Update – Cleaning up the neighborhood
Thanks for all the suggestions! The plan is a combination of things that were suggested. By the way, my BB is currently 2.99, WE is 6.27, and yearly ducat gain is 27.
Aceh/Brunei/Maka. As discussed previously, there is decent land to the south. Once I start a war, I will plan to take a bunch of provinces. I need 3 things before I can DOW them: 1) a non-pathetic navy, 2) lower BB, and 3) lower WE.
On the navy, my vassals all have decent fleets but I don’t trust them to deploy wisely. Unclear whether I could effectively use my own ships as bait to draw enemy fleets to the shores of the vassals. Aceh has their ships parked on the opposite side of the island from me, so decent chance I could get cavalry across the land bridge.
On the BB, I just took the 6 point hit for annexing Ayut. Since I plan to take a lot of provinces, I need to be at very low BB before starting the war. On the WE, this is about controlling RR. My current WE is in the “high but manageable” area. However, at the moment I can’t handle the additional points of RR caused by the DOW. As a result, Aceh/Brunei/Maka will be #2 on the target list.
India. With map spread set at default and quite a while till QFTNW, the only real interesting opportunity is the province of Bihar. If I get a chance, I will DOW someone who is allied with them. That will of course reveal Bihar, and it is right next to land that I can see. Would love to get my hands on their luscious COT. With the new 3.1 mechanic on map spread I would then get to see all the provinces bordering Bihar within a few years, and a couple of them are decent. While I am willing to take an unconnected province in the middle of Hindu territory, it by itself won’t do that much for me…so Bihar is #3 on the target list.
Easy Targets. This would be Pegu/Suko/Assam. The goal would be to gain 3 more members of the happy kid’s club of vassals. I don’t want any of the territory since it all has low base tax. The side benefits of going after these targets are A) seals me off to the north with vassals, so less at risk while fighting in the south later, and B) can be used as a time-filler while I prepare for fighting in the south. They are #1 on the target list.
5/1415 DOW on Pegu. This brings in alliance partners Sukthothai (Suko) and Assam. I have allies surrounding them, so this should be a short war.
6/1415 Peace with Sukthothai for 75 ducats and a vassal club card. Curious why they never built a fort in their one province, since they had enough money in the treasury. Oh well, the money is mine now
10/1416 Another one of the new random events in 3.1, resulting in yet another stab hit for me. I would like this event a lot more if I hadn’t already maxed the aristocracy slider.
In the background you can see progress in the war against Assam.
1/1417 Peace with Assam, for the price of a shiny membership card in the vassal club. I waited till the beginning of the year, but no cash to be had from this one.
1/1417 Peace with Pegu for the same deal. What happened to all the treasury cash we saw in the last wars? Notice the rebel pop up in the upper left corner of the screen that is about to wipe out my army.
1417-1420 Cue the background music, while we have a brief interlude so that I can fight ridiculous quantities of rebels...
4/1420 Finally time for some action. Unfortunately, Brunei’s guarantee on Maka expired a while ago. This means that I can’t get war with the 2 of them plus Aceh for the price of 1 DOW. The best I can do is a DOW on Maka, bringing in Aceh.
In general overview, my army size is up to 13k troops, yearly ducat gain is down to 9, WE is at 1.03, and BB is at 2.05. The navy situation remains very sad. In the last 3 years I have built 2 carracks. Brunei has 10 of them, Aceh has 11, and Maka has 6.
4/1420 DOW on Makassar, bringing in Aceh. This costs 3 stab and WE hits. As you can see, I got mil access to Aceh and spammed them with troops. The plan is to annex Makassar and take all of Aceh’s provinces except the capital. Aceh’s provinces are rather poor, but they are all the right culture and religion.
In the upper right corner, I just sent out my first missionary. RR is still a bit high so would have preferred to wait longer, but was close to capping out at 5 missionaries.
And now it is time to play a really long game of chase. The goal is to land troops on Maka and not get creamed by either their or Aceh’s navy. Aceh got the alliance lead in this war, so I can’t peace them out till done with Maka. My, what fun we have. We lure them over to our vassals, we go around and around Brunei, we go round and round Aceh, we drag some of their ships all the way north to Korea. You get the idea. While I could certainly provide lots of screenshots of this, I’m guessing you would much rather I didn’t.
8/1422 So anyway, we finally land the troops, win the siege, and annex Makassar. No more spelling that name either!
8/1422 Peace with Aceh for 7 provinces. They are now an OPM.
As expected, I picked up a ton of BB from that war, and it is now at 16.09. Planning to be at peace for several years to burn this off. Just started building a couple more forts, and will be sending out more missionaries soon. Will also need to build forts on the new provinces from Aceh.
Looking to the future, hopefully Brunei and Aceh will get into an alliance so I can attack both of them with one DOW. I will be sending Brunei a couple insults to drive our relationship down and try to make Aceh look good to them.
Thoughts?
