Episode 17: The Paper Tiger
Picking up immediately where we left off, we apparently have to wait for the transports we built to finish repairing. Luckily, part of my buildup to 1650 entailed constructing naval facilities all over the Italian Peninsula, so it'll go slightly faster than it otherwise would.
I don't think we'll be getting the 80% victory rate we need in order to get a ticking warscore bonus. My allies keep sending miniscule expeditions deep into Omegan territory - for instance, this French expedition of 8,000 men who can't possibly siege down provinces fast enough to be anything but a light snack for the Omega. By the time I notice them, they've already lost half their strength.
This raises more questions about the military AI than it answers.
The way the "Show Superiority" wargoals work is kind of questionable; you only need to win 80% or more of the battles in order to be considered victories. However, you could lose your entire army in one battle and still gain up to 25% ticking warscore if you intercepted enough partial enemy stacks while they were coalescing, and then avoided any sort of combat afterwards. The rest of the warscore wouldn't be in your favor, especially since battle score actually depends on the size of the battles, but it's still pretty silly.
The Omega begins to send armadas of fresh troops to Anatolia.
They probably got levy'd in Africa or the Levant. Then again, this isn't Victoria II, and troops raised anywhere are equivalent.
After they break a few small siege stacks, France sends their main blob of troops through the Caucasus and heads ever further north. I'll have to check on them later; it's time to attempt our naval invasion.
Little did I know that at the time I would lose track of them after they hung a left at the Volga steppe.
My first division of what will eventually be 90,000 troops lands in Rosetta, in the hopes of reducing attrition by initially sticking to farmlands.
Each percentile of attrition is worse than the last.
Before I can do anything, though, the Omega promptly slams some doomstacks into me, and my army is encircled and shattered in the Egyptian desert.
They will not become faiyumous for these exploits.
Furthermore, Omegans are trying to invade Italy again. That's a problem! For whatever reason, the Omega has military access through a disturbingly large amount of countries, so even sinking hundreds of their ships has not dissuaded invasion as much as I would hope.
The Omega should be conquering these countries, not merely walking over them!
Anyways, we need even more discipline than before, so we're implementing the absolutism now. It's a national emergency. That makes it okay, right?
The Omega does count as a 'national emergency', I think. Maybe government changes should cause stability hits like they did in EU3?
This does allow us to immediately and thoroughly win some battles I don't think we'd otherwise have won.
Or was it the French? We're more disciplined than they are now.
Also, now that I think about it, one benefit of the Omega's vassal cloud is that it provides them with some spare generals in a pinch. This doesn't always actually help them, since their vassal troops tend to be markedly inferior, but it's certainly an option they can take advantage of.
New plan: Congregate in Tunisia, which is much closer to where we need to invade, therefore giving the Omega less time to scramble huge stacks before I can consolidate my own. The plan gets a little screwed up because I end up clicking on Bizerte instead of Tunis proper, but that's close enough for me and it ought to be for the rest of Italy as well.
While I'm doing this, an Omegan legion decides to walk through the Balkans and besiege Salento. I am utterly confused to why this would ever be a good idea, and France understandably stackwipes it.
Hyperbole aside, the AI should not expect confusing human players to be a viable strategy.
More Omegans die in tragic lobotomy accidents before I can establish my troops in Bizerte. They won't be there for long, though. We begin our dash to Daimetta; casualties from coastal desert attrition are excessive at best.
However, due to reinforcements, the total strength of the army is not affected.
Our monarch is so moved by his general's ability to elicit a forced march that he dies. I immediately have to think up a new and even snarkier way to reference these deaths.
After this, the largest Omegan army yet coalesces, this time in Serbia, and seeks to slaughter us all. Looks like we have to rush!
For all my superior morale and discipline, the Omega does sometimes keep its morale up pretty well by simply having tons of troops that aren't in active combat.
We besieged Daimetta pretty quickly, even though I was able to get 60,000 of the 90,000 I wanted in the area; it's still far more than enough to assault a level 2 fort. Suez falls about as fast before the Omega starts sending troops lead by random Berbers.
Walk like an Egyptian, and your legs will give out twice as fast.
Now, I need to protect these two provinces for a little bit so their garrisons can recover; I don't want them falling the moment I leave for Gonder. As in all things, France joins me in Egypt. Perhaps a Napoleon seeks glory in some sort of futile crusade? You never know. Either way, it helps, since my manpower is beginning to decline rather drastically. I started off with about 160K in my reserves and was able to compensate for the occasional stackwipe somewhat effectively before then. By the time I'm established in Suez, we're at 77K.
I spend a little less than a year staving off increasingly worried Omegan troops. As usual, I have only been able to inflict about 2x-3x casualties on average, while the Omega outnumbers me by a factor of 4-5. Furthermore, their manpower is through the roof, and they are drawing ever closer to military tech 22, which will give them a massive advantage for about 5-10 years.
Having to retreat would certainly be an issue.
When a stack of almost 100,000 Omegans (plus maybe some random Armenians) shows up near Jerusalem, I decide that the Suez canal provinces have had enough time to reinforce. It's time to rush for Gonder. Manpower is now at 61K.
To prevent myself from slamming into other dangerous stacks, I have to detour through the Nile, and one time I even have to use a retreat to gain more ground. The Omega, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to understand what I'm doing, and orders its own troops to go around the Gonderblob.
In a hilarious irony, the Omega never bothered to build extra fortifications in its Ethiopian core. If you had a forcelimit of 500 or so, would you have done so? I think it's a worthy question, but I don't let it prevent me from assaulting Gonder...
"Hey, can we get some water from the lake?" "No. It's... uh... evil water."
Disturbingly, my entire infantry core collapses on this fort. They've presumably taken some nasty casualties from the previous assaults, combat, and attrition alone, but this is a bit much for a level 1 fort. Manpower is now at 53K...
France then accepts a white peace with the Omega, after 9 years. While this was expected, this still puts an even stricter deadline on my work. Everything comes down to this!
...
It takes
two assaults to bring down Gonder after this. The first takes them from 175 to 96 men (presumably horrific, soulless beasts bristling with cannon where lesser creatures have limbs and claws), and only the second assault brings Gonder down. With both wargoals achieved, I look at the peace treaty options. I am able to take the provinces I desire, and even have enough warscore to demand war reparations!
If the Omega knew how soon the momentum of the war would turn in their favor (I'd estimate 1-2 years), they would not have accepted this. I'm also lucky in that I did not mod in greater war enthusiasm for the Omega; that could've been devastating. But they don't know that, and I send the peace treaty, and they accept it...
We have won where even I feared we would not. I leave the game running for a bit just to see how much the Omega is paying us in reparations - it turns out to be a staggering 40 ducats a month. Thusly, does this AAR technically come to a conclusion in 1659, after only two chapters of fierce warfare. I was planning to expand that, but things were beginning to get pretty desperate towards the end. While I could reasonably continue onwards, factor after factor conspires to make this a fool's errand.
- Remember how I kept talking about the upcoming DLC and patch? I don't feel like continuing a 1.11 AAR after something THAT intense. Furthermore, I'll need some time to actually make the Omega 1.12 compliant, and time after that to implement the wealth of changes I want.
- Were I to continue, the Omega would probably immediately declare war on me when the truce expired. I believe the results would be broadly similar - overwhelming naval victories and bloody land warfare rapidly bringing me to about 40 warscore, followed by me making whatever concessions. The Omega has presumably been nerfed, even if only slightly, by their European and Asian holdings all going overseas, but it's not going to weaken them that much. It would be difficult for me to play, but I don't think it'd make for very captivating writing.
- I'm moving households very soon. I expect the preparations to take up increasing portions of my time in the interrim. The relatively large bloc of free time I had beforehand was a partial motivator for the update blitz.
I will, however, write a postmortem at some point; it might even be tomorrow if I'm feeling up for it. This is most likely going to be a summary and analysis of the various gameplay issues I and the Omega underwent, and how I suspect future changes would affect other people's Omega sessions.
