Can someone help me earn the autism that is required to play this game?

If you want to enjoy GSGs, you need to be able to roleplay as the characters/nations you play.

Enjoy the fruits of your careful planning, which requires you to be decent at the game in order to know what to do.

Well in any case the form of autism needed for grand strat is a love for borders (whether you pick the light side of aesthetic borders [pic 1] or the dark side of border gore [pic 2] is up to you), so if you can learn to love lines designating ownership of clay, you should be good to go.

How easy is it to play as the Byzantines

Probably the easiest difficulty

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Go to the military page, hit 'levy troops'. That's 90% of the game figured out right there. The other 10% is buildings and marriages.

Does shit like this count?

does anyone actually enjoy this for the game play or just the roleplaying aspects?

What about kebab hordes?

If you keep an eye on the mudslim and wage war against them and not Christian country is the easiest you can ever play

You have to be born with it tbh.

Pick a minor english count in the post-william 1066 start and go slow

Pff nerd, I read a bunch of guides, watched a few vids, and jumped straight into iron man. Stop being mentally handicapped.

Fuck of gook.

Traitor.

Pretty much this. I fucking love the ragged edges on the countries, almost orgasmic.

Ignore this fag.

user
CK2 is one of the easiest of grand strats

Start as a duke or count in Ireland in 1066, you will learn while playing in the newbie island

Ignore Charlememe start date (769), its broken.

EU4?

What do you mean the Charlemagne start date is broken? How?

its shit

You didn't answer my question. How and why?

Paradox games aren't hard. They're just obtuse mechanically.

CK2 is basically a heap of tiny mechanics that more or less form a cohesive narrative… most of the time.

The game has about the same depth as Paint bucket tool. You sure you just don't have the patience because you don't like the game?

Charlemagne is full of Muslim blobs and Francia itself, let alone the HRE, never form because the AI can't handle Christian blobs.

And then the RNG to strike your genetically engineered perfect successor to give him Pneumonia, so he dies in his 20s, and his infant retard brother gets to rule over the empire.

IT IS SHIT

This is true. The game mechancis already fit poorly for the initial time period, the earlier starts make the it even more ahistorical and SHIT. Not to mention nobody with any sense is going to play a game longer than two centuries even if they had the computer that could handle it without massive slow down.

I don't find it enjoyable at all for the personal-level roleplaying. I think it's utterly shit at that. There are older turn-based strategy games that scratch the "story-based, player insertion" itch better. Like EU 3 (everything after EU 3 and CK 2 a shit reminder goes here), it's appeal to me is in LARPing some alternate history retardation.

Shit like Tibet taking over the entire world, Byzantium Empire ruled by a Hellenic emperor, etc, it's kind of amusing. Hell, why stop there? With the ruler designer you can parachute an ethnic Roman ruler into 1000 AD Norway, hundreds of years after all Romans are dead, and mysteriously summon your countrymen through a rift of space and time by hitting "hire courtier".

CK2 is far easier and simpler than EU 3, though, so it's even more about alternate history than EU 3. In EU 3 you can sort of claim the gameplay is interesting and has some (minor) challenge to it, especially with the slider autism. CK2 is just a hilariously easy game no matter who you play or what you do to try to make it hard.

user, do you also find the 2D maps of the earlier Paradox games so much more soothing? I swear, every time I play some EU 3 and try to go back to CK 2 I find the new 3D rendering so fucking distasteful. I just want a new Paradox game with smooth, painterly maps, and not these abortions straight from the mouth of Satan Himself.

Clausewitz was a mistake.png

god damn it, this shit is not historically accurate at all, it was only supposed to be ottomans and infighting
instead the byzantines take southern territories as soon as i start, magyars take all of north west bulgaria, and then if i ever attack any nearby slavs for religious reasons, the hungarians and other nearby slavs group up on me
it's fucking bullshit
we wuz three seas and shit

Well what did you fucking expect?

i expected to be able to achieve three seas bulgaria

You can, you're just not good enough at the game

but the byzantines have an army at least three times as big as mine
no matter where i fight or how many mercenaries i hire or how many allies i manage to get, it's never enough

Guess I'll try playing as them and report back. What time period do you start?

i've tried each possible one
when boris the first rules, around early 9th century the magyars invade
i think you could play before that with the old gods dlc, not sure as which leader though, but i think the byzantines recked me then
same thing goes for 13th century when you play as constantine tikh

TRI MORETA

So should the game be started from the vanilla start date 1066 AD, or the Viking age start date 867 AD?

Both are alright. Depends on what you want to do. Vikings are reasonably fun for a while but inheritance laws will annoy the shit out of you. The 1066 features more established kingdoms with better laws but playing as a tribe sucks.

We bulgarians used tactics you cannot recreate in a game like that.
Besides the Byzantines were in an almost constant war with the varieties of arabs around em.
Doubt the game accounts for that.

Will Death Grips and Tarkovsky suffice?

set a challenge for yourself. when i first started CK1 i decided that I was going to actually make Ireland something worth fearing, and that was my longest single game of anything on my computer ever. i spent like three hundred hours first conquering enough of the Irish island to declare myself King, then learned diplomacy and underhanded spy tricks to claim the rest, then decided hey, why not, let's have a go at becoming the Holy Irish Empire. It worked, it took a ton of work, it taught me almost everything about the game, and I ended up with a hilariously powerful empire that spanned almost the entirety of Europe, all while crusading 24/7 and having vassals sucking my dick begging to be a part of my empire on a literally daily basis

tl;dr set a goal and try to achieve it. cleanse the Muslims from the holy land and take it for your own. become a Russian horse lord and raid all of eastern europe. become pope, or assassinate the pope and install the cardinal you want in the papacy. etc etc etc

I only play Vicky 2 so I can't really say.

In the game I am now playing, the AI Bulgaria is repeatedly defeating the Byzantines and taking land from them and expanding.

Nigger you can paint the world your color in 100 years get good and fuck off also disable Conclave you disgusting faggot