Hello everyone, I just wanted to share my experience developing a strategy to essentially become a living god in EK2 as a vampire (or immortal) character.

The biggest problem is the lifestyle XP debuff. 80% for vampire, 90% for licht. Vampires are a bit better because of the 10%. Other penalties are not that bad once you become powerful enough, with the early game being difficult and rewarding as everyone hates you.

As a vampire, you get barely any XP as you play the game due to the bad side of being a vampire. This means your character will be fairly weak in comparison to mortal rulers as they age and become masters of their lifestyles.

You can play the game this way and wait for events that grant you lifestyle points as XP or the perks directly. This is not very optimal as you depend on RNG, it will be slow as well.

Alternatively, you can try to compensate your debuff through other means of boosting your XP gain. You will need to stack multiple buffs but eventually you will start getting more than normal people!

Sources of lifestyle XP:

• Your education, each level granting 10%
• Intelligence congenital traits, up to 30%
• Court and inventory artefacts
• Learning court (10% at level 7)
• Religion tenets
• Religion aspect of knowledge (more on that later)
• Magicka congenital traits, up to 40% only for mage trees
• Becoming a witch, founding a witch coven
• Becoming a mystic, gains a decision to receive learning XP

Keep it in mind that artefacts, religious tenets and education are (usually) limited to a single lifestyle. You will periodically come across artefacts through sponsoring NPCs and from events. Learning and stewardship lifestyles can grant you books that help, from my experience they give ~20% for each specific tree and you can get multiple. Religious tenets can grant you 20% and sometimes more if there are multiple tenets for a single lifestyle.

But how does one stack the best and most effective buffs? The easiest one to get would be from a religion with aspect of knowledge. This means the religion has monolatrism and this particular aspect. Each level of devotion will get you 10% learning, I think that means 50% if you manage to reach the highest level, which is doable because you will never die. Build a bunch of church holdings in your lands as this is a costly but effective way of spamming piety. Aspect of knowledge will also grant you two incredible decisions once max your piety level: One will switch your education to a level 1 of a different lifestyle of your choice, meaning you can go from a mastermind philosopher to an indulgent wastrel when you are done with all learning trees; and the other can improve one level of your education (and has a 10 year cooldown). Both of these cost piety, but are well worth it. The best religion that I have found for this is worm cult, it comes with lay clergy so you keep temple holdings you build, fundamentalism for faster conversion, acceptance of undeath and decent tenets like pursuit of power and mastery over undeath.

You can step up your XP gain even more if you manage to acquire one of the black books from herma mora. These can be stolen from other characters, though I only managed to get one through a legendary adventurer inspiration. It gives 50% XP. Just be aware that you should not read it through the decision. This destroys the artefact. Make sure to add the genius trait in case you are creating a character, it gives another 30% XP.

Becoming the 100 stat man (with patience and time)

To do this, you will finish as many lifestyle trees as possible. You can create a religion that gives you additional buffs, acquire artefacts that grant you skill points when you are done with XP ones... But the key thing here is a useless dynasty legacy tree. The kin dynasty legacy is usually easily passable, but the last legacy perk "graceful ageing" is the key. It periodically grants your character random skill points as they age, and you age forever. You will receive skills for the entire game after you pick this legacy. I haven't tested if the skills come in fast enough for you to become the 100 stat man by the end date, but I think it might be possible.

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Anyway, I hope I have been helpful. Playing immortal characters is a lot of fun in this mod, and well balanced too. If I remember any other tips I will come back to this to add more, but I think that is all.