I Was Going To Conquer The World, But I Got Bored

All right, I think I'm ready to call it on my Bohemia / Saxony / Prussia game! It was a lot of fun, but like pretty much every Paradox game I've played, if you do a good enough job the challenge eventually fades away, and I don't think I'll be able to force myself to play all the way through to the 1821 end date.

 

Still, I did get to hit some great accomplishments in this. I was able to build all three of the great Canals: Kiel, Panama and Suez. I didn't conquer the world, but I did defeat everyone who ever challenged me. I think the #2 ended up being Korea with around 700 development, everyone else was under 500. I survived multiple waves of Revolutionary uprisings and nations, defeating each one. I accomplished a good 40-50 or so Steam Achievements over the course of this run. 

 

 

I don't think I have as much action to report in this last post. I was sort of half-heartedly working towards a World Conquest for a chunk of it, so I would fight a war, take a huge amount of provinces, either grant them to vassals or core them, and then repeat.

 

 

I did inherit the throne of Hungary, who had been in a Personal Union with me for centuries I'd been curious if that could happen; I had inherited Poland a while ago, but not Hungary or Lithuania, and I had wondered if those were too big or if Poland had been specifically scripted to inherit. I was honestly mildly bummed at the inheritance; I don't accept a lot of the Balkan cultures Hungary has, and they were a big and beefy military aid in my wars. I did get to make use of some of their Monuments, though, so that was kind of cool.

 

 

I continued to use my HRE Vassal Swarm in all these wars, but they're definitely less useful as you get further out from Europe. They take a while to walk over to, like, Bangladesh or whatever, and then need to trudge back afterwards, and might still be in east Asia when I'm spinning up my next war in south Africa or whatever.  I kind of wish they would just stay home and fight the rebels that pop up in their homelands when they seize crownland. Maybe there's a Subject Interaction for that, I never thought to check.

A few of my vassals got VERY big: Perm stretched from Norway to Siberia, Astrakhan snaked from the Black Sea to central India, Leon went all the way down into Mali, and so on. They stayed loyal, but I did discover a wrinkle. I'd been planning to revoke the revocation of the Privilegia, and then re-revoke it to vassalize a few late entries into the Holy Roman Empire. But those large vassals like Perm had been granted so much development by me that they would not support passing the reform. Which for other reforms would be fine - I definitely had a majority - but for that particular one, HRE members who voted "no" would leave the HRE entirely, thus depriving me of their awesomeness. I think I would get claims on them, but I didn't want to fight a war against the large snakes I'd created. In retrospect it probably makes sense to either wait until you have everyone you want in the HRE before revoking, or else avoid feeding non-European lands to your vassals until after you're done revoking.

 

 

I'm still pleased with how things turned out, though. By the end of the game I had 95 (!!) Royal Marriages going, taking up zero Diplomatic Relations slots. The HRE itself had over 100 members, counting republics and johnny-come-lately monarchies.

 

 

My most precious subject was Ethiopia, though. As I mentioned in my previous post, I'd had a long-running scheme to join into a personal union with them, and carefully balanced keeping them alive while leaving the door open for forcing them into the union. It took some luck to pull off, and they were initially miffed, but almost instantly flipped to loving me, thanks to the vast tracts of eastern African land I gifted them with. They got basically all of Aljuraan immediately after our war, got most of the Mamluks' African land south of the Mediterranean coast over the course of multiple wars, and even extended into central Africa through Yao. Good times. I love me a Prester John.

 

 

For the most part I was declaring on the largest country, then the next largest, working my way down. The main exception was Korea, which was allied to Yue, Wu, Khmer, and a few other good-sized regional powers. The Center of the Revolution spawned in Korea, so I kept hoping it would flip Revolutionary, which would cancel all of its alliances and give me a CB that would let me take a lot of land after fully conquering them. That never happened, though. Somehow Korea itself was able to remain stable while many of the other powers around them fell to the revolutionary forces.

 

 

My economy was insane. I was permanently on the hard cap of 1M ducats: no matter how much I spent in a month, it would be back at the cap the following month. My OCD compelled me to continue the process of forming Trade Companies and upgrading Centers of Trade and building Stock Exchanges, even though there was really no point for me, just spite for those not already in my empire.

 

 

 

I did make it through to the Industrial Revolution, the last Institution, which once again spawned in my borders. All of the Institutions ended up appearing in Europe, and I think all but Renaissance and Colonialism were mine. The IR did take a little longer to spawn than I had thought. Checking the tooltip, it looked like I had all of the requirements, but I hadn't connected the dots that all of them had to be true for the same province. I had provinces with furnaces, and I was the trade/production leader for all industrial goods, and I controlled the largest trade node in the world, and I had provinces over 30 dev... but I eventually realized that I didn't have a single province that was (1) in the English Channel trade node and (2) had a furnace and (3) was over 30 dev. Once I realized that, I dev'd up a Furnace province, but it didn't fire. I frowned. Then, on January 2nd 1751, it did fire. Hooray! I guess they probably only check for conditions once per year or something.

 

 

Anyways, that's it for this game! It was really fun, but as always I'm shocked at how long these games can be, and I'm sure it will be some time before I dive back into it. From watching the community, I think most players don't usually try to do these powerful campaigns I'm naturally attracted to: instead they'll set a goal of getting a specific Achievement or something (many of which require playing as a specific nation and accomplishing a specific task), and quit once they achieve that achievement. So that might be nice, if it could end up being a few dozen hours instead of many hundreds of hours of gameplay.

 The rarest achievements I got on this game included:

• Spice Girls: Having a female ruler, have active trading bonuses for Cloves, Spices, Salt and Sugar. (I don't think Prussia can have female monarchs, but I did get this during a Consort Regency.)
• Voltaire's Nightmare: Have at least 100 countries in the HRE. (Probably the most fun thing I did here! I'm particularly proud of adding Iceland.)
• Czechs and Balances: Starting as Bohemia, grant at least two privileges to each estate while having at least 50% Crown Land. (As you've probably noticed, EU4 achievements tend to be punny.)
• God Tier: Become a Tier 5 Defender of the Faith as a nation that is neither Catholic nor Sunni. (Bullying nations to become Protestant was surprisingly entertaining!)
• Georgia on my Mind: Fully own all three Georgias. (I'm actually not sure what the third one is.)
• Master of India: Own and have cores on all of India as a European nation. (Pretty sure I should have gotten this during my Portugal run too, but achievements got borked on that one, alas.)
• Trade Hegemon: Starting as any European country, conquer and have cores on Aden, Hormoz and Malacca. (Same comment as above.)
• Over a Thousand!: Own 1001 provinces directly.
• The Revolution was Crushed: In a war against the target of the Revolution, control their capital and have at least 99% war score.
• Black Jack: Have at least 21 different subjects with 5 cities each and without any subject having 50% or more Liberty Desire.
• The Coin is Stronger than the Sword: Charter Company from an Indian nation.
• Wonderful: Own 8 different monuments on tier 3. 
• Industrial Powerhouse: Have 10 furnaces built in your nation.
• Traditional Player: More than 90 percent Naval and Army Tradition. 

Anyways, there are a lot more achievements; those are the ones that apparently fewer than 5% of players have, for what it's worth.

I forget if I mentioned this in a previous post, but while playing this game I went on a non-sale shopping spree and picked up all of the music packs for this game. I'm glad that I did - I've been playing this game a lot, and it was great to hear some fresh tunes. Even without a sale they're just a few bucks, and I like supporting Paradox.

I guess that will do it for this post! Now to find some new games to play!

Your Revolution Is A Silly Idea, Yeah

I'm approaching the end of Europa Universalis IV! In particular, I have entered the final of the four ages, the Age of Revolutions. It's pretty fun!

I think I left off in the late 1600s, shortly before Enlightenment. Once again I was able to spawn it in my borders. In this game I've avoided taking technologies early, which means I have a good surplus of Monarch Points, so I've been plowing those into development. For the previous century I'd built Universities everywhere and was progressively Dev'ing provinces up to 30 to make them eligible for Enlightenment.

 

For previous Institutions, I used Edicts to encourage their spread but waited as late as possible before Embracing them to minimize the cost. For this one, I went ahead and Embraced pretty early, once it had spread to 10% of my country.  I'm at the hard 1-million-Ducat money cap, so money is completely meaningless now, and I welcome any chance to spend it.

 

Let's start at 9 o'clock and continue clockwise:

 

I was able to finish eating Spain. As one of the only Catholic countries left besides the Papal States they didn't have any significant allies, and over successive wars I'd gradually taken away their coastal provinces. Again, the key to fully annexing a large country with subjects is to declare on an ally (in this case, the Papal States) and co-belligerant them, which will let you fully annex them without getting the huge acceptance malus from a nation annexing itself. By this final war my New World holdings included the former English and Portuguese colonial nations, which were each smaller than Spain's American colonies but combined could hold their own. The hardest part of this war was actually taking a level-8 fort in the Andes that Spain directly owned; I think they ran out of real estate before they got enough provinces to make a Peruvian colony. South America was Spain's strongest presence so this ended up being slightly tricky: I did some dancing with large armies of theirs while my English and Portuguese subjects came through the American isthmus, started siegeing once I had some breathing room, and ultimately ordered some artillery barrages to break through the walls. 

 

Once Spain fell, I was de-facto the sole independent power in Europe. Decades later Sweden ate the one province Denmark, the Papal States still exist as an OPM, and I eventually forced Muscovy into the HRE.

As I expand outside of Europe, I try to use those HRE vassals when possible to spread around Overextension and make better use of Accepted Culture slots. Perm was a relatively late addition to my family, but in terms of square mileage it's one of the biggest nations on the map now, snaking out to Vladivostock and holding big chunks of Mongolia and even China. Astrakhan and Circassia are similarly making inroads into Asia.

I'm mostly focusing on the other Great Powers, especially the highest-dev ones, which end up needing multiple wars to take down. The Mughals were geographically the largest empire for much of the game. Their territory is shredded now, and they have less than half of their largest extent, but even with all that they still are large.

 

I was curious about where and how the Center of the Revolution would break out, and what to do about it. From reading online, some people will intentionally try to spawn the Revolution inside their territory, so they can crush it and remove it immediately. Much like with Absolutism, though, that requires tanking a lot of things I would ordinarily want to do well: having low Stability, lots of loans, low prestige, etc. I think that in my Portugal game the Revolution spawned in France, which led to a fun and exciting war against my one-time ally. Here, though, I had so dominated Europe that almost no free nations remained, let alone any other Great Powers.

So I was a bit surprised, though I shouldn't have been, to see the Revolution spawn in Korea. Korea has been a very strong and boring nation for as long as I've been aware of it: they're basically at their historical borders, have some strong alliances to deter aggression, have highly developed provinces and can keep up in institutions. 

 

Even though the Center of the Revolution spawned in Korea, they have not yet become revolutionary. This has been a bit of a pain. The Revolution has spread to many of my provinces in Asia, including in China, Indochina and the East Indies. So it's the first time in the game that I've had to deal with serious and sustained rebels, as the +20 unrest from my high Absolutism outweighs the many benefits I get from things like Humanism. Fortunately I haven't been getting actual Revolutionary rebels, but still some separatists and other annoying types. I'm falling back on my Portugal-era strategy of spreading around Fortresses to minimize the hit when rebels spawn into an undefended area.

The first nation to flip revolutionary was Wu. I wasn't around for the Mingsplosion, but it looks like Wu and Yue emerged as the biggest heirs, along with Liang and a few smaller nations. I had previously pounded Wu shortly after they took the first Celestial Reform and tanked their Mandate. When a nation becomes a Revolutionary Republic, they dissolve any pre-existing alliances they had, so if you declare quickly you can get a nice clean war in. 

 

"Crush the Revolution" is a really nice casus belli. It reduces War Score Cost, but more importantly for me, it seems to also eliminate Unjustified Demands, meaning you can take all provinces for 0 DIP.

One slightly annoying quirk I encountered in this playthrough: if you are a monarchy and you border the Revolution Target, you get a "Counter-Revolution" malus that increases Unrest in all your provinces (and I think has a few other negative effects). If you declare war on the Revolution Target, this should be replaced with a "Reaction" modifier that instead gives a net reduction to your Unrest. However, "Reaction" is only applied if your capital is on the same continent as the revolution target's capital. So for me, as a European with substantial Asian holdings, I had only downsides and no upsides.

But anyways, I defeated Wu a second time, taking much more territory from them. I try to be strategic about timing my wars, more specifically the end of them. At this phase of the game, part of me wants to always be at war, spinning up my next conquest as the previous one is winding down, especially since I have armies all over the world and big enemies with Level 8 forts can take longer to crack than their provinces take to core. But if a war ends and I have a few days or more of peace, I can grant provinces to my vassals, which lets me take over 100 Overextension worth of territory in a peace deal without actually having to keep it on my books. I can also release new vassals, which I almost never do these days but situationally can be very helpful (more on that later). So anyways, at the start of a war I'm already thinking about how long the war will take, how much overextension I expect to have (with that war, any other current wars and any provinces being cored that may not finish), what other wars I want to start, and based on all that whether I should have a rolling ladder of wars or fight this one to the finish and take a breather.

The revolution target had been crushed, but the actual revolution still lived on, as Korea's Center of Revolution continued its propaganda, bringing more disorder and chaos to my Asian holdings. Only a year or so after the Wu monarchy was restored, Japan was the next nation to turn Revolutionary. I'd been concerned about taking on Japan, as they had unified the islands and did not have any footholds available for naval insertion. But, again, a nice advantage is that all their existing treaties were canceled. Also, at the start of the Revolution several large "rebel" armies are spawned, and in this game those armies were similar in size to the regular armed forces. Thanks to my naval presence in the area, I could see that Japan's armies were all fully in the south of the country fighting off the rebels, so I quickly declared war and landed a ~40k stack on Hokkaido. Naval landings can be nail-biting experiences since they last over a month and quickly turn ugly if your enemy can move defenders into position prior to you touching soil. But they landed and took the province, so I could swiftly follow with the remainder of my invasion force.

This ended up being... I don't want to say necessarily an "easier" war than Wu, but maybe "cleaner": thanks to the constrained geography of Japan, I could steadily march south, siege forts one by one, and decisively crush their army outside Nagasaki, instead of chasing remnants all over the Asian Steppes and Siberia. Because of the -50 malus revolutionary targets get to accept a peace deal, you kind of need to fully occupy all their territory to push from 99 warscore up to the decisive 100; but once you do reach 100, you can take advantage of the reduced cost of warscore and diplo and take enormous swaths of land. In a single war I was able to take more than half of Japan, including all of its centers of trade, Great Projects, and straits, all in a contiguous line across the islands. I'll need to return and finish the job at some point in the future, but Japan's status as a Great Power has come to a permanent end.

After the first Wu war, they got separately declared on by both Yue and Manchu to claim the Mandate of Heaven. Yue was quite a big larger and more powerful than Manchu, but I think Manchu got a head start, and in any case Manchu was able to finish its war and seize the Mandate before Yue. But, Manchu doesn't have Beijing, Canton or Nanking. Oddly enough their Mandate has ticked up a bit over time even though their monthly rate is shown as negative; I've never played in China so I'm not super-familiar with the mechanics, I assume they're getting some Events that grant Mandate or maybe there's a Government transaction or something available to them. Part of me wants them to get the Mandate high enough so they'll take a Reform and then I can quickly declare on them while their forces are weak; but as it is I'm happy just waiting while it stagnates and eventually decays.

I did get to fight against Yue, though, when they became the third and (so far) last nation to turn Revolutionary. This was a bit more like the Wu war, except I had a much bigger footprint in China and so had a lot more room to position and maneuver my troops. Perm and Astrakhan were actually decently helpful in blocking out the north of the country while I focused on fighting and sieging in the south. As with Japan I was able to take a ton of land, but this time I could also give a lot of it away to Perm.

Somewhere along the way, I had forgotten one rule for optimal play. I had gotten used to giving my Holy Roman Empire vassals the Centers of Trade in Europe - since I use "Divert Trade" on all of them I end up with all the Trade Power anyways, and this way those centers can have an accepted culture and maybe some additional development. But I kept automatically doing that in land grants in Africa and Asia as well. I really should have kept those for myself, so I could turn them into Trade Companies, and just given the rest of the provinces to my vassal. Not a huge deal, just something I should remember for the future.

 

 

The East Indies has been a surprisingly slow point of expansion for this game. Brunei had an absolutely massive navy, and I was shocked when their swarms of galleys torpedoed my large fleets of heavy ships. I was able to declare later when Brunei and the Mamluks went to war against each other; in this game it looks like the Mamluks became colonizers, settling around Ternate, Tidore and other islands. By keeping a careful eye on the larger Brunei fleets and opportunistically attacking, I was able to take down some smaller groups of ships and land troops on some islands. I didn't bother to get this war close to 100%, but took forts on enough islands to be able to cherry-pick strategic positions and Centers of Trade. Later on Banjar and some other regional powers piled up on Brunei and I think they've been completely removed now.

 I've now fought a few wars in India, mostly against Vijayanagar but also Bengal. As usual the first one is challenging, subsequent ones are far easier. Most of the Monuments in India are tied to specific religions and so aren't very useful for me, but it is a very rich subcontinent. I don't really care much about production income since I've maxed out my treasury, but it is satisfying to tie up those trade nodes and get free merchants so I can siphon still more ducats away from potential rivals. Oh, and I've completely controlled the coast for a while now... actually, I'm away from my computer but I think I have everything from the Persian Gulf through Malaysia directly under my control.

Africa has been pretty quiet lately. I did finally succeed in a war against Mali, who were briefly a Great Power but have now been reduced to about six dispersed provinces. I grabbed a few provinces from Air and Yao as non-co-belligerants. I need to fight another war against Zimbabwe at some point as they still have some Centers of Trade. One of the more interesting wars was against Kilwa, which is the one place on Earth still under Terra Incognita. Interestingly, you can take provinces in a peace deal even if you can't see them on the map, so I prioritized taking those invisible provinces (which of course are instantly revealed once you own them). I can take the visible ones later.

The most interesting thing in Africa, though, has been Ethiopia. I think I mentioned this in a previous post, but a long-term ambition of mine has been to form a Personal Union with Ethiopia, a Christian nation that I can feed land to in Africa. I've had a Royal Marriage with them for ages; I never entered into an Alliance with them since I knew that would complicate an eventual succession war, but I did Guarantee their Independence as the Mamluks were nibbling away at their territory. Most importantly, I kept one Diplomat constantly Currying Favors with them. It took a long time for this to tick up since I didn't have an Alliance, but it did progress; once it reached 100, I would trade some in for Trust and continue growing.

 

Their leader was really, really old, but just wouldn't die. But his heir was aging, too. I think that at one point the ruler was in his 80s and the heir in his 50s. Finally I got the notification that they did not have an heir - perhaps a hunting accident? I immediately Traded Favors for Heir and got a Chotek in the line of succession. I nervously monitored the dynasty. Younger heirs are less likely to die, but still can die. And heirs that accede to the throne often come with their own consort and heir: not a huge problem as it makes the line secure, but I was running low on time to get the heirless gap I needed to make a play for the throne.

Still more time passed, and finally the old man croaked and my Chotek acceded to the throne. Without an heir - hooray! I claimed the throne - I now had my Casus Belli, but had to wait a month to make a move. After that month, I tried to declare the war - but of course I couldn't declare on a nation whose independence I had guaranteed. Fine, cancel the guarantee. Wait another month. Ethiopia's rival Aljuraan declared a conquest war against them. The new king was probably working overtime to try and sire an heir of his own. The month was up. Declaring the war would mean breaking a truce, for a painful -3 Stability... but I didn't care. The dream was coming true.

I'd positioned my Afrika Korps outside the southern border of Ethiopia. They had a lot of Level 8 forts, which of course are a pain. I was also in a bit of a race against Aljuraan: I would need a lot more war score to enforce the personal union than they would need to take some territory, and only one of us could siege each fort or province. I plopped a big stack down on the nearest fort, then sent another big one on a long detour through Mamluk land towards the Level 9 capital fort. Aljuraan was making good progress, but fortunately seemed content to take regular provinces while they chased Ethiopia's army, for the time being leaving forts in my control. Unlike them, I preferred not to fight any Ethiopian armies if I could avoid it, as they would shortly become my own allied armies.

It all went pretty well. Shortly before the end of the war the Europeans from the Holy Roman Empire showed up and managed to contribute some valuable artillery to a few sieges. I took the Personal Union the moment I could, and was pleased to see that I was correct and that I could now join in the Ethiopia/Aljuraan war as the new war leader. (I think something similar had happened previously when I Revoked the Privilegia and abruptly became the defender against Muscovy's invasion of Rostov.) Ethiopia, Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire all now had huge armies right outside Aljuraan, and we steamrolled them. I think it was like a month-long war in total. I had been thinking of just taking a chunk of them, but we were able to fully annex them. And then I could turn around and give a lot of that territory back to Ethiopia - see, aren't you glad to be in union with me?

 

 

By far the biggest development recently has been the war between Prussia and the Mamluks. They had been my most valuable and powerful ally for much of the game, and they are still the #2 great power even after losing two decisive wars against me. I don't have any good justification for turning on them, it's just a pure power struggle. I think I cleared my alliance by declaring on another ally of theirs, or possibly another Sunni nation. (In the past I had navigated those situations by first calling the Mamluks in as an ally in another war, in which case they are not eligible to receive a call to arms against me.) Once the alliance was over and the truce cleared, we began duking it out.

They have a lot of development, so even after getting a really high warscore and taking their capital I can just take a fraction of their empire each time. I'm trying to remember the timing... let's see. I think that, prior to the first or second war, I released the Ottomans as a one-province minor vassal in Byzantium. Since the province was in the HRE they popped out as an HRE Prince. The province was Protestant, but the overall Ottoman cores were Sunni, so it came out as Protestant; in the past nations I've released as Catholic or Orthodox will convert on their own to Protestant if all of their provinces are already Protestant, but I think that only works for other denominations in the same religion. I was hoping that I could use the "Force Religion" Emperor Action in Diplomacy to convert them.... and it worked! I am very amused to have my Protestant Holy Roman Ottomans as my vassal princes.

 

The Ottomans haven't been a contender for centuries since I drove them out of the Balkans and Greece and the Mamluks ate them from the rear, but they did still have cores on all of Anatolia, so I was able to very cheaply get back that huge chunk of real estate from the Mamluks.

In the more recent war, which I just finished, I finally did what I should have originally done and taken all of their islands: they had the Spice Islands and various other East Indies spots. I also grabbed Crete after sieging down a level 2 Fort. Thanks to Ethiopia being on my side, we could take their claims and cores as well. And I had a lot of other odds and ends that I granted to my Black Sea princes. I did snag a lot of provinces with tempting Great Projects. Unlike India, most (not all) of the Great Projects in the Middle-east don't have religion requirements, either being free to everyone or requiring an accepted culture. It will be a while until I can core and convert all of them, but when I do, I'm looking forward to blazing through those projects. I'm probably most excited for the bonus Missionary from Jerusalem. Oh! And I also took the provinces required to start construction on the Suez Canal, which is the third and final canal I have remaining to build.

At this point, I'm feeling like I'll probably make it to 1821 after all, as there's less than a century to go. I'm less certain how hard I'll work towards getting a World Conquest. Right now I'm just taking on a rotating slate of Great Powers and working my way down the list, but there are a lot of minor nations out there. I'm sure that I militarily could take them, but dealing with super-high overextension and rebels does not sound very fun, and I don't know if I have enough time to properly digest and integrate the whole world. I also could try doing more stuff with non-HRE vassals; I've been avoiding them since my understanding is that they will take the strength of HRE vassals into account when calculating liberty desire, but I did end up with a western African vassal and their Liberty Desire is pretty manageable, so now I'm wondering if that could be viable after all.

 

Anyways! I'm continuing to love the game, and will most likely have one final post in the future before I put this campaign to bed for good!

Before Enlightenment

I'm continuing to love my current Europa Universalis IV game, continuing as Prussia into the late 1600s. It's had a very different rhythm from my Portugal game, with much more warfare and a stronger European focus. As I head into the endgame they are growing more similar, as I'm now leading (conquered) subjects in the New World and fighting various wars in Africa and India to control trade. It remains to be seen if I'll see this game all the way through, but so far I'm having a blast.

As I expand, the "clockface" organization from my previous posts doesn't make as much sense, but I'll try doing something similar. Let's start off with Persia and India. For a while my influence extended to the shores of the Black Sea, as the edge of Europe and as far as the HRE can expand. My last post ended around the time of my first war against the Mughals, who are mutual foes with my allies the Mamluks. The Mughals at one time had the (geographical) largest empire in the world, stretching across a vast territory; but it seems like they were badly overextended, and there would be times I would check on their status and see that they're defending against five separate wars.

Part of my motivation was to soft-block the Mamluks from extending into Persia and India, and that's kind of worked. We thrashed the Mughals and I had a ton of war-score to spend, but they also had an enormous empire, and I ended up taking a very snaky chain of provinces rather than clean borders, prioritizing Centers of Trade and Great Projects, and secondarily coastal provinces and strategic chokepoints. After this kind of evisceration it's nearly impossible for an AI power to recover, and I'm sure that's contributed to their ongoing woes.

Dealing with the conquered lands was slightly more tricky than usual due to the sheer distances involved. If a revolt broke out, it could take a year to march troops over from Prague to deal with it. I think this is the first part in this campaign where I've started to maintain permanent standing armies in distant territories. I know they'll eventually be used in future wars, and in the meantime they can drill and put down revolts.

In general I've been having an easier time with unrest in this game than in the Portugal game, thanks to taking Humanist ideas, so it's pretty rare for me to worry about revolts, but when they do happen (so far only once or twice since Absolutism) they can erupt all over and be a pain. I think I ran into trouble when I had high Overextension plus lots of Separatism (both from big conquering sprees) along with unusually low Legitimacy, which in turn decreased Tolerance. Now that my Legitimacy is high again I haven't run into problems, even when actively converting recently-conquered provinces.

Apologies for the tangent / stream-of-consciousness, but while I'm talking about Legitimacy: One thing that initially annoyed me after Revoking the Privilegia was the endless stream of Royal Marriage proposals I received from my new vassals. At the start of each new play session I would dismiss or decline literally dozens of them. After a while, though, I started to wonder: why not? Why shouldn't I be loved?

When you accept (or initiate, more on that later) a RM proposal, there's an immediate hit to your Legitimacy, either -2 or -5 depending on the partner's own Legitimacy and Prestige. But then there's an ongoing monthly benefit for as long as the ruler lives: a big but not usually important boost to New Heir Change, a mildly important boost to Improve Relations, and a tiny but very helpful boost to Legitimacy. So after some time the marriage will "pay for itself" in Legitimacy, either about 2 or 4 years, and after that you'll get surplus Legitimacy.

Legitimacy is kind of interesting, in that there's a hard cap at 100 and any surplus value is wasted. It usually isn't terribly hard to get it to 100 and keep it at 100, so I'd been loathe to marry down from it. But if you get a lot of Royal Marriages (which usually isn't an option, except for the Emperor of a Revoked HRE, who doesn't use Diplomatic Relationship slots for vassal relations), then you can get pretty significant ticking monthly Legitimacy, so when it does drop (due to an event or a bad Heir or something), it will bounce back pretty quickly. Keeping Legitimacy high helps a lot with Unrest, and also gives Max Absolutism and a few other things.

The higher Improve Relations is nice. It isn't communicated very clearly in-game, but Aggressive Expansion's decay is largely driven by your passive Improve Relations modifier, so keeping that high will cause AE to melt away before coalitions can form.

Finally, while you don't often need the New Heir Chance, it did embolden me to disinherit a thoroughly average heir. The very next day I got a new heir, a better heir! Let's hear it for my harem of concubines!

So being in this situation of tons of Royal Marriages (I currently have over 80) is nice, but getting there was rough. Legitimacy has a hard cap of 100 and also a hard floor of 0, so once you get down there, there's no penalty to entering into additional marriages. So I went through a long stretch of accepting literally every proposal from my vassals. In less than a year I was all married up and started ticking up in my Legitimacy. I had planned this around the time that my Empress-Regent was about to step down and the new Emperor Heir would take the throne; but as I learned to my chagrin, you can't Abdicate while you have low Legitimacy, which I would think would be the whole point! I think I ended up burning some Military Mana on Strengthen Government just so I could get back over 50 Legitimacy and switch over. Abdicating gives a -20 Legitimacy hit, so my heir took the throne at 80 instead of 100; but again, thanks to all the active Marriages, I was able to get back up 100 before too long.

 

 

Oh, and finally a note on timing: you can either send or receive marriage proposals. The marriage lasts for as long as the person who sends the proposal. So, from the player's perspective, and marriages you initiated will end when your monarch dies, and marriages you accepted will end when the other monarch dies. So, if you want to keep your marriages high, you definitely want to receive and not initiate. This lets you maintain Legitimacy at nearly 100 indefinitely: periodically other rulers will die, then you'll receive an invitation, your Legitimacy will drop to 98 or 95 but will be back up at 100 before long. Going in the other direction,  you'd need to re-marry all 80+ rulers when your ruler dies, which means wading back through the Low Legitimacy morass again.

Final (phew!) observation: at least in my game, I don't seem to ever receive royal marriage proposals from my vassals while we're at war. I do receive marriage proposals from other nations, both in the HRE and outside it, whether at war or not. So lately, after wrapping up a war, I'll usually go for at least a month or so of peace to catch up on any pending proposals before kicking off my next war.

I can't believe I wrote all that in the middle of writing about war against the Mughals!

After the Mughals, I hit Gujarat next. I was now moving into Sunni territory, which is tricky: the Mamluks are my very good friends, and they're also allied to many large Sunni nations, and they're often the Defender of the Sunni Faith, so I definitely don't want to break that alliance (at least, not yet!). But fortunately this is usually pretty easy to work around: I can just declare any other war I want, invite the Mamluks in as war allies with my stock of 100 Favors, and then declare on the original target. A red "X" will appear in the war interface showing that the Mamluks won't honor the call to arms since they're already fighting on my side in another war. Humorously, sometimes I can even call them into that war on my side - I haven't thoroughly tested this, I think it works if they received the Call to Arms from their Defender of the Faith role, but not if they are allied to the war target.

Gujarat was an easier war than the Mughals; they were also large and powerful, but not nearly as vast and sprawling, so we could do a few more focused wars without chasing them all over the globe. I think that it's a bad sign when my HRE minions have time to get all the war to a war in Asia and meaningfully contribute.

As with the Mughals, I prioritized trade provinces and Great Projects, but also strategic positioning of borders: in particular, I wanted to get good borders on my next target, Vijayanagar, so I could Fabricate Claims on them. Having taken Espionage and Aristocratic Idea Groups, I can take claims on multiple large areas of provinces in a very short amount of time. I've been leaning heavily on the Conquest Casus Belli for most of my recent wars: I think the new Imperialism CB may technically be better since the War Score Cost is low, but what's great about Conquest is that you pay 0 Diplomatic mana for any province you have a claim on. This is especially great against wealthy European powers like Spain, but is handy everywhere.

Once my rebellions were under control, I declared on Vijayanagar. They had managed to consolidate pretty much the entire Indian subcontinent, which was pretty impressive; in my previous Portugal game there was much more of a partition. I was pretty shocked at how much territory I could take from them in a single war: I ended up taking the entire Indian coast, as well as most inland provinces with Centers of Trade and some other "pathways" through the north under the Himalayas. I now could walk from Lisbon to Bengal.

In my last post I'd mentioned making use of the Charter Trade Company diplomatic option to buy provinces for expansion. That was really helpful for these Gujarat and Vijayanagar wars, as I could fabricate claims around those provinces to help me maximize my future wars. So far I haven't operated in East Asia; I do periodically Fabricate there as well so I have claims ready to go, but I'm not ready for military action there yet.

My next big target will be Bengal, but right now that's looking like a really tricky war. They're allied with Wu, who are the current Emperors of China and have been doing surprisingly well. They're also allied with Malacca, which is allied with the Mamluks; Malacca is the most powerful regional player in the East Indies, we've butted heads a few times there around my Trade Company provinces. Overall this game is lagging far behind Portugal in my East Indies approach, by this point I had totally dominated that area and monopolized production of Cloves, but currently I just have a couple of tenuous footholds and am blocked from easy expansions by powerful webs of alliances. Which isn't a huge deal just yet, just something I may eventually deal with.

Phew! Moving along the clock dial:

I've been getting more active in Africa. The most important action took place nearly a century ago when I took control of the Ivory Coast from France and Denmark, letting me drive most of the world's trade to the English Channel and away from Spain, Portugal and France. Since then I've made a few attempts at breaking into Mali (who are allied with Denmark) but have not yet succeeded. Mali has a huge army, is up to date on tech, have high-level forts, and most of their territory is Terra Incognita so movement in there would be incredibly slow. They also have strong local alliances, so making them a co-belligerant will pull in Air, Yao and others. I usually C-B them intending to take territory, but end up fighting defensively on the Ivory Coast, eventually defeating their armies but unable to take land from them. Maybe next time!

Spain colonized most of South Africa, and I was able to take that from them - more on that later. This is one of the more satisfying parts of the game, as whoever owns the Cape of Good Hope province automatically dominates that Trade Node and will get a free Merchant, which they can use elsewhere since trade from here only flows to the Ivory Coast.

Between Mali and the Cape, I fought a war against Kongo. I already dominated the Ivory Coast but they did have a few Centers of Trade that I wanted for completeness sake, plus they have a nice Monument in Mambuka. This was a relatively straightforward war, with the mildly interesting wrinkle that Kongo was the one Catholic nation in Africa. I focused on taking their provinces, but in the future I may try and turn them Protestant.

The war I just won before starting this post was primarily against Zimbabwe, but pulled in Mombasa and Mahafaly as co-belligerents and Aljuraan as a non-co-belligerent. This war was all about trade. I already have a pretty good route to move trade from India through Astrakhan to Crimea to Kiev and on into my totally-dominated European funnel to the English Channel. Most siphoning happens in Aden, Aleppo and Basra, where the Mamluks dominate. This war for the east cost of Africa should give me very strong control of the Zanzibar trade node, which may help in drawing some other trade away from the Aden path to Alexandria. Once trade hits the Cape of Good Hope I have a straight shot through Ivory Coast to the Channel. Unlike in my Portugal game I'm not routing everything through this, it will mostly be local trade.

Moving on from Africa back to Europe: My main focus lately has been conquering the colonizers. Spain is the biggest priority as a long-term #2 power and the biggest colonial overlord, but Portugal is a lot smaller, and very shortly before my Zimbabwe war I managed to conquer Portugal. I think this only took two wars, thanks to my Administrative Efficiency and multiple nice war score cost reductions.

During my first war against Portugal, I was reminded that there's a huge malus to accept a treaty that would result in the war leader's complete annexation. This is especially painful against colonizers, since even if the mother country is fully occupied, you'd need to siege down like two whole continents to make them accept. The "trick" is to declare on one of their allies and make the colonizer a co-belligerent, since the ally won't have the malus for sacrificing their friend.

But I'd been too successful in isolating Portugal and they didn't have any allies left after Spain annexed Guanmar in a previous war. Fortunately, Portugal was the Defender of the Faith. Unfortunately, I'd also been too effective in stamping out Catholicism in Europe. The only independent Catholic states left were the Papal States, who I had a truce with, and Spain, who I also had a truce with and who Portugal hated and wouldn't defend. I ended up getting around this by declaring on the remnants of France, who had fallen into a Personal Union under Brittany, a landlocked OPM in the HRE. I couldn't declare on Brittany itself due to Perpetual Peace in the HRE, but somehow declaring on their junior subject worked.

 

 

Once I was finally able to get into the war, it ended pretty quickly, as Portugal was already exhausted from its previous Spanish war. I took their few remaining inland Maghreb provinces and the rest of Portugal proper, and a single token province from France, but the real prizes were the beefy colonies of Brazil, Rio de la Plata, Mexico and California, which now joined by former English colonies.

 

Now that Town Halls are available I don't really need to worry about Governing Capacity any more, but I've been giving provinces to my HRE vassals when it makes sense. My general priority is:

1. I'll keep provinces with a culture I already accept.
2. I'll keep provinces with Great Projects that I can use (either immediately or after accepting a culture).
3. I'll keep non-European provinces with a Center of Trade or an Estuary. I'll convert these to Protestantism and then give them to Trade Companies.
4. European provinces with a culture I don't accept will go to an adjacent vassal Prince.
5. Provinces that are outside Europe but adjacent to a Prince will get fed to them. I've now "snaked" states like Perm and Astrakhan far east to Siberia, and others like Provence and Catalonia across the Mediterranean to North Africa.
6. Provinces that are outside Europe and far from any HRE princes are kept by me as regular (non-Trade Company) territories. Once I build a Town Hall they're basically free to govern.

One little administrative trick: after winning a war, I'll often get a big chunk of territory, and I might want to keep one or two provinces inside it while giving the rest away. You can start to Core all the territories as long as you own everything that's in range and contiguous to your borders. But, once you give away border provinces, those interior ones won't be considered "adjacent" and you'll need to wait for your vassals to finish coring before you can start to core yours. So you should click the "Core" button for everything you want to keep before transferring provinces you want to get rid of.

I've also been fighting Spain, and those wars have been going well. Spain is stronger than Portugal, both in Europe and the New World, but the Vassal Swarm is incredibly strong, and the Mamluks have been happy to help me out too. In the first war I took all their islands other than a couple like Galapagos that I didn't have range for. Over successive wars I've taken their remaining Pacific holdings, the North African coast, and so on. This has been another great phase of expanding the HRE. In one war, I'll take a single province from Spain that has a core for, say, Leon, and another single province with a core for Catalonia, and so on. I'll core those provinces, convert them to Protestantism, add to the HRE, and then release them as a OPM vassal. They automatically join the HRE as a vassal prince. The UI will say that they release with the Catholic religion, because most of their cores are still in Catholic land; but in my experience they'll almost immediately convert to Protestantism, probably because their one owned province is Protestant. In the next war, I'll fight a Reconquest war, and will be able to take all of the remaining Leonese, Aragonese, Catalonian, etc. provinces. This leaves extra War Score, and my Spy Network will have given me a ton of claims to use to take more lands. Even the ones I take for myself I'll end up giving away as described above; this is a lot cheaper, since I have much more Admin Efficiency and stuff, so I'm better off taking the province and giving it than transferring the occupation and giving directly in the peace deal.

 

 

I think I have one more big war to fight against Spain before finally defeating them and taking their New World colonies, which will put me firmly in control of four continents. I think I'll be able to do that before worrying about their colonies revolting.

 

 

I fought a bit more against Denmark, they're very diminished now and I'll probably be able to add them to the HRE before long. I missed the opportunity to release Norway as a vassal since Norway has a core on a Great Project I already took for myself and want to keep, so instead Friesberg, Mecklenberg and other states have gotten to rule much of Scandinavia.

Muscovy is also a shell of its former self, and as noted above I've granted most of their lands to my far-east-European vassals. I kind of messed up after the last war and their capital ended up in Asia, so I just fought a war to take those Asian provinces and force Muscovy back into Europe. They'll eventually become part of the HRE.

I'm at the point now where money is meaningless. I'll hit 1 million Ducats in the bank before long. I still focus on trade when planning my strategy, which is largely from habit but also helps starve potential enemies and hopefully make future conquests easier. I'm also getting near 1 million maximum Manpower as well. For well over a century I've been throwing bodies into Great Projects to speed their completion. I haven't built anywhere near my Force Limit yet and haven't felt the need until now because the Vassal Swarm can crush anything near Europe and my main armies can handle the stuff outside. However, if I do start a war in China I'll probably need to raise some more serious armies for that... probably still nowhere near my Force Limit, but more than I've had to date.

Let's see, I think that's it! I'm coming up on Enlightenment, and will finally be able to start making use of all the Coal provinces I've been acquiring. I need to refresh my memory on the Revolution mechanic. In my Portugal game I hadn't gotten very involved in European expansion outside of Iberia, until the Revolution started in... I think France? I remember that being an exciting war but the details are fuzzy for me. Anyways, I don't think there are any European powers in my game who could become the Revolution Target. It would be interesting if it happened to the Mamluks or Wu or something. I think there might be some benefit to spawning the Revolution in my own borders so I can more easily crush it, but I'm not sure yet if I want to go down that path.

 

 

I'm also not sure exactly what I'm doing in this game. Earlier I had vaguely thought of forming Rome, which would probably still be doable, but very expensive to annex all the necessary vassals and would require many wars against my faithful allies the Mamluks. Trying for a World Conquest also sounds tempting, but I imagine that could get really tedious. As before, I'll keep playing this game until it isn't fun any more. Fortunately, so far it's still really fun!

Rushin' into Prussian

It may seem like I'm blogging a lot about EU4 lately. It has definitely been my go-to pasttime of the last several months. As much as I'm writing about it, I've been playing it way more, and by the time I remember to write a post I've already forgotten much of what happened since my last check-in. That said:

I think my last post ended around 1630 or so, after I had completed the Court & Country disaster and revoked the Privilegia. I'm now up to the mid 1660s or so. A lot has happened! The most obvious is yet another re-formation, completing my earliest vague goal of converting from Bohemia into Prussia with a detour through Saxony.

I'd been eligible to form Prussia for a while, as I was Protestant and had strong control over the northeast German coast. While double-checking requirements, though, I was dismayed to see that being Prussia would impose a harsh -50% penalty to my Governing Capacity. I'd been hovering near the top end of the cap for most of the game, and while being a little over it isn't too bad, remaining way over it for a long time would be brutal. So I soldiered on as Saxony for a while longer. During this time I doubled down on building Courthouses and State Houses: not just in my high-dev provinces, but literally everywhere. I ended up taking L'etat C'est Moi for a big +250 GC boost, paired that with some Estate Privileges for another +100, and pulled the trigger. That put me just a bit over capacity, and once I leveled up Admin Tech some more, I was back under the cap again. Phew!

So why Prussia? I haven't played as them before, but they seem to be the single most popular nation to play as in EU4, mostly due to their unique Militarization feature and unrivaled combat ability. The term "Prussian Space Marines" gets written a lot in the forums I frequent. They get big boosts to morale, damage and defense, but the rarest and most valuable perk is probably their high Discipline. Since converting, I've won multiple battles against equally advanced enemies with a 2:1 numerical advantage over me, simply because my guys just keep fighting and don't give up.

 

The reduced Governing Capacity makes a lot of sense for balance reasons, but seems very silly otherwise, since the whole purpose of Prussia (both historically and in the game) is to aggressively expand. I'm now very secure in Europe with nearly all minor nations under my suzerainty and the large nations not a threat. One of my first big goals was to expand into the New World: not by colonizing myself or conquering those lands, but by taking over the colonial powers. My first target was England. I had earlier gotten a foothold on the island while gunning for Global Trade, and subsequently expanded the Holy Roman Empire over all of Ireland and Cornwall. Scotland and England have fortunately been locked into a cycle of mutual destruction so Great Britain could never form.

As is always the case in EU4, it took multiple wars to accomplish my goals. In the first war I took most of England's Centers of Trade, all of its random islands and directly-owned New World territories, and broke any troublesome treaties. In the second war I took all of its coastal provinces, leaving them with York and several inland provinces around the midlands. I was a bit nervous that their North American holdings (Newfoundland, Louisiana, Cascadia, and Mexico) would break free, but fortunately they didn't: the relatively early year probably helped, as may have the much stronger and more threatening position of the Spanish colonies. In the third and final war I conquered all of their remaining provinces relatively quickly. Unfortunately, I couldn't actually end the war: there's a huge negative reason for accepting a treaty that would result in the complete annexation of a country. Their colonial powers weren't a threat, but still had most of their territory and armies, so the overall numbers weren't as favorable as they should have been. I was hoping that the ticking war score would put me over the limit, but I think that the "would result in complete annexation" value is dynamic and will always require 100-101% war score.

In this case, I had to fall back on the 5-year rule that I had relied on during World War Zero in my previous Portugal game: after a war has been going for 5 years, if one war leader is fully occupied and doesn't occupy any other territories (including provinces conquered by its vassals or allies), then it will capitulate and will accept any demand of up to 100% war score. In retrospect, I should have done what online strategists advise: in this scenario, it's best to declare on an ally of the colonizer, make the colonizer a co-belligerant, and eventually sign the peace with the war leader instead of separate-peacing. The war leader won't have the "complete annexation" malus, so it's much easier to get to this (assuming you can do well in the war against the alliance).

So far things have been relatively chill. As is usually the case, England owns most of the northern part of the New World, while Spain and Portugal have the central and lower bits. France didn't make it as a New World colonial power in this game (more on France later); Denmark and Scotland had some attempts of their own in the north but didn't get their colonies off the ground. Newfoundland is pretty large and came to me with something like 70-80% Liberty Desire, Louisiana is mid-sized and has around 60%, Cascadia and Mexico are tiny and loyal. I used some of my Subject Interactions like Support Loyalists and Send Officers to help improve our relations for a pittance in ducats, and have gradually been feeding them excess Prestige. But I also force-converted everyone to Protestant, so it will be a while until the whole setup is fully stable. Once I finally got some of them to be loyal I could start recruiting forces in their region. I'm planning to keep an army in the New World for any future conflicts. Nobody seems to have a Fort over level 1 so I can go light on the Artillery compared to my Old World armies. Unlike in my Portugal game I'm currently not getting very involved in my colonial nations' politics, leaving them to declare and fight their own wars without interference from me.

Hm, thinking about how to structure this post, I actually kind of liked my last post's clockwise spin, so I'll continue that structure here.

Moving from 10:00 to 12:00 - as I noted in my last post, after subjugating the HRE minors and forcing them to transfer trade power to me, one of the few remaining flies in my ointment was Denmark's presence in Lubeck. I finally had over 50% control, but they had most of the remainder, and as one of the final stops on the way to the English Channel that was a lot of money being diverted. This was an emotionally difficult war as Denmark had always been friendly to me, but militarily it wasn't too challenging. The main issue was the bottlenecks of getting past the forts into Denmark proper, dealing with islands in the straits, and handling the vast land in Finland and Sweden. The outcome was never in doubt, but the war dragged on longer than sheer numbers would have suggested because it took so long to siege down forts one by one.

 

 

I followed my normal practice of finishing the way by taking all Centers of Trade and any usable Great Projects. This resulted in quite a few non-contiguous territories for me; ordinarily I would balk at that, but as the provinces are all Protestant already I didn't need to worry about unrest like normal. The culture isn't ideal; in this game, my normal European strategy has been to take direct ownership of provinces in the Germanic culture group or other cultures I've accepted (the main ones being Greek, Francien and English). For other provinces, I'll try and give them to an HRE vassal of mine: even if they don't already accept the culture, they have plenty of unused culture slots. Ordinarily I would want to directly own Centers of Trade, but since I can take 100% of my vassals' trade power, I'll go ahead and give those to vassals too. The only things I want to keep for myself are Great Projects. What I really wanted to do here was to release Norway as an HRE Vassal, but I didn't have a way to do that without also giving up some Great Projects. I was able to give the peninsular provinces to HRE princes, but nobody could take land in Scandinavia proper. Definitely not the end of the world, I'm just spending some extra Governing Capacity on land that I can't use to its fullest potential.

 

 

One I had control of Lubeck, I was finally able to return to collecting trade in a single location. I moved my Trading Capital to the English Channel and switched everyone else to transfer trade, focusing on steering in nodes that could potentially branch into Venice or Genoa. This led to yet another skyrocketing of my trade income. This isn't entirely due to trade, but I'm now clearing between 1500-2000 ducats a month (without mothballing any forts or reducing army maintenance).

Continuing on to 3 o'clock: I've been fighting periodic wars against Muscovy for much of the game. They aren't a threat any more; they're still very large, with dev and even more with number of provinces, but much of their land is now non-contiguous and they only have trade influence in the very poor Girin node. Fighting them is no longer a big priority for me since I can reach beyond them and have the provinces I most care about. But there has been a common dynamic where I'll release some Orthodox nations from them, wait for the truce to expire, and then find that those nations have become allies or vassals of Muscovy, forcing me to fight yet another war to release them and another truce wait until I can force them into the HRE. This is all just kind of a background process so not a big deal. In my most recent fight, I allied, hm, I think Rustov or something, got our relations high, and then vassalized them. I hadn't realized that they were already at war against Muscovy who were trying to take them back for the second or third time. I immediately became the war leader. I wasn't prepared for this fight, but that's totally fine: the Vassal Swarm immediately sprang into action, and I could march some armies over from Central Europe before too long. We quickly got up to ~75% war score or so; going much higher than that against Muscovy is a huge pain because of how they retreat to the furthest reaches of Siberia, so I peaced out relatively early, releasing still more nascent Christian nations and taking a Gold province and a few other provinces of minor strategic interest.

The second-biggest war since my last post was a big war against the Mughals. They had been one of the bigger Great Powers and rivals with my allies the Mamluks so a confrontation was inevitable. One of the few Prussian missions I hadn't already completed required being the greatest trade power in Canton, and as I complained about previously reaching the Orient as a Germanic nation is daunting. I'd been eyeing Africa, where I'd need to take land from like five or six different nations to reach the Red Sea, and how was I going to even get CB on all those countries? But taking a fresh look at the map, I reasoned that it might be easier and faster to punch through Persia instead, connecting my Ukrainian land to Kazakhstan and on down to the Persian Gulf. This would require a greater total number of territories, but the Mughals had everything I needed, so I could potentially do it in one war.

I've been leaning heavily on the Mamluks during this stretch of time. I seem to always have 100 Favors banked with them and they're always down to join all the wars I care about. So far we haven't really come into any conflict, they're mostly focused on consolidating their power in the Middle-east and Africa. Lately I've been intentionally bringing them into wars even if I don't really need them, honestly to keep them in debt and with low manpower to keep them from growing too much. There have been a few times that they have called me to arms for an offensive war; my MO has been to accept, then completely ignore the war, then leave for a white peace (or sometimes even taking a province or two) after a year.

One challenge in the war against the Mamluks, like earlier wars against Muscovy, was the fog of war. I haven't taken Exploration ideas in this game, and have only very slowly gotten insight to coastal provinces and almost nothing in the interior of Asia. So while fighting a war, I'm also spending a lot of time scouting land to prepare for the following war.

At the end of the Mughal war, I was able to take the land bridge I wanted to connect Kazakhstan to the Persian Gulf. Thanks to my Absolutism, Administrative Efficiency and Protestant Justified Conflicts, I'm now able to take some pretty large chunks of land particularly when fighting heretics and heathens, which is pretty much everyone other than Denmark. So in addition to my land bridge, I was able to snake out and grab a lot of Centers of Trade as well as multiple Great Projects, including the excellent Bam Citadel.

As in my Portugal game, now that I'm expanding outside of Europe my normal approach is to core all provinces, then for Centers of Trade I'll prioritize converting to my state religion before adding to a Trade Company. This does mean dealing with higher Unrest for a while, since you don't get the immediate "Tolerance" benefit of being in a Trade Company; but over the long run it's better since you'll get the "Tolerance of the True Faith" instead. Since I took Humanist ideas instead of Religious in this game I haven't had to worry about rebellions nearly as often as I did in the Portugal game.

A pleasant surprise was just how long it took me to core everything. In previous wars against Muscovy I'd taken some deep tranches of territory, then had to core nearer provinces before I could start coring further ones, resulting in a 3x-4x longer period of being overextended. Because of that I'd shifted to only taking provinces that directly bordered me or a coast. With the Mughals I needed to take like 14 provinces in a row, though, so I wasn't gonna fight 14 wars for that. But I ended up being able to core them all at the same time after all, hooray! I'm now trying to remember why I had that problem with Muscovy earlier; it may have been due to me also granting provinces to Lithuania or other vassals of mine, you can core on the other side of a vassal but it may require you to have cores on the near side completed first.

Finally I had cores on the other side of Africa, hooray! Unfortunately I still didn't have the trading range to reach Canton, boo. I had done a similar mission in China earlier as Portugal and knew that the key would be to just get close enough to be able to place a merchant in the node, and then send enough Light Ships to Protect Trade; you don't actually need to conquer land in the node to beat the mission. But I would need to conquer land to get close enough to the node. Or would I?????

As it turns out, I could just buy my way to success. I don't think I've ever used this option before, but there's a diplomatic economic option called "Charter Company". You can use this on any nation located on a different continent from you that's at peace, and can straight-up buy a province from them. The costs scale up based on various factors: the bigger a share of their total dev the requested province is, the number of provinces you have nearby, etc. So in practice there's a soft cap that makes it hard to buy more than 1-2 provinces from a given nation, and they usually won't be willing to part with a province containing a Great Project at any price. But it's still insanely useful, as you can leapfrog forward to get range that could take decades of war to achieve. The cost is pricey - most of the provinces I buy cost around 4k-7k ducats - but again, at this stage in the game I'm netting over 1.5k ducats/month and this is one of the best money sinks I've found.

So I unrolled my bankroll and started buyin'. Ideally you'll Improve Relations with countries in advance as they're more likely to accept and the price will be cheaper, but if you're in a rush even countries that dislike you will make a sale for a premium. You can't buy provinces from nations that are at war, so don't wait around too long. I focused on buying provinces with Centers of Trade, ideally further east and decently far from any other provinces I had. In a matter of a week or so I had expanded from the Persian Gulf all the way around India to Indonesia and the Spice Islands, as well as the south coast of China! Fun fun fun. (Since these provinces are automatically added to your Trade Company you unfortunately can't easily convert their religion, but the unrest isn't anything to be concerned about, and hey, I'm not going to complain about a core that didn't cost me any Monarch Points!)

I did get to complete that Canton mission, which is part of a chain that also involves founding the Emden Company (which required me to annex East Frisia as it's a rare mission that requires directly owning a province without allowing a non-tributary subject), and also related to another one to construct the Kiel Canal. I think I've now finished just about all of the Prussian Missions, except for one that requires Enlightenment and another that requires having a Rival.

 

 

My single biggest war of this period has been the one against Spain, the #2 Great Power and my erstwhile ally. I had declared myself the Economic Hegemon after consolidating trade over Europe, which adds a big malus to every non-subject relationship. The Mamluks were willing to stick with me, but Spain was not. I spent several years fabricating claims on them while waiting for our truce to expire. Spain is huge in my game: besides Iberia they also have Sardinia, Sicily and the southern 2/3 of Italy. Oh, and they're the biggest colonizer in the New World and have numerous island colonies throughout the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

 

 

This was a very fun fight, a smaller-scale version of World War Zero. Much of the action took place in North America, where my disloyal ex-English subjects were forced into defending their territory against the huge might of the Spanish colonies. My own force here was just around 22k or so, enough to win any single engagement but no match for the consolidated forces of the colonies - oh, and of Spain proper, since as usual Spain had most of its army on the other side of the planet. I ended up focusing around the Cascadia region, sieging down Pacifico del Norte and keeping the capitals of English Cascadia and English Mexico free. The Spanish armies focused on Newfoundland, which was fine.

The Mamluks were busy fighting QQ for the first part of the war and so didn't contribute much, but I couldn't blame them, since I'd bailed on the QQ war after a year. Somewhat like the Denmark war, there were major chokepoints along the Italian peninsula, so even though the HRE vassal swarm had a big numerical advantage our progress was relatively slow.

Fighting in Iberia was more fun. I'd accelerated the timeline for kicking off this war once I saw that Spain and Portugal were already fighting one another. Portugal was Defender of the Faith, and I wasn't sure if they would defend Spain, but definitely not if they were already fighting! I forget what the proximate reason for this war was, but I think it was a New World colonial conflict that had pulled in the overlords. The Spanish side was a lot larger, but Portugal was making big gains, including occupying much of western Iberia.

The rest of us poured in through Catalonia. Portugal won the race to siege down Madrid, but I think that's OK; there's a -5 penalty to peace acceptance from controlling your own capital, but I don't think it matters if the capital is held by an enemy in your particular war or any other war.

I was able to start getting ticking warscore early from a province in northern Italy, and left most of Naples for my vassals to sop up while I focused on taking Mediterranean islands and things. As with most of these wars against large powers, I didn't want to struggle all the way up to 100% warscore, so I peaced out once we had Iberia and Italy and the other easily-reachable lands under control, which I think was around 50% warscore. Once again I focused my demands on taking islands, which gave me an even more significant expansion of my range; thanks to my spending spree with trade companies, I was able to reach all the way to Nan Madoll. I was more cautious about taking land in Europe proper. I took a single province in Catalonia; my plan is to convert it to Protestantism, add it to the HRE once I can extend the HRE out there, and then release that as a vassal and subsequently feed most of the remainder of Spain proper to it. Likewise, I took the northernmost province of Naples, and plan to do the same strategy with that. I had claims on much of central Italy and around Avignon. I'm holding on to some of these for their Great Projects, others I'm giving to vassals in the area.

 

 

Spain is much more powerful than England ever was, and it would take a lot more wars to take them down, but it's still my long-term hope to get to take their New World colonies as well. And probably eventually Portugal's as well, but that's still a ways off.

The last country on the clock, at 8 o'clock, is France! I've been fighting them a lot over the centuries. I win every war and they keep getting a bit weaker and weaker, but they've held together better than my other punching bags. This one was a 1-2 combo of France and Venice. For once I wasn't attacking France for its own land: rather, I wanted the Ivory Coast, which they dominate, so I can steer more of that trade from Seville to the English Channel. While the remaining French lands in France don't interest me much, the global French empire is tempting.

Separately, my other erstwhile ally Venice has been significantly diminished, but remains a thorn in my side. I dearly want to push them into the HRE, and I also want to reclaim the eastern Mediterranean islands they hold. Venice no longer has their powerful alliances of the past, but they were guaranteed by France, so I would need to take them both down in the same fight. This go-round was a lot easier since my navy now outnumbered theirs. I blockaded their Italian provinces while my HRE vassals and my own armies sieged down their forts, then we sailed east. I had hoped to take their islands in the previous war, but had been thwarted since I hadn't conquered their fort in Rhodes. This time around they had all of their remaining troops, a healthy 34k, waiting on the island...... of Crete. I snickered, parked my heavy ships outside Crete and brought my cannons to Rhodes, thankful that I wouldn't need to worry about a naval assault.

The most important action of the war was happening a continent away, though. I had previously staged a sizeable stack of 40k troops in my lone province in Africa that I had previously taken from Denmark. France controlled the entire Gulf of Guinea coast from modern-day Liberia through Gabon. Their own army was just around 30k and no match for my well-drilled Prussians. This ended up being a bit more cat-and-mouse than I had expected: after ambushing them early on, they fled inland to Mali, but later came back and wiped out my small 2k stacks I'd left behind to siege the coast while my main force was sieging Benin. I left a token presence on the Benin fort and raced back to pummel them again, eventually driving them down to their war allies in Kilwa. A combined French/Kilwa assault might have managed to dislodge me, but they never joined up, and I was able to fully occupy all of the French African lands.

The fight in France proper was more of a joke. Their small army hid behind their remaining zones-of-control while we invaded them from three directions. They were able to get off a few successful snipes against smaller stacks, but ended up being utterly annihilated.

I had to be extra-careful in timing the end of this war. France was the war target and Venice the co-belligerant, and I definitely wanted to separate-peace Venice to get maximum territory and minimum truce time from them. But much of the land I was planning to take from Venice and France was earmarked for my HRE vassals to take over or for new subjects I planned to manually release. Since I was still coring land from Muscovy and the Mughals, Venice alone would put me well over 100% Overextension, but I wouldn't be able to transfer territory until I was at peace. So I had to wait until I was at a good stopping point for both wars early in a month, peace them out back-to-back, and immediately set about granting provinces.

This ended up being a kind of inverted mirror of my normal war-ending process, where I'm picking and choosing which provinces to take from a victor: now, I was picking and choosing which provinces to surrender to a vassal. As noted above, my general preference is to grant provinces whose culture I don't accept to a vassal. The range for this is pretty short, though: the vassal needs to share a land border or be within a single sea zone to take the province. I ended up needing to hold on to some provinces I was hoping to ditch, notably the poorer Mediterranean islands. As a result, I ended up also needing to grant a couple of wealthy Francien provinces to my vassals in order to bring my Overextension below 100%. Overextension events are nasty, there is a lot of stuff you can tank for a while in this game (inflation, governing capacity, loans, stability), but overextension is a strict no-go for me.

 

 

So, that's it for my wars!

Internally, the HRE remains at peace and continues growing. I'm now up to something like 105 Princes in the Empire. A nifty pseudo-exploit I read about online is that you can revoke the reform to revoke the Privilegia, and then take the reform again, which will re-vassalize any princes you've added (forced) into the empire since the original Revoke. I did that once, and it was great, but since then I haven't been able to re-revoke revoking the Privilegia. The tooltip says that an emperor can only revoke a single Reform in their lifetime, even though I'm on an entire new Emperor now, so that seems like a mild bug. But I have found that some of my new HRE princes are willing to accept diplomatic vassalization. I have huge diplomatic reputation from a wide variety of sources, and some additional bonuses from my Idea Groups like Espionage. The princes I can't diplo-vassalize are the ones whose cores I own, which gives an insurmountable -1000 to acceptance. But anyways, most princes are under my vassalage now, with a few random exceptions like Crimea and the Great Horde; I hope to eventually be able to revoke and retake the reform again, but in the meantime we're definitely continuing to grow stronger all the time.

For my next goals, I'm going to continue expanding. I do eventually want to take down Spain and take their colonies; their European lands of Spain, Italy and northern Africa don't feed into the English Channel and so aren't very valuable, but I do really want their colonies, and especially control over the Caribbean. There are also some very valuable Great Projects in Spain that I'd like to own. It will take many wars to take them down.

I'm also gradually making my way east. I have footholds pretty much everywhere now, and will probably follow the standard process of consolidating trade nodes.

Over the long term, I may eventually go to war against the Mamluks, but that's been a very low priority for me. If I do turn against them, I'll probably increase my friendly relations with Ethiopia into a full alliance.

I'm undecided on whether to remain as Prussia or not. They are the strongest military power in the game, but at my size I don't really need to have the strongest units, I can easily outspend and outlevy anyone else. I would like to form Germany, but it looks like I can't do that as the HRE Emperor, and being the HRE Emperor is just way too much fun. I could take the final reform and turn into the Holy Roman Empire, but that also seems way less fun than leading the Vassal Swarm. I'm vaguely mulling over forming the Roman Empire; that would definitely require me conquering the Mamluks, and also integrating most of my southern vassals, but could be really fun. If I'm still playing in 1820, I might do these things and also consolidate the HRE just for any achievements.