Crusader Kings 2: Ironman #3

Few weeks ago, Ban started playing Stellaris and was enthusiastic about it, and that got me itching to play the only grand strategy game I played before: Crusader Kings 2.

I vaguely recalled telling Ban that it would be immensely difficult to beat the previous campaign's achievement. I floated the idea of doing something different, like trying out seniority succession but the consensus out that this is a terribly succession law. Ban, probably half-jokingly, suggested primogeniture. It's a pain to to enact that law because you have to progressively upgrade crown authority to high first, which is a slow process. Moreover, I find that tanistry is more stable because of the boost to vassal's opinon and dynasty opinion, which then encourages me to give out titles to dynasty members and that increases my dynasty's prestige too.

On the other hand, I wanted to re-enact my unfinished Polish gameplay, which was on primogeniture succession law. I then faced with a choice of either starting in the same year i.e. 1066, which meant shorter game time, and faced the Holy Roman Empire, or starting earlier in the year 936 but Poland is on tribal system (rather than feudal). I thought about this for quite some time and finally chose to compromise: year 936 but starting as Duke of Bohemia (de jure Kingdom of Bohemia is just south of Poland) on feudal system. Although this gave me extra 130 years to gather more points, it was countered by slightly higher difficulty because of small dynasty. In fact, the Bohemian culture is so small, pretty much like the Irish's.

This time I switched off the unbalanced Secret Society feature and left everything as they were. It still qualified as ironman mode (and so game achievement was still enabled).