How to have fun with a boring faction

[Rebellious Waffle]

It's finally done! BWAHAHAHAHA!

I donated Constantinople, Thessalonica, Corinth, Nicaea, and Nicosia to the Papal States, completely relocating the Byzantine Empire to Spain.

Valencia, Zaragoza, Cordoba and the fortress just south of Cordoba are all mine. Once the Moors have been completely wiped off the face of the planet, I'll take down the Spanish and Portuguese. From there, France and Sudan. Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. England and Scotland and Denmark and Poland and --


::Cackles maniacally::

[Rebellious Waffle]

(Sorry about double posting, I don't have edit privileges.)

For readers who have never tried mass migration to the other end of the map: a big worry that kept me from trying it earlier was that everyone around me would have built up their cities and I wouldn't have an infrastructure in place, leaving me vulnerable and underbuilt in a hostile land. This is not so much a problem as one would suppose; the whole idea is to take other people's infrastructures. You have way more soldiers free for campaign season; take settlements, merge, and move. You're conquering their territories, and they can't fight back by conquering yours -- they're too far away, if you still have any. Their soldiers are tied up defending settlements; yours aren't. When you take their settlements, you get the buildings they paid for at little or no cost to yourself. You have an overwhelming offensive advantage until precisely the time when they're so weak they can't fight back.

Advantages to migration:

1) It's just fun. History skips a beat, Fate does a double take, and your neighbors are very startled to make your acquaintance.
2) There's a reason to blitz your neighbors that doesn't have anything to do with powergaming. If you don't, you're dead. Get creative!
3) It can be very challenging. You're in a foreign land with next to no resources aside from your army, hedged about by people who don't share your religion and lagging a dozen turns behind everyone else. Survival requires that you make enemies and take risks. The resultant handicaps make the game much more challenging, and have far-reaching consequences.
4) You get to exploit (or be exploited by) the doctrine of asymmetrical warfare. Neighboring factions have similar styles of fighting. Changing regions will require that you adapt old styles to new circumstances, faster and better than your opponent as they do the same. You may have worked out how to get the most mileage out of Vardariotai fighting the Turks, but how are you going to handle those English longbows?

[Syrous_PL]

Well, historically the middle east had been occupied by Christians, so why not... I'm playing Poland and I sent 3 crusades to the Holy Land and now I own most of the Egypt and Jerusalem, plus the whole eastern Europe. Mongols are a bit of a pain, but they are not so good at sieging castles when they don't have their siege equipment, so I was able to withstand their push, except for Antioch which I lost after repeated sieges. I'm trying to make the middle east my cash cow, but it takes some time to convert everyone so that they don't rebel and I can squeeze some taxes from the region...

[NightStar]

Or you could try out one of the mods that helps bringing fun into the same old. That works for me at least