The Wall was, of course, a ridiculous scheme; one that could only have appealed to politicians in a European capital, used to drawing lines and colouring provinces on paper and thinking that their prettily coloured maps in some manner reflected, even altered, the reality. Anyone who had actually seen the Mississippi, anyone who had tried to ride through the immense territories the Ynglings believed they were “walling off” from German settlers, anyone who had set foot outside of Europe and experienced the vastness of the Americas for themselves, would immediately have seen the futility of the project. A few thousand settlers, a handful of regiments, not half a dozen forts garrisoned by less than ten thousand men and a hundred guns; to hold back the westward flood of half a million land-hungry Teutons? Laughable; risible; ludicrous. As well draw a line on paper, and expect it to hold back the tides. And yet, nevertheless: The scheme did not, after all, have to convince the actual settlers, the men wearing the boots on the ground; there was no need for it to appeal to the Teuton soldiers who drove the allies from the Mississippi to the Rio Grande, the colonial militias that skirmished and ambushed across twenty degrees of longitude, or the Indian confederates of either side, all of whom knew perfectly well how silly it was. Many of them, indeed, personally marched from the garrison towns near the Great Lakes, fought several murthering great battles between Mississippi and Missouri and covered the distance between the two great rivers twice or three times as the fortunes of war shifted, and then marched again to the Rio Grande in pursuit of the retreating allies as the balance went decisively to the Teuton side; if anyone knew the vastness of the American continent and the futility of binding it with a thin blue line on a paper map, it was the veterans of the War of the Wall.

And what of that? In the drama of European diplomacy, the colonial soldiers were bit players, literally musket-carriers; a faceless mass without lines, lucky if they got a mention in the stage directions. It was the leading men who would have to be convinced, the principals with monologues who got their names in lights, whose character arcs would be studied by scholars for a hundred years. And those men, the actual audience for the great scheme… they were, like its authors, European politicians, who had never set foot outside their countries, or outside the capitals of those countries if they could help it. To them, a line on a map was reality, just as much as to the schemers in Bergen who had drawn it in the first place; the immensities of the Americas, the wilderness stretching across thirty degrees of both latitude and longitude, the forests and plains that could swallow a hundred regiments and a thousand settlements without noticing, were words and numbers, not really real. Reality was forts – dots on a map, perhaps, but then what else is a fortress? – that the Teuton armies, for all their victories, had not taken; reality was the lobbying of their sugar colonists, men whose wealth and imminent bankruptcy from having their tiny-but-rich islands occupied could make a great noise in a capital far removed from the decisive battles on the Missouri; reality was the balance of power in the tight confines of Europe and the fact that a hundred regiments sent to the Americas to fight a colonial campaign could not be readily recalled, if they were suddenly needed on the Danube or the Oder.

Reality, in the end, was that the statesmen of Germany fundamentally did not care where the lines on the map went, or about the desire for land of their colonists. They cared that their armies should be seen to win, which they had done; they cared that their colonies should not be carved up to the point where they could no longer recruit a sizable number of soldiers from them, which after the victorious Mississippi campaign was no longer a serious possibility; and if, with these two aims accomplished, those colonists were prevented from getting the land they sought, and younger sons would have to go into the army or else take up a trade… well, the purpose of colonies, after all, is to raise bigger armies. At seventh and last, the most ridiculous thing about the Wall was that it worked.

Even if the Ynglings did have to pay for it themselves.

As the seventeenth century closed, Dragoon and I were in a race to colonise the interior of North America: A race in which Dragoon, to my eyes, was constantly ahead, and only by the skin of my teeth and considerable good luck was I able to catch up. For example, our first goal was to reach the Great Lakes; whoever first colonised Niagara province would shut the other off from OTL Michigan, or at least from the southern part of it which gives access to the real interior. And, indeed, Dragoon colonised Niagara first. But, to my great good fortune, Sauron and Khan attacked him for colonies in California; and although they lost that war in the end, Khan’s troops managed to seize and burn the Niagara province, letting me in.

Colonial situation in 1686, with the race well underway and Niagara recently burned by LarReignese troops.

Detail of the Great Lakes, showing the colonial plans.

Situation 1703, with me about to end Dragoon’s whole colonial career.

Again, with Niagara lost, Dragoon built colonies south of Lake Erie, with the obvious goal of getting Wyandot while I was completing Niagara, and then Mascouten and cutting me off from the south while I was building in Potawatomi. I appear to have gotten ahead of that one by the simple and risky expedient of having better colony modifiers: In the 1686 save, his Erie colony has 408 settlers versus my Niagara’s 246, but my colonist is better and so is my non-colonist growth rate – I have 185 per year average, he has 150. That 35 per year advantage could add up, with some lucky rolls, to complete Niagara just before he is done in Erie; even if it didn’t, we would start Wyandot and Potawatomi at roughly the same time, and then I’d finish first on that pair. Which would give me a start on Mascouten just before he finished Wyandot, forcing him into Miami instead; and then I could start Wea. That would make the race south instead of east, and I could meet up with my similar colony-snake out of Louisiana and prevent both Dragoon and Mike from getting access to the interior – as indeed happened:

1731, with the Wall complete in all its glory.

I placed my colonist in Kilatka with some satisfaction: All the Midwest now lay open to me without competition short of war. However, I also had some ambitions to retake my Lost Colony surrounding Chesapeake Bay, which is important for directing the trade there north to St Lawrence whence it can reach the North Sea, instead of east to Biscay where it is lost to me. I therefore gathered an alliance: Myself, Khan in Lar Reign, Sauron in Arrakis – the famous Navy with a Country – and Ranger playing Israel, and after some preparatory fort-building to make my colonial wall have military relevance as well, we attacked with a long list of objectives.

Our hoped-for annexations, which alas did not come to pass.

The actual war goal was the island of Martinique, belonging to Mike, which meant that securing the ticking warscore was trivial – we just had to park Sauron’s navy in the general vicinity. However, Dragoon’s force limit had grown beyond our calculations, and a series of battles in OTL Alabama saw us driven back towards the Rio Grande. Although decisively defeated in the only theatre that might have allowed us to impose our quite ambitious terms, the colonial-war house rules allowed us to claim a technical victory and demand what we occupied when the ticking warscore reached its maximum; we thus ended up with some random bits of Mexico and California, where my colonial militias had been more successful than Dragoon’s.

Collage of the War of the Wall. Note the battle for the Sea Islands in which the Troll Navy, with some Arrakene auxiliaries, utterly smashed the Teutons.

Although I thus failed to make Dragoon pay for my Wall, the wall still exists and, as long as nobody brings enough guns to knock it over, keeps the Midwest reserved for Yngling settlers and free of undesirable immigrant riffraff. While colonies are not necessarily a huge source of strength in EU4, I nevertheless consider this a major success, perhaps my first in this campaign.

Three reported player wars this session:

Caucasus War Mark : 1570.3 -> 1681.98 Ranger : 1472.3 -> 1330.27 Khan : 1610.34 -> 1454.99 Sauron : 1387.48 -> 1253.63 Windward Isles War Colonial war, reduced win number Tazzzo : 1595.13 -> 1649.09 Dragoon : 1648.98 -> 1621.97 (50%) "Damn all islands, anyway" Mike : 1627.06 -> 1600.41 (50%) War of the Wall Colonial war and technical victory, double-reduced win number King of Men : 1148.19 -> 1180.34 "Ok wall is built, now to make Dragoon pay for it." Sauron : 1253.63 -> 1288.72 Ranger : 1330.27 -> 1367.51 Khan : 1454.99 -> 1495.73 Dragoon : 1621.97 -> 1586.75 "You know I can commit 200 regiments to this, right?" Mike : 1600.41 -> 1565.66 "Damn island wargoals, anyway"