Found something that happened interesting.

I will get to the interesting thing in a bit, first I'd like to share a story with everyone. It begins a while back when I got my new laptop, which I got a little over a year ago. I was shopping in a Wal-Mart close to where I live and I noticed a box set. This set included RTW, RTW:BI, MTW2, and MTW2:kingdoms, all in the set. I was happy to see this, so I purchased it and brought it home, and installed Rome first. I played that for about an hour, when I decided to give MTW2 a try. Now mind you last time I played Rome was on an old laptop, and that could barely run it, the new one ran Rome great, but I didn't have high hopes for MTW2. Lo and behold MTW2 loads and play great on the new laptop, so I play for a bit, trying just the regular campaign, as well as all of the expansion campaigns.

Well after playing MTW2 a lot, I decide to put it down and play other things. The thing though is I lost the box with all of the games in it, so I couldn't play RTW or MTW2 anymore. Not to let that get me down, I dug out my old MTW and started to play that. But I couldn't stop thinking about MTW2 and where I lot it, so I gave one more great search, and lo and behold I found it, under some magazines in my room.

Now for why I'm writing any of this, which now that I think about it, none of the previous things have anything to do with this. I started a game in the Teutonic campaign as the Danish. I'm happily doing as the council says, as well as going on an as aggressive conquest of all the rebel lands I can get. I forget which turn it was, but the HRE come by one of my provinces, I believe it was Hamburg, with a full stack, now mind you Hamburg was sparsely defended, as I sent most of those guys off already to take the city Ulezan, sorry I can't really remember how it was spelled. Well my council wanted me to open a dialogue with the HRE, so I thought okay, as long as I can get them from attacking me I will. So I go to bring my diplomat to them when I finally take not of my princess near Arkhaus, again sorry I don't remember how it's spelled. So I select her and see that I can talk to a diplomat from the HRE, so i send her and i get an alliance, trade agreement, and map info. I'm happy, and that large stack near Hamburg goes off. Well it seems it was going after a province I was going for as well, but I got it first as I had catapults, and didn't have to wait to siege. So I get the town. Meanwhile, I get curious and send my princess to the HRE stack, which has a family member leading it, I see she can try to marry him with a 40% success rate, so I give it a whirl. To my surprise it worked, and the thing I found interesting was that the HRE family member became mine, and his huge stack disappeared.

I found this interesting, because my experience with princesses and princes before, was that of MTW1, where you'd just have a stake in that factions lands if something happened. I really didn't expect to get a family member like this. Now I'm just wondering what happened to that stack? Did it go to one the HRE's territories, or did it simply disband? It's not much of a story, but I found it interesting.

That's how it works in M2TW. The general, once married to your princess, acts like an adopted son or man of the hour promoted genral. He isn't part of your main bloodline (not an issue outside of the Stainless Steel mod) but he is capable of having children, becoming King and so on.

The stack gets disbanded, which is a major blow to the HRE as their recruitment is very limited in the starting regions for this campaign. That's why they were going for Hamburg, the AI has gold if you play on a difficulty higher than Medium, but it doesn't have enough stone castles to spend it.

Taking the HRE's citadel will cripple them completely. What you need to watch out for is the Teutonic Order's expansion to the east. If you let them sit back for 20 turns you'll have to deal with very strong stacks later on.