A History of the Ottoman Empire: 1544-1564
Reign of Sultan Süleymân I Kanuni (the lawgiver) Khan,
Emperor,
Sovereign of the House of Osman,
Sultan of Sultans,
Khan of Khans,
Commander of the Faithful and Successor (Caliph) of the Prophet of the Lord of the Universe,
Custodian of the Holy Sanctuaries (the Holy Cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem),
Lord of all Africa,
Emperor of Rome,
Emperor of The Three Cities of Constantinople, Adrianople and Bursa, and of the Cities of Damascus and Cairo, of all Azerbaijan, of the Magreb, of Barka, of Kairouan, of Aleppo, of the Arabic and the Persian Iraq, of Basra, of Al-Hasa strip, of Ar Raqqah, of Mosul, of Diyarbakır, of Cilicia, of Ahmadabad, of Bombay and the Deccan of India, of the provinces of Erzurum, of Sivas, of Adana, of Karaman, Van, of Abyssinia, of Tripoli, of Damascus, of Cyprus, of Crete, of the province of Morea, of the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea and also their coasts, of Anatolia, Rumelia, Baghdad, Kurdistan, Greece, Turkistan, Tartary, of the two regions of Kabarda, of the Steppe of Kypchaks, of the whole country of the Tatars, of the City and Fort of Belgrade, of the province of Serbia, with all the castles and cities, of all Albania, of all Eflak and Bogdania, as well as all the dependencies and borders, and many other countries and cities, of Benin and Songhai, of the oases of the Sahara and protector of the faithful.
Europe 1564
Chapter 2: TC and I waste a lot of money for nothing
Prelude
Boy, this session was ugly. It started off well enough with the vassalization of AIs in Arabia, some colonization and Drake building a shipyard for me in Qeshm. Some pagans were annexed in Africa, others were converted and trade was expanded (somewhat expensively, since I'd dropped my mercantilism for more colonists). Before the session I'd planned to help Russia recover its rightful place in the east, so we built up our armies and DoWed in 1552. However, I didn't count on Spain having anything to say about it, which turned out to be an incorrect assumption. Austria/HAL hadn't helped Spain do anything all game, and although I'd made some noises about helping Drake I hadn't actually done anything. In addition, we weren't asking for a lot, and nothing for the OE. However, I think TC was a little paranoid about Ottoman power so he joined the war. I was a little sleepy and with the wrong message settings didn't notice he was even in the war until six months after he joined.
Africa
The war went well at first, I assaulted into the Balkans a little and sieged several of HAL's small border forts. I was taking attrition, but didn't care--It's not like I was going to run out of manpower. When I noticed Spain joined I occupied its South African colony and sent my fleet to Zanzibar, which eventually kept me out of stabhit range when things went south. Then Spain pulled its first major offensive, in North Africa. I'd kept Suleyman there, because it's where I expected him to attack, but I wasn't about to risk him in the deserts west of Egypt when TC had an unknown amount of cavalry ready to drop down from his ships. I was losing provinces slowly, but TC was taking a ton of attrition and the provinces were too poor to really affect the warscore. Meanwhile I had landed troops in the Crimea and was assaulting my way across the southern Ukraine. We had stabhitting warscore for a while here, but didn't send many (any?) stabhits because we were holding out for more provinces. I believe we were at or close to stabhitting warscore for most of the war, but never sent more than a few as far as I know.
Anatolia
After about a year messing around in North Africa, HAL started screaming for help and TC obliged by opening a new front in Anatolia. He blocked the strait and landed in Western Anatolia with about 100k. I had left about 50k there under a leader in case this happened, but idiotically I sent it to perform the invasion of Crimea mentioned above. Most of the forts were minimal and I actually got a little lucky when he failed an assault. He did succeed in assaulting Teke, Izmir and Bursa though. I managed to sneak 100k across the strait and into the mountains in the east (Karaman and Angara) and continued recruiting in eastern Anatolia which stabilized the situation. I also had to keep an army in Constantinople so he didn't just hop over to the other side of the strait and take more provinces unopposed. He was camped in the mountains of Germyan, and I didn't want to attack across a river into Bursa where he could reinforce with cavalry from his ships, so we stalemated there for a while. I tried to sally my fleet a few times hoping for a good roll, but never got it.
Eventually I got him to move out of Germyan (possibly by fake marches to Bursa but the whole war is somewhat foggy), then began sieging it and Teke. At this point his Anatolian expedition was doomed because I held all the mountains, but it had served its purpose: HAL had recovered everything I had taken in the Balkans and Crimea. In the north Delian was making some headway, but Russia is severely overmatched by Austria and it was taking everything I had to repel TC. Honestly, I'm amazed Delian did as well as he did. After 1554 or so he was fighting 1v1 against HAL and actually making substantial progress despite his handicap. Looking at the stats I see it did cost him a lot though. I occasionally send leaderless armies (I didn't have any spare generals) to assault random Austrian border forts, but these were quickly retaken. I guess it did force HAL to keep some men in reserve.
TC had been pushed back to Bursa, Izmir and Karsai, which are plains provinces and can't all reinforce each other. My army was about 80k-90k half infantry half cavalry. He had three armies totaling maybe 100k spread across the three provinces. I moved to Izmir, but TC was looking somewhere else and started moving late (plus his Bursa detachment didn't have a chance of arriving in time). I won the battle pretty convincingly and TC prepared to shift to yet another theater of war.
The Theater of War
Greece and North Africa (again)
I left about 50k in Anatolia under a leader and shipped the rest of my men to the other side of the strait, preparing to once again take up the invasion of Austria. Unfortunately, Spain has literally as many men as he wants to mint for and was already back with fresh armies which landed in Greece. I had 7k in Attica I'd forgotten about, but with some mercenary help they were able to repel the first landing. Eventually they got pushed back and TC landed men in Attica, Epirus and Morea. The AI had built Morea into a medium fort which bought me some time, and I started redeploying my armies to Thessalia and Albania to contain TC. Unfortunately, this time he had landed in mountain provinces instead of plains, so it was going to be a lot harder to dislodge him. Again, my lack of leaders hurt me. I had about 30k in Albania, but my leader was still marching in from Constantinople to Thessaly so TC was able to dislodge that 20k despite my hiring two mercenary bands to boost morale. He eventually won in Thessaly and pursued me, pushing me out of Macedon too. Naxos was taken at the same time. I tried to dislodge him a few times (and maybe this was how he kicked me out of Thessaly, again my memory is foggy) but he landed men from his ships and pushed me back to Rumelia.
The situation was growing from mildly annoying to genuine threat. Even with Zanzibar and a lot of battle warscore from winning the initial mountain battles, my warscore vs Spain was nearing -40. Then he could potentially stabhit me for Tripoli and break my connection to Africa. Of course, by this time Suleyman had retaken everything I lost in Africa, but he could easily land 80k and assault it before stabhitting. If he did stabhit me out of the war that would leave Austria alone against both of us, so I didn't think he'd do it, but then again, I didn't exactly have a good track record of predicting TC's behavior this session. Needing some quick warscore I ordered Suleyman on the offensive--something I should have done a long time ago, but I was worried about TC landing behind me and cutting me off. However, Suleyman was getting old now and losing him wouldn't have been a big blow so I went for it. TC either couldn't spare the men or attention so Suleyman managed to win four battles and capture four provinces and was still advancing when the war ended.
My warscore was stabilized, but I really needed to do something about TC's Greek invasion so I decided to adopt some classic World War I tactics. I'd just throw men at impossible to break defenses until attrition broke his armies down. I should have done that a long time ago, I had plenty of recruiting and money, but years of EU2 combat had taught me "
DON'T ATTACK INTO MOUNTAINS." After some arguing the general staff decided on
Operation Piles of Bodies as a more appropriate name, though
Operation Mass Suicide also got a lot of votes. It got some laughs and giddy giggling from TC at first; and his gleeful outburst "You just activated my trap card!" wasn't exactly music to my ears, but in the end it was a success. I was able to reinforce a lot more quickly than he could and even got him to pursue onto the plains of Thrace. He assaulted it and moved to Constantinople, but had lost most of his cavalry and was quickly booted back to his ships. Now his unassailable position in the mountains had been broken and I moved into Thessaly. I won the first battle before his reinforcements arrived from the ships and moved to pursue, unfortunately the reinforcements arrived right as I clicked "pursue" and now my army was simultaneously pursuing 30k Spaniards into Attica and retreating from 40k Spaniards in Thessaly with Allah only knows how many more on those ships. I lost a few more battles but it didn't matter because attrition was really withering his army down and it turns out there weren't any more on those ships.
I'd been angling for a general white peace for a while now. The war was already an order of magnitude more expensive than I'd planned and I had AIs to kill. The war was costly for TC too, but when he was winning in Greece he wasn't really pushing for WP. Now that I'd basically ejected his expeditionary force again, he was ready to talk. Both Delian and HAL wanted to keep fighting; Delian really needs to expand to be anything other than a third-rate power, and HAL is HAL, but cooler heads prevailed and a general white peace was signed. As soon as peace was signed (literally within months) I got 3 new generals, whom would have come in really handy during the war, but such is life.
Total cost to the war (all numbers approximate)
Ottoman Empire - 1.25 million men, 250 galleys, 12000 ducats, +1% inflation
Spain - 1 million men, 200 galleys, 11500 ducats, +5.9% inflation
Austria - 500,000 men, 6000 ducats, +1.8% inflation
Russia - 800,000 men, 8000 ducats, +2.6% inflation
Aftermath
Overall, a colossal waste of time and money. My trade and colonization stagnated, as did my conversions. Tech didn't improve as much as I would've liked since I did a lot of minting. I don't think anyone would argue that HAL's Austria isn't a bloated monstrosity, and I wasn't asking for anything for OE. Honestly, would returning the two provinces HAL took last war, plus one or two more have been too much?
One thing this war has taught me is that the OE isn't as strong as a lot of people seem to think. You might look at the inflation and say that the war was more expensive for Spain more than me, but my inflation was only so low because I have infra 5. 20 years x .25 is -5 inflation, so we minted about the same amount for the session (and presumably the war). Sure the OE's stats numbers are pretty big, but it has a lot of territory to defend and its navy isn't able to compete with its only competitor (Spain)--it's basically a 8,000D, 12D/month ferrying service. I have to keep about 50-80k in Egypt/North Africa, India, West Africa and South Africa, plus another 20k on each of my Mediterranean islands. That totals to about 300k. In addition, stats don't show techcost, and with 162 provinces--most of which are 1-2 tax base and don't provide manpower--it cost me almost 20,000D to go from naval 3 to naval 5, which is about what LT18 costs too.
Near the end of the session, HG decided to get cute and attack Bengal, managing to take Calcutta in a peace deal before my eastern squadron could rebase from South Africa. Since he doesn't have a navy or sizable army refusing to cede it should be no more than an annoyance, but who knows what will happen. Also, Armenia revolted because I left 12k sieging a medium fort for 3 years, not my proudest moment.
Edits:
Ontime/AAR: -2 inflation
Quantity: +1 fire to all generals
+1 military (can this go to my next king? Suleyman dies in 2 years)
Decentralized: +2 generals
+2 maneuver
+1 year income to LT (5279)
+1 core on Congo (1506)
+2 admin (again, can this go to my next king?)
4 generals, 2 admirals please
