This a guide for the Hard rank CKIII achievement, “Kings to the Seventh Generation”. On its surface, the achievement seems fairly straightforward: starting as Count Eudes Capet of Anjou in 867, lead your Dynasty to rule the Kingdom of France (West Francia, to be specific). Easy stuff for any experienced player under normal circumstances, but there are several complications. Your character Eudes begins as a 10 year old boy with no living parents, you have two lieges standing between you and the throne, and the viking who killed your father and sees you as a rival has set up shop right next door. This is a character whose rise to greatness is far from guaranteed, requiring aggressive play if you want to secure your place in history. This goes double if you intend to accomplish this in a single lifetime, which is exactly what this guide is about.
Starting Things Off
Once you begin, there are several issues you'll want to take care of before you unpause the game:
Young Eudes
Young Eudes begins play midway through his formative years, granting you partial control over how he will develop. He will start with the Calm trait and one random other trait, as well as a randomized skill focus and Childhood trait. I strongly recommend restarting the game until you launch with a Stewardship focus and a solid second trait, preferably Stubborn or Temperate for further early Stewardship gains, or a Catholic virtue to make you more likable and generate some very profitable piety. The early part of this challenge requires you to spend an uncomfortable amount of time as a count, and being limited to only 3 holdings and no vassals is painful. Having enough Stewardship to get up to 4 or 5 holdings allows you to be a much more formidable force early on.
You'll want to select a good teacher for yourself before too much time has passed, but if you generated without any suitable candidates (high Stewardship skill, no negative traits that might contaminate you), feel free to set that aside for later.
Gaining Allies
For the entirety of this challenge, you will be playing as a vassal. While you will eventually become a very powerful vassal, early on you're going to be a serious military lightweight. To compensate for that, marry off some of your excess relatives and start forming alliances! Getting a few of your fellow vassals from neighboring kingdoms on your side can make wars a lot easier to handle. Just make sure to avoid allying with anyone you'll eventually want to conquer - no fellow Frenchmen adjacent to you or north of you, essentially - and under no circumstances should you ally with your liege. Your goal is to replace him, not promise to support him!
The Council
Your starting council members will probably be pretty lousy, so replace them as quickly as possible. You probably won't have anyone suitable among your courtiers or guests, so it's time to start aggressively marrying people off to acquire fresh talent. You should have a few lady courtiers - make sure you've got the marriage type set to Matrilineal, then organize their marriage candidates by individual stats to hunt down the best talent in all the land. Do this for Marshal, Steward, and Chancellor if you have enough ladies on hand, or just Marshal and Steward if not.
Next, time to marry off some of your knights. Do the same thing to acquire an appropriate Spymaster and Court Physician (high Learning stat), the two jobs that Catholicism allows women to handle. Finally, check to see if an appropriate educator is available. Either male or female is fine for this role.
Arranged Marriage
While you can't get married until you're 16, you can betroth yourself to another ahead of time. The main advantage here is locking down a very promising candidate before anyone else can grab her. Ordering candidates by "Sum of All Skills" or "Rank" makes it easier to find suitable significant others. If the initial batch of candidates doesn't wow you, feel free to wait; new characters will appear out of the blue as the years go by. So long as you have a supportive wife by your side by the time you're a proper adult, you'll be fine.
The Teen Years
While you're stuck playing as a child, a lot of the standard gameplay options are just not going to be available to you. Personal and hostile schemes are not options, which means you should focus on two other tools in your toybox: secrets and war.
Secrets
Ascending to the throne before you die is an expensive venture, so you'll want as many sources of income as possible. For a Steward-focused character with the Golden Obligations perk, hooks (especially strong ones) are amazingly profitable. Every court will be fairly quiet at first, so leave your spymaster defending your court for the first couple years - your rival will occasionally try to murder you, so don't waste time sending her away from your own court when there's no value in it. Once you hit age 12 or so, the people of the world will have had time to start making poor life decisions and you can begin harvesting them up. Especially choice targets for blackmail include either of your lieges (renegotiating your own feudal contract is very profitable, plus it weakens your future enemies) or the Pope (an unlikely hit, but very useful for generating claims if you can accomplish it), but anyone with a holding can be shaken down for a quick 30-50 gold. If you have strong hooks, those payouts become regular occurrences every five years. The more secrets you can gather as a child, the bigger the payout on your 16th birthday.
Be aware that characters with the "Honest" or "Just" traits generate stress by doing this. Do it anyway. The stress hits are small enough that you should be able to handle it through hunting and feasting so long as you space things out. Under no circumstances should you stress yourself past 40 through blackmail, as you have plenty of family members who will die over the next few decades. No sense giving yourself a mental break just to make a little gold.
War
If you're accustomed to playing as a giant empire, smashing your opponents under massive hordes, you might be heading for a bad time here. Your targets early on are limited to enemies of the faith and counties you have claims on. While it's possible to call all your allies to come to your assistance, the Prestige cost for doing so means you should do so sparingly. Fortunately, Eudes begins with a pair of choice targets right off the bat. Just north of your capitol lies the county of Vendome, held by a count with no other territory. Devour his territory immediately, restoring Control afterwards if needed. Every county under your control is another source of tax income and levies to scare off attackers with, and the sooner you reach maximum size, the better. Your fellow vassals are unlikely to attack you for your territory, but the weaker and less popular you are, the more likely this is to happen.
Most of the other lands you have claims on are controlled by much scarier opponents, but your next target isn't any of them at all. Instead, turn your eyes toward Montaigu, the single county to your west that is held by your rival, Haesteinn. He has a massive army made up of special troops, making him undefeatable in a fair fight and a constant raid threat. Taking his land for your own as soon as possible gets rid of one of the major irritants of this challenge, and thankfully he provides an opportunity to do just that early on.
Soon after the game begins, you'll notice his troops travelling away from his territory. Check his character screen to confirm that he's on an adventuring war against one of the nearby kingdoms. If he manages to win this war, your rival goes from being a dangerous count to a terrifying king, but you can stop this. Watch his war's victory percentage. Once it starts to climb above 0%, he will be fully invested in the war abroad. Take this opportunity to declare a Holy War for his county, then rush in, conquering the place unopposed. With any luck, you'll add his land to yours long before he wins his war and ascends to kinghood. That's your future job, not his.
Once you've grabbed two additional counties, you may be at your managerial capacity. If you can fit a fifth, look around at other counties you have claims on; you should be able to find several that can be taken, although you might need to call for help from allies and attack together. Either way, once you've gotten all the land you can comfortably hold as a count, let your levies recover to full, make sure your Marshal is increasing your max levy size, and then get ready to become a Duke.
Life as a Duke
Miniboss: Duke Hugo
You can't progress beyond this point very far without grabbing your half-brother Hugo's duchy title away from him; it's the only title of that rank you already have a claim on, and besides, Hugo is not a very intimidating opponent - unless the RNG has behaved very oddly, he shouldn't have anywhere near as many allies as you do. Ideally you should be able to take him out before reaching adulthood through use of your own allies and men-at-arms (bowmen are an excellent and affordable option early on, and even a single force of onagers makes sieges go faster), but feel free to save up funds for more men-at-arms or even some mercenaries if you need to. The gold is better spent upgrading your holdings, but failing a war against your liege is not ideal. As soon as he's defeated, the two of you switch places and he becomes your own (very unhappy) first vassal.
Serious Growth
Once you've become a duke, the cap on your controlled territories is removed and you can start collecting vassals! This is going to be your primary goal for the next twenty years or so, particularly in areas that allow you to create new duchy titles. Along with granting you a pile of prestige and improved tax and levy output, holding a duchy will make your new liege (the king) hand over his own vassals in that region for you to manage! Any territory that you don't need to fight for is a good thing.
Prestige may be a limiting factor in how quickly you can spread. Waging war on your own claim is much cheaper than doing so on behalf of a vassal, and holy wars are actually quite difficult when your opponent is actually there and willing to fight you. Besides, you should focus on territory within West Francia; the more of the place you control when the final battle starts, the easier it'll be. Having a competent chancellor will provide you with a steady stream of prestige, but you'll definitely need more than that.
Be sure to spend cash on extracurricular activities. Hosting Feasts and Hunts will help you manage stress, gain useful traits, and generate big chunks of Prestige. Going on Pilgrimages generates Piety and makes you more popular with fellow Catholics, but more importantly, allows you to ask the Pope for funding. Don't be afraid of the small popularity hit that comes with begging for cash from the Vatican; that will fade and the gold will be very useful.
Also, feel free to be a good little vassal and join your liege's wars! Yes, he will eventually be your opponent, but for now you should help him keep vikings out. Better still are wars against Italy, as Italy will invariably call its allies to assist it, providing you with a massive neighboring country with a busy military to loot, chock full of sites to siege and nobles to kidnap and ransom. You can acquire far more wealth looting and ransoming than you lose paying for your soldiers. In any case, joining these wars will sometimes make your liege become your Friend, which is not a bad thing. Friends are a lot slower to anger when you generate claims on their kingdoms, after all.
As all this is happening, you'll be gaining Stewardship perks. Take everything in the Avaricious tree, as well as Tax Man, Cutting Cornerstones, and Professional Workforce from Architect; you'll want to build up your controlled territories with as many gold- and levy-producing buildings as possible. By the time you've completed the tree, your liege will likely have died and been replaced by his less competent, less popular son. If West Francia still contains multiple kingdoms, the succession will split them up, greatly reducing your new liege's power. Your next perk should go into the Meritocracy perk of the Administrator branch, because it's time to take the throne.
Final Boss: The King of France
Unlike Duke Hugo, who you go up against in the end is determined by the RNG, but that hardly matters; the easiest way to take the throne involves very little direct conflict. First, save up some funds for mercenaries. Being able to summon a few thousand troops at a moment's notice is very powerful, making any fighting that does happen much less concerning. Next, use the Claim Throne decision against your liege. It'll take a while to finish, though setting your Spymaster to assist your schemes will speed things up significantly. You will want to do this fast to minimize the chance of your liege noticing your actions and deciding to act against you. For extra insurance, first get a hook against your liege, then renegotiate your contract to protect your titles, but ideally this won't be necessary.
Once you have a claim, be patient. War will break out, either on the border of Spain or the northern coast of France. In either case, your liege will commit his troops to deal with the mess, which will be your time to strike. Declare war against the liege for your claim on the kingdom of West Francia. If all goes well, your liege's troops will be so tied up dealing with the first issue that you'll be able to take several holdings before the first battle, and all your allies will have arrived and joined the party. Grabbing the enemy capitol can result in critical prisoners being taken, which may end the war early. If not, your liege's beleaguered armies will eventually march out to face you, reduced by their first war and already well behind in war score. Between your armies, your allies, and your mercenaries, your reduced opponent should be no match for you.
Win the war, declare yourself king, and pat yourself on the back for achieving Kings to the Seventh Generation in just one.
What Now?
Oftentimes, after snagging an achievement, a run kind of loses direction. One particularly nasty goal you can pursue from here is the Frankokratia achievement: as a French Catholic (hey that's you), hold the Kingdom of Thessalonika without being a vassal of the Byzantine Empire. There are fastier and cheatier ways to accomplish this, but if you want to push your plucky little Robertine cadet branch to the limits, start conquering eastward! It's a long march and there's a lot of territory to snag along the way, but holding the heart of Byzantium for your own is a solid cap on your story. Just remember that "Invite Claimants" and the Learning branch ability "Sanctioned Loopholes" are very powerful when you need a proper casus belli, and consider grabbing any regional techs along the way that improve vassal mood. By the time you're done, you'll need every advantage you can get to keep your empire from being in constant rebellion under its own weight.