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Not The One At The Top, Not The One That Writes History... Yet: Part XII - Growing Up Is The Hard Part (1167 - 1176)
Our realm is starting to come together fairly well, but we've still got a ways to go.
Seems like this time around, the duke of Champagne didn't fold to the demands of whoever wanted our heir on that throne, so we'll have some infighting in our realm, but not really give a shit about it.
Ohgodohgodohgod. This event has one option for the educator to "teach the child a lesson", which has a 80% chance of giving the kid Maimed. Please please please don't give me that...
...good, she just forbid us from climbing the tower again, and that had a 50/50 chance of giving us either Deceitful or Craven, so we got off with what's probably the best outcome. Doesn't help with our shit Diplomacy thanks to Kinslayer, though.
Our Piety is still in the shitter and we'll need a lot of it to abuse the fuck out of the Pope, so here's the easy way out - new decisions added with Sons of Abraham. You can donate money to Holy Orders if they exist and get a 1:1 ratio exchange of money to piety, which is fucking ridiculous compared to directly asking the Pope for some piety for gold, where the cost scales with your income. Methinks somebody didn't think a lot when they implemented those decisions, but hey, I'm not going to complain about easy piety.
Our policy of buttering up the Pope is working well...
...but I completely forgot that I'm in the HRE now, and they have an antipope! Fuckshits.
In '68, the old bat of Anjou kicks the bucket and her son takes over. Thankfully, he likes me a lot more, since I didn't directly absorb his titles and beat the shit out of him...
...so he'll accept an offer of vassalization. The count of Blois is his vassal, but not a de jure vassal, which kind of fucks with my system, but we'll be able to resolve that peacefully fairly soon.
The antipope is now gone again for whatever reason, and the HRE once again answers to the Pope, so my Chaplain heads right back over to Rome to butter him up again.
'69 rolls around, and Aldebert makes it as the duke of Champagne again. Good for him, I guess, it'll let him build up some prestige.
I switch around our educator for our best diplomat - I really want to gain some more Diplomacy and maybe get Grey Eminence.
He comes through with a claim, too, but we want to take bigger bites than that, we want duchy claims!
In '71, there's a new guy on the throne of the duchy of Orleans, which means our truce is officially over and it's time to smash his face in.
The war is a total formality, but takes until '72 because of siege times. As that takes away the duke's last landed title, he loses the duchy and I can recreate it. I then give it to the count of Blois, which frees him from the vassalage of the duke of Anjou, solving our little de jure problem quite handily.
And then the duke of Anjou becomes a megaduke. Normally, this would cause all alarm bells to ring, but in this case, we might as well allow it...
...you see, the duchies of Anjou and Berry both only contain two counties, causing this "megaduke" to be the same size as the duke of Orleans and still smaller than the duke of Flanders or Burgundy.
Speaking of Flanders, I've been trying to see if we can't get a claim on that one from the Pope, and I noticed that the heir to the duchy is a kinslayer. Since the main thing you need for a Pope claim is that the target has negative relations with the Pope, getting a kinslayer to be the duke would be a great help in that. This plan goes on the backburner as "something to think about" for now, and will go to "completely scrapped" really fast.
The mayors get uppity. Fuck you guys - until I get a pet republic, I'm not giving a single shit what you think.
Then, in '73, I suddenly realize just how fucked we are. The HRE has turned into what turns me off from ever playing a vanilla game within the HRE - a massive blob with Primogeniture and at least Medium Crown Authority, which means vassals can't declare war on vassals, completely cutting off any expansion within the Empire. We'll seriously have to start fucking with the Emperor to really reach our goals, but we're not really strong enough for that right now. We need to expand more.
The Hansa forms as well. I've never seen these guys do well, mostly because they usually can't fucking expand at all in the locked down HRE.
At least they can buy some women off of us for a pretty penny.
In '74, I get annoyed with the slow rate of claim fabrication and start scanning for new Chancellors I could possibly invite. I find a pretty good Swede that's willing to join up with us, although I don't make him my educator for a reason that I can't remember anymore.
The Bishop of Cluny comes knocking again, and you can see that the requested money actually scales with your highest title level, so that means he gets even more money than I thought.
Aubry comes of age, and... oh god. That'll need some work. A lot of work. I start by telling him to improve his Diplomacy.
Anyway, now that we're of age, we can join factions. However, we're only interested in a single one - lowering the CA. It might be a tough fight if they should rebel at this size, but we can bring mercs with the cash we've got, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem.
In '76, I check up on our heir and notice he picked up Possessed. Fantastic. Well, he's only an insurance policy we shouldn't need, we just need Aubry to pump out a son.
It's time to go on a pilgrimage to maybe improve some of his shitty traits.
I pick K?ln as our destination, and... why is the button staying grey? For some reason unknown to me, this event just stayed there and wouldn't let me click it away, and while I could open the menu, I couldn't actually save the game because I couldn't click any buttons. God damnit, time to shut the game down again.
Next time: No more bugs! Also, expansion!