Chapter seven:
Your First Gameplay Day!
Assign Generals, Reorganize the Navy, Set Up Trade and Command Your Troops
Finally we're there. We are now at the point were we can actually play this game, the whole reason why you are reading this AAR! I'm no annoying TV presenter, so without further ado....let's pause the game just a bit longer!
We need to get some things done first. Do you remember Sir Robert Knolles in the military tab? He is a moderate general, but without troops, he's of no use whatsoever to us. Shall we get him assigned to our troops in London?
Click on our troops in London. We see this little box appearing.
In the box you can see what that army consists of. In this case the army is 7.000 men big, consisting of 5.000 men and 2.000 cavaliers. The 0.0% is
attrition which will be dealt with in the split off, don't worry about it for the moment.
Now click on No Leader below the armies name,
Royal Army. You should see the general in a list appearing.
Click on the general. If all went well, this is what you should see now.
This means our general is now commanding our troops. It's possible for him to be reassigned, simply click on the generals' name and when the lists appears, click on
No Leader in the bottom. Don't do this now though.
As England, we start with one of the largest navies in the game. That's a powerful position. Our ships are now
stacked ---remember stacked? That's multiple
regiments or ships in this case, grouped together in a
stack--- in one big group in the port of London. When we go to war its not a good idea to send our vulnerable transport ships of the
cog type into a battle. We're going to split them up. First we need to select our navy.
Select your navy by creating a box ---hold your left mouse button and move--- near London. It's important to mention that land armies are prioritized above navies. So when you make a box, make sure that no land armies are inside of it, otherwise you select them in stead of the ships.
A box should pop up, similar like the one we saw when we selected our troops in London.
We find here that the navy consists out of 42 ships, which 29 are
Big Ships of the
Carrack-class and 13
Transport Ships of the
Cog-class. Do you also notice that this navy is not lead by an admiral?
We are going to split the cogs from the carracks. As you can see on the screenshot, there are two arrows pointing away from each other. There we can divide our navy.
Click on the two arrows pointing away from each other.
Yet another screen pops up!
Scroll down and press the arrow to the right at every cog-class ship. After you've down that, this is how it should look. ---The game does not arrange ships by class in a navy stack. So sometimes you need to look hard to find certain ships you want to split off. The large icons dedicating the amounts of ships of each class can help you if you are not sure you've got them all.---
Now click Close.
Okay, the troops are ready, the navy is organized. We are ready to go right!!? Well not quite yet. Hold on a second longer
.
Remember that we have a couple of merchants available in the toolbar at the top? We need to get them to work for us. As a member of the
Hansa Trade League, it's only logical that we send them to a
Center of Trade ---CoT--- of the league. So why not the capital of the Hansa itself, Lübeck?
Move the game map until its centered on modern day Germany. There you will find Lübeck somewhere in the north of Germany. You can also click on the
search province icon I told you about and search for Lübeck.
Select the province of Lübeck. When you've done that, you see in the bottom of the screen some information about the province.
Click on the Lübeck CoT button which is highlighted in the screenshot above. ---You may notice the map is trade map mode right now, this is not necessary. I don't know why I did that
.---
You should see the following now.
That's a break-down of the Lübeck CoT. Its total value of trade being traded there is 1026.87, which is a lot for a CoT. Our value is 0.0 right now, because we don't have any merchants there yet. All the shields in the bottom are merchants from other countries trading there. ---I'm not going into trade detail just yet, all trade mechanics will be explained.---
To the left of the big
Send Merchant button you see a price. Here it is 4.55. This means that if we want to send a merchant, it will cost us 4.55 ducats. Below that you will notice a percentage, 54.20% in this case. That is our
compete chance. In other words, we have a 54.20% to kick a merchant of another country out of this CoT to take that place for ourselves. ---How you can affect this percentage will be covered later, in a special Trade chapter.--- A CoT has a limited number (
Twenty?!) of places available for merchants. If it's full, we need to compete somebody else out of business before we can take over. Every nation can have a max of 5 merchants in a CoT,
unless they manage to create a
monopoly where you can have 6 merchants ---again, more on trade later.---
It can be quite annoying to send merchants, so our friends at Paradox made an auto-send feature available. It's off right now for Lübeck, but we will set it on. There are three levels of auto-sending merchants.
- Green. Green is the highest priority. The game will send merchants to a green prioritized CoT until we have a monopoly of 6 merchants established. This is above yellow. If we lose that monopoly, the game will keep sending merchants until we have it back.
- Yellow. Yellow is the second priority where the game will send merchants to CoTs where we do not have 5 merchants available yet. It will first send merchants to a yellow prioritized CoT rather then a red prioritized CoT. If one our merchants get kicked out, the game will auto-send a new one until again 5 has been reached.
- Red. Red is the lowest priority, which means the game will send our merchants to a CoT until our max limit of 5 merchants has been reached. If one our merchants get kicked out, the game will auto-send a new one until again 5 has been reached.
As you can imagine, that auto-sending can costs us quite a bit of money. Luckily, the game stops auto-sending automatically if we ever lose too much money to go break-even in a year. More on that later.
So how to set it on?
Click once on the 'traffic sign'-like icon until it looks like this.
---A more convenient way of setting the auto-send feature on, is going to the ledger on page 24. An overview of every CoT is given. It's also possible to send merchants to CoTs here by clicking on the owners shield.---
Remember that rebels popping up because I moved the
Centralization slider?
It's very likely that you didn't have rebels!. But in case you have, we need to squash those...those...peasants..!
So select the Royal Army by clicking on it once, and then right click where you want them to move. They should get moving once we unpause the game.
Okay, we are there. We are ready. Now I'm serious, we can play. But before we unpause..do you know what to expect?
- We've send an invitation to Castille to become our ally, we expect an answer.
- We've send merchants to a CoT. Money will be drained from our treasury.
- Our army will move to crush the rebels.
- We will be given a mission.
So now, you may unpause the game. Either hit spacebar or click on the date in the top.
There it was, your first gameplay day!!
What mission did you get? What did Castille say?
Now to fulfill our goal of forming the UK, chapter 8 will be:
Preparing for War.