Children of the Sun - a Cuzco MEIOU AAR

[blsteen]

Excellent progress by the Incas under the wise rule of Huyana Capac II.
That's quite the province haul.

[Rendap]

Inca > Europeans. At least here...

Great update Mal! Keep pounding on those minimalistic Europeans who can not reach the Incan levels. They have even admitted it and calls themselves colonial now...

[Nikolai II]

Time to start guaranteeing people in the hopes of stumbling into wars, or just time to build armies and whack rebels, or?

[morningSIDEr]

Plague kills 16800 people in Mayapan. After all the pathetic disasters in recent years this is a breath of fresh air.

Or rather a breath of plague filled, rancid air? Thank goodness for this anyway, the last natural disasters were hugely dissapointing!

A pity regarding Huayna Capac II's passing, he was a truly great leader. Sadly the same cannot quite be said of his 3/3/4 son...

[randakar]

But having bad stats on Incan rules is a time-honoured tradition!

[Malurous]

Wow, that is the longest ruler history I've ever seen. Although the "brief" and "short" wars with Iberians look odd in contrast to the "Long Incan-Hawaiian Imperialist War". At least your heir is almost half-way along to adolescence, but the regency council is going to hurt.

Yeah it's funny that the Hawaiian war was one of the longest wars we've fought. That's what you get for sieging instead of assaulting - I didn't want to ship armies capable of assaulting level 3 forts to Hawaii as it would have been a terrible hassle with no long term benefit.

At least I was lucky enough to get the regency while I was still at war so I could take more to partially compensate for the current inability to declare wars.

WOW 210 provinces he was busy.

You counted them? But yes, he truly was.

Kind of a rough rep to follow though.
Notice several enemy provinces still in north america.

It is! Yeah, I'll try and attack Portugal again when I can to keep the American campaign going.

Think I will reread the whole AAR.

Whee, happy to hear that!

Excellent progress by the Incas under the wise rule of Huyana Capac II.
That's quite the province haul.

It is, considering that we're more than 350 years into the game it's quite impressive that one Sapa Inca manages to double the size of the country.

Inca > Europeans. At least here...

Great update Mal! Keep pounding on those minimalistic Europeans who can not reach the Incan levels. They have even admitted it and calls themselves colonial now...

Ah Rendap, thanks and good to have you here! That's a good way to look at the colonial flip. It's a shame that the culture change events from colonial cultures to the local ones (for instance the Colonial Spanish -> Colombian flips we've seen in Inca territory) check the region so Gavaudan can't flip into Canadian or something.

Time to start guaranteeing people in the hopes of stumbling into wars, or just time to build armies and whack rebels, or?

The latter. I almost maxed out BB so I should be able to just sit around until the heir is old enough.

Or rather a breath of plague filled, rancid air? Thank goodness for this anyway, the last natural disasters were hugely dissapointing!

Indeed! "This is a breath of rancid air" would certainly be a fun expression to use.

A pity regarding Huayna Capac II's passing, he was a truly great leader. Sadly the same cannot quite be said of his 3/3/4 son...

It's not the son that's 3/3/4, it's the regency council. Sayri Tupac is actually very good.

But having bad stats on Incan rules is a time-honoured tradition!

True, especially when it comes to the administration stat. The current regency council is ADM 3, Huayna Capac II was ADM 3, Pachacutec II before him was ADM 3 and the regency for Pachacutec II was ADM 3 as well. In the best case scenario (i.e. Sayri Tupac doesn't die before taking the throne) we'll have had ADM 3 from 1629 until 1725. Good thing the guy before that managed to fully westernize or we would have been royally screwed with this run.

[dragonizer]

Yes I did and I read 51 pages in 9hrs last night & morning had to stop at 05:43 and go to sleep.

[Sethanon]

It is quite an addictive read once you get into it, Dragonizer!

Good update. Let's hope the heir will do as good as his father. Although I highly doubt he can add that many provinces lol! Very impressive deeds.

[dragonizer]

15hrs to reread.
It was even better the 2nd time.
If march times are so long in far north what about amphibious landings?
my marine corps time has to ask.

Unrelated: can someone tell me why while I am reading I get bumped off forum and have to login again?

[Athalcor]

Could you post some graphs? (like showing the number of provinces over time etc)

[Malurous]

I've run into some trouble with this. I played through the ~seven year regency in one long sitting only to find out afterwards that EU III inexplicably stopped saving the screenshots about a year in. This means that, since replaying would be both questionable and boring, this period won't be described in detail like the rest of the AAR has been. My apologies. Then again, it might be a good thing as seven years of no meaningful interaction with any other nation - I mean, how can you "interact meaningfully" when you can't declare war - probably isn't the most interesting thing to read a detailed description about.

So the plan now is to go back to the game and grab some screenshots (provided it actually works this time) of maps and stats, then piece together what I can of the major events of this period. We'll see what I can come up with as this is a totally different approach from what I usually have, but I hope it will be something of interest.

Yes I did and I read 51 pages in 9hrs last night & morning had to stop at 05:43 and go to sleep.

Kudos for that!

It is quite an addictive read once you get into it, Dragonizer!

Good update. Let's hope the heir will do as good as his father. Although I highly doubt he can add that many provinces lol! Very impressive deeds.

Thanks! The number might be difficult to top, he'd have to live a ridiculously long life as well for starters...

15hrs to reread.
It was even better the 2nd time.
If march times are so long in far north what about amphibious landings?
my marine corps time has to ask.

Unrelated: can someone tell me why while I am reading I get bumped off forum and have to login again?

Good to hear that it was still enjoyable!

Hmm, now that we're nearing the coastline in most places that might be worth a shot, thanks.

I wouldn't know, I've had no issues like that... Try asking in the Forum Help section if it persists.

Could you post some graphs? (like showing the number of provinces over time etc)

Sure, that might be a good way to fill the next update in these circumstances.

[Malurous]

Chapter Seventy-three
1718-1725

Alright, for those who didn't read the feedback post: this will be a bit different because EU III chose not to save most of the screenshots I took during a long play session. If anyone has an idea why that might have been the case, please enlighten me. It's important - when I took the shots I actually use in this chapter, the same thing happened again (save the first ~30 screenshots in the session, then nothing). If this is going to turn into a regular "feature" then AARing won't be easy.

Anyway, this chapter is an overview of the country, as well as a summary of what I remember happening during the regency for Sayri Tupac I. Fortunately, major events were few and far between so not much has been lost.

* * *

The September 1717 rebellion in Iyuu, the Canadian province that's over a year's march from the neighboring provinces, succeeded. I don't know how when it was 2000 men against a level 2 fort, but succeed it did. However, my army was then less than a month away, so retaking it was easy. The disobedient locals felt the wrath of Inti as smallpox caused about 1000 deaths, bombing the province back into a colony. This was a blessing in disguise as it made conversion and culture flipping with a colonist possible.

Another example of the most important part of Inca life: an earthquake killed just under 30000 people in Moche and around 9000 in neighboring Chimu. Quite decent numbers.

We gained two levels in both Government and Land techs, and three levels in the other categories. Here's where we are in 1725:



We're tied with Venice for the most advanced nation, but some of the European majors aren't that far behind.

You can also see that our economy is, unsurprisingly, very much based on production income.

And here's a graph of how our income has progressed over the centuries:



Our westernization process started late in the 16th century, and I guess the graph makes sense from that point of view.

One effect of the technological progress is that Latin Cuirassiers are now available. I haven't changed yet and am unsure whether I should or not - my New World Dragoons still have a slight edge in shock and fire, but the European units are starting to have a very large morale edge by now.

Speaking of the military, we've recruited two more 20k armies. One was transported to eastern Iberia while the other is currently onboard a fleet heading for our African holdings.

Our army is quite easily the largest in the world.



We got a lot of new cores during this time, most in the northern USA region. The conversion bonus from having a core led me to focus on the northwest a bit more with my missionaries. It's still the most problematic area we have left as far as religion goes with a lot of Catholic provinces.



The east is looking better, but the cores don't help as the converting progress is ahead of the cores here.



Everything south or west of these in continental America is Inti. Also, as the last two Catholic provinces on Hispaniola embraced the True Faith during the regency, Portuguese Cuba is the last bastion of Catholicism in the Caribbean.



Two of our African provinces are Inti while the one we got from Nice is Catholic. Iberia as well as the Isle of Man are Catholic, while thanks to Ireland there's a thin purple strip representing Calvinism in the religion pie.



One thing helping the conversions along was a slider move I got and used to move a bit towards Narrowminded. We have been very Innovative due to the westernization requirement, but right now missionaries are more important than tech speed. Current sliders:



Thanks to colonizing the regency didn't completely stop our expansion, but of course it wasn't as quick as it's been recently.



New colonization during the regency included minor additions in the western US area...



...and somewhat more notable but still quite minor expansion in inland South America.



More importantly, we have now reached our colonization goals (everything west of the eastern tip of Brazil, up to the point where the western hemisphere "ends" on the game map) apart from the still vacant inland provinces. In the south, Viti was the last island group needed for this, so we moved on and colonized the North Island of New Zealand.



There are also colonists en route to the South Island as well as Vanuatu.

In the north there was more work to do, but the Pacific coastline has now been fully colonized (apart from the wasteland province in the extreme north obviously) so we pushed forward to Andreanov. There's no more room for peaceful expansion in this direction as we've run into Ming.



In fact, we finished this area in the nick of time: months after the last bit of American coast was secured, we spotted a small Ming fleet, led by an explorer. It sailed east on the Alaskan coast for a while before apparently realizing the land is taken and heading back. Chances are that there would have been a Ming colony on our end of the Aleutian island chain within years. Ming dodged that bullet as I would have had to utterly destroy them in that case. And frankly, I dodged one as well as I'm going to have my hands full dealing with the kill list as it is.

Either way, on June 27th 1725 Sayri Tupac I is finally old enough and the regency council has done its job.

[Avindian]

If you have Windows 7, it'll sometimes hide your screenshots under "compatibility files" if you use the Program Files (x86) folder. There should be a button you can click.

[zwitterion117]

Only two conversions of Bio Bio? A truly pathetic reign.

[dragonizer]

Can't interact meaningfully when you can't declare war.
Do the tech levels go higher in MEIOU?
I think you can handle the offenders list. It is just who they bring to the party with them.

[Barsoom]

Hugely enjoying this, thanks for posting. Still catching up, I just read about half of this in a week. I look forward to the next half.

Yes I did and I read 51 pages in 9hrs last night & morning had to stop at 05:43 and go to sleep.

Respect.

[Malurous]

If you have Windows 7, it'll sometimes hide your screenshots under "compatibility files" if you use the Program Files (x86) folder. There should be a button you can click.

Nah, I never got used to the whole Program Files thingy, I name my stuff like I did in the 80s. And that wouldn't really explain why the screenshots work in the beginning of a session and then stop doing so. 31 first screenshots were there for the playthrough, 33 for the summary (only had to go back to grab a few there), 104 for the next session which I just played. Only lost one screenshot of any significance (a peace deal) this time because I was monitoring the situation.

It's interesting, works perfectly fine until a seemingly random point when it stops working at all, then works fine again when I restart the game.

Only two conversions of Bio Bio? A truly pathetic reign.

Some things never change.

But well, at a glance Huayna Capac II had four but the reign was a lot longer. So it's not bad when you take the length into account.

Can't interact meaningfully when you can't declare war.
Do the tech levels go higher in MEIOU?

In theory there are 105 tech levels compared to 72 in vanilla. However most of the higher ones are more or less unreachable - seems to me that the 10+ last ones are something an ordinary economy won't see, whereas in vanilla you can get pretty close to the cap with a similar economy.

At this point you can pretty much subtract 5 from my current tech levels to get the equivalent vanilla level. That's because MEIOU starts 43 years earlier and of course the early tech levels are needed for those years.

I think you can handle the offenders list. It is just who they bring to the party with them.

Not really, my assumption is that I'll mostly ignore anyone outside the list. As long as they stay off the list, of course. But some of those countries have a lot of provinces so I'll need many wars to take care of them.

Hugely enjoying this, thanks for posting. Still catching up, I just read about half of this in a week. I look forward to the next half.

Thanks and welcome! Good to hear you're having fun with this.

Respect.

Indeed.

[Barsoom]

Finally caught up. I look forward to the Inca conquest of Cuba, which surely must be high on the agenda now. And of course the expedition into Germany to punish the Pope.

[aldriq]

I didn't think Ming would be so bold sailing east. But I agree that they would have made your kill list a bit overcrowded...

[PrawnStar]

I'm with you on rejecting Program Files, I won't use My Documents either. I know what they are and I'll file them where I want!

Liked the update style