A Togoku World (Completed)

[ArzhurG]

Welcome to my first AAR. After completing several world conquests and palying for about 2.7k hours, I feel like a new challenge.I will playing as the Japanese Daimyo Ando. My ultimate goal will be very difficult so I will set two slightly easier ones first. My three goals are:

• World conquest
• Shinto one faith
• One culture

I have competed several world conquests, including a Three Mountains runs before absolutism was introduced (patch 1.18), so the first goal should be attainable.

I have only completed a single one faith before, as catholic Lithuania. Playing as a Shinto nation will certainly be a step up. The 3 missionaries that I will have will not be enough so I will be using extensive vassal feeding. This synergies almost perfectly with the shogunate government. As my vassals won't occupy diplo slots, I will be able to have an unlimited amount of small vassals converting my land. However, there are two issues with this. The subject interaction to convert your subjects doesn't exist for daimyos, so I will have to convert at least half of their cores dev before releasing them. The second issue is that I will already need a lot of diplo points to culture convert. I might have to release some of the vassals and core their provinces myself.

As the ultimate aim of this campaign is a one culture I will need to stack culture conversion modifiers. Religious ideas (-25%), enlightenment (-25%), religious-influence policy (-20%) and Shinto (-15%) add up to 85%, which is why I will be playing as Ando. They have another -15%, which will let me reach the cap of -90%. No formable nations have reduced culture conversion, so I have to start as one that does. The alternative of using the reduction from parliamentarian debates is to dependent on RNG for my liking. I will stick to my original culture (Togoku), as it feels wrong to switch to Manchu. In order to save up enough diplo points, I will start conversion and cancel it before it reaches 10%.

I've been toying with the idea of starting this campaign for the last half year and have finally decided that it's time. I will be playing on the current patch (1.25). I'm quite terrible at storytelling, so this will be sticking to the more technical side of trying to accomplish my goals. Any input/advice is welcome.

 

[Tom D.]

My ultimate goal will be very difficult so I will set two slightly easier ones first. My three goals are:

• World conquest
• Shinto one faith
• One culture

Slightly easier ? You must be god on earth! Seriously though, sounds very interesting, subbed.

 

[ArzhurG]

Ando start as the most northern daimyo, with two provinces and a total of 9 dev.

I start with the traditional milking of the estates, by granting them my second province (I left the clergy and merchants, as I couldn't get their influence high enough). I end up getting about the best general that I could wish for.

I start with an easy war as soon as possible against Mutsu.

This let me join my two provinces. This also let me increase the clergy's influence to get the 150 adm points (but not before the Shogun took two dev to contribute to their capital.).

Now that the first war and I've gotten a bit of prestige, its time to disinherit my mediocre 3-3-2 heir. He's a decent general (3-2-2-1), but with my 6 shock general I don't need him. He quickly gets replaced by an excellent 5-5-4!

My neighbor Shiba's only ally is already occupied in another war, so they won't accept a call to arms. Shiba also has a second province directly north of Kyoto (which I end up giving the merchant the province to get their diplo points), which will allow for new expansion possibilities.

Next I ally Ito who is in a defensive war against Ando and end up getting a single province.

My ally Uesugi was fully annexed in a separate war. The victors were overrun by rebels, so I DOWed them (Utsunomiya, Satake and Chiba). I managed to get the 3 Utsunomiya provinces and humiliate my rival for power projection.

That's it for now. The next update should be soon as I've already played until 1500.

 

[ArzhurG]

Slightly easier ? You must be god on earth! Seriously though, sounds very interesting, subbed.

Thanks, well it is in comparison to my final one. I might still fail the first one, but I feeling optimistic ... for now.

 

[stnylan]

Good fortune in this endeavour

 

[renchap]

What a challenge! Subbed and good luck!

 

[ArzhurG]

Good fortune in this endeavour

What a challenge! Subbed and good luck!

Thank you to both of you. Hopefully this will end up being interesting.

 

[ArzhurG]

Before I start, I want to apologies for the random-ish screenshots. I started the campaign and got ahead of myself. I played the first ~60 years before starting this thread. I took what felt to be important screenshots, but ended up having a lot of useless ones and missing some important war ones. When I start playing again I will try to be more consistent and give a better overview.

In the last post I consolidated the north. A quick war and one new province later (the one where my army is) and this is the result.

I took exploration as my first idea group, following one of the basic strats for Ryukyu. This will hopefully help spawn colonialism, allow me to expand in valuable trade company land and give me the opportunity to move my capital from Asia to Oceania. Eventually, I will abandon the idea group, once I have secured the cape, along with the Asian colonies.

My first colony was the Kurils, getting me closer to the Americas. In retrospect, it may have been better to focus on south east Asia. The Siberian tribes may be enough to get the colonial distance to Alaska. I attacked all of the natives, so as to avoid worrying about revolts and spread my own culture and religion. In this case The Kurils would have been converted anyways as it's not part of a trade company.

As it stood, I had two allies, Tokugawa and Ouchi. I had allied Usegi, Yamanna and Ito, but Usegi was annexed (as mentioned before). Both Yamanna and Ito sent me some horrible calls to arms, which I ignored. Yamanna called me against a strong Hosokawa and Ito against my stronger ally Ouchi.

After quickly allying Kikuchi (a safe bet as they were already allied to Ouchi), it was time for a real war. It was Hatakeyama, Chiba and Hosokawa against myself, Tokugawa and Ouchi. 2 stacks of 6k rebels had spawned in my land. I couldn’t face them myself (unless I took loans, which would have screwed my economy) and the had also weakened Chiba.

After almost 4 years later, the result was huge gains for me. Even though Chiba wasn’t a co-belligerent I took their COT to improve my economy. AE was becoming just a number in Japan as there wasn’t enough daimyo to form a coalition. I had to give Tokugawa a single province to avoid loss in trust and accidently gave Aki to Ouchi (it was their core so it went to them instead of me).

After this Ouchi rivalled me. Less then a year later I got a notification that Tokugawa was going to break our alliance. Normally when this happens you can’t call them into a war. However I found a loophole. I declared on the Ashikaga, which called in all of my allies automatically. We started slightly outnumbered, but with good positioning before the war I quickly whipped the Shogun’s stack, allowing me to win the war quite comfortably.

The war ended with total victory. I got 4 new provinces, including Kyoto, making myself the new Shogun. I'll leave you with the final screenshot with myself controlling all of Japan just before 1470. However, I was left with 5 disloyal daimyo (they still counted towards the 5 vassals for the age objective) and a long list of future revolts.

Edit: Spelling.

 

[botho]

Subbed.
Good luck!

 

[stnylan]

Nice worknon becoming Shogun

 

[Tom D.]

Already Shogun and probably the strongest nation in Japan in a mere 30 years, well done I would say.

 

[atwix]

subbed

 

[Pureanger]

• World conquest

• Shinto one faith

• One culture

Casual one-culture All of your goals are possible, but can be extremely stressful. Even though you will most likely play on normal, the shinto/one culture combination sounds crazy to me as you need to convert provinces first before you can culture convert them. You need to have all big developed provinces owned and converted by 1770ish. Optimally provinces next to them 10-20 years earlier so you can convert those first and get the multiplicative 25% reduction adjacency bonus too.

Pro-tip: When you form another country, it removes the seperatism from all provinces. Something that prevents culture conversion as well and which i did not know before going for my attempt... Also check my one-culture campaign in the signature below if you like.

 

[ArzhurG]

Thanks for all of your comments. It's encouraging to see people interested in this AAR.

Casual one-culture All of your goals are possible, but can be extremely stressful. Even though you will most likely play on normal, the shinto/one culture combination sounds crazy to me as you need to convert provinces first before you can culture convert them. You need to have all big developed provinces owned and converted by 1770ish. Optimally provinces next to them 10-20 years earlier so you can convert those first and get the multiplicative 25% reduction adjacency bonus too.

Pro-tip: When you form another country, it removes the seperatism from all provinces. Something that prevents culture conversion as well and which i did not know before going for my attempt... Also check my one-culture campaign in the signature below if you like.

A one-culture sees like a natural progression from my previous world conquests. I do expect the Shinto one faith to be very difficult, but I will be relying on a lot of medium sized vassals to convert everything. Ideally, I'll keep them all around until I have max absolutism to save as many diplo points as possible and have a HRE-like vassal swarm. I like the idea of Shinto's culture conversion cost reduction synergising with my final goal.

I am aware of the earlier time limit. Is the max time for conversion capped at 30 years, similarly to the cost? Policies should help with the separatism. I was planning on having islands of my culture for the adjacency bonus. That along with the fact that the game always rounds the diplo cost downwards will mean that I will pay less than one dip per dev. To decrease the total dev to convert I will ruthlessly exploit dev, once I have have a good power base. I had forgotten about nation forming removing separatism. The only formable with Togoku culture is Japan. If I do form it, I will loose all of my daimyos after I reload the game (at least that's what happened to me in my Oda campaign), so I will have to do it after annexing all of them.

Oh, and yes, I am only playing on normal.

 

[Pureanger]

Thanks for all of your comments. It's encouraging to see people interested in this AAR.


A one-culture sees like a natural progression from my previous world conquests. I do expect the Shinto one faith to be very difficult, but I will be relying on a lot of medium sized vassals to convert everything. Ideally, I'll keep them all around until I have max absolutism to save as many diplo points as possible and have a HRE-like vassal swarm. I like the idea of Shinto's culture conversion cost reduction synergising with my final goal.

I am aware of the earlier time limit. Is the max time for conversion capped at 30 years, similarly to the cost? Policies should help with the separatism. I was planning on having islands of my culture for the adjacency bonus. That along with the fact that the game always rounds the diplo cost downwards will mean that I will pay less than one dip per dev. To decrease the total dev to convert I will ruthlessly exploit dev, once I have have a good power base. I had forgotten about nation forming removing separatism. The only formable with Togoku culture is Japan. If I do form it, I will loose all of my daimyos after I reload the game (at least that's what happened to me in my Oda campaign), so I will have to do it after annexing all of them.

Oh, and yes, I am only playing on normal.

The biggest obstacle is that the max time for provinces is not capped at 30 years. A province with 55 dev will take 55 years, and there will be plenty arround by the end, at least 40ish dev provinces. Using vassals to religion convert is good and bad, since you need to pay diplo points to integrate them. On the other hand i don´t see how you can one-faith with shinto in time without the use of vassals, since you only got 2? missionaries. You definately need to make a shit ton of diplo to get both goals. I´d suggest you early savescum to have only rulers with 6 diplo skill and buy 5 diplo advisors asap.

Even though it is on normal, both goal together seem quite insane. It is like going from just finishing the bbb achievement directly to the three mountains. I would strongly suggest that you go for another religion Of course there is always the option of learning by failing... or showing it to this old know-it-all. In any case I wish you good luck and I will follow your adventures.

Ps. the change nation to remove seperatism is more of an trump card if you realize that you won´t make everything in time. If you need it there are plenty of nations you can form by changing primary culture. You can always change the primary culture back to japanese...

 

[ArzhurG]

At the end of the last part I had just become Shogun of Japan. This upgraded me to a Kingdom and gave me the ability to have infinite vassals/daimyos. However, the loyalty of my new daimyos left something to be desired.

My first action as the Shogun was to try to become a tributary of Ming, allowing me to easily conquer their other tributaries. However, due to strategic interests they refused. As a result I selected the 10 dev province in Taiwan as my second colony. The aim as to bring us closer and hopefully get rid of the strategic interest malus. We’ll see if this was a good idea or not later on.

In the meanwhile I forgot to mention that my old 3-3-3 rule had died 7 years earlier and was succeeded by my 5-5-4. He had quickly gotten a not so ideal 3-1-3 heir. Now that my final war for Japan was over, I could afford to disinherit him. Within a year he was replaced with a much better 5-3-5 heir. Even though he had an average claim, I’ve been having much better luck than usual with heirs.

A year later my first daimyo, Kikuchi, accepts the new order and grants me his loyalty. This comes with the paltry, but welcome sum of 0.11 ducats a month.

This is quickly followed by the selection of my first age ability, making my colonies that bit stronger.

After having conquered the Ainu, I had saved up enough mana, so it was time to develop the renaissance in Kinai in late 1477. The merchants had been especially disloyal so I didn’t manage to get the reduction development cost. I selected Kinai because it’s farmlands, has a decent trade good, low-ish autonomy, was within my capital area (which had a reduction in dev cost thanks to the mission) and starts with a decent dev of 13. With my first two loans of this campaign I embraced the renaissance.

My good luck with my rulers/heirs was partly balanced out by possibly the worst traits considering the precarious situation with my daimyos. Both were malevolent (+5% liberty desire), while my ruler was also a babbling buffoon (-1 diplo rep, which translates to +3% liberty desire, along with other unpleasant effects).

While waiting for my conquest of eastern tip of Siberia, my next colonies were placed in the Philippines. They are rich and allowed me to claim the natives (only one of which was a tributary of Ming).

A quick two years later and the eastern Siberian tribes were conquered.

A year later I reached admin tech 7 (while still being on diplo tech 3), unlocking my next idea group. I selected religious as my new land were unruly and needed converting. From now on I expect my missionaries to not get any respite. In the meantime my first incident (Neo-Confucianism) fired. After checking the game files to make sure that I selected the correct options (I have a memory of one of the incidents being bugged in my last Shinto game), I obviously went for the closed option. While I’ll miss the -10% reduction in development cost of the first level when I will develop the printing press, the extra missionary and reduced culture conversion cost is so much more important.

After that I built a navy of 4 heavies and conquered the provinces of Manila, Maguindanao and Lanao from Maynila and Maguindanao. I also finished annexing my first daimyo, Kikuchi and saved enough diplo points to tech up twice at around the same time. After that it was time to DOW Cebu, who was allied to Tondo, Butuan and Sulu. I slowly sieged them, but it was slow as they had a huge combined navy. By cornering small fleets and retreating when the moral of my ships started getting low (once ships have no moral they take huge damage), I took them out.

However, the risk that I took by colonising Taiwan to become a tributary of Ming came back to haunt me. During the war against Cebu Ming DOWed me for that very province! Along with my vassals I had 45k to Ming’s 100k. However, I had 18k stuck in the Philippians with not much hope of getting back to Japan, as I still needed them to win against Cebu and had little hope of getting them back easily with my 4 measly transports. Hosokawa was still disloyal and Tokugawa refused to attach to any stack of mine. This left with a total of 17k to control in Japan. I quickly took 2 loans to build 6 more heavies and braced myself.

Ming quickly occupied Taiwan for the ticking warscore and left a garrison of ~30k, their smartest move of the whole war. After than they tried to invade Japan with stacks for 20k. With my 17k I managed to intercept all of their landings. For some reason their landing parties never had a general. I took full advantage of this with my 4-3-5-1 (my 6 shock general had died a good while ago, but the constant warring for Japan resulted in 70 army tradition, giving me pretty decent replacements).

After 5 and a half years of wearing them down first on land and then on sea, they finally accepted a white peace. I personally suffered less than 10k casualties, with my vassals taking another 6k. On the other side, Ming lost over 100k.

At the same time I won my other war, only leaving Sulu on the map. I also colonised a province in Oceania and Alaska. Once they were finished I started 2 more in Alaska. During the war against Ming Colonialism spawned in Europe, so I will need a colonial nation to spread it to my lands.

I have finally caught up to where I am in the game. I’ll leave you with this final screenshot. I’m the 6th great power with 458 dev of my own and 138 as vassals. While I not that happy with my progress since claiming the Shogunate, this is better than my Three Mountains run, where I only had a score of about 300 by this time.

 

[ArzhurG]

The biggest obstacle is that the max time for provinces is not capped at 30 years. A province with 55 dev will take 55 years, and there will be plenty arround by the end, at least 40ish dev provinces. Using vassals to religion convert is good and bad, since you need to pay diplo points to integrate them. On the other hand i don´t see how you can one-faith with shinto in time without the use of vassals, since you only got 2? missionaries. You definately need to make a shit ton of diplo to get both goals. I´d suggest you early savescum to have only rulers with 6 diplo skill and buy 5 diplo advisors asap.

Even though it is on normal, both goal together seem quite insane. It is like going from just finishing the bbb achievement directly to the three mountains. I would strongly suggest that you go for another religion Of course there is always the option of learning by failing... or showing it to this old know-it-all. In any case I wish you good luck and I will follow your adventures.

Ps. the change nation to remove seperatism is more of an trump card if you realize that you won´t make everything in time. If you need it there are plenty of nations you can form by changing primary culture. You can always change the primary culture back to japanese...

I'll have to keep that in mind. I'll have to take the highest dev provinces as soon as possible. It'll also be a good excuse to neuter the most powerful nations early on. To culture convert the whole world I'll need ~20000 points, or 8.3 per month for 200 years. If I focus on dip, run a level 5 adviser and have an average of 4 for my rulers, I'll get 14 a mounts (without pp, which is difficult at the end of a game). On top of that, seeing that I'm Shinto I can have tributaries, Released Shinto vassals that I will eventually core myself could make prefect tributaries. Therefore there should be some left over to annex. Also as I've mentioned before, I'll only try to annex at 70 admin efficiency to make it as cheap as possible.

I'm doing this for the challenge. If I crash and burn, that's part of it and if only get a Shinto one faith I'll still be happy.

Yes, I guess that it's a good option to have.

And I'll have 3 missionaries, 1 base, 1 from religious ideas and 1 from isolationism.

 

[Pureanger]

I'll have to keep that in mind. I'll have to take the highest dev provinces as soon as possible. It'll also be a good excuse to neuter the most powerful nations early on. To culture convert the whole world I'll need ~20000 points, or 8.3 per month for 200 years. If I focus on dip, run a level 5 adviser and have an average of 4 for my rulers, I'll get 14 a mounts (without pp, which is difficult at the end of a game). On top of that, seeing that I'm Shinto I can have tributaries, Released Shinto vassals that I will eventually core myself could make prefect tributaries. Therefore there should be some left over to annex. Also as I've mentioned before, I'll only try to annex at 70 admin efficiency to make it as cheap as possible.

I'm doing this for the challenge. If I crash and burn, that's part of it and if only get a Shinto one faith I'll still be happy.

Yes, I guess that it's a good option to have.

And I'll have 3 missionaries, 1 base, 1 from religious ideas and 1 from isolationism.

This is definately a healthy attitude. This goal can seriously mess with your head as one has to juggle quite many balls at the same time. You can see it at the end of florryworrys one-culture run. Just check his eyes in the last videos and you know what´s up. A shinto one faith is already quite an achievement and anything on top of that is really good. I hope you can pull it off, just don´t loose any sleep over it when it gets close...

 

[Tom D.]

I think Ming will almost in 90% or more of the cases be hostile to whoever colonises/conquers Taiwan, almost as if they desperately want it because it's in the Chinese super-region or however it's called. Or just basic inferiority and being close by. Ming is terrifying on land, but maybe this is a situation where the navy is actually important and you managed fine. Even deliberately letting them land to wipe their forces seems like a very good strategy. Bring it on I would say!

 

[ArzhurG]

This is definately a healthy attitude. This goal can seriously mess with your head as one has to juggle quite many balls at the same time. You can see it at the end of florryworrys one-culture run. Just check his eyes in the last videos and you know what´s up. A shinto one faith is already quite an achievement and anything on top of that is really good. I hope you can pull it off, just don´t loose any sleep over it when it gets close...

Thanks and good luck in your own endeavour. It too doesn't seem like a walk in the park either.

I think Ming will almost in 90% or more of the cases be hostile to whoever colonises/conquers Taiwan, almost as if they desperately want it because it's in the Chinese super-region or however it's called. Or just basic inferiority and being close by. Ming is terrifying on land, but maybe this is a situation where the navy is actually important and you managed fine. Even deliberately letting them land to wipe their forces seems like a very good strategy. Bring it on I would say!

In retrospect it was a mistake, but for now they aren't a threat as I have a more powerful navy. Once I start conquering the mainland things will get a bit dicier. As I see it I have two options. I could either find as many strong allies as possible (it's not as if my diplo slots are doing anything else), or I could sell the province to Ryukyu. The first option would push me to rely more on the AI and could lead to some gruesome wars, especially if Ming finds a moment of weakness. While I don't like the idea of giving up any land, I think that the second one is better. I could get about 90 ducats for it and could lead to Ryukyu becoming Shinto, making them a better future vassal. I don't think that they take religious ideas, but might still be an option to convert some of China.

Speaking religious vassals does anybody know where I could find a new-ish list of tags that pick religious ideas? I've found one from 2015, but it's getting a bit old now. I'm considering no-CBing someone in India to open new expansion opportunities. There are quite a few very weak nations with either no or one ally (Kathiawar, Vijayanagar, Ceylon, Janpur and Arakan to mention a few). I'm also impressed by what AI Nagaur has accomplished so far.

Edit: Added Ryukyu possibly becoming Shinto.