After nearly 100 turns, I took all of England and Ireland as...England.
It was very heavy fighting. I took wales right off the bat, but scotland to the north was proving to be a strong enemy. My longbow men luckily won a lot of battles on my side, but scotland was able to field large stacks of troops. On top of that, my expansion was pretty slow because each castle/city needs a general to rule it. Each general when attacking also has to deal with supplies, attrition and their own individual income. One general I sent on a Winter campaign to scotland, and he came back starved and beaten. Got to scotland's capital, then had to turn back. He was also in major debt since he hired mercenaries. He in fact died right before he was able to make it to my northern castle. Just was a little ways away. Didn't die from the weather, but rebels attacked him and he stood no chance. He was at least just a general and not an actual family member.
But that slowed my progress by quite a lot. He was the general that would rule scotland's capital, and so I had to wait to adopt or one of my children to come of age.
Until then, I sent a diplomat over to Byzantine territory. I saw one of their princesses and was able to ally the byzantines AND marry the princess to my English heir who was not married at all. And by luck! The princess is fair looking, giving increased fertility.
Still for a child to raise to adult hood is a VERY long time. Each turn is 1 month, and it takes (obviously) 12 turns for each year. So you can imagine how long it takes to wait to have generals able to take care of cities or castles. On top of that, since I now am talking about turns and months. Each year, you can only recruit a certain amount of units. In January you can decide 12 units (or maybe its 14), 24 units or up to 40 units. But, the more units you have on the side (so lets say I chose 40), all your cities, castles and generals greatly suffer economically. Especially once Winter sets in. But you do get a much bigger army to recruit for that year.
Luckily though, I adopted two more people. Generally, I like to mostly stick with family members. But, it takes so long for them to age, that I adopted 3 young men to fight for my empire (one which died in his suicidal winter attack against scotland). And winter was over, so I stuck a bunch of troops to one of my generals and sent him off to scotland. Then gave my 2nd general some extra troops from other cities, and sent him to ireland. Which ireland was a pretty easy fight, and that secured all of that area.
Then my other general made it to scotland's capital. There he saw one entire stack of rather good units. However scottish must be blood thirsty, because they attacked and didn't have the reinforcements from their capital. The game also gave me an awesome starting location on a nice hill. So my longbow men did what they do best, rained destruction upon the enemy. My six longbow units wiped out more than half of the scottish army, making the rest of the battle a mop up.
And then took scotland's capital right after, as he only left two units there. Guess those scottish love to run out and fight the enemy head on! Head on, apply it directly to your forehead.
And all that took nearly 100 turns in a game that usually is mostly over in that amount of time.
Medieval 2 Total War
Stainless Steel
BGR V (harder than IV)
Hardest game/mod I've ever played for a strategy! And holy cow is BGR hard as heck. Even England being the easiest faction to play as, feels like I'm playing ultra hardcore mode with them lol. I tried crusader states and then went NOPE, that is like immortal difficulty right there
Oh and the pope kept complaining about scotland lol. But pope likes me so much, that I didn't lose much reputation from him. Still kept whining about me attacking scotland. Even whined when scotland attacked me rofl