What to do with North Africa?

[DABegley]

OK, I admit it. It was a mistake but I couldn't resist. In every game I play Castile goes hog wild in North Africa, there has to be a reason. So in my current game, my first 5.2 test game (I am the Byz, normal difficulty, standard settings), I went for some North African adventurism and before I knew it I had annexed Tripoli and Tunis and most of Algiers. So now I have 10 provinces that count as "overseas" so I'm not getting any tax from them. What do I do with them?

1. Just hold on to them until I get a land bridge through the Mamelukes, will take a while as the Timurids just took Mus and Aleppo from Venice and at least two provinces from the Mamelukes so I have to go through both of them before I get a land bridge.

2. Just keep the adventurism going and take it all, including Morocco. That's a lot of overseas provinces but the gold in NW Africa could be nice.

3. Release Tunis as a vassal and give her all my N. African provinces. She'll be Orthodox so will convert the provinces for me, I'll get income and unit limit but she'll be too big to ever diploannex.

What should I do?

Current situation (1435) is I have annexed Janina, the entire Ottoman Empire as well as Serbia and all the minors in Anatolia.Venice has annexed every other Greek/Mediterranean province in sight. Yup, Crete, Achaea, Cyprus, Albania, Zeta, Ragusa, even had Aleppo and Mus for a while before the Timis got involved. Hungary and Lithuania are huge and the only horde I border is the Timis, in truce. I conceded defeat before the first combat and they took it. Didn't even ask fro money.

 

[HNT]

I would give highest priority to crush the Timurids and the Mamluks.

 

[DABegley]

I am in truce with the Timis but do have a border with the Mamelukes, I own Cyrencia and they own Libya so I could launch from there. Have to check on how long I have left on my truce with the Timis. I would need to really build up my troops though. I had to disband a bunch after the first Ottoman war as I was going broke quickly. I am in inflation reduction mode right now, 2 loans and years of 100% minting to afford that initial Ottoman war left me with about 10% inflation, it's down to about 7.5 now but I only have about 15,000 troops. Not enough to take out the Mamelukes, but I can build good troops. Azab infantry from Otto cores and Charge cavalry from Lybia cores.

Still doesn't answer the question of what to do with North Africa as it will take me decades to get a land bridge with the new 10 year truces.

 

[cuendillar]

You should still get tariffs for them, which is how overseas taxes and production gets counted. With them all being of the wrong calture and religion, I can see why they're not too profitable though. Releasing them as vassals might just be simpler than to convert everything on your own though. Just go get Morocco too, so Castille won't. You don't need them to get stronger than they absolutely have to. Morocco is also nice as a jumping point, should you decide to colonize the Americas later on.

 

[NoobRage]

Beating Timmies with Byzzies is actually quite simple: the key here is to hold Mus and Imereti and make them bleed to death there. I once had one 10k (6k inf and 4k cav) stack hold against 40k Timmies and win a crushing victory. But dont go any further. Wait until the Mamluks clash with the Timmies and blitzkrieg the Levant. Then, if you still cant force the Mamluks to cede provinces, retreat to Mus and repeat until their WE is so high that you must race the rebels. GL HF.

 

[DABegley]

Morocco is in my cross-hairs, I hate the all-Castile N. Africa.

A good suggestion unfortunately I own neither Mus nor Imerti. The Mamelukes took Mus and then lost it to Venice who then Venice lost it to the Timmies. Imerti is owned by Georgia. If the Timmies come for me I can always retreat across Anatolia and hide behind the straights if I lose badly. I beat the GH that way one time when they came through Budjack and attacked my European provinces. I hide across the straights and let them siege for 6 months and then rolled over the low-morale stacks.

 

[Shiranui]

I hate any N. Africa that's not owned by Africans.
Which is one reason why I rarely play Vanilla.

 

[NoobRage]

Morocco is in my cross-hairs, I hate the all-Castile N. Africa.

A good suggestion unfortunately I own neither Mus nor Imerti. The Mamelukes took Mus and then lost it to Venice who then Venice lost it to the Timmies. Imerti is owned by Georgia. If the Timmies come for me I can always retreat across Anatolia and hide behind the straights if I lose badly. I beat the GH that way one time when they came through Budjack and attacked my European provinces. I hide across the straights and let them siege for 6 months and then rolled over the low-morale stacks.

Then capture Mus immediately after the Timurids declare war. And keep enough stacks north of it if they decide to attack there. Not owning Imereti is actually a good thing. One less front to hold. But please, please dont hide behind the straits. You will probably lose a lot of provinces (provinces flip to hordes after 1-3 years of occupation) and WE will into space. Just hold the mountains and eventually the Mamluks will do the rest.

 

[unmerged(625280)]

I guess it all depends on if you want to colonize or not. If you do I would suggest pushing trough Morocco and get Infi. Try to make land connection between your current holdings and Infi. Then sell all but Infi and Sus to Orthodox Tunisia. This way you will get the best "discovered" province to start colonizing South America and gold.

Why castille takes North Africa? Simple, it's the only way for anyone from Iberian peninsula to expand without huge infamy hits and they have such a huge economy they can handle it.

In general I would say that for most contries if your're not going for WC only provinces in North Africa worth taking are Tangiers, Ceuta, Mellila, Oran and Sus.