Crusader Kings 2: House of Zee Mau Part 1

Since my last post on my successful game (albeit on easy difficulty), I did create a ruler using the Ruler Designer DLC on normal difficulty but didn't get far with it as I was into other games at that time.

I picked it up again a few months ago. By then, there were some changes via patches - notably the technological advancement and creation of duchies.

Instead of merely emphasising which technology you wish to pursue the most, you now accumulate points (need to be at least a duke/duchess to generate these plus gains from your spy's study of technology in other counties) and then you periodically direct the points to whichever technology you want to advance.

Previously, you need at least 50% of the counties to create the duchy title. Now you need 51%. This is a good improvement because previously, if you hold 1 out of 2 counties in a duchy, there will be regular usurping of title between you and the ruler of the other county. Now, for a 2-county duchy, you have to control both counties to create the duchy and therefore avoiding the annoying (costly) regular usurping of the duchy title.

For my customised ruler, I decided on being a Irish ruler again. It's by process of elimination:

• Since I don't have any other DLCs, I'm largely confined to being a Catholic ruler
• I don't want to be an earl in a large kingdom as this makes it more difficult to be a king and so Holy Roman Empire ("HRE"), England and France are out
• Spanish ruler is out because the land is next to the Muslim land who will certainly declare Jihad on southern Spain. Northern Spain is potentially subject to dispute with the powerful neighbouring France.

Due to a marriage, my ruler's descendant was the ruler of 2 duchies and about 9 counties in France. That's like a quarter to a third of the Kingdom of France! This is on top of a few Irish counties. Later, he even gained England!

Later, however, he has to give up England because of rebellion and HRE's war for it (sheesh, from then on, I am very careful in not having marriage alliance with powerful kingdom such as HRE). By a twist of event, I retained a duchy and a few counties within England. What an eyesore for the King of England lol.

The last saved game shows that my ruler is King of Ireland and controls all counties in Ireland, 5 counties in England and 16 counties in France. Not bad, huh?

I, however, abandoned that game later due to something that I didn't know and that caused me headache. Whenever my ruler has more demense than he should hold, I usually grant the extra demense to my heir.

There was this particular ruler who ruled very long and so at one point, his eldest son, his heir, was granted a number of demense. I was concerned that he was getting too powerful and therefore may plot successfully to kill my ruler. So extra demense thereafter was given to his son's heir, who is a female. I believed the ruler's son and granddaughter collectively owned about 9 counties and 4 duchies between them.

Then disaster struck: my eldest son died. I expected the son's daughter to be my ruler's heir but instead it was his second eldest son! His granddaughter inherited titles and land from her father and therefore held 2 duchies and 9 counties! Eventually my ruler passed away and his second eldest son took over the reign but henceforth he and his descendants had to deal with a powerful kinsman. That was just too much trouble to handle because periodically they would be powerful enough to rebel, together with other vassals.

Although I'm quite sure I could salvage the situation, I chose to start afresh there would forever be an asterisk attached to that game if I had continued to the end, knowing that I unknowingly made a mistake.