yeah, ouch indeed..
it was a bit like being in a cake shop, taking all the cake home, and then finding out you actually had to take it all back again.
As you can see, there is a little more 'ouch' to come
1920
An end, of sorts.
I actually gave up at the 1912 point, since I wanted to win the war, and just couldn’t see how. Months later, in the interest of completeness, I went back to it.
It turned out that whilst I’d been waiting for a better peace I had built up about 200 manpower, so I set to an ordered 10 extra infantry divisions, and took a gamble on shipping them over from Brazil. This kind of worked, and I put together 3 armies of 4 divisions that systematically kicked the Ottomans out of North Africa.
I also fixed my income & expenditure at this time, putting a few more onto military, cutting out education, and raising poor tax to 75% - I had been too timid with those sliders before. Considering my lack of coal, I expanded lumber mills and furniture factories, to try to make just a little cash that way (by supplying my luxury furniture factory).
The campaign against the Ottomans worked, and I freed everything west of Egypt. That meant, however that I was up to a +5% peace with them, but stuck on –28% against Russia. Nobody wanted to take my offers of peace. In the end I bit the bullet, and offered Russia all the holy land and all of North East Africa. Naturally they took it. The prestige hit was not too huge (-20) and those lands weren’t doing too much for my economy. I really should have just lost them about three years earlier, since I was never in a position to really challenge the Russians.
The economy, ah yes. Debt about £98,000.00. Even with military funding on minimum, and lots of tax (75%, 49%, 40%) I was clearing about £100 per day profit. I had a garage sale of claims to my two buddies, Spain and the USA, tending to take £5000 to £9000 a go. I think they were short on cash, or something, since I think they could have sold for more, but I needed the money & didn’t have 10 years to get somebody else rich to be my friend. Amazingly I got the debt clear by about 1916.
Still couldn’t import any coal. Lumber businesses doing so well, I had to start importing timber. Level of railways around the country generally pretty pitiful.
I also remembered to demobilize around 1914 or so, a lot later than I should have. Oddly, that really helped by military rating. To go along with that, I started building a few more infantry divisions to make up for the relatively feeble size of my army in comparison to, say, my prestige.