The partition of the New World continues apace, with new players joining as they come into range; in particular, Hagbard, of “Carantania” – roughly speaking the Habsburg Empire – managed to colonise the western end of Hispaniola, an island on which I had designs. A Central-European power with a medium-size navy is, of course, vulnerable to a very simple strategy: Park the North Sea Confederation’s fleet at the Straits of Gibraltar where it corks up the Med like a bottle, land armies in Hispaniola to seize the colonies, and break Hagbard’s navy if he tried to force the Straits. And indeed, that part of the strategy worked perfectly:

Unfortunately, it turns out Hagbard can also look at the map for chokepoints. He had prepared for the war by moving 62 regiments – one-fourth of his force limit, our house-rule maximum for overseas deployments – into Hispaniola before the war, like some kind of strategic genius who actually gets ready to fight in peacetime. I don’t know, you’d think he’d played these games before or something. He was still somewhat outnumbered by the total troops the North Sea Confederation could send, and we were roughly evenly matched for generals, but Hagbard had only one person moving his armies. In world wars with multiple fronts this is a problem; fighting in a single tiny theatre, it was an advantage, and our failure to coordinate meant that we were never fighting Hagbard’s colonial army as a single unified force that outnumbered it. Instead we were defeated in detail and had our armies run all around the island until they surrendered, both when we were able to start from my colony in Les Cayes, and when we attempted a landing in Tortuga. In a game with an actual logistics model, of course, the solution would be to blockade the island (which I did do) and wait for the humongous garrison to starve to death along with the expendable colonists – by the EU4 numbers, there were at least ten times as many soldiers on the island as settlers, and perhaps twice as many soldiers as natives. As we are playing EU4, we instead signed a “white” peace, in effect conceding the island to Hagbard since he had seized my colonies on it.

Having tried to settle the issue by force and failed, I was later able to reach an accommodation with Hagbard which gave each of us a colonial nation in the Caribbean, and everyone settled down to expand. I finished exploring the two American continents, finding the Fountain of Youth in the process, unfortunately not in a place where it’s likely I’ll be the one to colonise it.

The situation after the war and much colonising:

As we are in 1582, it seems likely that Mexico, Panama, and the tip of South America will open this session, perhaps causing more conflict as people scrabble for what are increasingly the few remaining spots in the New World. For this week, it appears that my attempt at Hispaniola was the only player conflict:



Hispaniola War

Colonial war, reduced win number

Dragoon : 1765.26 -> 1648.78

King of Men : 1425.4 -> 1331.35 "Why should Hagbard have colonies?"

Mike : 1733.67 -> 1619.27

Hagbard : 1808 -> 1951.54



Of course a three-to-one loss is somewhat disastrous for the ratings of the three.