NA: The Prequel

[MacroEconomics]

Is there any interest in a collaborative AAR of France starting in 1776? Although I've written other AARs, this would be my first collaborative one. I'm looking for a small team, maybe three or four others to serve as "advisors" in the Directoire exécutif. Objective would be to use use the pre-revolutionary years to pump up France before triggering the BB wars sometime around the turn of the century. After that, total European conquest would be targeted. Maybe vassalization for countries with large overseas colonies and or active fleets (i.e. those that can carry the fight to the British).

The tentative rules set to be used:

Monarchs: Historical
Leaders: Historical
Difficulty: Standard
All other rules, @default

If you are interested, post here.

[MacroEconomics]

Well since there weren't any positive replies, but I'm still curious how this era of the game plays out, I'm going to modify the AAR. It will still be France starting in 1776, but I'll just go through solo. It would have been nice to have advisors since I didn't beta test the expansion and I haven't read through the event files, but oh well...

I'm still too lazy to read through the event files so I'm just going to power through and if I take a suboptimal line, then the chips will fall where they may. If you can't guess by now, this AAR will be gameplay based rather than role-playing oriented. You are forewarned.
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At the start of the game France is at peace with everyone and has a fine economy. With little incentive to further invest in economic infrastructure given the short period of time remaining in the game from which to recoup investments, the first thing I do is jack minting to beyond 50%. We will not want for cash in this game.

France does start with a really bad set of National Ideas however. I ditch QFtNW right away since we are using historical leaders and take Smithian Economics. Probably a bad choice. With in 5 days (of ingame time), I'm wishing I took Church Attendance. Gah. Anyway that drops our stability to -2. Next I shift trade one step towards Mercantilism in order to boost the rate at which I get Spies (now +0.4 per year). There are a lot of little one province countries in my way that I am going to have to steam roller and Spies/Fabricate Claims is needed to keep the badboy gain under some degree of control until all hell breaks loose.

With stability now at -3, all remaining economic output is set to stability so we can begin a campaign of aggression (i.e. declare war). It will take about a year to get a point of stability back. In the meantime level 1 fort contruction is begun at all of our overseas cities. New colonists are sent to three islands in the Indian Ocean (two of which France already owns). And another colonist is sent to Tasmania (which by some bizarre happenstance we have discovered - probably via knowledge from someone else). To help further our efforts at discovery in this area, 3 frigates and 3 transports are sent (empty) with our lone explorer, de Langle, from Marseille. Ships travel fast in this era and he'll be scouting out the coast of Australia shortly.

A missionary is sent to the southwest to convert the last remaining Protestant province in France. That also may very well be the last remaining missionary we send in this game. It's just not efficient with so little of the game remaining to have a strategy of conversion. Tolerance sliders are set to minimum for Pagans and Eastern religions. That allows Muslims and Orthodox at middle settings and max for everyone else.

With the remaining money we begin raising Blue Coat infantry regiments and start building a few Tripledecker ships of the line.

On the diplomatic front our strategy is to try and maintain the alliance with Spain. The first target of French aggression is likely to be Piedmont-Sardina. Beyond that there are few plans other than to roll with the punches. The big question is whether we will intervene on the side of the USA against the British.

In May 1777 we use our royal marriage with Piedmont-Sardina to claim its throne. On July 1 1777, we DoW Piedmont. Here's the situation in southern France thereafter. Note the rebel that pops up in southern France was we take a -2 hit in stability from the DoW (-1 marriage, -1 same religion) while already at -2 stability.

[MacroEconomics]

6 days after DoWing Piedmont, we get the Revolution Event. Doh. At least it didn't cause us more instability as we were already at -3! Revolts start popping up all over France though.

Piedmont-Sardina was allied to Tyrol and Wurzburg, both of who dutifully join in the war against France. Of the French allies, Spain stays loyal while Austria bolts for neutrality. About 30,000 French troops pour across the border into Italy against weak opposition. A large artillery and infantry dominated stack goes city from city starting from the north and breaks the seiges one by one via assault. Meanwhile we use our diplomats to get Mil Access through Austria, Venice and Bavaria. Actually I tried at first to get Mil Access to Wurzburg via a more direct route through Germany, but our diplomats just weren't up to the task. Eventually a stack of about 20,000 men treks across Northern Italy to beseige Trent (Tryol's single province), then trudges across the Alps and into southern Germany to assault and take the two provinces of Wurzburg. Then after a small occupation force is left there, the remaining troops go back to Trent to take that city. Wouldn't it have been more efficient to assault Trent along the way and then assault the Germans? Well yes, but I didn't think of that. At any rate our massed French surrender monkeys, err, Blue Coat infantry, still dominated the seige combats.

The US by the way seems to be doing quite well in its War of Independence against the UK. Here's a shot of the situation in North America along with my domestic policy settings:





By the end of November, the French-Sardinian War was concluded with France taking a province from Wurzburg and vassalizing it, annexing Tyrol and taking all but the capital province of Piedmont. Peace has come none too soon, as all of Metropolitan France is under a net 6.7% revolt risk.

[MacroEconomics]

These later era scenarios certainly are filled with activity. Perhaps it's due to not knowing what will come at you but it doesn't play at all like the typical scenario starting in 1453. I had accepted an alliance from Tuscany sometime during the war with Piedmont. Shortly after that war ended Tuscany DoWed Venice. By entering the war on Tuscany's side, we get another chance at expanding our Italian conquests despite having -3 stability. About 30,000 troops are sent through Austrian held southern Germany and descend on the hapless Venetians assaulting one city after another. By mid April 1780 it's all over with Venice losing all of its provinces, one (Verona) going to our Tuscan allies and the rest to France.



During the middle of that war, Sicily offers us another alliance. Sure, why not? With any luck one of our Italian allies will DoW The Papacy, thereby allowing further expansion.

After a year or two of minding our own business (i.e. putting down internal revolts), I noticed that the UK-US war was over. The Americans look to have gotten the worse of it as can be seen here.



Note the loss of upstate New York. The US did manage to grab some colonies in northern Ohio. You can also see where I'm spending my money - R&D. Until I can get the colonies built up it seems rather useless to try and build stability. At least twice I year I'm getting colonial revolt events that give -1 stability + colonial revolt risk or a deep drop in national taxation. I'm opting for the former. That's one of the reasons why Wadjuk (eastern Australia) has a 41% revolt risk. At least our cash is plentiful.

[MacroEconomics]

Yes, there's a lot going on, but still this shouldn't happen:

[germanpeon]

Dont worry, Im watching the AAR! Im curious to see what NA has to offer. Seems kind fo silly how the revolutionary war works. The side that wins should get ALL of the eastern USA. Oh well...

[MacroEconomics]

I'll have to check and see whether the US retained its cores on upstate New York. If so perhaps it can be coaxed to fight the UK once again. It does make me wonder if I shouldn't have intervened on the side of the US. France starts out with a good supply of naval leaders in 1776. That may not be the case later on.

Although I haven't been putting a lot of effort into stability increases, for some reason I did get a +1 stability move (as can be seen in the last screenshot). I did recall getting some events that gave a large % decrease to stability cost, so maybe that's how it occurred. Time to think about how to use that precious -2 stability! The obvious choice would be a DoW. Genoa or the Papacy perhaps. In the bigger scheme of things I need to spend some time thinking about what National Ideas I want to have come 1800. The problem is that making a change to NIs requires having +1 stability. Who knows when that'll happen. But I do have two nearly worthless NIs (Cabinet giving +1 diplomats and the one that gives +1 missionaries).

[PrawnStar]

I'll be following, I've read some of your analytical postings in the past and I'm sure I'll learn something interesting about the game reading this.

[MacroEconomics]

After noting that Avignon has somehow won its independence from The Papacy AND allied with Spain before I could take them out, I resign myself to targeting Genoa for annexation. But before I can put my plans into action, Tuscany DoWs The Papacy, which itself had somehow allied with Bavaria. Excellent, two targets for the price of one! Unfortunately, a scant one month later in game time, I logged off to do an errand and when I returned, a save game file was no where to be found. Forced to restart at my last Autosave, I again setup to take out Genoa. Once again before that could occur, Tuscany DoWs The Papacy. This time the Holy See had allied with Venice. Not as good as four province Bavaria, but I'll take what I can get.

One of the things I learned this time about answering a call to arms from an ally is that you still lose stability points for entering the war. But you do get an automatic Causus Belli. So in this instance for DoWing The Papacy I lost one stability pt (same religion). However you don't gain any BB from answer a call by your allies. Ordinarily I would have gotten 2 BB for DoWing Papacy w/o a Causus Belli and 1 BB pt w/CB (at least that's my recollection). But this time I received no BB. Morale of the story: allies can save you BB. Nor do any penalties for being dragged into war with your target's allies count (I still had an enforced peace treaty w/Venice for example).

One thing you do have to watch out for though is that allies will be quick to initiate sieges on targeted enemy provinces. Once war begins, if you have allies (particularly if they were the ones to start it), rush with your detached cav to cover as many provinces as you can.

Also given the hapharzard manner in which your allies behave, its probably a good idea not to use your spies to get CBs until right before you need them. For example in this case, I could have used my single spy to try and Fabricate Claims on Genoa in preparation for a DoW in a few months. But by not using it, I had it available to Fabricate Claims on one province Venice which saved me 3 BB when I annexed it.

Annexing Venice was a bit more complicated than expected however. Getting control of all three Papal provinces and Venezia was easy. I simply applied the standard surrender monkey assault force of: # of monkeys = fort level*10,000. I'm of the impression that artillery doesn't come into play during assaults (they sure don't take casualties), which is a bit odd. At any rate after seizing all of these provinces, Venice still would allow an annexation, despite my having a 100% war score. That puzzled me to no end, until the thought of colonies occurred. Sure enough they owned Tahiti. A amphibious force was sent from western Australia (all of coastal Australia is now blanketed by French colonies). Even after occupying Tahiti however annexation was not possible. Instead I was forced to seize Tahiti and then annex Venice. Some small extra BB from seizing the colony. The Papacy was also stubborn. They rejected three straight peace offers before offering both of their non-capital provinces on their own initiative.

Here's how Italy looks after the war (sorry about the odd positioning, but I wanted to show how I lost control of the Curia - after spending nearly 1000 gold trying to defend my control of it)

[MacroEconomics]

I've been getting a lot of Colonial Assembly events. I need to shed those events as soon as possible. No new colonies are being started and those that exist are being ramped to cities as soon as possible. The upshot of the new colonial events is that it is generally speaking a terrible idea to be a colonial builder at the late stages of the game in NA.

The year or so is relatively quiet, except for the constant revolts. The stationing of quick reactions forces (cav & naval forces) in the Carribean, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean is paying a lot of dividends. Without them, I probably would have lost 2/3rds of my overseas territories.

Sometime later our Sicilian allies DoW one province Papacy. We agree to enter the war and swoop down to seize Roma. After annexation, we get an event proposing the establishment of ... The Papacy. Now that would render our annexation a rather pointless, BB gaining exercise so we decline - at the cost of additional BB.

Finally in 1787, we start getting our Tech 45's. Both Production and Gov't hit level 45. Tech level 45 is an important milestone because it allows certain useful NIs. Speaking of which I'm wistfully looking at that Church Attendance NI which I mistakenly passed on at the start of the game. I need to come up with some strategy to get to +1 stability so I can make some more changes to my NIs. Seemingly the only way to do this is to suffer the national tax penalties from the Colonial Assembly events and throw economic output into building Stability. As I contemplate the 40-70% tax reductions that would occur from such a plan, a shocker occurs.

French Revolution. Viva la France! We get a Revoultionary Republic. +6 stability shift and massive changes to all of our domestic policy choices. Three days later the Revolution event ends. This changes everything.

[germanpeon]

the Revolution, hurrah! Lets see where this takes you.

[MacroEconomics]

A lot of internal events. But first a recap of international affairs. The most notable being the long running war between Crimea and the Ottomans on one side and Russia, Prusiia and Kurland on the other. The Russians are dominating the field of battle. All of Crimea is occupied as well as all of eastern Ottoman territory. By this I mean the Caucausus, 3/4ths of Asia Minor, all of Iraq, Syria and the Middle East down to the Sinai. Who knows what kind of blistering peace treaty the Russians will be able to land? A strong Russian/Prussian alliance bodes ill for France down the road. The British are moving to conquer the rest of Ireland, having DoWed Leinster. They then promptly got their butts kicked, as Leinster has all of the British provinces in Ireland occupied. Needless to say, we're rooting for the Irish. The British have also DoWed Vijayanager. No idea how that is going.

As can be seen from the last screenshot I immediately used the higher stability from the French Revolution to trade Divine Supremacy (+1 missionaries) for Church Attendance (-33% cost of stability). That plus the end of the Revolution lowered the cost of stability enough to warrant putting all our non-cash output to stability. Even with no disposable output to r&d, we did get our tech 45s in the summer of '87. That Septemeber we finished out stability building (to +1), which I promptly used to trade Scientific Revolution (-2.5% tech costs) for Rev/Counter Rev (automatic causus belli vs. other gov types). After also shifting domestic policy one step towards Narrowminded, we're right back at our customary -3 stability level. Fits like a glove!

Imagine my shock then in early 1788 when we get the great man event for Tallyrand. A nice +3 shift on stability plus reduction in BB. With a little more investment in stability we'll be able to shed our last useless NI, Colonial Adventures (+1 colonists) for something useful, like Esprit d'Corps or Improved Foraging. That will reduce the rate we get colonists to below zero, but ever since the end of the Revolution, those annoying Colonial Assembly events have stopped occurring. In another 15 years or so France will have moved back towards Narrowminded enough to start getting a few colonists.

The plan going forward now seems fairly straight forward. Start absorbing small minors so my territories can get connected. At some point decide on a bigger war to vassalize important minors such as Holland and Denmark. Then finally start the big war. It would seem that we're ahead of schedule. But this game has been a series of non-stop surprises...

[MacroEconomics]

I've progressed enough that I have some definitive thoughts on intial play for France in the 1776 scenario. I think it pays to be aggressive, but the focus shouldn't really be on small minors. The problem with annexing small minors, is that even if you Fabricate Claims on the capital province it takes 4 BB to conquer a single province (3 for the annexation and 1 for the DoW). It's true this can be reduced to 3 BB if the country is allied with a country you DoW, but it's still not a very efficient way to spend your 33 BB points before you begin the badboy wars.

Instead I think France's target should be a country with an extremely large number of valuable provinces that therefore cost only 1 BB per province to conquer (plus the fixed cost from DoW of course). That target is Austria. Fighting Austria early in the game when you have the revolution event ongoing is going to be a bit frightening. For the first couple of years you probably should limit yourself to simply nailing Piedmont-Sardina. But sometime in the 1780's your BB is going to be back down to around 0 (hire the best diplomats at the start of the game, there are some four star ones available), you'll get a leader and you should aim for Austria. The objective would be to take 20+ provinces from Austria in a series of wars so that by the time 1800 rolls around, the start of the BB wars will see Austria emasculated and France with no major powers on your border (I'm still assuming you focus diplomatic efforts on keeping Spain allied).
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Of course that's not the path taken here. I didn't come to the above conculsions until around 1792. By that time I had spent a slug of BB on annexing Piedmont & Genoa. Furthermore I was looking for a line to the Netherlands so I could force vassalize them. That led to the annexation of Liege and Trier, again at heavy BB cost. Yes, my spies were working overtime to get claims on all of those capital provinces, but still it was a lot of BB.

Here's the situation currently. France is at war with Koln. The plan is to DoW Palatinate which is allied with Saxony and Netherlands. Palatinate's province of Berg will give us access to the rest of Koln. Grab all but the capital provinces from Koln & Saxony and vassalize Netherlands.



As can be seen Netherlands is no pushover. They field a huge home army, and we'll need to grab many of their overseas possessions as well to enforce a vassalization. There's also the risk that defeating them will leave them so weak as to make them a worthless ally. But I feel confident (overconfident?) that Davout, a 5 fire, 5 shock leader will prevail. More problematic is how we're going to take overseas territory. According to the ledger the Dutch have 125k troops. Since naval scouting confirms that there are only 80k or so in their home territories that leaves some 45k abroad, presumably mostly in Java. That "slightly" outnumbers my 12k troops (combined) in the Carribean and East Indies. Hmmm, this may be a problem. The last thing I want to do is sink a bunch of Dutch ships to keep them from swarming over my overseas colonies...

[jambojones]

Nice AAR i will be following this .

[MacroEconomics]

After some consideration we need to postpone the big operation against the Netherlands. We've sighted a huge Dutch fleet with 20 East Indiamerchantmen in ... the East Indies of all places. Our limited ground forces in that area simply can't deal with the prospect of 20k Dutch troops rampaging from island to island. So we send off a fleet of 16 Tripledeckers to the Pacific. Another amphibious force is sent to Maritius so it can invade the Dutch possessions in south Africa. Those ships are slow so it will take some time to get there. Making it worse, I didn't post my naval leaders to those forces in transit so they moved slower and took more attrition. By the time they reached their destinations some ships were below 20% hull strength. Thus another long wait ensued while ships were repaired. In fact the wait got so long that even the Dutch got bored and their big 80k stack moved away from the French border back to their normal holding pen in Holland. Then at the last moment I realized I had lost track of that big Dutch transport fleet and a mad recon scramble ensued before the fleet was sighted just off the coast of Brittany!

Lesson: Fast, small ships (frigates in this era) actually do have a purpose. They are much better suited to overseas postings because they can more easily redeploy on a strategic level. Still, I'm satisfied with having built only ships of the line in this game - the big threat to me on the naval sphere is clearly Great Britain, and I'll need all the muscle I can muster to deal with them.

So finally on 1 Jan 1794 a DoW is sent to Palatinate. Dutifully Saxony and the Netherlands answer the call from Palatinate. All the baloons are up, the game is on.

The individual theatre deployments look as follows:

Carribean: 4k French troops under Moncey attack Dutch Guinea. Another 2k French aim to beseige St. Martin. We have 10 SoL (ships of the line, aka Tripledeckers) here with no Dutch ships in sight.

South Africa:7k troops under Joubert, protected by 6 SoLs. I can already tell what is going to be the problem here. I have no conquistadors (can't get any either since I'm playing with Historical Leaders), and no knowledge of the interior. The Dutch are going to flee to the hinterland and harass me. Oh well...

East Indies: Operating from our base in Halmahera (still only a colony), we have 9k troops under Joubert (for some reason you get two of this guy...), protected by 17 SoL and 5 frigates. That force plans to land on island after island eliminating the 1k field force the Dutch like to place on their islands and then leave 1k infantry to besiege will moving the rest of the force to hit the next island. We're never going to get to Java (inhabited by over 20k Dutch troops) or Ceylon (inhabited by 10k Dutch troops).

Europe: France has 62 SoLs based in Calais under our sole naval leader d'Gastiang, to keep watch on the Dutch fleet. I'd rather not fight (and destroy) them, but can't afford to let any ground troops escape to cause trouble overseas. The ground forces are deployed as in the prior screenshot, but with the arrival of on Napolean Bonaparte last year, he moves to take control of Davout's forces, and Davout goes to face the Saxons.

Time to roll the dice...

[MacroEconomics]

Napoleon heads north to Breda with 80k troops and annhiliates a single Dutch regiment in that province. The asault of the fort lasts for only 2 days before the defenders are wiped out and Nappy heads to Zeeland. By the end of Jan, that province too is in French hands and Nappy heads east to Holland where the big 70k Dutch force (no leader awaits). The battle was never in doubt as the Dutch suffer about 35k casualties vs. 8k for the French. Holland is a level 5 fort, so I decide to leave that beseiged and continue on with Napoleon to pursue the Dutch who are retreating towards Utrecht.

Davout has similar success against the Saxons in a field battle at Dresden. But with only about 1/3rd the infantry that Napoleon had, the assault of the city takes longer and more French casualties ensue. Kellerman and Jourdan are dispatched with cav to pursue the defeated Saxon field forces. But in a major mistake, I failed to keep track of where they were retreating to, and they actually defeated Kellerman at Meissen before Jourdan could join him. And then when Jourdan arrived, the Saxons beat him too! In both cases we had about 9k French cav with full morale under a good leader defeated by about 5k mixed cav/inf Saxons with lowered morale and no leader. Shocking.

In the centre, Suchet with about 30k infantry defeats the main Palatinate army of about 15k that had a significant cav advantage (about 8k v. 0 French horses). I was interested in this combat to see how much a lack of cav could be offset by better morale/leaders. From what I could tell, its not a good idea to go cav-less. The battle took longer to win than expected and enemy casualties were lower than desired. And importantly, pursuit after the battle is problematic.

Better news comes at the end of March when Nappy wipes out the remaining 30k Dutch at Utrecht, setting the stage for what should be a peaceful seige of the remaining mainland Dutch forts. And Davout finishes off the resistant Saxons at Meissen. That leaves Souchet with 30k infantry marching north to Berg to complete the conquest of the heretofore unaccessable province of Koln. Since those are also within range of Napoleon's force, I'm expecting/hoping there won't be a problem with that operation. Sure enough by the end of the summer all is in order here.

A note on fort assaults: While easy to carry off successfully in this era, it appears to me that the main consideration with them is the casualties you take. And that's not an issue from the standpoint of the assaulting regiments being made hors de combat, but rather from an overall manpower view. So far in this campaign I've assaulted 5 forts and they've probably accounted for 30+% the casualties I've sustained. I think I could pretty easily continue (given the lack of opposing field forces) and rapidly seize all the cities held by the Dutch/Saxons/Koln/Palatinate in Europe, but since I'm going to have to wait until seiges are successful in the Carrib & Pacific before force vassalizing Netherlands, I have time to spare. And the casualty count is of concern. Despite having National Conscripts (an NI), the casualties from this war alone are more than France's manpower adds for an entire year. I'm fearful for what will happen once we start meeting up with the likes of Charles, Suvarov and the like...

[Calum Cornish]

Why does having historical monarchs mean you can't hire conquistadors

[MacroEconomics]

>Why does having historical monarchs mean you can't hire conquistadors

It doesn't. But having historical leaders does.

[MacroEconomics]

It's not a long wait on the seiges against Koln, Palatinate and Saxony. After all we do have 5 leaders with seige bonus ratings. Each of those opponents are reduced to their capital provinces only. Against the Netherlands we grind through colonial south Africa, and make steady progress against their cities in the East Indies and the Carribean. The level 4 & 5 forts in their homeland are much tougher. But when we get a 55% warscore, I take a long shot at forced vassalization (650-odd victory score) and they accept! They should still be a viable ally, with a decent economic base. Their fleet has been reduced to 25 ships though. We never fought a naval battle against them, but our Spanish allies evidently reaped severe revenge against their former subjects.

Here's what northern Europe looks like at the end of the war. Note my BB levels are right at their threshold.



Not certain what the next step should be. Presumably wait for BB to drop to below 32.00, get a CB and DoW one of either a) Austria or b) Prussia/Russia. The idea would be to divide the first real war against majors into a prelude war against a single alliance and to cripple it before proceeding to leap over the BB limit.

[PrawnStar]

I would imagine DOW Austria once you're under 32 and seriously smash them about. Although you appear to have a royal marriage with them, which presumably makes for some interesting conversations in one royal bedroom...

My choice would be Austria because you can get to all of it in reasonable time and hence put one of the main opponents down and out before pressing the big red button. Russia might just turn into a meatgrinder that wrecks your manpower pool without establishing a clear strategic advantage.


Edit - congratulations on the BB judgement, you cut that pretty fine!