Tuesday, April 18, 2017

God Empress of Prussia: Part 10: 1518-1521: Imperial Unification

There's a new mechanic I discovered. Trade company provinces have 0% min autonomy, ignore non-accepted cultures, and get +100% trade power. At penalty they get -100% tax and -100% manpower.

So no tax and no manpower right? Not even close, because all modifiers except autonomy are additive, so any building you build will be as good as if that province was your accepted culture state - which is huge, as new state limit is really horrible otherwise.

Oh and I finally figured out why a few campaigns ago my colonized provinces wouldn't convert to my culture and religion even though they weren't assigned to a trade company - apparently they changed it and simply being in trade company region is enough. So Cape has this massive ahistorical Fetishist Khoisan population.

So some uncolonized provinces are in colonial regions, some are in trade company regions, some are in regular regions, and they all behave in a different and undocumented ways. Exact borders between them vary every patch. Fun.

I got administrative as 3rd idea group, so I can expand into Africa faster. I'll probably get influence as 4th for unjustified demands discount, as I'll need some creative CB usage to challenge Ming's sphere.

I noticed that I'm really close to passing 7th reform, so I added all my North France provinces to HRE, and that left countdown of very few malcontents.

Almeria - a big blob in Spain, which I long thought was non-member, actually turned out to be part of the empire. They started as 2 province minor, and expanded to 12 provinces and a non-imperial tributary. And since they've been very close to all the anti-French AE, they really didn't like me.

Fortunately I had tools - influencing nations, bestowing imperial grace, gifts, and improving relations, and by August 1519 everybody was willing to vote for unification, even two remaining heretics and a lot of former coalition members.

That left just two issues. First I needed to wait for Ural to integrate or they'd bug out to 300% liberty desire, but that would conveniently finish before any of my truces expired.

And second and much worse was Africa-Bavaria war. It started in 1497, Africa had wargoal at +25 ticker, and nothing whatsoever happened - presumably because they couldn't demand anything as there weren't any forts there, but wouldn't accept white peace as they had massively positive warscore.

I couldn't even enforce peace, as I was allied to Africa, and if I broke it and waited 5 years, well... That would be another mess because then they'd absolutely hate me. I could probably mess with their war using condottieri, but it was all just so dumb, so I white peaced them with console.

And on 1 January 1521 I integrated Ural, and next day I got 4th colonial nation of Canada, and passed 7th reform, getting nice vassal swarm.

That had a few funny side effects:

  • Byzantium's vassal Trebizond became my vassal
  • Almeria's nonimperial tributary Asturias became independent
  • Africa's nonimperial vassal Djerid became independent
  • Deccan's 3 imperial provinces they got from diploannexing Turkestan simply left empire
  • All imperial vassals and tributaries became my vassals

I thought I'd get claims on Turkestan, like you normally do when someone refuses to become your vassal, but it seriously doesn't matter, and I have better things to do that first another great power for literally 9 development in wrong direction.

By the way I pondered cheesing France into empire by giving them back Paris, but that kind of plan had to be done 200 AE ago. Or back in CK2. Right now I can just eat everyone, use vassal's armies to conquer them, and my vassal's mana to core their land.

I have a much bigger project in mind.

So this forces me to send troops to my colonies
And once I do that, next steps become much clearer

My empire in Europe
I need to destroy any competition

Global empire
They seriously ought to make vassals and tributaries a different color
They also seriously need to increase max zoom out, as it already doesn't quite fit

No comments:

Post a Comment