Let's All Play Together: Lan Na! Community Nation Discovery

[TheMeInTeam]

This guy conquered all of SE Asia in 50 years and people are still crying that Buddhism is a problematic religion.

Well guess what, if you conquered half the number of provinces as France then even Lan Na would be in a coalition against you....

Buddhism is great and SE Asia is interesting so stop crying people.

P.s. Good work there mate

1. Almost all of my targets also were Buddhist, so beating trash with trash isn't that uphill.
2. The only thing that prevented 9+ nation coalition was truce management. Ming has 125 AE in that screenshot, Ayuthaya was well over 200. There are fewer total tags in SEA than Europe.
3. I'm not running common sense, so the worst aspect of Buddhism by far (Karma) isn't active.
4. In that screenshot, you can see me in the process of switching out of it, which I consider worth it despite the switching cost .

 

[Dell19]

Also AE doesn't seem to have as much impact in the ROTW as there tends to be less nations which are also further apart.

For a decent portion of the game I was able to keep my karma within the +5 range but when I started to take provinces off Malacca it quickly reached -100 and it was surprisingly difficult to get back to above -50. The biggest killer is an event that sees an advisor leave the court and take 15 karma away which happened several times. Have finally been able to westernise in my game and have reached 1700.

 

[Axe99]

On Buddhism, it does make it harder, but once you're as big as TMIT, you don't need to be as good as TMIT to pretty much carry all before you, even if you're copping -10 per cent discipline and losing advisors through events. In some ways, it's one of the better mechanics for increasing difficulty mid-game, although I'm not sure that's its aim, and there are better ways to do it.

Don't get me wrong, I don't quite agree with the implementation of Karma as it is now (for example, think of the Dalai Lama's diplomatic reputation - everyone likes to talk with him, and he's about as positive Karma as you get - plus a bonus to dip rep is probably a good trade-off for not expanding like France on 'roids - penalising a country for not expanding in a game that's in large part about trying to expand seems a bit of a double malus), but if it's not stopping me (an average player, definitely nothing special) from expanding without too much trouble (I expand slower than possible due to role-playing reasons, and I'm at the stage now where I'm holding back for role-playing reasons, not because I have to, and I've still got most of South East Asia under my belt) the it's hardly the end of the world.

Also AE doesn't seem to have as much impact in the ROTW as there tends to be less nations which are also further apart.

For a decent portion of the game I was able to keep my karma within the +5 range but when I started to take provinces off Malacca it quickly reached -100 and it was surprisingly difficult to get back to above -50. The biggest killer is an event that sees an advisor leave the court and take 15 karma away which happened several times. Have finally been able to westernise in my game and have reached 1700.

Aye, when you get your Karma down at -90 or the like for a period of time, that event fires a bit, and is brutal. I'm not sure why, but I'm doing alright with Karma this game (I'm currently in the -25 to +25 range, and have knocked over the last of Ayyuthaya). I'm not going near as fast as most though (I think for this game I'm going to try and limit my empire to what I can work into my 'accepted cultures', making sure I convert any trade ports I take).

 

[net.split]

Here's my run so far:

Took a few restarts to get it going the way I wanted. I got a Mission on Pegu, who allied Hsenwi and Lan Xang. I allied Dai Viet, Arakan, and Khmer, recruited some more troops, and attacked. Properly maneuvering in the war was tricky because I had to work with the AI allies or lose, but Lan Na prevailed with Tilokaraj personally leading the forces.

I vassalized Pegu instead of taking the province, but I nabbed two provinces off Lan Xang while I was at it. This left me with -45% Karma. I then sat quietly, allying Ava and working on diplomacy. The timing worked out perfectly; almost at once I was able to integrate Pegu, hit Admin 5, take Exploration, and get the first three ideas immediately. I started colonizing a small island in the Malacca node, grabbing the fourth Exploration idea for the +20 settlers (critical for tropical colonization).

I had several events fire that gave me +10 or +15 Karma as an option, often with bonus prestige along with it. A bit of that and I got to +25, which let me pursue a claim on Lan Xang. They had allied Ava, and I'd lost Khmer, but it didn't matter. Lan Xang fell easily and is now my vassal (and Ava, which has my dynasty on its throne, is allies once again).

I'm colonizing my second province, the islands just south of me there, to boost my Bengal power a bit. So far being Buddhist hasn't caused any issues thanks to diplo-vassalizing. Conquering the Indonesia region will be a little trickier. If I can mix nation releasing with province capture it should be fine. So far I've enjoyed the bonus to dip rep and discipline for most of the game (well, all 33 years of it).

My heir is 5/0/0, which is bad for my lagging Dip tech. Thankfully I won't need any more of the Exploration ideas for some time (I can't afford two simultaneous colonies). My borders are a mess, but Ayutthaya and Hsenwi are allies, so that's going to have to wait. It'll help if I can manage to diplo-vassalize Taungu (not at all worth the trouble for conquest).

Ayutthaya has been Neutral or Friendly to me all game, which is lucky. They're looking southward for expansion. I'm currently rivals with Khmer, Champa, and Hsenwi. The diplomacy game has really worked out in my favor so far. Bengal is hostile to me though, which makes me hesitate to go after Arakan.

Oh, and Manchu has formed already (via Haixi), but the tribes aren't united at all. It's weird.

 

[Dell19]

In some ways, it's one of the better mechanics for increasing difficulty mid-game, although I'm not sure that's its aim, and there are better ways to do it.

Thats true although its quite frustrating that no other religion has a similar mechanic so I can see why people switch. It seems to work nicely at the start of the game when its possible to vassalise nations, return cores etc but in the late game it feels like its just a penalty that the player has to live with. I find it strange that its a flat 25 penalty for every nation regardless of religion, reason for war (return cores cb) and rivalry status.

I think I've about reached the end point in my game. I've westernised, Australia and Alaska are colonial nations and Bengal is a vassal. Dai Viet is a long standing ally. I'm at -100 karma which puts me off starting a war against Ming. Manchu, Korea and France are my other allies.

 

[Rabid]

Buddhism is getting hugely buffed next patch maybe even this week so wait for that first!

 

[Axe99]

Thats true although its quite frustrating that no other religion has a similar mechanic so I can see why people switch. It seems to work nicely at the start of the game when its possible to vassalise nations, return cores etc but in the late game it feels like its just a penalty that the player has to live with. I find it strange that its a flat 25 penalty for every nation regardless of religion, reason for war (return cores cb) and rivalry status.

I think I've about reached the end point in my game. I've westernised, Australia and Alaska are colonial nations and Bengal is a vassal. Dai Viet is a long standing ally. I'm at -100 karma which puts me off starting a war against Ming. Manchu, Korea and France are my other allies.

Yeah, agreed - of all the religions, at the moment Protestantism is my favourite by some margin - you get three different buffs, and get to pick what they are! Compare that with Buddhism and it's not exactly like for like. I'm not too worried though - EU4 is less about balance for me and more about dealing with the challenges you have.

Nicve work on your game, allying France is a good move .

 

[Thundercomet]

I'd like to apologize for dropping off a while back without warning. My run came to a quite sudden and tragic end.

All was going well in the kingdom of Lan Na. I was in a solid position, had a few allies who were still willing to support me, so on. Ming had lost the mandate of heaven, so I thought it would be an excellent time to capitalize on that and try to swipe a couple provinces from them, maybe speed up their collapse. But then, the worst happened. My rival to the west, Bengal, decided to strike almost as soon as I had declared war upon Ming. They then called in both of their allies, Malwa and Delhi, who together ruled the majority of northern india. Things looked bleak, but I still thought I could pull a turnabout and escape with my life intact, and avoid being dismantled.
I was wrong.
The armies of Lan Na and their only loyal ally, U-Tsang, were crushed in the field by the Bengalese. Shortly after, the imperial forces of Ming arrived, and there was little hope.
What remained of that hope was crushed when my former allies to the south turned upon me when Pegu declared war, bringing the rest of southeast Asia into war with me.

And then I ragequit. Didn't take a screenshot or anything, either. Also didn't have the motivation to try again immediately. If I do find it though, I'll be back.
So yeah, guys, sorry about being bad and not really having a great ending to my attempt.

 

[Axe99]

I'd like to apologize for dropping off a while back without warning. My run came to a quite sudden and tragic end.

All was going well in the kingdom of Lan Na. I was in a solid position, had a few allies who were still willing to support me, so on. Ming had lost the mandate of heaven, so I thought it would be an excellent time to capitalize on that and try to swipe a couple provinces from them, maybe speed up their collapse. But then, the worst happened. My rival to the west, Bengal, decided to strike almost as soon as I had declared war upon Ming. They then called in both of their allies, Malwa and Delhi, who together ruled the majority of northern india. Things looked bleak, but I still thought I could pull a turnabout and escape with my life intact, and avoid being dismantled.
I was wrong.
The armies of Lan Na and their only loyal ally, U-Tsang, were crushed in the field by the Bengalese. Shortly after, the imperial forces of Ming arrived, and there was little hope.
What remained of that hope was crushed when my former allies to the south turned upon me when Pegu declared war, bringing the rest of southeast Asia into war with me.

And then I ragequit. Didn't take a screenshot or anything, either. Also didn't have the motivation to try again immediately. If I do find it though, I'll be back.
So yeah, guys, sorry about being bad and not really having a great ending to my attempt.

Hey, there's no shame in getting hit like that, particularly with this start. Even being cautious for the most part (and the one time I wasn't, I got smashed), I'm currently on my fifth start! I'm too big to get taken down now, but it took five attempts, and only two of those attempts really got off the ground. Great work on getting to the stage where you were ready to give Ming the what-for .

 

[Peanutcat]

Do you have a thread where you keep the community LP's organized? If not you should create one with links to every Community LP and future ones as you make more, that one should be able to be stickied aswell hopefully.

 

[net.split]

Do you have a thread where you keep the community LP's organized? If not you should create one with links to every Community LP and future ones as you make more, that one should be able to be stickied aswell hopefully.

For now there's only been two. I will keep up with the organization by posting all the old links in each new OP. Beyond that I'll let the mods decide if they want any further organization to these efforts That will probably depend on whether we keep up interest in doing this over the longer term.

For my own game, I had a rather frustrating evening, with war targets manifesting new alliances more than two years into a war, bugs that stackwiped my army within days of it beginning a shattered retreat, and ally AI that didn't seem to want to coordinate like the enemy AI was. These are the moments that make me very glad I'm not into Ironman play! I'll retry soon and hopefully have something good to report. I'll probably just go into debt and brute force it with mercs; dealing with ally AI is just too frustrating.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I westernized too late so I probably can't get pants on head. I'll own all of India and China. I kept thinking "I'll go there next" but then blowing points on expansion when I should have been setting up for admin efficiency. I don't think I finished westernization until 1650ish or even a little after which is way too late (if you plan for it you can westernize w/o exploration before 1570 pretty consistently). I have like 70 years of tier 3 admin efficiency beatdown to throw around so I can make things kind of big but it won't be one of my more impressive empires, no 1000+ provinces or WC threat type outcomes this time.

 

[LordQ]

I westernized too late so I probably can't get pants on head. I'll own all of India and China. I kept thinking "I'll go there next" but then blowing points on expansion when I should have been setting up for admin efficiency. I don't think I finished westernization until 1650ish or even a little after which is way too late (if you plan for it you can westernize w/o exploration before 1570 pretty consistently). I have like 70 years of tier 3 admin efficiency beatdown to throw around so I can make things kind of big but it won't be one of my more impressive empires, no 1000+ provinces or WC threat type outcomes this time.

What's this method for westernising before 1570 without exploration? Does it involve Goa?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

What's this method for westernising before 1570 without exploration? Does it involve Goa?

No, it involves the fact that Nogai or Hejaz/Mamluk beatdowns were always doable, and downright viable since the 3/3/3 tech buff. You can enter TI belonging to nations you are fighting against, and you can core provinces adjacent to vassals on the same continent. After consolidating immediate surroundings you can thus no-CB vassal someone near TI like Baluchistan, Hejaz, Oman and fight your way through TI. While it sounds uphill at first, imagine if instead of pursuing Ming for so long on my 1500 start I'd instead no-CB on Hejaz. I had 27 regiments at that point, easily sustained alongside advisors, and was current to western standards in military technology. As long as I didn't run afoul of Ottoman missions, I could have trashed not only Hejaz but also the Mamluks without special effort, allowing a push into Tunis in the 1530s (using Mamluks to block Ottoman direct reinforcements). Horde land is viable too, especially because sometimes Muscovy fails hard enough that you can beat them also.

These routes are slower than with exploration by 30-40 years, but allow you to skip it. Another viable alternative (assuming the AI doesn't get tied up somehow), is to simply go South after the Hejaz/Oman no-CB, conquering the Zanzibar node (which is very powerful anyway) and putting a claim on a Portuguese colony in Cape or Madagascar to take it. That's the route I would recommend for Lan Na, because you can move trade capital there and after conquering Cape, you have a functional end node to which you can steer your trade and some nice (if overseas-gimped) gold provinces. This route is strong enough that it's good regardless of no exploration. Zanzibar is just that good.

Edit:

Slightly later due to 5/5/5 progress, first converting to animist (lol) and a late start due to planning my core-chain poorly, but from Kirishitan Japan run:

 

[Axe99]

@TheMeInTeam - you're a machine! It's not the kind of stuff I'd try m'self, but it's still very impressive to hear the methods you use .

For my own game, I had a rather frustrating evening, with war targets manifesting new alliances more than two years into a war, bugs that stackwiped my army within days of it beginning a shattered retreat, and ally AI that didn't seem to want to coordinate like the enemy AI was. These are the moments that make me very glad I'm not into Ironman play! I'll retry soon and hopefully have something good to report. I'll probably just go into debt and brute force it with mercs; dealing with ally AI is just too frustrating.

Commiserations, the La Na start deffo seems to be one of the tougher ones longer-term, as unless you go TMIT-style, there's a good chance of strong rivals for most of the game (and then the Europeans come along). Also makes it a fun start, but frustration comes with that as well!

I thought I was out of the woods when Bengal and Bahmanis un-rivalled me (Bengal was allied with Delhi and Malwa, and if they had decided to go to war with me would have brought about twice as many troops as my best alliance could muster. Not undefeatable, but it would have been a pretty near thing - I kept relations high with Delhi to try and defuse at least part of the alliance) but Wu's got biggish and I've got dragged into a war that's not going so well with them and Bukhara.

Also got smacked down on by France who managed to take and protectorate Brunei while I was at war with them. Went from a 'slightly inconvenient as I had to wait a while to build some new heavy ships' (after a naval loss) war to a 'dealing with 70K French troops marching up the Malay Peninsula'. Bought them off in the end, but they wanted 1800 gold and war reps, which hurt the treasury for a good while.

Currently into the 1700s and westernised, and trying to vassalise Ternate and Tidore (which I shouldn't have nabbed together, because they were both colonising and are now so large that together, combined with my terrible diplo tech, I'm having some liberty desire issues - I may have 'em both vassalised by the end of the game if I'm lucky). Have spent a bucketload of MPs on either annexation or vassalisation, so my non-military tech is pretty lagging, so the next stage was to sit on speed five and develop for a bit to try and catch up. The aim is still to have an empire of fully accepted cultures, and that'll mean either taking on Bengal or releasing my north-western holdings as a vassal, and I'd much rather try and take on Bengal, if I can build up the strength to pull it off . Well, that or spend silly amounts of diplo points to culture-convert, but that's not near as much fun.

Spoiler

 

[Peachrocks]

Going to give this a try in typical Peach style going exploration first. I've progressively come to reluctantly accept exploration isn't all that, no matter how much I LOVE colonising :|. At least not for the nations I usually like. Although maybe I'll do something like 'for the republic' and take Influence/Aristocratic for giggles.

I really like becoming a Theocracy but I've done that a lot lately. I did it with Semien not so long ago...

Love the idea. Tried to do something similar with silly custom nations but it didn't take off. Perhaps because I didn't have time to go into details, but what details can you go into with Luigia other than Luigi wins by doing nothing.

You should probably go over each of the ideas they have when talking about it though, just for some random thoughts and objective ideas.

Edit: And this is what I got so far. I couldn't resist 'for the Republic'. I didn't have the common sense to not use common sense but I did have the common sense to convert to Hindu ASAP.

 

[alpaca]

So, after finishing my last game, I finally decided to give this a go. Since most people seem to play ironman, I decided to make it an ironman game as well, this time. I will show screens of what is my second attempt (not counting the ten 10 I restarted after a month or so to get a feeling for how the alliances in the region tend to pan out). The first attempt reminded me why I don't usually play ironman. It was abandoned about 20 years in after I tried using TMIT's convert to animism trick to honor the great Alpaca in the Sky, but forgot that you lose your allies when you convert this way, which left me in a bad position with Manipur my only ally. Manipur then stupidly attacked Ava, and I honored the call, which was a stupid mistake since Ava was able to subsequently secure an alliance with Ayutthaya. After I won this war by going deep into debt, Ming decided to come and play, and I decided to call it quits and try again (I also had a terrible 2/0/2 heir).

The next attempt was a lot more serendipitous. Apart from a godlike 6/3/5 heir and a White Elephant event (+1 stab), I was able to secure an alliance with Mong Xang, Ava, Dai Viet and Khmer, and draw all of them into a year against Taungu and Ayutthaya, allowing me to take the province of the same name. The next war, I secured Pegu and force vassalized Hsenwi, after that it was pretty standard alliance and truce juggling in order to continue expanding my budding empire. The wars were harder than they usually would be. First, there was the -10% discipline, which I am only now in the process of removing by allowing Hindu rebels to roam (the animist provinces were converted too quickly this time, but Hindu is probably better anyways - though I really like the Holy War capability of Animism). Second, being in tropical all the time is super annoying, and my infantry mostly consisted of mercenaries for the whole game - leading to not being able to afford my full force limits a lot of the time. My navy is still tiny as a result as I haven't had enough money to build it up yet, which exacerbated the problem to some extent.

At any rate, it was still a very successful run. As you can see, I just finished my first foray into the Malacca node, having previously conquered Bengal for the first time in an epic war. They were allied with Bahmanis, Delhi and Malwa against my Jaunpur and Tibet. Unfortunately, my allies were behind in mil tech, so the first leg of the war, mostly faught in Jaunpuri territory, was rather unsuccessful despite a nominal number parity and my kickass 4/3/4/1 general due to Jaunpuri tech disparity and my 90% discipline being used in joint battles. Switching gears after two years, I decided to besiege the war goal Chittagong and vicously backstab my ally by signing separate peace Delhi by giving them some territory from Jaunpur, and Malwa by offering annul treaties with Jaunpur after beating them in a battle. Jaunpur signed their own white peace, funnily giving some more territory to Delhi despite them not being in the war anymore. Only Bengal and Bahmanis were left, who were too weak to beat my troops, and finally I was able to white peace out Bahmanis and, after six years, I was able to secure a decisive 100% WS victory against Bengal, which included annuling all their alliances (which I hope won't all reform).

I decided to take influence ideas after my first failed attempt to make it possible to gain alliances with people of a different religion due to the +dip rep, and also because of the other benefits like vassal annexation cost and cheaper unreasonable demands (which stack nicely with despotic monarchy). The idea group is already finished, by my dip tech is still at level 3. As you can see, I am currently integrating Hsenwi, which will cost me about 1350 points total. My mid-term planning involves securing the Bengal, Ceylon and Malacca nodes and trying to westernize somehow, although I'm not sure how to best approach this. I don't have visual on most of the African coast, so it will be hard to get there. If I can find a small vassal somewhere in the area, I will try to go in with a no-CB.

Edit: Hmm, 1.13 patch just in. Might be interesting to restart this for some of the changes to Buddhism and stuff.

 

[net.split]

The new 1.13 patch is up. Buddhist changes include reduction of Karma loss from -25 to -10 from war declarations, -10/+10 from re-election / electing a new ruler, and removal of Dip costs for releasing nations, releasing vassals, and returning cores (actions that grant Karma).

Buddhism should be a lot more interesting now. If you avoided this one because of the religion, played without CS enabled, or focused on a rapid conversion strategy, consider restarting to give it a try. Buddhism may still be a bit weaker than the other religion options nearby, but hopefully by a much smaller margin. If nothing else, reports from this thread would be a great way to give feedback to Paradox about this change

Another useful change is the tweak to native assimilation. It now gives +goods produced instead of -dev cost, which is substantially more useful in the uncolonized provinces in this region of the world.

I think I'll stay the course on my run, but I hadn't hit 1500 yet anyway and wasn't going to convert. I'm taking the colonization route too, so I'll be able to see the effects of the native changes as well.

 

[Peachrocks]

You might be able to do silly nonsense with releasing vassals but while that could have had potential applications in Europe, in Asia, though? I... don't think so, Ming is the major one that comes to mind but in Ming's case you usually want to take it's vassals for yourself rather than straight up release them.

Buddhism still seems really bad short of some ridiculous release exploit I haven't and won't even try to consider because even if it is 'good' this way, it'll get nerfed back. -10 karma on declare is alright and all but it's still the only religion in the game that can actively hurt you aside things from every religion (low unity etc.).

Anyway, plodding along. Trying to control most of Asia/Africa, might be on target, I always misjudge the last 100 years though, either overshooting or undershooting my goals.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

You might be able to do silly nonsense with releasing vassals but while that could have had potential applications in Europe, in Asia, though? I... don't think so, Ming is the major one that comes to mind but in Ming's case you usually want to take it's vassals for yourself rather than straight up release them.

Return core is 0dip, and there are a lot of cores to potentially return in Uzbek, Persia, Ming, and to a much lesser extent India. Plus, you can engineer that sort of thing.

But I bet it's still a sub-par faith overall .

From that position all of Africa will be relatively easy, but Asia you'll have to plan since you'll need multiple wars against the big nations with their big forts.