Succession Wars: Part 11: 1624-1634: Roman Emperor and Hegemon Carlos I de Trastamara of Spain, France, and Bohemia

I went to war with 23 groups of North American heathens at once. Sadly due to all the bordergore I couldn't just annex most of North America in one go like I initially hoped to do. There's no rush, and my colonial nations clean up OPMs on their own.

The most notable thing here is that 3 regions have 2 CNs instead of 1 - Castile's and Portugal's. This means double the bonuses (notable +3 merchants), but it requires some microing.

Annoying new mechanic are native federations. They look like bordergore, and every federation has the same black color. Right now there's 3 federations, and it's impossible to tell which is which. Fortunately this problem will solve itself soon.

Sweden used our alliance for help getting PU over Norway.

Once I unlocked Town Halls, I could spam them everywhere, revoke gov cap privileges, and get 100% absolutism. All the hassle that was once necessary with Court and Country and so on, nobody's going to bother with it anymore unless going for some really weird build.

Now the Town Hall tech happened way earlier than it's supposed to, as Fun and Balance reduces ahead of time tech cost penalty from +10%/year to +1%/year. In AI test games I ran this actually seemed fine, and was balanced by much slower institution spread, achieving big tech gradient between Europe and Rest of the World. But for the player located in Europe, it's clearly too good, so I did some mid-campaign nerf to +2%/year.

I also wanted to buff Court Ideas -20% max absolutism from estates to -50%, but it's coded in very annoying way where every privilege in the game checks this separately, mixing it with two other sources of this effect, and I'd rather not change hundred different places for something so minor.

Succession Wars events need a lot more rebalancing, but it's a lot harder to get it right due to their random nature, so I'll do this after the campaign is over.

There were many wars, but it felt rather uneventful.

When Carlos I died, the following happened:

• Portugal area got a lot of unrest by event (vanilla; happened a few months before actual succession)
• France got 165k pretender rebels
• Bohemia (nearly annexed) got Inward Focus
• Spain - all Protestant/Reformed/Anglican/Hussite countries I bordered declared war on me (except ones with truces or allies or already at war)

That list was literally just Thuringia with 6k troops, recently freed from Saxony's rule (I had truce with Saxony).

As this really doesn't showcase the mod, but then which event would? Jihad war would just be Aceh, as I have truces with all other Muslim neighbors. Other than all vassal rebellion, all other events feel like I'm likely too big to even care anymore. I'm sort of tempted to console command myself a global vassal rebellion, but since my colonial nations and PUs would remain loyal, it wouldn't even be particularly difficult, just rather tedious. And in any case, console commanding events would mess with mod testing.

Counting by dev, World Conquest is about 55% done.

I feel like if I want to conquer the world, I should already be planning something for big blobs like Poland instead of keeping our alliance and helping them expand.

Against everyone else, -30% warscore cost against other religion (Malta Forts, Council of Trent, Court policy), -20% province warscore cost (when I finish diplomatic ideas), and 100% absolutism should be enough