Eternal Sun - 1.19 Aztec World Conquest AAR (completed)

[Vulkandrache]

Nahuatl has massive conversion issues but there are ways to deal with that.

I wouldnt call it issues per se.
Sure you yourself only have 3 dudes but your vassals have max two anyway. And the MS is not that far behind.
Just need to be a bit more picky with the choice of vassals and match them more to their culture group.

The main problem with the mesoamerican religions is the loss of your third missionary should you move your capital to the old world,
and the fact that the MS decisions require +2 Stab, which means vassals will only ever get them by chance with a lucky event.
Whoever designed this should take a long hard look at his work.

 

[parats]

Any updates soon?

 

[bbqftw]

Hi,

I will see what I can do.

If it wasn't obvious (spoilers ahead):

Spoiler

I have completed the campaign quite a while ago

I think I will try to summarize the key points since past 1650 its very much the same stuff.

 

[bbqftw]

Chapter 5: Lion and Jaguar

The integration of the Afghans into the warrior and merchant classes has reached a critical level, to the point where they are seen as the dominant ethnic group in the empire:

1596 - With most of India truced, there is now some time to deal with some other issues. Due to collection penalties, Majapahit is siphoning a rather large amount of cash from the Moluccan merchants. Though similarly numbered, the Raja’s armies disintegrate to Aztec cannon fire.

Similarly, some of the inland Africans are attacked for the Zambezi trade centers.

Trade is finally the largest income stream of the empire. However, lack of full control on the Ceylon, Doab, Goa, Indus, and Moluccan nodes means there is still large room for improvement. Loans are primarily from institution embracement costs.

In the 1600, Delhi is invaded again, and Sirhind is taken. This unlocks a rather critical decision.

While the imperial capital is still officially Tehnochitlan, the Aztec ruling council has relocated to Delhi to directly oversee the numerous wars raging on the Indian subcontinent.

A freshly inaugurated group of Pashtun veterans complements the traditional Eagle-helmed bodyguard of the Emperor.

The new emperor speaks - “I am not a man of words, but of war. But know this: I come not to destroy your faiths. Come with me, and let us rule the world from sea to sea together.”

Moctezuma II will be crowned Emperor of India.

*

Tolerance and religious unity bonuses provide me the tools to deal with Nahuatl’s woeful conversion strength. At neutral tolerance, each wrong-religion province gives 25% religious unity, and the Mughal religious unity idea gives another 35% Ru. As such, I only need to convert a fraction of my holdings to Nahuatl to retain full religious unity. And of course, the Mughals have reduced core-creation cost – always welcome in a world conquest. But they also have an oft-overlooked idea – reduced stability cost modifier, that you will see can be utilized in a very powerful manner.

With the strong claims and RCC (both substantially reducing coring time), we now have an avenue to quickly grow in power.

Next 20 years see rapid declaration on VJ, Andhra x2, Malwa, Oudh, Kangra, Multan, Jaunpur, Delhi and Bengal

And after 20 years, nearly all of India has been taken:

 

[bbqftw]

Chapter 6: Plutocratic-grade Nuclear Devices

In 1632 trade ideas complete. You might be wondering why I would take trade – for this decision, of course.

Merchant republic? What? Do not worry, it will become clear in due time. In the meantime we fill out aristocratic ideas.

Anyways, we snap up exploded Ming as a vassal and immediately crush Jin for a bit of reconquest.

In Manchuria, we pick up optimal vassal. Manchu runs administrative and humanist, perfect ideas for mass scale feeding.

Due to paradox induced dysfunction we end up managing liberty desire by paying down a lot of vassal debt:

1652, aristocratic ideas complete. We are now ready to demonstrate the true power of merchant republic.

With economic, trade, aristocratic, and influence, we can now flip between merchant republics and oligarchic republics at will. This comes at a steep stab cost – it costs 1 stab to go from merchant to oligarchic, and 4 stab to go from oligarchic to merchant. 5 stability seems like a lot…

… but with Nahuatl reforms (20%), Mughal ideas (10%), religious (10%), and some other stability cost modifiers, I think we’ll make do.

And what’s the point of the flipping?

Well, merchant republics don’t have estates, and flipping from oligarchic republics to merchants thus unassigns all your provinces from estates. It also resets the estate interactions timer, which include demands for money, generals, and most importantly, monarch points. Which means every time we switch from merchant republic to oligarchic and back again we get 150 ADM, 200 DIP, 200 MIL, a general, an admiral, and an year’s worth of income. And we can do this for the cost of approximately 80 ADM every two months.

That’s the key.

With abolition of slavery and other crazy modifiers we’ll soon hit the stab cost reduction cap of 90% which means even more ADM profit from doing this.

For illustrated guide, see:

So we can dispose of our vassals quite effectively. At peacetime we have 100 DIP/month income so we can do fun things like this:

Timurids is the first to go:

Khorasan is resurrected in its place:

Current vassals:

The north is ours:

The last resistance in Southeast Asia are eradicated:

With Ming and Manchu nearly fully fed, only Europe truly remains – a land of high level 8 forts.

But we have Consul Sharif, the perfect ruler, who shall lead us to victory.

 

[Sch4tzmeister]

Dear Lord... that is some next level trickery right there.

 

[parats]

What a cocky move. I like

 

[Tom D.]

That's amazing, and very clever .

 

[bbqftw]

Chapter 7: End of the Line

Initial scouting reports reveal a Commonwealth PU over Spain. Due to bad selection of imperialism target and poor combat performance by France, initial incursions go poorly. Naples is reincarnated and will serve as a low-AE way to begin the dismemberment of the Spanish Commonwealth hydra. I am not ready to go all in on AE yet – merchant republics lack the force limit to really do damage.

War against Portugal is initiated:

End result - reduction of their colonial empire.

Second war against Spain is better:

Persia meets the business end of the nationalism CB. Ottomans will happily come beat them up allowing me to commit only two stacks to this area.

Aristocratic policies are actually pretty nice. Like this one, which fixes our religious unity issues for good:

Second war against Spain-PLC results in the taking of some more forts which are gifted to glorious Catalunya.

You should have been Swedish, foolish Danes. Unfortunately, they are not, so they end up brutalized by our armies.

Cleanup in central Africa begins:

Ottomans decide to move themselves to the top of the kill list. Since I have been AE-buffering via alliance this basically forces my hand. My next actions will generate very high AE with the Sunni bloc so I must truce lock the Ottomans:

Die, foolish Savoyard!

Persia almost destroyed in the next war:

Shhh, Savoy:

Current map:

Power of Mughal tolerance + policies:

First war against Ottomans results in a decent chunk of forts being taken out of commission:

Finally the Catalonians get a real homeland:

C’mon man I only took a few provinces…

Time to hit Tver-Muscovy tag team:

Scandinavians hit the deck

Poor Muscovy is sliced in two:

Hungary gets obliterated:

Morocco annoyingly metastasized over Africa…

Ottomans also get blasted:

Eztrucebreak

Round 2 vs Morocco:

Muscovy decides to declare for independence. This is fine – we trucebreak both Tver and Muscovy in response:

Muscovy is gifted to Novgorod:

Scandinavia gets some new decoration:

Tver gets crammed into some client state:

 

[bbqftw]

Surprise! Another trucebreak gets thrown Muscovy’s way.

Au revoir!

Another double trucebreak special on Spain and PLC:

War initiated against English via co-belligerent declaration on Iroquois:

Popeman bites the dust.

Die, Austria:

170 heavies is enough to dissuade the British navy though to be honest they’d probably still beat us at 1:4 odds

Using double peace exploit (peacing GBR separately, then peacing out Iroqouis for GBR land the day after), we remove GBR from the British isles completely, leaving them some minor country in North America.

Turk and Austria finished off:

Goodbye Hesse:

France is overrun:

PLC dead:

Floride proves too difficult to eat in one chunk.

But we have cheap trucebreaks, so who really cares?

Floride… the last.

The world fought the jaguar, and the jaguar won.

 

[atwix]

crazy.

nice campaign, hope you enjoyed it!

 

[Tom D.]

My congratulations, this was a very enjoying read.

 

[Philadelphus]

Wow. It's amazing to me to see people pull these kinds of things off. Kudos to you, good sir.

 

[parats]

Wtf

 

[ThetrueColt]

Amazing campaign. If you are the last one left in the ledger, you integrated all your client states in time, I guess? ( I am not familiar with everything involving client states)

 

[bbqftw]

Flipping from merchant republic to oligarchic resets the ability to demand points from merchant estates, since we can do this every 2 months that is essentially 100 DIP/month. There was no worry about running out of DIP to integrate.

I crafted this entire strategy to utilize this merchant republic trick, though to be honest, I am not sure whether it would have been more efficient than doing this WC as a non-merchant republic.

MRs are an extremely bad government form. Though amusingly they are among the best utilizers of debase currency as a result of their high autonomy.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I finally start reading up in AARs again after some time away to commit war crimes in Rimworld, this was pretty amusing . Moar infinite monarch points gogo!

 

[Siu-King**]

This is a Mughal true 1-tag, not Aztec

 

[Alienatu]

wtf