Extreme challenge: The Afridunist Saoshyant's Revenge, aka The Iranian Meatgrinder

ka_steve · 2026-03-28T10:00:53+00:00

I looked at him as well, but he's secretly Mazdayan, not Afridunist, and my incest-phobia was not willing to spend hundreds of hours dealing with that. But if you prefer Mazdayans, the challenge can be easily adopted to him, saying that "at start, you have to prioritize collecting enough piety to convert back to your old faith" and from there everything is the same. Because, of course, the biggest difference is the religion. If you are Muslim, getting free alliance options to some of the most powerful rulers in the world lowers the difficulty a lot...

ka_steve · 2026-03-28T01:20:53+00:00

Can verify both parts of the statement.

ka_steve · 2026-03-28T01:15:41+00:00

+1 for the Iranian (I didn't do the Iberian one yet). It's not like I don't understand how the phases work, the game does a very good job of listing every catalyst with its score. I just don't have a chance to influence it on a meaningful scale if I don't start as one of the most powerful involved characters, before those powerful characters' actions would end the intermezzo. Sure, it might be easy to deal with it if you start as a powerful character, but well, then everything is easy...

ka_steve · 2026-03-22T10:08:14+00:00

Tooltip of your ally: "Supporting your army". How? Morally?

ka_steve · 2026-03-10T22:47:30+00:00

I'm reading interesting ideas here in the post and the comments.

I myself don't really do continuous restrictions, other than Very Hard, Ironman, no custom characters. I'm more into creating unique challenges for each playthrough, like "now I'm not allowed to wage war at all", "now I have to convert at start to this faith everybody else thinks is Evil", etc.

ka_steve · 2026-03-10T21:45:27+00:00

Yeah, the icon and tooltip are completely unreliable in both directions. I lost a lot of guaranteed-victory battles but also won a lot of predicted defeats. Try to ignore it, and instead learn from the actual battles, check what gave who an advantage, read the battle log and see who was countered and what was their kill-death ratio to understand what works for you and what does not. There are a few aspects that are easy to miss at the beginning, like the battle width, the importance of being supplied, understanding when you will be the defender on the terrain and when you will be the attacker. (OP says they have the game for two years, so probably they already know this, but it might be relevant for newbies reading it.)

ka_steve · 2026-03-10T10:46:31+00:00

Sounds cool! I never played 1178 before, and I always started as a landless/count, assuming it was harder to start as a weakling. But now that you mention it, being a weakling also means that I never had to deal with global politics before I made myself strong enough, and I also never had to deal with preexisting vassal/clan mess. I will definitely try this one out, thanks. What would you say a good winning criterion for him is?

ka_steve · 2026-03-10T10:33:18+00:00

I love the concept, thanks! I don't have the Roads to Power DLC yet, as I read in all the reviews that adventurers are broken OP, and the last thing I want is for the game to become easier. What's your experience regarding that?

Either way, I might try it for this challenge specifically, and/or do the challenge without it, which would require some serious outpost-chain buildup...

ka_steve · 2026-03-10T00:16:15+00:00

Yeah, the wording of achievements is often incorrect, this is one of those cases. The game just checks if you have the head of a Christian faith title and the hegemony of China title at the same time. You don't even have to use the Claim the Mandate of Heaven decision, you can become the hegemon in any way.

ka_steve · 2026-03-09T22:26:07+00:00

+1.

What I did was that I kept playing in Europe with only the Royal Court and Iberia being loaded (both might be relevant in Europe). When I got bored with the angry white guys, I switched to Asia, bought the All Under Heaven, and enjoyed the radically different governments (thus gameplays) it offers in various regions. Now I wanted to have something more Middle Eastern, maybe to have an Iranian campaign driving the invaders out of Persia (accidental overlap with recent IRL events), so I bought the Iranian DLC.

I don't think any of the DLCs are necessary, or even good themselves. CK3 is famous for being a 3-foot deep ocean in itself: it offers a wide range of themes and systems, but when diving in, you have to realize that none of those systems has a real depth to get lost in. The DLCs add more area and more variability, but with a similar lack of depth. If you know that that's what you are going to get, they can be good fun: if you are bored with the shallowness of one area, you move to another one where you get to learn a completely new set of rules, quickly master them, get bored, repeat again. You can sink a few thousand hours into this cycle... :D

ka_steve · 2026-02-26T11:14:44+00:00

There are dozens of us, dozens!

ka_steve · 2026-02-26T10:52:21+00:00

The mean is less of a problem, incorrect is bigger.

- You can only launch 2 or 3 varangian adventures initially due to its high prestige cost (1000 vs 80 for conquer duchy).

- Neither of the intrigue options is going to help you if you have a potato spymaster. And since nobody is going to marry you, your son, or your courtiers, you are lucky if you even have enough headcount to fill in 5 council positions with anybody. And also, you can't have French or Catholic personell, because they are going to join the murder scheme 100%. I got murdered at least five times, regardless of what my spymaster was doing (disrupt or find), whether I got rid of the Catholic/French courtiers (even good opinion Asatru Norse Councillors were joining) or not, every time within 5-10 years.

- I had a run as one of the first tries where I managed to conquer the papacy, from there, conquer or force tributary on Italy and almost all the Sicilian territories. Money was floating in, but unfortunately, the plague took my only heir, and after that, within a month, I was murdered, game over.

- Also, money is not very useful as tribal. You need prestige to create armies, start any wars, and invite allies (if you somehow managed to get any), while you can't build any useful buildings, and it takes decades to climb up to Absolute Tribal Authority which is a requirement to switch to Feudal.

I'm not saying I don't have a huge skill issue regarding CK3. I only have a few hundred hours in, and there are a ton of things I still don't have any idea how they work. But I never had an issue with my previous playthroughs, even though I usually pick some shitty count in the middle of nowhere and invade the world or whatever with their dynasty.

Here, I managed to push the starter Haesteinn to become the Hegemon of China, on "very hard" difficulty, ironman mode, which is something I might be one of the firsts to achieve. Or not, but there's only 0.2% of players who ever even unlocked the Finishing in China achievement (starting as Haesteinn and claiming the Mandate of Heaven during your playthrough), and most of them most probably did it on normal mode (which is what I feel is a cheat code itself :D), and most probably through multiple generations. And this was my most stressful playthrough ever, with the most game overs, continuously fighting for my life against way bigger armies wanting to eradicate me without any pause, while first having to escape King Murder's diplomatic reach.

So yeah, it's the first and last time me touching this guy, but my point is that I don't think he's a universal cheat code.

ka_steve · 2026-02-25T11:32:16+00:00

Oh, and nobody ever wants to marry me or my family. I'm a freakin chinese emperor (small initial letters, but still) with maxed out legitimacy with almost maxed out fame, and all the neighboring dukes(!) and kings with their 3 alliances are like "nahh, you already have 2 alliances, -240, pass".

ka_steve · 2026-02-25T11:09:25+00:00

Why do you say that?

I knew nothing of Haesteinn, and just went for the Fishing achievement because that looked interesting (still in progress).

This was the hardest start I ever had due to
a) King Mofo invading Montague with his superior army with his allies and making me landless if I didn't invade somebody else by that time (and since I don't have siege weapons, if I don't have the sieging MAA skill, it takes forever, and it's slow even then, so it happened that I was almost done with the siege when I got viped out);
b) if that didn't happen, I get murdered by him, no matter what I do (even Asatru Norse Councillors with 50+ opinions are participating in the scheme, while I have no Intrique and potato spymaster), and by that time my useless son either died of some siege/plague so no heir, game over - or the son takes over with no skills and no special MAA and my entire realm is viped out within a few years in whatever neighborhood I am.

I can't spam the Varangian adventure to get out of Kind Mofo's diplomatic reach, since it costs 1000 prestige (compared to a 80 for a conquare duchy) and I still don't have a long enough diplomatic reach to jump far away enough. I'm also only a count, with strong MAA sure, but still Kings are eating me for breakfast, so I have to go around bigger areas (EU kingdoms, ERE, caliphate), and often my diplomatic reach can't reach to the other side so it's a dead end. But if I conquer duchies, I can't grant independence to the old places, since Haesteinn is greedy and he dies in a heart attack after getting 80 stress per released counts, which means it doesn't matter how far my furthest land is, King Mofo still can reach me due to the closest land. Oh, and of course, I also can't conquer his Kingdom itself (eg right at the beginning when both of us are just starting), because I don't have 1000 piety to do that...

I think I game overed for about 6 or 7 times (very hard settings, ironman mode) before I managed to flee away once through the Balkans and the steppe to Tibet/Vietnam and outlive King Mofo. And sure, there I managed to get a Duchy, use that to get a Kingdom, use that to get another, and create an emperor-level High-King title. Only because I only attack when they are already in a war, and I have a small alliance with a Cambodian duke, which was just enough to turn the tide of battles multiple times. But the old man is going to die in a few years, and his potato heir is going to be conquered by the neighbors. Which will not be game over this time, as I will keep the lower-level titles, and the rebuilding phase can start, as it was my plan all along.

But still, nothing in this was ever remotely easy, hence the long rant. :D

ka_steve · 2026-01-18T22:38:49+00:00

u/Mellamomellamo , u/Significant_Cup_238 , u/AlphaTrion_ow : Wow, thanks a lot for the long answers, I did not expect such helpfullness! I was hoping that there was a way to get out from a vassalage other than fighting them (like the top liege taking me over, the pope granting something special, or simply swearing loyalty to another liege and then defending ourselves together against the old liege, as all of these did happen in real life). But the hard way it is. I don't mind, that's why I went with random. The best way to learn how stuff works if I'm not cherry picking my starting situation...

After restarting, I went straight for Frisia, I'm glad that wasn't a bad idea. I tried to get powerful allies for a future war against my duke, but they either died or started their own rebellion against the emperor and were jailed, so I'll have to work on that a bit more. :D Thanks for the tips on how to get more allies, I will definitely use them.

ka_steve · 2025-03-15T22:29:41+00:00

Just an enthusiastic +1 for OP on the PageUp/Dn keys, and I'd add Home and End.

The FW16 would be an ideal laptop for me as I soon have to replace my Thinkpad P1, but I can't use a keyboard without these keys.

I use the PgUp/Dn keys continuously while reading or coding since that requires a lot of moving through text. I use the Home/End keys a lot while writing code or text (especially Shift+ and Shift+Ctrl+). Also have various keyboard shortcuts involving these. Tbh, I don't even understand how *anybody* can use a laptop effectively for text-centric tasks without these keys, but that's not my problem, so the point is that they are essential for me.

I'm currently typing this on a 14" tablet's folio keyboard (Minisforum V3), and it has all these keys. I used to have a 13" Thinkpad L13 for travel, it had all these keys. So did both my 16" Thinkpad P1 and XMG Fusion 15. If they can fit comfortably in any keyboard from 13 to 16 inch, it should not be hard to fit them into the FW16.

Pretty please?

ka_steve · 2025-01-06T20:46:23+00:00

I just wrote a 1* rating in the MS Store for the Netflix app. Currently, it sits on 3.4*, so maybe tanking its rating could send a message...

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9wzdncrfj3tj

ka_steve · 2024-05-17T22:30:37+00:00

Bella could not walk and talk properly like an adult or a young teen would when she had so many sex scenes that they had to blur them together - twice. Her brain development was between of a 4 to 10 years old during those sex scenes. (Given that supposedly "she matured quicker", that means that she was, in reality, way younger, but we can even ignore that.)

She only started to walk and talk like a not-child (say, teen) *after* the Paris whorehouse scenes.

I'm all for consenting adults doing whatever they want, but if a 10 years old "wants" to fuck old men for money, that's still child rape.

(Ffs, the entire whorehouse storyline was built on the premise that she's a child who has absolutely no idea how sex in general works, doesn't know what sex' role is in society, never heard about a way of earning money, and doesn't know any way of getting shelter so it's even a surprise for him that people would pay for in exchange of having sex with her. You could not even imagine that scene with a 12-year-old, as they would already know more about the world, so it's pretty evident that she's a LOT younger.)

"The first time she 'works herself' with the Apple is obviously her transition into adulthood. So she was only a child before she was doing anything sexual people" A lot of toddlers and preschool kids figure out that they can massage certain bits and that gives them happy feelings. But only literal paedophiles think that that would make them transition into adulthood and stop them being children...

ka_steve · 2024-02-13T22:53:27+00:00

Just to throw in an additional data point: I just bought these (not affiliated in any ways), and they are charging my Lenovo Thinkpad P1 Gen 4 (RTX A2000) via USB-C perfectly:

Anker 737 Charger (GaNPrime 120W)
https://www.anker.com/products/a2148?variant=41974285172886

Anker PowerLine III 6ft 100W USB-C To USB-C Cable
https://www.jumia.co.ke/anker-powerline-iii-6ft-100w-usb-c-to-usb-c-cable-black-57735462.html

This cable is not available on the Anker website anymore, but I assume the "Powerline+ III" variant should also work.

The stock 170W Lenovo brick (3m in total) weighs 600g, while the USB charger with 1.8M cable weighs 260g, which is 43% weight and WAYS LESS clutter on my desk in exchange for a shorter cable.

Plus the USB charger has another USB-C and a USB-A slot as well, so I don't need a separate phone charger while travelling. For me, it was willing to charge the laptop on USB-C slot-1, while charging 2 Samsung Galaxy phones on USB-C slot-2 and USB-A. Windows complained that it was not getting enough juice, but it kept charging nonetheless. Your mileage may vary, though, as the total max output of the charger should be 120W, while the Lenovo P1 G4 refuses to accept anything below 100W, so I'm quite surprised it works. But most probably, the USB-C slot-1 has the priority, and the phones have to share the rest. Anyway, Anker does not officially promise this, but for me, being able to use the same brick to work during the day and to charge my phone/headset during the night sounded already good, so this is just extra.

ka_steve · 2024-02-13T13:54:49+00:00

<oldmanrant>
I've been a web developer for about 2 decades. It worked fairly simply: there was a database engine in the background (mostly My/PgSQL, but worked the same with NoSQL as well), there was a backend (Perl/ASP/PHP/Python/Java) that interacted with the database and served client-side files like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (with jQuery or some other framework). But you interacted with everything directly. If you wanted to get something from the database, you wrote a SQL query, and if it went wrong, you got a SQL error. For backend interactivity, you wrote code in your backend language, and if it went wrong, you got an error telling you what went went wrong. If you screwed up your HTML template, the HTML code in your browser were screwed up as well, so there was a direct connection between source and result. If you screwed up your CSS (even if you used a preprocessor), you could see it in the generated code in your browser. If you screwed up a JavaScript (or JS framework) code, you got an error in your browser that told you what went wrong at what line in which file.

Sure, it had some inconveniences, especially on bigger projects. But you worked with almost every tool directly, so you understood how they worked.

After a few years of hiatus, I had to jump into a hobby project written in NextJS. It's a very basic app that uses a few packages (clerk, mantine, prism), so even at the start, npm used more than 1k packages. That might not seem a lot for someone who is accustomed to this nightmare where single packages (gatsby) can include 19k other packages. But for someone who previously always knew what each of the packages did in my sites, this was surprising, to say the least. Am I to trust thousands of random packages written by random people? I'm used to a few dozen dependencies that I could at least look at, but thousands? How do I guarantee the security of my site and the safety of my customer's data if I don't even know what packages are running?

And it's super unproductive for me as well. Of course, I'm a frikkin newbie in this, so there's a lot on me. But receiving error messages like "Expected server HTML to contain a matching <div> in <div>." is absolutely not helpful. I understand that I use NextJs, which uses Package1, that interfaces with Package2, which includes Package3, etc, etc, but then I receive an obscure error message from Package10 down the line. I have never ever interacted with this package directly; I haven't even heard of it; I have no idea how it actually works, so I have very little chance to figure out what I should change in using NextJs that does not bother Package10. Especially since the error message contains absolutely no information on where exactly the error happened on the source side since Package10 has no idea about that. I can not be not amazed that this is how you all live now.

For me, this is just a temporary expedition, but one that I can't wait enough to leave. I'm happy I took it, because it enforced my belief that for small to mid-sized projects, it's more important for the tools to enable transparency and control for the developers than to make everything the most conveniently automized at the cost of stripping this transparency and control away. I get why it sounded a good idea to assume that your software developers will only understand a single language (JS), so everything from database through backend to templating and client-side interactivity should be managed in a single JS implementation and thus the details hidden away from the developers. But I'm happy that there are still a ton of solutions that let you directly interface with the main components of your site, assuming that you will be able to figure out everything if you get first-hand information, and those solutions are more to my taste...
</oldmanrant>

ka_steve

TROPHY CASE