The Butter Cycle

This is a description of why Swadia always ends up getting split between all the major factions. If you're too lazy to read the whole thing, important points are highlighted in bold, and there's a TL;DR at the end.

People complain that the Butterlord is greedy, but honestly, Harlaus giving himself all the fiefs isn't the real issue.

The problem isn't that - any king can be generous if both he and his vassals like you. Granted, blokes like Count Haringoth will be unhappy no matter what he does, but Haringoth can go fuck himself. I enjoy seeing him with an Emir title, eating sand somewhere far away from the crucial castle he holds at the start of the game.

The problem is the endless cycle of feasting that earned him the nickname "butterlord" (that and the Floris bug in which villages would only yield butter after being razed, long since fixed). It's out of his control and is not based on his personality - I could drop Isolla into the same situation at the very start of the game and the same thing would happen.

Swadia starts out in the middle of everything, squished between the Nords, the Rhodoks and the Khergits, with the Vaegirs bordering them near Dhirim. Of those four neighbors, at the start of the war the great butter nation is at war with two - the crossbow bois and the horse bois. The Nords, however, declare war pretty quickly in nine out of ten games, resulting in a three-front war.

An aspiring vassal of the Butterlord should ideally join before such a thing happens, as at the start of the game it's easy to make early gains against the Khanate - that's what I did, we took out the Khergits by day 70, and Harlaus gave me both Narra and Halmar. The Vaegirs managed to take over Tulga and Ichamur and the surrounding castles - they were pretty strong in that one.

Because of the war on multiple fronts, villages get raided, lords get defeated and fiefs get taken. A common target to strike is Dhirim - being the geographical center of Calradia, Count Clais's city usually gets besieged by the Khergits or the Rhodoks before the Nords even think of joining in. As u/PatTheWrath pointed out in the "Harlaus ain't so bad" thread, Swadia can't really succeed in offensive campaigns once Dhirim is taken. Dhirim is considered so valuable by the AI, in fact, that it changes hands every 5 days or so (give or take), and ends up as the poorest city in Calradia by the time Praven falls.

After losing their armies, castles and wealth to the enemy, the Counts of Swadia get piiiiissed. They stop joining military campaigns as they just lost all their troops, and start thinking of defecting.

And to appease the lords, Harlaus calls a feast.

With the nation's resources diverted towards gathering butter for the feasts, and its lords too busy gorging themselves on said butter to patrol their holdings, the process starts to repeat - lose battles and fiefs -> have a bunch of pissed of lords because of that -> call a feast so lords won't defect -> because of the feasting become unable to defend your faction -> lose battles and fiefs...

It's the ciiiircle of feasts!

Because of this cycle, Swadia almost always gets wiped out first without player intervention despite arguably having the strongest troops in the game: it's hard for any monarch to hold under such pressure, and the constant feasting is hardly Harlaus's fault. Sure, he may be enjoying it a tad too much, but he's doing it for a reason - to keep his lords from rebelling. However, you can't have your butter and eat it too, and so the Butterlord's opening of the valves to relieve the pressure makes the whole contraption explode.

TL;DR: Harlaus is not at fault for the feasting - it's a byproduct of how relations and vassalage works. The cycle goes like this: Lords get their asses kicked and fiefs taken -> lords get pissed off at Harlaus -> Harlaus feasts so the lords aren't pissed -> more defeats because all of the lords are busy feasting -> repeat

Submitted March 14, 2019 at 12:06PM by Nico_Storch https://ift.tt/2Hv3xUo