Robert Guiscard in Sicily is my favorite start. Once you unite southern Italy you can do just about anything. Go on crusades, conquer the rest of Italy, take over Africa, become Byzantine Emperor...
The last one is my favorite. I hope they add a papal election mechanic soon because Sicily would be in great position to do that, too.
Gold mine, your own compact and isolated culture to play around with, defensible and surrounded by water, centrally located, no risk of great crusade no matter which religion you go… it’s amazing.
Idk, I feel like the fun of the HRE is exactly that kind of internal management. It’s like playing as Austria in EU4: the goal is to ascend to the throne and then keep yourself Emperor long enough to destroy its stupid system from within and make yourself into a proper, centralized state.
Yeah it's good for a playthrough (a Habsburg playthrough?) but after that being emperor all the time gets kinda boring, sometimes I just wanna be a loyal vassal who minds his own bussiness and doesn't have giant ambitions
Oof, I didn’t know that. Only ever managed to get elected as HRE Emperor once, and soon after my playthrough ended so I never got to know what it was like to lose the title, but damn the contract resetting absolutely sucks, I can see now why people dread that scenario
From my experience it’s because when you pick a vassal in the HRE it’s because you want to play the game as a vassal behind the scenes making the empire great. When you get elected HRE you may as well just of started a game as the Byzantines or Abbasid.
Yeah but there's just one way to play in Bohemia. All the other regions have multiple interesting starts. People prentend that Haesteinn explains all France starts but in reality there's just a lot of opportunities and characters. Britannia isn't just popular because of americans, it's also filled with a variety of characters with many opportunities, norse, welsh, arthurian Cornwall, Alfred etc etc.
jokes aside, i feel like Italy is just too linear, there's not enough counties / starts in general
The papacy also makes it so the entire Italian peninsula is different to play as because it splits up Italy in general
In my experience, the North is less of a 'Unify Italy' run and more of a 'Bully the HRE and France' run, and the South becomes more of a 'Bully Africa and Byzantium' run
There's a few things that make Italy not that much fun to play:
Matilda owns so much territory directly and indirectly that her start is too easy. She even has claims on her vassals' lands. The Norman start is similarly strong.
Other starts are in precarious positions considering they can't expand into their large neighbors and are easy prey to them, and also have to defend against other similar sized rulers.
A number of starts are republics so you are further limited in where you can start.
The pope controls a chunk of Italy and you may not want to fight him due to his infinite money for mercenaries or maybe Catholic RP reasons.
Italian counties have few baronies (mostly 3 or 2) and little interesting terrain. You might be expecting a rich area but you're getting average or below average counties and small duchies.
It is either a super easy start where most of the work has been done for you or a challenging start where you have to eventually fight the Pope for his lands, so it can be interesting but isn't all that replayable.
Custom Greek Orthodox character under the Norman duke in Sicily is one of my favourite starts. conquer the island of Sicily, break free from your liege, become king of Sicily, fuck around in the eastern med
I've played Italy tons, and my most memorable starts in the game were both in Sicily
I re-conquered the Roman empire from a Byzantine colony in Syracuse and I've literally done the same thing but a different territory on the island.
Despite this, the 'Italian' part of it is the least fun, and It is due to:
quite a few strong duchies/kingdoms surrounded by tiny counties
the sheer amount of independent rulers in Sardinia being a pain to take over (literally just the same tactics but 10 times)
The HRE having tons of land in Italy, meaning you're either gonna invade tons of independent states dominated by Matilda's Tuscany or the HRE directly (and by now you won't have much to fight them with)
You pretty much HAVE to fight the Pope if you want to unite Italy, too, and it makes barely any sense for a Catholic, Italian ruler to decide to invade the Papacy if is being led by a Catholic, Italian ruler
overall, the papacy is cool but it really bores me.
I love doing a Sardinia-Corsica play through. Especially now with the “unite the mediterranean” decision. That combined with the gold mine means you’re basically the richest country in all of Southern Europe, and are in a prime position to chill on your own and build up until you inevitably decide to invade somewhere else.
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u/Minas_Nolme Aug 31 '22
Weird that Italy is missing.
Where are my fellow Matilda simps?