I picked this up for my birthday and am loving it. I'm in the middle of my first serious game as Denmark (after some learning time in Ireland) and already I have a pretty funny tale. This is a tale about a younger, ambitious brother of the heir, and how I got rid of him, and how he eventually made good on his own in a pretty spectacular way.
King Svend of Denmark starts off with a zillion sons and daughters. It took me awhile to sort them all out and set up his oldest Harald as the heir, and at some point I noticed that Svend (who lived long enough to become known as 'the Old') starts with a weak claim on the throne of England. Huh. Somehow I am able to start a war with Suffolk, and take it. This is mostly on a whim; England is a cauldron of rebelling states most of the time so it seemed safe enough. This is also convenient, because at that point I was having some problems with one of my sons, Knud, plotting against Harald and getting nasty about having no land. I grant him the county of Suffolk, effectively banishing him to England and getting him out of the way. Or so I thought. One last thing - I married him to Duchess Jolanta of Silesia, which I never bothered to look up.
Knud had a son with Jolanta, called Glum. The entire time I am completely ignoring these two, despite a warning that these two may 'lose me titles' and my wife is trying to kill the baby Glum. I tell her to stop, but later realize I should figure out what's going on. I dig into Knud and Glum and realize that they've inherited the claim to the throne of England. If they ever succeed, I lose the County of Suffolk. I laugh that off - I never really wanted the county anyway, and them win England? The betting pool in Copenhagen is on how many years they can keep Suffolk before the English boot their ass into the sea!
Years pass. Young Glum inherits Suffolk, and Harald inherits Denmark. Feeling generous, I buy Glum the Duchy of Norfolk, in case we have a chance to snag Norfolk some day. I'm slowly turning things so I can invade and take Sweden, while keeping the HRE appeased. Suddenly, one day I am running an army around in the mainland during an HRE war near Poland, and I am a little shocked to see a whole chunk of land named... Denmark? On the west edge of Poland. Three entire counties, and their liege is... Glum. WTF? It's the duchy of Silesia. The name rang a bell... apparently the duchess of Silesia is Glum's mum, and
her poor old pa died with her as the eldest of two girls. She's dead at this point, so the title passed to firstborn Glum, who has also managed to keep that toehold of Suffolk, despite several periods of English hegemony. The HRE seems to be ignoring Silesia, despite them grabbing damn near anything small and weak and easy... Glum is leading a touched life.
That was funny enough, until the 2nd Crusade. Harald's son, King Knud II, is hip-deep in Saracens when Glum comes to him with a request for help against the King of England. I had only sent half my levies to Palestine, so I take a look at England and I figure, wth, why not. I send Glum the rest of my troops, futz around in England stomping on various red stacks and running from others (I can never keep track of all the factions) for a few months until my army is ground down, and I send it home. It didn't look too promising for Glum when I left, a big red stack running around and no blue stacks willing to take it on. Negative warscore, too. I turn my attention back to manufacturing more claims on Sweden, and not a month or so later I get a splattering of various alerts.
Seems that Glum has added the title of 'King of England' to go along with that spiffy Duchy of Silesia.
Its no home run, he's got only half of it under control, but still. Oh, and now I see England prominently in the middle of Europe. Those must be some really confused Poles. It was funny running around England side by side with stacks of Silesians!
How the hell he pulled that off I'll never know, I didn't pay close attention to who was backing who and I swore the warscore was negative when I left the field. It gets a little funnier - this period of history is not my strong point. Apparently, after digging around on Wikipedia, it turns out that when I 'banished' his good old papa Knud to Suffolk,
I was just playing into Knud's hands (wikipedia).
http://steamcommunity.com/id/A-X/screenshots... I won Jerusalem. I booted up an old save and I still somehow had 19% contribution (most other people had 10%). Is this normal? I only did that one battle.
I watched the entire Knights Hospitaler run into a 20k+ doomstack as their first battle in the 2nd Crusade, and get demolished. I happened to check the score right after, and they had a 35% contribution for that one heroic belly flop. Many months later its only down to 34%.