Aftermath – Canada – Toronto East
Rise and shine!
Ah. It’s a lovely day. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping outside my window – SHUT THE F*CK UP WOULD YA! – and I have the enormous pleasure of
not having to go to work today.
I don’t remember exactly when I went down for the count last night. I do, vaguely, recall stumbling upstairs to bed. I recall the ceiling doing that annoying thing when it spins in the opposite direction to the bed. And then…no more.
I feel surprisingly good this morning; ready to celebrate out country’s adopted “birthday” by tuning in a little later to the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation…similar to the BBC but no budget to speak of) to watch the festivities on parliament hill. I say “adopted” because July 1st isn’t the exact date of confederation but I guess somewhere back there someone had the bright idea that we needed a holiday sometime in early July with which to recover from a MP EU II game – remarkable foresight they had, our forefathers.
Canada didn’t win its independence through war, blood, or glory as our neighbours to the south did. Ours was more of a long, slow process of weening, and those first steps were taken 135 years ago – hence, this is our 135th birthday. Prior to that, we were content (ha!) to be British subjects; and prior to
that, we were discontent being a variety of nations’ “subjects” – France and England featuring most prominently, but let us not forget the many peaceful and not-so-peaceful tribes of Native American Indians who had hunted these lands for more than 10,000 years.
Coming downstairs, I start a pot of coffee and clear away the six empty litre bottles of Smithwicks – promising myself yet once again that I really will put that tap system in some day and buy the stuff by the keg instead. I also toss the empty scotch bottle into the recycling and put the lid back on the gin bottle that some ingrate has left open on the counter…oh. That would be me. Wouldn’t it?
Coffee in hand, a bagel toasted and cream-cheesed, I wander into my study and decide to read the results of yesterday’s MP experiment. Sure, I remember virtually all details of it. I’m just curious to read back through it to see how badly my coordination had suffered as I became progressively more inebriated. “Very”, would appear to be the answer. Reading Rictus and Norgesvenn’s comments this morning, I have to smile…sorry mates, that’s the joy of living 5-6 hours behind you.
That last session, before Valkyrie.net crashed, had been a great one: 6 uninterrupted crash-free years of play in which Lord Durham and I had begun the conquest of Africa. I recall him scooping up some nice little provinces by virtue of having the ability to build trading posts while I was still devoting roughly 50% of my budget to catching up with him on that regard. I recall my modus operandi, trying hard to work in concert with Lord Durham’s guessed-at aims – not easy when you can’t discuss it with him since shift+f12 was an almost guaranteed crash. Between us, we were well on our way to making the Iberian peninsula a powerhouse…a bastion of Canadian values in an otherwise hostile European and African world.
Considering our inability to communicate, I think that he and I did remarkably well, doing the ol’ one-two punch to our foes and being fairly good about sharing the conquests (in spite of some of my tongue-in-cheek comments yesterday). It is interesting to read LD’s notes to see his perspective on it, and I have a couple comments to add that might explain what was going on in my mind (besides the booze):
The first time we played – about 6 months before a crash forced us to regroup and re-start – I had started the game by forming the Iberian alliance with my good Portuguese-Canadian friend…a mistake since it meant that I wasn’t immediately involved in his war. The second time, I suggested to him that
he be the one to create the alliance, and thus I was able to move immediately against Fez and Algiers.
That war dragged on for about 2 ½ years, as I left Fez to Lord Durham’s smaller army and shipped wave after wave of men into Algiers. Of course we could only do this because we had managed to get both of our fleets down ‘round the Gibraltar area and has annihilated the Algerian and Fezian (?) fleets. As I took on the Algerian army in the desert, Lord Durham settled into the comfortable sieges of Fez, and then he eventually came over to help me with the Algerian sieges. I was thrilled when he besieged the Algerian capital since I intended to make peace with them first, take all their lands except for the capital, and then he could annex them….pretty much exactly what happened except for one temporary glitch…
I had accused LD of “stealing one of my sieges”, but I later discovered that the reason for this was that I had left only a covering force there…and he very kindly marched his folks away when I later returned in great force. Mighty sporting of him I’d say. Happily, I had a plan as to how to return the favour.
After the carefully orchestrated conquest of Fez and Algiers, we were at peace. I neglected to notice that LD had vassalised Fez – something I would have advised him against if I’d realised he was thinking of it. Why? Because I had a permanent causus belli against Granada, and Granada was allied with Fez (and Algiers). My CB is pre-game, and I think the African alliance is too, but that Granada had taken a pre-game “peace” of some sort…I’m not sure about that, but I know that Granada wasn’t involved in the first war.
That peace lasted only a couple days, as I declared war on Granada with no stability hit and dutiful Fez agreed to honour the alliance - as I had hoped since I was trying to give LD a free(ish) was against Fez right away so he could annex them. Wanting to get rid of Granada right away, I was content to give LD Gibraltar – waiting for him to make his peace with the nation first – so I could then annex Granada in one war. It ended up working out that way, but it took him forever to send someone to Gibraltar. I had almost given up hope and had marched a small force there to besiege it (prior to that I was only covering it, waiting for him…). The city was at “3 months” when he finally arrived, and I promptly marched my guys away to avoid having him lose anyone to attrition. Nice eh?
Somewhere during the war, Morocco made the fatal error of joining the Fez-Granada alliance and the Portuguese troops in the area immediately swung south to deal with them. I sent recently-acquired Alvaro de Luna (or whatever his name is…I’m not
that good this morning) via ship to the Canary Islands (which I had already colonized up to 1000 folks and build a L1 fortress), and Alvaro pounced on Sahara, causing the remnants of the Moroccan army to ping-ping between LD and I for a few months as they were slowly consigned to the sands.
When LD took the capital and gained the Moroccan maps, I asked him to kindly share…to which he complied…and I was going to take Anti-Atlas from them because I’d forgotten that you can annex them outright. He beat me there, however, so I took Sahara in the peace and then he annexed the other two. Sweet!
Shortly after the peace, I had begun witnessing a string of LD’s explorers heading off towards the south, so I marched Alvaro de Luna through the former lands of the Songhai began clearing the natives out of narrow inland corridor in preparation to sending colonists…only to see him claim the provinces with his trading posts. I was more than a trifle annoyed at the time, thinking that he was being a little overly-acquisitive given that it was
he who had all the explorers and would therefore be getting all sorts of places to colonize further south along the coast, and so when Alvaro reached the Songhai border with more than 20,000 men still in tow, I declared war on them and invited LD to join in the fun.
I quickly destroyed the Songhai army stationed in their capital – with medium losses - and began to lay siege to the place since I needed their maps in order to conquer the rest of the nation. Then what do I see? I see a 10k Portuguese army headed my way, and I just feared that he was about to come and steal some stuff. Now that’s all very well, but I was rather hoping to most/all of Songhai myself to set up a nice camp in their gold provinces and have a base from which to push further south against the African tribes while he could gradually take most/all of the coastal provinces to provide him with lots of ports to use as he continued his explorations to the south.
And that’s where we crashed, so this may very well still happen.
I also recall asking Aragon for military access, something that they were happy to grant to their “respectable” neighbours (relations were +170-something). This had a dual purpose…Rictus had bitten off a little more of Italy than he could chew and there were about 20 nations intent on cramming that infraction down his throat. The dual purpose was to offer me two possibilities: join in the fun and vassalise the pope; or perhaps I’d take mercy on the poor bastard and help him out. It was undecided.
Of course Norgesvenn seemed to be doing well in the east, though I had to chuckle when Byzantium took that province in Italy. He must have been seriously pissed off. But green was definitely the predominant colour over there, and I figured that the world would frown on his warmongering tactics soon enough – particularly since it wasn’t even 1428 yet.
Besides the extreme frustrations of the earlier part of the day while we tried to iron out the poorly documented (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “completely undocumented”) MP issues, the continual crashes and network latency problems, and such, I have to say that the entire thing was a blast – one that I would repeat in a heartbeat. The almost-organized way that LD and I took out pretty much all of the African competition in a span of 5 years just shows you how inept the AI allies are when compared to a human alliance. As Castile, allied with an AI Portugal, that would have taken at least ten to accomplish anything close to the same. Or maybe that’s just sheer Canadian genius at work.
The save file is still happily sitting in my game folder, as it will be in LD’s, so you can be almost assured that this thread will be picked up once more at a later date – the next time that the four of us feel like a nice bout of self-poisoning. I’m looking forward to our continued exploits, and I’m salivating for the day that LD and I turn our attention eastwards in Mediterranean, since that is going to be a
very bad day for the rest of northern Africa. I wonder if Norgesvenn will beat us to Alexandria?
The only problem that Castile faces at the moment is the money crunch and the extremely high cost of regaining stability. At slightly less than 50% of my budget, it takes almost 2 years to recoup a single point and I seem to have been hit with a string of those events where you get to choose between a –1 stab hit + a revolt, or –4 stab hit and watch the country go up in flames. If those would kindly go away, I’d be doing just fine…and LD seems to be well on his way to carving out a sizeable empire of his own which I have no designs of interfering with. With two powerhouse and well-funded Iberians, the upcoming (eventually in 1516) likelihood of Aragon becoming part of my nation, and the continued cooperation, the rest of Europe should watch its back and the days of the Moslems are numbered.
And
that is my usual, overly-verbose take on things to date.
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Thanks for the "happy Canada day" well-wishes, all.
Wasa: No kidding? You've got my vote!
Roland: Rather than raising or lowering it, we just plowed right on through it.
Soarom: we'll have to think about the interactive thing. If the play-at-home readers had been forced to take a drink at every crash, you wouldn't have survived the first three hours.
We'll try to come up with an alternative for you.
USA Patriot: Try starting out with a shandy and gradually increasing the amount of beer in it. Failing that, go and find a really good bag of weed...
Alternatively, become a Canadian hockey fan.
Rictus/Norgesvenn: Aaaaawe. Does somebody's head hurt? LOL!
Thanks for the game...it was really fun and I
know that I will want to continue our exploits - if for no reason other than to see how badly Rictus gets crunched in his BB wars...annexing 3 co-religionist when you're the one who declared war might be considered, by some, as a trifle aggressive.
Snark: Happy Canada Day to you too!
