Been playing the Game of Thrones mod since Friday, logged 80 hours. Yup, I'm addicted.

 

It's doomed us all.

 

Words cannot begin to describe my hatred for the new patch, I'm pretty sure that it's fucked up my current save, which sucks because I love it so much ;-;. I'm not going to bother going into the levy change, because the big problem I have is with the factions. Thanks to this change, instead of having to constantly end plots every few seconds, I instead have no way of stopping them without having to have my spymaster be in 10 places at once, since I can no longer tell them to end their plot, and imprisoning them would give me a -40 opinion penalty. Looks like it's time to start anothing game and hope I get retardedly lucky like I did last time.

 

Do you have the DLC or not?

 

Yeah, factions need to be worked on. Steam also does imo. It doesn't matter how many times you tell it not to update the fucking thing will somehow fuck with you just because it can.

I'm waiting for the CK2+ overhaul of the system.

 

Game of Thrones mod updated, added Seven Kingdoms, Aegon's Landing & 2nd Blackfyre Rebellion scenarios.

Bye bye again life.

 

How did they deal with the dragons?

 

The same way they did in the other scenarios, pretty much. There are some flaws in it, but they are still fun. In Aegon's Landing you start with the Dragon Rider trait, so your martial is 175, but the really cool thing is that you can deploy your dragon in battle and in siege. 3000 men can defeat 18,000, in other words.

Aegon is lacking troops, so it's still difficult to manage, as everyone else just has so MANY men. The dragon burns the territory it sieged, obviously, which is a negative effect.

When Aegon dies, his dragon is passed on, but it is a wild dragon, which must be tamed. If Aegon dies mid-Conquest, it sucks dick.

 

I just tried the mod for the first time and the change between the original game and the mod are a bit overwhelming at first. I see 68k troops walking around during Robert's rebellion.

The North really needs boats, walking all the way from Winterfell to King's Landing is a pain in the ass, my vassals are all telling me I've raised the troops for too long and I haven't even reach pass The Neck.

I've tried playing Staks and Lannister. The new faction system (I haven't play for a while), is pretty interesting. The way the lordship works is amazing; it truly represents the book. When there is a war between Lord Paramount, everyone can declare their allegiance; if the Iron Throne is at war versus someone else, then your vassals can declare for the King even tho you are against him. Can create pretty interesting situation.

So far, an interesting way of playing the game. I'm going to try another house in a few and probably take some notes / screenshot to write something about the game!

 

They've tried giving the north boats, but the AI goes absolutely full retard when they do. It's a choice between an inconvenience for people who play the North, or having the North be an unusable, barely-functioning region when you're playing as anybody else.

 

So I started playing this game again with Aztecs and CKII+ enabled. I start as a count in France, and manage to luck and strategise my way into controlling two empires (Frankish and Roman), mending the Schism through having my line pass through the Byzantine's, and having a total of 29 Kingdom titles either as vassals or under my belt. Completely forgetting about the Aztecs, I play my way around for a while before, suddenly, I get a notification that they took a county in Brittany.

Pissed off beyond belief, I drop in a 30k retinue stack before realising that I misread 120.K as 12.K somehow.

Loading back a year, and actually pulling all my troops across the Empire in preparation for this invasion, I thought I'd prepared for the attack.

Unfortunately, I didn't have enough of my troops reach on time, so I'd almost lost the duchy to the Aztecs by the time I could muster enough in one spot to take them on.

The result:



Note: This is with the help of the HRE, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Scotland, Moray, Hungary, Poland, Wales, and a few other nations thrown in.

 

The Republic comes out today; and for anyone who wants it now, since Steam is taking ages:

Repost (Reposting this here, Steam DLC is up on GreenManGaming

http://www.greenmangaming.com/s/us/e...s-ii-republic/

Gives you a code to activate on Steam.

Use this code to save $2: GMG20-PJFEW-Y16HK)

 

Well, with Republics now playable and interesting we should now see Essos in the GoT mod . It might be hard to create Patricians but I can't wait.

 

There has actually been a barely-playable companion mod to the GoT mod, adding Essos, for awhile now. Though it was obviously made before the Republic DLC, so fuck yes this will be awesome.

Can't play CK2 until Sunday night, as I'm out of town, but the second I get home (well, maybe I'll put my stuff down) I am buying the new DLC and getting in a good session.

Hope one of you posts about your thoughts wrt Republics!

 

This DLC owns bones, get it.

There's five Patrician families to a merchant republic, and four merchant republics at the 1066 start - Pisa, Genoa, Venice, and Gotland (Swedish island in the Baltic). I assume Lubeck shows up early, but haven't checked. Furthermore any kingdom or higher can create one by giving a duchy to a mayor.

A Patrician can build a trading post in any coastal province that doesn't already have one. It costs 150 gold times a multiplier for distance and relationship with the province's owner - building one in Sicily from Venice would probably cost you ~300, to give you a vague idea. The trading post gives you a base income of 6 a year, plus additional income for each trading post boarding the sea tile, the upgrade levels of those posts, plus the number of cities on those coastal provinces. Plus a bonus if it's linked to your capital by sea tiles you 'control' - you control a sea tile if a Republic's families control the majority of the trading posts in coastal provinces on it.

The controller of a given Republic is determined by who has the most 'respect' when the old one dies - you get a big bonus for age (~3000 or so if you're 60), a middling bonus for prestige (1:1?) and 50 respect for each 10 you sink into an 'election fund' - you can put money in and take money out freely, but once the elections happen the gold is gone whether you won or not.

In theory this means old fucks win. In practice it means dosh wins. As it should be.

What being the ruler of a Republic means is that you get control of the vassals and capital city of the Republic. Which inevitably means you'll use the capital's tax income to enrich your own holdings instead of furthering the goals of the city, because your heirs may not control the city but they'll keep your manor and counties. As it should be.

Merchant Republics DROWN in money once they get rolling. Started as Gotland in 1066 - and mind you Gotland is much poorer than the Italian republics, but it has no competition for the region - and by 1086 I was bringing in ~25 gold per month.

Oh, and if you have a trading province somewhere, you get an automatic CB to seize a city in the province. If you have a city, you have a CB to seize the province. You quickly get into the habit of snipping cities off rebelling coastal provinces - in my Gotland game, I've got Aberdeen.

The downsides? The other Patricians will stab you in the back. Will, period. You're nowhere near noble, so nobody will marry their daughters to you unless you pay them a fuckload. Like 400 gold for a princess. So marrying your way to power is a lot harder. Your riches depend on the largesse of your host nations, and if you give them a reason (or if they're given a reason by your rivals) they will take all your shit and boot you out. They'll even get piety for it if they're of a different religion. Nobody will ever marry your daughters matrilineally, and it's all Agnatic all day, so daughters are about as useless as they are as an Islamic nation - sorry, feminism. At least you get prestige for days for marrying them off to princes. Your income is huge, but you get frequent +/- gold events, that seem slightly slanted towards minuses - so you can find yourself in the red if you don't have a buffer fund, which will fuck you over if you're depending on mercenaries to fuck someone at that time. <16-year-old heirs cannot get elected, period, so if the RNG fucks you you will lose control of the Republic.

Protip: don't build trading posts somewhere unless you can personally kick their arse. One of the rival families in my Venice game built trading posts in Byzantine lands, and when the Byzantines declared war to seize them (at the behest of the Genoans) I couldn't hit surrender fast enough. Fuck your shit, rival families. On the other hand, when the Croatians tried the same thing (at the behest of the Pisans) entire mercenary armies when stomping through the lands of them and the Pisans while I cackled like a madman, and in the end the Pisans had to pay reparations to me.

 

Part 2

Ruler Designer is super broken with this. Doges rule for life, which is balanced by the fact that unless you've got mountains of dosh to fuck the elections with, the winners will be ancient. But if you ruler-design the leader of one of the merchant republics to the minimum of 16 years old, then you've got a good fifty years to build up an economic powerhouse to ram your heir of choice down the throats of the other families.

If you're the Doge, you can jail anyone you find plotting. If it's the other family heads, you either a) throw them in jail, where they quickly die but not before their hilariously gimped diplomacy means you can easily plot against them to take all of their trading posts, but they can't throw you in jail for it, or b) you fail to jail them, they run off and let someone else be new family boss. The new candidate is younger and therefore less electable, and now has a relative-in-exile they still have to support financially.

Speaking of, you only have to financially support your relatives if they're unlanded. Hire a mercenary band and go rampaging until you've got enough cities to give one to all of your male relatives. Then they have to pay you tax instead of you paying for their hooker and cocaine habits. Did you know you only have to disband levies to declare war, not retinues or mercenaries? Abuse this.

BOATS. You need BOATS. All of the boats. You're never going to have levies worth a damn, so you're going to be relying on either a) retinues or b) mercenaries, in either case you need to be able to deliver them quickly. Old British maxim - the army is a projectile to be fired by the navy. Live that. Build harbours, build the palace upgrades that give you more delicious boats. For the hire price of a mercenary fleet of 100 boats you could have got 5000 more mercenaries, and for the upkeep cost of them you could have gotten triple that.

NEVER EVER BUILD TRADING POSTS IN HRE OR BYZANTINE LANDS UNLESS YOU CAN FIGHT THEM AND WIN. They will embargo you just to loot your trading posts. In my Gotland game they just embargo'd me for the 14 trading posts on their German coasts - I immediately surrendered because they all belonged to the rival families. The HRE got 750 gold out of it, which is megabucks for poverty-stricken feudal scum.

 

I've managed to install the 1.08 update and the latest game of thrones update. When I start up immediately there's a change. The options for the GoT mods come up for a change.



Maybe I'm clicking on the wrong mods or combination of mods but no matter what I seem to do, when it's launched, then game just goes to the regular map of Europe and the vanilla starting scenarios. I'm assuming that screen would have to have a map of Westeros so I could choose the modded starting scenarios and which family I wanted to play as.

Anyone have any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong?

 

Lol, that sucks. Gotland may have no competition, but it can't expand. You can't fight holy wars to gain land in the Mediterranean., which is both a quick way to get land and to block your opponents from getting land. It makes trading posts very cheap with a flat 90 gold price and it blocks your opponents from getting trade zones in that area.

That's the good thing about the Med, there is a lot of competition but if you claim land you can block your enemies from getting a lot of land.

But the patricians are worthless. I pretty much broke them over my knee immediately. Plot and take their trading posts. Without that, they're weak. They never use money for campaign funds and without a lot of money they can't build trading posts. I pretty much keep the Republic seat forever. Only one other house has any trading posts and those are the ones they had at the game start or the ones they stole out from under

You're lucky that those are the only two you have to deal with. The king of Castille somehow conquered most of Hispania and then took France and so had the majority of the land under his control. That's pretty much most of the coastline. If he embargoed me I'd have been fucked, so I just didn't build trade posts around him. But it pushed me to expand into Africa though, which gave me a real advantage

I think I'm gonna do an AAR of a new play through of Genoa.

 

The Game of Thrones mod updated.

Essos was not added in this update, sadly, but they did add a slew of other things.

Things like two new scenarios (The Dance of the Dragons and the Conquest of Dorne), stillbirths and moon tea, new plots, and airborne fights between dragonriders, to name a few.

 

No matter what I do as a merchant republic I always end up rampaging through Ireland. Either I start in Gotland in which case they're the ideal conquest to jump past the Denmark/Norway/HRE/France contiguous block of unconquerable land, or I start as one of the Italian MRs and end up grabbing some land around the straight of Gibraltar, some more around the northern coast of Iberia, and then bloody Ireland just to grab the trading post slots before some other fucker does.