saintly traits associated with your specific kind of religion. To save you the trouble of datamining yourself, I decided to put it out here.
That way, you can best decide how to raise your dynastic kids and your vassals’ kids so they’ll grow up to be prestigious upholders of your reformed pagan faith (and ancestors when they die). Maximizing the number of venerated ancestors in your religion will maximize the amount of bloodlines you can breed into your next superpious heir.
Notice how asides from Dawn Breakers, Children of Perun, and Survivor of Ukko, no other unique features are listed in the chart. That’s right, even if you have Eternal Riders, your ancestor veneration chances are NOT affected by what affects Polygamy and Unrelenting! So even if you got Eternal Riders or Dawn Breakers, you do not have to worry about giving everyone two wives to make them a venerated ancestor.
Forge Bloodline
You know that nifty little ambition Forge Bloodline, which you unlock at 5000 prestige first, and then 20000 prestige every subsequent time you play as a dynastic heir who didn’t inherit the bloodline? Yeah you do. If you don’t, again you should check out the Bloodline guide I referenced in the Introduction.
Either way, you might have some questions about this method. After all, under normal circumstances, your heirs would inherit the bloodline you created. And why WOULDN’T you want to keep the bloodline you worked so hard to create? How would you even end up with an heir who doesn’t carry the bloodline you created, and still preserve your created bloodline? Let alone get up to 20k prestige?
Don’t worry, we will go through several strategies to help you maximize the Forge Bloodline ambition, and forge as many bloodlines as you can.
Accumulating 20k Prestige
The very first problem to tackle with unlocking Forge Bloodline ambition, of course, is accumulating 20k prestige (or 15k prestige as a child). Because that is pretty challenging, even if you’re a powerful emperor. So what can you do to get the prestige necessary to forging another bloodline?
But of course!
If you’ve been raiding via boats, you might remember that the moment you bring the loot back home, you’ll get a big chunk of prestige equivalent to the cash you’ve reaped. But even if you’re just raiding normally by land, you can still get the prestige equivalent to the cash you’ve taken. So using this method, you can accumulate prestige pretty quickly.
Of course, that’s especially so if you have access to the Mediterranean sea, where every province is coastal and rife with abundant amounts of cash to grab. Rome, Ragusa, Genoa, Pisa, Alexandria, all of these are pretty wealthy provinces you can plunder tons of gold and prestige from. So as long as you remain diligent in your raiding, you should be able to accumulate 20k prestige a bit more quickly than you would through other means.
Another strategy related to using boats to raid is to hold onto loot before bringing it home. If you’re old and you know you’re going to die soon, and leave behind a 5 year old heir, you can take advantage of that by stocking up as much gold on your fleet as possible, dying, and then bringing that loot home once your 5 year old inherits. That way, despite the old man being the one who did the raiding, the 5 year old is the one who receives the thousands of prestige you accumulate, giving you a jump start on reaching 15k prestige for a childhood Forge Bloodline ambition.
Creating titles is also a good way of generating large quantities of prestige, even though this one is a bit more costly and a lot more finite. Even then though, you can get quite a big hefty chunk of prestige, perhaps just enough to boost you up to 20k/15k prestige before you die of old age.
These are big hefty chunks of prestige you can get if you have the money for it (and if you’ve been diligently raiding, you should have the money), but you might be wondering, what do you do with the titles you create? Won’t your vassals be angry with you holding onto too many titles? Wouldn’t destroying these titles just revert the prestige gain? Well…
If you create a ducal title, you can actually resolve this issue by handing it off to a king vassal who owns NO land in that de jure duchy. Usually, when they receive the title and have enough prestige, they’ll destroy the ducal title, since they’re not interested in holding ducal titles they don’t own land in. That way, you can recreate the ducal title for another chunk of 200 prestige.
As for the kingdoms and empires… yeah, those are finite resources. So you might not wanna rely on that too much.
Either way, these strategies should help you get a leg up on accumulating prestige, far more effective than just carousing, hosting festivals, and whatnot, so you can get the prestige you need to unlock the Forge Bloodline ambition in no time.
Forging Good Bloodlines
Now, this isn’t entirely about the forging of bloodlines itself, but this is about powerful bloodlines that you might want to stack over the course of generation. In particular, bloodlines that just get increasingly powerful the more you stack them.
If you’re tribal, have the Forge Bloodline ambition, and are ready to go feudal, stock up on cash. You’re going to want at least 3900 gold, maybe 5000 or 6000 to be safe, and you’re going to want to hold onto 9 demesne provinces of at least 3 empty holding slots. If it already has a temple in it, then it can’t be helped, but ideally you’ll want exactly 9 provinces with 3 empty holding slots.
The moment you turn feudal ,each of your demesne provinces will automatically get 1 free city and 1 free temple (if there is not already a temple there), and guess what? Those free buildings count towards the Forge Bloodline ambition. So that’s automatically 9 cities and hopefully 9 temples, sometimes less if you have provinces with temples in them, and all you would need to do is build 6 more castles and however many temples you need, in your tribal vassals’ provinces abundant with empty space. Then, just wait two years, and you’ll unlock the Builder bloodline. Voila.
Of course, beyond that, stacking anymore of this bloodline will require an immense monetary investment. But if you manage to stack even a few, you can severely cut down on the cost of building new holdings. If you get 5 of this bloodline, you can even cut down the cost of building new holdings down to a minimum of 1 gold and 1 day. Which is a power you would normally only get from console commands, so the potential payoff here is massive.
When you think about Forging multiple Bloodlines, you’re definitely going to want to think ahead and consider how you want to prepare yourself ahead of time. After all, if you’re going to be generating infinite bloodlines, you’re gonna want to make sure that you’re getting the right ones that immensely builds upon your strengths.
Now that we actually have our bloodlines established though, let’s get into the specifics of how you can actually go about forging multiple bloodlines. There are very good strategies you will want to think about as you plan, after all.
Eldership/Tanistry Succession
You know about Eldership/Tanistry succession? The ones you get as Romuva or Ancestor Veneration, or with an Irish bloodline? Yeah, those succession laws are pretty neat. they allow you to elect anyone from your dynasty to be your heir. Naturally, this comes with a huge advantage: you can choose anyone from any branch of your dynasty to be your heir, even if they don’t have a created bloodline.
Naturally, that means you can always choose an heir from a branch of the dynasty who doesn’t have any created bloodlines, get 20k prestige, forge a bloodline, and then merge it back with the other bloodlines through some incestuous matrilineal marriages. That way, you’ll end up with a potential heir with all the bloodlines you’ve worked hard to forge.
The only downside you have to be wary about with this strategy is the fact that when you’re jumping all over the family tree like a squirrel, it’s very easy to lose track of who has what bloodline and who doesn’t. So if you want to use this strategy, you have to be very diligent in keeping track of who has what and who’s married to whom.
Matrilineal Transfer
You remember the whole deal about bloodline inheritance? The whole matrilineal/patrilineal transfer? When you create a new bloodline, whether it’s patrilineal or matrilineal transfer is based on the gender of the founder. Normally, you would prefer patrilineal transfer since it’s easier to play as a male character. However if there is a way for you to choose to play a female characters if you’d like, then there’s a nifty little trick you can do with matrilineal transfer to maximize your Forged Bloodlines.
We all know that when you have a matrilineal marriage, your children will inherit all bloodlines from both parents. However, when you have a patrilineal marriage, only patrilineal OR matrilineal bloodlines will be inherited, depending. So if you have a matrilineal bloodline, a man with a patrilineal marriage will NOT pass on his matrilineal bloodlines.
Now, why would you want that? Isn’t that a bad thing? Well, maybe, BUT…
If you have have Absolute Cognatic succession, whether through Equality feature or simply through raising your Tolerance tech for women’s rights laws or being Basque/Zhangzhung/Sumpa/Messalian/Cathar, and you ALSO have access to Heir Designation (through Meritocracy, Taoist, Buddhist, or Jain) or Open succession, any kind of succession law that allows you to choose between female and male heir freely, you can make good use of matrilineal bloodlines.
If you play as a female character with matrilineal marriage, and create yourself a matrilineal bloodline, and then choose yourself a male heir with a patrilineal marriage, you can end up with a granddaughter without the bloodline. That way, once the granddaughter inherits, you will get a brand new opportunity to create another bloodline. As long as you keep the bloodline alive through other relatives via matrilineal marriages, you will get a chance to have their kids matrilineally marry the granddaughter so that HER children will inherit BOTH the previous created bloodline AND the bloodline she just created.
To demonstrate this a bit easier, I decided to make a diagram.
It’s a lot, but as you can see, if you alternate between Incestuous Matrilineal Marriage and non-Incestuous Patrilineal Marriage, you can give yourself an opportunity to create a new bloodline every other generation. So as long as you avoid inbreeding, you can stack more and more created bloodlines as you go.
And you can do this basically forever! As long as you have the means to create bloodlines every other generation, you can pile on bloodlines indefinitely.
Other Created Bloodlines
Of course, asides from the Forge Bloodline ambition, you do have other options when it comes to creating bloodlines that doesn’t involve racking up 20k prestige every time. For most of these, you have to be pagan, although there is one option you can do even if you are not. Let’s get into it.
Of course, the obvious downside is that it’s pretty hard to fight that much every other generation, but that’s always an option for you.
Just make sure you get this bloodline AFTER you get the other created bloodlines, the other bloodlines that ARE blocked by you already having a created bloodline.
But either way, these do provide very good options if you’re ever looking to create another bloodline for your dynasty to absorb.
Strategies
So with all of these things in mind, what are some ways you can optimize your bloodline-hoarding? After all, you just received an absolutely overwhelming amount of options, not just for bloodlines, but also for ways of accruing as many of them as possible, so it can be difficult to figure out specifically what you want when presented with so many options. To make this easier, let’s go with some specific strategies you can use to employ what you’ve learned.
Lots of this guide has been about pagan-specific bloodlines, but that doesn’t mean you can’t accrue massive amounts of bloodlines as a Christian either. As you know, you can always go with the Saintly or Infidel Saintly route, where you bring single men with saintly bloodlines into your court and force them to matrilineally marry your daughter.
But what else can you do? After all, you can’t use the Matrilineal Transfer strategy without Heir Designation or Open succession, and even if you gain access to Absolute Cognatic through laws or culture or religion, you can’t always guarantee you’ll have a daughter or a son first for that Primogeniture succession.
Of course, that’s where Tanistry succession comes in. Even if you aren’t in the right culture group for Tanistry, you can still try to marry a Tanistry bloodline into your dynasty so you can reap its rewards, giving you the chance to jump around and Forge new Bloodlines through heirs who don’t already have a bloodline.
Naturally, the challenge here is accumulating 20k prestige after the first time, since unless you’re tribal or have a raiding culture, you can’t really raid for prestige. You’d basically have to wait for the pope to call a crusade and hope you win a big enough share of the war chest to get 20k prestige so you can Forge a new Bloodline. If you didn’t just get a Crusader bloodline in the process, of course, but that’s a nice option too.
Or you can forgo Forge Bloodline and just train a dynasty of extreme duelists so you can stack Duelist bloodlines.
If you have an Eastern religion, you will have an easier time with this. Not only are there multiple Tibetan cultures that enable Absolute Cognatic, there are 3 religions that allow Heir Designation: Taoist, Buddhist, and Jain. So as either of those three religion, you can easily put the Matrilineal Transfer strategy to good use, alternating between male and female as you build up your blood.
Of course, out of all three of those options, none of them can raid, which is rather inconvenient. However, if you later switch to a raider culture once you got Absolute Cognatic, or if you temporarily switch to Hindu using Indian religions’ flexible ability to convert on a whim, you can absolutely make use of the Hindu ability to raid before changing back to Buddhism to designate the heir you want.
If you’re a Pagan then hooboy this is where all the options and flexibility comes in.
If you’re Aztec, you don’t even need to choose Bloodthirsty Gods or Invaders to get your Bloodthirsty bloodline, you can use your free feature slots for Stability and Ancestor Veneration instead, giving you a chance to breed in some Ancestor bloodlines while getting some Stability bloodlines. You can go for Meritocratic too but if you’re the Aztec Emperor, you can’t change your succession law from Agnatic. So you might wanna consider the Eldership route too.
If you’re Germanic, you can go straight for Stability too if you want, or if you’re comfortable enough with your ability to get up to 20k prestige by raiding consistently, go straight for Equality and Meritocracy instead so you can make full use of the Matrilineal Transfer strategy.
If you’re Bön, your Harmonious covers both Equality and Meritocracy already, giving you easy access to the Matrilineal Transfer strategy while freeing up a feature slot for you to choose whatever you feel will maximize your options (maybe Stability, maybe Ancestor Worship, maybe even Bloodthirsty Gods).
Everyone has still has their options too, you don’t HAVE to use the Matrilineal Transfer strategy, or simply go for Meritocratic and wait until you have unlocked Absolute Cognatic. And Eldership is always an option for jumping around and spawning some Ancestors. Stability for Stability bloodlines, you can even go for Divine Marriage to make the incestuous marriages you’ll make during Matrilineal Transfer a bit more beneficial. If you don’t want to get too fancy, the classic Enatic Clans always works too, as you scour the ledger for more bloodlines to suck up and maybe spawn some Ancestors. The world is your oyster and you got so many options as pagans, that if you do play pagans, you pretty much HAVE to go out of your way to spam bloodlines and create the ultimate superhuman.
One a single character, you can easily create multiple bloodlines in one lifetime too. You can get a Stability or Forged bloodline first (as those are blocked by having a created bloodline), and THEN go for a Bloodthirsty bloodline or Raiding bloodline, or even both if you’re Germanic and you chose Bloodthirsty Gods, and then even go for the Duelist bloodline. You have the possibility to create 4 whole bloodlines on a single character if you’re wily and lucky enough, and stack bloodlines far faster than anyone else can.
Sorry man, you really don’t have a lot of options. No ability to raid, no perks that can actually help with jumping around the dynasty, no access to Matrilineal Transfer strategy unless you stop being nomadic/merchant republic, or maximize women’s rights as a Muslim, your options are extremely limited. Nomadic Succession may allow you to jump around in your dynasty, but its nature of relying on prestige means it’s extremely difficult to control which branch you end up in, or if you’re able to stack the bloodlines with the right members you want, so it can be extremely finicky. Even the Jewish saintly bloodlines are extremely limited, as it’ll take you a while to even restore the Jewish priesthood.
At least Muslims with Absolute Cognatic and Open succession are able to make use of the Matrilineal Transfer strategy. It’s just getting the 20k prestige without a raiding culture that’s difficult to achieve.
Conclusion
Bloodlines are so rewarding and so much fun to play with, especially once you’ve really gotten to know how they work and figure out how to easily breed yourself some superhuman babies. Whether you’re accumulating the blood of saints to become the ultimate holy figure of divine humours, or you’re Forging a new bloodline with every succession, the exuberance of scrolling through your massive list of bloodlines and having unmatched advantages in the Medieval world is absolutely parallel to none. It just takes a lot of planning and luck to see your plans through, but if you can make it happen, there’s nothing better.
I hope this guide has been helpful to you in your quest to achieve the ultimate bloodline amalgam. Let me know if you have anymore questions about strategies in creating new bloodlines or stacking as many bloodlines as you can, and I will do my best to answer.
Have some blood collages for good measure.
