Effectively finished my Vlach Draculesti game at 1444. The Demon-Queen Satana was offed by poison at the ripe old age of 60 circa 1225. Guess I got careless with weedwacking plots as I expected her high intrigue to prevent anyone from bumping her off. Amusingly enough, the Joan of Arc event had fired near the end of her reign leading to an amusing teamup between a possessed cannibal Bogomilist Queen and a Virtuous Bogomilist maid! It was a good run though; she reconquered the Caucuses and ate or impaled roughly 3/4ths of the Seljuk dynasty! Great grandpa Vlad made sure to tell all the kids about the Turks.
Vlad III Draculesti was the first relatively normal and righteous ruler of Dacia; Satana's heresy never made much headway and he remained Orthodox, so the heresy pretty quickly collapsed except in the Kingdom of Georgia. Most of his reign was spent keeping the Bulgarians and Hungarians down while waiting for the clock to run out.
Here's Europe in 1444. Not
too much bordergore for a CK2 game. However, Iberia's a total mess, Ireland owns half of southern France, and the less said about Russia the better. That dark red blob in Poland is a frightened orthodox Lithuania next to a bunch of angry Poles rebelling against a Nestorian Mongol that somehow became king...
Back in my neck of the woods Hungary's been reduced to a two-bit player, and the Byzantines are down to a few islands and slivers of land in Greece. Georgia, Epirus, and the Republic of Thrace are owned by Vlad III's younger brothers, and Crimea was reconquered after the extended family proved incapable of keeping it. The Timurids have largely spend themselves, but the Turks and Ayyubids are still quite strong.
Eventually I'll convert this to EU4, but it looks like the next patch will re-work the Russian provinces so I'll wait until then. In the meantime, I've installed CK2+ and the Anime Portraits mod (god the faces look so much better!), and started a 867 game as a Sogdian Manichean count in Samarkand... Been going OK about 20 years in, though it's rather frustrating to have to kowtow to the Seljuks and their 70k event troops after eating half their dynasty in the last game!
Doing a RP play as the Byzantine Empire in HIP.
Got a ruler who was already a Secret Bogomilist. I worked very hard to lay the groundwork, and, ultimately, come out as publicly Bogomilist and unseat the Ecumenical Patriarch and start to convert the Empire and state apparatus, as well as regularize Bogomilism into the state religion.
He died suddenly of smallpox, only inches away from establishing a permanent Bogomilist establishment in the Byzantine Empire. Okay, I think, I'll just finish with his daughter, my new ruler.
Look at daughter's traits.
"Secret Catholic"
Fuuuuuuuu-
The more I hear about the M&M expansion the less interested I am. Seems totally historically immersion-breaking, and not in a fun "Aztecs invade!" way either.
