Here's My Story

I noticed that one of my courtiers, who I invited to court earlier beause he had a strong claim to the Kingdom of Italy, was the heir to the Kingdom of Pomerania. I normally hesitant to initiate a plot to kill because half the time, my complicit is revealed but I thought it was worth it. So, I landed this courtier with one of my two spare baronies and initiated the plot. Good news: assassination went without revealing the mastermind (moi) but instead of being my vassal, my new baron became an independent king! Gah, why?  It is now that I suspect it's because he inherited the kingdom, rather than me pressing his claim. So since his inheritance title (king) is higher than his then current title of baron, he became an independent king, taking along the barony. I felt dissatisfied with the previous outcome and wanted to declare war on Italy just to get back my barony. It would have started the first world war though haha. Better idea is to simply press a claim on Italy for a vassal....

I loved the story and the universe of Might and Magic. It's unfortunate that the series eventually fell out of favour. I blame Ubisoft. I played Might and Magic 7 (MM 7) , MM 8, Heroes of Might and Magic 2 (Heroes 2), Heroes 3, Heroes 4, Heroes 5 and Heroes 6 but I've completed only MM 7, MM 8 and Heroes 2. I nearly finished Heroes 5 but the game crashed after I just finished the penultimate campaign. I shelled out money for original DVD. Yes, this was pre-Steam age. So recently Ban suggested I get it on Steam to finally finish the storyline it. Good idea! Coincidentally, the very next day, there was a sale! So I bought the Heroes 5 and its two expansions i.e. Hammer of Fate and Tribe of the East. I've already completed the first 3 campaigns: Haven, Inferno and Necromancy. I'm now doing the 3rd mission of Dungeon campaign. It was only recently I suddenly thought of recording potentially interesting battle. Before each campaign, I tried researching ideas of how to build ...

Did another blood test 8 weeks after the last one and WBC count dropped again i.e. 2.4. The historical readings are as follows: 3.3, 3.2, 3.2, 3.4, 2.8, 2.9, 2.6, 2.4 😬 Although I was given a choice of going for bone marrow test right then, I chose to follow the hematolgist's recommendation of still monitoring. I surmised the reasons are as follows: (1) The reading is still above 2. (2) The neutrophiles count is still above 1. It had fallen slightly though such that technically I have mild neutropenia, as pointed out by my friend who's an anaesthetist. (3) Although he was leaning towards autoimmune disorder diagnosis, he doesn't want to unnecessarily prescribe steroids. (4) It takes some time for the body to get rid of supplements (multivitamins) that I took. That, honestly, seems dubious to me. Maybe he meant it takes some time for the blood to stabilise after having gotten rid of them? (5) The examination of bone marrow is apparently a painful procedure, something that ...

As expected, King of Germany (temporarily) left defensive pact (against me) when he brought up a marriage proposal. My eyes widened when I saw that I could press claimed to the Kingdom of Germany for my son-in-law. I had to think for some time because realm-wise, Germany was just under a third of mine but strangely its army was so much lower. Maybe much of it was expended in the war against Venice? In the end, I bit the bullet: granted my last remaining excess holding (a county) to my son-in-law and pressed his claim. Largest conquest by far! Ah, I was hoping there wouldn't be a revolt so soon against the new German King. I had less than a hundred (in-game) years left before it ends. I thought it would be nice to add France to my realm, so as to have a huge contiguous land. Initially, I did something that I hadn't done in hundreds of years: fabricrate a claim, so that I could land one of the title claimant. It was much later that I discovered an existing German earl vassal had ...

Usually I'm the one who brings my mum to her medical appointments but I haven't done so ever since interstate travel is banned. We had to utilise our back-up plan (which was used pre-pandemic times): my sister arranged Grab for my mum to make a return trip to Penang GH by herself. We noticed, however, there were significant number of times that my mum would coincidentally felt unwell on appointment dates and thus needed to postpone them. After a recent episode, I decided to talk to her and tried to tease out the underlying reason. She confirmed my guess that she felt anxious and/or stressed when needing to go by herself. This was due to only one reason: queueing at the pharmacy. At the GH pharmacy, we need to queue twice: one is to hand in the prescription slip and the red card to later collect medicine for the mont and the sceond time is to hand in the same items to update postal service to deliver the subsequent monthly supply of medicine. My mum cannot stand long: she will g...

Usually when a ruler approaches me with a marriage proposal, they will temporarily leave any defensive pact against me, if they're in one. So, when the Sultana of Egypt did that, I frantically invited a kinsman who was a claimant to the Kingdom of Egypt to my court.

Ban has taken up to paying parking ticket in Selangor using Smart Selangor app and to use the physical tickets, purchased earlier, as backup. (This reminds me: I want to check the expiry date of the physical tickets) One day, as we were looking for parking space during lunch time, I noticed an MBPJ officer checking parking validity of cars and so I reminded Ban to pay for parking, after we got a space. Yes, there were parking summons on some cars that we walked passed later. However, we were shocked to discover a parking summon on Ban's car, after we were done with lunch. An upset Ban called Smart Selangor. One good thing about Ban is that he never sound upset when seeking redress. To his horror, during the conversation with Smart Selangor, he realised that he keyed in his car plate number in the app with one wrong letter. Eeek. He promptly corrected it but of course the summon remained because the ticket was paid for the wrong car. Smart Selangor advised him to contact MBPJ to ask...

I love this concept!

So, after remembering the tactic, when I have a new emperor, I scouted which multiple wars I want to initiate. Since the defensive pacts are set up personally against a ruler, the new emperor has none at the very start but it won't last long. There is another borderline cheating way: each time a saved game is loaded, some rulers leave defensive pacts. I think I used this in the past but not for this campaign. Meanwhile, I decided to strengthen my king vassals by transferring vassals to them. I have to bear in mind 3 things: (1) none should be so powerful that they can challenge me, (2) the distribution should result in as even distribution as possible so that not one can overpower the others and thus can potentially violate (1) above, and (3) that the realm of the vassals transferred should be as close as to theirs and avoiding infighting due to de jure claim. Here's the commencement of the seven wars! It was profitable :)

Arrrgggh this Orthodoxy "true believer" phenomenon (likely due to Secret Society feature) is so annoying! Just before this, I had stamped it out of my king, duke and earl vassals, leaving only the mayors and bishops which I wasn't worried much about.  However, later I learned that "demand conversion" attempts will highly increase the chance of this secret society and so it's a vicious cycle e.g. court chaplain converts king vassals from Orthooxy to Catholic and then the latter demand conversion from their vassals. Meanwhile, when this mushroomed once more, I again checked whether any of them I could attempt to imprison due to plot discovery and for once, there was a couple. Fortunately, they rebeled: I could then crush them and revoke their titles. One of them even called their ally. Very good.