Papal States: Part 15: 1597-1610: Jesus Brings Gold

I wanted to get into some more fights with France, as Paris has 2 monument slots, and they held some cores from my vassals. They allied Commonwealth and Portugal, so it looked nasty, fortunately I got my allies to fight on my side. Spain would only join once I paid off their debt of 2000 gold, fortunately I have a lot of gold. I took Paris for its monuments, cores of my vassals, and mostly French colonies in Africa and Indonesia.

I continued expanding in Indonesia and East Africa, really struggling with governing capacity. Well, there are three good ways to increase that:

• spam courthouses - definitely doing that
• economic hegemon - at max level it gives +20%, but only at max level, nothing until then
• monument in Bangkok, currently level 0 controlled by Ayutthaya - at max level it gives +15%

It looks like they fixed the exploit where I could buy a province with monument through Charter Company. But that only applied if monument is actually there (even unusable counts), slots for empty monuments do not count. So I really wanted to buy it from Ayutthaya - and they didn't care about monument slot, but they really hated all my nearby provinces, so they wouldn't sell anyway. Did the numbers change there too, or did I just wait too long?

Well, I guess this means war. At some point at least, direct attack on Ayutthaya's tributary Malacca would bring Bengal and a lot of annoying countries into the war, and I really don't have many troops or ships over there.

An unrelated weird thing is that I can also build great projects for my vassals, even if I can't use them myself.

Economic hegemon gives -50 relations with everyone, they toned it down in 1.33, down from ridiculous -100. Unfortunately this means I can no longer diplovassalize infidel countries, there's pretty much no way to overcome -50 on top of all the other penalties. I could still diplovassalize Catholic, and I could force convert then diplovassalize other Christians, but neither of these is really helpful for my Chinese expansion plans.

I've been expanding quite aggressively, and so far my dipomats have been able to patch things up with angry countries, so no real coalition risk yet, but that -50 is going to make it a lot harder.

Catholicism is doing decently. Denmark and Great Britain are the only significant heretic powers, but there's a lot of small ones in Germany. Indonesia and East Africa are both about half done.

Speaking of China, Shun nearly unified China - but it's actually Chu who grabbed mandate from Ming a while back, and they're still holding to it. Ming still barely exists. Overall a very rare combination.