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Kagemin

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Mar 8, 2014
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Hello everyone, and welcome to another AAR of mine. It's been quite a while, and I'm still sad about how the last one ended prematurely, but I felt like giving this another try. As usual this will be pretty image-heavy, and mostly focussed on the game play.
And I'll do my best to see this one through to the end again. :)

Overview:
Chapter 1: The Wars of Kapilendra - Starts further down in this very post
Chapter 2: The Cult of Jagannath
Chapter 3: Over the Mountains we go
Chapter 4: Looming Disaster
Chapter 5: Civil War!
Chapter 6: A new rival appears
Chapter 7: Breakthrough in China
Chapter 8: Troubled times for our rivals
Chapter 9: Dynastic Woes
Chapter 10: Pent-up
Chapter 11: Shiva the Destroyer
Chapter 12: Shiva the Destroyer - continued
Chapter 13: The fall of an empire
Chapter 14: Steady progress
Chapter 15: Praise be to Vishnu \o/
Chapter 16: Acceleration and a bit of a lull
Chapter 17: First tussle with a western nation
Chapter 18: A Foothold in Europe
Chapter 19: Stepping Stones
Chapter 20: Goals in sight
Chapter 21: Final Sprint

So, Orissa. I still didn't get around to play any Hindu nation for more than a little testing since they got their personal deities, so I'm happy to finally go for that. Plus they got the option for some interesting (imo) achievments.

Goals:
My goals for this are pretty straightforward. Become the Foremost Servitor of Jagannath, and see to it that The Sun Never Sets on the Indian Empire. :cool:
So that means getting all provinces with Tropical Wood, and getting the Cape, London, Ottawa, and Hong Kong.
Past that I'll just see how things develop and if I can pick up any other achievments along the way (both Steam- and self-set ones).

Gameplan:
Yeah, as usual not too sure about things here. I don't think I'll go out of my way to westernize asap (so no tentacle of wisdom or early no-CB wars to get to the Europeans faster). I'll probably do a bit of colonizing later on, but I won't pick up Exploration as one of my first ideas.
I'm not too sure about some of the newer mechanics (as I said, only one campaign in 1.14 and 1.15), but I think I should be fine just going at my own pace, hopefully that won't come back to haunt me later on... :confused:


Chapter 1: The Wars of Kapilendra

So, let's look at our situation first:
xgcz5u.jpg

We start out medium-sized with some good provinces along the coastline, and even got our own vassal already. We're a bit boxed in between several bigger and stronger nations though, so we'll have to be a bit opportunistic and/or get some good allies early on.
Our starting rivals are Malwa, Bengal, and Andhra, and in addition to these 3 Jaunpur rivalled us as well. Neither Bahmanis nor V-J to the south though, so hopefully I can get one of them as an ally.

We got a great starting ruler, and a below-average heir. Problematically our ruler is also a great general (5 shock), so hopefully we won't get too the heir too fast and for too long... :rolleyes:

Now to a very cool part, the Hindu deitis:
k9yu0j.jpg

With the exception of maybe Ganga these are all great, but for the start cheaper cores and less AE sound the best to me.

I also got a nice mission to start out with, conquering one of my rivals:
wapmhi.jpg

Sadly they allied V-J right away before I could jump then, so fulfilling that mission will probably take a bit... :(

I started by fabricating on Jharkhand and Bastar, both of them very weak and without allies (so far). Since V-J was a potential enemy due to their alliance to my rival Andhra I decided to go for an alliance with Bahmanis early on, securing a royal marriage to get to the alliance faster:
10wu1sg.jpg


Jharkhand was my first target, apparently my vassal was thinking along the same line as I did, fabricating a claim on them as well:
29bg0o3.jpg

Might as well save the admin points and feed it to them I guess...

Next up came the first very tough decision. I did not yet have the alliance with Bahmanis, when a big war broke out:
ioeph4.jpg

It was V-J and their vassal, as well as Andhra, against Bahmanis. That made the alliance with Bahmanis a moot point (even if they suddenly felt more positive about the idea), the real questions now were a) wether to jump them as well, or go after Andhra, and b) jump into the war right away or wait a bit longer and go for the losing side.

Since there were no deceisive battles yet from what I could tell I just continued going after the easy targets and kept watching from the sidelines for a bit longer:
29xu7bp.jpg


I'll be taking that for myself, since it opens up some more options.

Since I still didn't have any allies now I decided to accept Mewar when they offered it:
5p046h.jpg


Not the strongest option, but should be enough to deal with any problems should Malwa or Jaunpur get uppity.

Since Hindu has some good religious decisions I decided to spend some admin points to up my stability and go for the one that reduces unrest in addition to stronger missionaries:
29ndzjd.jpg


While I kept on watching the big war to the west a literary golden age begun, giving me the option of a half-priced Theologian without having to pay an estate for it ;)
14abqs0.jpg

I was actually making some pretty good money from trade already, so I got him right away.

The last of my small neighbours devoured, and still the war to the west carries on:
20jhk5s.jpg

It was swinging against Bahmanis now, but both sides' armies still were mostly intact, so I decided to wait a bit longer.

Apparently the historic Kapilendra (my ruler) went pretty crazy in his wars, so far I couldn't really compete with his achievments:
wkl8xu.jpg

Hopefully that will change soon. ;)
Still, seems like a good deal to me, some small money for less unrest and more legitimacy.

With Bahmanis looking worse and worse in their war I decided it was a good idea to start fabricating some claims on them, and I broke our royal marriage with them. (It's only been 3 years my dear, but don't worry. It's not you, it's me~ :p)

Shortly after Bahmanis finally fell:
19wa4w.jpg


And while I had no illusions about this lasting very long, I secured an alliance with V-J:
2cp8ec4.jpg

Should at the least keep me safe from any opportunistic rivals while I'm busy. And if I can get them to join some other war I might be able to jump Andhra in the meantime... :D

Speaking of which, a claim fabrication later (Andhra took the province I originally claimed) I finally declared war on Bahmanis:
eju0e8.jpg

AI was starting some serious dogpiling already, and I wanted a piece of them as well.

I was considering vassalizing Mysore to the south in this war, and try feeding them the other small nations to the south, but that definitely would have ended the alliance with V-J, and I wanted to keep them around as an ally for a little longer. At least until I dealed with some of my rivals...

And after Malwa and Gujarat finished their own wars with Bahmanis they actually were small enough to be vassalized, with all the cores they just lost that seemed like a very good option:
34xqg7l.jpg


Even though I usually try to wait for some neighbour bonus, in preparation for my next war I went and bought the next level in military tech at full price:
beuiza.jpg

Didn't think I'd get the bonus with me having a ruler with a 6 in military and nothing else to spend the points on anyways.
Plus the extra level served me pretty well in my war against Bengal:
mbnw5c.jpg

Scared them so much that this turned out to be the only battle in the whole war...o_O
vwvmo5.jpg

With the Bengal Delta and Dhaka both having river estuaries that should secure my grip on the Bengal trade node.
In hindsight I should have taken the province in the north as well, and go into Tibet from there, but oh well...:oops:
So as it was I was in a bit of a stalemate now, everyone I could get (or already had) a CB on had some pretty strong allies, and I couldn't get V-J to join an offensive war yet either.

I was actually considering a no-CB war into Indonesia at that point. I think it would have been a strong option (still a fair amount of smaller nations over there), but eh...:rolleyes:

My ally Mewar getting attacked turned out to be a possible way out, but looking at their enemies that was a pretty tough choice as well:
67uyj9.jpg


And we'll see how that turned out in the next chapter. With this screenshot also giving a good overview over the current situation in India I feel like this a good spot to take a break.
With the exeption of some small nations in the very south almost all the smaller nations have already been eaten or vassalized, definitely feels like the AI has gotten better at the early expansion. Just means I'll have too be more on the lookout for opportunities, since any war now promises to be a big one.
 
Last edited:
Yay, new AAR! :)
Quite good progress, plan on force bahamanis to hindu?
I was thinking about it, but upon taking a closer look they start off with +3 tolerance of heathens. So I don't think they'd ever convert anything, at least they're not converting any of the non-Shia provinces they got now.
 
ALLY MEWAR?!

You should BURN THEM! KILL IT WITH FIRE!

ehh...

subbed.
 
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With both the Rajput and the Central Indians having +50% core creation traditions there really wasn't too much of a way around Mewar, I think. I needed an ally in that region, and they were the only one of decent power available.
Plus it's only temporary, I might be able to feed most of their stuff to vassals and revoke as many cores as possible when the time comes.
 
it's only temporary, I might be able to feed most of their stuff to vassals and revoke as many cores as possible when the time comes.

*heartbeat slowing down*

*mutter mutter*

fbf.gif



"FIRE I say!"
 
Kagemin is back with a new AAR and no one told me? I'm subbed.

I played one SP and one MP campaign as Orissa, back in the day when there was only Hindustan, and no separate tag for the Hindus to form.

I'm expecting a stellar performance as usual - and I'm on @atwix side when it comes to Mewar :D
 
What's this nonsense of a "normal dislike" of increased coring costs? We all know that the mechanic is more or less badwrongfun and basically the bane of an expanding EU IV player ;)

I wonder if they will ever change the modifier to something not involving mp while maintaining the purpose of it (to make it harder to grab land from the affected countries).
 
What's with all the hate for Mewar? Anything I'm missing, or just the normal dislike of increased coring cost?

I'm just roleplaying a bit.

Have you ever seen a campaign where Mewar does NOT dominate NW India over time, thanks to coring cost protecting them from AI?

Its one of the reasons why Timurids or whoever almost never invade nw India..
 
Chapter 2: The Cult of Jagannath

Continuing on from where we last left, I of course answered my ally's call to arms. Fighting two of my rivals when being the strongest faction involved in the war, and not being the main target sounded pretty nice too well. :D
Sadly I don't seem to have made any screenshots during the war, but it basically cost me what little manpower I had (I'm running more and more on merc infantry at this point, making some nice money from trade to fund it), and I made a seperate peace taking a province for me and my two vassals each. I did keep my alliance with Mewar though, for the time being. :p

Next up I started the integration of my first vassal, Garjat:
10cvzoi.jpg

With Bahmanis having the potential to get really huge really easily I wanted to get started on that as early as possible, didn't want the relative strength to get too unbalanced...

As a very nice surprise, the next time I checked on my rival Andhra V-J seems to have broken the alliance with them:
293jdx3.jpg

Always nice when the AI chooses you when the "allied to rival" modifier kicks in. :)

Anyways, between me and my vassals I felt confident going into this war alone, even it was against all my rivals at once. Luckily they were very far apart, so I could take them out one after another. First I took out Bengal:
2a9pue8.jpg

Didn't want to go too crazy with the AE yet, plus they weren't a co-belligerent, so I couldn't take too much anyways. It was time to turn south now and deal with the other 2, and nicely enough Mewar was willing to join my war once their truce with Malwa ran out. :)

Sadly during this war my ruler passed away, guess I can't really complain after almost 20 years of active duty on the front...
nf1wup.jpg

A 3/2/2 is far from great, but it's not terrible either. And his 3/3/3 heir is the epitome of averageness, so that's fine too.

We finished the conquest of Andhra without too much trouble:
9uqihw.jpg

I did forget a little something though before signing the treaty. I'm a monarchy, have no manpower, and ended the war at negative stability, whoops...:oops:
Hopefully with buffing up my stability a bit and the increased manpower recovery from the mission I would be able to recover enough manpower power fast enough. A Peasant's War would really put a damper on my plans there...

Since I had to wait a bit for my manpower to recover that also meant my war exhaustion could tick down a bit, and watching V-J struggle with their pretender rebels was entertaining as well, so it wasn't all bad. :D
I also got a nice flavour event during this time:
ayu5nc.jpg

I'm still making most of my money from trade, so it doesn't really hurt me, but I'm still not sure that 5% less taxes is worth +1TTF. Especially compred to the free stability the other option woulda given...:confused:
Still, I'm trying to become the foremost servitor of Jagannath, so I of course made him our primary god.

Not too surprisingly V-J broke their alliance shortly after, I'm actually surpised it laster this long after vassalizing Bahmanis:
66wvtz.jpg

I needed a new rival anyways now that Andhra was gone, and maybe I can make use of their rebel issues.

And once again Mewar is sending me a call to arms:
5wxftj.jpg

Dunno why they felt the need call me in against their OPM vassal, but my vassals marched over there and made for quite a few favours. :D

With no OE and positive stabiltiy the Peasant's War doesn't tick, so I felt confident enough attacking Malwa to feed my vassals, when I saw that they had no allies:
m7ued1.jpg


2jff1j7.jpg

Well, so much for the positive stability...:rolleyes:
Between raising some additional levies and letting my vassals do most of the work my manpower was already close enough to the 50% required to end the Disaster progress that I left stability at zero.

And soon after, Malwa was gone as well:
35aiqzp.jpg

Borders are pretty painfull at this point, but this early on I can accept it as "work in progress". :D

Time for the first idea pick:
23r1xxt.jpg

Not too surprisingly I went with Administrative. Cheaper coring is just too important currently, and I can make very good use of the cheaper mercs as well. So much that I'm considering actually filling this idea group for a change. :eek:

Next up was a small war against Sadiya to the north east, Ava beat them up and left them without allies:
2rxk4yh.jpg

Somewhere around this point in time I also allied Ava, just as a defensive security. Not planning on attacking them anytime soon anyways, they got some nasty other allies...
And yes, that's a pretty badly exploded Ming. Surprisingly enough they stay surprisingly stable for surprisingly long after that, despite 5 Chinese minors having been set free.

And another call to arms from Mewar...:rolleyes:
rm20ex.jpg

So far these actually turned out pretty well to me, and the most dangerous enemy in this war, Persia, would have to go through all of Mewar (and then my vassals) before being able to reach me, so I joined. Both Gujarat and Jaunpur also were rivals (V-J, Gujarat, and Jaunpur at this point), meaning my vassals had a bunch of claims on them, so I should be able to get something out of this again. Will have to watch everyone's war enthusiasm and individual war scores closely though, and be ready to make my own peace before Mewar does something stupid.

During this war my next ruler died, and since the war was rather tough I went with Shakti as a personal deity:
2wdzxc4.jpg

Really liking the deities so far, even if there are several I probably won't use at all ever.

And here things got a little weird, I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me if this is a bug.
I was keeping a close watch on the warscore and Mewar's war enthusiasm, especially after they joined a war against the Timurids. As soon as their enthusiasm dropped to low I made a seperate peace, I had good enough warscore against Gujarat and Jaunpur to get something out of it:
a0zz9y.jpg

And apparently Mewar made their own peace on the same day. I don't think you're supposed to get favours and a share of the money and prestige if you make a seperate peace, or are you? o_O
Sucks that they took so many provinces for themselves, but I really didn't trust them to give me some of it even if I stayed. And the favours at least made up for the loss in trust from the seperate peace, so I'm not complaining.

And then the next ruler died. o_O
2hfma9v.jpg

Also switched dynasties there, so my legitimacy was in the gutter now.
Hm. Wasn't there something about low legitimacy and negative stability? Especially if you have mostly high-autonomy provinces?
2i8j87m.jpg

Well, this will suck. Has a chance of going well of course, but most likely it will suck. At least my leader doesn't have a zero in any of his skills, and I mostly expand through my vassals (there's a +1% progress per month for having more than 10% overextension), so once my stab is at least neutral again the disaster won't progress. Will take forever to actually be stopped though, considering I got a 19 years old ruler at 19 legitimacy.
Unless he dies as quickly as his predecessors of course, but I don't think a civil war is bad enough that I'd wish for a regency council...;)

So, a slightly more bumpy second chapter, but so far I'm still happy with my progress. Next I'll be on the lookout for opportunites to break Jaunpur and V-J for good, as well as trying to expand outside of India. Straight east is a bit tough with the current alliance network (there's a big block of Dali, Ava, Pegu, and Ayuthayya all being allied to one another), but the northern Tibet region looks very weak, and would open up a fair amount of directions to further expand.
I also have to admit that I was actually contemplating a no-CB war on either the Spice Islands or the eastern African coast while I was at -2 stability, but then I remembered that coring range is a thing. Could have gotten a vassal with some claims of course, but eh...:confused:
 
guess you could have taken border with Koch way earlier, and delve into himalayas.

but could and should have doesn't matter after its done :)
 
Yeah, that kind of longer term planning is usually my biggest weakness if I'm not focussed on it (besides the obvious "whoops" moments of course :rolleyes:).
I usually see these things when I take a break and just look at things from like an outside view. But in my "normal" play I'm just going with the flow without really planning too far ahead.
On the other hand I think I'm pretty good at understanding and making use of the current situation at any point in the game, so usually it doesn't come back to bite me too hard in the overall scheme of things. ;)
 
Chapter 3: Over the mountains we go

Even with the civil war looming I saw no reason to just stop expanding, so I declared war on Benghal in the hopes of getting rid of them for good now:
x1kmrt.jpg

Also pulled Jaunpur into the next war right away, not giving them a chance to recover. You also might notice that I have two new allies, Nepal and Ava. Ava is mostly a defensive ally, but there's also the hope that this will break up the alliance block in the region. And Nepal I allied in the hopes of diplo-vassalizing them, they lost a bunch of territory and have some pretty good military ideas, so that sounds like a good idea (also no +core creation ideas ;)).

Since I no longer had my starting dynasties I also lost the Cult of Jagannath modifier I just got in the previous chapter:
f3xeky.jpg

Probably good from a gameplay perspective, but sad from the roleplaying side of things. :(

The war against Benghal and Jaunpur was going well, I jumped the Benghalese army right away and my vassals kept Jaunpur busy:
1zdozo5.jpg


And as chance would have it the enemy retreated into the very province I planned on sieging next.
5jv38n.jpg

So that takes care of that. :D

V-J also finally decided to rival me:
qs5mx2.jpg

Bahmanis still has a bunch of cores on them, so that fine. ;)

Another thing that happened during the war, I got an heir:
6tmr9e.jpg

Not complaing about the stats, plus a strong claim. :)

Next up, an investment to save a ton of admin points in the future:
mw3xh2.jpg

As I said earlier, I actually plan on completing the admin ideas this time.
And another rare and very nice event:
2rp32w7.jpg

So much going on during this war. :p

I made another seperate peace here, giving Garjat a bit and taking my new core for myself:
zl9fma.jpg


And with Jaunpur out of the way I had the warscore to full annex Benghal now:
1zg6j5x.jpg

Yeah, not caring about the AE with these nations...:rolleyes:

As well as our plans for expansion were going, we had some internal problems. The civil war was ticking up whenever I got above 10%OE, and apparently we got a famine as well:
15647ew.jpg

28cho9u.jpg

Tough choice actually, but since the penalties only last for 5 years I took the +1 mercantilism.

To distract from these problems (all the war wasn't enough to distract from all that:p) we also decided to build a grand palace:
34erfw2.jpg

While I have no hopes of getting out of the civil war with this ruler, the legitimacy was hurting pretty badly in terms of unrest, so that was really nice. :)

I got a diplo rep advisor for a couple months, and with that I was able to vassalize Nepal:
255m35e.jpg


And wasted no time in making use of their cores. ;)
25kqydw.jpg


And I even remembered to take some provinces for myself to be able to push further. :eek:
2qbdjia.jpg

Nepal still had a claim on Guge when I checked before the war, but apparently it ran out before I could press it. :(
Oh well, I can still go through Kham. Another problem I only realized much later, the province of Koch is one of the province needed to form Bharat. Not 100% sure if I can from Bharat and still get the Jaghannat achievment later, but I think that's possible, so I potentially wasted a lot of time in making use of the permanent claims on India there. :confused:

Nibbling a bit on Assam, didn't want to sit on overextension longer than neccessary with the Civil War looming, so I didn't take both provinces, since I'd have to core them one after another:
24qvhbp.jpg


Kahm was next:
2rdwzr7.jpg

Just kept the provinces long enough to start claims on Guge and Shu, then gave them to Nepal.

Turning back to India, I started a big war against Gujarat and Persia to return some cores to Bahmanis:
2hex9xk.jpg

Fighting Persia actually was good for a confidence boost, didn't think I'd manhandle them like this:
14mjpe.jpg

My general obviously helped, but that still went much better than I expected. :)
Also notice that they fled south, so after a bit more ping-ponging I could wipe them.

I didn't take the time to push into Persia though, just took the Bahmani cores and left it at that:
fem360.jpg

Even if I didn't push into Persia, I at least should have taken a province for myself from Gujarat, but hindsight... :oops:

Anyways, back north I took another easy war and conquered Guge:
fkyv03.jpg

Same procedure as earlier, I started a claim on Ladakh and then gave the province to Nepal.
The Timurids also seemed to be in trouble, they were looking pretty scary even after looking Persia, so that's nice.
The situation in the east is still as annoying as ever, but at least I opened some new routes in the north now. Even if the Chinese minors are surprisingly strong, compared to how much Ming gets out of these province.
But that's something we'll start dealing with next time. ;)