The Crusader Kings II matchmaker quickstart guide

Hello! This page is designed to give you a quickstart intro to how the Matchmaker works. It assumes that you've already downloaded the program and been able to start it.

Loading the files

First, click on the 'Choose...' button after 'installation directory:', and choose the directory that you installed Crusader Kings II into. For example, on my machine, this is C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\crusader kings ii - this is the directory that has ck2.exe in it, and a bunch of sub-folders like common, events, etc.

Second, click on the other 'Choose...' button, the one after 'Save game file', and select the CK2 save you want to analyze. For example, the last autosave will typically have a name of autosave.ck2

Once you have done both of these, the 'Load' button will turn green, showing you that you are ready to proceed. Press the button, wait a bit (these files are big!), and then you should see something like this:

There are three main areas here. On the top, you see what you saw before, except that the program is now telling you what it's loaded - 5129 nobles from 3162 dynasties in this example:

There are actually far more in the save file, the 'only Christian' value next to 'Religions to load' told it to only load Christians, to make things faster. If you want analyses that include all religions, set this to 'all' before you load the file.

The second area, with all the tabs on the top, is the 'filter' area. This is where you can specify all the various filters on the data. We'll worry about that later, for now let's go on to the third area, the 'view' area.

Viewing the data

The view area is where you can view all the nobles who pass your filters. At the start, you don't have any filters set up, so it says '5129 pass' - all 5129 of the original 5129. However, to keep the app speedy, it doesn't show you all 5129, it randomly picks 400 out of that.

So below you see 400 representative nobles. You can see their age, gender, name, stats, traits, religion, culture, and so forth. All of these columns are sort-able. Click on a column heading once to sort by it. For example, I clicked once on the 'Age' column and got this:

You see three newborns. Remember that this is just 3 out of the random 400. Click again on 'Age', and the sort changes order - you'll see the 3 oldest out of the random 400:

Filtering

Now we'll show how to filter the data - let's say we want to find an unmarried male genius for our daughter to marry. Go to the filter tabs, and click on the 'Married' pane. You'll see it has a drop-down that lets you specify desired marital state. Set the drop-down to 'No':
Three things happened here:

1. The text in the drop-down changed color, showing you that it's now an active filter
2. The text above the filters now says '1 active', in that same color
3. Your filter took effect! You have gone from 5129 nobles to 4559 (the save game I'm using here is from a scenario start, where most people aren't married yet).

Use a similar process to set the 'gender' to 'male':

Note how the text changed to say that there are now 2 active filters, and that fewer people, 3631 to be specific, pass now.

Finally, click on the 'Traits' tab. You can specify up to 5 traits a person must have, and up to 5 that they must not have. Add 'Genius' to the 'must-have' section:

And now you're down to 57 results.

That completes the quick-start. For more detail, go on to the full reference