Once you play through Ireland once, it is hard to resist the siren's call of easy counties/duchies/kingdoms.

 

So uh, here I was, chilling out and taking over France by exploiting a massive civil war to basically take 8 counties from different rebelling duchies, when once I've finished taking them, the king of france loses the war, and suddenly the Duke of Champagne is now the King of France. Whilst still being my vassal. So I know have all of France and Aquitaine.

I honestly stopped playing and starred at my computer, I didn't know shit like that could even happen in this game. The next problem is to figure out a way to revoke the title from him because in all honesty I don't like having a vassal with that much power...

 

Assuming you were the Holy Roman Emperor?

 

Equally bizarre stuff happens in my games.

Over the course of about three years as King of France my kingdom suddenly absorbs pretty much the entire western half of the HRE (My wonderful ambitious dukes eating through Lombardy south through to Provence). One of the dukes promptly rebels, is shut down, and I take over his duchy and hold onto it.

Two years later I find myself Holy Roman Emperor, while my nephew is married to the Byzantine Empress, with relatives ruling over England, Scotland, a united Ireland, and an immense Galicia that's absorbed everything in Africa west of Tunis and west of Aragon.

Unfortunately that game was lost to patches and incompatibility, but still. Muslim presence in that game was limited to Tunis through Egypt. The Golden Horde pretty much controlled everything east of Poland and Antioch.

Finding yourself with a King under you unexpectedly beats your beautiful blue map turned all grey and ugly. Or, in another game, having the ruler of a third of your Kingdom inherit another one and secede. /sadface

 

I was playing as the glorious leader of the Brittanian Empire, and to be fair, this wasn't the first time hilariously bullshit stuff had come out in my favor. When I married off my heir who would be my second king, I was able to marry him to the queen of leon and castille, who he was able to get pregnent with a son very quickly.

My King died of old age, causing King 2 to take the throne, and with absolutely no meddling from me, my wife died of an illness leaving my newborn son as the king of leon and castille, and then somebody assassinated him (most likely the king of galicia since he inheritted leon due to gravelking succession). But this then left me with the kingdom of castille for my seccond king with absolutely no actual work on my half.

To top things all off, the muslims were doing VERY well in my game, to the point where they have everything in spain apart from half of galicia, navara, leon and castille, and gallicia/leon didn't last very long. And by that stage, I had all of scotland+ireland with a good chunk of england, meaning that it only took me a few holy wars to get most of spain.

tl;dr I've spent hundreds of hours playing this game and shit still comes out of nowhere and surprises me.

 

So I'm trying to play through the tutorial of CK2. I open up the first tutorial and try to click on shield to see what "de jure" is. Game crashes. Repeat x4. I have no freaking clue what's going on.

Gonna try and reinstall, but this is annoying,

 

Is it fully patched?

 

The tutorial is fucked in the new version. Wait for a patch, use this in the meantime if you need to learn the ropes.

 

CK2 linux version is finally here. :awesome

Also there's some mysterious 10 day countdown shit going down at their forum and it's day 2 now. People are guessing a Viking dlc.

Anyway here is the image.

 

New patch today; fixes dozens of bugs, including:

"Tutorial: Fixed a crash in Realm View"

Give that a go, Evan Tide.

 

The bottom right looks like chunks of partially-broken-up ice. Norse/Pagan DLC would be my guess, too.

 

Third day now and the top left looks like the bow of a longboat to me.

 

I love ireland, don't ask me why. I just love how hard it is to get it all consolidated.

 

I thought that Ireland was the easiest start in the game?

 

It is. Once you get to two counties you can pretty much roll over the rest of Ireland, then Wales, then Scotland. The only real threat is England, or one of the Spanish nations if Leinster manages to get an alliance going, otherwise it's plain sailing.

 

meh, I just suck then since I keep failing at 7 counties.

 

The easiest way to do it is to have your Chancellor forge a claim on a neighbouring county (preferably the other part of the two-country duchies so you can become a Duke), then wait until you can afford a small band of mercenaries for 3/4 months. Use them as shock troops to get rid of the enemy's army and conquer as many baronies as possible with them before you run out of cash (assaulting is a good way to go here since you pay less cash for weakened mercs). After that it's just a matter of sieging your way to victory with your regular army. Repeat with the next target, then you should have enough to take on any other Irish Count or Duke.

 

The duchy of Brittany is also a pretty easy start.. just use it as a base to conquer Ireland and then you can decide between Spain, England or France.
With a bit of scheming it is also quite possible to make the whole duchy into your personal fiefdom where you control all counties personally which gives you a nice power base and money for the start.

 

England is a threat?

News to me, in all honesty. I've always found them to be hilariously weak unless everyone's culture-flipped to English already. Even then they're kind of mediocre.

 

They've got more soldiers to draw on, a stronger financial base to hire mercenaries, and while you're unifying Ireland, they're strengthening their control over England by evicting Saxon & Breton lords from their lands. They're not exactly a cake-walk.