No, though I haven’t played that much (my genius ruler just turned 18). Building up the piety and cash to create the kingdom of Wales has been a pain in the butt (I had -4 piety when I took over as a kid and you don’t get ambition or focus until you are 16) and I just managed to consolidate my lands again. Since you can’t do any plotting during a regency, I had to wait to revoke the counties. Then I had to spend all the money from the jews to defend against a danish invasion, so now I get the fun of trying to win back England from the vikings.
Man am I enjoying this, though. Just before the genius son took over, I had gotten a claim on a neighboring county that belonged to the guy who had just kicked my butt in a war. So I really wanted to try to press that claim for my older brother, since he would automatically become a vassal and love me (and since it would be lost if he died), but I just didn’t have the forces to beat both Deheubarth and Mercia, who were allied. I used some bastard siblings to create alliances with East Anglia, Kent, and some Irish chieftain, giving me about 2.5k troops I could potentially call in. Deheubarth had about 1.1k, but Mercia had like 2.5k on its own. So first, I went to the king of Deheubarth and figured out how much each of the allies liked him vs. me. Then I made sure that not only did my allies like me at least 20 points or so more than him, but I really buttered up the king of Mercia. I sent my chancellor in to improve relations, then gave him a big gift and asked him to educate my sister (which required a little more buttering up of the regent uncle). Once he was up to 75 opinion of me, I figured I was good to go, so I pressed my claim, called my banners (turns out one of my allies couldn’t join because he had his own war - mental note, need to check that first, next time), rounded up the troops my allies sent, and won a 1.5k vs 1k battle, then hunted down and destroyed his forces, and was able to carve off the province.
So combine crazy politics like that with the ability to use your ruler’s focus to shape future events with my new understanding of things like using matrilineal marriages to bring in better councilors, using marriages to minor court members to acquire good teachers (and what it means to be a good teacher thanks to those youtube tutorials), and how to expand your kingdom despite what used to seem like a daunting system of constraints, and I finally feel like this game is what I’ve always wanted it to be.
I’ve resorted to building an extensive list of “important characters” and then culling people out as I manage to deal with them or whatever. All my vassals and important relatives, allies, or enemies, I click that star on, and I get much richer info about them (plus it’s a lot easier to navigate to their page).
If you go to the page for a title by clicking on it, you can get the list of all claimants to the title (a great way to find people to help you usurp it…) - I suppose it doesn’t directly show you who the heir is, but I believe you can find him or her in that list.
