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.