I know I could just go and try for myself, but my connection is slow and my laziness legendary: how do HIP and CK2+(and any other major overhaul I'm not aware of) compare against each other? I'm interested in something that adds flavour and interesting gameplay without breaking the vanilla feel too much and doesn't perform significantly worse than vanilla.
I have recently started playing CK2 again with CK2+ and it's very good, but also depressingly slow(played the whole night yesterday and only made 30 years :S). And while HIP sounds just as, if not more, slow with the SWMH module, I'm hoping since it's modular I can just skip that one, maybe throw in another mod that removes India, and still have an enjoyable experience, am I wrong?
I checked for myself and the newest release of HIP has a new variant of SMWH that instead of adding more provinces to Europe only removes a good chunk of India and the Steppes. Performance is very much improved from CK2+. I still haven't got around the deepest differences in both mods but HIP now has CK2+ very decent faction system and many more flavour events.
Fired a few games in my favorite ToG start(Duke of Balaton) and had some fun.
In the first one the High Chief of Bihar(which is an independent tributary of Bulgaria in the mod) randomly declared on me. Easy prestige after marrying a genius lowborn. I offered fealty to Árpád ASAP but resigned when he begun the revokefest on me(the 15k+ doomstack the Magyar get in the beginning is too scary -- still not enough to net them the whole of Hungary, apparently)
Second one I decided to join the Bulgarians instead. No luck, they are gimped to the ground.
In the current one I decided to join Moravia. They had one revolt and two wars with surrounding
barbarian pagan tribes. Really fun ride, with the 4 provinces + the usual 3 vassal counts Balaton starts with in this mod I was able to have quite a big impact in the wars, we had to clear out two additional neighbors that declared on us and I had to take a loan to hire mercs but we did it.
Then I created a new ducal title with 2 of my provinces and managed to lose the one I start with
Balaton starts as Agnatic-Cognatic Gavelkind in HIP, I thought I wouldn't be able to meet the requirements for Primogeniture until my character's death so I decided to install Elective Monarchy instead. 2 of my counts prompted to vote on one of them and the rest(including me) just voted for themselves or their own heir. Since you can only change inheritance laws once per character(pretty sure that's a HIP thing) I was screwed, and I did have what I needed for primogeniture after all.
Next I asked the king to transfer the vassalage of the last de jure county of my new duchy to me. As soon as he transferred I got the message it was plagued by cathar heretics(did I mention it was a pagan slavic province?), no wonder he was so willing to give it to me, huh? It didn't take much for the heretics to organize around a militant leader and spawn a 2k stack. That's really bad, ain't it? Actually, it's not!
Just as the king was struggling to put enough troops in the battle against them he decided to enforce a revocation on a county of mine he had been wanting since forever. Well, I may have just short of 2k troops, but out of your ~4k there's a 1k stack being decimated by 2k angry heretics, have fun. And indeed much fun was had when I took a loan, filled my ranks with a few mercs and proceeded to wipe the floor with the king's ass(I wonder why he didn't take a loan and hired mercs himself too though).
I did lose a duchy in the end, but I had a daughter married to the lucky elected's firstborn just in case. The bastard changed his heir to his middle son, but I think I'll still get children with claims out of the marriage? We'll see.