1461-1470. WEEE!!! No! WE sucks.
In 1461, I checked and saw my truce was over with the Tims. I also had over 14 WE now. I -also- had overextension, giving the +50% cost to stab ontop of my base +38% and the WE penalty of over 50%. Stab cost for my provinces was now averaging around 100. Restarting the war with Tims was going to hit me for 2 stab which would take some
11 years to recover with max stab investment. My wars were not letting up. Infact, the tempo had perhaps increased, which was how my WE had climbed. Still, there was no way around it. No save/reload, remember?!!
My wars were all going well, except that my enemies always got 5 year breaks, while I would still be at war. I clicked over to Tims and declared war, and instanly 3 new revolts popped up, and my war cap went right to zero. There was nothing left to do except... more killing!!! DIE REBEL SCUM!
I played the Imperial Death March mp3, and got to work. Mamaluks declared war, and drug along a few allies.
Wow, that sucked. Not for me, for them!
I was killing them all. It was great! That was the entire reason for playing this game! I wiped out many navies, and killed Euroscum by the stack. There was only one problem. My WE was just continuing to rise a tiny bit with each fight. Revolts were frequent, and probably half of my combat was fighting rebels.
I crushed the Mams, destroying their two stacks in a total of three fights. They had even sized armies to what I had on the border, but not even odds. Shortest war ever!
I got a WP offer from France and took it, then continued killing the English and Spanish, and their allies. I realized however that sooner or later the rebels were going to get out of control if I didn't make peace and chill out for a bit. It was a long time ago the last time I went past the point of no return with revolts, but I could see I was getting rather uncomfortably close with WE and overextension creating RR everywhere.
While killing more English, Burgundy sent me a warning. In gambling lingo that's called a 'tell' letting you know what your adversaries are up to. In this case, war would soon follow.
One revolter I let capture a province. Hamadan! Persian nationals were all over my border area, and it looked like Persia would break free! This was great for me, so I just let them go crazy and tried to protect the Persian rebels from the Tims. A gamble for sure, but posibly letting me pick up 2-3 provinces at no cost some time down the line.
Of course, my vassals started trying to retake my captured province for me, but luckily they're easily distracted by... everything, and never sieged it for any length of time.
This was my war screen with Castile at that point, showing my WE and war capacity, as well as how many troops each side had at that moment. Remember, this shows all their armies -combined-. They'd lost a rediculous amount of troops in this war.
My war with Qara was back on, and I made peace with the Tims. War with GH was soon to come. I redeployed my forces to prepare for GH. Two stacks stayed on the Tim border, with one going after Qara, and the other ready to invade when/if Persia formed.
I kept beating the crap out of Castile and friends, but was very careful not to fight any 'pitched' battles. I made sure I had enough forces to overcome terrain penalties and still have a strong victory with each fight in order to avoid any more WE.
With all the rebels I had to put down, I was hard pressed to get an acceptable presence on my border with GH in time! And then te war started, and I checked his troops total to see what kind of damage I'd need to inflict.
With his army at roughly 100k and stability zero, I felt I had a good chance of getting a quick peace deal. That would be critical, because soon after the war was back on with GH, I got several new wardecs.
Those damn Vikings and their infernal warmaking! It would have bothered me much less if they'd sent more armies, but typically I'd just get some chumpy unit of 1-2k every 6 months or so. What kind of war is that for a Viking?!! Whimps. They should be ashamed! The Brandenburg crew jumped in as well, just as worthless as the Vikings most of the time. And of course TO had to join in, never sending a single ship or unit. Sigh. Way to hold back the Ottoman menace TO, great job! Go back to paying tribute to the Horde. Which they were almost instantly after getting a border with GH.
So this is who I was fighting/killing at that time.
Not really sure who was allied with who, didn't really care. When they came, they died, and it didn't take a single extra unit in coastal defense to do the extra killing either, because they all failed!!! 22k OE armies on that coast had killed an incredibly lopsided number of enemies ever since they'd been posted there. There were two types of countries in the world, us and them. OE was us. Everyone else was them, and they all sucked. It was declared to be so on day one, and would be that way until there were no more 'them' left. I would kill them all! Or as many as I could before running out of time.
In the East, the 'real' war was going down with GH. They were numerous as always, but simply couldn't hang with my troops. With 2 to one odds they'd maybe break my morale, but lose most of their force in the process, and I'd always have that extra stack in reserve if things got too heavy. 3 x 10k troops were fighting them in the East, and a single 12k stack plus most of my vassals were in the West.
I destroyed several medium sized navies, including around 15 or so from the Papal State. I am so going to own Rome! Eventually.
My biggest and longest running war wasn't even with 'them'. 'They' would never break me! My worst enemies were WE, and his ally RR. They were hitting me hard. About half my fights in this decade were vs Rebels, no joke.
After giving GH a moderate thrashing, they peaced out. With my largest enemy out of the fight, many other nations offered peace as well. But best of all, Persia broke free and I invaded. My armies who were fighting GH were then turned loose on revolters, who were all over the place.
Things weren't per say going well, but they were going according to plan. Then, 'it' happened. That seemingly unimportant thing that you can trace back to as the turning point. After 5 years of stab investment, I hadn't even recovered a single point yet. WE had driven my leaders legit down almost under 50%, and revolts were 2-3 a month.
I got the advisor event giving +2 stab. YES! 'They' were going to be in big trouble soon.
With my war cap now at 40, peace offers rolled in. I accepted WP with 'them' for now, except Qara, who I made pay me cash again, and Persia, who I'd have to sit on for a while because their annexation cost was too high.
Not everyone was ready to give me some space however, and Burgundy, as predicted, declared war.
The war was pretty weak really. My navies killed their navies, except for the main navy of Burgundy. My armies spent far more time killing rebels than the forces sent by 'them'.
As the decade drew to a close, the war with GH was back on, and we were both much better prepared than in the last war. His troops strength was better, and my border force was 10k stronger. My WE was also down to 11 and change. I'll tell you in the next update how it all worked out.