If you’re looking to go to war in Crusader Kings 3, you’re almost certainly going to need to raise your levies in order to do it. But if they aren’t replenishing, you need to know how to get them back to strength. Levies are the bread and butter of your army. Unlike men-at-arms, they’re untrained and relatively weak, but they do their damage through sheer numbers rather than skill-at-arms.
In general, the more territory you control, the bigger your levies. However, like many systems in Crusader Kings 3, there are a few intricacies to building up more significant levies and reinforcing them faster. Here’s what you need to know.
How to Reinforce and Replenish Levies in Crusader Kings 3
Before we get into the meat of reinforcing Levies, there are a few foundational topics we need to cover.
What are Limits on Levies?
If you want to send larger levies off to war, there are a few ways to build them up. First, it would help to familiarize yourself with why your levy limit is set where it is.
Hitting the “F3” key or clicking the red shield icon on the right-hand side of the screen will pull up your Military menu. From here, you can see the basics of how many levies are currently available for your territory, how large the maximum number is, and how much their maintenance cost is. You can also see your knights, your men-at-arms, and many more details about your military on this screen.
If you click the large Levies icon (the one with men holding pikes), you can see further details about them. You can see things like bonuses they may have accumulated and their strengths. Finally, the buttons at the top of this screen will allow you to raise and disband your troops all at once, which we’d usually recommend if you’re fighting a war.
If you want to know why your levy limit is where it is, you’ll want to start exploring your holdings.
If you click on a territory with a holding (meaning it has a town or bailey on it, instead of an empty circle), it will pull up details about that particular holding. If you hover over the levies near the lower right, it will pull up details about why that specific holding has that number of troops.
All manner of things affect this number in Crusader Kings 3:
- Your martial skill.
- Holding type.
- The technology you’ve developed.
- Military buildings.
Here’s how you can increase it.
How Do I Increase My Levy Size in Crusader Kings 3?
There are too many ways to increase your levy size to touch on them all, but here are the basics.
Build Military Buildings
One way to ensure you have larger levies for a long time is by building military buildings in your holdings.
Click on a holding, then look for the “+” icons at the bottom. Each of those icons indicates a building you can construct, such as a barracks or military camp. Each building shows what upgrades it provides. Build (or improve) some war camps or a similar construction to increase your levy size.
Hone Your Martial Skill
Your leader’s martial skill will add or subtract a percentage to your levy size. Set their focus to martial abilities and add perks to increase the size of your levies further, or marry someone with high martial skill to add to your own.
Put Your Marshall to Work
Your Marshall is a member of your council. Their martial skill will also affect your levy size. They also have an action you can apply called “Organize Levies.” Using this ability will add a percentage to your levy size. It’s the icon on the Council menu that looks like soldiers in armor.
How Do I Reinforce and Replenish My Levies?
If you send your troops out to war in a neighboring duchy or kingdom, some of them aren’t going to come back. Luckily, levies in Crusader Kings 3 are pretty easy to reinforce back to full strength.
Well… they’re designed to be.
Levies automatically replenish over time, which means that fighting too many wars over a short period will leave your military running on fumes. If you open your military menu and hover over the “Total Soldiers” section. It will tell you how quickly your levies will build back up.
Unfortunately, there is also a bug in the early builds of CK3 (as of this writing, that’s build 1.0.3) that seem to prevent levies from reinforcing over time.
There’s no clear indication of what triggers this bug/glitch, but those who encounter it report that their reinforcement rate sits at 0/month, even if it should not be.
The main fix seems to be raising your army and then disbanding them immediately. It seems likely this bug will be fixed quickly, as it significantly hampers the game. For now, that seems to be the only way around it should you encounter this issue.
That’s all you need to know about how to reinforce and replenish your levies in Crusader Kings 3. Doing so is perhaps the foundational element of declaring war. To make your armies run smoothly, you’ll need lots of money; here’s how to make more faster. Make sure to check out our tips page for more guides to help you conquer the world.
