Habsburg Megacampaign: Part 01: 1066-1072: Werner von Habsburg, Count of Basel

They're locking down the whole world, so might as well start a megacampaign.

Earliest Habsburg start is 1066 Werner von Habsburg, Count of Basel. A 41 year old married to a useless lowborn, with two children, and sister married to nearby count.

A lot of minimods, hopefully nothing breaks horribly. I plan to play until 1444 and then export it into EU4. Maybe I could then play it in Vic2, but EU4 blobbing is so fast, I doubt I'll even last to 1821. But never say never.

There are also some Etichonen dynasty members in earlier start date with special decision to flip Habsburg, but that makes megacampaign a lot less likely to happen.

Count Werner is a 4/12/7/7/10 just wroth paranoid erudite Tough Soldier, nothing special.

Pretty much everything is locked until I become a duke. I did some legal reforms, went on a pilgrimage, and I was trying to accumulate piety. Kaiser created a duchy of Transjurania, gave it to someone else, making me a two level vassal, ugh.

I managed to fight two wars - one for nearest county, making me a double count, and second to get independent from Transjurania - being a vassal is tolerable, being double-vassal locks out basically everything.

After that it was an RNG wait. Somehow a baby girl became a duchess of Meissen, and our "alternative Pope" decided that I'd be a better duke of Meissen that her. Kaiser didn't love the one in Rome much, so we have our own Pope, not like that does us much good.

Meissen is not much, but I need to be a duke to get anything done, so might just as well.

And so in 6 years I managed to get a duke title, increase my demesne size. I can create a second duchy of Thuringia by just spending some gold, but there's no obvious avenue towards becoming a king or migrating to any nice coastal land. Oh well, it's a good start.

My family is:

• son Otto, 12, betrothed to Scottish princess, heir to duchy of Moray
• daughter Ida, 8, bethrothed to heir to duchy of Swabia, who provided a lot of troops for my wars
• son Radbot, 4, betrothed to daughter of duke of Savoy and second in line, maybe something will come out of it
• sister Richenza, married to count of Bern, who helped in my first war but then turned out to be quite useless later

Very modest start. The biggest RNG is to whom the Kaiser will give duchy of Transjurania, but that guy is a double-count, and there's very little time, so I'm not sure it's possible to reliably get it.

There's a risk that after becoming independent I'd get transferred back under that bastard - with a truce. Fortunately that didn't happen.

Not only I got new titles, I got 23 attribute points. Catholic "ask Pope for claims" mechanic is really powerful, but extremely RNG driven. Pope really hates women and children, so that's the targets I can get. It's difficult to get claims on titles held by men, even excommunicated ones.