This Papal States game, a retrospective
So I just finished reading the 1.2 patch notes... verrrry interesting.
Reignking (post 35) from
the main patch discussion thread said, "Biggest change, IMO: the cost of colonists drops from 50 to 20."
I quite agree, and if you take a gander back at the beginning of my AAR, you'd notice how huge that would have been. I would have had so much less inflation, and would have been able to colonize so much faster.
...
But back to this game. Yes, it's over because of 1.2. But still, it's a papal states WC. I don't think there's any doubt about that given the 130+ years left, the massive armies, and the explosive expansion in the past 17. (On a side note, could any mods out there add "(a WC)" to the title?)
What are the lessons?
In retrospect, I managed the economy as well as I could I suppose in the beginning. The big thing I didn't understand was how "freeminting" works. Now I doubt my inflation would have hit 13 in the beginning - just using this freeminting would have reduced it to 10 or even less.
Also, I annexed without cores a lot in the beginning, which is a terribly inefficient way to expand in terms of BB. It may have been necessary, as I explained at the time since I didn't have the spare cash to build up relations, but I can't help but think that I should have vassalized and diplo-annexed a bit more. I think it would have sped up that initial expansion tremendously.
And also, an idea from
Rensslaer's Milan AAR - I was eager to diplo-annex all my vassals as fast as possible. But why? Why not use my BB to gain new provinces from other nations, in addition to those vassals? My vassals continue to help me with wars, they continue to pay me, and every year I leave them as my vassals my chance to diplo-annex increases and therefore so too does the cost to diplo-annex them decrease.
All this talk of managing BB and vassals so as to expand super quickly perhaps gets its greatest expression (at least that I've seen) in
Zeppelin's Burgundy AAR.
Also, Rennslaer's Milan AAR is inspiring in another respect: his early use of navy. In Victoria, the key strategy was to completely and utterly ignore the navy in favor of the army until such time as your economy was insane, and you got ships that gave troop bombardment bonuses, at which time you built a huge unstoppable flotilla all in one go.
But an early fleet of Galleys would have been incredibly useful, and do-able, in my papal states game. Combine that with the 100 naval tradition admiral that is easy to get from exploring, and I could have dominated the mediterranean quite early and quite cheaply. That would have enabled me to vassalize and take Milan much earlier, have faster troop movement via transports, and blockade much earlier, which speeds up sieges quite noticably. Also, my lack of immediately diplo-annexing would have played into this, as I'd have the formidable navies of Sicily and Savoy to back me up.
Another thing is innovative versus narrowminded - tech costs really do not matter past a certain point. And those extra colonists, in the long term, would more than make up for any slower tech gain.
...
I think my general strategy- expand as fast as possible militarily staying under the BB limit while colonizing and building the economy into a behemoth is the best for WC. Then, once you have an insane economy, highest possible tech, insane military, +3 stability, say to hell with BB and burst out onto the world, turboannexing everything in sight.
Also, since one optimally stays at about 15 BB at all times, and since one needs NI slots for rich colonies, trade is still pretty much worthless with this strategy. But given the relative cheapness of stability for small countries, a hybrid trade/colonization start, later switching those two trade NIs over to colonial NIs might work well actually. I'll consider it for next game.
(Ack, now that I look at it, 15 BB = -15 foreign compete chance, which is as much +compete chance as you get from both trading NIs. Yeah, trade is worthless for this strat.)
I should be starting another 1.2 WC coming up here in a while. It will be on VH, rather than normal as this game has been. Haven't quite decided what country to play yet. The smaller, the poorer, the more technologically backward the better, as long as WC is still possible.
