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Playing with the Sunset invasion expansion? Or too Ahistorical?

That's my main problem with CK2 is that at a certain point, your victory becomes essentially assured because the AI isn't strong enough to make the tactical and strategic decisions to overcome your advantage. Makes me wish the multi-player wasn't so unwieldy.

TheHammer wrote:Playing with the Sunset invasion expansion? Or too Ahistorical?

That's my main problem with CK2 is that at a certain point, your victory becomes essentially assured because the AI isn't strong enough to make the tactical and strategic decisions to overcome your advantage. Makes me wish the multi-player wasn't so unwieldy.

What could the AI do though? It's not like a stack of 10K troops can beat a stack of 50K troops no matter how strategic you play it. And the guy with 50K can always split 10K off to beat your stack up whilst using the remaining 40K to do as he pleases.

That's really the problem with CK2. It just lets scaling run away when it comes to levees. There should be some sort of mechanism where you can't take them too far away from their home province or something.

Best bet would be to tweak the negative opinion penalty of keeping levies raised, and make it short. Essentially carrying levies too far away will piss off your vassals enough that you risk them plotting revolt.

The terrain could be handled much better. For example, you would not be able to use levies that far away from their hometown. Some areas could be more defensible - chokepoints could be set up. Or a quick fix would be to allow levies to be used defensively only, to force you to use the highly expensive retinues or mercenaries. (Which would require some tweaking though).

@Hammer: No sunset invasion. It does nothing and a large empire will beat it easily anyway, so it is an ahistorical mess for no gain. Except to provide you with one or two 500k battles.

Purple wrote:

TheHammer wrote:Playing with the Sunset invasion expansion? Or too Ahistorical?

That's my main problem with CK2 is that at a certain point, your victory becomes essentially assured because the AI isn't strong enough to make the tactical and strategic decisions to overcome your advantage. Makes me wish the multi-player wasn't so unwieldy.

What could the AI do though? It's not like a stack of 10K troops can beat a stack of 50K troops no matter how strategic you play it. And the guy with 50K can always split 10K off to beat your stack up whilst using the remaining 40K to do as he pleases.

That's really the problem with CK2. It just lets scaling run away when it comes to levees. There should be some sort of mechanism where you can't take them too far away from their home province or something.

Well as you've seen throughout the majority of this play through, the AI doesn't always pick the best locations for battles, nor use the troops at its disposal in the best ways. But you are correct at a certain point the numbers are overwhelming to where it completely doesn't matter. I don't have a problem with that, it's certainly a realistic aspect to it. The Big empires should essentially be able to bully the small players whenever they want.

However, from a game/challenge aspect, at that point your only chance for success as a smaller player would be to strategically weaken a large powerful opponent by making nice with the foreign emperor while secretly fomenting internal strife. Perhaps opportunistically assassinating a leader with a female or child heir with the idea that this would cause a civil war that you could take advantage of in a land grab etc.

For example, right now if I'm the HRE or one of the other big players I'm eying the BE with the idea that some day these super powers are going to go to war. And as such I'd be seeing what I could do to support the breakup of that adversary. But the AI doesn't think that way. It probably won't care much, or even view the BE as a threat until they share some sort of common border.

Whatever happened to the Seljuks? They were supposed to spawn a 100k+ horde right off your doorstep sometime during the period you played.

Dominus Atheos wrote:Whatever happened to the Seljuks? They were supposed to spawn a 100k+ horde right off your doorstep sometime during the period you played.

No, not in the viking age start. Seljuk isn't even doing anything right now, he seems to be either dead or stuck in the court of the pope (see previous posts where I posted the screenshot).

Still pissed that fucking dwarf still has his balls and eyes. Even though he's probably long dead.

Maybe I should do a serious playthrough myself.... seek to make House Garrett hold the hereditary title of Imperator Britannia....



In the meantime, I look forward to the continued Saga of the Thanasiad. I wonder how long before that jumped up Latin bishop with delusions of grandeur is brought to heel and accepts his true place in the structure of the Church.....

Just got around to reading this thread yesterday. Excellent job!

Steve wrote:Maybe I should do a serious playthrough myself.... seek to make House Garrett hold the hereditary title of Imperator Britannia....



In the meantime, I look forward to the continued Saga of the Thanasiad. I wonder how long before that jumped up Latin bishop with delusions of grandeur is brought to heel and accepts his true place in the structure of the Church.....

Lol, same here. He basically inspired me to start my own game from the same position as his. Well, not exactly the same. But close enough. I started off as a member of the Merchant republic just north of his start. And now the house of Pyrrhus holds sway over all of Italy (Sicily excluded) and the sultanate of Africa. Also Rome. Ortodox Greek controlled Rome.

And yes, I was inspired by the fact that in CKII every victory is Pyrrhic for it only leads to an endgame of quitting out of boredom or save file corruption.

Purple wrote:And yes, I was inspired by the fact that in CKII every victory is Pyrrhic for it only leads to an endgame of quitting out of boredom or save file corruption.

I hear ya. I was playing a game where a genius African princess ended up inheriting Wales, then proceeded to conquer all of England and Scotland. She was loved by all her people... except for her kids and relatives, as she had the habit of killing off the ones with low stats. Alas, just before she could launch an invasion to conquer Ireland and become Empress of all Britannia, the game file was corrupted

Tribble wrote:

Purple wrote:And yes, I was inspired by the fact that in CKII every victory is Pyrrhic for it only leads to an endgame of quitting out of boredom or save file corruption.

I hear ya. I was playing a game where an genius African princess ended up inheriting Wales, then proceeded to conquer all of England and Scotland. She was beloved be her newfound people... except for her kids and relatives, as she had the habit of killing off the ones with low stats. Alas, just before she could launch an invasion to conquer Ireland and become Empress of all Britannia, the game file was corrupted

That reminds me of a game I had where I started as a petty lord in viking Denmark with but a single territory to my name. Several centuries later and the religiously reformed Scandinavian empire controlled ALL the land to the east, the entirety of the DDR and as far south as the Byzantine empire. All of it. I still have the save game that has me set to usurp the byzantine crown as my own only to freeze up and die when I unpause.

Well, at least I got to try out my parenting skills. In that game I ended up kid-farming. I'd have a bunch of kids, pick out the one who is best, then just before I thought my character would croak I'd have him/her imprison and kill all the others to make sure the one I want ends up being heir. All the main pretenders wiped out and the heir wouldn't even have to get his/her hands dirty!

I also tended to farm Jews. Namely, when I thought my character would die soon, I'd borrow money from them, then expel them to gain even more money. After my heir takes over, in a show of mercy he/she would happily invite the Jews back into the realm. Lather, rinse, repeat.

If my current character didn't die someone would usually kill him/her off via plot before a civil war could break out, and my heir would take over anyways so it was a win/win for me.

I have a similar situation in my current game. Having started as a patrician I am stuck with seniority succession. So when my guy dies I get stuck with the hot potato of both my new character and his AI built alliances and hatreds AND the old ones now disenfranchised kin with axes to grind and old alliances to call on.

Purple wrote:I have a similar situation in my current game. Having started as a patrician I am stuck with seniority succession. So when my guy dies I get stuck with the hot potato of both my new character and his AI built alliances and hatreds AND the old ones now disenfranchised kin with axes to grind and old alliances to call on.

Before your guy dies, kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out. He's not too old to have more kids right?

Tribble wrote:

Purple wrote:I have a similar situation in my current game. Having started as a patrician I am stuck with seniority succession. So when my guy dies I get stuck with the hot potato of both my new character and his AI built alliances and hatreds AND the old ones now disenfranchised kin with axes to grind and old alliances to call on.

Before your guy dies, kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out. He's not too old to have more kids right?

I have a hard rule from my patrician days. No killing of family members. At least as long as they remain Orthodox and Greek.

Purple wrote:

Tribble wrote:

Purple wrote:I have a similar situation in my current game. Having started as a patrician I am stuck with seniority succession. So when my guy dies I get stuck with the hot potato of both my new character and his AI built alliances and hatreds AND the old ones now disenfranchised kin with axes to grind and old alliances to call on.

Before your guy dies, kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out. He's not too old to have more kids right?

I have a hard rule from my patrician days. No killing of family members. At least as long as they remain Orthodox and Greek.

I guess you can't castrate and/or blind eh?

Tribble wrote:I guess you can't castrate and/or blind eh?

Nope. Family is family.

A general question for people - how far shall I go with this?

Because there is the possibility of converting this into EU IV (and later into Vic2 via a seperate mod) I am not sure how far you want me to go here.

For example, if I would restore the empire to 400 borders, it would wreck EU IV. OTOH, I kinda want to play the Roman Empire until the 1930s.

So options to have it remain challenging are:
a) Play CKII to the end grab as much as possible and keep an earlier save for conversion (maybe the best. If the conversion fails it would at least give us one completed conquest).
b) Only conquer up to a certain point (like say the Justinian borders) and then let the AI play out the past years before converting
c) Don't continue this with EU IV and/or Vic2.

For B, I would think one of those should be the stop:

a) Justinian borders (Probably quite easy to do. Just finish up the reconquest of Italy and push Islam out of Africa)
b) Justinian borders + Spain
c) Justinian borders + Spain + Gaul (probably would wreck EU IV)

Try and restore the empire at its prime. So up to Hadrian's Wall. With the ultimate goal being to control the whole world. Make that your objective for the whole playthrough. As to when to switch games do so at a point where you feel comfortable that you will still have a challenge when you switch to EU. As in the point where you feel it's enough to give you a really good start but not ruin your fun. Because if you don't have fun playing it you won't have fun writing about it. And thus we won't enjoy reading it either.

There's gotta be someone who made a mod with Roman borders or some shit for the dreadful HOI.

Flagg wrote:There's gotta be someone who made a mod with Roman borders or some shit for the dreadful HOI.

There is a Roman era mod.

Justinian borders sounds good. You can choose to just port from the game at that point instead of playing on auto-pilot up to 1444. It won't adversely effect your starting technology in EUIV.

As for the EUIV-Vic2 converter, the only one I've heard of isn't a perfect one since it doesn't convert POPs properly, IIRC.