Nick Breckon

Crusader Kings II: The Triumph of Ragnar

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The Tragedy of Ragnar
 
Arise, King Vanaman. We played six hours of "Who Wants to Marry a Baby?" or, as it is sometimes referred to, Crusader Kings II. Follow the lineage of our faithful and ill-begotten servant Ragnar. Woe the life of Brian, our hapless son unwittingly in the way of King Vanaman's succession. Watch us kill some wives and imprison half of Ireland.
 
Twitch Archive
 

Download save file (begins shortly after the accession of King Sean I)
 
Ragnar's tale, as recounted by Something Awful member Dezinus:
 

The Chronicles of Ragnar, Hero of Ireland, Thus Far:

  • Humble Gardener turned Mayor of Nenagh
  • Ragnar is drawn into the King's plot to murder his brother
  • He mistakenly outs the secret plot in a drunken stupor
  • In a rage, the King throws Ragnar in jail for his indiscretion
  • After two years, the King shows a turn of heart, and turns down harsher punishment for Ragnar
  • Soon after, Ragnar is pardoned for his crimes, retakes his place in Nenagh
  • Many years pass, and Ragnar is given the title of Chancellor for one day, before quickly being replaced & stripped of the title
  • A few years later Ragnar is called upon to lead the King's armies into battle in Ossory, and is victorious in securing and expansion to the empire.
  • After becoming a widower, Ragnar's opinion of the King eventually sours, leaving him as the crucial last vote to change the Rules of Succesion
  • After taking a generous gift of gold, Ragnar agrees to change the Succesion Rules, allowing Sean I Vanaman to become heir to the throne
  • Some years later, Ragnar is drawn in as an initial member of a plot to kill the King's daughter-in-law
  • The plot succeeds, redeeming Ragnar for his past failure.
  • Ragnar then lives out the remainder of his years peacefully as Mayor, until his good friend King Murchad dies of old age

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This was seriously the best five hours of my life in a long time. Now, for you to spread the line of Vanaman across Europe and into the fifteenth century!

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AWESOME! I'm quite excited.



I'm laughing a lot. I love it when Nick goes "Wow this is so easy" referring to finding a wife "I wish I was born in 1066." You guys are hilarious, I think that's a big part of why I enjoy watching you play.

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In theory, I should absolutely love a game like Crusader Kings, but the one time I tried to play, I was too overwhelmed to really enjoy/understand anything that was going on. But I'm really intrigued by a game that is able to make interesting comments on patriarchal political systems just through its game mechanics.

 

Hopefully I'll have better luck with Paradox's Cold War sim.

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In theory, I should absolutely love a game like Crusader Kings, but the one time I tried to play, I was too overwhelmed to really enjoy/understand anything that was going on. But I'm really intrigued by a game that is able to make interesting comments on patriarchal political systems just through its game mechanics.

Hopefully I'll have better luck with Paradox's Cold War sim.

I had the same initial experience with CK2 but I figured out the solution: just have a bunch of people on the Internet tell you what do to.

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Argobot, if you find Crusader Kings overwhelming, with its mechanical focus on one character and one family, I wouldn't hold out hope for a Hearts of Iron spinoff to be much better. The latter is no Victoria II, which has a massive and inscrutable economic system driving it, but it's still on the high end of the Paradox complexity scale that ranges from Europa Universalis to Victoria.

 

As for the patriarchy stuff, it's great how the game turns you into Henry VIII almost instantly. "Why haven't you given me a child yet? Why have you given me only daughters? Why have you ta-- Oh, a son! You're the best wife, so meek and mild..." And then your son dies of typhus and you're back to hating your wife's guts.

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I had the same initial experience with CK2 but I figured out the solution: just have a bunch of people on the Internet tell you what do to.

 

Oh cool, sounds easy enough. Unrelated: can I have the password to the Idle Thumbs Twitch account? 

 

Argobot, if you find Crusader Kings overwhelming, with its mechanical focus on one character and one family, I wouldn't hold out hope for a Hearts of Iron spinoff to be much better. The latter is no Victoria II, which has a massive and inscrutable economic system driving it, but it's still on the high end of the Paradox complexity scale that ranges from Europa Universalis to Victoria.

 

As for the patriarchy stuff, it's great how the game turns you into Henry VIII almost instantly. "Why haven't you given me a child yet? Why have you given me only daughters? Why have you ta-- Oh, a son! You're the best wife, so meek and mild..." And then your son dies of typhus and you're back to hating your wife's guts.

 

What makes me hopeful about the Cold War game is that I actually am familiar with the history, so I'm (naively) expecting the mechanics to make more intuitive sense to me. Plus, I just really want to sim an Eastern bloc country.

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Has anybody ever won WW2 with someplace like Morocco or Tunisia in HoI 2?

 

In short, yes. Pretty much every country has achieved world conquest or something like it in every Paradox game ever. There's someone out there with the patience and determination to do a WC with Bhutan in Europa Universalis III, so nothing surprises me anymore.

 

The main problem with small countries or countries in the spheres of others means that, while you have less to do, what you can do is circumscribed by the larger powers, so in some ways you have to work even harder to keep apprised of both their situation and your own. What makes Ireland the tutorial island in Crusader Kings II is that you have no powerful neighbors, unless Scotland or England gets their shit together preternaturally fast. All the Irish lords are on equal footing, so there's less to miss if you're wearing (figurative) blinders.

 

 

EDIT: If anyone would ever like me to coach them through their first playthrough of Crusader Kings II, I'm down. I spend my whole day in front of a computer and might as well put the six hundred hours(!) I have in this game to good use.

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Someone was good enough to give me a link to a really nice walk through of the same Irish starting area

 

http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/7575-crusader-kngs-ii/?p=198550

 

It along with some help from Gormongous and a few other thumbs in the CK2 thread really helped me get over the notorious paradox UI,  and allowed me to create the situation which created one of my favourite ever characters in a video game whom I affectionately referred to as "The Duchess"

 

Finally at the age of 74 my Duke pops his clogs leaving everything to his 18-year-old grandson. I start to believe I may have the chance to reunite my domains, after all my new Duke is barely out of his teens he's got all his life ahead of him to sort out the mess his grandfather created.

However it turns out in this case that a lifetime equates to about 11 months my Duke dies before even seeing his 19th birthday as do my claims to about half of Ireland.

His sister inherits a small kingdom with a huge and democratic neighbour that my poor administrative skills are pretty much responsible for creating. Worse still the law of the land means there is no current line of succession and she will have no chance to change it for at least 10 years.

Fortunately although I didn't know it yet Duchesss Dervogilla is the kind of woman, that would make Ceresti Lansister look gentle, Luceriza Borgia look moral, and puts Lady MacBeth's plotting skills to shame.

By the time she reaches her 40th year the casualty list is impressive, Four husbands, her eldest son, two bishops, two mayors and an earl, A duke, and three children who were unlucky enough to be born to people who made them a inconvenience. Her eldest surviving son has strong claims on large parts of Ireland and Wales, and she has just married a man just one well placed dagger from the English crown. Perhaps even more remarkable is the one year later she gives birth to a son who now has a claim on one of the English crowns most powerful Ducys and is betrothed to a girl with claims on much of northern Ireland.

 

Believe me if I could have switched to a matriarchal succession at this point I would have, she was the greatest ruler Ireland never knew.

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Oh man, last night's stream was incredible. The extent of my experience with CKII is glancing over at my roommate's screen for about five seconds at a time while he was playing the Game of Thrones mod and thinking "huh, this is complicated" and then going back to whatever I was doing. That said, watching these two guys wife-kill their way to installing Sean Vanaman as the heir to Munster and future king of Ireland was majestic. Hope to see more of you guys in chat when they stream again tonight (I think).

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King Sean I Vanaman will surely be the greatest Petty King Ireland has ever seen. The saga of Ragnar though definitely propelled that guy to being the titular character of the series. You can't beat the sheer volume of intrigue and drama that is Ragnar's poor beset life. At least his wife never got murdered..... His only friend and his only enemy, King Murchaud, finally dead though. Long live King Sean Vanaman.

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For curious minds (the Wikipedia pages for the kings of Munster and for eleventh- and twelfth-century Ireland before the Anglo-Norman settlement in general being pretty abysmal), here is a genealogy page for Murchad mac Donnchada, the Thumbs' first player character.

 

Oh, interesting! According to another Wikipedia page, Murchad was killed in 1068 fighting his nephew Toirdelbach ua Brian, king of Munster and de facto high king of Ireland from 1068 to 1086, after the former's father had been driven from the throne of Munster. Murchad's son, Bran or Brian, never even ruled So see, even with that fraught playthrough, they already did better than history! Well, not better than their nephew did in real life, but better than their own character.

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What a fun, fascinating stream. It made my Monday infinitely better. I loved Nick and Chris's interpretations of the fiction as the game went on. That 'gardener' stuff absolutely killed me. 

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About two hours into the stream, Chris mentioned that games can start with Crusader Kings in 1066 and go all the way to 1964 with Hearts of Iron II: Armageddon. There are several online, but the most famous is a Let's Play of the Hohenzollern, minor counts in southern Germany and future emperors of the new German nation.

 

The amazing thing here is how well the Let's Plays showcase the power of Paradox's games as story-generating engines. The simple recounting of events by the author of the Hohenzollern Let's Play, with very little roleplaying or interpretation, is several degrees better than some of the professional, published counterfactual and alternate-history sci-fi and fantasy that I've read over the years. It's just so cool, if you have any knowledge of a region, to see the history turn out just slightly different. It can be so striking.

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http://lparchive.org/Crusader-Kings-2/

 

This Let's Play was made by the same guy that was linked in the above CK2 link. It is fantastic and starts in a similar place that the Thumbs do. Highly recommended entertainment.

 

e: wait, it might be a link to the exact same Let's Play? I'm not even sure, my links are getting confused. They look different though. Either way, it's condensed so you're not reading an entire thread for just his updates.

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No, those are different ones, the Hohenzollern is many years old and from past installments of all the constituent games. I'd forgotten about the dude's Ireland-to-Egypt Let's Play with Crusader Kings II. It's actually a fairly good walkthrough of the challenges, expectations, and rewards at each level of rulership, even though it's from an older version. Thanks, Badfinger!

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For curious minds (the Wikipedia pages for the kings of Munster and for eleventh- and twelfth-century Ireland before the Anglo-Norman settlement in general being pretty abysmal), here is a genealogy page for Murchad mac Donnchada, the Thumbs' first player character.

 

Oh, interesting! According to another Wikipedia page, Murchad was killed in 1068 fighting his nephew Toirdelbach ua Brian, king of Munster and de facto high king of Ireland from 1068 to 1086, after the former's father had been driven from the throne of Munster. Murchad's son, Bran or Brian, never even ruled So see, even with that fraught playthrough, they already did better than history! Well, not better than their nephew did in real life, but better than their own character.

 

I'm from Dublin and I can't believe how much of this I have absolutely no fucking idea about. Time for a wikipedia binge methinks.

 

I have no idea how to pronounce Murchad. I think it might be kinda like ''Murr-hud'', really soft pronunciation of the 'C'. I dunno. 

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I have no idea how to pronounce Murchad. I think it might be kinda like ''Murr-hud'', really soft pronunciation of the 'C'. I dunno. 

 

All I know is that the Irish archaeology professor here gets really angry if you say it "Mer-Chad," like a half-fish half-Chad.

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No, those are different ones, the Hohenzollern is many years old and from past installments of all the constituent games. I'd forgotten about the dude's Ireland-to-Egypt Let's Play with Crusader Kings II. It's actually a fairly good walkthrough of the challenges, expectations, and rewards at each level of rulership, even though it's from an older version. Thanks, Badfinger!

Certainly! I was actually concerned it was the same LP that codicier linked to, and it appears to be. Mine does start from the beginning and is an edited version, so at least I'm not a complete horrible copycat.

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Is this what King Sean I Vanaman would have wanted?

 

Show us what date it is, you dog-hearted bastard. I'll only be impressed if you did that in under a hundred years.

 

Just kidding, I'm a little impressed no matter what. You married into the king of France's line, right? For some reason, I always prefer conquest to marriage, even though the former is more inefficient.

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Oh god dammit, i think this stream probably just finally sold me on Crusader Kings II.
 

Or it would have if the Steam sale hadn't just ended.

Gaaah.

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