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[scriver]

I've been thinking of doing a Muslim merchant republic, starting as one of the Morocco-ways African tribes, conquering my way to Tunisia, and making Carthage my MR capital.

Another one I used to intend to try out was starting as one of the Arab-Peninsular tribes, taking over Oman, and doing an Indian Ocean merchant republic game. Particularly nice with the Silk Road bonuses. It feels a lot less fun to play an MR with no other republics around to compete with you, though.

Then again the Italian ones barely every survive particularly long. It will be interesting to see if the new casus bellis that allow kings/emperors to swallow whole duchies will mean Genoa and Pisa and whatelse won't get stamped out by Greek and German Romans now.

[ZeroGravitas]

Wait... How do you play non Venice/Genoa/byzantine MR's? I didn't realize any existed o.O

I think the only ironman way is to ascend from tribalism via a coastal city, rather than a castle.  I've done it a couple times, most successfully as Mali.  The trickiest part is definitely reforming the religion in order to abandon tribalism.

(Or just converting to a non-pagan faith.  I'm considering a Muslim Mali trade republic run, soon)

In non-ironman, you can create a new merchant republic simply by giving a mayor a coastal duchy.  You can do that in ironman too, but this way you can load your game as a member of that new republic.

Even simpler: just convert to Islam as a normal MR. But yeah, settling as a nomad gives you the most flexibility in terms of culture and region (Merchant Republic + silk road is absurd).

[StagnantSoul]

Was having a playthrough of novgorod, my third person was a twin, pair of girls, so after she caused some problems in my reign I banished my sister... Yeah, I decided to check out what she's been up to in the past thirty years, checked the family tree: Kaizeress of the Holy Roman Empire. No husband. Apparently she managed to catch on of the Francias at moment of weakness, marry in with no heir, then kill them and somehow become the leader- then she conquered everything. And here I am having trouble with some viking raiders.

[Ehndras]

o.O Damn, dude. Now that's badass! Is she still of your dynasty? Too bad she probably hates you. Maybe take a family focus and rekindle the bloodline

[Paul]

Did they increase the risk and strength of religious uprisings at one point? I conquered Tangier as one of the Berber tribals, but couldn't hold it due to religious uprisings one after another after another after another. It's horribly broken - you would think they would have some kind of modifier to prevent them from coming so close together.

I have a 5 tribal counties and 2000 men. The uprising was 1700 men. My troops won, but lost a few hundred men. Two months later, another uprising with 1700 men. I barely won again. Six months pass and nothing happens, so I figure maybe they're stopped for a bit and send my guys on a raid. BAM, another uprising. In the month it took my guys to walk home, they get reinforced with another 1700 - so 3400 vs my army of now 1700. I use my prestige to get an extra 2500 and handily wipe them out. Three DAYS after the victory and right after my event troops disbanded, a fourth uprising and another 1700 appeared right on top of my guys, who were around 1600 remaining, and wiped them out.

So in less than a year I faced 8500 angry Catholics, all from the one little looted and raided province that I had conquered.


-edit- Hmm, seems that the "recent uprising" flag wasn't properly being applied. Bug I guess? I started a new game and did much  the same thing, crushed the uprising and got a recent uprising modifier that stopped this from happening.

[hector13]

Not played the game for a long while, but I'm reasonably sure the game has a chance for rebellion in all the provinces (which is usually 0) so... maybe there was a lot of bad things happening there? Usually the AI isn't particularly great at ruling, so you get things like incompetent rulers and smugglers and that sort of nonsense that increases rebel risk, among other things.

Fakeedit: This page of the CKII wiki outlines it better.

[Paul]

It wasn't the high risk in itself, it was the failure of the recent uprising flag being applied - making it have uprising after uprising after uprising instead of multiple years of peace after the uprising.

The risk was high due to religious unrest and a flag I assume was associated with me looting the province as a tribal (forgot what it said, something like savages running rampant), but the recent uprising flag normally reduces that to zero.

[Descan]

Aye, if you loot a province as a tribal, it's basically a guarantee'd rebellion. But the flag *should* fire after winning or losing the rebellion (though losing makes it moot because you lose the province and it stops being tribal, soooo) and if it doesn't that'd be a bug.

Note: It doesn't reduce it all the way to 0. It's more like -25% to the +33% the looting causes, though the exact numbers elude me. Even if it's working as designed, you'd want your marshall surpressing revolts in that province. (I know, right? An actual use for that ability? Who'da thunk it?)

[Paul]

Yeah it wasn't firing at all here, I wasn't getting anything from crushing the revolt.

In my new game they rose up and it got reduced to 0. Recent revolt was a huge negative plus "crushed rebellion" was another smaller one, reducing both the huge penalties to revolt risk (rampaging savages or something like that, and religious unrest). Went from like 60% revolt risk to 0. The prior game's 60% never ending revolt risk was definitely unwinnable. That game was really bugged though, the flags didn't go away even after the rebel won. So even the next count who got installed in the religious revolt got taken out by some other revolt. Peasant revolt I guess?

[Tawa]

Update just dropped. I haven't really played at all yet, but I made a quick game to see what was new for myself:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

- Names can now be written across wastelands, and named wastelands like the Rub al'Khali can be colored in! Among other things, this means that Mali looks MUCH better, because the Plateau and Western Sahara can be filled in, the HRE's name is now written vertically in 1066 due to crossing the Alps, Norway's name is now in the middle of Norway instead of weirdly scrunched, and you could hypothetically be marked as owning Siberia or the Sahara if you owned enough land.
- Additionally, named wastelands now have their names written across them on the map, rather than only being visible in mouseover text, and some of the names have been changed. Siberia is now Siberian Wastes and Burma was changed to the name of the mountain range.
- The Mongol khans (e.g. the Ilkhanate, Chagatai, etc.) are now tributaries of Yuan China. The Western Protectorate completely replaces old Chinese territory.
- The Middle East looks beautiful now. No more Sykes-Picot style straight lines, and a bunch of counties have been moved to the proper spots (especially Damascus and Alamut.) There's more color variation, too, with some bits of blue in northern Persia and orange in Yemen.
- Tibet seems pretty cool so far, but I'm waiting to look into it more when the DLC drops. I intend to play there first. There's an emperor of Tibet in some of the earlier starts and there's an eclectic mix of Bon, Buddhist, and Taoist characters in the area.

E: DLC is here!

[ZeroGravitas]

That "servant no more" achievement is presumably achievable either by becoming a Satanist and regaining your scimitar, or by marrying four straight lustful women and looking the other way when one of them cheats on you.

You can't marry as a eunuch, period. You can't even force your own courtiers to marry you.

That said, it's way easier than it looks, precisely because of the Satanist stuff. You don't even need to use dark healing to remove the trait, although that's probably a good backup plan. All the Satanist features make it absurdly easy to, say, kidnap your emperor and then force him to join your cult. Since you'll outrank him, he'll automatically surrender in all wars to you. It should be trivial to take over the empire from within and get to 100 realm size (if he's not at it already).

Even if you didn't have Satanist stuff, it's probably not that hard anyway. You're 22, you have your duchy, and you're relatively close to holy war targets. It's just not going to be that hard barring the unlucky "died of natural causes" at age 50 stuff.

Turns out it has to be done in the character's lifetime:

# Starting as Mu’nis al-Muzaffar of Galilee in 867, become an Emperor and have at least 100 realm size.
A_SERVANT_NO_MORE = {
   possible = {
      is_ironman = yes
      character = 163134
   }
   
   happened = {
      character = 163134
      tier = EMPEROR
      realm_size = 100
   }
}

No point in removing eunuch or trying to get married or get concubines.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Anyone want to jump in on a multiplayer game of the DLC?  Got a discord set up here we can organize in: https://discord.gg/5fjtGx5

[Ehndras]

Anyone want to jump in on a multiplayer game of the DLC?  Got a discord set up here we can organize in: https://discord.gg/5fjtGx5

Aww. Why must adulting take place. If you're still around in 2-3 hours, I'm in!

[Tawa]

So I've been playing some more and getting a feel for the Jade Dragon mechanics.

Pros:
- China mechanics are spot-on. China is always there but it doesn't totally dominate play in India and Tibet
- The soundtrack is magnificent. I particularly like "The Way of the Dragon".
- Most of the CBs work well; De Jure Duchy in particular has a huge prestige price that makes it good for emperors and risky for kings, as intended.
- The kowtow journey mechanic is pretty cool.
- There is basically no downside to selling the people you don't like to the emperor.
- I think it's part of the update, not the DLC, but I wanna mention that I love how you can buy armor from the blacksmith now.
- Waifu button

Cons:
- Grace prices are kind of weird, and unless you become a tributary or kowtow to the Emperor (which give you a running bonus like prestige or piety) you might need to save up for a couple of rulers to get anything decent.
- Force vassalization is incredibly broken and there's no option to turn it off without killing the actually good CBs. I saw a surprising number of HRE revolts, but the Kaiser kept forcing them to be his vassals again. Brittany, Wales, and Ireland died instantly.
- I'm not a huge fan of how "WESTERN PROTECTORATE" gets superimposed on China's tributaries in place of their original names.
- I'm dead???

[Radsoc]

Some other DLCs are on sale right now until Nov 22th, which is when the steam sale starts. Trying to anticipate their move, but to me it seems highly unlikely that they would drop prices even more after just one week. So I'm guessing the sale stops then for technical reasons, only to be rebooted.