You’re a beautiful man! I’ve been waiting for this.
I look forward to your tales of conquest and treachery.
Please note that the “Sunset Invasion” DLC is a kind of fantasy setting, where Aztecs invade the west like Mongols invade the east. For your first playthough, you really shouldn’t play with it. I haven’t picked it up myself since I’m not interested in ahistorical settings. Fortunately, the game launcher lets you specify which DLC to load with the game; just turn it off and you’re good to go!
“Currently unavailable
We don’t know when or if this item will be available again.”
I’m currently just watching through videos because holy shit is this game complicated.
A-yup.
But really fun.
So I decided to start as an earl rather than as a king in the hopes of getting a slightly better handle on things. At the suggestion of the CK2 wiki I picked the Earl of Dublin, since he starts with an elderly father who shortly dies off, and you get his stuff.
Anyway, it seems that my guy decided that among the things that he inherited from Daddy was his second wife, because just a year or so after daddy kicked off, I’m schtupping her on the side. :eek:
The thing that I’m having the biggest problem with right now is succession. I keep forgetting that if I give my heir his own lands (to stave off the gavelkind stuff), he becomes completely autonomous, which means that I can’t arrange marriages for him and his own kids.
What’s weird is that on one playthrough I managed to change the succession laws to primogeniture, but when I finally got succeeded, it was back to gavelkind. 
I bought it awhile ago because a deep political game set in midieval Europe is in my wheelhouse. I just can’t get over the fact it’s not turn based. I know I can stop it any time I want, but it just isn’t the same thing.
This is almost the only thing about the game which really, really annoys me. Handing out lands to your children is practically required for a lot of play styles, but your kids suddenly become morons if you do, choosing incredibly bad marriages among other things (although I’m also fond of the odd idiots who decide to rebel against their own elderly father with three drunk swordsmen and a part-time archer). This is also one of the things which really doesn’t make sense in either the game context or the social/historical one. It wasn’t (and still isn’t) unusual to give titles to children before they took power. But that would never involve them getting a wife on their own.
Aside from which, I can imagine a lot of cool events to flow from that. What if you’re holding off a couple years to try and marry your 25-y.o. son to the 14-y.o. future heiress of some rich province… but then he comes up and says he’s had enough and is marrying the daughter of some other lord? Or if he just does it? Heck, what if you’re at war with said lord? Will could instantly block off one alliance and suddenly give you on you hadn’t planned on?
Check your laws screenb and make sure you changed it for the correct realm. If you have more than one, some of the laws may vary.
Actually, you can set it to auto-pause every day, which instantly makes it turn-based. That’s extremely slow play, so not many want to do it.
Forgot to explain: Your realms in this case would be any simultaneous “top level” political body you control. If your highest title is King, you have may different succession laws in every kingdom you own, whether it’s two or two dozen.
You should be able to arrange a betrothal for your heir before giving them a title. The marriage will still take effect even after they’ve taken a title.
As for succession, I believe there’s an issue when you create a higher level title de novo - the new title is created with gavelkind succession by default. For example, as Duke of Bohemia I had already gotten up to elective succession. I then created the Kingdom of Bohemia, which hadn’t existed previously; the kingdom reverted to gavelkind succession. (This may actually be the intended design.)
Yeah, it’s just a game design structure I’m comfortable with, you could pause a movie at the end of every minute also because essentially that’s what this feels like to me. There’s lots going on so turns help me organize it in my head.
It’s a shame too, because I know I’m missing out on a good game.
The beauty of the game is that it tracks individual days over a 400-year period. Actual dates matter for things like birthdays, events, council assignments and so on. All of that detail precludes an actual turn-based setup.
I agree that it takes some getting used to, but it sure is nice being able to just ramp up to 5x speed and let a year or two go by while you’re waiting on some long-term stuff to pan out.
What game is it most similar to?
All the individual components are still deeply discounted, so you can get the whole pack on the cheap, you just have to go buy and purchase them one by one.
The problem with that is that I couldn’t help trying to get relatives all over the place. Daughters only married men willing to give up their family name, I attracted people to my court just to marry them out to extremely remote cousins so they wouldn’t die childless, etc… After maybe 150 years like that, I was tracking an uncountable number of relatives all over the place in a gigantic genealogic tree, and it was becoming tedious.
By the way, I noticed some problems with male primogeniture. Sometimes, when inheritance is passed to second cousins or such, it’s not the guy who should inherit according to this system who does, and I never could find the rationale the computer was following in these cases, so I assumed it was some sort of bug.
Apart from that, yes it’s a great game, with a steep learning curve like all paradox games. And I don’t like beginning as a king, or duke, etc…I like to begin small and carve my way up. Much more satisfying.
One thing which really annoyed me was that I couldn’t figure out how (or even if it’s possible) to set notes and calender-stops for myself. Their are often points where I want to take a particular action on a particular date, but it’s really easy to let that slip and have a year or two pass before I realize it.
Any tips?
I saw somewhere that there’s a way to set which events create autopauses and which don’t, but I haven’t seen any way to set custom stops. Maybe there’s a mod for that.
clairobscur, I’m also finding it much more entertaining so far to start as a small fry and work up.
You can set the game to pause on certain notifications, e.g., if a castle has been besieged or when you’ve won a battle, but there’s no way to get it to pause on an arbitrary date.
This is again available from Amazon. I am looking forward to playing it soon.
Should I start with Crusader Kings or skip to Crusader Kings II?
I’ve never played the original game. Just go ahead and jump right to CKII.