It's been very long time since I last played this campaign due to lack of time, and it doesn't seem like I'll have any more time soon, so let's do the final episode just to close things up.
I needed a lot of paper mana to finish my idea groups, and I didn't particularly want too much AE, so I mostly expanded by vassal core return.
As Timurids broke their alliance with Ming, and were busy in some silly war against Delhi, I did a quick one on them to seize their coast for my vassals, taking just two provinces for myself to cut them from the sea completely. Then I diplovassalized two recently shrunk Indian countries Mewar and Delhi, and returned some of their cores.
I needed to spend some paper mana to get sites of 3 monuments, from Pasai, Pegu, and Ayutthaya, also cutting Ayutthaya from the sea, bringing that Indian Ocean Mare Nostrum ideal closer. This got me to rare 100.0% OE, but as a small secret you can actually get to 100.9% before you start getting bad events - back then they coded it, there was no fractional OE, and the game didn't have any way to represent ">100% OE" condition, so they made it ">=101% OE".
Then I remembered, there's this Golden Age button. I only even used it for +10 max absolutism, because it made Court and Country so much easier. But it's not really needed in recent patches. Golden Age has one more fun ability - +10% goods produced.
So I started the Golden Age, and that got me over 1000 monthly income, and let me press the Economic Hegemon button.
This sort of messes up my diplomatic game, as -50 opinion with everyone else makes diplovassalizing even harder than having unique religion already did. But it would let me get ridiculous amounts of money. If I were to continue, but I don't have time, so this is as good a closure as this campaign gets.
In the end, I never got my mission tree. The Mamluks were just too ambitious of a formable tag for an OPM to rush it. Even if I fought them a lot earlier, it would still be far too many wars to annex them. That's a good lesson, if you play custom nation, plan where you're getting mission trees a bit better.
I never even completed my custom idea set, being one idea short, and 20 years away from Economic Hegemony ticking up to the max and giving me stacking -20% minimum autonomy in territories.
Ideas I took were just as OP as I thought, especially Goods Produced was just plain ridiculous. Infantry Fire was great, but it still required some attention early game if you're playing an small country, as enemies having much bigger armies sort of balances it out.
There was some anti-synergy between vassalization acceptance and going Ibadi. And generally going Ibadi just wasn't worth the hassle, I wouldn't get warscore discount against Sunnis until so late most of the Sunnis were gone anyway, and it would have made my early game so much easier.
Considering how little time I have, and how many other games there are, this might very well be my last EU4 game. I'll try to post the final version of Fun and Balance sometime soon.
Socotra at start of its Golden Age
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