u/Thin-Supermarket-714

I'm playing as Neuria and I unified the Slavs, and I plan on doing a long campaign with the Crisis of the Third Century mod to convert to Christianity and conquer the Balkans region. My plan right now is to try and destroy Rome before it becomes a monster, and finally... I have to annihilate the Ptolemies and rebuild Babylonia, which was devastated by those Hellenic barbarians

It was a pretty straightforward run playing as Chattia, and I wanted to form Charlemagne's empire. The first time I tried a while back following the mission tree to form Francia, it was a complete disaster. Turning into a civilized nation left me with very few pops, and a mission forced me to move my capital, which ultimately got me crushed by an extremely powerful Rome.

So on this second run, I just stayed as a migratory tribe and converted a bunch of cultures into my primary one. With huge armies, I managed to destroy Rome and secure the territories I wanted after about four wars. After that, I spent a long time raising my centralization to finish the mission to form Francia and, eventually, an empire.

Aside from a few mistakes with some missions, I didn't initially plan on playing tall or developing the region. But once the borders were looking clean and I had plenty of room to expand and build up, I got the itch. I thought, "If I can switch religions once I civilize, maybe I'll play a few more years." But then it immediately hit me—man, I really should have used the Crisis of the Third Century mod and converted to Christianity! It would have made so much sense... Now I feel like I did an entire playthrough only to end up with a sense of empty completion because I missed that opportunity, and I completely lost the motivation to keep developing it haha.

So I wanted to try out the Crisis of the Third Century mod, and I wanted to play as a republic that wasn't Rome. I thought it would be funny to play as an Italian Gaul tribe and form the borders of the Roman Empire with it. I chose Insubria because I knew their mission tree was fun. The hardest part is obviously the beginning, but it's not that complicated. The primary culture, Lepontic, is quite populous at the start, and there's a mission to bring in more people to colonize the region that gives you almost 90 pops practically for free. Because of this and being a tribe, your armies are quite large, with the main issue being manpower, which is very low.

In the final part of its mission tree, Insubria lets you become a republic, and I kept that government type until I conquered all of this territory around 720, which is where I stopped my expansion after conquering Mesopotamia from Persia and taking Albion in the British Isles.

Then came two mod events that I thought were really amazing: the Crisis of the Republic and the Monetary Crisis, which I'll mention in a moment. The Crisis of the Republic is cool because it presents various internal issues within your empire as you expand and add more provinces. You can delay and reduce the crisis, but eventually, you'll have to take action to save the republic! I saved my democracy by becoming a Dictator... It works! The path to becoming a dictatorship here is really cool, especially since I find the conventional way of turning into a dictatorship extremely boring and uninspired. It's important to mention that Christianity had already appeared and was spreading throughout the empire, and with the fall of the republic, a church appeared in Rome and another in my capital, Mediolanum. With that, I got everything needed to convert, becoming Christian (which is actually very strong, especially the saints and Christianity itself).

Anyway, the monetary crisis is another event I didn't pay much attention to at first because when the option appeared, it showed I was extremely well-off, around 300% fine. However, over the years, the gold mines start drying up, more people become integrated cultures, and you have to manage the crisis until you can enact reforms to fix it—that is, until two issues appeared that tested my patience.

The first one is fine and I think it's cool: some of your generals demand that you declare war on random countries, and if you refuse, you lose loyalty with all generals in a legion as well as popularity. Fair enough, it's pretty neat... Now, the epidemic crisis is another story. I know it's meant to be brutal and mess you up, but it's extremely frustrating to have heaps of resources at my disposal and not be able to use any of them to ease the situation even a little and relieve the pressure. Like, why can't I use state funds, or better yet, the governor's money to distribute food, reducing the monthly food debuff in provincial capitals? Or why can't I add food to provinces like some deity bonuses that provide a fixed food supply to the province, or demand that my governors do something at the cost of loyalty or state money, increasing their corruption and mine? In short, it's just very annoying to deal with this crisis because there is no mechanism or resource you can spend, unlike other crises that give you tools to handle them and make managing them intuitive.

Overall, this mod is very much worth playing, especially if you want to do a longer campaign. I highly recommend it, and I believe I haven't even seen everything it has to offer yet.

I wanted to test the Virtual Limes mod and decided it would be cool to do so with Massalia, attempting to form the Phocean League—which I had never done before. It was an extremely challenging campaign. The Virtual Limes mod works in a way where large empires or kingdoms create special vassals, like Military Marches, and a special one for Rome called 'Friend and Ally of Rome.' They establish these vassals and, after some time, annex them diplomatically. This makes things much harder, as they essentially build a wall of surprisingly strong vassals around themselves.

Having said all that, I hate Rome. I could write a 10-page essay on how much I hate Rome in this Massalia campaign. The number of defensive wars I had to fight against them was sheer hell. They just don't stop attacking! As soon as a peace treaty expires, they almost immediately declare war again. They were constantly trying to take my capital province, which would have been game over if I had lost it.

At one unlucky moment, I had to fight three consecutive wars against Rome because they declared war on my tributaries one after the other... I spent almost 19 straight years at war, with my war exhaustion maxed out... Man, I really hate Rome