Randoms questions raised playing Africa/Songhai

[unmerged(122040)]

Hey all,

I played my first real game of EU3 Divine Wind as England and with a little help from a strategy guide and some trial an error dealing with France, I dominated pretty easily (on Easy). So I thought I'd try something completely different and do an African nation. I started with Mali because it was close and big. Figured it would be the easier of African nations. But I quickly found out that pretty much any nation that starts with Tribal Despotism is doomed. Very unstable Can't ever upgrade governments. I played a few games and each time Mali would be overrun by rebels (was Songhai sending spies?) and I'd eventually run out of manpower and crumble.

Anyway, I switched to Songhai for that there Monarchy and upward mobility. Right off the bat I found it easy to dominate Hausa with by with an army of 5,000. Enough to grab a couple decent provinces. So far so good. Mali could be slowly conquered by timing wars with heavy internal rebellion and various Songhai missions to take provinces. The goal is to reach the coast to meet the europeans for westernization and get some gold provinces along the way.

My first try at it went rather well. Though I probably annexed too much. I was constantly dealing with rebels and I hadn't planned westernization quite well enough. I couldn't get Centralized enough to do military reform. I started over to see if I could plan a bit better. Next major game was a bit different. Mali was much more stable and was managing to complete tech levels amazingly quick. Also Mali and Benin had amazing generals that I juts couldn't beat.

I realize the 2-3 gold provinces that Mali has are good for research, but how in the world did Mali get Land/Navy level 4 by 1480ish? Seemed like the nations around me were advancing way faster than should be possible for sub saharan groups starting at level 1 at everything.

Is this normal for Mali? Did I just not take their gold provinces soon enough?

Also, why am I seeing generals on the field with like 4 Fire, 6 Shock, and 2 maneuver? This is particularly a problem with rebel groups. Is this just a way to make the AI more competitive? Is it luck? I've been overrun several times simply because their general is so good and mine sucks.

Why are rebellions so BIG in africa? It is kind of a game killer when you've got a force limit of like 5 and then some rebel group comes up with 10k stack? WTF? How is the size of rebel group calculated?

 

[Emeny]

Unfortunately EU3 is incredibly eurocentric and is balanced as such, so it's quite a shock to switch over to less advanced nations and still get many of the problems meant for more advanced countries. I wouldn't recommend trying them out seriously until you get quite experienced with the game. Ottomans, Moscovy, Ming, maybe even one of the Japanese states are all good stepping stones.

If your intent on playing it though, slow and steady is probably best. The AI is always going to out-tech you if you are being aggressive and trying to expand, esp if they have gold provinces. I'm not sure how they had good generals without fighting you though. Are you sure it wasn't just their king that they had turned into a general?

Rebel sizes are based on the tax of a province. A bigger base tax will create more rebels, and rebels from events are increased even moreso. You really have to do everything you can to keep your revolt risk down. Convert provinces to your religion, build forts, and make sure rebels dont manage to capture provinces and make the nationalism last even longer. Keep in mind also that you can give concessions to rebels in the religion screen if they are too powerful to deal with directly.

If you can manage to beat out the other local countries then you should start to westernise asap. The Europeans are going to have it out for you as soon as they discover you, especially England. You may want to start colonising on your own and then sell a province to someone like Portugal to get started with westernising.

Good luck!

 

[Thrake]

Rebelions are scalled on province population, too, I believe. Fighting revolt risk must be your main goal, because of revolts obviously, but worst is it kills your income. Try to avoid going too much off limits of the policies, until you are ready to westernize. Try to limit decreses of stability, too.

Overall, you should avoid Africa for now IMO, this is one of the harder games available; you'll be easy pray for Europeans as soon as they come around. Asia is probably easier if you really want a change, though it is still not easy to deal with greedy Europeans.