Empire of Japan: The Greater East African Co-Prosperity Sphere
（日本帝国大東阿共栄圏,
Nippon Teikoku Daitoua Kyoueiken)
My second game, 1836 start, Normal difficulty, and without going over the infamy limit. I always pick Japan as the second country to play in games like these because I
am a weeaboo find it an excellent choice to learn how to tech up and modernise before going around conquering people in the name of the Emperor. In this game I also wanted to learn how to conquer uncivs, colonise, and scramble for Africa, and that's exactly what I did. I passed the 'Early Meiji Reformation' decision (I don't even know why such a thing is in the game), attacked Johore and Brunei, and was sphered by UK before breaking out upon modernisation. I then attacked Egypt, rushed N&I and Machine Guns, then colonised in such a way as to encircle as much territory as possible. Almost all the colonisable territories in the Pacific are also mine, the exception being Papua.
Strangely enough, I did not receive all of UK's research when I modernised despite being their sphereling. I thought modernising while being a sphereling gives you all your sphere-master's techs? A pity, but I still managed to into space (but not gain all inventions) by the end of the game.
I know the borders are horrible so I shan't murder your eyes by posting the screenshot showing only my national borders. Of the big players, USA, France, China and Ottomans are my closest allies, with whom I have never been at war. Suffice to say those were the ones who did not try to colonise Africa. Belgium is my puppet, while important spherelings are Netherlands, Brazil, Gran Colombia, Chile, Java, and especially Transvaal, who helped a ton against the UK. Also note how Prussia basically became the punching bag of the world - Austria owns the Polish territories, USA owns Holstein, and Ottomans owns Gelderland...
I took all the CBs I could get to steal territory from the other European nations, and I had a Great War against Netherlands and Prussia so I took as much as possible with the cheaper infamy cost. I'd like to annex Sokoto but unfortunately every single GP in the world decided that they wanted to get friendly with it despite none of them being adjacent to it, so I had to leave it alone. I also happen to own a little piece of South Africa as the UK, for some reason, decided that it absolutely didn't want to colonise it. Pperhaps the UK's AI is hardcoded not to colonise the very last available territory so as to give others a chance? When someone else tried to take it I decided I might as well snap it up.
My colonial war in Africa was the only 'Great War' of the game. I fought another spectacular war around the time of the real Great War when Austria attacked France, alone, and I called in half the world to help defeat the evil white blob in a 4 year-long war, hence the spot of blue in the middle of their country. My last significant war was when I fought Russia and UK, thanks to a free CB against Primorye, the warscore for which I gained purely through occupying UK territory with only Transvaal to help =)
Here's the scoreboard.
Note that my final score is actually rather inflated - I wanted to see if I could knock UK off the top spot so in the last few years of the game I spammed dreadnoughts, soldiers, and in the final month I declared war on someone and mobilised, but it still wasn't enough =( Silly Brits, they're so backward that they didn't research the tech which gives you -50% supply consumption, which could probably have made the difference. Still, even before the final sprint, dreadnoughts alone made up almost 3000 points of my military score. How the heck do AI countries get such a high military score without building capital ships?
But I guess I'm happy with my score - my Prestige is first place and greater than the next three nations added together, while my Industry was 4th-5th due to most of my POPs living in colonial states and thus I had relatively fewer crafties.
One last little quirk - due to going on a mad colonising rampage, I wanted to see how many foreign territories I could convert to a majority Japanese population. Here's the result of my efforts - the white territories represent Japanese populations.
I'm curious about the factors which could help convert a province to your nation's culture. I know you can set the National Focus to encouraging immigration, but I also tried to convert as many colonies to states as possible to see if it helped. I know it's bad for literacy, but I wanted to at least give it a try. Turning colonies into states gives you prestige, lets craftsmen appear, and allows the 'Patrimony' event giving cores to fire, but I don't know if it had an effect on cultural conversion. Does anyone have any ideas?
Anyway, that's it from me. I'm probably going to try USA for my next game to have a taste of the events that lead up to the civil war, and also to see if I can break the infamy limit, kill the UK, and become the tyrant of the world. But until then ...
Long Live the Emperor!
天皇陛下万歳！(Tennou Heika Banzai!)
