holidailies 2013: episode 4

Crusader Kings 2 is the best game. The BEST.

I happened to get it in a Humble Bundle a few months ago, partly because one of my other Facebook/Steam friends had been playing it a lot and I thought it looked kind of neat (and for what I paid for the bundle, if it wasn't, so what? I'm out a few bucks that went to charity), but mostly because my boyfriend said there was a Game of Thrones mod for it. SOLD.

It was really hard to get started: Paradox's tutorials are notoriously crappy. I think my biggest mistake was starting with the GoT mod. I started as a random Westerosi character who then instantly got smacked down by...I think it was Robert Baratheon, actually...and then suddenly I had no land because his army completely owned me. Oops. So I consulted the internets (continued watching a bunch of Let's Plays about it) and started messing around in Ireland. I still wasn't totally sure what I was doing, so one of my boyfriend's friends, the one who is really into the game and has a few hundred hours invested, took us both through some basic starting strategies. And now...

I've got ninety hours played so far, and while I still haven't been able to form the Empire of Brittania on my Irish games (because England is always a dick), on my Norwegian game...

Let's just say that King Harald is, historically and in the game, a giant badass.

I've been playing this particular game for two days (so many holy wars!), and despite a little save-gave fuckery with stupid Scotland, this is my progress. I have all of Brittania, Iceland, the Scandinavian regions, and a number of territories to the west, and I've been starting to take chunks of Frankish, Spanish, and Polish holdings, and also screwing with the King of Hungary because it's really fun. But today is when I locked down Scandinavia. It's like "What'd you do today?" "Oh, not much. Did some laundry, ran a few errands, formed the Empire of Scandinavia. You know, the usual." I'd been playing as the Emperor of Brittania prior to forming Scandinavia, but this seemed more correct for a Norwegian ruler to have as his primary title. 

I think my next mission is to take out the Holy Roman Empire. That should be fun. Hard, but fun. I have the biggest army in the game world at the moment, but the HRE is no joke.

I've only played as Catholics so far, so I also really want to try playing as the Norse and the Tengri soon. Subjugation wars! Pagans! Yay!