Succession Wars: Part 02: 1445-1457: King Joan II de Trastamara of Aragon, Naples, and Navarra

The first order of business was dealing with 91k peasants rebels. It's not really worth fighting, so I accepted their demands for +20% autonomy everywhere and -50 prestige. It's not ideas, but I was already at war, and I'd spend a lot more money on mercs to deal with the peasants than a bit of autonomy would cost.

But first I can let them fight Tunis army who landed on Sicily. Our side has stronger navy, so I could have stopped them if Naples fleet attached to mine, but subjects are useless, so they didn't. In Fun and Balance there are no magical bridges like one between Sicily and South Italy, so Naples army is not going to just walk to Sicily either. It's all just a minor inconvenience.

North African wars were going fairly smoothly. I vassalized Granada and took some of Tunis's coastline. This upset them a bit, and they started a coalition, so I started a war with intention of white peacing it quickly to break the coalition. Then a few more easy wars. The goal is to not upset the Mamluks or Ottomans to prevent coalitions, and not have direct border with the Mamluks to prevent nasty succession events with them (vassal border is fine).

I got vanilla event for +50% liberty desire by Naples (obviously I won't just let them go), and then negative prestige from peasant rebellion gave them even more on top. I really should have dumped all my mana into their dev to get it under 50%, but I didn't do it, and they started to gather supporters.

Ottomans were the first supporter. Castile broke our alliance, and supported them too soon. Then England. Then France. Somehow 6 countries rivalled me!

I tried to play vanilla Burgundy succession roulette, but Castile got them instead. This is sort of fine, as I will probably get Castile eventually, but for now they're really hostile to me. They refused to release the lowlands, bringing them into war with Austria.

Austria challenged the succession, and it the attacker against Castile, Castilian Burgundy, and Portugal, so Austria can't call its allies (like me). Normally it would be total wipe by Castile, but AI is really awful at naval invasions, and they never asked me for military access, so Austria might actually win this, costing me my rightful clay.

After all that, my new ally setup is Pope, Milan, East Rome, and Austria. That's not really going to frighten Naples into not declaring.

On Papal succession Pope's vassal rebelled, so I got dragged into that war.

I got CB on throne of Muscovy, but I'm not doing that.

Morocco's vassals declared war on them, and their ally Ottomans abandoned them instead of helping, so I joined the pile-up to grab a few provinces for myself as well.

And then king Joan II died, and on succession (separate events for every country):

• Navarra got 6k peasant rebels
• Naples got 30k pretender rebels - they'd break the PU if they succeed
• I got inward focus - -50% build cost, -25% dev cost, +50% province warscore cost, go play tall now!

Inward focus isn't too bad, as I can't take too much land due to AE anyway.

For interesting succession events that happened in this episode:

• Oldenburg became junior partner under Burgundy (they got auto-annexed with other HRE juniors when Castile got Burgundy)
• Kildare became junior partner under Scotland
• Mantua became junior partner under Ferrara
• Crimea tried to jihad Genoa, and got full annexed instead
• Ottomans are getting wrecked to normal reconquest war as Venice guaranteed Albania, nothing to do with the mod

Ottomans are getting wrecked with almost no player intervention, all I did was ally East Rome, that made Ottomans attack Albania instead, and they are losing to Venice somehow. I still hope to get East Rome PU by event, but odds aren't that high.

Inward Focus could be really good if I stacked the discounts even more, right now I'll only build a few temples with it.

Succession Wars: Part 01: 1444-1445: King Alfons V de Trastamara of Aragon and Naples

Modding with clankers

I thought my custom Socotra game two years ago would be my final EU4 campaign, but two things happened. First, I tried EU5 and I really did not like it. And second, I really wanted to see if clankers are any good at modding, and EU4 is the game I'm most familiar with modding.

So I drafted a simple mod idea. Every new monarch, every country receives a big succession related event. This isn't a typical player-only randomness meme game, I wanted everyone to play by the same rules. Things that can happen on succession include:

• become a junior partner of another country (Christians only; only allies and neighbors allowed, and not if they're much smaller than you), or a vassal of a much stronger ally (non-Christian)
• every neighboring Muslim / Christian / Dharmic / other horde instantly attack you if you're wrong religion / wrong horsiness
• reset all rivals and alies and instantly wipe out -40 AE with everyone, so you can start over diplomatically
• all your rivals get claim throne CB on you
• a lot of religious rebels, maybe even from a religion that's not on the map but was historically present on a given subcontinent
• and a lot of fun smaller scale events; modifiers generally last 20 years or until the next succession

I'll explain each event as we get it (or some important country gets it).

Also latest Fun and Balance included. This campaign won't be very balanced, but I ran about 20 AI only simulations with tweaks in between, and it has just the right level of chaos.

So to answer my question, clankers are OKish at this. The clanker I used needed a lot of guidance, access to game files and some example mods, access to game's error log, and in-game testing, but in the end I managed to write this mod a lot more quickly than I'd do by hand, and I didn't even burn too many tokens on it. And that's speaking as a very experienced Paradox modder. If you haven't modded much, you might struggle to prevent the clanker from going of the rails completely.

Clankers are a lot worse at this than at coding mainstream programming language. They hallucinate syntax, make many basic mistakes, and of course they have no idea how to make the game fun, so that's why there's a human in the loop.

Anyway, as event choice is random and you only get a few rolls per century, there aren't any great ways to cheese the system. You can steer the system by allying countries you'd like PU over, avoiding borders with infidels you really don't want to fight, and so on. But for most part you'll need to adapt to what you get.

Some high impact events like becoming a PU junior have quite high odds, but AI is bad maintaining PUs so a lot of them fall apart.

Aragon

It's 1444 again. At least Fun and Balance colors subjects with overlord's colors

So now that the introduction is over, it's time to play. I picked Aragon, as a big easy country with big mission tree is going to be great for dealing with all the nasty events I'll need to deal with. I'm going to play really chill, which for me means no 11 December 1444 NoCB Byz.

To keep the theme, this series will be one episode per monarch, however long or short their reign.

Aragon can form Spain, go colonial, or form some mini Roman Empire. Or for all I know I could get PU over Sweden and take this campaign into a wildly different direction.

So my plan is to expand by force mostly in North Africa, and try to get as much land in Europe as possible from free PU events, and claim throne wars. So:

• Naples - already my PU junior
• Navarra - currently ruled by my heir, so automatic PU on succession, still vanilla
• ally Castile, I can get their PU by vanilla event or by mod event
• ally and marry Burgundy. Countries with more than 1 junior partner are not eligible to mod PU event to, but since I'm doing PU game, it would be silly not to try
• ally Pope - that prevents excommunication event, and it's just a good idea for Catholic power
• try to ally Byz and get them as junior partner. And normally that would discourage Ottomans from attacking them, but in this mod Muslims and Christians (and Hindus, Sikhs, and hordes) can declare automatic religious wars on succession

I started war with my rival Tunis right away, before they could ally Ottomans. They allied Granada, so the goal was to force vassalize them, and then maybe grab some coastline in North Africa so future wars will be easier.

Unfortunately my king died almost right away. The random event was 91k peasant rebels, which is fairly mild as these events go.

One event PU already happened offscreen, of Ennarea over Kaffa, both in East Africa.

The first succession happened far too early, and peasants are not happy about it

I didn't want to make any event 100% good or 100% bad, and technically "your rebels could fight your enemies" makes it only a 99% bad event

Socotra: Part 10: 1533-1540: The Golden Age of Socotran Hegemony

It's been very long time since I last played this campaign due to lack of time, and it doesn't seem like I'll have any more time soon, so let's do the final episode just to close things up.

I needed a lot of paper mana to finish my idea groups, and I didn't particularly want too much AE, so I mostly expanded by vassal core return.

As Timurids broke their alliance with Ming, and were busy in some silly war against Delhi, I did a quick one on them to seize their coast for my vassals, taking just two provinces for myself to cut them from the sea completely. Then I diplovassalized two recently shrunk Indian countries Mewar and Delhi, and returned some of their cores.

I needed to spend some paper mana to get sites of 3 monuments, from Pasai, Pegu, and Ayutthaya, also cutting Ayutthaya from the sea, bringing that Indian Ocean Mare Nostrum ideal closer. This got me to rare 100.0% OE, but as a small secret you can actually get to 100.9% before you start getting bad events - back then they coded it, there was no fractional OE, and the game didn't have any way to represent ">100% OE" condition, so they made it ">=101% OE".

Then I remembered, there's this Golden Age button. I only even used it for +10 max absolutism, because it made Court and Country so much easier. But it's not really needed in recent patches. Golden Age has one more fun ability - +10% goods produced.

So I started the Golden Age, and that got me over 1000 monthly income, and let me press the Economic Hegemon button.

This sort of messes up my diplomatic game, as -50 opinion with everyone else makes diplovassalizing even harder than having unique religion already did. But it would let me get ridiculous amounts of money. If I were to continue, but I don't have time, so this is as good a closure as this campaign gets.

In the end, I never got my mission tree. The Mamluks were just too ambitious of a formable tag for an OPM to rush it. Even if I fought them a lot earlier, it would still be far too many wars to annex them. That's a good lesson, if you play custom nation, plan where you're getting mission trees a bit better.

I never even completed my custom idea set, being one idea short, and 20 years away from Economic Hegemony ticking up to the max and giving me stacking -20% minimum autonomy in territories.

Ideas I took were just as OP as I thought, especially Goods Produced was just plain ridiculous. Infantry Fire was great, but it still required some attention early game if you're playing an small country, as enemies having much bigger armies sort of balances it out.

There was some anti-synergy between vassalization acceptance and going Ibadi. And generally going Ibadi just wasn't worth the hassle, I wouldn't get warscore discount against Sunnis until so late most of the Sunnis were gone anyway, and it would have made my early game so much easier.

Considering how little time I have, and how many other games there are, this might very well be my last EU4 game. I'll try to post the final version of Fun and Balance sometime soon.

Socotra at start of its Golden Age

Socotra: Part 09: 1526-1533: Great Pyramids of Socotra

I went to a big war with the Mamluks, but even with big province warscore discounts, it will still be more than two 100% wars to fully conquer them.

After that, my province warscore cost stacking really started working, and I had:

• -25% vs other religions from custom ideas
• -25% vs other religions from age bonus
• -5% vs other religion from Mecca monument

Which meant I could take half of Vijayanagar in one war. And this will only stack higher.

And so I was slowly expanding in Africa, India, and Indonesia, slowly turning the Indian Ocean into Mare Nostrum.

I have a small side quest to do of going into Ayutthaya for their -10% AE +15% gov cap monument, and there's also +1 diplo rep +2 diplo relations monument in Pegu as well, and +2% missionary strength and +2 tolerance of true faith in Pasai (Muslim only). Other monuments in the region are either religion locked or not that relevant anyway.

My income keeps going higher and higher, and it went from 630 to 770 in seven years, really close to economic hegemony. Taking economic hegemony will unfortunately make vassal game harder, especially since I have a rare religion. There are some fairly big countries that are practically asking to become my vassals like Mewar and Aq Qoyunlu.

Weirdly Venice is second richest at 146, is it some DLC power creep there? That never happened in old patches.

There are some annoying Portuguese and Castilian settlers in Cape area. I don't want a distraction of fighting them right now.

Timurids and Ming broke their alliance and rivalled each other instead, so I might clean up that border at some point.

So much purple but you can't even see my name on the map, so there's still more work to be done.

Socotra: Part 08: 1516-1526: Going East

Haasa rejoined as my vassal, and this way they forgot that I once demanded their religious conversion from them, Breenter scenario. This costs 25 prestige and a lot of hassle, vs spending 100 prestige on placating them 5 times, but it's so much more hassle. It's even better when making someone forget that I changed their religious group, that would normally cost 200 prestige to forget.

I got to max prestige, became empire, then threw all that prestige away into negatives to disinherit bad heir, and placating some vassals.

Something I didn't really know until now is that generic missions are no longer totally bad. They basically stapled "get claims on all neighboring provinces/areas" on half of the missions, extremely convenient.

I got some Indian vassals, then waged a few small wars to return their cores. Well, might as well keep going East, so I took parts of Ceylon, then finally got to some Indonesian wars.

I paid Hungary for Colonialism, but it's going to take quite a while to reach me. With capital area fully colonial, I was still at only 6.5% of adoption.

I used a small new exploit with Espionage Ideas, where there's government reform that lets you revoke privileges from estates ignoring their loyalty and influence. This sounds trivial (other than for things like bypassing Ottoman and Polish disasters, and rushing absolutism) but there's an exploit. There's merchant privilege that gives +3 mercantilism on being granted, and just -20% loyalty (capped at 0%) at being revoked, so I got my mercantilism to 100%, and they'll get over it soon enough.

Technically, maxing out mercantilism is not optimal for world conquest, as it's only helpful in contested trade nodes, and eventually you'll be having 100% of most of your trade nodes. And then you want to give trade companies as much trade power % as possible with minimum land. Mercantilism gives trade power bonus to both trade companies and non-trade-company land, and the way Paradox math works, for really huge empires mercantilism is potentially bad, and there's no way to get rid of it. But that only matters when you're so ridiculously huge you don't care about money anyway. For normal countries, this exploit is great, +200% province trade power, and also +10% merchant loyalty equilibrium (ironically), and +100% embargo efficiency. As well as colonial nation liberty desire penalty, but for the player it doesn't even matter that much.

My income went from 420 to 630 in another decade, even with pissed off merchants. It's really not far for economic hegemony.

So much beautiful purple, but still very poor map placement due to Socotra's shape. Even if we do Indian  Ocean Mare Nostrum, it won't fix my font placement, as EU4 won't color the ocean purple.

Conversion has been going quite well even without religious ideas. Religious ideas used to be A tier, but the game is throwing so many conversion bonuses at the player (especially monuments and government reforms) these days, I don't think it's still the case as at some point they just become redundant. Religious isn't bad, just less key.

Socotra: Part 07: 1509-1516: Socotran Renaissance

It was the time to break the Mamluks.

My infantry bonus that was stupidly strong at first fell down to just +57%, and now armies contain artillery as well, so it's really even less than that. And my numerous vassals' armies don't have that bonus either.

There was even a big battle where I was attacker against mountain fort in Tabuk, and had to throw my entire army to only narrowly win with bigger losses than the Mamluks. Oh well, it served its goals in the most difficult early game.

On the other hand God blessed me with a 5 siege general by pure luck.

Once I got past Tabuk, the rest was easy, and I cut the Mamluks in half, took Jerusalem and Petra monuments, one Syria province for a vassal, and some Mediterranean ports so I can buy institutions. And I finally paid Tunis to sell me Renaissance, for some ridiculous price.

Protestantism started in Europe just as my troops were crossing into Mamluk territory, starting with Sweden.

I had so much trouble with unruly vassals, that I just converted my non-Ibadi vassals Haasa, Mushasha, and Pattani and if they really want to go, they can leave. They'll rejoin later anyway. Haasa left, but they'll rejoin at some point soon.

I finally managed to get Renaissance, 66 years late, hopefully next institutions won't be this bad. I can buy them from just about anyone, and the penalty isn't that bad yet.

I could become an empire, but I'll need to farm some prestige to get to 75. Fortunately that's the last time in the campaign where prestige will matter.

I got my income up to 420.

One small thing that didn't go right, is that Portugal managed to colonize Cape before I got it in my reach, so now they're getting free merchant from South Africa trade node, not me.

I intentionally paused expanding for a bit, as I really needed Renaissance and I had too many unruly vassals already. It can all resume now.

Socotra: Part 06: 1497-1509: Economic Boom Before The Second Mamluk War

I kept bribing countries to join my realm. Medina came with a nice bonus of my 3rd missionary (2nd was from Defender of the Faith) from holding both Mecca and Medina, even though Mecca can't be converted yet.

Baluchistan was left barely alive from Indian wars, so they joined as well. I fought Indians, but only took core returns from them. I plan to go so hard on AE conquering the Mamluks, I don't want that coalition to spread to India. It was mostly just opportunistic, free clay is free clay.

I took Kilwa's 3 more gold mines, destated Magagascar to setup some trade companies, and in five years 1497-1502 my income grew from 200 to 250 per month. By 1590 it got to 290 gold per month. Mostly spamming trade company investments, workshops, and manufactories. It's not that far away from economic hegemony at 1000, but hegemony means -50 relations with everyone except my subjects, and that sort of clashes with expansion through vassals.

Hormuz and Mushasha were a bit too big to get vassalized, so I allied them, curried some favors, used favors to make them return cores to my vassals, and then oh wow, you guys are so small now, would you like to be my vassals by any chance?

I wanted to use vassal cores against the Timurids as well, but they somehow allied Ming, and I don't want to get involved in that kind of hassle just yet.

So many vassals meant they decided that they're stronger than me and started behaving disloyally. Maybe I'm overdoing vassals a bit.

Well, truce timer with the Mamluks is over, so it's time for another war. This time there are no vassal cores left, just sheer aggression, still at -40% AE, and full warscore cost against their full warscore worth of 452%. But the age is coming to its end, Mecca is slowly getting converted, and soon I'll be getting my warscore discounts.

I used to really like religious ideas, but I'm doing pretty well without them:

• +1 base missionary
• +1 missionary from Defender of the Faith
• +1 missionary from Custodian of the Holy Cities
• +2% base missionary strength
• +1.5% missionary strength from tier 4 reform
• +2% missionary strength from advisor
• +1% missionary strength from positive stability
• +1% missionary strength from state edict
• +0.3% missionary strength from mysticism (I'm not even paying attention to it much)
• +2% missionary strength vs heretics from some event
• merchants spreading religion (only against Fetishists for now, against Hindus in India later)

And soon I'll get Jerusalem monument for extra +1 missionary and extra +3% missionary strength vs heretics. With all that, religious ideas seem really redundant except I guess for CB.

The plan to quickly conquer Cairo, and become the Mamluks to get their mission tree sort of relied of Ottomans helping, but they barely conquered Albania.

The backup plan of becoming Persia or Mughals would require fighting Timurids and their ally Ming over and over, so that's even worse.

Maybe I'll be able to at least grab Renaissance from all this, as Mamluks already have it.