The Crusader Kings II Matchmaker Reference

Hello! This page is designed as a reference for how the Matchmaker works. It assumes that you've already downloaded the program and been able to start it, and gone through the quickstart guide.

Loading the files

When you first start, you see 4 things you can click on:
  1. Installation directory. Click on the 'Choose...' button here to tell the Matchmaker where you installed Ck2. For example, on my machine this is C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\crusader kings ii.
  2. Save game file. Click on the 'Choose...' button here to tell the Matchmaker which save-game file to analyze.
  3. Religions to load:. To make Matchmaker faster, and use less memory, you can tell to 'only load Christians', or 'only load Muslims' (handy if using 'Sword of Islam', or 'all'.
  4. the 'Load' button. This will turn green, and become active, once you have entered both an installation directory and a save-game file.

After you press the 'load' button, the game will tell you how many nobles it loaded, along with whatever 'mods' you have that the matchmaker is reading to get a correct picture of what people and places are named, e.g:

Custom traits

Some 'mods' define their own sets of traits. If the Matchmaker finds that you have any mods, it will ask you if you want to use their defined traits instead of the built-in ones:

The data

Let's skip the middle part of the app for now, that lets you define filters. Below that, on the bottom part, is where you see the data that has passed your filters. For speed, it limits the result set to 300. It has 18 columns of data it displays, all of which are sortable:

  1. Age the age, in years.
  2. Gender 'm' for male, 'f' for female
  3. SpousesHow many spouses they have. Note that this can be more than one, for Muslim leaders!
  4. Kids the number of living children they have
  5. Name their first name from birth. If they have a nickname, this is also shown.
  6. Dynasty their dynasty
  7. Holdings. Their holdings. These are the things they actually hold title to. Note that this is different from their 'title'. For example, if the Duke of York has a wife and daughters, they all get the title of Duchess, even though they don't actually hold the duchy. In this case, only the Duke will show as having the holding. I find this much more useful. The Matchmaker tries its best to display the name of the holding, but there is some funkiness going on with how Paradox knows the name of Counties, so sometimes you will see these displayed by their internal label (e.g. "c_chalkidike" for the County of Chalkidike). Sorry about that.
  8. #Claims how many claims they have
  9. Diplomacy their diplomacy rating
  10. Martial their martial rating
  11. Steward their stewardship rating
  12. Intrigue their intrigue rating
  13. Learning their learning rating
  14. Traits their traits. The sort order for this column is by number of traits.
  15. Religion their relgion
  16. Culture their culture
  17. Piety their piety
  18. Wealth their wealth
  19. [V1.2]Home their normal home county. This is where they 'normally' live, it doesn't account for if they are off leading troops, peforming a council mission, etc.

Exporting the data

You can export the data as a CSV file, which you can load into Click this and you'll export the results as a CSV file, which you can load into Excel, Access, mySQL, etc. You can do this in two ways: (1) click on the 'export all' button, which will export all nobles in the save file, or (2) click on the 'export' button to the right of the 'Results:' display, which will export only those who pass your current filters. For example, you might decide that you want to evaluate the nobles by the sum of their attributes - here it is in excel:

The Filters

There are 12 categories of filter you can apply to filter the nobles. They are, from left to right:
  1. by 'Age'. You can specify both a min and a max age.
  2. by 'Gender'
  3. by 'Spouses'. You can specify both a min and a max # of spouses.
  4. by 'Kids'. You can specify both a min and a max # of children. This is living children.
  5. by 'Dynasties'. You can specify either a certain dynasty they must have, or up to 5 dynasties they must not have.
  6. by 'Holdings'. You can specify both a min and a max holding level. For example, can find nobles who hold either a Barony or a County, but nothing higher or lower.
  7. by 'Claims'. You can specify both a min and a max # of claims.
  8. by 'Attributes'. You can specify a min/max value for each of the 5 attributes
  9. by 'Traits'. You can specify up to 5 traits they must have, and up to 5 traits they must not have. For example, in this save game file there were 7 people who were Brave and Genius, but neither Ambitous nor Celibate:
  10. by 'Religion'. You can specify either a certain religion they must have, or up to 5 religions they must not have. This is much more useful when the 'only load Christians?' box is not checked.
  11. by 'Culture'. You can specify either a culture they must have, or up to 5 cultures they must not have.
  12. by 'Piety. You can specify both a min and max piety.
  13. by 'Wealth'. You can specify both a min and max wealth.

Resetting the filters

When you have filters active, a 'reset' button shows up next to the message that shows you how many are active - press it and you can reset all your filters. This is handy when you want to change filters.