If At First You Don't Secede: Crusader Kings 2

Prefaced by the fact I suck as well... being good at this game is SERIOUSLY about minding your Ps and Qs. Shit like who has claims on your throne or who the powerful vassals are has to be really carefully tracked at all times, especially in good times. The bad shit always happens when there's a new heir. Strongly encourage you to look at your tooltips to figure out why everyone is made at you or why they do what they do---it'll usually say.

Also, some of this is WAD. The tribal thing being a great example---tribal government is meant to go to the strongest and then be virtually impossible to keep over time IIRC. With respect to the feudal Europe situation, it might be fun to just try to play through some of this stuff? I get if you are reduced to nothing why you might not want to play through, but often times if you lose or have a shitty heir part of the fun is just fighting through it and keeping whatever you can until you get a stronger dude or situation.

ps One lesson I've learned the hard way is that you need to be really careful with your marriages, especially where you send your daughters. It's really easy to generate potential claims to your throne in all sorts of undesirable places by marrying your daughter to the wrong count, whose king will then press their claim and fuck you up.

Gary Sax wrote: ps One lesson I've learned the hard way is that you need to be really careful with your marriages, especially where you send your daughters.

Is this real life or the PC game?

Gary Sax wrote: With respect to the feudal Europe situation, it might be fun to just try to play through some of this stuff? I get if you are reduced to nothing why you might not want to play through, but often times if you lose or have a shitty heir part of the fun is just fighting through it and keeping whatever you can until you get a stronger dude or situation.

Yeah I get that and I've thought about it. I never quit immediately, just after a few years of accomplishing nothing with my little peon character. The main reason I want a semi-stable semi-power position is so that I can breathe a little bit and feel out the different systems in the game. I still have no idea what's going on with Rome and the Papacy, I don't know what the stuff under the Religion tab does, etc. I'm getting better at it but I kind of wish it had more of a sandbox mode so I could figure out how things worked a little more before being put down and out and not knowing why. I've read some of the beginner guides and some of the CK2 wiki, but I'd like to figure it out more on my own.

I think the thing that throws me with the game is that it's about people instead of kingdom/countries/territories/whatnot.

Yeah, standard recommendation is Duke in Ireland... I learned using a duke in Catalonia which was a lot of fun, but I picked a fight with the muslims that I couldn't win and they aced me after like a hundred years a number of characters.