Reason VIII
This game is too easy.
Issue Twenty-seven
We start this Reason in January of 1700. As you can see on the picture below, I have the greatest empire in Europe (the Ottomans are mostly in Asia, that doesn't count!) and I'm basically uncontested in Western Africa as well. Morocco might look intimidating but I handed their ass to them on multiple occasions, so I don't think I need any proof that I could do so again if I had to. The Ottomans have slightly more troops than I do, but they are like ten levels behind me in both Land and Naval tech, so they aren't a real threat either, despite their insane size. I could most likely kick England around with my hands tied behind my back if I wanted to. I can't really imagine who would be a relevant enemy at this point.
The state of Europe and Northern Africa in January, 1700.
So what should I do now? Waging wars is boring and doesn't really provide any benefits. Colonizing is even less fun than it sounds and we are actually running out of colonizable land (most of the gray area in Africa is Wasteland). Building factories was fun for a while and with over 1000 gold annual income (after taxes!) I could easily afford more of them (they cost over 4000 now, so it would take over four boring years, but they take five years to build anyway), but I'm sure you see why that doesn't really appeal to me now either.
Alright, I can't sit this Issue through entirely (well, technically I could, but that wouldn't be too entertaining now, would it?), so let's do something half-interesting at least: try and end this idiocy of a mission I have been cursed with for the past two centuries and beat Milan once and for all! Here's the situation:
- From the mission, I have a Conquest Casus Belli, which is nice but since I also have a core in Verona, I have a much better Reconquest Casus Belli as well.
- Milan is allied with Baden, Bavaria and Aquileia, and also part of the Empire, currently under Brandemburgian rule. Baden has three provinces and 14.000 men, Bavira has a single province and 8.000 men, Aquileia has about four provinces and 26.000 men. Brandenburg is a little more intimidating with 102.000 men, but they have their own war to fight right now and they are pretty far away so they shouldn't effect the war too much.
- I have a miriad of minions as usual and they should do well for cannon fodder.
After positioning one of my two major fleets outside of the Aquileian ports and the other in Öresund to block Brandenburg (They have like 8 ships total! Ridiculous!) and redeploying my armies on the Milanese border, I give the order to attack. By the way, Milan is also five levels behind me in Land tech. But before I could have done that, I recieved this event:
Sought after Bachelor, you say?
As you can see, the event is kinda borked. If I chose the obvious option, ie. telling the b*tch to scr*w herself ASAP would lower my relations with myself (
How can you look into the mirror after telling an ugly girl that you won't marry her?!) and also my king will try to commit suicide and he has a 50% chance to fail, making himself the laughing stock of Europe. The other option would be a Royal Marriage with
noone and increased relations with said
noone by 100 points. Plus losing the "Sought after Bachelor" modifier, which gives -0.5 Infamy and +2% Prestige a year. Now this is what I call a dilema. Still, losing my king and thus not being able to declare war would be a serious setback with a two years old bastard next in succession and I don't think 50-50 is a good chance to avoid that (losing 5 Prestige wouldn't be
that catastrophic).
Hmm. Alright, I'll be honest. I was
reeeeealy tempted to take the second option and hope for my king to succeed in his suicide attempt, which would have allowed me to wash my hands and sit out this Issue after all, but... I don't know, maybe I'm geting old and sentimental?
So I took the offer and lost the bonus modifier for nothing. By the way, if you are interested why I didn't get the Royal Marriage and the bonus relations, it's quite simple: Holstein
does exist at the moment, but they have a Regency Council so they can't have Royal Marriages right now... Or so I thought. But actually it was only a display error, because I recieved both the Royal Marriage and the relations bonus (Skyrocketing from -161 to -61! Woooohooo!). Whatever.
Soooo, as I was, I finally started the war against Milan in late April, 1700. All of the allies have joined right away on both sides, so no surprises there. Their side had an average War Capacity of about 35-40%, which is very bad news for them, but much better news for me of course. Aquileia was also 100% blockaded right away and Brandenburg wasn't much better off with their 40% either. Turns out it's not a good idea to have colonies in the New World with 8 ships total after all.
French Military Supremacy was undeniable from the start:
A five levels difference is a lot, even when it's less than 15%.
The funny thing is that my minions were really afraid of Aquileia. For whatever reason they didn't notice that I'm completely blockading the country off and that their entire Army was sitting in their capital (Friuli, what a stupid sounding name...) to avoid collapse! Idiots!
Anyway, Bavaria was very quick to go down and they became my Vassal, losing all their now-foreign cores and stuff. They'll think twice before betting on the wrong side next time!
Milan of course had a stray province left somewhere outside my reach. Don't you just love that? When a single province on the far end of the world keeps you from annexing a country? Truly an awesome feature of such a beautiful game! Fortunatelly it wasn't really that hard to find: Estland. Seems legit. Bah, whatever, I probably couldn't annex them anyway. So let's just take three of their five provinces now and we'll be back for the rest!
That leaves Baden, Brandenburg and Aquileia. I suffered heavy losses in sieges in Aquileia and also in Baden. I really don't understand how this works. Having a lot of cannons should give me a huge advantage in sieges, shouldn't it? Yet I'm a lot more efficient in sieges if I only have Infantry. And they are also cheaper. Go figure...
A little later Brandenburg managed to bring some reinforcements to besieged Baden, cathing me completely off-guard and wiping out one of my otherwise perfectly good Divisions I had there! Because the notification messages are still messed up and I didn't even know about the battle! In the end I accepted their White Peace offer after decimating twice as many of their troops. Good riddance. I also started to consider increasing my standing army.
After defeating Baden (forcing them to release the Palatinate again), I could focus my whole attention to Aquileia. And Wales, who joined a little while ago and was vassalized rather quickly (after costing me like 20-30.00 men on their damned walls!). And when I managed to take most of Aquileia, I realized that they don't really have anything left to give. They had no money, their provinces were crap except for the ones that weren't occupied by me and they didn't have any minors to release either. So I took Görz just to gain a foothold in the middle of their lands. That should teach them! And thus ended my first war to finally get that stupid mission done. I could take another shot as early as November, 1705, so it was only a year and a half of waiting.
1706 began with my final invasion of Milan. This time I chose not to call any of my allies because they are not needed and would only complicate things with their surrendering to irrelevant enemies. Milan brought Brandenburg into the conflict again but that shouldn't be any more of a problem now than it was the last time around.
By June, Milan was already defeated (the 10 Prestige I got is kinda underwhelming and my next mission, turning Switzerland Catholic isn't that exciting either) and Brandenburg was sending huge forces to take my lands. They will be defeated promptly and my lands returned to my proper rule.
Later on Brandenburg managed to bring a surprising amount of buddies into our little party. How can they have so many allies with a rather bad reputation and like 20-30 provinces?! No matter, evne Holland with pretty much all of South Africa under their belt is nothing more than an annoyance. The best Brandenburg could manage before they started bombarding me with White Peace offers was losing two thirds of their army. So, it quickly became a question of what my war goal against them should be. Originally I decided that the release of Bohemia should be a worthy goal but later on I noticed a sizeable army of Bohemian Nationalists, so I went for Mazovia, Thuringia and Münster instead, with some money thrown in for good measure. I let Holland and the minors go with a simple warning and after a lightning campaign with my 40.000 strong Army, Brandenburg was quick to dissolve, although by the end of the campaign, my army shrink to a mere 12.000. Still, the morale of the story is that you don't f*ck with France. (Sorry for the rude word, but it was necessary for the alliteration
)
After that easy victory I spent the last two years of the first decade of 1700 training some more Infantry and building another Weapons Manufactury in Périgord. And with this the Issue #27 is concluded. I wonder what my next goal should be. How about the dissolution of the HRE?
The current electors are Croatia, Meissen, Mecklenburg, Oldenburg, Silesia and the Papal States, plus Brandenburg... None of them looks too scary...