CK2 Arslan of Ili Campaign AAR

Post 1 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-09 23:04:44 UTC

Arslan of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 0: Pre-campaign notes

Let's roll back the clock to year 769. In mountains of Ili lived a remarkable character - Arslan of Ili. So remarkable that I had to turn off ruler designer costing to create him. I know how to abuse it to get gay wounded lustful dwarves with stats I like, but let's just skip this step and create character we want.

Like everybody else in his small Karluk tribe he was a poor goat herder. From the youngest age he was remarkably good at one thing - organizing cattle raids. Be it goats, sheep, cows, or horses - he and his merry band were able to steal it all and get away with it, occasionally also getting some shiny trinkets or a pretty girl or two while they were at it.

But he had a much bigger dream. Rumors had it that across impassable peaks of the Himalayas - impassable as far as anybody knew, frankly nobody bothered as there was nothing worth stealing there, and it would be too much effort to do so otherwise - there was a land of boundless riches. Why steal goats when you get steal some elephants? Why hunt rabbits when you can hurt a tiger! And however practical they might be, nobody enjoyed mud huts heated with burning goat dung during cold winter nights much, so moving to a palace in some warm climate sounded like a great idea.

He was strong like everybody else in his tribe - weak ones never survived harsh mountain winters. When he wasn't raiding, he was hunting. Or feasting. Or whoring. Of all the cardinal sins the only one nobody could accuse him of was slothfulness - people of Ili knew how to enjoy their short lives, never knowing if they'll have enough goat dung to avoid freezing to death next winter.

He wasn't especially religious. As was proper in land dependent on wellbeing of the herds, he sacrificed a goat to sky gods on designated days. But what did he care that in other lands other people worshiped their gods differently - by staring into the sun all day, going onto distant pilgrimages, or for that matter fucking their sister. He didn't have a sister, so that one was out, but if the tribe ever moves to faraway places with different gods, he might need to worship the new ones appropriately.

Some shamans, usually after they smoked too many holy herbs, talked about future coming of grand shaman chosen by sky god, who would lead all tribes together against foreigners who worship weird gods in weird ways. Few treated that talk seriously.

At his 16th birthday he was elected chief of Ili by tribesmen hopeful for bountiful cattle raids. Little did they know how far he'd go.

As first in his family to lead the whole tribe, he chose blood red horse and saber on night black shield as his symbol, celebrating many successful cattle raids.

Full stats: 6/25/8/11/7

• Brilliant Strategist
• Strong
• Organizer
• Hunter
• Ambitious
• Brave
• Lustful
• Gluttonous
• Greedy
• Diligent
• Envious
• Wroth
• Proud

This build would cost a lot of points, even though objectively it's not that great.

Other than resetting ruler designer cost the only change I'm using is disabling all dynastic names on the map (so it's Arabian Empire not Abbasids etc.) as I can't stand them, and using Arumba's keyboard shortcuts mod.

A fairly major annoyance in CK2 game starts is that game files don't bother to specify anybody's daughters and sisters, so there's no way to get any dynastic alliances early game unless you live in 1066 Europe. Obviously history is pretty spotty at recording that, but game should just randomly generate some sisters.

I don't plan to give super-detailed reports like with EU4, that would probably take forever in this game.

Khiva is Sunni-ruled and civilized, and everything north of it is Tengri or Manichean and tribal - this means I want to unite as much of the tribes as I can early - starting obviously with Chuy, so I get long border with Khiva to raid. Due to lack of boats in this region that's the only way I can make decent money and prestige from looting.

The most obvious way would be to take ambition to become king of Turkestan, but that's really awful 12-holding title - relocating capital to Cumania or Khiva has a lot more potential (even if Cumania extends crazy far away from India).

The easiest way I can fail is early, once I get rolling, steamroll all the way to India is not unlikely.
 #ck2

Political map


De jure kingdoms


Religions

Post 2 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-10 13:56:36 UTC

Arslan of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 0.5: More pre-campaign notes

First order of business was finding a wife, and it was immediately back to the modding board:

• Tengri can't marry anybody who's not Tengri.
• Being on edge of the map in Ili I can't even marry half of Tengri women since they are too far away.
• Game did not generate any significant number of Tengri women except for fairly small number of lowborn courtiers - 1 per court apparently.

As far as I can tell it's a bug - everybody is supposed to be marriageable within their religious group at least, but Pagans somehow aren't. I think that's due to to the new Zunists religion, which tries to be intermarriagable with Zoroastrian group and Indian group - nice try, but that doesn't actually work, you can only specify individual religions, not religious groups, and this bug not only makes Zunists intermarry not work, it apparently screws the entire Pagan religious group. At least that's my best guess.

I'd report a (presumed) bug, but these days I can't be bothered if it involves more than a tweet. Non-public bug reporting system tend to be dumping groups nobody ever looks at most of the time.

Anyway, I absolutely despise "Must not marry an infidel" mechanic, so it's now gone from this campaign. Everybody can marry everybody else, like they did in real history, as well as early CK2. Some opinion penalty would be justifiable, as at least Muslims and Christians married each other very rarely (Oneca García as an example that it totally happened) - but Christians with Pagans, and Pagans with other Pagans intermarried all the time.

That leaves another problem unresolved - UI for finding a spouse. Clicking find spouse button next to character icon only shows women in your realm (which is 1 courtier total, and also sounds like a bug), and anybody who will result in alliance or is in line of inheritance (which is nobody for Tengri at start date). Total fail.

Finding all women by character finder lists them all, but most are too distant to interact with, and that can't be filtered away in any way and takes a few clicks to check one by one.

I don't like interaction distance limit much either, but it makes some sense, presumably serves some gameplay function, and hopefully won't be an issue too often. But seriously Paradox, if you're going to do stuff like that, at least make UI for it work.

To make sure I don't get into any more issues, I double checked my notes on how I patched CK2 previously. These were mostly sensible things in their context (like increasing demesne size bonus for gavelkind, faster de jure drift, everybody with boats being able to navigate major rivers, adoption and disinheritance decisions etc.), but I don't really care for any of them enough to include them.

Hopefully that's the last detour, and the actual campaign can start without any more interruptions.

Post 3 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-12 01:29:44 UTC

Arslan of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 1: 769-770: Karluk Dating Agency

After all the complains about how difficult it is to find eligible wife with distance and religion issues, modding the game to fix some of them, and restarting (in case my mid-game modding messed up anything), the most eligible potential wife in the world ended up... in next county.

Seriously, Ipek was literally in Zhetysu (working there as spymaster), and she's Tengri Karluk with Genius, Ambitious, Honest, Temperate, and Brave for total of 11/18/11/13/10. 16 years old, 6 health, and 60% fertility - not super high considering how many children she'll have to bear before she gets strong genius son statistically - but still pretty decent, and I'll have backup concubines.

Her major downsides are that she's only level 1 stewardship education, and she's lowborn (like every other Tengri woman in the world apparently). Generally wife stewardship is the most important stat, not her martial, as spouse stewardship influences your demesne limit, but you get bonuses only from your personal martial as far as I know.

Of course for prestige and dynastic continuity reasons I immediately needed 3 concubines for which I immediately sent - it didn't really matter much who, I can replace them at later date at no cost if anybody prettier shows up or gets captured. One was Rajput Hindu (and hated me as I had no caste), one was Panjabi Buddhist (and only somewhat disliked me), one was Pecheneg Manichean (with no siblings, poor thing...). Karluk tribes definitely suffer from lack of eligible women. All 3 concubines are gluttonous as I found after they arrived. One of them even managed to be super cute while stuffing herself with goat pie. Karluks don't care for shallow things like how heavy a woman is, just important things like how many healthy sons she can bear.

Oh and obviously I arranged marriages for all my councilors as soon as they chose their ambition to get married (as almost everybody does) - there are very few Karluks on the map, so they'll be my most likely vassals in the future once I grow a bit bigger - and getting relationship boost now for fulfilling their ambitions is easier than trying to arrange that once they're landed.

Did I mention before that CK2 is just an elaborate dating simulator? If only you could so easily see everybody's stats and traits in the real world... Tumblerina -50 relations with chantards; Brave, 50% mtth to get an STD and so on.

While my ambition to get married (next one is to improve diplomacy, becoming king has to wait) was being taken care of, I also attacked tribe of Chuy on day one.

Next part of the plan was raiding civilized people in county of Fergana under emir of Khiva - this is seriously my only source of hard cash, tribes make pretty much nothing whatsoever in tax, I won't make any money raiding other tribes since they're also poor, and there are no Jews to "borrow" money from that far from their homelands in Warsaw.

Plan of course had to change as Khivan League independence war spawned in Fergana and another county. In the long term I don't mind them being divided, but I don't want to conquer any of that now - as long as I'm tribal I won't get significant amount of cash from it - and I urgently need money and prestige and looting settled people of Fergana is right now my only possible source.

Fortunately rebels were kind enough to raise their troops and move away, so it ended up being even better - instead of just skimming money off the top I fully sacked 4 holdings. Unfortunately no prisoners, and I'm still pretty far away from being able to afford significant amount of mercs or tribal troops.

At least dynastically it's good news - my wife bore strong daughter (who can't inherit as a woman), and two of my concubines are pregnant.

The most obvious next step would be to conquer Manichean tribe of Chach, but tribe of Penchenegs can join on defender side in county conquest wars as they're same religion (if I understand correctly), or high chief of Turkestan might opportunistically DoW Chach as soon as I destroy their armies, making us hostile to each other. Neither of these scenarios sound like fun (well, if Turkestan goes in, I can just GTFO for free, but then they could subjugate war me as the next thing).

I'm currently at 816/1533 troops since it takes long time for a freshly conquered county to have levies - it's a bit hard to figure out how many troops other people can raise as their army. Assuming every tribal vassal raises their whole army and enters as ally, other countries can raise:

• Chach - 473
• Khiva - 689/726 (way less than tribals, as feudal lieges get small predictable % levy from vassals, tribals get unreliable high alliance troop)
• Zhetysu - 771
• Kirghiz - 841
• Kimak - 1407
• Pecheneg - 1336
• Turkestan - 3203

I don't have CB on Kirghiz, but I would get one once I'm duke and neighbouring them. So basically my choice (once I somehow get larger army) is one of:

• ambition to become king of Turkestan, subjugate Zhetysu, buy high chief title, invade Kirghiz and Pechenegs, then maybe subjugate Turkestan at some point and become king of Turkestan - leaving ambition and capital move available, but making expansion north really hard, so that's a quick way to India strategy

• once-in-lifetime subjugation of Zhetysu, buy high chief title, invade Kirghiz and Pechenegs, move capital to Kirghiz or Pecheneg territory, take ambition to become king of Cumania etc. That costs me once-in-lifetime subjugation but Zhetysu is way easier to conquer than Kimak.

• once-in-lifetime subjugation of Kimak, move capital there (I think it would be free since high chief of Kimak would be my primary title and moving to historical capital of primary title is free), invade Kirghiz and Pechenegs, ambition to become king of Cumania, unite Cumania. Zhetysu might possibly accept vassalization, but Turkestan won't and I won't have any CB on them. Very high potential to blob north, but slow way towards India.

There could still be some exploits with moving capital while having "become king of <your current de jure kingdom>" ambition, I'm not sure really.

Detour to get Chach (or for that matter Fergana - even with wrong holding type and wrong religion penalties it's still worth something)

Another option would be to bribe people into plot to kill high chief of Turkestan to remove biggest threat, and have his two child sons split his demesne - I'm nowhere near the point where I can throw money at stuff speculatively, and it's hard to predict what would be the outcome with tribal mechanics - civil war would be nice but not guaranteed.

And if Turkestan went into war against someone (Pechenegs would be best), I'd definitely get Chach quickly while they're busy.

Oh and I don't want to get into opportunistic county conquest against Pechenegs - I want their 3 provinces in de jure Cumania, not get 1 province in de jure Turkestan I can DoW for, and then wait 10 years.

Did I mention I want to keep this series brief and with much less detail than my EU4 games? How about that...
 #ck2

Looting


My wife is pretty awesome

Post 4 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-12 05:04:17 UTC

Arslan of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 2: 770-774 High Chief of Zhetysu tribes

The main reason I didn't just attack chief of Zhetysu and Karluk was that I wanted to save my once-in-lifetime subjugation for use against Turkestan sometime later, and I didn't want to take ambition for kingdom of Turkestan as it's very small.

But seriously, I have to once-in-lifetime either Zhetysu or Kimak anyway. The main difference is easy war and spending extra 200 gold (with some prestige dependent discount even) on high chief title if I attack Zhetysu versus hard war (if vassal chief joins it, if they don't it's not really that harder) and free high chief title.

Anyway, Zhetysu. I could presumably take them head on, but it was better to soften them - first fully sieging Karluk tribe with looters, so he'd lose 236 troops (and I'd gain 1.5 gold - raiding tribes in entirely pointless), then I could crush his army of only 535 instead of doing something unreasonably fair.

All that was really good since I could win the war by just destroying his army and sieging his non-capital county, so I got tribe of Zhetysu with full garrison at least (and still no levy, as there's no way to get any levy right after war, at least for this kind of wars).

So now I sort of need to play the waiting game... or I could just go after Chach. If Turkestan enters the fight I can hire mercs for at least a few months. Well, surprisingly they did not join. I'm not entirely sure why, it was still easy conquest for them with me doing most of the work and them taking the province unless I contested it.

Anyway, the point of this was not Chach as such - it was access to second lootable civilized province of Oshrusana. Emir of Khiva was far too active to just let me siege it, so I just raided some cash off the top and ran away, just like in the good old days of cattle raiding.

Fortunately rebels still held Fergana and didn't mind that I'd sack everything in it again. I used money from the raids to create high chiefdom, which meant +25% levy in every county in capital duchy, and access to tribal invasion CB.

Amazingly my plot against high chief of Turkestan even worked, splitting his demesne among his two sons, but keeping his territory otherwise intact.

Up north a lot of action is going on - Manichean Kirghiz conquered Tengri Kipchak in a holy war, Khazaria got one county from Pechenegs, but lost 7 in presumed gavelkind succession (they're still allied as same dynasty, so it's not all well) - I think that's because Khazaria is titular, so whatever the other son got was inherently non de jure? That's my best guess, normal gavelkind would keep him as high chief under his brother as king.

It might actually get awkward as my territories will definitely end up in multiple kingdoms, so any succession might end up splitting them. It's actually sort of tolerable, as I don't think I'll ever have the kind of money to convert them all to feudalism at once, so one branch of the family taking civilized south, and another branch of the family taking tribal north, while remaining allied, is actually a reasonable outcome.

Anyway, there's absolutely zero doubt what I'm going to do next - high chief of Kirghiz has 6 counties but only 3 of them provide any levies, and even that with big penalty as they're all Tengri and he's Manichean. It is not permanent war mode for me yet, as every use invasion CB costs me 500 prestige, but I think that yes, I'd like to double my territory cheaply. I have twice the army he has, higher martial, and Pechenegs won't help him as they just got totally screwed in their war - the biggest worry is really that someone will conquer them before I do.

I finally got a son, but his mother died in childbirth, so I had to get another concubine - some Khazar Tengri cruel wroth brave honest hedonist woman. I can imagine with traits like this it will be interesting...

And the babies kept popping, 2 sons and 3 daughters so far, and more on the way. My plan is to have absolutely no non-dynastic vassals at high chief or above if I can. Just make babies fast enough to keep up with my conquests.

I also lost proud - it doesn't really matter, it's just +6 free prestige / year. So far not one of the events for improving diplomacy fired in 5 years, making me wonder if that's bugged somehow maybe?

A huge pain in the ass I can already see is that they restricted which territory I can give to my heir (only stuff he'd inherit normally), which is total bullshit, as I just want to give each son one high chiefdom territory (without high chiefdom title for now, as I'm not a king yet, and I don't have that kind of money anyway), not try to avoid gavelkind.

A minor complication is that I'll need to move my capital to de jure Cumania... Anyway, let's wait with dividing spoils of war until the war is won.
 #ck2

Post 5 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-13 02:10:07 UTC

Arslan of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 3: 774-778: 15 goat pastures are better than 5

I double checked files, and main premise of this campaign is wrong. I thought that tribal invasion CB is based on culture not religion (except pagans can't use it against other pagans, and Christians can't use it at all). This is only half true - if you have horde_invader flag, or you're Nahuatl or Mongol - then you can use it with any non-Christian religion. Magyars and non-Mongol Altaic characters only keep it as long as they're pagan.

This is really awkward, as it makes direct Tengri to Jain transition I wanted totally unviable.

Oh and I can't go feudal by simply moving my capital to owned feudal province, that would be too easy.

I have a few options (after I establish power base in Cumania):

• reform Tengri faith - this enables holy wars, keeps invasions, allows going feudal, all pretty awesome.
• go Zoroastrian - lose invasions to gain holy wars, so it's option for day after I invade kingdom of Persia successfully. Could be fun to restore high priesthood and become Saoshyant. Also gives me access to Jewish money.
• go Buddhist / Hindu instead of Jain - at least I get holy war CBs to reach India.

I might even end up with some combination of 3. I can't think of any reason for going Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Zunist, or non-Tengri Pagan this campaign, but at this point my plan is basically going full Daenerys Targaryen, going to Westeros through Vaes Dothrak, Meereen... I mean to India through Cumania, Hungary (Tengri holy sites are spread very wide), Armenia, and Persia.

Anyway, back to the storyline. The first tribal invasion was 5/6 successful, as Tobol took one county from Kirghiz before I could.

Second tribal invasion of Pecheneg almost failed as Turkestan got 1/3 of their lands occupied, but somehow I managed to press the win button first and got it all. I even got some event troops (461) for it from building legend.

Time to burn my once-in-lifetime capital move (seriously, all of these once-in-lifetime decisions should just have 20 year timer or something...) to Balkhash, abandon ambition to improve diplomacy (not sure if bugged or just very unlucky), take ambition to become king of Cumania and go to war! Well, not much war actually, I got 1 province from Suomenusko high chiefdom of Yugra (that attrition was brutal), and subjugated chief of Tyumen. For some reason I couldn't declare war on 3-chief of Tobol, Ishim, and Kimak, so Khazaria subjugated him instead.

So now I have 9/28 counties of Cumania, 6/12 provinces of Turkestan, and pretty much zero money. I ran out of new sons (just 3), so non-dynastic vassals currently hold 3 counties, in addition to 7 held by my sons, and 5 held my me.

I really want to just go full in for subjugation of Khazaria and Itil - both at once are the only way as they're same dynasty so I'd be fighting both anyawy. I can even call double tribal army into this for 2x2500 extra troops. And I also desperately need money to fund all that as I'm basically broke and there are no Jews to politely ask for any shekels. I even captured a bunch of prisoners, but none of them had any money to pay ransom.

Waiting would make me lose my event troops (now down from 461 to 325), but I'd regain my somewhat depleted levies (unfortunately moving my capital lost me a lot of levy bonuses). I could start a silly war against someone irrelevant to keep them, but all the irrelevant chiefs go conquered by larger powers already.

Itil has 1 holy site and Khazaria has 2, but only one would be in right de jure kingdom, so I don't really have CBs for reforming Tengri faith.

Alternatively instead of bothering with reformed Tengri I could invade Khiva, and maybe go Buddhist or Zoroastrian? Zoroastrian plan sort of demands invasion of Persia since getting it one duchy at a time would be way too slow, and I'm nowhere near powerful enough to take on Arabian Empire. Of course I could go Zoroastrian without going for Saoshyant, but that feels pointless.

Invading south and becoming Buddhist is also fairly straightforward. It even has nice follow up in that I can holy war Turkestan to link my realm together.

Either way I'm going to need ridiculous (compared to what all steppe tribes put together make in taxes) amounts of money to get second duchy (~200), then kingdom of Cumania (~400), then build up my provinces so they can go feudal (~500 each). If i just do my demesne (bad idea long term, as my tribal vassals will hat me), that's 3100 for just that. Even Tengri, second best Pagans after Norse, are nowhere near how ridiculously powerful Norse can be with their boundless money and prestige from raiding Europe.

And as for dynastic politics, I'm no longer lustful. That cruel hedonist stuff was apparently too much. And I forgot to arrange betrothals for my sons before giving them land, so now it's too late and they'll find themselves some truly awful women, guaranteed.
 #ck2

Post 6 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-15 03:20:39 UTC

Arslan of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 4: 778-782: What can I even do with all those steppes?

I actually got a brilliant idea how to solve my problem of getting permanent war - why not revoke that Cuman Tengri chief I recently subjugated? He'd probably revolt, and screw tyranny modifiers, it's not like my sons will care... Oh, I can't revoke from character I have truce with without a reason? I had no idea... Oh well, goodbye event troops.

I did some more raiding of Khiva, as I was really short on money, and I did fairly poorly, now that Khiva was at peace it had enough troops to force me to loot one province at time, not two. Too much time wasted on game of cat and mouse with their stack there. And then mid-raid two counties split from Khiva without a war. My guess is that he folded to independence league ultimatum. Then not much later Samarkand gavelkinded away.

Raiding took about two years - it's much less efficient than blitz raiding of half of Europe's coasts Norse can do. I got about 200 gold in the raids, and about 100 more from randoms, got level 1 in castle infrastructure, and even started upgrading some provinces capital (big mistake as it turns out).

My southern border is so fragmented that if I wanted to reach India, it wouldn't be too hard. However, that's not the plan - the plan is to conquer the steppes first.

So I got two 2500 tribal armies - and then I had to lower tribal organization from high to medium, as I could get only 241 levy troops, instead of up to 2979 ally vassal troops. I hate calling allies as vassals mechanic, but levy nerfs got just ridiculous by now. This by the way is another demonstration how awful the idea of vassal cuddling is - this kind of shitty levy is what I get with +100 opinion from all my sons and lowest opinion count was still over +80. I'd get more levies from a building or two in my capital than multiple duchies worth of vassals.

The war took very long time, mostly due to very slow travel time, and I totally miscalculated how much money it will cost and how little prestige I'll make out of it - I've spent 150 gold and 300 prestige on buildings, and now I'm at only 363 prestige (I need 500 to start invasion), and I got bankrupted during last months of the war (after I subjugated king of Khazaria's part of Cumania, but not high chief of Itil yet), in spite of sacking multiple holdings, and even capturing one dude for small ransom. That disbanded my 5k tribal armies (well, a bit less than 5k by that point). I even got 1k troops from building legend, but I had to disband them too since it would take them like a year to reach frontlines, and I was bankrupt already. Tribals are just ridiculously poor.

As I'm now double high chief, my vassal limit increased to 18 and my demesne limit to 7, so I'm fine with both.

My vassals in Western part of my realm don't like me much, and I have double-chiefs who are same dynasty as king of Khazaria. I want to do something about that at some point.

I already got 2 Tengri holy sites, but there are no easy ways to get any of the 3 remaining ones. I'm even fabricating claim on one in Turkestan, but that will take forever. Of course if my ruler dies, one of his sons will be able to subjugate either Turkestan or Khazaria (the last one is way too far in Pannonia), but then if my ruler dies anytime soon, it will be civil war clusterfuck, as two sons will get a duchy each, and western vassals will probably rebel day one.

Now I sort of want to conquer Oshrusana, wrong holding type be damned, as it would give me great base for looting deeper south. There are still 3 chiefdoms in Cumania I don't hold (2 Magyar, 1 Turkestani), but I don't care about them all that much.

Oh and I control 31/71 of de jure empire of Tartaria - I'd need 57/81 to create it, in addition to 2 kingdom titles and buckets of gold.

My realm in terms of stability is (everybody is Tengri at least, and at least same culture group if not culture):

• 5 - directly held
• 9 (3+3+3) - held my my sons
• 2 (1+1) - other Karluks
• 6 (2+2+2) - family of king of Khazaria, two of them claimants to high chiefdom of Itil
• 9 (3+2+1+1+1+1) - other foreigners
• 3 temple baronies

So plans for the near future are some of the following:

• get lucky with claim on 3rd holy site, reform Tengri faith - I'll need extra 2% religious authority for that, but that's just 2 sacked mosques - high chief of Kimak losing holy war to high chief of Kirghiz is the main reason we're below 50%
• expand south into Khiva and maybe even further for more lootable territories
• plot revocation from unreliable multicounts, and generally opportunistically clean up the realm without going full tyrant mode. At least I don't think I have any need or reason to go full tyrant. Half of my realm being held by foreigners, supported by foreign king, is pretty bad. A few tribes I don't really care about that much.

Then further plans depend mostly on managing to reform Tengri faith or not, as without it I don't really have that many good CBs. I can county conquest different religion Pagans to the North/West, but that's not terribly useful. I want to conquer Turkestan and/or Khazaria, but I have neither subjugation nor invasion on them. I can invasion on various countries to the South (except not enough prestige for it), but that's really awkward due to all the feudal holdings there.

If I manage to reform Tengri faith, I can holy war the hell out of de jure empire of Tartaria, and going feudal will be relatively smooth. This is really sweet, since then I can even tribal invade Persia, and do the whole Zoroastrian fun.

If I don't, maybe I could go Buddhist? That would definitely close the door to restoring Persian Empire on the way to India, but then I've been making pretty big detours anyway.

I thought I'd have more sons by now. It's been 13 years with 4 women, and it only resulted in 3 sons and 4 daughters. Maybe it's time for some younger concubines?

I guess I could work around lack of sons by betrothing my daughters matrilinearly and giving their husbands land, but that's much less reliable way to ensure your dynasty succeeds due to concubines and elective gavelkind. Still might be worth a shot.
 #ck2

Post 7 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-15 20:20:46 UTC

Arslan of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 5: 782-785: Khan of Cumania

My court Persian who knows how to do numbers told me that it would take about 100,000 gold to turn lands I'm lord of into a serious kingdom like the ones in the South.

This is bad, as yearly income from my demesne is only 8.2, so it would take 600 generations to get there. It's not quite as bad as it seems since:

• My vassals have some incomes of their own
• My income will generally increase as I move closer to feudal model
• There's some amount of looting possible in two neighbouring counties of Khiva - Fergana and Oshrusana, so even now I'll be making more than 8.2/year

But it's still not a viable plan. Subjugating Magyars, Khazaria, or Turkestan would give me access to move lootable territory, but that's not the kind of war I can currently explain to my subjects.

That leaves me with just two options:
• Conquer some territory in Khiva to expand my border with settled people, use money from that to create proper feudal kingdom
• Conquer some territory in Khiva and just migrate to India, dividing family lands between settled lands to the South and tribal lands to the North

In theory a third way would be to fabricate claim on third Tengri holy site, then start a series of holy wars, but I don't even have money to pay for that fabrication without first moving against Khiva.

I organized another round of raids to recover some treasury, while my vassals dealt with chief Erza of Pecheneg and Inder who refused our legitimate call to relinquish one of his chiefdoms. He was helped by high chief of Crimea - a minor independent ruler also of Ashina dynasty.

Meanwhile second of Ashina counts refused similar offer - this time getting help from king of Khazaria, so I had to send my troops as well, my vassals would probably not be enough (they had numbers, but not a shred of coordination); and third of them got caught plotting murder (of another Ashina, so I could let it pass, but plotting murder is plotting murder), so I tried to arrest him, failed, and had another revolt at hand.

As I had no more sons, I couldn't give each tribe to independent chief for silly vassal limit reasons, and I didn't really want strong non-dynastic vassals, I matrilinearly two of my daughers to content boys of similar age, and divided lands of the traitors between them. One of the boys then turned out to be homosexual... I guess at least he won't be whoring bastards on the side, and hopefully will have enough sense of duty to give his wife a son. We're a tolerant society here. There's so many things which could go wrong here, so if even one of the two ends up being inherited by a child of my dynasty I'll call it success.

The raids and fights against rebels resulted in dual success - not only I'm now a Khan of Cumania (spending nearly all the money on the title - a fairly bad idea as in my position I really ought to keep significant reserve), and I managed to expel Ashinas from my realm - none of my vassals now has any foreign allies.

I also have ton of prestige, so between tribal army I could call, my demesne troops, and my vassals I could call the second largest army in the world after Abbasids. It wouldn't be particularly good army - uncoordinated, spread over very large area, mostly light infantry, and I wouldn't be able to pay them for long, bat that's something.

The "county conquest Oshrusana as soon as I'm done looting" plan failed as quickly as it was conceived - first Khan of Khazaria sided with traitor vassals against me, so I had to move my troops West, and simultaneously emir of Khiva declared holy war on Manichean Oshrusana.

I could declare invasion of Khiva. Its success mostly depends on question if Abbasid Caliph would join against me - he currently faces no revolts, and is at 0% decadence (like every other major Muslim ruler, apparently the patch fucked up decadence again, this time in "too easy" direction - it was never balanced in any patch, the only question was which way it would go). At least he's 71, so there's some hope he'll die soon plunging his caliphate into civil war, and letting me expand South freely.
 #ck2

Post 8 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-16 04:00:06 UTC

Arslan of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 6: 785-790: Looting my way to India

I declared invasion of Khiva - and got bankrupt in the process before even the first battle, but never mind, nobody except double chief of Samarkand joined against me, and I got over 200 gold from it.

During the war my concubines bore me 2 sons (as well as 1 daughter - there's more twins out there that I'd expect), and the 2 infant sons as well as some patient and lustful 29 old guy betrothed to my 14 year old daughter became my first feudal vassals. That's such a good combination - hopefully he'll be patient enough to wait for the wedding night and not whore on the side, and afterwards make a ton of legitimate babies. (can underage characters become pregnant in CK2? I've seen some screen shots of men becoming pregnant via glitches, but I've never seen this happen myself)

Of course the war was immediately followed by raiding, which funded a series of hillforts and market villages in my demesne. They are admittedly very primitive, but Constantinople wasn't built in one day either. Looters got a bit overenthusiastic and even completely destroyed city of Ishtikhon. That's not too good.

Conquests greatly expanded my territory, as well as expanded raiding potential from 2 to 6 neighbouring counties.

Territory over which I rule currently consists of:

• 31 tribes
• 3 tribal temples
• 6 feudal counties
• 1 barony castle
• 6 temples
• 7 cities

In terms of lands, feudal holdings are a small corner of my realm, but their significance is growing, and southern edges of tribal territory are very slowly becoming more like that.

Since I achieved my main ambition of becoming Khan of Cumania, and I somehow lost my diligence on the way, I decided to focus on improving my abilities - this time it's progressing better - some gardening, some flying contraption, it's getting somewhere.

There's not much choice of next steps - expand towards India for more loot and glory!

As long as Abbasid caliphate stands strong, there's little chance of successfully invading Persia - at least I can raid them over our small border (having border with strongest country in the world with holy war CBs on you is an unhealthy lifestyle choice). I'm not sure if it will ever fall apart on its own - permanent 0% decadence in this patch turns already overpowered Abbasids into lucky France level monster.

I invited some distant relatives of some former high chiefs within khanate of Khazaria - their claims over these high chiefdoms are currently weak, but if situation changes, they might be of some use. Subjugating khan of Khazaria and high chief of Turkestan would be great achievements, maybe even leading to creation of empire of Tartaria - currently a rather remote dream.
 #ck2

Post 9 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-16 07:06:40 UTC

Arslan of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 7: 790-797: Long live the new Khan

I continued expanding and looting South. I brought home enough gold that I started funding market villages and earth hillforts in demesne of my sons as well - I could rush to make my demesne feudal while the rest of my realm was tribal, but that would probably lead to a disaster, I'd much prefer if at least half of Cumania went feudal together (probably the Eastern half).

While I was at it, I also got a de jure Cumanian tribe from king of the Magyars, who got beaten pretty hard by just about everybody by that point.

A lot of small things went on:
• one of my sons created feudal duchy of Khiva (those feudals have so much money even without raiding, it's ridiculous)
• one of my daughters died - she bore a son before that, and he's an heir to current ruler - unfortunately that was not matrilinear marriage, probably due to misclick, oh well
• one of my grandsons was assassinated
• I revoked a few more foreign multichiefs, giving the lands to my relatives or keeping them for myself
• Abbasids tried to holy warred last Zunist duchy, who decided to change religion to keep it
• Bohemia is in process of subjugating Pannonia, which is pretty bad, as that's one of Tengri holy sites gone
• I continued building market villages and earth hillforts, I even started building the first wooden hillfort in the realm
• I took a lover and had bastard daughter - apparently wife and 3 concubines was not enough. Unfortunately I wasn't asked to legitimize her (unless I missed that somehow).

And then at young age of 44, after ruling for 28 successful years, Khan Arslan of Ili died, splitting his realms in inheritance clusterfuck:

• oldest son Kotyan got high chiefdom of Itil, and chiefdom of Itil in it
• second son (and most popular heir) Uzur got Khanate of Cumania, and 3 of father's chiefdoms
• third son Sevenc got ancestral lands in high chiefdom of Zhetysu, and newly created khanate of Khiva with all feudal holdings in it as vassals. Khanate itself is still tribal.
• fourth son Itkuk and fifth son Aepak got nothing, possibly because they're feudal

The weirdest part was that Sevenc, who originally held 3 counties lost them all to Uzur, getting 4 father's counties instead... Is the next patch going to finally fix gavelkind succession?

Anyway, the plan is straightforward:
• make sure the realm doesn't collapse right away
• deal with my brother (shouldn't be too hard, as tribal rulers over feudal vassals act as if they had autonomous vassal law)
• subjugate Turkestan or Khazaria to reform Tengri faith
• become emperor of Tartaria

All that while continuing to expand towards India and reforming my realm along feudal lines.

It's a good thing I spread market villages and hillforts, instead of building them all in my demesne - otherwise my brother would have them all, and that would not be good.
 #ck2

Post 10 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-16 08:03:45 UTC

Uzur of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 8: 797: Brothers

First, let's introduce the new Khan of Cumania: Uzur is 23 old, child of Panjabi Buddhist concubine Bhani (which is not quite as bad as being a legitimized bastard, but not perfect), 4th of 11 children of his father with various women. He's brilliant strategist, just, and zealous. He's also deceitful, shy, and greedy.

• diplomacy 0
• martial 20
• stewardship 7
• intrigue 12
• learning 5

His strongest vassal is his older half-brother and chosen successor Kotyan, high chief of Itil. His vassals are generally not overly enthusiastic about him.

Meanwhile Sevenc, Khan of Khiva, at age of 22, is son of his father's legitimate wife Ipek, and 7th of the children. He had a twin sistem, but she died of poor health during her second pregnancy.

He's attractive (out of nowhere, his father was strong, and his mother was a genius)
, skilled tactician, brave, and gregarious. He's also greedy, envious, and arbitrary.

• diplomacy 5
• martial 12
• stewardship 3
• intrigue 6
• learning 5

The already mentioned Kotyan, high chief of Itil, was son of another concubine - Pecheneg Manichean Ilkay, 2nd of his father's children and oldest son. He's skilled tactician, humble, and charitable. He's also gluttonous, depressed, and cynical.

• diplomacy 7
• martial 14
• stewardship 2
• intrigue 8
• learning 7

Election was fairly close between Uzur and Kotyan, with few people supporting Sevenc.

The first order of business was finding wife - and the most eligible woman was Muslim 16 year old genius in nearby Merv. Unfortunately her liege was zealous, and there was no way to convince him. I'm tempted to sack this place to take her as my concubine at least.

So as next best thing Khan married Lyukha, Tengri Khazar lowborn 18-year old, who's ambitious, diligent, trusting, and midas touched, with very good stats of 12/6/21/6/5, and hopefully highly fertile hips.

I also got some concubines to spread my dynasty further.

What's going to happen to the brothers? You'll see in the next episode.
 #ck2

Post 11 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-16 09:27:53 UTC

Uzur of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 9: 797-801: Mandatory succession war

My brother Sevenc immediately started plotting my murder. Then since that didn't work, he tried to murder our brother Kotyan...

All the while getting himself holy warred by Abbasid caliph - fortunately for just one county. It was hopeless, so I didn't even bother helping him. Instead I subjugated Turkestan for third Tengi holy site.

Of course I immediately went bankrupt (got just barely over 0 when I sacked holy site temple) - I think my father had a reserve of about 100 gold, no idea who inherited that, unless of course I forgot to keep reserve for a moment, and that's when death happened. Only 3 of my vassals bothered joinig me, showing how my realm is not doing all that well.

First order of business was subjugation of Turkestan - 2 tribes held by high chief of Turkestan went to new content vassal, so at least I have some support there.

Second order of business was pressing my claim over khanate of Khiva. My brother couldn't really fight as caliph crushed his armies before I even joined - but he did his best by avoiding any battles and making it take forever. To avoid another bankruptcy in this long war, I separated looting group from the actual army, so I could sack everything twice. It was pretty damn effective way to get some money.

Now he's reduced to high chief of Zhetysu and hates me so much I doubt he'll ever help me with anything. I could try throwing him in jail as he keeps plotting against my brother Kotyan. Not sure how much that would help, as I don't really want to execute or banish him (unless really necessary). I could keep him imprisoned for a while until things stabilize a bit more maybe.

I now control 3 Tengri holy sites, so reforming the faith is a realistic option. Unfortunately after losing series of holy wars to Abbasids and Slavic Bohemia subjugating Pannonia with one of our holy sites, our religious authority is not very high at 45 and falling. My piety is also not high enough, at just 409 of 750 needed. Both issues are solvable but not trivially.

To avoid splitting the realm again, it would be sensible to create an imperial title. Right now I control 37/71 counties in Tartaria (as well as 9/90 in Persia), and I'd need 20 more, in addition to big bucket of gold. It's all doable but not trivial, as it would involve a lot of fighting Suomenusko Pagans one county at a time and brutal attrition.

Probably the best thing about it is that fighting them would gain me de jure territory, piety, and Tengri religious authority simultaneously.

Factions keep plotting. The largest is one to lower tribal organization, and I could even agree to that maybe, as I don't really care all that much at the moment - going feudal probably won't happen until next generation or two. The only problem with that is that I wouldn't be able to revoke infidel titles, but that's not a big deal right now.

The next largest faction is independence, and that is actually not a huge problem, as I'd have de jure claims on all of them separately. Some people try to setup factions to but one of my brothers on the throne, but these don't seem to be getting anywhere at least.
 #ck2

Post 12 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-16 17:59:36 UTC

Uzur of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 10: 801-806: The Old Gods and The New

It's entirely possible that I might lose a lot of territory to Abbasids - they're a huge blob, with much larger armies than anyone, way better tech than mine, extra bonuses due to 0% decadence thanks to patch rebalance fail, unreasonable levels of realm stability, and free CB on every neighbouring duchy.

They have truce with my brother as he lost one county to them, but not with me. My main protection is AI's opportunism - Abbasids can defeat me, but I can put up a good fight. I'm not sure if I'd even want to, burning all the money and prestige, but they might decide to go after weaker targets elsewhere.

Anyway, let's expand in direction as far away from Abbasids as possible. One of claimants I invited got himself 3rd in line of succession somehow, so I can press his weak claim.

I can also do a bunch of de jure claims and county conquests against neighbouring Suomenusko Pagans.

Expanding towards India as I found out would be a lot harder - Khiva was feudal but barely developed, so it was easy takings, but going further South from there castles are much stronger, levies are much larger, and Indians can hire holy orders already at this date, unlike anyone else as far as I know - Pagans get holy orders when they reform, and Christians/Muslims sometime around times of crusades. Even raiding there was not as easy as I thought from my experience with Khiva.

Anyway, let's get back to the realm. First order of business was rightfully arresting my brother Sevenc to prevent his plotting. Second order of business was some minor warfare:

• pushing claims of Zengi Dulo's for high chiefdom of Bolgar (who eventually lost to revolt, but at that point I don't care, revolt leader is still my vassal)
• my de jure claim on Sharukan against king of Magyars
• my de jure claim on Aqtobe against high chief of Terkestan (subjugation truce lasts much less than regular truce for some reason)
• and county conquest of Fergana held by Muslim duke, so I could give it to my youngest brother who already holds 3 other counties in duchy of Samarkand, so I have one happy vassal more. It would also let my brother create duchy for himself, hopefully.

This time 10/14 vassals dediced to honor their obligations. The realm is not quite where I want it, but it's getting there.

My chancellors did a decent job at keeping factions in check - spymaster by discouraging them from joining facitons (I think you need to check for blackmailable traits first), chancellor by impoving relations, and especially my marshal helping to arrest my brother

My subjugation of Aqtobe failed as he lost holy war at the same time - not even to Abbasids, simultaneous Sunni holy war by duke of Merv - who himself is losing to Zoroastrian uprising - a nice clusterfuck is going on there. Zoroastrians then got attacked by the caliph... Yeah, I wondered what else they were expecting.

That was high chief's only demesne tribe, but somehow instead of usurping title from his 2-tribe vassal, his title got destroyed. Oh well, his vassal would totally accept my overlordship now. Oh and my new vassal, how about you give me one of your counties? You actually would? Well, that's the first time that happens, frankly I did not expect it. Oh well.

I also had to deal with Zoroastrian uprising myself. And then another... Leader of the second one somehow had 300 gold with him - that sounds like Jew money, nobody on the steppes has this kind of gold. But yes, sure, I'll build more hillforts for it.

Time for another set of wars to improve my piety and Tengri religious authority: 2 conquests of Suomenusko tribes, and one on Zoroastrian county not currently holy warred by the caliph. So now everybody except my brother in oubliette will happily join? That's pretty damn good.

Wars against (mostly) the infidels have been going very well, but somehow Gods still hate me - they cursed me with 5 worthless daughters one after another. Will I ever be blessed with a true born son, or will I be forced to leave everything I have to my brothers? It seems I have no choice, but to reform the faith!

Now it's time to finish unification of Tartaria - only 47 of 71 its tribes are under my control, so I'll need at least 10 more to crown myself emperor.

I'm also over my vassal limit - mostly due to rampant gavelkinding among my vassals, which is not something I have much control over. I don't really like this mechanic much.
 #ck2

Post 13 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-16 19:47:08 UTC

Uzur of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 11: 806: Interview with Khan who reformed Tengri faith

• Q: Wasn't this supposed to be India campaign? India is the other way
• A: It was meant to be tribal and India campaign, if I meant it to just be India, I'd start in India.

• Q: So when is it going to India?
• A: As soon as I become Saoshyant, the chosen savior of the world, I'll start great holy war upon one of Indian kingdoms and go on from there.

• Q: Saoshyant? That's some Zoroastrian thing? Didn't you just reform the Tengri faith.
• A: Gods work in mysterious ways.

• Q: It's about one of your sisters, isn't it?
• A: I doubt I'll make it, but I have 5 daughters, and my son might be interested...

• Q: OK, no more questions about incest, I actually don't want to know. Didn't you say something about being emperor of India as a Jain or a Buddhist? You reformed Tengri faith, and now you're talking about becoming Saoshyant, how does that even work?
• A: Gods work in very mysterious ways.

• Q: OK, so when are you invading Persia?
• A: There are two things stopping me - first Abbasids are far stronger than I expected, so either they need to get a lot weaker, or I need to get a lot more powerful, or both. Second, Persia would mean huge amount of feudal territory to manage, and that wouldn't be very practical for a feudal ruler, so I'd like to go feudal on day of my conquest of Persia.

• Q: How powerful is the Abbasid Caliph exactly?
• A: 2nd to 4th most powerful countries are three about equally strong empires - Umayyad's Sunni Empire of Hispania, Karling's Catholic Empire of Francia, and Isauros's Orthodox Byzantine Empire. Abbasid Caliph is stronger than any two of them put together, and I'm not even sure who would win a 3-vs-1, if that somehow came to happen.

• Q: And Khanate of Cumania and Khiva?
• A: It looks big on the map, but it's sparsely populated, poor, and underdeveloped. It would not stand a chance.

• Q: Does the Caliph even have any weaknesses?
• A: He can't increase crown authority past medium at his current technology level, and he won't be getting holy orders unless someone of another faith conquers Baghdad (that's part of Saoshyant plan), Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem, or Mecca, or very long time passes.

• Q: And speaking of your realm, how far are you from going feudal anyway?
• A: I need stone hillforts (level 4) in at least my demesne. So far my entire realm has 2 wooden hillforts (level 2), about a dozen earth hillforts (level 1), and assortment of market villages and barracks I also wouldn't mind upgrading while I'm at it. It doesn't help that with elective gavelkind I don't really know what my demesne is going to be, so I need to spread upgrades among everything held by my family.

• Q: How much would that cost?
• A: Even very limited feudalization, at least 10,000 gold. Building all cities, temples, castle towns, and so on, even to Khiva's level (and far below what they have in Byzantium, Persia, or India) more like 100,000 gold.

• Q: So, more raiding then?
• A: My experience with raiding the Caliph has been mixed so far, and Southern border is now fairly straight, restricting raiding opportunities. Expanding further towards India for new raiding grounds could work, but these lands tend to be well fortified, and difficult to sack for loot and prisoners. Raiders can of course steal some cattle and whatever wasn't locked behind walls and get out fast, but that's not worth as much.

• Q: Would some feudal taxes help?
• A: Somewhat, but I don't want to tax my feudal subjects (2 duke brothers, and 1 almost-duke) too much, as Khiva is also underdeveloped, and I'd prefer if they spent money on fortifications in case Caliph decides to attack.

• Q: Any other sources of gold?
• A: That Zoroastrian uprising with 300 of Jew gold was literally God-sent... sorry for the pun. Situation is not desperate, so I don't expect any more bankruptcies, but we lack funds for investment, and any kind of development aid is welcome.

• Q: Is that the only problem?
• A: I wish. Even if we looted all the gold in the world, very few provinces in the tribal parts my realm have technology necessary to build reinforced hillforts (level 3) and stone hillforts (level 4) - and without high chiefs in charge, spread of technology is very slow. I'd also like level 3 legalism to adopt high crown authority, or realm would be weaker after feudalization than it was before, fortunately at least that is only required in my capital. Of course with very high legalism and majesty we would love to establish imperial administration like the Byzantines, but that's getting really far ahead.

• Q: Coming back to reforming Tengri faith. How does that help?
• A: It helps with realm stability a lot, removing -10 opinion penalty from unreformed Pagan vassals they'd otherwise have at medium tribal organization (would be up to -30 at absolute, but I won't be going there anytime soon), and reducing short reign penalty by about a third.

• Q: Was there any backlash?
• A: Much less than I expected. Almost every Tengri ruler within as well as outside my realm converted, including the Khazar Khan.

• Q: Does it help with further expansion too?
• A: It grants duchy level holy war CB against nearby Suomenusko and Slavic Pagans (as well as Old Tengri, but there aren't many around, and more remote Pagan). It's still not a happy direction to expand, as I have no protection against Arctic winters, on top of their Pagan homeland penalty. In due time (mtth 3 years) holy order Lords of the Sky is expected to get organized, that would definitely help in case Caliph decided to attack me, but I'm not sure if that would be enough.

• Q: And the final question, Gods forbid anything were to happen to you, who would be the next Khan of Cumania and Khiva?
• A: Chiefs don't agree with my choice of my brother Kotyan, instead preferring my younger brother Ituk, duke of Khiva. He's currently feudal, but inheriting tribal title would force him to go back to tribal ways. It's not an entirely unreasonable choice, even if I hope for Gods to bless me with a son before I die.

• Q: Thank you again for your time. Would you be willing to answer questions from the audience?
• A: Of course. What would they like to ask me?
 #ck2

Post 14 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-17 03:43:30 UTC

Uzur of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 12: 806-810: Wars of Religion

Reformation went relatively smoothly, but not perfectly - 2 chiefs refused to convert, and one of them even refused revocation and rebelled.

There was also rebellion against Khan of the Khazars, and rebel leader was Old Tengri, so that was a good opportunity to enforce my claim to Khazar lands.

My brother Sevenc, such fool, he got killed while trying to escape prison. And I was just about to show brotherly mercy and release him, the papers were literally on the way... Oh well, at least his son loves me, and I gave him lands of rebellious Old Tengri chiefs to let him get over his father's death faster.

There was Old Tengri uprising, and Buddhist uprising simultaneously, neither of them had even one shekel of Jew gold, so who the hell pays them to rebel against a just and merciful ruler like me? I charged in first line of battle and became wroth because of them. And then there was another Old Tengri uprising, and another Buddhist uprising... Unfairness of it all made me lose my faith in justice. I have literally 1 Buddhist county in my whole realm, and it got "Religious Unrest" +50% revolt risk/year modifier. What the hell game?

I had to increase feudal taxes to fund development of Cumania - I'm now getting about 35-40 gold annually in taxes. That's still not much as I need tens of thousands, but it's better than nothing.

Oh and somehow that one count rebellion got king level temporary title, and as far as vassals know it was a major rebellion I crushed... Apparently it grows with every retelling on a drunken feast, and who am I to correct the bards?

Sadly I also ran into bullshit "vassal limit", so now I have 12.9% penalty to my vassal income. I guess it's time to create imperial title. Those 4 tribes in Azov were extremely helpful, now I'll just need a few in the North.

Or I could go all in and holy war Byzantines, who also took advantage of Khazaria's troubles and put Greek Orthodox bishop in charge of Tengri holy site... They're a lot stronger than me in theory, but is this also true in practice? Especially if anything were to happen to Byzantine empress, and there was civil war there...

I even got my sister married to Ailbert Karling, heir to empire of Francia. Really more because I had nothing better to do with her, but maybe we could crush Byzantines together?

The Saoshyant plan looks a lot worse now that I took a closer look - Abbasids were very effective at converting Persians to Sunni faith. I could of course take over Persian lands, but there would be no benefit in going Zoroastrian.

Detailed maps of possible war zones and of religious situation below (apparently Google+ doesn't handle 5 screenshots on one post too well...).
 #ck2

Post 15 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-20 09:07:46 UTC

Uzur of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 13: Thoughts on new CK2 mechanics (for the last few versions, not just 2.2)

Tribal economics:

• tribals make ridiculously little money from their lands - Byzantine 1-counts make more money than large tribal kings
• this is an major problem, as upgrading provinces requires a lot of money
• fortunately there is second source of major income - coastal raiding. Unfortunately it's only available to the Norse. Everybody else is screwed as you can only raid direct neighbours (at least now you can raid other Pagans at will), and that's literally worthless unless they're civilized, and even if you're lucky to border a few it's a fairly slow trickle of gold, and big risk of losing your men with no boats to withdraw to quickly
• exchange rates are really poor - if you build tribal market town (level 2) for 75+150 gold, then convert to castle, it will convert to castle town (level 1) which costs just 100 gold directly - especially annoying since feudal rulers have far more money - so I think the right strategy is to rush hillforts and skip market towns
• using prestige as resource is a great idea
• except your best source of prestige is coastal raiding, only available to the Norse, which also gives gold so you have both or neither
• of things you can spend it on - buildings have fairly poor exchange rate (700 prestige tribal - 100 gold feudal), and tribal armies need fairly significant gold upkeep, which you probably won't be able to afford unless you're Norse
• wars between feudals are self-funding as long as they're going well - sacked holdings and ransomed prisoners are worth a lot of gold - but sacking tribal holdings gives you basically nothing, and tribals can't afford any meaningful ransoms, so tribe vs tribe wars are money sink for everybody

Going feudal:

• mechanics are extremely punitive for trying to go feudal gradually, you have to go all in and that's ridiculously unaffordable - I guess that could be a legitimate design decision
• seriously, they are extremely punitive - tribals pay no taxes, you lose tribal allies (and get really tiny vassal levy instead, and that only if they like you) even just to go to high tribal authority, every wrong holding type in your demesne gets -75% levy and tax penalty, and as long as you're tribal, your feudal vassals are at zero crown authority and hate you
• even once you go feudal, you only have one holding per county so you still need 1100 gold per county to build city and temple
• it seems way easier for feudal lord to expand into tribal territory and turn it feudal gradually
• but you can't pull a reverse one, by conquering feudal territory as tribal and using that to help you - you can't move capital to different holding type (well, there are exploits...), and you get -75% levy and tax penalty for wrong holding type

Elective gavelkind:

• actually works better than expected
• you have basically zero control over who gets elected, your vassals will vote for whomever they feel like even if they love you - supposedly they nerfed elective that way too
• it's still fairly glitchy, maybe I've been quite lucky so far as glitches I've got weren't too bad
• +2 demesne limit for tribal at least does something meaningful, unlike +30% (rounded down, and applied before half of modifiers, so +0 usually, or +1 at best) for being gavelkind

Levies:

• vassals as allies is not as bad as I thought - they're dumb as hell, but at least they use full levy instead of 10%-ish numbers you'd get otherwise after all the recent nerfs
• vassal levy nerfs got really ridiculous
• it doesn't nerf blobs at all - now that rebellions use temporary title with no de jure territory they get hit with vassal levy nerfs way harder than blobs - and blobs were limited more by stability than by smaller countries around them
• as tribe you have very low retinue limit as it's per holding (and you have 1/county, not 3-4/county like feudals), and you can't afford any retinue anyway now that it costs money all the time
• as tribe you can't afford mercs, as they got way more expensive in recent nerfs, that makes a lot of sense since you get tribal armies (hired for prestige) and councilor-raised armies as replacement for mercs - except tribal armies and councilor armies don't reinforce and autodisband on peace - should they really?

Vassal limit:

• fuck that shit
• feudal kings can have vassal dukes, but you can't afford to create duchies, your multicounts definitely have zero chance of being able to afford to create duchies, and your multicounts will gavelkind just to fuck with your vassal limit
• even if you have duke vassals, rebellions against them count as another vassal to screw you
• it's just making the game worse, and I can think of no redeeming qualities
• as additional entry in fuck that shit category, if you're over your vassal limit, vassals can go independent on succession - which would be tolerable if you got claims to get them back, but you don't
• and let's reiterate - EU4 low diplo relationship limit were literally the worst design decision EU4 ever made (even the universally behated scaled truce timer would make some sense if they actually applied to country you got stuff from, not everyone) - repeating similar bullshit here is not appreciated

Attrition:

• when you stack defensive Pagan homeland, arctic, severe winter, and long travel time, you'll lose 80% of your army in time it takes you to move from one Suomenusko province (even one already occupied by you) to another - attrition makes sense to a degree, but they overdid it way too much
• you can plan around winter penalties in Europe where travel times are short - in steppes there's no way in hell, it takes one season to move to a province, then another season to move back

Muslims:

• Muslims are ridiculously stable and decadence is easier to keep at 0% than ever - that needs some serious nerfing
• they also have best inheritance system, best CBs, best crown laws, and generally no downsides
• the only bad thing about playing Muslim is when you're a vassal and your liege is totally OP

Marriages and diplomacy:

• I'm pretty sure it's a bug in files, but it's such nonsense that Pagans can't marry other Pagans
• Everybody starting the game with no female family members kills all diplomacy for Pagans for the first 20 years - it's just all in war
• Diplomatic distance makes sense in theory, but it's extremely painful since you can't filter characters to just ones you can interact with in character search

Plots:

• Removing assassination button sucks - what makes it a lot worse is that plots outside your realm are still awful. Let's say you want to murder Caliph. You have 20% plot power, so that will never fire, and nobody will join you as you're infidel. You can't join other people's plot against the Caliph, or ask other foreign rulers who hate the Caliph to join, or throw money/prestige/etc. for greater plot power etc.
• The game really needs more available plots than just murdering someone

Other stuff:

• there isn't really that much new stuff you can do as tribe, I thought they'd add more events, decisions etc. I guess the DLC was really about playing as Karlings, not playing as tribes.
• the game has so few available ambitions, it really needs more
• Indians getting holy orders even at earliest start date feels really weird

What's missing:

• non-Norse tribes absolutely need more sources of gold
• maybe allow armies to carry loot so you can go further looting than just the next county
• maybe raiding non-Norse troops could get movement bonus, to let them escape easier?
• there really needs to be some kind of raid CB against civilized people (Game of Thrones mod have these for Dothraki raids, pirate raids, slave raids etc., as well as whole slave trading mechanic) somewhat similar to existing embargo CB - if tribe wins, it gets gold, but not any territory - that's fairly easy to mod, as mods already do that
• and analogous CBs against other tribals for prestige farming without territorial conquest
• I'm not sure if they want slavery in game, they probably don't (it's literally worse than incest) even though that was huge part of tribal economy of these times. Slavery was something that feudal Catholic Europe managed to eradicate fairly successfully, so it's much less necessary in 1066 start date (it was still widespread in the Muslim world until 19th century British Empire made them stop), but in early start dates, that's pretty much how tribal chiefs made money
• Game of Thrones mod handles these things reasonably well
 #ck2

Post 16 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-22 00:22:36 UTC

Uzur of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 14: 810-818

Game updated from 2.2.0.6 to 2.2.1.

I couldn't really afford any major fighting, so all I did was 3 Indian counties, 1 Suomenusko tribe, some rebel fighting, and some raiding. Caliph declared holy war on me, which I couldn't realistically fight, so I just surrendered one tribal chiefdom to him. Losing one county for 10 year truce is not too terrible - I thought Caliph would holy war for Khiva instead, and that would screw me a lot worse.

At least every now and then random vassal chief would go Old Tengri, which would mean I could give his territory to one of my nephews.

Without major source of gold holding upgrades were really slow, and I've spent a lot of money creating high chiefdoms to work around damn vassal limit instead of doing upgrades.

But then wonderful opportunity happened - my claimant to high chiefdom of Alania got high enough in inheritance chain that I could press his claim. This is really useful, as that plus some holy wars against Suomenusko chiefs (not easy by any means, mostly due to brutal attrition).

And of course in the middle of that war I got ill, then I got pneumonic, and then I died an ace of 45, with the realm being divided between:

• Khan Ituk of Cumania (49 holdings) - younger brother of Uzur
• Khan Bonek of Khiva (37 holdings) - 4 year old son of Uzur
• Khan Tolun of newly created Volga Bulgaria (16 holdings) - 11 year old son of Uzur

Borders are horrible mess - lands in de jure Turkestan and Alania got divided between Cumania and Volga Bulgaria in a messy way, Ituk's original holdings in duchy of Khiva got given away to Bonek...

As if mid-war 3-way succession wasn't bad enough, Caliph declared invasion of Armenia on Byzantine Empress while she's at war with king of Lombardy as well. It's a pretty safe bet that Caliph will crush her, and be even more unstoppable than he already is. It's totally fair when I exploit game mechanics to blob, not when AI does it.

Anyway, let's introduce Khan Ituk. He's 31, son of Khan Arslan and Rajput Hindu concubine Kanchuka (the gluttonous attractive one).

He's Mastermind Theologian, which is definitely super useful for Khan of steppe tribes, and zealous mystic on top of that. He's honest, brave, temperate, and humble - all admirable traits for civilized ruler like duke of Khiva he used to be.

Other than intrigue, his stats are not too awful:

• diplomacy 8
• martial 13
• stewardship 11
• intrigue 2
• learning 12

His biggest downside is his zealotry - just like his brother. He won't have fun possibilities like:

• changing his religion to Sunni to avoid losing his lands to the Caliph
• going Buddhist and expanding to India
• going Slavic or Suomenusko and moving from Tartaria to Russia
• going Norse and finally making enough money from raidings to afford development of Cumania
• invading Greece, going Orthodox, and crowning himself Byzantine Emperor
• invading Persia, going Zoroastrian, and becoming Saoshyant

None of these are particularly amazing ideas, but I'm not taking advantage of invasion CB anyway, and Tengri doesn't have much special content other than that, so maybe it's time to consider alternatives?

Right now it seems that victory over Khazar Khan, subjugating my nephews, and finally some holy wars against Suomenusko chiefs will be enough to crown myself emperor of Tartaria if everything goes well.

Most holdings in the realm have at least earth hillfort (level 1), and a lot have wooden hillfort (level 2). There aren't any reinforced (level 3) or stone hillforts (level 4) yet, but it seems going feudal by year 900 is plausible, not by original pessimistic prediction of year over 9000.

As another unfortunate consequence of Uzur's untimely demise, Caliph no longer has truce with any of Uzur's successors.
 #ck2

Post 17 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-22 03:41:20 UTC

Ituk of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 15: 818-828

Something really weird is going on with warscore system - instead of being really easy to get to 100% like it used to be it's now much harder. I think it just calculates occupation warscore by holding not by county, so if you have mix of tribal and feudal counties, feudal counties (with multiple holdings) count for way more than tribal counties (with one holding each). Between this and painfully slow travel time (here's an idea - why not make travel time same between any neighbouring provinces? I know, it sounds radical, but it's such pain in CK2 and EU4 depending on which part of the map you're on, and how stupid map projection is there) this makes tribal wars really slow.

Anyway, finishing finishing high chiefdom of Alania took forever, with help from my both nephews, but wasn't too difficult.

Then khanate of Volga Bulgaria took even longer - and while I was at it duke of Kabulistan attacked me for de jure claim over one of Indian counties. My second nephew helped me defend against that while my army was busy in the West.

Weirdly High Chief of Bolghar inherited duchy of Moldova with 3 counties (while still under Volga Bulgaria). That extends my country uncomfortably far to the West.

I created 2 duchies in territory already held by my subjugated nephew and gave them to him, so now he tolerates me. It might end with less kinslaying than previous succession, hopefully.

Fight against duke of Kabulistan was victorious, but my armies suffered massive losses. Fortunately so did my nephew's so it's time to reunite family lands. It took 10 years to resolve succession - and with successions happening mostly brother to brother that means realm will be in state of succession crisis more often than not.

Unlike with my tribal nephew who accepted his position in life, all 3 nephews who happen to be feudal dukes under me hate me - 2 as title claimants, 3rd without claims just because he's ambitious. At least 4th feudal nephew - who holds 3 counties, but only 2 of them in his main duchy, so he can't be a real duke likes me there.

I have loads of nephews like that - House of Ili grew to 49 living members, and has already higher prestige than Karlings - even if not as high as Abbasids, Umayyads, and various ancient Indian dynasties. Those minor titles really add up.

Contrary to my predictions, Caliph's invasion of Byzantine empire failed miserably, but that had little impact on the Caliphate. Caliph is 73, and his successor is content, so there's some hope thing will get better.

And yes - it turns out I'm so good at this game, I win even metagame, Muslim decadence is no longer hardcoded at 0%, Abbasids got to 38% somehow. But then Umayyads are still at 0%, and most other Muslim rulers are very low, so it could be just some event-driven decadence here, and not actually fixed Muslim decadence? Only time will tell.

Right now I'm helping king of what's-left-of-Khazaria defend against holy war waged by a Miaphysine duke. It's totally awkward as I'd rather de jure claim the county I'm defending as I just need one more county to crown myself emperor!

Feudalization is progressing nicely. Double high chief of Bolgar (tribal) and Moldau (feudal) used his feudal income, even with -75% penalty, to build stone fort and reinforced fort in his tribal holdings. It could be that remote Bolgar will be the first place to feudalize, due to their weird family situation.

My demesne on the other hand is just 1 reinforced hillfort (level 3), 1 wooden hillfort (level 2), and 7 earth hillforts (level 1). Somewhat quite disappointing as lands two previous khans spent money and prestige improving are now mostly under their vassals - and they've spent tons of money on creating all the high chiefdoms.

That's 3450 gold for demesne only feudalization, and 400 gold for imperial title. With current khan at age of 41, he probably won't make it long enough to feudalize his realm.

I'm not sure what's the best next step. Some possibilities:

• Invasion of Kabulistan is definitely doable - he's just Buddhist duke and everyone around him is Hindu, so the only help he'd get is Buddhist holy order.
• Suomenusko rulers hold 5 counties in my de jure empire, so if I wanted to get imperial title quickly that would be a way - but that's extremely painful arctic.
• Holy war against Byzantines - or even invasion - if Caliph failed, it feels like an extremely poor idea, but then who knows, maybe it's doable. I'm also allied with Karling empire of Francia. My nieces married kings of Serbia and Saxony too, but that unfortunately doesn't count as an alliance.
• Wait for truce with Khan of Khazaria to end, de jure that one missing county - sounds like at least part of the plan.
• Holy war or Pagan subjugation against Slavic rulers to the West - that's really really off route to India, but at least it's not arctic over there, and more land means more power base for my future empire, and more power means less worrying about the Caliph. That duchy of Moldau I got is sort of asking to get connected to the rest of my realm, and it's either that or holy warring Byzantines for it.
• Clean up Miaphysite counts in Caucasus - easy, but they provide distraction for Caliph and Byzantines, so I'm somewhat willing to let them be.

I'm not even totally sure if this is still India campaign... That's what drove chief Arslan out from his home village, but then his successors might have different ideas. I'll probably decide once I'm feudal emperor.
 #ck2

Post 18 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-23 04:58:52 UTC

Ituk of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 16: 828-832

I had long truce with Khan of Khazaria, so I spent the money on upgrades instead of saving it for emperorship. Then Khazar Khan suddenly died, and I got 80% control over de jure Tartaria much faster than expected, except I couldn't afford it right away.

Supply of family members finally outran my ability to get new territory fast enough.

Anyway, it was time to rethink the strategy. Tengri religion, even reformed, has no future. I can't expand North/West due to atrocious levels of attrition, I can't expand South because Byzantine Emperor and Caliph are both too strong, and expansion to India is cute, but Caliph will probably holy war me and cut my realm in half - steppe part and Indian part.

Until recently it was not really possible to do anything about it, as Ituk of Ili was zealous, but teaching his son Sircan and his cynicism made Ituk realize that zealotry leads nowhere.

Maybe it's time to preempt all this and convert already? My options are:

• Sunni - the can't beat them, join them option - I'm still not convinced if sudden decadence Caliph got is a real problem, or just a glitch - right now it looks like the most powerful way to go. With +25% jizya tax in infidel provinces, and (from 0 decadence I assume I'm getting) +20% demesne income and +50% demesne troops morale - in pretty much the entire realm as my family holds most of it it gets even better. It would change me from Elective Gavelkind to Open succession, which means no more realm split.

• Orthodox - can't beat the Caliph? get help from Byzantine Emperor - sadly most special features of Orthodoxy are only enabled for Greek culture or even only Byzantine empire (or restored Roman empire) - if only there was any guarantee that Byzantines will even help, or that we'll succeed against Caliph even 2-vs-1
• Catholic - Francia is hypothetically another great power, but they're simply too far to do anything against the Caliph - it would protect me from at least Byzantine holy wars, and maybe I could get diplomatic alliance with Byzantine emperor? It will be long time until holy orders and crusades start, and I'm not sure if access to papacy is a good or bad thing on net.

• Hindu - caste system sounds horrible, as far as I can tell every character will have to change caste on their own. Politically India is ruled by mostly Hindu rulers, so they might come to my rescue.
• Jain - it might be fine for slow games, but right now I need to expand fast to protect myself from the Caliph
• Buddhist - that's probably best Indian religion to switch to, but other than duke of Kabulistan there aren't any Buddhist countries which could help me against the Caliph - Buddhist Maharaja of Bengal has some power, but Bengal is far away

• Slavic/Suomenusko/Romuva - if I could have enough time to convert my lands and get pagan homeland modifier, it would be sweet, but other than that, it's only good for migrating West and abandoning plan India completely. Long term that keeps me invasion CB, but the only countries I can invade are too powerful.
• Norse - that's extreme version of migrating West hard, Norse is a way better religion that Slavic/Suomenusko too. Norse invasion of India is actually quite reasonable, as India has great rivers which are made for raiding, and I'd be keeping invasion CB. Downside is that it doesn't help with Caliph problem at all.

• Zunist/Zoroastrian/Miaphysite/Jewish/(various minor heresies) - political dead ends right now

• Remain Tengri - any kind of change will inevitably result in major realm stability problems, at least temporarily - getting into this just after succession crisis does not sound like winning strategy. I might lose some territory to the Caliph, but then Caliph might get lazy and not attack, and even if I do, that's one duchy at a time - long way to go until it's really threatening.

As far as I see it right now most promising options are Sunni, Orthodox, and Norse. Going Muslim, Christian, or Zoroastrian gives me access to Jewish moneylenders so instant emperor title - or emergency money for mercs to prevent realm from falling apart during religious transition.
 #ck2

Post 19 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-26 12:27:21 UTC

Ituk of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 17: 832: Playing CK2 is like debugging C++

I hate it when I plot a brilliant strategy, then I look at the files, and it turns out it's not even going to work.

So the plan was to choose new religion! Candidates being Norse, Slavic, Orthodox, Catholic, Sunni, and Buddhist.

Norse and Slavic being unreformed Pagans would have big disadvantage that I wouldn't be able to demand that my vassals convert, but I can revoke all non-dynastic vassals anyway thanks to medium tribal organization, and I could work around it by reforming them as well, and then ask my family to convert too, so not a huge deal.

Unfortunately, the first problem - convert to spouse/concubine religion only works for Pagan switching to non-Pagan, so I can't go Norse or Slavic that easily. Even worse, this means any decision I make is going to be harder to revert than simply getting a new wife/concubine and paying some prestige or piety.

Second problem - the biggest benefit of going Sunni, Caliph losing duchy level holy war CB on me, yeah that's not going to work as Caliph has special kingdom-level subjugation CB on every independent Muslim ruler, so it would get even worse. Or actually it wouldn't get worse - Caliph also already has kingdom-level jihad and invasion CBs on me anyway in addition to duchy-level holy war I was worried about. Not good. On the other hand Caliph is going to like me a lot more if I convert, so maybe he'll go fight someone else?

And third problem - I won't even have "convert to attacker's religion" option, as that's only available to unreformed Pagans, but it's not a huge deal, as there are some Sunni and Orthodox concubines available (only ones with Pagan or Indian lieges works - no-concubine-religion lieges won't send you a girl as concubine).

And fourth problem - if Caliph holy wars me and I convert to Sunni (via concubine), the war ends inconclusively - but unfortunately I won't be getting 10 year truce this way, so he could attack me again basically the next day. Still, AI is fairly random, so he might decide to go somewhere else, or maybe even die and let his son inherit the Caliphate.

Anyway, back to religions. Orthodox vs Catholic is easy choice - Catholic means losing half (or worse) of bishop money to the Pope and much lower chance of Byzantine Emperor helping me defend against the Caliph, so it's basically strictly worse than Orthodox. At some point Catholics get crusades, and tons of holy orders, so they won't always suck that hard, but it's going to take very long time.

Going Buddhist is cute, as it gives me +4 learning, removes short reign penalty, and unlocks all Rajas of India content, but it doesn't help me with money, doesn't help me with alliances against the Caliph, and CBs are awful - even holy war goes down to county-level only.

And ignoring the issue of Caliph-safety, Sunni is simply best religion in game, especially if decadence is really trending hard towards 0% like I assume it is.

So that leaves me with:

• Go Orthodox right away, ally Byzantine Emperor, hope he'll help me defend against the Caliph
• Wait for Caliph to attack, go Sunni if that happens
• Go Sunni right away
• Go Sunni, swear allegiance to the Caliph, try to undermine him from within (pretty much no way that's going to work at my size)
• Remain Tengri, use super cheesy trick I haven't tested yet, but which might just work, get 30k+ army, invade the damn Caliph, and solve this problem once and for all.

More in next episode. I want to test the damn cheesy trick before I continue.
 #ck2

Post 20 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-27 23:51:38 UTC

Ituk of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 18: 832-836: Civil Jihad

It turns out the game explicitly checks for cheesy trick I wanted to use for infinite money and prestige, so that's not going to happen. Damn.

Oh well, absolute tribal authority, divorce my old wife, send away all concubines as incompatible with my new religion, convert to Muslim, get new set of wives including Caliph's daughter, betroth my daughter to Caliph's son, and revoke infidel titles left and right, starting civil war to get this realm in order. Oh and also borrow some money from the Jews, kick them out because they're Jews, and use the Jew gold to crown myself emperor of Tartaria.

Some fighting later - and that includes a lot of totally provoked revolts so my vassals would love me due to +350 crushed 14 major revolts modifier - all my landed vassals are my family (one is non-dynastic nephew, due to matrilinearity misclick, but I'll let that pass). They're also all Sunni except my underage sons who will eventually convert as well. There are no top level foreigners as well - it's all Karluk. The exception is Tengri high priest who's Khazar Tengri and nondynastic, but he's landless even as my vassal.

My army is much smaller than it used to be as instead of major tribal allies I can only call in small vassal levy, and instead of +30% Tengri levy modifier we all have -25% wrong religion penalty (well, not all the land was Tengri, so half of it had that already). Even with vassals all entertained up to +100 by tales of "major revolts" I can only raise 8k soldiers - not impressive.

Caliph is fighting Byzantine Emperor, who's totally screwed this time - with two separate Byzantine revolts at the same time as if that wasn't enough.

I got decadence from 25% to 8% in four years without doing anything unusual, demonstrating pretty clearly that Muslims are OP as hell this patch.

Granting land to dynasty members reduces decadence, taking land from dynasty members doesn't, so infinite away if you ever find yourself in decadence problems, but realistically it will be at 0% even without it - I simply got rid of all non-dynastic rulers, and put family members in charge.

Unfortunately Muslim open inheritance merges instead of splitting titles, so now one of my nephews is 4-duke, and another is a 3-duke. They love my stories how I crushed all those scary mayors, so they love me, but it might be awkward on inheritance. Apparently as Muslim I can revoke duchies at will (except of course target will -80 me for that)... Seriously? Like they're not OP enough. I should probably do that to avoid succession mess.
 #ck2

Post 21 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-28 04:32:49 UTC

Ituk of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 19: 836-852: Settling Down

I finally figured out how to get basically infinite money and prestige, but the method involves insane number of clicks (all easier versions have been closed one by one), so I did it a few times just to try, got maybe 100 gold out of it, and gave it a break.

I finally got 11 boats so I could raid Byzantines freely with some tribal armies - with another stack of tribal armies raiding Kabulistan. Loads of money and prestige to be had this way.

Byzantine Emperor is now Sunni too, he totally realizes how broken they are this patch. He got his decadence down to 5%, mine is 0%, Caliph went from 38% to 0% too, all really quickly.

I holy warred Aghbania, took 3 castles there (2 well upgraded, 1 former tribal holding barely turned into a castle) for myself, gave one of my tribal high chiefdoms to a son, and I went feudal!

This was instantly really poor idea:

• I can no longer raid anyone (I had no idea, I naively thought they gave everyone raiding, as Norse feudals can raid just fine)
• For a while I only had 1 castle with decent levy - other than that I had 3 newly conquered castles (which won't give much levy for a few years), 3 tribes (I wanted their buildings to finish, so they stayed tribal for a couple more years). Even after upgrades levy refills from basically 0 since tribes and castles have different levy type.
• I can no longer raise tribal armies, or event troops - at least I get to keep what I got until I'm at peace (which won't be anytime soon).

Some Karluk kinsman inherited a duchy, so I wanted to revoke it - but I had no army, so I tried to assassinate him instead - it got me dishonorable, but somehow not kinslayer on top of that. His son revolted anyway, so I have at least one +25 crushed major revolt.

All the old "crushed major revolt" modifiers wore off, and I had massive penalty for raising crown laws for a while (that wears off fast at least), as well as dishonorable, wrong holding type, and basically everyone hated me, and I had no troops to keep everything under control.

And of course tons of religious rebels spawned all at once on opposite ends of the realm. It took me a long while to get this all together.

Pretty much the only upside of all this is that I'm making crazy amounts of money, crazy at least by standards of what I used to make - 190/year (compared with previous 45 or so) and I hope to double that by getting better castles.

The big question is - do I want to keep my capital where it is, or move it. In old patches moving it would be obvious choice, as out of 7 counties I hold only 2 in Aghbania are decently upgraded, and even they are in de jure Byzantine Empire, so not the best place to be. On the other hand vassal levies are now ridiculously based on where capital is - not even your primary title like sanity would demand, so moving it out would improve my levy at cost of losing a lot of vassal levy.

With 4/5 emperors Sunni, it's pretty clear which religion won. I'm 65 so I probably won't live long - I should designate successor, but to be honest all of my sons are mediocre, except for one total imbecile.

All the minor countries between me, Byzantine Empire, and Caliph have been divided, so the only directions of expansion are towards India (with only CB being duchy-level holy war, and fighting holy orders every time) and towards high attrition Pagans.

House of Ili has 117 living members and higher prestige than even Karlings, so I don't think I'm ever going to need to give titles to non-dynastic people again.

About half of high chiefs upgraded their capital holding to castle, but they still have almost all tribal vassals, so realm is very far from losing its tribal character. Most of it doesn't even have technology (castle infrastructure 1) necessary to fully upgrade hillforts. I'd assume it's going to become mostly feudal by year 900, but then I might expand further into Pagan territory if India turns out too hostile.
 #ck2

Post 22 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-12-01 04:27:16 UTC

Ituk of Ili, Emperor of India: Part 20: 852: The End and post-campaign notes

I thought about it a bit, and I think it's time to stop this campaign, even thought the big plan to get to India failed miserably, and I'm not even bordering India (I'd need one more holy war for one remaining duchy in Afghanistan to even border de jure Punjab).

I wanted to do two things in one campaign - tribal/feudalization stuff and India/Buddhist/Jain stuff, and it seemed totally doable. Tribal/feudalization part went pretty well - new mechanics to explore, new kinds of problems to overcome and so on. Loads of fun to be had.

Unfortunately between non-Norse tribals being ridiculously weak, Abbasids next to me being ridiculously OP, Indians having access to holy orders stronger than all tribal armies of the steppes combined (sensible design decision to avoid them getting curbstomped by Abbassids, but sucks if you're not Abbassids), and 2/3 of my time being spent fighting civil wars and rebellions (there weren't even that many, travel time was just so ridiculously long), India kept getting delayed and delayed.

I finally reached the point where I can invade India - but I'd be doing it as feudal Muslim ruler with zero special CBs (I misread the files and thought I'd keep them as non-Pagan, oh well), totally generic and pretty much the opposite of what I wanted.

And so India will have to wait for another campaign. I keep returning to Paradox games, so it will happen sooner or later. For that matter I played as EU3 Vijayanagar, EU3 Orissa, EU4 Dai Viet, and EU4 Timurids (into Mughals into Byzantium), where India played very prominent role, as well as quite a few campaign where it was secondary theater of operations.

I wrote what I think about new mechanics already, and I don't have that much to add. The game is just ridiculously unbalanced - it feels like it might be the least balanced patch so far, but then I'm contrasting the most OP option (Abbasids) with the most nerfed option (non-Norse tribals with no nearby settled people to raid, and very high travel time - they're nearly as bad as Africans), if you're playing Catholic or Norse game it might be just fine-ish.

Once upon a time the feudal system of the game made sense - city vassals provided taxes, feudal vassals provided levies (based on how much they liked you), temple vassals something in between. After levy nerfs, feudal vassals are nearly pointless - kingdom's worth of feudal vassals provides less levy than your demesne, even if they totally love you.

I mean literally, 134-holding kingdom of Lombardy, 5th largest country on the map - controlling Italy, half of Sicily, and big parts of Bavaria, gets 4.2k levy from vassals, 2.4k levy from own 5-holding demesne (of 7 max), as well as 1.3k retinue. The nerfs have gone way too far.

And so the game cut max demesne size, prevented you from having large demesne by harsher penalties with each patch, prevented you from having more temple/city vassals by arbitrary 10%-of-your-realm limit, nerfed mercs and now also retinues you could use to work around that, banned you from giving titles to your successor in case you wanted smooth succession, and is generally being an asshole. It started with "HRE too strong, please nerf" and step by step it descended into current mess that's far worse than the original design, and contains just so many dumb penalties and arbitrary limitations.

The biggest derail along the way were probably temporary revolt titles. That managed to somehow nerf revolts, so people are afraid of random adventurers and rebels instead of unhappy vassals and claimant brothers these days.

Anyway, I'm not even entirely sure how I'd fix it with simple tweaks. Some obvious ideas:

• Reduce wrong holding type penalties from ridiculously high 75% on both tax and levy to something reasonable, at least for tribal/feudal.
• If decadence can't be fixed, just remove decadence bonuses/penalties completely.
• Give tribal troop upkeep discounts, as they're too poor for even own levies.

But they honestly just won't do enough. The whole pile of arbitrary nerfs and limitations the game got over time needs dismantling.

It doesn't mean the game is unplayable - plenty of people enjoy it as an RPG / dating simulator, and seriously unbalanced strategy games can be perfectly enjoyable. I just feel I'm done with it for now. Maybe I'll play some mods instead.

Anyway, here's a small bonus, some exploits.

How to farm infinite gold/prestige:

• Own county as part of your demesne, with city inside. (it doesn't have to be city, but you get a lot less money per iteration otherwise)
• Grant city to infidel - just make sure not the same one as last time.
• Grant independence to that infidel.
• Attack with county claim, with your levies/retinues/event troops/etc. sitting on the province.
• First time it will take a while to siege that down, that's totally fine.
• Once you win the war, enforce demands, repeat - this time since garrison has 0 troops (it got conquered today), it will take just 1 day to win the war.
• Every time you sack it you get loot money (sadly only 30% due to new administration modifier, so about 14 gold a day from mid-wealthy city), and 50 prestige from winning a war.
• It's a lot of clicking. I find it too tedious. Easier versions used to be possible, but they closed them. (I don't even mind that)
• And don't accidentally give the title to same infidel, as you'll have truce timer. You don't want that.

How to get a ton of rebellions (not infinite, just opportunistic):

• You need to be at medium crown authority or medium tribal organization, so you have infidel revocations free
• If you happen to conquer territory with infidel rulers, do this:
• Revoke all counties so they're your demesne
• Once that's done, revoke all baronies, same day, they'll definitely all say yes
• Give all counties to someone
• Barons will notice you're not their direct liege, so they'll automatically refuse your offer, and rebel against you
• You get ten-years +25 opinion with all your vassals per revolting baron. One duchy worth of them is basically +100 opinion realmwide no matter what you do. Sadly this all expires in 10 years and any new vassals won't have it.
• This trick can be farmed - give titles to infidels, wait 1 year so you can revoke them, do everything, but usually you'll find yourself with infidel counties anyway in normal gameplay, and you might as well do this opportunistically.
• This works if you get infidel territory by claim / invasion. Holy war automatically kicks them out and gives their holdings to you.
• It's easy to accidentally do this (that's how I discovered it) - barons will always accept revocations, but they wait different time, so you might accidentally give county away before getting all barons to accept revocations.

How to change crown authority by multiple levels is one day:

• Be Muslim, so you don't need to bother with vassal votes.
• You need 2 kingdoms worth of land
• If not Muslim, get your vassals happy (see previous exploit)
• Change crown authority from 0 to 1
• Create second kingdom titles - it will start with higher level but no timer
• Change crown authority from 1 to 2 in new kingdom
• Change your primary to kingdom with highest authority, repeat until happy
• If you run out of kingdoms, destroy some and recreate them
• If you want to create empire, do that last
• That will leave you with some kingdoms at lower authority than your primary, you can leave it for your successors, or destroy and recreate those titles
• You can't destroy titles as gavelkind or elective gavelkind, but you can still go 2 levels up right away by just creating a new one.

That's all exploits I'm aware of. If you know any more, I'm always interested.
 #ck2

Banished Colonial Charter mod AAR

Post 1 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-23 03:34:44 UTC

First impressions review: Banished: Colonial Charter mod

I decided to give it a try - hard start (smaller population, and no seeds/animals), but only medium climate settings.

So far nobody died, the colony is short on building materials, which is understandable as it's building very aggressively. It's OK on food, education, and tools.

The way I play is that I preplan very far in advance, with paused buildings everywhere, and then unpause them when I want to actually build them. This results is much more aesthetically pleasing colony than what some other people on youtube get by building just-in-time.

It's weird how in some games I'm really obsessed about aesthetics (I can't play factorio after oil processing, it breaks my pretty layouts), and in others it's minmax all the way.

Preplanning would also probably be more optimal than building just-in-time, but then I can't be bothered to check wiki, even if there was wiki for mod stuff.

It's been 6 years, and so far the only mod features I used are apiary (produces honey from nothing), and pure decorative statue of colonial governor on a llama. As far as I can tell most mod features are very late game.

The colony plan is:
• main village
• forestry center 1
• forestry center 2 (only planned)
• quarry / graveyard
• mines

It's mostly optimized to give both forestry centers (forester / gatherer / hunter / herbalist / stockpile / stone houses) enough space and for aesthetics.

Starting terrain is a bit awkward - especially if I want to keep that forested area for forestry use and not cut it all for farms and bigger town. That lake South of the village is not connected to main river, but lake West of the village is, that's why planned trading post is located there somewhat awkwardly.

There's some space East from the quarry where I can put some farms over the bridge. As far as I can tell most mod-specific content starts with farming, and right now I don't have any seeds since it's hard start, and I don't have enough expendable material (probably firewood, since it's renewable) to trade.

Other than 4 wooden houses I rushed so my colonists could survive first winter, it's stone houses everywhere. Mod adds two more house types, but they require some resources I don't have yet to build.

Gaming is so much more relaxing when I don't have to worry if I'm going to get attacked by Caliph's deathstacks...

Mod is available from [ http://banishedinfo.com/mods/view/679-Colonial-Charter-Turbo-BlackLiquid ] and works just fine with gog.com version of the game.
 #banished

Post 2 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-24 01:22:46 UTC

Banished: Colonial Charter mod: Part 2

My big plan this time was to go all stone houses, skipping wooden houses stage. I even upgraded 4 wooden houses I've built in year 1 to survive the first winter.

I'm not convinced it has been such a great idea - I have tons of firewood (what stone houses save in the long run), but I'm short of stone all the time.

Colony still fits on a single screenshot with some camera fiddling. It now has 2 forester/gatherer centers and trading post. I'm trading much more aggressively as Banished is nearly unique among games in that all traders offer totally fair prices (same buy and sell price) - selling firewood which I have in abundance and buying everything nonrenewable.

Maybe I'd be better off going all wooden houses instead to grow population faster? In theory firewood is great for trade, but not enough traders come anyway. Would building more trade post bring more traders, or is there something else I could do about it?

I've just build silkworm hut, so I make silk cocoons (mod specific building), which presumably can be used to make silk somehow later, but not I'm not sure how. So far this is basically vanilla game.
 #banished

Post 3 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-24 17:11:25 UTC

Banished: colonial charter mod

I got some llamas and bisons, and abbey, and silkworm hut (all presumably mod-specific, I don't recall them from base game), but it doesn't seem to change game much.

I'm not sure why population did not increase for so long - it was in 40-45 adult range for very long time, in spite of plentiful housing, food, firewood, and 4.5 health and happiness.

I was hit by a tornado which destroyed fishing dock and killed 3 people - fortunately it avoided central parts of the colony.

I allocated area on other side of the stream to farmland - some pastures (bison and llamas), orchards (pear and walnut), and crop fields (I couldn't get any seeds yet). This was really easy to make as they needed zero stone, just some labor to clear them, and wood for fences. I'm going to build a mod building "bank barn" (larger capacity barn which needs to be built onto side of the hill) there as well.

So far mod plays basically the same as vanilla. That's a bit disappointing. Presumably if I got tobacco, hemp, linen etc. seeds I'd be able to setup some minor industry, but it's all up to RNG when I'll be able to get them.
 #banished

Post 4 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-11-25 19:45:47 UTC

Banished: Colonial Charter mod

There was achievement for building bridge longer than 50 units - well, why not do that... and apparently I can't get that achievement. Not sure if that's because I'm using a mod (probably), or it doesn't work on gog version maybe, or what else? That's really annoying, as doing random achievements sounds like a fun thing to do in city builder game - it doesn't have meaningful victory conditions anyway, so achievements would be a good goal.

Screenshots:
• trade area - I assume 2x trade post means 2x more frequent boat visits
• industrial area - including water mill, baker, weavers, clothier, tavern making mead etc. - quite a lot of mod content
• farm area - barley, 3 types of orchards, 4 types of animals - including bison, llamas, and milk cows (vanilla only has meat cows), as well as some bank barns built into hillside

I'm relatively happy with what I got aesthetically - it's not perfect, but water, hills, and space needed for forestry made it fairly difficult to do much better than that in space I got. Annoyingly buildings that need water or hill (trade posts, mines, water wheels, bank barns etc.) need straight edge between flat land and that, so they're very hard to place.

I had one fire, fortunately very close to the well, so everyone rushed to the well and it only burned 2 stone houses, not a big deal, but presumably I don't have enough houses.

Population is nearing 200. It's not very smooth, and I sometimes have short term shortages (like current firewood shortage as I sold all of it to buy sheep and milk cows), but it's overall very stable.

I think that's it for this campaign. Mod content adds a bit extra content, but not all that much, and without achievements or some other goal, I don't really see what would be the endpoint of the campaign. Maybe I'll come back to the game in another year when modding scene gets a lot more developed.
 #banished

Post 5 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-12-10 08:19:21 UTC

I briefly resumed my  #banished  Colonial Charter town out of certain suspicion, and indeed, I wasn't taking advantage of mod features - you can build silkworm huts and weavers right away, and that's even better export than firewood.

I was playing it like vanilla since I didn't know any better and 80% of mod content is late game, but it does provide alternative early/mid game route.

EU4 Extended Timeline British Empire Reborn AAR

Post 1 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-12-05 05:02:46 UTC

British Empire Reborn: Part 0: 2014: Pre-campaign notes

I've played so many Rome reborn and Caliphate reborn games, I'm surprised I haven't tried to recreate the greatest empire of all times yet. Also I promised India game before, and what kind of British Empire would it be if it didn't include India?

So, goals of the campaign are:

• remain some kind of monarchy - I see no reason to abandon Constitutional Monarchy, but I'm not totally sure what government types Extended Timeline mod has
• recreate colonial empire including all the countries (controlled directly or as vassals) British Empire should have including Ireland, India, Australia, South Africa, Canada, Thirteen Colonies etc.
• win Hundred Years War, even if a couple centuries late
• take revenge for all other historical injustice, no matter how late
• 100% control over all 4 trade end nodes is highly desirable - English Channel, Bordeaux, and Seville definitely, Venice depending on how things go.
• 100% of provinces producing tea, obviously
• get some kind of vassal European Union, even if not necessarily in current borders
• stop this Secular nonsense and go back to our Christian roots at some point. For that matter why not go back to our Catholic roots (Anglican Church sits undecidedly halfway between Catholic and Protestant tradition anyway), as there are zero other Catholic countries, so it's free curia for whoever wants it.
• as usual, if I end up totally dominating the world without actually fulfilling some conditions, I'll call it a win anyway

But first, some pre-game modding. It's a problem with every start date except date zero (which for Extended Timeline mod is awkwardly Rome-Parthia War) that everyone starts with predetermined idea groups. You can cancel them, but you don't get your points back (well, you get 10%, but that's just silly), and it's a lot of manual effort to fix things by console, so I'm just going to edit mod files to set "historical ideas" I want.

Mod gives 10 and has some extra "early X" idea groups to choose from. Ideas I want are:

• Early Diplomatic - most countries have 2/3 here but Early Military and Early Administrative suck, so I'll just pick this one
• Aristocratic - is there even a question?
• Diplomatic - global empire runs on diplomacy
• Trade - the tea must flow!
• Influence - we need to manage our vassals
• Administrative - to core all the
• Humanist - to deal with nationalist nonsense in the colonies
• Expansion - we're the very definition of it
• Religious - we were Defender of the Faith before it was cool, and perhaps it's time to go back to that
• Economic - I wasn't totally sure about this one, I just don't particularly care for any other 10th idea

What's missing:

• Naval and Maritime are so shitty that they're worthless even for ocean-oriented empire
• Military ideas are not horrible, but it's easier to just get bigger army by expansion and trade
• Exploration is not that great with everything already explored, no Pagans to CB, and no empty provinces to colonize - there are still a few colonies in progress on the map, but we'll have 1 colonists from Expansion anyway
• Espionage - that's something a lot of countries are going to have at this date, so expect a lot of sabotaged reputation

There are very few alliances, as the game doesn't try to model NATO, EU etc., but we start in alliance with France. Not like that's going to save them from final chapter of the Hundred Years War eventually.
 #eu4

Post 2 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-12-07 10:46:36 UTC

British Empire Reborn: Part 1: 2014-2021: New European Union

I forgot to mention one more objective - we definitely need to build Suez canal as somehow there are no canals at this start date. Panama and Kiel canal won't hurt either, but they're option.

Oh and EU4 is bugged again - it has this "revolutionary target" system for Napoleonic Wars, but nonexistent countries (Revolutionary France - RFR tag) can remain revolution targets even after they're gone, so I had to edit game files to kill that as that basically forces every monarchy in Europe into war against them or suffer ridiculous penalties, and war isn't even possible. If another revolution target emerges somehow, so be it.

Also Extended Timeline is bugged in that Bermuda is in no trade node, so I fixed it by making it part of Chesapeake Bay like in vanilla. There seem to be a few more other provinces without trade node, maybe I'll write a script to validate this stuff someday.

(I reported both issues, I have way more trust in modders fixing their shit than in Paradox fixing base game)

Anyway, time to choose 10 policies, select rivals - Spain, Netherlands, and... Morocco I guess, that one's somewhat dubious, and start day 0 war against Spain. If you Spaniards thought the Great Armada invasion of 1588 is forgiven, you were gravely mistaken.

The problem with my starting position is that I'm only 18th country by army size - way below even Spain. Fortunately my vassal France is 5th, and hates Spain for some reason, so that will be relatively straightforward. Did I say vassal? Freudian slip here, of course I meant valuable ally.

And take some policies. I didn't consider policy implications of different idea groups, maybe I should have, I could easily swap 1 or 2 idea groups if that led to better policies. Anyway, I'm taking:

• Licensing of the Press Act (better relations +20%, AE -10%)
• Dissolution Act (AE -20%)
• Statute of Monopolies (trade efficiency +10%, production efficiency +10%)
• Religiously Sponsored Guilds (goods produced nationally +10%, missionary strength +1%)
• Overseas Dominions (tariffs +10%, income from vassals +25%)
• Vassal Obligation Act (income from vassals +25%, subject forcelimit contribution +25%)
• Manueline Architecture (build cost -15%)
• Multilingual Diplomats (better relations +20%, accepted culture threshold -10%)
• Encouragement of Merchant Navy (trade efficiency +10%, trade steering +20%)
• Importation Act (trade income +20%)

I've heard some rumors tariffs are bugged in current release, and count CN's ideas not overlord's, in which case Overseas Dominions is wrong choice. We'll see.

By the way these policies only make sense in this mod, since tech basically stops soon, and we're already maxed out on ideas, so we won't need points all that much, but we'll need money. And Fun and Balance makes policies free, otherwise optimal strategy would be to take zero of them.

Anyway, Spain and France adopted strategy of putting their stacks in Barcelona and Bearn and looking threateningly at each other, fighting the blinking war. France blinked first, moved its army to siege stuff, and Spain lost the war with intact 44k stack and 39 ship navy.

Making Spain my vassal dragged me into war against Morocco, who decided to use Spain's weakness to reconquer Ceuta. There's also another problem that Spain absolutely hates me.

Another problem was that even with my AE discounts Portugal really hated what I just did, and were likely to join coalition against me. To preempt that, I declared war on them right away.

Portugal took very little convincing - France wiped out their army in one battle, Spanish stack kept chilling out in Barcelona, I just sieged some things, so it was time for war against Ireland for decades of their covert support for IRA.

And then against Belgium as soon as they broke their only alliance with Brazil for some reason (French wouldn't help, but I can handle Belgium), as revenge against all the cigarette smuggling in English Channel trade node, and let's be honest clear - it's not like Belgian people can even govern on their own, they're still holding coalition talks. By the way Belgium ambitiously tried to attack Germany, and failed miserably, but Germany was satisfied with just war reparations.

My vassals did a decent job fighting Morocco, but I let it get away with war reparations, just so I could call France into my war against Belgium. My manpower situation was bad enough that actually fighting against Belgium would get me to zero. It turned out to be pointless as Belgian army waited out the war in their capital, and French army showed zero interest in moving out of Paris. Oh well.

I took advantage of one day of peace to set new rivals, as old ones all became invalid - this time Germany, Italy, and Argentina.

Of course I wasn't done. We have unfinished business with the Dutch after their unprovoked 1667 raids. All the cigarette smuggling across English Channel is not welcome either.

Now this was a much bigger war. I was facing not just Netherlands-Italy coalition against me, but also Luxembourg, Peru, Ecuador, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, wherever that is.

Dutch army decided to stand in their capital - not the worst idea as France and Belgium showed zero interest in helping, I had basically no manpower, and there were no mercs to hire. Dutch navy got defeated but with very heavy losses - fortunately rebuilding new navy takes just gold (or should it be dogecoin at this stage of the game?) and no manpower, so that's not a big deal. Italian navy successfully dominated Mediterranean over my vassals, and I didn't feel like challenging them there.

Once I suffered from enough attrition, the Dutch decided to move against me - I won, but I lost all my manpower, and pretty close to all my army. Even after fully occupying Netherlands I had to wait for Spain and Portugal to siege a bunch of Italian provinces before they were willing to accept vassalization. Coalition nonsense.

I got two monarch deaths, and now 26 year old 1/2/0 George VII of Windsor is in charge... I might reconsider that not going republic thing...

Meanwhile, highlights from other parts of the world:

• South Korea crushed North Korea and formed united Korea
• Greece conquered Cyprus, Albania, and Macedonia. Turkey then took Albania and Rhodes from them and forced them to release Cyprus.
• China conquered Taiwan
• Bosnia and Herzegovina conquered Serbia, Montenegro, and half of Croatia - someone's playing my Bosnia Stronk game even if it's not me
• Iraq and Syria defeated Caliphate rebels (sadly game starts with provinces rebel-occupied, but no rebel armies there)
• Poland won war against Ukraine and Russia (not sure why Russia was in it, they're not allied with Ukraine or guaranteeing it, was it warning against Poland maybe?) and took 2 Ukrainian provinces.
• Indonesia somehow attacked Syria, and got war reparation out of them

And so New European Union emerges, featuring:

• United Kingdom
• Ireland
• France (as ally)
• Spain
• Portugal
• Netherlands
• Belgium
• Luxembourg (as Belgian province)

8/28 in a pretty quick expansion. Between Extended Timeline (all the ideas groups, and modern times modifier), bonuses from English Ideas, and Fun and Balance doubling all the bonuses, my relationship limit is 22, so I can reestablish literal European Union (not trivially, many countries are not vassalizable in one go).

I'm somewhat disappointed that there's nothing to do with all that money - I can't hire mercs, and I'm spamming buildings as fast as I can and I'm still flooded in money. If that continues I'll consider adding mercs to the game. (as they're apparently gone in this era, not sure if it's intentional or a bug)
 #eu4

Post 3 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-12-07 18:30:05 UTC

British Empire Reborn: Part 2: 2021: Missing Mercenaries Interlude

So I wasted half a day debugging the game again. Remind me, why don't I ever play games where things just work?

The problem was that there are no mercs in the game after 1850s or so. I thought that might even be by design, but I couldn't find anything in game files. I had tons of ideas, all failed, until I finally figured it out:

• Extended Timeline late game units are same for every tech group
• merc code fails miserably if your infantry/cavalry units are not tech group specific
• it _probably_ prioritizes ancient unit types in your tech groups, and then fails miserably because they're way too obsolete

There are a few thing I considered doing about it:

• Add tons of extra western_ak47, eastern_ak47 etc. units to the game as mercs. This is actually even save game compatible since I'm just adding them, and can be done automatically by a script. It took me a lot of attempt to actually reach something workable like this.

• Just play without mercs. That's valid I guess (and my 21th century Caliphate game was like that too), but then what the hell am I going to do with all that money I'm making from my trade empire?

• Just add a decision to get mercs in your capital for gold, ignoring broken merc pool. Unfortunately scripting doesn't seem to have anything that would spawn mercs - just spawning regular units. It's possible there's a way, but other than what vanilla does in existing code it's hard to guess what would work and what wouldn't.

• Add mercs to pool directly by decision - again, that doesn't seem to be supported.

• Let you buy manpower with money for similar cost it would take to use mercs for that. That's easiest, but I'm a bit worried that AI would take infinite loans, spam that feature, and go bankrupt in every war it's losing. Presumably the only reason AI doesn't do that in normal games is small merc pool size.

• Do that, and add a timer. I could even vary timer and cost based on your idea groups etc. so it works basically the same as regular mercs.

How much would fair cost be? Assuming you go for infantry only mercs (AI doesn't, but AI is stupid), and they last 2 years before replacement (by fully reinforcing, or merging with another unit, or disbanding etc.), that's about 15 for recruitment + 25 for two year upkeep vs 10 for recruitment + 10 for upkeep of regular infantry. So 1k extra manpower costs you about 30 gold by using merc infantry. I'm assuming zero reinforcement costs here not because that's realistic, but because reinforcing mercs saved you more than 1000 initial manpower. I should probably bump it to 10k manpower for 500 gold, available once a year. (with possible modifiers based on idea groups etc.)

I'm still not sure which was to go about it.

All that does not make me terribly happy. Next time I'll just watch somebody's let's play of debugging a game, instead of debugging a game myself.
 #eu4

Post 4 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-12-08 04:30:45 UTC

British Empire Reborn: Part 3: 2021-2026: From Iceland to Guinea

So now that I know how to fix mercs, I decided to continue playing without mercs. If I ever find myself with 100K+ cash and absolutely nothing to spend it on, I might reconsider.

Fortunately I got event for 16k free manpower (or some army tradition - normally tradition would be better I guess) so I could rebuild at least a bit.

As I didn't want any serious wars, and coalition against me war already started forming, I decided to just invade Iceland with its 2 base tax provinces. Their annexation will end all their conflicts over cod fishing rights once and for all.

Next I got free stability event, so I decided to take the plunge and abandon secularism. And apparently I only got 2 missionaries (0 base, 1 religious ideas, 1 defender of the faith) instead of expected 4 (1 base, 1 religion ideas, 2 defender of the faith). This is going to take much longer than I thought.

Unfortunately not only Spain but also Netherlands were somehow unhappy about their membership in our glorious union, and treacherous Germans supported them. And France decided that it wants basically all of Belgium, which didn't make them break alliance, but it downgraded their relation to defensive, making their help in any war against Germany somewhat doubtful.

I allied Switzerland and Algeria (pretty much every country hates every other country due to imperialism CB, and in my case different religion as well), and to distract my unfaithful vassals, I declared war on Mauritania, bringing Morocco and Guinea Bissau into the war.

All 3 deserved it - for their attack on Ceuta, for support for Muslim terrorists, and for spreading Ebola. What do you mean it was the other Guinea? How many Guineas do they have? You sure they didn't have Ebola in the other one too? I mean, just for extra safety we should probably put someone trustworthy there in charge.

Morocco got vassalized as North Africa isn't even a colonial region (its 2 southmost provinces are in West Africa colonial region, but that can be handled later), the other two got annexed, and I'm coring 5/10 of their cheapest provinces just to spawn a CN to finish the job.

The Dutch changed their mind, and like me now, but Spain still wants independence. Maybe they'll change their mind once I integrate Portugal and Ireland.

My religious unity is at 50% (25% from provinces, 25% from humanism), but it will get better quickly once I lose Sunni provinces in Africa and get Catholic provinces in Portugal and Ireland. I have no idea how my CNs could possibly convert anything due to base 0 missionaries, but then again they'll probably all go Secular anyway.

Surprisingly Alsace spawned from France (rebel sat there forever, French stack sat in Paris doing nothing), as second Catholic country, but they don't seem to be competing in the pope game yet.

I got up to 39k gold already, gaining huge stash every month, and yeah, this game simply needs those mercs as money dump.
 #eu4

Post 5 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-12-09 05:28:41 UTC

British Empire Reborn: Part 4: 2026-2032: The Empire on which the Sun sets for only half a day

I'll leave mercs for a while. I'm thinking about adding some other money dump, like making level 5-6 buildings not exclusive. I never liked that exclusivity, usually how this ends is not building any of them (except for centers of trade where it's obvious what needs to be built) as calculating correct decision is too hard.

At least I modded it so that subject nations can't go secular, as secular prevents both religious conversion, as well as cultural conversion (as that requires province to have same religion as you, and provinces can't be secular). I should probably allow that if overlord is secular, but it doesn't really make much difference. The whole secular thing mostly annoys me.

I attacked Tunis, and they were only allied with Sudan, so it was no big deal. Except my ally Algeria decided to DoW Tunis while we were at war, so vassalizing Tunis would result in awkward war against one of my few allies - and I'd need to wait for 2 year timer (as Sudan was much larger than Tunis - fortunately that's not 5 years like vanilla), and deal with too many small vassals. I decided to give all Tunis's provinces except their capital to Morocco. That's not entirely safe, as vassals get hostile if they get too big, but that's still reasonable.

Portugal and Ireland got integrated under direct royal administration - Spain and Netherlands would be much more interesting, but they're less enthusiastic about it, so we're going to give them some more time to consider. Belgians would be fine with it, but that would mean direct border with France, and that's probably not something our country is ready for - well, unless it integrates Spain. Distant overseas vassals like Morocco will probably stay such for very long time.

I got alliances with Sweden, Poland, and Venezuela - I don't think they'll be of much use, but who knows really.

So, time for peace in the Middle East!

• Attack Palestine
• Palestine's ally Egypt (not cobeligerent)
• Palestine's ally Syria (cobeligerent)
• Palestine's ally Lebanon (cobeligerent)
• Syria's/Lebanon's ally Israel
• Lebanon's ally Cyprus

Such a great plan, other than Egypt everybody else on the list is a total pushover....

And Lebanon got Turkey as mid-war ally, so now I have to fight them as well. I really, really, dislike this mechanic. I tried to setup the entire thing as to avoid getting Turkey involved (it was allied with Egypt), as well as avoiding getting USA involved (it was guaranteeing Israel), but nope.

Of course none of my allies would be bothered by such a "distant war". I understand the reason this modifier exists, but it's ridiculously huge - France could easily send ships against Egypt or Turkey (which even holds Albania - really close from Corsica), and Poland could send some troops.  They are not that damn far away. And Algeria? Come on, how is that -112 distant war? Maybe I should lower it by a lot someday, like by 75%. (Algeria wouldn't help anyway as it's deep in debt, which is a much more reasonable modifier)

Meanwhile my ally Sweden dragged me into a war against Denmark, Norway, Czech Republic, Germany, and Italy, bringing on its side only Estonia, Lithuania, and Slovenia. Later Finland, Latvia, and Switzerland (breaking our alliance) decided to join the anti-Swedish pileup as well.

And so my minor regional war turned into two wars against half of Europe. I had enough naval superiority to dominate either Baltic or Mediterranean, not necessarily both.

But it wouldn't even be that bad - Denmark got some troops into Sweden, but Baltic was mostly under our control, so Germany couldn't join, and Sweden had more troops than Denmark. Except of course Swedish stack fucking stood there doing nothing, not even standing on war goal, which would make some sense, or on their capital, nope - they decided to take holidays in Halsingland. This is way worse in Extended Timeline mod than in vanilla, not just this campaign, every campaign.

Denmark managed to annex Slovenia, with Italy doing all the fighting there - I'm not used to this 1.8 stuff. Sweden then took one of Norway's province - it sent some 2k stacks to Norway, but none to challenge Danish invasion - seriously, what the hell, both sides are winning somehow, and it's and totally fucked anyway?

British Mauritania spawned as my first CN. There were some weird glitches - initially they had 75% autonomy, +15 unrest from nationalism, +5 unrest from intolerance, +1.5 unrest from almost no religious unity... Then weirdly nationalism went away in cored provinces and to 10 in uncored ones, intolerance went down to 1.25 unrest, and autonomy went down to 40% overnight, I can't trust the numbers... At least they spawned with same ideas as me fully unlocked, so they have a missionary to handle this maybe.

In war against Egypt / Turkey / Syria / Palestine / Israel / Lebanon / Cyprus I tried to mostly avoid Egyptian and Turkish stacks.

Egyptian stack stood in Cairo preventing me from getting 92% warscore needed, and Turkish stacks were walking around threateningly, so I sieged whatever I could from Egypt, put some small stacks in Sudan waiting, and moved my main stacks to Israel and Palestine.

Israel annexed, war target Judea occupied (didn't I change this timeout from 5 years to 2 years? why the hell is it still not 100%?), I tried to get Lebanon, but Syrian and Turkish stacks had better idea, so I GTFOed all my army to Cyprus and Rhodes. Oh wait, I can blockade the straits, occupy Constantinople, and maybe get Turks to see reason this way?

Egyptian stack decided to join defense of Lebanon for some strange reason, so my Sudanese army got Cairo and vassalized them, with no battles so far.

Germans, Italians, Czechs all piled up on Belgium and Netherlands, so I conceded defeat to Denmark, and rebought Defender of the Faith for trivial 500 gold.

Even with 4 Turkish provinces including their capital occupied, and them fully blockaded, best I could get was me conceding defeat and rebuying Defender of the Faith second time in a year.

After than opposition was reduced to Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. Syrian army stood in their capital, so I couldn't vassalize them without losing what little manpower I had left, so instead I just took all their other provinces leaving them as OPM. Lebanon got annexed and released as Catholic vassal (Egypt is somehow secular, so it won't buy any provinces ever - another problem with "secular" mechanic).

I plan to core Jerusalem and Cyprus myself, and feed everything else to Lebanon as soon as it's converted.

My subject have ridiculous problems with rebels now::

• Spain (force limit 73) got 27k Moroccan Patriots - I don't even care if they defect to Morocco, but that province is -14% unrest, WTF? Of course Spain has zero interest in dropping its 118k army there... (everybody in Extended Timeline massively overbuilds armies, as AI decides based on its income, not on its force limit)
• Morocco (force limit 40) got 24k Tunisian Patriots - Morocco totally has military access through Algeria, so it could go fight them, but nope. Spawned again in province with negative unrest. Fucking game, what is it now?
• British Mauritania (force limit 12) got 3x12k Tuareg Patriots - at least this is semi-legitimate as unrest was positive, but these numbers are completely ridiculous!!!

Of course I even really can't help them as I can't hire mercs, I can't send them money to hire mercs, and that trick with supporting rebels in your subjects no longer works...

I'm not terribly fond of modding game in the middle of it, but there's not much choice here.

Iran forced Iraq to release Abbasids - which is basically ISIS in this mod. In ironic twist they were spawned as Shia. They also had to release Kuwait and give Iran a bunch of territory.

Interesting question - if I give Egypt 20k gold, will they build Suez canal? That would be pretty sweet, as I'm not going to annex them anytime soon.
 #eu4

Post 6 - Originally published on Google+ on 2014-12-12 03:47:06 UTC

British Empire Reborn: Part 5: 2032: Premature End of Restoration

There's a new problem - game decided that my last save (compressed) was corrupt. I do monthly uncompressed autosaves, and they worked, so it would lose me just a few day, but manually uncompressing the same (it's just a zip file) recovered it as well.

I modded some money sinks into Fun and Balance for Extended Timeline:

• buildings level 5/6 can be built in any number
• you can pay 1k gold for 20k manpower once every 5 years - only if you have no loans and are at war or face rebels - that feels much weaker than regular mercs, maybe weaker than it ought to be
• full occupation timer 2 years not 5 years (as was always meant to be)

And apparently AI will build canals, but only if it has 50k gold, not just 20k.

Anyway, I'm going for holidays now, and while I would be totally fine with playing games on holidays, the ratio of debugging to playing in this campaign is so high that it doesn't sound like a good holiday fun, so I'll just take a break.

Also, I have no idea how to solve the worst problem - AI passively sitting with its stack in one province while every other province it has is occupied. I've seen this AI dumb in previous Extended Timeline campaigns, but it seems much worse now. I'm not sure if there's some problem with Extended Timeline map, or AI is just as confused in vanilla, I just didn't notice.

Meanwhile the India remains uninvaded.
 #eu4

EU4 Manchu Empire campaign AAR

Post 1 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-20 07:23:33 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 01: 1399-1405

Shattered Europe (with tons of fixes over currently released version) + Fun and Balance, starting as Khan Bakuri Yongson of Manchu tribe of Jianzhou, the goal is to establishing myself as ruling dynasty in China, and fully control Greater China, directly or via vassal states. How big is Greater China? Somewhere between Chinese culture group borders and everything east of Afghanistan, it's not time to worry about definitions.

Did I just say I'm trying to conquer India for the third time after my CK2 Ili tribal and EU4 Extended Timeline British Empire campaigns derailed? Yes I did. Shattered Europe start mostly for hilarity, to see what kind of crazy stuff will happen in Europe - but it helps Muslims in India somewhat. Lucky nations random for the lulz.

The long term plan is to ally Ming and wait for them to naturally implode, then move it and clean up. Or if they refuse to implode for too long, I might help them with it instead.

The first problem I can see is that I know of lands as far away as Finland, but I don't know of Japan... Seriously? I guess these are default horde maps, and maps are generally per tech group. Not a big deal, let's marry Ming and Korchin, and try to get allied with them, rival all non-Ming neighbours. I don't need any fabrications, as a horde I have tons of free CBs. (fabrications might still save some admin points on coring)

Ming isn't terribly enthusiastic about an alliance due to my weakness, but Korchin is happy once I marry them, so we can 2-vs-1 Haixi almost right away.

Meanwhile Yeren attacks Haixi too - this is pretty neat, as I force vassalize Haixi dragging me into defensive war against Yeren, and this means I can call Korchin into arms, no matter how old the war is... Sweet. Korchin got itself into Oirats vs Mongolia war, so it wouldn't accept any offensive call to arms.

Weirdly Ming would accept our alliance now, even though I was still at war - I guess Yeren is too far for them to care - and they even joined our little war here. So much win. And Ming sent me massive 1.84/month war subsidies.

So Yeren is pretty much rekt (see pic). Anyway, Yeren was not relevant, Korea is relevant, and their damn alliance with Ming. I can't even finish war against Yeren, since by new rules this would mean Ming joining Korea against me.

So I beat up Korea with Haixi's help, up to 70% warscore (a lot from battles as hordes vs nonhordes have some sweet CB), but I had to stop a bit earlier than I'd like because Ming white peaced Yeren so they could join Korea at any time - and I had call for peace going on as well.

I annexed and released Yeren to switch then from Shamanism to Confucianism

I ended up with 6.35 war exhaustion, army 9k short of design strength, and definitely dominant local power North side of Ming. Korea was forced to give me cash and reparation, lose 6 provinces (still considerably over vassalizable size), and most important of all - break relations with Ming.

Sadly Korchin set me as a rival, so I rivaled them back, as well as Oirats (higher rival range is so awesome, coming to you in next Fun and Balance version).

Plans for the next few years are coring North Korea, integrating Haixi, recovering manpower, dealing with hostile attitude Yeren has towards me, and getting exploration ideas so I can discover and conquer Japan before it unites.
 #eu4

Post 2 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-20 12:39:19 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 02: 1405-1423

I took some break from fighting, helped Yeren siege back their provinces from rebels (peasants and pretenders) for some relations bonus, I only got into one small war with Korea (and some Japanese allies they had who never showed) for 2 provinces, as I couldn't take more, saving admin points for idea group.

Ming decided to rival me as well, so I was out of allies, and being in corner of the map and with small religion (well, big provincewise, but almost all of these provinces are Ming), allies are hard to get.

I got exploration ideas, sent some colonists to Siberian coast, got explorer, and discovered "faraway" islands of Japan.

I got alliance there with Ouchi clan (I hope to diplovassalize them at some point), fabricated some claims, sent 20k troops over by boat, and I'm ready to strike!

Target is OPM daimyo Yamana, allied with 3 clans in the east - OPM Date, 2-province Uesugi, and 3-province Takeda. Date got away with some reparations and religion change, but the other three clans became my vassals, two smaller ones also becoming Confucian. So 6/30 Japanese provinces done. (counting Ainu and Ryukyu as Japan too)

And so many vassal claims to push now! Time for the Second Japanese War, against 8-province Otomo clan and their OPM ally Date again. Ouchi accepted vassalization mid-war as well. Spoils of war got divided between vassal clans, leaving Otomo with their capital and new religion. 14/30 provinces conquered.

The Third Japanese War overlapped with the second, with attack on OPM clan Imagawa, and then at 7-province Shogunate, allied with OPM clan Shimazu and what was left of Korea.

Korea was really awkward, as I had no troops left on the mainland, and Yeren would be of no help, fighting endless war against pretenders. In the end I only got 4/6 Japanese provinces out of it.

After the war, I reestablished alliance with Ming. My four vassal daimyos now control 21/30 of Japanese provinces.

Pushing vassal claims apparently sometimes costs massive amount of diplo points, and sometimes it doesn't. The tooltip lies about it, but then it always lied about diplo point cost of peace deals.

I might be able to win against Ming, especially with help of AI stupidity, but I'm still hoping they'll fall apart on their own. The next target is Ainu - one of my clans fabricated claims to half of Hokkaido. Then I'll need to clean up Japan, and maybe this time crush Korea as well.

If that's done, and Yeren is annexed, I'll try expanding West as well towards steppes. Basically every direction that's not Ming. If Ming is still not fallen apart by the time I run out of targets, I'll move against them.

I'm playing much more casually than I normally do here. Just look at this manpower.
 #eu4

After Japanese Wars


Before Japanese Wars

Post 3 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-20 15:46:19 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 03: 1423-1431

First, a quick war, I got half of Ainu for Uesugi.

Then I waited a bit, and got into war against Buryatia, Oirats, Mongolia, and Kara Del. The CB was not really important, and neither was the whole war really. Getting Ming on my side so I can finish off Korea was important.

I discovered that AI now cheats with land attrition. Fuck's sake Paradox, attrition mechanic is frustrating, but at least it used to be fair, now cheating is ridiculous. Basically AI armies are not added, each country's is counted independently. So AI had 3 stacks of 9k each (one Oirat, one Buryatian, one Mongolian) in 10k supply limit province, and as a result zero attrition. Paradox, seriously... And as far as I can tell, only AI gets to cheat that way, human player still follows old rules when in same province as vassals' stacks... This wins the biggest bullshit of the patch award.

Anyway, I sent half the army north to Buryatia, declared war on Korea naming Japan as cobeligerent and sent the other half south to Korea. Then I also declared one more war on Shimazu, remaining Japanese daimyo, leaving it up to my vassals to do all the island fighting.

Ming tried to help against the Oirats, but they were so bad at it. Maybe I shouldn't be trying to ally them, just fight them right away.

The war resulted in Buryatia and (South remaining half of) Korea becoming my new vassals, and my daimyos getting 2 more provinces in Japan (I could get more, but that would bleed me tons of diplo points, I already lost way a few hundreds by trusting the tooltip during my conquest of Japan) - and then in strategic realignment. Instead of old Oirat/Buryatia/Korchin and Ming/Korea/Japan alliances, now it's just Ming/Korchin, with me and Ming being rivals, very understandably.

What really sucks is how ridiculously tiny is "eclipsed rival" bonus, just +4. That while losing maybe +10 from long term rival. I really need to redo those bonuses one day.

Anyway, unfortunately I can't really attack Ming/Korchin alliance, as I have marriages with both. I can't annex any of my 6 subjects due to "Annexed Subjects, -3 diplomatic reputation" penalty, currently impossible to overcome other than by waiting it out (even +1 from max legitimacy, no OE penalty, and +2 advisor would still only get it to 0) - I'd need to get new idea group I guess, not sure if there's anything else I could do to get diplomatic reputation bonus.

So I basically ran out of good opportunities for expansion.

I'll be getting second colonist in a few years, Siberia might be poor, but it's huge, and by luck my first colony had gold. On the other hand both colonies got event that made them lose half their population, so it wasn't all that lucky.

For quick size comparison:

• Ming + Korchin: 101 provinces, 458 base tax (Ming has some allies in Indochina as well, doubtful they'll be of much use)
• Me + vassals: 68 provinces, 216 base tax
• Oirat + vassals: 19 provinces, 41 base tax

And Oirats were beating Ming anyway.
 #eu4

Post 4 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-22 03:42:21 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 04: 1431: Planning time

Time for some planning. For Western hordes reforming the government makes a lot of sense, as it goes from +75% cost increase down to Muslim +40%, 35% is a huge difference. Sadly I only go to Chinese group at +60%, and 15% is not as impressive, especially considering that I'm currently benefiting from nice neighbour bonus from being in same tech group as all the European hordes, so actual bonus is even less.

There are following decisions to take:

• Unite Jurchen Tribes: gain cores in all of Manchuria (4 in Korchin, 4 in Ming), go Chinese tech and despotic monarchy
• Qing Dynasty: change tag, gain claims on all of China (must be Manchu), Beijing changes culture and becomes capital - must own 3 provinces currently in Ming and 1 currently in Mongolia
• Partial Westernization (Reform The Government): -250 each point type, -5 stab, 10 years of unrest, go Muslim tech - must neighbour Muslim or higher tech country

There's also normal Stop Being Horde decision (Reform The Government): -200 adm, -5 stab, go Chinese tech and despotic monarchy - no reason to take this one ever, for Eastern religion countries it goes Chinese tech, for everyone else it goes Muslim tech and is actually good.

Now the best case scenario would be going all the way Manchu, Qing, partial westernization in one go, but I'm not even close to prerequisites, and first decision costs me half the force limits and manpower, and doubling my army costs (or worse if it gets me over force limit).

Real options are:

• stay horde until much further, when I can go all the way, in the meantime core everything the hard way (or setup tons of Chinese minors as vassals) - I can get border with a Muslim country either going through steppes to the Uzbeks (who already reformed), or colonizing around through Taiwan, Indonesia, conquer some OPMs in India etc. (or maybe faster colonizing through Siberia to Uzbeks, silly as this might seem)
• one war against China to take all my free cores (and maybe Beijing as well) so it doesn't hurt that much, reform day before peace, then go West fighting Oirats until I get border with Muslim country (I don't even need to conquer Oirats, just take 1 province), partially westernize, fight Ming once that's done

Another thing is that I don't care about teching until I can get two more ideas (so I get my nationa idea for -10% tech cost discount), and for that matter until I can get straight to adm 7 for second idea group.

I think the temptation to get free cores is strong, but that's only 22 base tax, or 352 points without claims, or 242 with full claims. Would I pay that much for amazing CB, 2x manpower, 2x force limit, and tons of gold? Of course I would.

Eventually, 25% autonomy minimum and tech penalties will be too much, but that's quite some time away. By the way my average autonomy is currently at 41%, not that much better than Ming's 50%, and 13th highest in the world out of 340 coutries.

Incorporating the Shamanist mess that was Yeren into the country really screwed things up, and even the good parts of my country have 25% autonomy minimum.
 #eu4

Post 5 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-22 17:00:17 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 05: 1431-1440

I waited for WE to go away, fabricated a bunch of claims, had my marriages with Ming and Korchin expired by death of my khan, and went for the First Ming War.

Ming got ridiculous number of 38k mercs (at peak), having barely any manpower on its own. Sadly it had total control of the seas, with total of 61 ships vs my 12, so that means all my daimyo vassals were stuck in Japan.

Ming's armies looked respectable in theory, but they were poorly managed, and much worse soldier-for-soldier than mine, so the got crushed. As a result Korchin became my vassal (I would prefer to just take their provinces directly, but I would need to pay massive diplo costs for each of Korchin's province as they were only cobeligerent, not war target). Then I was left with 53% warscore against Ming - 40% from battles, 10% from ticking warscore (for winning battles), and 3% from occupations (minus blockades). Yeah, that's not worth it. I took war reparations, 4 provinces including Beijing, and some minor gold.

This is going to take a very long time.

I finished off Shimazu and Japan, causing Yamana to change tag to Japan. I annexed smallest and most hostile of 4 daimyos, got alliance with Dai Viet (fairly futile, as they also allied Ming later).

Then a series of silly disasters happened - ruler died, heir was 0/0/1 child, so I chose "no child can be khan" option replacing him with low legitimacy 3/3/3 guy, and a minor pretender. Then I got hit by random -1 stability -10 legitimacy event.

So the country is not in the best shape - however my truce with the Ming just expired, so it's not the time to worry about that, it's time to kick some ass. It would take at least 9 100% wars to take over all of Ming, or more like 20 wars of the king I'm waging.
 #eu4

The only direction for expansion is into Ming territory

Post 6 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-23 15:10:19 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 06: 1440-1448: The Second Ming War

And so the second Ming War begun! Naval balance of power was less one sided 54 to 25 ships, but Ming got a lot of naval battles against daimyo fleets, harming my warscore, which never got to ticking range from 80% battles won.

During the war my theologian died, increasing unrest greatly, so I had to deal with 38k peasant troops at the same time as I had to deal with the Ming, as well as 26k Yan and 5k Ainu troops. These numbers are all entirely unreasonable.

In the end I got 10 provinces out of Ming, setting up Jin in 7 of them, and used temporary border with Oirats to declare tribal war against them.

Sagir Yogir, Kham, Lan Xang, Taungu, Sukhothai, and Mong Yang all decided to join the pileup against the Ming in 3 separate wars, so hopefully they won't recoved by the time our truce expires. Only Sagir Yorig's war was successful, getting them 3 fairly poor provinces (7 base tax total).

Anyway, the Oirats. Buryatia got 3 provinces, Jin got 3, and Korchin got 6, leaving Oirats with just 6, but since we no longer share a border they might keep them for a while.

After that it was just fighting rebels (ridiculously many) and waiting for truce with Ming to expire. As soon as it happens, it's time to expand Jin, setup Liang as new vassal, or take some coastal land for myself (high warscore will allow for 2 out of these 3, there's no realistic way to do all 3 in one war).
 #eu4

Post 7 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-23 20:09:17 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 07: 1448-1456: The Third Ming War

There's probably going to be like 15 of those..

The Ming came up with really brilliant strategy this time - since I'd get +40 from defeating their army, they decided to not have any serious army, so battle score topped at +31 (and even that after long carpet siege, from their 3rd or 4th wave of armies after they got totally wiped out a few times), and my stupid daimyos lost enough naval battles to disable ticking warscore.

Oh well, I got to the point where carpet sieging Ming is viable strategy, and my vassals helped somewhat as well. I pushed this war until they gave me 100% (instead of planned just getting 40% from battles and a bit extra for maybe 60%-70%), so Jin got 4 provinces of tehir accepted cultures (Jin and Mongol), Liang got all its 5 cores, and there were even 2 provinces for me, reducing Ming from 815% to 712% total warscore cost.

I like abusing the fact that having temporarily massive OE pretty often gets me "reduce OE" mission, which is basically free stability, as I get rid of OE by releasing a vassal.

I got 3 provinces from some pagans while waiting for truce with Ming to expire.

And now it's time for big decision:

• attack Ming as soon as truce expires (May 1456), or wait for when I can start annexing Jin (December 1456)
• expand Liang, setup new Chinese vassal, or take territory for myself? Korea is fabricating like crazy too, maybe they should get some territory?
• perhaps declare Dai Viet, Ayutthaya, and/or Pegu as cobeligerent and force vassalize them? I want to do that at some point, but perhaps it's still too early - getting involved in Indochina early would give me tons of sweet CBs to push claims of my vassals there, but then I don't have that many free vassal slots
• or just screw that, and as soon as I annex Jin go against Oirats and Sagir Yogir?
• maybe challenge Ming on sea? My navy used to be a joke, but it keeps growing and now it's up to 25 barques and 11 cogs, vs theirs 4 early carracks, 12 barques, and 11 cogs - that's somewhat behind, but not crazy behind
• I could stop bothering with Siberia and go colonize Alaska instead - it's currently out of range, but probably will be in range once I colonize Kamchatka
 #eu4

Post 8 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-24 12:26:54 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 08: 1456-1463: The Fourth Ming War

I figured out the dilemma if I want to annex Jin as soon as possible (December) and wait with the war, or start war as soon as possible (May) and wait with annexation - I'll send a diplomat to Jin right away and he just won't get anything done for half a year, will start making progress as soon as possible.

For second dilemma, I'll name Dai Viet as cobelligerent even though I probably won't vassalize them this time (I'll have 2 free slots after annexing Jin) - it gives me more options depending on how the war goes, and in the worst case it ensures I'll have enough armies to fight to get +40% warscore from battles, making everything go more smoothly.

And for the naval question, Ming fleets got separated in two groups, with 8 light ships fighting 1 Ouchi ship, so I joined that battle with everything I got, and then what the hell, I attacked the rest of Ming fleet as well. Losses were heavy, but I won, and I just bought a bunch of replacement ships.

By the way, I misunderstood annexation mechanic - it's not just diploreputation, there's also +1 base, +1 same culture group, +1 same religion, so it's actually not as hard as I thought.

And this time I did a lot better job at looting - something I almost forgot about in previous wars.

I divided my army into 4 groups, 1 sent to Dai Viet, the other 3 first to fight enemy stacks, and then carpet siege North-East parts of Ming I wanted to take in the war. It was somewhat risky, as Dai Viet stack was isolated, but AI can't coordinate.

Somehow I managed to get perfect 100% battles won, land or sea, even my vassals managed not to lose any. For all that I took Dai Viet as vassal, gave Liang 5 provinces they fabricated claims on, 3 claimed to Korea, and 1 for myself as I had mission for it. Both Liang and Korea had somewhat dangerous 88% OE - Korea even had one more province claimed, but that would get their OE over 100% so I left that for the next war.

I took advantage of the truce to clean up remaining pagan tribes in Siberia, then I planned to strike west - sadly Oirats and Lan Xang decided to coalition - and Lan Xang would be a huge pain to transport troops to and occupy right now - most likely they'd just beat up Dai Viet.

Fortunately there's still backup plan of attacking Sagir Yogir, with Oirats as cobeligerent, which wouldn't trigger coalition. And it was probably a mistake, as horde vs horde is apparently really shitty CB which only lets me take provinces I border directly (not even bordered by vassals) without paying 50 diplo points each. So I took 2 provinces I could for Korchin, and got Kham as a vassal. There was a slight problem that they were completely disconnected from my territory, with some armies trapped (neither Ming nor Sagir Yogir were likely to let them back).

Meanwhile at home I had 45k Jin nationalists, which makes some sense, and 22k Chavchuvenian nationalists, which is just retarded.

The truce with Ming expires in November, but I might have wait a bit to deal with rebels. Goal of this war is connecting Kham with my lands, and expading Korea / Liang a little. I don't think I'll be able to connect Dai Viet too just yet, completely encircling the Ming, but that's definitely a plan at some point.
 #eu4

Post 9 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-24 15:21:50 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 09: 1463-1469: The Fifth Ming War

This is going to be the first war featuring artillery, even if not very numerous yet. I've been avoiding teching up too fast as Nomad tech group is so painful, but I'm at 6/5/7, and the most advanced country is at 9/8/8 already.

I manage to connect all my vassals with very weirdly shaped conquest - Kham and Dai Viet getting 5 provinces each, and me, Korea, and Liang just 1 each.

And after that I stopped all the wars other than against rebels. Korchin and Ouchi got annexed, so I have 2 free vassal slots, and on top of that embassy seems to be giving +1 diplomatic relations in addition to +1 diplomat these days (when did that change?), so I'll have 3rd free slot soon. Truce with Ming expires January 1471.

I took Ouchi because they were fairly unfriendly Shinto minor, as well as not very useful being overseas to my wars. And Korchin because they hold some provinces I needed to form Qing - and because they interfered with nice display of my name on the map.

Who would be the best new vassals? I'm thinking Yue (Chinese coastal minor around Canton), what's left of Ayutthaya, Pegu and/or U-Tsang. I don't have good access to Central Asia or India, but Indochina is extremely relevant to my interests.

I'll get border with Uzbeks is about a decade by colonization.

I took humanist ideas as second group because I'm suffering from rebels everywhere - I can't realistically form Manchu into Qing and go Muslim tech in my current state, rebels would completely overwhelm me.

Korea spawned rebels (Jianhuai Patriots) which are for some reason friendly to me. Are they planning to defect to me or is it just a bug?
 #eu4

Post 10 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-24 22:04:05 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 10: 1469-1477: The Sixth Ming War

I divided my about 102k army (excluding 2x 1k colonial militia) into 5 about even stacks - one assigned to policing the home front, one in Dai Viet, one at Liang/Kham border, and two really close to Ming's capital.

I DoWed Ming as soon as truce expired, getting into the war:

• Pegu as cobeligerent
• Lan Xang as cobeligerent
• U-Tsang with its vassals Guge and Ladakh as ally of Pegu
• Taungu as ally of Lan Xang

Sadly missing from this list were Ayutthaya (allied to Pegu and Lan Xang) and Oirats (allied to Ming). As result of the war Pegu got vassalized, Dai Viet and Korea got 2 provinces each, and Liang and Kham got 3 each. Not for any deep strategic reasons, mostly to make sure I always get 100% warscore out of Ming.

That's all nice territory in China, but my vassal acquisition plans did not work yet, and Pegu itself was made of 3 disconnected parts, one completely surrounded by enemy countries.

So during truce time I kept looking for good opening to strike against Indochina minors, but there simply wasn't any that didn't bring Ming into the war as well, which would be silly.

Even worse, Oirats got vassalized by Chagatai, so I don't have any more ways of growing Buryatia that don't involve war with Uzbek/Timurids/Ottomans/Qasim, or Chagatai/Timurids/Nogai/Golden Horde.

So instead, I annexed Liang and Korea, and I'll try to involve as many minors as possible during he next Ming war - with only 5/9 diplo slots taken, I don't need to be too picky.

I hope to get Arakan and Mong Yang - both have really nice claims and cores on Bengal. Ayutthaya would be even nicer, as it's currently OPM but it used to be big, but I don't see how to pull it into this. It would be nice if my existing vassals started fabricating, but only Korea and Liang ever showed any real enthusiasm for it, and these were the least useful claims (except Korea's first overseas claim let me get them provinces on the other side of Korea Bay, once first was done, the rest wasn't very relevant).

Regardless of any vassals acquired during the next war, I might need to take territory from one of Ming's allies instead of Ming directly (in negotiations with Ming as war leader, so they cost 0 dip) - all 3 fragments of Pegu are disconnected from my mainland.
 #eu4

Post 11 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-25 14:48:26 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 11: 1477-1483: The Seventh Ming War

How many generations will fight over emperorship of China?

Anyway, Timurids settled down, my khan died leaving another child in place, which got usurped by a nice 4/3/5 khan with entirely reasonable 74 starting legitimacy for an usurper.

So another Ming war, pulling almost all Indochina into it. Taungu gave me some war reparations as did Mong Yang, Arakan that and switch religion to a more sensible one.

Then I got 5 provinces from Ming to setup Yue (67% warscore), 2 provinces from Sukhothai (one for Pegu, one temporary for myself), and 1 in Lan Xang (also for Pegu). I don't really have any good CBs over there, so wasting potential 33% warscore worth of provinces is fine.

Using temporary province for free CBs, I declared wars on Ayutthaya (with Taungu as non-cobeligerent) and Ligor (with Malacca and Kedah as cobeligerent, and Pagarruyung, Bengal, Brunei, and Pattani as non-cobeligerents), and then since I had some armies free DoWed Ryukyu too (using CB from exploration idean).

The plan was to vassalize Ayutthaya, make them join the war, and return them their cores. But halfway through the war I figured out that makes no sense - I can just give all that land to Pegu instead. That had an awkward side effect of giving Pegu 128% OE (and me 12% as I couldn't offload Ayutthaya's core without Ayutthaya existing), but I planned to keep my armies parked there anyway, so I can help them with rebels.

After that it was just waiting for truces to expire and dealing with endless rebellions. By the way you could probably avoid most of the rebels I'm facing by avoiding "decrease autonomy" button, but to hell with them!

I still have tons of vassal slots, so I have a trick planned for the next war.
 #eu4

Post 12 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-25 20:07:09 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 12: 1483-1490: The Eighth Ming War

This time I did a small trick - instead of DoWing Ming directly, I DoWed Sukhothai, with Ming (obviously), Mong Yang, Sarig Yogir, and Arakan all as cobeligerents.

The war was joined by Assam and Lan Xang. Quite a few countries could have joined but didn't.

Arakan and Mong Yang got vassalized - I'm not sure why I can't get them to rejoin current war - it makes sense why they shouldn't be able to, but I don't know what's the mechanic preventing it.

Lan Xang got to return one core to Mong Yang. Lanzhou defected to me by event. Assam got forced to Confucianism.

Then I did serious border cleanup - Khan got 3 Ming's and 1 Sarig Yogir's province. Dai Viet got 2 provinces from Ming, and Yue got 6, including that annoying island.

All these assignments by the way are carefully planned - Buryatya and Japan are out of range, Pegu is still seriously overextended, Lan Xang's land would cost 2x, Mong Yang and Arakan can't join, and what I could get is carefully balanced to get 100% warscore cost while assigning provinces to countries where they'll be accepted and if possible looking pretty, and as much as possible being immediately coreable, and keeping OE manageable. Not every criterion can be fulfilled simultaneously, but I think about peace deals a lot and early - something I've noticed nobody on youtube gives a shit about.

The good thing about this is that I have a lot of new directions to expand now, and still one free vassal slot. Did I promise conquest of India? Assam is in India, and some first fighting already happened there, it's only a matter of time until all of India falls.

Let's start a few more wars:

• Horde CB against Ligor (cobeligerent Pasai and Pagarruyung; joined by Brunei and Sulu)
• Arakan's claims against Taungu (joined by Lan Xang)
• Mong Yang's core reconquest against Bengal (joined by Multan, Gujarat, Delhi, Pattani)
• Mong Yang's core reconquest against Manipur

Conquest of Indochina, West Indonesia, and Bengal region need to proceed faster. In all the wars I got a total of 14 provinces for my vassals, plus some reparations and other minor concessions, creating a fairly dubious but continuous connection linking all my vassals, all the way to Sumatra.

I was not done yet - Khmer conquered what was left of Ligor, volunteering for border with me. I had one free vassal slot, and I was just about to annex Dai Viet and Japan, freeing 2 more. If they're asking for it so hard...

And there was also annoying OPM Dali I needed to clean up.

All that was extremely busy waiting for truce to expire, and there's still half a year to go.

Technically 3 of my vassals' provinces are already in India. I'm not sure if I actually want to conquer all of India, or just enough to make my borders pretty. Forming Qing might very well be the last thing I'll do, giving up horde CB without something to replace them (either religious ideas CB or imperialism CB, but that's ridiculously late) just seems so awful.

I sort of won already - even if it would take 4 more wars to fully annex Ming, even assuming I do maximum Ming province annexation every time - and I did less than that for many reasons in the past so perhaps it will actually be 5-7 more wars.
 #eu4

Post 13 - Originally published on Google+ on 2015-01-26 20:21:43 UTC

Manchu Emperor of China, Part 13: 1490-1503: The New Emperor of China (and the end)

I appiled some modest horde nerfs which will get into next Fun and Balance version, increasing army cost from 18.41 to 24.58 (-50% to -40%, but stacking with -20% bonus from Manchu ideas), decreasing my force limit 259 to 227 (+100% to +75% bonus), and manpower proportionally as well. I overdid them by a bit.

It's weird that I didn't mod anything yet this campaign... Oh wait, actually I did, Shattered Europe was corrupting save games, so I setup a bunch of province history cleanup scripts and fixed that all, including fixing live save files. I wonder why I never mentioned that, this kind of straight bug fixing just seemed unrelated to all the Manchu operations.

The Ninth Ming War was ridiculously one-sided - almost no fighting, just endless stream of popups that this or that siege finished. I took 3 provinces in India (all of Assam), 4 provinces in Indochina (2 from Sukhathai, 2 returned Khmer cores from non-cobeligerent Lan Xang), and 4 in China (1 for Kham, 3 for Yue).

Time to end this. Manchu decision. Qing decision. Get stability up to +3, go Muslim tech (for -5 satbility), pay to get it back to +1, get down from 165 to 132 units. Weirdly my force limit soon went up to 144 - is that because of autonomy which was secretly 0% in many provinces but counted as 25%? (minimum autonomy is actually minimum _effective_ autonomy; actual autonomy is secretly recorded in save file, even if not used or displayed anywhere). Well, now that I no longer suffered from 25% minimum autonomy, I decided to press "decrease autonomy" button a bit more - getting up to 150 force limit. I guess I had no reason to disband all those troops.

The only remaining thing was to ensure the country doesn't fall apart during reforms. I got into quickie war agauinst OPM Manipur for Mong Yang's core.

Other than that, I spent the next 10 years fighting rebels until Western Influences and Increased Centralization both expired, and my inquisitor got replaced by a theologian, resulting in 0 unrest in all provinces. Well, not really, most of that is due to "recent uprising" modifier, as pretty much every rebel group which could rebel did.

As I didn't attack them the day truce ended, Ming, Lan Xang, and Malacca setup a coaliton against me, but that's easy to break in one war.

And that concludes the campaign. China, India, and everything else in Asia east of Timurids is just a matter of trivial cleanup, not worth actually executing. Thanks to -10% tech cost as Manchu, I'm just a couple techs behind Ottomans, so nobody in Asia could even be a threat by outteching me. If I really wanted, Badajoz colonized Cape, so I could send some colonists there instead of to Siberia, and fully westernize by 1550.

It was an OK quick campaign, but I've played better.

Some random modding and strategy points:

• trade system is infuriating - I had just 2 merchants so I had no choice but to let trade value leak all over the place - it either needs reversible trade links (not gonna happen), or nations automatically steering towards their capital even without merchants (in one node I had 100% trade power, it still leaked 1/3 of trade value wrong way), or some ways to get free merchants, let's say if you have >75% of trade power (needs some care to avoid stacking that with trade company bonuses).
• Ming didn't get even close to collapsing ever, CK2 style assassinations would be so nice. I hoped for them to crush into countless pieces and interesting political alliances between Chinese minors struggling for dominance, what I got instead was a series of one sided stack wipes.
• Horde bonuses were too big, so small nerf will be applied to next release (to about halfway between vanilla and current levels)
• For pure power level reasons I should have stayed horde until I got all of India, vassal claims/cores CBs are better than nothing, but really weak in practice
• I honestly don't recall losing any battles ever, except one to rebels during westernization (which was a bit risky, but I preferred to take the chance to avoid their siege succeeding). My vassals lost a few, especially on sea, but over last half of campaign I don't even recall a single loss by my vassals. I'm pretty damn good at microing troops, but that's fairly extreme.
• Korean and Japanese are no longer in Chinese group, but with huminist ideas they are big enough to keep accepted. Other unaccepted cultures I tried to diploconvert, but that's slow due to religious problems and nationalism blocking it. Beijing got converted by forming Qing.
• No idea why some neighbouring Buddhist vassals had -40 heretic (like Buryatia), and others had -10 heretic (like Kham). Anybody has any guesses?

Time to try some other game now.

Maps below are countries, diplomatic, religion, cultures, accepted cultures.
 #eu4