Survival challenge: Ming's vassal

[Thucydides7]

Starting in 1444, can a player survive and break free as a vassal of Ming?

But Ming has no vassal in 1444? Well, Ming can release a vassal, Xi for example.

Playing a vassal like Xi, can the player survive and break free? Or has the player zero practical chance?

 

[Piotrzeci]

Ehm... yes? Ming isn't exactly hard to beat. You can either attack them on low Mandate, wait for their disaster or maybe get the Shogun to support your independence. I don't really expect it to be challenging.

 

[Thucydides7]

This is just the sort of reply I was looking for:

Ehm... yes? Ming isn't exactly hard to beat. You can either attack them on low Mandate, wait for their disaster or maybe get the Shogun to support your independence. I don't really expect it to be challenging.

But how to keep Ming from annexing the vassal before low mandate arrives?

 

[Piotrzeci]

This is just the sort of reply I was looking for:

But how to keep Ming from annexing the vassal before low mandate arrives?

I haven't tried and it might indeed be an issue, but I think they'll lose enough army against Oirat to give you the time on +50% liberty desire and if not as long as Ashigaka rivals MIng they should be conceivable to support independence within first 10 years (and that will likely keep you on disloyal).

 

[Drmcdevitt]

As the only vassal it can be difficult to survive (I’ve tried a few times). If you release multiple it can be hard too, but more possible. Once I released like 5 and played as the vassal in the south in canton. I was able to develop provinces faster then he could integrate but I wasn’t taking tech. Another time I created a colony in Australia and just released and played as that before he annexed me.

 

[Thucydides7]

As the only vassal it can be difficult to survive (I’ve tried a few times). If you release multiple it can be hard too, but more possible. Once I released like 5 and played as the vassal in the south in canton. I was able to develop provinces faster then he could integrate but I wasn’t taking tech. Another time I created a colony in Australia and just released and played as that before he annexed me.

You've actually tried it? Awesome.

If you feel like regaling us with your own exploits, I would like to read more.

 

[Drmcdevitt]

Well for one of the games I released and played as Wu as the only vassal. I took Eco - Quantity and tried to dev up as much as possible to avoid being annexed. I got someone i think ayuthaya or another big country to support independence for a while which allowed me to get my provinces to like 40 each. Eventually Ming was able to get annexation progress up to 99% even with my independence being supported it wasn’t enough to stop progress. Eventually i declared for independence and lost.

 

[atwix]

@Thucydides7 I did it couple patches ago wih Miao, an animist vassal of Ming, on very hard. expect no support independence, since you are wrong religion.

But you got gold mines, and defendable terrain.

The independence war took me a LOT of micro to win, and it really was HARD.

We then proceeded to conquer the origin of our animist cat worship religion, and made Miao meow at cat goddess Bastet temple in the Mamluks terrain.

video playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqF0_-avbxRy5u3UkDpWbrOcz6s6NNeCP

independence stream:

 

[Thucydides7]

@Thucydides7 I did it couple patches ago wih Miao, an animist vassal of Ming, on very hard. expect no support independence, since you are wrong religion.

But you got gold mines, and defendable terrain.

The independence war took me a LOT of micro to win, and it really was HARD.

We then proceeded to conquer the origin of our animist cat worship religion, and made Miao meow at cat goddess Bastet temple in the Mamluks terrain.

video playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqF0_-avbxRy5u3UkDpWbrOcz6s6NNeCP

independence stream:

Outstanding. A five-hour video! This is much more thorough an answer than I would have expected.

I cannot say that I will make it all the way through your video at one sitting (nor indeed that I will make it all the way through at all), but I am starting to watch now.

I wish that I had as strong a radio voice as you have. Very deep. Easy to listen to: "Develop the gold and nothing but the gold!"

 

[BlazeKnight_]

Xi and Shun are the 2 best nations for this. You could either wait for Ming to DOW Oirat or something and lose manpower or just DOW right away. Either way you'd need to go over force limit and spam mercenaries, particularly on very hard. On normal/hard this should be easy because the AI hates going over gov cap so Ming will have like 50k.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Tempting to do this trivially by nation ruining Ming before releasing vassal and then not mentioning that when showing successful screenshot .

For example you can chain take + repay loans until negative income with no military for Ming, making it nearly impossible for them to pay for their army w/o bankrupting first (which makes independence war trivial, if bankruptcy doesn't kill them outright with rebels first). Then release/play vassal with a gutted nation-ruined overlord.

Defeats the purpose of the challenge but opening post didn't ban it explicitly!

 

[Thucydides7]

Tempting to do this trivially by nation ruining Ming before releasing vassal and then not mentioning that when showing successful screenshot .

For example you can chain take + repay loans until negative income with no military for Ming, making it nearly impossible for them to pay for their army w/o bankrupting first (which makes independence war trivial, if bankruptcy doesn't kill them outright with rebels first). Then release/play vassal with a gutted nation-ruined overlord.

Defeats the purpose of the challenge but opening post didn't ban it explicitly!

I thought about banning it explicitly but wanted to make the post short enough that readers would read it.

You are right, of course: the challenge implies that the player may do nothing as Ming except to release the vassal.

 

[Guibou]

This would really depends on how much you want to destroy Ming before trying the game itself.

-Destroy fort/army
-Loan + inflation
-10 corruption with the money thingy
-Put on useless edict everywhere
-Recrute merc and disband
-Release other nation that would include the 3 provinces needed for high mandate (canton and the other 2 i forgot)
-Insult every country near
-release other tags
-release tributuaries


edit: just saw your reply to the other post so dont read this... too late i know.

 

[Drmcdevitt]

Xi and Shun are the 2 best nations for this. You could either wait for Ming to DOW Oirat or something and lose manpower or just DOW right away. Either way you'd need to go over force limit and spam mercenaries, particularly on very hard. On normal/hard this should be easy because the AI hates going over gov cap so Ming will have like 50k.

This isn’t true at all. I declared on them later and they had like 200k and swarmed all over me and that was on normal. It may just depend on how the opening goes.