The land route to India - a gameplay-focused Morocco AAR

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 1 - Preparations

First, let's take a look at our ruler. He is extremely bad (and the main reason why an AI Morocco would be almost guaranteed to stay at mil tech 3 until at least 1456), so we have to do something about it. We set our focus to military.

Iqta is a government form that provides useful bonuses, but it doesn't allow you to have a consort which means there is a severely increased chance of getting regency councils that prevent you from declaring war. In this run, we don't want to take that risk so we immediately change our government to a Plutocracy at the cost of 10 corruption. It's also possible to go for Feudal Monarchy and still make lots of money from vassals (Feudal Monarchy + Influence ideas + Administrative/Offensive policy gives you +100% income from vassals). In a different run, we actually managed to have vassal tax as our highest source of income at some point during the 16th century. But in the end, trade company money is all that matters anyway, plus we don't plan to take Offensive ideas in this run, so we decide against picking Feudal Monarchy.

Our economy is looking good already.

Now, we look at our diplomatic options – and this is the most important aspect. Portugal and Castile always rival you at the start of the game, but Castile's rivalry will end after the first month because they are too strong to stay Morocco's rival on Very Hard difficulty (if Morocco is controlled by the player). If Castile's ruler is something like a diplomat, this means they don't want to conquer your land early on. Portugal might still want to attack, but they cannot call in Castile before accumulating enough favours.

But as Castile's ruler is a militarist in this game, they desire all our coastal provinces from the get go which means that Portugal could easily call them into an offensive war by promising them land (or the Castilians themselves might pull the trigger).

If Castile didn't want our land, we could easily start with an attack on Tlemcen and focus on the Iberians after that, but in the current situation we have to focus on them first because they WILL attack us if we go for Tlemcen without having any strong allies.

We set Portugal as a rival, but we DO NOT rival Tlemcen at this point in case something nasty happens, such as them allying the Ottomans early on (which would mean that we get a -50 modifier if we want to ally the Ottomans ourselves. And we definitely want to ally the Ottomans.)

We also try to ally Tunis.

Our king has got 3 shock and 2 siege pips – we got really lucky here. This also means we don't have to get a general from the estates.

We got lucky again. As we are not an Iqta anymore we can now get consorts, and we get a really good one. Though it's not certain whether she will ever be in charge of the country.

Then we start raiding the Iberians because we desperately need the money and sailors...

.. because we are going to build a heavy ship in each of our coastal provinces.

At the start of December we manage our estates. We demand 150 monarch points from each of them and also get a cheaper level 2 advisor from the Clergy.

We disband all but one of our light ships because we need the sailors. We only keep the last one because we might need it for privateering later on (any fleet needs at least one light ship in it to be able to privateer).

... and we got lucky again.

The "crisis of the Maghreb" event (which slightly increases stability cost) reminds us to raise our stability to +1. We don't want to get a peasants war later on when we run out of manpower (which we definitely will!)

We ally Tunis and...

We set all of Tlemcen's provinces, apart from Titteri, as vital interest. The ruler of Tunis is a diplomat and has only marked some of Tlemcen's land as strategic interest (yellow), but none as vital interest (red). This way we can make sure that we can call Tunis into a war by promising land and we only have to give them Titteri in the end, no matter how big their war participation is going to be.

And that's how it looks from their side. Now they only have Titteri as strategic interest, all their other marked provinces in Tlemcen have been overwritten by our own vital interest. That's how it's supposed to be!

One year after game start, we are allowed to revoke provinces, and we immediately revoke Tafilalt from the Amirs because it's a nice gold mine that should be at 0% autonomy instead of 25%. We make sure this happens by decreasing the autonomy after the province is revoked. We also spend some diplo points to increase its production from 4 to 7. We really need the money, but we don't develop it any further because we'd have to spend ADM or MIL for it now and we really want to keep those points.

Then, something unexpected happens.

Usually the way it works is that England will go to war with France because of the "Surrender of Maine" event. England's mainland provinces will be occupied which means that they will dishonour their alliance with Portugal. And we really want to attack Portugal to reconquer Ceuta. That's also why we are building all the heavy ships – if England is not part of the war, we only have to fight Portugal and Castile, and while their navy will still be superior to ours it can be beaten, or at least we can block off the straits of Gibraltar whenever we want to prevent their troops from crossing and our navy won't die immediately when a naval battle starts.

But this time, there is the "English-French Unification war". This also works for us. But unlike the "Surrender of Maine", this one doesn't result in a global notification, so we almost didn't notice that the war started (England and France weren't set as "important" countries in the message settings because it usually isn't needed).

We wait for our ships to finish before attacking, and we accept this alliance offer from Granada because it will make them more unlikely to give military access to Castile or Portugal, which means that they won't be able to march across the strait at all, which means that we are going to have more room for error. Right? Right? (Spoiler: of course the AI gave them access anyway)

At the first of January 1447, our navy is finished so we finally attack Portugal.

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 2 - The first war of micro-management

As we are playing on Very Hard, we are clearly outnumbered which means that we cannot let the Iberians cross into Africa. If they do manage to cross, we lose. Even our mountain forts won't be able to help us win a 20k vs 60k battle especially as the Castilians have their 15% morale bonus. If we managed to get a tech advantage, it might be doable but still very costly. We just can't let them cross at any cost. Thankfully Granada...

... Yeah, let's forget about Granada. This happened way quicker than expected.

And here they come. 60000 Castilians and Portuguese are marching across the strait. This turns the war into a war of micro-management - if we make a mistake now, it's game over.

We move out our fleet to stop them. The Castilians have parked most of their navy in the straits of Gibraltar, but thankfully they didn't assign a leader. We might have a chance to win this.

We roll very badly and retreat towards the end of the month to repair our morale after the Portuguese navy joined the battle. All in all, we lost one and sunk one heavy ship, but most importantly we dispersed the enemy armies - just look how the big stack is now marching through Granada because they can't find a path into North Africa. That's the reason why we technically don't need to win the naval battle to prevent them from crossing - in theory we could lose any single battle and still come out victorious as long as we happen to start a battle whenever they are trying to cross, and our navy doesn't get completely obliterated in the process. However, now we are low on morale so we have to wait some months before fighting another big naval battle.

Shortly after that, the AI tries to cross again, but they move their navy away from the straits of Gibraltar! This means we can prevent them from crossing by sending out a single transport ship. We retreat into a port when the big Portuguese navy comes to hunt us down. All this gained us another month.

The siege of Ceuta is won just when a Castilian army is about to engage us. This time...

... We send out our transport boat again even though we know that it's going to be sunk by the Portuguese navy this time. Our main fleet still hasn't recovered and we definitely won't risk losing it unless we really have to. This again disperses the enemy armies.

There is a Castilian army of 11000 without a leader - and this time we let them cross. But only them. We also burn Melilla because we really need the sailors to repair our heavy ships before engaging in another battle.

The Castilian army has way better morale of course, but they come without a leader and attack across a strait into the highlands. Also, we went for a 14/6 army composition to make use of our superior cavalry early on. We roll a 9 in the first shock phase, resulting in 1500 Castilian soldiers dying each day.

Our navy is sent out in time to both prevent their reinforcements and make the Castilian army unable to retreat, resulting in a stackwipe.

The naval battle goes reasonably well because the AI is somehow uninterested in reinforcing it, but at the end of December we retreat anyway for another tick of morale.

After that, we let a Portuguese army cross and we managed to stackwipe it properly (which means we didn't even have to block off the strait to achieve this).

Although we are not at full morale, we still let the next Castilian army attack us across the strait and we send out a part of our heavy ships (the ones that didn't receive a lot of damage) in order to prevent the next wave of reinforcements.

Because the AI doesn't reinforce the naval battle again, we actually manage to win this time.

And the Castilian army is stack wiped.

In April, we stack wipe another Castilian army, but this time we have to engage in a big naval battle in order to do it.

This naval battle again results in a trade of heavy ships and as always, we retreat at the end of the month to regain a bit of our morale.

After that, the war seems to calm down a bit. The AI is rebuilding its armies, we sink some unguarded transport boats - and then we notice that the Ottomans switched to Friendly attitude. Now, we have been improving relations with them ever since the start of the game even though the positive reasons gained by improving relations would never be enough to make them sign an alliance due to all of the negative reasons like distance between borders and relative strength. But by improving relations, we also made the AI switch to Friendly attitude which removes the "-20" from Neutral attitude and adds another +50 reasons for accepting an alliance. It also means we can marry them now.

That's one of the benefits of being Sunni in EU4 - you are almost guaranteed to ally the Ottomans unless you are in their direct expansion path. Even on Very Hard difficulty. Even if we were playing as Granada, we could do it. Sometimes it is a bit harder because the Ottomans go over their diplomatic relations limit, but even then Friendly attitude should be just enough to overcome the malus. Then there are those games where you really need their protection as Granada but the Ottomans actually explode and get fully annexed by 1500! But in 90% of games, you get a guaranteed alliance with the strongest and most active AI power in the game. What's not to like?

If we didn't have the same religion, we could improve relations all we like and they still wouldn't flip to Friendly attitude unless we become a lot stronger.

Of course, Catholics can also use their religion for diplomacy very well and it's possible to ally someone like France with the same strategy as a Catholic minor power. But other religions in EU4 don't have this luxury. There is usually only one greater power you can rely on for every other religion (such as Muscovy if playing as an Orthodox minor in the Caucasus, or something). And none of them are as good as the Ottomans.

As we have almost maxed out warscore from battles, we start thinking about a peace deal. We will not be waiting for the ticking warscore to increase all the way to 25 and we definitely won't invade the Iberian mainland.

We try to raise our warscore by blockading Lisbon - but that doesn't make a difference at all as we aren't actually able to blockade the capital. So we decide to extend the war, do another round of stack wiping and then hopefully peace out.

And then the AI does something unexpected.

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 3 - Challenging the player

We lower our army maintenance in order to encourage the AI to cross again. That's when it gets interesting - the AI uses this opportunity to land two stacks in Dukkala, one on the 28th and the other on the 30th November. Even though we haven't fully recovered our morale, we place our army in Dukkala anyway and wait for their arrival.

Actually, we only wait for the Castilian army. We move our heavy ships out of Tangiers on the 28th November, so they arrive on the 29th, just between the landing times of the two Iberian armies.

Also, the game wants us to murder an advisor because we are so corrupt (or something along those lines).

The Castilian army is wiped - which also gives us some of our morale back!

The naval battle "suddenly" ends because we decide to retreat again...

... and the Portuguese army is wiped.

This time the Portuguese land an army in Melilla while we fight another Castilian landing party in Dukkala. Not bad. This makes it impossible for us to prevent them from reaching Melilla.

The Castilian army from Dukkala is somehow allowed to retreat to Melilla (yes, it looks like it's going to retreat on a boat, but that movement actually gets cancelled). At the same time, Castile tries to land another army on top of it, together with the Portuguese army that's landing anyway.

The AI has the chance to do a successful landing in North Africa here, but then it makes the decisive mistake. In this picture, we move towards the weakened Castilian army that retreated to Melilla, but the Portuguese landing party has already moved on top of our fort in Fez, so it cannot immediately join the battle. The second Castilian army still needs some time to land.

Here we have already wiped the first Castilian army before the Portuguese army is able to engage us. We wipe them.

Also, in this patch there is a strange bug which sometimes makes it impossible for your navies to reinforce your own naval battles. In this case, it doesn't matter because we don't lose anything.

We could fight the other Castilian army too, but we end the war before they can even land because Portugal is willing to give us an acceptable peace deal. We take Ceuta, annul their treaties with Castile, war reparations and some money. Taking Ceuta prevents a situation where Portugal and Castile are always allowed to cross the strait after one of them conquered Granada. That's why it's so important (if you want to go for the same strategy as I do) to take Ceuta BEFORE Granada gets annexed - so ideally Portugal should be attacked before February 1448 (that's when the Castilian truce with Granada expires). Of course, that also means that England has to dishonour its alliance with Portugal before February 1448, which happens frequently but is not guaranteed.

It's also possible to combine this strategy with an expansion into Iberia (don't ally Granada at all, just fabricate a claim on them and attack them immediately after ending the Portuguese/Castilian war!). This strategy works best if you can ally both Tlemcen and Tunis (though Tunis also likes to ally Granada, so you might have to fight them anyway). After that, it might be possible to go for Andalusia, perhaps converting to Christianity (because it's definitely advantageous if you expand into Europe early on) or playing a colonial game. In this AAR, we don't want any of that so we are just going for a defensive naval strategy against the Iberians. And Ceuta is all we really need for it.

It's also possible to ignore the Iberians entirely and unify the whole Maghreb 10 years into the game if alliances allow for it. But then, the Iberians can just invade you later if they feel they are strong enough.

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 4 - Tlemcen delenda est!

Now is the time to rival Tlemcen and prepare for an attack on them. We come up with a particularly original insult. Well, it's not quite Carthage, but close enough.

At this point, we already have an alliance with the Ottomans because we allied them right after the war with Portugal ended. The Ottoman army size (and quality) will scare potential enemies and make them much more unlikely to declare war on us.

The alliance with Granada will be cancelled because we are mad at them. No, actually it's because defending them against a Castilian attack was never part of our strategy. We don't plan to expand into Iberia anytime soon, so we really don't care about them. Another important detail is that Granada is allied with Tunis.

We are the first country in the world to unlock military technology 4. We are so innovative! What an incredible achievement.

We also start building a spy network on Mzab. I wonder what that is about?

After consolidating our regular infantry and hiring some mercenaries to get our army back to full strength, we are ready to declare war on Tlemcen, but then we notice an important detail. Fezzan is guaranteed by Tunis (that always happens at the start of the game), but they are also allied to Tlemcen (that doesn't always happen at the start of the game). So if we call Tunis into our war, they will also fight Fezzan which means that the guarantee will be cancelled - and probably not renewed after the war (though you never know with the AI).

But here is the thing - the Tunisian guarantee must remain. There is a particular reason for this which I will not disclose at this point. So what are we going to do?

We choose the crazy option and declare war without calling in Tunis. That also turns out to be a big mistake even though it does mean that the Tunisian guarantee on Fezzan will remain. The problem is that we have to siege down a costal level 3 highlands fort before we are able to reach all of Tlemcen's provinces, or even march to Fezzan to peace them out. We have destroyed our fort in Tangiers (that doesn't matter) and in Marrakesh. The latter is a huge problem because it allows the AI free movement across our lands.

So basically, what we should have done here is one of those two options:

1) call in Tunis.
2) keep the fort in Marrakesh.

Shortly after the start of the war, we get one of the Moroccan historical events (yes, there are quite a few of them at the start of the game). This one is very useful because choosing the second option will result in the Wattasids trying to seize power. This means we get an option to ditch our bad ruler.

We try to chase down the Tlemcen army in the belief that we could actually catch them - of course we can't. In this screenshot, we already decided to stop the chase and continue sieging Tlemcen. At least we managed to create some distance between the enemy army and our gold mine of Tafilalt. It doesn't matter that our 1k army in Tlemcen is currently getting beaten. We didn't have any siege progress anyway.

Then, the second event fires. We have the choice between getting a big stack of pretender rebels right next to our capital...

... or settling for a new 5/0/4 ruler and losing 2 stability. Because we are not happy with a 5/0/4, we decide to spawn the pretender rebels.

The great thing is that the candidate supported by the pretender rebels has different stats than the one from the event, even though it's technically the same person. We are content with a 3/5/2 in this situation because we are going to need a lot of DIP points in the early game. That's why this event is so great - it basically gives you two chances to convert your bad starting ruler into a good one.

In the meantime, we mark Titteri as vital interest because we don't want the Tunisians to attack Tlemcen now (which would still cancel their guarantee on Fezzan!). As the Tunisian ruler is still a diplomat and hasn't even fabricated a claim yet, we can easily discourage them from attacking. Laghouat is also marked because again, it is only strategic interest for Tunis and we don't want them to attack Mzab either.

After that, we focus on the siege of Tlemcen. One year later, we are almost done but the enemies have occupied the southern half of our country including our gold mine. That leads to increased war exhaustion and a bad economy. We build a completely unsuspicious spy network on Granada. By the way, the spy network on Mzab has been cancelled for now because the diplomat has been discovered way too early. We will build it back up again.

Then, we get unlucky for once. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the screenshot of doom:

After completing the siege of Tlemcen, we manage to catch the Fezzani army when Tlemcen is too far away to reinforce. Now, they have a 4 shock general and we are attacking into the highlands, but we severely outnumber them and they are also still on tech 3 (so is Tlemcen). But then, our Sultan Abdalhaqq Marinid immediately dies in battle, resulting in a -2 stability hit, a random Osmanoglu taking over our nation (not for long!) as well as...

... defeat in the current battle. Even though we have no leader and we roll terribly, we still almost managed to beat the Fezzani army before Tlemcen could reinforce. This means that we would have easily won in pretty much every other scenario. We would also have won against the advancing army of Tlemcen with a general and the defensive advantage of highlands terrain. But like this, we have to retreat.

This is a screenshot shortly after our retreat. As bankruptcy is looming and we have no quick way to liberate our goldmine, we have to debase currency now.

In fact, we debase currency five times because we have to survive until we can get our army to Tafilalt. As a consequence, we are now again a corrupt country. We hire some mercenaries in our unoccupied provinces and march our main army back from Kasdir into our lands. As the pretender rebels have left Fez, we can actually do so without running into a full stack on the way. We also get a general from the estates. He's actually good.

The army of Fezzan keeps wandering through our lands while Tlemcen starts unsieging their capital. That's a great opportunity. We catch the Fezzani army and eventually stackwipe it in February 1452. As Tlemcen is busy sieging, we can now easily liberate our lands which will remove the threat of immediate bankruptcy. But are we still going to win the war?

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 5 - We are Wattasid now!

Yes, the war is still absolutely winnable. A lot of things went badly, but after unoccupying our provinces we really hold all the advantages. As we move into Kasdir to overrun a single Fezzani cavalry management, Tlemcen abandons its siege... in order to reinforce the 1k that's going to get wiped immediately? I don't know. It's a strange decision though we would have gotten the highlands advantage anyway by attacking them in Tlemcen.

The battle is won and it looks like the Tlemcen army retreats towards the coast...

... before changing its direction to the south and running straight towards Fezzan territory. Damn. We can't chase them immediately because we first need to split off some units to carpet siege and the rest of our army is not going to be big enough to wipe both the Tlemcen army and the new units that Fezzan is probably recruiting right now.

Once again, the game wants us to kill one of our advisors. We already fired the diplo advisor because we need the money. The 50% cheaper unrest advisor will stay. He is just too valuable.

Some months later, the pretender rebels move through Figuig, right on top of our gold mine in Tafilalt. That is bad because it could get us into bankruptcy territory again. It forces us to take out some more loans in advance before our maximum number of allowed loans is going to drop. At least they are close to enforcing their demands now - so we will only lose the gold income for a short time.

Then we finally reach Fezzan. Tunis is actually not giving military access to the AI (a pleasant surprise this time). Of course they are ready to give access to us. This allows us to outmaneuver the enemy armies. First, Fezzan is moving into Ghadames when the Tlemcen army is still too far away...

... resulting in a stackwipe. Now Tlemcen is not interested to reinforce anymore.

The army of Tlemcen tries to run away of course. But we are the ones that control their military access into Tunis so we can easily cancel their movement...

As we are still at a tech advantage, we win the resulting battle quite comfortably. Now we only have to chase the army...

... first into Fezzan, but they manage to run away again before we finally stackwipe them in Sirt. The war is won. The enemy alliance has no armies left.

As we are besieging all of Fezzan's provinces, it means they are not ready to defend their other ally Touggourt anymore, so Mzab and Djerid take the opportunity to attack. We don't mind that at all.

Then the pretender rebels finally win. Ottoman out, Wattasid in. That's our third dynasty in the first 10 years of the game.

Two months later, we notice that we actually want to white peace Fezzan for a particular reason. (Hint: the Tunisian guarantee!)

After peacing out Fezzan, we are marching our armies home. In order to reinforce our powerful cavalry, we have to demand some manpower from the Amirs.

Meanwhile let's take a look at Iberia. Castile has already sieged down Granada, but for some reason there is still a Granadan army hiding out in Gibraltar with the Castilian troops nowhere to be seen. Tunis is also part of the war, but nobody can reach the other side because we are not giving military access to anyone. This war might drag on for some time.

Our new heir is not great, but decent, so we will not disinherit him immediately. We have assembled our army in Kasdir and right now we are waiting for the siege of Touggourt to end. That's because we are preparing an attack on Mzab. Even though it might not look like it, we have a spy network ready - we just recalled our diplomat to prevent him from getting caught again. The spy network is slowly ticking down, but it is still enough to fabricate a claim on Mzab after we get a border with them.

The war ends, Touggourt is split up and the victorious powers immediately rival each other. Mzab is now completely without allies...

But wait... what's that? Their independence is guaranteed by Tlemcen. Very interesting. Also notice how we didn't peace out Tlemcen yet despite sitting at 99% warscore? These two things might be connected. A stack of peasants disagrees with our strategy and promptly spawns on their capital.

We finally peace out Tlemcen while having three free diplomats (which is important). In this peace deal, we had the following objectives:

1) take out their fort provinces
2) get a border with Mzab
3) humilitate them for power projection and the age objective

And finally, objective 4) make sure their total war score cost is less than 50% after the war. We immediately double check.

In the meantime, we already clicked the "fabricate claim" button on Mzab's province. But the thing is, whenever you fabricate a claim, you don't get the CB immediately. Usually CBs are only updated at the start of the month (precisely between the 1st and 2nd day of every given month). But we want the CB immediately, and that's because Tlemcen is guaranteeing Mzab. We definitely want to fight Tlemcen again, but at the tick of the month the AI might revoke the guarantee. We don't want to take that chance.

We use our second free diplomat to issue a random embargo on Djerid. This gives Djerid an immediate CB on us. As a consequence, the game also recalculates our own CBs...

So we immediately get a conquest CB against Mzab on the 4th of July.

We planned this so nicely, but then we have to wait for six more days before declaring the war because for some reason we had sent a diplomat to Mzab the month before. This is one of the little oversights in EU4 that can be costly, but in this case it doesn't ruin our strategy. We attack anyway.

Mzab is easy to fight. We also split off some units to prevent Tlemcen from recruiting any new troops. In this picture we also see the garrison of Oujda, Tlemcen's new capital - because we had to delay our war declaration, this means we didn't manage to reach Oujda before the tick of the month. All new capital forts start with a garrison of exactly zero, which then slowly recovers. In this case, it's still only at 60 which means that we will be able to siege down the fort immediately once we actually get enough units on top of it. That's good because we can't lose any time right now.

Before sieging down any forts, we charge into a highland province in order to attack the rebelling peasants. We don't even care.

As already mentioned, Oujda falls immediately and eventually we also manage to occupy the glorious capital of Mzab.

Tlemcen will be fully annexed as a non co-belligerent. For the first time in the game we have to do the coalition check:

- Tlemcen: will be gone
- Granada: one
- Mzab: truce (yes, we won't fully annex them)
- Djerid: two

So there are two possible coalition members which means we don't have to worry.

We are going to take two provinces from Mzab, make them convert from Ibadi to Sunni in order to fulfill the objective from the Age of Reformation and ask for various other terms.

Tlemcen on the other hand is going to be released immediately as a vassal. We are also going to divert their trade because it allows us to control our home trade node, Safi. It is a bad trade node overall, but at least it can be useful in the early game when even a few ducats of income are helpful. Tunis on the other hand - that is a bad trade node that is never useful. Not even in the early game.

After several years of warfare, devastation and looming bankruptcies, we are now finally at peace. We take a look at the new ruler of Tlemcen - all five parts of his name begin with an 'A' and his stats are 4/4/4. How unlikely is this? And what does it mean for the future?

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 6 - I want to fight my ally please

Well, here's the thing. We really want to fight Tunis. But they happen to be our ally. As we didn't call them into our war against Tlemcen, one could say it was a useless alliance (but early on it wasn't useless because it made Castile and Portugal more unlikely to attack us right at the start, before we could finish our boats).

The Tunisian armies are split up in a strange way because they are still technically at war with Castile, but they don't have military access. Our army on the other hand has been built up back to full strength with the help of mercenaries. Now it's stationed in Titteri, ready to pounce the Tunisian 11k stack that sits in the neighbouring province.

But how do we start a war?

This is the most efficient way to dismantle an ally - declare war on one of their allies and call them in as a co-belligerent. This way, we can take up to 100% warscore from them immediately. If we broke our alliance first, we would get an automatic five year truce. We don't want that.

However...

After thinking about it for a long time (yep), we decide to set Tunis as a rival before declaring the war. Now this does automatically break our alliance, so we do get a 5-year truce with them...

... which means we can't set them as a co-belligerent anymore. So we will only be able to take 50% warscore from them. But what if Granada gets annexed? In this case, Tunis will immediately take over their status as warleader. This means we will be able to take 100% anyway.

We only have to rely on Castile to finally hunt down that remaining Granadan army...

But in the meantime, war is declared and we win against the Tunisian army in Hodna.

Our next step must be taking out the fort in Kef - because that's actually the only thing preventing us from accessing all Tunisian provinces.

We meet another Tunisian army in Kabylia...

... and in Kef.

We also reach the next military technology level during the war. The army of our vassal has been set to "No focus" as they weren't ready to cross Tunisian territory in order to attach to us. Now they are sieging on their own.

Castile still hasn't fought the Granadan army, still hasn't sieged down Gibraltar, but they fully annex them anyway. Good!

Now Tunis is suddenly the warleader. That's magic!

We also switch our unit types in the middle of war because that's how we play.

Then something bad happens... the Ottomans get a terrible ruler. If they get carved up by a European alliance early on, we are dead. If they have a lower mil tech than the Mamluks when we are ready to expand into Egypt, we are also dead. I'm starting to think the Ottomans will be a problem.

Anyway. We win the siege of Kef...

... and we ask Djerid for military access because it's needed to go past the hostile zone of control in Tataouine (which is due to the Tunisian island fort in Djerba).

Because we don't have any money, we transfer occupation of the captured fort to our vassal. Let them pay for it.

We have already improved relations with the Mamluks, but forgotten to set our attitude to Friendly. This is extremely important. The Ottomans must never call us into an offensive war against the Mamluks - and they won't do it as long as we are Friendly.

We want to fight the Mamluks later on and then we have to attack them again and again whenever our truce expires, just so the Ottomans don't have a chance to start the war themselves.

We must control the Ottoman AI.

Some months later, we can pick our first government reform and we seriously think about picking the trader privileges (that one is only available if you picked Plutocracy first). But... TImbuktu is out of range anyway...

So we end up taking the manpower. We would have liked to steer trade from Timbuktu into Safi (due to our caravan power, this would have given us some ducats). As that's not possible, we pick the option that gives us the biggest immediate benefit. And that's the manpower. Yes, 5% trade efficiency would be better in the later game, but that doesn't matter to us right now.

A Castilian army is constantly drilling in Gibraltar. That scares us.

After that, we try to engage the Tunisian army in Dahra before they can siege down the fort. This time, our vassal is attached to us (we set them to supportive again) so we significantly outnumber the enemy even though some our troops are still busy somewhere in the Tunisian hinterlands.

The other part of their army seems to be too far away to reinforce.

Will we win this decisive battle?

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 7 - Best supporting actor: Djerid

Yes, we win the battle rather easily because the other part of the Tunisian army cannot reinforce. So everything seems to be going well, but just a few days later...

... the warmongers in Djerid invade Fezzan! (Yes. They are WARMONGERS.)

But why is that a problem and why does it turn a peaceful little country into an evil expansionist power? Right! The Tunisian guarantee! The Tunisian guarantee on Fezzan must remain. Here we see that our truce with Fezzan expires in November 1458. After that we want to attack them so we can get into a second war with Tunis, and fully annex them as a non co-belligerent. It's the same strategy we used against Tlemcen earlier.

Now, of course Tunis is not in a position to join Fezzan's defensive war right now. That does not break the guarantee though because guarantees, unlike alliances, do not get broken when they are dishounoured. Yes. That's how it works.

So our strategy is not ruined. The guarantee is still there, but it will be gone forever if Djerid ends up annexing Fezzan. That is the real risk here. And that's why Djerid is so evil.

Anyway, we have our own war to focus on and we stackwipe the remainder of the Tunisian army in Tripoli.

Some months later, our ruler just dies. Osmanoglu in. Now we are happy that we did not disinherit our heir because we really prefer to be at 100 legitimacy right now, instead of 20.

Our Sultan ruled for 5 years. He was not made into a general.

But hey, we get an event that allows us to make our merchants loyal. Wouldn't that be a good opportunity to develop our gold mine a bit more? (we can afford to spend a bit of MIL now for development)

Just as we try to hit the development button, the gold mine partially depletes. Really?????

So yeah, we develop it up to 8 production. It used to be at 7 production before.

The Ottomans then attack Dulkadir, which is another event we don't like because it could give them a direct land border with the Mamluks. If the Ottomans set more Mamluk land as vital interest, it means we will have to give them more in our wars. But we really don't want to give them a lot of Mamluk land initially if it can be prevented at all.

We also start improving relations with pretty much all potential expansion targets of the Ottomans. We need to get relations with all of them to 50, then we can set our attitude to Friendly which means we will not be called into the Ottoman wars. Genoa and Venice are the most important targets here. Later on, they are going to dislike us because we are going to raid them. So now is the only chance we may get to improve relations to 50. We only have to set our attitude to Friendly once, then it will remain for the rest of the game unless one of the following happens:

1) they form another nation
2) we ally them and the alliance breaks
3) we rival them (it doesn't matter whether they rival us)

Here is one of the (very, very) small advantages you get for playing in the Maghreb - you are almost guaranteed to get the bonus for trading in sugar early on. At some point, some AI is going to colonize some sugar provinces - then the bonus will be lost.

After some time (way too long!) we win the siege of Tunis. We are now at 99% warscore so we can peace them out. Djerid and Fezzan are occupying each other and it looks like Fezzan might actually have the upper hand. As long as they don't get annexed RIGHT NOW, everything will be fine.

We peace out Tunis while we have a spy network on Fezzan ready (again, diplomat recalled so he doesn't get caught). This peace deal has the following objectives:

1) take their forts
2) get a border with Fezzan
3) make sure Tlemcen has a direct connection to the conquered Tunisian provinces

We click the "fabricate claim" button on Fezzan and again, Djerid receives a random embargo, which recalculates our own CBs so we can attack Fezzan before Tunis might be tempted to revoke their guarantee.

Because our third diplomat was still travelling home from Genoa, we have to wait for some days again... just like in the first example, we didn't time it perfectly but it doesn't really matter. War it is!

But no, first Tlemcen has to be set on scutage. We give them some Tunisian provinces so they can start coring them while we fight the next war.

Tlemcen immediately starts coring all four provinces! Good vassal. That's one of the benefits of the 4/4/4 ruler...

Because we took Tunis in the peace deal, the capital changes to Sousse which is immediately occupied by one of our regiments.

The Ottoman Sultan probably got murdered... but his successor isn't much better.

Our glorious war against Portugal and Castile ended 10 years ago. As the effect of "annul treaties" expires, Portugal immediately re-allies Castile. Of course they are historical friends, so they will do this forever. This means we missed our opportunity to fight one of them isolated, but we don't really mind. There are more important targets for us.

We get an event raising our army professionalism...

... and we immediately roll two new generals so we can get our professionalism to 5. Then we immediately slacken recruiting standards to gain some manpower because we are so desperate.

Now, we have basically won the "second Tunisian war", but Djerid still occupies some Fezzani provinces. Because we want the provinces for ourselves, we decide to cut Djerid down to size (yes, exactly). We declare war on them.

In the meantime, the Ottomans win against Dulkadir - and they don't fully annex them! This means no land border with the Mamluks. Good. Thank you.

So now we are at war with Djerid and their ally Mzab and we win the war quickly. Now we only have to siege down their forts.

For the first time in ages, we can stop paying for our troops but we still lose a lot of money. A part of that is due to rooting out corruption, but the interest is significant now for the early stages of the game.

As always, the sieges take objectively way too long. In January 1461, we are almost finished and we think about two things - what to take in the peace treaty and when to go bankrupt. Then, we get an event that sounds very dangerous, but it just gives us some DIP points in exchange for prestige.

Anyway, on the 29th January, we win the siege of Mzab so we now have fully occupied Fezzan, Tunis, Djerid and Mzab at the same time. It's time for a peace treaty...

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 8 - The symmetry of diplomacy

First we end the Fezzan/Tunis war. Tunis gives us some provinces... and Fezzan gives us their own as well the rest of the Tunisian provinces.

Wait what?

How is that possible?

Fezzan was the warleader. So naturally we first had to make a separate peace with Tunis. But after that, Tunis should be out of the war, so how can we demand their land while negotiating with Fezzan?

...

This is made possible by the double peace out, my favourite exploit in EU4. It seems to be fixed because you cannot send two peace offers at the same day anymore, but in reality it can still be used.

Now, I'm sure there are some posts somewhere in this forum explaining how to use it (else I wouldn't know about it myself). But I'm pretty sure that most players - even the ones that used the exploit previously - don't know that it is still possible.

I'm not going to explain more about it here because it if gets too much attention it might be fixed. But there are other, much more important issues in EU4 that should have the priority. This one is situational, difficult to use, a lot of fun and it doesn't break the game all that hard. It also means that...

.. it is impossible for us to do the coalition check because if you send two peace offers essentially at the same time, the AE calculation of each peace offer cannot take the other offer into account, and vice versa.

So if you use this exploit, you need to hope you won't get a coalition and reload if things go wrong. The other option is to know there won't be a coalition in a given scenario, simply from experience. We know that it is very difficult to trigger a coalition in the Maghreb early on if you are a Sunni power expanding into other Sunnis.

In this picture, the Mamluks and Timbuktu are the only powers with dangerous levels of AE. Djerid and Mzab do not matter because they will be annexed.

But if you try the same thing in the middle of Europe, or even India, you will get a coalition.

So yes, we annex Mzab as a non co-belligerent and...

... Djerid is also annexed. This time we can do the coalition check. Djerid - gone, Timbuktu - one, Mamluks are actually not displayed because their overall opinion is still slightly positive. But they are close.

Now we own the whole Maghreb and we have 102% overextension. Oops.

That's why Tlemcen receives another province.

Unfortunately, we cannot core all of the provinces at the same time because the eastern half of Tunis is still out of coring range. Now, if we had a direct land connection from our capital to those lands, we could core all of them anyway. But Tlemcen blocks the direct connection, so we can't. That is a very important detail for later - if you want to snake efficiently, you need the direct land connection.

Some of the newly conquered provinces aren't really important to us, so we increase autonomy to 100% immediately. We will not make those into states. (Yes, we can afford to keep some of them as territories without eating corruption early on. That's all calculated already.)

We also take out some more loans to build some light ships. But... aren't we broke?

The Renaissance is now present in Palermo so it is ready to spread into Tunis. That is also why we improved relations with Aragon. Positive relations are needed for the institution spread.

Because we increased our total development, we can now take bigger loans. Now is the time to do some serious debt restructuring...

We replace all of the old loans that expire before May 1464 with new, shiny 121 ducat loans. At that time, all our cores will be finished so then we can think about how to solve our financial problems.

Tunisian separatists are about to rise up. We manage to lower their revolt size a bit by using two 1k regiments and telling them to suppress rebels in certain areas.

But 20k is still a significant size so we have to hire some more mercenaries.

Castile then gets the Burgundian inheritance. That is bad, unless it means France is going to rival them, in which case it will be good. Yes, they might also get problems with the Dutch revolts later on, but at that point we should be strong enough to defend ourselves anyway.

Shortly after that, we are allowed to core the rest of our provinces. Great!

Tunis is immediately made into a state so we can enact the edict for institution spread.

The separatists spawn with a powerful army and a good leader, but because our morale is better we still win fairly comfortably.

Now we are just waiting for our cores to finish before we can act.

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 9 - A beautiful bankruptcy

We decide that we should declare bankruptcy after our cores finish, but then we notice that we will get fairly close to military tech 6. As this is an important technology, and bankruptcy clears all our monarch points, we absolutely have to reach it first. That's why we hire a way too expensive military advisor. The money doesn't matter anymore.

Apart from that, there are several reasons why this would be the perfect scenario for a bankruptcy:

1) the interest is too damn high
2) we don't have to attack anyone in the next years
3) Castile and Portugal won't attack us (okay we actually don't know this, but we are going to treat this as a fact anyway because why not)
4) among other things, bankruptcy also sets our legitimacy to 0. But we are in a regency, so we will get all our legitimacy back once our heir with a Strong claim ascends to the throne

As we cannot reach mil tech 6 by May 1464, this means some more debt restructuring.

Our cores finish at the end of 1463. In the meantime we are improving relations with potential alliance partners. Right now we fully rely on the Ottomans, but it would be better if we had more numbers to discourage the Iberians from attacking us. Once we are bankrupt, our army quality will be terrible so the strength of our allies will be the main factor that decides whether we get attacked or not.

Siena would be a good ally. They have something like 10000 troops on Very Hard. Because they are fairly weak, and fairly close, they are easy to ally. They probably won't get attacked themselves because they are in a trade league and allied to the Pope.

Savoy would be great. They have 20000 troops, are allied to France among others and their very short coastline means that we won't lose a lot of raiding income later on by allying them (because it is impossible to raid your allies). Unfortunately, they are not quite ready to accept...

... whatever. Here take some money.

Unsurprisingly, the Ottomans have declared an offensive war. The opponents seem fairly easy, but Venice has more boats (why?). As long as they don't end up dishonouring their alliance with us, we should be good to go.

The next year, we can demand 150 military points from the Amirs. We are now very close to tech 6...

Okay, we know we can reach it by July 1465. So that is going to be our bankruptcy date.

As we know the date of our bankruptcy, we are now able to prepare ourselves even better. Mercenaries automatically disappear upon bankruptcy, so we disband them and we hire as many regular units as our manpower pool allows.

We end up with a regular army consisting of 15 infantry and 8 cavalry. Yes, 8 (eight) cavalry. That is not too much in the early game, especially with our more powerful cavalry units.

We unlock mil tech 6 two months earlier than expected. This means: immediate bankruptcy!

We could also unlock admin tech 4, but...

... as bankruptcy reduces our stability by 3 points, we really need to get up to +3 first.

Then we micro-manage our advisors. Bankruptcy doesn't just dismiss your current advisors, no, they get removed from the game entirely. But we'd really like to keep the cheaper admin advisor. That's why we fire him before bankruptcy so he doesn't get affected. We don't need the expensive discipline advisor on the other hand, so we keep him so he can get deleted by the game. Maybe he will be recreated as a level 1?

As we still have some monarch points left, we use them to develop our gold mine a bit. We could go on, but...

... we decide to use our last ADM points to make Tunis into a full core. Then we develop it with some DIP points in order to speed up institution spread.

The last DIP points are spent in Tlemcen. They WILL be disloyal, so we might as well do this.

All points are spent - so bankruptcy it is!

Look at that difference! Bankruptcies can be so beautiful. We have suddenly become rich.

But wait... we had an army composition of 15/8 before. Now it's 14/7. We also lost a transport ship. (The reason why we have 12 heavies is because we built 3 more in the meantime.)

Since when does bankruptcy delete regular units?

On top of that, one of our regiments only has 6 soldiers left. Are there ghosts in EU4?

Being bankrupt also results in slower institution spread... but that's not a big problem right now. We should be able to embrace the Renaissance before we have enough points to tech up anyway.

Still on the same day, we switch our national focus from military to admin. We are still at admin tech 3 and we would like to unlock an idea group at some point.

In order to fill our treasury quickly, we also start raiding again. Iberia is the first target, then we move our fleet to Italy, but we will only raid the coasts that do not belong to Aragon. We still need Aragon to like us so the Renaissance keeps spreading.

Then we re-hire our favourite admin advisor! He will be more expensive during bankruptcy but we can afford him anyway because our loans are gone. We can also afford a level 1 diplomatic and military advisor (which happens to be a newly created discipline guy).

When the Castilian army in Gibraltar stops drilling, this scares us even more. We activate our fort in Ceuta. We can afford it now! Hehe.

But surely the Castilians are not going to attack us?

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 10 - Wait for the next invasion

They don't attack, instead the Castilian army in Granada starts drilling after some time. And then they stop. And then they start again. And then they stop again. And so on and so forth. Okay. After that goes on for some time, we actually start feeling pretty safe.

As bankruptcy removes the "recent uprising" modifier, it means the Tunisian separatists are now ready for round two. We don't really want to fight them with our terrible morale... our army is moved to Tunis anyway.

We make use of the autonomous rebel suppression in order to slow down the rebellion.

Then we get another historical event. We already have 10% admin tech cost reduction from the event with the Sufi shrine (which fires quite frequently). That is good because we are already so far behind.

Next year, our new Sultan comes of age, our next heir is good and legitimacy immediately rises to 93...

That massively reduces our unrest (you get +2 national unrest for 0 legitimacy, -2 for 100). As we are still suppressing rebels, that is now enough to make the rebellion progress drop down to zero.

Unfortunately our new ruler is also craven... well we are going to make him into a general then. The next heir is already 14, so we don't really care about our Sultan now.

In the meantime we also raid some coasts, though we are terribly out of sync - some still have the "recently raided" modifier. That is bad because raiding is so much micro-management anyway. If there are different sets of provinces that we can raid at different points in time, the micro-management increases even more.

The Ottomans have lost against the Venetian navy, but somehow they are still able to get a 35k army on their capital. The Venetian navy is probably blockading some "strategically important targets" right now.

As our bankruptcy still hasn't expired, we don't have a lot to do. There is an event which allows us to ask Tlemcen for assistance, but we'd rather take the prestige.

The Ottomans finally peace out the Knights - and only take Venetian land. They hadn't managed to siege down Rhodes due to the enemy naval superiority.

Now, the Mamluks are our natural next expansion target, but we really really need the Ottomans to win that war for us. And that's not possible as long as they stay on mil tech 5 (the Mamluks are on tech 6 already).

Bankruptcy expires in May 1470, so we could strike soon - if the AI is able to tech up.

Now, that definitely helps! Ottomans embrace the Renaissance. Here we can also see that Castile got attacked by France! That also helps. Castile is on tech 5 as well so they are most likely going to lose.

In October, the Ottomans reach tech 6 and our units are already stationed near the Mamluk border. Army maintenance up and we are ready to go!

Thankfully, the Ottomans have only set Antakiya and Tarabulus as vital interest. Again, we can overwrite their strategic interest in the other provinces by setting them as vital interest ourselves. And that's what we do.

This means we can call in the Ottomans for land and after we win, we only have to give them those two provinces even if they do all the work.

If we managed to occupy Antakiya and Tarabulus before the Ottomans do, then we wouldn't have to give them anything at all. But we don't really mind. Two provinces are okay. It doesn't prevent us from reaching all our targets in this war (more about this in the next chapter).

As we are about to attack them, we are now also allowed to rival the Mamluks. Previously we couldn't do that because we didn't want the Ottomans to call us into an offensive war against them.

As I explained previously, we will be in a perpetual "war-truce cycle" with the Mamluks from now on, meaning we have to attack them immediately whenever our truce expires, just so the Ottomans can't start the war first.

At least that's until we can create a snake through their territory, allowing us to reach Persia via Arabia (that should take two wars). But then we also need to achieve some... special objectives. More on that later.

Let's go! We are slightly outnumbered, but the Ottomans have got superior armies and, most importantly, their overpowered siege bonus. Our morale is a bit low due to negative prestige and our ruler trait, but surely we should be able to win this?

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 11 - Get the strategy right, and tactics don't matter

At the end of the last chapter, you saw us marching with half morale into Mamluk territory. Here is the reason - the Mamluks are still fighting their own war in Arabia so we don't expect to meet their armies on the way to Alexandria...

As we have obtained a 3-siege general, we should be able to get past that fort quickly.

We also send our fleet to blockade Alexandria, but the enemy immediately intercepts us. The Ottomans also join in, and it turns out we are going to win the battle, but do we really want to sacrifice a heavy ship for that?

Yes. In fact, we lose two. What a waste...

Anyway. Alexandria falls quickly (finally a siege that does not take objectively way too long!)

Because the Ottomans are good at sieging, we can peace out Karaman quickly and we use this opportunity to annul all of their alliances. Ending their alliance with Aq Qoyunlu is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL because the Ottomans are also allied to Aq. That will block off the Ottoman expansion route to the East forever unless they somehow end up at war with each other (which could easily happen if the Ottomans attack Karaman later and Aq Qoyunlu joins in).

As we are not careful enough, we start a large battle with the Mamluks in Buhaira...

... We do quite well actually, but in the end we have to retreat due to their superior numbers.

Dulkadir is done and we also annul their treaties with the Mamluks. We notice that Aq Qoyunlu is probably going to eat them after that (they got claims on Dulkadir land), but we are okay with that.

After that we raise war taxes and hire some mercenaries because we spot a great opportunity to beat the enemy army that is currently sieging Alexandria!

Yeah, but... oh look they do have the bonus for fighting in the same terrain as their capital (farmlands)...

... we lose. Most likely that also means losing the siege of Alexandria.

Because quick progression in the game is more important than money, we take out some loans so we can embrace the Renaissance. We will be able to tech up admin twice...

... and then we grab Exploration! And this is our target...

... it's the Sahara.

Yes, it is in our interest to clear that path through the desert immediately. There is also another hidden reason why we need Exploration at this point in the game. No, we do not plan to go around the Cape.

The Ottoman siege machines do their work and we peace out Haasa.

We hire a 3k mercenary army, put our Sultan on it and march it into Tuat in order to attack the natives (we also enabled native suppression policy). Just as we march past, the gold mine in Tafilalt depletes again.

Why does this keep happening?

Anyway, we have to attack the natives twice, but in the end we win. Our ruler survived the battle, the mercenaries are immediately disbanded.

After some time, we start the second siege of Alexandria. The Ottomans already sieged down Cairo for us! Great job.

We win the siege again and this is when we start thinking about a peace deal. It could look like that...

They would accept this, but we also want some money so we decide to extend the war a bit. That said, these are our objectives in this war:

1) take all Mamluk land that is already in coring range (everything up to Rashid)
2) make sure the Ottomans are happy
3) money.

As we have lost so many units for no reason, our war participation is almost 50% - so we would get a good share of the ducats we demand in a peace treaty.

Anyway, we will also be able to pick our first age ability before peacing out. Obviously we are going to pick...

...

Let's see in the next chapter.

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 12 - Age ability review

So this is how I would rate all the different age objectives in our current scenario:


- Feudal de jure law: very useful. We are still quite small, so we will be able to make a lot of land into states (particularly in Egypt) and the -5 unrest reduction is huge.

- reduced AE impact: very useful because AE is AE.

- claims bordering claims: situational. We don't really have any conquest targets that we do not border and the ability to transfer subjects is better suited to Christian Europe

- free war taxes: good. Because it's free money.

- cavalry ratio: doesn't matter because we don't have enough manpower to build and sustain that much cavalry anyway

- better colonies: does not matter.

- combat terrain: situational.


But we are still going for claims bordering claims. That's because we must increase our trust with the Ottomans by any means possible and one way to do it is attacking some easy targets they want to conquer anyway, call them into the war, then give them all the land. We get the favours. The favours can then be converted into trust.

For example, by getting the age ability now we will be able to claim Karaman via Cyprus after the Mamluk war is over. Karaman happens to have a truce with us and the Ottomans because they were part of the Mamluk war as well. Once the truce is over, we want to start the attack and gain a lot of favours...

In this screenshot, the Mamluks try to unsiege Antioch while there is no Ottoman army nearby. If we don't occupy the province anymore, then we will not be able to transfer it to the Ottomans, so the Ottomans will suddenly be unhappy with our peace deal. That's why we decide to peace out right at this moment even though we can't quite demand 100% warscore yet.

We take exactly the provinces shown in the last chapter, plus war reparations and some ducats.

We already have a spy network on Cyprus, so we fabricate a claim on them as a preparation for Karaman.

The Ottomans now desire a lot of Mamluk land. In the next war, we will have to call them in by using favours.

And... oh look, Alexandria is not in coring range after all. Had we known this, we might have taken more provinces - because if you have to core them in two batches anyway, you might as well take more. Right?

Meanwhile, Dulkadir is being annexed by Aq Qoyunlu. We also started a spy network on the Ottomans themselves to be able to claim Dulkadir, but now that won't be needed anymore.

Then we get the additional settler increase from the merchant guilds even though it will put them over 100% influence for a short time...

... and hey, one year later we can ask them for a lot of money.

We also start raiding again...

... and this makes us rich enough to pick the most overpowered naval doctrine until the end of the game.

At the same time, Castile is fighting a lot of Granadan separatists. Surely that means their war with France is over?

It is over and the French took six provinces in this very AE-intensive area...

... without triggering a pan-European coalition. That's what the AI can do on Very Hard.

Because we need more DIP points, we give some land to the Amirs and then we hire the 50% cheaper diplomat. It is always worth it to go for the cheap advisors even though it means that the influence of your estate is going to increase to dangerous levels.

By the way, as we are Sunni we will also get a LOT of cheaper advisors via event, but I think those are only ADM advisors (which is also great of course).

Some months later, we unlock the Quest for the New World, aka "the second reason why we need Exploration right now".

Next stop: Brazil.

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 13 - Unfortunate annexations

While our explorer explores, and our cores finish, we tried to improve relations with Dawasir because they start with the Hanbali school. If we managed to ally or vassalize them while having great relations, we could have invited one of their scholars for 10% AE reduction.

There are only four countries that start with the Hanbali school: Najd, Dawasir, Yas and Oman. Two of them had already been annexed by Hormuz... and then the AGGRESSORS in Hadramut and the Mamluk Sultanate took out Najd and Dawasir pretty much at the same time.

This is bad because we were really close to allying Dawasir. Now we have to wait for the bonus.

(Note: I'm not even sure whether releasing one of those tags will make them pick the same school again. All newly created or converted tags get an event which lets them choose their school freely, not sure whether e.g. Najd will pick Hanbali again or something else.)

Anyway. We fight the Mamluk rebels in Alexandria and we win.

In order to celebrate our victory, we spontaneously invent cannons!

What a miracle! We discover America and we meet one of the four tribes living in the Brazilian region, though we need to unlock the third idea in Exploration before we can actually reach that place.

Then the Ottomans agree to an alliance that does not benefit them at all. Of course, the only reason why we are unhappy about this is because we wanted to feed them the Karaman land for favours. Now that plan is ruined - but it should be possible to get to 80 trust by feeding them Mamluk land only! Of course we have our own expansion targets against the Mamluks, so we can't just focus on giving the Ottomans their land. But at some point, we should be able to do it.

Then we destroy the castle in Alexandria because it isn't needed anymore. While it does block the passage to the west, we know that the Mamluks are going to focus on it in further wars and we probably won't be able to stop them. That's why it is a liability and we dismantle it.

We also get an extremely useful event for faster colony growth.

The trade good in Tuat changes to salt so we might consider building a fort in this province. No wait. Let's not. (Though Tuat is one of the few places that's great for scorched earth tactics.)

This screenshot documents how we start a spy network on Tupinamba and how we peacefully land our peaceful army in Belem, right next to them.

We get the comet event which would trigger a peasants war right now if our manpower was a bit lower. We won't click the button just yet...

... urgh.

Some months later, our cores finish so we can now raise stability for an acceptable price.

Then we unlock another idea which means that parts of South America are now in range!

Our whole army is now present in Belem and we send a colonist to the province. This allows us to claim the neighbouring province of Alcantara...

... but we shortly divert our attention to the Old World because Tlemcen must be annexed. Yes, we have unlocked all the Exploration ideas we need (as promised, this is not really going to be a colonial game). This means we can now afford to waste some DIP points elsewhere. Our technology level is also still at 3, but does it really matter?

Tlemcen has some nice provinces, particularly in Algiers, that would make us some money. They are also frequently disloyal and...

... they are still located in between our capital and our eastern possessions. We will try to snake into India, and as I mentioned in another chapter, in order to snake efficiently it's important to have a direct land connection from your capital because it allows you to conquer several provinces deep into enemy territory and core all the provinces immediately.

Also, Tlemcen is somehow able to afford a fleet which means they are stealing our money and disrupting our raiding schedules. This must end now!

And... oh look, Tupinamba migrated away from Alcantara to Maranhao. This means we have to create a new colony in order to fabricate a claim on them. Well it's not too bad, Ceara is a better province anyway.

Maghrebi countries get WAY TOO MUCH idea and tech cost reduction in the early game, Paradox op pls fix.

(I'm joking here. But the bonus is useful.)

Now we create our claim. Again, the diplomat has been recalled even before we could fabricate the claim, in order to prevent him from getting caught. We just made sure the spy network was still just over 20.

Easy.

We also discover the other guys (Tapuia, Potiguara aka "Portugal" and Tupiniquim). They are all living along the coast and they are allied to each other! That is great because it makes it easier to conquer them. Once we got all four of them, we only have to complete one colony to spawn a colonial nation in Brazil. And that is our only target here...

Meanwhile, our colony in Tuat has to grow without a colonist. That also means we are currently paying additional money.

The war against Tupinamba is won, but... oh no! This province is out of coring range!

We did check their former province of Alcantara, but it seems we forgot to check whether Maranhao is in range or not. Or are there some inconsistencies involved when coring range is calculated? (we did have a similar problem with Alexandria earlier)

Anyway, we have to take that province in order to get the whole Brazilian coast inside our coring range. Else we'd have to wait for our colony to finish, then attack the natives, but it just takes too long. So our strategy is pretty much ruined if we cannot take that province right now.

It really seems like the AI tricked us by migrating away in the right moment. Well played.

But not all hope is lost...

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 14 - Advisor to the rescue

We retire one of our existing DIP advisors and we immediately get a female colonial range advisor. Interesting. And extremely lucky. Sometimes you have to dismiss 20 spymasters and 20 tariff advisors before you can get the type of advisor you want.

We annex Tupinamba and due to the increased colonial range we can now create a colony right next to the province of Ilheus even before finishing our core.

We prepare for the next battle. In the meantime, our colonies have become very expensive but that will only remain for a short time. Tuat is about to finish while Bahia will be cancelled.

We got the claim, our army is ready, so we declare the "war for the coast of Brazil" against the Potiguara - Tapuia - Tupiniquim alliance.

And our colony will be destroyed. The colonist is sent back to Ceara.

The enemy troops march through terra incognita to siege down our newly conquered province and our colony. This is annoying, though in this scenario it's actually the best thing they can do. We will have to repel them...

Then we get a dangerous event. Picking the first option permanently decreases heathen tolerance by 0.5. The second option is not too bad, but the event seems to fire quite often (I assume that picking the first option means the event is not going to fire anymore, but I'm certainly not going to try!)

Because our favourite admin advisor died, we want to get Clergy influence back to 80 so we can hire another cheap advisor. We abandon the state of Delta (which we hadn't fully cored yet) in order to increase their influence...

We do some interactions, give them one or two provinces and now we can get our new advisor. He is a level 3, so he is way too expensive anyway, but we need the points. The only real alternative right now would be hiring a regular level 1 advisor... that's not enough.

Then we get another good event which makes our colony finish immediately. We now control the path into West Africa!

In the meantime, we split up our army to repel the invaders. But now we have to wait until February 1484 before we can peace out...

And hello, it's February 1484 but we notice that one of the provinces is still not in coring range! That seems rather familiar. So we hire our advisor again which gives us just enough range...

... to core them all. The war for the Brazilian coast is won.

Of course, some of their armies still exist, so they turn into separatists. One of the armies invades the southernmost province (that was to be expected), but the other immediately goes for our colony. Ehm... why are they allowed to do that?

So we have to repel the evil colony invaders (this time they are evil because it sets us back a bit). Whenever a colony is occupied, the settler growth rate remains, but the colonist himself is expelled from the colony. After that, we also forgot to resend the colonist for one year or so. All of this is slowing down the formation of our Brazilian colonial nation.

(Well played, AI?)

With all our boosts to technology, neighbour bonuses and high legalism acquired due to declaring war on infidels, we can now tech up admin cheaply. We tech up twice in a row...

... Now we don't need the legalism anymore so we debase our currency and then we make use of our special abilites to remove the corruption immediately.

In 1485, we are allowed to demand more points from our estates, and again we get 150 points of each type without many problems. Then we also set our focus to DIP because that's the biggest bottleneck right now. We just need all the DIP points in the early game...

Splendor now increases quickly which allows us to pick our second age ability. This time we definitely go for the AE reduction.

But then our good heir dies and he is immediately replaced by a terrible heir! We cannot disinherit him right now because we used our prestige to make our vassal more loyal. Our ruler is only 31, but as we made him into a general we think he might die at any time.

Can we disinherit Hisham before it is too late?

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 15 - The path to the second Mamluk war

Even though we need the points, we still develop our gold mine to 10 because we think that's the value it should be at. (Hadn't we been unlucky with gold mine depletions, our province would be way past 10 production anyway).

The diplomatic situation changes: Savoy is now in a PU under France so our alliance automatically breaks.

We immediately know the best candidate to replace them: Aq Qoyunlu. They can become quite powerful later on and they are allied to the Ottomans. They still block off the Ottoman expansion path to the east. We don't plan to attack them whatsoever, but they could help us in our future wars if we ally them now. Also, once we acquire huge amounts of AE with the Sunni world (which will happen sooner or later), every Sunni ally we can get is an advantage, particularly the ones that we cannot attack to get them into perpetual truces.

Siena is not important anymore so the alliance is cancelled. Thank you for protecting us during our bankruptcy!

Someone is now starting to hunt pirates in Sevilla (I wonder why?). This massively reduces the amount of money and sailors we can loot. In order to maximize our returns, we use a little trick. In order to send a fleet on a privateering mission, you need at least one light ship in it, but heavy ships are way better at the actual job. That's why we use a fleet composition of "9 heavy, 1 light" in order to privateer.

Then we use another fleet, consisting mainly of lights and transports, in order to raid the coasts. All the cannons on our heavy ships made the privateering mission very efficient, so we are now able to raid all their coasts with an efficiency of 93.3%.

For the actual raiding, light ships are actually way better than heavies because the maximum province development you can raid depends on the blockade power of the fleet. Faster ships are better at blockading. Though if your fleet is big enough, then you can raid any coastal province anyway so it doesn't matter which kinds of ships you use.

Then we also ally Karaman! They are very weak, behind in MIL tech, but they are also allied to the Ottomans and Aq Qoyunlu. That alone makes them an interesting ally. Though we might drop them later on.

We can now pick our next government reform, and even though the additional accepted cultures are tempting, the autonomy reduction is way better for what we are trying to do. We are basically sitting at 50% total autonomy all the time due to our conquests.

The truce with the Mamluks ends, but we still have something to do...

Yes, here is some money. Now ally us.

Good.

Also, the Ottomans could have declared their own war in the meantime, but the AI usually moves their troops to the border before attacking (though sometimes, I have seen them attack without doing this!)

In this case, we felt save enough to postpone the war for three months.

But now it's time to go! It's time to start the second Mamluk war. Also known as the most important Mamluk war.

In the war declaration screen, we have not called in the Ottomans! That's because we are going to use a little trick this time. Here we call them in via the diplomatic menu after declaring the war.

Before unpausing the game, we also spend favours to increase trust.

As a result, we get 5 trust plus Ottoman support, all for the price of 13 favours. Thank you for the discount!

We also unlock mil tech 8, which is not one of the most important technologies but it does improve cavalry, so we need that.

During the war with the Mamluks, we also accept Egyptian culture. Yes, well timed. That's because we plan to make big parts of Egypt into our states, also it means that we will be able to core Egyptian provinces faster than usual.

The first move must be against their capital, so we besiege Cairo with our whole army and we breach the walls for quicker progression.

We have exactly 4 artillery regiments now. The number is exactly 4 because it allows us to breach any fort in the game at this point if we are willing to spend the 50 MIL points. Of course, adding more cannons would speed up the sieges but we can't afford it right now.

We knew that the Mamluks would try to reach our western territories, so we use some scorched earth tactics to slow them down. Yes, the reduced movement speed is actually worth it here. It is very situational, but can be useful.

The siege of Cairo is won quickly, but...

... now the Mamluks are very interested in getting it back and we cannot fight their whole army without Ottoman support. Also, once they retake Cairo we won't be able to march across Sharqiya anymore.

As we still have a 3-siege general, we help out the Ottomans a bit in the siege of Damascus...

... yeah okay, that was easy.

Everything is going well up to this point, but can we beat the combined Mamluk army?

 

[qwertzuiop]

Interlude - Advanced administration

The most reputable admin advisor: "My Sultan, I have a great idea that will transform our beautiful country from now on until 1821... I mean, until the end of time."

The Sultan: "Now I'm curious. Tell me about your ideas!"

Advisor: "Well, as you may know my great Sultan, the job of an administrator is extremely boring."

The Sultan: "Is that so?"

Advisor: "Yes. It is so boring, in fact, that the people carrying out the job sometimes forget to record something... a bit of taxable income here and there... sometimes they forget to properly document the income of our state-owned properties in newly conquered lands..."

The Sultan: "State-owned properties?"

Advisor: "Yes, I'm talking about the estates that directly belong to you, or to members of your blessed family, or to some of the more powerful nobles of the realm. They are directly managed by your servants and their revenue is then summed up as 'Production Income' in our financial report."

The Sultan: "Ah, those ones... I'm aware of those. But what's a 'state' then?"

Advisor: "The state? Well, that is an incredibly innovative term that describes the whole government of our country, which is of course rightfully led by you, my Sultan. But it is more than that - it is a very abstract term. It is not easy to explain it practically - but here is the thing. Administrators love abstract terms."

The Sultan: "Those administrators seem to have strange habits at times..."

Advisor: "In fact, most of them seem to be so focused on their work that they don't really care about anything else. Yes, it's shocking, but I'm sure they don't even care who is in charge of the country. But at the same time, they know that the country would collapse without them, so they are very arrogant. That arrogance makes them lazy at times, leading to bad administration. But finally, I know how to deal with that vicious cycle!"

The Sultan: "So what is your suggestion?"

Advisor: "We can make them loyal by indoctrinating them. Not loyal to you personally, my Sultan, as they wouldn't understand that anyway. No, we will make them loyal to the state. Loyal to the beautiful, ever expanding institution that is held together by a bunch of laws and regulations. Loyal to the abstract apparatus. Loyal to their own fantasy, so to speak.

That's also very mundane, but the administrators love that kind of thing. We have already done some tests and it seems like our whole administration would become 25% more efficient, as well as 25% quicker at integrating new provinces into our realm properly. All we have to do is taking the following text and making it into the credo of our 'state':

'There is what is ours and what is part of our ancestral domain that will never be surrendered. A bit of flexibility here will see much more land being considered never surrenderable and should the worst happen the whole world will know our crusade to recover it will be just.'

My Sultan, they will absolutely love this text. Though maybe we should take out the word 'crusade' and replace it with something else..."

The Sultan: "Fine. Summon the cabinet and we will discuss about your plans."

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 16 - The creation of the first snake

We never fight the combined Mamluk army.

In this screenshot, we already managed to make one of the Ottoman stacks attach to us. We are then attacking a 35k Mamluk army in Cairo, but they had another 20k nearby - that army was scared when we entered Fayyum so it immediately ran away to the south.

In the battle overview, you can see that the Ottoman troops are in the center, while the Moroccan cavalry supports them on the flanks. That's a nice combined army deployment.

Though to be honest, we wanted the Ottomans to take the whole front line, but our 1k army they attached to got wiped (because it reached Cairo one day earlier than everyone else - a known bug).

Anyway. We end up winning the battle...

... but the Ottoman army is now wandering around freely because it is not attached to us anymore. In this picture, it helps us beat the Haasalese army, but...

... the Mamluks siege extremely quickly so Cairo is lost again.

Second try.

Other countries have heard about our extremely reputable admin advisor so we get a huge prestige boost.

Our colony in Ceara finished which results in the creation of our first colonial nation! The game automatically calls it "Granada al-Jadida". We take that name.

The colonial nation is important because it will spread Colonialism to all our coastal provinces after 1500. Now, Colonialism might spawn in Iberia, but due to our terrible relations it won't actually spread from there to North Africa. It might still be possible to get the institution from Aragon (if we raided them a bit less), but we decided to take the safe route here.

Apart from that, it also gives us a base in the New World - that is important for the late game.

We are now also allowed to complete the "acquire subjects" mission which reduces Tlemcen's integration cost by 15%. Yes, the discount applies retroactively (so basically, you can activate it during integration without wasting any points).

In the next months, we siege down Cairo again and we stack wipe the army of Haasa with Ottoman help.

After peacing out Ajam (we take money), the Ottomans finally start to siege down the capital of Haasa. We want to peace them out quickly because they are going to be our next target!

After that, we just stack all our units on Tabuk because it is a nasty mountain fort and the Mamluks tried to cancel the siege at one point. We are now close to peacing out...

Haasa is finished and we only annul their treaties because we want a short truce.

After winning the siege of Tabuk, we can peace out for 100% warscore.

Our objectives in this war:

1) snake across Arabia
2) take out Mamluk mountain forts
3) take the holy city of Jerusalem!
4) money

We love beautiful borders.

For some reason, we are even allowed to core all provinces apart from one immediately. Yeah... okay. (We also bought down our war exhaustion.)

Again, we look at all our conquered provinces and we separate them into two categories - future state and not future state.

We conquered two provinces in Palestine, one in Bahari and one more in Delta. We would like to make these into states later on (yes, we did unstate Delta once again before declaring the Mamluk war). That's why we do not increase the autonomy here.

In previous versions, you could just do the "state -> increase autonomy -> unstate" trick everywhere, but now abandoning a state also removes the -10 unrest obtained by increasing autonomy so this doesn't work anymore.

Transjordan, Tabuk and an Nafud are three territories we don't really care about. Well, they are extremely important logistically (we have to reach India after all), but they won't give us a lot of money. That's why we increase the autonomy to 100 immediately, preventing any kind of uprising here.

AE is not too bad. Haasa is the "most upset" with an AE value of 32. They will be more upset when we invade them.

Most importantly, we can now disinherit our heir! Actually we could have done so during the war, but prestige is important for the morale boost and reduced AE impact so we decided to wait. Now we just need a new heir. What could possibly go wrong?

 

[qwertzuiop]

Chapter 17 - Timurids in the way

Many things will go wrong. (Spoiler!)

But at first we replace Exploration ideas with something better - Influence.

We pick the Feudal de jure law and we use it to prevent the Mamluk rebellion in Delta, Bahari and Palestine. It works. This edict is just great in the early game.

But then we notice the problem. A red problem.

The Timurids are too strong. This picture shows the opinion map mode - Vijayanagar, Delhi, the Mamluks and Qara Qoyunlu have rivalled them. The red thing in Shirvan is also Qara Qoyunlu.

The Timurids still have Transoxiana as a vassal, by the way. They have recently conquered some provinces from Delhi, then some provinces from Qara Qoyunlu. They are basically unopposed right now, but they block our land route into India!

This is the time for a summary because it isn't the first bad thing to happen in this run:

1) I didn't play well in the Tlemcen war which eventually led to bankruptcy. That went very smoothly but it did slow down the tech and idea progression

2) I didn't conquer the Malian gold mines despite clearing a path through the desert because I just didn't find the right moment to do it. It is also possible to conquer them by attacking from the coast, but then I shouldn't have cancelled Exploration (for now).

3) bad luck with rulers

4) alliance chains seem to be harder in this playthrough. It's not unlikely for the AI to ally everyone (particularly if they have the same religion and they all feel threatened by your expansion), but in this run the alliances formed by the AI seem to cause more problems than usual

Back to the game... we are not strong enough to fight the Timurids right now, so we end up allying them. Maybe we can make them fight some wars for us?

The annexation of Tlemcen is complete and they disband a part of their army shortly before it ends. Okay then. Now we get some additional states (Algiers is in fact much better than anything we have right now).

In March 1499, our truce with Haasa is over so we immediately attack them. They are allied to Ethiopia...

We actually focus on Haasa first because we cannot get military access to Ethiopia initially. Their capital is sieged down fairly quickly. Then we also get a new heir. We had to buy up our legitimacy before that because else we would have gotten a civil war with our 0 ADM ruler.

Bad.

At the same time, we are using our age ability in order to fabricate claims along the Indian coast! Sindh would be an interesting target...

Eventually, we manage to get an army into Ethiopia and separate peace them. Now we can take 100% warscore from Haasa. We demand the state of Bahrain, one of the Dawasir cores and money.

Dawasir is immediately released as a vassal. They do pick the Hanbali school again. Good!

Sindh would be in coring range now... (just saying)

Here we prevent a big rebellion in Bahrain, even though most of the provinces are Shia, by using the Feudal de jure law after increasing autonomy. We made Bahrain into a state before that, but we did not fully core the provinces.

After that, we also pick the idea that gives us -20% AE, we invite the Hanbali scholar and we unlock military tech 9.

Unfortunately, we must stay at peace until 1507 because that's when the truce with the Mamluks expires and we have to call in the Ottomans again. If we were already in an offensive war at that point, the Ottomans would not join, so they would be allowed to start their own war with the Mamluks. That would be bad. We still have to feed them land...

Anyway... it's going to be another huge war.