Great Moments in Europa Universalis/Victoria/Hearts of Iron

nations dont play differently as much as religions do.. I guess it depends on what dlc you have. muslims/byzantines/westerners/russians have their own ways to play and their own challenges.

another good way to start is to pick a duke and try to graduate to a king. if you start out as a king it can get boring quickly. if youre a truly cool dude you start as a one province count and try to claw your way up to the top.

an easy way to keep your kingdom together but your personal demesne small is to use elective succession. gavelkind is default and totally sucks.

I've sunk so much time into CK2 recently. Started as an Irish count and worked my way through the neighbours until I was king. Then I got lucky with some marriages and inherited a big chunk of England. Took over Wales quite easily, then hoovered up enough English counties to usurp the throne. Only Scotland was left, so I pressed my brother's claim and got him installed as king. But obviously he wasn't my vassal so I assassinated him and his only child so that I'd inherit the crown. Finally I could create the empire of Britannia after 200 years of scheming. A week later the ageing emperor decided to rekindle his sex life and died from exertion!

Now I'm left with a shaky grasp on the emperor's title and four kingdoms. Not sure how to play it now - is trying to hold onto everything unrealistic? I was thinking I could focus on keeping England in the dynasty through primogeniture, and not worry too much about the emperor elections.

Once you start to understand the mechanics the game gets really absorbing. I still feel like I only understand a tiny amount of the rules but it's fun working them out. The random events are great as well. My king had some fun hanging out with Robin Hood for a while.

i am fucking with crusader kings 2 again. also the irish scenario oppet described above, although i'm only 40 years in and can confidently predict that i will NOT become an emperor.

can anyone recommend some good tutorials/strategy guides for marriage, succession laws, etc? i have a loose grasp but i still feel blindsided half of the time.

also can anyone recommend one of the DLCs to purchase? i just have the vanilla version of CK2 but i'd consider picking up one of the DLCs if it's beginner-friendly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP7VCmIDc_w

so funny tho i've been playing CK2 again too. i had a decent game as Duke of Silesia going and had most of Poland when the King of Poland rounded up my own in-laws (!) to put down my rebellion and retake Krakow which put the kibosh on that. i'd like to found the empire of russia as a russian for the achievement but i'm never sure the best way to go about it since all the starting dukes are like siblings. i guess that didn't stop me from conquering all of spain as leon but it's not clear to me the best way to start off grabbing land. lots of Rus border gore too - non-continental territory that i didn't even know belonged to me until some vikings started raiding it.

my recommended dlcs btw: legacy of rome (adds retinues and more flavor for byzantine empire), rajas of india (adds indian religions), sons of abraham (adds jews and a lot more other religious content), sword of islam (make muslims playable), the old gods (pagans and zoroastrians and adds 867 start date), the republic (merchant republics)

those are the ones i have. of those i think sons of abraham and sword of islam are best but i've loved playing as pagans recently.

charlemagne gives 769 start and the zunists (if you have old gods), horse lords lets you play as nomads (adds raiding adventurers, silk roads, forts), conclave not sure what that does, the reaper's due is the newest i also haven't played it yet but has better epidemics, hospitals, new disease mechanics, etc. way of life is supposedly kinda terrible and breaks the game since everyone starts taking the seduction focus and you end up getting constantly cuckolded by rando courtiers. sunset invasion i have but it's goofy - let's you play as aztecs and if it's activated at some pt the aztecs invade europe as /historical counter-factual/.

going off track but I really need to go back to my game of Victoria II where I united Italy and then colonised Malaysia (!)

of course the more you think about your game of Victoria II the more you realise you are an absolute cock

I need to play CK more as well

I went back to my Ireland game but I guess bc of the recent patches everything was fucked up so I started a new one. Conquered Ireland in about 25 years and now have my hooks in Scotland. Current dilemma: My heir (under primogenture) is my grandson who doesn't have any debilitating statistics but is fairly blah considering how long I've been trying to get positive traits into my genetic bloodline. My youngest daughter however is a genius! They are obviously related but only through me because her mother and his grandmother were different wives (and then of course he has an additional genetic infusion from outline the bloodline from /his/ mother). I'd love to marry them to each other but I'm worried about my inbred risks. Maybe I should roll the dice because genius is worth it, the chances should be fairly low I think?, and I can always force imbeciles to take vows or straight-up poison them.

Also wondering what will happen if I marry my heir off to my daughter matrilineally. Is there any chance she'll become my heir or will it pass to my second oldest son (obv oldest son died which is why my grandson is currently the heir)?

Oh, also my new Commander has a 32 (!?) in Militant skills because Jesus gives him military advice!!!!!!

thanks for all of the recommendations, mordy!

i think i got really lucky in my game and then shit the bed because i wasn't ready for the additional complexity.

after a 50-year reign as murmad THE CRUEL, i was all set to pass my crown to my oldest son who had just turned 16. i held off on betrothing the heir because i didn't see too many advantageous options. king murmad died from having too much sex, and the heir, Brian, took the throne. but somehow he was instantly married. i don't know how it happened - he was just instantly married to a lowborn who didn't have any listed family, had poor traits, and also followed a different religion. i guess i'll know for next time, but i thought that the game would at least allow me some input on what i wanted for the marriage of the new king.

anyway, i dealt with that (via poisoning the new bride) but i shit the bed about 10 years later. it turns out that after king murmad died, the widow got married somewhere way up the line in the county of York, and when she died, I (Brian) inherited the duchy of York. this took me by surprise. about 20 nanoseconds later, the Queen of England declared war on me. i was not ready at all for this, and still working on uniting ireland in fact, so i just surrendered and ceded York without a fight.

in retrospect, maybe i should have tried to ally with scotland and went to war?

i also switched my laws over from Agnatic-Cognatic Gavelkind to Feudal Elective. since i recently had handed out the majority of the duchys to various people in my court, this immediately resulted in a bunch of factions trying to murder my children.

whoops.

Oh, also my new Commander has a 32 (!?) in Militant skills because Jesus gives him military advice!!!!!!

how do i unlock jesus

two years later and my truce with the king of scotland has expired while he's in the middle of a crusade campaign in beirut with his entire army. alas my military leader is no longer inspired jesus now :(

that's awesome btw about inheriting York. i think i've maybe successfully inherited a distant county through marriage once ever. what was the queen's comparable strength? if you could've held her off with an alliance or a mercenary corp it might've been worth doing. even if you could hold her to a white peace you'd have gotten to keep york and a like 20 year truce out of it.

what's sad is that i had spent a considerable amount of time trying to pull the marriage inheritance thing off, by looking for men with titles willing to marry matrilineally (couldn't find any, although i invested a lot of time into it!) and various other shenanigans, none of which panned out. meanwhile the york thing just kind of happened on its own. i still don't fully understand, or even partly understand, the ways that titles and claims are passed on from generation to generation.

the queen's comparable strength was much higher than mine, probably not so much because of the strength of her alliances but because i was relatively weak over in ireland. i was spending most of my time trying to unite a bunch of vassals who were trying to murder my children, and wasn't thinking about broader military concerns.

conquered Scotland (waited like a courageous and virtuous ruler for the king of scotland to go crusading in jerusalem and then hijacked the bulk of his kingdom while he was gone) and most of Wales - now eyeing England. I have an alliance w/ the King of France (and my genius daughter is married to his heir and is his heir's heir's mother) so that should be useful. the problem is that even w/ vassals (which i try to resist using bc my own levies are robust) i only have like 15k soldiers and the king of england has 20+. i've built up a bit of a bank (1000g) but that doesn't feel like enough to overwhelm him w/ mercenaries and i'm concerned about relying on France to supply the missing firepower because NPC AI is not fantastic especially when you need to build up for a big army - doom stacks facing each other - they won't always coordinate correctly and stack w/ your army and then you end up losing.

i did get a genius on the throne - the son of my second son was a genius so i educated him up and then switched over to electoral monarchy so i could bypass my eldest's claim to the throne. he had married some dumbshit (w/ a cute portrait tho) in the meanwhile so i had to assassinate her (pope was extorting me for a divorce for like 400g so that was not happening) and then married my genius cousin to hopefully make some genius heirs to inherit. unfortunately w/ electoral monarchy i had my son (from the first marriage but that won't be a problem since i can just elect the right heir when he's hatched) set up to inherit the kingdom of ireland but one of my conniving uncles got enough support to become the inheritor for scotland and i sure as hell was not going to let scotland go after all the work i spent stealing it. so i assassinated my uncle too and now my dumb brat kid from my first marriage is set to inherit both kingdoms. luckily i'm young and my genius cousin is young so we should have time making genius babies and hopefully avoiding inbred ones.

achievement unlocked: United the Kingdoms

now to never play as anyone in the UK ever again

any ideas for what achievement to go after next? i've always wanted to unite Russia

http://www.ckiiwiki.com/After_the_End

that sounds p cool.

i united india in eu4, currently reenacting the classic 18th c land grab tug of war in the middle east between the ottomans, india and russia.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?attachments/secret_cult_screen_01-jpg.240720

WHAT

No Active Mission, eh?

tom do u play this game? it's really the greatest.

No I need to give this marriage a fighting chance

this goddamn game is FIVE. YEARS. OLD.

and still rules.

has anyone played Hearts of Iron IV? i'm about to start it up for the first time, and was just wondering if there is an obvious go-to resource/guide i should look for