So I'll be playing in an hour or so, but realized that the truce the UK and NGF signed with Austria would delay the war and allow them to rebuild. That might be bad news for team us. Think I'll go women's suffrage and the navy for now.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Update 15: In Which Brilliant Plans Go Awry (1906 - 1910)
Apologies for the screenshot taken thing, an invention popped up while I was trying to take a shot of this. Anyway, we ally with the UK, as planned.
I hold early elections to get our jingoist party back in power. Pacifists won't let you go for the acquire state casus belli, which is unacceptable.
Further defensive techs, which make us very, very tough to crack on defense without artillery of some kind. As the Egyptians would learn (spoilers).
But first, let's declare war on Austria! We'll give Venice to the Two Sicilies, with the hopes of possibly adding Dalmatia at some point, which is that strip of land along the Adriatic that is making our border ugly.
They encourage the Arab revolt in response. You can pick the first option and be annoyed or pick the second, and lose half of your territory and some prestige. Ummmm, no.
And we get this. Things are looking solid!
The problem is, I forgot that because Russia's military score is so much higher than ours (I brought them in but not the UK) they became the war leader. So when they decide that they don't really want to fight the war and want a white peace it ends, giving us a truce for five years. Laaaaaaaaaaaaame.
Oh well, more army techs.
We do get a convenient border incident on Egypt, who we can beat up pretty easily. So that's good news!
War is declared. The border is long, so I can't really establish a front.
And the Omani rebel, which is obnoxious.
Savoy is finally added to our sphere. Which means all the Italian minors are ours, if we can only get the stuff under France/Austria released.
This is what happens when we defend in that war. 106k to 2k casualties. Yikes. When we go on the offense in bad terrain, it's not quite as pretty, but we're still fine. I call Persia in, they demand Eritrea.
During the war become the totally liberalized Ottomans. In about 70 years we've established a massive colonial empire/welfare state. Realism!
That basically knocks out the southern bit of Egypt and connects all of our Ethiopian stuff to the main empire, saving us on overseas costs. Hooray. Persia gets some more territory too, which is fine.
Social science is another big education boost, and allows us to grant women's suffrage, which will end the 40 events/year triggered by not having it.
Which we do.
Now it's time for naval techs. We start with learning ironclads finally. Better ships and higher war score!
There's the invention.
The rest of the tier 2 naval techs follow just after. New naval bases are built in most of our European and Asian territories, to build ships slightly faster (Ironclads take three years - about .5 a year/level of base).
We can go explore Antarctica. The Austrians beat us there.
Reinforce faster! War exhaustion got to 12 or so during that relatively short war with Egypt, so this was probably needed.
We start a navy. It'll finish in 1913. We have 28 ships currently.
Sphere Portugal because we could and no one had yet. They've got a bunch of territory in various places, useful resources for the most part.
Assembly line's taken to improve our industrial score, mostly. Plus we'll have to pay for all those ships with a better economy, right? Right. Work started on tanks, one of the last factories we have to activate (radio and boots; the latter of which is kind of hilarious). After tanks, probably go back to naval techs, which can turn our ironclads into pre-dreadnoughts, a fairly fearsome ship. Then I dunno what.
I also added another 50 regiments or so, moving our total to 240.
So yeah, disappointed. I think ourselves + Italians vassals could probably have taken Austria without Russia. We'll try again once those ironclads are built and our military score is up near Russia's.
We're still fourth, about 1600 behind the UK/USA and 1200 behind France. That's an achievable gap, I think.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Hah good job introducing womens' suffrage to Sub-Saharan Africa. I feel like big empires in the Paradox grand strategy games should have a lot more destabilizing events.
Earlier in the thread, Phyphor and I were talking about playing as Japan. In APD/PDM, I figured out what you're supposed to do. Choose Choshu, use your national focus on bureaucrats until you're at 1.02% or so and then clergy til more clergy doesn't increase the rate you're gaining literacy (3%). Then probably craftsmen. Build a bunch of regulars. You should civilize by 1860 or so with a bakery and cement factory already. Use the next five years to learn some better research and military techs. You should win the Boshin War easily as soon as Meiji is crowned.
Then you get a ton of neat decisions, most of which grant you 3500 RPs or so, and including an entirely unique tech school. Which is something I don't get into in this LP because we can't trigger the requirements for military-industrial complex for some reason. Which is annoying me.
Anyway, it's +10% army research, +25% navy, -10% commerce, -10% culture, +25% industry. Which is insane. And great. Plus you obviously have a bunch of uncivs to beat up (Korea, for one), colonial provinces to take, China and Siberia to invade if you feel like it. It's a good time, but the first 25 years are boring. I just got to the fun bit and now I have 65 years with a large population with decent literacy for industrialization, a huge number of soldier pops to build troops with, highly defensible land, a good mix of resources, and a bunch of advantages, they're fun.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
It is with the expansion, you only need the 1860 tech for the Franco-Prussian war, assert Hegemony casus belli, and taking Holstein by force. You can still sphere them all to form the NGF. And all you need that you don't have is Holstein (no one wants Holstein anyway), Hanover (easy once Victoria is crowned), and Saxony (the one in Austria's sphere).
I just went railroads for my first tech, then the influence tech as my second, built railroads in all of Saxony's provinces then put all my influence into them.
My friend is working on a roguelike game you can play if you want to. (It has free demo)
Yeah, it is A Pop Divided that adds the State & Government req. Which kinda makes sense. NGF from the start is even more overpowered than normal for Germany in a Paradox game
I couldn't hold it any longer and also bought Vicky 2. I decided to start with Argentina and things are completely different from your game. El Presidente is a road block and I've been doing my darnest to start a revolution. Finally the anarcho-liberals were pushed over the edge, after letting Chile tear the country in 2, picking fights all the time and then immediately offering peace and plenty of violently breaking down uprisings.
The result:
*E: moments later...find out that anarcho-liberalists oppose all reforms. x_x
Yea, had to reload back to the moment I decided to try this. Instead I went for political reforms, after a few I was informed my country has been changed to a democracy (in name). Unfortunately the reactionaries are still the biggest party, but this opens the way to more options down the line.
I did have to get the reforms in the cheesy way: I declared war on the UK twice over the Falkland Islands (casus belli) and immediately offered them peace. This got me enough militancy in Argentina that the liberal faction in the Upper House was all in favour of reforms.
It's slow to get reforms rolling in Argentina unless you really really want them, because you don't get the age of liberalism events that trigger in europe, but thing's will get rolling pretty well in the second half of the 19th century.
I want to make Argentina the immigrant magnet it has the potential to be, so I just had to get those reforms going that get you ~2% migration each. It's ridiculous how many times I've had to restart or take a step back so far. It's ridic.
If you take universities (and you probably should) then your RP generation post-civilizing will actually be lower than just before. So it can be worth it to delay civilizing until you're stored up enough for the research tech
Romania is finally formed and Wallachia/Moldavia merge. It's still in our sphere and allied with us, so that's fine.
Russia declares war on Austria with the intention of humiliating them. Russia is a full generation of army tech behind, but of course has a couple million dudes to throw at them and they mobilize their reserve as soon as Austria does.
I can't resist, so declare war as well, once again aiming to give Venice to the Two Sicilies.
The plan: keep our dudes on the border in place, moving north to cut off all of these dudes on the Adriatic Coast. Then basically hold while the Italian forces wander over. From there we'll call in our Italian allies who will swarm into Venice. Let's see if it works!
I believe I mentioned that gas attack is incredible if your opponent doesn't have gas defense? They're actually one tech ahead of us overall, but they don't have gas defenses, so we inflict insane amounts of casualties on them.
Capped by the battle of Karlovac, which would max out the "battles" war score by itself even without those other battles.
Meanwhile, in the north, our Russian allies are fighting a pretty brutal war with high casualties. Also, the NGF has joined the war, also seeking to humiliate Austria.
After not a terrible long time, Austria is utterly doomed.
We learn infiltration, which allows the tank invention and the tank factory (barrels here, because these are European game designers). It also increases the speed at which all units occupy territory.
Mmmm free alliance with the NGF. That makes us allied with the UK, NGF, and Russia. Nobody is attacking us.
Russia is the first to peace out, which is followed by a mad dash by us and the NGF to reoccupy the territory they had taken to add to our war scores. This was approximately split.
We get the invention or armor, which means we just need someone to start making tanks and we can build them. Wooooo. And yeah, no one is actually building them yet, so that's a small problem.
Austria's no good very bad day continues when their President is assassinated.
Also the UK has joined the NGF's war. Belgium declares war on them to further humiliate them and brings France and Spain as well. I've brought in Romania, Bavaria has joined the NGF...
Machine guns is the next level of guns, which is mostly important because it triggers the invention for guards, which are great. So, so great.
Austria managed to sphere the Papal States and bring them in at some point. Tuscany added a war goal to annex them, so there we go.
Japan attacked Russia for the Sakhalin islands. In this universe, Russia wins the Russo-Japanese War and takes Hokaido.
We make peace with Austria, giving all of their Italian territory to Sicily. Couldn't get Dalmatia and had to make peace for reasons which will become apparent momentarily. Alas.
There's our guards invention. Guards are slightly stronger than normal infantry, but they are MUCH faster. And they occupy territory MUCH, MUCH faster. Necessary for late game wars. The big forts on the border took almost a year to occupy, this should speed that up if we can make enough guards and incorporate them into our armies. So we're getting on that. An air force would speed things up even more, but that is a super expensive technology.
This is why we had to make peace. We were losing money with max taxes and max tariffs. Burned through our nearly 2 million pound reserves, too. War weariness is a bitch, and we didn't have the navy to break the Austrian blockade yet. Soon we will, but not yet.
To make more money, we learn even better mining/steel tech.
The Bavarians peace out for Bohemia (the Czech Republic, if you've never played CK or EU). That makes them a sizable country and once again a fringe great power.
With our conquests, the Two Sicilies can unite Italy. We're still buds, of course. We keep them sphered, which is nice. That will go away if they hit Great Power status, right now they're 10th.
Conservatives win the election. One downside of getting all of the reforms is that your people are all for the status quo now and so become conservatives. And then vote for them. The war weariness probably didn't help, either. So no more laissez faire.
We did manage to force a barrel factory though. If you want to do this yourself, encourage industry X in a state, then cancel anything your capitalists try to make. Eventually they'll do something useful. It's how we got automobile/aeroplane factories originally. Usually once the capitalists see a factory is profitable they'll remember and build new ones. They'll definitely expand existing ones.
We uncover Knossos, giving us a whole bunch of RPs and prestige.
Which we use on the best trains. Next level of transportation is highways. Again, we need the invention to fire before we can actually build railroads.
These are about 4k RPs total. I decide to finally grab them. If we're going to make a score push every little bit helps.
Russia despheres Romania because I forgot to increment the influence thingy when it formed. I did not repeat this mistake with Italy. Highest priority is put on restoring Romania to its proper overlords. They're still our puppet, so it's not a huge deal.
There's the railroad invention, so that should all finish in 1919 or so (this is actually middle 1916, I was trying to get the NGF war finished, but occupation is soooooo slow).
And one more tech for the road. I'm building another 70 ironclads, so the maintenance costs are going to hurt a bit.
Austria is fuuuuuuucked. I believe they're disarmed, humiliatedx2, lost their Italian possessions, lost Bohemia, lost their Danish allies (NGF is going to annex them when they finish occupying Vienna in a couple months), lost a couple million dudes, have 100% war weariness and massive rebel problems. I'm willing to bet Hungary frees itself when the NGF finally makes peace. And it's surrounded by hostile allied powers (ourselves, Russia, Italy, and the NGF).
As for us, we're burning infamy and war weariness for a while. Only wars I'm particularly interested in are maybe smacking Egypt around a couple more times and finally taking the Adriatic Coast from Austria. But it would be fun to trigger a Great War, possibly against France/Belgium. We would need to build a ton of guards in Africa though.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
If you get Greater Germany you should be able to demolish all comers so that shouldn't matter. I guess except maybe the blockade if you haven't built up your fleet.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Posts
Apologies for the screenshot taken thing, an invention popped up while I was trying to take a shot of this. Anyway, we ally with the UK, as planned.
I hold early elections to get our jingoist party back in power. Pacifists won't let you go for the acquire state casus belli, which is unacceptable.
Further defensive techs, which make us very, very tough to crack on defense without artillery of some kind. As the Egyptians would learn (spoilers).
But first, let's declare war on Austria! We'll give Venice to the Two Sicilies, with the hopes of possibly adding Dalmatia at some point, which is that strip of land along the Adriatic that is making our border ugly.
They encourage the Arab revolt in response. You can pick the first option and be annoyed or pick the second, and lose half of your territory and some prestige. Ummmm, no.
And we get this. Things are looking solid!
The problem is, I forgot that because Russia's military score is so much higher than ours (I brought them in but not the UK) they became the war leader. So when they decide that they don't really want to fight the war and want a white peace it ends, giving us a truce for five years. Laaaaaaaaaaaaame.
Oh well, more army techs.
We do get a convenient border incident on Egypt, who we can beat up pretty easily. So that's good news!
War is declared. The border is long, so I can't really establish a front.
And the Omani rebel, which is obnoxious.
Savoy is finally added to our sphere. Which means all the Italian minors are ours, if we can only get the stuff under France/Austria released.
This is what happens when we defend in that war. 106k to 2k casualties. Yikes. When we go on the offense in bad terrain, it's not quite as pretty, but we're still fine. I call Persia in, they demand Eritrea.
During the war become the totally liberalized Ottomans. In about 70 years we've established a massive colonial empire/welfare state. Realism!
That basically knocks out the southern bit of Egypt and connects all of our Ethiopian stuff to the main empire, saving us on overseas costs. Hooray. Persia gets some more territory too, which is fine.
Social science is another big education boost, and allows us to grant women's suffrage, which will end the 40 events/year triggered by not having it.
Which we do.
Now it's time for naval techs. We start with learning ironclads finally. Better ships and higher war score!
There's the invention.
The rest of the tier 2 naval techs follow just after. New naval bases are built in most of our European and Asian territories, to build ships slightly faster (Ironclads take three years - about .5 a year/level of base).
We can go explore Antarctica. The Austrians beat us there.
Reinforce faster! War exhaustion got to 12 or so during that relatively short war with Egypt, so this was probably needed.
We start a navy. It'll finish in 1913. We have 28 ships currently.
Sphere Portugal because we could and no one had yet. They've got a bunch of territory in various places, useful resources for the most part.
Assembly line's taken to improve our industrial score, mostly. Plus we'll have to pay for all those ships with a better economy, right? Right. Work started on tanks, one of the last factories we have to activate (radio and boots; the latter of which is kind of hilarious). After tanks, probably go back to naval techs, which can turn our ironclads into pre-dreadnoughts, a fairly fearsome ship. Then I dunno what.
I also added another 50 regiments or so, moving our total to 240.
So yeah, disappointed. I think ourselves + Italians vassals could probably have taken Austria without Russia. We'll try again once those ironclads are built and our military score is up near Russia's.
We're still fourth, about 1600 behind the UK/USA and 1200 behind France. That's an achievable gap, I think.
Our traditional holdings in Europe + Serbia.
And this map:
+ Sokoto, Oyo, the white stuff in the south and the areas between our Ethiopian and other African holdings.
I'll post a full map at 1915 though, with 20 years left.
Steam: CavilatRest
The Congo would really top off your empire nicely.
I think France has Loango sphered, and Portugal ate Kongo. I'd have to double check. The uncivs are gone by now though.
Then you get a ton of neat decisions, most of which grant you 3500 RPs or so, and including an entirely unique tech school. Which is something I don't get into in this LP because we can't trigger the requirements for military-industrial complex for some reason. Which is annoying me.
Anyway, it's +10% army research, +25% navy, -10% commerce, -10% culture, +25% industry. Which is insane. And great. Plus you obviously have a bunch of uncivs to beat up (Korea, for one), colonial provinces to take, China and Siberia to invade if you feel like it. It's a good time, but the first 25 years are boring. I just got to the fun bit and now I have 65 years with a large population with decent literacy for industrialization, a huge number of soldier pops to build troops with, highly defensible land, a good mix of resources, and a bunch of advantages, they're fun.
Other games have included Argentina, USCA, Two Sicilies, New Zeeland, and Eithiopia.
Do not ask me why I do this.
I am broken.
The other three would be tough, but I've been toying with a conquer Mexico/Columbia/Haiti/Venezuela as the USCA game. It's definitely doable!
Gotta love those prestige techs.
Prussia can from the NGF in 3 years without fighting a war apparently.
And in any case, how are you getting Austria's sphere members without a war?
I just went railroads for my first tech, then the influence tech as my second, built railroads in all of Saxony's provinces then put all my influence into them.
The result:
*E: moments later...find out that anarcho-liberalists oppose all reforms. x_x
I did have to get the reforms in the cheesy way: I declared war on the UK twice over the Falkland Islands (casus belli) and immediately offered them peace. This got me enough militancy in Argentina that the liberal faction in the Upper House was all in favour of reforms.
EDIT: Hockey has killed tonight's update.
If you take universities (and you probably should) then your RP generation post-civilizing will actually be lower than just before. So it can be worth it to delay civilizing until you're stored up enough for the research tech
Romania is finally formed and Wallachia/Moldavia merge. It's still in our sphere and allied with us, so that's fine.
Russia declares war on Austria with the intention of humiliating them. Russia is a full generation of army tech behind, but of course has a couple million dudes to throw at them and they mobilize their reserve as soon as Austria does.
I can't resist, so declare war as well, once again aiming to give Venice to the Two Sicilies.
The plan: keep our dudes on the border in place, moving north to cut off all of these dudes on the Adriatic Coast. Then basically hold while the Italian forces wander over. From there we'll call in our Italian allies who will swarm into Venice. Let's see if it works!
I believe I mentioned that gas attack is incredible if your opponent doesn't have gas defense? They're actually one tech ahead of us overall, but they don't have gas defenses, so we inflict insane amounts of casualties on them.
Capped by the battle of Karlovac, which would max out the "battles" war score by itself even without those other battles.
Meanwhile, in the north, our Russian allies are fighting a pretty brutal war with high casualties. Also, the NGF has joined the war, also seeking to humiliate Austria.
After not a terrible long time, Austria is utterly doomed.
We learn infiltration, which allows the tank invention and the tank factory (barrels here, because these are European game designers). It also increases the speed at which all units occupy territory.
Mmmm free alliance with the NGF. That makes us allied with the UK, NGF, and Russia. Nobody is attacking us.
Russia is the first to peace out, which is followed by a mad dash by us and the NGF to reoccupy the territory they had taken to add to our war scores. This was approximately split.
We get the invention or armor, which means we just need someone to start making tanks and we can build them. Wooooo. And yeah, no one is actually building them yet, so that's a small problem.
Austria's no good very bad day continues when their President is assassinated.
Also the UK has joined the NGF's war. Belgium declares war on them to further humiliate them and brings France and Spain as well. I've brought in Romania, Bavaria has joined the NGF...
Machine guns is the next level of guns, which is mostly important because it triggers the invention for guards, which are great. So, so great.
Austria managed to sphere the Papal States and bring them in at some point. Tuscany added a war goal to annex them, so there we go.
Japan attacked Russia for the Sakhalin islands. In this universe, Russia wins the Russo-Japanese War and takes Hokaido.
We make peace with Austria, giving all of their Italian territory to Sicily. Couldn't get Dalmatia and had to make peace for reasons which will become apparent momentarily. Alas.
There's our guards invention. Guards are slightly stronger than normal infantry, but they are MUCH faster. And they occupy territory MUCH, MUCH faster. Necessary for late game wars. The big forts on the border took almost a year to occupy, this should speed that up if we can make enough guards and incorporate them into our armies. So we're getting on that. An air force would speed things up even more, but that is a super expensive technology.
This is why we had to make peace. We were losing money with max taxes and max tariffs. Burned through our nearly 2 million pound reserves, too. War weariness is a bitch, and we didn't have the navy to break the Austrian blockade yet. Soon we will, but not yet.
To make more money, we learn even better mining/steel tech.
The Bavarians peace out for Bohemia (the Czech Republic, if you've never played CK or EU). That makes them a sizable country and once again a fringe great power.
With our conquests, the Two Sicilies can unite Italy. We're still buds, of course. We keep them sphered, which is nice. That will go away if they hit Great Power status, right now they're 10th.
Conservatives win the election. One downside of getting all of the reforms is that your people are all for the status quo now and so become conservatives. And then vote for them. The war weariness probably didn't help, either. So no more laissez faire.
We did manage to force a barrel factory though. If you want to do this yourself, encourage industry X in a state, then cancel anything your capitalists try to make. Eventually they'll do something useful. It's how we got automobile/aeroplane factories originally. Usually once the capitalists see a factory is profitable they'll remember and build new ones. They'll definitely expand existing ones.
We uncover Knossos, giving us a whole bunch of RPs and prestige.
Which we use on the best trains. Next level of transportation is highways. Again, we need the invention to fire before we can actually build railroads.
These are about 4k RPs total. I decide to finally grab them. If we're going to make a score push every little bit helps.
Russia despheres Romania because I forgot to increment the influence thingy when it formed. I did not repeat this mistake with Italy. Highest priority is put on restoring Romania to its proper overlords. They're still our puppet, so it's not a huge deal.
There's the railroad invention, so that should all finish in 1919 or so (this is actually middle 1916, I was trying to get the NGF war finished, but occupation is soooooo slow).
And one more tech for the road. I'm building another 70 ironclads, so the maintenance costs are going to hurt a bit.
Austria is fuuuuuuucked. I believe they're disarmed, humiliatedx2, lost their Italian possessions, lost Bohemia, lost their Danish allies (NGF is going to annex them when they finish occupying Vienna in a couple months), lost a couple million dudes, have 100% war weariness and massive rebel problems. I'm willing to bet Hungary frees itself when the NGF finally makes peace. And it's surrounded by hostile allied powers (ourselves, Russia, Italy, and the NGF).
As for us, we're burning infamy and war weariness for a while. Only wars I'm particularly interested in are maybe smacking Egypt around a couple more times and finally taking the Adriatic Coast from Austria. But it would be fun to trigger a Great War, possibly against France/Belgium. We would need to build a ton of guards in Africa though.
edit: well they're still at war, but not losing