Total bore: How a video game prompted my thesis - Byzantium in Medieval total war two.

Yeah, the whole "trading technologies for churches" thing was really annoying; thankfully there are mods that just remove it. The worst part is that it isn't even CA just connecting actual technological decline with contemporary Church matters, which might be almost understandable; in reality, literally none of the "legacy technologies" ecclesiastic research disables actually went out of use in the 5th century. "Roman Ethics", plumbing, natural philosophy, and concrete were all alive and well in Justinian's day -- hell, the Hagia Sophia itself is made of the stuff, or at least a modified form of it (the church employs bricks in its construction, but only as an ordered aggregate for even thicker courses of Roman cement, which constitutes the main load-bearing element). Actually, concrete never really fell out of use at all in Romania -- it can be seen in the brick-aggregate form in the 10th century Myrelaion and 11th century Mangana cisterns, in a traditional form in a fragment of the 8th century Hagia Sophia in Thessaloniki and the 12th century walls of Kotyaion, and in both in the 11th century Ucayak Church. Some interesting/relevant reading on the subject includes Materials analysis of the Masonry of the Hagia Sophia Basilica, Istanbul by R.A. Livingston, Technological Evolution of Historic Structural Mortars by Pachta, Stefanidou, et al., and Material Characterization of Byzantine Period Brick Masonry Walls Revealed in Istanbul (Turkey) by Ulukaya, Yüzer, et al.

Also, this paragraph from the "Imperial Church" technology, which apparently disables "moulded architecture", has enough material for an entire post:

"Before Christianity, it was believed that the gods were responsible for every worldly and otherworldly happening. Investigation into more natural solutions revealed preliminary understanding of atomics, which fed into understanding of the elements. As the Romans conquered their philosophy expanded to become self-aggrandising; Rome conquered, thus Rome was right. Great edifices to their glory, and to the gods, were erected from concrete in impressively short timeframes. Christianity, and the notion of the Emperor's semi-divinity, later bolstered the self-absorbed notion of Roman philosophy and its outlook on the world - the Emperor was charged with the task of uniting the world, in the name of God! This notion persisted among the barbarian kingdoms which followed the Empire, into the Middle Ages and beyond - the monarch was chosen by God himself to rule on His behalf."

Just a heads-up: it's Attila, not Atilla. The hungarian language is weird.

The stupidity of it of course being that Mamelukes could never be Arabs (they were from the Caucasus or Turks), and Bactrian two-humped camels are only native to central asia, they wouldn't survive in Egypt.

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The throwing curved swords is just too plainly stupid.

I was on the Stainless Steel team!

Nice!

Not OP, but in my experience absolutely, unilaterally terrible -- from the perspective of historical accuracy, that is. The "Byzantine system" in CK2 is like the bastard lovechild of 11th century French feudalism and Achaemenid satrapal administration, a mess of inheritable counties and baronies, cities as non-entities, private armies (and even wars!), personal politics, separatist tendencies, and local nobles as governors with a thin veneer of "Byzantium" draped halfheartedly over it. The more recent "imperial elective" mechanic is an interesting attempt to make the outcomes of the Roman succession more historical, but the methods employed to reach that outcome are -- to an extent by necessity, given the game's systems -- still almost entirely unhistorical.

In reality, medieval Romania was a centralized, bureaucratic nation-state which maintained a professional, centralized military, operated a professional, centralized legal system, administered its territory through regularly rotated provincial governors sent out from Constantinople (with their own provincial bureaucracies and sub-governors above semi-incorporated towns and cities, private estates, and village councils), and maintained a central monopoly on taxes, their collection (through a comprehensive system based on heads, homes, and land value, real and potential, operated by surveyors and functionaries sent out from the bureaus of the capital), and their distribution. It was capable of mustering multiple armies of tens of thousands of professionals (three expeditions of over 20,000 men were launched against Crete alone in the early-mid 10th century), conducting attritional wars on the scale of generations (Basil II's systematic destruction of the Bulgarian polity lasted over 30 years in total), resettling and assimilating entire peoples in the tens and hundreds of thousands, imposing unilateral trade blockades on major powers, and concentrating enormous sums of money and material where needed. In general, the medieval Roman polity was closer in form and function to the states of Early Modern or even Napoleonic Europe than the feudal entities CK2 was designed to portray, hence its failure in doing so.

Politically, the Roman state was legally an absolute monarchy, but in practice had a strong republican tradition of government by consensus for the common good (or else). The Republican ideology of the aristocracy/bureaucracy remained largely continuous in its form and the terminology through which it was expressed since the classical Republic -- the Greek terms koinon, pragmata, and politeia having been colonized by the meaning of the Latin Res Publica over the course of antiquity -- and the Roman people had a strong sense of their rights as citizens and the Emperors' responsibilities as their representatives. The people of Constantinople deposed Emperors and elected their own candidates on multiple occasions in CK2's time-frame -- namely replacing Michael V with Zoe and Theodora (the first popular election of female heads of state in history!), Andronikos Komnenos with Isaac Angelos, and Alexios IV Angelos with Alexios V Doukas -- as well as suppressing outside attempts to depose Emperors they supported, for instance in forcing the Lakapenoi into exile when they felt Constantine VIII was in danger of being forced out of politics; none of this is represented whatsoever in the game, of course. An interesting example of Republican thought higher up in society can be found in the 12th century high judge and historian Johannes Zonaras's criticism of the nepotistic and personal politics of Alexios Komnenos:

• "[a ruler] must also care for justice, provide for his subjects, and maintain the ancient principles of the body-politic. But Alexios' agenda was to alter the ancient forms of the Republic ... He approached political affairs not as if they were common or public, and he did not regard himself to be their steward but their master. He thought that the palace was his own private house and called it that ... He did not give to each his own based on merit but rather gave over public money to his relatives and servants by the cartload"

And when writing about the prediction of a 4th century astrologer that the new capital of Constantinople would last for 696 years (Alexios came to power in 1081):

• "But these have now long since passed, so that we must either regard his prediction as false and his art as flawed or we must suppose that he meant the years during which the forms of the Republic would be maintained along with the proper protocols, when the senate would be honored, its citizens would flourish, when there would be a lawful supervision, and the regime would be a basileia [in this context referring to a proper imperial monarchy] rather than a tyranny, when the rulers would consider that common things were their own and use them for their private pleasures."

Additionally, it should be noted that CK2 horribly misrepresents the Eastern Mediterranean in general on a fundamental, geographic level -- Italy and the rest of Western Europe are literally 2 or 3 times bigger than they should be, namely, and most geographic fixtures in the region are badly warped and slanted. Furthermore, and perhaps partially as a result of this, the eastern-southern Balkans and Anatolia are extremely underrepresented in terms of both counties and holding slots -- England has 37 counties to Anatolia's 33, for instance, despite the latter historically having a population 5+ times higher through most of the medieval period (and an area of 530,000 square kilometres to the former's 130,000).

In sum, CK2 terribly misrepresents the medieval Roman state on pretty much every conceivable level, completely butchering its government, politics, society, military, comparative resources, and even basic geography.

Sources/further reading:

• The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome, Anthony Kaldellis

• Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium, by the same

• Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade, by the same

• Constantine Porphyrogennetos: The Book of Ceremonies, trans. Moffatt & Tall (for accounting lists for the Cretan expeditions)

• The Economic History of Byzantium, Angeliki Laiou

• The Palgrave Atlas of Byzantine History, John Haldon

• The Empire of Manuel Komnenos, 1143-1180, Paul Magdalino

• A Byzantine Government in Exile: Government and Society under the Laskarids of Nicaea (1204-1261), Michael Angold