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Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I haven't had a chance to play this yet, but that shattered retreat thing sounds awesome to me. Something like that is what I've wanted in this game since the beginning. I hated how easy it was to wipe out whole armies down to the last man. The wars/military part of the game was one of the weakest parts of the game IMO.

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Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

It's a history based game; historically, after an army was defeated it would pretty much disentigrate. He is advocating for something emulating that.

I think it is a great idea. It may need some work but there is no need to be a dick about it.

The vast majority of medieval warfare was in the form of maneuver and skirmish warfare (and sieges of course). Medieval military campaigns often had armies shadowing each other over hundreds of miles, constantly trying to outmaneuver each other. You had a lot of vanguard and rearguard actions, advances and retreats, small unit actions, skirmishes between foraging parties and so on. Guerrilla warfare was a thing back then. Big giant battles where armies fought until one army was destroyed were rare. Armies were more likely to sit and stare at each other than actually fight. Once forces were committed to a battle on a large scale, they became very difficult if not impossible for commanders to control, and no commander wanted to be the guy who got his army massacred.

I wouldn't want every single battle in CK2 to result in an army wiped out. When I first read about the shattered retreat thing they were gonna add, I thought it sounded awesome. Something like that probably could have been implemented a lot better though. The whole war system in CK2 is just so simplified. I wish it was more than just "click on army, click on enemy army, watch numbers go down until army is gone".

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

The Sin of Onan posted:

Even sieges weren't necessarily all that common. The way you have to siege down every single castle, city, and church(?) in a province in CK2 to control it is a bit ridiculous; William the Conqueror and Alp Arslan managed to take enormous amounts of land without besieging very much at all. Paradox games in general would be considerably improved if there were some way of simulating small-scale combats - skirmishes, ambushes, guerrilla warfare, and so forth - as well as small-scale wars, because the way the AI (and players) will generally fight to the death over even a single county, as if they were engaged in modern-style total warfare, isn't terribly realistic. I'd also like a mechanic whereby holdings are likely to just surrender rather than trying to withstand a siege if the war is going sufficiently badly. It would make occasions like the Turkish conquest of Anatolia or the Mongol conquest of the Abbasid Caliphate, in which large amounts of land changed hands with only a few sieges being fought, actually possible.

Armies just disbanding after a massive battle, with appropriate gold and manpower penalties, is absolutely something I'd like to see, but that also means that massive pitched battles should be rarer. Like I said above, that's one of the reasons I'd like to see asymmetrical warfare enhanced in all Paradox games; it would make small countries and rebels actually able to stand a chance against larger ones, without needing to resort to unrealistic things like untouchable shattered retreats or rebels spawning more soldiers than there could conceivably be people in their province of origin.

I would also like a pony.

I think a way to make more fun and realistic wars in CK2 would be to allow two opposing armies to be in the same province together without actually fighting. Each army can be given a posture or stance, like Offense, Probe, Assault, Defend, Evade, etc. If two armies are in a province together and both are on Evade or Defend, they don't fight. Small armies should be able to outmaneuver larger ones most of the time. If a small unit of light cavalry is using Evade stance, they should be able to run circles around that giant 10k doomstack. If you want to attack the light cavalry, you should be able to force them out of your province, but you shouldn't be able to just kill them all.

The way that it works now, where a giant doomstack can walk into an enemy province with 100 men in it and instantly kill them all is ridiculous. If you think insurgencies are bad right now in the 21st century, imagine what they must have been like in the 12th. Small armies of rebels should be able to gently caress off into the mountains and hide if you just send a giant doomstack at them.

If a couple of big armies are both on Assault stance, then you can have your huge Bannockburn-style clusterfuck. If one army is assaulting and the other evading, then the evading army should be fighting rearguard actions to cover a retreat into the next province. Perhaps a good general can even cut off the retreating army and force a confrontation. If armies are probing each other, then the armies should be fighting skirmishes with each other as they jockey for good positions inside the province. If your character is leading one of the armies, perhaps the game can even throw some cool events at you where you have to make decisions.

Some kind of system like that would be more realistic and also give more control to the player, without being overly complicated. The AGEOD games work in a similar way to this. I was playing the AGEOD Thirty Years War game for a bit. Those games have some problems of their own but I like the combat and supply systems they have. Also I want a pony too.

Ivan Shitskin fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Oct 30, 2016

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I hadn't played this in many months and recently started a new game as the Emir of Tripoli.

My starting ruler was pretty normal. Died of cancer.
Second ruler was a humble, kind-hearted cannibal who ate one of his wives. Died of cancer.
Third and current ruler is a genius, disfigured lunatic who wears a mask and is now King of Syria.

Fun stuff.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Sheep posted:

To be fair the other societies aren't nearly as fun/interesting to play as. As one of Lucifer's own I could summon a familiar, give people diseases, abduct my enemies and sacrifice them to Devil, or a bunch of other random stuff. Or you know embrace celibacy and write my magnum opus :rolleyes:

To be fair I don't know what other random events occur for Catholic societies but I doubt they are as varied & fun.

Do I get to play as an equally insane, violent, heretic-smashing zealot? That might be fun.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

My devil-worshipping dude is really scary looking. :ohdear:



He just kidnapped a 10-year-old dwarf and boiled him to death for Satan.

The Contarini family was also voted out of office in the last election, and the new Doge appointed my guy here as his spymaster due to his high intrigue. Bad idea on his part! He dead now.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Lord Cyrahzax posted:

The best part is his sad, exasperated looking wife

And it's funny because she hates him and tries joining any plot she can against him, even if it's just taking away a trade post.

She won't give me any kids either. Does a negative opinion affect fertility? It's been ages since I've played this game.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Man, playing as Venice in 1066 is pretty hard. The HRE and the Byzantines are the two dominant powers, controlling such a huge amount of coastline, and they constantly embargo me with their gigantic 20,000-man armies, so my options seem limited. I can only build trade posts either in a tiny stretch of land close to home, or really far away where it's really expensive. Not even the powers of Satan can help me here. Doesn't help that my guy was outed as a witch to the rest of the world, giving a -50 opinion hit to what seems to be literally every character on the planet, even other devil-worshippers for some reason. That and being a disfigured, cruel, possessed, insane cannibal means I'm hated by everyone.

I'm gonna be overtaken by the other merchant republics before long, since they have the backing of the great powers. At least no one can take me down from within because of my devil magic and high intrigue. I'm set to remain in power for a long time.

My old wife was scared of me and wouldn't gently caress me, so I ate her and then replaced her with a hot young devil cultist named Dora the Spider. She liked me enough to screw me, but she was immediately murdered by a rival patrician. That pissed me off so I used my devil magic to give him smallpox, then imprisoned and burned him to death. My greatest hope now is that I'm next in line to be high priest of the Satanists. The current one is a possessed, gay mercenary captain, and he's older than me so I hope he dies soon. This game can be pretty hilarious.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Toadsniff posted:

Demon worshipers are the new easy mode, overpowered and completely ridiculous, they just have too many risk-less powers.

Well it wasn't that way for me at least. I guess I was unlucky, with my character being exposed to the world as a witch by a random event not that long after he joined, giving a permanent -50 opinion hit with literally every character in the entire game. It made the game incredibly difficult for the rest of that character's lifetime, and I almost lost the game completely because of it.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I tried to seduce the gay pope but he couldn't get his dick up. :sigh:

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Bloody Pom posted:

New thread title spotted.

Crusader Kings II: Old gay pope can't get his dick up


I figured he'd want to celebrate after I helped liberate France in crusade against the rampaging Aztec horde.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

ShootaBoy posted:

Hermetic missions are bullshit. I have never had a successful break and enter, I get caught every loving time. And then you can't even get a ransom because it automatically makes you a rival of the guy that caught you! It's idiotic!

This just happened to me and it was annoying indeed. I suppose it's kinda my fault since I picked the riskier option, since I didn't know what to expect and had only just joined the hermetics for the first time. And then I had to sit there and wait for over a decade until my super rich grey eminence serene doge died in the dungeons. I had thousands of gold, I should've been able to bribe him or bribe the guards with mountains of cash, but nope. gently caress you hermetic society. :cry:

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I've been trying to play in the Dominican order for a bit and not a whole lot interesting happened other than some gay old man sex in a monastery.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I have no idea what the hell is happening in France here. It's changed hands about 6 times now in the Aztec wars.



First the Aztecs took it, then it was retaken during a crusade. Aztecs took it back once again, then ANOTHER crusade retook it, only for it to fall under the control of Barcelona this time. So there was a giant Barcelona blob covering western Europe. Eventually Barcelona lost control, and it flipped to "Tours" with some princess suddenly in control of every county in France, with no kingdom title or duchies. A while later, the title "France" appeared once again while the Aztecs began their 3rd invasion. They're winning and will soon take France back once again.

Oh and all this is going on with my own dynasty in charge of the Aztec empire because of my demon-spawn son leading the initial invasion.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Has anyone gotten that "Have trade posts in 80 provinces" Steam achievement before? I have 27 and I'm way past my limit because male family members keep dying off. I try to seduce tons of women, invite lots of women to my court just to gently caress them and even have that nice Satanic fertility bonus but it's tough to keep up. I feel like the Republic DLC coming out before The Reaper's Due makes it harder, because all these lethal epidemics are a new thing and they kill my trade post limit. The Black Death is gonna be interesting. I haven't seen it before.

Do I want to give out land to the other patrician families? I guess I would want them to be more powerful so they can have more trade posts? I just conquered Tunisia in a holy war so I have lots of land to give out. The only other surviving republic in the Mediterranean is Pisa, and I guess I would want to seize some of their posts as well, but that would take a long time having to just snipe them off one by one over many decades.

Also there's that other achievement for owning all the silk route ports in India as a European merchant republic. I wonder how you would do that. They're too drat far away.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Deceitful Penguin posted:

Never give land to the other families

Never? What if they're all really weak and I'm already at max centralization with a really large demesne? I'm maxed out at 11 holdings. I'm in the 1250s or so, have a pretty large army and retinue and a lot of money for mercs, enough to beat back the enormous Fatimid sultanate when I invaded Tunisia. I pretty much have absolute power and it doesn't seem like the other families would be a threat to me if I just gave one county or holding to each of the weaker families. None of the other families have more than 5 trade posts, and a lot of them have been wiped out and replaced by new, even weaker families over the course of the game. If the trade posts of the other families count towards that 80 goal, then giving them just a little bit more power so they could build more wouldn't be a bad thing right?

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Deceitful Penguin posted:

why the gently caress can't I form a merchant republic as a muslim

I've made a city the capital holding, I have the required tech and on the coastline

Yet the stupid loving thing says my holding type ain't a city

UGGHHH


and when I consoled into being a merchant republic it turned me into a regular one

thank gently caress I wasn't on ironman because the 867 Nefoud start is a loving impossible pain to get off the ground even if it worked

I think merchant republics have to be a duke-level title. Maybe that's the problem?

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Goon Danton posted:

I decided to try a nomad game since I've never played around outside of Europe before.

Same. I started a game as the Khazars the other day and it seems really fun so far. I love the CBs that you get, like the "humiliate" one, where I guess you just charge in and steal a bunch of their women and children and ride away with them on your horses or something. I'm not sure why you would do that rather than just conquer them outright though. Maybe if you need a population boost to keep your clan ahead of the others in your own realm? Like if you conquer another realm outright, you would need to make a new clan to govern the territories right? So maybe you wouldn't want to be making new clans when you want to just increase the power of your own clan instead.

My first dude got maimed and disfigured in battle and then died of an infected wound, and so far my second dude is doing pretty well expanding the realm and keeping the now 6 clans under him in check. The Khazars get an interesting start position, right in the dead center of the map, so I can expand in any direction. I'm not really sure where to go from here though. I could head east, conquering the steppes and heading toward China, or go north into the big Russian tribal thunderdome, or go invade the middle east or western europe and burn civilization to the ground. So many choices...

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Fuligin posted:

Nomad priority imo, at least in 1066 or 1081, is to get the hell out of mongol ground zero

Ah yeah, I picked the Charlemagne start date so I won't have to worry about that for a while. Before the game started though, I made sure to set the Aztec invasion date to the 13th century. So if I last that long, hopefully the Aztecs and Mongols will descend onto the world at roughly the same time and crush it like a huge vice, with me in the middle. :getin:

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Minenfeld! posted:

Is there any weird, smallish religion a relative newbie could play with a reasonable chance of success? I always want to do Zoroastrians, but I usually end up failing horribly.

Play the Jewish Khazars and then invade the middle east with your big Jewish horse horde and then build the Kingdom of Israel.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I must suck at this game if the Khazars are easy mode. I just got my rear end handed to me. It all seemed to be going so well. I had grown pretty big, and my Byzantine neighbors broke out in civil war, so I thought I might take advantage of that and snatch some Byzantine land while they were distracted. I almost won, but the war ended inconclusively for some reason. On the way back home, my ruler bizarrely died of natural causes even though he was healthy and only in his early 40s. He was replaced by his widely hated cruel and arbitrary son who was also a secret demon worshipper. All the clans banded together and overthrew him and then executed him. Since all the clans' armies were still together from the Byzantine war, they were able to easily overpower my own. My heir was a young child at that point.

After I lost the war, not even a month of peace would go by before another civil war broke out, with the 6 clans of the realm all trying to destroy each other. After the third civil war ended, my child ruler had turned 16 and then I launched a fourth war in a last ditch attempt to take back what was mine. I still failed, and not even with mercenaries was I able to beat the combined power of the other clans. :saddowns:

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

luxury handset posted:

starting in the british isles in that era, the number one thing you need to worry about is not getting ganked by vikings.

Best way to learn the game is to be one of those vikings instead. To hell with playing some boring Catholic somewhere. No worrying about feudal politics and marriage and all that crap. Just take a bunch of concubines and pillage and loot everything. You get free reign all over the whole map with fast moving fleets that can go anywhere and up all the rivers. You can pick and choose your targets and declare war whenever you want, and make lots of fast easy money with raiding. Expand rapidly and sit back and watch the chaos.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Crusader Kings II: A full playthrough of satanic lesbian rulers

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I've been playing a game as the Ottomans in the 1337 start date. Almost right away, a jihad was called against Portugal, and then a few years in, before the Muslim armies made much progress, a crusade was called on Jerusalem. Crusader armies gradually filtered into the holy land and almost won the war while the Muslims were scattered and distracted from the jihad. Portugal was taken with almost no resistance, and when the Muslim armies began returning home from the jihad, and big battles started flaring up in the holy land, the black death suddenly swept through and caused a hilarious clusterfuck orgy of death and destruction, right at the height of the crusade.

For a while, the biggest Christian army was actually outrunning the black death as it headed south. Eventually the plague and the Muslims caught up to it and decimated it in a long series of battles right on the frontier of the black death, right next to Jerusalem. The Christians were eventually ground to a halt, but both sides were devastated by the plague. The Christians had a very high war score, and it took many years to grind it back down again, and I watched countless thousands more crusaders march through my lands on the way to their deaths in the plague-hellscape holy land. The pope eventually called off the crusade in a white peace. All that death and devastation for nothing. The most metal crusade I've seen in this game. :black101:

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I put glitterhoof in charge of educating a couple of my kids in the hope she would turn them into horse culture but it didn't work dammit.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I could never understand the freak-out over shattered retreat when they put that in. It makes the game so much more interesting when armies can slip away into the mountains, reform and come back again. It's saved my rear end multiple times when I was being invaded.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I just noticed that there's a bug with Muslim devil-worshippers. When you get the mission to sacrifice a holy person, it tells you that you should sacrifice an "imam or an ascetic" to complete the mission, but it doesn't work. I must have kidnapped and sacrificed 5 different people including my own court imam and some mosque holders and nothing worked. Turns out it only works if you sacrifice a non-Muslim. If you imprison an imam, he stops being an imam all of a sudden and then it doesn't count toward the mission. So I wasted loads of my dark magic points on that bullshit until I killed some Catholic bishop. I looked that up and it seems to be an old bug since I found old posts from 2017 about it. I hope they fix that in the new DLC.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

TaurusTorus posted:

Serious answer: you can get an STD. But that's just a weapon to wield against your enemies and their spouses.

I accidentally married some woman with syphilis as my fourth wife and then died of syphilis some time later. Since she was just my fourth wife I didn't look at her traits very closely and whoops!

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Sydin posted:

I caved and bought all the DLC I was missing, and I must say this is incredibly unrealistic. People catch on way too fast to your secret society dealings. I've been under suspicion of being a Satanist for like, a full year now. Come on, how could they possibly suspect?!



Look at this face, is this a face that would lie about being a Satanist? Really now.

My first and my favorite Satanist has always been this guy, Sith Lord Gaspare of Venice:



Surely nothing will go wrong if you appoint this evil-looking known-cannibal motherfucker as your spymaster right after taking office as the new Doge. Surely nothing at all!

Ivan Shitskin fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Aug 19, 2018

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I cut my brother's dick off and sent him as a gift to the Chinese Emperor :discourse:

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

My character wrote a war book that gives him +10% to both morale damage and morale defense. I'm guessing that only applies to armies he leads personally right? And if so, does that only apply to the one specific flank that he's leading? Even if he is a brilliant strategist with really high martial skill and good traits I usually avoid having my guy personally lead armies because he always ends up getting killed, but with this thing, it might be worth the risk to bring him out now and then if it's an important battle. I have a suit of armor that adds another +5% morale damage too. I usually don't pay that much attention to the battles in this game, but with all this stuff, maybe I can start trying some different strategies like stacking all of my elephants on one flank, led by my brilliant strategist dude with all of his bonus stuff, and then see if he can just utterly crush that one enemy flank.

Battles seem a lot more difficult than they used to be in this game. Maybe they've been changed with all the patches and DLC. There have been multiple times where I've vastly outnumbered the enemy yet still got my rear end beat. Maybe I've been going up against other generals that have their own treasury filled with combat-boosting stuff and I didn't notice, and then they kicked my rear end.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

GokuGoesSSJ3 posted:

there are some that need an insane composition of it mixed with other retinues to be effective like longbows or elephants.

What do you mean by that? Are elephants good or no? I recently started as the Bengal Kingdom in 769, and now I'm the Bengal Empire and I've been raising units of elephants. I have a little over 100 of them now but it's hard to tell if they are effective or not. I tried massing all of my elephants on one flank led personally by the emperor with his really high martial skill and they did pretty well. They defeated a numerically superior Chinese army at one point, although I baited them into crossing the Ganges into jungle terrain so I got a bonus from that. I haven't played this enough to tell if the elephants are good or not.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Kaza42 posted:

Elephants are good via the Cultural Building. You get a better stat total from that building than any of the alternatives. However, they are very bad as Retinues. The elephant retinue is a big mix of archers and elephants, and for the cost they are one of the weakest retinues.

So maybe it was a bad idea to go 100% elephant retinues then...

Oh well, my emperor does have the "elephant leader" trait though so he gets another big bonus with all his elephants. I am determined to one day trample the Pope with an elephant. Hopefully before that DLC comes out and messes up my savegame.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I tried to do a little eugenics experiment. I didn't know what to do with my genius daughter so I married her to the idiot raja of northern Sri Lanka. He has the slow trait, and both slow and genius are hereditary so I was wondering which trait would "win" in their offspring. They had two kids, one a genius and the other a drooling moron. Totally the best family. There should be a sitcom for that.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Ulio posted:

Alright I guess Ireland is the safest place to start in every game.

No I don't have any of the dlcs.

Pick the Earl of Dublin or whatever his name is. Your character’s father will be in charge of the county to your south. He’s an old man though and will die within a few years of the game start, and you will inherit his county, giving you twice the manpower and two counties while everyone else around you has one. Then you can start pushing around everyone else as much as you want, becoming a duke and eventually king pretty easily.

It’s also fun to start in the early 1066 date and not the later one, so you can sit back in safety in Ireland and watch the chaos of the Norman invasion unfold and the subsequent rebellions in England. You can mark William the Conqueror as a character of special interest so it will give you updates as to what goes on over there. As a new player I thought a good way to learn was to just sit back and watch how things go elsewhere in the world.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Has anyone here actually beaten the Chinese army and broken free from them? They invaded me ages ago with a ridiculously huge army and forced me to be a tributary but I'm tired of it, dammit. After they invaded me, they went through a golden age that lasted decades, so their armies were even more powerful than normal. Now they are 'stable' but who knows how long that will last. I'd like to wait until they go into disorder or civil war but their stability never ends.



Rirse posted:

What am I doing wrong. Twice when I try to take land from a country I look at their army listing on the land map and it shows them with 500 guys, but when I attack them they suddenly have 2000 people. Where the gently caress are all the guys coming from.

Are they tribal? If so, they can call up special tribal armies if they have enough prestige.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Goddamn you China. It's such bullshit that if you're a Chinese tributary and you try to declare war on them to break free, the war will end inconclusively if your character dies. I was winning too! Such a load of horseshit. :argh:

What's worse is that the moment I declared war on China, the Abbasids decided to take advantage of the distraction and then snatch away one of the kingdoms on the far western frontier of my Bengal Empire. So I was being sandwiched from two directions -- the Abbasids from the far west with 20k men, and the Chinese from the far east with 30k men, AND I had to deal with the constellation of smaller Chinese tributary states attacking me with their own small armies as well. The AI is very good at being opportunistic bastards sometimes.

It was impossible to fight all these enemies at once across my huge empire stretching all the way across northern India from coast to coast. I had to concentrate on one, so I massed together my army + mercenaries + Chinese honor guard and actually managed to beat the entire Chinese army after years of fighting. I ignored the Abbasids and let them take the kingdom they wanted. I figured I could just take it back later through holy wars or something.

I was so excited to actually beat the Chinese and free myself from 100+ years of tributary status. I was right on the verge of winning the war when suddenly my guy dies of tuberculosis and the war ends instantly. Now I'm still stuck as a tributary AND I've lost a kingdom on top of it.


So I've learned a few things in this playthrough. If you haven't played on that part of the map or dealt with the Chinese before:
  • If you're not a tributary, secure a peace deal with them ASAP. Otherwise it's inevitable that they'll invade you and you might be stuck as a Chinese tributary state for decades or centuries on end. You can break away easily if they are in civil war, but don't count on that happening. I haven't seen it happen for hundreds of years. It's like they are eternally stable in my game or something.
  • If you ARE stuck as a tributary, use your extra tributary influence to get an imperial marriage before trying to break away. You can use your Chinese honor guard against the Chinese, and you need all the extra troops you can get.
  • You can also use your influence to get Chinese strategists and then use them against the Chinese as well.
  • Never try to break away from the Chinese if your character is old or sick.
  • When the Chinese first attack, run away. I don't think they can get to 100% warscore through sieges alone. Be patient and wait a while and their armies might separate and you can defeat them in detail.

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

I always like it when people post the way their games turn out so here's mine. Started in 769, and here's what the game turned into as of the year 1000. I'm the big green blob in India.



The Black Death is rolling through the world. The Umayyads have been unstoppable and Islam has been flooding into Europe, beating back multiple retaliatory crusades, but their ruler converted to Judaism for some reason and they're in civil war to kick him out.

The situation in the rest of Europe has been very fluid since the beginning. The HRE formed early on, in Italy and parts of France and Germany, but collapsed. A pagan Kingdom of Poland formed, flipped back and forth between Catholicism and paganism, conquered most of Scandinavia, then collapsed. After that, the Magyar nomads rolled in and conquered all of Eastern Europe, all of Scandinavia, and just about all of Germany, converted to Catholicism, then settled down and collapsed. The Karlings have been reduced to just a single duchy in England, and one duchy in the Netherlands. The Catholic world has been reduced to a weak, messy patchwork of small realms, and the power vacuum has been filled by the Byzantines and Muslims. The Muslims are now right at the Pope's doorstep, one county over from Rome, while the Byzantines have held steady against Jihads from the south.

For the first 100 years of the game, it looked like the Byzantines and Abbasids had mostly collapsed and were very weak for a while, but they've since regained their power.

The religion map:




Meanwhile in India, I finally broke away from China, and the Pala Empire has been let loose upon the world. I have a dozen viceroy kings expanding the empire in every direction on their own, the Muslims have been pushed out, and the new Pala Empire be like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_MyUGq7pgs



The normal game map:

Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

gently caress yeah i finally did it

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Ivan Shitskin
Nov 29, 2002

Torrannor posted:

Congrats, now enjoy your eternal hellwar with the Abbasids

I already had to fight six separate wars against them in order to unite India. Pain in the rear end. Two great conquest wars and two holy wars to kick them out of the western provinces, and then two more wars in order to take back individual little baronies they had way out in the middle of India for some reason.

Now I will not stop until Mecca is conquered and converted to Hinduism or the new DLC comes out.

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