I'll probably stay Hindu, as India is almost all Hindu, it's a nearly top tier religion, and nearby alternatives like Confucians, Sikhs, various Buddhists and Pagans are all godawful. Muslims are about the same tier as Hindus, so that's a reasonable flip, but if I wanted to do that, I might just as well start as an Indian Muslim.
My religion tier list for the Old World is:
- S: Orthodox and Coptic
- A: Hindu, all Muslims
- B: Catholics, Protestants, Norse, Shinto
- C: Reformed, all Buddhists, Tengri
- D: Anglican, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Sikh, various Pagans (do nothing generic religions)
- F: Confucian (as I found during my Korean game, way worse than that)
Exact position of these could be argued up or down a tier of course.
There are some difficulties I can see:
- I'll need to dev push maybe as much as 3 times, there aren't any great places to dev push.
- I risk some nasty coalitions from Brunei to Morrocco once I start expanding into Muslim-occupied India, as AE in EU4 is broken. Fortunately India has so many culture groups this will dampen AE
India gets into instant clusterfun mode every time, and it's anybody's guess who's going to be top powers. This time it was Vijayanagar, Jaunpur, and Sirhind (which then reformed Delhi)
So the usual start. Deleting all forts, hiring level 1 advisors, building to force limit, milking all estates. I gave my heir swimming lessons, which ended up quite poorly.
I rivalled Gujarat, Bahmanis, and Bengal. Then I sent alliance offers to Malwa, Orissa, and Pegu, in addition to my existing alliance with Andhra.
Sirhind started with the first war in the world on 22 November 1444, attacking Delhi by event, before official wars can start. Delhi didn't last one year. Then Sirhind formed Delhi. It's as if nothing really happened.
Unfortunately my Indian estates can't give me any generals, and with my army tradition it felt like a waste to even roll one, so I got my ruler into an awful 0/1/3/0.
The war was annoying as Bahmanis had far too many forts, and I had no cannons, and no siege generals. Orissa and Malwa helped me, but then after disagreement as to division of spoils of war they broke our alliance. So I allied Mewar and Jaunpur in their place.
I had a mission to deal with autonomy of Tamil provinces, so I mass reduced autonomy everywhere. Unfortunately that's still far from enough.
Bengal lost a war to my ally Mewar defending some OPM, lost half its territory, and so I eclipsed my first rival. Well, Orissa it is then.
Another mission I had was to get war reparations from 3 countries, and reward was development cost discount in my capital, so I really needed that before Renaissance dev push. I got into a minor war against Mysore and friends just for that.
After that I dev pushed my capital to 38 to get Renaissance, cleaned up South India, in process Andhra ended up as my vassal.
Fun and Balance gives Timurids 8 diplo slots instead of vanilla's 4, so they could pick any 3 allies. Najd, Dawasir, and Biapas wouldn't be my first choices.
I think their vassals could have decent chance to win even unsupported, but they weren't willing to pull the trigger.
Vassals of the Timurids really needed a push, so I told them I'd support their independence, and they pulled the trigger. On paper it's a 57k vs 35k war, but there's just this one awkward issue that it's really inconvenient for me to get there. What was very convenient was just sending my boats to blockade Timurids.
Then once I crushed all my rebels, I landed my entire army, and got 60% war participation. I got nothing out of it except some petty cash, and not even any favors - probably because the country which triggered (Sistan) wasn't the one I supported (Afghanistan). Oh well, Timurids lost 4/5 of its vassals and 9 provinces.
I transferred all my occupations to encourage some greed. It paid off.
All that got me from not even being a great power into being 2nd on the list.
So far only 3 missions are done. 4 more would be done, but I can't click the button as they're in wrong order.
Jaffa and Andhra are my vassals, Chanda is my likely future vassal.
Afghanistan, Mewar, Jaunpur, and Pegu are my allies.
For now no coalitions are forming, but that won't last much longer.
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