Very Sus Celestial Andalusia: Part 08: 1539-1554: Very Sus Reformation

I thought I'd do the right thing and go Fetishist, but then I remembered that Paradox made it so that Pagan rebels can't flip your country - except Animist and Norse for some reason. Actually each kind of religious rebels seem to be working just tiny bit differently for some reason, apparently based on when it was added to the game, not any logic.

There's really no reason for that rule, so I fixed that, and now every rebel type can convert you if their religion is majority of your country. Enjoy it in the next release.

So with this in mind I started annoying Fetishists, and started moving my troops to Malacca node.

But who even has time for that, I just declared on Pasai, Ligor, and Ming's tributary Malacca without having a single ship or soldier east of Cape, just calling into it my allies Brunei and Majapahit.

Ming did not join. I don't understand the rules for tributaries and cobeligerents - are they supposed to be joining in such case or not? Well, I guess I'll need to attack Malacca directly then, so I white peaced them. It also looks that switching to Andalusia made me lose my pirate raids ability, so I couldn't even give Ming devastation to ruin their mandate.

So I just grabbed some land including a gold mine from Pasai.

Getting Fetishist rebels to spawn was much harder than I thought. Kilwa tried to call me into their silly war, but I needed to be able to provoke rebels.

And these were the worst rebels in history of rebelling. It was one lazy stack that barely moved, and mostly stuck to sieging already Fetishist provinces. I completely forgot how hard it is to get converted by rebels without estates. Back in 1.29 just revoking Dhimmi land would spawn a lot of fun little stacks, but that got removed completely.

I conquered Oyo to get some more Fetishist provinces, but it's really hopeless. To get majority Fetishist without rebels, I'd need to colonize or conquer the rest of Subsaharan Africa, which is definitely doable, but it would take until 1575 even with full focus on this.

Well, I guess I have one more trick - there's small bit of editable AI code that tells rebel which provinces to prioritize. So what if I tried to fix that? And actually fixed rebel type weights so religious rebels spawn in provinces with missionaries, as was supposed to happen, except at some point Paradox messed up the weights, so it doesn't always? I doubt it will help all that much, but improving Fun and Balance mod is big part of why I'm playing the way I'm playing.

All right, in 1547, starting with 65 Fetishist and 111 other provinces, so 47 to flip, let's see how fast I can get to Fetishist majority.

I took 11 Fetishist provinces from Kilwa. I integrated Joloff for 6 Fetishist and 1 Sunni province. I took 6 more provinces from Soyo. Then I sent a bunch of colonists for more Fetishist provinces - with CN about to spawn and lose me a few Sunni ones. Even rebels finally got second stack and converted whole 3 provinces. This actually completed stupidly fast and by 1552 game told me I had Fetishing majority of 94/204, ridiculously much faster than I expected. Oh wait, that's not how math works at all!

I checked if it's about trade companies, and it is not. I guess there just needed to be more of them than any other religion? Well, then it was always far easier than I expected. Well, this just creates huge coalition risk, but other than that, it went pretty well. I got a coalition of Aragon, Castile, France, Chokwe, Maravi, and Malacca for this.

Oh well, time to accept demands, and instantly declare on Incas to get their temple. Event fired pretty quick, and I changed religion once more.

Meanwhile Ming defeated its rebels, and so ended Crisis of the Ming Dynasty. Unguarded Nomadic Frontier is a few months away from starting. I allied Manchus to make sure they stay a threat.

My idea build so far is Exploration (7), Administrative (7), Plutocratic (7), Expansion (7), Quantity (5), Dipromatic (7), Espionage (2), Religious (1), Humanist (1).

Sadly a lot of my gold mines got depleted in a row, but at this point my economy is really good, with nice mix of gold, trade, and tax income, so it's not a huge deal.

Global coalition against me, and there are quite a few more countries which could join but didn't

None of that would have happened if I knew I didn't actually need Fetishist majority of provinces

I'm just a few years away from France AE ticking down below 50

I don't really need to expand in South Africa any more, so that will tick down as well, but Iberians and East Asians will remain a problem forever.

Allies to discourage coalition. I dropped Brittany due to too many relations, and Japan is in far too much debt to accept call to arms, but the rest probably would.

Not like they'd be of that much use in actual fight, I'd really struggle to defend my capital.