Friday, April 21, 2017

God Empress of Prussia: Part 12: 1529-1541: The Great Ming War

I discovered pretty much everything that was discorevable, so Age of Discovery ended.

What followed was weirdly named Age of Reformation. What's reforming again? I guess Imperial cult keeps evolving, it incorporated Vajrayana and (Sunni) Muslim beliefs, and is now in process of incorporating the Hindus. Next on the list are Pagans and Theravada, eventually Shinto and (Coptic) Christians.

Start of new age (modded to start in 1530, now I think 1520 would be more in line with vanilla), and I immediately lost -30 bonus to liberty desire from my tributaries, so Maya, Egypt, and Castile decided to take a break in sending to tribute until I bribed them to give me a break and continue. Except Castile, they'll pay for it.

Also Sinope and Connacht were disloyal because of what their previous overlords did to them. Liberty desire modifiers are now inherited, I'm reasonably sure they used to be reset, and I'd call new behaviour a bug, but nothing a bit of prestige spending wouldn't fix.

And my colonies are now much worse. No more +50 settler growth, no more +1 of each kind of dev on completion.

As long as previous age existed, I had ability to raise free war taxes, but since you actually need to remember to press this button, I only did it once, so I wasted something like 5k gold by just not having a reminder for it. I'll be sure to do it better next campaign.

I had some fun in Africa and Middle East. Sadly I lost a lot of troops, as they got cought in Egypt's one province exclave while coming back from a war, and would suffer attrition for 15 years if I didn't just disband them. I wish there was a way to just force exile own troops in such cases, but not even console can help.

But the real target is Ming. They had following 20 tributaries, with 1659 dev before I started messing with them:

  • Jianzhou horde - 333 dev (+35 vassal Buryatia)
  • 14 Indochinese minors - 805 dev
  • 2 other hordes  - 157 dev
  • Tibetan minors - 150 dev
  • Korea and Ryukyu - 118 dev
  • lands I now held that used to belong to Ming's tributaries - 61

Well, I attacked Ming tributary horde Anxi, bringing Jianzhou as my ally. That instantly kicked huge chunk of their tributary development out of the war - and started ticking up their big neighbour horde disaster.

I hoped it would make Jianzhou separate-peaceable as former tributary, but sadly this bug didn't happen this time. I think that's because it's not former tributary of war leader. Maybe.

I built 20 carracks, more troops, and started slowly moving them to Indonesia, hoping Ming will ignore that.

So next war was Khmer, Lan Xang, and Taungu. And then Annam. And then Champa. And then Dai Viet. And then Pegu and Mong Yang (which wasn't really annexable). Then Sukhotai and Ava. And finally Manipur.

Ming was already at war with me, so it couldn't defend them. Now it was still hostile, so it could just walk over and attack me - but it was distracted in Anxi and Jianzhou.

I got 571 development worth of Ming tributaries for myself. I didn't really have a luxury of staying under 100% overextension, best I could do was stay under 200%. I had 45% coring discount (10% HRE, 10% national ideas, 25% administrative), so at least it cored in half time too.

Jianzhou unfortunately took most of Ming's wrath and bailed out early, but as long as they're not Ming tributary, it doesn't even matter.

In all that my navy - far bigger than I ever had - was just a minor annoyance against Ming navy.

Rebels of all kinds overran my country. My armies becme dominated by mercenaries, but overall it went just fine.

And of course I couldn't just let other countries coalition me, so while I had this huge war, I fought France, Kerman, Castile, and Byzantium with Nubia.

In the end, Ming got reduced to 9 tributaries, worth total of 677:

  • Anxi horde leftover - 25
  • Ayutthaya - 196 - I didn't touch them as they were allied with my tributary Malacca, but they broke it
  • Kham - 134 - amazingly has one province in trade company region, so I can just fabricate on them
  • Korea - 111 - can't fabricate as not in trade company region
  • Kucha - 16
  • Ligor - 13 - still Malacca's ally
  • Mong Yang - 120
  • Oirat horde - 55
  • Ryukyu - 7 - can't fabricate as not in trade company region

60% of their tributary development destroyed in one war. Well, it was a huge war.

Because Ming is bordering me from both sides and Jianzhou, they're losing mandate so fast it will go to zero in about 15 years.

Ming's crisis stopped ticking because they have truce with Jianzhou horde, but it will hopefully resume soon enough.

Back to alchemy after 100 year break
Immortals have a lot of time 

The main Ming war
I won day one when they lost Jianzhou as tributary
Everything else was just extra

Saryupara's independence revolt was enormous
It failed, and as side effect, Byzantium had less than 40k troops left when I attacked

Jianzhou served as a good distraction
Not like I needed them, eventually my vassal swarm got Anxi
War in Indochina and rebel whackamole I had to do myself

Occupied but waiting for annexation, as I really didn't want to go over 200% OE and I needed to annex them in specific order
Even that spawned huge number of rebels

The rest of my empire was just as bad 
I suspect there were probably over 1 million rebels
I have zero manpower and 100k+ mercs.
My final idea wil give me +30% national manpower modifier, so it probably won't be that bad.
I don't think I'll need to do that again anytime soon.

Ming's tributary sphere completely destroyed

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