As Castile was allied with Aragon, they broke our alliance. So I only had Portugal and Aragon to protect me. Aragon later broke the alliance as well, for fairly unclear reasons.
And nobody I can see was anywhere close to being interested in an alliance. Weirdly I kept getting offers from countries in West Africa which I don't even see. Obviously they can see me just fine.
I moved my capital to the gold mine and started developing it.
Morocco managed to ally Tlemcen, Tunis, and Granada to stop me from expanding at all, even though Tlemcen hated Tunis and Grenada.
The only way out was to fight Tlemcen with non-cobeligerent Morocco. I went over force limit, made Morocco lose all their alliances except the one with Grenada - and that one pulled it into hopeless wars to defend Grenada.
I thought I'd wait for Renaissance since it wasn't that far, but since I was halfway there with my capital gold mine, I just finished, ending up with 39dev on it.
As Morocco was without allies and getting wrecked, it was a super easy war. Unfortunately they were just over 100% warscore and so I had to leave them with a 3dev province, delaying my chance of becoming Morocco by 15 years. I was counting on either Morocco's vassals rebelling and breaking it apart, or Iberians taking tons of land, but so far only Portugal took one province. Why couldn't they have taken a second one? It would have made my life so much easier.
Also unfortunately I'm at tech 3/4/5, and nowhere close to even unlocking my first idea group. Theocracies are garbage as I can't reroll heirs, and I've been very unlucky with my sheikhs. I also needed to spend tons of mana on all kinds of things - stabbing up from independence war, recovering from 20 war exhaustion, dev pushing for gold and Renaissance, and coring all that clay.
I wasn't sure what's going to be military situation, so I focused points on sword mana, and that turned out to be completely wrong, and the mana I need the most is paper as every single time. Well, it's not totally crazy, things could have gone differently, and mil tech advantage might have been crucial.
I think I'll be pretty much forced to go admin ideas first, or I'll never have enough paper mana. Portugal and Castile already started exploring, so hopefully Colonialism will reach me fast enough. I just hope they left me some islands in colonial range.
From a tiny vassal doomed to annexation to a secondary power.
I could now comfortably expand into Tlemcen and Tunis, but I'm not anywhere close to challenging Castile, on land or sea.
I thought I'd be able to get some allies like Mamluks, Ottomans, or even Tunis, but absolutely nobody is interested. So it's just Portugal, and how much can I really rely on them?
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