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Thus in 1467 the 22-year-old William became England's first future monarch to marry a commoner—taking as his bride the 16-year-old Eleanor Wydeville, 10th child of Richard Wydeville, Baron Rivers.
I liked this nice little nod to the war of the roses and Edward IV who married Elizabeth Woodville, daughter of Richard Woodville, 1 st Lord Rivers. Excellent update although I have only read half.
I liked this nice little nod to the war of the roses and Edward IV who married Elizabeth Woodville, daughter of Richard Woodville, 1 st Lord Rivers. Excellent update although I have only read half.
Normally I would be rooting against a large and imperious Papal State. But since the 16th century is looming ahead and a strong Pope will breed a strong Reformation, I can't help but be pleased the pontiff avoided serious consequences. Right now he's the villain we love to hate.
I probably would have gone to aid a smaller Austria fend off revolts, but after they vassalised Wallachia and beat up Hungary I started worrying about what the AI was thinking about. I didn't want a massive Austrian empire bordering Byzantium, but for RP reasons I couldn't just dump them and DoW them; I still wanted to keep them as an ally. (It would be stupid after all for the Eastern Roman Emperor to junk an alliance with the Latin Roman Empire.)
I can't tell you who gets smashed right now; that'll be in the next update.
Another great update. I especially enjoyed the part about the Austrian civil war and William's introduction. Looking forward to your telling of his reluctant glorious deeds.
Thank you Omen, Urza and JacktheJumper. This is very effusive praise! I'm glad you fellas are still enjoying the story.
When i first got the PU with Byzantium I had a hard time deciding if I was going to give the Imperial title precedence over the native titles, but decided against it. Byzantium is still a small empire—much smaller than England, now. And when they tacked on Emperor of India to the British monarch's real-life style, it was pretty far down the list of precedence...
Well, he'll be a famous warrior-king. Whether that also equates to greatness is something I'll leave for you guys to decide after the tale is told. Good anecdote about Grant; if memory serves Eisenhower would be another competent but very low-key type.
Prince Henry's stats are ADM 6, DIP 8, MIL 3.
Thanks Sweboy. Very perceptive! Incidentally, though the House of York did not (in this timeline) generate enough support to contest the throne during Henry VI's reign (as they did in real life), they are not a spent force. We'll see them again in a decade or two.
fantastic, this AAR is a credit to yourself and the mod you are using. I wish i could play the game half as well as you.
Thanks for the kind compliment, robb1993! The Magna Mundi team sure put together a comprehensive and engrossing mod.
I'm no MM strategy genius (you'd be better served reading Gabor or CJL78 for really good gameplay advice), but thanks nonetheless!
I just try to keep the country on an even keel, and make sure that I am engaging my rivals when they are either in—or have just recently finished—another major war. That's how I was able to get turf from France and Burgundy in relatively painless ways. Once you're stronger you can start landing the first punch, but in the very early game, that's almost never a good idea.
Thanks, thaipan! For an AAR game I tend to decide things a little differently than if it were just an ordinary game. In a ordinary single player game I'd choose what is best (easiest, expedient, etc) for me as the player. In an AAR I try to think about what would be the most epic or in-character for a given monarch. What would I like to see on screen, if this were a TV series.
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aye my games as Britain always collapse which is a shame. I particularly liked how you handled Austria, in game terms what actually happened, having never played MM i'm curious to see if you can hand over monarchs to rebels or not as it would certainly add a new element to the game.
Regrettably handing over a deposed monarch is not a gameplay item. I kind of wish it was, though. The best you can do is assassinate an advisor or (as I did) "Incite Social Chaos", which does a ton of things—lowers stability, increases inflation, makes it harder to run the country.
In gameplay terms what happened to Austria is that they got sucked into a 10-year war with the Ottomans (1475-1485). During the war they lost all but one of the battles they fought, so their war exhaustion went through the ceiling. The massively increased war exhaustion caused revolt risk to skyrocket, creating several different types of near-simultaneous rebellions—nobles (or pretenders? Revolutionaries? Whatever created the new, despotic government) and a couple of nationalist revolts.
Because the Ottomans had all but wiped out the Austrian armies, the Austrians didn't have enough troops on hand to defeat the rebels. They were effectively already over the edge of the precipice. All I did was ensure that they wouldn't have the money to raise more troops, thus increasing the likelihood that the rebels would hold the capital long enough (2-3 years) for the revolution to succeed.
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Are you still trying to recreate the British Empire? Or have you given up and it's anything goes now?
Still trying to recreate the British Empire—that long-term goal is never going away. There are divergences from our real history, of course, as the game mechanics force me to adapt to things—like the PU with Byzantium.
Speaking of which, with colonisation around the corner I need to free up admin efficiency points. Because of the story arc for Jane, I RP'ed Byzantine events during her reign as if she wanted to hang on to it. But the ENG-BYZ relationship is much more ambivalent for succeeding monarchs.
If there's any way you can make BYZ a vassal in MM, then you should do so. I don't know if the inherit->release vassal thing works in it, but that would be great.
One thing thats missing from MM that I would have like to see is having your dynasty kept if a PU breaks peacefully. It would be nice to have Byzantium select some younger brother or sister of the English monarch who would take a Greek/Roman name. Maybe you could mod it in if the union breaks peacefully. Also something else to keep in mind in case you don't know. You can only have one PU at once with the exception of Denmark over Sweden and Norway. I found this profoundly frustrating in one game as Portugal. I imagine inheriting something closer to home might be more strategically expedient.
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Just finished the most recent update, it was a long one. The AAR has been quite amazing, since you brought up colonization how much do you intend to constrain yourself to form the British Empire. I assume you'll take Northwest Passage, but will you avoid other decisions since they will detract from your ability to grab north America? Also achieving that level of colonization as a player should be a blast to watch.
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Just finished the most recent update, it was a long one. The AAR has been quite amazing, since you brought up colonization how much do you intend to constrain yourself to form the British Empire. I assume you'll take Northwest Passage, but will you avoid other decisions since they will detract from your ability to grab north America? Also achieving that level of colonization as a player should be a blast to watch.
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Great update. The long wait was well worthwhile! Hope you won't keep us waiting that long next time. Want to learn of William III, the warrior-king.
So the Pope got away with it... No schism. No significant territory loss. (Avignon has been kept, right?)
...while the Emperor didn't. As for the rebellion in Austria, I was surprised the Electors didn't pick a different Emperor. After all, there must have been numerous more prestigeous German houses to choose from than this upstart Zwerger.
Austria broken - due to the game mechanics - gets all the ex-rebel troops as its armies, for free! There can be quite a lot of them, won't it tempt Austria AI to go on the offensive again?
The Danish link seems interesting, though I can see some conflicting interests. And Denmark has this obstinacy about dowing Holstein no matter what. A monarch from the same dynasty may hardly put them off.
Will Castile get anything from its war against the Ottos?
And France is alarmingly asserting its power...
Want to learn of William III, the warrior-king.So the Pope got away with it... No schism. No significant territory loss. (Avignon has been kept, right?)
...while the Emperor didn't. As for the rebellion in Austria, I was surprised the Electors didn't pick a different Emperor. After all, there must have been numerous more prestigeous German houses to choose from than this upstart Zwerger.
Austria broken - due to the game mechanics - gets all the ex-rebel troops as its armies, for free! There can be quite a lot of them, won't it tempt Austria AI to go on the offensive again?
The Danish link seems interesting, though I can see some conflicting interests. And Denmark has this obstinacy about dowing Holstein no matter what. A monarch from the same dynasty may hardly put them off.
Will Castile get anything from its war against the Ottos?
And France is alarmingly asserting its power...
I have just discovered this excellent AAR -I'm reading page 5 right now- and I must agree with the other readAARs that have stated that this alternate England looks awfully plausible. Well done!
Yes, that ought to be possible.
It would be nice if we had the option/decision of releasing a vassal or PU using one's own regnal dynasty. In Byzantium's case it's not strictly necessary because they never historically adopted primogenture. If an Emperor didn't have time to inaugurate his offspring as co-Emperor prior to dying... Voilà, new dynasty.
And yes, I'm aware of the single PU limitation. Not really a problem right now as the only places I'd really like to inherit are Brunswick or Lüneburg, and they are still small enough to diplo-vassalise. I'd be over the moon if one of them became an elector before being inherited, but I've never seen it. Heck, Hanover forming at all is pretty rare. The sad thing is I don't want Brunswick/Lüneburg because of political, economic, or military reasons... but because it will give me an opportunity to be historically accurate with the coat of arms.
I'm going to give the AI a head start before kicking down the door on the New World. I'll hold off on Northwest Passage and select Middle Passage (the Carolinas) instead. In Magna Mundi all of the other New World exploration decisions become available at naval tech 12 (for both AI and player), while the Middle Passage happens at AI tech 12 and player tech 16.
My other notable constraint will be to avoid demolishing natives; try to ally and encourage development of the North American tribes rather than overrun them. So my British North America will probably have significant native enclaves. Whether they survive the United States (and whether there is ever an American Revolution) is something else. I'm looking forward to finding out.
Thanks, BigBadBob. Good to see you're still tuning in and enjoying it!
Great update. The long wait was well worthwhile! Hope you won't keep us waiting that long next time.
I don't want to wait that long, either. The next 20 years were a lot of fun to play, and I look forward to sharing them with you guys. I've already start penning the next update and roughly half of the graphics are done. Might have to split the war update in two to keep the wall-o'-text factor down. We'll see.
Avignon is still the Pope's turf, but he's also still at war with France. Which as we all know is twice as scary as all of Italy combined.
...while the Emperor didn't. As for the rebellion in Austria, I was surprised the Electors didn't pick a different Emperor. After all, there must have been numerous more prestigeous German houses to choose from than this upstart Zwerger.
That was a minor annoyance for me, but I declined to mod it in the save afterward. The reality in gameplay was that Empire more or less ignored the change in Austrian dynasty. There was no "Franz I has been declared Emperor" pop-up. His name just started appearing in the HRE screen as if he'd been the Emperor all along (and, interestingly, he stays Emperor for a good long time). I couldn't rationalise that happening in real life, so I inserted my own fiction about the Electors approving the change.
It might, but I'm not sure how many of its formerly absorbed territories Austria has cores on. Very few, I think. At any rate I kind of broke them again—by accident—so they've got enough on their plate for a good long time.
Well, they've been quiet about northern Germany for the past 30 years, and I made them remove their Holstein core after the last war. Unless the Danes get it back by event or mission, I am hoping they continue to be pleasant and non-aggressive to Lübeck. The marriage was mostly a ploy to keep them from doing something stupid as I geared up for possible war (I thought the odds of Castile ruining my day in Greece were pretty high). As it turns out they did do something stupid but epic, and not to me. So... it worked?
Yes, absolutely.
Yes, though aside from consolidation France has been quiet too (despite still having cores on Normandy). I think the growth of Castile next door worries them, and that's A-OK with me.
Thank you, Kurt_Steiner! I must say that I love your nickname; The Eagle Has Landed was a Saturday afternoon favourite as a young lad of 13 or so. Used to be on TV fairly regularly.
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Well, I've finally caught up! (RL forced me to go slower than usual). A very thirlling AAR and a very puzzling cliffhanger... While Britain looks like an oasis of peace, Europe seems on the verge of disaster...
Ain't that the truth...
Magnificent work, Chris. This is one of my favourite AARs!
Thank you, Arakhor! You'll be happy to know the next update is imminent!
Well, Europe's certainly endured better days. But on the upside, its major powers are about to be united in the service of a grand undertaking—the likes of which hasn't been seen for almost 500 years.