Chapel The Evergreen
Gung-Ho Gun

Yeah, they're fuckin' sweet for Catholics. You basically get to appoint your own Dukes and Counts. The Orthodox got gipped, and prince-archbisops are basically no better than republics for us. Prince-bishops at least seem to stay Greek and Orthodox, but after the first dies the next person is essentially a dice roll. I have to wonder at the first ruler who was stupid enough to cede away his whole country to hereditary positions he had little to no control over. What were they thinking? I mean, playing this game I was ecstatic when I believed I could have the alternative of giving someone an irrevokable lifetime position, which would still be a stupid thing to institute.

What's worse, if you try and revoke the title of the new Muslim infidel who's pretty much usurped the holy Orthodox church and defiled it with his dirty Muslim hands, your vassals hate you. Even the fucking Patriarch.

If you don't appoint them up to archbishophric level, you still don't get to appoint new heirs, but whenever you kill someone a new Greek Orthodox takes their place, rather than a Leventine Muslim, or Bulgarian Catholic, or whatever the culture and religion of the province is, so that is obviously the level you want to keep them at.

So, I decided to make a prince-archbisophric so that I wouldn't have to deal with nobles. Then I noticed a curious fact: the "heir" listed was a Muslim. So, I saved the game, and killed my new prince-archbishop to see what would happen and, sure enough, a new Muslim theocracy was formed out of my old Orthodox prince-archbishopric. It turns out that, unlike the Catholics, Orthodox rulers don't get to appoint new Bishops. And, furthermore, heirs are elective, like doges, once you appoint them up to the archbishophric level, so the local inhabitants always choose someone of their culture and religion. And this means that the new ruler always hates you if he's ruling over counties of a different culture or religion.

So, I went back and gave it to some stupid Greek Orthodox noble, so he could properly oppress the stupid Muslims.

Beating back Germany as France? You are truly a God amongst men.

I also murdered my son's wife, then married my son to some courtier in Germany who had awesome stats (like 28 Stewardship), taking another 100 hit to prestige (but I had like 2000 at this point anyway - Muslims are an endless source of prestige). Then I murdered my four year old grandson, from the old wife, in a plot involving his new stepmother, his guardian, and the spymaster at my sons court, so that he wouldn't be in the way of the succession of the new, superhuman grandson I was planning to make and eventually play as emperor.

Now that I think about it, that sounds a little evil.

As you know, in the middle ages it was very common for Byzantine princesses, the daughters of emperors, to run off and marry some dude off in Spain who doesn't even have a title to his name. At the end of the day, however, I had a council consisting of all of the best people for their respective jobs in the entire game. I feel a bit like I'm cheating. :-/

So, I've started playing Crusader Kings II again. One thing I've discovered is that you can marry off some of your bitches to a guy with good stats, sending them off to the guys court, and then reinvite them to come back to your court, and if they accept they'll take the guy with them. It really helps that I'm Orthodox, because they get both religious and cultural negs with their new, Catholic liege and usually hate him, so it makes my job easy. Problem is, I've already used up all of the Greek bitches I had lying around on this little plot. There's just never enough. I actually had to invite some Russian Orthodox bitch who liked me for whatever reason into my court specifically to marry her off and bring her back. I also eventually had to marry off my youngest daughter to some middle-aged, hairy Spaniard courtier with a martial skill of 27 (who was, for whatever reason, employed as the Chancellor in his lieges court - the AI is kind of stupid), taking a 100 hit to prestige.

Yes! Lets do football.

And Freud is the worst. I chose this new name while I was drunk, for some reason I thought it would be funny to pick a figure I had no respect for.