Lesson IV: Getting Down to Business
Alright, I'm a tad bit later than I anticipated. But there's an update now, so we shall all rejoice!
Let's take a quick look at what we have to work with. Holland is a two province nation in the Lowlands. Our immediate neighbors are Friesland, Gelre, and Utrecht, whose provinces we need to form the Netherlands (Well, Gelre's isn't). But that's all long-term.
There's a few immediate problems with Holland's situation: small size, small forcelimits, and a highly aggressive neighbor (Burgundy) to the south.
These problems are all out of our control, but we can control one other issue. That issue, of course, is that we are currently the junior partner in a
personal union with Hainaut.
A personal union is established through several means, including luck with a royal marriage, claims on thrones, unification wars, and in our case, history. You will hear a lot of different opinions about what to do against Hainaut in the beginning. Some suggest to wait for Burgundy to annex them and hope you don't get caught in the crossfire. Some suggest that you need to lower relations and wait for their king to die (hoping it comes before Burgundy's war).
Personally, I am of the opinion that we should - instead of taking a peaceful, boring route - declare war on them and let them cower in front of our additional.. one province.
To war!
"HOLD IT!" I can already hear some people shouting. "Why are you poisoning these beginners with that thought! What about the all-mighty and powerful Emperor and his death-bringing war machine?"
Well, despite your odd reverence for the Emperor, my dear friend, there is one slight issue with your argument.
The senior partner in a personal union always retains leadership of the war. Although the immediate implications of this may not be apparent, allow me to point them out.
We have already gained our new king, and all we must do now is end our war. Because Hainaut is the leader, all we need to do is kill a single 1k stack and siege a single province, then we win. Seriously. That's all we need to do, and we can often end the war before that because we're aiming for a white peace.
We don't annex Hainaut or vassalize it because Burgundy has a mission to take the province itself. So if we do either of those, we end up in a war with Burgundy. Consider that Burgundy starts the game with the most efficient, deadly fighting force in all of Europe and that they are considerably larger than us. I don't exactly like the prospect of fighting them, because I've only won a Burgundy-Holland war once, and I'd say I was pretty lucky.
So, let's go on down to Hainaut and crush their insignificant little force that dares challenge us! What? That was a little too dramatic? Ah, okay..
Completely obliterated, and we only lost 36 men! I wonder how that battle went, was their entire army asleep or something? You think they would've woken up after they heard the first person screaming from being stabbed in the stomach with a spear....
Regardless, it's time to begin the siege. So we'll leave our army here until Hainaut feels humiliated enough that they'll accept ante bellum.
In the mean time, we'll focus on trade, Holland's main strength. You see, we start at +4 Free Trade, and I used our slider move to max it out at +5. This gives us an awesome competing chance, so let's make it work to our advantage!
I put Lubeck up to green so I don't have to worry about moving it up for monopolies later. You see, Lubeck is arguably the most important center of trade in the world at this time, funded completely by the might of the Hanseatic Trade League. No worries, in a few years all the traders in Lubeck will be speaking Dutch to each other! (Hint: that's because they'll all be Dutch.)
However, red should be used if you only want the trade benefits, and yellow should be used if you don't want to waste merchants on monopolies.
We'll cover the benefits of trade and how to effectively use it next lesson!