That's one of the truly brilliant aspects of this game - all of the systems are constantly working at odds with each other. In your case, gaining political alliances and the favor of nobles through marriages is good, but they may get more ambitious and try to usurp your claims.

The tutorial is pretty good at showing you what the interface is and all the things you can do with it, but it's up to you to take it from there and see how far the rabbit hole goes. As long as your taking care of your top notifications you don't really need a deep understanding of the game to just go along and have fun with it. You don't have to worry about Game overs or just bad positions either. Do you really want to play one dynasty up until the fall of Constantinople? That's a lot of time, and the point really is to just have fun with all the insane trout that goes on.

But to learn more about the game I highly recommend either of the two wikis or, better yet, registering your game to gain access to the Paradox forums. You might not need to register just to view.

I haven't tried the multiplayer yet but if we can get an EoFF game night I think that'd be rad. We should play as the members of the Rurikovich family and see if we could one day pitch it as an original series on Starz/Encore.