Shit, someone should mod the nazgul into the game. Maybe as a secret society or something.
Anyways, behold the Labourdian Empire
As you can see in the screenshot, the Emperor is a vampire. One issue I'm having is that since HF came out there seems to be no way of vamping other people into your dinasty... but of course, thanks to longevity and plot defense this is largely a non-issue. It's important to keep the Emperor out of duels and shit like that because otherwise you're a dice roll away from a gameover.
My original idea was to expand north rather south, but as you can see there's a big empire there which poses problems. Plus most nations there are feudal, which makes them tougher to beat, whereas most nations in the rest of the Iberian peninsula were tribal. So in the end I converted from my original raider religion to worshipping the Crone of Time which has raiding AND holy war (and crucially, an Assasin cult), and I conquered most of the Peninsula via Holy Wars. I made Biscay and Navarre my core demense with personally owned castles and not-mosques in order to be able to pop up a decent private levy as needed (and it's needed often).
Now I'm moving towards Africa for three reasons:
- The Saharan trade route. I need that sweet, sweet money.
- Eventually I hope to make the Emperor into the Caliph of the Crone of Time. I think I need the holy sites for this which are in Western Africa I think.
-Last but not least.... this game has all invasions turned on. Which means that at some point in the near future we're gonna get ravaged by not-aztecs and not-mongols. I expect the former will likely take over most, if not all, my European territories. So I was hoping to take over southern Africa in order to establish a second contingency empire down there, with chokepoints. I might actually move the capital there TBH, and hole down for the storm.