BEHOLD, INFIDELS, AND TREMBLE!
Not pictured: I also own northern Scandinavia, of all places.
As you can see, I've been playing the game quite a lot since patch 1.04.
The tale of how I got to be a triple-emperor is a rather bizarre one. The current year is 1210. I started out as the lowly Sheikh of Palermo in 1066, and spent most of my first character's life duking it out (*ba-dum-ching*) with the Christians in southern Italy. By the end of his life he was the Emir of Capua and Palermo, having had a pretty successful career of declaring holy war on the surrounding lands and taking them over in the name of Allah.
I did have one pretty scary brush with the HRE back then, when they took a sizable chunk of territory from me. After that I learned my lesson and kept a diplomat stationed in the HRE capital at all times to keep the Kaiser placated.
After I hit the northern wall of the HRE, I started expanding east over the Adriatic as my heir. I took out Duklja and won some territory from Croatia, and also pulled off a successful defensive campaign against a very irritated Hungary with the help of a Muslim holy order. By this time, due to some provinces in Italy splitting off in wars of independence from the HRE, I also managed to take enough territory to form the kingdom of Sicily.
I had managed to marry one of my least favorite sons to a princess of the Shia Caliphate, forming a very handy alliance with them. Both the Shia and Sunni caliphates had been in a steady decline since the beginning of the game, although they were still large enough to be a significant presence in their region. I decided to install my eight year old grandson as the Shia caliph even though he was a drooling imbecile with terrible stats; I figured, 'what the heck, he might end up having a son I want to play as, and it'll increase the prestige of my dynasty'.
After fighting a long and drawn out war with the caliphate I finally won with the help of mercenaries and installed my grandson as Caliph Abbas I. At that point I noticed something I hadn't counted on: the line of inheritance of the Shia Caliphate went to
me if my grandson died! Well, the little idiot was clearly of more use to me dead than alive, so I had him assassinated (it took something like four tries and cost me a good portion of gold, but it was worth it - luckily all the failure events were of the 'the assassins were caught but did not reveal my name' variety).
I was now Caliph Adam I. Being ridiculously excited to suddenly be playing an emperor, I decided it was time to kick the hell out of the infidels, and immediately declared war on Croatia to take another half of their territory or so. I also snatched up Genoa and Venezia.
I have a habit of picking my younger sons as my heirs, since it gives me more time to get their ducks in a row and really rack up piety and prestige. It also gives me time to try to optimize the claims and inheritances I get, since I tend to assassinate my older wives so that I can pick newer wives with better claims and stats; I can still press the claims of my older sons if I want that way, but I'll end up with the best claims as the characters I actually play as myself.
Late in Caliph Adam's career, I got rid of his current wife in just this manner - actually a bit earlier than I would have preferred, since she was still fertile, but she'd tried to assassinate one of my older children, and I don't tolerate that kind of behavior. I took care of her via a plot, and then went looking for a new wifey. I ended up finding Karlotte Salian, daughter of Kaiser Heinrich, who amazingly actually accepted my marriage request. Probably this was because I'd had my diplomat stationed with him for his entire reign. This netted me an alliance with the HRE (bizarre, really, since I was a Muslim caliph), as well as the potential for my son to inherit Karlotte's claim on the empire. Karlotte and Adam had three children, two sons and a daughter. This was very late in Adam's life, and I picked the older of the two sons, Mukhtar, as my heir, because he had more favorable stats and because he stood to inherit the HRE claim. Also, the other son was named Yahya, and who the hell wants to play as somebody named Yahya?
Well, Mukhtar's career is when things got really exciting. As with most of my characters, I spent the first ten years of his reign or so just getting the realm under control and putting down rebellious vassals, only expanding in tiny bits and pieces without taking any real risks due to the hindrance of the 'short reign' modifier. I had already decided that I was going to try to take over the HRE with this character, since his claim was only inheritable if pressed in war. After the realm was stabilized and everything was in order - and I had a LOT of money saved up - I proceeded to declare war on the HRE, then call up every single one of my armies, along with several mercenary bands.
I had decided on a strategy of blitzkrieg against the HRE. I knew I'd NEVER be able to take them in a toe-to-toe match, so I figured my best hope was to land on their shores with overwhelming forces, then just proceed to assault everything into oblivion and force a 100% warscore surrender. This was amazingly effective, mainly because of how many port provinces I had as the ruler of lower Italy. I also had enough spare fleets to haul my entire army from the Middle Eastern territories of the Shia Caliphate over to Europe at the same time that I flooded the southern HRE with all of my European troops. Basically what happened was that one hundred and fifty thousand troops, give or take, landed on the shores of the HRE almost simultaneously. The Kaiser, who was a ten year old kid named Gebhard, didn't even have time to put together a proper defense. I don't think any real battles were fought; the HRE surrendered to me within a few months of constant keep assaults. I lost thousands upon thousands of men in the assaults, but it was well worth it.
Immediately upon taking the HRE, I had to deal with a TON of pissed off vassals, who were not happy about the fact that their holy empire was now being ruled by a Muslim caliph. Naturally, the first thing I did was to go around converting everybody. The HRE had medium crown authority, which meant that for those vassals who refused to allow me to bribe them into converting, I was able to simply revoke their titles without consequence. Well, I mean, many of them revolted - but considering the amount of troops now at my disposal, putting down those revolts was basically a joke. Within a year, the HRE was well on its way to conversion. My vassals were beginning to do a lot of the work for me, forcing
their vassals to convert. The process was gradual, but over the course of Mukhtar's life, much of the (former) HRE had begun to convert.
After all the craziness of taking over the HRE was done with, and the realm was slightly less prone to sudden revolts, I basically settled in as Mukhtar and decided he would spend the rest of his life kicking back and building up the caliphate, having already accomplished probably the most dramatic military victory in the history of Europe. I also wanted to be ready for the Mongolian invasion, since they completely took me apart in my last game, so I was determined to have a very, very large army ready for them if they ever came as far west as Germany.
During my (relatively) peaceful years as Mukhtar the Caliph-Emperor, I married Hedwig, the daughter of Lampert, the oldest son of King Salamon of Hungary. Salamon was about to croak, being in his late sixties, and Lampert was getting a bit dusty himself. Even better, Lampert's only children were Hedwig and her older sister Iren. I assassinated Iren right then and there while the chance of success was still high, just in case Lampert didn't have any more kids. Well, he didn't - his wife was too old - although he lived for a long time. Meanwhile, Hedwig and Caliph Adam had three sons, Malik, Zafir, and Hamad. My thought process here was that I'd be able to inherit Hungary as one of my children without ever stepping foot there with my armies, so all I'd really have to do is wait for Hedwig to croak once I started playing as my heir.
It was at this point that I started digging around in Hedwig's ancestry more deeply and discovered something that made me squeal like a little girl inside. I had COMPLETELY passed over the fact that Hedwig, aside from being the daughter of the heir of Hungary, was the granddaughter of Empress Kyriake of the Byzantine Empire. Lampert's wife was Agne Doukas, Kyriake's daughter. The current leader of the Byzantines was Euphemia, an ancient old goat of a woman without any children. The inheritor of the empire was Garyphallia, another of Kyriake's granddaughters, some nobody without any titles living in the court of a Byzantine duke. Hedwig was next in line. I moved my spymaster over to the duke's court in a hurry and had Garyphallia ushered from the mortal coil, taking a piety hit in the process due to one failed attempt. Again, VERY worth it.
At about this time, the three sons of Hedwig and Mukhtar were coming of age. Malik, the eldest, was the one I originally wanted to inherit. Unfortunately, after I gave him a sheikdom for his coming-of-age present, he proceeded to prove himself to be a complete idiot. He tried to assassinate both of his brothers, and actually DID successfully assassinate a cousin, getting the 'Kinslayer' trait in the process. D'oh. He, in turn, was assassinated himself (not by me).
Out of the two remaining sons, Zafir, the middle child, had very good stats after I tutored him. Hamad turned out to be kind of an idiot, but I kept him around just in case Zafir got assassinated before Mukhtar died.
As soon as Lampert kicked the bucket, Hedwig became the Queen of Hungary, with Zafir as her heir. She immediately called me into war several times to put down rebellions - because I'd converted her to Shiite while she was in my court, her vassals were very pissy about her reign, just as mine had been. Because my son would be inheriting her lands I didn't want them all breaking off, so I assisted her in putting down the rebellions. Unfortunately this was to become the pattern of the next twenty years or so of Mukhtar's existence, because as soon as Euphemia died, Hedwig became empress of the Byzantine empire, and she did NOT let me forget our alliance. Again, I felt obliged to assist her in the MULTIPLE wars caused by her rule, because I didn't want my son inheriting a terribly fractured Byzantine empire, but holy crap. I think by the time her vassals stopped rebelling, we were on something like 'the twelfth war against the tryanny of Empress Hedwig'. It wasn't all bad, though, because Hedwig did all of the work of force-converting the Byzantine empire to Shiite for me.
The process is slow, but before Zafir's reign ends, most of Europe will worship Allah.
When Mukhtar died I took up the throne as Zafir, my current character. Hedwig was about ten years younger than Mukhtar, so I had some time to establish myself before she died and I got control of the Byzantine empire, which amazingly came under Zafir's rule with very little in the way of trouble from rebellious vassals. Sure, there were one or two, but nothing on the scale of the massive rebellions suffered by Hedwig's rule. I'm guessing this was probably because of the aforementioned pre-conversion to Shiite.
Thanks to the crazy succession to the throne of the Byzantine Empire that I got completely by accident, I now essentially rule over a fully intact Roman empire, albeit a Muslim one. It seemed appropriate to move my capital to Rome, which I did as Mukhtar - although I'm now considering moving again to Byzantion just because of how obscenely crazy its income is.
I'm now playing as Zafir. The only other thing of note that's happened recently is that one of my half-brothers from an earlier marriage of Mukhtar had a claim on the Sunni caliphate which I didn't notice at first. Once I did, I went to war with the Sunni caliphate to install him. I don't have any way of inheriting it for now, and I haven't been able to scheme my way into a claim for one of my sons so far, but I did create the following hilarious situation due to the fact that my half-brother was previously one of my vassals:
My next move? Well, I'm currently married to a princess of the Seljuk Turks who will pass on a claim to both the Seljuk and Persian sultanates to our sons. I may have to do some expansion out east to have a foothold there to assault the Mongols from...
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Topic: Crusader Kings 2 is released. (Read 2091668 times)