Update – Ming, Ming, Ming!!!
4/1441 So, it appears that my loyal readers aren’t particularly surprised that I would choose the aggressive path. And I do have to agree that it would be really out of character for me to take a pass on this one
So naturally, I take a really deep breath and DOW Ming.
These next several years will be played at very low speed. If you want to dance, you have to be ready to move out the instant Ming sends a big stack toward you.
I also accept peace with Maja. Occupying their capital didn’t get me enough warscore for a vassal, and since I can’t see their other 2 provinces this is as good as it gets. And of course, I have a lot better uses for those 5k of armies than beating up on Maja.
Here is what I expect to happen in the first year of the war.
1. Ming will quickly peace out their other war.
2. Ming will then send almost all their armies down south.
3. Most of Ming’s armies will be grouped up in 10-20k stacks.
4. I will win 6-12 sieges down south before Ming arrives in force. The only help I am expecting from vassals is in this phase, where they will hopefully siege a few provinces for me.
5. I will win 2-3 sieges on the Manchu border and 0-1 sieges on the Tibet border.
6. Once Ming arrives, they will drop big stacks on the occupied provinces and suffer huge attrition. They will also assault frequently, so sieges will not last that long.
7. We will see a couple rebel pops in Ming’s recently won territory. These provinces are mostly in Siberia or near Manchu, so they will be a long ways from Ming’s forces in the south.
8. The odds of a sea invasion are quite low, both because Ming has a huge land border with my vassals and because almost all of their armies are in inland provinces.
9. The only fighting I will do with Ming is sniping 1-2k stacks. I will run like a little girl from all of Ming’s large stacks.
10. My goals in the first year are to drive up their WE, drain their manpower pool and stack size through attrition, and give their big stacks something to do when they arrive (namely siege back their land).
Here is what I expect to happen in the second year of the war.
1. The most important thing is that at some point Ming will win back all the sieges down south. What happens after that is absolutely critical. If all their stacks head further south into my vassals’ land, that is very bad. If some of their stacks head elsewhere, that is very good. So, my focus in the second year will be trying to convince some of Ming’s stacks to head somewhere else.
2. Ming’s stacks are most likely to head elsewhere if I have a lot of land occupied near Manchu/Tibet and if there are a lot of rebel stacks up north.
3. With Ming’s WE rather high by this point, I expect the AI to prioritize “win back sieges” above “siege the enemy”. However, “siege the enemy” will be a much shorter march than “win back sieges”.
5/1441
Here are the jobs of all 24k troops, with screenshots showing positions 1 ½ months into the war.
First off, the 3k troops hanging out in Manchu finally get to do something. These guys need to siege lots of provinces, and there are no Ming troops visible anywhere. I suspect Ming will focus on the south and leave these guys alone for quite a while.
Up north there is a lot going on. Ming has 49 regiments in a single province headed home, and there is lots of attrition damage. At the top of the screen, Ming has also created a 28-regiment mega-stack and made their king the leader.
I have 2k of armies here. One unit is hanging out with nothing to do. He will eventually head north to siege provinces north of Tibet like Urumqi, but right now his job is scouting.
The other unit is headed to Yumen to siege. You may wonder if this is suicidal, but I think they will be ok. The AI tends to give units incredibly long marching orders, and then rarely alters them until the units arrive at the destination. I believe all their armies will march right past my unit sieging Yumen.
Now, I have noticed that the AI has a tendency to “rethink” their plans whenever you first load the game. If I quit the game and reload, there is a risk that some of their armies will reroute and kill the siege unit. In order to prevent this from happening, I will keep the EU3 application running for days if necessary until my fun with Ming is finished.
And in the south, we have lots and lots of action and 11k of troops. So far we have 8 provinces under siege (all the red and green circles) and plan to siege 3 more quite soon (the blue X’s). The 3 red circles are tropical provinces where I am suffering attrition. While this is painful for me right now, it will be much more painful for Ming when they want to win back the sieges with big stacks. As you can see, my vassals are helping out a bit and are sieging 2 provinces. Yeah, guys!
Ming only has 2 regiments in view in the extreme right, and they are both headed northeast.
And here are the rest of the troops. The 5k on the boats will remain on rebel killing duty. I still have a lot of provinces with high RR, so cannot afford to send all my troops to fight Ming. The 3k of troops on land will join up with a couple of extra regiments and form a stack focused on defending siege regiments.
Ming only has a few regiments down south, and I can’t let them interfere with sieges. This mobile group will battle 1k-2k stacks and keep them away from my sieging troops. It will also snipe any new army builds. The stack is small enough that it should be able to move around freely inside Ming’s territory without attrition damage. My one general (shock 2 maneuver 2) goes with this stack.
7/1441 Golden Horde accepts a white peace with Ming. The Horde was the alliance leader, so that war is over. That was expected, but still not fun to see.
We are now sieging 13 provinces and the vassal kids are sieging 2 more.
Ming’s WE is up a full point, going from 12.90 in April to 13.94 today. That is a lot of increase in 3 months. Once we win a few sieges, we will have a nice additional source of WE.
9/1441 The first of Ming’s big stacks shows up, and I run away as fast as I can. That is 5 months after the DOW and a bit earlier than expected, but I did get quite a few months of carefree sieging.
So far I have won 1 siege, which is just barely visible on the left of the screen. I have also managed to snipe a few 1k armies with the “siege protection” group.
In the blue oval at the right, you can see progress on the siege at Yumen. Yes, all of Ming’s armies did march right past that regiment, just as I had hoped.
And at the bottom in the notes, Ming has embargoed us from their nice rich COT. No surprises there.
10/1441 The Manchu border is going decently well. We have won one siege so far, and the siege in Liaodong is almost done. Ming did send a small stack our way that disrupted another siege, so we danced out of the way. In the middle bottom of the screen, you can see a 5k pop of peasant rebels.
10/1441 The southern border is also going well. We have won 3 sieges there and are getting close on 6 more.
Ming’s big stack is about to attack my vassals in Viet Bac. There are 2 vassals there and combined they have 7k troops, so they should keep Ming busy for a little while. Ming is also sending a few armies my way in Wenshan, so my siege protection group is headed there to defend.
10/1441 And just for comic relief, Ming goes for the seaborne invasion with a 1k stack on Maka. Check out the protection squad of 49 galleys…overkill perhaps?
The goon squad of galleys will hang out for a while looking for a fight and then get bored and leave. At that point I will bring in my troops and kill the siegers. We may play end up playing many, many rounds of this. I don’t want to leave troops on the island as that will just cause Ming to send bigger invasion forces.
In random other news, Ming’s troop count is down to 125k…woohoo 3k less than in April. At this pace I just might finish the war before 1821.