The Rise of Socotra - a Crusader Kings 3 Story

[pindicator]

Yes to both. I think 35000 of his 44000 troops are "special event" units, too

[Bobchillingworth]

Can you play as one of the nations bordering the Mongolian spawn area? If so, would there even be a point to doing so, or are you simply doomed to die shortly after the horde appears?

[pindicator]

You can, and there are some options. You can try to resist, and in that case you have about 150 years to build up and prepare. Or there is a decision (even available to me way out in Diskarkha, which is weird because it's only supposed to be available if you border them) to submit to the Great Khan. If you submit then you become a vassal within their realm.

[pindicator]

Kafa II, Part Three: Finally, A Successful Warrior King

Kafa's next target is the Emirate of Najd.




After his brother's failed attempt to conquer the Emirate, Kafa brings in considerably more troops to defeat a friendless Najd.

We're not sure what the AI was thinking with the strategy here, but their allies of Yahyid sent their forces  into the Persian Gulf, through the Straights of Hormuz, and landed on the backwater county of Duqm.  Najd sent their army into Medina, defeating Prince Halil's army again as if it was out of habit.  Only Numayr stayed even close to the action, but kept their distance from my armies the entire time.




We captured the heir to the kingdom when Surrah fell, and then Najd's army ran right into a peasant revolt at Medina and suffered a bad loss.  Those two events together brought the war to a quick end.

During the war, Kafa's daughter Sarah comes of age.  She marries her betrothed, Rajkumar Udayasimha of the Jayasimhid Kingdom.

With Najd falling, Kafa's goal is starting to come clear:  expand the kingdom enough to jump up to an empire.  (Part of me thought I should just stay as a kingdom and use de Jure drift to expand my de jure borders, but this has been a difficult enough game; I can handicap myself that way another time).

None of the de jure empires in the area really encompass what I feel is "Socotra" de jure land, so I am going to aim for the event decision to create my own empire.  This means I need to have either 120 counties and 1 kingdom title, or 80 counties and 3 kingdom titles.  Currently I'm at 70 and 1, and it would cost me 800g to make the needed Kingdom titles in addition to the 1200g for the decision.  There's a perk in the Diplomat tree that will knock 20% off the kingdom costs, but that's still a lot of gold I need to raise.  Currently I'm at 660 and making 12.5 per month.  I want the lands that Kafa inherits from his mother to be part of the de jure empire, as well as Yemen and Arabia.  I'm not sure if we include any of the Horn kingdoms.

Back in Ethiopia, Lasta is carved up between Alodia and Danakil.  They had been good allies in past lifetimes, but here it would have been too costly to intervene.

Cadet Houses start to appear everywhere as more landed Diskarkhans establish themselves over the generations.




Emir Eliya III of Hadramawt now is Emir of the Shibamid Emirate as he has created the cadet branch House Shibamid.  Prince Halil would go on to form House Madin.  Emir Aghlab would come up with the creativively named House Aghlabid.  It is nice to see Diskarkha's dynasty grow as it's borders do.

Emir Sulayman does not start his own cadet branch, but instead starts a faction to claim the throne of Diskarkha.




In September of 1210 Princess Parween's husband, Eudoxios, dies mysteriously.  This is what I get for trying to establish myself in Byzantine politics.  But with his death my alliance to the Byzantine Doux dies as well, and Kafa's oldest daughter is now without husband.  Sadly her only child of the marriage also died young and sickly, and as she is our player heir we need to find her a new husband.

There are no strong alliances to be forged, so we opt for the best stats and find a genius husband of a very minor house.




The last trait icon of a white mask over a red circle tells us he's also a lunatic. Fingers crossed that won't cause us any trouble down the line.

Kafa's mother is now approaching 70 and offers Kafa an alliance with Nobatia.  Kafa would rather she just died so he could inherit these lands, but I suppose this is good enough to secure them.

At the same time, Emir Khalil of the Nizwid Emirate comes to me with a solution to Emir Sulayman's scheming.




In exchange for a favor from Kafa, Khalil tells that Sulayman attempted to murder Adey Dir.  We're not sure why as the Dirs rule minor lands in Mogadishu, but this is exactly what we can use to keep the Emir in his place.

Because now we can go to the Intrigue Screen, and attempt to blackmail Emir Sulayman with the knowledge of his secret:




And this gives us a Strong Hook on Sulayman.

In return, Khalil asks me to publicly concede my rights to punish him for his uprising.  Yes, I can go for this exchange. 

But now Sulayman cannot plot against me, as my Strong Hook on him prevents him from starting a faction.  And so the plot to take the throne is gone.

He also hates me.




In July 1211 I decide to springboard from my new alliance into Nobatia to an expansion into Egypt.  With Queen Mother Eudosia getting older and older, it seems soon that Nobatia will come into our possession and this seems a logical place to expand.  Eventually we will have Diskarkha on both sides of the Red Sea.

It also gives me a chance to hit Danakil as they are Egypt's only ally.

The war goes pretty much according to plan.  Kafa musters his armies in Zaila, just to the south of Danakil, and we manage to catch their army as they are attempting to disembark into the Red Sea and sail north.  After a few sieges and defeating their army a few more times, half the forces go to Egypt to take the Emirate in question, while the rest continue to put the hurt on Danakil.

In November of 1213 the war is won, but we find that Count Beranger of Cairo has also declared holy war for the same Emirate, and so we have to defeat him.  By some quirk of the game rules, Danakil is now my ally in this war.  It is a short affair; Count Beranger and allies are very weak.  We capture his heir when Cairo falls and demand payment for our trouble.

Mother Queen Eudosia turns 80.  Will she ever die?




In August 1215 Sanaag wins their war against Sabbid and the realm size is up to 75 counties.  And I swear, as I was typing this then Abu-Bakr of Samalo dies, and his land splits with the exclave of Gode becoming independent.  I waste no time and declare war. 

You can see we are already in a war against the Byzantines here.  Nothing big.  During the war against Egypt our youngest daughter Judith came of age and she is married to Doux Berold of Philippopolis mostly because he has an army of 10,000 on his side.  He doesn't waste much time in asking us to support his claim on the throne, and we don't waste any armies by sending anyone north to assist.

Sadly we seem to have missed our window against Jerusalem as they now have several powerful allies.  But there are still many weak neighbors to pick at.

Which brings me back to Gode.  We only raise our men-at-arms for this war, and although they are outnumbered 1,400 to Gode's 2,200, our quality shines through and we win decisively: killing half of Gode's army while only losing 100.  By February 1216 the war is won.

In the following months, two more neighboring rulers die and see their lands splinter off.  Emir Ibrahim of the Abbadids dies and the lands they conquered in Baqlin pass on as independent realms to 2 of his sons.  Also, the Emir of Numayr dies, and his son is left without allies.




I decide to attack Numayr first, guessing that the Baqlin states will stay weak longer.  Numayr has 2,000 troops and Kafa brings just shy of 5,000.

Meanwhile, Al-Jawf (formerly Outrejourdain before I took the the duchy of Outrejourdain from them) is also seizing the moment, declaring for the splintered realm of Tha'labiya.  Our troops fall into their sieges by September.

Numayr tries to counter by besieging Shaqiq, but our walls and siege engines are stronger, and we can finish our sieges and then turn around and catch their armies before Shaqiq gives in.




With the victory at Shaqiq we win the war.

And then tragedy:  mother dies.




Prince Halil inherits Makuria, while Kafa II inherits Kafa II.

Where our neighbors have become weaker with their leaders dying, our kingdom becomes stronger.  Diskarkha now rules both sides of the Red Sea.

Kafa has so many opportunities here.  I'm going to expand a ton but there are so many ways to go.  With the inheritance from Queen Mother, Kafa now also has the gold needed to create the 2 kingdom titles and also create a custom empire.

The only catch is that when you take the decision to create a custom empire, all kingdom titles you hold at the time of creation are what is considered "de jure".  So I could in fact be greedy here, and expand more, save up more to create additional kingdoms.  It just depends on how far I'm willing to tempt luck.  Kafa is starting to get into his 50s, after all.

[pindicator]

Kafa II, Part Four:  Pressing the Button

While deciding what to do with his inherited lands, Kafa takes an easy first step and declares on Uqayr, on the shores of the Persian Gulf




The men-at-arms are still off limits from use in Gode, but we just swarm them with massive numbers of levies and it works out.  By March 1218 we are owners of two more counties.

While we're expanding in Arabia, the next tech comes in:




Windmills will give us a nice little boost to taxes, and open up all those economic buildings that I haven't been building.  Perhaps the next leader will have more of an in income to work on developing the land with, but Kafa needs all his cash for making up an Empire title.

One downside to having only daughters for children is that I am unable to give any land to them before my character dies.  With 3 boys I could manage the inheritence better by giving them pieces of the inheritence earlier.  Now I have to wait for the game to do it all at the very end.  So while Kafa sits at 7 over the domain limit, we give the holdings inherited in Nobatia to Aarif Diskarkha, youngest son of Emir Reza of Mecca.  He stands to inherit nothing and hopefully can be a counter-balance to Prince Halil in this area.

And then Shamir becomes the next war target, declaring for all their lands within de jure Petty Kingdom of Shamir.

We win a decisive victory at Meroe:




And then Shamir is conquered.

That next spring Kafa's oldest sister and best friend, Rafiqa, dies.




With that reminder of mortality, Kafa realizes he must act soon to finish his empire-building before his own demise.  Above shows a map of the de jure kingdoms of the area.  We already own the majority of Adal, Diskarkha, Arabia, Nubia and parts of Blemmyia, Abyssinia, and Outer Ajuraan.  However we have to have the kingdom titles for those lands to be considered de jure in our custom empire.

Kafa spends 800 gold here to make himself Malik of Nubia and Arabia in addition to Diskarkha.  Adal would be a nice addition; however, we decide to go for Blemmyia next so that Nubia is connected to the rest of the empire by sea.

You can also notice portions of Adal (and Arabia too but the color scheme doesn't let it show very well) are checkered with Diskarkha's color: that signifies de jure drift is happening.  Basically, de jure drift is the process where the neighboring duchies of another kingdom will eventually become de jure lands in my main title.  This is a very slow process, taking 100 years naturally.  You can speed it up with Council actions, and I had at various points used my Chancellor to do that.  But even now we are about 10 years away from the Emirate of Asiq (south-central Arabia) and 20 years from Sanaag from becoming de jure Diskarkha.  Kafa doesn't have that long.

The good news is that once I become an empire, de jure drift then works on Kingdom titles, and I can potentially expand my de jure lands by whole kingdoms at a time.  De jure will matter for taxes: the game gives a penalty for not being "their rightful liege".  In addition, creating these kingdom titles ends up boosting Kafa's income considerably.  I probably should have done this earlier.




After spending that 800 gold I revisit the decision to create my custom empire.  I have enough gold, but again want to spend at least 400 more on creating the Kingdom of Blemmyia.  I have enough prestige.  But I do not have enough Piety:  all of these holy wars cost Piety to declare and I have dipped too low.  At my current rate of gaining piety by 3 per month, it will take a little under 5 years to finish.  So we have roughly 5 years to and conquer Blemmyia.

However, Kafa gets sidetracked here and instead declares a war for the Duchy of Amman.  Since he now holds the kingdom title for Arabia this does not need to be declared as a Holy War (which costs Piety to start), but instead as a war for de jure lands within the Kingdom of Arabia (which costs Prestige).  Amman is a tiny duchy on the border of Jerusalem.




During this war, Princess Sarah's husband dies in wars in India and our alliance there is done.  We find a new husband for her, the Duke of Damascas.  He is the strongest vassal within the Kingdom of Jerusalem.




However, Amman was not a quick war.  Or rather, not as quick as we had hoped.  After sieging the war targets of Ma'an and Balqa' we are still at 92%, and it takes a few more months of chashing down Al-Jawf's armies and the war counter ticking upward before we can take the lands.

In that time, Kafa's wife Zerebekka dies, succumbing to old age:




Kafa would go on to remarry an elderly woman.  We did not want to complicate things with new heirs, but we also needed the stats from a spouse to help with the domain.  Especially if we could get to up our domain limit some more and control more lands ourselves.




However I forgot a very important detail!  If your spouse is a ruler then you don't get their stats to help, as they are using all their efforts to ruling their own lands.  So in the end Kafa gets no stat boost, and I am left with only a middling alliance.

The Prestige gain from the marriage did get us enough to the Exalted Among Men status, which is required for creating a custom empire.  So it wasn't without merit entirely.

That following spring, Kafa's sister Shola dies, having drank herself to death.

With the feeling of time pressing down on him, Kafa decides to go to pilgrimage to gain the needed piety.




With the piety now in place, we can conquer Blemmyia and finish up the last holdout for our empire.  Family ties had caused Kafa to give his nephews in Bazin a peaceful existance, but here they must be gathered up for the good of his future empire.




Bazin falls in October and from there it is straight on to Badi.




In 1223 Mogadishu's longtime ruler, Gerad Hamalmal, died at age 56.  His oldest daughter, Geradad Mulki now reigns.  Her husband is Gerad Nasr of House Aghlab and heir to the Aghlabid Emirate.  So their children will inherit both the Aghlabid Emirate and Mogadishu and fall under Diskarkha's expanding empire.  Again we will add a kingdom to our lands by peaceful means.

My notes get worse from here, as apparently the constant repetition of "Conquer neighboring weak duchy, move on to next neighboring weak duchy" seemed to get a little banal.  But in some course over the previous year and through next April we conquered the succession states from Baqlin when the Abbadids lost their grip over it.

In January 1224 Kafa created the title for Kingdom of Blemmyia.




This brought us down to 1100 gold, and we only needed to wait a few more months to get back over 1200.

So in April a button was pressed.




And there is now a new de Jure empire.  Note how the Kingdom of Adal is still part of Abyssinia; even though we own all the lands within the kingdom we never created the kingdom title, so it does not fall de jure under our new empire's mantle.  I can envision a world where we de jure drift Adal into our possession.  Or possibly we release them as an independent kingdom (ruled by a Diskarkha of course):  our goals have always been to the north and east, and possessing those Nestorian holy sites.

Should we keep the name Diskarkha for our new empire?  Or do we need a new name to signify this new status?

[Mjmd]

Surprisingly not as big of a deal in game as I expected. I thought we'd get some kind of event. I'm sure this puts me high up on the Jihad list though.

Especially after I convert the county to be Nestorian

Did anything ever come of converting Mecca?

[Miguelito]

Congratulations emperor, or what is the title?

I like how "Attempt Suicide" doesn't feature under "Major Decisions"

Btw on the Arabian Empire, are those the crusaders? And how unified is Persia (Iskenderid) right now? Mongols coming in yet?

[sunrise089]

I was so worried you were going to die before you pressed to button with all those delays!

I like how "Attempt Suicide" doesn't feature under "Major Decisions"

Or Submit to the Great Khan for that matter. Apparently those are roughly as momentous of decisions as hiring a new court physician

pindicator, just wanted to note that while you're not getting a ton of comments I think that's because the quality of the reporting speaks for itself. I'm sure this is challenging to report but I happily check for updates each day.

[pindicator]

Did anything ever come of converting Mecca?

Not really, but I think that's more because the Arab world is in shambles. Persia has been in constant state of revolts. They did invade with a Holy War for Oman, a few updates ago, but that was the only invasion we've seen. Instead the Iskenderids have lost more vassals to rebellions and the Byzantines continue to gobble up land in their west. I've heard people say that its due to how the Byzantines and Seljuks are set up; originally they both are given primogenerature to keep the empires together, but if either loses their ruling dynasty then they fall into Confederate Partition like the rest of us.

Congratulations emperor,  or what is the title?

I like how "Attempt Suicide" doesn't feature under "Major Decisions"

Btw on the Arabian Empire, are those the crusaders? And how unified is Persia (Iskenderid) right now? Mongols coming in yet?

That screen is showing the de jure Empires in the game. Normally what the game considers legal land for the Arabian Empire stretches all the way into the Arabian peninsula. But with our new Diskarkha Empire we've taken a lot of those lands that were legally (as far as titles work) for Arabia and Abyssinia and made a new name for them.

Here is a zoomed out picture of the east:




You can see where the Persians have lost a lot of vassals in their north already. Honestly, they may be my next target: going after the holy sites at Fars and Baghdad. They have not been able to project their force outward for some time because it's been nothing but constant infighting for them.

EDIT: On further inspection, the Iskenderids are actually attacking the Byzantines right now. They are trying to reclaim lands the Byzantines have taken in the past 50 years, namely the duchy of Azerbaijian to their northwest. So perhaps it's that the Byzantines have pissed them off more than I have?

The Mongols are suffering from some kind of bad AI right now. On the map I've highlighted every kingdom they have declared war on: the green ones are wars they are winning and the red ones are wars they are losing. Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense until you zero in on the war and see that they are at -90%, -70% on these wars and they haven't lost a single battle. They haven't even engaged the enemy, and so monthly the defender gets a ticking war score in their favor for owning the contested lands while the Mongols do .... nothing? I'm not sure where the Great Khan has sent his 30,000 troops. My guess is they're off chasing some far distant target while they slowly lose all their other wars.

On the plus side he has conquered the Tibetan plateau, so he does share a border with Iskenderid now.

Or Submit to the Great Khan for that matter. Apparently those are roughly as momentous of decisions as hiring a new court physician

pindicator, just wanted to note that while you're not getting a ton of comments I think that's because the quality of the reporting speaks for itself. I'm sure this is challenging to report but I happily check for updates each day.

Yes, so apparently once you become an Empire you lose the ability to submit to the Great Khan. Did not realize that before. Guess it's death or glory for us Diskarkhans now.

Speaking of, I feel like hitting this milestone of becoming an empire means it's time to give us a more empirical sounding name. Currently I'm leaning towards Erythraean Empire, as that is what the greeks used to call the Red & Arabian seas, and our empire stratles one and hopes to surround the other.

[pindicator]

Congratulations emperor,  or what is the title?

Thank you! We are known as Malik al-Muazzam now.