So I've played approximately fifteen hours of CKII and, speaking as someone who is generally pretty pretty down on the whole "grand strategy that isn't Civilization" genre, I fucking love this game. The emergent bat-shit insanity that happens all the time (with all the backstabbing and plotting and child murdering and intrigue and whatnot) makes CKII one of the most compelling story driven games I've ever played even though it isn't, technically speaking, a story driven game.

Despite how much I've played , I'm still a little lost when it comes to a few things and would love some pointers from some experienced players (the CKII wiki has been maddeningly unhelpful). The version of CKII I am playing is the base game sans mods with the Sword of Islam expansion on Normal difficulty, if that helps with answering any questions.

1. What is the point of creating titles and what role do titles play in general? For instance, yesterday I was given the "you may create a title" prompt and gave my king the title of duke over the province he already controlled as king. Unless I missed something in the fine print, that title didn't seem to do anything. Also, I am really confused about what sort of effect losing titles upon succession has on the game.

2. How do I survive early, sudden wars? For instance, I started a game today as the King of Galacia (I think that was the name of the area) and less than a year after the beginning of the game my brother pressed his claim on my territory and steamrolled me with a gigantic army. None of my allies responded to my call and I barely had enough money (this is with not having spent a single cent thus far) to hire mercenaries for a month. What the hell am I supposed to do in a situation like that? Along the same lines, throughout all of the games I've played thus far, 9 out of every 10 times I've called an ally to help me with a war, I've been denied. What do I have to do to get my allies to actually be proper allies?

3. Finally, what do you do when you start a game and your demesne size is already bigger than your maximum amount? This happened to me with one of the Muslim caliphs and I had no idea what to do.

1. That title gives you more prestige and also allows you to control a group of an area easily, if it's a duchy.

2. Sometimes you just have to lose. I think even if you lose that war you stay on as the duke of galicia so you can wait until your liege is most vulnerable and then rebel. and your allies will be your allies if they like you enough, but since your brother ALSO has all of your allies (due to you being the same dynasty), he probably called them first; or at least they like him better than you.

3. you grant people counties. Go find a landless courtier (hopefully one of your sons) and go to his diplomacy screen, the top option is to grant a claim, and grant him the county (or shiekdom if you're muslim) of whatever.

I am by no means an expert and I could be plain wrong on some of this stuff.

1. I use titles for basically the following: to give my children something to rule when they start bugging me, create a title and give it to somebody if I'm over my demesne limit, create a title and give it to a vassal that is pissed at me to try to increase their opinion of me. For the title loss on succession thing. Let's say for example you create the title Duchy of ____ and give it to somebody who isn't your heir. When you die and your heir takes over that Duchy can break off and become independent. To stop that you have to either change your succession laws so your oldest child inherits everything or somehow find a way to make it so your heir inherits that title that you might lose.

2. Sometimes you are just fucked. As for why allies won't join there are a number of reasons. Their opinion of you, their opinion of your opponent, the reason for the war, if they are already at war or just got done with a war, and probably others I can't think of.

3. You have to start giving away land to your children and/or vassals to lower the amount of territory you personally control.

Ah ha, I played my first game of CK2 yesterday, started as that same guy and had the same thing happen. Actually in my game both of my brothers declared war on me, so that was fun. I was totally screwed about 10 minutes after the game started.

Don't play as a King to start with (and certainly not a Muslim ruler, they are 'advanced mode'), far too much going on to get your head around, especially with the Iberian peninsula where you are getting your shit pushed in by all those Muslim dynasties. So assuming you're not starting in 867 with The Old Gods, a really nice 'self-tutorial' game is to play as one of the small Irish dukes. You have a small number of vassals, no liege, don't have to worry about invasion for a while, can play at your own pace, and can learn how to use titles, casus bellis, claims etc in order to expand your realm. As you get more land and more vassals it gets more complex, until you can try to form the Kingdom of Ireland. Then you learn about all the extra complexity of being a King. Note that this doesn't apply if you're using the 867 start date, where it is one of the hardest possible starts, since Ireland is a technological backwater and loads of Vikings will come, raid and pillage your lands, kidnap your women, wreck your shit with impunity, hear your lamentations and conquer the island in short order.

After that I had a great time playing in southern Italy as a second game until I formed the Kingdom of Sicily and made my dynasty one of the most powerful in Europe, but I think that has got more difficult since then with various changes to the game.

As for specific questions:

1. many reasons. If you are a King, you might create a duchy to hand out to a son or dynasty member. Delegation is important - you don't want to be ruling a kingdom with 40 direct vassals - so it's a good idea to create duchies if you can, and hand them out to family or trusted courtiers. All the counties under those dukes will be vassals of your vassal dukes, meaning you have less to deal with. Of course, you don't want to create overly-powerful dukes who could overthrow you!

Another very important use of such a title is to get claims. Let's say you control two counties, and a neighbouring county is in someone else' hands (especially if it is a different realm from your own). If you create the duchy title for those counties, you get de jure claims on the counties you don't control. This means you have a casus belli, and can declare war to win the holdings. It ends up being more complex, of course - if I have an annoying vassal I might give him an unimportant duchy so that he becomes independent and leaves me alone for a while, for example.

2. Depends - some characters are in hopeless situations at the start of the game. In most cases surrendering isn't too bad, but hey, you should learn to love losing in this game! Whether allies will join in depends heavily on what people think of you, and the person you're fighting, and a bunch of other things. Don't get too reliant on allies, most of the time they'll be fleeting alliances that last as long as a marriage between your dynasties.

3. Hand out titles, see above about delegating. I try to keep my holdings one below my demesne limit to allow some flexibility. To make up for the loss, try to increase vassal taxes/levies. Of course, if you have too few holdings in a large realm you will be very weak and vulnerable in civil wars.

This wiki has some decent guides http://ckiiwiki.com/Beginner%27s_guide but as you will discover, much of the fun in CK2 is in losing spectacularly and entertainingly. As this site succinctly describes. http://www.matchstickeyes.com/2012/03/16/how-to-lose-crusader-kings-ii-a-very-short-guide/

@banefirelord For question 2 I learned this over time and this helped me a lot but when defending you don't need to get a 100% victory. What I try to do when defending someone more powerful than myself is I try and get enough victory points for a white peace. You will only earn half the prestige for the win but at least you won't be tied up in a per-longed war which will drain much more resources and man power in the long run. Same is also true for revolts, yeah you don't get to imprison the person behind it but at least you get all of your stuff back and live to fight another day.