King John said:
You guys should've waited until after they dropped the troops to attack their fleets. Could've killed half their men due to lack of supply. Or else waited for Nelson to die
.
The english got Cochrane afterwards
Anyway, I thought it could better to go to our 'Trafalgar' than waiting outside.
Well, I am quite happy with Portugal. Managed to be the richest or the second richest for a long time, colonial holdings were always safe, got provinces here and there.
So, basically early XVI policy was:
a) Not to be a lap-dog of Spain. And be as independent as you can be (in particular, after I saw that Spain was not that useful to Austria; and that I was kind of treated as granted)
b) Manage to get India for yourself.
c) In colonial matters, try that everyone but English is successful. So I traded maps, granted MA, exchanged provinces, guaranteed provinces to everyone, but England never received any help.
In the XVII century:
a) NL was becoming more richer than us! So I decided to start the whole license business thinking that a) I could got access to other COTs simply granting licenses and b) NL was not that willing to pay. Of course, NL was granted free access to our COTs, since the idea was that they lost trade elsewhere.
No idea if that worked, but essentially -after 30 or 40 years- we were again in top position in trade. So we decided to stop the license business.
b) Going with France. Since they offered somethings, and well the spaniards never offered anything. So we got some med islands and Galicia (for some time).
And then, our most critical moment (and our best single moment): surviving the spanish onslaught at the end of the XVII century, getting the spanish slaughtered colonially whereas our mainland was completely invaded, and exchanging provinces in the end.
We always remembered that Spain when they thought could force peace asked not only for Galicia but for several mainland portuguese provinces, so we decided never to be complet and full spanish allies. Unfortunately, we were subbed at some times, some portuguese troops lost time defending Spain
But basically, we decided in the XVIII century to be friendly with NL (the only country that never had attacked us, or supported an attack on us) and be as opportunistic as we could be. So, the defence of the NL when France started the uber-long-war by Myoz was fully according to our idea. And then, we got a province from France (by K'shar mistake but in the end we convinced him to gave us the chinese province), 5 provinces from Russia, 2 from Poland, 2 from the OE, 2 from Spain. Nice things.
And then the last sesssion where I decided to forgot about rational policy and try to go for the game to end in 1819. Because switching sides was against all my ideas for end game actually (crippling Spain, attacking Russia and take all China).
So rankings:
FRA (obvious)
NL (NL with Baltic lands? that neither SWE, POL or RUS managed to take in the entire game? That is very good. And since it was a long-term gain, way more important that getting 4 vassals in the last session
).
HAB (basically for surviving fighting a bigger country for almost the entire game)
RUS (it could receive a higher ranking if they could had done something in the game, but they only appeared in the end, and actually lost most of their wars)
OE (they never quite managed to recover after the 'everyone got independent' disaster)
SPA (yep, they were rich -although for a long time, not that rich- and the like, but actually they lost all italian possesions, they lost all the gains that their betrayal of FRA gave them, they never quite got a good alliance with HAB when it mattered -at the early or middle game, unable to defeat POR on a 1-v-1 with all mainland POR in their hands,
POL (before we lost permanent, POL was going very nicely, and I do think it could had survived quite good in the end)
ENG (by managing to recover -well, they got quite nice leaders too in the end, but the revenge on Spain was nicely done)
PRU (it was, actually, more successful as BRA than as PRU, quite strange)
SWE (well, I do think that Joo abandoned earlier than needed since SWE was a middle range country)
VEN (ah, no idea why they traded with OE at the beginning, that will be always a mistery for me. The fact that SPA and HAB never managed to go along doomed their habsburg alliance, but of that they were innocent. Of their deal with OE, they were guilty)
