Chapter 1 - Otto... who?
Alright, 1444, tag byz... where do we begin? Like I mentioned I keep getting spammed by byzantium guides. The most popular one arround seems to be from budgetmonk. For a guide it has rather a lot of steps involved, so I´m a bit sceptical as rng has more chances to f*ck us over. All in all it seems legit and doing a siege race with otto is right up my alley. I won´t argue with him when it comes to hre and byz as he seems to play those a lot, but let´s see if we tweak it a bit...
The general idea is to build up to and over forcelimit immediately and get otto to commit all their troops to a siege of constantinople, while we siege up the rest of their country. Could have come right out of my playbook...
Already deviating from the guide and I haven´t even unpaused yet ^^ We take 150 power points instead of the suggested 100. This actually causes problems as the negative prestige delays our relations improvement with albania. It works out in the end, but it get´s very close to delaying the initial dow. That´s what you get for thinking you are smarter
We also ask for contributions as money seems to be an issue with this strategy. Armies are on low maintenance.... New units are being recruited constantly.
Otto allies crimea.
The 5k rng stack is moving to anatolia. Good, good... so far everything as predicted.
Kocaeli is mothballed and stays mothballed after we finish our 1k stack in constantinople. Something new I learned from this guide... I usually keep my armies 2 provinces away and move to the adjacent province on the 1st of the month. Turns out if you have your maintenance on zero the ai doesn´t care when you build new units next to their forts ^^
Relations should be higher by now... thank you stupid brain :/
We make up for it by sending albania a little present.
On april fools we turn up the maintenance. Otto still doesn´t activate his forts in anatolia.
Just in case we forget, activate defensive edict in the capital a bit early...
On top, we hire a fort defense guy to delay ottos siege even further. Not sure why it wasn´t mentioned in the guide, but the upside seems rather tremendous... if available.
Another deviation... I build a second unit in constantiople as I noticed that the ankara fort is also mothballed. Greedy is good, right? Make sure that it finishes on the first of the month we want to declare.
Two weeks before dow albania accepts our alliance offer. Pfeww ^^
This is what I was worried about when seeing the guide the first time. Otto parked one little light ship in the bosporus and doesn´t seem to move it. This will delay our strategy as we will want to move our constantinople stacks over to anatolia immediately. In the guide there was no light ship in the strait. It also messes up my greedier strategy to also siege ankara. Even if the naval battle takes only 1 day, the fort in kocaeli will be activated and we won´t be able to move our second unit to ankara...
I know, I know I said no exploits, but I just can´t help abusing the promise land, but not giving land trick at the start of a campaign. Heads up, I must have f*cked something up there as it did not work later in the peace deal...
Can´t see what though as I also desired the avlonya province after the dow... oh well, can´t have everything I guess.
A savescum solved our lightship problem. Good, as this opening involved too many steps that require perfect timing to do it like 10 times. The rest of the guide was pretty spot on, except the otto fleet behavior. Seems like there are too many factors involved to predict where ottos ships will be in 6 month. Parking 1 light ship in the strait seemed very deliberate and was actually very smart by the ai. Lucky for us that it suffers from post-savescum dementia...
Not sure if it was the savescum or some other issue, but 2 days before the dow ankara becomes un-mothballed... oh well, maybe we get lucky and get a breach.
Dow day. Ready or not... here we come!
Otto was successfully intimidated and moved all his greek armies to siege down constantinople. We reached selanik, kocaeli and even ankara before they could reinforce. However the 5k rng stack will reach our unit in kocaeli before it can finish the siege. Not sure why, maybe the stack was already moving, took a quicker route or the ai hired a fort defense guy himself. In any case, this is a problem....
... that hopefully can be resolved by a savescum....
Look at that... I did work. And seeing the screenshots now I realize where the problem was. In the first attempt otto attached a general to the 5k stack that most likely had manoever pips.... We lose our unit, but we got the siege....
Two sieges actually...
-64%, 42% defensiveness... we got some time....
The major contribution of albania is actually ships which keep otto busy while we land 6k men in anatolia. Skanderbeg is nice to have too. We will move him to siege down crimea once their troops arrive in greece.
Quite a big deficit, but only 2 loans so far....
Crimea incoming. Skanderbeg waiting for them to pass by. We could easily wipe the 5k stack, but otto would most likely build new units in anatolia and move his units from constantinople...
I forgot to also siege down ottos coastal provinces to prevent him from building new galleys. This threatens our naval dominance and he already completed one in hüdavendigar...
Damn, otto just build 2 fresh units in anatolia and wiped our ankara siege. Luckyly we are paying attention and reinforce before the turn of the month
Don´t mind if I do...
Poland got the union. Not sure yet if that´s good or bad for us....
Crimea fell and peaces out. Constantinople is at 7% and might get critical over the next couple of rolls. Anakara unfortunately didn´t get a breach, but I´m confident, that we will finish it soon. Looks like a good start. Props to budgetmonk!
With crimea out of the war ottos siege of selanik won´t progress. His war exhaustion is currently at medium, definately want it go down to low before peacing out...
Before we peace out we buy ourselves our favorite icon. Ae reduction and relations improvement...
Hmm, serbia is attacked by venice... and otto garantees them.
Reconquest cb, 40 spynetwork and 10% ae reduction from icon... nobody cares except otto. We even have some warscore left to give a province back to albania. They deserved it... also I f*cked up the exploit and not giving them land would have given us the broken promise penalty...
We took all required provinces to finish our first mission and get new claims. Byzantium despite having a difficult start has a couple of things going for them. The missions are one thing. They give claims over most of the roman empire as well as some very nice permanent and non-permanent bonuses. So we are actually trying to use the railroads pdx has laid for byzantine expansion.
Our current claims. Most are permanent with -25% coring cost and time. One claim on serbia we fabricated manually. Our loan situation doesn´t really look that bad despite quite going over forcelimit for 2 years...
Ae is looking manageble..
Venice becomes our first rival. Too bad you can´t rival otto from the start anymore :/
Establish communties for further ae improvement.
This is the second thing byzantium has going for them. Lots of events and decisions that revolve arround reclaiming the former roman empire...
Possible Alliances are rare. Wallachia seems like a good option. Don´t want hungary to get any ideas...
Some of our troops haven´t returned home yet and we fight our second war against otto via their garantuee of serbia.
Otto is still at 30k, but our forcelimit increased. We currently field 16k men. Serbia is still busy with venice and albania joined in again.
We still controll the strait and ottos new capital has 0 garrison. His armies will stay on the greek side and can do whatever they like while we take care of anatolia...
(un)lucky lucca?
Moldavia has become a march of hungary instead of poland. Don´t see that everyday. Poland would have been better, since we need a couple of provinces from hungary, but we don´t plan to take then anytime soon...
Unlucky otto for sure...
All we take from otto this time is money and a 8 year truce, instead of 15 years... He is non-co-belligerent and we don´t want to end up in coalition hell 3 years into the run. Our little phoenix needs to learn how to fly yet
Time to secure our naval dominance. The burghers "gift" 5 heavies....
Hungary loooves and wants to marry us....
Unfortunately We can´t take land from bosnia, so we vassalize them....
Serbia gives us their land, including a gold mine... and becomes a vassal as well. I was very conflicted about the last part as vassal integration will be a bitch without influence ideas and or absolutism. Going overboard on vassals (no 3 with athens) so early is not such a good sign...
... then again this gives us a free war against venice, who is still at war with serbia. They do have several provinces we want and we get to call in our allies ...
This might come in handy...
Otto is being smashed from all sides, like in a pinball machine. Sweet music in my ears...
Austria and hungary often come in a pack...
By all means milan... don´t wait for our permission...
Can´t take all provinces in the agean, but venice will have much less forts to siege down the second time arround....
Quick look on the ae map. Nothing too worrysome...
We formalize our alliance with hungary...
... and austria. This puts us over diplo limit, but it´s well worth it. We don´t want no beef with those two nations yet. They will acquire less ae and protect us from coalition threat in general...
Otto is finally a valid rival.
I guess we can save some diplo points by dumping albania... they rightfully belong to the phoenix anyways...
Normal mode, lol. We are already among the top nations when it comes to forcelimit...
Don´t see that everyday neither. Blue rebels... gogogo!
What in the world made you think this is a good idea burgundy?!? We are already watching france as I expect it to be one of the last obstacles to form the roman empire. Super france is certainly not good for us...
Kosovo certainly needs to be in a state. Delicious gold....
Our rebels failed :/ I guess we have to do it the old fashioned way...
Don´t underestimate the otto... a lesson learned by the former nation of candar...
Now it is mamluks turn...
Come on poland... what did we ever do to you? I guess we will go for a russian alliance then...
Free annexation of athens.
Free points, wohoo..
Those 14681 belong to otto...
...12782...
Dow I waited with the declaration and watched the army ledger until the otto total unit counter went down. That meant that mamluks engaged them in a fight, most likely in the eastern part of their empire. If they retreat, what is likely, they will do so in our direction and might become a good target for a stackwipe.
Like here. No need to do the heavy lifting when mamluks can do it for us...
Let´s have a joust...
Mil tech 5 is good to go...
Small adversarial allies, like lucca are good prestige and money suppliers. They also prevent otto from taking bigger allies by blocking diplo slots... so we don´t cancel their alliance.
Hmm, interesting. Tunis is already at war with castile and portugal and the message tells us that aragon will dow them seperately. I wonder if we can use that to our benefit....
Darn it, they are too rich and powerful for us to guarantee them... but maybe....
We peace out otto a bit earlier then planned. Originally we wanted to wait for otto to make their peace with mamluks as they occupied a couple of provinces we would have liked...
Ha... it worked. The conquered provinces from otto made us rich and powerful enough. Now we can guarantee tunis...
Too bad... not enough splendor yet...
New claims over naples from missions.
Mamluks at 40 ae. We don´t want to fight them yet so we better improve relations...
1457 and we have surpassed england as a great power... not too bad.
Gonna make a cut here. Our little phoenix has hatched and grows strong quickly. Our northern borders have been secured by alliances with austria, hungary and wallachia. Otto is battling a two front war for survivial and is most likely to lose it. Next episode we will find out if aragon dares to attack tunis with us guaranteeing them. Aragon is one of our upcoming primary targets together with otto and mamluks. We do want to get as much of their land before an iberian wedding triggers and complicates things. Hope you enjoyed it so far and come back for the next one. Bye!
Alright, 1444, tag byz... where do we begin? Like I mentioned I keep getting spammed by byzantium guides. The most popular one arround seems to be from budgetmonk. For a guide it has rather a lot of steps involved, so I´m a bit sceptical as rng has more chances to f*ck us over. All in all it seems legit and doing a siege race with otto is right up my alley. I won´t argue with him when it comes to hre and byz as he seems to play those a lot, but let´s see if we tweak it a bit...
The general idea is to build up to and over forcelimit immediately and get otto to commit all their troops to a siege of constantinople, while we siege up the rest of their country. Could have come right out of my playbook...
Already deviating from the guide and I haven´t even unpaused yet ^^ We take 150 power points instead of the suggested 100. This actually causes problems as the negative prestige delays our relations improvement with albania. It works out in the end, but it get´s very close to delaying the initial dow. That´s what you get for thinking you are smarter
We also ask for contributions as money seems to be an issue with this strategy. Armies are on low maintenance.... New units are being recruited constantly.
Otto allies crimea.
The 5k rng stack is moving to anatolia. Good, good... so far everything as predicted.
Kocaeli is mothballed and stays mothballed after we finish our 1k stack in constantinople. Something new I learned from this guide... I usually keep my armies 2 provinces away and move to the adjacent province on the 1st of the month. Turns out if you have your maintenance on zero the ai doesn´t care when you build new units next to their forts ^^
Relations should be higher by now... thank you stupid brain :/
We make up for it by sending albania a little present.
On april fools we turn up the maintenance. Otto still doesn´t activate his forts in anatolia.
Just in case we forget, activate defensive edict in the capital a bit early...
On top, we hire a fort defense guy to delay ottos siege even further. Not sure why it wasn´t mentioned in the guide, but the upside seems rather tremendous... if available.
Another deviation... I build a second unit in constantiople as I noticed that the ankara fort is also mothballed. Greedy is good, right? Make sure that it finishes on the first of the month we want to declare.
Two weeks before dow albania accepts our alliance offer. Pfeww ^^
This is what I was worried about when seeing the guide the first time. Otto parked one little light ship in the bosporus and doesn´t seem to move it. This will delay our strategy as we will want to move our constantinople stacks over to anatolia immediately. In the guide there was no light ship in the strait. It also messes up my greedier strategy to also siege ankara. Even if the naval battle takes only 1 day, the fort in kocaeli will be activated and we won´t be able to move our second unit to ankara...
I know, I know I said no exploits, but I just can´t help abusing the promise land, but not giving land trick at the start of a campaign. Heads up, I must have f*cked something up there as it did not work later in the peace deal...
Can´t see what though as I also desired the avlonya province after the dow... oh well, can´t have everything I guess.
A savescum solved our lightship problem. Good, as this opening involved too many steps that require perfect timing to do it like 10 times. The rest of the guide was pretty spot on, except the otto fleet behavior. Seems like there are too many factors involved to predict where ottos ships will be in 6 month. Parking 1 light ship in the strait seemed very deliberate and was actually very smart by the ai. Lucky for us that it suffers from post-savescum dementia...
Not sure if it was the savescum or some other issue, but 2 days before the dow ankara becomes un-mothballed... oh well, maybe we get lucky and get a breach.
Dow day. Ready or not... here we come!
Otto was successfully intimidated and moved all his greek armies to siege down constantinople. We reached selanik, kocaeli and even ankara before they could reinforce. However the 5k rng stack will reach our unit in kocaeli before it can finish the siege. Not sure why, maybe the stack was already moving, took a quicker route or the ai hired a fort defense guy himself. In any case, this is a problem....
... that hopefully can be resolved by a savescum....
Look at that... I did work. And seeing the screenshots now I realize where the problem was. In the first attempt otto attached a general to the 5k stack that most likely had manoever pips.... We lose our unit, but we got the siege....
Two sieges actually...
-64%, 42% defensiveness... we got some time....
The major contribution of albania is actually ships which keep otto busy while we land 6k men in anatolia. Skanderbeg is nice to have too. We will move him to siege down crimea once their troops arrive in greece.
Quite a big deficit, but only 2 loans so far....
Crimea incoming. Skanderbeg waiting for them to pass by. We could easily wipe the 5k stack, but otto would most likely build new units in anatolia and move his units from constantinople...
I forgot to also siege down ottos coastal provinces to prevent him from building new galleys. This threatens our naval dominance and he already completed one in hüdavendigar...
Damn, otto just build 2 fresh units in anatolia and wiped our ankara siege. Luckyly we are paying attention and reinforce before the turn of the month
Don´t mind if I do...
Poland got the union. Not sure yet if that´s good or bad for us....
Crimea fell and peaces out. Constantinople is at 7% and might get critical over the next couple of rolls. Anakara unfortunately didn´t get a breach, but I´m confident, that we will finish it soon. Looks like a good start. Props to budgetmonk!
With crimea out of the war ottos siege of selanik won´t progress. His war exhaustion is currently at medium, definately want it go down to low before peacing out...
Before we peace out we buy ourselves our favorite icon. Ae reduction and relations improvement...
Hmm, serbia is attacked by venice... and otto garantees them.
Reconquest cb, 40 spynetwork and 10% ae reduction from icon... nobody cares except otto. We even have some warscore left to give a province back to albania. They deserved it... also I f*cked up the exploit and not giving them land would have given us the broken promise penalty...
We took all required provinces to finish our first mission and get new claims. Byzantium despite having a difficult start has a couple of things going for them. The missions are one thing. They give claims over most of the roman empire as well as some very nice permanent and non-permanent bonuses. So we are actually trying to use the railroads pdx has laid for byzantine expansion.
Our current claims. Most are permanent with -25% coring cost and time. One claim on serbia we fabricated manually. Our loan situation doesn´t really look that bad despite quite going over forcelimit for 2 years...
Ae is looking manageble..
Venice becomes our first rival. Too bad you can´t rival otto from the start anymore :/
Establish communties for further ae improvement.
This is the second thing byzantium has going for them. Lots of events and decisions that revolve arround reclaiming the former roman empire...
Possible Alliances are rare. Wallachia seems like a good option. Don´t want hungary to get any ideas...
Some of our troops haven´t returned home yet and we fight our second war against otto via their garantuee of serbia.
Otto is still at 30k, but our forcelimit increased. We currently field 16k men. Serbia is still busy with venice and albania joined in again.
We still controll the strait and ottos new capital has 0 garrison. His armies will stay on the greek side and can do whatever they like while we take care of anatolia...
(un)lucky lucca?
Moldavia has become a march of hungary instead of poland. Don´t see that everyday. Poland would have been better, since we need a couple of provinces from hungary, but we don´t plan to take then anytime soon...
Unlucky otto for sure...
All we take from otto this time is money and a 8 year truce, instead of 15 years... He is non-co-belligerent and we don´t want to end up in coalition hell 3 years into the run. Our little phoenix needs to learn how to fly yet
Time to secure our naval dominance. The burghers "gift" 5 heavies....
Hungary loooves and wants to marry us....
Unfortunately We can´t take land from bosnia, so we vassalize them....
Serbia gives us their land, including a gold mine... and becomes a vassal as well. I was very conflicted about the last part as vassal integration will be a bitch without influence ideas and or absolutism. Going overboard on vassals (no 3 with athens) so early is not such a good sign...
... then again this gives us a free war against venice, who is still at war with serbia. They do have several provinces we want and we get to call in our allies ...
This might come in handy...
Otto is being smashed from all sides, like in a pinball machine. Sweet music in my ears...
Austria and hungary often come in a pack...
By all means milan... don´t wait for our permission...
Can´t take all provinces in the agean, but venice will have much less forts to siege down the second time arround....
Quick look on the ae map. Nothing too worrysome...
We formalize our alliance with hungary...
... and austria. This puts us over diplo limit, but it´s well worth it. We don´t want no beef with those two nations yet. They will acquire less ae and protect us from coalition threat in general...
Otto is finally a valid rival.
I guess we can save some diplo points by dumping albania... they rightfully belong to the phoenix anyways...
Normal mode, lol. We are already among the top nations when it comes to forcelimit...
Don´t see that everyday neither. Blue rebels... gogogo!
What in the world made you think this is a good idea burgundy?!? We are already watching france as I expect it to be one of the last obstacles to form the roman empire. Super france is certainly not good for us...
Kosovo certainly needs to be in a state. Delicious gold....
Our rebels failed :/ I guess we have to do it the old fashioned way...
Don´t underestimate the otto... a lesson learned by the former nation of candar...
Now it is mamluks turn...
Come on poland... what did we ever do to you? I guess we will go for a russian alliance then...
Free annexation of athens.
Free points, wohoo..
Those 14681 belong to otto...
...12782...
Dow
I waited with the declaration and watched the army ledger until the otto total unit counter went down. That meant that mamluks engaged them in a fight, most likely in the eastern part of their empire. If they retreat, what is likely, they will do so in our direction and might become a good target for a stackwipe.
Like here. No need to do the heavy lifting when mamluks can do it for us...
Let´s have a joust...
Mil tech 5 is good to go...
Small adversarial allies, like lucca are good prestige and money suppliers. They also prevent otto from taking bigger allies by blocking diplo slots... so we don´t cancel their alliance.
Hmm, interesting. Tunis is already at war with castile and portugal and the message tells us that aragon will dow them seperately. I wonder if we can use that to our benefit....
Darn it, they are too rich and powerful for us to guarantee them... but maybe....
We peace out otto a bit earlier then planned. Originally we wanted to wait for otto to make their peace with mamluks as they occupied a couple of provinces we would have liked...
Ha... it worked. The conquered provinces from otto made us rich and powerful enough. Now we can guarantee tunis...
Too bad... not enough splendor yet...
New claims over naples from missions.
Mamluks at 40 ae. We don´t want to fight them yet so we better improve relations...
1457 and we have surpassed england as a great power... not too bad.
Gonna make a cut here. Our little phoenix has hatched and grows strong quickly. Our northern borders have been secured by alliances with austria, hungary and wallachia. Otto is battling a two front war for survivial and is most likely to lose it. Next episode we will find out if aragon dares to attack tunis with us guaranteeing them. Aragon is one of our upcoming primary targets together with otto and mamluks. We do want to get as much of their land before an iberian wedding triggers and complicates things. Hope you enjoyed it so far and come back for the next one. Bye!
Attachments
Last edited:
