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Hiring advisors

When you start a new game, there will be a number of historical advisors to hire to your court. Some may be part of your court already, and others may be available for hire. Up to three advisors may be hired at one time. In Divine Wind and Heir to the Throne, it is possible to use Cultural tradition to recruit an advisor of any type. As the tradition increases, the better the advisors will be.

In Divine Wind, it is not possible to hire multiple advisors of the same type.

It is advisable to check for good advisors at the very beginning of the game, before you unpause. A great advisor can contribute a lot to your country's development.

Cost and Skill

The advisors you can hire to your court are rated on a skill scale from 1 (worst) to 6 (best) stars. The bonuses they provide is scaled linearly, so that an advisor with skill 4 gives twice the bonus of a skill 2 advisor.

Graph of Hiring Cost vs. Age and Stars

New advisors cost a one-time fee to recruit, and then a monthly upkeep. The monthly cost is always a tenth of their stars, regardless of age. For example, a 6-star advisor always costs 0.6 ducats/month. Hiring and monthly costs are subject to inflation, but are s not affected by the country you play or game difficulty.

Life expectancy

An analysis of a single savegame at endgame (1791) in v. 1.3 found that that advisors' median age was 23.3 years (average age was 25.7 years), and the oldest was 82 (N=116). This observation can be weighed against changing out a great, but aging, advisor for a young one of less stars that's liable to be snapped up. Although only one savegame was analyzed, it dovetails with the facts that advisors reach their lowest hiring price at age 20, and that new games have a large advisor pool which shrinks sharply circa 20-50 years.

First-year Exclusivity

Many nations begin the game with advisors that are exclusive to them. This means that during the first year, no other nation can hire any of these exclusive advisors. These advisors remain exclusive to their country for the first year even if that country hires and then sacks/replaces them. In fact, unless a nation begins with a few exclusive advisors, it will not be able to hire any advisors until one year from the start date.

Exactly one year after the start of the game, all advisors not hired by any nation will be put in the collective pool. This makes it a very good idea to pause at exactly this date (October 14, 1400, for a Grand Campaign start), before other nations have a chance to pick them up.

Certain decisions require a nation to employ a certain type of advisor. Unfortunately, sometimes the required advisor is not very skilled and/or the nation has no need for his particular specialty. This is where the first-year exclusivity feature becomes valuable. If a nation wants to enact an advisor-dependent decision, it can hire and then replace this advisor with a better one from the advisor pool or sack him altogether without having to worry about any of the advisors in the pool being hired by another nation during that time.

Advisors types

In Nomine added many new advisor types. HTTT added one additional type (the Grand Marshal), Divine Wind made no changes.

EU3 Advisors

The different types of advisors and their bonuses in patch 1.3 are:

Note that having a Colonial Governor prevents nasty Colonial Assemblies from occurring if your stability goes below 0 after there has been a Quest for Independence (which can occur after 1750). For a typical example, see Brazilian Colonial Assembly. There are 10 possible Quests for Independence and concomitant Assemblies, so having a governor or keeping your stability high is important for large world-spanning colonial empires in the end game.

See Also

• Historical advisors
• Advisor types definition