Crusader Kings III Guides

Marriage is one of the most important actions a character can take in Crusader Kings III. For both your character and your family it plays major roles in your alliances, your titles claims, your relationships and much more.

If you’re new to the game, figuring out how to marry your character can be daunting since there are so many menus. In this guide we’ll show you how to find a marriage for your character through both the game’s recommendations, and how to marry a specific character.

How to Get Your Character Married

If your character is unmarried, or if your culture and religion allow for multiple spouses, you can start the process for finding a prospective spouse by selecting your character in the bottom left of your screen. Here you are also able to determine if your character is married.

From here the character menu opens up. Your character appears at the top of the menu, and if you aren’t married two rings overlay a silhouette where your spouse would be. Click this to take you to the Arrange Marriage menu.

Within this menu the game recommends the best fits for your character’s potential marriage. The recommendations aren’t perfect, but they are a great starting point for newcomers to the game.

Start with the drop-down menu where you can get the best potential partner based on Alliance Power, Prestige Gain, Age, Rank and more. Generally, Alliance Power is a great spot to start for a new game; you can call allies to war with you, and they are highly unlikely to declare war on you. If they are close geographically to you — reducing troop transport times — it is even better.

If you have a few strong alliances to choose from, look at the character traits. You typically want your spouse to have strong statistics and good congenital traits. This will give your offspring and future heirs a better chance at having strong traits themselves.

When you’ve found the character you want to marry, click on their listing in that menu. This will take you to a screen detailing the potential relationship: How much prestige each character will lose or gain; the opinion of you from the potential spouse and their liege; likelihood of having children; inheritable traits; and any alliances created.

If you found a spouse through this process, the liege will say yes; the game doesn’t recommend any marriage proposals that won’t be accepted. If everything looks good to you, click “Send Proposal” at the bottom. You will be married within two weeks. If you’re a liege, you will be able to collect some amount of gold from your vassals for the wedding.

Still, you can’t just marry any character you would like; depending on religion, culture, rank, title and prestige, a character could choose to decline. You may be able to change their opinion enough, acquire a higher title or use a hook to make this marriage happen, depending on the situation.

How to Marry a Specific Character

If you have your eye on a specific character for marriage — likely because they have a specific title claim or alliance, but also because they have an inheritable trait that is useful (or fun if, say, you want to create a family of scaled rulers) — it is still easy to propose a marriage to them.

Find the character, and then open their character menu. Right click on their character and click “Arrange Marriage.”

The default puts them into the arrangement, with an empty slot on your side of the arrangement (Note: This is how you arrange marriages for your vassals, family members and courtiers). Your character is at the top of the list, so click it to view a potential marriage between yourself and the selected character.

Since this was a manual potential arrangement, there is a chance they will decline a marriage. But again, you will get the same summary of the potential marriage. If it looks good, click “Send Proposal.”