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KOM has steadily improved his EU4 skill this campaign. Considering it is his first kick at the game he has held up incredibly well. He is making good trade income and hasn't bled land since he last tried to stand up to England. My prediction he finishes EU4 climbing from dead last to a #6 slot if he can resist the temptation of poking me in the eye.

Enjoy the ledger and a heat map under. as an FYI England has probably another 1500 in development via colonies/vassals. Fox another 300. Germany 200.

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I have 50 more or so!

Awesome elephant story, there.

Thanks bro. I think I'll revisit the Hound sometime soon (almost a century since he appeared last) and add some black mass lovecraftian stuff this time.
 
As always, KoM, you're a better writer than player. You manage to survive the game through sheer tenacity but never a top player since the Ynglings.

I wasn't a top player as the Ynglings, either; I was one of the three humans who stuck with the game to the very end, so it was hard to avoid winning. In CK and EU2, Yngling Norway was nothing special.
 
I wasn't a top player as the Ynglings

But you were the top player of our hearts. All these people stabbing each other from the front are dreadfully predictable and dull.
 
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I wasn't a top player as the Ynglings, either; I was one of the three humans who stuck with the game to the very end, so it was hard to avoid winning. In CK and EU2, Yngling Norway was nothing special.
Reading about the Ynglings (the first incarnation), it certainly felt like they were a top faction. At least during the Victoria stage, which was when I got hooked.

Didn't you try to swap doctrine paths during the first years of the HOI2 stage and get horribly savaged for it? But it was your offensive across Siberia that triggered glorious nuclear armageddon, wasn't it? Man, that AAR of yours (and your esteemed colleagues) was quite a blast to read. Those were the times! :)
 
Reading about the Ynglings (the first incarnation), it certainly felt like they were a top faction. At least during the Victoria stage, which was when I got hooked.

Well, yes and no. In the first Great Game, my Victoria AAR was dominated by the terrible Twenty Years' War. Which I won by the skin of my teeth after two decades of grinding attritional trench warfare. Against the AI. So yes, I came out on top, but my opposition wasn't exactly the varsity; a human-played Burgundy would have mopped the floor with me.

Didn't you try to swap doctrine paths during the first years of the HOI2 stage and get horribly savaged for it?

Yes; extremely unfortunately timed, that. Or fortunate for my opponent. By that point Burgundy had a human player again, and he very nearly did mop the floor with me; only the highly fortuitous Malmø Rising - partisans in the one province that would put his whole invasion force out of supply - saved me from losing my whole industrial base.

But it was your offensive across Siberia that triggered glorious nuclear armageddon, wasn't it? Man, that AAR of yours (and your esteemed colleagues) was quite a blast to read. Those were the times! :)

Those were the days! The Ynglings were savage and ruthless, with none of this namby-pamby self-doubt that crept in during the second timeline; the games were simple and easy to understand; and peanuts commented in the AAR threads!
 
Bowden really needs to step up his game there, England isn't near dystopian and menacing enough for a great game world hegemon.
 
Indeed, I am at the mercy of my opponents in setting up worthwhile enemies. I do think von Hentzau was a fine invention, and I think Kuipy's Jackal will make an excellent final showdown. He just needs to dominate the whole of Africa, reduce England to a shadow of its current self, and make puppet-allies of the Indians first.
 
The Sanity and the People

September 20th, 1655
Kirthar range, Persia
Morning

"March, march, march your men, through the drifts of snow, onemorestep, onemorestep, onemorestep, onemorestep, at least I don't have to row."

There were no drifts of snow in these passes; not in late summer. But the chant had gone with the men through Siberia, from the Oxus to the Chosin and back. And on the way it had changed, had grown endless new verses and discarded them, until in the depths of winter someone sang 'onemorestep' instead of 'merrily' and the whole army took it up; and the chant of onemorestep had carried them from Lake Bajkal and into spring. They would not change it now even for the promise of ships to carry them home to Italy; it belonged to them, to the men who had twice carried their pikes across Asia. Now they were carrying them east, again, for the war was not over after all even though the Uzbek Khanate was out; the English were in, and the Japanese, and for Venetians to fight on the Oxus was no longer a senseless sacrifice.

They were lean and sinewy now, this endless dusty column of men who had once had the stocky muscle of fishermen; who had handled oars and sails, and sung "row, row, row your boat" when they needed a mindless rhyming chant for an endless rhythmic task. They bore their pikes comfortably on the deep calluses on their right shoulders, with hands almost smooth again for lack of saltwater oars to make them rough; and they marched with the easy assurance of men who had done it for a thousand miles, and another thousand, and another. They were veterans, in some sense; each man had stood by his comrades through storm and snow, had joked around fires and shared the last bit of mare's milk mixed with blood when it was uncertain that the Uzbek tribes would send them another herd. Any fights were long since fought out or smoothed over; if any regiments in the world had ever been knit together by shared hardships, surely these were the ones. And yet Eliezer was uneasy in his heart.

In two years of war they had yet to fight a battle.

There had been blood shed, certainly, on the long march through Siberia; but it had been skirmish, razzia, and raid. Defending the Khanate - and the Venetian supply lines - against marauding Indian cavalry, or subduing tribes nominally subject to the Khagan but susceptible to Indian gold. There had been shots fired and men killed. But they had never set their heels in the dirt to stand against ten thousand men coming to make them move; had never heard the cannon firing three rounds per minute, to conserve barrels and break regiments; had never pushed the pike on a front of a mile to make an army run or die.

But now Peshawar marched across the Kirthar, a hundred thousand strong; and Persia and Venice went to meet them, to throw them back into the valley of the Indus and roll back the border that had crept slowly westward for a hundred years. So the Senate had decreed, and the Doge had called, and men from all over Italy had sailed across the wine-dark waters to fight against angry strangers. Eliezer could lay out the chain of reasoning, in his mind; Persia was an ally, the Indians were rivals for control of the lucrative Indian Ocean trade, the balance of power was shifting in a way unfavourable to Venice's interests... but in truth, it seemed strange that ten thousand Italians should die for a quarrel on the distant Indus.

He felt a small pressure at the back of his neck, as always when his mind wandered down such a path; with a practiced effort of half-conscious unwill, he flinched away from trying to analyse why they were here and what the Senate hoped to gain. If he didn't, the tiny warning pressure would grow into a headache, then a migraine that would make every sun-reflecting piece of metal in the army into a dagger stabbing his eyes. Instead he turned to considering whether to offer the Indians battle in a favourable location and hope they accepted, or push the attack himself. Defense rarely won decisions, but the kshatriya were said to be very good... the pressure receded as he juggled the supply line, the dangers of being overawed by reputation, his confidence in his own well-drilled veterans and lack of confidence in his allies. There would be a battle, if not tomorrow, then within the week. That was what mattered; not metaphysical questions about the sanity of the Senate and the Doge.

And besides - if the Senate was mad, what was he going to do about it? There was a war to fight.

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Victorious battles of the Indus Delta War. Note the immense casualties on the Veneto-Persian side.​

The combined Venetian-Persian army won the battle of Kalat, but at an immense price in blood. Eliezer Aiello never returned to Venice, where he might have overcome his migraines and thought more deeply about the sanity of the Senate. The Indus Delta War ended in defeat, though without the loss of any Venetian territory. Its ultimate purpose remains unclear.

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As prophesied in my previous AAR, my armies did drive the raiding Indians back from Siberia; too late, unfortunately, to save Uzbek, which was driven out of the war with loss of territory. I then made the acquaintance of the exiled-army rules; thinking that I needed to get to allied and belligerent land, I marched to Korea to help out Mark, who was facing a full-dress Indian invasion - and then back again to Venetia-oltre-il-Mare when I learned that no, you actually need to be on your own land to un-exile armies. So I marched across Asia twice, and then back to the Indus to help Persia against the impending attack. (England and Japan, meanwhile, were faffing about in the south of India, doing... something. I'm sure they were doing something because they repeatedly said they were. Obviously they would not tell me they were invading southern India and then not, in fact, invade southern India. The mere fact that they never occupied anything beyond Ceylon cannot controvert this incontrovertible logic.) This is, of course, ridiculous both in terms of what these armies think they are doing, and logistics; EU4's war model really falls down here. You cannot march a hundred thousand men through Siberia; they'll starve. But that's the nature of wargame models, sometimes they give silly results in the service of getting something fun to play most of the time.

For a change, I and the Persian player were able to coordinate tactically, concentrate force to achieve local superiority, and win battles. For a brief, shining moment it looked as though we would enforce a victorious peace; but then Peshawar took heart (and pointed out that the offered terms did not actually settle any of the issues at stake, and we would just have to fight all over again once the truce ran out, which was probably true), and rallied his armies. This enraged my Persian ally to the point where he began to make bad decisions, including slinging insults in chat, which distracted him from tactical maneuvering. Between that, and the Indians optimising very strongly for combat, we won all the battles but lost the war of attrition: We would defeat their armies, force them to withdraw behind their fortresses, and face the same army again six months later with thirty thousand manpower lost. Three rounds of that and we were looking for mountain provinces where we could make stands and slow down the retreat enough for England to pull us out of it. And then the awesome Persian general died and I lost even defending a mountain, and there was nothing to do but exit the war with a massive loss of Persian provinces. I have to say I admire the Indian players' skill; they fought all their neighbours, plus England and Venice, to a standstill and got out with a gain.

While all this was going on, I was able to achieve the Thalassocracy by judiciously juggling my trade fleets in the Med; yea, even unto Genoa was I briefly the dominant trading power. Which actually lowered my income, of course, since I don't collect there; but I only needed it for a couple of days to enact the decision. I now possess a humongous trading fleet and a fighting navy that, while nowhere near England's, is at least within striking distance of the second-tier naval powers'.


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Eurasia, 1669. Peshawar expands into Persia, Byzantium takes some Egyptian provinces and makes a start on recreating the old province of Africa, and Venice subdues the Algerian coastline.
 
Pharaoh hardened his heart
XII – Growth

1656, deep in the west African wilderness, a little east of the Niger river

"Wait here," the butler said, not too courteously. They waited.

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"That's one big tree," one said to the other.
Centuries ago, before the conquest, Great Zimbabwe had been a city of kings, bustling and hustling. Its streets echoed with the din of caravans and craftsmen, and Hassan Abed called it "the Golden Turd". But now it was abandoned; gold prospecting had moved downstream to more promising lodes, and the region was ruled from Inhambane. Everyone had forgotten Great Zimbabwe the Golden Turd, except Pharaoh who came there, to the old brick observatory, with a handful of servants, priests and guards, when he needed isolation. And except trees.
This one was a colossal baobab, which had spread large, obscene roots across the disjointed pavement and grown to the point of reaching the two nearest brick walls, slouching against and bursting them. Quite like the Egypts, continually growing against the wall of greater empires.

"Our expansion in the Sahel has not gone unremarked. England and its slaves will come for us."
"Are you sure of that?"
"I feel it."
Then the butler was back.
"You may come in."

The rooms inside were clean and freshly repaired, but sparsely furnished. Pharaoh did not care for comfort or ceremonial here. What he cared for was an immense wall of slate, where he was completing an immense astronomical chart. Three turbaned scholars stood at attention, one step behind him, as did a servant with a platter where bread slices, fruits, a jug of water, rags and chalks were neatly arranged.
"… The stars are not right. It makes no sense. Redo your observations tonight, and no mistake this time. You're dismissed."
One the part of the wall closer to the two diplomats someone had drawn and immense, stylized arrow with hundreds of annotations along its longs. Those above it were dates arranged in chronological order, and seemingly and minor and unrelated to historical events, for example as the third siege of Samarkand, the birth of a Foxy princess, and such. Those underneath were one or several astrological symbols. Pastward, the historical events grew scarcer and stopped altogether a thousand years or so before the Prophet's birth, but the astrological symbols went on and on, at apparently regular intervals. The arrow ended at a point with three of them, circled twice.

But then they stopped paying attention, because the Pharaoh stood before them, a tall, severe man in a simple, very clean linen robe.
"You are the ambassadors my vizir recommended. You will now answer some questions, truthfully."
Strange, each one observed, I had not expected Pharaoh to speak Egyptian with a [Delta/Nubian] accent. Then one hour passed. They realized in a panicked flash, noticing the candles now on the table. Had they dared to dose off, to stop paying attention while Pharaoh was talking? They could feel intense feelings at the brim of their conscious thought, like the taste of a rich meal lingering on the palate: their most intimate loves and lusts and hatred and fears, their devotion to the Pharaoh and the Egypts, their feeling toward the Church cults.

"Do you remember what happened?" Pharaoh asked.
One fell prostrate, pleading and blubbering, the other just stood agape.
"Answer."
"No."/"No." The word jerked out them simultaneously.
"Good. You were tested and found worthy. Here are your diplomatic safe-conducts. You, Ali, will sail to Fandango, and warn those kafirs that we will join Babuchistan against them if they do not return our province Socotra, which they took from us unfairly. You, Hussain, will sail to Babuchista, and warn those traitors that we will join Fandango against them if they do not return our province Mahra, which they took from us unfairly. Is there any question?"
"No."/"No."
"Leave now and hurry. Act with discretion."

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So with Fandango and Babuchistan locked in a deadly struggle I put on my troll cap and figured I'd shake both of them up for one of my cores back. Fandango folded. Babuchistan fought, lost and gave me all my cores back, which was nice, but then he flounced and to reward that behavior the provinces were edited back to him.
Also I conquered a bit of the Sahel, in a shape that… where's that gif again?

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totally legit conquests
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And then England and Byzantium jumped on me because they were mad for some reasons took all my provinces in North Egypt!
 
Bowden really needs to step up his game there, England isn't near dystopian and menacing enough for a great game world hegemon.

This is true, I prefer a much softer diplomacy with malleable people. The AAR's obviously don't show the full depth of what occurs in game. I generally play the player and let the rest take care of itself. With that context starting out within the first two sessions I put Oddman on his heels and then boxed him into a small small corner. I 'knew' I wouldn't have to annex him or even do anything more because he has a history of quitting anytime he doesn't get to be a world power. Sure enough he cried for a few sessions about how the game was already over (because he wasn't #1-2) and quit. I was 90% sure I would never have to annex him and he would do my work for me; but just in case I held Jerusalem as an implicit launching pad to his Syria.

In order and directly from my shifting politics we have seen Oddman in Syria, Fimconte in Persia, Zilcho in Russia (Jacobgood in Germany takes at least half credit here; my policy of never trust a zilcho however prevented him from any real assistance), Dunkfunk In Aztec and finally #3 player in game with Dragoon in Spain. KhanXLT in Japan would have been one of my earlier victims as well (I respect his ability to be a real pain) but he cleverly shifted and offered better utility if left alive.

We don't count anders; because he really deserves all the credit for killing himself ;)

KOM would have been on this list session 1 of EU4, but I started feeling too guilty at the idea of having us all miss out on the AAR; plus its hard to find quality plotters these days.

In summation there has yet to be a single session since #2-3 of CK2 that I havn't been in some sort of pvp war, most sessions it is 2. This week will be a real surprise for the KOM, Kuipy AAR readers!

Compared to the game you were in I have been ruthless; that game I was just constantly vassalizing and proping up people. Other than Kuipy though no loyalty!


So with Fandango and Babuchistan locked in a deadly struggle I put on my troll cap and figured I'd shake both of them up for one of my cores back. Fandango folded. Babuchistan fought, lost and gave me all my cores back, which was nice, but then he flounced and to reward that behavior the provinces were edited back to him.
Also I conquered a bit of the Sahel, in a shape that… where's that gif again?


And then England and Byzantium jumped on me because they were mad for some reasons took all my provinces in North Egypt!


Yami quit and was trying to ruin his nation, at the time it really didn't seem like he would rage quit... and come back the next session.

You got jumped because you got greedy and took 3 provinces I needed you rascal!!
 
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I'm fairly sure oddman quit because we killed like 20 family members in a single session :p he still had plenty of potential to expand if he wasn't dieing every 5 minutes
 
All the True Colours

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Map of the world, 1689.​

Crown Princess of Men: Tell that colour!

King of Men: That is the sanguine red of the Wicked Wardenate of the West, sometimes called England; it is the colour of the blood of millions, shed that such a state might live. It is the colour of the hundreds of hearts that are daily torn out of living breasts to ensure that the Sun shall not set on the empire.

CPOM (hides her face): It's too scary!

KOM: Well, yes. That is the nature of globe-spanning empires run by ruthless optimisers, even if they do have an affable manner until the hammer falls.

CPOM: This colour!

KOM: That is the corrupt rotting purple of Byzantium; it is the colour you get when a fragment of the ancient world lives beyond its time, becoming a shambling mockery of what was once right and glorious. When a world-conquering impulse is hemmed in by stronger peoples surrounding it, and turns on itself in intrigue and backbiting, entirely unlike the healthy democratic debate of the mercantile successor states who have the better claim to the true mantle of Rome.

Queen of Men: It looks more lavender to me.

KOM: It's only slightly lavender; and anyway, that's no insult these days.

CPOM: Tell that one.

KOM: It is the weak unmanly pink of Denmark, England's lapdog. That is the colour you get when the vigorous red of blood fades, in vassalage and servitude, and the warlike heritage of Yngling and Skjoldung thins out to something better suited to adorn a four-year-old's hair.

CPOM: Can I have a pink butterfly?

KOM: Not right now. You tell this one.

CPOM: Green!

KOM: And such a green! The healthy vibrant green of jungle and rainforest, of fresh-planted fields watered by the annual flood, of growing things and new life! The deep verdant green that covers Africa, the cradle of the race; the fecund green that our earliest ancestors saw beyond the circle of light, when they danced around their fires in worship of the first gods. It is sometimes called the Dark Continent; but they do not say so, who have stood in a rainforest at noon, and seen the sunlight filtered through meters of leaves to make a cathedral of green-lit rays.

CPOM: This tiny one!

KOM: It is not great in extent, that is true; but the brave defiant azure of Venice makes up in gold what it lacks in size. Here is the true successor of Rome; and even in libertarian utopia, Rome cannot be rebuilt in a day. The blue represents the sea; it is the azure of the Mediterranean on a day in early spring, when you see it from the porch of your white summer house in the foothills of the Apennines. Perhaps, as you idly muse on the ships which bring the lifeblood of the Republic to the peninsula, your fingers play with golden coins, as one does; lifting them out of the bowl set on your table, beside the good white wine and the simple meal of bread and meat, and letting them trickle through your fingers, glinting in the sunlight and chiming sweetly against one another. But not, of course, throwing them up in the air and letting them rain down over your head; only the nouveau riche do that sort of thing.

CPOM: Can I play with my piggabank?

KOM: After the colours.

CPOM: Ok, fine! Tell this one.

KOM: That is the menacing steel grey of the Uzbek Khanate; of which little can be said other than that it is not as threatening as it looks. Indeed its armies are positively cuddly once you get to know them. But if we were playing EU2 it would be a threat greater than England.

CPOM: White!

KOM: The pure Aryan white of Peshawar; where the master race is carefully bred and raised in the communal creches, under the guidance of the autistic artificial intelligence from the far future, to have Discipline of 125.

CPOM: This one?

KOM: That is the noble intellectual field-grey of Germany; it denotes a state that needs no flamboyant ornament to show to advantage. The plain grey uniforms that keep watch on the Rhine have conquered to the Volga. It is a simple and Spartan design, contrasting favourably with the baroque - not to say Byzantine - curlicues of other countries; and above all it is cheap. Over an army of a quarter million, that cheapness saves enough money to outfit two additional regiments. This consideration tells you all you need to know about German philosophy. Can you say 'philosophy'?

CPOM: Phosophy!

KOM: Close enough. You tell this one.

CPOM: Blue! Blue!

KOM: The deep blue called 'royal'. The blue of the sea at dusk, when one's thoughts turn - as they do - to dominating all the Pacific, and latching on to its trade in the chokepoint at Malacca and draining it dry, preventing the Indian and European nations from taking their just profit. The colour of a vein very close to the skin, temptingly throbbing with the lifeblood of nations; but if the skin were breached the rich liquid within would run red... the red of England. Best not to think of it; best to be content with one's station in life, and perhaps write the occasional dekaeptaic poem in which one subtly, allusively, metaphorically, hints that the actual world history in which one finds oneself is not, all things considered, the finest possible world history.

CPOM: Another green?

KOM: The grim dark green of Fandango; the shade that gives India, not Africa, the true claim to be the Dark Continent. The green of silent pine forests, shivering with chemical warfare; the green of mold on bread. The creeping omnipresent colour that underlies the clean purity of Peshawar's ideology, and bursts out in stench and slime if you dig below its surface.

CPOM: Tell that one.

KOM: The cheerful bright orange of Korea; the colour of comic relief.

CPOM: That one is orange too.

KOM: That's right; but it is the angry orange of Persia; the orange of rage and madness. It is the colour of loss; of an empire which once reached clear to the Indus, and now is fallen back on the Iranian highlands; the colour of not escalating minor incidents into globe-spanning wars, and losing province upon province as a reward. Moloch laughs when men cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma, for it takes only one defector to make a mockery of reason; and the one who refuses to break silence, the honest thief who suffers his colleague's betrayal, is made to wear a prison jumpsuit in this shade of orange. For all the twenty years of his sentence.

CPOM: Last one.

KOM: That is Fox, and it is a colour which must not be named; whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent. No one knows what the fox says.

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The Crown Princess of Men does, on occasion, exclaim "Tell that colour!" (although more often "Tell those letters"); all her dialogue is authentic. My replies may have been slightly embellished. Incidentally, being a well-brought-up middle-class child, she does not in fact throw coins up in the air and let them rain down on her head, even when permitted to play with her piggy bank. But I have seen her attempt to swim through them like a dolphin.

In this session I took Ragusa from Byzantium, with some incidental help from the field-gray armies based to my north; the Byzantine navy was, for inscrutable AI reasons (Blayne had been absent last session) composed mainly of galleys, and sank very picturesquely. Obviously, once I had established naval superiority in the Adriatic it was all over for Byzantium, entirely notwithstanding that he caught my armies out of supporting distance of my German auxiliaries and forced me into a strategic retreat behind my fortifications. Only a temporary setback! I now control Ragusa, and thus most of the trade power in one of the nodes that feeds Venice. I also picked up what was left of the Maghreb from the Templar Republic.

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The decisive naval battle that broke the power of Byzantium and established Venetian naval superiority in the Adriatic. NB: "Venetian naval superiority" shall not be construed to include any ability to prevent English fleets from going where they like. Side effects may include delusions of grandeur and careless running into immense amounts of heavy ships bearing the White Ensign. Use responsibly; consult your doctor before taking for prolonged periods.

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So... it's just my imagination, right, that in player mapmode there seems to be a tortured human face - modulo something nasty growing out of his forehead - outlined by the verdant green of Egypt? Nobody else sees that, right?​
 
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Ha you show those purple bastards! You done good.

Next time Blayne doesn't show up, make his country cough up Sicily. For the sake of prettifying the map, if nothing else.
 
First it's my Sicily. I send all the Englishmen that show a tendency to criminality there.

Secondly Blayne did offer it to KOM over the week this week to buy KOM off from hitting Blayne again. He didn't remember to ask me if I was willing to give it up though! lol