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There's a CK2 diary just being started on RPS at the moment. Not sure I'm super into the start, but we'll see where it goes.

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I could tell you the story of an aged king blessed with three daughters, each married matrilineally to strong young men of promising birth in the hopes that one might bear him a grandson to rule someday. Alas, more women were all that came of these unions, and so the process was repeated for another generation. The wisest of the daughters, a duchess named Eufemia, took the throne after the death of old King Giselbert in battle, but she soon died of depression after her young son was murdered while she was away on campaign in Denmark. Her younger sister Richwara was an able schemer and stood ready to take the throne, but any suspicions of foul play were allayed when she completed the conquest of the Danish crown and made substantial inroads into Prussia and Poland. Her daughter Berta took up the reins in turn as her mother lay dying and united the crowns of Saxony, Lotharingia, Denmark, Prussia, and Poland in an Empire of the North to last a thousand years, but some say the Kaiserin Berta's greatest achievement was at last bearing a son called Hesso, the great-grandson of the beleaguered king Giselbert.

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Thanks for indulging me. I've finally reached the tipping point I eventually hit in every Crusader Kings II game around the end of the thirteenth century, where my realm is big enough with enough de jure vassals that I'll never see another internal or external threat, so long as I keep the feasts and tournaments coming on a regular basis. I've still had an enormously good time, especially playing as a loyal vassal with little interest in expansion for the first hundred years. I'll probably sit out the last hundred or so until the game's timeline ends just to see my crowns assimilated into the Nordic Empire I've formed, but there's no need to natter on about that here.

Other cool things I've noticed? The game's hidden genetic coding works great. The Billung dukes, kings and emperors have had enormous trouble with their children all being daughters, unless I take special care to marry them to fertile wives with a family history of multiple sons. Possession, which also bedeviled one of my early rulers, continues to be a family trait, popping up every third generation and usually around the forties, but only with the men. A few of the male cousins I've married matrilineally into other dynasties with family histories of poor health have had children and grandchildren manifest the same symptoms. It's awesome to see at work.

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Two of my rulers, Hesso and his mother Berta, were both killed in conspiracies fomented by disgruntled barons from their own demesne. It seems like the character AI has recognized that outright rebellions are doomed to fail at this point and has adjusted its tactics accordingly, but that might be me projecting. At the very least, it's cool to see that the AI can plot to kill over bad blood, rather than only when it has something to gain.

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The Black Death finally popped up in my game, around 1300! I've never actually seen it strike before, but this time it hit northern Europe hard and cleaned out maybe half my court, which made attempts to breed a male heir almost impossible. You can also see that I've resorted into fourth- and fifth-degree inbreeding out of desperation.

Anyway, I need to take a break from this game, since exams are coming up in a big way, but I thought I'd go ahead and share the full story with my compatriots here before I call it.
 

There's a CK2 diary just being started on RPS at the moment. Not sure I'm super into the start, but we'll see where it goes.

 

I found the RPS diary a little underwhelming, though probably more because Adam clearly confused Leon in Spain, Léon in Brittany, and Lyon in Burgundy than anything else.

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For those of you who play this wonderful game, there's a new DLC out with what should be some definite gameplay improvements. It's called "Legacy of Rome".

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Already picked it up. Not controlling Byzantium yourself tends to end up with it eaten alive by one of a few emirs, which is hilarious.

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I'm kind of lukewarm on the whole factions system. If you have a large realm, the factions icon is always there at the top of the screen, with no actual warning when the "independence" faction jumps from 5% to 118%. At least when they do revolt, it's still the same two dozen little armies pissing around the map, getting very little accomplished.

Although it has some serious glitches, I really like how civil wars are handled in the CK2Plus mod right now. When a vassal revolts, it sends out a decision to all vassals on whether to join the revolt. Those that do are organized under a titular title with equivalent rank to their liege, with the revolt leader at its head. When the civil war ends, the victor gains/keeps the liege title, while the titles of the loser and their supporters stripped and given to the victor to reward supporters. The AI seems to understand it better than the current revolt system and it tends to make for a more dynamic game. Realms are capable of tearing themselves apart, and not in the piecemeal way of vanilla. But then, I haven't played much with the new patch. Maybe Paradox's milder solution is just as potent.

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Also, and this is just me, but I would commit murder most foul for an "invite all willing conspirators to my plot" button. I've done so much repetitive clicking towards that end that my fingers are like cigars, fat and stiff.

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It seems that the Aztecs are coming:

http://www.paradoxpl...sunset-invasion

In short: a DLC which implements an Aztec invasion from the sea, similar to how the Mongols already work. It's made from bits of Europa Universalis 4 and doesn't count as one of their full expansions, so fans lose nothing and gain a bit of fun.

I wasn't too sure about it at first, but boy did I warm up to it fast. I'm a sucker for a joke taken beyond all expectation.

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Also, and this is just me, but I would commit murder most foul for an "invite all willing conspirators to my plot" button. I've done so much repetitive clicking towards that end that my fingers are like cigars, fat and stiff.

That's problematic, though. You want to be careful with some people. I've had people spill the beans drunk, for example. So you don't want just any idiot in on it.

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I might be the only person still playing this game regularly. It's just perfect to have on in the background, running at the lowest speed, while I'm doing research or chores.

I'm playing as the King of Mann and the Isles this time around, after a late night a week ago reading about the Crovan dynasty. I've had the best run of ruler names: Aslak the Seemly, Gudrod the Hunter, Tormod the Silent, Erling the Monk... I've praised a lot of things about this game, but never the algorithm that quietly chooses an epithet based on your ruler's traits and ability scores. It's the little things.

Also, my rainy little kingdom in the north exists in a horrifyingly shattered world. The Mongols made it to the Rhine before a last-ditch crusade led by me and Sicily threw them out of Germany. The whole Middle East save Turkey and Africa up to the Straits of Gibraltar are under the Ilkhan. These are the end times indeed.

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Just started listening to the 3MA podcasts recently and have been listening to a number of the older ones. Just finished their in depth look at Crusader Kings 2 which I have been on he fence on picking up for awhile and it helped push me over the edge. Did some looking around and found it on sale at Green Man Gaming for 75% off, along with all of it's related DLC.

Definitely a bit overwhelming to get into and a tutorial that bounces you all over the place, but happy with it so far. Toughest part is getting used to setting very different goals from most strategy games and sometimes just going with the flow of what our rulers want and not what I want.

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Definitely a bit overwhelming to get into and a tutorial that bounces you all over the place, but happy with it so far. Toughest part is getting used to setting very different goals from most strategy games and sometimes just going with the flow of what our rulers want and not what I want.

Yeah, the tutorial is not great. The information's all there, but not presented in a very coherent or compelling fashion. The best thing for a new player to do is to pick one of the larger lords in Ireland and play it slow, working on uniting the island. The only power you're at risk from is Scotland, which usually takes a century before the king there is strong enough to present a threat.

In an ideal world, I'd wish for a tutorial mode that had a smaller geographic scope and the ability to toggle in game mechanics as the player became ready for them, but I know that there's no way that's going to happen. Once you've grokked one Paradox game, you've pretty much grokked them all, so better just to force new players to climb the learning curve alone.

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Yea, I was talking to a friend about the tutorial stuff yesterday. I keep trying to get into it (haven't given up either), but I have no idea what to do most of the time. I normally hate it when games take me by the hand and spell everything out for me, but in this case it might've been prudent. Their tutorials kind of point out how the systems in their game work, but not necessarily how to use them and, you know, actually play the game.

One of these days I'll get it.

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I jumped in without even touching the tutorial and did reasonably fine. As long as you ignore buildings and science the game isn't terribly hard to figure out.

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They'll finally be releasing a Pagan addon at some point. Can't wait!

The really exciting thing is them pushing back the start date two hundred years. The Carolingian empire is still twenty years away from its final split, the Abbasid caliphate owns half the map, Great Moravia and Bulgaria are regional superpowers, and England is still three or four different kingdoms. It'll be a completely different game, for better or for worse.

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The really exciting thing is them pushing back the start date two hundred years. The Carolingian empire is still twenty years away from its final split, the Abbasid caliphate owns half the map, Great Moravia and Bulgaria are regional superpowers, and England is still three or four different kingdoms. It'll be a completely different game, for better or for worse.

I agree, it's going to be great. I don't so much want a CK3 as I want more of this game. Expansions that bring in other scenarios, yes. Now I just have to figure out how to get into Europa Universalis and kick ass with the Ming Empire.

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I'm a little miffed that the earlier start date is only a bookmark and not a full addition to the game's timeline, but it still seems cool. Pulling a King Alfred and uniting England against the Norsemen will be pretty badass, as will actually getting to play as that one pagan prince in Sweden.

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I'm a little miffed that the earlier start date is only a bookmark and not a full addition to the game's timeline, but it still seems cool.

Is that confirmed? The features list only mentions the bookmark, but the ad copy says something about being able to start "as far back as the year 867 AD", which implies a continuum. If only a bookmark, disappointing. A lot of cool things go down in those two hundred years, which I guess might be too much for us to ask Paradox to model. Still...

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In the meantime, the mod scene has stabilized after the slew of (partially broken) features that the Republic DLC for 1.09 introduced have been incorporated and in some cases circumvented. CK2Plus is still the best if you want to play a game like vanilla, but with balance and pacing. This might change someday, since the mod developer has been hired as an AI programmer at Paradox now and has stopped development on his mod.

 

Other mods to look at? The Prince and the Thane is the roleplaying mod for people who want to be an impoverished medieval lord squatting in his drafty castle and laying down justice. There are a million and one different custom-built events for all kinds of situations, so about as much time is spent looking after one's own lands as plotting over others'. I like it a lot, except I think the SWMH map it uses is kind of a mess (double the number of counties in Italy and Germany, but only a few more added to France, England, and Spain, means that the Holy Roman Empire is the monster under everyone's bed) and the events go off the rails a fair amount, leaving me independent in one instance as a four-county "king" of the Lombard League that kept getting money from the pope in a bugged message. Still a fun time, since it makes the RPG underpinnings of Crusader Kings' dynasty system more obvious and tweakable.

 

And then there's the fantasy mod, Lux Invicta. Not much to say about the mod itself, except that it cares way too much about its lore but makes a good excuse for every ruler to start with only two or three counties and a different religion. On the meta level, I actually like watching this one develop, because it's being handled by a "regency council" of modders, self-appointed when the mod creator vanished from the forums. It means that some newer core features like factions haven't gotten much attention, out of respect to Shaytana's original vision, but it also means that there's more a public dialogue about what works and doesn't than the more auteur approaches of Wiz and idib816.

 

I'm not going to talk about the Game of Thrones mod. I hate it. All it does is prove how boring the Middle Ages would have been without religion in the mix, plus the fan wank it inspires is even more toxic and shrill than the "why didn't Byzantium conquer the world with their cataphracts" threads all over the main forum.

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Thanks for the rundown on these mods.  Probably going to give that CK2Plus one a go.

 

I'm glad I could help. I haven't played CK2Plus for a couple versions, since maybe November, so I'm running a game in the background at a slow speed while I do dissertation reading.

 

This time, I chose dukes of Bavaria. I think I've decided that the five stem duchies of the Holy Roman Empire (Saxony, Swabia, Bavaria, and Upper/Lower Lorraine, with Carinthia sitting in for Franconia) offer the best gameplay, at least in the mods I've played. They start with more land than the average king, so there's not the mad dash to fabricate and press claims before crown authority goes too high. Instead you, as the player, have two straightforward goals: switch out of gavelkind and dispossess your vassals without causing a revolt. You can either use the plot mechanics against them and come out smelling like roses (maybe), or just revoke as much as your prestige will allow and hope your ruler kicks the bucket before the other shoe drops.

 

I don't know, I'm probably not selling it well, but it's been a blast as both Saxony and now Bavaria. Using free investiture to disqualify disappointing sons from the succession, voting in imperial elections, and pushing towards the closest kingship (except if you're Swabia, in which case good fucking luck forming Germany or Burgundy) feels like the best-case scenario for experiencing what Crusader Kings II has to offer, which is weird because I remember the Holy Roman Empire being a goddamn wasteland in the first Crusader Kings. I never thought it would be the stage for my most memorable playthroughs in the sequel.

 

 

Edit: I still wish some of the Thumbs would play it and talk about it on the podcast, but I think the moment's passed. The big three DLCs have overcomplicated and unbalanced the base game to the point that I despair for new players, who missed their chance to play a Paradox game that didn't start kicking you in the balls right away with revolt-happy factions and world-conquering republics.

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The Old Gods DLC is out! Has anyone bought and played it? I'd go check on the Paradox forums, but I've sworn them off ever since several people all used the "butterfly effect" to explain why the Fatamid caliphate is a powerhouse in every campaign but not in actual history. Shit like that is one of the few things that gets me pissed off.

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Bought The Old Gods and played with all the different pagan religions, so far I’m loving it! Lots of balance issues, but with all the stuff they’ve added I’m not surprised.

 

The 867 start is far less stable than 1066 so don’t expect history to play out as It should. In my current game, 50 or so years in, Lithuania (Me) now dominates most of Russia, the Frankish empire now includes France and most of Italy and Germany, Hungary is a single county kingdom that is about to be conquered by a Polish Slavic pagan duke, and England is a patchwork of several different Norse rulers. I also have 10 military, 10 economy, and 9 culture tech in my capital, I started with 0.

 

If you are okay with all the crazy, I’d say this expansion is definitely worth it. If you’re not, the patch adds a ton of new stuff to the game for free.

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