Start and Strat for Hellenic Roman Empire

[JK22]

Any suggestions on what character to start as if my goal is to have a homogenous Roman-Hellenic Roman Empire? Also when Hellenism is reformed I would prefer the Roman names for the gods so if you have any tips for that they much be appreciated as well.

[Warlordnipple]

Roman Hellenic Empire was the last run I did and it went pretty well.

Start: Byzantine Empire in 769.

(1) First Moves: I married one of my sons to the oldest lombard princess I could and attacked Bulgaria. I am basically always using Holy War CB unless otherwise noted.

During this phase I am just picking pagans in the west and if the Caliphate is in a ton of war (which he will be with all the tributaries) I snag some of the Eastern land.

I planned on switching to Roman so I tried to only go after de jure byzantine territory and the land I needed to form Rome, no point in giving out tons of dukedoms to greek ortho chars if I am gonna switch to hellenic Roman.

You will need to fabricate on Papal land, Venice, and possibly sicily, although your vassals will probably fabricate on sicily and you can press their claims.

(2) Lombard War: The Lombard almost always end up with a woman on the throne within the first 20 years of the game, which means you can now press the throne for your grandson or your daughter-in-law. If you press it for your daughter-in-law make sure that her husband is your heir or if it is your grandson you are pressing the throne for it will all become yours anyway because he is of your dynasty and getting a lower tier title than you have. The war is pretty easy, especially if you have been pushing the pagans back and taking land from the Muslims whenever they were a bit weak.

(3) Holy Land: Once you have Italy you will want to grab Tunis and start watching for the Caliph to be very decadent, which usually happens about 40 years into the game. The caliph has a large empire which usually means he has unhappy vassals that you can bribe into plotting to kill him. Plot to kill any good caliph (high mil, or has ruled for a long time, or has good traits) and hopefully you can get a child on the throne. Attack them for land in Syria and keep plotting to kill good characters so that decadence will reach 100 and the revolt will shatter his empire. Once the empire is shattered this is pretty easy, just take enough land to form Syria and Jersualem form them and hand them out as viceroyalty Kingdoms.

(4) Optional Strategy: I decided to mend the schism so that Catholicism was a heresy a bit before I converted to Hellenism. I did this so that the Holy Orders couldn't pop up. This makes taking back the rest of Rome much easier.

(5) Rome, Hellenism, and Bloodlines: Before forming Rome I would suggest obtaining the Heir to Alexander bloodline, the requirements can be found under Special Event Bloodlines on the wiki.

https://ck2.paradoxwikis.com/Bloodline

The bloodline costs a lot of prestige and gold but is incredibly powerful, especially if you give out land to family members. The main bonuses are +5 Hellenic opinion, +10 personal combat skill, +15% levy reinforcement rate, and can use invasion CB once per lifetime.

After you get a bloodline you can form Rome, which will give you an extra bloodline and allow you to convert to Roman culture. The bloodline will help you spread Roman culture and give you another +5 relations bonus to hellenic characters.

Now you want to secretly convert to Hellenism by adopting the scholarly Way of Life and clicking on a decision to'Study the Classics'. Once you are secretly hellenic I would suggest you join the secret society for them and prepare all of your demesne land for conversion and try to convert some characters. I would suggest that you stop expansion at this point until you convert so that when you create Holy Men they will be the Hellenic religion and Roman culture.

You don't have to convert that many people because you will be able to reform the religion immediately if you have Alexandria and all the other requirement to form Rome, which means you can demand conversions from people.

Hellenism is a very good but tricky religion to play as though because of its ability to sympathize with other religions, which means any character can join that religions secret society. I took cosmopolitan as my nature on my last run which was a mistake, I would suggest Proselytzing because of how much land you need to convert, or unyielding for a defensive buff against all the pagan raiders. Peaceful is a bad choice because it prevents raiding which Hellenic special doctrine allows them to do, Warmongering is bad because you already have that ability from your doctrine, Dogmatic is not very useful because you will probably already have very high MA from owning all your holy sites and having very few minors that are your religion losing Holy Wars. Temporarl religious head is another area that is a bit buggy right now and will always be inherited by your oldest son instead of your chosen heir, you can give the title to anyone which can avoid this issue as long as you don't die very unexpectedly. You may want to just pick Heirocratic and vassalize him so that you never have a chance of losing control of the religious head title.

You can look up the religious mechanics here.

https://ck2.paradoxwikis.com/Pagans#Reformation_in_Holy_Fury

Once you reform make sure to demand religious conversions from as many characters as possible and make sure to educate heirs of dukes and kings with Roman Hellenic characters. The gods will all be named after the Roman versions if you do things in this order. Make sure to form both societies (Hellenic has a Learning society and Martial) and the Holy Order and vassalize the Holy Order. Now you have a 9k Holy Order stack and 3k varangian stack that are very cheap and you can supplment thos ewith retinues to fight the remains wars.