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A county is the smallest delineated piece of land on the map. Count - A count controls a single county.You can, however, control baronies in addition to other titles. A playable character cannot be 'just' a baron. Baron - A baron owns a single holding within a county, but doesn't control the county itself.These are the possible title ranks that a playable character can hold: You can be a count of a backwater castle in the countryside who swears fealty to a duke who swears fealty to a king. Remember, you aren't playing as France or England or the Holy Roman Empire. This includes dukes who swear fealty to a king or emperor (such as the dukes of Aquitaine or Normandy in France), and independent dukes who also appear on the Independent Realms map mode, such as the dukes of Brittany or Munster. In the Ducal map mode we can see all of the duchies. There are other map modes here to let you see counts and dukes, or sort it by religion or culture. In this map mode, I think the first time you click on any county it will select their top level liege, but if you click the county again it will select the particular character who administers that county. You select a character to play by clicking on a single county (province) that they control. The King of France doesn't swear fealty to any emperor, for example, so his holdings and all vassals that swear fealty to him or his vassals are grouped here under his highest title (The Kingdom of France). Hitting the Independent Realms map mode will show characters grouped under the highest independent title in their realm. Right now we're on terrain map mode, but that can be switched with the small icons at the bottom of the frame in the top center. Unless you know exactly who you want to play and where they are, this may not be the best map mode for selecting your character.
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There are some bookmarked dates on the left along with suggested characters to play for those dates, but you can fine tune the starting date down to the day with the arrow buttons on the frame at the top center. Note that this playthrough will be for version 1.05g, so some things may be different down the road.Īfter hitting Single Player you end up at the character and date selection screen.
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I am playing with default settings, so we're just going to jump right in. Part 1: Picking a Character & Introducing the Interface
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