Succession Wars: Part 02: 1445-1457: King Joan II de Trastamara of Aragon, Naples, and Navarra

The first order of business was dealing with 91k peasants rebels. It's not really worth fighting, so I accepted their demands for +20% autonomy everywhere and -50 prestige. It's not ideas, but I was already at war, and I'd spend a lot more money on mercs to deal with the peasants than a bit of autonomy would cost.

But first I can let them fight Tunis army who landed on Sicily. Our side has stronger navy, so I could have stopped them if Naples fleet attached to mine, but subjects are useless, so they didn't. In Fun and Balance there are no magical bridges like one between Sicily and South Italy, so Naples army is not going to just walk to Sicily either. It's all just a minor inconvenience.

North African wars were going fairly smoothly. I vassalized Granada and took some of Tunis's coastline. This upset them a bit, and they started a coalition, so I started a war with intention of white peacing it quickly to break the coalition. Then a few more easy wars. The goal is to not upset the Mamluks or Ottomans to prevent coalitions, and not have direct border with the Mamluks to prevent nasty succession events with them (vassal border is fine).

I got vanilla event for +50% liberty desire by Naples (obviously I won't just let them go), and then negative prestige from peasant rebellion gave them even more on top. I really should have dumped all my mana into their dev to get it under 50%, but I didn't do it, and they started to gather supporters.

Ottomans were the first supporter. Castile broke our alliance, and supported them too soon. Then England. Then France. Somehow 6 countries rivalled me!

I tried to play vanilla Burgundy succession roulette, but Castile got them instead. This is sort of fine, as I will probably get Castile eventually, but for now they're really hostile to me. They refused to release the lowlands, bringing them into war with Austria.

Austria challenged the succession, and it the attacker against Castile, Castilian Burgundy, and Portugal, so Austria can't call its allies (like me). Normally it would be total wipe by Castile, but AI is really awful at naval invasions, and they never asked me for military access, so Austria might actually win this, costing me my rightful clay.

After all that, my new ally setup is Pope, Milan, East Rome, and Austria. That's not really going to frighten Naples into not declaring.

On Papal succession Pope's vassal rebelled, so I got dragged into that war.

I got CB on throne of Muscovy, but I'm not doing that.

Morocco's vassals declared war on them, and their ally Ottomans abandoned them instead of helping, so I joined the pile-up to grab a few provinces for myself as well.

And then king Joan II died, and on succession (separate events for every country):

• Navarra got 6k peasant rebels
• Naples got 30k pretender rebels - they'd break the PU if they succeed
• I got inward focus - -50% build cost, -25% dev cost, +50% province warscore cost, go play tall now!

Inward focus isn't too bad, as I can't take too much land due to AE anyway.

For interesting succession events that happened in this episode:

• Oldenburg became junior partner under Burgundy (they got auto-annexed with other HRE juniors when Castile got Burgundy)
• Kildare became junior partner under Scotland
• Mantua became junior partner under Ferrara
• Crimea tried to jihad Genoa, and got full annexed instead
• Ottomans are getting wrecked to normal reconquest war as Venice guaranteed Albania, nothing to do with the mod

Ottomans are getting wrecked with almost no player intervention, all I did was ally East Rome, that made Ottomans attack Albania instead, and they are losing to Venice somehow. I still hope to get East Rome PU by event, but odds aren't that high.

Inward Focus could be really good if I stacked the discounts even more, right now I'll only build a few temples with it.

Succession Wars: Part 01: 1444-1445: King Alfons V de Trastamara of Aragon and Naples

Modding with clankers

I thought my custom Socotra game two years ago would be my final EU4 campaign, but two things happened. First, I tried EU5 and I really did not like it. And second, I really wanted to see if clankers are any good at modding, and EU4 is the game I'm most familiar with modding.

So I drafted a simple mod idea. Every new monarch, every country receives a big succession related event. This isn't a typical player-only randomness meme game, I wanted everyone to play by the same rules. Things that can happen on succession include:

• become a junior partner of another country (Christians only; only allies and neighbors allowed, and not if they're much smaller than you), or a vassal of a much stronger ally (non-Christian)
• every neighboring Muslim / Christian / Dharmic / other horde instantly attack you if you're wrong religion / wrong horsiness
• reset all rivals and alies and instantly wipe out -40 AE with everyone, so you can start over diplomatically
• all your rivals get claim throne CB on you
• a lot of religious rebels, maybe even from a religion that's not on the map but was historically present on a given subcontinent
• and a lot of fun smaller scale events; modifiers generally last 20 years or until the next succession

I'll explain each event as we get it (or some important country gets it).

Also latest Fun and Balance included. This campaign won't be very balanced, but I ran about 20 AI only simulations with tweaks in between, and it has just the right level of chaos.

So to answer my question, clankers are OKish at this. The clanker I used needed a lot of guidance, access to game files and some example mods, access to game's error log, and in-game testing, but in the end I managed to write this mod a lot more quickly than I'd do by hand, and I didn't even burn too many tokens on it. And that's speaking as a very experienced Paradox modder. If you haven't modded much, you might struggle to prevent the clanker from going of the rails completely.

Clankers are a lot worse at this than at coding mainstream programming language. They hallucinate syntax, make many basic mistakes, and of course they have no idea how to make the game fun, so that's why there's a human in the loop.

Anyway, as event choice is random and you only get a few rolls per century, there aren't any great ways to cheese the system. You can steer the system by allying countries you'd like PU over, avoiding borders with infidels you really don't want to fight, and so on. But for most part you'll need to adapt to what you get.

Some high impact events like becoming a PU junior have quite high odds, but AI is bad maintaining PUs so a lot of them fall apart.

Aragon

It's 1444 again. At least Fun and Balance colors subjects with overlord's colors

So now that the introduction is over, it's time to play. I picked Aragon, as a big easy country with big mission tree is going to be great for dealing with all the nasty events I'll need to deal with. I'm going to play really chill, which for me means no 11 December 1444 NoCB Byz.

To keep the theme, this series will be one episode per monarch, however long or short their reign.

Aragon can form Spain, go colonial, or form some mini Roman Empire. Or for all I know I could get PU over Sweden and take this campaign into a wildly different direction.

So my plan is to expand by force mostly in North Africa, and try to get as much land in Europe as possible from free PU events, and claim throne wars. So:

• Naples - already my PU junior
• Navarra - currently ruled by my heir, so automatic PU on succession, still vanilla
• ally Castile, I can get their PU by vanilla event or by mod event
• ally and marry Burgundy. Countries with more than 1 junior partner are not eligible to mod PU event to, but since I'm doing PU game, it would be silly not to try
• ally Pope - that prevents excommunication event, and it's just a good idea for Catholic power
• try to ally Byz and get them as junior partner. And normally that would discourage Ottomans from attacking them, but in this mod Muslims and Christians (and Hindus, Sikhs, and hordes) can declare automatic religious wars on succession

I started war with my rival Tunis right away, before they could ally Ottomans. They allied Granada, so the goal was to force vassalize them, and then maybe grab some coastline in North Africa so future wars will be easier.

Unfortunately my king died almost right away. The random event was 91k peasant rebels, which is fairly mild as these events go.

One event PU already happened offscreen, of Ennarea over Kaffa, both in East Africa.

The first succession happened far too early, and peasants are not happy about it

I didn't want to make any event 100% good or 100% bad, and technically "your rebels could fight your enemies" makes it only a 99% bad event