Kongo: African Power Part 1

Welcome to my latest achievement run write-up!  This time we’re delving deep into the mysterious wilds of Africa and going for the African Power achievement my conquering all of Africa as the Kongo.  This was one of the first “hard” achievements I went for way back in the day when I was first learning how to play the game, and dare I say that all of the changes and updates since then have made this achievement much easier to get than it was when I first attempted it.  For example, look how much the landscape of Africa has changed since the release patch:

*Keep in mind that while I’m playing this in patch 1.17.1, I do not have the Mare Nostrum dlc active.  This shouldn’t really affect my strategy though, which should still work with the dlc active.

The Kongo originally had the dubious honor of having the second most boring start in the entire game (bested only by the Incas) as you started out isolated and at tech level 1 in all categories so you couldn’t build ships, and you couldn’t march your army over land either because you’d get massacred by Africa’s vicious natives.  The only thing you could do is wait until you researched diplo tech 2 to unlock cogs and then declare a no-cb war on Benin to give you a foothold in Western Africa.  Of course, this took forever because back then sub-Saharan Africans had 150% increased tech costs (the same as North American natives) and you only got 1 free monarch point per month (instead of three like nowadays.)  To make matters even worse, you started out with a tribal government, and while that part hasn’t changed, tribal governments used to be waaaaaaay worse.  For example, if your tribe controlled ten or more provinces you exposed yourself to three horribly crippling events (one for each of the monarch point types) unless your leader had at least 4 skill in that category.  Events such as 300% increased coring costs, which meant that you pretty much couldn’t expand past 9 provinces without reforming your government first.

The strategy for the Kongo boiled down to:  attack and vassalize all of the western African countries (which you could do because there was no liberty desire back then,) annex a province by Cayor, and pray that the Europeans didn’t take forever to colonize the provinces in northwestern Africa.  Of course, thanks to your terrible tech group you would be *very* far behind the Europeans when they did show up, so you had to also pray that they didn’t attack you while you were westernizing.  Finally, there is no catch-up mechanic for the Kongo like the North American natives have now, so even after you westernized you’d still be really far behind the Europeans in tech.  It usually took until the 1700’s to catch up in tech, and then there was always the chance you’d have to take on a runaway France or Ottomans or something.  Yep, it was pretty tough.  But enough about the way things used to be; let’s talk about the way things are.

Behold, the new starting position for the Kongo.  The neighborhood is pretty crowded now, and should give us plenty to do until we can branch out and meet the rest of the world.  All of the extra provinces they added to Africa have also increased the power of this continent quite a bit.  We can be on par with the western superpowers just by conquering and colonizing central and southern Africa.

Kind of like Cusco in the Andean Mountains, we start out as the strongest of all the tribes in central Africa, and start with Loango and Ndongo as vassals, but we aren’t that much stronger than everybody else so we’re going to have to carefully play the diplomacy game if we want conquer this region.

Here is our government tab at the start.  Like I said before, we start with a tribal government, but that isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be.  You could probably conquer the world as a tribe if you really wanted to.  The tribal governments themselves are actually pretty good if you look at their bonuses, at least in the early game.  Tribal federations get a whopping +10% force limits and 15% manpower, tribal despots get 10% cheaper coring costs and -1 revolt risk, and while all three get -1 to diplomatic relations, that isn’t really that big of a deal.  We start with the worst of the tribal governments, the tribal monarchy, for 10% cheaper stability costs and +20% income from vassals.  As good as the other tribal governments are, it’s not worth dropping 100 admin power to change governments, so we’re stuck with it.

In 1444 the Kongo are ruled by the only-slightly-below-average King Nkuwu Lukeni (2/3/3,) who is good enough for now, with heir Nzinga Nkuwa Lukeni (1/6/2) on deck.  Believe me, having an heir with stats like that was not an accident on Paradox’s part.  I don’t know if there’s any historical justification for Nzinga’s stats, but pretty much every Kongo player goes for exploration first, and you’ll be unlocking that idea group just in time for your 6 diplo skill monarch to ascend the throne.  Couldn’t possibly be a coincidence…

Here’s our tech situation.  We start at tech level2 in every category instead of 1, so we got that going for us.  The most recent patch (Mare Nostrum) also added in a new tech group just for us:  Central African.  Our techs cost 65% more than normal, which is about a billion times better than when I first got this achievement.  Compared to the rest of the old world, we’re worse than the Chinese tech group but better than the steppe hordes.  This group isn’t so bad that we can’t be competitive with the rest of the world, but we’re still going to want to westernize ASAP.

Here are the Kongolese ideas, which are a pretty decent set.  For traditions we get 10% trade efficiency, which is alright, and 20% less land attrition.  At face value, the attrition bonus might not seem like such a great bonus to have, but given the Kongo situation it’s a lot more valuable than you might think.  Keep in mind that most of the provinces in Africa are either jungle or desert, which have high attrition, and that most of the continent is tropical, which adds even more attrition.  20% less attrition makes a big difference when you’re eating 3% minimum attrition from every siege.

The first idea is a generic 10% extra tax revenue, which is nice.  The second idea, “Election of Manikongos,” is terrible.  50% increased chance of a new heir is probably the worst idea bonus in the game.  It doesn’t even guarantee an heir!  It just increases whatever your chance to get a new heir is by 50%.  This is so bad, that if you have this as an idea, you’re essentially playing with one national idea fewer than the rest of the world.  This idea right here is what prevents the Kongo from having a good idea set.

The third idea, however, is great, and is another cleverly placed nuance Paradox clearly planned out.  By the time you are able to unlock this idea, you will likely have westernized, and thus will be brought into potential conflict with the Europeans.  You will be desperately trying to catch up to them in military tech, and this idea will go a long way towards helping that goal.

The diplo rep and envoy time idea is pretty meh, although I suppose it would help with landing a crucial alliance with a European superpower, so it’s alright, and the rest of the ideas boost trade power and production (which works because most of Africa’s wealth comes from valuable trade goods, rather than high development) and buffing your military which will also be very helpful in driving foreigners out of Africa.  Overall I’d say this idea set was tailor made for people going after the African Power achievement, and if only that crappy 2^nd idea was replaced with something like manpower or coring cost reduction, then this idea set move stop being decent and start being great.  Ah well, it’s good enough for me.

Speaking of ideas, let’s talk about how we’re going reform out of tribalism.  Normally there’s a way for the Kongo (and only the Kongo) to get around this, which I’ll get into later, but I’m not going to take advantage of that so we’re going to have to reform the old fashioned way:  taking the decision.  The requirements are pretty hefty:  you have to have at least 60 legitimacy, 200 admin power, 3 stability and to have completed one of economic, innovative, or administrative idea groups.  Those are some pretty hefty requirements, especially the 3 stability one (that’s a lot of wasted admin power unless you get really, really lucky,) but it must be done.

At game start we and almost all of the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa are Shamanist Fetishist.  Wait a minute…  Fetishist?

No… not that kind of fetish.

There we go.  This kind.

As I understand it, a fetish is an object of power that is said to house the spirits, be they animal, ancestral, or divine.  The shamans and witch doctors of the Fetishist religions use religious ceremonies to enter altered states of consciousness to hear and interpret the will of these spirits, and to receive guidance from them.  Just for fun, I think it’ll be cool to give the Christians and the Muslims the middle finger this game and to stay Fetishist for the duration.  We gotta protect our African heritage!

As far as game mechanics go, all of the generic pagan religions (Totemist, Animist and Shamanist Fetishist) are pretty bad, at least compared to the more sophisticated Abrahamic religions.  All we get for being Fetishist is +2 tolerance of heathens (which will help quite a bit actually) and +1 diplo rep (which will also help a bit.)  These bonuses are nothing compared to what you get from being Christian or Muslim though.  Given that we get no bonuses to conversion speed, taking either the humanist or religious idea group is mandatory, and since only the weak are tolerant of other religions and cultures (hurr hurr) religious it is.  That idea group is so good, I take it in pretty much every game I play.  I should probably play a game where I make myself take humanist, just because.  Anyway, I digress.

Lastly, for my little introduction here, we are in the Congo culture group.  Not much to say here except that it’s interesting that we’re in the same culture group as everybody we can get to without colonizing and that there is no point in converting any of them since they’ll all automatically become accepted when I become an empire.  This will make for a nice core for my empire.

Tune in to part 2 of my write-up where we will actually start playing the game.

France: Big Blue Blob

Welcome to the write-up for my France:  Big Blue Blob achievement run.

Not long after I finished posting my Incan Sun God game I picked up the Common Sense dlc expansion eager to dive into the new mechanics, and boy, were they new.  This expansion radically changed some of this game’s most fundamental aspects, so much so that it almost felt like I was playing a different game and I almost had to re-learn how to play.  Nevertheless, I was tickled when I saw that they added a new achievement:  Big Blue Blob.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to own 100 core provinces (in Europe) as France before 1500.  Woah.  This achievement is like a mini version of the Over a Thousand! achievement, and as soon as I saw it I knew I had to try and get it.  Hey, as I saw it, if I could conquer 100 provinces as France before 1500 I would probably have a pretty good grasp of how the new mechanics work.  So, without any further ado, let’s get on with it!

As usual with new expansion packs, Paradox changed a few things here and there in the European map at the start of the game, only this time the changes they made were pretty radical.  As far as this achievement goes, France was pretty heavily nerfed by this patch (1.12.)  France was famous for starting with four vassals, all of whom used their own armies and manpower pools, and when combined with France’s actual army they were by far the strongest force in Europe, right from the get go.  France’s vassals are gone now.  They start out already integrated into France and each province that formerly belonged to a vassal now starts with pretty high local autonomy.  This makes France substantially weaker at the beginning of the game (although they’re still one of the strongest countries in the game at the start.)  On a similar note, Burgundy got the opposite treatment.  Whereas Burgundy used to start as a unified country controlling, uh, Burgundy, and the low countries, things have been changed to where Burgundy itself controls less territory and Flanders, Barbrant, and Holland are separate entities that Burgundy now holds personal unions over.  While this may be more historically accurate, from a gameplay perspective it makes Burgundy stronger, as it now has it’s own vassal swarm.

Probably the biggest change of all to the political climate in 1444 Europe, however, is that France and England no longer start out at war with each other.  This is huge, and it is another nerf to France.  Before this change England was approximately guaranteed to lose the Hundred Years War and would usually end up ceding it’s continental holdings to France after having dragged out the pointless conflict for about a decade.  On the other hand, trying to win the HYW as England was always an interesting challenge for players, at least if you weren’t using cheesy exploits to do it (but I digress.)  Now both France and England are free to sign alliances straight from the beginning of the game, and more often than not this ends up benefiting England more than France.  Thanks to this change AI France is no longer guaranteed to become an unstoppable juggernaut.  I’ve played a couple practice games to learn how the new mechanics work, and both times England managed to hold onto it’s continental holdings for a very long time and France eventually fell behind the other superpowers.  I, however, am not an AI.

So, where do we start out at?  At the beginning of the game, France has 20 provinces under her control.  We need 80 more to get the achievement, and we have 53 years to do it.  (You really have until 1497 to conquer the provinces, as they need to be cored to count, and it takes a base of three years to core provinces.)  So, we need to average at least 1.5 provinces acquired per year to make that deadline.  No problem, right?

For anyone going for this achievement, I would restart until your starting diplomatic situation looks like this, which neither Castile nor Austria declaring you a rival, and ideally with both of them rivaling England.  This way they should both be friendly to you and willng to sign alliances starting from day one.  Choosing your rivals carefully is important now, as other countries seem to only want to join you in wars against mutual rivals, unless you’ve built up a lot of trust with an ally, but that takes a lot of time, time we don’t have if we want to hit 100 provinces before 1500.  Also, choosing the right rivals is important for fabricating claims, as we’re going to have to carefully manage aggressive expansion this run to make sure we don’t get coalitioned to hell and getting caught fabricating claims does actually generate a lot of aggressive expansion by itself.  The bonus you get for fabricating claims on a rival should more or less prevent you from ever getting caught (but only against them.)  I chose to rival England because they are going to be my first target, Burgundy because Austria hates them and I will probably want to take the fight to them if the inheritance doesn’t trigger, and lastly I chose to rival Aragon because they were an enemy of Castile, and I wanted to keep them as a possible future avenue of expansion.

Here’s the new diplo map mode for France at the start of the game.  We have cores on four English provinces which gives us a reconquest cb from day one.  As soon as Castile and Austria accept my alliances I’m going to immediately delcare war on the to take my land back.  There was another nerf to France here, as Calais and Picardie used to start out as French cores, but for whatever reason the guys at Paradox saw fit to remove them.  A bummer, but it’s not really the end of the world.

Here’s yet another change:  England and France no longer start with what felt like a billion generals each.  Now France has two generals, and I’m planning to keep both of them.  Jean Bureau is going to get quite a workout this game.  Hue hue…

Let’s move on to my overall strategy for approaching this achievement.  Another major change that came with the Common Sense xpac is that coring provinces is now much more expensive.  It’s become so expensive that many players feel that if you’re planning on expanding much over a game you practically need to take administrative ideas for the coring cost reduction, and that a single-tag world conquest is now practically impossible without playing a country that has core cost reducing national ideas or abusing HRE vassal feeding.  In this game I don’t expect to take any ideas at all.

Keep in mind that our goal is to conquer 100 provinces.  The quality of the individual provinces doesn’t matter at all.  We could own 100 30-development provinces, or 100 3-development provinces;  there’s no difference as far as the achievement conditions go.  Having said that, we’re only going to have so many admin points to spend on coring this early in the game, and I just finished remarking on how expensive cores are now, so for best results we’re gonna have to try and limit our expansion to the poorer, low development parts of Europe.  This means that Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany are all off the team.  Up above I posted the economic map of Europe at game start, which is based on base tax.  The darker red a province, the poorer (and thus cheaper to core) it is.  It looks like the best places to expand into are going to be Ireland/Scotland, Scandinavia, Russia, and the Balkans.  No problem right?  The only hard part is going to be getting a casus belli.

Right at the beginning of the game I took the “England must be driven from France” mission.  If you don’t have this mission, then you’ll probably have the “reclaim Normandie” mission which is just as good.  They both give ten years of 10% increased manpower recovery speed, something we are definitely going to need.

Before I do anything else I like to hire advisors.  I hired whatever level 1 advisors were available for each category, my selection of which was sadly sub-optimal.  Ideally you’d have a statesman and either a commondant or an army reformer for their combat bonuses, but I had to settle for a spymaster and a master recruiter (although extra manpower is never a bad thing.)  I also opted to go with the prestige advisor, as prestige is actually kind of tough to get now (my Timurids game is laughting at me now, I’m sure.)

Once that was done, and because coring costs are so high, I set the national focus to admin.  I don’t expect to research even a single admin tech this game;  that’s how expensive coring is.  I also don’t expect to research many diplo techs either, as we’re going to have to pay a shit load of diplo points for the peace treaties I want and later on for annexing vassals.

Well check this out:  less than a year into the game (after I had declared war on England, with Austria coming to help me) a landed a random personal union over Navarra.  I was trying to diplo vassalize them so I had a royal marriage with them, and then the game surprises me with this.  I guess this goes to show that random personal unions can happen, I just wish it had been with somebody more… useful (like Austria or Castile.)  My original plan had been to vassalize Navarra and then maybe feed them some of Aragon’s land before annexing them, but since PU’s have to “remain stable” for a whopping FIFTY YEARS before you can even start to integrate them, I’m not even sure if it would be possible to annex them before 1500 rolls around.  Oh well, I suppose there are worse things that can happen than getting a personal union over a one province minor that contributes almost nothing but still takes up a relations slot.

Wow, now here is a huge stroke of luck:  one of the earliest Burgundian Inheritances I have ever seen.  Seriously, it’s only two years into the game.  Burgundy had just declared war on England (reclaim Calais) and then their King immediately died.  This happening so soon is a huge boon to my game, but for anyone reading this keep in mind that players are usually bound to get this event eventually, and the strategy I’m using can still be done even without this event firing at all.  The king of Burgundy dropping dead scored me 6 high-development provinces, all for free, bringing my total province count to 26.

I chuckled to myself when this popped up.  Has anyone in the history of this game ever NOT claimed Burgundy?

Here’s a shot of my territory after the inheritance.  The war with England is going well;  another small stroke of luck for me.  England only called Portugal (who they start the game with an alliance with) into the war with me, and so far I’ve managed to avoid fighting even a single battle against either England or Portugal myself.  Gotta conserve that manpower!  I had one failed attempt where England called in Provence, Savoy AND the Papal states into the war against me.  I could win that war, but it would be so costly that I wouldn’t be able to carry on the way I’d need to to win this achievement.

Sure enough, right after I made note of England’s lack of alliances, they signed a bunch of alliances and called them into the war.  I’m not really sure how I feel about this mechanic;  it seems kind of cheesy that a war can rage on for several years only for the defender to suddenly sign a new alliance and immediately call them into the war.  I’ve heard that there is a time limit to when they can do this, but I have no idea how long it is or whether the AI is bound by it, and I KNOW I’ve seen AI’s call in new allies to wars more than five years long, so if there is a time limit, it is very long.  Fortunately for this war, England only called in Leinster, Tyrone (neither of whom will do anything except artificially drive down my warscore) and the Papal States.  Nothing I can’t handle.

On the other hand, you can see from the battle history that Austria’s AI is derping really hard this war.  Austria, your army is huge, especially with the inheritance territory beefing you up!  What in the hell are you doing?

After Austria destroyed Portugal’s army for me and I sieged down a few of their provinces, Portugal was ready to cry uncle.  I made them pay me all their money and war reparations, as well as annulling alliances with England, Castile and Aragon.  I potentially could have taken some land from them, but their territory is really expensive to core, and it would have generated a shit-ton of aggressive expansion with Castile and Aragon, so I decided not to.

Check it out, I was blessed with more good luck this run, in the form of the monopoly company formed event.  I was literally bailed out of financial problems in my Incan game by this event, and that huge cash infusion will help tremendously this game too, as cash is pretty tight for France in the early game.  I gotta admit, every time I see this event I think of this guy:

It’s nice to have Rich Uncle Pennybags looking out for me.  Face it:  from now on, every time you get this event you’re gonna think of the Monopoly guy too, aren’t you?  Unfortunately, there are some things money can’t buy…

What is going on Austria?  They have about 30k men in this screen shot, and England has a stack of 15k men marauding the Austrian countryside.  Austria decided it would be a good idea to attack England’s army with a 10k stack and leave all the rest of their troops idle throughout their territory.  You can buy your troops the biggest weapons and shiniest armor, but that won’t help you if your generals are morons who don’t know what they’re doing!  The best thing that could happen for me here would be for Austria to peace out with England.

While Austria was messing around with England, I sent a couple armies down to Rome to convince the Pope that maybe war against me isn’t in his best interest.  He agreed, but only after I demanded that he cede Avignon to me.  He wasn’t a co-belligerent, but Avignon is a French culture, low-development province so taking it shouldn’t piss off too many people.

At long last, in July of 1449, England agrees to my demands and cedes all five of their continental provninces to me, the only one of which I need to core is Calais.  Here are some pics to show the aftermath of the war:

My mission completes and I get more manpower and legitimacy.  Hooray.

England being removed from the French region triggers this event:  The End of the Hundred Years War.  Free stability and (much needed) admin points for me!

Here’s an overview shot of my territory at the war’s end, which brought me up to 32 provinces.  Hey, we’re about a third of the way there, and it’s only been 5 years!  Yeah, I did get incredibly lucky, but so what?  Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good (I hear this quite a bit at the poker tables.)

Alright, let’s get on with it.  I still have a long way to go.  The next thing I do is take a new mission:  this time the “Solidify Papal Relations” mission.  His Holiness is pretty pissed at me for taking Avignon, so it’s time I started smoothing that over and making amends.  Who knows, maybe by the end of this game I’ll have accrued enough Papal influence to buy a free stability point or something.

The next thing I do is bear the fruit of something I’ve been working on since day one:  diplo vassalizing an Irish minor.  Any of them will do, and which one you can get depends on how the RNG rolls the diplomatic scene at the beginning of the game.  Generally, if you start improving relations early on, you should be able to diplo vassalize one of them by the time the war with England is over.  This step is absolutely crucial to my plan because…

Look at all those juicy claims I get to take advantage of.  Vassalizing Connacht gives me the casus belli I need to declare war on the rest of Ireland without taking any nasty hits to my stability and war exhaustion.  They will also be the springboard for me to push into Scotland.

Just as I was about to start my second offensive war of the game, this nifty event that is unique to France pops up:  The Inheritance of Anjou.  Apparently the king of France has some validity in claiming the throne of Naples for himself and this event, should you press the claim, gives you what you need to enforce it in the form of claims on all Neapolitan provinces.  You know, wouldn’t an event like this be more accurate if it gave a cb to enforce a personal union on Naples?  That seems more logical to me, but whatever.  Claims are good too.  If you were so inclined, this event would be the catalyst for allowing a France player to push into the Balkans (claims on Naples -> conquer Naples -> fabricate claims on Albania or whatever -> win.)  This event is certain to happen in every game as long as Naples, Aragon, Castile or Spain controls land in the Neapolitan region.

In 1450 I declare war on Munster, who is allied with Tyrone and Scotland, who I declare a co-belligerent.  Scotland is allied with Leinster, who should be called into this war, so in one fell swoop I should be able to take down all of Ireland AND Scotland.

Sure enough, with only a little abuse of the strait between Scotland and Ireland, I was able to wipe out my enemies entire army with relatively few losses on my part.  Nothing can stop me now, not even William Wallace!

Wait a minute, he’s not even Scottish!  What other Scotsman could stand against me…  How about the Highlander?

Wait a minute, he’s not Scottish either!  Surely there’s a hero who is actually Scottish who could save Scotland from certain doom at the hands of the French?

Ah, here we go.  I’ve heard Sean Connery referred to as “The Greatest Living Scot” so if anyone could stop me, it would be him.  Fortunately for me, this is just a game so I think I’m safe.  Hopefully.  Actually, now that I think about it, isn’t it kind of ironic that in the movie Highlander the non-Scottish character is played by a Scot and the Scottish character is played by a non-Scot in a movie set in Scotland?  (say that five times fast)  What gives?  Anyway, back to the game.

While I was happily sieging down Ireland and Scotland’s forts Scotland formed a new alliance with Novgorod.  This was mildly alarming as Scotland was a co-belligerent so they could potentially call Novgorod into the war.  I took a peek over to see how Novgorod was actually doing and was pleasantly surprised to see that the second condition for my strategy came to fruition:  Muscovy took a big bite out of Novgorod and brought their total war score cost down below 100%.  The first condition was being able to diplo-vassalize an Irish minor and attack Scotland.  This presents me with a new problem though:  if Scotland calls Novgorod in, that will seriously slow down my conquest and coring of the highlands and the Emerald Isle.  Also, Novgorod won’t be a co-belligerent so I won’t be able to vassalize them even if I get 100% war score against them.  I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do this, but I decided to pull the trigger, bite the bullet, and declare a no-cb war on Novgorod.  At least this way I can make sure to have enough time to get everything done I need to get done before 1500.

The stability and war exhaustion hit suck big time, but we don’t have a lot of time to dilly dally and getting involved in a war I don’t benefit from would be far more harmful than the no-cb penalty.

On a side note, this is about the time I researched my first tech of the game:  military tech 4.  Being on the cutting edge of military technology is extremely important (especially this tech) and military points are the only monarch point type I don’t need to pay for my conquest.

After a couple years of war, in 1452, the last fort falls and I get 100% war score against my Irish and Scottish enemies future subjects.  I use the transfer occupation mechanic to give Connacht control of the Irish provinces and keep Scotland for myself.  It’s important to balance out your use of monarch points, so coring some provinces directly and annexing a vassal a little later works out nicely.

In addition to time, aggressive expansion is probably the second biggest limit to how players can accomplish this achievement.  Full annexing Scotland (whom I had no legitimate claim on) generated a lot of heat against me, but fortunately the only countries that really hate me are England (who I have a truce with) Norway (who is under Danish rule) and Brittany (who is too small and weak to matter) so so far so good.  My future conquests shouldn’t generate much more aggressive expansion with the culture groups that already hate me so I should be able to avoid a coalition.

As far as the achievement goes, the conquest of Scotland brings me to 38 provinces directly owned, and another 4 owned by Connacht.  While I’m making good time so far I don’t have any time to waste, which moves me on to my next goal:  subjugating Novgorod.

After 2 years of fort sieging and a pretty uneventful war, Novgorod capitulates and becomes the newest member of the French family.  I’ve been keeping really good momentum so far, always being able to move from one objective to the next and so far I’ve been able to avoid fighting any major costly battles.  My manpower is sitting at 18k right now and most of what I’ve lost has been to attrition (damn these new forts!)

The reason why conquering Scotland is so important is because it unlocks a new path of expansion:  Scandinavia.  Orkney is owned by Norway, so by claiming it we can get the casus belli we need to fuel future expansion.  Unfortunately for me, Denmark is still hanging onto it’s personal unions over Norway and Sweden, and there’s no way I’m gonna fight a united Scandinavia, so I’ll make the claim now and focus on other expansion while keeping an eye on the diplo scene up here, which is bound to boil over some time.

While I was mulling over what my next move would be, I spotted a golden opportunity:  Muscovy was at war with Poland-Lithuania.  Apparently Muscovy was allied with the Teutonic Order and Poland launched it’s usual conquest of Danzig, so right now Muscovy’s army is getting horribly beaten up by Lithuania’s massive army.  Taking down Muscovy without having to actually fight them?  Sign me up!  I use Novgorod’s convenient “reconquest” cb to get things started.

Muscovy’s army is bigger than I’d like, but I do outnumber them, I’m a tech ahead of them, and they’re busy fighting Poland-Lithuania, so I doubt I’ll get a better opportunity than this to kick them in the teeth.

Ruh-Roh Shaggy, we might have a problem here:  my heir Louis (the heir France starts the game with) bought the farm.  I chose to find solace in the arms of the Lord, as when you find solace in the arms of a maid the heir you get always has a weak claim and I want to avoid low legitimacy like the plague.  Of course, Louis was immediately replaced by the perfectly acceptable 4/4/4 Charles, the only problem being that Charles is underage while my king is old and could drop dead at any moment.  A badly timed regency council could be disastrous for this achievement run, but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

The war with Muscovy was going well when all of a sudden a curve ball I never expected was thrown at me.  Novgorodian Separatists spawned in Muscovy right under my armies while I was sieging them down!  This resulted in a really awkward situation for me, as the rebels were obviously hostile to me (God damn those guys, those sneak battles I had no chance to avoid absolutely murdered my manpower pool) but friendly towards my subject Novgorod?  I had no idea what would happen if I let them run wild.  Would the provinces defect to Novgorod for free?  Could they even defect at all with Novgorod being a subject nation and at war with the country the rebels spawned in?  The rebel system has seemed a little wonky lately, and I haven’t yet reached DDRJake’s mastery over this mechanic, so after I learned the rebels were sieging down all of the provinces I controlled and tanking my war score against Muscovy I decided to bite the bullet once again and kill them myself just so I could keep the war moving forward with as little time wasted as possible.  I’m not sure if this was the “right” thing to do, but I didn’t want to risk this run on an unknown factor.

Sure enough, a year after my previous heir died my king kicked the bucket and a regency council for Charles started.  The kid’s only 8 years old, so it’s gonna be at least 7 years until I can declare another offensive war.  I have the war with Muscovy to keep me busy right now, and I think I can handle a few years of down time and still make the achievement, but a second regency council is completely out of the question at this point.

I guess in the end the good luck balances out the bad (and I’ve had a lot of good luck so far) as during my war with Muscovy the third and final condition for my strategy to work came to fruition.  Both Norway and Sweden broke free from Danish rule.  I actually only needed Sweden to break free, but having Norway be independent too just makes things easier for me.  I don’t think they fought any wars of independence, so the Danish king must have died while having negative prestige or otherwise failed one of the conditions needed to keep the personal unions intact.  I know what my next move is going to be after I’m done with Muscovy!

Man, this is brutal.  As I was cleaning up the last wave of Russian rebels ANOTHER stack spawns underneath one of my armies.  Such BS.  Just as I learned in my Timurids game and my Incan game, and is once again being proven true this time around, the most dangerous enemy you can possibly fight in this game are the rebels.  Those bastards have inflicted far more damage to my army in this war than the actual Muscovite army ever has.

Aaaaaand like I just said, the good luck balances out the bad, in the form of another Monopoly Company Formed event and another sizable chunk of free money.  It’s nice having a rich Uncle Pennybags to bankroll my war efforts for me!

At long last, in 1460 after a war that ended up being way costlier than it needed to be thanks to those asshole rebels I may or may not have even needed to fight, the war ends and I feed Novgorod as many of its stolen cores as I can.  They are now primed and ready for annexation (as soon as I get relations high enough and enough time has passed.)

The war with Muscovy might be over, but the regency council goes on.  It will last another three years, but given how much manpower I lost in Russia (insert mandatory Napoleon joke here) I’m strangely comfortable with the idea of taking a three year break.

Here’s my heat map again immediately after the war with Muscovy.  As you can see, most of the hate towards me has dissipated, except for England, and now Muscovy hates my guts.  Eh, who cares what Muscovy thinks.  England can be as angry as they want, but since I’m still allied with Austria and Castile all this time nobody will dare form a coalition against me.

In October of 1462 Charles VIII comes of age and the regency council ends.  Time to get on with it!

My next target is Norway, who has allied with their former overlord Denmark.  I’m very confident I could win that war on my own, but what’s this?  Sweden has rivaled both Norway and Denmark, the very nations I want to attack?  Sweden, you wouldn’t be interested in helping me murder them, would you?  I ally Sweden to see if they’ll get involved in the brewing hostilities, an alliance I have absolutely, positively, no intention of breaking or betraying in anyway whatsoever later on in this game.

Well look at that!  Sweden WILL help me fight Denmark and Norway.  Even Austria wants to get in on the fun!  I call them both in and Norway and Denmark are completely screwed.

Uh, yeah.  This war is a little stacked.  As Survivor’s Jeff Probst would say:  “Not!  Even!  Close!”

As the war with Norway and Denmark rages on, in 1465 Charles fathers a new heir with excellent stats, 5/6/3 Louis.  I wonder if this game will go on long enough for him to become king.

Here’s another interesting tidbit:  what could possibly be the world’s latest War of the Roses fired in this game, in 1466.  I don’t remember exactly what the triggers are for this disaster, but its kind of funny that England had to have sorted out its succession issues early on only for them to strike back 20 years later.

After a relatively short three year war, in 1466 Norway surrenders and I take Iceland, the islands in the Norwegian Sea and as much of their continental land as I can get from them.  Since most of these provinces are only 3 development, they are all cheap to core and don’t generate that much aggressive expansion to take.

All of these provinces bring my total land up to 55 provinces, not including my vassal’s territory.  Here’s a shot of my empire:

After chilling out for a few years to core my new territory and recover a bit of manpower, I move along with the next phase of my plan, do the unthinkable, and back stab my ally Sweden.  Sorry man, I just can’t turn away all those juicy provinces you’re holding!

They were allied with The Hansa and the Livonian Order, but I don’t expect them to do much and my own army dwarfs Sweden’s, so pas de problème.

Well whaddaya know!  In 1472 I finally built up enough papal influence to buy a stability point, proving that that mission I took earlier wasn’t a complete waste of time after all.

About four years after the war started Sweden gave up and I took as much land from them as I could, putting them under the 100% war score threshold which will allow me to finish them off for good during the next war.  Conquering their land brings me to 67 provinces (not including my vassals.)  It was at this point I became 100% confident that this run was going to succeed, barring some sort of crazy bad luck, like a long regency council.  Here’s a shot of my empire:

I like to call it “A Tale of Three Frances.”  There’s French France, Scotch-Irish France and Scandinavian France.

I also started annexing Novgorod at this time too.  I forgot to mention it, but I had already annexed Connacht a while ago.

Moving right along, as soon as my truce with Muscovy expired I renewed hostilities with them.  They still have a lot of low-development provinces and are diplomatically isolated, so they continue to be an excellent target.  I can even core their provinces myself since they border a same-continent vassal of mine.

They have just under 30k men in their army, but this war should be a piece of cake.

Sure enough, three years and 10k manpower lost later Muscovy is 100% occupied.  I return Novgorod their remaining cores and take as many of the low development provinces as I can, bringing me to 77 provinces total.

In 1481 I attack Norway again, and since they only have two provinces and no friends, they retire from the game without any trouble.

In 1485 I noticed that Novgorod is only 48% done being annexed and I start to get worried about finishing them in time (vassals take sooo long to annex now!) so after thinking for a bit I decided to go for broke, risk bankrupting my empire and hire a level 3 statesman I can’t afford just so I can speed up the annexation a little bit.  I had to hire a level 3 advisor because he was the only statesman available, even after firing and resetting my diplo advisors a few times (I don’t want to not be able to afford hiring the advisor at all…)  It will be costly, but you gotta do what you gotta do to take care of business.

In 1487 my truce with Sweden expires and I immediately attack them again.  They did manage to score an alliance with Poland, but luckily for me Poland was busy elsewhere and wasn’t able or willing to come to Sweden’s aid.

Man, these new forts and their ensuing siege lengths can be brutal early game before you get access to artillery.  Look at that:  Stockholm held out for 1,171 days, or just a little over three years.  I don’t know how long sieges usually lasted historically, but that seems unusually long.  Oh well, they may have put up a valiant defense, but the end result stayed the same nevertheless.

Goodbye Sweden.  This world is only big enough for one big blue blob, and you ain’t it.  After finishing Sweden off I tallied up my provinces and as soon as Novgorod finishes annexing I’ll have enough to put me over 100!  It’s just a matter of waiting now…

There we go.  In 1493 Novgorod finished annexing and I could finally fire that level three statesman who had possibly become the wealthiest man in Europe from all the money I paid him.  Also, my province count was brought to 101, successfully accomplishing the achievement.

If you’re looking for a TL;DR recap of what I did, it goes something like this:

1)  Restart until Austria or Castile are friendly and will join you against England

2)  Reclaim your cores from England while buttering up an Irish minor (with claims in Scotland/Ireland.) If this war is too costly or otherwise doesn’t go smoothly, restart and try again.

3)  Pray that Muscovy takes a bite out of Novgorod in a timely manner that bring Novgorod down to vassalizable size.

4)  Pray that Sweden breaks free of Danish rule without needing player interference.

5)  Conquer Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia and Russia as quickly as you can.

While waiting for these things to happen, other possible avenues of expansion include: Aragon, England, Naples and the Balkans (after Naples.)

So there you have it.  I hope you had as much reading this as I had writing it.

Saxony: Meissner Porcelain

Welcome to my Saxony:  Meissner Porcelain write-up.

This is gonna be something a little different, in that this isn’t a fully detailed, step by step report of how I got this achievement, but rather an overview recap written after the fact.  The goal for this achievement is to own (either directly or through subjects) every chinaware producing province in the world as Saxony, which is kind of interesting since Saxony starts out the game as a relatively small, landlocked elector in the Holy Roman Empire.  Having said that, this is still probably the easiest of the three “resource monopoly” achievements, the others being tropical wood as Orissa and naval supplies as Norway.

From what I can tell, this achievement is inspired by this guy, Johann Friedrich Böttger, a dude from Saxony who is credited with being the first European to discover the secret to creating porcelain.  In 1710 he established a Porcelain manufactory in Meissen (near Dresden) which was the first European company to produce porcelain products in large quantities.  This company is actually still in business to this day, operating under the name Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Meissen GmbH.  Pretty cool that there is a company in Germany that’s 66 years older than the United States as a country.

Fun fact:  the Meissen crossed swords logo is one of the oldest trademarks in the world.

But enough history, how about the game itself?

Here is my empire in 1727.  Heading into this game I was like “wouldn’t it be fun to conquer the borders of the German Empire before heading off into Asia?” and this was the result.  Also, Paradox radically changed the way aggressive expansion works in this patch version, and the Holy Roman Empire is a good place to test things like that out.  Overall, up until this point it was a pretty standard expansion-within-the-Empire game, where I focused on vassalizing and integrating my neighbors in order to avoid unlawful territory, and took the diplomatic idea group first for the extra diplomat, relation slot and the boost to improve relations.

Generally the key to success inside the empire is to become BFF’s with the Emperor and then constantly verbally fellate improve relations with all the other princes so they look the other way as you expand your holdings.  The new cap for a coalition to form is 50 aggressive expansion (up from 30) which is a HUGE increase.  Since countries won’t form a coalition against you if you have positive relations with them, it is entirely possible to be at or above this threshold and still have no coalition against you, you just gotta stay on the ball in managing your relationships with your neighbors.  Austria always seems to lose Emperorship in recent patch versions, so it is easier said than done to stay on the Emperor’s good side, but if you can keep your relation with him at +150 he won’t demand unlawful territory from you anymore.  When you’re small early on in the game, it would be wise to try to ally Poland or France (or both) and have them do the heavy lifting for you in wars, but in case they don’t think you’re important enough to be worth fighting for, you should generally identify your target, rival them, then ally all of their rivals.  AI’s will pretty much always join your wars if they’re against their rivals.

The traditional balance of power in Europe seems to have been really upset by this patch.  The new aggressive expansion rules allow the AI’s to blob like crazy.  In the opening years of this game, Austria 100% annexed Bavaria, all without claims!  No coalition.  France ended up on the wrong side of the alliance web and got wrecked, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth never formed, the Burgundian Inheritance never fired, allowing Provence and Liege to conquer them and become the dominant powers in the French region.  The Iberian Wedding never triggered and Aragon and Portugal ate Castile.  Muscovy sucked early on and never conquered Novgorod or formed Russia.  Overall this was a very weird Europe.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Anyway, my game plan was to expand into the German Empire’s territory, dismantling the HRE along the way if I could (I couldn’t) take exploration ideas later than I usually do just so I could set up enough colonies to get my coring range into Asia and then start going after the chinaware provinces after I unlocked the Imperialism cb.  If you’re keeping up with diplo tech, you’ll probably unlock that cb around 1680 or so.

I definitely took my time in finishing this achievement, but if you wanted to do it faster the simplest way to accomplish that would be to conquer your way to a port, take expansion for the cb against Asians, colonize some bases to reach Asia, and go nuts conquering.  It might even be fun to do an exodus game where you abandon your homeland in Europe and set up shop in Indonesia or something.  Anyway, here are the chinaware provinces I needed to acquire:

In this game there were 31 chinaware producing provinces, mostly in Ming (go figure) but also a couple in Japan, a few in Korea, and a handful in Indochina.  Any of the colonizable provinces in the Asian region (not Siberia) have a chance of rolling chinaware as their good produced, so you’ve got to keep your eyes peeled to make sure you don’t miss any.  Or you could just do this:

The ledger has a tab that shows the location of every good type in the game, which can be found by opening up the “trade” tab and then opening up the “good locations” tab.  This makes it much easier to keep track of where all the needed provinces are, and who owns them.

In 1771 I finished my conquests and accomplished my goal of acquiring every chinaware province and thus got the achievement.  It can be kind of hard to see here, so lets check out the diplomatic view.

Border gore incoming, but all I wanted to do was get the provinces I needed to get the achievement.  I was able to get all the provinces I needed in one war with each owner, except for Ming of course, who required two.  Actually, Ming was a badass in this game.  When I met them for the first time they were even more advanced than I was, despite still being in the Chinese tech group!  They still had the 50% local autonomy in all of their provinces and were nevertheless able to field an army of over 200,000 men.  When I saw that, I was suddenly very glad that I had decided to conquer as much territory in Europe as I did.  So everyone reading this, keep in mind that if Ming survives this late into the game, they can still be very dangerous, and might even end up being the reason this achievement could be failed.  Now that I mention it, I did encounter an odd peculiarity whilst fighting them…

Ming’s fort garrisons are fucking huge!  This is a level 4 fort (the highest level) and thanks to all their bonuses to garrison size this fort requires 36 attacking regiments to be present for the siege to progress at all.  36,000 men?  No problem right?  My army is way bigger than that.  There’s only one problem:

The supply limit for this province is only 30 units.  I need to go way over the supply limit just to be able to siege the province!  That means that this fort is impossible to take without eating a shitload of attrition throughout the process, and high level forts like this can take a very long time to take down, even with lots of artillery.  I don’t know if situations like this were intended or not by Paradox, but it does seem kind of cheesy that these things can arise from time to time.  I mean, maybe they could change it so that if a fort is in a province then the minimum supply limit will always be the minimum number of regiments required to siege the fort.  Especially since the AI still gets to be immune to attrition for being over the supply limit.  Oh well, this is hardly game breaking and it probably doesn’t come into play very often, but it does exist!

Now that I think of it, it seems kind of silly that Ming and I were doing all this fighting over this:

A bunch of plates and teacups.  Totally worth it;  definitely worth sending hundreds of thousands of men to die for.  On the other hand, what is my reward for getting control of all this porcelain, you know, besides a shiny achievement?

0.25 legitimacy per year.  Oh yeah.  Actually, I’ve been reading a biography about Napoleon recently, and the author pointed out that, while Napoleon is famous for a great many things, all throughout his reign he was a great patron of the arts, including painting, sculpture, and porcelain.  He used these artistic mediums to celebrate his glories and accomplishments, which served to (and the author directly pointed this out) legitimize his reign in the eyes of the people.  So I guess it does make sense that the trading in chinaware buff helps legitimize your monarch.  Paradox doesn’t miss a thing, do they?  (except small fort garrison/supply limit inconsistencies)

So there you have it:  mission accomplished.

But wait, there’s more!

I was having a lot of fun with this game, and after I accomplished the achievement run I asked myself “You know what would be really fun?  If I formed Germany and went revolutionary.”  I already had all the territory I needed to form Germany, but something was lacking.  In my humble opinion, I found Saxony’s national idea set to be pretty mediocre.  Not terrible, but I don’t think I’m being terribly radical when I say that most players would probably consider a different countries’ idea set to be the “real” German national ideas.  That country is Prussia.  Fortunately, Saxony is one of the illustrious few countries capable of forming Prussia.  Here are the two idea groups for comparison:

Saxony’s ideas:

And Prussia’s ideas:

No matter what you think of Saxony’s ideas, there is no question that Prussia’s national ideas are one of the best sets in the game.  They scream military conquest.  If you’re looking to kick ass and take names, you can’t do better than Prussia’s ideas.  As it happened, I already had all the requirements to form Prussia ready to go too:

Coincidentally, the day after I reformed I unlocked the “A Fine Goosestep” achievement.  Here are the idea groups I chose throughout this game:

As Prussia you get 7.5% discipline from you national idea set, and you can also get another 2.5% from being Protestant and picking the national church option that gives discipline for a total of 10%, and I got 5% from the offensive group, 5% from the quality group, and 5% from being an absolute monarchy.  You can also get an extra 5% from the economic-quality policy and from hiring a commandant.

The day after the achievement fired I swapped tags again into Germany.

Alright!  Now that I’m Germany, its time to kick off the revolution.  The Revolution is a disaster that can only happen after the year 1750, and in order to become the target of the revolution you have to

a) be western tech

b) have your capital in Europe

c) have at least 30 cities

d) not already be a republic

Well, I’ve already got those taken care of, so the last thing I needed to do to get the disaster to activate was lose stability.  How do you deliberately lose stability?  It easy:  just declare a no-cb war against someone.  Even if you have a cb against a particular target, you can always choose not to use it.  I declared on some small native American tribe with no friends.

Once the disaster is active the next thing you need to do is get it to progress.  There are several ways to do that, like have negative prestige or high war exhaustion, but the most reliable way to get it to trigger is to simply take out at least 25 loans.  Once thats done all you need to do is wait until the disaster fires (which will take about 8 years if you only do the loan thing.)  Once the revolution is officially started what you need to do then is let the revolutionary rebels occupy your capital.  There is a way to (kind of) cheese it.  Kill the initial rebel stack that spawns, and wait for one of two revolution events to pop up that give an option of having more revolutionary rebel stacks spawn.  It will tell you where they’re going to be, so you can move your capital to that province (which you can only do if you don’t already have any rebels active) and let the rebels occupy the province.  Voila, once the month ticks over you will become the target of the revolution.

Your country’s name will change to “revolutionary ___” (in my case revolutionary Germany,) your flag will swap to a revolutionary tri-color (I think revolutionary Germany’s flag is pretty cool.  It’s obviously based on their modern-day flag, if it were flipped upright instead of having horizontal stripes.) and your government will change to a revolutionary republic.  Pretty cool huh?  But why should we go through all this effort?  What do we get in exchange for going through all this trouble?  Well first of all becoming the target of the revolution gives you the best cb in the game,  “Spread the Revolution.”

It’s show superiority, everything is a part of the war goal, and everything is half cost!

Next, being the target of the revolution gives some pretty serious bonuses:

Look at that:  more morale, more manpower, HUGE land and naval force limit increases, and MASSIVE land and naval maintenance discounts.  You can also forget about war exhaustion too!  These bonuses will let you field an absolutely massive army on the cheap so you can put that spread the revolution cb to good use.  The revolution mechanic in this game is designed to represent the French Revolution, so all these bonuses are designed to represent the idea that this is the first nation in Europe to have a government that is for the people, by the people, and is thus able to really rally and mobilize the entire population to support it.

To get an idea of how powerful being the target of the revolution makes you, just check out my military and financial screens:

Wow, 500 land force limit.  Keep in mind that I hardly control any territory at all outside of Germany and all my German land is ~2000 development.  If I had been blobbing out like most players do these numbers would be even more ridiculous.  Here’s a final shot of the empire:

Due to my pursuit of the Meissen Porcelain achievement I had to put off starting the revolution until later, but playing around with revolutionary countries is a lot of fun simply because of all the crazy stuff you can get away with and I recommend that everyone try it at least once.  Too bad there’s no achievement for being the target of the revolution.  1750 might seem like really late in the game, and it is, but the game doesn’t end until 1820.  If you trigger the revolution as soon as it unlocks you could probably become the target by 1758, which would still give you 60 years to mess around with.  Plenty of time.

So there you have it.  Vive la Revolution!

Inca: A Sun God Part 5

Welcome to the fifth and final part of my Inca:  A Sun God run.

It’s 1655, we’ve just taken all of Brittany’s land in South America, and all I have to do now to wrap up this achievement run is to boot France and Spain out of South America, and take those two South Atlantic islands from Portugal.  No problem, right?

Unfortunately, I’m in a regency council right now, so I’ not gonna be picking fights with anyone anytime soon.  That’s ok though, as I have a lot of land to core now, some debt to pay back, and just in general need to recover from driving out those English invaders.  I crank up the speed to 11  5 and watch the time fly by.

The years blaze by and in 1662 the underwhelming 4/0/2 Yahuar Hacuac comes of age, and I find myself wondering, what exactly does a zero stat in diplomatic skill represent?  Is he really ugly?  Does he have a speech impediment?  Is he a selfish asshole that pisses off everyone he meets?  Perhaps he lacks that personal magnetism, that animal attraction that is so necessary for someone to be a leader of men, like Fredo from the Godfather.  Regardless of what the situation may be, my diplo tech is gonna be weak during his reign.

He did roll a pretty decent 3/4/2 heir though, who must be his brother since they are about the same age.  Too bad Tupac Hualpa wasn’t born first, heh.

After the first month ticks over after Yahuar became king the game remembered that this king has been educated, and his military stat gets boosted by 2, making him a little less terrible, but still below average.  I make him a general.

Now that I’m able to declare wars again I take a look around to see if there are any opportunities I can take advantage of, and to my surprise I see Spain losing a war against England.  If continental Spain is getting sieged down their army has got to be weak, and I found out the hard way how strong England’s navy is in the last war, so this is my chance to kick Spain while they’re down (karma’s a bitch, ain’t she) and take all of their Brazilian land from them.   I declare war in 1667.

As usual, the combined land armies of my enemies completely blow mine out of the water, except for the small but important detail that none of them have any transport ships!  Together Spain and Austria have a decently sized combat navy, but it looks like England’s navy did their job and crippled their ability to shuffle troops around.  Just like the war with France and Portugal, it doesn’t matter how big your army is if you can’t get to me!

In 1670 I make another technological breakthrough by researching  military tech 22, and unlock a new unit model along with it.  I gotta admit, I really like the new unit models for Incan units from the El Dorado content pack, especially this one.  Very cavalier.  Now we can kick some European ass with style!

The war with Spain and friends continues to go well, and not long after I unlock the new unit models I get the idea of buying fleet basing rights from someone in Europe/Northern Africa so I can start blockading Spanish ports and squeeze a little bit of extra warscore out of them.  This will cause them serious war exhaustion too, if I can maintain a 100% blockade, which will make them more “agreeable” when its time to negotiate peace.  Morocco is a hated enemy of Spain and is more than happy to sell me fleet basing rights for a pittance.

Sure enough, as soon as I move my navy in towards Spain’s homeland, I encounter their fleet off the coast of Africa.  You know what happens next:

The flower of the Spanish navy is sent to Davy Jones’ locker.

Coincidentally, right after I sink Spain’s fleet the English death fleet of over 120 ships shows up off the coast of Morocco.  Uh, yeah, remind me not to try to take on England’s navy anytime soon.

In 1671, only 6 years into the war, I finally finish sieging all of the land in Spanish Brazil.  It is a lot of land, but colonial nation provinces actually cost very little war score in peace deals and I’m not going to get any overextension from them, so really its just a matter now of getting enough war score against Spain to be able to take all of this land from them at once.  Blockades, don’t fail me now!

In the meantime, I’ve gained enough colonial range from settling the islands in the Pacific that I’m able to start colonizing the Philippines.  Trade from this node can be steered towards Panama, so this land will actually be useful.

In 1682 I was finally able to get Spain to give me most of what I wanted, but as it turns out there was simply too much land to be able to take it all in one war.  Hey, getting 63% war score against someone without even fighting any land battles against them or sieging any of their homeland is pretty impressive I think.  Finishing off Spanish Brazil will be no problem as soon as the truce runs out.

Here’s an overview shot of South America in 1682, after the war with Spain.  I’m closing in!

As it turns out, that last war with Spain finally made me big and strong enough for a European to want to ally with me!  I’m sure the fact that we were both rivals of Spain and France helped, but England decided that maybe the two of us could get along after all.  I’m willing to forgive and forget their invasion during the war with Breton la Plata if it means their boss navy will help me against Spain, Portugal and France.

Hey, check it out:  this time I actually did get some overextension this time.  Where did it come from?  While empty land that was colonized doesn’t give any OE, some of Brazil’s land was conquered from the South American tribes, and that land actually does give OE.  68% overextension from relatively few provinces;  I bet if all the land gave OE I’d be over 1000% overextended right now.  I’ll count myself lucky.

Not a moment too soon, my diplomatically inept king kicked the bucket in 1684, and his considerably better brother Tupac took the throne.  To make things even better, a few months after his ascendancy he rolls an amazing 5/4/6 heir!  Now THATS what I’m talking about!  Long live the king (but not too long.)

Now that all the excitement of the war with Spain and the succession are over, its time to complete my original plan, and move my trade capital into the Caribbean node:

I don’t control any centers of trade in the Caribbean, but simply by having my light ships protect trade in this node I’m able to cut 41% of the trade power in this node for myself.  I haven’t made jack shit from trade this whole game, and this move more than triples my trade income.  I guess this just goes to show how wealthy/important the Caribbean is to anyone wanting to make money from trade.  Usually whoever controls the Caribbean ends up being the wealthiest country in the game.

Thanks to my Pacific Asian colonies I’m able to pass the “Create Indian Trade Company” decision for a nice extra merchant and global trade power.

Here is a shot of what Southeast Asia looks like.  Almost every single one of the little islands in Oceania was colonized by me, along with the entirety of the Philippines and Taiwan, all of which generate a decent chunk of change that gets moved toward the Caribbean.  Interestingly, and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this before, but the world actually ran out of empty land to colonize!  There are only a handful of provinces left in Southeast Asia, and all of the Americas and Africa have been claimed, leaving only the Pacific coast of Siberia left untouched.  Well, I have no interest in setting up shop in Siberia (way too cold for me) so I end up repealing the expansion-quantity policy that gives an extra colonist.  I simply don’t need him anymore.

I start to scan Europe again, looking for another opportunity to stick it to the Europeans, when I notice France has run into a bit of trouble.  Fighting against England and Austria?  It looks like the War of the Second Coalition started about 100 years early.  Nevertheless, the time to strike is now.

In 1694 I declare war on French Columbia using my holy war cb (I haven’t discovered imperialism yet) and my third war against France begins.  I also unlock the offensive idea group not long after the war starts.  I expect this to play out just like all the others wars I’ve fought against Europe.  In fact, dare I say that this game is starting to get a little repetitive.

While I’m technically not allied with England in this war, England IS at war with France, and to my delight I see the English fleet engage the French fleet off the coast of Columbia, which was almost certainly headed for Panama (again.)  Man, the Europeans just can’t leave that place alone.  I move my own fleet in to join the English in that battle (they only had light ships and were actually starting to lose) but afterwards I realized that was a mistake:  England got credit for the battle, and it didn’t even appear on my own war progress screen, nor did it contribute to getting the show superiority cb to start ticking in my favor.  I don’t know if that was a bug, but it was disappointing, because now the French fleet was destroyed, and I’m sure as hell not sending any of my troops over to France to fight them there, so now I have no idea how I’m going to get any more battle victories to get war score ticking in my favor.

Here’s the war overview screen after France’s fleet got sunk.  I’ve made some serious blunders here:  I accidentally let one of my small siege stacks get wiped by a French Columbian army that came out of nowhere and I accidentally misclicked during a naval battle and made my navy RETREAT from a battle I was WINNING, but still counted as a “loss” as far as the show superiority cb goes and now was score was actually ticking in France’s favor.  Jaysus, I screwed that up.  The thing about the show superiority cb is that you have to win 80% of battles in order to get it, and the more battles that are fought, the more wins you need to hit that threshold.  One battle and one win is 100%, so you’d get it.  If you won one and lost one, that’s 50%, and you won’t get it.  If you fight a third battle and win that’s 66%  and you wont get it.  Fight a fourth battle and win and that’s 75% and you still won’t get it.  See what I mean?  Those two blunderous mistakes have cost me the ability to get warscore ticking in my favor, and have possibly botched this whole war for me.  Whoops.

As soon as the war started I was always on the lookout for the Commonwealth’s fleet, and I could not find it anywhere.  As it turns out, they must have made a beeline for my colonies in the Philippines as soon as the war started, which isn’t really dangerous, but it is annoying.  I need to squeeze every point of war score that I can get, and moving troops all the way over here is going to be a huge pain in the ass.  Oh well, if this is how they want to play ball, then so be it.

To add insult to injury after my botched opening to this war, my amazing heir fell ill and died.  That always seems to happen when you’ve got a great king on deck, doesn’t it?

Woah, what is this?  It looks like England’s colony in Mexico got a little rebellious and scored the support of Portugal and their huge colonial empire in their independence war.  I’m allied with England so I got called into this war against English Mexico and Portugal right in the middle of my war against France.  This could get interesting.  I debated for a bit whether to actually do anything to help this war, and originally decided not to, because I don’t really care whether Mexico stays under English control, but Mexico absolutely insisted on sending troops to attack my land and I had to put my foot down.  I just gotta be careful not to let Portugal sink my navy with their absolutely massive fleet.  See all those ships?  70 heavies and 414 lights?  Almost all of those are Portugal’s.  Even together England and I will have a hell of a time taking that down.

In 1705 I research admin tech 20 and swap to my second favorite government type, an Absolute Monarchy.  My favorite government type is the Revolutionary Empire, but that isn’t accessible until very late in the game and I hardly ever get to use it.  It is really fun though when you do.

Well what do we have here?  Portugal manages to accomplish what France and Spain could not:  they manage to land troops in South America, in the tip of Brazil.  Perfect timing for them, as all my troops are currently off fighting the Mexicans in Mexico.  Awesome.

In 1707 I decide to cut my losses with France and make peace for only half of French Columbia’s land.  I had hoped to take more of it, but for reasons previously stated and with this new war with Portugal and Mexico going on I figured it would probably be for the best if I just took what I got and ran and tried again later (and not screwing it up that time.)

Here’s South America in 1708, after signing peace with France:

As it turns out, less than a year after I made peace with France the Mexicans decided that maybe life under English rule wasn’t so bad after all and made peace with England, staying a colony.  At the same time a new heir to my throne springs up and disappoints everyone with his 1/1/5 stats.  I’m still pissed the 5/4/6 dropped dead.  (not really)

A few years go by and my truce with Spain expires.  You know what that means.  Hey, England will even join in straight off the bat this time.  Also, I unlocked the imperialism cb during the down time, so getting ticking war score will be very easy now.  No more show superiority screw ups.

Its funny, even with our two empires combined, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Austrians still have our land armies completely dwarfed, yet we control the seas, rendering their huge armies useless against us.  Well, we will rule the seas as soon as we take down Portugal’s massive, massive navy.  I can’t believe that such a small country can afford to own that many ships AND keep control of their colonial nations, most of whom are much stronger than the parent country.  /shrug

I strike a double whammy against Portugal in the opening months of the war:  I sink their fleet off the coast of Brazil, while their army was disembarking from it, killing all those troops in the process.  You’ll notice that I had an army placed to intercept them anyway, just in case they did manage to make landfall.

Ah, I got a little lucky here.  I was worried that England was going to foolishly land troops in continental Europe and get massacred by the alliance, but they instead wisely chose to go after Spain and Portugal’s colonies in North America.  Nice, now I don’t have to worry about Alaska, California, Louisiana and New Spain sending armies to attack me.

In 1721 I finally get around to unlocking the economics idea group.  Its a little late in this game for this to really matter, but hey, I said I was gonna take it (eventually.)

In 1722 I was up to my fleet-basing-rights-fueled naval shenanigans in the Mediterranean when I found and sank the majority of the Spanish fleet, and found the Spanish army.  It turns out they’ve been hanging out in Northern Africa all this time.  That’s probably the biggest weakness of the Spanish AI in this game:  Spain looks really strong on paper, but they like to spread their troops out all over the world, and its difficult for the AI to get their troops to where they really need them, especially if they’re up against a human and the player sinks their navy (hue hue.)  Oh well, I like to think of this as payback for what they did to me back before I westernized.

After what ended up being a really short war and a crushing victory for the Incan/English alliance, I take the rest of Spanish Brazil’s land, the two islands in the South Atlantic held by Portugal, and a couple of islands in the Caribbean, including the center of trade on Hispaniola.  I’m really rocking and rolling now!

Here’s a shot of my empire after I make peace with Spain/Portugal for the last time.

In 1723 my extraordinarily below average heir takes the throne and brings his slightly more average heir to court with him.  This game is pretty much over now, though, so I don’t really care what my monarch’s stats are anymore.

Here’s a questionable phenomenon:  Curacao, and all of the other islands in the Caribbean are considered “distant overseas” despite Curacao literally almost touching my domestic territory in South America and sharing a sea node.  The Caribbean islands are all flagged as being in North America, and apparently the only way to make them considered domestic territory is to move your capital to North America.  I could move my capital to Panama (which is a part of North America) but I’m still not 100% confident that I could keep that province safe, and even after all this time I’m still vulnerable to the capture and ransom of the Sapa Inca event.  I already have four cores in the Caribbean, and I’m pretty sure that a fifth would trigger the creation of a colonial nation, which I don’t want, so I’m just gonna have to leave Curacao uncored until I figure out what I’m gonna do.  At least it doesn’t give any overextension.

Despite the islands being “distant overseas,” gaining control over that center of trade in Hispaniola rockets my trade power in the Caribbean node to 64% and now I’m rolling in money.  Just as importantly, this means that Spain and Portugal are not getting that money anymore.

By 1730 I’ve finished coring those Spanish and Portuguese provinces (except Curacao) and it’s time for the final blow.  I declare war on France, using the imperialism cb against whats left of French Columbia.

As usual, the French fleet is spotted and quickly sunk a few months into the war, this time off the coast of Brazil.  Looks like they were trying to unload 47 units onto my territory, which would have been a huge pain to deal with, but its a moot point because nobody got off those ships alive.

After their death fleet was dealt with, I continued my fleet basing rights fueled shenanigans and blockaded all of France’s European territory.  Look at that war score!  19% from just a couple naval battles and the blockades.  Never underestimate the importance of blockading enemies.

Wow, check out this shit:  France somehow rolled a 6/6/6/1 god general.  Its like Aries himself decided to lend France a helping hand in this war.  I’m so glad I don’t have to win a land war against them;  there’s a reason why France is often considered to be this game’s “end boss.”

While maintaining the blockade I sink a couple more French fleets and the Commonwealth’s meager navy until at last there aren’t any more enemy ships sailing about, and with my blockades in place there won’t be any more rolling off the assembly line, either.  It’s just a matter of waiting until everybody else loses their will to fight now.

I have no idea how they did it, but France did manage to land 10 units over by Panama (I no rite?) and I moved to deal with them.  Look at those combat stats:  they have a full three points of morale more than my own armies, and that’s while I’m ahead in tech!  I couldn’t even imagine fighting a pitched battle against them.  I actually am not sure whether I could beat that.

At long last, in 1739, France is willing to make peace and I take all of French Columbia’s remaining land and thus complete the “A Sun God” achievement.  The text says you’re supposed to have a core on everything, but I got the achievement to fire as soon as the land came under my control.  Here’s a shot of the empire:

Overall, this was a pretty fun game.  It was pretty interesting to navigate the diplomatic labyrinth of the pre-Columbian Andean kingdoms and the new Inti mechanics added a lot of flavor to what might have otherwise been a bland experience.  There were a lot of exciting and frustrating go-big-or-go-home moments when the Europeans showed up and decided that South America wasn’t big enough for the both of us, and it was really rewarding to stick it to the Europeans by sinking their navies and making a mockery of their land power.  Originally I had intended to take things a step further and go for an Incan Sunset Invasion, but the Common Sense dlc has been out for a while now and I’d like to start exploring that, so its time to move on.  I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed playing it, and remember, Praise the Sun!

Here are some end game shots of the empire and government tabs:

Inca: A Sun God Part 4

Welcome to part 4 of my Inca:  A Sun God play through.

It’s 1575, and we’ve just completed our westernization and a brutal war against Spain that seemed like it would never end.  After 12 years I lucked out and managed to make peace for a handful of ducats while keeping all of my territory intact.  I still have no idea how that happened, but hey, I’ll take whatever luck I can get.  Anyway, here’s an overview shot of my empire, immediately after westernizing and making peace with Spain:

All things considered, I’m actually pretty well off, despite all the bullshit that war with Spain is making me have to deal with.  I’ve almost got Columbia and Brazil sealed off from the Europeans, and wimpy little Brittany is the only one colonizing Argentina.  Even better, now that I’m western I should be safe from European aggression for the time being.  Their colonial conquest cb no longer applies to me, they can’t fabricate claims, and since I don’t directly border them they can’t use their holy war cb’s against me either.  They shouldn’t really be able to get a cb against me until imperialism shows up at diplo tech 22, but by the time that rolls around I will be much stronger and better able to defend myself.

As usual, here is the customary Tour-of-Europe-Right-After-We-Discover-It picture.  Nothing terribly out of the ordinary here.  Austria got the Burgundian inheritance and seems to be doing well.  Spain got the full Iberian wedding stuff and controls Naples, the Commonwealth is blobbing out, Russia has formed and is also blobbing out, Norway and Sweden have declared independence from Denmark, and the Ottomans are kicking some serious ass in the Middle East.  England and France actually seem to be a little bit behind, as Scotland and Brittany are still independent, but it’s probably only a matter of time until the AI’s fix those problems.  Brandenburg also seems to be blobbing out in the NE corner of the Holy Roman Empire.  Overall, I’d say this is a typical Europe.

Back home, now that I’m western I can finally start seriously researching techs for myself.  I have enough points to reach admin tech 10, diplo tech 11 and military tech 10, with a 20-25% discount remaining for each category.  I’m still way behind Europe, but with these discounts it won’t be long until I’m competitive with them.

Hitting admin tech 10 unlocks the third idea group slot, for which I choose the Quantity idea group.  Aside from quantity probably being the best military idea group in the game (running out of manpower has been a chronic problem for me this entire game so far) this group actually unlocks a nifty policy when finished that gives an extra colonist, which I definitely want.  If you’re playing any country that wants to colonize a lot, Exploration -> Expansion -> Quantity is an opening combo that can’t be beat.

While being western now is all fine and dandy, we are actually exposed to a new problem now…

We control a LOT of gold provinces, and now that we’re not primitives anymore we’re getting the full amount of gold generated from them, which in turn produces a LOT of inflation.  0.18% per year, wow.  While there are no immediate solutions to this, it IS something to keep an eye on.  No matter who you’re playing as, the major inflation threshold to watch out for is 15%.  Being above that number opens up some very nasty economic events, so make sure you stay below that, and try not to take out any loans.

Actually, I like this game’s inflation mechanic very much.  I studied economics in college, so I have a strong understanding of fiscal and monetary policy and how all of that fits together and affects the overall economy, and Europa Universalis IV is one of the few games that gets it right.  In its simplest form, inflation is nothing but the steady destruction of a currency’s purchasing power, which is mainly caused by an increase in the money supply in circulation without a corresponding, equivalent increase in the real “wealth” (goods and services produced) of an economy.  The two main ways inflation is generated in this game is by owning gold mines and taking out loans, both of which represent cash infusions without corresponding productivity increases, and all inflation does is make everything that costs money more expensive, so this accurately represents the real world.  Nice job Paradox!  Anyway, I’m getting off topic, so there’s your economics lesson for the day.

About a year after I unpause the game, I get a giant stroke of luck:  the “Monopoly Company Formed” event pops up, and they’ll pay me  huge sum of money.  Thanks guys, you just paid off all the debt I had to take on during the war with Spain!  Here I was just talking about cash infusions and inflation, but this event generates no inflation.

Oh boy, here is comes:  France and Portugal waste no time in declaring me their rivals.  Really guys?  Am I really that threatening to your power?  So much for ever scoring any European alliances.

Wow, REALLY?  A few months earlier I had a pretty unlucky event pop up that gave France a free claim on one of my provinces.  I didn’t take a screenshot of the event because I didn’t think it was important enough, but France wasted no time in using that claim to declare war on me.  I am so not ready for this war.  It’s only been four years since the war with Spain ended and I haven’t recovered yet.  I was able to pay off my loans thanks to that awesome monopoly company event, but I haven’t been able to build very many ships yet to defend myself and my land army still leaves a lot to be desired, not that I would stand a chance at beating France in a land war at this point anyway.  France has unlocked all of her national ideas, so France’s famous Elan combined with their prestige, army tradition and tech bonuses my armies would start a battle with half of France’s morale, and there’s no way in hell I could beat that.  For now I’m just gonna have to bend over and take whatever France sends my way.

As it turns out, it wouldn’t really matter much even if I had a fleet capable of sinking the French’s right now, as that exploring army of 20k men is still running around and will soon be unexiled.  This could get ugly.

To make things even more fun, France called their inexplicable ally Brittany into the war too!

Here’s the situation a couple of years into the war.  I’ve pretty much tried to avoid fighting the French, as (like I said before) they would slap my armies silly and there’s not really any point to engaging them other than to waste manpower and money.  Just like in the Spanish war I’m being attacked in both the north and in the east, so all I can really do is try to take down whatever Breton stacks (who are much weaker than France) show up and reclaim what I can.  As you can see, things aren’t really going well for me.

Wow, not long after I took that last screen shot I get what I would call another bout of luck.  As it turns out, despite occupying quite a bit of my land, even land adjacent to their colonial nation, all France wants out of me is war reparations and the province they lucked their way into a claim on.  Fine, they can have it, as long as they leave me alone so I can build up.  That’s twice now I’ve made it through wars with the Europeans with relatively few losses on my part.

Actually, despite all the bullshit of getting slapped around by Spain and France, at this point I’m feeling really good about this play through.  I am 100% positive that I’ll succeed in getting the achievement now, and even though it might not seem like things are going so well, they actually are, all things considered.  So, having said that, I think now would be a good time to talk about the Incans themselves as a country (which I’ve neglected to do so far, shame on me.)

Here are the Incan ideas (courtesy of the wiki, which I “borrowed” this picture from) which, by themselves, I would call only an average set.  While they may not have the raw power of the more popular nations, there is actually a pretty strong theme to them, and they synergize well with the situation we Incans find ourselves in.  First of all, the Incan traditions are very good.  Extra force limits and discounted idea costs are excellent and really are a boon towards conquering the Andes and filling out that exploration tree ASAP.  As far as the military goes the Incans get an extra free upkeep leader, 10% reduced attrition, 10% extra manpower, and 2.5% discipline.  Keep in mind that in addition to these we also get the bonuses from the Inti reforms, adding an extra 10% manpower recovery speed and 10% army morale to the mix, AND we also have the Royal Guard buff for even more discipline and morale.  There are a lot of moving parts here, but it is entirely possible for the Incans to have a competitive military once tech parity is attained.

The rest of the national ideas are all economically focused.  The passive prestige and the building power and money cost reduction scream to me one thing:  you are a builder.  Not a trader, or a conqueror, but a builder.  Building up your provinces also ties into another aspect of the Incan situation:  the trade network in South America is really weak for countries actually in South America.  Obviously, the continent is *supposed* to be conquered and colonized by the Europeans and the layout of the trade nodes fits into that view:

All of the trade from the western half of the continent flows towards the Caribbean, while all of the trade from the eastern half flows towards the Ivory Coast, so unless you expand outside of South America, you will never be a great trading power.  The solution to this, of course, is to go with the Economic idea group and focus on boosting the tax and production money you make, which happens to synergize perfectly with the 10% tax boost and 10% production efficiency the Incans enjoy.

Finally, the Inti reforms give a free colonist, really helping out with settling the continent, and also give a 10% discount to coring costs.  It would seem to me that this set of national ideas, when combined with the Inti reform bonuses, are practically begging you to take exploration, expansion, economic and a couple of military quality boosting idea groups and focus your game around colonization, internal development, and late game conquest.  As it turns out, that is exactly what I’m going to do.

Note:  Originally, I was going to put in a big, long discussion of how I go about constructing buildings and internally developing my land  in this game, but since I played this run and wrote this part Paradox released the “Common Sense” dlc expansion, which happened to completely overhaul the way countries develop internally.  After messing around with the new mechanics I’ve concluded that all my advice has been rendered obsolete, so I will now only do a brief fly-over of what I did and why.  Who knows, maybe some of my advice can still be carried over to the new system.

Here are the buildings from the old system (sorry for the workshop covering up a bunch of them, but this was the only picture I could find, and the wiki has changed their site to cover the new buildings.)

Under the old system, provinces could have as many buildings as they want from the basic buildings section, but only one set of buildings from the special buildings section, so you sort of had to choose how to “specialize” your provinces.

From the government row, I build temples in every province.  They give a flat base tax which directly increases your income and force limits.  The rest of the government buildings I would build only in my capital, and only for the espionage defense, in case the AI’s actually used any espionage missions against me (they usually don’t.)  The special buildings from the government tab, particularly the Cathedral, give extra missionary strength, so I would build those in high base tax provinces that I’m not able to religiously convert without the extra boost.

From the army row, I build all of the basic buildings in every province, starting with same culture, same religion provinces.  They give a flat boost and later a percentage boost to manpower, and when built everywhere can dramatically increase your manpower pool.  The special buildings are more focused in their use.  Ideally what I would do is designate around ten provinces to be my “recruitment center,”  build these in those provinces, and recruit all my troops from them as they significantly reduce the cost of unit recruitment, which in turn reduces the upkeep cost, so you could make armies much cheaper to maintain with a little planning.

From the navy row, I almost never build any of these, except (similar to the army buildings) for about ten or so provinces where I will build all of the buildings and use them as my naval recruitment center, for the same reasons as the army buildings.

From the production row, I build the first two buildings (constable and workshop) in every province.  They give a flat and percentage boost to the quantity of goods produced in a province, respectively, which gives more money and also increases the trade value in their node, so you can make more money that way too.  The rest of the buildings, including the special buildings, I build only in gold producing provinces, as they are usually the only provinces worth getting all that extra increased percent good production in.  Also, (I almost forgot) I build all of the basic production buildings in my army recruitment centers, as the fourth building lowers recruitment costs.

From the trade row, I build all of the buildings only in provinces that already have a significant boost to trade power (important centers of trade, estuaries, etc.)  You can completely dominate a trade node simply by controlling the important trade provinces and buildings these buildings in them.

From the fort tab, I almost never build forts, anywhere.  In this game I’ve just been using them for the “fortify x province” mission.  Generally, if your own provinces are getting sieged, you’re losing.

None of the unique buildings exist anymore, but I always build all of them (except the march) as soon as I can afford it.  So there you have it:  Shoot the Moon’s guide to constructing buildings in EUIV (prior to Common Sense.)

Anyway, back to the game.

Here’s another overview shot of the continent after the war with France.  Not much has changed from the earlier shot, but you can see I’m slowly making progress in locking down the continent.  I’ve actually sealed off the interior of the Amazon basin, but there are still a handful of provinces between me and Spanish Brazil that I can claim.

Ugh, there is one consequence of these wars:  all the money I’m having to pay out in war reparations.  I’ve having to fork over 14 gold a month to France and Spain!  That’s 20% of my total income.  Oh well, its only money;  one of the less important resources in the game.  Manpower and monarch points are more precious to me than mere cash.  Actually, I once saw somebody on reddit claim that, when you get down to it, money is more important than manpower and monarch points.  After all, this is a war game, and you can’t field an army if you don’t have any money.  The only limit to how big of an army you can field is how big your income is.  Force limits are only a soft cap;  the real cap is when you go bankrupt.  Money can also be converted into manpower, via mercenaries.  Money can also be converted into monarch points, although only a few, via high level advisors.  I suppose in the end they are all important, but money is the easiest to get  and the easiest to recover from a loss of.  Manpower takes forever to recover naturally, and there’s no way to get it beyond letting it grow back on its own, and I’m sure we’ve all had to deal with the frustration of a 0/1/0 monarch that won’t die.  Heh, just look at some of the leaders I was getting towards the end of my Timurids game.

A couple of years after the war with France I decide that I’m teching up my military tech too slowly.  I need to be ready to handle the Europeans if any of them come knocking, and my zero military skill monarch is really hurting that effort, so I swap my national focus to military, and I’ll probably leave it there until I’m caught up in tech and finish the quantity idea group.  I had hoped to keep it set to admin to help with teching up, coring and paying down inflation, but like I said my monarch’s incompetency is hurting me and being able to defend myself always takes priority over economic stability and technological progress (if you have to choose.)

After I get my empire back on its feet and enter what will hopefully be a golden age of peace, prosperity and colonial expansion, I take another look around Europe and see something alarming:  Portugal’s unholy network of alliances.  They’re allied with Spain, France AND England.  How is that even possible?  Don’t tell me that this is going to be the one game where the western Europeans aren’t constantly beating each other up and instead decide to hold hands and sing Kumbaya.  The Europeans weaken themselves by constantly being at war with each other, and more importantly stay distracted from me, so hopefully this alliance network won’t hold for long.  Note to self:  don’t attack Portugal.

Praise the Sun!  In 1589 my craptacular heir dies.  The only problem now is that my king is 58 years old with no heir.  Will he be able to sire a new heir before his own demise, or will a new dynasty take the throne?

Later in 1589 I finish filling out the Expansion idea group.  I now have an overpowered cb against Asian nations I have no intention of using, but more importantly…

…having completed the Exploration and Expansion idea groups opens up a useful policy:  The Colonial Expansion Act.  For the mere cost of 1 diplo point a month, I get an extra +20 annual global settlers, which is a pretty substantial boost to my colonial growth rate.  This is definitely one of the most useful policies, at least if you’re playing a colonial game.

As it turns out, my king could not sire a new heir, so when he kicked the bucket in 1591 a new dynasty took the throne, tanking their legitimacy in the process.  On the other hand, the new king (named Huayna Capac, right on!) as pretty decent stats at 3/3/4.  Huayna Capac was the leader of the Incan Empire in Civilization IV, which is probably my favorite game of all time, so just imagine that this is the guy running my country right now:  (this is his leader head from Civ IV)

He’ll play ceremonial ball with you, if you’ll play ceremonial ball with him, if you know what I mean.

In 1594 I research the pivotal military tech 12.  As I’m sure you know, this doesn’t only mean an increased tactics level, it also means a new unit model:

Aw yeah, check that out.  If I had to imagine what Incan musketeers would look like, this would be it.  Actually, they look really similar to Huayna Capac’s portrait’s outfit.  Nevertheless, I think we can all agree that my troops are definitely rockin’ a new groove.

As it turns out, new uniforms wasn’t the only significant thing to happen in 1594.  This year is the year I managed to officially seal off the interior of northern South America from the Europeans, and I can now colonize this land at my leisure with no pressure from the rest of the world.  Now to focus southwards.

Here’s a shot of what the southern half of the continent looks like.  I’ve got almost the entire Chilean coast under my control, and my tentacles are closing in on Breton La Plata.  It’s amazing how quickly you can colonize land with four colonists running around the clock.

Seeing how I’m closing in on Breton La Plata, I get curious about where Brittany is diplomatically, just to get an idea of how easy they might be to conquer.  I pull them up on the diplo screen, and to my horror, they also have an unholy alliance network of their own, being allied with France AND England.  Seriously, what is going on?  France and England, you guys are supposed to hate Brittany!  Looks like Breton La Plata is off the (dinner) table for now too.  Something’s gotta happen to break up these lovefest alliances.

While I was scoping things out diplomatically I check out the military page on the ledger, and to my surprise learn that I actually have the fourth largest army in the world.  No wonder France and Portugal were quick to rival me;  my army is even bigger than France’s!  Spain is still stronger than me though, and Austria and the Ottomans have massive armies.  I might look good on paper, but I’m still behind in tech and the Europeans still have way better troop quality than I do.

In 1587 a new heir pops up, this one named Cavillaca with pretty decent 4/3/4 stats.  I’m happy with him;  may he live forever.

God dammit, in 1600 France somehow lucks their way into another event-generated claim on my territory and, as usual, they immediately declare war on me for it.  I’m still not 100% confident that I can take the Europeans on in a war, let alone France, but I *am* a lot stronger now than I was the last time we tangoed.

I made a few references to the game Dark Souls during the first part of the write up, and with all these European powerhouse war declarations beating down on me, this run is starting to feel more and more like a Dark Souls game.

Spain would definitely be the Asylum Demon, the tutorial boss that takes you completely by surprise and pounds you into the ground without you being able to do anything about it:

Then I would say that the first war against France and Brittany was like the Gargoyle fight, still early on before you know what you’re doing, and kind of cheesy since it springs a 2v1 fight on you.

Hehehe, the gods must be angry about France’s war declaration on me, because later that year they make Huaynaputina erupt, spitting so much ash into the sky that it completely tanks the value of all that French wine.  At least it does for two years.

Anyway, back to the actual game itself.  The reason why I have a fighting chance this time is around is because all of France’s troops are in France, so they’re going to have to ship them all over here to wage war on me.  By this point, I’ve had all the time I need to build a navy of my own (around 60 ships, with 30 of them being heavies) so what I need to do is hunt down the French and Portuguese navies and sink them.  Hopefully I’ll be able to hit them separately, as they would own me if they combined forces, but if I can manage to sink all their transports I can siege French Columbia’s land and they won’t be able to do anything about it.  For a few months after the war started all I did was slow the game speed down and constantly scan the coasts of South America for any signs of enemy ships.  In January of 1601, the main French fleet shows up along the coast of Chile.

Victory!  While I wasn’t able to sink the French fleet before their first wave of invading armies landed, I was able to position my own armies to intercept them as they made landfall, slamming them with the nasty -2 landing attack penalty.  My armies emerge victorious, and all I had to do was outnumber them two to one.  It also helped that their army didn’t have a general leading it.  Look at the casualties from that battle screen.  The French have so much more morale than me that they almost fought down to the last man before finally breaking.  At least this stack will be easily wiped in the next province, and now that I know where their ships are, they won’t be landing any armies a second time.

Just as I expected, my fleet engages the French fleet as they make their return trip near the Magellan Strait, and I sink all of their transports and 16 of their heavies while losing only a few ships of my own.  This war just ended:  France loses.

Here’s a show of the war screen, and on it we can see that France has no transport ships left.  Portugal itself only has 7.  The only enemy combatant that can even send a meaningful number of troops to attack me is Portugal’s colonial nation Caraibas, and so far there’s no sign of them anywhere.  Hey guys, it doesn’t matter if your land army is twice the size of mine if you can’t get to me!

A few months later I spot the Portuguese fleet moving along the coast of Brazil, and I engage and sink their fleet too.  I’ve got complete naval dominance now, and I should be completely safe from their attacks now.

A couple of  years go by without much in the way of action, and then I notice these guys causing trouble down in Brazil, way far away from where my armies are.  I have no idea where they came from.  Did France actually have a few guys in Columbia and they took the scenic route through Brazil to get to me?  Has France constructed a new toy fleet and is sending token amounts of soldiers to fight me?  They’re never going to beat me that way, what are they thinking?

Well I guess I spoke too soon, because while I was marching my armies down to Brazil from Venezuela (take forever why dont’cha) France did reinforce that little stack with another little stack from their new fleet they built.  In a foolish move I attacked them without my full strength into a couple of combat penalties and, well, I paid for it.  Beating that first French army doesn’t mean that my troops are now invincible.  Silly mistake on my part, and I knew before the battle started that I probably should have waited for a better opportunity to attack.  Never gamble on battle outcomes in this game.  If you are playing in what I would call a correct manner, you should already know how each battle is going to end before it even begins (unless you get EXTREMELY unlucky with the dice rolls.)  Anyway, letting my armies be defeated opens me up to…

Another long retreat!  It still blows my mind how far defeated armies will run in South America.  Its going to take months to recover and march all the way back to Brazil.  If you look closely at that picture, though, in the corner you can see that my fleet is engaging the second French fleet.

There we go, the second invading French army is wiped out in 1607, only two years after my blunderous lost battle.  It took that long for my armies to recover and then get back to the front lines.  Don’t carelessly lose battles!

In 1608, after 8 years of fighting, Portugal has had enough and is willing to sign a white peace.  This is awesome, as now I don’t have to worry about any more marauding fleets or small stacks annoyingly showing up at the other side of the continent at the wrong moment.  Caraibas never did send any troops (or ships) to fight me.  It’s just me and France now, mano a mano.

In 1610 I make another breakthrough in the war effort:  I research military tech 15, a landmark tech that gives both a tactics increase and a gigantic full point increase to morale.  France already had this tech all along, and is one of the reasons why their stacks have been so hard to take down, but this will really help even the odds.

Just as soon as I thought I was safe again, and that the French armies in South America had been destroyed, another small stack gets dropped off in Venezuela.  While this stack isn’t scary to me at all anymore, this does mean that France has built a third fleet somewhere and smacking down all these stacks is distracting me from being able to siege back my land.  If you look closely you can see that, once again, I am completely drained of manpower.  But hey, at least I’m winning the war!  If you’re wondering how so much of my territory has fallen under French control, it’s because all of these colonized provinces start with level 1 forts (remember, this is before Common Sense came out) and with their Offensive tree bonus and their lucky nation bonus France starts out every siege with a positive chance to win, so they are occupying my territory hilariously fast even with these tiny stacks.  And since it takes s long to move from one side of the continent to the other, that gives them the time they need to do that.

There we go, I spot the third French fleet sailing up the coast of Chile again and manage to sink it without much trouble.

Hooray!  In 1611 I reclaim Darien from French occupation and them losing all that ticking warscore shifts me all the way to +21% warscore, and France is willing to make peace.  In the peace treaty I take back my core that they stole from me earlier on, I make them pay me war reparations, and I also take Cartagena and Panama, both of the important centers of trade in the Panama node.  This is a pretty monumental moment, as this proves that we Incans CAN win wars against the Europeans, and I doubt France’ll come back knocking on our door after this.  Maybe finally we will be left alone now to build up.

Getting those war reparations is kind of a big deal, as now I’m getting 10 ducats a month from France.  That’s 11% of my entire income!  Getting those two new provinces are also kind of a big deal, as now I have ports I can base fleets out of on the north coast, so I can send ships into the Caribbean without all of them dying to attrition.  We’re really movin’ up in the world!

If I had to give an mvp award to anyone in the Incan army, it would definitely go to this guy:  Admiral Taraque Ninancoro.  While he might look like he sucks with his underwhelming 1/0/1 stats, gaining and keeping naval superiority over the Europeans was absolutely critical to me winning this war, and my ships under this guy’s leadership did their job flawlessly.  In those clutch naval battles, even having a crappy admiral like this guy is better than having no admiral at all, and he may have made all the difference between victory and defeat.  Having said all that, I don’t need him anymore so I dismiss him from active duty.  Maybe he can honorably retire to a seaside village or something.

Now that the war is over and things are calming down again I do what I should have done a while ago, and swap to an administrative monarchy.

Just as with the previous wars I’ve fought, my colonization efforts continued unimpeded throughout that whole war against France, and by the time the war ended I had finished sealing off the Northern half of Argentina from Breton La Plata.  There are only a handful of empty provinces left up for grabs in the southern tip of South America now.

Here’s an overview shot of the continent after the second war with France ended:

Like I said, good progress is being made, and I’ve almost got the whole continent secured by now.  That name placement is making my eyes bleed, though.

One last thing I do before cranking the game speed back up and ushering a new age of peace and prosperity is swap my trade capital to Cartagena.  While I don’t have absolute control over this node like I do in Peru, trade from my empire can flow into this node, and trade from Mexico also flows into this node, so despite having less percent power here the node itself is much wealthier and I’ll actually make more money this way.  Also, now that I have those Caribbean ports I can send my light ships to protect trade in this region and put them to work earning me money during peacetime.

I figured that this would happen sooner or later, but Spain also declared me to be their rival.  The only western European superpower that doesn’t hate my guts is England.

A few years fly by and in 1621 I finally complete my goal of sealing off the interior of South America from the Europeans.  They are done colonizing in South America and all of that empty land is mine, all mine.  To get the Sun God achievement it looks like I’m gonna have to take down Brittany, Spain, France and Portugal (for those island provinces I need to get.)  I actually don’t need to take any land from England, and they haven’t rivaled me, so maybe I could score an alliance with them and use their navy to help me out?  We’ll see.

In 1623 I research admin tech 14 and unlock my fourth idea group slot, which brings me to a kind of crossroads in this game.  I need to make two major decisions, and my choices here will have a pretty big impact on how the rest of this game plays out.  The first decision is whether I want to continue to play peacefully and keep teching up, or if I want to get an early start on booting the Europeans out of South America.  If I choose peace, I’ll go with the economic idea group to boost income and make building buildings cheaper, but if I choose war I’m gonna need a way to deal with religious disunity.

The other choice, which I’m going to need to make sooner or later anyway, is for how exactly I’m going to handle the religious disunity that conquering the colonial nations will bring.  As I’m sure everyone who reads this report already knows, there are two ways to deal with religion in this game:  the Humanist idea group or the Religious idea group.  Humanism is all about tolerance and Religious is all about conversion.  From a pure strategic standpoint, the pagan religions (like my Inti religion) favor the humanism group, as pagan religions get access to a couple of decisions that lower global revolt risk, but get absolutely no buffs to conversion speed, which synergizes very well with the live and let live tolerance and further reduced revolt risk ideas of the humanism group.  On the other hand, the religious group gives access to the awesome Deus Vult cb, which will give me the cb I need to get an early start attacking the Europeans and being able to take whatever land I want without having to pay diplo points for it.

In the end, I decide I want to start taking the fight to the Europeans sooner rather than later, and I want access to that cb now, and besides, how can you go after an achievement named “A Sun God” without taking the religious group?  I might be doing a little roleplaying here, but hey, this is my game, and I do what I want.

In 1621 Cavilla ascends the throne, and as it turns out, Cavillaca is a female name.  Long live the queen!  I was almost excited about her heir Tupac, but that quickly fizzled out when I saw his zero admin skill.  With a national focus swap he could be workable, but I think we can do better than him.

In 1628 I unlock the first religious idea, Deus Vult.  With this cb I can start attacking the colonial nations bordering me whenever I want, but I’m not quite ready  yet.

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In 1631 I finish the quantity idea group and pass the long-awaited Colonial Settlement Act, for an extra colonist.  I’ve already got the interior of South America secured, so I get a rather bold idea and decide to head…

…into the Southeast Pacific, starting with Tahiti!  Hey, the good people of the Incan Empire need a fun place to go on vacation right?  Actually, most of these islands are in the Philippines trade node, which can be steered towards Panama, so settling these islands actually isn’t a complete waste of time.

In September of 1640 the big moment comes:  I decide that I’m finally ready to start booting the Europeans out of South America, starting with Brittany.  They’re allied with England, Scotland, and Savoy, (France broke their alliance) but Savoy won’t join in because they’re currently getting pummeled in a different war, I’m pretty sure that Scotland won’t send any troops to attack me, and I’m confident that I can take on England’s armies if they manage to land any.  Tally-ho!

Back to the Dark Souls theme, I’ve got a feeling this war is going to shape up like the Ornstein and Smough fight.  Players encounter these guys about midway through the game and together they make up one of the game’s toughest fights.  If you can take these guys down on your own, you’ve got very solid control of the game mechanics and shouldn’t really have any trouble completing the game.  That’s easier said than done though.

As expected, Breton la Plata’s army is easily destroyed and the carpet siege commences.  I keep my eyes peeled for enemy fleets, and my ships are biting at the bit for some action.

Sure enough, the English land their troops on the opposite side of the continent from my own, and well out of the way of my own navy.  I don’t know what it is about Panama that makes the AI like attacking it so much, but it would probably be wise to assume that European invaders are going to show up here.

This development forces me to make a tough decision:  do I move my troops up to Columbia and drive the English out now?  Or do I finish sieging the uncontested land in La Plata?  After hemming and hawing for a bit I decide to finish sieging Breton la Plata’s land, so I have my war goal locked down and don’t have to worry about spreading my troops out.  In the meantime though, my Columbian land is going to have to take one for the team and be occupied by the English until I can liberate them.

Whoops.  After the English landed their army in Columbia I sent my navy over there to see if I could pick off some of their ships, and while I was looking away the English navy managed to pick ME off.  Winning naval battles isn’t terribly complicated;  all you have to do is have at least as many heavy ships as your enemy, and outnumber them in total ships.  I broke both of these rules here, and it cost me my entire fleet, which I don’t have the money or the time to rebuild.  I can’t stop anyone from landing troops in South America now, but fortunately nobody I’m fighting right now is terribly strong.

On the bright side, I no longer have to pay the upkeep for those ships, and believe me, 40 heavy ships are EXPENSIVE.

This is how far the English made it into my territory by the time I finished sieging down Breton la Plata.  It could have been way worse, but my armies are on the move north now and these English aren’t long for the world.  All in all my enemies have landed about 67,000 troops in Panama/Columbia.

Success!  A decisive victory over the English invaders, although for some reason my enemies didn’t bring all their troops to the fight.  Whatever, I’m all for making things as easy as possible.

Tupac must have been seriously wounded in that last battle (he was the general,) because less than a year later he died.  Now I’ve got a 47-year-old queen with no heir.  I don’t know if this game takes menopause into account, but normally I’d doubt that I’m gonna get another heir out of her.  Anything is possible though.

In 1645 I make another major breakthrough in military tech and pick up tech 19.  This is another major one, as it upgrades tactics and unlocks new units for both infantry and cavalry, giving my overall fighting power a much-needed boost.  I am officially at tech parity with Europe now.

Apparently this game doesn’t take menopause into account, because in 1647 my 50-year-old queen gives birth to a new 0 year old heir, the 4/0/2 Yahuar Hacuac.  Ugh, I was hoping for better than that.

I guess giving birth at that age took a lot out of her, because less than a year later Cavillaca passed on and governorship was taken over by diplomatic-but-otherwise-incapable regency council.  Man, a weakly statted 14 year-long regency followed by a king with crappy stats?  This is NOT what I need right now.

One decent thing about having a regency council is the chance to get this event:  Education for a king.  For some reason diplomacy isn’t an option (maybe because he has a zero base stat) but usually this event lets you give your heir a free +2 boost to their skill in admin, diplo or military.  I like having balanced rulers, so I go with boosting his military skill, meaning he’ll improve to a 4/0/4 king when he comes of age.

In 1650 we hit that ten-year mark of the war and suddenly all of the lesser participants are willing to white peace out.  Savoy (who joined the war later on) and Scotland peace out.

In 1651 I finally stack wipe the last English army remaining in South America.  Once I take all my land back from English occupation they should be willing to make peace, and then Brittany is all mine.

In 1652 the English are at last willing to sign peace, and now that I don’t have their navy looking to murder my ships, I go after my second target after all this time:  Brittany’s islands in the Caribbean.  My goal is to ultimately gain enough power in this node to move my trade capital here, but before I can do that I need to have naval bases in the Caribbean.  I just have to be careful not to take more than four provinces, as these islands are technically considered to be “distant overseas” from me (hardy har har) and a colonial nation will form, which I don’t want to happen.  I could prevent a CN from forming if I move my capital to Panama (which is considered a part of North America, along with the Caribbean,) but I looked it up and that nasty, nasty King-Gets-Ransomed-and-Executed-by-Europeans event can still fire no matter where your capital is, or what tech group you’re in, and I’m not 100% confident that I’d be able to keep Panama 100% completely safe from occupation, so for now I’ll be careful not to core more than 4 Caribbean islands.

In 1655, after a 15 year war, I’m ready to make peace with Brittany.  I take all of Breton la Plata’s land and all three of Brittany’s islands in the Caribbean.  That is a shitload of land, and normally nobody would be able to survive taking that much uncored land (I don’t even want to know how much overextension that would be worth,) but check this out:

All of that land,, which is costing hundreds and hundreds of admin points to core, causes me no overextension whatsoever.  They changed things so that colonized land no longer gives overextension to the colonizer, but I guess that rule still applies even if somebody else conquers the land.  I have no idea whether this is what was intended, nor do I know whether or not this was changed in the Common Sense patch.  Theoretically, I could only have to fight three more wars to finish this achievement run!

Here’s a shot of South America after the war with England a Brittany:

Tune in to part 5 to continue this groovy adventure!

Inca: A Sun God Part 3

Welcome to part 3 of my Inca:  A Sun God play through.

We’re off to a good start so far, with the Andean region fully conquered, the Incan Empire formed, and all of the religious reforms passed by 1494.  The first thing I do after looking around reminding myself what was going on is to disband all of my mercenaries, which actually made up the bulk of my army.  They’ve served their purpose, but I don’t really need them anymore.  I don’t really need much of an army at all right now, but I start replacing the lost regiments with much cheaper regular troops.  The next thing I do is hit the space bar button to unpause the game and start watching the calendar tick by, as there isn’t a whole lot that I can even do right now. There isn’t anyone I can see to fight, I can’t explore the terra incognita yet, and I can’t even build any buildings.  This is only the lull before the storm though, I’m sure.  Things are bound to get exciting when the Europeans show up.

Finally, after watching the months fly by for what seemed like a bazillion years, in 1503 I unlock the fourth admin tech, and unlock the exploration idea group along with it.  There’s a big world out there, and it’s time for us to go out and see it.

You can see here I had enough diplo points banked to buy the first four ideas, scoring me a second colonist and, more importantly, the extra annual settlers.  Seriously, at tech level 1 colonies grow painfully slowly and this by itself will practically triple my colonial growth.  Thanks to that idea it’s now even possible for me to colonize tropical provinces, whose malus previously cancelled out my settler growth rate.

I decide to go over my leader limit and hire two conquistadors, one to explore the north coast and one to head towards Brazil to see if anybody’s shown up yet.  It’s not like I’ve got anything else to spend my military points on right now.

Three years later, in 1506, I make my first contact with the Europeans when I discover Castile in the eastern tip of Brazil.  Interesting, it seems like an ovewhelming majority of the time Portugal is the one who takes Brazil, but not this time.  I bet they went whole hog on the Caribbean.  This also gives us a little peek into what is going on in Europe.  Since Aragon is still independent, that means the Iberian wedding hasn’t triggered, which is fine by me.  I want the Europeans to be as weak as possible.  It looks like Castile has a female heir though, so I might not luck out there.

A year after meeting Castile the first occurrence of a nasty event shows up:  European Epidemic.  Smallpox has started to spread through my empire, and manifests as a 25% drop in the wealth of five of my provinces.  While that totally sucks, according to Wikipedia the real European epidemics that tore through the Incan Empire killed between 60% and 94% of the Incan population, so I guess I got off easy here.

Sure enough, as soon as Castile’s heir took the throne the wedding triggered.  Funny though, that this event used to stop triggering after 1500, and Paradox only recently extended its time frame.  It’s after 1500 now so this wedding used to not even be possible right now.  I’m ok with the change though, as this makes the wedding triggering more reliable, and I think it’s more satisfying to see a unified Spain in a game than to see Castile and Aragon punching each other the whole game until France shows up and curb stomps both of them, even if it’s not really to my advantage for Spain to be stronger.

I played a test game to try out some of the new El Dorado mechanics, and I rather liked the “Hunt for the Seven Cities” automatic exploration button, although I feel that some of the events that it spawns are kind of overpowered (here, have 50 admin points for no reason!) but after I hired my first conquistadors I was disappointed to see that that button is disabled for “primitives.”  Now, I get why as the Incans I shouldn’t be able to “hunt for the seven cities” or get any of the bonus events, but I can’t even toggle on the passive exploration.  Is there really any reason why it has to be this way?  I was always under the impression that the whole reason they added that feature was to make exploring less tedious for the player.  The passive exploration mechanic would have been very nice to have this time around, as having to manually move my exploring armies into every single province did get very tedious very fast.

In 1514 I research the last idea in the exploration group and complete the set.  We’re really cooking now, with 3 colonists in action!  We also have the colonial conquest cb against all the other native tribes we’ve discovered, for what it’s worth.

In 1518 I finish exploring all of the land in South America, which is still almost completely empty.  So far Castile is the only one who’s shown up, and they are as far away from me as you can possibly get and still share the continent.  It’s going to be a while before I can reform and westernize.  The only question I need to ask myself right now is what direction to colonize in.  Do I go along the north by the Caribbean, or do I hang south of the Amazon basin and head towards Brazil?  I have three colonists, so I ended up saying “why not both?”  I’ll focus one colonist up in the Columbia/Venezuela region, one to push across Bolivia and into Brazil, and the third I’ll use to settle the temperate provinces along the western coast (Chile.)

Pro tip:  You can really delay how long it takes for the Europeans to turn hostile towards you by staying out of their coring range.  The Europeans won’t attack you if they can’t core your land, so if you don’t take any coastal provinces along the northern coast of South America the Europeans won’t be able to get you in coring range until they push their range all the way around the Magellan Strait.  Settle inland provinces while pushing towards them;  that’s the key to staying off their hit list (for a while.)

Here is a closer view of my current situation.  I’m going to push across northern South America by settling the inland provinces one-off the coast, and at the same time I’m going to push across the region south of the Amazon wasteland in the general direction of Castilian Brazil.  Depending on where the Europeans decide to colonize I’ll probably reach them with about 7 colonies in either direction.

In 1522 a pretty interesting scripted event for the Incans shows up, one that I’m pretty sure only triggers after you’ve discovered any Europeans:  the Death of Viracocha.  Apparently my king and heir were killed by the smallpox epidemic plaguing my land and now the disputed succession has triggered another civil war:  Atahualpa vs Huascar.  In my test games I got this event every time, and it seems to be that Atahualpa is always the better king of the two brothers, but the rebel stacks that spawn against him are stronger too.  I ain’t afraid of no pretender rebels, so I choose to support Atahualpa.  A 6/5/1 king is too good to pass up and besides, he was the one who won historically anyway.

Here are all of the rebel stacks that event spawned.  The little two and three stacks I’m not worried about, but that 12 stack on the capital is kind of scary.  Where are all those mercenaries again?  Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten rid of them after all!  Nevertheless, the rebels must die.  There can be only one king.

While the civil war rages down in Cuzco I finish exploring the native civilizations in Mexico.  Nothing too out of the ordinary here, Xiu has conquered the Yucutan peninsula and the Aztecs seem to be doing well.  Nobody is anybody’s vassal, so I wonder if a religious reform was recently passed.  Now that I think of it, do the AI’s even use the same religion mechanic as the player?  I’m no programmer, but it would seem pretty difficult to me to program an AI to juggle war and vassalization with the doom mechanic.

In an amusing twist, later in the year I get an event that marks the end of the civil war despite the fact that the war is very clearly not over.  I haven’t even killed a single rebel stack yet!  Maybe a slight triggering bug there, but we can’t expect everything to be perfect.  Paradox does a great job creating new content and tweaking the old.  Anyway, I get to choose between gaining a stability point and losing a bit of legitimacy or losing 2 stability points and gaining a lot of legitimacy.  At this moment I value stability much more than a bit of legitimacy, so I choose the moderate retribution option.  Atahualpa is merciful.

A few months later another event triggers:  the Policies of Huascar.  Apparently the pretender is doing everything he can to piss off the establishment, who then throw their support under me, gaining me 10 legitimacy and essentially refunding my legitimacy lost from the previous event.  Hooray for free stability!

Ugh, the 12 stack of rebels sieging Cuzco prove to be pretty tough and are able to rout my army during the first assault.  I’m not sure if there are any triggers for if they manage to siege my capital down, and I would prefer not to take that chance.  Anyway, there is one mildly annoying thing about having a large empire in South America:  armies retreat a loooooooong way when they get defeated.  Look at that, running all the way from southern Peru to Columbia.  It’s going to take months to march all the way back down, and the rebels are continuing to siege all the while.

In 1523 Atahualpa secures his line on the throne with an underwhelming new heir, 2/4/1 Inca Roca.  His name is Inca?  Interesting.  Anyway, this guy is a far cry from his daddy and I’m going to make a general out of him as soon as he comes of age.  I hear that life guarding colonies on the frontier is really exciting!  …and short.

After another year and a couple of failed assaults later, the rebel armies are destroyed and I can start recovering all the land they managed to occupy during my long retreats.  I learned the hard way that there are no triggers for after the pretender rebels occupy your capital, but it does allow them to enforce their demands MUCH faster than otherwise.  Gotta keep your capital safe!  If you look closely at the picture you can see that my entire manpower pool has been wiped out by this civil war.  That rebel stack in Cuzco was really tough I tell you!  Another pro tip:  keep a merc stack handy to be able to take the brunt of the damage during this civil war event.  It’s going to take a long time to recover my manpower, let alone rebuild my army.  At least I’m done dealing with the internal struggles the Incans are scripted to have to deal with.  Now I get to worry about a much bigger threat:  the Europeans.

What in the hell?  In 1525, after what might be the shortest reign of a king the world has ever seen, Athualpa dies and his one year old takes the throne, dumping me into a 14 year-long regency council.  I haven’t even finished sieging back the provinces the rebels took during the civil war that installed Athualpa on the throne!  I don’t think there’s anything this game loves more than trolling its players.  Oh well, I must play the hand I’m dealt.  At least the regency council has perfectly average 3/3/3 stats.

In 1526 Castile does something that changes everything:  they conquer Tapuia.  Now I am only four colonizable provinces away from western cores!  After Fuerte Borbon finishes all I have to do is colonize Corumba, Ofaie, Araxas and Minas Gerais and I can reform.  This will really speed up how quickly I can get started westernizing.

A word of warning:  be careful of the natives in Fuerte Borbon and Chaco Boreal.  Most provinces in South America have very modest native populations that aren’t really dangerous, but the two aforementioned provinces have very large and aggressive natives, about 5,000 each.  Notice that I have 8,000 men guarding my colony there.  It’s almost like Paradox knew that these two provinces would be the gateway towards quick westernization and are trolling the players.  Surely they wouldn’t be THAT devious…  would they?

I have to admit, I got a little scared for a moment when I saw this Castilian army gallivanting about.  Then I realized that it’s just an exploring army and that Castile isn’t here to whoop my ass after all (although that army probably could all by itself.)  I am in danger though, if Castile declared war on me, they could un-exile that army in their colonial nation and I wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop them at all.  Not at my tech level.

In 1534 France and England show up at the party in South America, meaning that I’m going to come into conflict with both of them eventually.  Things could get interesting.

Remember what I said about the Aztecs doing pretty well?  Well I guess I spoke too soon because in 1537 DOOMSDAY hits them, and the wheels completely fall off of their wagon.  Whoops.  This also answers the question I had earlier about the AI’s using the same religion mechanics and the player.  Apparently they do, although not well, by the look of things.

Later in 1537 my colony in Corumba completes and I’m that much closer to reaching those juicy western cores.  Only three more colonies to go!

At long last, in 1538 my regency council ends and Inca Roca takes the throne.  Looks like he has a brother, who is also named Inca Roca (I bet family get togethers are confusing in that family) and has better stats (4/4/0).  I would actually prefer it if Inca Roca 2 were to take the throne, despite having 0 military skill.

After some time passes and my nation recovers from the manpower destruction of the civil war, I tease the idea of going on the offensive.  I do have the colonial conquest cb on all the other natives tribes, after all.  Arawak borders my land in Columbia, only to my shock and awe they are able to field a massive 20 units despite only having a single 5 base tax province.  The non-Inti tribes of South America do use the same native ideas system that the North American tribes use, and there is a building that really boosts their force limits, so maybe that’s how.  They’re only one military tech below me though, so attacking them wouldn’t be a roflstomp.

Somebody call Kenny Loggins, cuz I just entered the Danger Zone.  In 1543 Spain (Castile had just united with Aragon) decided that South America isn’t big enough for the both of us and turned hostile, suddenly desiring my colony closest to them and my capital.  This is weird, because I’m positive I’m still outside their coring range and they shouldn’t want my land yet.  They’ve also started colonizing the interior of Brazil, so now I’m only one province away from reforming and westernizing!

Here’s another trick I’ve been doing while colonizing:  using the “Turn X province into a city” mission.  All I have to do to complete it is to let one of my colonies finish colonizing, and in return I get a nifty boost to base tax and manpower in the province.  Since I would be doing that anyway, its like free economic growth.  I can cycle this mission too, as I’ve unlocked the first tier of forts for construction, which allows the “Fortify X Province” mission, which is possilbe for all of my provinces, since all of my land starts with level 1 forts.  At any given moment, at least one of my colonies will be getting boosted by these missions.

Oh boy.  I knew it was going to come eventually, but I didn’t expect it this soon.  Spain has declared war, citing “colonial conquest” as their cb.  I’m still sure that I’m outside of their colonial range, so I have no idea what they would want from me.  I decide to hang back and see what happens.

Here’s an overview shot of my empire and South America in 1546, right after Spain declare war.  My tentacles are slowly spreading across the continent, Spain has locked down almost the entire Brazilian coast, and France is slowly beating England in the race for colonial Columbia.

Here’s something interesting:  Xiu conquered Kiche and formed the Maya, which I didn’t know was even a formable nation.  That’s pretty cool.

In 1548 my colony in Ofaie finishes growing.  I’m so close to westernizing, yet so far away.  I decide not to settle the provinces that directly border Spanish Brazil right now because I’m at war with them and I don’t want to give my enemies a direct land connection to my empire.  So far I haven’t seen hide nor hair of the Spanish, which makes me think that I really am still outside their coring range, but it has been pretty tense always looking around to see if they’re coming.  I guess they sent that exploring army back home.

In an anticlimactic twist, the Spanish never did come for me, not did I come for them, so after five years of no fighting or sieging we auto-signed a white peace.  There can be no war without violence, and I’m very relieved to see this message.  Even better, I now have a five-year truce with Spain so that should give me the time I need to finish a bordering colony.

Time flies by and my truce with Spain is about to run out, but just before it does Spain declares a crusade against Morocco.  Great timing!  They won’t attack me if they’re already at war, so this buys me that much more time to reform.

Stressing out over my colonies in Brazil might have been a waste of time because at the same time I have a colonly building adjacent to Spanish Brazil, the French start building a colony adjacent to mine in Venezuela, and they immediately turn hostile.

I’ve read on the forums and such about the possibility of becoming someone’s protectorate.  I don’t know what game the people who recommend that were playing, but that wasn’t working for me.  Even with a statesman advisor and maxed out improved relations I never came anywhere even close to being granted protectorate status by any of the western powers, so I wouldn’t rely on that if you’re playing your own Inca game.

In 1556 Brittany stamps its flag in the La Plata region.  It looks like all the colonial regions are claimed now:  Spain gets Brazil, France gets Columbia, I get Peru, and Brittany gets La Plata.  Of all the countries that could go after La Plata I consider myself to have gotten off lucky for that country to be Brittany.  Brittany is small and weak, so they will be a good way to test my mettle when I want to start taking South America away from the Europeans.

Here’s another Incan event that I’ve gotten several times so far but neglected to take any screen shots of:  “The Young Men and Women of X” event.  If you choose to send a priest to arrange marriages, a few years down the road you’ll get a free boost to the base tax of said province, so I go with arranging marriages every time.

At long last, in 1557, my border colony in Araxas finishes!  Only I can’t reform yet, because I still need to core it.  Psyche!

At long last, later in 1557, I finish coring Araxas and can finally reform my religion one last time.  Drum roll please…

Ta da!  I magically rocket forward to admin tech 9, diplo tech 8, and military tech 9, although I’m still in the Andean tech group.  I immediately hit the westernization button.

Looks like my westernization process is set to complete in 1575, after 18 years.  That is… a long time.  A very long time.  I’m definitely within coring range of both France and Spain now, AND they both have the colonial conquest cb to use against me.  18 years is a long time to have to survive against that.  Here goes nothing.

By reforming I’m able to pick up a second idea group, and I go with expansion for ultimate colonization.  I take the first three ideas from it to boost my colonial growth, but every point after that I need to save up for the westernization process.  I’m slowly losing points every month, and 18 years is a long time to keep that going.

Not long after I start westernizing the Aztecs get their SECOND Doomsday.  Man, they just can’t get their shit together, can they?  I have a feeling though that it won’t be long until one of the Europeans puts them out of their misery.

Here’s an overview shot of my empire in 1559, about a year into the westernization process.  So far, so good.  What I need to do now is try to colonize so I block off as much of the continent’s interior as I can.  Remember, every province I can colonize myself is a province I don’t have to take from the Europeans by war.

Uh oh.  I’m in trouble now, for real this time.  In 1563 Spain declares war on me again using their colonial conquest cb.  I am definitely within coring range of their territory now, so they’re definitely going to come for me this time.  No auto-white peaces anymore.  I can’t stop them from shipping troops over (I still can’t build any ships yet) but I’m not hopelessly behind them in tech anymore.  Right now they are about two techs ahead of me, and we’re equal in terms of tactics and morale from tech, but one thing they have that I don’t is troop quality.  Spain has unlocked all of their national ideas at this point, so they’ve got a 15% morale boost and 5% discipline from that, plus they have an extra 5% discipline from the offensive idea group and they could potentially have a commandant as well, for a total of 15% discipline.  In addition to their tech bonuses, they’ve got maxed out prestige and decently high army tradition, while I have zero of both thanks to my westernization events.  All of these things add up to mean that despite not being that far behind in tech they will still absolutely slaughter me in anything resembling an even battle.

Fortunately, I have the home field advantage, and it is a show superiority cb, so even if I can’t beat them straight up I can avoid fighting them altogether so they don’t get ticking warscore against me.

Just after the war starts I spot a way to get an early edge that might pay off:  Spanish Brazil.  They have a tiny army, tiny enough that I can overwhelm them and defeat it.  While Spain’s army will be indestructible, Spanish Brazil doesn’t have any military bonuses whatsoever, just like me, so we’re actually on even terms.  I take down their army without much trouble, hilariously getting the warscore to start ticking in my favor and I start sieging down their territory.  I’m pretty sure the Spanish would land their armies down here, so I’ll be ready for them as soon as they show up.

Damn it all.  The Spanish did not choose to land in Brazil, they chose to land in my undefended territory up in Venezuela.  It is only 11k troops, but my entire army is in Brazil and it would take a long time to get all my dudes up there to fight them, and it would take all of my troops to have a chance at winning.  If I moved my army up there then Spanish Brazil would be able to rebuild their army and start sieging me down in the south!  I find myself stuck in a kind of two-front war.

When I spotted that army there in Cartagena I realized the big mistake that I had made: that province is actually a colony of mine, one that I just started immediately before Spain declared war.  While my land is definitely within coring range of Europe’s colonial nations, the Europeans themselves might have still left me alone because I’m outside of their own coring ranges.  In my zeal from having begun the westernization process I figured I’d be safe to start colonizing what I could along the Caribbean coast.  Big mistake.  That colony brough my domestic territory into direct coring range of Spain itself, ergo the war declaration.  They immediately occupy it and I abandon it the next month, an act that will actually have major consequences down the road.

Ugh.  After several months I notice that my war exhaustion was spiking up, and after buying it down I examine why.  Each one of my siege stacks in Brazil is eating a nasty 3% attrition per month, 1% for a siege, 2% for the province being tropical.  All of that siege attrition adds up to give me a whopping .1 war exhaustion per month.  What the hell?  I’m not sure if that’s a bug or if its working as intended, but I’m going to have to deal with a ton of war exhaustion this war.  Good thing I have all those diplo points saved up.

In 1565, two years into the war with Spain, I hit the ten-years-left-to-go-to-westernize point in my progress.  That is still a long time, but I can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  The war itself with Spain isn’t really as exciting as it could be:  they haven’t landed any more troops, but they have sieged down a couple of my provinces, which brings up something kind of cheesy.  I got less than a tenth of a percent of warscore for sieging down Sao Joao del Rei, yet Spain got 3-4% warscore for EACH of my provinces they sieged.  That’s such BS, but alas, colonial nation warscore value is balanced around wars with other European colonial powers, not against native South Americans trying to defend themselves.  At least my total warscore is still in the green.

A couple uneventful years later the Paradox troll strikes again, this time with a Ship Building Boom event, which reduces how long it takes to build those ships I can’t build.  Hurr durr.

In 1567 I finish sieging Spanish Brazil’s land and move my army up north to make a move against the Spanish army, which has grown to about 20k men.  While the Spanish were sieging one of the few non-mountain provinces in Peru I work up the courage to attack them with my entire army and…  lose.  I probably should have expected that to happen, but I thought there was a chance I could do it.  This was disastrous for me though, as that battle wiped out all my manpower and more importantly made me lose my ticking warscore bonus.  I fell all the way from +7% warscore to -10% just from that one battle!  Talk about a tactical blunder.  This is bad too, because now Spain has enough warscore to be able to demand stuff.

While the war with Spain rages on the French decide that they REALLY want my land, and that they hate my guts with every inch of their body.  Man, if France declares war on my while this war with Spain drags on I might quit and start over.  A war like that would be a baaaad situation, especially given the state I currently find myself in.

France might hate my guts, but they decide to take out their hatred on me in a passive-aggressive way.  Apparently exploring armies can move freely through whatever territory they want, regardless of military access.  Since I can’t beat the Spanish in the open, I decide to set up a defensive line of all mountainous provinces so that the Spanish can’t get farther into my territory without going through them and taking a -2 penalty, which might be enough to tip the scales.  While my armies are camped out, the troll French exploring army (which apparently still uses up supply limit slots) kept walking in and out of the provinces that my own armies were standing in, causes them to eat tons of attrition over and over again, and there was nothing I could do about it.  Thanks a lot France!  Jerk.  Keep in mind that my armies aren’t reinforcing either, as I have exactly 0 manpower left in my pool.

There is one beacon of hope in this destructive, costly war:  Inca Roca kicked the bucket and his brother Inca Roca 2 took the throne, putting is awesome 5/6/1 heir Atahualpa next in line.  Now THAT is a king I’ve been looking for, even if his military skill is a little weak.

Somewhere along the line Spain landed another 10k men in Venezuela, bringing their troop total in the war zone to about 30k.  My mountain wall plan seems to be working though, as that 26 stack has been sitting in place for a while now and hasn’t made any moves to attack my army.  There is still hope yet!

Here is an overview of the war zone in 1670, 7 years into the war.  This is all the land that Spain has occupied, and my mountain wall seems to have stopped their progress.  Keep in mind, though, that I’ve still been getting westernization events every year throughout this whole ordeal, and that this war has actually been pretty destructive for me.  My prestige is barely hanging in there, my manpower is completely spent, and I’m falling deeply into debt.  The one thing I do have going for me is that my colonial efforts are still going strong.  Nobody’s sending any troops to harass my colonies, so they are staying protected and continue to progress at a nice pace.  Now if only Spain would make peace.

Another year passes, and no progress has been made on either side.  Nobody has won enough battles to get ticking warscore, and Spain hasn’t worked up the balls to attack me.  Our armies in this picture have been sitting in place eyeballing each other for over two years at this point, but Spain still won’t make peace.  That screenshot only shows the requirements for white peace, but I can’t even offer them anything that they will accept.  They are just determined to keep this war going.

I think I figured out what was going on here.  When they attacked me my land was coreable by them because of my colony in Cartagena.  Since I abandoned that colony my land is now back outside Spain’s own coring range, or at least the land that they’ve already sieged down is, so they won’t take it.  All of my land over in Brazil probably is coreable by them, but they haven’t occupied it yet so they can’t demand it.  I haven’t destroyed their army, so the AI thinks it’s “winning” the war and wants to be able to demand something beyond gold, but at the same time can’t, so what it ends up doing is sitting around doing nothing, all while officially being at war.  It was kind of lame to be on the receiving end of this, because the war has completely stalled out and the Spanish simply won’t make peace.

I don’t know what changed, but after another two years of eyeballing each other Spain pulls the trigger and attacks me, and my army is crushed.  Maybe the researched a new tech or something, it’s been long enough.  My mountain wall strategy worked for a while but that plan is fubar now.  We’ve only been fighting for a full ten years now, Spain’s got to want to make peace soon, right?

Ugh, this is starting to go really badly for me now.  Spain landed another 10k men in South America, this time in Brazil like I originally thought, and they start sieging back all the land I had occupied.  Spanish Brazil also builds their army back up so now I’ve got 50,000 more advanced hostile troops gallivanting about my territory.  Is this it?  There’s no way in hell I can win this war now.

I looked up army sizes in the ledge, and Spain has almost their entire force limit in my territory.  Hey France!  Now would be a good time to go after Spain, their armies are way out of position!  Naw, that would be way too cool of the AI.

Here’s another overview shot of my empire under occupation, this time 11 years into the war.  The Spanish are making progress on both sides now, and they still won’t make peace.

We’re getting down to the wire here.  The Spanish are advancing on both fronts, and there’s nowhere else to hide.  I plop whats left of my army down in Cuzco and start praying (to the Sun of course) for an end to the war.  For anyone reading this, NEVER let any European country occupy your capital province.  This is scripted to trigger an extremely nasty event, one that will probably be the death knell of your failing empire.  Do everything you can to protect your capital.

At long last, in 1575, just as the Spanish start knocking on Cuzco’s front door, my westernization process completes.  This lets me pick up a military tech then something miraculous happens:

NOW Spain will finally make peace.  I don’t know what changed about the AI’s attitude, but now they’re willing to lay down their sword.  Even better, after all that fighting and sieging, all they want from me is a measley 150 ducats and war reparations!  Wow, I was without words when I saw that.  There must be something programmed into the AI that makes them not want overseas provinces from other western nations.

So there ya go, we did it.  That was probably the most brutal westernization process I’ve ever endured, but I made it out the other side intact.  It took me 18 years to westernize, and I was at war with Spain for 12 of them.  We might have no manpower, no prestige, still be way behind in tech and deeply in debt, but we’re alive.  Praise the Sun!

Tune in to part 4 to continue the adventure!

Inca: A Sun God Part 2

Welcome to part two of my Inca:  A Sun God play through.  It’s time to get this show on the road.

The first thing I do is take the “conquer Wanka” mission, which I’m pretty sure is always available for Cusco, regardless of who is who’s rival or whatever.

Then, before I even unpause the game for the first time, I declare war on Wanka using my mission-generated claims before they have a chance to form any alliances.  They could potentially call allies into the war even after it starts, but I doubt that’s going to happen.

Mere days after unpausing, the “Fall of Chanka & the Rise of Cusco” event pops up.  I looked it up, and this event has a mean time to happen of 1 month, meaning that everyone is approximately guaranteed to get it very quickly, and this has got to be a record for shortest mean time to happen in the game.  I can’t think of any events that are more likely to happen than this!  Anyway, all this event does is give us a bit of money and a nice 75 monarch points in each category.  Hey game, thanks for the free points!

Pachacuti engages the Wankan army and, sure enough, there’s the -2 attacking into mountains penalty.  Normally I would never attack into mountains, but for the Incans there’s no way around it.  Despite the penalty, their army is swiftly defeated and stackwiped in their other province.

About six months later while I’m waiting for the sieges in Wanka to finish I get the “Cusco, Navel of the World” event.  Apparently, my capital is currently a ramshackle dump and this gives an opportunity to transform the city into a worthy capital.  I’ll gain some prestige up front and a bit of passive prestige for 20 years, but in return I have to spend a few of the free monarch points I just got and have to tie up 15% of my manpower for 20 years.  That blow to my manpower sucks, right when I’ll probably need it the most too, but lets face it:  no Cusco game is complete without overhauling the capital.  I take the restructuring option.

A few months later I get the “National Epic” event.  An extra prestige point per year?  Yes please.  The bonuses for having high prestige are substantial, and I’d like to get there ASAP.

In 1446 I get the “Oracles and Divination” event for the first time, an event which I’m pretty sure is tied to the Inti faith.  Apparently our kingdom is in need of guidance, and I decide to travel to the great Oracle of Pachacamac to seek it.

And we get a favorable answer!  Seriously, paying a tiny sum of ducats for an 80% chance to get a stability point is a deal I will take every time.  I also netted 10 prestige from these events.

In March of 1446 my sieges in Wanka finish I and I fully annex them, bringing me up to 6 provinces.  The conquer wanka mission completes and I take a mission to rescue our Quecha brothers in Ichma, the one province minor that controls Lima.  Being at peace with positive stability unlocks the “Divination” decision available to pagans, which I take.  A permanent -1 to unrest for the rest of the game?  And all it costs is an extra 5% to stability costs?  That’s another deal I’ll take.

With Wanka annexed I suppose now is a good time to go into exactly what my strategy is during the earliest phase of the game.  As I said in the introduction to this game, we are in the Andean technology group, which makes techs extremely expensive to research.  Prohibitively expensive, if you will.  We will need to westernize, but before we can do that we need to pass five religious reforms and then enact a final reform once we border a western core.  We will not be able to westernize until we do all that.  When we do reform our religion off a western core we’ll be instantly moved up to 80% of that country’s tech level, meaning we get a bunch of free techs but our tech group will remain the same.  That won’t matter though, because we’ll be able to instantly start westernizing.

Because we’ll be getting a bunch of free techs once we reform our religion, any points spent on technology before then are technically a waste of points.  What this means is that we’re free to liberally spend monarch points on stuff besides technology.  I plan to spend admin points on coring, reducing inflation and boosting stability, spend diplo points paying for peace treaties, reducing war exhaustion, and culture converting, and military points on recruiting generals and harshly treating rebels.

I’m not worried about falling behind in tech, because I’ll likely be able to conquer all of the other Andean states before they even reach tech level 2, and when the Europeans show up I’ll be so far behind them anyway it won’t matter whether I’m at tech level 1 or 6;  they’ll annihilate me either way.

Now, how do we go about passing religious reforms?

The unique Inti religion mechanic is based around religious authority, which is somewhat similar to the Imperial Authority mechanic in the Holy Roman Empire.  You gain (or lose) authority for doing various things, and when you have 100 authority, and meet certain other requirements, you can choose one of five reforms to pass which give bonuses.  For the Inti, passing a reform makes you lose all of your authority, you lose a couple of stability points, and a bunch of pretender rebels spawn.  These rebels are particularly tough, and if they succeed in enforcing their demands a new king takes over the country and you lose two of your previously passed reforms (if you had any.)

While most of your religious authority will be generated passively over time, which the amount you get scaling up as you obtain more provinces and base tax, there is one active way to boost authority…

You gain a lot of authority from manually lowering province autonomy.  Normally I never do this.  In fact, I usually increase local autonomy in recently conquered provinces because I hate dealing with rebels.  Doing this for every province I conquer will generate a lot of extra religious authority, but it will also cause a lot of civil unrest.  I just said that I’m not going to spend any points on military tech;  now you know what I am going to be spending it on.  I’m going to need to spend a lot to keep the rebellions in check.

Anyway, now that Wanka is finished its time to look around and assess the diplomatic situation.

Ichma, the one province minor whom I have a conquest cb on, is allied with Quito, Cajamarca and Chachapoya.  Ugh, that is a lot of allies, and Chimu and Huyla won’t ally with me either.  There is no way in hell I’d be able to take all of them on right now, so for the time being I think it’s time to look southward for expansion.  Maybe a war will break out in the north that I can take advantage of.

The Andean region to my south is split into four other tribes.  Colla, my pale green colored neighbor, is the weakest of the four, but they’re allied with Calchaqui, who is purple.  Neither Pacajes nor Charca are allied with anyone, but both of them have rivaled Colla, and I spot an opportunity.

By rivaling Colla myself, Charca and Pacajes become friendly to me and are willing to sign an alliance.  Because they’re rivaled with Colla they should be more than willing to join me in my war against them, and between the three of us we should have no trouble taking down Colla and Calchaqui.  I buddy up to them and begin fabricating a claim on Colla.  If you’re wondering, I chose not to declare my other two rivals because I don’t want to risk pissing off the wrong person or inadvertently preventing myself from being able to sign an alliance I need.  Power projection is overrated*

*no it isn’t

While I’m waiting for the claim to finish I get the first event in a chain of events centering around the Royal Bodyguards.  I don’ know exactly what the triggers are for this event (whether it’s tied to the Inti faith, Andean culture, country tag, or Andean tech group) but you’ll probably get this to fire for every king you have unless they have an unusually short reign.  I opt to bring in the new blood, which gives an awesome extra 5% morale and 2.5% discipline.  The Incans have an idea that gives 10% manpower recovery and 2.5% discipline, so if you think of this modifier as being a national idea, that’s the same as having 10% manpower recovery, 5% morale and 5% discipline as an idea.  Pretty cool!

In January of 1447 I harshly treat rebels for the first of many, many times to come.  You can almost taste the opression!

A couple of months later my claim finishes and I move to declare war.  Sure enough, Calchaqui will rush to Colla’s aid (I make them a co-belligerent) and both Pacajes and Charca are willing to join me.  Let the games begin!

This is kind of funny:  we’re several months into the war, and there has yet to be a battle fought.  I guess that given all the mountain provinces nobody thinks their tough enough to win.  That’s ok with me, I’d prefer not to fight battles in order to conserve manpower.  If you’re wondering why my army is sieging that specific province, it’s because Charca actually has a claim on that province, and I want to make sure they don’t get it.

I guess I spoke too soon about the battling, because not long later Colla makes a horrible mistake:  they attacked my ally after they split their attack.  Nice bait!  With that -2 penalty, Colla’s army is crushed with almost no losses on my part.

I chased Colla’s retreating army south, only to find that Calchaqui made a horrible mistake too!  Look at that casualty disparity.  If I had initiated that battle, even if I had won I would have been the one who lost 2,000 men instead of them.

While the carpet sieging commences, the next event in the Royal Guard chain pops up:  Alarmed Nobles.  Apparently the families of all the original bodyguards are getting all upset about the new guys and want them kicked out.  Sorry guys, there’s no way I’m giving up that morale and discipline boost just to make you feel better.  I take the second option which gives me 5 authority at the cost of increased costs of advisors, which I’m still too poor to afford, and increased stability cost, which I don’t care about.

Woah, this was close.  If you look closely at the picture you can see that I forgot to harshly treat the Wankan rebels and they almost got a rebellion started.  I gotta keep on top of that!  I’m not really in a position to be able to deal with a bunch of nationalist rebels right now.

While the war wraps up I get the third event in the Royal Guard chain:  Attack in Cusco.  Apparently someone tried to kill Pachacuti (despite him leading an army in the south) but got away.  This event gives you another chance to give the new guys the boot and lose both the military bonuses and the economic penalties, but I instead choose the second option, which starts an investigation into who caused the attack.

Immediately afterward the plot is uncovered, and it is revealed that the attackers were young noblemen who felt jilted by the addition of new bodyguards!  They beg for forgiveness, and by forgiving them (choosing the second option) I could keep the military buffs and lose the economic penalties, but I would lose a TON of religious authority in the process.  I cannot allow that, so I toss them into the Sankachancha Pit.  I wasn’t actually sure what a Sankachancha pit was, so I looked it up and discovered that apparently it was a giant underground cavern the Incans filled with snakes, pumas, bears, jaguars and other vicious beasts which they would toss hapless prisoners into to be horribly mauled.  A grisly fate indeed, but hey, they need to respect my authoritah.

The war finally ends, and while I can’t directly annex Calchaqui’s land, I really don’t want to have to fight them a second time, so I decide to vassalize them.  That’s one kingdom down!

Next I looked north, ready to full annex Colla, when I saw the map and was like “hey, what is this?”  For some reason Charca retained occupation over Colla’s capital.  I control the province they have a claim on, and I honestly have no idea why they didn’t transfer occupation over to me.  Oh well, I guess I’ll have to settle for taking two of Colla’s provinces rather than three.  Thanks a lot Charca, dick.

After I lower the autonomy of my new conquests, I bring myself up to 33 authority.  It’s 1450, only 6 years into the game, and I’m already a third of the way to my first reform.

Now that the war in the south is over I take another look to the north to see whats going on, and I spot an opportunity I can’t afford to pass up.  A war has broken out, resulting in Ichma breaking their alliance with Cajamarca, and Quito is so beaten up from their war with Chimu that they won’t join in.  Ichma and Chachapoya combined can only field 6,000 men, so I immediately use my mission-generated cb to declare war.

Here’s another religion-related event that can pop up:  a conspiring chief.  Apparently this guy was praying for illness and misfortune on Pachacuti through his “Huaca.”  That cannot be tolerated.  The event gives three choices:  the first one is to forgive and forget, which causes you to lose authority, the second gains you some authority but gives a chance to spawn rebels, and the third event gives you authority and a bonus to unrest and autonomy for the chosen province, but guarantees that rebels will spawn.  I go with the third option.

After reading through that mission I realized I wasn’t sure what Huaca was either, so I looked it up, and from what I could find it seems that Huacas were more like monuments or spiritual locations, but the mission says it was a golden huaca, so I would imagine that something like this is what Paradox had in mind:

Don’t piss him off;  he’ll rain plague and misfortune on you.

Anyway, back in the game I noticed that my now vassal Calchaqui somehow managed to roll a god tier 5/5/1/2 general.  Man, I’m glad he’s fighting for me, rather than against me!

Not long later I get another oracle visit and another favorable answer.  I love this (almost) free stability!

The war against Ichma ends with me vassalizing Chacapoya and full annexing Ichma, who actually managed to grab a province from Chimu during the war.  That’s fine, more land for me!

I’ve got enough land now to increase my force limit, and it is at this point that I start recruiting mercs to fill my army instead of regulars.  These mountain battles are nasty, and I really need to conserve manpower.

Here’s another event you’re bound to run into:  The Mitmaq wanting to go home.  I’m not sure exactly what the triggers are, but it’s probably associated with acquiring new land, and all it does is either shuffle base tax around or cause a ton of unrest.  I went with the base tax option.

In 1454 I make my next move in my conquest of the Andes:  I attack Chimu and their ally Cajamarca.  They’re both still really weak from their war with Quito, so this isn’t going to be much of a war.  Hey, since after they’re conquered both their lands will directly border mine, I can full annex both of them.

Just after I start the war I get the “Machu Picchu” event.  It’s time to construct a more stately and luxurious palace, and Machu Picchu is just the place to do it.  In exchange for some admin points and a little bit of money we get an extra 0.5 annual prestige for the rest of the game.

Without much action both Cajamarca and Chimu are defeated and annexed.  Here’s a shot of my empire at the end of these wars, in 1456, only 12 years after the game started.

Chacapoya and Calchaqui are my vassals, Pacajes is still my ally and now there are only five other kingdoms in the Andes.  None of them are really a threat anymore;  the only way I could run into trouble would be if all five of them attacked me at once (not gonna happen.)

Not long after the war ends I get the “Inti Raymi, the Festival of the Sun” event.  Not much to say here;  I went with the third option which gives +15 authority, which puts me at 100.  While I could pass a reform right now, I decide to wait until my new territory finishes coring.  Who knows whats gonna happen during the civil war?  I’d rather all the coring be finished and taken care of before those hijinks go down.

Here we go, it’s 1458, 14 years into the game, and its time to pass my first reform.  In order to pass a reform you must have positive stability, at least 10 cities, no active rebels and, most importantly, 100 authority.  It is time for everyone to respect my authoritah.

Thats right, Cartman’s here to lay down the law and make sure that my authoritah is properly respected.  He’s got his work cut out for him though…

Three stacks of pretender rebels spawn.  They all must die.  Oh, I almost forgot:  I chose the morale boost as my first reform, as that will make killing these rebel stacks (or anything else) much easier.

Man, these rebel stacks are tough.  Look at the unit stats:  they have the same morale as me despite the fact that I’ve got the Royal Guard buff, the reform buff, and the boosts I get from prestige and army tradition, and they don’t.  Fortunately though, engaging them with equal stats mean that I win without too much trouble.

Um, except they did cause trouble:  Pachacuti was killed in the battle that defeated the rebels once and for all!  I’m really sorry to see him go, but he did stick around for 14 years as an active general and that’s almost long enough for his heir to come of age.  The regency in that picture lasted less than a year before Tupac came of age.  Let’s hear it for Tupac!

After I annexed Colla’s land in the first war Charca decided to get all pissy at me and broke our alliance and declared me a rival.  It would seem that they allied themselves with their former enemy Colla just in time for our truce to expire.  This is awesome, because now I can conquer them without having to declare a no-cb war.  Their capital is their only province to border mine so I can’t fabricate any claims.  The same goes for Pacajes too.  I attack Colla and call in Charca, but I leave Pacajes out of it.  They have some claims of their own now and I don’t want them to get anything.

Without incident they are easily defeated and in 1461 they are both annexed.  You can see from my peace treaty with Charca that I had to spend almost 200 diplo points to annex them.  Normally that would be a colossal waste of points, but hey, I told you I wasn’t going to spend any on tech!

With the deaths of Colla and Charca, there was no one left who could possibly rival me, so the power projection mechanic disappeared.  That’s ok game, I didn’t want any power projection anyway!  Hmph.

My next move is to attack Quito and their ally Huyla using a claim I fabricated during the previous war.  We’re getting down to brass tacks now;  after they’re gone my ally Pacajes will be the only independent Andean kingdom left!

In 1462 Tupac sires a new heir:  the below average 2/2/3 Yahuar Hacuac.  Well, I suppose that getting lame heirs was bound to happen with two god level kings in a row at the start.  Having said that, I have a feeling this guy is gonna spend a lot of time leading troops, if you know what I mean.

Not long later I get another Inti event:  the festival of water.  This event gives you the choice of spending admin or diplo points to gain a stability point, and I go with the diplo option.  I’m really getting spoiled with all this easy stability!  Not much of interest happens during the war and in 1463 both Huyla and Quito are annexed.

With Quito and Huyla’s defeat I deem myself wealthy enough to afford my first advisors, so I pick up an inquisitor and an army reformer.  The first part of the opening phase of this game (uniting the Andes) is almost complete now, so it’s time I started gearing up for the next step:  push to admin tech 4 and unlock exploration ideas.  I set my national focus to admin.  I could probably have done this from the beginning and that would let me pick up those techs much sooner, but I wanted to make sure I’d have enough points in the other categories to suit my needs.  Harshly treating rebels is expensive now!

In 1465, while I’m preparing for war against my ally Pacajes, the reconstruction of Cusco completes.  This nifty buff grants 0.5 prestige and legitimacy for the rest of the game.  Not exactly game changing, but nice to have nevertheless.  I’m just glad to have my full manpower pool back now.

Before I actually attack Pacajes though, I reach 100 authority again.  You know what that means, its time for everyone to respect my authoritah!

Yep, he’s back again, and this time he’s really pissed off.

The same deal as last time:  three stacks spawn at random locations.  I have a huge mercenary army now, so I’m not at all worried about beating them, but I haven’t gotten the royal guard event for Tupac yet, so they’re actually going to have better morale than me this time.  For my second reform I was originally going to go with the manpower recovery bonus, but since I’m almost finished uniting the Andes already and I’m doing fine on manpower, I decided at the last second to go with the colonist.  I’m not sure whether or not I’ll regret this, but getting started with claiming all that empty land as soon as possible can’t be a bad idea, can it?

In 1467 I attack Pacajes, the last independent kingdom of the Andes.  Looks like they’ve got a bit of a rebel problem too.  The funny thing is that those rebels will probably be tougher to kill than their actual army.

As I engage their army I thought to take a peek at their tech levels, and to my surprise they had already reached military tech 2.  Thats not going to save them though, not when I outnumber them 4 to 1.

In 1469 Pacajes in annexed and the time has come to swap my tag and pass the decision to form the Incan Empire.  I like our new purple color much better than our old pink-orangish color, and now we have the sunniest flag there ever could be.  Praise the Sun!  Passing this decision also gives us completely unusable claims on all of the empty land in the Andean region;  I suppose these are more for historical flavor than anything else.

A couple of months after I tag swap a scripted event pops up:  the Chimu Revolt.  Apparently the Chimu people can’t appreciate the glory of the Incan empire and want to break free again.  Good luck with that Chimu!

Uh, except that a month after that event popped up a Cajamarcan revolt I couldn’t stop (I ran out of military points) sprang up and now I’ve got five rebel stacks running around.  I guess now that there isn’t anyone else left to fight we Incans have to fight each other.

While I’m working on getting those rebels under control I decide its time to found my first colony in Cauca.  I’ve had the colonist idle for a few years now because as it turns out I wasn’t quite as wealthy as I thought and because I needed all of my troops to fight and siege the other kingdoms.  I’m still only at military tech 1, so my troops are barely better than the natives and I’ll need to stack a sizable amount in my colonies to keep them safe early on here.  I send 6,000 men to protect the colony.

Given my recently isolated position, I didn’t have any missions available for me to take, but starting that new colonly unlocked the “turn blank into a city” mission, which gives your colony a bunch of manpower and an extra base tax upon completion.  These missions are extremely good, and you should try to take them whenever you can.  Especially when the colonized provinces will be domestic territory.

In 1471, right in the middle of the Chimu revolt, I get another event:  The Coastal Peoples.  The Chimu people are apparently master craftsmen and artisans, and by integrating their customs into my culture I can get a PERMANENT 5% DISCOUNT TO ADMIN AND DIPLO TECH.  Wow.  That buff is amazing.  So amazing that I think you’d be a fool not to take it.  It will also make stability 10% more expensive, but I’m ok with that. Taking this choice will also give a substantial boost to the local autonomy of all the Chimuan provinces, meaning that this will cost me a *lot* of religious authority, but I think its worth it.  Its kind of funny though that we’re making the decision to culturally integrate the Chimu people while they are currently in open revolt against us.

Later that year the last rebel army is destroyed and the Chimu revolt ends.  Now I just have to decide what to do with the defeated Chimu people, whose culture I just assimilated.  I could harshly punish the revolters, which would give me a stability point and enough revolt risk reduction to make sure that the Chimuan people never revolt against me again, but then I would lose that sweet integration bonus.  No, its much better to go with the military prohibition and resettlement option, which lets me keep the integration bonus, gives a couple free base tax, and permanently reduces the manpower generated by the Chimuan provinces to zero for the rest of the game.  Losing out on a bit of manpower is totally worth trading to keep those tech discounts.

Here is a reason why taking the colonist reform early may not be such a good idea:  at diplo tech level 1 colonies grow very slowly.  At only 10 colonists per year, I’m not even going to be able to settle any tropical provinces yet, and my temperate ones will still take forever to finish.  Oh well, I suppose getting any colonial growth is better than nothing at all.  It’s not like I have anything else to spend money on right now.  I don’t even have enough technology to build any buildings!

In 1472 I research my first technology of the game:  admin tech 2.  The only thing this tech does is unlock the government type I already have, so nothing changes for now.

Here’s another interesting Inti event:  A suitable wife.  It looks like the priests of Inti have decided that the king needs a new wife, and they’ve chosen his sister.  Wait, what?  His SISTER?  Scandalous!  The king’s mother understandably disapproves of this, but all of the options to choose from here are pretty undesirable, so Tupac does what any great leader should do:  boldly step up to the plate and declare that he couldn’t possibly make this decision himself, and defer to a higher authority, which in this case is the family Mallqui.  The Mallqui approves of this incestuous union, and because that option gives a bunch of religious authority, I go along with it.  If future heirs are born with two heads and a club foot, it’s all Mallqui’s fault.

After the excitement from the Chimu revolt and the brother-sister marriage dies down a couple of years pass until I gain enough authority to pass another reform.  That’s right, once again its time for everyone to RESPECT MY AUTHORITAH!

This time I opted to go with the manpower recovery speed.  Despite hiring a lot of mercs to do my fighting, I’ve still always been way below my manpower limit.  This is the safest reform to take at this point.

Look how much authority I’m gaining every year now.  At this rate I should be finished with the reforms in about 20 years.

There was a reason why I chose Cauca as my first colony.  It’s a temperate province and it links me up with Musica’s territory so I can attack them.  They follow the Inti faith too so my empire will stay nice and religiously unified, and I there’s not really any reason NOT to take their land.  They managed to reach military tech level 2 like Pacajes did, but like before that will not save them.  They are annexed soon after.

With Musica gone I’m all alone in my explored world now, and that one song by Celine Dion kept popping into my head, All By Myself.  I can see that there are at least two other countries bordering my land, but I haven’t explored the land they occupy, and I have no way of exploring it yet, so for the time being its just gonna be me, myself, and my shadow.

Here’s another amusing event:  The Seaborne Merchants.  Apparently a bunch of merchants have shown up on ships claiming to be from distant wealthy islands in the Pacific, which is kind of funny since, being a primitive, I can’t even build any ships.  I wonder if this event is just Paradox trolling players, since there was a bit of a controversy when they revealed that primitives would no longer be able to build ships.  Nevertheless, my heir wants to go on a long voyage which he may or may not return from, and since his stats suck, I decide to let him go.

In 1480, after only ten years, my first colony completes.  I have to core it, but I am extremely happy to see that I’m still sitting on 0% overextension.  I had some pretty bad experiences with colony overextension in my Timurids game.  Anyway, I set up my second colony in Ucayali, where I can show off a nifty little trick.  Because this province borders my capital, the travel time for a colonist is only 13 days.  There aren’t any costs associated with sending and recalling colonists, and every time a colonist arrives in a colony he brings 10 settlers with him, so you can actually dramatically speed up the growth rate for colonies with less than a month of travel time by recalling and resending the colonist every month.  Just make sure that he’s in the colony when the month ticks over, as that’s when the calculation takes place that determines whether any bonus settlers from having a colonist present show up.  Ucayali is actually a tropical province, so normally I wouldn’t even be able to colonize this province yet.  This trick is pretty micro-intensive and tedious, but hey, it’s not like there’s anything else to do right now.

A couple of years after he left, Yahuar Hacuac returns from his adventure at sea in the mythical ships I can’t build yet.  His journey was a success, and I have a choice of either getting a discount on diplo tech until my heir’s death or getting a lump sum of prestige and diplo power.  Since I’m not going to research any diplo techs that bonus would be a waste, so I go with the lump sum.

A few more years go by and before I know it, it is again time for everyone to RESPECT MY AUTHORITAH.

Heh, I bet you’re getting tired of seeing Cartman at this point.  Alright, alright, I’m done posting his picture and wearing out the joke.

I took the core cost reduction reform this time, and a this point the rebels aren’t a threat anymore.

Here’s something funny:  it’s 1485, I haven’t discovered any Europeans yet, and I’m not even sure if they would have started colonizing the Americas at this point, but I nevertheless get an option to take one of the “Women of History” dlc’s advisors.  That’s right, my people have never even seen a white person before, but we nevertheless have an old white woman advising the king.

Later in 1485 I get another unique flavor event for the Inti:  the Huacas and the Royal Temple.  That kind of sounds like the title of an Indiana Jones movie, doesn’t it?  Indiana Jones and the Huacas of the Royal Temple.  Stephen Spielberg, we need to talk!  Anyway, this event gives the option of another permanent -1 to unrest for the rest of the game in exchange for a stability point and 10 legitimacy.  I’ll take it.

In 1486 my second colony finishes.  See?  By using that send/resend trick I was able to shave four years off the completion time of that colony.  All that micro was getting tiresome though, so even though it’s not maxing out the game’s mechanics, I think I’ll just let my colonies slow grow from now on.

In 1487 Tupac kicks the bucket and his crappy son who went on the adventure at sea takes over, unveiling his even worse heir in the process.  Thanks Mallqui, those marriage policies are really paying off, aren’t they?

In 1491 my authority caps out again, so you know what that means.  Its time for everyone to RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH for one last time.

Haha, Cartman just couldn’t stay away, not when there’s authoritah that needs respecting!  Ok, ok, I won’t post Cartman pictures anymore, and this time I mean it.

While the rebel stacks themselves aren’t really that threatening individually, now that my empire is huge they like to spawn at opposite ends of it, and it takes forever for my men to march from one end of the empire to the other.  Ironically, it’s actually taking me longer to deal with these civil war rebels now than it did before when I was smaller.

In 1493 I pick up my second tech of the game:  admin tech 3.  Hey hey, I’ve caught up in admin tech to where most other countries in the world start out at the beginning of the game!  Only one more tech to go until I unlock exploration ideas.

In 1494 I finish sieging down the last of the rebel occupations and thus complete the first phase of the game.  The Andes are united under my Incan banner and all of the religious reforms are passed, so no more civil wars.  Here’s my tech situation in 1494;  that’s right, its been 50 years and I’ve only researched two techs.  I’m still at diplo and military tech 1!  I wasn’t kidding when I said I wasn’t going to research any techs in the Andean tech group.

Completing the first phase of this game’s strategy moves us right along into phase two:  reforming the religion and westernizing.  Conquering the Andes wasn’t really terribly challenging, but this second phase is going to be much more dangerous.  The Europeans are going to start showing up soon, and they will be the ones who make or break this run.

Tune in to part 3 to find out whether I can survive the Europeans and join the western word!

Here’s a shot of the empire in 1494:

Inca: A Sun God Part 1

After completing my Timurids play through I picked up the El Dorado expansion with much eagerness and upon noticing a certain achievement, “A Sun God,” I could think of only one thing:

Do you even praise the sun?  For those of you who don’t know, that is Knight Solaire, a character from one of my favorite games, Dark Souls.  Knight Solaire has become famously endearing within the Dark Souls community for both his jovial attitude and his hilariously naive obsession with the sun.  His catch phrase is “Praise the Sun!”

In this play through I’m going to show Knight Solaire exactly how much I praise the sun by becoming a Sun God, that is to say I’m going to conquer all of South America as the Incans, starting as Cusco.  I’ve been wanting to play a South American game for a while now, and this achievement gives me an excuse to do both that and to play around with the new Inti religion mechanics introduced by the El Dorado expansion.

As usual with new games I start, here’s an overview of our situation:

The world as we know it.  We are Cusco, a four province kingdom nestled in the heart of the Andes mountains, which are divided up into no fewer than 12 (13 if you include Muscia) minor tribes who all hate each other.  They will all need to be brought into the fold if we’re to properly praise the sun and make Solaire happy.

Cusco actually starts out as one of the most powerful of the Andean kingdoms despite being only four provinces, with a force limit of 8 units, although Pacajes, Charca and Quito are capable of fielding 6 units.  While me may be individually the strongest, we aren’t THAT much stronger than everybody else, and we’ll need to carefully navigate the diplomatic labyrinth that having this many individual kingdoms always creates.  We do have one ace up our sleeve though:

We start off as a despotic monarchy (no tribal government here) ruled over by the 5/4/6 god-king Pachacuti, with his only slightly less godlike 5/3/6 heir Tupac on deck.  Wait a minute…  Tupac?

No…  not that Tupac.  Anyway, with these guys in charge we should have no shortage of monarch points for the immediate future.  Tupac is 0 years old though, so hopefully we’ll get lucky and Pachacuti will stick around long enough for his heir to come of age.

Pachacuti sticking around is actually an issue too, as he starts out rolled as an extremely good 3/5/4/2 general.  Normally I would NEVER use a monarch with stats as good as his as a general, but we already have him, and there is another problem with the Andes region that forces us to seek every advantage we can get:

This is the simple terrain map mode, and here you can see that almost every single inhabited province in the Andean region is a mountain province, meaning that we’re gonna be eating a nasty -2 penalty for every aggressive battle we fight.  There is no way around this;  we’re just gonna have to deal with it, which is why having such an awesome general at the start is a big deal.

Back to the military screen, its interesting to note that we can’t field any cavalry units.  All infantry here, baby!  In this day and age it’s easy to forget that horses aren’t native to the Americas, so this is historically accurate, and now that I think about it, I doubt that horses would be of much use in the jagged, high-altitude terrain that makes up the Incan Empire anyway.

Here is our technology screen, and from it you can see we start at level 1 in every tech group, making us as primitive as it gets, at least within the context of this game.  We’re in the Andean tech group too, which increases tech costs by a whopping 150%.  It costs 1,474 monarch points to research each technology!  We simply cannot go on like this.  If we want to praise the sun as much as Solaire does, we’re going to have to westernize, and in order to do that we’re going to have to take advantage of the new Inti mechanic introduced by the El Dorado expansion.

Here is the religion screen, and on it you can see we follow the Inti faith.  We are a part of the pagan religious group, meaning that animists, totemists, and shamanists, as well as the other unique religions in Mexico are considered to be heretics to us, and all of the religions of the old world are heathens.  The religion itself is decent, giving us an extra tolerance of the true faith and a very useful passive reduction to local autonomy.  Very representative of the religion’s idea that the king is a god on Earth, and cementing his unquestioned authority over the realm is a central tenet of the Inti faith.  There’s more to this religion though, which I’ll talk about later when we start to encounter it.

Here is the trade map as we know it.  Not much to say here, as we’ve only even discovered two nodes, Lima and Cuiabá.  Lima is our home node and we don’t currently have enough trade range to able to place a merchant in Cuiabá, so I’m just gonna have to ignore it for now.

Tune in to part 2 to kick off this Sun God run!

Timurids: Over a Thousand! Conclusions

In this part I just want to post some overview pictures and thoughts about the play through.  Here are some shots of my government tabs at the end of the game:

I ended up staying as an absolute monarchy for the rest of the game, which is fine with me.  When you’re blobbing out like I did you eventually reach a point where you don’t really even care about local autonomy anymore.  Even despite my monarch having 0 admin skill I was still pulling in a decent 8 points per month, although that was with the national focus set to amin.  Workable, but non-ideal.  Hindvi was my only accepted culture, so my empire was a sea of oppressed minorities held together only by the strength of our faith in the Sunni religion.

Here’s my technology screen.  In the end I managed to stay ahead of time in military tech for most of the game, but started to fall behind in admin and diplo tech.  This is perfectly fine with me;  I feel that if your aren’t behind in admin and diplo tech, then you aren’t expanding enough.  That’s just me though.  That’s the beauty of a sandbox game like this;  you can do whatever you want!

Here are my idea groups.  These are what I consider to be the best 6 idea groups in the game, with Offensive coming in at 7th.  They give you everything you need to expand and integrate new land efficiently, and I think that any empire that doesn’t take at least some of these ideas will find itself lacking.  People might be on the fence about me taking exploration ideas, and as I see it that mostly comes down to personal choice.  I tallied them up, and ended up colonizing about 75 provinces over the course of the game, or less than one tenth of my total.  Still, that’s 75 provinces I didn’t have to conquer, although with the year only being 1772 I still would have had plenty of time to make up for it.  As I mentioned in the last part, the next idea group I would have chosen would have been offensive, and if I was able to pick up an eighth I probably would have gone with either economic or quality.

Here’s my military tab.  Not much to say here, other than that my army was just shy of 1,000,000 men.  Once I completed quantity ideas I was always way below my maximum force limit for the rest of the game.  The generals I rolled were nothing special;  they are pretty typical of what you usually get with 100 army tradition and no other bonuses.  The offensive idea groups would obviously make them much better.

You might notice that I hardly have any light ships at all.  That was simply how things ended up panning out.  I didn’t need any trade ships because my home node was landlocked and I controlled every province in most of the trade nodes upstream from there.

Here you can see the religious layout of the world.  My missionaries did a good job of converting everything once I got their ball rolling and by the end only a handful of recently conquered heathen provinces remained.  I have plenty of missionary strength though, there was nothing that I couldn’t convert to Sunni.  I could probably have even converted Rome to Sunni if I had bothered to take it.

Here’s my cultural layout at the end of the game.  Hindvi isn’t really a very widespread culture, and every Hindvi province of it you see outside of India is a province that I colonized.  I know a lot of people love the Humanism idea group, and it is a good group, but for a game like this there’s just no way you could keep all of the disparate cultures of the world accepted, even with the -50% threshold.  It is way better for huge empires like this to be unified by faith than to simply be tolerant.  Once I got the heathens converted I never had another rebellion ever again (unless I went over 100% overextension.)

At last, here is a shot of one of the blobbiest Europe’s I have ever seen.  The HRE just dominates everything, and France is in the middle of getting eaten by them and the late-blooming juggernaut Aragon.

I hope you enjoyed reading through this write-up, I know I had a lot of fun playing and writing it.  Now I can rest easy knowing that I’ve done the Timurids justice in a play through after botching my first ever EUIV game so badly.

Timurids: Over a Thousand! Part 8

Welcome to Part 8 of my Timurids:  Over a Thousand! play through.

It’s 1683, we’ve got 500 provinces, and the world is our oyster.  All I’ve got to do is keep my foot on the accelerator and keep pushing for the next 500 provinces.  As usual, I take a look around before I start playing to remind myself of whats going on.  Here’s Europe as we know it:

Check it out.  This is actually one of the blobbiest Europes I think I’ve ever seen.  The Commonwealth was formed by Lithuania a couple of centuries late, Norway and Denmark ate Sweden (definitely NOT overpowered,) Bohemia and Hesse are eating the Holy Roman Empire, Tuscany has conquered almost all of Italy, and Aragon rules over Portugal in a personal union.  France and Castile haven’t really done much in Europe, but they have colonized quite a bit.  The clear winner here, however, is definitely Austria.  Wow.  They got the Burgundian Inheritance (which isn’t that unusual) AND they managed to land and keep a personal union over England, eventually inheriting the throne.  No wonder they’ve managed to pass so many reforms;  there’s no one who’s strong enough to resist them!

Not long after un-pausing, I finish the war with Oirat I left unresolved at the end of the last part and take as much land as I can handle.  Here’s another pic to show exactly what I’m doing, because I feel I didn’t really showcase it well enough in the last part:

I’m pushing my empire’s ability to annex land to the max.  There are essentially two main bottlenecks to annexing land;  your admin point income to pay for the cores, and the amount of time needed to actually core the province.  My awesome coring cost reductions also lower the coring time by half as well, meaning that I can core unclaimed provinces in 1.5 years, down from the usual 3 years.  If you look closely you can see that I’ve got a bunch of uncored land, but not enough admin points to pay for them all.  That was done on purpose, just to make sure that I waste as little time as possible in claiming new land.  You can see I’ve also attacked the Ottomans, so they will be on deck and ready to annex land from as soon as I finish coring these (wars take time to fight too!)

At long last, in 1687, I unlock the last major technological threshold of this game:  diplo tech 22.  Despite its seemingly innocuous title, Limes, this is probably the most important tech in the game.  Its main purpose, at last based on its title, is that it prevents your navies from taking attrition damage from spending too much time at sea, making  long, world-traversing voyages much easier, but in more recent patches this tech has a new purpose.  It unlocks the “advanced casus belli” (imperialism.)  Every time I see this casus belli in-game, I can think only of one picture:

For those of you who don’t know, this is the “Sneering Imperialist” Vault Boy from the game Fallout:  New Vegas (another one of my favorites,) and I can’t think of a better (or more awesome) picture that captures the spirit of Imperialism.  The imperialism cb is the best in the game.  After unlocking this tech you automatically get it against every other country in the game, regardless of religion, geographic location, or tech level, it has an occupy capital war goal, and lets you take any province without having to pay any diplo points.  AND you get reduced aggressive expansion!  Seriously, Paradox giving players this cb is like a father giving his son the keys to his 1959 Corvette and saying “here ya go kiddo, go have some fun!”  And we will.

Here’s the pop-up letting us know that we can now attack anyone, for any reason.  I love it;  “They will be better off in our glorious empire!”

Well the Kongo will definitely be better of in my glorious empire, as they become my newest vassal later that year.

Remember the death fleet I built?  Well, it turns out it wasnt quite as deathly as I though, and loses to the Ottoman fleet.  I retreat before I lose too many ships, but now I still can’t cross the Bosphorus.  Oh well, if 20 heavies and 75 galleys weren’t enough, then maybe 40 heavies and 150 galleys will do it.  In games like this, it’s all about volume.

The next year my truce with Ming expires and I pick yet another fight with them.  Look at what I have to deal with here;  usually the Asian countries all hate each other, but in this instance they’re all having a giant hippie love fest, with everyone allying with each other, and Ming being everybody’s best friend.  So, just like with the steppe hordes earlier in this game, if I want to fight any of these countries (and I do!), I have to fight all of them.  I need to break this up.

I take a bunch more land from the Ottos and come that much closer to wiping them off the face of the Earth.

In the wake of my destruction of the steppe hordes, the Golden Horde has fallen on hard times.  The recently formed Commonwealth has started picking on them and the fair-weather friend Kazan has turned on them as well.  I decide to vassalize them since they have a bunch of cores strewn about that I can feed back to them.  Despite how many times we’ve fought they hardly have any aggressive expansion hate towards me, so I should have no trouble annexing them later.

Here’s another picture to showcase something I’ve had to do that I’ve come to call “spinning plates.”  That is, there are a lot of countries that hate my guts and want to form a coalition against me.  Fortunately, they’re all on different truce timers so none of them are ever actually in coalition against me at the same time.  I have to keep up on it though, and start fights with all of them as soon as I can to avoid having ti fight them all at the same time.  Kazan here joined the coalition against me as soon as our truce expired, but I’m already at war with the current coalition of Ming and Uzbek, and they can’t retroactively join a coalition war.  I notice that, despite their alliance, the Ottos are still licking their wounds from our last war and won’t aid Kazan.  In this moment I decide that the world would be a better place without Kazan, and lock them into a war where they have to face me alone.

In 1691 I get a pop-up letting me know that the Emperor has passed the seventh reform:  Revoke The Privilegia.  This is an extremely big deal, as now every price of the Empire that supported it becomes a direct vassal of the Emperor (Austria.)

Damn it all, it looks like Austria got EVERYONE to sign on except Bohemia.  I’ve got to be careful about getting on Austria’s bad side now, as their combined armies might actually outnumber me, despite me controlling almost all of Asia.

In the meantime I make vassals out of Kaffa and Alodia.  They both have a ton of cores currently under the control of Ethiopia, and they’re just waiting to be fed back to their rightful owners.

After a short, uneventful war, I make peace with Kazan by removing Crimea from existence and taking as much land from them as I can get.  Only one more war now and I can finish them off.  More importantly, I now have direct land access to Muscovy, so I can feed them back their cores in Novgorod.

Here we go, the completion of my new, deatheir fleet! (yes, that’s a word now.)  40 heavies and 100 galleys is way more than any other Mediterranean power can muster, so my control of the sea should be unchallenged now.

Once again, I take more land from Uzbek and Ming.  Having to attack Ming over and over and over always reminds of a song by Aerosmith, “Chip Away at the Stone.”  Here are some lines, so you can catch my drift:

Even a rock will crumble,

If you strike it night and day.

If hammer I must, I’m gonna get through your crust.

Gonna chip that stone away.

Chip away,

Chip away at the stone.

I won’t stop until your love land is my very own.

Up until this point I’ve gotten the “trading in” bonuses for quite a few goods, but in 1696 I get one of the more important ones:  Ivory.  A free extra diplo rep point is always welcome, for ultimate vassal annexation.  In the background you can see me spreading the light of the Mughal Empire to the East coast of Africa (thank you imperialism.)

I also attacked Novgorod and made them give Muscovy’s land back.  I told you their day of reckoning would come eventually, and now it’s here.

Adjuuraan gets vassalized too, filling out my relations slots and giving my diplomats plenty of things to work one when they aren’t handing out war declarations or negotiating peace treaties.

There was one thorn in my side that I needed to deal with:  Dai Viet.  Due to my conquest of everybody else in Indochina they are VERY upset at me and constantly start/join coalitions against me.  I, however, don’t want to directly annex them because they are one of the lovely countries with the +100% core creation cost modifier, and some of their land has decent base tax.  It would cost like 400 admin points just to core their capital!  I can’t leave them alone, but I don’t want to core their land either.  I hit a stroke of luck, however.  Right before I declared war on them this time around, they finished their westernization process.  Now I can make them a vassal!  They were actually too big to vassalize the old-fashioned way, but there is another perk of the imperialism cb:  it reduces the war score cost of fully annexing countries by 25%, so I COULD annex all their land.  The next step…

Is to release them as a vassal!  Since they managed to westernize, they stay western and can actually be a vassal.  I’d much rather spend diplo points to annex them later than waste precious admin points coring their crappy land.

Here’s an overview shot of my empire and my vassals in 1697.  While I’ve been expanding in the mainland my settlers have been busy furiously colonizing southeast Asia.  I’m gonna leave Australia alone though, as I’m pretty sure I would get a colonial nation to form, and those don’t count for the achievement.

At long last, in 1698, Uzbek leaves the game.  Not a moment too soon, let me tell ya.  Fighting the same enemies over and over again gets to be quite tiresome.  (I’m lookin’ at YOU, Ming.)

I also take a big bite out of Oirat.  They’re just about finished off too at this point.

Well, they did it.  In 1700 Austria manages to pass the final reform of the Holy Roman Empire, Renovatio Imperii Romanorum, which unifies all of states of the HRE into a single country, instantly transforming Austria into a gigantic superpower.  This is pretty wild, actually.  I’ve completed dozens of games, and I think I’ve only ever seen the AI pass all the reforms maybe once.  Crazy shit going on in this game!

Here’s what the new Europe looks like.  If I were France or Venice I’d be pretty nervous, as provinces that were a part of the Holy Roman Empire but not owned by a prince become cores of the Empire when the final reform is passed, so the HRE has a reconquest cb against both of them.  It was nice of them, however, to give Rome back to the Papal State.  They’re probably the only country on Earth who is safe from them.

I was really curious to see how strong the new Empire’s army would be, so I waited a few months before I took this screen shot so their army would normalize, and this appears to be what they settled at.  Over half a million solders!  And I though I would have by and far the largest army in the world;  I guess the joke’s on me!  I have no idea how they can afford that, though.  Their army is more than double their force limit!  Gotta love those lucky nations.

After getting over the shock of how huge the HRE’s army is, I feed some cores back to Muscovy and the Golden Horde.

Of course, the HRE promptly declares me their rival, and I get the “protect against” mission, which I thought was funny because it’s not often you get this mission and in order to complete it you’re required to have over 500k soldiers.

I told you there were a lot of juicy cores in Ethiopia just waiting to be fed back to their parents.  I completely gut Ethiopia, and take a little for myself as well.  No Prester John this time.

In the middle of all the excitement I get a new heir:  Hakim Shah, the thoroughly underwhelming 1/3/1.  It’s ironic that the leaders of this continent-spanning empire are so… average.  Its things like this that make me believe that the European superpowers are scripted to get better leaders, even when played by a human.  Who knows, maybe its just confirmation bias talking.

Malindi falls to my might.

I return a bunch of cores from the Mamluks and conquer Jerusalem and the surrounding land for myself, which unlocks the triggered condition “conquest of Jerusalem.”  This nifty bonus gives me an extra missionary (which I need, even after all this time) and an extra prestige point per year.

With the addition of the conquest of Jerusalem prestige point, I am officially permanently at 100 prestige.  I told you prestige was easy to get!

Also, those most recent conquests put me over the 600 province threshold!  We’re closing in now, only 400 more to go.

Wow.  This is a problem.  In 1707 the Holy Roman Empire inexplicably starts a coalition against me.  The best part is that I have no idea what I did to piss them off.  I’ve barely touched Europe, and I haven’t attacked any Catholics (surely returning cores from the Commonwealth, who the Empire hates, couldn’t have angered them that much) but they nevertheless are in the coalition.  So much for staying off the Empire’s bad side.  I need to be even more vigilant about keeping my victims from having a chance to join the HRE in the coalition than I was before!

In 1709, at long last, Kazan agrees to leave the game.

Wow, this game is full of surprises!  The Mamluks formed Egypt, and I think that this is the first time I have ever seen this happen.

In 1710 I take another swathe of land from the Ottos.

That last war against the Ottos was enough for me to eclipse them as a rival.  Good thing I got all the power projection from conquering their land before that message popped up.  I’m above the 50 pp threshold now, and will now be getting an extra monarch point in every category per month, which will help a lot with coring land.

In 1711 I run into yet another roadblock:  the massive and powerful Holy Roman Empire has claimed the title “Defender of the Faith” for the Catholic religion.  I swear, it’s like they’re trying to stop me from reaching 1001 provinces.  This pretty much makes all of Europe off-limits now, at least unless I want to fight a gigantic slogfest that will take forever and I still won’t be able to take any extra land for my effort.

I take another big bite out of Haixi.

Here it is, after attempting to get them to spawn ever since I was able to start fighting them, I see the first stack of nationalist rebels spawn in Ming.  Will they be the ones to rip Ming apart?

I take some more land from Ming.  Seriously, if I could make one complaint, it would be that it takes *way* too much effort to break apart large countries.  Seriously, I have to occupy like 75 provinces just to get 50% war score against Ming, and then can only take 5-6 from them before I hit 100% overextension.  Fighting against Ming (and the Ottos) has pretty much turned into a repetitive grind, where I have to make sure to declare war every 15 years or so (when the truce ends) to make sure they don’t coalition against me and spend a whole bunch of time murdering their stacks, which they easily rebuild to full strength in between wars, combine into one giant army that ignores attrition, and keep trying to seek out my weakest army, so I really have to focus and micro my armies if I want to make any progress.  The bottom line is that fighting against ultra-mega-blobs, like a westernized Ming, just isn’t very fun.

On a lighter note, here’s an amusing story:  the Aztecs somehow got involved in a war with the Mighty Holy Roman Empire and landed a stack in Crimea!  How often do you see THAT?  Not often, I’m guessing.

Sorrow overtakes me as my underwhelming heir dies in a hunting accident and is promptly replaced by an equally underwhelming new heir, 2/2/1 Shah Jahan.  I’m going to let him live, because at this point I care a lot more about avoiding a regency council than I do about what his stats are.  You lucked out here, Shah Jahan!

Here Oirat finally leaves the game and I take a bunch of land from the Commonwealth.  If you’re wondering how I managed to be at war with the Commonwealth without fighting the HRE, I spotted an opportunity (which I forgot to take a screen shot of) when the HRE dropped out of the coalition, possibly because they were involved in the war against the Aztecs.  The Commonwealth and Oirat had both joined the coalition against me, so I attacked Oirat as was able to fight them without triggering the DofF call to arms.  Gotta keep your eyes peeled for opportunities like this!

I annex Jianzhou in one war.  The hippie love fest in east Asia is officially over now!

In 1718 another interesting thing happens:  Orissa is resurrected from the dead!  I did some sleuthing and discovered that the HRE had been at war with Castile because of a colonial nation war (I firmly belive those things exist late game only to stir up trouble in Europe) and they were allied with the westernized Aztecs.  As a part of the peace treaty Castile was forced to release Orissa as a sovereign state, and now I can finally conquer all of India without even having to fight Castile!  Pretty cool if you ask me.

A couple of years later, in 1720, I hit 700 provinces.  I can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel now!

Mutapa falls and joins the empire.

I’ve been continuing to research military techs all this time, but I haven’t been mentioning them.  I’ve gotta mention tech 26 though, because it is the last tech on the tree that unlocks NEW UNIT MODELS!

In this modern age my soldiers finally let go of their tradition of crazy hats and settle for simpler, cleaner looking turban.  We’re really stylin’ now!

I take yet another swath of land from the Ottos.  Chippin’ away at the stone.

I also finish off Ethiopia.  It was fun while it lasted, Ethiopia.

I take a peek over at Europe and I think France might be in a bit of trouble.  The HRE declared war to retake all of their cores that France holds, and Aragon, who still rules over Portugal and is allied with Norway, Denmark and Venice seizes the opportunity to conquer some land from France too.  France might be famous in this game for being a badass, but I don’t think they’re gonna be badass enough to take on literally all of western Europe (except Castile, who is still hurting from their war with the Empire.)

While the HRE is beating down on France, my trigger finger starts to get really itchy and I decide to take a big risk:  I pick a fight with the Catholics.  This is kind of a test to see how tough everybody really is, and hopefully the HRE will stay distracted with France and I won’t actually have to fight very many of their armies.  We’ll see.

Yep, this is happening.  You didn’t think I would finish this game without fighting a huge war against these huge enemies at least once, did you?  I can block the Bosphorus strait with my death fleet, so I expect all of the troops they send to face me to head into the Russian region.  I forecast violence, with a chance of bloodshed.

Not long after I start the ultra mega huge war, I take a bunch of land from Egypt.  Only one more war to finish them off now.

Here’s the one thing in this game that really grinds my gears:  that province has a supply limit of 20 units.  There are 171,000 men on that province.  They take no attrition.  They take no attrition because each individual stack is fewer than 20 units.  This is possibly the lamest thing I have ever seen.  Really, it is extremely unfair that the ai can cheesily avoid attrition while the human player can’t do the same.  All I can do to combat this doom stack is to keep my armies in provinces adjacent to each other, and then march over to reinforce after they attack (and pray that my army can hold out long enough for reinforcements to arrive.)  This needs to be fixed.  (It may have been by the El Dorado patch, but I’m not sure.)

Here’s the biggest battle of the game so far, which involved over 400,000 men and was a barely-scraped-by victory for me.  It would have been a cleaner win if it weren’t for them all getting to attack at once while I have to trickle my stacks in one at a time.  Oh well, a win is a win.

Slowly but surely, progress is being made.  I’m pushing my way into the Commonwealth (thank God they didn’t take defensive ideas) and gaining territory.  Its been extremely costly though:  I’ve had to reinforce over 300k men so far!  Talk about a bloodbath.

Here’s another, even more massive battle fought.  Yep, I’m still glad I took the quantity idea group.  That’s the only way I’m able to withstand all these battle and attrition losses.

Here I make peace with Ming yet again and take a few more provinces from them, but if you look closely you can see that Ming has no fewer than 7 rebels stacks causing havoc in their territory.  This was kind of an interesting situation, as I conquered countries a little bit too fast and needed some time to let myself core provinces before I could make peace, and the result was that Ming was under occupation by me for about ten years.  While I never got a call for peace with them, they DID build up 20 war exhaustion in that time and their manpower and military were completely spent.  There is no way they can muster the forces to take down all these rebels stacks.  I think I cracked the code for how to break Ming apart!  All you have to do is obliterate their army and occupy them for a decade!  I really look forward to seeing how much these nationalist rebels can break Ming apart.

In 1735 I cross the 800 province threshold.  We’re getting closer!

In 1736 my king kicks the bucket and Shah Jahan takes the throne in all his underwhelming glory (thankfully no regency.)  I get a new heir not long after, the also extremely underwhelming 0/2/5 Shir Shah.  Really?  ZERO admin skill?  This game is trolling me so hard.

6 years into the ultra mega huge war I find myself making good progress.  All of my enemies (except the HRE) are completely out of manpower and have seriously diminished armies, although the Commonwealth still isn’t ready to surrender.  By surrender I mean give me 100% overextension worth of land.  They won’t last much longer though.

There we go, now they’re ready to give up.  Now it’s time to focus on my real target:  Venice, and her Balkan holdings.

Getting rid of the Commonwealth was a huge blow to their military strength, even with the HRE on their side, and the war ends with a resounding victory for me!  I take most of Venice’s territory in Greece and link up with all of the Ottoman’s remaining land.  It only took ten years of fighting and untold hundreds of thousands of men’s lives, no big deal.  I do, however, think this will be the last time I mess around in Europe in this play through.

While the war in Europe was wrapping up the rebels in Ming finally do their job and enforce their demands, splitting off Chu, Wu, and Yan.  At this point Ming has recovered enough military strength to stop the remaining rebels, but I’m happy with this result.  Anything that helps destroy Ming faster is Ok in my book.

I’m pretty much on cleanup duty now in Asia, starting with Haixi.  They leave the game and I get their land.

I also make my first foray into the Japanese Islands, who after all this time have still not managed to unite into one country.  All the land I took in that screenshot belonged to the Shimazu clan, who had broken free of their Ashikaga overlord.

The cleaning up doesn’t stop in Asia though.  Here I’m almost able to finish off Novgorod, but I can’t do it without going over 100% OE.  They’re not Catholic though, so I shouldn’t have any trouble finishing them off when the truce expires.

It’s 1747, and I take yet even another swathe of land from the Ottomans.  I gotta hand it too them, they’ve got good instincts for survival (well… kind of.)  While Bohemia was weak and the Holy Roman Empire was preoccupied with fighting me they took the initiative to attack Bohemia and managed to take a lot of land from them.  The jokes on them though, because now they get stuck with that ugly +100% coring cost the Czechs have.

Remember when I got that mission to protect against the HRE by having over 500k soldiers?  Forgot that lame mission, this one blows that out of the water.  Now in order to “protect” against the HRE i need to have 800,000 soldiers.  I have no idea where that’s coming from, and I have never seen an AI wield an army as massive as this.

In 1748 I make my first serious excursion into northwest Africa.  All the various states have their usual web of alliances, but I spot one main opportunity.  My goal in this war is to vassalize Timbuktu, Air, and Kano and to take as much land from Mali as I can.  They have all westernized (thanks Portugal!) so I can get away with this.

Once again, I shave a few more provinces off of Ming.  I’m working them down, bit by bit.

After a few short years of Ironically going after everybody else besides the war target first, I vassalize Air and Tumbuktu.  Someone else declared war on Kano while I was at war with them, so I decided not to vassalize them after all.

Yan submits.  If they hadn’t broken free from Ming I’d have to wait another war+truce timer length of time before being able to conquer that land.  See how its easier to take down many smaller nations than one big one?  Although it occurred to me that I’ve run into a new problem:  you can’t core provinces while you’re at war with someone who also has a core there.  Now I’ve got to be careful of making sure these cores are finished before I attack Ming again.

In 1754 I complete the diplomatic idea group, which will probably be my last idea group of this play through.  In that picture you can see what are my most favorite idea groups.  Notice I only have 1 military idea group, and it’s not even one that gives any combat boosts.  Generally, I prefer ideas that make it easier to incorporate new land into your empire.  I’ve been able to fight the Europeans and Ottomans just fine even without shiny army stats.  Having said that, the next idea group I would pick would be Offensive ideas.  Better generals, faster sieges and more discipline are always useful to have, and the Offensive group unlocks some pretty useful polices, but those aren’t important for this game.

In 1755 I end the war in Africa by taking a gigantic bite out of Mali.  This does net me a lot of provinces, but now I have to add Mali to the list of coalition plates I need to keep spinning.

Actually, that war with Mali was enough to put me over the 900 provinces threshold!  We’re in the home stretch now!  Simply annexing my current vassals will push me most of the way there by itself, so I won’t actually need to annex very many more provinces.

I will need more though, and Nupe is my next unfortunate victim.

In 1761 I continue my clean up duty with Korea and Novgorod.  It was fun while it lasted, guys.  (no it wasn’t)

I clean up Africa by conquering various minor countries in the region.  Its kind of cool how I’ve taken over this entire region in less than 20 years.  Imperialism cb for the win!

Oh boy, I’ve done it this time…  I have a problem that when I play for too long I start to get sloppy.  I was accidentally 1 day late in re-declaring war on Mali, so they managed to join the coalition against me (which the Commonwealth, Venice, and HRE all formed again) and in my stupidity decided to declare war on Mali’s protectorate, Mobassa.  I completely forgot that declaring war on a protectorate nation is treated exactly the same as if you had declared war on the overlord country itself, so even though the war declaration screen said that Mali would only be called in as a co-belligerent, all of their allies and the entire coalition against me were also called in.  Oops.

Uh, Houston, we have a problem.  That is a lot of troops, way more than I have.  This could get ugly.  I do have one advantage though, to get me through this blunder.

Mali is the war leader in this coalition war, and Mombassa’s capital of Gurma is the war goal.  Mali is isolated from the rest of the coalition, and I dramatically outnumber them in this localized theater of the war, so if I can just hold off the angry Europeans I think I’ll be all right.

Ugh, things are rough in eastern Europe.  The HRE is coming after me in force now, and they brought their 6/6/4 god-general with them.  279,000 men fought against me in this battle, and if you look closely you can see they have another 180k off to the side that didn’t even participate in the battle.  Talk about cocky!  I haven’t lost my love for these attrition-immune doom stacks though.

While I might be struggling in Europe, I’m doing well down in Africa, where it matters.  I’ve got the Malinese army on the run and am working on getting as much war score as I can.  Maybe I can salvage something out of this sticky situation.

As the war rages on in the west, I take another round of land from Ming.  Seriously, I think this is like the 12th war I’ve fought against them.  Its kinda funny that even though I’m outnumbered overall in the coalition war, I still have 150k of my army running around in China.

After two years of bloody fighting, I decide that it’s just not worth it to drag the war on.  Mali is being really obstinate about handing over any land, and I can’t hold off the European onslaught.  I forgot to take a screenshot (trying to micro all of that was quite tiresome) but I had lost a lot of ground and the Europeans were pushing deep into the Russian region.  You can see from my manpower tally that I’ve lost about 500k men in the fighting so far, and just to make 10% war score.  After all that, I make peace with Mali by making them give me war reparations.

A year after I end the war of the second coalition my king dies and the zero admin skill trollface heir takes the throne, and unveils to the world his equally worthless 3/1/0 heir, Sikandar Shah.  Damn this dynasty sucks.  This guy is probably gonna be the last king of this play through though, so his weak administrative skills won’t hold me back too much.

During the war of the second coalition Bohemia worked up the balls to counter attack the Otto’s and take back their land, and also made the Otto’s release some of the Balkan states they conquered long ago, reducing them to an insignificant one province minor based in Istanbul.  How the mighty have fallen!

In my final act of geographic housekeeping, I finish off Egypt once and for all.  All I need to do now is annex my vassals and that will be enough to put me over 1000.  Ending this war ushers in the first years of peace my empire has known in a very long time.

To speed along the annexation process, in 1770 I enact my first policy of the game, the “Pen Relies on The Sword Act,” which gives a few extra force limits and more importantly gives and extra diplo reputation point.

Two years later I finish annexing Ajuuraan, Air and Timbuktu, and that does it.  I now directly control Over a Thousand provinces!  Its 1772, so I ended up having plenty of time to spare.  It was a long road to get here, and there were some pretty rocky patches along the way, but I made it happen.  If you ever want to know what a 1000 province empire looks like, this is it.

When I set out to start a new game I usually do so with a clear goal for the play through in mind and I usually stop once I achieve it, so I’m going to end this here.  It’s too bad that I wasn’t able to completely finish off the Ottomans or Ming, but at this point I’m very tired of fighting against them and I would rather move on to something else.

Next I’m going to make a conclusions post with some more thoughts and screenshots.