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Oct 18, 2000
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I just finished the first 40 years of the GC as Austria (on level Leicht/Easy), and boy did I learn some valuable lessons for the future.
I posted a couple of pictures to go with these comments at:
http://members.tripod.de/yuanti/screens.html

The first picture shows what I was able to accomplish in 40 years. The second shows what else I was able to accomplish... everyone hates me! If you look at the little dialog box on the left you can see that only Hungary and Russia have a positive view of me, while the other 6 major powers all hate me (-200). Strangely enough, I fought a long, bitter (for me) war with Saxony, and they still only have a -170 attitude towards me, while all the other small German states have a -200 attitude.

Well, what did I expect.

Last night I had started the campaign by forging a military alliance with Saxony and Hungary and then attacking Bohemia -- last night no one came to my aid, and after a hard struggle I managed to pry two provinces aways from Bohemia. This morning I went back and picked up right before declaring war, because it was pointed out to me that a small button appears on the upper right of the map which you have to push to call your allies to your aid. Oh. Well, that certainly helped the second time around, as Saxon and Hungarian troops poured into Bohemia alongside their Austrian allies and within a few short months the three allies partitioned Bohemia with relatively little loss of life. Everyone else began to hate me at this point. Not that I was well-liked to begin with. I spent the next couple of years rebuilding my forces for a go at either Venice or Bavaria, while using my high diplomacy rating with Saxony to try to vassalize them. They just kept refusing (3 times!), so I decided to make them my next target! I had to wait a while, so I could break the state marriage and alliiance with them and be able to declare war without dropping into negative stability, so in the meantime I took Milan, which proved to be rather easy, though it ticked off the rest of Italy. And then I conquered Bavaria, which had a decent sized army, but my two-pronged attack never gave it a chance to recover from its initial loss, so it retreated from province to province running into rested troops, who immediately sent it packing again. Then I launched my war against Saxony, which had three provinces (having secured Sudeten from Bohemia).

Now, I have to say that on paper this looked to be a cake walk (and my Milanese and Bavarian expeditions made me overconfident). Two of my bordering provinces had Small size fortresses (which are tough nuts to crack around 1500), and I had a 60 size army and a 28 size army ready to put a hurting on his 11, 7, and 11 armies. I checked all the diplomacy ratings to make sure i wasn't stepping on any big toes and declared war, sending the 60 army into Sudeten to take the fortress and beat his 11 army there. Well, in the two months since I had checked the diplomacy ratings, Saxony signed an alliance with Thüringen, so I actually had to fight two small German powers. No problem for mighty Austria, right!?! WRONG! I think the war took about three years, and I never even managed to lay siege to Saxony's capital. After about 30 months I had Sudeten firmly in my control and I was besieging Thüringen, while a massive combined army was waiting in Saxony for me to make a wrong move, but the AI failed to come to the rescue of the Thüringen capital and I captured it and signed a separate peace with them, in which I annexed them. After another six months of fighting, I realized I couldn't win, so I accepted peace in return for taking Sudeten.

I set about building up a new army, and one year later I was ready to go back to war with Saxony... but I couldn't because the terms of peace treaties mean that you can't go right back to war with someone. Okay. Now what. I sure as hell wasn't going to sit around with a big army, so i attacked Württemberg and conquered them fairly easily, though their tiny army did a tour of Austria, pillaging along the way, causing a revolt in the Sudeten, being chased by an army twice the size which finally caught up with them in Thüringen, just in time to absorb them when I annexed Würtemberg.

This is when I noticed a very big problem that had developed. My finances were in ruins. I had taken out three 200 Ducat loans, which is bad enough. Two of them I had already extended, making the interest ridiculously high. Luckily, Austria is a fairly rich country, thanks to Styria (which has gold in abundance), so I figured a few years of peace would allow me to pay off those debts, so I went ahead and raised the amount of money I was getting per month (by decreasing expenditures) and settled down to wait for the next loan to come due. I quickly reversed this decision when I noticed my inflation had risen to 20% !!!
I then spent 4 years trying to undo all the damage i had done. I boosted my economy by making infrastructure upgrades, I paid off my loans, and I reduced my monthly income (after expenditures) to a zero. This had no effect on my inflation, other than to prevent it from rising any further.

The result is that after 40 years, I have added 8 provinces to Austria at the cost of a 20% inflation rate and the hatred of everyone (even distant Spain hates me now). I may have ruined my chances in the later parts of the game, but maybe I can still find a way to reduce the inflation. And if I can cultivate my relations with Hungary and Russia, I may yet find a way out of diplomatic isolation. I still have an alliance with Hungary. Maybe if i declare war on Turkey, Hungary will join and together we can win a war in the Balkans. This will piss off Venice, but they already hate me (-200) anyway! I hadn't intended this to be a full-fledged AAR, but it sort of was. Sorry about that. Hope it was interesting at least.



------------------
'Therefore take heed how you impawn our person,
How you awake our sleeping sword of war.
We charge you in the name of God, take heed;
For never two such kingdoms did contend
Without much fall of blood...'
Henry V (a la Shakespeare)
 
hehe, your first lessons :)

The worst thing is everyone is hating you. Pray the Lord that upcoming wars with the Turks go well for you. Noone else will help you when Turks will be heading to Vienna :)

Another side consequence of your bad relationship will be that the crown of the Heiliges Reich will certainly go to Spain.
When well used, the power of the HRE Emperor can be awesome.
As the Emperor will probably be Spanish and as Spain probably hates you now... :)

Don't also forget to pay back your loans. A bankruptcy is devastating.

You'll have hard times :)

Welcome to EU

Pierre

[This message has been edited by pierre (edited 24-10-2000).]
 
Excellent! I knowledgable persone to answer a couple of my questions....

Originally posted by pierre:
Another side consequence of your bad relationship will be that the crown of the Heiliges Reich will certainly go to Spain.
When well used, the power of the HRE Emperor can be awesome.
As the Emperor will probably be Spanish and as Spain probably hates you now... :)

Already happened. Spain now has the HRE Emperor. Another lesson, since I wasn't even thinking about it until it happened. Ooops.

I have a big Q about the HRE, though. First, how do you know which provinces are in the HRE. Some of the Challenges you can take to get victory points tell you to, for example, make sure that Poland has no HRE provinces. How do I know for sure which ones are HRE provinces?

Second, does the election only happen when the current Emperor dies? So I have to wait until Spain's king dies before I can try to win it back? Of course, I don't think there is enough gold in the treasury to get back on good terms with the Electorates...

Thanks for the comments!
 
Check the religion screen. You'll see the borders of the HRE, so which provinces are part of the HRE.
Wait a moment when pointing a country on that screen and you'll see things like 'Bavaria is an electorate of...'

Without gold, don't even dream to see the crown coming back to you.

Yes, you'll have to wait for the death of the Emperor to see new elections.

Pierre
 
I have found that having -200 relationships with nearly all the great powers is usually not a serious problem. Just make sure that they don't have good relations with one another, or you'll get pounded by a powerful alliance. If everyone hates eachother, the individual powers will be more reluctant to go to war and risk having their enemies pounce on them all at once. I've seen it happen to central powers like France and Austria before, and it ain't pretty. Of course, having a large army will also act as a deterrent.

As for your debts, look in the information book to see what your interest rates are. You want to wait to pay off your most expensive loan first. You may be rolling one loan at 20% interest and your last loan at 100% interest! Also, check the breakdown of your expenditures. Going into debt not only causes inflation, it can also eat up a substantial portion of your income. I would be curious to hear from the designers in more detail how the interest rate is determined.

Finally, I cannot emphasize enough: TRADE, TRADE, TRADE! If you've read my Austria AAR, you know that trade revenues will eventually account for 2/3 of your income if you play your cards right. Conquering territory is fun, looks good and pays off in the long run, but don't neglect your merchants.
 
Thanks, Sapura! (or whoever moved this to the AAR Forum) I didn't intend it to be an AAR when I started writing it, but I got carried away. :rolleyes:

Excellent point about trade, Devin. I actually used my ability to send Traders to Venice cheaply (2 ducats) to have an alternating 5 or 6 share there. I also have maintained large shares of trade in Genoa, Novgorod, Andalusia and ... Holland, I think. It has certainly helped a lot, providing about 100 ducats a year, which isn't bad, as you said in your AAR, for a power without a port!

A small update. I have played another 20 years, and accomplished some big things. After spending a few years building my infrastructure, ensuring my trade base, and slowly reconstructing my army, I started in on my relations with neighbors. The most important was that I brought Hungary from a +48 to 200 very quickly and vassalized them! That gave me confidence, and i wanted to go after Turkey, but they had just finished a series of wars and were completely unoccupied by opponents and building huge armies in the Balkans, so I chickened out and went after Venice instead. In another lesson learned, I realized, but ignored, the fact that Venice had islands in the Mediterranean which I could never touch. As a result, my dreams of annexing Venice fell flat, but my Hungarian vassals took two Kosovo and part of the Illyrian coast while I got the rest of the coast and Mantua, as well as an indemnity for my troubles.

About this time, the alliance of Spain, Naples and Lorraine went to war against France, Poland, and the Papal States. I decided this was my big chance, so I moved my forces into Milan (which I already controlled) and declared war on the Papal States (I figured they would be more easily subdued, and if France started to steamroll me, I could sue for peace and end the war, no matter how much damage France had done.) France honored its alliance with the Papal States and I called Hungary to my side, to give me an edge. I jumped in and quickly took Savoy, and laid siege to Emilia. At first I thought everything would go well, especially when Lorraine captured Champagne and Spain captured Paris!
But two things started to cause problems right away. The papal States slipped a moderate sized army (14,000) into Austria and started rampaging through my provinces. Forced to go after them with the forces I had guarding my rear, I eventually chased them down and destroyed them after several months, but in the process two of my Lutheran provinces revolted.

Then Hungary, which was given control of Emilia and Romagna in Italy (after our mutual sieges of the cities there) sued for a separate piece with the Papal States, taking those two provinces. That wouldn't have been so bad except that now I had no leverage over the Papal States, so they would not accept peace with me except on status quo terms. Meanwhile, France had refused to offer a separate peace with me in return for Savoy (I had been unsuccessful in taking another province), had pushed Spain out of northern France, forced Lorraine into a separate peace (taking a large indemnity, some of it my money), and was sending a 97,000 man army toward Northern Italy. I decided to cut my losses, sued for peace with France, and surprisingly got a 250 ducat indemnity in return for giving up Savoy without a fight. With France off my back, I sent 12,000 men to lay siege to Rome, and 12 months later I annexed her.

So there I stand in 1551... Where to next?