Chapter 21: The end of Egypt
March 2, 1877: Austria honors its truce with us, and ignores Bavaria's call for help. This is an effective way to make someone's prestige plummet, as they will lose 25 prestige per dishonored call. Bavaria mobilizes 2 weeks later, giving them almost 20 more divisions.
March 29: The Bavarians managed to sneak much of their army west, while I was expecting them to go east. As a result, they caught my occupation army with their pants down. And as we all know, you can't fire breech loading rifles if your pants are down.
April 15: Oldenburg is annexed. This gives me 3 provinces surrounded by Hanover.
April - September: Bavaria's army and mine dance around, not really managing to land any killing blows. Unfortunately for them, I can take this indefinitely, and they cannot.
September 9: I don't want to let too much of my army sit around idle. This is a straight occupation and rebel clearing: Switzerland has no army.
October 28: Kenya is colonized. Now we can train secret units that can run
LIKE KENYANS! (mild language) And with our first colony, we are addicted. More colonies!!!!!!
October 31: Prussia falls to Jacobins. That leaves the Anarcho Liberal rebels still running around angrily.
December 7: After whittling down Bavaria's army and occupying everything, we reduce Bavaria to their final region. Our borders look a little better.
One ironic result of colonizing: new colonial pops are equally split among ideologies.
There are 7 nations with 50+ brigades: China (1413), UK (679), Japan (165), Me (123), France (92), Korea (91), and Russia (50). My numbers sound impressive until you realize that I can mobilize a whipping 10 brigades.
While I was busy in Bavaria, I failed to notice this...
January 21, 1878: Abeche is colonized.
January 24: We get the Ambassador insulted event. We choose to mend fences, since I don't want to trigger a two sided war between France and Russia.
Here's a random world map, resulting from hitting the wrong button. As you can see, the UK literally just signed peace to take New England from the USA.
February 14: Switzerland cedes East Switzerland to us. We celebrate by colonizing the Libyan Desert. Niger follows 10 days later, and the East Central Sahara follows in a month.
March 1: I finally manage to scrape together enough influence to drop France to Cordial in Baden. In retrospect, I should have risked the intervention for a clean shot at France. C'est la vie.
March 9: With Russia coming close to taking West Galicia from Austria, I declare war on Serbia to try and draw them into a war. Russia declines. On the 10th, I try again with Krakow - again Russia declines. Instead, they force Austria to cede West Galicia on the 11th. I'm now at war with 2 armyless minors.
March 22: I look at the Anarcho-Liberal rebels and nearly spew coke. With so many angry people, you'd expect lots of emigration: I lose 3363/month, but gain 16317 in Immigration.
In a look at my Upper House, I find my Capitalists are overwhelmingly Liberal (50%), and 21% Socialist. Unfortunately, my Aristocrats are 10x as numerous and are 53% Conservative, 19% Liberal. Apparently, I can't send them all into the army and march them to Siberia.
My middle class pops are 36% socialist/32% liberal, but expanding the UH franchise would be bad, as my poor POPs are overwhelmingly conservative. As usual, I have no good options (even if I had options).
April 1: We declare war on armyless Baden. A simple map cleaning job, and it provides a shorter link between Switzerland and Wurttemburg (which otherwise has a lake in the way).
June 10: I try again to get Russia into a war by declaring war on Afghanistan (spheremate and ally), but they still don't bite). Russia has lost 75 prestige in less than a year though, so that's something.
June 20: Krakow is annexed. Serbia follows in August, and Baden in November.
October 2: Tuscany declares independence from Italy, and I get even better news 5 days later:
With our protection gone, Egypt gets a flurry of war declarations: Italy on October 27th, Russia on November 8th, Greece on November 18th, and finally us on the 19th. This sounds like a race for Egypt, except that we're the only one with troops in the area.
March 17, 1879: Rift Valley is colonized. Mauritania follows in May, then Niamey Region in July, and Waw and Timbuktu in August.
June 1: Woohoo! Time to go after Experimental Railroad.
June 20: Afghanistan is annexed (with Persian help). We follow up with a declaration of war on Bukkhara (who has no allies).
August: The Netherlands declares war on Egypt.
September: Italy is booted out as a GP by USCA.
November 12: Egypt is cut down to size by Russia, despite Russia having only taken 1 province.
November 17: Experimental Railroad is researched, leading to a MASSIVE railroad building spree. We go for Mechanical Production.
December 1: Darwinism is invented. Literacy, here we come!
January 7, 1880: The UK hosts the Congo Conference. Ironically, the next month, they choose to table it.
January 20: Egypt is crushed.