Thoughts on the Norse and the kinky shit I chose as religion:
- Elections are somewhat fun and VERY useful for keeping kingdoms unified before having an empire, but it has a very big downside is that you basically don't know who your heir will be, which is bad for some reasons:
- - You can't always secure that the reformed religion will be the empire religion after a transition
- - Your counties and duchies are all over the place, so the very good advice of having a developed area as your base you keep regardless doesn't work when the elected heir is an unlanded random cousin
- - When you have multiple kingdoms and are trying to form an empire, elections are probably best, but after forming an empire, it's just a headache. You want a very clear linear line holding it all together with at least one very clear well developed duchy to serve as your bank. Having an unlanded emperor will just mean debt and he will probably be unseated by a faction anyway. Actually, in my game, I just let them take the throne and just voted back in to have another faction take away again. All the while I was making no money and my army was basically the men-at-arms. It wasn't nice. I'm thinking of dropping this game as I don't really like that this chaos is where I am going forward.
- The norse expand like crazy while tribal. Without my envolvement, they captured the entire british islands, the iberian Peninsula, part of italy, and a chunk of France, too. Yep, those people up North, they just took it all.
A very bad downside: they took so much they formed new empires and so on the transition, part of the De Jure Scandinavia became Brittany, which, you know, fuck off, keep your dirty island, who needs it? Also A LOT of random kingdoms around Europe, which, you know, you can keep it. I really just wanted the De Jure scandinavia, but now I have this nightmare of dotted random land around the world, dragging me into wars for land I don't care at all. Even the "You can create 25 titles" thing started to annoy me. It became too big and too bloated and out of my control because my vassals were doing all the conquering.
- Being tribal is excellent tho because you pay most things with prestige instead of money. You actually use money for very little, mostly to create and usurp titles, which give you prestige, which allow you to hire more armies, and so on and so on and that's how you snowball. Prestige is very easy to acquire and having it as your main currency borders on OP. But then you go feudal. And now prestige is useless and money is everything. And I keep wondering if I can sell my dignity because I am always broke, but fabulous and famous.
- - It's odd that expanding and holding land is that easier as a tribe, isn't it supposed to be the other way around? I even ask myself if it is worth it, at all, if it is not just straight up better to remain a tribe for the entire game and just not develop technologically. You lose on buildings that produce money, but money is for nothing when the armies cost prestige. You lose on forts, too, but, will you ever really need to defend yourself? If I have enormous ammount of time, I will try to remain tribal for centuries because paying with prestige that you get by, lol, romancing people for example, is bananas.
- As for my religion choices:
- - Allowing "progressive" things such as permitting homossexuality and gender equality is very very good because you are no longer losing potentially good people to irrelevant shit.
- - The same with allowing divorce and being polyamorous, tbh. I thought polyamorous would be just flavor, but just like in real life, it means not being bothered by "oh no this person is cheating on this person the scandal", nah, it doesn't matter, keep being my spymaster with 23 skill, who cares if you are cheating?
- - Divorce just not being a crime helps, but in the end the Polyamorous tenet really drives home that it doesn't matter. People with multiple lovers don't even take a reputation hit, it is not a secret, it gives no hooks, it is great and helps everything runs morte smoothly.
- - Communal Identity is kind of necessary, I feel, because having your religion take over is not as simple as I thought, who would think people would be slow to change everything they believe in?
- - Carnal Exaltation was flavor lol, useless, I think I should have chosen anything else, really.
