After playing a merchant republic for a while, I realized base game is really lacking here. There's supposed to be 5 families competing against each other, but you literally cannot do anything to each other except plot to kill the whole family tree. So I added some mod I used before that added at least plot to seize each other's trade posts.
It was time to advance the Buddhist faith, and for that I declared a claimant war for Borobudur on Java, against queen of Java that was barely holding together.
As that ungrateful Hindu barbarian wouldn't convert to Buddhism even though I pressed his claim, I gave my concubine (too old to have any more children) and court priest the holy site and its whole county instead. It's not quite the same as having Pope as a lover, but it's the closest thing I can do as a Buddhist. I setup similar retirement in a temple for another of my concubines.
Inspired by my example, Pala 2-king of Bengal declared war on Pratihara 6-king of basically whole West India, to get duchy with holy site of Varanasi. As he was married to my daughter - and that was really hard to arrange - he called me into this fight. I was much weaker than either of them, but together our armies had easy victory. Unfortunately the Pala king would not replace Hindu priests there, so it was in contested state.
After that I got to military organization 4, which means no more defensive pagan attrition, so I went on conquering spree, leading troops personally again, and almost dying of scurvy.
Not like I had much longer to live, my last act as a prince mayor was leading troops against peasant rebels.
I hated my son, so I bribed people to vote my grandson into office. Kiet II is 15/15/27/15/23 Midas Touched, Quick, Just, Erudite, Ambitious, Chaste, Kind, and Diligent. Basically a perfect ruler. And I can likely increase that by another 20 points in a decade.
He's even perfectly married to my daughter Tasanee, perhaps a little less impressive 5/6/16/3/10 (they come from different concubines, so they're not even that related).
His other grandfather is king of Annam who proclaimed himself Zhou Emperor of China, but his realm really turned into a Khmer puppet. It's currently ruled by his fairly distant cousin.
His regular cousin is the Pala king of Bengal. In spite of his grandfather best efforts, there are currently no links with Sailendra Empire to the South or Khmer Empire to the East.
I don't think it's even possible to connect North and South Mookjai trade zones. That province in the middle with route bifurcating has port on the wrong side.
Next two yellow provinces along the route are part of my South Mookjai trade zone, the map mode is just confusing.
That bad map design costs me like 20% of trade income.
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