Habsburg Megacampaign: Part 08: 1119-1126: The Second Crusade for Maghreb

Before the crusade I legitimized my two adult bastard sons. One is Basque after his mother, but in spite of that I made him my primary heir as my trueborn sons are all quite old now. The other is a proper German, and I asked Pope for him to be my beneficiary of the crusade.

I really wanted to be the top contributor, so I gathered my troops half a year before the crusade, so on its day the boats sailed for Maghreb.

Technically we didn't even have a big advantage, as a lot of infidel rulers from Asia declared their participation, but I had no intention of waiting for them to join. Or of waiting for other Christian rulers to steal my glory. First I attacked Tlemcen where sultan's vassals were already fighting, then marched on his capital.

I pretty much won the crusade with my sieges, but the way participation is counted is total bullshit, and my occupations (worth over 100% of warscore) didn't count for much, while some minor battles (worth about 1% of warscore) somehow counted, so I ended up as only 3rd at 20%, with Adelmo von Habsburg getting just duchy of Fes, while Queen Beorhtgifu the Sword of God, Anglo-Saxon of Hwicce, ended up taking the main title.

Occupations count for 10 points per day, like that's in any way whatsoever relevant, so blitzkrieg win is nearly worthless. Battles are worth 200 points per day per 1000 enemy soldiers, so it's crazy easy to accumulate score while costing us warscore by throwing your troops at enemies.

That's all ridiculously unfair, but at least the infidels have been removed. And most importantly I got a ton of gold for my contributions.

So I took ambition to forge bloodline and started building 9 cities, 9 castles, and 7 temples exactly to get Builder bloodline before I die. This timing is extremely important, as then most of my family will get it. If I wait for the successor then most Habsburgs won't have it.

Unfortunately the game would not let me pick the bloodline I wanted, instead of insistint I'd get one for winning a lot of wars. It's bullshit that there's no way to refuse bloodlines, so I had to mod it. Win 15+ wars is trivial without even trying to do anything special. To be fair, none of the bloodlines are particularly good.

Some bastard tried to challenge me to a duel, even though I'm one leg in the grave already. I agreed, and used my skills at deception, so he lost his eye.

Strangely my 35 year old wife Melusine Capet, rightful queen of France, died in childbirth, only giving birth to a second daughter.

I married one of my lovers Adelasia, and arranged for our 8 year old bastard son Ugo to be betrothed to queen of Croatia, matrilineally. One of my bastard daughters I sent to become a concubine of the Chinese Emperor.

King Otto died at age of 66, leaving the realm to his legitimized bastard Egidio, while fighting some minor border cleanup wars.

Egidio is a 3/10/13/11/11 content Fortune Builder, competent at many things but master of none. He's likely to be unobjectionable to his subjects.

Hearing Voices of Jesus let me plan and execute Crusade flawlessly

My beneficiary only got one duchy

Unfortunately that one battle about to start in Tangiers was worth 5x more than me getting all the warscore

This was controversial heir designation, and his stats aren't even that great (content? Basque?) but I prefer playing younger characters, especially with Reaper's Due killing people left and right

There's a lot of Sunni leftover to clean up, but Catholic realms of Castille/Leon, Maghreb, Sicily/Africa, and Egypt/Jerusalem/Arabia - all victorious in part due to my help - can deal with it

Also German Kaiser took over Danzig from Poland. Nothing to see here, nothing to see.