Chapter 1 - Agony of choice

Being still slightly hungover, but already having excercised my democratic rights, it is time to turn my attention to AARland and get this report on the road. First there is another election to be held... which country to attempt this challenge with. I talked about the pros and cons in my recent post and did several test runs to get a good feel for what was actually possible. I also analysed my previous attempt for things that went wrong. I even started to make a like black strategy notebook like florry has. Well prepared I would say. If I fail this time, I doubt I will ever try again. Please excuse me being a bit dazed and confused about a screenshot here and there. I started this run over 2 month ago and probably forgot half of what has happend...Alrights, cast you votes gentlemen... oh right, you don´t get to vote... aaaand the winner is ....My good ol`buddy and choice for my first attempt mr uzbek ! I did have a plan for this nation, which I wasn´t able to excecute last time, so I was kinda eager to give it another try. The primary reason behind this choice is that uzbek has horde ideas. Horde ideas are super powerful, but especially in this run as they have -20% attrition and therefore lets us skipwhole idea groups. That is like 80 years earlier to reach our 80% attrition reduction cap, nothing to underestimate. Of course there are other hordes to consider, but I don´t want to spoil all the reasons right away. One more reason is that uzbek does have a half way capable starting ruler and no 0/0/0 heir unlike great horde, crimea and nogai. Kazan would have been a very good option, but they have their own idea set and it does not have attrition reduction unfortunately.Uzbek has pretty decent military muscles at the start of the game. 29 forcelimit can do some damage. Unfortunately our economy isn´t that strong, 6 something ducats income is not a lot if your army is based on cavalry. This was actually one of the major reasons what broke my first attempt, me failing to build a decent economy. I was hoping to reroute some of that nothern indian trade via samarkand... did not work out so well. Our ruler seems pretty skilled at fighting (there might have been a couple of savescums involved). After all it is of utmost importance to make every year count that our armies do damage. In the first two decades we are actually doing more damage then most other nations due to superior unit types.We are getting as many men and units from our tribe estate as we can...I don´t want to deal with rebels at this point. Uzbek has some hard coded unrest in the sibir cultures provinces so we increase autonomy in those... Having to move armies back and forth costs a lot of time in those vast areas. This was another reason that did not went optimal in my last run. I was going in all directions, even towards ming to become their tributary (which lasted like 2 years or so..). Every month is precious and we will be pushing only in one direction this time!Next we have to find some allies. Looks like we do have quite a couple of options on this start. The who rivals who situation is important here. Our first pick is golden horde.Improve relations with dawasir, the sunni juggernaut in the arabian desert...... and a rather unimportant nation called the ottomans.Top 7 biggest army of the known world... not bad at all...Even could form the mughals rather easily... pretty temptingThis was actually the plan the last time. Get all the requirements early and play as an orthodox mughals. Since then they patched in some extra requirements that would make it more difficult though. Namely having to be muslim when forming mughals.Kazan will be our only rival for now.Off to war. One little exploit we will be using a couple of times (6-7 times maybe to get a good early start) and which I failed to mention in my initial post is the promise land exploit. For those of you who aren´t familiar... You promise your ally land and declare the war. Before you let a day tick you set all of your enemies provinces to desired. It wouldn´t be possible to do it before, because you couldn´t promise land. A day later would be impossible too as you can´t change it during war if some of your allies or subjects desire those provinces as well. Now you only need to occupy all of the provinces yourself and your ally won´t get a trust hit if you don´t give him any land. A bit scummy, but we will only be using this for a little while to get the best possible start. Won´t use any other exploits, pinky promise!Kazan managed to ally crimea. Most unfortunately.We let the golden hordes army attach to one of our units and use them as a fighting stack, while our forces occupy kazan. Two flies with one stone. Gotta be very conservative with our resources right from the get go.Curious news.Even more so...Crimea had enough. Occupying all their provinces was enough. Taking down their capital as well would simply take too long. As of some patches ago they became 100+% warscore at the start. Would have loved to take them as a vassal, but eh... can´t have everything.Sry golden horde, things changed and we can´t afford to give you any of the promised lands...Rival time. Muscovy. They do have -27% military power and are at war with novgorod....Having not to upgrade military tech has the advantage that we will have quite a few military monarch points available to spend on developing, breaching walls and recruiting generals. Developing will be our priority though as we need quite a big manpower pool later on...We are close to engaging sexy time. . part of reasoning for the push towards west is to reduce the distance modifier with the ottomans. This will be easier then last time as playing on very hard gives extra penalty to opinion. Unfortunately we can´t rival any of their rivals, otherwise we could already ally them.First we need to put our attention elsewhere Jaunpur is interested in a royal marriage. They could be a useful ally to deter coaltions...Already available if it wasn´t for the muscovite war...We want to do as little fighting ourselves as possible. Should the novgorodians and golden horde do the heavy lifting for us. If there are battles, they should be in the plains to get our 25% horde bonus for the shock phase. Muscovite territory mostly consists of woods and non-plain provinces. Otto said "yes" to our proposal... oh my gosh, oh my gosh.Dawasir usually has a good chance of surviving, we should make double sure however....God damn rebels. Making me raise another army. We only have 1 ducats in our bank and going up to force limit won´t make that any better...Bordergore intensifies. Once again, no land for you golden horde. Next time... promise!Finally we can embrace feudalism. We refrained from razing and lowering autonomy in our newly conquered lands.I´m a bit confused here, as I still see ryazan on the map. I believe that muscovy took the province "ryazan" from ryazan earlier. We took it from them in the recent war and now we are able to finish our mission, subjugating ryazan which gives us permanent claims over core russian lands. Some of which we just conquered and haven´t cored yet. With those claims we will get them 25% cheaper and quicker. Very nice misison for hordes in the area.Time to pick a new rival. Lithuania isn´t rivaled by to ottos yet, but they do rival them. Seems like a good choice.Our religious unity is going down quite a bit... Let´s start converting a bit. Mozhaisk looks like a good candidate.The ae map looks warmish. However the majority of the muslim world does not care at all, which would be a problem. We will accumulate ae quicker rate as we are of different religion. However there is a reduced penalty for catholics when taking orthodox land. We also have this beautiful terra incognita over europe, which makes the rest of europe not care at all. So we actually do piss of only a very limited amount of nations while expanding aggressively in eastern europe. No coalition in sight.Sh*t, our economy is spiraling out of control again. Income just won´t increase by conquest alone. At least our loan sizes keep increasing... Bankruptcy would mean game over as we would most likely lose all our allies. This is what ended my last attempt.This changed since my last attempt as well. Now you are required to have 50+% of dev on a continent if you want to move your capital there. Not moving our capital to europe would be a major disadvantage as we couldn´t make use of trade companies in asia. We will already have huge difficulties fighting off corruption as we will get +0.50 from unbalanced tech in no time... At this point I´m debating with myself where to move our capital. Bashgrid has a gold mine and we could develop cheaper in our capital. Iglino has a curious advantage though. It is terra incognita for 80-90% of european/asian nations. Moving our captial there and taking land left and right, would still mean that we get ae with all those nations. However as long as the terra incognita is still intact, they won´t be able to join a coaltion. This is a super op move some players use to conquer the whole of europe in 50 years or so. I´m still uncertain, as once we declared against a nation once, they will be able to see our capital. I also doubt that we could conquer that quick for that long as we will be far behind in tech by that time...Lithuania allied ryazan. Bad move since this allows us to declare on them without involving poland as well...Sure, assault their capital... golden horde won´t mind us wasting their soldiers...Cores finished, good, good...Bashgird will be crucial to finance our expansions. Developing it won´t just increase our income, but also increase our credit line , preventing us from going bankrupt.We don´t take too much from lithuania, just a few provinces to give us borders to new countries. More importantly we cancel their polish alliance.We core our new provinces via occupied ryazan... which we will take as well in a second. Our finance guy called ... he thinks lowering autonomy in bashgird would be a good idea.Manpower is becoming also a problem, so we start hiring mercs. I guess conquest has priority over economy. We can fix our finances later, but conquest will become increasingly difficult...Time to seal the deal with jaunpur.Yay, we have trustworthy allies... giving us +1 dip rep....... which gives us more allies. Otto alliance secured. Looks like a good run... make copy of savegameNovgorod becomes our third rival. We have to move quickly before muscovy takes crucial provinces like novgorods capital.Dawasir finally accepts our mariage proposal as well. Had to pull all the tricks...Tver was garanteed by novgorod, who can´t protect them now. We want to eat them before they also get swallowed up by muscovy.That is a bold move crimea. By all means... go for it..Tver and odoyev join the realm.We waited a bit with peacing out novgorod as we knew muscovy would peace out before us. Their war started several years earlier. Without having occupied their capital they could only take a couple of low dev provinces and we can do 100% warscore now...... which is what we are going to take from them. There are 5 nations eligible for coalition now, but nobody we can´t truce-cycle at this point...Time to state some territories. We refrained from razing all major states in the novgorod node as we will start collecting trade there and hopefully have a better economy because of this...I decided against bashgird and iglino. Our new capital will be in moscow! It does have a fortress and more importantly grassland. It will probably make a tempting target for our enemies. Siegeing it down will take a while and we will be fighting in favorable flat terrain there. Last but not least, we will have very good spot to dump our military points by developing for manpower. It also automatically moves our trade city there, saving us 200 dip points.Caucasus heating up, as long as poland does not join in we won´t have a problem at this point.We should promote muscovite culture. This gives us a boost to manpower in those provinces...Get that dip rep dude...... and get that dawasir alliance.This allows us to pick -10% ae reduction from friendly schools. We do have some nice ae reduction by this point. -10% from national ideas, -10% from friendly school, prestige is another 5-10%, we try to get spynetworks whenever possible for up to another 10%. Also our tribal conquest cb reduces ae to 75%. Eventually we will get 10 more percent from splendor during this age. Very nice!He look at that. The dothraki are learning how to sail ships ...5th great power 8 years into the game. We are doing well.We are running out of rival options... chagatai i guess...What a coincidence, we will fight them now as they are allied to nogai... Golden horde, when will you learn..This is actually a major fight. Fortunately we can fight them one at a time ...Manpower is hard to come by, we should slacken our standards from time to time...Nogai and kazan peace out first.Yikes, already too many territories. We should have a close eye on that. Corruption could become a major problem like I said... Oh no, a revolt.Crimean capital fell, wait... lithuania got there before us *feelsbadman*Got some unexpected support from ming there...A humiliate should suffice. Lands to the east is not what we should desire.... Our powerprojection is at 100 even before this... Trying to paratroop into bijar here , which we can´t access otherwise. Of course you have to remember cancelling the movement once you have reached the province you want to land in.... which I of course forget. Multitasking can be a mother...Orthodox rebels seem hell bent to siege down our capital even though it is already orthodox. Let´s give them a hand and sortie our garrison...Tech is coming along, except military of course... sweet innovativeness, trade efficiency and corruption reduction.Occupying our capital reduces the timer for the rebels to enforce their demands to a short 23 month...Our previously blackflagged units are not blackflagged anymore, but still can move to biapar even without military access... still a wasted effort as I forget to cancel the movement as I just mentioned. Our first idea group , what will we pick?Admin ideas. Always a solid choice, especially when expanding rapidly they save a crap ton of admin points and coring time. I´m usually torn between admin and religious, but since we don´t need deus vult as we have tribal cbs, it is an obvious choice I guess.Lithuania finally let go of crimeas capital, so we can peace them out now...Golden horde army marching towards our rebel stack. I appreciate the sentiment, but in this case we have to refuse you entry to our provinces...Yes please, tie them up so hard it is difficult to breatheSweet, border friction cb with muscovy and we have quite a few border provinces!I guess we can get rid of golden horde now. Their helpfulness is rather limited at this point...We dow golden hordes tributary circassia a moment later...Get the siege bois, rebels are about to enforce their demands...Finally rebels are moving in the right direction...Not looking too great for the great horde...... and connect the two arms.... and another round with the great horde.Rebels, what are you doing?!Pfew... sry kazan, our bad! too many territories going up...Just spotted another opportunity. Livonian order does not have any major allies. We exploit that immediately!Army tradition looking awesome. We are starting to roll some kickass generals. Every roll gives us army tradition, which we can in return into manpower. This will keep our fighting power afloat a while longer...Money isn´t looking so great though, so we plunder great horde mostly for cash and war reps.Ottomans reached military level 5 and so will other soon. So far we can more then keep up and crash all of our enemies at ease...All things considered this does not look too bad. Transoxiania and qq got some ae from us taking land from our horde competitors. Since we won´t be expanding further into their directions for a while they will eventually cool of.I decided to make a cut here, since I already failed my promise to release this episode on sunday. Well i guess technically it is still sunday in some parts of the world. We will finish our livonian conquest in the next episode... and chances are probably others. All in all I say we made decent progress, especially if you consider only 14 years have passed so far. By my inital estimations we will have another 50 years or so where we can fight our enemies with our own armies without being torn to shreds like paper. Fingers crossed we will be still allied to the ottos by that point. Until then have a pleasant evening and see you arround!