Oda: Part 05: 1512-1534: Westernization

I got into my first war against Ming, the plan was to attack Jianzhou, bring Ming in, and Korea on my side, then assault their capital and white peace them as soon as possible.

This went wrong right away. Ming managed to reach Jianzhou's capital before I finish the siege. On the other hand somehow Dai Viet decided that it's willing to join the war.

80k dead Chinese, 11k dead Jianzhou, 34k dead Japanese, 28k dead Koreans, 8k dead Vietnamese later, as well as 37 sunk ships on my ally's side, and 10 sunk ships on Ming's, I got the white peace, and broke Ming's two most important tributary relations.

And then Korea accepted becoming Ming's tributary again just after the war. WTF AI. At least Dai Viet didn't, so it wasn't a total failure. And Korea-Ming trust dropped from 100 to 60, so maybe next time it will work?

Age of Reformation started, and Ming triggered their Golden Age. Well let's see how golden it really is.

Portugal reached the Cape before me. Maybe I could ally them and get Renaissance this way? Mamluks got Renaissance as well, so that's another country I could ally. I gave Portugal far too much money to secure the alliance, but it's unfortunately up to AI if they offer knowledge sharing or not.

Once I allied Portugal I gave up on further expansion into Africa.

It finally paid off in 1524 when Portugal decided to knowledge share, for a small cost of 13 gold/month, which was a nice increase of their 33 gold/month income. But then I had 4 gold mines to pay for it - two in the Malaya, and two spawned in Japan.

Knowledge sharing only spreads to capital state, and that was less than 10% of my total autonomy-adjusted dev, so I basically had to dev push my capital state. Or I'd need to wait another decade for it to spread to next few states.

Finally in 1529 I embraced Renaissance, and Portuguese Colonialism started to spread in my capital as well. Now that plan Africa is dead, I'm setting up a colonial nation is East Australia, while my tribal trade league is in North Australia, so they shouldn't fight each other.

With that problem solved, I thought I'd fight Ming, but I wanted their crisis to trigger first. The way it works is that they need 80+ mandate, then they press reform button, lose 70 mandate, and the disaster starts ticking. Unfortunately Ming had really poorly timed earthquake event costing them 20 mandate from 70 to 50 or so, delaying the whole disaster for quite a while. Then Ming went just over 80, but got some -5 event. Come on Ming, I know you want to trigger the crisis.

So I went back to Malaya to clean up most of the remaining Sunnis.

I embraced Colonialism in 1534, also from Portugal. I'll probably need to do the same with the Printing Press. And yet I'm 6 techs behind Ming who has zero institutions somehow.

Right now I'm mostly waiting for Ming to trigger the crisis. If they keep delaying I'll setup some Colonial Nation in Canada, or maybe revisit that idea of conquering Madagascar and Egypt.

Aceh and Majapahit are my vassals officially. Brunei and Sulu as well, they just don't know it

The rest of the countries will get cleaned up once truce timers finish.

Spread of Renaissance is even slower than in my AI only test games, mostly due to Cyprus-Mamluk disagreements slowing spread into Egypt by decades.

In retrospect I think no-CBing some Arabs as soon as I had Japan unified, then rushing Egypt would have been far faster than what I did.

Colonialism is very slowly following Renaissance. I paid Portugal some ridiculous pile of gold to get both ahead of the queue. I hope Portugal gets the Printing Press quickly too.