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Paradox 4X Thread [Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis 4, etc.]
I spent six and a half hours in the fucking demo yesterday.
I am currently downloading the full game.
god help me.
EDIT: now I can ramble about EU4 here too, suck it!
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after choosing England as my starting point, I have--through an escalating series of terrible decisions--found myself in the shoes of a great king of England, that king's son, that king's deadbeat brother (who is now king), that king's deadbeat brother who is demoted to second prince, and that king's deadbeat brother's daughter. Who I am now.
She is a Duchess named Alice (I didn't really think that name had much royal history, but I didn't name her that, the game did) who controls several scattered counties in England, France, and what we would consider Upper Spain.
I find this line incredibly amusing because of heaper injokes.
well apparently the official name of the genre is "grand strategy", but I'd basically describe it as one of the Civilization scenario maps if those actually modeled politics and history as well as they were implied to.
It's a really, really complicated game. To give you a small example in just one particular facet, I own the Duchy of Aquitaine, but not any of the counties within it. Nor are any of the Counts within the Duchy my vassals (for this specific reason I changed Alice's main title to be "Duchess of Anjou", since I actually own all the counties within that area).
also there's a really in-depth intrigue system where you can assassinate rival leaders and also you can't declare war without a valid (or plausible at least) reason and there's so much it's just kinda crazy.
that's specifically why I included the parenthesized part.well the king's son ruled for about two seconds. The in-game timer counted it as 20 days or something.
Anyway, the deadbeat's daughter turned out to be my favorite member of the family by far. Establishing an independant Duchy of Aquitaine* after plotting for a long time against England's Queen Joan, who had it as a vassal state at the time. She eventually got "The Great" affixed to her name (yes: Duchess Alice The Great of Aquitaine. It's a pretty cool title, I know).
Of course, it all fell apart in the end. She had no male heirs in a reasonable amount of time and the game doesn't let you play as female ones (she had two, who became the Queen of Leon and a countess somewhere respectively) since the house name changes (there's probably a way to finegle around this, but matrilineal marriage didn't work because the guy she married ended up becoming the King of Leon entirely by accident). Plus, Queen Joan came back with a vengeance and tried to invade me when she was like 60-something, and then I made peace with her only for her son William of England & Sicily to start the war again like a month later. By that time, Alice had come down with a severe fever after giving birth to her first son, who technically ascended to the throne for a little while (Duke Allison, everybody) before being killed by some mercenaries gone AWOL and ending my bloodline. "Alice The Great has passed to Christ at the age of 36" actually made me tear up a little bit because I get the feelz over everything.
Ultimately, the game's score system decided that I'd done nothing of importance. I don't know what became of Alice II, the Queen of Leon. I'd sure like to though.
It occurred to me in retrospect that I could've used the same tactic I used to make an independent Aquitaine to become the Queen of England, and indeed, I may reload the save sometime and do that, but as of now, I'm playing as the King of Poland.
*for the curious, this ended up encompassing much of western France (historical Aquitaine, iirc), and also an area that served as a sort of buffer state between England and Scotland. As well as the county of Suffolk. Just kind of by itself.
The start date I picked is before Poland-Lithuania was a thing. At start date, Lithuania wasn't even a country yet (it later became one, but it's very small, and under constant siege from the various Grand Principalities around the area).
And despite being historically accurate, I don't think it enforces exactly historical governments. The best simulation of that sort of thing is noble uprisings, which are a pain.
personal goal still unaccomplished. Should be more viable once the Queen finally kicks the bucket though, since our successor will have a claim on the entirety of Denmark.
May have to give up on the Abyssinia part. Our single Abyssinian relative isn't closely related enough to the current king.
establishing a Wendish Empire may prove feasible though. I'll post a list of interesting historical diversions a little later, cuz some cool stuff has happened on this map without my involvement at all.
Some interesting historical deviations (we're in the 1100s right now, for reference)
well that went downhill quickly.
after the Queen died, a pair of civil wars broke out almost immediately and I lost both of them. I've been reduced to the Duke of two-county duchy Mazovia.
I have attempted this a few times and it has always gone poorly.
I think this has something to do with your Diplomacy stat.i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
actually now that I think of it his name might be Kirill
I dunno. This may be offensive and if it is I apologize but I can rarely keep Slavic names straight.
also he is a "The II".
the first Kirrill/Krillan/K Word Duke died as a child and was severely handicapped, or at least enough so that he was deemed incapable of ruling. He fell into a coma and died, it was really damn sad, so I had Gelb name his firstborn after him.
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
I didn't name the first one that.
I didn't name about 99% of the Polish playthrough's characters actually. Else I would've named them all Boleslaw (I like roman numerals), the reason for that being that the Queen I was playing as lived for a long-ass time, she was 77 when she died. So her children already had children (grandchildren in a few cases) when I went to play them, and you can only name children of your current character.
and this time I played Sicily.
Technically I started out as a Duchy within, but I was able to declare my realm "The Kingdom of Sicily" in relatively little time by invading the Muslim emirates on the actual island of Sicily. An interesting result of this, two generations later, is that I now have a number of Catholic, Egyptian-descended nobles with distinctly Muslim names.
succession so far has gone Father->Son and Brother->Half-Brother. I'm not happy about that most recent one, but worse is that my current heir has the "Imbicile" trait. Which is probably the worst in the game.
well I was way off.
I've never started in Ireland. Seems hard.
I have continual problems with making and keeping money.
Well not properly
but I prefer to save some for mercenaries if they're necessary.
Also, the disconnect between traits can be amazing. My current leader is a kind, patient, gregarious, brave man, who has a hobby of sticking people on pikes.
Yeah, I think I've cemented my place in Hell with that one.
To explain the chain of events that lead to this: When my son, Diarmait, was born, I betrothed him to Adelajda, princess of Poland. Zwinislawa, the sole sibling of Adelajda, was heir to the Kingdom of Poland. So I grabbed the opportunity with both hands and smothered it with a pillow.
how high does someone's opinion of you have to be before they'll consider vassalization? Or is that not even relevant to that at all?
I'm playing as Muenster and so far have gained only a single county, and that was by force.
On the plus side, my Castillan-Irish grandson, the awesomely named Rodrigo Brianez, will be heir to both Muenster and the Duchy of Aragon.
well fuck. I'm pretty sure that neither of those two apply (I'm still not entirely sure where Petty Kings fall on the scale of things. I wanna say above an Earl but below an actual King).
I have no idea how to increase culture either, the mechanic isn't explained terribly well and I've been trying to go without tutorials (you have no idea how long it took for me to realize that the "De Jure Kingdoms" empires etc. were essentially irrelevant to how the map actually looks).
I also need to get better at working out how lineages work (since it only tells you direct successors). I spent quite a lot of time trying to kill the Queen of Navarra before realizing that I wouldn't actually benefit from it in any way.
this may just be a sign that I haven't played the game enough yet but
I'm still laughing about this ten minutes later.
also: England broke again.
so apparently under gravelkind succession, if you have two King-level titles, they get split amongst your heirs.
So, since I have two sons, I am guessing this is Bad.
what exactly was the reasoning behind it, historically? It just seems like a terrible solution to every concievable problem it might've been invented to prevent.
anyway, I switched to "youngest son gets everything" which will still make me lose Aragon (I don't understand why Fiann gets it regardless, but w/e) but is still not nearly as bad as it was before.
also the third son (who is now to inherit Ireland) is named Rodrigo, and uses Castillan naming conventions.
I could've changed it, but I find the idea of "Rodrigo Rodriguez, king of Ireland" too funny to tamper with.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
well, here's how my Ireland playthrough has gone so far (from memory, at any rate).
the game begins in 1066 with me as Murchad mac Briain, Petty King of Munster.
over his relatively short reign, Murchad managed to subjugate the independant county of Desmond to the west, uniting the de jure Petty Kingdom of Munster. He was succeeded by his son Brian mac Murchad Ua Briain.
Brian made no substantial territorial gains during the six years of his reign. However, his father had secured a politically advantageous marriage between him and the Aragonian-born Duchess Sancha. His son, counted as ethnically Castillan, would be named Rodrigo Brianez Ua Briain, and would spend most of his early years in his mother's Duchy. During Brian's reign, Munster was reorganized as a Duchy, and both he and his father became retroactively known as "Dukes" rather than "Petty Kings" of Munster.
When Brian passed away, the 17-year old Rodrigo became Duke of Munster, but he also had a strong claim on the throne of Aragon. Inspired by his grandfather's example, he took the throne by force. Naming himself the King of Aragon despite still reigning from Munster. Over the years (moreso in his later life, where he was less beset by pesky unloyal nobles) he slowly conquered many of the remaining independant counties in Ireland, as well as assisting the Duchy of Barcelona in beating back the Muslim Caliphates slowly creeping up into the northern regions of the Iberian peninsula, making some territorial gains in the process. He even managed to inherit a county in Greece, but it was swiftly retaken in a brief war with the Duchy of Antioch. In his late thirties, he officially declared himself King of Ireland, and made it his primary--and then sole--title, dissolving the Kingdom of Aragon. He used his newfound moral and legal authority to subjugate the remaining independant provinces on the island. Uniting them all by the time he was 40.
King Rodrigo would gain the epitaph "the Great" in honor of his conquering prowess. His last major act in life was to replace the gavelkind succession system with an unusual one naming his youngest son--Rodrigo Rodriguez--the sole heir of all his titles (he feared the family lands would split if the older Prince Fain remained entitled to a claim on the throne of the now defunct Kingdom of Aragon). At the age of 43, Rodrigo I died peacefully in his sleep.
Rodrigo II was still a child of a mere ten when he technically took the throne. He was beset by plots from all angles at a young age, and even his regent planned to take a slice of Ireland for himself. Somehow, he survived it all into adulthood. The vast majority of his kingship was spent putting down rebellions from various angles--for this, he too was named "The Great", and he managed to keep his kingdom in one piece, even the Aragonese holdings, while also making some small gains in Wales. Sadly, in his later years, complex marriage laws weasled the county of Ossary out of his kingdom. A brief, but intense war with Castille--the technical owners of the county now--followed, but was fruitless. Even with all the mercenaries Rodrigo's deep pockets could afford, there was simply no way to efficiently fight the Castillans both on their home turf and their invasion forces at the Irish shores. Rodrigo eventually conceded the war, the Queen of Castille pulling off what countless Irish Earls and Dukes had failed to do.
Towards the very end of his life, at age 51, Rodrigo launched a small crusade to conquer the Shiekdom of Catyludd. He died before he could finish this task, and it was at this time that his son, bearing the germanized version of his name--Roderick--took the throne. Roderick's first task was to finish what his father had started, and he did so successfully. However, Roderick was unpopular from the start, and his frequent fumbling--both of words and physical objects--earned him the derogatory nickname "The Careless". Roderick was forced to put down three entire major rebellions in his first few years as King. The first two were attempts on the crown--made in the name of his sisters--and the final was Catyludd attempting to reclaim its independence.
Roderick persevered, and in the years that followed, he was also able to make substantial territorial gains in Wales and England, both by force and through advantageous marriages, but rebellions continued, with the uprising of the Welsh Holdings under the command of Duke Alfonso being the most notable.
Later in his reign, Roderick willingly granted the now-Catholic County of Catyludd independence, and lost the county of Middlesex in a brief war with England. He was also able to retake the formerly lost county of Ossory, and gained holdings in the Holy Roman empire via an inheritance. Roderick officially formed the Kingdom of Wales, crowning himself the first king.
At the end of his reign, Roderick was beset by even more rebellions than at the beginning. This, combined with invasions from Scotland (who snatched up the northernpost province of the Emerald Isle--Ulster) made the ongoing wars almost impossible to win. Combined with a crown claim from his older sister Elisabeth, Roderick was forced to abdicate the throne of Ireland, becoming the King of Wales only.
In spite of this, he--through deft political maneuvering--managed to ensure that his son became the next King of Wales, navigating the country's tricky elective monarchial system expertly.
His son, Ruiadri, had a strange life. Born in a jail cell to a deposed Queen of Georgia, and spending much of his childhood as the titular Duke of Alania, Ruaidri barely knew his father's native Ireland--much less Wales--when he was called upon to rule it at his father's death.
An unambitious figure, Ruiadri was content to secede his personal Duchy half a world away to his former chancellor, and additionally, found himself facing rebellions from East Anglia and incursions upon Wales' remaining Iberian holdings by the Dunnunnid Caliphate. Unwilling to drag his people into another war, he seceded both territories. Reducing the Ua Briain's family holdings to the rump state of Wales and a single province in Aragon. A far cry from the small Irish empire that had existed only years before.
and that's Ireland up until now.
elsewhere in the world:
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
So yeah, this happened. Starting as Earl Áed of Tyron, I first married to Princess Cicca of Croatia, although this didn't come into play till later because of Gavelkind. When my son, Blathmac was born, I betrothed him to Princess Brunhilde of the Holy Roman Empire. Under Áed's orders, Brunhilde's past and future siblings were all assassinated. After dealing with all obstacles to that inheritance, Áed arranged for the death of the King of Croatia (who was an imbecile anyway.) The plan succeeded, but Áed died soon after, and Blathmac took the helm.
Under Blathmac's command, Queen Mirna, King Dytryk, and King Usciech were killed. During this, his fabricated claims on Tyrconnell were completed, and with the aid of a mercenary army, he took control of it. Cicca ascended to the throne soon after, and, due to the lack of any living relatives who weren't children, Blathmac became her heir. So he ordered her death too to hasten the process. Surprisingly, nobody has revolted or invaded yet. Maybe because my father in law is kinda, well, the Holy Roman Emperor.
Harold of Godwin survived the Battle of Stamford Bridge, and England is at relative peace. Wales is tearing itself apart with internal strife.
interesting thing happened.
Li'l Roderick recently became king, and he is listed as Roderick III. There has never been another King Roderick in Ireland, but there have been two Kings Rodrigo.
Does this mean that the game can tell if you use a name that's just a different ethnicization of another?
history up above has been updated.
Rod is in some deep mess right now.
I have never gotten anything intrigue-related to go my way. I'm just bad at that part of the game.
anyway,
Ireland
mainland
additional holdings in Iberia and Bavaria