Italy Megacampaign: Part 17: 1639-1656: Mexican Gold

In July 1640, Italy broke alliance with Spain due to -171 "wants your subject's provinces". If Senate wants the war, so how about I take them! Florida was in my CN, so it was obvious. Much more interesting was the New Spain - they're in Mexico so now I have completely disconnected territories. And also direct access to heathen gold mines.

I started seriously falling behind on tech. Instead of getting institution, I built 5 universities to have at least one of age goals fulfilled - in the end I had to take 1000 gold of loans to get global trade. I'll have to do it again for manufactories and enlightenment, there's no way I'll be able to afford enough buildings.

I was wondering where the hell was my absolutism going, turn out assigning parliament seats costs a lot of it. I had no idea just how bad republics and parliaments are in this game. And now that my ruler is a shitty 4/1/1 every time, slowly getting better while throwing republican tradition at them? Just awful.

What was going real well was expanding. I had 4 colonists, I was taking land from other colonizers, and now I had access to Mexico area.

After taking Mexico as a state, gold mines provide 15/75 monthly income.

In August 1642 Burgundy pressed that Revoke Privilegia button, but far too early, getting only handful of minors. AI can screw things up no matter how much setup I do. Then it tried to conquer Germany by force, and got coalition against itself - including Italy and me.

And surprisingly Burgundy managed to crush the coalition. Actually it makes a lot of sense, all those troops coalition was counting on were mostly in colonies. HRE's were almost all in Europe. Burgundy took a big chunk of Switzerland.

Now that it's been shown that Italy can be defeated, with Spain breaking up with them, and with our much greater power, many members of the colonial assembly are openly talking about independence. Many taxes are unpaid due to protests and boycotts, but half of our trade is still diverted.

If we got support from Spain or Burgundy, and possibly alliances with some other colonies, it would be a realistic possibility. For now it's not quite that urgent.

Maybe I should have modded it so this button is only clickable when at 100 IA? HRE is very strong, but it could have been far stronger. Oh well, Vic2 has ready-made events for that.

Latest patch added a button to expel minorities, so all the Welsh, all the Portuguese, many Tunisians, and other randoms ended up in the New World. I started culture converting them all, but it's slow.

Germany causing World War, who would have thought? Those numbers look like 5:3 for coalition, and 3:1 in navy, but it's deceptive, as there's no way colonies are sending anyone, and most of Italian army was away.

I expected long, bloody, and painful fight, instead Burgundy just wrecked the coalition. It didn't weaken Italy in any way, but let's just wait for the final HRE button.

This is not a pretty map, but we'll fill in those gaps later. Sadly I discovered I can't block my overlord, so Italy colonized those provinces in Illinois and gave them to Ferdinandia.

There's now also a pirate OPM in Bahamas, but they have 5 heavies, so it would cost a fortune to defeat them.

It's a race between me and Italy, who grabs more of Mexico.