Socotra: Part 09: 1526-1533: Great Pyramids of Socotra

I went to a big war with the Mamluks, but even with big province warscore discounts, it will still be more than two 100% wars to fully conquer them.

After that, my province warscore cost stacking really started working, and I had:

• -25% vs other religions from custom ideas
• -25% vs other religions from age bonus
• -5% vs other religion from Mecca monument

Which meant I could take half of Vijayanagar in one war. And this will only stack higher.

And so I was slowly expanding in Africa, India, and Indonesia, slowly turning the Indian Ocean into Mare Nostrum.

I have a small side quest to do of going into Ayutthaya for their -10% AE +15% gov cap monument, and there's also +1 diplo rep +2 diplo relations monument in Pegu as well, and +2% missionary strength and +2 tolerance of true faith in Pasai (Muslim only). Other monuments in the region are either religion locked or not that relevant anyway.

My income keeps going higher and higher, and it went from 630 to 770 in seven years, really close to economic hegemony. Taking economic hegemony will unfortunately make vassal game harder, especially since I have a rare religion. There are some fairly big countries that are practically asking to become my vassals like Mewar and Aq Qoyunlu.

Weirdly Venice is second richest at 146, is it some DLC power creep there? That never happened in old patches.

There are some annoying Portuguese and Castilian settlers in Cape area. I don't want a distraction of fighting them right now.

Timurids and Ming broke their alliance and rivalled each other instead, so I might clean up that border at some point.

So much purple but you can't even see my name on the map, so there's still more work to be done.

Socotra: Part 08: 1516-1526: Going East

Haasa rejoined as my vassal, and this way they forgot that I once demanded their religious conversion from them, Breenter scenario. This costs 25 prestige and a lot of hassle, vs spending 100 prestige on placating them 5 times, but it's so much more hassle. It's even better when making someone forget that I changed their religious group, that would normally cost 200 prestige to forget.

I got to max prestige, became empire, then threw all that prestige away into negatives to disinherit bad heir, and placating some vassals.

Something I didn't really know until now is that generic missions are no longer totally bad. They basically stapled "get claims on all neighboring provinces/areas" on half of the missions, extremely convenient.

I got some Indian vassals, then waged a few small wars to return their cores. Well, might as well keep going East, so I took parts of Ceylon, then finally got to some Indonesian wars.

I paid Hungary for Colonialism, but it's going to take quite a while to reach me. With capital area fully colonial, I was still at only 6.5% of adoption.

I used a small new exploit with Espionage Ideas, where there's government reform that lets you revoke privileges from estates ignoring their loyalty and influence. This sounds trivial (other than for things like bypassing Ottoman and Polish disasters, and rushing absolutism) but there's an exploit. There's merchant privilege that gives +3 mercantilism on being granted, and just -20% loyalty (capped at 0%) at being revoked, so I got my mercantilism to 100%, and they'll get over it soon enough.

Technically, maxing out mercantilism is not optimal for world conquest, as it's only helpful in contested trade nodes, and eventually you'll be having 100% of most of your trade nodes. And then you want to give trade companies as much trade power % as possible with minimum land. Mercantilism gives trade power bonus to both trade companies and non-trade-company land, and the way Paradox math works, for really huge empires mercantilism is potentially bad, and there's no way to get rid of it. But that only matters when you're so ridiculously huge you don't care about money anyway. For normal countries, this exploit is great, +200% province trade power, and also +10% merchant loyalty equilibrium (ironically), and +100% embargo efficiency. As well as colonial nation liberty desire penalty, but for the player it doesn't even matter that much.

My income went from 420 to 630 in another decade, even with pissed off merchants. It's really not far for economic hegemony.

So much beautiful purple, but still very poor map placement due to Socotra's shape. Even if we do Indian  Ocean Mare Nostrum, it won't fix my font placement, as EU4 won't color the ocean purple.

Conversion has been going quite well even without religious ideas. Religious ideas used to be A tier, but the game is throwing so many conversion bonuses at the player (especially monuments and government reforms) these days, I don't think it's still the case as at some point they just become redundant. Religious isn't bad, just less key.

Socotra: Part 07: 1509-1516: Socotran Renaissance

It was the time to break the Mamluks.

My infantry bonus that was stupidly strong at first fell down to just +57%, and now armies contain artillery as well, so it's really even less than that. And my numerous vassals' armies don't have that bonus either.

There was even a big battle where I was attacker against mountain fort in Tabuk, and had to throw my entire army to only narrowly win with bigger losses than the Mamluks. Oh well, it served its goals in the most difficult early game.

On the other hand God blessed me with a 5 siege general by pure luck.

Once I got past Tabuk, the rest was easy, and I cut the Mamluks in half, took Jerusalem and Petra monuments, one Syria province for a vassal, and some Mediterranean ports so I can buy institutions. And I finally paid Tunis to sell me Renaissance, for some ridiculous price.

Protestantism started in Europe just as my troops were crossing into Mamluk territory, starting with Sweden.

I had so much trouble with unruly vassals, that I just converted my non-Ibadi vassals Haasa, Mushasha, and Pattani and if they really want to go, they can leave. They'll rejoin later anyway. Haasa left, but they'll rejoin at some point soon.

I finally managed to get Renaissance, 66 years late, hopefully next institutions won't be this bad. I can buy them from just about anyone, and the penalty isn't that bad yet.

I could become an empire, but I'll need to farm some prestige to get to 75. Fortunately that's the last time in the campaign where prestige will matter.

I got my income up to 420.

One small thing that didn't go right, is that Portugal managed to colonize Cape before I got it in my reach, so now they're getting free merchant from South Africa trade node, not me.

I intentionally paused expanding for a bit, as I really needed Renaissance and I had too many unruly vassals already. It can all resume now.

Socotra: Part 06: 1497-1509: Economic Boom Before The Second Mamluk War

I kept bribing countries to join my realm. Medina came with a nice bonus of my 3rd missionary (2nd was from Defender of the Faith) from holding both Mecca and Medina, even though Mecca can't be converted yet.

Baluchistan was left barely alive from Indian wars, so they joined as well. I fought Indians, but only took core returns from them. I plan to go so hard on AE conquering the Mamluks, I don't want that coalition to spread to India. It was mostly just opportunistic, free clay is free clay.

I took Kilwa's 3 more gold mines, destated Magagascar to setup some trade companies, and in five years 1497-1502 my income grew from 200 to 250 per month. By 1590 it got to 290 gold per month. Mostly spamming trade company investments, workshops, and manufactories. It's not that far away from economic hegemony at 1000, but hegemony means -50 relations with everyone except my subjects, and that sort of clashes with expansion through vassals.

Hormuz and Mushasha were a bit too big to get vassalized, so I allied them, curried some favors, used favors to make them return cores to my vassals, and then oh wow, you guys are so small now, would you like to be my vassals by any chance?

I wanted to use vassal cores against the Timurids as well, but they somehow allied Ming, and I don't want to get involved in that kind of hassle just yet.

So many vassals meant they decided that they're stronger than me and started behaving disloyally. Maybe I'm overdoing vassals a bit.

Well, truce timer with the Mamluks is over, so it's time for another war. This time there are no vassal cores left, just sheer aggression, still at -40% AE, and full warscore cost against their full warscore worth of 452%. But the age is coming to its end, Mecca is slowly getting converted, and soon I'll be getting my warscore discounts.

I used to really like religious ideas, but I'm doing pretty well without them:

• +1 base missionary
• +1 missionary from Defender of the Faith
• +1 missionary from Custodian of the Holy Cities
• +2% base missionary strength
• +1.5% missionary strength from tier 4 reform
• +2% missionary strength from advisor
• +1% missionary strength from positive stability
• +1% missionary strength from state edict
• +0.3% missionary strength from mysticism (I'm not even paying attention to it much)
• +2% missionary strength vs heretics from some event
• merchants spreading religion (only against Fetishists for now, against Hindus in India later)

And soon I'll get Jerusalem monument for extra +1 missionary and extra +3% missionary strength vs heretics. With all that, religious ideas seem really redundant except I guess for CB.

The plan to quickly conquer Cairo, and become the Mamluks to get their mission tree sort of relied of Ottomans helping, but they barely conquered Albania.

The backup plan of becoming Persia or Mughals would require fighting Timurids and their ally Ming over and over, so that's even worse.

Maybe I'll be able to at least grab Renaissance from all this, as Mamluks already have it.

Socotra: Part 05: 1489-1497: Ibadi Conquest of Mecca

Things have been going really smoothly. The gold is piling up, most battles are one sided stackwipes, and minor countries are lining up to join the great Socotran Kingdom.

I didn't get any mana, sieging, or religious conversion bonuses yet, so there's been some issues with these. In retrospect, picking Ibadi was probably not worth it, at least not early game. The biggest hurdle so far was the mod disabling dev pushing for institutions and limiting institution spread, so Renaissance is still barely past Cyprus.

Anyway, it's time to stop dillydallying and challenge the Mamluks. As minor side quests I converted Hormuz and Medina to Ibadi, and they'll likely join as vassals in the future.

And from the Mamluks I took all my vassals' cores, some coastline, and Mecca. I can't even use Mecca, as I'd need to convert it first, and it has -5% Religious Center, -2% Sunni, and -1.3% development modifiers to conversion. I can maybe just barely overcome this, but even then it would take agas and I have so much other clay to convert. Even with two missionaries (second from Defender of the Faith), and my merchants doing extra conversions (only of Fetishists, not Sunnis), I barely get 65% religious unity. Again, going Sunni would simply be easier.

It didn't even cost that much AE. I have -46.3% AE right now, -10% from Hanbali Muslim school, -10% from age ability, -20% from Espionage ideas, and -6.3% from current prestige. I don't have a build to stack it, and soon the age ability will end. There's a monument in Ayutthaya that gives -10% more, but fighting there would be really awkward.

I finally got over 200 gold per month, Ming is second with 80.

I got my first colonist too, and with that free explorer from estates. For now I sent him to colonize some high dev islands near Madagascar, but soon I'll settle Cape.

Renaissance finally reached Cairo from their Cyprus former vassal, so maybe I can figure out some way to get it, like by conquering Cairo. This game is definitely more intense this without possibility of dev pushing institutions. Once I get access to Europe, next institutions shouldn't be too bad.

Mamluk War took a while, but it wasn't particularly hard. My infantry bonus is worth a bit less now that artillery joined the armies, but it's still quite strong.

I thought I'd conquer Mamluks to become the Mamluks and steal their mission tree, but that's 5 more wars at full warscore. Fun fact - massive warscore discounts are coming my way real soon. It would still be easier if Ottomans helped from the other side.

Socotra: Part 04: 1482-1489: Mostly Peaceful Expansion

I was the richest country in the world by a good margin, before I was anywhere close to being a great power. I wasn't even a kingdom until 1485 - due to endless bad prestige events, I couldn't get 50 prestige necessary. I ended up giving away prestige privilege to merchants, and prestige for conversions privilege to the clergy, and then I had to do some prestige farming on top of that.

I got to admin tech 6, and I overpaid like crazy for it as I still had no hopes of getting Renaissance. This unlocked workshops, which are normally already decent, but +2 flat good produced interacts crazy well with their +50% production income.

I did some fighting, but mostly I just bribes everyone around me to be my vassal. That's before a single vassalization acceptance bonus. My vassal swarm is already getting a bit unruly, so I'll need to integrate a bunch before I ask more countries, but there's still volunteers out there. For a while I thought that maybe vassals not taking diplo slots is a bit overpowered, but then they count their strength together against you (unlike some DLC subjects), so maybe it's not actually that OP.

Just because I'm the richest country in the world doesn't mean I have enough money, Kilwa still has 3 gold mines that are rightfully mine. But that part of the world is nearly conquered, and soon I'll need to decide to turn North or East.

But the whole Indonesia expansion, seems somewhat pointless right now, trade from there goes either to India, or to Cape, not Zanzibar, so I can't even get it yet. I think it used to go to Zanzibar a few patches ago, but I might be misremembering.

At first it seemed that Ottomans would recover and go challenge the Mamluks, but it looks like they can't even handle Albania, so I'll need to fight the Mamluks all by myself. They have >500% total warscore cost (I'll get discounts but much later), and the AE would be crazy as well.

I think I might be able to take over all of Indonesia with just bribes, but that's a slow and low priority process.

Another option is going for India as I can claim them from Maldives and Vijayanagar rivalled me.

My backup plans of forming Persia or Mughals don't look so great with this kind of Timurids, I'll likely be better off just facing the Mamluks.

Socotra: Part 03: 1466-1482: Richest Country in the World

I really wanted to conquer Kilwa, so I cleaned up East Africa of all their allies. I was so focused on that task that I didn't even notice I got 9 Sunni countries over coalition limit, including Kilwa and the Mamluks.

I also had massive paper mana deficit, as there's so much land to core, only -5% coring cost discount from Iqta government, and I need one more tech level, plus two ideas to get more coring cost discount. Coring cost stacking is a great thing to pick in your custom ideas, but I got nothing except for some administrative efficiency very late.

Mamluks joined the coalition, so I had to trigger war with Kilwa and their ally Warsangali. I took just one small island of Zanzibar from Kilwa, and converted Warsangali to Ibadi, as I really needed to save some paper mana. Then the usual save game, load game, coalition dismantles.

I wanted to save mana and AE, while maybe farming some prestige, so I started some silly wars. I converted Najran to Ibadi, showed strength against Ethiopia, and farmed prestige against Geledi. I keep getting negative prestige events, and they nerfed prestige farming from OPM wars a good while back, so no idea when I'll be able to upgrade to a kingdom.

They also nerfed administrative ideas, and core creation cost is now 3rd not 2nd. That's not a huge deal, but it delays my wars quite a bit.

Well, I finally got my coring cost reduction, so it was time for the long delayed Kilwa war! I took the whole coastline including two gold mines. I still need to statify them, reduce autonomy and so on, but I'm already richer than Ming at 89 gold per month. Well Ming used to be richer, but they're having some trouble right now. Kilwa has 3 more gold mines that were hiding in terra incognita, and there's still two more in Ethiopia.

I also started diplovassalizing a bit in Indonesia. I'll get huge diplovassalization buffs later, but I can just barely squeeze a few small vassals already. It won't be much, but it's free real estate.

There's also something really wrong with advisor rerolling code. I rerolled about 100 times spending thousands of gold to get a missionary with no luck. There's only 7 types per category, so there's no way in hell this is just random. Eventually I got a level 3 one from random event, but he's wrong culture so I can't even promote him to level 5 to get more mana. Oh well.

The next thing I need to do is farm some prestige to upgrade to a kingdom. I'm really low on governing capacity.

A lot of beautiful purple. I need to get a bit more inland for 5 more gold mines, but after that I'll need to think about my mission tree. Becoming either Mamluks or Persia or Mughals are the most obvious routes, and I'm not really that close to any of them.

Socotra: Part 02: 1455-1466: Socotran Profits

I had some trouble with rebels, and the math really didn't work out. My ideas include +1 Infantry Fire, so my infantry should be stupid good early game, but it wasn't really that good against rebels.

I did some testing, and I discovered that the game works in really dumb way now:

• rebels have my bonus!
• every mercenary group has province of origin, and if that province is outside my territory, they do not get my bonus (free company and a few others are "local" and always use your tech)

But none of my mercenaries have provinces of origin in my territory, so I'm getting total crap. This bonus spectacularly backfires, and instead of me having supersoldiers, my rebels have supersoldiers. This is really really dumb, and I'm just learning this. And it especially doesn't work that great with being Ibadi at no religious unity, and going ham on rebels. Oh well.

So I guess I need to either slow down my expansion until I recover some manpower, or alternatively conquer some mercenary provinces of origin. Fortunately at least one of them was in Madagascar, so when I finished conquering it, that's one mercenary group that will have the right bonus.

Ethiopia, who is definitely one of my top targets, volunteered to be my ally, so I promised them some land, and started a big war to really dominate the Gulf of Aden, and destroy any of Kilwa's allies, so I can fight Kilwa in peace. I didn't even have to break my promise, as Ethiopia chickened out halfway through the way, and gave my enemies some of their provinces.

As a result I mostly cleaned up East Africa, and took some of Arabian coast, but Mamluks got most of Arabia by now. Oh well.

I'm still at least 100dev away from being a great power, but I'm already second richest behind Ming. Before even one gold mine, gold mines are stupid good with this bonus. Of custom nation bonuses so far, flat goods produced is insanely good as expected, even if flat infantry fire was a bit underwhelming due to rebel and merc issue. The rest will wait for me to get some idea group, right now I'm spending so many points coring I can't even get tech 5.

I also have enough dev to become a kingdom, but I don't have enough prestige, as I keep giving my heirs swimming lessons. Hopefully I'll roll a better one next time.

Also fun fact, it looks like I completely disabled deving for institutions. So that's going to be a big problem. Cyprus is a decade away from getting Renaissance, and it will only very slowly spread further.

It's a very nice color, we should spread it further. Once I get Kilwan trade centers and gold mines, I might be richer than Ming. At some point I'll look East, but for now there's a lot of quality 1/1/1 clay in East Africa to grab.

Socotra: Part 01: 1444-1455: East African Power

It's been very long time since I played any map games.

So here's a fun mod pack:

• all the usual Fun and Balance, updated to EU4 1.37.2
• subjects use overlord colors (there are some minor coloring glitches with 3-level relationships)
• institution spread nerfs from before
• subjects no longer cost any diplo slots - there are 4 diplo slots for external relations. Paradox keeps adding no-diplo-slots subjects in basically every DLC nowadays, which just shows how diplo slots for subjects were a mistake in the first place, so let's just go for it. You'll no longer get any bonus diplo slots for Strong Duchies.
• as I'm tired of Ottomans blobbing every single game (and of the no-CB Byz opening), I reversed results of battle of Varna one day before game start, and released all Ottoman Balkans to East Rome, Bulgaria, and Albania. Ottomans keep their cores, and they have all the stupid bonuses Paradox gave them, so they might still dominate. I'm not going to interact much with that part of the map early game, so this change is just for fun.

I don't really know if current Fun and Balance really balances anything anyore, as Paradox ran wild with power creep recently, and I'm not playing often enough to keep up with that.

So anyway, recently I've been thinking about how OP custom nations became lately, so I'm playing a custom nation this time, Ibadi Mahri Socotra (Socotra is actually Coptic in vanilla, but that doesn't work for the build I want). But the only way to get mission trees is to form one of the nations. In this part of the world, I think my options with good OP mission trees are Mamluks, Persia, Mughals, or maybe Byzantium or Italy.

I took 400 points to pack my nation full of overpowered ideas. It's totally possible to do extremely overpowered for just 200 points, but I sort of want to try multiple different overpowered things.

The set is:

• Tradition: +1 Infantry Fire
• Tradition: +2 Goods Produced
• 1st: +30% Reform Progress Growth
• 2nd: +1 Colonist
• 3rd: +1% Yearly Army Professionalism
• 4th: +30 Vassalization Acceptance
• 5th: -25% Warscore Cost vs Other Religions
• 6th: +10% Administrative Efficiency
• 7th: -20% Minimum Autonomy in Territories
• Ambition: -25% Province Warscore Cost

So by the time I finish my third idea group I'll have:

• overpowered economy (full cheese, Ibadi throws +10% goods produced on top)
• overpowered early game army (just one of two possible Infantry bonuses)
• basically free exploration ideas with +1 colonist (estates now give)
• -50% warscore cost (which I'll stack even higher)
• free 100% professionalism
• everybody lining up to be my vassal
• overpowered trade companies
• and +10% admin efficiency on top of that
• +30% Reform Progress Growth is nothing special, I just rarely get to these late reforms, so I wanted to give it a try

To do proper modifier stacking, I'll need Diplomatic (for warscore cost), Espionage (for vassalization acceptance), and Expansion (for minimum autonomy in territories). Administrative is always a good ideas, as I got no coring cost or gov cap bonuses. Religious would be great as I'm playing Ibadi, and free CB sounds great, but I might get away without Religious thanks to monuments, we'll see.

For my starting provinces, I took 6 small islands for total of 25dev:

• Socotra
• Qamari next to Madagascar
• Maldives
• Nias, Belitung, and Christmas Island in Indonesia

Mainly to have CBs everywhere from Madagascar to Java, not really for sake of land as such. The only thing that's Fun and Balance specific here is provinces scattered so much, in vanilla max distance is a lot lower, so I'd probably need to put my capital in Maldives for this kind of build.

With 2/2/2 ruler, 0/0/0 heir, Iqta government, and 0/0/0 spouse. Iqta government disallows spouses, but custom nations are a bit broken, so if you use load ideas function, you can get 4 more points with 0/0/0 spouse who's going to disappear right away, first giving you 4 more points to spend. This fits exactly in 400 point limit.

I get to choose my Islamic school, so I took one for -10% aggressive expansion.

Campaign goal is some kind of Indian Ocean Mare Nostrum, probably with Suez Canal and grabbing Italy for convenient trade end node.

Anyway, time to get started. And the first goal is to get as much clay as I can. 1/1/1 provinces are just amazing, as I'm getting basically 10 free dev per province from my ideas. 30dev of such crappy lands is like 130dev to me, and Arabian peninsula is full of it.

Standard opening, seize land, gran mana privileges, hire all advisors, disinherit 0/0/0 heir, the usual stuff.

Then I went on conquering Madagascar and East African coast. A lot of top tier 1/1/1 land at low coring cost and low AE. Even with extra strong infantry, I ran out of manpower real fast, but I have plenty of money for mercs, even going over force limit on mercs is no big deal. I need to be careful with my ships, as I don't have any naval bonuses, and my navy is mostly transports, fortunately AI is too dumb to do anything about it.

I increased Socotra's size from 25dev (plus virtual 60dev) to 141dev, plus equivalent of virtual 300dev from my ideas. I have a lot of rebellions, and coring to do, and other issues to deal with right now, but once I'm done, I'll likely have great power level income. Before even reaching any of the 6 nearby gold mines, which would also gain free 10dev equivalent each. If I get gold mines of Kilwa, Ethiopia, and Indonesia, I'll probably have world's second highest income after Ming.

I have no good way to get Renaissance, as all my land is terribly for deving, but we can wait a bit with this.

A handful of 6 tiny islands. Nice thing about custom start is that I can choose my color.

Just some very aggressive opportunistic expansion into crappy land. Arabia is even crappier (which is great ROI), but there were a few too many alliances, and Mamluks now took a good chunk, so maybe later.

So I made Ottomans lose all their Balkan lands to see what would happen. The game barely started, and they completely reverted my Varna change. Poland even rejected Lithuania PU, so their main opponent is not there.

Well, it's potentially convenient for me, as Mamluks have been aggressively expanding into Arabia, and I wouldn't mind someone cutting them down to size.

And the map looks so much better when subjects (of France, Hungary, Poland, Mamluks, Timurids etc.) are colored with overlord's colors. That's the main reason I came back to EU4.