Permanently occupying France?

[Rilek]

I've been playing EU4 for~350 hours (ie. just a sample ) playing mostly as England. I had a quick strategy question for you guys since most of your have more experience than me in the game.

In my current game I've conquered some of the Iberian peninsula so that Aragon and Portugal are too weak to threaten me. Castile no longer exists. I'm allied to Austria and Denmark so that the only current threat comes from France. I'm beating them soundly in a war and I'm curious if I should every make peace with them once I occupy all their provinces.

If I make peace then the will soon regain their impressive manpower reserves and I'll have to go through another costly war with them. But if I just occupy them indefinitely they won't regain their strength and will slowly fall behind on tech and money over time while I focus on colonization.

I know that was exhaustion will rise over time due to the desire for peace effect, but I'm thinking I could mitigate that by taking more land in Iberia. If I regularly fight wars with Portugal/Aragon and make peace every few years it might reset the desire for peace.

I'm going to give it a try and see what happens as I'm not playing on Ironman, but I'm still curious what you guys think, or if you've tried this sort of strategy yourselves.

Edit: Nope, rebels are just too costly even in the short term. Right as I finished capturing France rebel armies started popping up all over that I was too weak to fight after a long war with France. Oh well, I made them release a bunch of nations that I'll be able to vassalize and annex. It's all the same so long as France is weakened.

 

[zeLukey]

Desire for peace would not be cancelled by ending other wars, as it's only associated with a specific war. So the only way to stop the crazy war exhaustion would be to end the war with France or dump obscene amounts of diplo points into reducing it regularly.

 

[Mrkew]

Actually, you can let rebels take the war goal.
EDIT: I just tested it if it still works, and letting rebels drop my warscore below 50% (not sure if it's still 66% as the wiki says) stops the call for peace completely. Once you get above the threshold, it will start all over. You can use it to break France into pieces, if that's what you want.

Here - https://imgur.com/a/71woG

 

[Metroidkirby]

One time, I occupy all of Burgundy for 25 years in order for the BI to trigger. It would have been better to just make peace and then attack them again after the truce.

 

[Horn and Ivory]

It's worth knowing that if you white peace, war exhaustion doesn't go away, either for you or for your oppenent; and AIs are not good at paying it down. If you totally occupy a country, loot everything, wait for a few big rebel stacks to form, and then white peace out, you can cripple even very powerful nations. It's always worth weighing up carefully whether you wouldn't be better off just enforcing peace terms, but against nations that might bounce back after even a big territory loss the 'peace with exhaustion' can deal more damage. The strategy is at its best with nations like the Ming, but you might want to consider it here.