Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
I thought about starting as a Breton count but the main problem as I see it is there's no one nearby really for you to attack to expand. I guess you could go attack Ireland or Iberia, but eh, better to just play there. Would make for an interesting challenge, though. I like to try and get the duchy of Brittany as my main holding.
I thought about starting as a Breton count but the main problem as I see it is there's no one nearby really for you to attack to expand. I guess you could go attack Ireland or Iberia, but eh, better to just play there. Would make for an interesting challenge, though. I like to try and get the duchy of Brittany as my main holding.
Bretons are Celtics so expanding into Wales and Ireland actually makes sense.
All that I can see right now is that Catholic religious authority goes down. I know that affects heresy spread, but I haven't seen any other noticeable effects.
Once it drops down to 50% or so, Europe will explode and your territory will become a pain in the ass to manage.
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Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Awwww yeah, downloading the War of the Roses alpha.
I've been getting way into CK2 after buying it in the Steam sale recently. I started as the bastard son of the King of Denmark. The inheritance law changed to Elective at some point, which resulted in the title passing erratically back and forth between my half-brothers instead of down a clear line of succession. Eventually I was named as the heir and murdered my way onto the throne.
It's been going okay, but expansion is starting to become a problem. I gobbled up most of Finland in holy wars, but it turns out that Finland is worthless due to the extremely low number of holdings. The Holy Roman Empire has me totally boxed in to the south, obviously...I didn't really consider the ramifications of that when I started. I'm currently working on gradually worming my way into Sweden and Norway simultaneously with the backing of mercenaries, but I don't know if my long-term prospects are all that great.
One thing that I really haven't worked out yet is the best way to deal with handing out titles. Duchy titles especially. I initially gave almost all of Finland to my youngest son so he'd be well taken-care of when his older brother inherited the kingdom, but it turns out that pretenders to the throne aren't as understanding about these things as I might have hoped. The duchy of Finland has tried to secede like three times now under different holders. It can barely produce any actual soldiers, so it's trivial to retake, but it's getting to be a chore, and I'm worried about running into similar problems with any new duchies I take from here on out.
The best people to give land to are distant cousins. You get the family bonus without any of the pretender crap. If you can absorb the prestige hit (or want to play like a real feudal lord) give all your sons land.
I tend to have a Duchy or two devoted to the heir. Ideally once I get him married to someone useful.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Giving your direct heir a dutchy (Give him all the counties, then the duchy) pretty much sets him at +100, and if your next inheritance is rough, you have land to soothe over. If not, you can repeat the process.
A minor consideration is that every member of your house that holds land adds to your dynasty prestige, which in turn adds to the amount of prestige you are born with. This bonus is rather small, but every bit helps, and there are basicly no downsides to slowly turning your vassals into kin only. The added advantage is avoiding the foreigner penalty as much as possible. On succession especially, every bit helps.
I've been playing some CK2Plus, and the mod really slows expansion down, while stuff still happens. At first I was doubtful, but now I feel that a won war feels much nicer now that it was actually a challenge.
Or give him a county, then give him the duchy and click "include all lesser holdings" to save time.
I think I'm giving up on my Wales game. Maybe forever, or maybe just until the patch/expansion. My current King has had no time other than to fight various rebellions. 20 years of this crap.
Apparently it's hard to rule Spain, Scandanavia, and the Middle East from Wales.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
My current game is going pretty good. Still on my first ruler (he's 72), and I am King of Ireland and King of Brittany. I have the whole duchy of Brittany as my personal demense. I've spent the last 10 years or so pumping money into it and it's now quite the cash cow. Currently working on upgrading the troop buildings. I'll wait for this ruler to die before I start another conquest, but I'm not sure what that will be.
Also, I played a bit of War of the Roses last night. I'm not sure how much I can say (NDA and all), but I will say that it was pretty fun (even though I'm terrible at it). It's like a slightly less twitchy Mount&Blade multiplayer.
My current game is going pretty good. Still on my first ruler (he's 72), and I am King of Ireland and King of Brittany. I have the whole duchy of Brittany as my personal demense. I've spent the last 10 years or so pumping money into it and it's now quite the cash cow. Currently working on upgrading the troop buildings. I'll wait for this ruler to die before I start another conquest, but I'm not sure what that will be.
Also, I played a bit of War of the Roses last night. I'm not sure how much I can say (NDA and all), but I will say that it was pretty fun (even though I'm terrible at it). It's like a slightly less twitchy Mount&Blade multiplayer.
Yeah, sadly the NDA is pretty strict at this point, although if something slips I could care less. I'm no rat. Hah.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Hmm. As someone whose only been playing Ck2 for a few weeks, it's hard for me to properly gauge the effect of the non-Muslim changes they mentioned. Namely how much of a boost are the Commander traits going to offer and what will the cultural specific buildings offer that the current listings don't. Although, it'd be hilarious to me if it was cosmetic only, changing the name of "Wooden Palisade" to "Ye Ol' Scottish Wooden Palisade".
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
I think the ability to destroy titles is interesting. I'm trying to think of an instance where it would be something you'd want to do.
One change I reallllllly want to see (and I know it's been mentioned in this thread before) is some way to enforce claims if you win a defensive war. That's one of the few things from CK1 I miss (at least I'm pretty sure it was in CK1). I like the CB system, but it totally sucks that you can have someone try to usurp your titles, kick the everloving crap out of them, and get nothing for your trouble. I'm going to look into modding that, but I have a feeling it might be hardcoded.
I think the ability to destroy titles is interesting. I'm trying to think of an instance where it would be something you'd want to do.
I often want to destroy duchy titles in CK2. Often, as a king, the main reason I don't have extra land is because of the relationship hits you take for owning extra duchies or pieces of other peoples' duchies.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Well there you go.
Man, I'm so glad Paradox nailed it with CK2. I'm pretty sure I've been massively disappointed by sequels more than I've been happy. If Paradox is good at one thing, it's making sequels that actually improve on the previous game instead of pissing on everything that made it great. At least from what I've seen.
Man, I'm so glad Paradox nailed it with CK2. I'm pretty sure I've been massively disappointed by sequels more than I've been happy. If Paradox is good at one thing, it's making sequels that actually improve on the previous game instead of pissing on everything that made it great. At least from what I've seen.
Now if they could just somehow manage to make the Mount and Blade series and the Crusader Kings series have a baby, then add multiplayer, I'd seriously love them forever.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Yeah, sometimes when I'm playing CK2 I start getting an itch to play M&B, and vice-versa.
Yeah the 'desires county' penalty is rather large in CK2, though 2 ducal titles is fine in most situations. Late game I really like having 2 or even 3 castles in my capital, so that the army right of out the gate is the strongest around right when a war starts. (3 fully developed castles + marshal bonus can get rather silly, and you get the gold modifier from stewards too). A third dutchy could be partially held by your kid, the bonus of giving it keeps him inline.
Meanwhile in my CK2 game I've just about hit critical mass. I was the highest contributor to the Crusade for Egypt and choose to keep the whole Kingdom, and through hilarious inheritance without any interference (from me at least), I now stand to inherit the Kingdom of Croatia. It's 1165, going to be interesting to see what happens when the Mongols show up.
So I'm playing Portugal and Castille declared war on me. Actual Portugal is basically overrun, but I have a very large colonial empire still. Any advice on how to actually prosecute this kind of war? I'd rather not have to give up any provinces, but I'm not sure I can counter the war score from losing my European holdings without actually invading main-land Spain.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
The naval force limit is totally meaningless, upkeep is barely increased if you go over it.
But generally speaking, blockades are super powerful. You can get a high war score and it jacks up their war exhaustion quickly, which the AIs do factor in terms of what peace deals they're willing to allow.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Oh god, things in Denmark have taken a sudden turn for the awful. I tried to nab a very remote Scottish county in my area as part of my aggressive northern expansion policy, and they turned out to be capable of sending over a lot more troops than I expected. I was eventually able to work then down (with a lot more losses than I had expected based on previous wars with my other neighbors), but they were able to pressure Sweden into the war. The Swedes wiped out the mercenary company which made up like 75% of my remaining forces, forcing me into a demoralizing white peace.
Then, when my levies were still dead and I was at my weakest, my 35-year old heir and my queen abruptly dropped dead one after another of natural causes, which for some reason resulted in my underage grandson (my heir's heir) inheriting the kingdom instead of my 20-something son, murdering all my stats. At this point, every vassal chose to rebel simultaneously.
Attacking three different equal-sized kingdoms over and over again in sequence to keep 10-year truces from slowing down my land acquisition seemed like such a good idea at the time.
To be fair, I couldn't figure out how to disembark troops into hostile territory until like two years ago, so staging a full naval invasion has been out of the question for most of the game. I also didn't know about inviting claimants to your court until really recently, so I've also had very few opportunities to try to claim a whole kingdom instead of all the nickel-and-dime wars I kept being forced to rely on.
On the latter topic, if I invite someone with a non-inheritable claim on a kingdom into my court, marry him matrilinearly to a member of my dynasty, and then push the claim, what happens? Will he be my vassal because he's married into my dynasty, or will he be independent because he isn't personally a member of my bloodline? If he does end up independent, would the kingdom pass into my domain after it gets inherited by one of his sons, who would be in my bloodline?
He'll be independent and his son of your dynasty will inherit (assuming gavelkind/primogeniture). With enough kinslaying, you could get it. But more likely you'll just be gaining an ally.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
To be fair, I couldn't figure out how to disembark troops into hostile territory until like two years ago, so staging a full naval invasion has been out of the question for most of the game. I also didn't know about inviting claimants to your court until really recently, so I've also had very few opportunities to try to claim a whole kingdom instead of all the nickel-and-dime wars I kept being forced to rely on.
On the latter topic, if I invite someone with a non-inheritable claim on a kingdom into my court, marry him matrilinearly to a member of my dynasty, and then push the claim, what happens? Will he be my vassal because he's married into my dynasty, or will he be independent because he isn't personally a member of my bloodline? If he does end up independent, would the kingdom pass into my domain after it gets inherited by one of his sons, who would be in my bloodline?
My understanding is that he'll be independent because he's now a king and can't be the vassal of another king. Bloodline isn't as much a factor as that.
I have hit a point in CK2 where I kind of want to kill myself. King of Ireland, no other claims. My half-brother (also claimint to Ireland) has inheritable claims to 4! English duchies. I don't really want to enforce them as he'll inevitably rebel however.
The naval force limit is totally meaningless, upkeep is barely increased if you go over it.
But generally speaking, blockades are super powerful. You can get a high war score and it jacks up their war exhaustion quickly, which the AIs do factor in terms of what peace deals they're willing to allow.
Thanks for the advice. I lost the initial war and had to give up most of Portugal, but I moved my capitol to South America, rebuilt a massive navy, and regained all but one province while also seizing a handful of Spain's colonies.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
The naval force limit is totally meaningless, upkeep is barely increased if you go over it.
But generally speaking, blockades are super powerful. You can get a high war score and it jacks up their war exhaustion quickly, which the AIs do factor in terms of what peace deals they're willing to allow.
Thanks for the advice. I lost the initial war and had to give up most of Portugal, but I moved my capitol to South America, rebuilt a massive navy, and regained all but one province while also seizing a handful of Spain's colonies.
No problem. Most of what I learned about Paradox games came from Wiz' original monstrosity, which you can find here. Also the reason I own any of them.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
I have hit a point in CK2 where I kind of want to kill myself. King of Ireland, no other claims. My half-brother (also claimint to Ireland) has inheritable claims to 4! English duchies. I don't really want to enforce them as he'll inevitably rebel however.
Send assassins after the Caliph. If you somehow manage to succeed, just do the same with his successor.
I had to hire more mercenaries to try to get Denmark back under control, but both Sweden and a large kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire pounced on me (apparently I was excommunicated at some point and didn't catch it). I had no hope whatsoever of beating the 10,000+ troops from the HRE, so I had no choice but to surrender immediately before the situation got worse. This resulted in another underage heir coming onto the throne (my previous king had been an adult for a matter of months, I think), and due to some mechanics that I don't totally understand, all of my personal holdings were flagged as both recently captured and wrong culture, reducing my levy growth to zero. Also, the new king was flat broke, so my mercenaries rebelled. I tried to use my remaining troops to put down the lesser vassals while avoiding the big doom-stacks, but eventually they got picked off.
I honestly don't know how I got out of it. I had literally zero troops against maybe eight or nine thousand. But somehow I held out long enough to scrape together enough cash to hire another mercenary company, and them plus the thousand or so troops I was eventually able to pull together was just barely enough to reunite almost all of the kingdom.
On the bright side, Norway had been reduced to bits and pieces by intermittent aggression from both Sweden and Scotland while all this was going down, so once my army had finally recovered I pressed my mother's claim on their kingdom. I won without too much trouble, but what I didn't realize was that Norway's succession was elective. My mother nominated some Norwegian nobody to inherit the kingdom instead of me, so I had to murder her in order to get the claim on myself and then re-fight the whole war. A couple of good provinces fell to Scotland by the time I had won again, unfortunately.
Now my top concern is the fact that the kingdom is still under elective succession, and one of the top pretenders--who also controls the most votes--is the king of Scotland. I'm trying to increase the crown rule so I can implement Primogeniture, but since I have no personal duchies there it's looking like it'll never pass. I'm thinking my best option is to just settle for Gavelkind...if I understand correctly, my eldest son is still guaranteed to inherit the kingdom itself, and I don't have claims on any lesser Norwegian titles anyway.
Well I think my Ck2+ game is over, apart from the question if I can fight the Golden Horde / HRE. Because my British Emperor died, left the realm to his 4 year old grand son, and it netted me a single rebelling duke with 6 counties. I'm at ~350 holdings with the largest army in the world, so I'm not sure what can cause much challenges at this point.
Decided to take on the Charlemagne Challenge yesterday (start as Count of Vermandois, direct male descendent of Charlemagne). The difficult start was made even more so by the King of France instituting medium crown authority pretty fast, so I had to marry my way up the ladder.
I thought my break had finally come when I, a lowly count with a mere 3 holdings to my name, was able to marry the Duchess of Auvergne. As she held the higher title, our two sons were raised in her court, out of my direct control. That kind of sucked since I couldn't tutor them, but I was willing to go with it to inherit a dukedom. They were raised uneventfully in Auvergne, until they came of age and the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in CK2 happened. My bitch wife married both of her sons off matrilinerally, basically willfully terminating my (our?) family line! I didn't notice right away as they were in her court, and so by the time I checked both had heirs themselves outside my dynasty and everything was just a complete clusterfuck. My leader was forced to spend his twilight years in a murderous rampage, killing everything in sight to get my lineage straightened out again. I think the body count reached double digits before the dust settled, including my wife, my sons' wives, their heirs and other assorted bad guys that started sniffing around my territory when they saw my line was about to die out.
I was on fine terms with my wife when all this went down (60+ if I recall), and she had no other children. Why on earth would she do something so monumentally stupid? Crazy as it was though I have to admit it was fun trying to fix it, just assassinating my way though southeastern France.
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
In most Paradox games you reach a point of inevitability where you are just so much stronger, its just a matter of time
I reached that point with my EU3 game where I have twice the amount of soldiers as the next guy in the 1690s with no inflation, all of south america and most of the eastern colonies and south africa. My only hope is that I can destroy the HRE and banish the brits out of Sweden which they inhereted and with whom I'm at 200 relations with.
mrt144 on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
I'm getting quite good at this defeating Spain through blockades strategy, since they just will not give up on declaring war on me. The stupid Brits excomunicating me is not helping matters. Most recently though I was able to force Spain to release Aragon, so my plan for the containment of Spain and perhaps their eventual dissolution has begun.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
In most Paradox games you reach a point of inevitability where you are just so much stronger, its just a matter of time
I reached that point with my EU3 game where I have twice the amount of soldiers as the next guy in the 1690s with no inflation, all of south america and most of the eastern colonies and south africa. My only hope is that I can destroy the HRE and banish the brits out of Sweden which they inhereted and with whom I'm at 200 relations with.
Particularly in EU3 I find, it becomes nearly impossible to lose before you even become bigger than everyone. Once you've passed (or are) france and the emperor, that's it, unless you're planing a non-western nation
MackenzierGold Star Police NinjaLurking... less than usual.Registered Userregular
Once I was the King of Ireland (and Wales!), but then England kicked my ass. 200 years in and I was doing pretty decently for my first real foray into this, but the final 3 counties I needed to truely unite Ireland (also Wales) passed 100 years of English rule... goodbye de jure claims. I'm pretty well hemmed in at this point by doom stacks from England, Scotland and France (who owns everything on mainland Europe west of the HRE). Ah well, whom to try next - any suggestions?
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Bretons are Celtics so expanding into Wales and Ireland actually makes sense.
Once it drops down to 50% or so, Europe will explode and your territory will become a pain in the ass to manage.
It's been going okay, but expansion is starting to become a problem. I gobbled up most of Finland in holy wars, but it turns out that Finland is worthless due to the extremely low number of holdings. The Holy Roman Empire has me totally boxed in to the south, obviously...I didn't really consider the ramifications of that when I started. I'm currently working on gradually worming my way into Sweden and Norway simultaneously with the backing of mercenaries, but I don't know if my long-term prospects are all that great.
One thing that I really haven't worked out yet is the best way to deal with handing out titles. Duchy titles especially. I initially gave almost all of Finland to my youngest son so he'd be well taken-care of when his older brother inherited the kingdom, but it turns out that pretenders to the throne aren't as understanding about these things as I might have hoped. The duchy of Finland has tried to secede like three times now under different holders. It can barely produce any actual soldiers, so it's trivial to retake, but it's getting to be a chore, and I'm worried about running into similar problems with any new duchies I take from here on out.
I tend to have a Duchy or two devoted to the heir. Ideally once I get him married to someone useful.
A minor consideration is that every member of your house that holds land adds to your dynasty prestige, which in turn adds to the amount of prestige you are born with. This bonus is rather small, but every bit helps, and there are basicly no downsides to slowly turning your vassals into kin only. The added advantage is avoiding the foreigner penalty as much as possible. On succession especially, every bit helps.
I've been playing some CK2Plus, and the mod really slows expansion down, while stuff still happens. At first I was doubtful, but now I feel that a won war feels much nicer now that it was actually a challenge.
I think I'm giving up on my Wales game. Maybe forever, or maybe just until the patch/expansion. My current King has had no time other than to fight various rebellions. 20 years of this crap.
Apparently it's hard to rule Spain, Scandanavia, and the Middle East from Wales.
Also, I played a bit of War of the Roses last night. I'm not sure how much I can say (NDA and all), but I will say that it was pretty fun (even though I'm terrible at it). It's like a slightly less twitchy Mount&Blade multiplayer.
Yeah, sadly the NDA is pretty strict at this point, although if something slips I could care less. I'm no rat. Hah.
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/content.php?1004-The-Sword-of-Islam-Dev-Diary-3
One change I reallllllly want to see (and I know it's been mentioned in this thread before) is some way to enforce claims if you win a defensive war. That's one of the few things from CK1 I miss (at least I'm pretty sure it was in CK1). I like the CB system, but it totally sucks that you can have someone try to usurp your titles, kick the everloving crap out of them, and get nothing for your trouble. I'm going to look into modding that, but I have a feeling it might be hardcoded.
I often want to destroy duchy titles in CK2. Often, as a king, the main reason I don't have extra land is because of the relationship hits you take for owning extra duchies or pieces of other peoples' duchies.
Man, I'm so glad Paradox nailed it with CK2. I'm pretty sure I've been massively disappointed by sequels more than I've been happy. If Paradox is good at one thing, it's making sequels that actually improve on the previous game instead of pissing on everything that made it great. At least from what I've seen.
Now if they could just somehow manage to make the Mount and Blade series and the Crusader Kings series have a baby, then add multiplayer, I'd seriously love them forever.
Islamic rulers are looking really powerful, so hopefully I'll finally be able to utterly crush them.
Meanwhile in my CK2 game I've just about hit critical mass. I was the highest contributor to the Crusade for Egypt and choose to keep the whole Kingdom, and through hilarious inheritance without any interference (from me at least), I now stand to inherit the Kingdom of Croatia. It's 1165, going to be interesting to see what happens when the Mongols show up.
Blockade them until their war weariness creates enough revolts you can kill their military. You do have a giant fleet for your colonial empire, right?
I'm maxed out at like 56 naval force limit though like a dozen of that is transports. I'm not sure if that's enough to contain them or not.
But generally speaking, blockades are super powerful. You can get a high war score and it jacks up their war exhaustion quickly, which the AIs do factor in terms of what peace deals they're willing to allow.
Then, when my levies were still dead and I was at my weakest, my 35-year old heir and my queen abruptly dropped dead one after another of natural causes, which for some reason resulted in my underage grandson (my heir's heir) inheriting the kingdom instead of my 20-something son, murdering all my stats. At this point, every vassal chose to rebel simultaneously.
Attacking three different equal-sized kingdoms over and over again in sequence to keep 10-year truces from slowing down my land acquisition seemed like such a good idea at the time.
The middle east is also pretty unhistorical...
On the latter topic, if I invite someone with a non-inheritable claim on a kingdom into my court, marry him matrilinearly to a member of my dynasty, and then push the claim, what happens? Will he be my vassal because he's married into my dynasty, or will he be independent because he isn't personally a member of my bloodline? If he does end up independent, would the kingdom pass into my domain after it gets inherited by one of his sons, who would be in my bloodline?
My understanding is that he'll be independent because he's now a king and can't be the vassal of another king. Bloodline isn't as much a factor as that.
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Thanks for the advice. I lost the initial war and had to give up most of Portugal, but I moved my capitol to South America, rebuilt a massive navy, and regained all but one province while also seizing a handful of Spain's colonies.
No problem. Most of what I learned about Paradox games came from Wiz' original monstrosity, which you can find here. Also the reason I own any of them.
Send assassins after the Caliph. If you somehow manage to succeed, just do the same with his successor.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
I had to hire more mercenaries to try to get Denmark back under control, but both Sweden and a large kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire pounced on me (apparently I was excommunicated at some point and didn't catch it). I had no hope whatsoever of beating the 10,000+ troops from the HRE, so I had no choice but to surrender immediately before the situation got worse. This resulted in another underage heir coming onto the throne (my previous king had been an adult for a matter of months, I think), and due to some mechanics that I don't totally understand, all of my personal holdings were flagged as both recently captured and wrong culture, reducing my levy growth to zero. Also, the new king was flat broke, so my mercenaries rebelled. I tried to use my remaining troops to put down the lesser vassals while avoiding the big doom-stacks, but eventually they got picked off.
I honestly don't know how I got out of it. I had literally zero troops against maybe eight or nine thousand. But somehow I held out long enough to scrape together enough cash to hire another mercenary company, and them plus the thousand or so troops I was eventually able to pull together was just barely enough to reunite almost all of the kingdom.
On the bright side, Norway had been reduced to bits and pieces by intermittent aggression from both Sweden and Scotland while all this was going down, so once my army had finally recovered I pressed my mother's claim on their kingdom. I won without too much trouble, but what I didn't realize was that Norway's succession was elective. My mother nominated some Norwegian nobody to inherit the kingdom instead of me, so I had to murder her in order to get the claim on myself and then re-fight the whole war. A couple of good provinces fell to Scotland by the time I had won again, unfortunately.
Now my top concern is the fact that the kingdom is still under elective succession, and one of the top pretenders--who also controls the most votes--is the king of Scotland. I'm trying to increase the crown rule so I can implement Primogeniture, but since I have no personal duchies there it's looking like it'll never pass. I'm thinking my best option is to just settle for Gavelkind...if I understand correctly, my eldest son is still guaranteed to inherit the kingdom itself, and I don't have claims on any lesser Norwegian titles anyway.
I thought my break had finally come when I, a lowly count with a mere 3 holdings to my name, was able to marry the Duchess of Auvergne. As she held the higher title, our two sons were raised in her court, out of my direct control. That kind of sucked since I couldn't tutor them, but I was willing to go with it to inherit a dukedom. They were raised uneventfully in Auvergne, until they came of age and the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in CK2 happened. My bitch wife married both of her sons off matrilinerally, basically willfully terminating my (our?) family line! I didn't notice right away as they were in her court, and so by the time I checked both had heirs themselves outside my dynasty and everything was just a complete clusterfuck. My leader was forced to spend his twilight years in a murderous rampage, killing everything in sight to get my lineage straightened out again. I think the body count reached double digits before the dust settled, including my wife, my sons' wives, their heirs and other assorted bad guys that started sniffing around my territory when they saw my line was about to die out.
I was on fine terms with my wife when all this went down (60+ if I recall), and she had no other children. Why on earth would she do something so monumentally stupid? Crazy as it was though I have to admit it was fun trying to fix it, just assassinating my way though southeastern France.
I reached that point with my EU3 game where I have twice the amount of soldiers as the next guy in the 1690s with no inflation, all of south america and most of the eastern colonies and south africa. My only hope is that I can destroy the HRE and banish the brits out of Sweden which they inhereted and with whom I'm at 200 relations with.
Particularly in EU3 I find, it becomes nearly impossible to lose before you even become bigger than everyone. Once you've passed (or are) france and the emperor, that's it, unless you're planing a non-western nation
FFRK: 9rRG