With Fire and Sword: Part 05: 1498-1504: Swedish War of Independence

I got involved in Sweden's war of independence, which was complicated a bit by Danes having total naval superiority on the Baltic.

Not like it mattered, they were dramatically outnumbered and ended up losing. It's all vanilla's fault. In Fun and Balance they'd have 2 extra diplo slots, so they'd be able to offer more of a challenge.

Speaking of diplo relations limit, I'm two over, and it's annoying. Honestly I never liked the system and I think the game would be better off without it.

Meanwhile I developed Kosovo gold mines and moved my trade capital to Gdanks, so my income grew to 77, which is just slightly behind Ming's 86. I'll probably go over 100 soon enough just by reshuffling trade a bit. I'll need that money for courthouse spam, as I'm constantly near governing capacity.

I don't really see any chance of getting elected to the HRE, so those alliances with Brandenburg and especially Palatinate seem pointless in retrospect. The one with Burgundy was all RNG, and I think since 1500 passed it can no longer happen. As I'm not involved in the HRE, that alliance ended up pointless as well.

It would also be difficult to destroy the HRE, as Austria has only one elector ally, so I'd need to ally the other 6, and they hate each other. Normally they have like 3 or 4, so allying the rest is easy, but Austria really underperformed this time.

And I think that's really it. There's not even much point waiting for admin tech 10 to press that Commonwealth button. I have higher force limit than Ottomans by myself, not even counting Lithuania, Hungary, Bohemia, Ryazan, and whichever allies I manage to get into the war - and somehow higher army quality.

Overall, I would not recommend the mod. It is very poorly balanced, and doesn't really add much to the game. What EU4 needs is interesting CB mechanics like CK2 has, not 200 mods for each country to give them interesting CBs.

And as for all the mods that go for "playing tall", "internal politics", "roleplaying" etc. - this is wrong game for it. "Roleplaying" in EU4 makes as much sense as roleplaying in "chess". It sort of works in CK2, not here, and the extremely rudimentary roleplaying features EU4 adds every now and then like ruler traits or estate interactions, barely make any difference.

I guess I'll wait for 1.32.

Poland+Lithuania+Bohemia+Hungary+Ryazan completely dominates European politics

With Fire and Sword: Part 04: 1491-1498: First War With Muscovy

I cleaned up the last remaining Balkan minors Bosnia and Ragusa. Not sure why Ragusa didn't have Ottoman guarantee.

Well, there were still a few great powers surrounding me, and I needed to deliver some ass whooping. Starting with Muscovy and their ally Ryazan.

War against Muscovy was fairly uneventful siege race. They managed to sack Warsaw, and Lithuanian troops "liberating" it sacked it some more. Oh well, it's not just peasants whose life is hard.

This time I wanted some serious land grabs, and a lot of HRE minors were a bit offended, but I have decent number of diplomats who can talk them out of doing something stupid. All this land grabbing didn't break Muscovy, but they'll never form Russia now, and they'd have 5 fewer forts for the next war.

Bohemia spawned Hussite center of reformation, which is a minor annoyance, but I'll let them keep it.

As for my other potential rivals, Sweden is asking around who would support their independence, so that could break Denmark. I'm really not seeing any chances of getting HRE emperorship, other than by force vassalizing some electors. I might try to destroy the HRE instead. The Ottomans would need to be a fairly boring war.

These are fairly decent borders. They're just terrible from trade point of view, but I don't think Poland can have good trade.

Because EU4 rival system is really stupid, Mamluks rivalled me instead of allying me against the Ottomans.

With Fire and Sword: Part 03: 1474-1491: Get All The Thrones

I alllied and married Burgundy, hoping to get on that inheritance RNG, but so far Burgundy continues stubbornly existing.

I got my cardinal elected Pope, but that didn't seem to be of much use, nobody I could excommunicate except some Italian minors I don't care about, and crusade was already called against Tunis, and nobody showed up anyway.

I destroyed what was left of Teutonic Order. That gave me PU CBs on Hungary and Bohemia.

Hungary was totally diplomatically isolated, as Austria got that event that made them claim throne of Hungary, so that alliance broke, but I swiped the throne first. That also got me PU over Croatia, but there's event when same person holds both, Hungary instantly inherits Croatia, so that saves me one diplo slot.

Hungary was at war with Serbia and friends, so I inherited that war, and full annexed Serbia for that second gold mine in Kosovo. I unfortunately wasn't able to core any provinces except those neigbouring Hungary itself, so it will be a while until that gold actually shows up.

After that I had a quick Livonian war, then I broke alliance with Bohemia, and took the PU.

Weirdly nobody even really minded all that AE, zero countries in coalition range. Hungary CB got AE discount, Bohemia CB got AE discount, and they were also Hussite, Serbia was Orthodox and there's a small discount for defensive wars, and so on. Zero care, and I got to me the number 1 Great Power.

I thought that might get me elected as HRE emperor, as Bohemia is mine, and Brandenburg and Palatinate are my allies, but apparently I get "controlling other electors -50". I'm not sure in which situations it triggers and it which it doesn't. Maybe I should just destroy the HRE and get over it?

As for mod content, I have 5 estates - the usual, Cossacks, and Magnates. Szlachta (Nobility) and Magnates hate each other, but Magnates are such trash, I never want them. And like with other cases of two estates hating each other, one will be invariable unhappy through events, so I made Magnates the unhappy one. Overall, nothing interesting here.

Updated mission tree does something, but that something is mostly free claims and PUs, and I feel like maybe the game should have dynamic PU CB system like EU3? Well, technically EU4 still has "claim throne" functionality, but it got nerfed so hard people use hardcoded mission CBs instead.

I got to 54 income and Kosovo is still not dev pushed.

Now obviously playing Poland I wasn't expecting super hard mode, but so far this run has been really lacking in challenge. Fun and Balance gives big buffs to HRE emperor, so Austria would at least fight me. Here I think I fought Austria 5 times already (3 times when they defended Hungary; then Bohemia and Burgundy dragged me into their wars against Austria once each), and each time they've been a total pushover. I'll continue until I form the Commonwealth, not sure if I'll do much beyond that.

I've been so busy bullying Austria, I didn't fight Denmark, Muscovy, or Ottomans yet.

With Fire and Sword: Part 02: 1457-1474: Danzig and Wallachia

The Danzig rebellion happened, but Danzig as war leader was stupid, and left Teutons with two provinces. This looks trivial, but it also delays my claim to Hungarian and Bohemian thrones by 15 years. Never trust the AI. I think that was caused by culture of those two provinces being Lithuanian and Polish, but I don't know if there are any tricks I could use no make them take them.

And since Teutons never sold Neumark to Brandenburg, I ended up with two HRE provinces, so I had to go to a distraction war with Crimea, so Austria wouldn't demand them while they were coring.

One thing led to another, and I took over half of Crimea, Theodoro, and Wallachia as a vassal. Now since Wallachia was disconnected, I then needed to attack Hungary for rest of Moldavia. I didn't want to take any Hungarian lands, as they were going to be mine after I got the PU later.

My subjects all refused to fabricate any useful claims, so I couldn't go to war with Livonian Order, or Ryazan, or anyone else I wanted to.

So it's been a lot of waiting. But I think soon I'll finish the Teutons, and I'll get the CBs for PUs on (my now-eclipsed former rival) Hungary and (my good ally) Bohemia.

During all that wait, I managed to increase my income from 22 to 35 (4th place after Ming, Mamluks, and Ottomans), but it's hard as Polish trade situation is terrible. That's another reason why the mod's idea of playing Poland "tall" is just ridiculous. You'd need to conquer more than Poland ever historically did to plug the trade leaks.

I'm still fairly modest with the conquering, so only a few countries had over 50 AE, and currently it's only what's left of Crimea. But those coalitions will definitely happen at some point.

So far the game isn't too broken. My impression of 1.31 was awful based on what it did to colonization and East Asia, but it looks like it's actually tolerable in Europe.

I feel like so far the mod did very little, and everything here might just as well be vanilla. Those claims on Slovakia and/or Silesia (depending who you ally and who you rival) were from the mod, but since Slovakia has a gold mine and isn't in HRE, every Poland campaign pretty much has to go there first thing anyway.

I did a bit of expanding, but less than I hoped for, as Teutons couldn't get quick annexed, Byzantium no-CB got delayed too much so it didn't happen, and both my stupid subjects just refuse to fabricate on Livonian Order or Ryazan, so I can't go East.

With Fire and Sword: Part 01: 1444-1457: Polish Conquest of Slovakian Gold Mines

So against my better judgment, I decided to try EU4 1.31 again, with With Fire and Sword - Eastern Europe Expansion Mod v.1.2 mod focusing on Central Europe.

I decided to not use any of the Fun and Balance changes initially. There's a few reasons for this:

• It's been forever since I last played non-F&B game, and it might be useful to know which of the changes are still needed, and which are actually no longer necessary.
• I know how these changes work with the base game, but no idea if they'd somehow interfere with what the mod is doing
• a lot of the changes are for things like colonization, and Ming, and for this campaign I don't terribly care if they're not working properly
• 1.31 can't really be balanced anyway
• adapting it to work with another mod would take a lot of work, and I'm not sure if it's worth it

But I'll likely start turning on Fun and Balance features one by one if it seems necessary. Also I replaced "+1 stab hit from declaring wars" by "-10% morale" in various modifiers, as mod authors clearly have no idea what they're doing here. To be honest that mod looks terribly unbalanced, but what the hell, I'll give it a go anyway.

Opening moves

So starting as Poland, easy campaign overall. In interregnum. 183dev, and pitiful 12 income, and can't do anything until I get out of interregnum.

Rivals on Denmark, Teutonic Order, and Hungary. Deleting stupid forts. Ally Bohemia and Brandenburg, and instantly remember how much I'm annoyed by very low level of max diplo relations.

Fortunately the PU over Lithuania event triggered fast enough. It has three options:

• local ruler (which honestly is the best, as elective monarchy is trash)
• get Jagiellon, get elective, PU over Lithuania (the flavor option; and it used to be by far the best before elective monarchy nerfs)
• get Piast, get elective, instantly integrate Mazovia - some kind of mod flavor, obviously the worst except for roleplaying

I took Lithuania, and instantly declared war on Hungary and its ally Austria. Also staying Catholic. PU + Catholic is the flavor choice, but Orthodox + local ruler is probably the optimal these days.

I got a siege 3 general from merc company, so I could just siege race. I humiliated Austria, but siege race was going poorly, and Hungary got great RNG and managed to get Molvadia as a march instead of me. Between Hungary, Croatia, and Moldavia, that was a ridiculous number of 9 forts.

In the end, I 100%ed them without many battles. It just took five years.

I thought about no-CBing Byzantium, but war with Hungary took too long, event to start war with Teutons was about to begin, and the Ottomans declared too fast on them.

The much anticipated war with the Teutons did not happen. Meanwhile Bohemia went Hussite. Also Danzig did not secede from the Teutonic Order, asking for my aid. I thought it can happen as soon as our truce expires so 1449, but apparently it's a 1460+ event. Damn, I could have conquered Byzantium by now. Oh well, I'm ridiculously overpowered either way.

My development increased to 252, and my income to 22. I'm still struggling with crownlands as I have 5 estates and I believe in getting mana privileges day one. I want to take diploamtic ideas first, but all my bird mana goes to developing gold mine.

The mod changes elective monarchy mechanic, so I could actually be HRE emperor, and I'm already allied with two electors (Bohemia even votes for me), but realistically to overthrow Austria I'd need to stack a few more diplomatic reputation modifiers, and put a lot more effort into courting electors. Still, not a terrible idea for 1500 or so.

Starting map, same as vanilla

Much less expansion than anticipated, as I thought I'd get into fight with the Teutons by now

Not like it matters, my income is going up like crazy