Been playing a bit more lately as I've been busy with other stuff (and working on my mod
) and had a run as the Eastern Roman Empire in the Charlemagne start. My first Basileus had a game stabilizing the empire and destroying the Iconoclasts, and died in his forties as the master of a stabilized realm...but his secondborn son was literally a child of destiny within ten years of the game start, and the Roman Imperial Government system allowed me to select him as my heir. Said heir has taken over, and has such ungodly stats that he's bulldozed everyone. Abbasid was blown in
half in one war, as the Child of Destiny gets infinite uses of the invasion casus belli, so you can conquer whoever you want whenever you want, and take not just the kingdom it says on the war declaration, but all occupied territory. If you want, you can occupy an entire empire and annex it outright. But along the way after taking back Italy, the man got the immortality event line and
succeeded and now I've got an immortal child of destiny rebuilding the Roman Empire, with the organizer trait that lets his armies advance like a goddamn mechanized division from HoI when it gets the multipliers off his insane martial.
This has let me do this...
...by 874. To get around the defensive pact mechanic, I'm going to declare war on Aquitaine and France (got a mod in for cultural names, so its called Frankrich - alas, it didn't do anything to my Rome other than change province names) and take them both on simultaneously, so I can annex the entirety of those realms in one war, and then finally go for Khazaria who has been beneath my notice for a very, very long time, but I want to connect the whole empire by land as well as by water. A small downside, though, is that mending the great schism (actually one of the biggest historical ball drops in CK, as the actual
schism didn't happen till 1054) has actually caused a drop in the moral authority of Orthodoxy, as the realms of the north that converted to it by the event keep getting creamed by the Norse. I'm going to go in there and clean the place out soon enough, so that won't be a problem for much longer, but it is making the conversion of that much territory a pain in the ass. On the plus sid,e I was able to do it mega quick to the Middle East proper, but I haven't been able to do North Africa just yet, so converting all that to the faith and to the Roman culture is gonna be a long term focus.
For now, though, I'm content to just build up for five years, then reclaim Gaul and Illyria. After that, Britannia, and then - hang on a moment: immortal, Anatolian, legendary conqueror, has a double headed eagle...oh snap, its the Emperor of Mankind!