So I played my first SoI game today and I started out as a 4 county duchy to make things a little bit easier (the one with Tripoli in it). I quickly expanded to about 10-15 provinces by using some fake claims, holy warring the independent counties, and luckily pursuing a strong claim to a neighboring emirate once they had a succession crisis. All that done in about 10-15 years (around 1080s) which is not too shabby since most of the time I had to siege my enemies and I only had about 1000 strong army since the provinces didn't get a chance to lose their penalties yet.
Then came something really interesting.. around this time my children finally grew up so I started getting alliances with the 2 big Sunni sultanates (Egypt and Persia) and then I noticed the Byzantine Empire was having one huge war (guessing a Succession Crisis) since 70-80% of its duchies were showing up independent on the map. So what do I do? Declare holy war against the closest independent duchy and invite my friends the Egyptians and Persians
It worked out a lot better than expected, they brought in about 16k stacks each and once I noticed that I quickly finished the war. Then I'm like, hmm well can I get even more duchies this way? So I wrap this up and declare war on pretty much every Byzantine duchy rebelling (missed maybe 2-3 further ones, and a few dukes had 2+ duchy holdings so I couldn't absorb them entirely). I had probably 10+ holy wars going at once.
Of course the Egyptian/Persians end up doing all the work for me.. I just run around like a madman sieging provinces. Since this is super early in the game (it hit 1090 halfway through -- I remember because the Pope called a Crusade to retake Sicily and Egypt had to pull out which slowed my progress) most cities were <500 troops defending them which meant a 20k stack chewed through that like butter.
I got like 50+ provinces in just a few years. I had so many I ran out of dynasty members to give them to!
So yeah, maybe something needs to be fixed here.. Holy War is supposed to be "balanced" because you can only attack one Duchy with it, not an entire Kingdom but this doesn't apply in case of independence wars plus the fact that other Muslim rulers love joining Holy Wars, and you have a crapton of wives/kids which means its trivial to get every other Muslim nation allied with you (except the ones you want to conquer).
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TLDR I got about 50 provinces in <5 years even though I started out with just 4 provinces at the beginning of the game and 15 provinces before the war (same ruler).
Then came something really interesting.. around this time my children finally grew up so I started getting alliances with the 2 big Sunni sultanates (Egypt and Persia) and then I noticed the Byzantine Empire was having one huge war (guessing a Succession Crisis) since 70-80% of its duchies were showing up independent on the map. So what do I do? Declare holy war against the closest independent duchy and invite my friends the Egyptians and Persians
It worked out a lot better than expected, they brought in about 16k stacks each and once I noticed that I quickly finished the war. Then I'm like, hmm well can I get even more duchies this way? So I wrap this up and declare war on pretty much every Byzantine duchy rebelling (missed maybe 2-3 further ones, and a few dukes had 2+ duchy holdings so I couldn't absorb them entirely). I had probably 10+ holy wars going at once.
Of course the Egyptian/Persians end up doing all the work for me.. I just run around like a madman sieging provinces. Since this is super early in the game (it hit 1090 halfway through -- I remember because the Pope called a Crusade to retake Sicily and Egypt had to pull out which slowed my progress) most cities were <500 troops defending them which meant a 20k stack chewed through that like butter.
I got like 50+ provinces in just a few years. I had so many I ran out of dynasty members to give them to!
So yeah, maybe something needs to be fixed here.. Holy War is supposed to be "balanced" because you can only attack one Duchy with it, not an entire Kingdom but this doesn't apply in case of independence wars plus the fact that other Muslim rulers love joining Holy Wars, and you have a crapton of wives/kids which means its trivial to get every other Muslim nation allied with you (except the ones you want to conquer).
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TLDR I got about 50 provinces in <5 years even though I started out with just 4 provinces at the beginning of the game and 15 provinces before the war (same ruler).