Tags

, , , , , , , ,

You may have noticed that I dropped hints about some gaming I’ve been doing – it is something I’ve been at it for most of 2021. Back when I was toying with Field of Glory‘s scripting and early-medieval battles, I started a campaign in Crusader Kings II, playing as an heir to Charlemagne. I previously let you know about it when I got to 1336, proud to still be keeping the bloodline going (which is the raison d’être of CK2 after all). My ambition, by that time, was to make it until the end of the CK2 timeline and continue the game in Europa Universalis IV.

I made it.

As I explained before, despite my explicit desire to avoid starting the game as England, I’m starting my EU4 portion of the game as England. It’s a bit of a weird start, so I’ll tell you how I got here before getting into some details regarding the conversion process.

My alternative history of medieval Europe really started going off the rails when I lost control of the Holy Roman Empire courtesy of a lack of support for a too-young heir. Based on what I’ve learned this year, this seems to be a key element of playing the HRE in CK2. Each emperor is chosen by electors. It is possible to manage the process and control the passage of imperial throne to a relation of your choosing but it is also easy to lose control of that process. When the death of a monarch takes place while he is in his prime and when his heir is merely a child, the Imperial Electors can be forgiven for seeking a more mature alternative. In such an eventuality, the imperial title passes to a different family (in my case, they were also descendants of Charlemagne) but the player’s own royal holdings remain intact. I found myself as but one elector in the HRE body politic but, also, the king of Bavaria.

So far, while not particularly historical, it also isn’t particularly weird.

The weirdness came from how religion is modeled in the current versions of CK2. You see, while emperor, I beefed up my perceived majesty by virtue of a marriage or two between my own family and the caliphs of northern Africa and the Levant. That introduced some pretty, dark-skinned young ladies into my bloodline who also brought with them some strange ideas about religion. While I was busy working the politics to get my family back in the running for Holy Roman Emperor, a mass conversion from Christianity to Islam began. It was an entirely peaceful conversion at that. Pillow talk and some strategically placed copies of the Quran bore fruit via a wave of Muslim-ruled areas in Germany up to and finally including the Emperor himself.

Frankly, that didn’t sit so well with me.

The result was that the series of crusades which help define this game took place as much in Europe itself as in the traditional Middle East. Generations of loyal Catholics fought to remove the Islamic lords from their thrones scattered across Europe while at the same time the Crusader Kingdoms in Egypt and Jerusalem managed to hold their own. Byzantium never fell to an expanding caliphate, leaving a massive Orthodox Christian power standing between Europe and the historic threat to Christianity. This war of religions fought by diplomacy, persuasion, and intermarriage was to repeat itself through the years.

Once the Muslim rule was gone, several other waves followed. Adherents to the Greek Orthodox religion rose in various corners of Northern Europe but never quite swayed empires the way Islam did. The Lollard heresy proved to be a persistent threat – rising and falling in successive generations; never quite stamped out. Several of the final crusades in the game involved sending the Christian armies to Egypt to remove another Christian, albeit heretical, ruler from the throne.

As Crusader Kings approached its final years (1444 through 1453, that period between the beginning of EU4 to the last possible end-date of CK2), I had a healthy, young, and competent ruler governing the English Empire. Mine was, by now, a large domain consisting of holdings in England, Scotland, Wales, Poland, Italy, Denmark, and a chunk of what would be, today, in Romania. The Emperor also retained a castle in the center of the Bavarian Empire, a county whose traditional lordship reckoned back to the Carolingian domination of Europe and the throne of the no-longer-existent Holy Roman Empire. It looked like smooth sailing into the CK2-to-EU4 transition. Perhaps I got complacent.

The emperor must relinquish his throne

I was, of course, aware of a discontented uncle who felt he would make a much better emperor than myself. The threat was serious but manageable and I had intended to use a combination of diplomacy and intrigue to tamp it down. Before I could do so, a peasant revolt broke out in southern England and my uncle’s backers decided to strike. By himself, my uncle didn’t have the might to back up his claim. The usurpation’s real power came from the King in the North (northern England and parts of Scotland) and the King of Poland. Between them they could field an army that was more than a match for me, their advantage multiplied by several early victories near London. Ultimately, I had to give up the title of Emperor. I still remained “King of England” and continued to possess the majority of the holdings formerly under my control. Thus CK2 ended in 1451 with me not quite where I intended to be.

It has been a while since I converted a game from CK2 to EU4. It was about this same season of the year, but in 2019, that I was playing a CK2 game focused on the Hundred Years War and, reaching the end of its allotted time, converted my game to EU4 using the facility built into the base game. I don’t remember what issues I had with it but I do recall that I was less than fully satisfied. For whatever reason, I never went very far with the conversion. Instead, I got myself wound up about the new board game Imperial Struggle and launched into EU4’s historical treatment of that period. Then, still dissatisfied, I restarted at the beginning of the grand campaign.

No, it’s the successful Crusade of Egypt and the Byzantine Empire in the east.

As I was fishing around on the internet for the best dates to make the switch from CK2 to EU4, I came across a project on Steam. Apparently there has long been a user-driven, open-source effort to create a better CK2-to-EU4 converter; one that promises to solve many problems with the “stock” version.

One thing I noticed from my previous conversion was that a long-running game of CK2 tends to have an awful lot of empires. It only takes a little bit of military aggressiveness before one is allowed to start forming additional duchies and kingdoms. Once one collects a few kingdom crowns, it only takes a bit of coin to form an empire. My northwestern corner of Europe had empires in England (mine), France, Bavaria, Hispania, Byzantium, and probably another one or two that I just didn’t notice. In context, it isn’t too crazy (think, maybe, petty and greater kingdoms) but when translated to the Europa Universalis world, a Europe dominated by empires seems more suited to its end game, not the start. A tool that promises to fix this seemed like just what the doctor ordered.

An empire converted

I downloaded and ran the converter program and then started EU4, back into my formerly-CK2 world. You can see the result in the screenshot above. The erstwhile British Empire, as a result of that inter-family struggle, was broken into two halves – Greater and Lesser England. I took Lesser England, that being my domain in CK2, which made me a Grand Duke and a vassal of Greater England – although I am already vassal with a very strong desire for independence. Similarly, France was divided in twain – the Empire of France and the Empire of Francia. Although my predicament may be seen as being entirely off the historical rails, maybe there is a way to justify this. The situation is about the right year and almost the right divisions for a historical replay* of the Wars of the Roses.

There were, unfortunately, other troubles as well. Within a little over a year, I had had a crash to desktop – a crash from which I was unable to resume. After much struggle, I found that something about the crash had cause the system to automatically disabled my mod**. A good bit of fiddling later, I had the game back up and running – but continued to experience frequent crashes. Ironically, it seemed that once my own War of the Roses began, the game stabilized. Although I was saving constantly to preserve the rapidly changes brought about by war, I suffered no more… until…

Stop whatever you are doing and start over!

Returning to the game after having saved for the night, I again got a crash upon load. The warning was similar to the earlier ones – but not quite the same. EU4 explained that the save I was loading or the mod I had enabled was incompatible with the current version. After a bit of wheel-spinning I realized the key was the software version, not the save file. Overnight, I suppose, a new major update had occurred and that update was not compatible with the game in which I was right in the middle.

That seems like a serious problem. In this case, however, it was also a solution.

Between the time that I downloaded my converter program and the time I was using it, another version of the converter began appearing. The so-called Habsburg release posted its final package the same day that the 1.32 Songhai update came for the main game. Habsburg fixes converter bugs as well as providing compatibility with the Songhai EU4 version. As I said, just what the doctor ordered.

I went back and reconverted, this time using the UI tool to managed the options. It became clear to me that this “shattering of empires” that you may have read about in the link is, by default, only for the Holy Roman Empire. It is intended to take a fully-formed HRE leviathan and implement it through EU4‘s Imperial Elector system rather than as a monster “empire” in the footsteps of Napoleonic France or the United Kingdom. Using the defaults, I found, just like in my earlier conversion, I was a Duke of Lesser England sworn to His Great Majesty, the Lord of Greater England.

Can nobody deal with those Lollards?!

There were some differences – whether due to changes with the conversion or as a result of the EU4 update, I couldn’t tell you. In both starts, the game launched both of the Englands with a lot of power and money. Also in both, Greater England immediate rekindled the (non-existent) Hundred Years War. In the first conversion, Greater England’s war with Francia drained the manpower so quickly and thoroughly so that Lesser England (me, right?) felt comfortable launching a war for independence. In the second play through, the war (with France this time) did not cripple Greater England. I was left conspiring to build up my strength and seek diplomatic support for a war that might come some day in the near or distant future.

I then started thinking about that empire thing.

So, I got so excited about this feature – this ability to remove these massive, ahistorical empires from Europe circa 1451 – only to leave the setting at the default. Furthermore, that default is to break up only the HRE – but, remember, the HRE had gone Muslim and been destroyed (perhaps to be replaced by the Empire of Bavaria). By default, the converter would just do nothing.

Beyond the handful of easy choices presented by the software, the reconfiguration of CK2 empires can be controlled on a nation-by-nation basis via a text file. Not really wanting to do that, I decided to stick basic settings, where there are but a few empire options. I selected that ALL empires be “shattered” but, additionally, that the Byzantine Empire take over the elector system of the HRE. (Byzantium, in this CK2 save, is massive – on par with the real-world Ottoman Empire of this time). The revamped results are shown below.

Feudal ties in England are tenuous, to say the least

Quite a bit different this time. Greater and Lesser England are no longer a thing, with that empire split into many tiny but interrelated feudal nations. Oddly enough, France is considerably more intact than in the non-shattering iterations, looking much more like the historical incarnation – and maybe then some. Trying to pick up where I left off was a little harder this time with my “kingdom” of England being no longer intact. My best bet seemed to take the reins as the Duke of Holstein, one of the many titles held by King Henri II at the end of CK2.

Oh yeah, Henri? I can’t seem to find him anywhere on the new map. May he live on in our memories.

In the screenshot above, the best way to illustrate my own position seemed to be to plot provinces by ruling family. You can see those provinces under the rule of Holstein by their bluish-purple color. This includes the counties whose titles are held directly by the Duke (not just Schleswig and Holstein but also Oxford, probably due to a miss-click in CK2 when I accidentally built a royal palace) as well as sworn vassals (most notably, Middlesex county with London and its port). I also have very strong allegiance with a pair of northern dukes (Northumbria and York) and I used the initial months of the game to tie them even tighter to me.

In some ways, this makes my imagined connection to history even more tenuous. Unlike the evenly-divided England of the first cut, here there is no England. This means it is unlikely that a near-term Wars of the Roses will reunite England under any of the prominent banners. I predict a good century-or-more of rebellious fiefdoms at odds in Southern England. On the other hand, the political situation may be far more representative of the Historical one compared to the Greater/Lesser alternative. The politics behind the struggles of the Lancesters and the Yorks to control the throne was, in fact, less a story of loyalists and rebels and more one about powerful families maneuvering for control. Dukes and Earls had varying degrees of loyalty and several were known to jump ship in midstream. One might even say that sitting on the throne was less of a prize than simply having “your man” on the throne – a king willing to support your long-standing interests. Might this version of England actually work? I think it is worth trying.

The downside to this setup is that without a “there” there in England, this “shattered empire” is at the mercy of anyone and everyone. The starting point for Greater and Lesser England saw some fairly decent fleets capable of protecting the island and allowing both a domination of trade and a projection of power. With the kingdom divided, what happens when France or Spain comes calling? Is there really any chance that a loose affiliation of alliances, oaths, and marriages will be able to muster enough of an army and navy to defeat a major power? Given what I know of EU4, I am not optimistic.

Whatever the case, I’ll put some time in it and see how it goes. If it does go anywhere, maybe you’ll even hear about it.

One more comment on the upgrading process, just in case you’ve read this far with a mind to try this conversion project out for yourself. I had a moment of panic when I saw the “Requirements” section in the project’s ReadMe.txt. That document explains that CK2 should be running the Conclave DLC and that Europa Universalis IV should be running the Dharma DLC. While I validated that I have the Conclave DLC in CK2 I wasn’t sure about Dharma. For a few days, I thought the whole enterprise was going to collapse unless I spend $9.99 (it is the “Content Pack” that I never bought) to get some India-focused graphics. Reading on the discussion boards, I found out that the CK2-to-EU4 conversion is intended to be independent of your installations details but it is impossible for the team to test against all combinations. For that reason, they identify an official configuration and then rely on miscellaneous users to identify issues that crop up outside of that. The upgrade worked (well, with all the caveats that I identify above) and then I realized that I actually was running Dharma (the DLC) after all. Maybe you are not… but maybe your upgrade will work anyway.

*There is actually a problem with this. The Wars of the Roses were entirely about installing a ruler to the throne of an indisputably united nation. The end result of a War of Independence would be two antagonistic nations which would then have to chip away at each other’s holdings over the centuries.

**The mechanism for upgrading a CK2 game is to create a mod that allows a newly-started game in EU4 to have the political world imported from CK2. It is not, as you might expect, a save game to be loaded. This also means that when you do save, that save has to be reloaded with that conversion mod enabled.