Struggling with a Struggle's Paradox

[Ciccillo Rre]

Hello! Today I started a playthrough to get the achievement "Legacy of the Campeadores", the last one I needed before restoring my 100% achievement score on Steam. I had a pretty successful run with Rodrigu, the son of Rodrigo "El Cid" Vivar and Infanta Urraca Jimena: I quickly managed to dominate almost all of Iberia. However, I quitted the game as I realized that it would be pointless to play without the ability to create the Empire of Hispania after Rodrigu's death, no matter how well I would manage the inheritance with his sons. The reason, in short: I could not end the struggle because I could not meet one of the criteria for the Domination ending. And this, despite my total dominance over almost all the peninsula (here's the paradox). I attach a couple of screenshots.

The culprit condition is the one that requires all counties of your primary kingdom to be culturally and religiously homogeneous: no matter how well you plan it ahead, you would always encounter unfortunate events, such as a random county in your primary kingdom converting to Jewish or your religious councillor giving up on his conversion task for some... reason (?) shortly before it ended, with no time to restart it before the switch to the Compromise phase (sorry, demonstrating screenshots are missing). This is a particular case, but my point is more general: this is a loophole in game design that ruined my game.

In general, I think that the Struggle as a mechanic is a great idea, and I wish more like it arose for other parts of the map (Britain, Byzantium, etc.). However, I feel it was not too well designed and implemented, there are many things that occur and just "don't feel right". I also agree with the OP in this thread: Struggle is a Pandora's Box; you get access to too many abilities that normally would require more investment to get, and in my opinion this tends to make the game too easy in the Iberian region.

 

[Ilya Belkin]

I was in a similar situation and noticed many similar threads on the forum. I do feel something needs to improve so that players do not feel like their game is ruined by a weird mechanic.

One way I found helpful in looking at it is that you don‘t really achieve cultural or religious domination, you just managed to acquire a lot of titles in the struggling region. You painted it in your colour, but it is not at all dominated… it will rebel, Muslims will get support from the south and push you back north, your vassals will be unruly. But this fact is not really supported by the mechanics that well… as a smart player will probably manage to keep these titles for a while and even survive succession.

An extreme version of this, once you conquered everything and managed to keep it for a while probably should trigger domination resolution. But a better way might be to seriously increase how rebellious and unyielding are your southern neighbors during the struggles.