Sunday, April 23, 2017

God Empress of Prussia: Part 13: 1541-1550: Stabilizing the Empire

It feels like unifying whole empire in one go would be too big a step, and diploannexing them for mana would be silly, so I decided to just add intermediate option - integrating one member vassal for 10 IA during peace time. It feels like reasonable gameplay.

I spent the first 250 IA to integrate:

  • Britain: Cornwall, Hwicce, Lothian, Northumberland, East Anglia, Wessex, Oxford, Essex, York, Kent
  • Denmark: Fyn, Jylland
  • Sweden: Smaland, Uppland
  • Germany/Netherlands: Oldenburg, Brandenburg, Meissen, Holland, Brunswick, Loon, Cologne
  • Poland/Rus: Lubusz, Mazovia, Kurland, Polotsk

That cleaned up the borders, and let me start setting up my trade system properly.

Having so many vassals also causes micro problems - for example to transfer a bunch of provinces to same vassal, I need to scroll the tiny list every time. And whenever I load a game or go to peace I get spammed by 50+ marriage offers.

My 12 dev tributary Yarkand - whom I got mostly so Ming doesn't - got attacked, so I had to defend them against Rajastan, Deccan, and friends.

Conveniently I already had troops on India's East border. And my war fleet, originally meant to challenge Ming, but then finding out it's still only half as strong as them, made a good showing fighting against Indians.

I separate peaced for a bit of land with two estuaries and center of trade, so I'd get another merchant, and let them do whatever they want with Yarkand - whom they peaced out for reparations.

That got me over 100% again, something I wanted to avoid until I recover my manpower. Right now I'd be near zero if I replaced mercs with regulars.

I have adequate mana, so my expansion rate is limited by OE. If I want to stay below 100% OE, and average core takes 18 months, that means about 650 dev a decade. Sadly with Anxi the OE x CoreTime product was way higher as I needed to core previous provinces before next ones would be in coring range - final being 5th, or taking nearly 8 years to core.

Normally I wouldn't do that, but I absolutely needed land connection with Ming up North, and coring rules are rather inconsistent - sometimes I'm allowed to jump cores, sometimes I'm not, so I wasn't even sure if I'd get penalized.

My tributary Malacca attacked Ming's tributary Ayutthaya, Ming joined, but I wouldn't let their troops pass. That didn't help them, as Ayutthaya was still a good deal stronger than Malacca. That's 27 dev added to Ming tributary bonus.

I don't think I could have helped in any way, and Malacca's cores instantly expired by a bug. Not a huge deal, Ming is going to hit zero mandate by 1508 or so.

Their best plan to recover was to spam requests asking me to become their tributary, hoping I'd misclick one of them. Pretty clever for AI.

Printing Press spawned in Goldingen, which used to be Kurland before I annexed it.

Somehow in a fight between Portugal and Portucale Asturias got released with Mahayana religion - which was otherwise not seen on the map, so if I get that and develop a bit I will be able to harmonize it.

Imperial War Fleet was meant to fight a different war, but it did well

That's a new bug
Not even vassal whose claims I pushed joined
I peaced them out by console,  as it was too silly

West Africa looks nice now

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