Welcome to The Pagan's Progress: A Ryukyu AAR, I was encouraged to write this AAR after mentioning my last game as Ryukyu in a thread about the playability of small, weak nations after the release of patch 1.3. This AAR is as much an attempt to show that it is actually possible to play a successful game as a one-province, vassalised and pagan nation as it is an attempt for me to write my first AAR (hopefully I won't screw up too badly!).
Before I begin with the actual game, I'd like to give a brief summary of the history of Ryukyu (as I doubt too many of you know much more about the Ryukyu Kingdom than I did before I googled myself wiser ):
The Ryukyu Kingdom used to be three kingdoms until they in 1429 were unified under King Hashi and founded as the Ryukyu Kingdom, though apparently they were a tributary state to the Ming Dynasty as far back as 1372. The Ryukyuan religion is one based on ancestor worship aswell as the respecting of the relationship between the living, the dead, and the gods and spirits of the natural world, they also believe in the spiritual superiority of women over men, therefore priests are traditionally female (which would actually make them priestesses instead, hmm...).
After being a tribute state to Japan aswell since the Japanese invasion of 1609, they were eventually annexed into Japan in 1879, today there still exists a movement for Ryukyu independence with a considerably big support in Okinawa.
Now, to the actual game... this game will be played with patch 1.3 vanilla EU3 on Very Easy difficulty (shh!) and it starts... Now.
Prologue
New Year's Eve, 1454. A secret meeting is taking place somewhere in the Okinawan capital of Shuri, hidden from the eyes of the Ming envoys. King Sho Taikyu has gathered together his most trusted servants and advisors to discuss and plan the eventual break from their liege, the Ming. Taikyu knows that a declaration of independence would infuriate the Ming and could very well mean total enslavement of his Kingdom by the Ming if not executed at the exact right time. Therefore it is decided that the break of liegeship will be declared during a time of Ming struggle, preferably in wartime...
ATTENTION! After having had to restart the game (due to stupidly forgetting to save), taking all new pictures and changing the accompanying text where neccessary, I found that the majority of the pictures had been "boxed" due to a mistake in Paint I have no way of re-taking them so a number of the early pictures will be a bit funny, I've now found out about the F11 button screenshots so all future updates (read: ones made after 7th of July 2007) should be optimal.
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