Chapter 7 - Rize of the Fenix
Just checked the timestamp on the first screenshot... almost two and a half month since I started playing this campaign. I better hurry completing this AAR before memory fades away. Good thing is we are already close to the finish line. Before I start the chapter I want to let you in about some of my pre-campaign thoughts. I already mentioned a couple of times that I wasn´t completely happy with how a couple of things went. Making too much use of vassals for one, the bankruptcies (which might have been unavoidable at this pace, but maybe one less...), not starting earlier with the feeding of allies to reduce coalition members...
The original plan was to have a chill campaign to
calm my strained nerves after the brutal no-mil wc. That being said I was also looking forward to some
bloody bare-knuckle streetfighting. Brute-forcing the roman restoration against wave after wave of coalition armies after having to run away for centuries only being equipped with bow and arrows. Yes there was always going to be a grace period to gain a powerbase in order to be able to take on a european coalition even on normal. Not having this planned out completely and basically going from situation to situation I realized in early 1500s that there will be a second limiter to earliest restoration. Namely vassal integration as we have to hold all the required provinces ourselves. Sure there is always the possibility of breaking vassalization and conquering your own subjects. Since I didn´t plan for that neither it would have created a whole bunch of new problems which might have delayed me for the same period. So I went with the comfortable route and integrated the vassals regularly, after all this run was supposed to be chill ^^.
With better planning and execution I´m pretty sure that I could have
shaved off another 10-30 years though. How? If you read the requirement to form rome carefully you will notice that you don´t need to have all required provinces cored. My plan for the late-game was to prepare the map and make an old-school huge final push and end up with 1000 oe. I haven´t done or seen that for a while, but that´s how wcs used to end usually back in the days. Would have broken our country a few month afterwards, but we´d had a green button. This plan became unfortunately less likely as france was going nuts. Having to trucebreak them 5-7 times in a row while surving the oe would have been a challenge. Otherwise we would have started working on them earlier, losing them as ally and adding them to the coalition. You see, bad options where you look. I hope you forgive me for taking the easy way out. I will try to do a campaign where we just don´t give a f*ck and just murder coalition after coalition and everybody else who stands in our way
Back to present things and the easy way... This is the current situation we are dealing with ^^
Bohemia was the weight that
could have tipped the scale to either side. We managed to get the relations in the positves and keep our alliance intact for now... barely. Our other allies are gb, russia and timurids if I recall correctly. I doubt that they would be much help in a war, but lucky for the the ai does not know this...
Our income finally made a decent jump from 150 to arround to 200 ducats a month. I kid you not, I´m scared sh*tless about a third bankruptcy and try to avoid it at all cost...
We are about to enter not-give-damn mode now as I saw an opportunity by truce breaking burgundy. This will break our alliance with bohemia, which was most likely to break after the next war or two. The extra aggressive expansion doesn´t even matter too much as 200 or 500 ae makes no difference. Everybody inside of europe is already against us and countries outside of europe don´t care. The only one we care about it terms of ae is our allies. Most in danger was the bohemian alliance, who we are at war with now. Next in line will be gb, who we will have to finght in the future anyways as we need two provinces from them... It is most useful that we are able to call them in in this war... Oh right, why are we fighting this war? We do need several provinces from burgundy. Burgundy is also allied to brabant, who holds zeeland, which we also need. Also milan. On top we get truces with bohemia and it´s allies. This keeps the number of eligible coalition countries low...
Easy as pie...
Blitzkrieg...
Why are
we giving money to the clergy?!
Ah right, stab cost reduction. Man 9.2 corruption, that does not go well with our vassal integration cost...
Just need zeeland. You do your thing now, brabant...
Seems like we are in a hurry. Peacing out bohemia at 35% warscore. A longer truce might have been useful...
Nowhere to run... nowhere to hide...
That stab hit reduced the number of loans available down to 35 :/
Pfew, stab 0 raised it to 47... we got time
Which provinces do we need? Hmm,
better check the wiki... don´t want to make any mistakes here. Looks good...
Gb at 31 relations, good enough...
Renewing our truce with morocco...
... and tunis.
Bankruptcy looming ^^
How is our vassal integration of naples going? 1188/2545, eta oct 1604... way too late.
I think we should give back some tunesian land that we accidentally granted to naples... This was quite stupid.
Maxed out on loans. Corruption at 12 and rising...
Giving away naples land did not only reduce integration cost, it also gave us revanchism...
300 dip points and 8 years saved...
Another truce break? Right,
annoying provence that stole away quite a bit of money from our genoan trade node while being part of the empire. Us being allied to the emperor could not declare on them before...
Stab comes cheap, even with corruption...
I was just thinking the same thing like you probably did. How in the hell... but then I recalled provence bought some trade company land with all the money they stole from us, so we did not fully annex them here...
Seizing land whenever we can...
Whoa, now that is a bit much...
I see, changed my mind on regular integration. At first I thought this vassal would not make much of a difference since it was way smaller and sooner integrated then naples. As long as we had enough dip points no problem... Then I realized that after seizing a couple of provinces from them they would be a one war job with 99% warscore cost...
... I then realize that I miscalculated and that gascony isn´t a one war job. We made them orthodox, removing the -25% warscore cost vs other religions modifier.
Stupid, so stupid!
Finally dip tech 9 ^^
We started another war against milan, who we did not annex earlier due to being non-co-belligerent and over 50% warscore. We give back görz to austria. Another province we don´t need to form rome and is owned by naples... I pains me to do this as like the tunesian provinces it makes the borders look much more pretty, but 12 years is 12 years.. Wait, what? Austria does not want their core back? Ok they don´t have a land connection, but as far as I recall they still have a core.... Oh well
We just returned a core to gascony to peace out austria, since we need to fight another war against them anyways it does not matter. Milan gets full annexed and we don´t need any more provinces from burgundy...
This completes our mission tree and grants us 10% ccr for the next 20 years.
Got to love the byzantine missions...
Lol, totally forgot about the third one.... I thought we´d make it...
At least we have truces for the next 5 years...
Gb wants to cancel their alliance... not enough favors to stop them...
Oh well...
We are still losing money... maybe there will be a fourth bankruptcy?!
Where were you couple of month ago....
Now I recall why dip tech 9 was so important. We still have a war with gb on our list and that requires a navy. Dip tech 9 is still decades behind, but at least we get a couple of new units. To make the most of it, we exchange our flagship...
We finally peace out gascony. There was still 80% something oe when we declared bankruptcy and had to take care of it first... No need to take 100% now....
France is 100% warscore... I swear if you develop anything....
Dip rep is at full capacity again, eta feb 1580...
sounds more like it...
We are out of bankruptcy. Let´s quickly dow france, before they get any ideas...
Right, truce times ran out as well... yikes
That´s not even half of it...
Damn, too late... gb already joined and commonwealth is a member as well...
Lucky for us
portugal is still dicking arround and hasn´t applied for membership...
Hey, our debt is gone... what does the world cost?
Gimme those ducats...
Isn´t that beautiful? Russia trust us utterly. We do the same, they have been such a reliable ally...
Traitorous russians, desert us in our moment of need. Scum of the earth!
This is quite inconvenient. We are so close to finishing our goals and now the coalition decides to pull the trigger. As stupid as the ai might be, sometimes it has a sixth sense about the best timing... meaning the worst timing for us :/
Barbarians at the gates! Sound the alarm!!!
Well, wargoal is superiority.
I guess we better hit them hard...
Oh I see what you are doing... Sneaky f*ckers, I told you ai sometimes has a sixth sense.
They are planning to occupy neapolitan provinces so integration gets halted...
Let´s finish our other wars first... Mainland france was less then 100% warscore as some of their territory is outside of europe. False alarm...
Ha, now that is funny. The ai
calculated our paper strengh before they declared war on us. They saw that russia woulnd´t join and we were busy with france and gb. Now this fires back in their face when the ai calculates against the ai... The religious league war got triggered, lol.
Now half of the holy roman anti-roman league is in a league war against the other half...
Another mastermind move from the ai. The graubünden fort is a key choke point for us to enter the hre from the south. Which we need to do if we want to also protect naples provinces. If we take it we could peace out several nations seperately. Somehow knowing this sweden parked a stack in the tirol mountains and does not move an inch. I tried attacking that stack but it gets reinforced in 2 seconds...
so we have a stalemate
One of our stacks got locked inside the hre and can´t actually get out. Maybe that gets movement into the situation. I´m also hoping that the ai will decide to dodge us by invading our western or eastern fronts. As soon as he walks down from his mountains to the south he will get a bloody nose...
We got 45% warscore on them. Enough that they accept timurids releasing 3 nations to peace out... More then we would have needed, but a longer truce is nice...
Already 20k in debt again... forming rome ain´t cheap...
On the plus side. Gb got cocky and landed their main army stack on the continent. We just engaged their navy and if we beat them we have few obstacles left to siege down their capital...
The mandatory second gascony war... Cost us like 8 stab, hmpf...
We managed to beat them, most likely to our awesome admiral and flagship...
Hip hip horray.
London has fallen...
Awesome, naples has debt...
This allows us to seize another province... 51 ld though...
So we develop mantua. Developing vassals and seizing provinces from them is cost neutral. Meaning if you seize 10 development from them it gives as much ld as you reduce it from developing the same amount... only one exception...
If you develop the highest dev province they have and seize it as a last push. It does not matter if you are at 100 or 120% ld after the seizure as long as your integration process is over 100%...
We peace out portugal. Azores, canaries.. check, check...
Are you kidding me, we have to wait to the next year because there are no diplomats available... sry rome in 1578.. no diplomats
Annex gascony...
Oh right, had to wait for naples too... 1579 ain´t too bad... now we can enjoy....
Wait what????!!!! Motherf*... That´s what I get for trusting the wiki and not using the cool in-game feature that high-lights the required provinces...
The war against burgundy was in 1566... ages and a coalition war ago... I´m not going back that far...
We savescum a few days back to not have to suffer the oe from peacing out portugal and gascony and truce break burgundy half a year later...
So, turns out integrating vassals wasn´t the last thing we needed to do :/
Being rome in 1579
Unfortunately I haven´t found
a better quality video of this, so we have to
celebrate the rize of the fenix with the pg13 version. It was a pretty fun run and relaxing for me. Hadn´t played byzantium or on normal mode since forever. Maybe I´m getting old and it is time to retire from those crazy world conquests...
ah wth , who am I kidding... Anyways, this is not the end yet. There will be a short epilog as we still have some scores to settle. Don´t want you guys
leaving with blue balls after talking about bloody street brawls at the beginning of this chapter. So stay tuned just a little bit longer...