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William III von Habsburg, whose title should've been 'the fucking amazing', because his stats were 5/6/6.

This should go in the Hall of Fame thread as "luckiest event ever."
 
Why? You mean any player who ever got a randomly generated 5/5/6 ruler would have to go in the hall of fame? Hell, a few weeks ago I got a Queen Candela (IIRC) of Spain who was 6/6/6, pure RNG.

Well, it's also that, but mostly I mean getting a Habsburg ruler as HYW-winning England right after Henry croaks.
 
I’d call that ‘a windfall’ rather than ‘lucky’.

"Windfalliest event ever" doesn't really roll off the tongue in the same way, though. Still, I'm happy enough with that, I suppose. ;)
 
How did your Hundred Years War go? Did you force France into a PU?
It's not super difficult to win the HYW if you have the basic plan ready at the start. Essentially, you get your forces off the mainland, then vassalize scotland with them while the french are sieging your provinces, calling portugal to arms against the scottish (which also makes them join against the french, for some reason). Hit-and-run the besieged coastal provinces until french manpower eventually drops low enough that you have more men than them. After a while, it's also possible to peace out provence, taking almost 10k guys out of the war.

Then I guaranteed granda and waited for portugal or castile to attack them, giving me the chance to grab at least one province in iberia, which is all that's needed to start fabricating claims, slowly eating them up. For some reason, the rest of europe doesn't seem to care very much what goes on down there, so you get almost no AE with them for conquering the entire place.

Well, it's also that, but mostly I mean getting a Habsburg ruler as HYW-winning England right after Henry croaks.
Well, it wasn't right after; various lancasters ruled for a few decades as I was fighting spain and protugal, but huge amounts of them started dying very young, until the bloodline was extinguished. That von Habsburg taking the throne sure was the reason I stayed with the game, though, never had anything that lucky happen to me before. The dynasty was in control of several thrones by that point.
 
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A short game as I somehow couldn't sleep at all last night. I picked Sukhothai, that Southeast Asian OPM under PU with Ayutthaya, without really intending to go for a full campaign. I just wanted to see if Sukhothai was viable at all, and I used the general strategy for the European OPMs: get the hell out and colonize. I just wanted to play a peaceful island nation.

There was absolutely no question that it is impossible to break away with a war. But after playing several campaigns in the region, I was fairly confident that Ayutthaya is pretty likely to fall into negative prestige at least at some point of time; while it is pretty much the equivalent of France in the region, it is also often targeted by its neighbors, and I also saw the AI Sukhothai getting independent a few times. It did, and I had relationships improved all over the place in the mean time. I broke free without independence war in 1504. Just canceling the integration worked well enough.

Fortunately, Arakan was there as an OPM. It actually expanded quite a bit into Bengal before, but it lost all but its capital Arakan to Assam by then. I allied Dai Viet, Shan and Ceylon immediately and DoW'd Arakan with no CB to gain a harbor. Getting the FBR from Ceylon allowed me to core it.. and if Arakan was not there, I wouldn't have gotten anywhere. I found out that the FBR doesn't help at all if I didn't have a port with a land connection to the capital. Darn.

I always wanted to move my capital to Hawaii for some reason. I only colonized Palawan, using it as a basis to hop into Palau, the closest island that belongs to Oceania. Once the colonization processes gained some momentum, I sold both Sukhothai and Arakan and had my capital moved first to Palau, then later to Hawaii. By 1628 (on the screenshot) I had most of the Pacific though there are some islands still left out, but I decided to stop there. Spain showed up in Java, so I could Westernize if I wanted... but I had no intention to Westernize, and doing so would be painful at this point. Ferrying the troops all over the Pacific for rebel hunting doesn't exactly sound like fun. In sum, I moved the capital four times: Sukhothai > Arakan > Palawan > Palau > Hawaii.

I only declared three wars afterwards. I vassalized Ryukyu (actually released it back after converting it into Buddhist) as my pet vassal, annexed Makassar and took Mataram from Majapahit. It was sad that Bali core disappeared. I did discover the Americas, but didn't colonize there because I wanted to avoid conflicts with the European colonial empires. Except Spain just colonized right next to me in Java. Damn.

Anyways, I love the light purple color. It's one of the most beautiful colors to paint the map.
 
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Westernized Aztec game, began out of boredom but then i started taking it seriously.

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My wealthy Havana capital.

Inca and Shawnee are loyal vassals. GB almost ended up in a PU with me for a short while.
 
Ironman Poland - Commonwealth game
Poland uber alles basically, just kicking off Russia and Sweden until endgame now

I saw someone posted on forum that there is a way to enter HRE as Poland. I decided to give it a try and I did it. After that my long-time alliance with France ensured my HRE emperorship around 1600's I think. Could have gotten it before if I didn't vassalized the electors, but god damn they just liked Austria too much. And when talking about Austria, I could have gotten them into union under me. Their freakin old ruler had 60 and no kids. Suddenly my prestige dropped because of some event I guess, so they got the 'noble from House of Valois will come to throne' ( yes, I have Valois dynasty ), and I was deciding should I claim throne or not, and I didn't. What happened was that old senile bastard died 5 days after unpausing.
I was very very mad, but what you can do?

So around 1710's I got my France Personal Union 20 years later I Revoked Privilegia. My diplo tech sucks, well, I chosed to ignore that tech so I can westernize, and I took 2 diplo ideas ( expansion and diplo ) so I can manage HRE easier.
Military tech is kinda normal, only HRE minors and Netherlands have better ( not including Russia which is Eastern ), and Admin tech is 18 years ahead.

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Vassals, Venice is the only ally which offered me alliance after Ottoman took one of their provinces in Europe

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Polish America
 
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I'm really loving this France game, it is 1648. Trying to colonize all of north america if I can. Once that is done, I'm going for all of India.
I dare not attack Austria because they have had a mega alliance for a while which consists of Castille, Portugal, Russia, Poland, Lithuania and other HRE states. And yes, Savoy formed Sardinia-Peidmont.
 
90 years of ottoman goodness thanks to Fatih Sultan Mehmet reigning for freaking 69 years
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Bright greens are vassals, Hedjaz can be diplo-vassalized ,italian region can be force vassalized except naples because they somehow reclaimed messina
Crimea is a protectorate that I cannot ally because of my low opinion of them. if they ever get in my good graces I'll use them to reclaim the provinces
held by lithuania. The only obstacle is 11 strong coalition around italy.Time to turn to the india I guess..

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Brandenburg -> Prussia -> Germany (Ironman 1.3). Lovely colour for an early reich. Center alliance of Germany/Hungary/Poland & a big but weak Lithuania. The other two large alliances are France/Russia/Milan/Sweden and Spain/Trier?/Ottomans/England/Portugal. Everybody is pretty much fighting everybody with coalition after coalition.

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The Prussian army is way OP. 160% Discipline, 11+ Morale with Discipline advisor on. Not sure if I could made any stats higher.

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Tech Setup.

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Failed in reaching one self-imposed goal, max all military ideas and reach 32 tech level by the end of the game but it was extremely fun so I will give it another go. If I had more time the next campaign was to finish off Bavaria & Salzburg for a little house keeping.

I started off by allying Lithuania/Austria and DOW the Tutons. I didn't want to give a chance to Poland to snatch any territory so when they failed to PU Lithuania I DOW them with my new ally Bohemia (Emperor) since Austria went under a Spanish PU. I got a few territories while at the same time Lithuania didn't join the defense of Poland since they were helping me vasalise the Tutons in another war. France got Scotland and Savoy got a lot of Burgundy lands (no clue how that happened).

With Austria out I went elector hunting expanding in Denmark & allying France while Spain was integrating Austria. As soon I got elected I attacked Spain, released Austria as vassal and feeding territory in a series of wars. That was the only time I needed the HRE mechanics as I wasn't planning in staying in for long. Austria almost doubled my size and with the Prussian troops unmatched I ate up as much of the empire as possible before leaving the HRE. End game was coalition after coalition with the army being on top of their game killing millions of enemies in different fronts.

Spain got Savoy, Russia didn't join the party as they focused on reaching Mecca for some reason. France didn't expand in England apart from a couple of provinces in Ireland. Ottos failed to conquer Egypt, were back in tech and as soon as the Russians bordered them, they never expanded further at all.


A few more screens.

Orissa ?

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Our dynasty went places, but they don't like us very much.

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Coalition after coalition.

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The end. All in all a great campaign!

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Here is what I managed to do with orthodox Ottomans. Bohemia is in personal union with me. Westernized around 1610.
I stopped there because the country was to much instable. Even with +3 stab, everything converted, a theologist and no OE, I kept on having too much boring rebels. Guess spreading turkish culture only through the Balkans and Crimea was not enough, I should have not passed so much decisions with +1 revolt risk...
I also ended up against super coalitions involving Venice, Spain, France, Hedjaz, Baluchistan (lol) and Tripoli. I beat them twice thanks to my Austrian ally (yup, everything is historically wrong). Still, the annoying Habsburgs managed to keep their hand on the HRE with their ideas, even with half of electors converted to orthodoxy... I was close to be the emperor before they got diplomatic ideas, then, everything became boring and full of rebels, so I stopped...

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I also own a good chunk of Oceanian islands.

(Note that Muscovy has never been at war with the Livonians, despite them having Novgorod... So they never formed Russia... Sometimes, AI just don't get it...)
 
Man, you got lucky... In my Manchu game... Russia ate everyone. Even though I stopped their eastward expansion, they decided to just eat crimea and lithuania instead... Then come attack me while I was in the middle of annexing India T_T Equal forces + 6 military tech behind = certain doom for Qing.

This was a strange game. Russia failed thanks to my involvment but also France failed, poland lithuania failed (against crimea-ottoma rather than russia), ottoman got overpowered in a big way, and both Louisiana and the USA actually managed to get formed, though it's a castillian usa and they were given Tech 6. Louisiana was tech 11 when it formed ...

But yeah i got to occupy Lisboa with a former steppe horde nation, that's priceless x)
 
Finished my Ironman Poland - Commonwealth game

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PUed Sweden around 1700's in a war for throne. It was a painful war though, Swedish discipline made my life a living hell because I forgot about their ideas and traditions. But when I realized I can't win it in 1:1 ratio I slaughtered them.
I formed HRE on end just to see what's my score, but map is looking stupid and I just couldn't post it, my moral and my border senses don't allow me to post it, it's just ugly.
 
My ongoing game:
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The Malayan Empire, formerly Ayutthaya. Bali, Pegu and Lan Na are Vassals, the latter will probably not be annexed because I don't want a border with Ming. I also diplo-vassalized Ceylon after colonising the Andamans and the Maledives. Sukhothai is still in a PU with me as is Japan - yes, their emperor died without issue after uniting the realm and now the Malay King is also Emperor of Japan - that's one of these moments where I miss the empire decision.

I took Expansion and Exploration as my first two ideas to colonise everything before the Europeans get there. As soon as the provinces on the Southern island turn into cities, I'll send a explorer to discover the neighbouring islands and Australia.