---
It seemed I was destined to expand my grand strategy collection having spent so much recent time on EU3; Paradox sale on Steam over the weekend and today is CK2 day. Already spent the entire afternoon as a sort-of-ambitious Sicilian count.
---
Crusader Kings 2 consumes my free time at an alarming rate. I was a tad ornery when Laura was trying to ask me what I wanted for dinner because I was in the middle of a succession crisis, but then I realized a moment later that she had been home from work for a while and was asking what I wanted for dinner because it was 5PM, not noonish.
---
My Duke of Mercia also holds one province in and the Duchy of Lancaster. When the previous pope called the second crusade, it was conveniently at just the right point in time that the Saracen dynasty that held Jerusalem at the time had just finished exhausting their military beating back a rival Muslim dynasty, so when I and a handful of lesser western European powers came riding in there was nothing but ripe sieges and stacks of 2k soldiers everywhere, and when the crusade won I accidentally inherited all of the pope-inaugurated Kingdom of Jerusalem. I now had 100+ holdings which was much higher than the 8 max I could administrate, so I quickly unloaded the four brand spanking new duchies on a bunch of whiny uncles who were mad they didn't have any land. Anyways, one of those uncles decided the Duke of Mercia shouldn't ALSO be the Duke of Lancaster and started a plot (which I foolishly backed) to depose the title for the latter duchy. But being as the ambitious uncle has four kind-of small territories all the way over in the middle east and his opponent controls essentially two duchies worth of provinces in northwest England, he's spent the last several years ferrying over tiny groups of soldiers (started off between 1-2k troops) and promptly smashing them into a much larger force (8k).
The last boats seriously unloaded a squad of 14 guys.
The Duke of Mercia apparently doesn't have any boats (he has a few ports but isn't calling any of his ships) so he's just sitting waiting. I'm waiting for the damn war to be over with (could take decades for the negative warscore to build up at the rate soldiers are slowly being ferried from southern Israel to England) so I can just revoke the damn title anyways (which I can do for free because the cunt supported the pretender in the last succession crisis).
Deus vult.
---
I remembered Steam actually co-operates when trying to take screenshots with CK2 when I noticed this funny little detail up the top-left. My character had just gone from Infirm to Incapable and his wife, Queen Birgitta of England was appointed regent. At some point I'd also gotten an event to have an affair...with his wife. Fun fact: via the gift of tragic irony she's also the highest intrigue vassal I have and is thus my spymaster. I'm several years into Saexraed's grandson's reign and grandma Birgitta is STILL my spymaster.
---
Decided to give the ASoIaF mod for CK2, loaded up the Feast for Crows scenario, picked Martell because Dorne is relatively passive to the central conflict, except shortly in Aegon VI landed in Westeros but I couldn't remember canonically if Dorne supported Aegon's campaign (did a little digging on the wiki, apparently the event that popped up where Arianne is sent as an envoy is yet to occur in the Winds of Winter) but he already has secret pro-Targaryen plots afoot and Aegon VI would technically be his nephew so I figured why not.
Anyways, immersion was immediately broken when, in the first battle of campaign, my troops summarily cornered and slew Jaime Lannister.
---
While I wasn't looking, Scotland managed to somehow inherit all of Norway, which gave momentary pause to my future plans to take Scotland for myself. Fortunately, a few years later virtually every Norwegian duchy revolted and at present Norway's back to the status quo. Meanwhile, Scotland has also somehow inherited what's left of Connacht.
Two words: Scottish vikings.
---
I ran into a snag in my England game where midway through an offensive war to unify Portugal (the third Crusade that granted me the Kingdom of Portugal somehow left two counties in Islamic hands) my king died in battle and quickly resulted in a small succession issue that obliterated my slight advantage over the Moorish reply to my offensive. Took a break for a few days (played some Mount & Blade) and then came back to my save before I'd started my offensive. Went smoothly this time.
When the above king's grandson inherited (his direct son had died to illness) things were very smooth. No rival claims and he cleanly inherited two kingdoms which were under gavelkind succession (which is tough to do, he had at least one eligible uncle and/or brother and I'm not actually sure how it technically happened). Things were great until his two eldest sons starting warring over separate duchies in Portugal (which was still under low crown authority which permits intra-Kingdom warfare). This wasn't unmanageable (I was actually using it to my advantage to try to maneuver the elder son into a stronger position on succession) but then the Duke of East Anglia decided he wanted independence and dragged two other duchies with him. Even THIS wasn't unmanageable but the Fatimid Empire took advantage of the situation to decide he wanted Jerusalem back. With ~2/3 of my potential forces attempting to pacify the other third, I managed to put down the rebellion and bring all my forces into the far east side of the Mediterranean JUST in time to lose the entire Kingdom of Jerusalem to war score.
I actually wasn't too discouraged by losing Jerusalem (one less kingdom title to worry about doling out on succession), but I used it as an excuse to rage-revoke the primary titles of everyone whose rebellion caused me to lose it.
Anyways, I played for a little bit after that, but attempting to mitigate the gavelkind succession of the Kingdom of Ireland and Portugal was more daunting than I was prepared for this afternoon so I decided to quietly retire that campaign for now. The lesson learned here is not to create titles that have de jure gavelkind succession until you ALSO have the ability to create the title one level above it. For instance I basically should never have created the title for the Kingdom of Ireland because it's liable to pass to my heir's sibling and thus completely invalidate the effort spent uniting the Irish mainland. I still would have had to deal with having Portugal and Jerusalem thrust on me, but dealing with 2-3 extra kingdom titles is better than 4.
I started a game as King of France, since I have yet to touch them in a grand strategy game and immediately found another set of problems. Like England, France starts with primogeniture (unlike, say, the Iberian kingdoms), which is much much easier to deal with compared to gavelkind. Unlike England, France starts with no established crown authority which isn't a real disadvantage by itself but means that your internal politics are going to be in constant turmoil as your vassals bicker incessantly and makes individual dukes who accumulate power potentially dangerous. In addition to all that you start with the very menacing HRE looming to the east.
I actually had to start twice. Both times the HRE went full on angry war for the laughably tiny county of Gent. The first time just as I was marshaling all my forces, my uncle decided he should be king and took about a quarter of my forces with him. My 10kish army was getting stomped by the 30k HRE stack when I realized I could just surrender Gent at absolutely no penalty aside from losing the county. When I restarted again, I just gave him Gent and then reclaimed it like 5 years later when the duchy that held it declared independence from the HRE. It seems that the size of the HRE is mitigated by the same problem I'm dealing with--the low crown authority means that basically your "country" is a bunch of tiny duchies constantly warring with each other while you're busy trying to deal with world politics, and the HRE has the added problem of elective succession which means there's only really going to be brief windows of time where there's actually a unified HRE to be worried about knocking at your door all at once. They're already suffering somewhat from a number of independent nations popping out from the empire.
Anyways, the constant intra-kingdom warfare is really chaotic and I'm just trying to hold on long enough for my next heir to institute medium crown authority which'll put an end to internal disputes. Then I only have to worry about my dukes poking the sleeping dragon to the east.
---
After reading about a von Habsburg count to HRE challenge I decided to give that a try. Had a really slow early game that picked up steam when I convinced the emperor to give me the Duchy of North Burgundy but then came to a screeching halt once medium crown authority was instituted and I couldn't even press de jure duchal claims when I was finally in the position to.
---
Woke up yesterday at like 6AM thinking about my France campaign. The trouble I was having planning ahead was that I wasn't sure where France should go in the endgame. I always like to plan on shooting for the de jure empire of my chosen country but I can't foresee what the next goal is after forming Francia, but laying in bed thinking about it I was starting to get psyched up to just go for it and see where it takes me.
But as I sat down at my computer, before I loaded it up I did a quick review of the wiki tabs I had up and I was looking at the tab on succession laws trying to think more on dealing with gavelkind succession when I was reading the section describing seniority succession and the section mentioned that it's a useful tool for unifying the Iberian kingdoms which sounded really interesting so I went and started a game as Leon instead.
Right off the bat I had to consider the same issue that I was slightly vexed with when I tried starting as Castille: do you make an early grab for the other Christian kingdoms so that you have full control over the push into Moorish territory or do you keep the alliances and risk them either calling you into wars with very weak positioning and/or taking land for themselves and putting you into a weaker position. The advantage of starting as Leon is that you're already playing the eldest of the Jimena kings; a quick survey of my neighbors showed that the king of Castille (to whom the king of Leon is heir) was the heir of Galicia, so I decided I would try to grab Castille and hope Galicia falls apart. Castille starts weaker than Leon, but when I declared war they called in Galicia and Navarra. But I had a little luck on my side, Galicia's Duke of Portucale started a faction to hand Galicia over to me, so I marshaled my forces and bitchslapped the small contingent from Galicia so the Duke of Portucale could mop up and give me a nice birthday present before turning back to Castille.
So less than a few years in and I held all three of the western Iberian kingdoms. Nice start. There was a slight wrinkle; Galicia's crown authority didn't start high enough for me to convert it to seniority succession right away. I decided I was fine with this though since I got the duchy of Portucale out of the deal, which meant when my king died his son would inherit the two counties comprising what remained of the Kingdom of Galicia while I got to keep Leon, Castille, and the lower half of Galicia. As it turned out, it got a little better, because the King of Navarra was the senior-most heir, so on succession I picked up Navarra when I lost Galicia--but this was only a temporary boon, it too couldn't be converted straight to seniority but I only needed its resources long enough to expand decisively into Moorish territory. By the time I lost Navarra's three provinces I'd gained 3-4 times as much territory by expanding south. Playing in the afternoon yesterday I steadily advanced south taking more and more territory.
I was gonna continue the advance today but I've been distracted watching CEO 2013 all day. I briefly tried to play while having the stream run on my second monitor but I accidentally won the Second Crusade for Jerusalem (again, seriously I didn't want it this time, I arrived late when the warscore was already like 70-something, beat down a 13k enemy stack and didn't even have time to start a siege--somehow that had given me the highest contribution rating and before I could load my troops back onto the boats to run off with my Crusader trait I suddenly had a whole new kingdom under my belt--quick aside: somehow the Kingdom of Jerusalem started with seniority succession, so one less massive headache to deal with) and suddenly had a lot of minutiae I had to deal with and I didn't want to have to divide my attention so I'm saving the county handout for later.
---
Taken at the start o' my last session. I've since expanded farther south and control about half of Ghana (had truces with both Jerjerid and Almoravid so I had nowhere else to throw soldiers). Had some trouble following my last succession that was eerily reminiscent of the trouble I ran into at the end of my England campaign but I managed to ferry troops over in time to save northern Jerusalem from an opportunistic Jerjerid attack. As I was taking a chunk of Ghana, there was a Catholic crusade for Hungary, which is the western tip of Cumanian blob there; it was won and picked up by a single HRE duke who is now probably busy trolling the emperor.
No comments:
Post a Comment