Heir is now out of jail but no longer seems to have a little bloodline symbol. Not sure how many problems this will raise in the future

Revoke their titles and give them to your horse.

Yup. Shame the Civ Civvy Civilization V thread seems to have dried up as a consequence though.

Yep, there is always some little (or very big) shit scheming and conniving. And its normally a close relation. Got to be on your toes all the time.

Finally i died aged 73, which isn't bad. Severe stress was the given cause and not surprising at all considering what a nasty downward spiral i found myself in at the end. I must have lost close to 1000 piety and 2000 prestige during The Great Uprising. My son now inherits a year-zero type situation. I own every piece of land in England, except the churches, and there are 44 people in prison, most of whom are angry former land-owners. I'll have to give a lot away for the nation to function again, but at least i get to carefully select where the power lies. The plan is to only give landed titles to my sons or the husbands of those who agree to a matrilinial marriage with one of my daughters, so that the heir will be of my bloodline. 

Fortunately King Richard has not inherited his father's debts- which ran into the hundreds- or favour with elites. Their opinion of me had sunk to around -2200 by the end, mostly due to property seizures and executions, which had become commonplace. 

In short, my last reign was focused on deciding who to lock up (everyone), while this time i get to choose who i'm releasing. It's a welcome change, as anyone who looks like they might piss me of sometime in the future can rot in solitary confinement and i won't take any penalty as it was my father who imprisoned them.

Ha. Oh shit.

So what's the best way of dishing out this land? All to my son? My demesne size is 34, which is 28 more than i'm capable of maintaining.

Well, if you hadn't locked everyone up and made everyone hate you I would have said give it to members of your court that like you, but that aren't ambitious and don't have any powerful alliances due to marriage or blood lines.  Basically you want your vassals to be weak yes men.

Well i've just had his wife killed so he can't spawn any more threats, so if he liked me before he definitely doesn't now. Hopefully him being gay will soften the blow.

Fuck. Totally forgot about Prince Alf, who's been in exile for 10 years. I killed his family but he managed to flee to France. He's allied to more of my noblemen than i am. It's saying he has a claim to my throne. No idea how he got that into his head. I can't even lock him up because i've no idea where he actually is. Perhaps i can invite him to court and then make my move. Although i also don't want to get into the same spiral as i did last time

So that all went wrong. I was slowly releasing the land i inherited as well as prisoners who liked me, but as soon as i'd released enough for them to form an army they did, led by the French and my bishop brother it seems. About a month into the war the king randomly dies, and so i take on the role of playing my son, who's 14. Then my council got wiped out because i forgot to tell them not to lead troops, and so now have a panel of retards setting the pace of progress. I just about held out for about 18 months by taking out loans and paying mercenaries, but in the end i was forced to surrender. Somehow my brother is now king. Think i might have fucked up. When i made him bishop-prince it definitely said something about him no longer being able to inherit the throne, so I presumed it meant he could not be king at all, but i'm guessing it just meant he had to capture it through war. 

I now get 1 gold per month and am based in Bedford. Just turned 16. No idea how to move forward from here. Made the controversial move of marrying a random with no status, so my prestige has taken a kicking, but she makes a very good steward. Bit of a risk though. She's 32, twice my age, and i really need a son. 

Sadly just discovered my laptop wont run this, so i won't be able to play it from tomorrow

Haha. Nice. 

I miss this. My final game for quite a while ended horribly. I started as the King of England and ended as the baron of some obscure county in Norway.

http://gk4.me/en/steam/833-crusader-kings-ii.html


€6.49
It's a steal at that price.

An "accident"? Don't forget about trying to push through laws about inheritance or you might end up back to square one when you pop your cloggs, like I did.

The more i understand of this the better it gets. There's even joy to be had when shit goes massively wrong. I recently formulated a gameplan which almost worked. I was King of Leon, had 1 sister, and a quarter of what is now Spain as my territory. My strategy was to focus on developing my marshal skills and conquer all the lands between myself and Barcelona. Meanwhile, my sister and heir would marry the second in line to inherit the Byzantine empire, knowing that first in line to the throne was old, ugly and single, and therefore likely to pass on titles to my brother-in-law instead. When he in turn died, and presuming i had died by this point too, his son (my nephew) would inherit the entire Byzantine Empire in addition to all the titles i conquered in Spain. 

It looked to be working perfectly. I was staying single, amassing titles, and then gifting any which took me over my demesne limit to my sister. I amassed a lot of money, which i then redistributed among my vassals to keep them happy at the sweeping changes which were being made to the legal system. Crown authority was upped significantly and taxes were raised, but sharing out the spoils of war kept factions at bay. As hoped for, my sister had a son to inherit all my (and her) titles when we died. 

So i summoned all my troops for one final fight to the death against the Sunnis occupying southern Spain. I would grab as much land as i could before getting killed, and then carry on the game as my ageing sister to make further preparations for Prince Code inheriting combined realms, and then fully conquering Spain with the backing of a giant army. Everything seemed set in place, but then some cunt in the Byzantine Empire changed the succession laws shortly before my brother-in-law died, so none of that got passed onto my heir. Worse still, my sister had 3 more kids in relatively quick succession, so now the land she was holding would be distributed evenly amongst them when she died. I was unable to change my own succession laws to counter this due to being locked into war with the Sunnis, who had called in reinforcements and were crushing me. In the end i was killed, my sister took over, then she got smallpox and died. I'm now playing as her son, as planned, but instead of inheriting the second largest empire in Europe, most of Spain and untold wealth, i've inherited the Canaries and Zaragoza, a few angry vassals, no money, and greedy landed siblings.