Wow! this is a playable game now. I really had my best CK experience with this.
Not that I want to make a AAR here or anything... but I'm Duke of Gwenydd or whatever in 1066. My son is a stewardship moron (3) so I think I've got to get a kingdom title fast so that I'll have something to work with when he takes over (maybe *two* allowed provinces in my demense instead of one
) so I take a province off my neighbor and am King of Wales. As I'm just hanging out hoping William the Konk doesn't come wipe me out a crusade is called against Toledo. Whatever. I'm just a little guy trying to make it in this world. I go about my business building sawmills and such.
anyway, my son takes over and a couplathree years into the crusade I check up on how it's going for everybody down there in spain. Toledo is run by a two province emir with no allies and can only recruit 300 men to defend himself. so i'm like, shoot, let's go. I send off my 1100 man army and take toledo pretty quick since we had found out what siege engines were like the week before. So i'm feeling pretty good, you know, making a little more money ( 9 bucks a month, woohoo!) and go back to province improvements. i'm just hanging out when i look at my piety and its like 2000, and my prestige is like 1000. now, i'd never done any crusading before so this is a big shock to me. so I start claiming counties in england on my border just for the heck of it. anything to undermine the english, you know?
and now evidently, my boy is papal controller for life, cause with his 2000 piety he keeps getting chosen. I look around for people to excommunicate and decide to excommunicate hiers to english throne. the King of England's kids all handsome boys (stats like 8,8,8,8) except for the ugly one (4,4,5,1), so all the nice ones I ex out and set up the ugly kid for the throne.
In a year or two some kind of civil war or something breaks out in england (i have no idea why, but the loyalty dropped all around the realm suddenly) so I jump in and shoot the cripples, taking the duchy of warwick.
I'm feeling pretty secure, and especially happy when my heir chooses a totally hot babe for his wife (5,6,11,13) when an event fires where the pope asks *me* to call a crusade against palermo. hey why not? and i hit 15% chance lottery and get the "crusader" trait. I'd heard a lot about the crusader trait sucking when you couldn't use it, but luckily Palermo was held by a two province emir again who only had 500 men in his army. so we went down there and took it. I've suddenly got 5000 prestige and 10000 piety. wow. for someone who had never seen those numbers it was shocking.
so i'm feeling like leader of the free world. but my son's hot wife has four daughters and dies, then he marries some worthless wench (2,3,1,0) and she proceeds to have a ton of sons with stewardship number of 2 and under. yeesh. meanwhile, my badass crusader king dude was never much for stewardship himself and I don't have enough people to give all these newly won provinces away to. just like p.diddy said, more money, more problems
anyway, it as several hours of nonstop action, actual crusading, and getting to metamorphose from a small time duke to a king with too much empire to manage. granted the crusade targets for whatever accident were in a totally weakened position, but i felt like *this* betapatch was the crusader kings game i had been promised and I hoped it could be when i bought it. I'm sure it'll go through a ton more patches but this is really encouraging.
and only one CTD in four hours of play (it happened after a message saying the crusade for sicily was over, at the very end)
