Succession Wars: Part 06: 1527-1551: Emperor Ferran III de Trastamara of Aragon, Castile, Portugal, and Jerusalem

On succession, I inherited nasty wars with Venice, Hungary, and France, and I really wanted out.

Hungary was nearly fully occupied, so I let them get away with some broken alliances and some gold. I thought this would be a good signal for Bohemia to start their independence rebellion against Hungary, but Hungary just allied Muscovy right away, Austria soon after, and Bohemia chickened out of declaring independence.

I had to white peace France, but at least I could fully remove Venice, one of few remaining minor powers - and briefly even one of the great powers.

As the strongest country in the world, I was the rightful successor of the Roman Empire, but nobody acknowledged my claim. The Western crown was Austria's and electors were not interested in handing it over, the Eastern crown was in Constantinople, and the Pope was holding Rome and not interested in giving me a a third one.

And Europe was consolidating. Denmark got PU over England, and I didn't even notice for a good while as almost everyone in Europe has the same salmon color.

The Great Salmon Empire

There are now 7 major powers in Europe, and 4 of them have almost the same color:

• Aragon/Castile/Portugal/Jerusalem/so many vassals - salmon
• Denmark/Sweden/Norway/England - salmon
• France - blue
• Austria and its HRE minions - white and rainbow of minors
• Hungary/Bohemia/Milan (also in the HRE) - salmon
• Poland/Lithuania/Brandenburg - salmon
• Muscovy - yellow

There were other powers outside Europe, but they didn't have color conflicts with me. I don't think there was a single EU4 game ever where color scheme bothered me so much.

I would love to undermine all of them, to make my color unique, but that's probably not going to happen anytime soon. Fine, I guess I'll just pay the price to integrate Castile, so I can change my color to Spanish yellow.

For some minor undermining, I started bribing OPMs in the "Holy Roman Empire" to swear fealty to me one by one. It's a lot of vassals, but it doesn't add up to that much land.

Since supporting independence of Bohemia didn't really work out, I tried it with England instead, but that wasn't too successful either.

Well, there's the whole rest of the world to conquer.

The Mamluks had another succession, and I autodeclared holy war on them by event. I was planning to just core return CB them to restore Syria, but I guess Jerusalem is calling. Mamluks had annoying allies like Persia and Kilwa, so this took a while, but I took the whole coastline, Jerusalem, Cairo, and Mecca for good measure.

And I ran into a surprise mechanic. Overextension effects used to only happen when you had >=101% overextension, so I took 100.8% without worrying about it, but apparently they changed it in some recent patch, and now the threshold is actually >100%. I learn new things even after so many years of playing.

I got my first colonist, and sent them to Kongo, together with some soldiers to secure the whole coastline. I even accepted Kongolese culture, as there's a decent monument there that requires that. It's really silly that the whole culture system got reduced to unlocking monuments, but it is what it is.

I'm spreading my expansion between Kongo, West Africa, North Italy, Egypt, and Middle East, and with some core returns, and some holy wars, there's not even any coalition against me.

But new things are coming. Printing Press got invented, and with it, religious leagues started in the HRE, so all of Europe is going to get realigned now.

I still hope to roll free East Rome PU, and I alss allied Bavaria to try to roll their PU, but no luck there either. Bavaria isn't even that likely, they have so many allies and same religion neighbors, even if they fall under PU, it probably won't be mine.

Overall, I didn't have any high impactful events yet, either positive or negative. I based the odds on what made AI simulations work best. For most fun experience, the player should have a lot of high impact events. But if every AI was rolling high impact event all the time, the world would fall apart pretty quickly. And I really wanted the mod to treat player and AIs the same.