It's hard to get motivated for warring on my current game.
It's 1150 and I'm the emperor of Britannia, with isles conquered. Kings of Lorraine, Aquitaine, Sardinia, Sweden, Lapland, Asturia and one other within Spain are my vassals. Most of the Kingdoms outside the isles were acquired my supporting claimants to the throne.
I just can't be bothered to wage war for a 3 county duchy. I won't even notice the difference in borders.
Give me a juicy pretender for west Frankia or something and we'll talk.
Yeah, my goals have definitely shifted from "survive the vikings" to "grab all the territory" to "experimental breeding program". Someone on reddit posted an economy guide which basically points out that your income and levies are overwhelmingly tied to the strength of your personal domain rather than how many vassals you have. And I can see it; I'm getting a maximum of 0.3 gold per month from my very strongest vassals, vs 1.2 gold per month from my crappiest county. So its really not worth grabbing territory unless you're going to use it personally. I'd rather go for marriages to powerful dynasties in the hopes of getting claims I can use to take entire Kingdoms later.
I've been experimenting with giving my adult kids some counties here and there. They seem to develop more traits if they're actively doing stuff.
Just be aware that sometimes, "actively doing stuff" means waging a hopeless war to conquer Tunis, leading his army to defeat after defeat and losing an eye and an arm in the process, thereby dying a broken man from his injuries just months before you and your alliance of Hungary, Poland and Bohemia were about to win the war to enforce his claim to the Byzantine Empire that he inherited from his mother. One which you could not wage again with your other still-living son because you never actually had the prestige for the CB for the first place, sending you to the lowest level of fame and your prestige into the negative thousands, and even when you swear fealty to Byzantium just to start a claimant faction war, soon it turns out you are also dying from a would be-assassin who, despite have zero chance of success, managed to get all the events that lowered the target's health. And so on your death, your infant grandson, too distantly related from the marriages that gave you those alliances to renew them, has to deal with your other, still living son as his most powerful vassal.
(yes this actually happened to me, but it was so CK I couldn't help but laugh at it all.)
Third Generation Norse in England, great grand son of Whiteshirt:
Made Kingdom of England
Caught Son in Bed with My Wife
Jailed son
Had pope declare a Crusade against me
Converted to Insular Christianity
Killed son and somehow lost stress
Back to back one tried to murder me and another was caught sleeping with his mom
Yeah, sounds about Crusader Kings. What you want is a really good Spymaster. Or, if you feel like your current character is terrible and you want to play as the much better heir, a really good Spymaster who hates you.
Back to back one tried to murder me and another was caught sleeping with his mom
Yeah, sounds about Crusader Kings. What you want is a really good Spymaster. Or, if you feel like your current character is terrible and you want to play as the much better heir, a really good Spymaster who hates you.
Spymaster is the one council position where I will ignore the bitching of "Powerful" vassals and only put in someone actually competent at the job. 8 Learning realm priest? Annoying but I can deal with it. 8 intrigue spymaster? Completely different story.
I've been experimenting with giving my adult kids some counties here and there. They seem to develop more traits if they're actively doing stuff.
Its worth bearing in mind that this will count against whatever they eventually inherit. E.g, if you're under partition and have 10 counties and two sons, and you've already given your heir three counties, they'll only inherit two more when you die. Which is not ideal if the three you gave them were crap ones you just conquered, leaving your second child to inherit five good counties from your original territory. For this reason I never give anything to my primary heir since they're already in line to get the lion's share anyway, but I'll sometimes hand out newly conquered counties to my younger kids.
So my giant Scandinavian Empire transitioned from Tribal to Feudal. And, as expected, my levee count dropped tremendously. Although my income remained.
And, as expected, my large Tribal neighbours took advantage of my hopefully-temporary weakened state to start taking counties at the fringes of my realm. And I didn't really care, to be honest. My realm is massive, my army is still big enough to tangle with my Feudal neighbours, if my Tribal neighbours want to grab a few tiny territories at the border I'm just gonna let them.
But then Poland and its allies decided to launch an invasion of the Kingdom of Pomerania. And I was like, "Wait, I have Pomerania? Huh, I have a lot of counties of Pomerania."
So my recently Feudal Empire against a large Tribal alliance. Yeah, I wasn't gonna win that. But while I'm not willing to go bankrupt in a doomed attempt to hang on to a few border counties, I'm not about to let my opponents take a huge chunk out of my realm without a bit of a fight. Even if it is a huge chunk I was unaware of even having.
Of course, my army doesn't stand a chance against the Tribal one, and the AI wisely keeps its armies clumped up so they can reinforce one another if I try to pick off a smaller one. So instead I just... sailed into Poland and sieged down its capital. And then just kept sieging counties. At any point, the AI could have marched its army back into its home territory, chase my army out and retake its counties, but no. It stayed in Pomerania and kept sieging counties there, while I kept sieging Poland. Back and forth and back and forth.
Turns out, the AI doesn't really like wars that stretch out for years and years, and with me and them taking each other's counties in roughly equal measure, the war score never managed to tick up very high in my enemy's favour. So, in the end, apparently fed up with accomplishing nothing, Poland agreed to a white peace and I got to keep Pomerania.
They really should've crushed my forces and then taken the realm, but as it happened, my relatively tiny army managed to annoy them into a truce. I'm willing to call that a win.
Blech. I managed to grab West Francia and form the Empire of Francia, making me Emperor of both Britannia and Francia. Great, awesome. Except then I die, and rather than splitting the two Empires between my children nicely, I'm left with a Britannia with ugly blobs of Francia in the middle of it, and vice-versa. And Ireland is now part of Francia. Aaaaargh!
This may of been a mistake. The other Norse seem mad at my new faith and want my lands. The Isles has 3k men, Sweden 4k and Denmark 7k. I can raise 3k. Sweden and Denmark already own parts of England.
Hopefully this new god of mine favors me, I will need it.
This is very weird. I reformed my Norse religion. My head of faith called a crusade for Norway, which I own already. So am I going to give the beneficiary the whole kingdom if I win?
This is very weird. I reformed my Norse religion. My head of faith called a crusade for Norway, which I own already. So am I going to give the beneficiary the whole kingdom if I win?
Short answer is no.
Long answer it depends on if your Spiritual HoF has their own preferred candidate or not. If they do (and it might be you as King of Norway) then they become the ruler of the land claimed by the Great Holy War with the top beneficiaries taking the lower titles. Even if that isn't the case, since you are already the proper Norse religion, you'd still keep Norway, and whoever was the top beneficiary becomes ruler of whatever was taken.
...Which is probably the tiny islands off the north of Scotland/Alba, which technically start off as the de jure part of Norway, along with Iceland IIRC... Heads of Faith are currently not very good at picking Crusade targets that would actually be worth calling their entire faith to war for.
This is very weird. I reformed my Norse religion. My head of faith called a crusade for Norway, which I own already. So am I going to give the beneficiary the whole kingdom if I win?
Short answer is no.
Long answer it depends on if your Spiritual HoF has their own preferred candidate or not. If they do (and it might be you as King of Norway) then they become the ruler of the land claimed by the Great Holy War with the top beneficiaries taking the lower titles. Even if that isn't the case, since you are already the proper Norse religion, you'd still keep Norway, and whoever was the top beneficiary becomes ruler of whatever was taken.
...Which is probably the tiny islands off the north of Scotland/Alba, which technically start off as the de jure part of Norway, along with Iceland IIRC... Heads of Faith are currently not very good at picking Crusade targets that would actually be worth calling their entire faith to war for.
Or likewise, whether they have any chance of actually taking said target. The Catholic world is a shadow of its former self thanks to Waldensianism and my custom faith taking over most of Western Europe, yet they still keep calling crusades against Jerusalem. I had one called against me and the entire Catholic faith was able to raise about 6000 men vs my 18000, not even counting my allies who also piled on.
Mind you, given how most of the actual crusades went, this is probably historically accurate.
I'm currently in a similar Crusade loop. I own Syria and Egypt, and whenever the pope gets frisky I lose 3 years standing 1 province away from the coast until more crusaders land, because I have enough armies to kill them but not enough to safely push Rome. In theory the Crusade calls in 40k troops but about 10k lands at a time, and I can field about 16k. The one time it was 14k the -30% advantage was enough.
The upside is that the renown/piety is great. The downside is that the money doesn't cover the loss, and it is my limiting factor by far.
It is pretty funny that the pope gets all the holy orders + mercs, so they arrive months before anyone else (since they instant spawn). They're decimated before anyone else arrives.
I noticed that a lot of the map maxes out the tech tree currently. Playing from the early start, almost all feudal cultures have the Middle-Age start at the earliest possible date of 1057.
Returned to my Halfdan game. Well, his grandson rather. He started a war for the kingdom of Alba late in his life and his son finished it. That gave almost enough land to form Britannia and a vassal taking a county from parts of England Denmark had conquered put me over the limit. This guy is just and honest so some of the normal shenanigans cause a ton of stress but he's overall a pretty good character with one of the mental traits. His son is a Genius with high learning but because he was educated under a vassal I could not prevent him from becoming Shy and Paranoid so he's going to be very different to play as. I'd hoped to use him to reform the faith but I'm waiting for the Norse culture split event to fire before taking holy sites in Scandinavia to stay Norse. I've already taken over as the cultural head but would prefer to not have my tech growth held back by tribal counties in Sweden. Still waiting as of 960.
So I decided to do a 1.1 Mother of Us All run and goddamn is that ever an accurate name. 80 years later the dynasty is up to 188 members. Everybody is having 5+ kids, it's ridiculous
My very first murder plot outed me as a murderer so after that well, time to correct some issues. Plus once I reformed the religion executing infidels was free dread and piety. Despite being just and honest, my pile of friends told me to not stress out over it. I think you actually keep the -stress modifier after they die too, I spent the entire game on 0/100 stress. AI still doesn't seem to do matrilineal marriages very much
I founded the empire, reformed the religion and consecrated the bloodline as the original character, and late in life I got offered a chance to be a witch...
However with a stupid number of dynasty members and an even stupider number of children coming of age constantly I'm still trying to make enough witches to take the decision. I'm just chain running witch induction plots - it's harder to find a valid character to induct, I have to scroll trough the entire list over and over
I'm an unstoppable juggernaut rampaging over africa. There have been no serious internal or external threats since very early on. Various factions get started and then stopped, I don't even pay attention to them anymore
My earlier campaign problems were neatly solved by the bubonic plague. It wiped my emperor and 3 of his wives. Some interesting time were had.
On other news. The random name generator can be a bit weird. I usually name one of my sons Halfdan in honour of the founder. but otherwise I've let the game decide the names.
It's year 1200 and I'm still waiting for Halfdan II.
My current ruler is Emperor Guido III.
And I'm Norse descended Anglo-Saxon dynasty that never had holdings in Italy. New Jersey.
I got to alliance with Byzantine by betrothing off my oldest son. Sweet.
I didn't even notice she wasn't a princess. She was the 8-year old child-empress!
My empire is pretty big, but Byzantium owns east-Europe, middle-east and north-east Africa.
My Grandson should ascent to the throne just in time to face the Mongols.
Did lose some territory before final showdown.
On west, My emperor died literally 2 years before he could figure out that you can leave all titles to a single heir. Brother got Empire of Francia, which is currently imploding.
On north is a failed attempt to make cousins and sons into independent rulers. They're also imploding.
On east, my current emperor lost independence wars against Egypt, Syria and Sadaddin. This was before he inherited the western Empire.
I'd gobble them all up, except:
The Mongols are here!!
East vs Farther East.
War of the Century.
I am close to finishing Mother of us All.
I'm somewhere in the 1100s and there are roughly 2000 Dauras owning 90% of Africa.
I feudalized, which is probably a mistake. My plan was to minimize the damage by doing it right after capturing Syria, a well developed region. But the drop in levied and income is enormous. -75% on each, and having to pay Men at Arms in gold means Golden Obligations is a must.
Find secrets blackmail get money.
A side effect of Feudalism is that you can have Cadet branches, which the AI will always do. So there are a hundred of them.
I did it because I wanted proper Partition (instead of Confed Partition) But you are way better off planning better than
me on releasing small Kingdoms after they have finished converting faith.
I was too late too, I got assassinated 3y before getting Partition and am in an alliance and truce with the other Empire now because of AI inbreeding.
An because of the many rulers there are so many bishops now who can get me -10% fervor....which fires the Old Bori event....
Still going to get there, it's just getting tougher.
It's a weird run because the middle is almost boring easy.
You can blame for many things, but planning ahead isn't one of them.
Insular Christianity + Saxon elective system have been real stabilizing force.
Me and most of my vassals have multiple wives and billion kids, so everyone is allied to everyone.
I don't think I've faced a civil war even once during the campaign, apart from occasional peasant.
Insular is also friendly with pope, so no crusades against you.
I've only had to manage elective system few times, when an outsider became an heir.
Otherwise I've been happy to let any of the relatives to get elected.
The nice thing with fighting the Mongols is that they have 30k event troops which don't respawn. So if you can force a large battle and win, they will be permanently weaker military-wise. I had a similar looking map when I launched the second war with Mongol, found their troops, and destroyed them completely. They only had like 10k actual levies afterwards, so one generation later they have completely collapsed.
I almost lost an independence war because I stupidly had my emperor leading an 8k army sieging capitols when a 20k army that had been kicking my ass showed up out of nowhere. My emperor barely escaped being captured. Losing the war would have been a setback, but I imagine it'd be pretty embarrassing for my dude to negotiate with the king of Denmark after he denounced and tried to imprison him. I'd been wary of how powerful of a vassal he was for a bit, so when I saw the faction was ready to send an ultimatum, I decided I needed to revoke the kingdom of Denmark. I wondered maybe an "unfortunate accident" might help prevent war, maybe the line of succession would benefit me. So I went to check who his heir was.
same image with arrows
Apparently this is something the AI likes to do. When I switched to my current empress, I found she had her oldest son as a concubine. I was like no, you have a continent's worth of beautiful, herculean genius's, concubine a cousin or distant relative or anything besides your own children. Crusader kings, please.
An because of the many rulers there are so many bishops now who can get me -10% fervor....which fires the Old Bori event....
I think this event fires at a regular interval regardless of the size of the faith. The only way to prevent it is if there are literally sinful bishops.
The big hit to fervor is really your vassals doing constant holy wars, you just don't get told about it.
From what I can tell, there is no way for a player to avoid the event that splits the Norse into Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. Even holding no territory in mainland Europe I ended up turning Swedish. In a future Halfdan game I may have to try switching cultures to keep my county development average from being tanked by tribal counties.
It's somewhere between 1000 and 1050 and the reduction to vassals traveling for conquests has made a very noticeable difference. At this time in my last game I had taken over France and Span. Now I have Brittany because the Duke of Cornwall was ambitious and took half of it and I took the other half to have more control over when and how the duchy is made, Zeeland because I wanted the holy site, the duchy of Uppland for that holy site, Nidaros + one county next to it, Sjaelland, and duchy on the north of France that went through a weird swap of being conquered by Jerusalem before the duke of East Anglia conquered it.
Sweden has completely ceased to exist after repeated wars from Denmark and the Finnish kingdoms. Denmark is actually pretty big actually with most of Norway and parts of Sweden in it along with a smattering of northern German counties.
The downside to having much more restrained vassals is that Crusades are even more miserable. With how many dukes and counts join one now, I probably have no choice except to blob up just to survive those. At one point I decided it was ridiculous to fight another crusade in less than 20 years after the last so i swapped characters and redirected the called Crusade to somewhere near India. There really needs to be a longer cooldown and/or greater reward for beating back a Crusade. The prestige and piety boosts really only matter once on a character. And whatever they did to try to make the pope not just hire every mercenary in the world is clearly not working.
From what I can tell, there is no way for a player to avoid the event that splits the Norse into Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. Even holding no territory in mainland Europe I ended up turning Swedish. In a future Halfdan game I may have to try switching cultures to keep my county development average from being tanked by tribal counties.
It's somewhere between 1000 and 1050 and the reduction to vassals traveling for conquests has made a very noticeable difference. At this time in my last game I had taken over France and Span. Now I have Brittany because the Duke of Cornwall was ambitious and took half of it and I took the other half to have more control over when and how the duchy is made, Zeeland because I wanted the holy site, the duchy of Uppland for that holy site, Nidaros + one county next to it, Sjaelland, and duchy on the north of France that went through a weird swap of being conquered by Jerusalem before the duke of East Anglia conquered it.
Sweden has completely ceased to exist after repeated wars from Denmark and the Finnish kingdoms. Denmark is actually pretty big actually with most of Norway and parts of Sweden in it along with a smattering of northern German counties.
The downside to having much more restrained vassals is that Crusades are even more miserable. With how many dukes and counts join one now, I probably have no choice except to blob up just to survive those. At one point I decided it was ridiculous to fight another crusade in less than 20 years after the last so i swapped characters and redirected the called Crusade to somewhere near India. There really needs to be a longer cooldown and/or greater reward for beating back a Crusade. The prestige and piety boosts really only matter once on a character. And whatever they did to try to make the pope not just hire every mercenary in the world is clearly not working.
According to the files, Preventing the culture switch away from Norse in your realm requires you to hold at least 80% of all counties of that culture by the time the event triggers, and even then it will still happen beyond your borders.
...and I think one of the most common complaints I've seen on the forums is how nigh-impossible and unfun it is to defend against Crusades/GHW and the like, so I would hope they're looking into that for the next update.
From what I can tell, there is no way for a player to avoid the event that splits the Norse into Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. Even holding no territory in mainland Europe I ended up turning Swedish. In a future Halfdan game I may have to try switching cultures to keep my county development average from being tanked by tribal counties.
It's somewhere between 1000 and 1050 and the reduction to vassals traveling for conquests has made a very noticeable difference. At this time in my last game I had taken over France and Span. Now I have Brittany because the Duke of Cornwall was ambitious and took half of it and I took the other half to have more control over when and how the duchy is made, Zeeland because I wanted the holy site, the duchy of Uppland for that holy site, Nidaros + one county next to it, Sjaelland, and duchy on the north of France that went through a weird swap of being conquered by Jerusalem before the duke of East Anglia conquered it.
Sweden has completely ceased to exist after repeated wars from Denmark and the Finnish kingdoms. Denmark is actually pretty big actually with most of Norway and parts of Sweden in it along with a smattering of northern German counties.
The downside to having much more restrained vassals is that Crusades are even more miserable. With how many dukes and counts join one now, I probably have no choice except to blob up just to survive those. At one point I decided it was ridiculous to fight another crusade in less than 20 years after the last so i swapped characters and redirected the called Crusade to somewhere near India. There really needs to be a longer cooldown and/or greater reward for beating back a Crusade. The prestige and piety boosts really only matter once on a character. And whatever they did to try to make the pope not just hire every mercenary in the world is clearly not working.
According to the files, Preventing the culture switch away from Norse in your realm requires you to hold at least 80% of all counties of that culture by the time the event triggers, and even then it will still happen beyond your borders.
...and I think one of the most common complaints I've seen on the forums is how nigh-impossible and unfun it is to defend against Crusades/GHW and the like, so I would hope they're looking into that for the next update.
I've seen some AI characters outside of Scandinavia remain Norse after the event but I have no idea what lets them do so. The wiki said the event shouldn't hit anyone outside of Scandinavia and Northern Europe but I'm not sure what it considers Northern Europe anymore as apparently England still counted. At the very least I'm not too far behind on tech. I mean, I'm still pretty far behind on it and will not start the High Medieval period at its date but I've managed to catch up somewhat with all of my leaders spending some time in the Learning trees since becoming cultural head. Certainly better than what the Danes have managed due to being stick in Tribal. Moving my capitol to Hwicce and giving away Jorvik so I could have Stonehenge in my realm helps with that as does now having had a 2 or 3 generations of Genius rulers.
In other news, I used this game to experiment a little more with faith tenets and doctrines.
This time I kept Asatru's no spiritual head and theocratic vassals because it always seemed like the more asshole rulers ended up holding temples and tanking fervor. Plus it's a good chunk of piety to change it to a temporal head of faith.
Still went with equal rights but the AI definitely still seems to not have the greatest handle on it and it does slow down my genius breeding program since my rulers have only been having one kid and stopping whereas before I might get a few daughters first to matraliniealy marry to people with good traits. In theory i can get the best of both worlds by making my own laws as male preference while still having female commanders, champions, etc but that needs high crown authority first.
I'm sticking with Monasticism and Warmongering for two tenets. Did about a decade with natural primitivism where witchcraft was accepted and everyone else shunned. That was amusing but not being able to jail and revoke seemed like it would make pruning down ambitious vassals a lot tougher.
Ended up reloading and going for Religious Law instead but still making withcraft accepted. My vassals have mostly avoided sinful traits though so my new plan is to educate the heirs of dukes with non-de jure holdings/vassals and see if I can give them one sinful trait or more. We'll see if this pays off in a generation.
Also, I'd already been planning on making witchcraft accepted when I got the event that led to my ruler becoming a witch. He made some headway on starting a house coven that his successor finished. Said successor also consecrated the bloodline after a Crusade defense though the benefits for it are less than what I got when I was the head of faith.
So, right now I'm going for a personal chevo: Zunist Persian Empire under the Zunbil dynasty.
Step one is getting big enough that I'm not instantly smited when the Heir who was educated as the version of Bon that allows for human sacrifice takes over. Since Zunbil is already Muslim in 867, the government type is clan, so no contract I can use to trade away levies for Title revocation protection, at least for the point where I would be the most vulnerable. Original idea was to stay safe under the Saffarids as I work my way through Hindu and Buddist Kabulstan, but that idea went belly-up thanks to a perfect storm of RNG lords that actually made Saffarid substantially weaker than Tahirid, so instead I had to help my liege fend off regulat conquests of my lands long enough for him to wear down to the point where I could got to war with him for the duchy my capital is in (which Zunbil starts with a weal claim on) use my higher status to get a marriage alliamce with Tahrid with my heir (she even had the quick trait!) circumvent the Truce timer with a independence faction demand (since I just used a regular wardec for the duchy), and then swore fealty to Tahrid, who had claimed all of Kabulstan so I could press my claims before I died.
Now I'm the heir, whose educated in Stewardship, so Claim Throne scheme in the not-so-distant future. In the meantime though, Afghan culture doesn't start with the invovation needed to take limited Crown Authority so I can revoke my brothers' titles, so I'm probably going to have to murder a few to gain some of that land back before the inspiration unlocks.
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why is that
Nothing much what's updo with you?
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What is your succession type? The most obvious reason would be because you're under some kind of elective and people keep changing their votes.
Yeah, my goals have definitely shifted from "survive the vikings" to "grab all the territory" to "experimental breeding program". Someone on reddit posted an economy guide which basically points out that your income and levies are overwhelmingly tied to the strength of your personal domain rather than how many vassals you have. And I can see it; I'm getting a maximum of 0.3 gold per month from my very strongest vassals, vs 1.2 gold per month from my crappiest county. So its really not worth grabbing territory unless you're going to use it personally. I'd rather go for marriages to powerful dynasties in the hopes of getting claims I can use to take entire Kingdoms later.
Just be aware that sometimes, "actively doing stuff" means waging a hopeless war to conquer Tunis, leading his army to defeat after defeat and losing an eye and an arm in the process, thereby dying a broken man from his injuries just months before you and your alliance of Hungary, Poland and Bohemia were about to win the war to enforce his claim to the Byzantine Empire that he inherited from his mother. One which you could not wage again with your other still-living son because you never actually had the prestige for the CB for the first place, sending you to the lowest level of fame and your prestige into the negative thousands, and even when you swear fealty to Byzantium just to start a claimant faction war, soon it turns out you are also dying from a would be-assassin who, despite have zero chance of success, managed to get all the events that lowered the target's health. And so on your death, your infant grandson, too distantly related from the marriages that gave you those alliances to renew them, has to deal with your other, still living son as his most powerful vassal.
(yes this actually happened to me, but it was so CK I couldn't help but laugh at it all.)
Back to back one tried to murder me and another was caught sleeping with his mom
Made Kingdom of England
Caught Son in Bed with My Wife
Jailed son
Had pope declare a Crusade against me
Converted to Insular Christianity
Killed son and somehow lost stress
Love this game.
Yeah, sounds about Crusader Kings. What you want is a really good Spymaster. Or, if you feel like your current character is terrible and you want to play as the much better heir, a really good Spymaster who hates you.
Spymaster is the one council position where I will ignore the bitching of "Powerful" vassals and only put in someone actually competent at the job. 8 Learning realm priest? Annoying but I can deal with it. 8 intrigue spymaster? Completely different story.
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Its worth bearing in mind that this will count against whatever they eventually inherit. E.g, if you're under partition and have 10 counties and two sons, and you've already given your heir three counties, they'll only inherit two more when you die. Which is not ideal if the three you gave them were crap ones you just conquered, leaving your second child to inherit five good counties from your original territory. For this reason I never give anything to my primary heir since they're already in line to get the lion's share anyway, but I'll sometimes hand out newly conquered counties to my younger kids.
And, as expected, my large Tribal neighbours took advantage of my hopefully-temporary weakened state to start taking counties at the fringes of my realm. And I didn't really care, to be honest. My realm is massive, my army is still big enough to tangle with my Feudal neighbours, if my Tribal neighbours want to grab a few tiny territories at the border I'm just gonna let them.
But then Poland and its allies decided to launch an invasion of the Kingdom of Pomerania. And I was like, "Wait, I have Pomerania? Huh, I have a lot of counties of Pomerania."
So my recently Feudal Empire against a large Tribal alliance. Yeah, I wasn't gonna win that. But while I'm not willing to go bankrupt in a doomed attempt to hang on to a few border counties, I'm not about to let my opponents take a huge chunk out of my realm without a bit of a fight. Even if it is a huge chunk I was unaware of even having.
Of course, my army doesn't stand a chance against the Tribal one, and the AI wisely keeps its armies clumped up so they can reinforce one another if I try to pick off a smaller one. So instead I just... sailed into Poland and sieged down its capital. And then just kept sieging counties. At any point, the AI could have marched its army back into its home territory, chase my army out and retake its counties, but no. It stayed in Pomerania and kept sieging counties there, while I kept sieging Poland. Back and forth and back and forth.
Turns out, the AI doesn't really like wars that stretch out for years and years, and with me and them taking each other's counties in roughly equal measure, the war score never managed to tick up very high in my enemy's favour. So, in the end, apparently fed up with accomplishing nothing, Poland agreed to a white peace and I got to keep Pomerania.
They really should've crushed my forces and then taken the realm, but as it happened, my relatively tiny army managed to annoy them into a truce. I'm willing to call that a win.
Hopefully this new god of mine favors me, I will need it.
Long answer it depends on if your Spiritual HoF has their own preferred candidate or not. If they do (and it might be you as King of Norway) then they become the ruler of the land claimed by the Great Holy War with the top beneficiaries taking the lower titles. Even if that isn't the case, since you are already the proper Norse religion, you'd still keep Norway, and whoever was the top beneficiary becomes ruler of whatever was taken.
...Which is probably the tiny islands off the north of Scotland/Alba, which technically start off as the de jure part of Norway, along with Iceland IIRC... Heads of Faith are currently not very good at picking Crusade targets that would actually be worth calling their entire faith to war for.
Or likewise, whether they have any chance of actually taking said target. The Catholic world is a shadow of its former self thanks to Waldensianism and my custom faith taking over most of Western Europe, yet they still keep calling crusades against Jerusalem. I had one called against me and the entire Catholic faith was able to raise about 6000 men vs my 18000, not even counting my allies who also piled on.
Mind you, given how most of the actual crusades went, this is probably historically accurate.
The upside is that the renown/piety is great. The downside is that the money doesn't cover the loss, and it is my limiting factor by far.
It is pretty funny that the pope gets all the holy orders + mercs, so they arrive months before anyone else (since they instant spawn). They're decimated before anyone else arrives.
I noticed that a lot of the map maxes out the tech tree currently. Playing from the early start, almost all feudal cultures have the Middle-Age start at the earliest possible date of 1057.
I was really not fun. There seemed to be no way to stop the collapse.
Yeah, that happens occasionally.
And then you can build back up, usually stronger than you were before.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
My very first murder plot outed me as a murderer so after that well, time to correct some issues. Plus once I reformed the religion executing infidels was free dread and piety. Despite being just and honest, my pile of friends told me to not stress out over it. I think you actually keep the -stress modifier after they die too, I spent the entire game on 0/100 stress. AI still doesn't seem to do matrilineal marriages very much
I founded the empire, reformed the religion and consecrated the bloodline as the original character, and late in life I got offered a chance to be a witch...
However with a stupid number of dynasty members and an even stupider number of children coming of age constantly I'm still trying to make enough witches to take the decision. I'm just chain running witch induction plots - it's harder to find a valid character to induct, I have to scroll trough the entire list over and over
I'm an unstoppable juggernaut rampaging over africa. There have been no serious internal or external threats since very early on. Various factions get started and then stopped, I don't even pay attention to them anymore
On other news. The random name generator can be a bit weird. I usually name one of my sons Halfdan in honour of the founder. but otherwise I've let the game decide the names.
It's year 1200 and I'm still waiting for Halfdan II.
My current ruler is Emperor Guido III.
And I'm Norse descended Anglo-Saxon dynasty that never had holdings in Italy. New Jersey.
I didn't even notice she wasn't a princess. She was the 8-year old child-empress!
My empire is pretty big, but Byzantium owns east-Europe, middle-east and north-east Africa.
My Grandson should ascent to the throne just in time to face the Mongols.
Did lose some territory before final showdown.
On west, My emperor died literally 2 years before he could figure out that you can leave all titles to a single heir. Brother got Empire of Francia, which is currently imploding.
On north is a failed attempt to make cousins and sons into independent rulers. They're also imploding.
On east, my current emperor lost independence wars against Egypt, Syria and Sadaddin. This was before he inherited the western Empire.
I'd gobble them all up, except:
The Mongols are here!!
East vs Farther East.
War of the Century.
I am close to finishing Mother of us All.
I'm somewhere in the 1100s and there are roughly 2000 Dauras owning 90% of Africa.
I feudalized, which is probably a mistake. My plan was to minimize the damage by doing it right after capturing Syria, a well developed region. But the drop in levied and income is enormous. -75% on each, and having to pay Men at Arms in gold means Golden Obligations is a must.
Find secrets blackmail get money.
A side effect of Feudalism is that you can have Cadet branches, which the AI will always do. So there are a hundred of them.
I did it because I wanted proper Partition (instead of Confed Partition) But you are way better off planning better than
me on releasing small Kingdoms after they have finished converting faith.
I was too late too, I got assassinated 3y before getting Partition and am in an alliance and truce with the other Empire now because of AI inbreeding.
An because of the many rulers there are so many bishops now who can get me -10% fervor....which fires the Old Bori event....
Still going to get there, it's just getting tougher.
It's a weird run because the middle is almost boring easy.
Insular Christianity + Saxon elective system have been real stabilizing force.
Me and most of my vassals have multiple wives and billion kids, so everyone is allied to everyone.
I don't think I've faced a civil war even once during the campaign, apart from occasional peasant.
Insular is also friendly with pope, so no crusades against you.
I've only had to manage elective system few times, when an outsider became an heir.
Otherwise I've been happy to let any of the relatives to get elected.
I almost lost an independence war because I stupidly had my emperor leading an 8k army sieging capitols when a 20k army that had been kicking my ass showed up out of nowhere. My emperor barely escaped being captured. Losing the war would have been a setback, but I imagine it'd be pretty embarrassing for my dude to negotiate with the king of Denmark after he denounced and tried to imprison him. I'd been wary of how powerful of a vassal he was for a bit, so when I saw the faction was ready to send an ultimatum, I decided I needed to revoke the kingdom of Denmark. I wondered maybe an "unfortunate accident" might help prevent war, maybe the line of succession would benefit me. So I went to check who his heir was.
same image with arrows
Apparently this is something the AI likes to do. When I switched to my current empress, I found she had her oldest son as a concubine. I was like no, you have a continent's worth of beautiful, herculean genius's, concubine a cousin or distant relative or anything besides your own children. Crusader kings, please.
I think this event fires at a regular interval regardless of the size of the faith. The only way to prevent it is if there are literally sinful bishops.
The big hit to fervor is really your vassals doing constant holy wars, you just don't get told about it.
It's somewhere between 1000 and 1050 and the reduction to vassals traveling for conquests has made a very noticeable difference. At this time in my last game I had taken over France and Span. Now I have Brittany because the Duke of Cornwall was ambitious and took half of it and I took the other half to have more control over when and how the duchy is made, Zeeland because I wanted the holy site, the duchy of Uppland for that holy site, Nidaros + one county next to it, Sjaelland, and duchy on the north of France that went through a weird swap of being conquered by Jerusalem before the duke of East Anglia conquered it.
Sweden has completely ceased to exist after repeated wars from Denmark and the Finnish kingdoms. Denmark is actually pretty big actually with most of Norway and parts of Sweden in it along with a smattering of northern German counties.
The downside to having much more restrained vassals is that Crusades are even more miserable. With how many dukes and counts join one now, I probably have no choice except to blob up just to survive those. At one point I decided it was ridiculous to fight another crusade in less than 20 years after the last so i swapped characters and redirected the called Crusade to somewhere near India. There really needs to be a longer cooldown and/or greater reward for beating back a Crusade. The prestige and piety boosts really only matter once on a character. And whatever they did to try to make the pope not just hire every mercenary in the world is clearly not working.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
According to the files, Preventing the culture switch away from Norse in your realm requires you to hold at least 80% of all counties of that culture by the time the event triggers, and even then it will still happen beyond your borders.
...and I think one of the most common complaints I've seen on the forums is how nigh-impossible and unfun it is to defend against Crusades/GHW and the like, so I would hope they're looking into that for the next update.
I've seen some AI characters outside of Scandinavia remain Norse after the event but I have no idea what lets them do so. The wiki said the event shouldn't hit anyone outside of Scandinavia and Northern Europe but I'm not sure what it considers Northern Europe anymore as apparently England still counted. At the very least I'm not too far behind on tech. I mean, I'm still pretty far behind on it and will not start the High Medieval period at its date but I've managed to catch up somewhat with all of my leaders spending some time in the Learning trees since becoming cultural head. Certainly better than what the Danes have managed due to being stick in Tribal. Moving my capitol to Hwicce and giving away Jorvik so I could have Stonehenge in my realm helps with that as does now having had a 2 or 3 generations of Genius rulers.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
This time I kept Asatru's no spiritual head and theocratic vassals because it always seemed like the more asshole rulers ended up holding temples and tanking fervor. Plus it's a good chunk of piety to change it to a temporal head of faith.
Still went with equal rights but the AI definitely still seems to not have the greatest handle on it and it does slow down my genius breeding program since my rulers have only been having one kid and stopping whereas before I might get a few daughters first to matraliniealy marry to people with good traits. In theory i can get the best of both worlds by making my own laws as male preference while still having female commanders, champions, etc but that needs high crown authority first.
I'm sticking with Monasticism and Warmongering for two tenets. Did about a decade with natural primitivism where witchcraft was accepted and everyone else shunned. That was amusing but not being able to jail and revoke seemed like it would make pruning down ambitious vassals a lot tougher.
Ended up reloading and going for Religious Law instead but still making withcraft accepted. My vassals have mostly avoided sinful traits though so my new plan is to educate the heirs of dukes with non-de jure holdings/vassals and see if I can give them one sinful trait or more. We'll see if this pays off in a generation.
Also, I'd already been planning on making witchcraft accepted when I got the event that led to my ruler becoming a witch. He made some headway on starting a house coven that his successor finished. Said successor also consecrated the bloodline after a Crusade defense though the benefits for it are less than what I got when I was the head of faith.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Step one is getting big enough that I'm not instantly smited when the Heir who was educated as the version of Bon that allows for human sacrifice takes over. Since Zunbil is already Muslim in 867, the government type is clan, so no contract I can use to trade away levies for Title revocation protection, at least for the point where I would be the most vulnerable. Original idea was to stay safe under the Saffarids as I work my way through Hindu and Buddist Kabulstan, but that idea went belly-up thanks to a perfect storm of RNG lords that actually made Saffarid substantially weaker than Tahirid, so instead I had to help my liege fend off regulat conquests of my lands long enough for him to wear down to the point where I could got to war with him for the duchy my capital is in (which Zunbil starts with a weal claim on) use my higher status to get a marriage alliamce with Tahrid with my heir (she even had the quick trait!) circumvent the Truce timer with a independence faction demand (since I just used a regular wardec for the duchy), and then swore fealty to Tahrid, who had claimed all of Kabulstan so I could press my claims before I died.
Now I'm the heir, whose educated in Stewardship, so Claim Throne scheme in the not-so-distant future. In the meantime though, Afghan culture doesn't start with the invovation needed to take limited Crown Authority so I can revoke my brothers' titles, so I'm probably going to have to murder a few to gain some of that land back before the inspiration unlocks.
I manufactured a claim on a meaningless county, declared war and started to siege.
I sieged couple more provinces. Few more.
Then I got notified that Mongols have disintegrated after the death of the Khan.
Never even saw the doomstack.
(Arrogant, Gluttonous, Callous)
Still no Emperor Halfdan II...