My latest game as Castille -> Spain.
After first buying EU3 seven or eight months ago, I've play about ten games in total, all on Easy difficulty. By this point I felt I was ready to wean myself off of that and kick it up to Hard, so for this I picked a powerful country, Castille, to let me get used to it.
My goal here was pretty much to colonize historically and play a "conventional" Spain game, while keeping it interesting by having random lucky nations on. It seems a lot of people don't like to use lucky nations, but I for one like it because it sets up clearly-defined, stable powers and a less chaotic atmosphere.
After completing the Reconquista I just went with the flow when I got the mission to take provinces in North Africa. I ended up force-vassalizing Morocco and taking one of their landlocked provinces solely because it had gold. One of the coastal provinces bordered Algiers so over the next century I exploited the Holy War CB to eat up Algiers and sell all the provinces to Morocco to make them more powerful. True, their troops eventually became relatively backwards later in the game, but they had a large enough military to give some strategic benefit.
Boundary Disputes on Portugal led to me to slowly force them off the continent over the course of the game without many obstacles. Aragon was a much harder nut to crack though. After France's early collapse, the power vacuum to my north was filled by England, Burgundy, and Aragon. On the second map above, all my vassals you see in southern France were once part of Aragon, which by early-16th-century was a huge threat to me. For a while I was convinced they were "lucky." But wars with England and Burgundy broke them and I was able to take most of their provinces and force them to release southern French minors which I later diplo-vassalized. By this time I allied with Burgundy and England, and we were the three most powerful nations in the world. However, for most of the game I was pulling my hair out, unable to conquer Aragon due to a huge web of guarantees and alliances, often involving Burgundy and England themselves.
By far the biggest power here was, as you can see, Austria. Needless to say, all of Siberia was theirs as soon as they reached the Black Sea. They've been HRE for the entire game and they managed to pass all but the last two reforms. They even attempted to Revoke the Privilegia but it failed, which kind of disappointed me because I was looking for a big boss-type threat. They were already immensely powerful but they were a sleeping giant. I never went to war with them because I knew they would have crushed me. They inherited Aragon in the late 1600s which enraged me and almost destroyed all hope of forming Spain, but I soon realized I could gain Barcelona by using spies to spawn stack after stack of patriot rebels which they were powerless to defeat, considering their mere 20-strong transport fleet.
Predictably, I conquered the Inca and Central American natives as quickly as possible and proceeded to colonize in all directions. I wanted to finish the game with all of South America as my private continent, but I didn't quite make it. I ended up forcing several minors off the Brazilian coast, but I conceded to leave Britain and Austria alone. Britain, my reliable ally and almost evenly-matched power, was not a country worth warring with, and there was no way I was going to mess with the Austrian beast.
As far as PUs go, I got a peaceful PU on a weak Sweden in midgame and subsequently forced a PU on Denmark which had colonized extensively in Canada. After inheriting both of them, I released Denmark as a vassal and sold them all of Sweden's former provinces, allowing them to form Scandinavia.
Vijayanagar was a huge stable power stretching all the way from the Bay of Bengal to the Caucasus, until Austria pulverized them in the 1700s. Rather interestingly, in the late game, Ming actually offered me an alliance, which I accepted partly for the sheer novelty of it, and partly because, despite their backwards troops, they had the third largest army in the world at the time, at over 400,000. B-ut alas, almost immediately after I accepted, Ming fell under a personal union with a Hindu Khorasan that Austria had forced Vijayanagar to release earlier. So now I had the Confucian Chinese being ruled by a Hindu Persian king thousands of miles away. Not something you see every day. :happy:
