Caveat lector: I’ve never written an AAR before, so expect it to be something of a bumpy ride. If you’re willing to put up with that, you’re welcome aboard the Gothic conquest train.
The plan is to provide some idea of how I play the expansion game. As a great believer in the strength of vassal integration and minimal same-continent coring, I’ll try to lead Theodoro to greatness using the former. This means that my general strategy, idea group choices etc. will all be geared towards facilitating rapid growth once I’ve established my power base. There are some slight differences in how I approach things depending on starting position (e.g., Theodoro being Eastern means free westernization, so I don’t need to factor that in) but the basic strategy remains the same. If you are sensitive to cheese, well, you have been warned.
This means that I’ll open with religious, influence and administrative, and to better illustrate how viable this is I’ll be even stricter on the same-continent coring than I usually am. While I’m functionally a power player, I still adhere to some artificial limitations, a.k.a. house rules. I rarely tag switch (although to be fair this is irrelevant in this case as the achievement requires you to remain Theodoro), and I will neither join the empire nor get myself elected HRE.
For this run I will not be teching dip at all until much later (at the very least I’ll have diplomatic ideas fully filled out by then, meaning tech 14-15+). I sometimes tech up to 7 for the convenience of the extended coring range, but demonstrations are demonstrations so I won’t be doing that here. Why? Because dip tech is basically just one big mana sink, and it’s entirely possible to play the expansion game without touching it. I’m also going to stay Orthodox. There are advantages to this, although going Sunni early on is probably the better choice—it’s certainly the easier one.
What is so good about vassal integrations, then? Early game vassals help bolster your numbers, but for me it mainly comes down to one thing: mana cost. If you’re good enough at the game you’ll inevitably find yourself limited by mana at some point, and relying on vassal integrations to expand is an—in my opinion—efficient, if not perfect, way to help mitigate this problem.
The base cost for coring same-continent clay is 10 paper mana, while the cost for integrating is 8 bird mana. It’s easy to cut down the integration cost to 4.4 mana by filling out influence and administrative and activating the policy as required (this also means that integrating larger vassals side by side saves you mana, as you’ll require fewer policy activations). Coring, on the other hand, can be reduced to 6.5 mana by getting administrative ideas and making sure you have claims on the provinces you take.
There are ways to improve this further, but most of them require you pick easy mode tags, e.g., the Ottomans, rely on formables to get better claims or abuse cheap gimmicks, e.g., the empire. Admin efficiency will improve this, but admin efficiency affects integrations too, and at any rate you don’t want to sit around waiting for admin tech 17 until you start expanding. Of course, there’s always the option to beeline for off-continent clay, but there are a lot of geographical considerations here—there are many reasons the Ottomans are as strong as they are.
As far as I’m concerned, a more elegant solution is one that doesn’t require you to pick strong tags or rely on specific gimmicks (becoming HRE isn’t exactly a realistic option in many cases), but each to his own. Further complicating the matter is the requirement to tech admin; you don’t really have much of a choice here, as access to more idea groups require you to do so. On the other hand, there are few compelling reasons to tech dip at all—in fact, you could probably one-tag comfortably enough by sitting on dip tech 3 for the entire game, although it’d require a few no-CB wars. Whether it’s actually worth teching up for imperialism and client states is debatable, but I tend to do so. Even if you do, you’ll end up saving thousands of mana by being so far behind once you start teching up—mana that can easily be channelled into acquiring more land.
Talk is cheap, though; throwing out some numbers doesn’t prove much, so I’ll get back to this once I’ve built up Theodoro a bit (assuming I don’t get ignominiously destroyed on the way). I last played here before the Cossacks, so I’d expect a few differences, but I’m confident that the general ideas from my Trebizond campaign will work for Theodoro, too. As such, I’ll aim to become a kingdom within 50 years, an empire within 100, and to restore the Pentarchy (because sticking it to the Catholic heretics is always fun) along the way. We’ll see how that works out (cue 10 years of regency hell).
The plan is to provide some idea of how I play the expansion game. As a great believer in the strength of vassal integration and minimal same-continent coring, I’ll try to lead Theodoro to greatness using the former. This means that my general strategy, idea group choices etc. will all be geared towards facilitating rapid growth once I’ve established my power base. There are some slight differences in how I approach things depending on starting position (e.g., Theodoro being Eastern means free westernization, so I don’t need to factor that in) but the basic strategy remains the same. If you are sensitive to cheese, well, you have been warned.
This means that I’ll open with religious, influence and administrative, and to better illustrate how viable this is I’ll be even stricter on the same-continent coring than I usually am. While I’m functionally a power player, I still adhere to some artificial limitations, a.k.a. house rules. I rarely tag switch (although to be fair this is irrelevant in this case as the achievement requires you to remain Theodoro), and I will neither join the empire nor get myself elected HRE.
For this run I will not be teching dip at all until much later (at the very least I’ll have diplomatic ideas fully filled out by then, meaning tech 14-15+). I sometimes tech up to 7 for the convenience of the extended coring range, but demonstrations are demonstrations so I won’t be doing that here. Why? Because dip tech is basically just one big mana sink, and it’s entirely possible to play the expansion game without touching it. I’m also going to stay Orthodox. There are advantages to this, although going Sunni early on is probably the better choice—it’s certainly the easier one.
What is so good about vassal integrations, then? Early game vassals help bolster your numbers, but for me it mainly comes down to one thing: mana cost. If you’re good enough at the game you’ll inevitably find yourself limited by mana at some point, and relying on vassal integrations to expand is an—in my opinion—efficient, if not perfect, way to help mitigate this problem.
The base cost for coring same-continent clay is 10 paper mana, while the cost for integrating is 8 bird mana. It’s easy to cut down the integration cost to 4.4 mana by filling out influence and administrative and activating the policy as required (this also means that integrating larger vassals side by side saves you mana, as you’ll require fewer policy activations). Coring, on the other hand, can be reduced to 6.5 mana by getting administrative ideas and making sure you have claims on the provinces you take.
There are ways to improve this further, but most of them require you pick easy mode tags, e.g., the Ottomans, rely on formables to get better claims or abuse cheap gimmicks, e.g., the empire. Admin efficiency will improve this, but admin efficiency affects integrations too, and at any rate you don’t want to sit around waiting for admin tech 17 until you start expanding. Of course, there’s always the option to beeline for off-continent clay, but there are a lot of geographical considerations here—there are many reasons the Ottomans are as strong as they are.
As far as I’m concerned, a more elegant solution is one that doesn’t require you to pick strong tags or rely on specific gimmicks (becoming HRE isn’t exactly a realistic option in many cases), but each to his own. Further complicating the matter is the requirement to tech admin; you don’t really have much of a choice here, as access to more idea groups require you to do so. On the other hand, there are few compelling reasons to tech dip at all—in fact, you could probably one-tag comfortably enough by sitting on dip tech 3 for the entire game, although it’d require a few no-CB wars. Whether it’s actually worth teching up for imperialism and client states is debatable, but I tend to do so. Even if you do, you’ll end up saving thousands of mana by being so far behind once you start teching up—mana that can easily be channelled into acquiring more land.
Talk is cheap, though; throwing out some numbers doesn’t prove much, so I’ll get back to this once I’ve built up Theodoro a bit (assuming I don’t get ignominiously destroyed on the way). I last played here before the Cossacks, so I’d expect a few differences, but I’m confident that the general ideas from my Trebizond campaign will work for Theodoro, too. As such, I’ll aim to become a kingdom within 50 years, an empire within 100, and to restore the Pentarchy (because sticking it to the Catholic heretics is always fun) along the way. We’ll see how that works out (cue 10 years of regency hell).
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