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[Mephansteras]

Started up my first game of Old Gods the other day (finally got some of the expansions during the winter sale).

Playing as Holmgardr has been...interesting. Started off Norse with Norse religion, my heir ended up being Slavic Religion (but still Norse culture), and his heir ended up being Russian (still Slavic religion). So now we're Novogorad all off a sudden. I assume that's just the Russian name for the region.

I like the ability to just conquer neighboring counties, it's been rather handy. Keeping everything with the constant rebellions, though, has been a good bit more difficult. So after three generations and about a century of play I've lost most of the eastern and northern territories I'd conquered but have expanded a bit south and west.

So not doing great, but not actually doing all that bad. Especially since the second ruler I had was pretty much worthless for the first half of his reign and I was spending almost all my time just trying to keep the kingdom together. I really wish Rurik hadn't died off at 45, that guy was awesome.

But I'm having the most fun I've ever had in Crusader Kings. Got sucked into it last night and didn't even notice that it'd gotten close to midnight. Normally I get bored after an hour or two. So, good sign!

[umiman]

In games like these, it only gets fun when everything is fucking up.

[PenguinOverlord]

My game as Navarre went a bit too well. It just dawned on my how easy it is to blob once you have an Empire title. And how easy it is to prevent rebellions once the Pope is your vassal. It only took me around 30 years to take everything outside Hispania, about the same time it took me to grab a third province in the early game.
(image)

The Byzantine Empire is held by my son's wife and should fall into my lap in a couple generations. (Plus, since she's a Catholic, she's doing the nasty business of converting her vassals for me, with the occasional help from my 20.000 stack stationed in Constantinople.

Now, I'm actually pissed somewhat, because I started this game to play with the new Catholic mechanics, but maybe because I was so fast, maybe because I was so successful we still don't have Crusade or Holy Orders.

I was thinking of maybe switching to Byzantine once I get the title and then forming the Roman Empire. Is this even possible as Catholic?

Are you using cognatic succession?

[EnigmaticHat]

My game as Navarre went a bit too well. It just dawned on my how easy it is to blob once you have an Empire title. And how easy it is to prevent rebellions once the Pope is your vassal. It only took me around 30 years to take everything outside Hispania, about the same time it took me to grab a third province in the early game.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Byzantine Empire is held by my son's wife and should fall into my lap in a couple generations. (Plus, since she's a Catholic, she's doing the nasty business of converting her vassals for me, with the occasional help from my 20.000 stack stationed in Constantinople.

Now, I'm actually pissed somewhat, because I started this game to play with the new Catholic mechanics, but maybe because I was so fast, maybe because I was so successful we still don't have Crusade or Holy Orders.

I was thinking of maybe switching to Byzantine once I get the title and then forming the Roman Empire. Is this even possible as Catholic?

Normally I'd agree with you about the blobbing easiness but... how did you do that as a Catholic?  You could invade the HRE I guess, but that still leaves conquering France and Britain.  Was it the "grant a claimant a county and then press their claim" trick?

[Mephansteras]

Well, that all went to hell in a handbasket. Had a revolution pop up right after I spent most of my money squashing a different one, then had two different neighboring nations declare war on me at once. No money for mercs, my forces were undermanned as it was, and I had about 10x as many enemies running around as I could muster. All within 15 minutes of me booting up the game.

Cue my country getting smashed to pieces on all sides and me ragequitting. I'll probably boot it back up again later when I feel like a challenge, but that went from fun and challenging to impossible way too fast.

[EuchreJack]

I've got a 50% off CKII coupon too.  I suspect everyone who already owns the game gets the coupon, lol.

[Sheb]

Yup, invite a claimant, give them a county and press their claims. Then excommunicate them, imprison them and if they revolt, crush them, take their kingdom and give them to one of the legion of retarded cousins I have hanging around.

Also, I'm using Fully Cognatic Elective, with me and a couple prince-bishops (from my family) holding all the elector title in the De Jure Empire of Hispania.

[PanH]

Normally I'd agree with you about the blobbing easiness but... how did you do that as a Catholic?  You could invade the HRE I guess, but that still leaves conquering France and Britain.  Was it the "grant a claimant a county and then press their claim" trick?

I'm not sure about how he did it, but having the pope as a vassal is an extremely powerful tool. You can ask him to give you any claim, and he can't refuse (when you're on the screen of a title, with the buttons destroy, claimants, etc, there is a claim button, that sends a demand to the pope to give you a claim on that title, costing piety).

[EnigmaticHat]

I'm playing a game with the goal of going from a single county ruler in the HRE all the way up to Emperor.  I expected it to be kind of like Ireland, slowly going up the ranks one county at a time.  Nope, I stayed a one county ruler for 200 years, and then with a single inheritance and many murders I became a king.  It wasn't even possible to fight for much of that because the HRE became medium crown authority.  For those 200 years I played the marriage game hardcore, spreading my dynasty everywhere.  Almost all of the branches I've created either didn't inherit or lost their title immediately.  Some of them, for example the branch that still has a claim on Croatia, might be salvageable.  More importantly it gave me something to do while my one successful scheme reached fruition.

Now to consolidate my power, and set my eyes on becoming Emperor.

[Mono124]

Normally I'd agree with you about the blobbing easiness but... how did you do that as a Catholic?  You could invade the HRE I guess, but that still leaves conquering France and Britain.  Was it the "grant a claimant a county and then press their claim" trick?

I'm not sure about how he did it, but having the pope as a vassal is an extremely powerful tool. You can ask him to give you any claim, and he can't refuse (when you're on the screen of a title, with the buttons destroy, claimants, etc, there is a claim button, that sends a demand to the pope to give you a claim on that title, costing piety).

To get the pope as a permanent Vassal:
Step 1: See if you have any of your bishops are cardinals. For any of this to work, you MUST be an emperor. If no bishops of yours are cardinals, see step 1a, if you do have some, see step 2
Step 1a: Create a YOUNG antipope
Step 1b: Press claim on papacy, the pope is now your vassal.
Step 2: Put lots of money into the election fund for cardinals, until your nominee is winning by a long shot
Step 3: Assasinate a cardinal
Step 4: See step 2 until all the cardinals are your bishops. If you created an antipope and pressed his claim, congratulations! Keep that campaign fund high, and you will never lose the your new vassal. If not, see step 4a:
Step 4a: Assasinate the pope.
Step 5: Congratulations! Keep that campaign fund high, and you will never lose your new vassal.

Edit:
Step 6 (for super easy mode): Increase church taxes to max, and church levies to minimum. Bribe/whatever the pope to positive relations, and tada, money forever!

[Sheb]

What happens if the papacy is your vassal and some pope from some other country wins?

[Un67]

What's a fun, mid-size character to play in the 867 start? I've got the gist of the game down, but I've found that it gets really frustrating at times.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

1066 is the much better starting year. There's less nonsense and the world tends to form in an almost sane way. No mega doom vikings taking over the world as well.

Ireland is the traditional newbie starting area but since it sounds like you've grown beyond that. I would recommend the Normans in Italy. An interesting start with plenty of different cultures and politics to meddle in. You can push into Italy, Iberia, North Africa or even Greece. They have a decent cultural retinue* and some really interesting dynasties/characters.

*I personally find the Italian retinue better as it's far cheaper and pikemen are pretty strong in CK2. If you do play Italians make sure you have a small enclave of Scottish vassals so you can recruit them as leaders so you get the awesome Sheltron/Schiltrom cultural tactic and just blast away whatever you want, it's crazy powerful.

[Sheb]

Regarding retinues, since I'm Basque and have probably the single worse cultural retinue in the world (500 light cavalry), I've been playing with retinues made entirely out of skirmish retinues with pretty good results. Sure, you know that any fight that goes into melee phase will see you take heavy losses, but most armies will break before that, and since skirmish retinues take only 600 retinue size, you can have more of them.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Yeah LC retinues are just awful. They're a terrible unit AND they can force your army to do really substandard tactics.

If I had to rate units/retinues:
Horse Archers (Mongols/Turkish). Devastating shock which will just wipe the other army. Rather expensive and comes in low numbers but are by far worth it.
Archers. (Welsh/English). Cheap, numerous, excellent shock, great for "zerking" and unlike HA can be easily used to assault castles. However if you let your enemies get into the melee phase you're in for a lot of trouble.
Pikemen. Decently cheap and if led by a Scot has perhaps the most powerful tactic in the game. I find the Italians have the better modifier (IT +15% Morale vs SC +15% defense).
Heavy Cavalry. (German/French/Byzantine). A very expensive unit that really excels in melee. Very hard to kill but due to price and number are fairly limited. I find the Byzantines have the better retinue due to the addition of 200 HA giving them a massive shock bonus (but a slightly harder chance of some negative tactics). German/French +60% offensive is still pretty devastating though.
Heavy Infantry. (Norse, Irish, Baltic). Decent all round unit, not much to add. Find the Irish units better than the Norse since the extra defense helps them survive past the shock phase a little better.
Light Infantry. (Ethopian) Not a very good retinue but it's a great cultural building. Spam them everywhere and have hordes of cheap units to throw at assaults.
Light Cavalry. (Iberian, North African) Awful, terrible on every level. If you have these guys just stick with skirmish retinues and not even bother building any cultural buildings. Their stats suck, they use terrible tactics and are a bit expensive to throw at assaults. The closest thing they have to a bonus is their incredible speed, a single retinue could be very effective at baiting enemies into waiting doom stacks.

Skirmish. Good amount of archers so decent shock, a couple HI mixed in for a little bit of melee. Cheap and numerous.
Defence/Shock. Both are fairly equal. Defence might just slightly be better if you take the time to get a scottish general but that's a lot of effort when you could go skirmish instead.
Cavalry. Expensive, small numbers with way too much LC. I wouldn't want this anywhere near my army.

Now I haven't really played since EU4 since it's been sucking up all my time but unless there was a major combat rehaul that information should be decently correct.

I personally love the CK2 combat and find it has a lot more depth than EU4 (if solely due to the unit variety). I just wish tactics were done a little better so the chance for negative tactics should come from having too little unit variation rather than rewarding unit homogeneity.