You probably know what an estate is, but just to make it simpler for this guide.
Lets say you are in a Kingmaker game there are Castle/Player estates, and then there are village estates. On Castle ones you build you castle, and on Village you have a certain deegre of control of a relatively basic AI.













Tehnically the right terms for your estate should be Player estate, or just anything other than a Castle estate since thats a separete concept. In the game's help section you might have come across it and 1 particular mission, mission 6, in which once you take care of Edwin you move your keep to his and your previous estate is left in control of a new AI, id say William since he is Dark Red but its prob just a color to know that you switched.

My 'Help' section and general play Castle estate should appear once you kill a lord and his AI is supposed to be replaced by this basic AI, but in Kingmaker all Player estates turn to village estates, dissapointing to say the least. Weirdly enough Olaf in mission 6 should also turn into this basic AI, but weirdly Firefly made it so that incase you kill Olaf his estate is converted to a village [you find this out by using a map unlocked then editing the map, which is why i went out to create this guide since i was confused why would Firefly do this] So in order to even acquire Castle AI you have to play in a War Custom/Peace/Free Build map with an enemy AI. I am not aware if its possible to edit code to make it so in Kingmaker Estates turn into Castle estates but to be honest this AI is not exciting.

Bassicaly you might as well call this Rat 2.0, or Thief the AI, or dumbass. Once your target is defeated this little Peasant promotes himself to rank Duke while forgeting about all the things he can do. The AI will take whatever castle layout AI has chosen at start of the mission and build Walls, Towers and Defences, so if you killed Barclay he will make a Barclay castle. If there is no layout [Mission 6 AI] then he will just build standard set of buildings, which is always Edwin's building [in short it will take any castle but always use what Edwin uses]

Bit of AI knowledge here, it needs to have either pre placed main buildings or have them in their castle design in other for them to be made, what i mean by this is that if you kill Olaf for example since he doesn't make a barracks he can't produce units, and this still acts like a standard estate so you can't build castle structures.

However as an Estate you can build a lot of economic buildings, you can put Inns and Churches for AI's that don't naturally use them and AI will use them in their economy, this includes weapon production buildings. Lady and Kitchen don't work and AI automatically sells those goods. Oh yeah they sell their goods, partially, i played around with an AI for like 30 minutes and it sent me food and stone, but i saw it regularly sell its vegetables, maybe because original AI was Edwin and he doesn't use veggies so thats why it kept selling.












Now unlike a normal Village with this castle you have 3 modes, Economy , Nothing, and Combat. Now i think they still send goods on either of 2 modes, i think from what ive seen all it means is that on Combat they create units and attack, and economy and nothing they do nothing. But hang on, Combat i say? Yes, our little Peasant, which i named Rat not so long ago can attack... with 40 spearmen and 20 arches. Edwin is stronger than this, infact weirdly this AI will never use Swordsmen even though it creates apropriate workshops and mines Iron. However, there does seem to be a qucik with it on Chapter 6, its way more agressive. On my map it barely wanted to attack the Hawk even tough Hawk was willing to be attacked, but it pummeled Olaf so much it crashed my game, so it seems that it can attack when it wants to or is closer.

The Attack force, note this is 2 Estates attacking at once, funnily they are attacking right after one of other Estates got a lord so, they were hammering my/his guy.











Ai players themselves also seems to ignore castle estates, they seem to think they are just normal Villages so when they attack they only send raids which rarely go trough on the keep, so this little AI is somewhat invincible. One cool thing is that this Estate can capture villages, i think it might be pure accidents, they seem to raid stuff but they don't directly go to the estate. On plus side you can actually control those Estates, you can even control Estates that your Estates capture, quite neat.

Overall this is extremely basic, i made this since there is very few information on these guys and even seen people not understand them completely, but honestly there is not much to them. Still though i am dissapointed you can't have these in Kingmaker, maybe sicne AI can't make them go to combat mode [might be possible to change in game files but who knows] but even so this can honestly be entertaining enough, as having this AI still build walls it makes what ends up in empty maps feel, more active.

How didn't i think of this? Manual contains more information than in game. There is a thing i got wrong [mainly how states you set the estate's names are] but overall there is nothing i didn't mention, still a cool read [there is quite a few stuff that actually is cut from game mentioned, which means some of this stuff was really late decisions]

Estates are the areas of land owned by you and the other Lords in the game.
Coloured borders on the land mark out the estates. Some estates are not owned by
any of the Lords. Neutral estates can be bought using honour and the village within
that estate will automatically supply you with its excess resources.
There are two kinds of estates, village estates and castle estates:
Village estates are simple settlements tending to produce only a few kinds of goods.
The Lord that owns a village estate can expect cartloads of supplies sent to him from
his village. Villages vary in size and in the types of goods they tend to produce. Many
villages start off neutral and they can then be brought from the crown with honour.
Once a village is no longer neutral, that is a Lord owns them, they can be taken by
force by sending troops to capture its village flag. To capture the flag the attacking
force must first get rid off any defenders stood nearby. The more troops there are near
the flag the faster the transfer of ownership will occur.
Castle estates tend to run bigger economies. An attacking army can capture Castle
estates by capturing their flag . Once captured, a castle then becomes the attackers
and will send its master goods just like a village estate. Clicking on the new castle
however will reveal three castle stance icons giving the player a basic set of
objectives for his new castle:
ECONOMIC – The captured castle concentrates on sending goods to the
conqueror’s castle.
DEFENSIVE – The captured castle stores troops and goods, thus fattening
itself up.
AGGRESSIVE – The captured castle builds siege armies and sends them
out to attack targets of your choosing.