Chapter 1: 1419-1440
When I decided to return to EU2 after nearly a year without seriously playing it, I wasn't sure that I wanted to undertake another AAR. My last one was really long and drawn out and, to be honest, I really wasn't interested in it by the end. Well, the first end anyway. As you probably know, since I said it in the first post, I just got around to writing the last two updates in it, so it is, I guess, finished. So why am I starting this, you ask? Even that last AAR was actually my third; the first, an aborted tale about Lorraine was, by my own reckoning, outstanding only in its mediocrity, and the second was my first attempt at a WC at the hands of Austria. That didn't go well either. But I digress. So why a new AAR? Hopefully this one will be entertaining. I don't intend to do a history book style approach to this. Instead, it will be my own first-person commentary on my game. I know there are a lot of character based AARs out there, and some of you would probably prefer that; but having just read William Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury, I want to stick to one consistent setting and narrator for now. No confusing characters. Now I'm done with this. Here we go.
Denmark in 1419
I start out on January 1, 1419. My king, Erik VII, is very average - 4/4/5, to be exact. I start with 600 ducats in the treasury. You know what? I don't like ducats. We're Danish. I'm calling them kroner from now on. And I think there's an accent there, but I don't care. I'm an American and we don't have those on our keyboards. So I take 200 of those kroner and recruit tax collectors in my four provinces: Jutland, Sjaelland, Skane, and Gotland. I also set my religion sliders to full tolerance for Catholics, half for Orthodox, and none for Muslims. I'm in Scandinavia, I barely know of any Muslims, much less actually have any of them as subjects. I also increased my centralization slider by one, because we all know what happened to Poland. I also sent my two merchants to Mecklemburg, which I want so very badly to be my own. At the same time, I look up at my merchant icon. I find that I'm getting 0.4 merchants per year. So I make a mental note that I'll probably forget by the next war to move my slider toward free trade. Until then though, I'll keep trying to get my four-tenths of a merchant into Luebeck each year, since I have a lot of money with which I have nothing to do.
And then I find out on January 6 that I have allies. Sweden decides to declare war on everyone's favorite Russian punching bag, Novgorod. My other ally, Norway, is too concerned with wrestling polar bears to help, so Sweden and I go it alone. I send a bunch of troops to the colonies of Kola and Karelia, hoping to get them quickly. But Novgorod won't budge. Now, the AI makes the first of many idiotic moves it will make throughout the game. It's winter, so I send my troops back to Sweden so they don't go Grande Armee and freeze to death (because Sweden is so much warmer and friendlier to Danes). But Novgorod's 20k troops sitting next to their colonies don't bother invading. In fact, they just send colonists to Kola. To make a long story short, I didn't defend the colonies at all, and Novgorod evidently didn't care about them. They just sent colonists to Kola without bothering to retake it.
I have a core shield on Holstein, which is owned by a one province minor of the same name. So while they're off fighting somewhere else, I declare war on them (January 3, 1420) and send 26k men south to besiege Hamburg. My navy also goes around Jutland to blockade the port. But, of course, they can't be bothered with defending their only province. All their troops are off fighting Swedes in Prussia. So, with absolutely no effort, Holstein is mine by October. But since they still have a few thousand men in Prussia, they won't accept annexation. Finally, my friends in Sweden do something right and make the world's first Hamburgers, so I can finally annex them on July 9, 1421. Now I have all my core provinces. Whoopee. Unfortunately, Europe couldn't get any ketchup until Columbus sailed the ocean blue and gave all the natives smallpox. For which he was given the gift of tomatoes.
A political crisis happened in March 1421, but it doesn't matter enough to be really concerned about. The interesting thing though is that stability of the nation seems to be closely linked to the weather in the capital. I'm not sure if strangely colored skies make people angry or what, or if the skies act like a mood ring for the peasant population, but either way, that circle got a little gray and I really couldn't care less.
In August 1422, I finally got Novgorod to give me Kola for peace. This was three years after I took Kola and Karelia and they still hadn't made any attempts to reconquer either. The main benefit of this was that I finally had something to do with my money. I had 300 or so kroner in the bank from the beginning of the game. Now I could send colonists. It's amazing how when a couple of Danes arrived there, all 500 of those Russian Orthodox fur trappers suddenly became nice, docile Scandinavian Catholics. Maybe it was the simultaneous prohibition of vodka imports and high taxes on beer for Orthodox Russians that made them change. Who knows. But in any case, I had a nice snowy place where I could wrestle polar bears along with those Norwegians in case of war.
In May 1423, I got a boundary dispute with the Palatinate. Now the last time I heard of the Palatinate was when I beat them to a nice pulp with my one-province Lorraine in another game about two years ago. And, in case you forgot your early fifteenth century German geography (because the Palatinate tends not to last long), the Palatinate is in west-central Germany on the Rhine. I am in Scandinavia. Guess what? I don't have a boundary with them! For that matter, I'd have to go through four other countries just to get to them. So I decide to press the case, hoping to find where that disputed border is in the first place.
Now at this point, I want Mecklemburg. It's got a center of trade. But I don't have a CB on them or their allies. So I send them insults. I call them lots of nasty names, spit on that animal that's on their shield, and have my merchants explode stink bombs in their palace, all to no avail. Apparently the peasants in Skane weren't too happy with this though; I guess the smell carried across the water to them. They were revolted, so they revolted. That didn't last long. Let's just say we had a surplus of cow manure in Jutland that year.
On July 6, 1427, I got my wish: Norway declared war on Pommern. I was a Norwegian ally (and her suzerain) and Pommern was Mecklenburg's ally. Yay! This time Sweden wanted to go wrestle polar bears, but they too rejoined the alliance in a few months after discovering that killing Germans was infinitely more preferable to killing polar bears. Anyway, I invaded Mecklemburg. They tried to counter with a few thousand measly men, but evidently they were scared of our stink bombs, so most of them ran away pretty quickly. Honestly, I don't know where they went, because I never saw any of them again. Maybe they got onto a ship and got sunk or something. So that siege was easy, since Bremen and Pommern didn't seem to care that Mecklemburg was under siege. They just went around me. Incidentally, my merchants were having a good time with the stink bombs; on November 20, I got a letter that they were unhappy. I seriously considered lifting the siege, I really did. But mistakes happen. Soon there were four-tenths of Danish merchants lying around Luebeck, since I could only replace them at that rate. On October 3, 1428, I captured the city and annexed Mecklemburg. Now we're cookin'.
On April 14, 1429, I decided to impose the Sound Due. At first I started setting up giant speakers along my borders and blasting Finnish metal. Man, you should have seen them. But then one of those naval types told me that I was actually supposed to be stealing money from traders who wanted to go to the Baltic. Which is code for screwing over the Swedes. My relations with everyone were actually starting to go up; they liked the music. But then they decided that they didn't like giving me money, so they went down down down. Oh well, they'll hate me in twenty years anyway, no reason not to start now. A few months later, someone told me that my policies were good, so evidently at least someone liked it.
In 1432 I moved the centralization slider up again. Oh, I forgot about technology. I hit infra 2 in 1425, which means that I can build "fine arts" academy. I remember that in one of those quiz bowl competitions, a member of my team would shorten "fine arts" to "f'arts." So building one of those probably wasn't a good idea. I hit trade 2 in 1433. Yay, no more fractional merchants. That was actually getting to be a problem; no one wants to buy anything from just an arm. My income went up too, probably as a result of the new whole-merchant phenomenon.
In May 1433 I discovered Georgia. 562 years later, the Atlanta Braves would beat my Cleveland Indians in the World Series 4 games to 2. So I regret having done that. This was the second worst discovery ever made, next to that of Jose Mesa by some scout in the Dominican Republic or something.
In June I swapped maps with Norway. I told them about Georgia so they could get to the Olympics in 563 years and they told me about Iceland and Greenland and how sneaky they were for switching around the names. I just sent some ships to Iceland and started sailing them back and forth along the coast of Vinland and Markland, hoping to actually discover that there is land there. Unfortunately, the ship captains didn't seem to get bored with sailing back and forth repeatedly, so here I am in 1440 and nothing has happened over there.
The maps I got from Norway
In November 1435 the peasants in Skane caught on to that new emo craze and began to complain: "Oh woe is me, the world hates me, why doesn't anyone understand me." Someone in Sjaelland yelled at them to shut up, and then they got even less happy and started to rebel. Seven months later there was a large pile of broken black glasses sitting in Malmo.
On November 17, 1437, the Teutonic Order called me stupid.
Oh yeah, I also hit naval 2 somewhere in that period. It obviously wasn't that exciting.
Byzantium became Catholic on May 15, 1439. Ah, Byzantium, if only you knew how doomed you were. Just look at my last AAR for reasons why you shouldn't do that. Oh well, they only had one province left and were at war with the Ottomans anyway.
And on April 11, 1440, Erik VII abdicated and Christoffer III became king. Erik decided to retire to Greenland, having forgotten Norway's joke. Boy, was he surprised. It became a story the Danish royals would tell at parties for centuries to come.
Denmark in 1440; Kola is also Danish, but it's too far away to be included
And by the way, I did in fact forget about that free trade slider once the Novgorod war began.