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[Reverend]

Yeah, I like the centrality of Venice/Milan. Anyway, that's three for Denmark so we'll go with that. Just patching now and then I'll kick off some bid'ness.

[MadPiper6]

I'm not sure if we've selected a date to start this good times, but I'm out of town until Tuesday, so I'm still in, just not here at the moment.

[Reverend]

I've started, on about turn 25. Many many screenshots have been taken, I will hopefully be able to update tomorrow with THE ACTUAL START. King Knut is about 50 as of now so may die any day, so we should set a swap-rota. If MP6 is out till tuesday perhaps Dust should take the next, since Knut will probably die sometime before then. Dude is old.

[Reverend]

Sorry for margin rape, pathetic explanation at the end.





The year is 1080, and the summer sun blazes down on the shittest faction region in the medieval world- Denmark. Look to the lower left to see our little red splodge on the minimap. Centrally placed is Arhus, our capital. Settlements come in two varieties in M2:TW, Castle or City. Cities are all about the commerce, growing the taxpaying population and building lots of markets, ports and the like. Castles are, somewhat obviously, about the fighting. They're less able to generate cash and don't have the odd subsidiary buildings needed to train things like spies and assassins, but they get all the good military units that a city doesn't have access to. Arhus is a city, and I have raised it's taxes to fuel some early-game Rebel settlement grabs, because we need to do some expansion beyond our arse-end of Europe.



The handsome King Knud, at a sprightly 40 years of age, is excited about furthering Danish interests in the area. We can also see by my wonderful Authority rating how much clout I have. What a man.

A bit more in the way of explanation (these early posts will be longer since I want to include game information when relevant so it's easy to follow.) Command, Chivalry/Dread, Authority and Piety are the four main stats for a ruler. They affect various in-game actions. The most useful and relevant generally is the Command score. A high command is a must for a general who's going warmongering, it massively helps troop morale as well as making him a tough bastard on his own. I/we can go over the others as they become needed.

The four stats listed under his box are for the city- tax revenue, public order, population and population growth. Taxes are fairly self explanatory, we need them to buy everything, be it a pretty new highway for swift movement or training a big guy with an axe. Public order is how happy the people in the settlement are. PO goes down if you raise taxes and up if you lower them. It's also affected by things such as squalor, living space, religion of the people as compared to your state religion, and a few other things. If it gets low enough (around 60%) usually you will get rioting, damaging buildings and killing people and soldiers. If it drops low enough the whole city may revolt, ejecting your army into the surrounding land.

Population is key for taxes; more people equals more money. Population growth is pretty self explanatory, but its worth noting: raising taxes takes this number down. Too busy tilling my fields to show the missus' a good time or something. In the early game you need money badly enough that you can raise taxes as high as your public order lets you, but later on when you have enough cash to coast you end up getting a lot more by lowering the rate, since as your population grows you'll end up getting a lot more cash overall as the amount of people paying your lower rate vastly outstrips what you'd get from a small population paying big monies.



This is an overview of our empire. I'll check back to it every so often just so we can see the changes in fortune neatly condensed into one screen. On the left is our faction heir, Prince Charles, taking the fight to the Rebel castle of Hamburg. Rather than running in with battering rams and ladders, I'm going to starve them out so we take less losses. We don't need the castle badly enough to waste good troops taking it that little bit faster.



Finally, my son and heir, Prince Charles. Not bad at all.

I've taken a whole bunch more shots, but that'll do for an intro. If anyone can suggest a better method than 1) use fraps to get shots, 2) use paint.net to convert them to jpg, 3) host them on photobucket and link here I'd appreciate it. It can take a long fucking while.

Also, apologies for the margin rape that anyone gets. I kinda just wanted to get this out there so people had something to see, and cropping/resizing every pic individually would have taken too long for how much time I have right now. Again, if anyone can tell me a bit of software out there that makes doing that easier as well I'd appreciate it.

[Verminator]

Using the inbuilt tools of the forum, you can resize the images to a width of 780 pixels, which I've found out is the maximum width that doesn't bust the borders. I tried quoting your images with them sized down to 780, and there's no margin rape and a negligible loss of quality, at least for me. I can still read pretty much everything. Here's what the first pic looks like when I do that.



Oh, and I'm glad you're doing this, because this is one game that my computer doesn't run quite well enough for me to enjoy. I was actually considering doing one for Rome after coming back from holiday, but now there's no need.

[Reverend]

Awesome. Thanks very much Verminator. That'll save me a huge amount of time I thought I'd have to be using a different program to do. Edited so should fit now.

[Reverend]

Ch.2: A Bit More Info and Our First Battle!



The end of turn report gives us a turn by turn update on our fortunes as well as a handy ranking system. We are ranked pretty awfully at the moment. That Finance- 2nd looks impressive now but give me a couple of turns and we'll be as poor as everyone else.



A suitable prince has been found for Princess Ingrid! We could keep Ingrid and use her to marry into other royal families, but this guy is pretty damn good and we need more generals, at the moment we only have the king and the crown prince. Welcome to the family, Crazy Name Man!



It's fighting time. A rebel army has walked very close to our capital, so I have sent out our new man before he could even get settled at court. He'll prove his worthiness or die trying.



The first look at one of our armies on the field. Archers up front, spear militia behind and the general bringing up the rear.



Our first kills of the game as the enemy advances into our arrows.



The clash of spear rings out across the field.



That was a Proper Fuckening. Those guys to the right of the red line are JUST failing to catch their very last man as he makes it over the battlefield marker lines. Lucky bastard.

[Reverend]

This means we can go out a-dealing. The Holy Roman Empire are nearest and also pretty sizeable, so we'll get him chatting to them first, see if we can get on their good side.



I have my priorities in order, don't doubt it. I can recruit spies from the brothel, and if we upgrade it again we'll have access to assassins. Spies are brilliant, they have an excellent visual range so make for fast and useful scouts. As well as that you can use them to spy specifically on characters/armies/cities. If they manage to enter a city successfully (they get executed if caught) you get a % chance that they might be able to open the gates from the inside in the event of you besieging the place.



Financial overview. I'm going nuts for markets, ports and roads in Arhus (going to use Hamburg as our main military centre) so hopefully that trade income will go up soon.



Stenkilsson at it again, besieging Stockholm to gain for us a port town on the Baltic sea, as well as ever-important tax money from the new population we'll gain.



Awesome, free shitty naval units.



Our spy at work, off scouting. The HRE is expanding, hoping to get Magdeburg taken into it's empire.



Forward, my men! Stockholm is only a village and has no walls for us to climb or batter down, so we may as well just get on in there.



Confused enemy viking raiders are stumbling around, being pounded point-blank by our archers.



Stenkilsson and his knights, charging towards the enemy (that's him closest to the 'camera').



Some horrible meat-grinders that I couldn't avoid happened, so we lost more men doing that than I'd have liked, but at least another town has been added to the empire.

[Frozen Pie]

I wonder if I can get in on this, I love this game.

[Uberstache]

Awesome, free shitty naval units.

So I take it they retained this unfortunate mechanic from Rome Total War?

[Dust Buster]

They did, but the rewards and penalties tend to be much less significant.

[Airija]

Unless you piss off the papacy enough that you get a crusade called on you. The combined powers of catholocism are worse than the other roman families ever were.

[Reverend]

Dunno why I took a pic on the Exterminate option. We're just occupying. The population is so low it'd take half the game to get it up and running if we killed everyone upon entry. There's also just no reason to anyway.



The empire so far! Weirdly, Hamburg, when they ran out of food and water, just gave in without a fight. Normally on the last turn that they can hold out, a castle's army will sally forth to try to lift the siege. But hey ho, good news for us, free castle. Now we can really start working on making ourselves poor by building and paying upkeep on a larger army.



Just a shot of what we're up to, construction-wise. Land clearance leads to more effective farming, increasing the growth speed of a settlement. Roads add to your trade income, as well as making anything moving along them faster.



The Polish are besieging Stettin. Thing is, looking at those army sizes (the colour-filled amount of the standard flying above the head of the army) the Poles are bringing way fewer men to the field. I think we might get an army in position, wait for them to weaken the rebels while losing, and then swoop in. Also, using our bishop to check the Catholicism of the region, turns out it's overrun by Paganism, to the point of there being 0 Catholics. We're going to send the bishop out to spread the good word of the Lord, otherwise Stettin's public order will suffer when we take it.



Damn right, watch the old fucker go.



Seems I was right. The Poles fucked up an attack and now the crown prince is getting involved, with a standard early army similar to the one he first used in our first battle.



Well what do we have here? I loves me some Crusading, and we have just the crown prince for the job. We have to hold Jerusalem at some point to win the campaign, so why not now when it'll get the Pope on side. We're about the furthest away you can get, gonna have to be a combination of sea and land movement to get there in any sort of reasonable time.



Oslo is on the to-take list, but is well defended for a rebel castle and enough out of the way that nobody else will get there first for a good while. We'll leave it for now.



I'm impatient to take Stettin, let's do it.



I dunno who promoted this Thorsten chap to the leadership of the rebel forces, but man, they made a mistake with that choice.

[Reverend]

A great crusading army is made! An army going crusading gets specially marked as such, and suffers no detriment to wandering through other nations' territory like a normal army would. Jerusalem will be ours!

Our route will be ridiculously circuitous to get there in any decent time. I'm sending boats through the Channel to skirt France and Spain to pick up our crusaders in north-west Italy and then on to the Holy Land. This is actually the quickest route I can tell, but we're still gonna get a lot of desertion along the way.



Again, we luck out on adoption options, this guy is pretty damned good and can help with our mainland conquests as the crown prince heads to the middle east.



Another bit of construction, but an important one. Each full settlement upgrade unlocks a whole new bunch of building and troop options for a castle. Now Stettin can join Hamburg in churning out the newest high-tech units (armour?! what is this!?)




Some info on the special mercenaries that can be hired for a crusading army. Instead of paying to create a unit, we can hire them from the surrounding lands. Crusader-hired stuff has the unique feature of being really fucking cheap as well as damn effective. We'll be having some of that for the army.



Well, I saw it coming, and this won't be the first time. But still, goddamit, we had to pay for those bastards. WE'RE GOING. I SWEAR, STAY WITH THE ARMY AND YOU'LL GET THERE A LOT FASTER YOU DUMB DESERTING COCKLORDS.



There we go, nice and pathetic, nice and poor. At least we're bringing in a turn-by-turn profit.




Looking like a nice new rebel target. Near enough our own borders to lend assistance in an emergency, and worth it because it's a pretty sizeable place to have.



Another look at our current holdings.



WHAT IS THIS FUTURE SCIENCE



Of all of this, our main focus is on the alliance between the Holy Roman Empire and Poland. The HRE, as the game goes on, just gets bigger and badder, so we want to take the pain to them as soon as we feel we can. But Poland is pretty big. Directly below us on the map the two big empires are, you guessed it, those two. Now they're allied, to fight one is to fight the other, barring some wonderful alliance-breaking because one of them loves us so much. We're really going to have to either pick our moment to fight, or try to convince one of them being friends with with us is better than being friends with the other.



Less relevant, but Hungary also joins the Gayliance.



We've got offered this because I've been churning out spies from Arhus to expand our intelligence-gathering base. Accepting the guild into the city means any future-made spies or assassins will be more effective.



He's getting old, but the empire steadily grows.

Next update- Jerusalem; Jihad or Bust!

[Monoxx]

I love these LP threads. I wanted to do a Rome: TW one, but didn't know if it would work here. Guess I should have taken the risk.

[TropicalCoke]

Thank you for continuing it.  I was in agony over the fact there were no new things.

Great job, Reverend.

P.S. You ever try the Kingdoms expansion? There's a nice one with Denmark in it. It's kewl.

[Vermillion]

I've never played these games before but now I really want to.

[Reverend]

Thanks for the comments, guys, I admit a part of me was worried that nobody but the succession-players (if them) were actually reading the thing.

I'll say now, shit gets crazy over the next few updates. Unexpected shit, my friends.

Oh, also, so it's out there- during my rule at least (little there is left of it, Knud is over 60 now in my current turn), I'm open to foreign policy suggestions or amusing demands. I'd guess future rulers will be the same.

I was about to do an update tonight before I realised my fraps file for the pics has completely fucked itself order-wise and I just spent an hour putting everything in the order it should be, or so I thought. A whole bunch are still randomly placed in the middle of when something completely different should be happening. It'll be done tomorrow when I have time to slowly go through my brain remembering when different occurrences actually took place so it's right.

[Thirsty Pony]

Thanks for the updates- "let's play" is a really cool concept.  Pardon my ignorance, but how does the player switch control to his/her successor after the king dies?

[TropicalCoke]

It does it automatically.