With the confinement situation, I ended up with a lot of time on my hands so I started doing a bunch of achievements in EUIV. After completing "Where am I" and "Ideas guy" I was pondering what to do next when it occur ed to me that "Big Blue Blob" will be very different in the upcoming patch so I should tackle it right now. Since this run will be done by 1500 no matter what, I thought it would be a good opportunity to write a short report about it. Therefore I give you “Open "BBBaar, all you can eat buffet of Nordic delicacies”.
Played in version 1.29.6 with normal difficulty. In this version, France begins with 34 core provinces, 7 of which are in English hands. Thus we need to acquire 66 new provinces before year 1497 meaning 5 new provinces each 4 years. Of course the provinces under English control will have to be recovered somewhere along the way. This will be a big change of pace for me as my usual play style is slow expansion and consolidation before moving on to the next target. In this run no time to consolidate, just keep pushing forward until you own 100 provinces in coring range.
England is the obvious main target, since we do have to recover our cores. We are guaranteed a defensive war because of the "Maine" event (haha! see note1!). Depending on the alliance web, England might bring good opportunities for indirect land acquisition. Eating all of the British Isles would bring 52 provinces but would require at least 4 wars with England. Without truce breaking, that would take too long. With truce breaking, that would bring extra AE. Because of the time deadline, we can mostly ignore AE. However an early coalition war would mean using a lot of time and resources for little to no territorial gains, so we do have to care about AE. On top of that, the number of ADM we can generate is limited so we should avoid high coring cost provinces. It seems we need some kind of plan.
Note 1: After much planning about how to proceed, the RNG gods played a neat trick on me. The "surrender of Maine" event triggered in December 1444 and England turned over the province, robbing me of 5 years of easy expansion in Ireland. That was putting me on plan B before even beginning plan A. of course it would still be possible to achieve the goal but I did not want to play that B game so I restarted. I offer you my second attempt at this achievement.
Played in version 1.29.6 with normal difficulty. In this version, France begins with 34 core provinces, 7 of which are in English hands. Thus we need to acquire 66 new provinces before year 1497 meaning 5 new provinces each 4 years. Of course the provinces under English control will have to be recovered somewhere along the way. This will be a big change of pace for me as my usual play style is slow expansion and consolidation before moving on to the next target. In this run no time to consolidate, just keep pushing forward until you own 100 provinces in coring range.
England is the obvious main target, since we do have to recover our cores. We are guaranteed a defensive war because of the "Maine" event (haha! see note1!). Depending on the alliance web, England might bring good opportunities for indirect land acquisition. Eating all of the British Isles would bring 52 provinces but would require at least 4 wars with England. Without truce breaking, that would take too long. With truce breaking, that would bring extra AE. Because of the time deadline, we can mostly ignore AE. However an early coalition war would mean using a lot of time and resources for little to no territorial gains, so we do have to care about AE. On top of that, the number of ADM we can generate is limited so we should avoid high coring cost provinces. It seems we need some kind of plan.
Note 1: After much planning about how to proceed, the RNG gods played a neat trick on me. The "surrender of Maine" event triggered in December 1444 and England turned over the province, robbing me of 5 years of easy expansion in Ireland. That was putting me on plan B before even beginning plan A. of course it would still be possible to achieve the goal but I did not want to play that B game so I restarted. I offer you my second attempt at this achievement.
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