Yeah, I basically waited until the other Nestorians got eaten by the nearby Muslim states, so they couldn't screw me over by declaring holy wars anymore.
After that I waged a bunch of consolidation wars until all of Mesopotamia was under my rule. Mainly focusing on taking over the Levant now, probably pushing into Persia afterwards.
Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.
That all you got?
I should try and do a Zoroastrian game again. Last time I tried it the Abbasids ruined everything by deciding to avail me of all of my lands.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
Go Bavandid and encourage the Abbablob to collapse internally.
I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.
That all you got?
Ah, dammit. The Witcher Kings mod only goes into Assassins of Kings instead of pre-First Northern War. There goes my wishes of playing a Cintra game.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
I have to wonder what the big mods plan to do, with regards to CK 3. Will projects like Elder Kings, Game of Thrones, etc move on to CK 3 at first opportunity, or will they wait until it stabilizes/deepens and finish up their CK 2 efforts in the mean time.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
Overlording the Underworld
I'll give the makers of Old World Blues this, they managed to balance power armor quite nicely with the Tlaloc update. Used to be, you could rush power armor if you devoted a research slot to it and built up your war industry. Give it a few years and you could start producing the stuff for your army even if you weren't Brotherhood. Now? 1. It's locked behind a string of Special Forces kits. 2. Power armor units are counted as Special Forces. You're not going to be mass producing power armor troops at all anymore.
That all you got?
Even if you're the Brotherhood?
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
IIRC Brotherhood gets big bonuses to their SF capacity to make up for the nerf, so they can still field lots of Power Armor, just not exclusively Power Armor.
Speaking of OWB they added the "North Pole Enclave" led by "Senator Claus" as a Christmas gift. Come January they'll change it into a "Christmas Mode" game rule that's off by default.
Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Dec 30th 2019 at 6:38:02 AM
Overlording the Underworld
It didn't save the Washington Brotherhood. 
I'm playing a Troll Warren campaign right now. I took three tribes out by national focus wars, ended a fourth on my own terms. Then the Washies showed up. In the time they took justifying me, I went from 50 divisions to 75 and built up a defensive line. Well, I didn't quite finish going up to 75. Had to pull my 25 units out of training early to contain a breakthrough along the river between Port Maw's old lands and my own. But I held. And they threw themselves into the meat grinder. They went from matching my reserves and outnumbering me in the field to being ground down while I only lost a quarter of what they did. Still had reserves. Wore them out. They made the mistake of attacking Old Country during our war. I took 13 states, the Oldies took 8.
I was going to take out Yakama after, but Arroyo, backed by the Western Brotherhood, went "Notice Me Sempai!" on me and are in the middle of feeling the weight of 102 divisions of Super Mutants grinding them down too.
Overlording the Underworld
I played conservatively and defensively for a while and broke the might of the Brotherhood and Arroyo. I haven't won yet, but Arroyo capitulated and the Brotherhood is out of reserve manpower and losing units fast. The Yakuza, in the form of the Shogunate, has entered the Brotherhood faction, but I quit for a while before they entered the actual war. I have over 9K in reserve manpower and am likely to use it to muster untrained rabble to contain them until I can draw back the main forces to deal with them. I'm also only on Limited Conscription and I still have a bunch of states I can core. I'm not doing any national focuses, so I can pump up my conscription laws within 2.5 months if I feel the need. Definitely going to do it once to rebuild my reserves.
That all you got?
Doing a Life-Seeded one-system run for the past few sessions. The galaxy is slowly dividing itself into two different Federations, while the Great Khan is at work and doing...fairly well? They've met one defeat but otherwise are progressing pretty steadily, though all the different empires around there are fairly large in a variety of ways. There's one faction of Fanatic Purifiers on the eastern rim of the galaxy, but so far we haven't gotten any sort of crisis-related thing. I've been doing fairly well, mainly keeping to myself and staying out of trouble while slowly building up my fleet. Now it's at 5K in strength. Far outmatched by the rest of the galaxy but still good, I think. Wondering if we've gotten any Fallen Empires that will eventually start to blossom as well, but in the meantime we're also taking in various refugees from a variety of star-nations that have fallen to wars or have been invaded by the Khan.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
She/Her Pronouns
Welp, I said I'd try out Equestria at War about a year back. And as most of the mods I do play haven't updated in that amount of time, I guess now would be as good of a time as any to try it out.
Now, I've read the TV Tropes page for it, but my grasp of the show itself is...mostly what I've gathered through Pop-Cultural Osmosis. So, this will be interesting.
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -Fighteer
That all you got?
It’s quite the experience, yes.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
Redmess
I turned England, Scotland and the Iberian kingdoms into Sunni just to see what would happen in EU 4, but they basically stay the same, and it didn't seem to change the dynamic with Catholic Europe all that much. Interestingly, Castille is not allowed to form Spain as a muslim country, but England IS allowed to form Great Britain. Is there any reason why that is?
Optimism is a duty.
Spanish Muslims are supposed to form Andalusia - however, that's also linked to Andalusian or Maghrebi culture. A Muslim Castile is an odd duck that's not supposed to happen in EU 4.
Meanwhile, nobody even thought about a Muslim England.
I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.
She/Her Pronouns
Several years into the game...
I'm worried I might have broken something. I started as Equestria (as it had the only characters whose names I recognized), and began reorganizing the nation to be less racist (and my army to become more magic heavy). Eventually, the Changeling Lands declared war...only to get curbstomped by a combination of Olenia, and Greater Equestria (Equestria and the Crystal Empire). I didn't even need to end the Magic of Friendship. I'm not entirely sure that was how it was supposed to go.
Now I'm just in a permanent frosty cold war with Stalliongrad, who has a war goal against me but nothing I do can goad them into actually attacking. Additionally, there's an entire political tree that's locked to me (if I wanted to form the Constitutional Monarchy I planned to do or if I wanted a Republic). Was I supposed to do something different?
Also, as an amusing aside, the first time I started the mod I was met with a loading screen painting showing all these cute ponies...carrying rifles, cowering as a unicorn among them created a forcefield to shield them all from raining artillery shells as the world burned around them. If anything could set the tone for a mod like this, that image certainly did.
Edited by AzurePaladin on Jan 12th 2020 at 11:42:12 AM
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -Fighteer
Redmess
The separate political tree being locked probably depends on who is leading your nation, and what state it is in. If you can see what is in there, that might be a hint to what is supposed to happen for that.
Optimism is a duty.
Overlording the Underworld
Speaking of Ho I IV mods . . .
The war against the Brotherhood coalition has ended. Two of the four factions stayed out of it and sent expeditionary forces instead. We held them up north while a major thrust was sent south to dislodge the Brotherhood's core territories. Despite whack-a-mole guerrilla warfare, we were victorious. Now I have 180 divisions and 6K in spare manpower, with 66 new states to core and some national focuses to help with that. I wouldn't have held all that land but I knew if I released or puppeted any of it, the Legion would have a field day taking it. They look scary, but I've inflicted way worse losses than they'll take, while barely losing anything. Just ask both Brotherhood's I've stamped out. And those guys had power armor.
That all you got?
> by a combination of Olenia
Excuse me? How? That's almost literally impossible, Olenia never survives to the point where the Changelings declare war on Equestria.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
So, I started on that Africa game in Crusader Kings.
Good news: The Malian Empire is united and increasingly feudal, with a reformed African religion, and I've begun the process of creating a Hermetic library. It's been kind of fits and starts due to a lot of rebellions, assassinations, mad sultans and musical thrones.
Bad news: I'm pretty much boxed in between the Umayblob and the Abbablob. Both have bigger fish to fry but I'm not going to be expanding any time soon.
Solution: I'm going to spend the next half-century to a century encouraging rebellions, squashing them, and collecting ransoms to fund continued expansion of my castles. Then, when I see a chance, I'm going to rip Maghreb off the Umayyads.
I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.
Redmess
Maybe you could try and mess with the blob's politics, assassinate a few key figures and spark civil wars?
Optimism is a duty.
That all you got?
Try and up their Decadence percentage, too?
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
She/Her Pronouns
I, uh, went down the path of diplomacy with Olenia and guaranteed them. I then joined before it asked me what aid to send to Olenia, allowing me to fight alongside them and transfer some arms to them to keep them even a little alive.
Was that not supposed to happen?
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -Fighteer
That all you got?
No, was just wondering.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
I'll keep an eye out on that one, then. There is no good answer to that one beyond bug fixing it. Can't declare new wars with levies drawn, so that knocks out simply declaring war on the new threats, if that's even possible in each case. You obviously couldn't beat those augmented armies anyway, or you wouldn't have bothered white peacing. So you wouldn't want to reset your armies and declare new wars anyway. You did the smartest thing you could, and it at least sounds like you managed to salvage the situation.