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.