Let's Discover the Caliphate - A Basileia Romaion 0.11 AAR

[Nikolai]

Yesterday I started an AAR from the Basileia Romaion mod, version 0.10 - playing as Basileia Romaion. It went well, but the game had come to a place where I could not continue. And besides, version 0.11 came out today - so let's start anew - as the Caliphate!

This is a different world of course, both as in the setting of the mod - with Eastern Rome surviving and all that means for the world - but also 0.11 is different. Main difference it seems, is India is no longer controlled by the British, instead being controlled by the Mughals, Mysore, Travancore, bigger Afghanistan - and a small colony from the French HRE:

Also it seems the poor British has lost Australia:

But the Cape is still British:

In Europe, a big change has happened with the French the HRE gaining half of Germany as vassals:

The Americas OTOH seems to be pretty unchanged:

 

[Nikolai]

So this is us, the Caliphate. We control Arabia, and if luck stands, we will soon control Egypt and the Greek kingdom of Africa, which we start at war with.

We also control two vassals; Adal Sultanate and Zanzibar:

We have a good army, at least in numbers, a small GDP, poor literacy - and we start with quite a bit of infamy. 75 points of it. Ooops. Better be careful.

This is the Caliph:

Our budget, note no building costs yet (we only have 10 construction points, so we're badly off there), but also no consumption taxes!

Shortly after:

This is our industry:

And a lot of barracks!

This, though...

Let's try this:

Government is secure:

Our laws:

Low chances, but let's go for national militia, shall we?

As for technology:

Uh, and we're at war and NO units are mobilized. Time to rectify that!

Time to unpause.

 

[Nikolai]

The reform will have to wait, but the war goes well:

 

[Nikolai]

April 16th, 1837 and Egypt is ours!

 

[Nikolai]

Taking Egypt cost me a lot of bureaucracy though, and I suddenly is almost 600 points in the negative and losing about 90% of my income. Massive government administration building commenced!

 

[Nikolai]

By 1839 we're almsot 700 in the red in bureaucracy and I am in default. 100% tax waste, nothing is building and it seems people are fleeing my government administrations? This can't be WAD...

 

[Nikolai]

Peace. But, at what cost?

 

[Nikolai]

So I found the problem. When I win these wars, my newly conquered land gets automatically incorporated. So now I am at default and 403 in minus in bureacracy, and I can't do much about it...

 

[Nikolai]

I have cut all I can. Now I need to do this:

And still I go in the negative:

 

[Nikolai]

Suddenly I gained like 500 bureacracy, even though I only built 2-3 new levels of government admin buildings. Weird. In any case I used up my investment pool to build banana plantations and now we try to not build for a while...

 

[Nikolai]

February 1st, 1848 and we are again forced to declare bankrupcy.

Our slow colonization of Africa is going well, though.

 

[Nikolai]

And we've got a plan, gold in them mines in the south, first we just have to take Zululand, and then it's Transvaal!

 

[Nikolai]

An would you look at that, Zululand just gave in!

 

[Nikolai]

Boldly, we demand Transvaal too!

And they yield!

 

[Nikolai]

But then there's civil war in the air!

Time to crush them and take our gold back!

 

[Nikolai]

...the waht now?

 

[Nikolai]

We won, but it was oddly costly...

 

[Nikolai]

Oranje next. As the land to the west of them is full of gold!

They chose war.

And we won, of course.

 

[Nikolai]

Rome, mighty Rome, wants to be our friend and let us join their customs union. We go from 15k in the negative each week to this:

A month later it's going up even more:

 

[Nikolai]

As we end the year 1850, this is the world:

Yes, Japan is going places. Quite literally.

The world's mightiest states: