Lords of France: Roads to the Enlightenment

Rifal said:

There is a scary amount of red on that map. Hopefully France's military leadership is up too the task.

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I mean, this is a far weaker coalition than France is used to fighting (historically). Gameplay wise...as I said, the issue came up multiple times where I was nearly bankrupted. My biggest issue with any EU3 game is that I've never seen clever tactical AI actions. But then again I am playing as an omniscient player, maybe I need to lower my tactical abilities...

loki100 said:

what I like most about this is the realism of the logic behind your actors. The Anglo-Hapsburg alliance being one. It does look like France is very much on her own in this ... and well spotted to Rifal for this:

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A literary kind of realism or an IR kind of realism? Because I could go on for pages (and I have!) about the constructed nature of realist thinking, and how the origins of realism in Italy and England came as much out of the idea of Balance as a scientific ideal (as well as a dislike for France) as it came out of prudent strategy.

Although I have made much over Louis' reforms of the French army, by the beginning of the War of Savoy the French officer corps had remained relatively unchanged. The men who would become heroes after the war: de Maurepas, Comte Tulle, and the Prince de Chaumond, were still all junior staffers in the Royal Army at the beginning of the war.



In fact, discounting the King himself, there was only one senior officer left in the whole army. Maximillien de Toqueville, who had first fought in the Burgundian Wars as an infantry captain, was promoted to general for his loyalty during the reign of Henri II. He was the only general to survive both the purges of Francophile generals at the beginning of Henri II's reign and of Imperialist generals during the beginning of Louis XII's career. But his survivalist instincts had little to do with his military capability--de Toqueville was a phlegmatic commander, who content to wake up late, sit in his officer's carriage, reading every report sent to him before giving the order to move after he finished lunch. These marching orders generally came around 1PM, which meant that the army was only able to move for a couple of hours before having to make camp again--de Toqueville's main army, the Armee du Flandres, only averaged a couple of kilometers a day under his command, and the armies in the Northern Corps fared far worse.


With all of this considered, it's no question why Louis personally hesitated in his decision to give him command of the Austrian theatre. In the end, Louis decided that he would gamble on the idea that quickly dispatching the Savoyard army would give an opportunity for a quick war. The first month of the War of Savoy seemed to prove Louis' point: the Armee Royale was able to interdict the Army of Savoy while they were en route to Avignon (and totally unaware of France's involvement in the War). Louis' gallop cavalry started the battle by charging out of the Vercors forest, pistols blazing, into the unprepared Savoyard column. Chaos and a quick rout ensued, and before the Duke of Savoy was able to get a defense in order, many of his regiments had surrendered.


With the Army of Savoy dealt with, Louis XII felt that he was able to leave the Savoyard theater (essentially a series of static sieges) to Lorenzo, Prince of Milan, and move north to take control of the Northern Front, which was in desperate need of help.

De Toqueville thought that the Northern front would be a relatively easy war early on--although the 35,000 man Armee der Nederlanders was positioned in Kleves, it was the only Austrian army in the area. More men and supply would be difficult to ship through Germany, and most importantly, France possessed a series of 25 strongholds scattered across the provinces of Flanders and Artois which would slow the enemy down immeasurably. De Toqueville felt that he could create a picket line going from Calais to Champagne, which would protect Paris, and from Artois he could command the Flandres garrisons.

This was a huge mistake. Firstly, the 25 strongholds of Southern France, while impressive, were undermanned and undergunned. Only 15,000 men and 40 guns protected the 25 strongholds, leaving some strongholds with no artillery, or as little as 200 men. The largest stronghold in the Flanders, Poperinge (which protected the route between the Leie and Yser rivers), was commanded by de Toqueville's sycophant, the Comte Valmont, who shared de Toqueville's combination of strategic passivity and organizational micromanagement. Furthermore Valmont was particularly rude to the Flemish militiamen he commanded, as well as the townspeople he lorded over. So when the Duke of Luxembourg came to Poperinge with an army of 8,000 and 30 guns, the garrison surrendered immediately and started looting the French barracks, opening all of Flanders to the Armee der Netherlanders.


When de Toqueville woke up on the 8th of March, 1561 (at 10 AM) and read about the fall of Poperinge and the ensuing murder of French officers by Flemish militiamen, he was stunned, to the degree that he didn't take any visitors, hear any other reports, or have anyone come in contact with him for a full 4 hours. For those four hours he sat (or more likely paced) in his officerial carriage, considering his options. It's likely that he realized that his epic mismanagement of the Northern Front, which allowed the Austrian army to get within a stone's throw of Paris without any significant losses, would likely lead to him losing his position as Commander of the French Army. With news that Louis XII was coming to the Northern Front soon to replace him, and with the fear that he may be executed for acute incompetence, de Toqueville decided that now was the time to act. At 4 in the afternoon onf the 8th of March, de Toqueville gave the order to march on the Armee der Nederlanders.

What de Toqueville didn't know (likely because he didn't read the other reports of the day) was that the Armee der Nederlanders was no longer commanded by the Duke of Luxembourg alone. Instead, it had been split in two after the arrival of Emperor Mattias at the head of his 3,000 man House Guard. Now the new Armee der Flanders was bolstered by better leadership and elite soldiers. De Toqueville's troops, on the other hand, were utterly out of shape after two months with little drilling or marches, and were demoralized by the knowledge that their inaction had led to the loss of Flanders. De toqueville, furthermore, hadn't drilled any of his troops in the use of newer methods of infantry tactics--he had insisted on total officer independence, and most of his officers had gone to Academy before the creation of newer, more accurate arquebuses (not to mention the invention of the new, heavier weapon of the musket).

As such, though the Armee de Flandres had far more firearms than their enemy, their officers had no clue as to how to use them. Overestimating the efficacy of his soldiers, de Toqueville put his armies in square formations, with 2 ranks of pikemen protecting many more gunmen. These squares were incredibly fragile--once Matthias' cavalry broke through the first few pikemen, they were able to kill a great many gunmen. Realizing the mistake he had made, de Toqueville compounded his problem by ordering his other pikemen to engage in Matthias' house guard. This left the rest of his gunmen open to an offensive, and within only a few hours, the Battle of Cassel had led to the loss of nearly two whole French armies at little loss to the Austrians.


When Louis XII reached the theater, he found that the Armee du Nord and the Armee du Flandres had retreated to Normandy, that the Austrian armies were advancing steadily on Paris, and that the most experienced of those armies was led by the Holy Roman Emperor himself. His only recompense was that Maximillien de Toqueville had died in battle, so there would be no problems of seniority when Louis promoted all of his captains to commanders. But needless to say, Louis XII had his work cut out for him.

loki100 said:

The campaign in Flanders was pretty disastrous from the start but that was a bad beating, especially if your armies are now dispersed?

As to your earlier question - I'm a social constructionist to my finger tips, so that may give you a clue what I think of the claims of the realist school.

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Yes, the Armee du Nord/du Flandres are in Normandy, waiting a couple of months to reinforce. I may have lost my other army in Barrois at the time,,,but I don't know.

Also, ah! I mean, realism was coming into play around this time (in game it's probably going to be attributed more to England and France than to Italy, because Italy found a way to band against the hegemon and live among each other in peace and you're not supposed to do that)

blsteen said:

The Battle of Cassel
Ouch...that had to hurt.
Still with Louis and reinforcements enroute, Paris should be safe.

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Of course!

Rifal said:

The Emperor Cometh!

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Rifal said:

No Roostbeefs yet?

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No, they were too cowardly to even land. They did put me under total blockade for the whole war though.

The War of Savoy was a trans-formative moment for French military doctrine, which was already unique as it was. It's hard to estimate how much of a head start that France got out of de Villenueve (Roughly a 300 year headstart, as I have only recently realized how revolutionary Clausewitz and the mere idea of strategic doctrine was). His idea of a defensively oriented army which actively engaged in increasing enemy attrition as they approached both anticipated the concept of defense in depth and the strategy of guerrilla warfare. But after de Toqueville's utterly failed defense of France in 1561 completely poisoned the concept of defensive warfare in France for a generation.

Why did Villenuevan strategy fail so painfully under de Toqueville? There were two reasons for this, one of doctrine and one of implementation. I will deal with the problem of implementation first because it's more obvious.

De Toqueville failed at a defensive strategy because he only implemented half of such a strategy: he waited in place with his heavy infantry, but he didn't interdict his enemy's supply lines, he didn't scout out the enemy positions or maneuver his army to cut off enemy advances. De Toqueville, being trained during the golden age of Villenuevan thought, clearly understood that the defense was about waiting, but he didn't realize the other side of this--that defense is about preparation, and about actively wearing down the opponent as they come to you.

But there was also a basic doctrinal error in Villenuevan thinking: it didn't account for the political cost of a defense. There was nothing that would say that Poperinge would hold after several other forts fell before Austrian guns, and there's nothing to say that Villenuevan doctrine wouldn't be rightly criticized when it led a general to leave the garrisons to their enemies, alone and isolated (This really is my only real issue with Clausewitz, but then Clausewitz was very aware that he was writing for generals rather than heads or state, and he knew that it wasn't the generals place to decide on political matters, so in the end it's not a real problem).

But these weren't body-blows. These were problems with Villenuevan doctrine, which were ameliorated to some degree by Louis XI and Henri II, but the real deathblow to Villenuevan doctrine (at the time) was the colossal success of Louisian warfare during the second half of the War of Savoy.


Louis took command of a Northern Corps in shambles. The Armee de Bourbonnais had been destroyed in the Battle of Barrois, and the other two armies were so below battle strength that they had to retreat to Normandie and Brittany to reinforce. Worse still, the armies of Liege, Trier, and Austria were now only a stone's throw away from Paris, which was itself undefended except by a series of 4 strongholds along the Loire. The situation seemed dire, untenable. And yet Louis remained calm and analytical. He realized that he only had 15,000 men at his disposal at this point--5,000 cavalry, 8,000 infantry, and 2,000 gunners and support troops guarding several supply convoys and roughly 50 guns. For the next 6 months, this was all that he effectively had--the other armies within the corps would take until the mid-summer to reorganize, so Louis was on his own. With this army, Louis had to defeat the ~50,000 soldiers of the Austrian coalition who were positioned within France.

Worse still, he had deprived himself of his best leadership. The Prince de Chaumond and the Comte Tulle were both given command of the other armies in the Northern Corps, which left Louis with an experienced though mediocre staff. The only general of note left in Louis' army (besides Louis himself) was the Comte de Maurepas, son of a long line of French commanders. De Maurepas was an exceptional infantry commander, and one of the few infantrymen in the early 16th century who truly understood the impact of the musket and arquebus.

With the obstacle's in place, Louis moved on to his short-term goal: the defeat, piece by piece, of the Imperial Coalition. Louis' first goal was to bring about the surrenders of the bishoprics of Trier and Liege. Both enemies, though small, were highly dangerous, for totally different reasons. The Archbishopric of Trier had developed along the Rhine for the last several centuries, and over time the bishops of Trier had allowed certain degrees of usury, which led to an explosion of the Treiran merchant class. The merchant houses of Trier were one of the main backers of the coalition's side of the War of Savoy, and without Trier Austria would be greatly weakened. On the other hand, Liege, which had been utterly surrounded first by the Duchy of Burgundy and then by the Kingdom of France and the Archduchy of Austria, had taken to overdeveloping their military, until in 1560 the Liegian army was one of the most disciplined, hardened forces in the world. Furthermore the weakness of the Liegian aristocracy had led to a meritocratic officer system in Liege which led to top-rate generals.

With this said, Louis had two massive advantages on his side, which he used with gusto. The invention of the corps system of separate armies converging on one point gave the French military far more flexibility against the armies of her enemies, and the fact that Louis was operating in French territory allowed him to make do without supply lines and buy food for his army directly from the people. With these two advantages in place, we can see how it was that Louis was able to advance from Savoy to Orleanais to Valencies and Barrois within 3 months time (a devilish speed for an army at the time), and also how Louis managed to create such decisive victories against his opponents.


The first opponent was the Liegian army, which posed the most danger as the most mobile force. The battle of Valencies I will deal with in depth because it shaped Louis' tactics greatly and because most other battles in the summer and fall of 1561 occurred in a similar fashion. Louis, attacking a 6,000 man enemy, split his armies into three groups--two infantry groups (one of which was commanded by de Maurepas), which engaged the enemy one after the other, and a 5,000 man cavalry reserve which would deploy in plain sight and be controlled directly by Louis. Holding his cavalry in reserve set the Liegian Bishop-General highly on edge--he knew that at any moment the cavalry could be ordered to charge, and so he adopted a far more conservative tactic than he would have against a mere 5,000 man force. When he realized that there was a third army of infantry, he ordered that his army fall back, after which Louis ordered a charge. The battle, though seemingly unimportant militarily, showed the coalition how skilled a general Louis was, and this reputation became a key factor soon after.


From Valencies, Louis moved on to Barrois, where he scored a victory against the Army of Trier. The battle of Trier involved a similar dynamic to the Battle of Valencies, but Louis used his cavalry far more aggressively, charging all at once into the opponent's flanks. This tactic broke the Trierian army and sent them retreating all the way to the Rhine, leaving Trier completely unguarded. The Archbishop met Louis at the Franco-Trierian border on August 12th, negotiating for a white peace. Louis managed to get a slightly better peace deal, which led to Trier leaving the war and renouncing subsidies to the rest of the coalition. This, along with the message Louis read on the 13th that the Armees du Nord/du Flandres were ready to march led to the end of one 'phase' of the war, marked by an Austrian offensive, and led to the second 'phase', wherein Louis used his messanges to conduct a massive war of maneuver against the Austrian generals.


Out of these battles came a group of cavalry commanders who would dominate the French military for a generation. De Baumanhaise is the most recognizable of these commanders, but there were nearly 20 other men who served in the cavalry of the Armee Royale who became senior officers in the French military. Their edict of corps-based, decentralized, offensive warfare became a way of thinking that all Frenchmen applied to the military, to the degree that talk of 'initiative' (the favorite word of these commanders) became used in the common vernacular of the townsman, merchant, and intellectual.

Now that the Corps du Nord was ready for battle, the first goal was to defeat the Armee der Nederlanders (led by the Duke of Luxembourg), which posed a fatal threat to Paris. The Duke of Luxembourg was, by all accounts, a great general, but his experience came, almost entirely, from putting down Hungarian revolts and fighting minor German states. He (and by extension his army) had never fought an army larger than his, and he was rightly horrified of Louis' reputation by this point (especially considering how far away from the Austrian lines the Armee der Nederlanders was), and so he sent all his scouts out to see when the Armee Royale approached. When his scouts found (in September) that the Armee Royale was marching on his position, the Duke of Luxembourg chose to fall back towards the Austrian front line, which is when he was attacked by the Armee du Nord (led by Prince de Chaumond). The Duke of Luxembourg did his best to keep up a steady withdrawal while being beset on all sides by the Corps du Nord. Finally Louis XII was able to force the Duke of Luxembourg into battle with his back to the Meuse river. Forced into the river by the force of French arms, the Duke of Luxembourg died, pierced by an epee, on the border of his own fiefdom.


With the desruction of the key parts of the Austrian offensive in the late fall of 1561, Louis wintered on the border to the Austrian Netherlands while Matthias I retreated to Amsterdam, the only city in the Duchy of the Netherlands which could sustain the Armee der Vlandren. 1562 saw a reversal of fortunes, as French troops invaded the Occupied and Austrian Netherlands, reaching the Rhine by may, and surprising/destroying many recently raised Austrian regiments.


This good news was supported with further good news: a message by the Duke of Milan announced that he had negotiated the Treaty of Savoie during the summer, which gave the Kingdom of France her claimed territories as well as a massive share of the Savoyard treasury. The Duke of Milan then stated that his next objective was the conquest of Tyrol.


The picture wasn't completely rosy, though. As 1563 dawned, it quickly became clear to Louis that the Armee der Vlaandern wasn't the only threat. The increasing fiscal and social unraveling of the realm was soon coming into play, and things would only get worse on that front while the war waged on.

note: There were two separate games here, one in which my computer overheated and the one that I ended up finishing. The overheated one featured the death of de Toqueville (he's still alive, and he has yet another embarrassment coming up), a high-fire Louis, and Austrians at Cambray. The actual game had a high-maneuver Louis (which makes more sense given he was a cavalry captain) and a more cautious Austrian AI (I also messed up in the overheated game by not setting my military maintenance to the highest before the war leading to several major losses)

loki100 said:

like the meshing of strategic doctrine with the in-game events. You could say that poor old Fabius Cunctator (sp?) was the first to find out that politicians don't appreciate the consequences of a masterfully defensive campaign where the enemy can have anything they want (except for the things they really do want).

At least you've secured the south and in grabbing Savoy-Nice, could be said to have your offensive war goals?

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yes, but the issue now is typical AI bs where I need to tons of the enemy territory to get a white peace. But the fact that Austria and I have such a back and forth tells me that we're pretty evenly matched.

Also thank you, everyone, for the comments! I wouldn't have been able to write this at such a breakneck pace (once a day on some weeks, once every 2 days on others) without knowing that I had some people reading it

The financial sector of Europe was born out of Europe's wartorn history. Because of the unreliable nature of war, and the unreliability that war inflicts upon governmental budgets, the Kings of Europe needed a reliable group from which to draw money. At first this group was made of individual financiers (and the Jewish community, which wasn't barred from usury), but the War of Savoy showed the Kings of England and France (as well as the Austrian Emperor) how desperately they needed money in times of war (especially in times of extended war). This was especially true of Matthias I, Holy Roman Emperor, Archduke of Austria, and King of Hungary.


Matthias I spent his formative years in the Austrian Netherlands, learning about the Burgundian Dukes who had reigned there. As a child he was fed stories of Crusades, Conquistadors, and recent stories of battles against the Turks and the Heretics. He was also taught about the inevitability of Hapsburg rule, how the Wise and Pious expansion of the Hapsburgs had created an Empire which couldn't be defeated, and Empire which rivaled in greatness the Empires of Caesar and Alexander. The mindset that this distilled in Matthias was that of a world of goods and evils, a world where any strategy or weapon should be used against The Enemy. As such, Matthias relished acting in the military. He loved the discipline and hierarchy of it, the stoicism of his generals, and the heroism of combat. In fact, Matthias was probably too heroic a man to be a good commander--though he grasped eloquently the tactics of his time, he could not be bothered by the key elements of war which did not involve combat. Beyond this, his goals for the war (The main one being killing Louis on the battlefield, at best personally killing him [Matthias' journals enact and reenact scenarios where he murders the 'upstart Bourbon' many times, to the degree that by the wars end Matthias had written 300 pages on the regicide of Remy de Bourbon], with the ancilliary goal being burning Paris to the ground and forcing the surrender of the Bourbon government, bringing France back under the Hapsburg wing) were incredibly unrealistic and were pursued regardless of their cost in lives and coin.

The same problems effected France in this time, with the exception that France had lost far fewer soldiers by 1563, and that france had been given an extraordinary burst of currency by the surrender of Savoy. Furthermore France had gained all of her objectives by this point in the war--the conflict was only to retain the status quo afterwards. Lastly, Louis knew of Matthias' hatred for him, and knew (due to long-distance scouting by elite messagers) how many troops Matthias had cooped up in Amsterdam. So Louis sent the Armee du Nord (commanded by du Toqueville, who Louis considered apt enough to command an out-of-the way front) to Limburg, the Armee du Flandres (commanded de Baumanhaise) and the Armee d'Est (commanded by Benolt de la Mothe) along the Rhine while he relegated the Armee Royale to mopping up Austrian resistance in France and taking Brabant and Antwerp.

But as the war dragged on, France's society started to fall apart. Rochelle and Nantes, the two capitals of Hugenot France (Rochelle being the center of NeoCatharist Christianity, Nantes being the capital of Breton Christianity, which was an integration of Neocatharist and English theological thinking), suffered the most from the War: they were taxed the most of any other region (because the provinces of Gascogne and Brittany were the most simplified and had the best tax-extracting structures), they were the most effected by the British blockades, and unlike the northeastern and Flemish territories, Gascogne and Brittany weren't promised public spending at the end of the war. So when von Faulkhaven announced a new round of war taxes, the Pastor of Rochelle excommunicated him and called for a city-wide riot.

The revolt of Rochelle tore Gascogne up. Hugenot and Catholic militias patrolled the province, stealing, burning, and killing anyone of a different denomination. The provincial government, which was already split along sectarian lines, broke apart, and the Hugenot captain of the guards killed the provincial governor. Meanwhile, Breton peasants were burning tax assessor buildings to the ground, and tarring and feathering any representatives of the King. By may, the Hugenot revolters numbered 8,000 men plus several guns, and the Breton revolters numbered 10,000 infantry. From our knowledge of Louis' meetings, we know that by the summer of 1563 the revolts of Rochelle were of a far higher priority than the war itself, with Louis taking 2 weeks considering which army should be sent to deal with the revolt.


Eventually Louis came up with a decision borne of his experience as a cavalry commander: an army would be raised entirely from cavalry veterans from his other armies, forming a "Household Guard". These Guards would serve as the elite mobile policing unit for the French kingdom. The Household Guard (only 3,000 strong at this point) would deal with the Rochelle revolt, while the Armee d'Italy would be moved from Nizze to Nancy to deal with the Bretons.

Meanwhile, the war in the Netherlands got bloodier and bloodier. Matthias, having lost his trained core of troops, had resorted in the spring of 1564 to throwing untrained soldiers (barely militiamen) at the French armies encamped on the Rhine. This worked roughly as well as one would presume: Austrian, Dutch, and Hungarian soldiers died in the thousands in the last years of the War of Savoy, at little loss for French life. All the while, Louis directed a methodical campaign against the Austrian forts in the area, clearing the Northern Corps' rear by late 1564.


Matthias' problem, which he undoubtedly considered over and over, was that the Armee der Nederlanders didn't have enough soldiers in it to successfully mount an attack, while also defending his supply line to Amsterdam. So he had to stay cooped up in the city while he saw his men die with little effect beyond an increase in the experience of the French army. Worse still, he was getting news from across the South Sea of a Hungarian Pretender who was organizing troops for a rebellion, and he was constantly being told about the nigh-bankrupt state of the realm. What ended up chiding Matthias into acting was the news, in the early spring of 1565, that the Protestant Princes were gathering in the City of Stettin, to discuss plans for a league aimed directly at the Hapsburg Empire.

With this knowledge Matthias knew that he needed a quick victory. Finding his legs, Matthias moved east before crossing the Rhine on a little-known fjord, attacking the force of the weakest general in the French army--namely, de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville had fought off several offensives by this point, and he knew that he just needed to control the rivers by which one could cross the Rhine. By controlling these rivers, he figured that he was in a perfectly defensible position. But when he found news that Matthias had already cross the Rhine and was heading for him, he sent his messagers West to the Armee d'Est, and south to the Armee Royale, before moving to engage.

The engagement was a massive failure, but what the Battle of Rosendal showed was the weakness of the messager policy at this point in time. Matthias was well acquainted by 1565 of French use of messengers, and had sent his own scouts to intercept them. By the time Louis got news of the Battle, it was too late: the French army was broken.


What was tragic about the Battle of Rosendal was how utterly pointless it was. Standing at the mouth of the Meuse, Matthais realized that his troops were too demoralized to defeat the Armee Royale. But, further, Matthias realized that to truly 'win' the war against France, he would need to retake Flanders. But Matthias got yet more bad news: the Milanese army had defeated the garrison of Tyrol and was marching on Vienna. Seeing the situation around him, Matthias went to the table for talks in the winter of 1565, agreeing (after riots in Vienna, Amsterdam, and Budapest in response to the possibility of shut down talks) to a series of reparations paid by the English and Austrian government to France.


The War of Savoy had 4 major repucussions: first, it led in Austria to the first modern banking system, with the acceptance of the refugee Medici family into Brussels, where they were given substantial control over Austrian funds in order to save the Empire from certain bankruptcy. Secondly, the military victories of Modena led to a consolidation in The Italian league under the more powerful Duchy of Modena, and the creation of a Modenan Faction (who supported integrating the League under the rule of Romagna, as opposed to the Italiano faction, which supported the creation of a Noble Republic of Italy based in Florence). Thirdly, the substantial weakening of the emperor gave the Protestant states enough room to challenge the Austrians--indeed the War of the League of Stettin comes only 4 years after the end of the War of Savoy. The last consequences, which both came from Louis' massive popularity as a Conqueror, and his realization that he needed to delegate some of his powers, are what I will deal with in my next section.

WGPower said:

Was there a way to negotiate England out of the war to slip the noose of the blockade, and further isolate Austria? Savoy a worthwhile gain?

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Savoy was a worthwhile gain indeed (Savoie is, strangely enough, one of the highest tax provs in the kingdom), but there was no way to break the blockade--England had double my ships and I didn't know where their colonies were yet.

Rifal said:

Tens of thousands of lives wasted just for a pile of coins. The treaty of amsterdam was a sad thing indeed.

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Although we're going to have an intermission soon, I want to note that way more people are going to die as a result of this war, because the results of this war (Austria looking weak and being distracted for 6 years) lead directly into the War of the League of Stettin.

loki100 said:

but needed ... that was indeed a classic stalemate, you could both hurt each other but neither side could really escalate any gains. That complete naval blockade must have been hurting too.

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Yeah, there was another back and forth which I glossed over in the interest of not repeating the same narrative over and over. And I didn't want to mess with the Empire by taking an uncored province just yet.