A Let's Play of Paradox's grand strategy games...like, ALL of them, from Imperator to Hearts of Iron 4

[abrandt]

Medina would never voluntarily become our vassal since we own some lands they consider their cores. So I think we’ll force the matter. I think it’s worth burning the alliance with Diyarbakr for the time being, especially since Sao is willing to back us up. That’ll force Diyarbakr into dealing with an Egyptian front.

And it all goes pretty smoothly. In the end, we vassalize Medina and grab a bridge to the Mediterranean from Diyarbakr with the idea of turning it into a client state.

But uh oh, Sinai is considered an overseas province.

But Gaza to the north is not so we do turn them into a client state. If we have another war up here we’ll grow them.

Also good news, I can assign Sinai to Gaza. Huzzah

We also take the time to quick grab the independent territories in Kamchatka. Sadly, Ming has grabbed the south of the peninsula. With this stuff all centralized, we grant statehood to all of our northern territories.

And good news closer to home, Medina is more than happy to integrate

We’ll leave things here at the dawn of 1760 and a new era that has begun in India

And the state of our corner of the world

[DefinitelyNotADisqus]

Only 60 years left; this world is filled with some huge countries.

[dtolman]

If you look at maps of the late 19th century/early 20th - that’s pretty spot on. Lots of big blobs - France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Ottoman Empire, etc.

[abrandt]

Northern Asia is the area of this globe that hasn’t really consolidated without a Russia stand in. We’re just 100 years too early for some of this stuff.

[DefinitelyNotADisqus]

It’s more Sao, Ajuraan, Mali, the Marathas, Trigata, that stand out (Soqotra gets a pass). The Julicher Franco-German union is also unusual to say the least.

[abrandt]

I started playing around with the EU4 to Vicky 3 converter in preparation for us hitting the end of EU4 soon. I’ll need to do some more tweaking of the settings files once we actually hit the end to come up with a satisfying starting setup for Vicky 3. The converter recommends using its “eurocentric” conversion to avoid a world where all countries are super advanced at the start. Unfortunately, that doesn’t quite match up with our slightly less eurocentric world, especially because it makes nations like, say, Soqotra, into decentralized nations. That makes it unplayable! So I’m going to mess with the converter to make sure our large and advanced nations(like the big African empires we have) all convert as centralized nations. And since the Industrial Revolution seems to have started in India, I’d prefer a spread where starting techs more or less radiate out from there. We’ll have to see how feasible that is.

Regardless, with the Vicky 3 expansion delayed until late June I’m no longer tempted to try to wait for that before we start over there. I’ll aim to get through the 18th century in the next few days and go from there.

[DefinitelyNotADisqus]

Yeah the converters’ really aren’t designed around a non-Europe/Americas playthrough. Starting from Imperator definitely earns you (and the AI nations) the right to have a non-eurocentric 19th and 20th century. :)

[abrandt]

It would work great if Institution spread wasn’t out of control allowing the whole world to stay at max tech all the time. Don’t understand why Paradox hasn’t rebalanced that.

[abrandt]

The Socotran people are still bitter that we’ve been booted to the fringes of the American continents. As a result, we’ve decided on a policy of supporting independent polities there.

So to start, we proclaim a guarantee on Illinois’ independence.

Since we’re feeling especially liberal now, we also abolish slavery across Socotra. Sadly, the replacement trade goods now that we aren’t producing slaves aren’t great.

We also launch a most liberal liberation effort against the Dravidians with the goal of retaking the Maldives after many hundreds of years in their hands.

We succeed, and take some additional lands as interest.

But almost immediately Trigata calls us into this war. If Ming holds up their guarantee this could be a bloody affair.

Which they do. However, I didn’t realize that Trigata is also allies with Carthago Nova. If they contribute we should be in good shape.

And things had been going well until Marathas decided to jump in on the other side.

Which very quickly shifts things against us. Trigata is falling as are many of our territories. Amdo offers us a way out that will only cost ducats. We’ll take it.

After licking our wounds we decide to take advantage of Tabiene’s weak alliance network. Taking full control of the Persian Gulf has a lot of appeal. Plus it’ll make us feel better about the Indian behemoth on our doorstep.

Much better!

[DefinitelyNotADisqus]

I like that haven’t made yourself an unstoppable behemoth, although EU4 is usually good about providing at least one opponent that can still challenge the player by the 18th century. Congrats on seizing control of the Persian Gulf; they’re gonna have to rename it to the Soqotran Gulf soon enough. :)

[abrandt]

This setup has been harder than a regular EU4 game. Had I not gone and released a bunch of nations at the start things might have been different, but with such big powers from the start it’s been a challenge. Not that I’ve been trying to play optimally here, but I did intend to take more of the Horn region of Africa but Ajuraan’s had strong alliances all game that have prevented that.

[abrandt]

Speaking of making things harder, let’s shake things up a bit in the last few decades!

Without doing much research I installed the Responsible Blobbing mod, which seemingly is working fine being inserted to a game in progress.

The thing this is supposed to do is make it way harder to blob. Well, the whole world has already blobbed, so I’m hoping it makes the blobs a little less stable over the last little bit here. Certainly, it’s already made a pretty notable difference with Soqotra:

Yikes!

And of course all that administrative strain means our allies should declare a bunch of wars that they want us to join! Three loans later we get the budget situation settled down, but we’re back at war on the continent thanks to Trigata.

On the bright side, Trigata seems way better at fighting their own wars then they are at supporting us.

That war has been going pretty well, and so far other than the budgetary situation, our absurd governing overages are mostly resulting in lots of rebel whack-a-mole

After growing Gaza, adding some territories to trade companies(the mod is supposed to make territories cost more to govern but make trade companies better for it), and building State Houses in our costliest states, we’ve gotten the governing capacity situation down to this

A long way to go but certainly better than it was.

[abrandt]

Well, it’s after 1810 and no fireworks from the mod. I’m guessing it was just too late with too much available governing capacity and stability. So I make one last ditch effort to juice things to an interesting conclusion. I loaded up as Julich, Ming, and Marathas and declared a dumb war as each. And by dumb war I mean I broke a truce which murdered their stability. And also there was the fact that these are all some pretty major wars. Now, before you accuse me of just going after Socotra’s enemies by cheating, we got pulled into two of these wars too.

Let’s see how things shake out in the last few years!

But ultimately, those wars don’t change too much.

Ming kind of took it on the chin, though.

And no independence in the new world outside of Illinois. Who has continued to grow.

Interestingly, in Scandinavia things kind of blew up for Vastergotland. It’s now quite a fractured place.

And with that we’ve hit Jan 1, 1836 and the end of our time with EU4. Once I get the proper westernization values figured out to center industrialization in Marathas, we’ll pick up in Victoria 3! Barely more than 100 years left on this grand adventure.

[DefinitelyNotADisqus]

This is definitely one of the most unique worlds I’ve seen. Good luck with the conversion and I am excited for what transpires in the next century. I haven’t seen a megacampaign that used Victoria 3 so this will be a new one for me.

[abrandt]

I think this is the conversion I’m going to go with. I don’t like that it has us at #2, but playing around with settings to try to mitigate that moves too much of the pop and economy back to Europe and other places that aren’t as developed in our world.

Something I was pretty torn on was how developed to make East Asia. I ended up bumping them up a little bit but left them low enough to not be recognized at game start. Yes, they are right within range of our central Indian superpower of Marathas, but China had a disastrous end to our EU4 campaign and Korea and Japan have been pretty isolated.

I did make it so that Dai Nam would be recognized from the start as they’ve been super involved in world affairs. As a side effect, Malacca and Blambangan are both recognized, but that seems okay.

I also modified the initial setup so that the kingdoms of Hawaii would not convert as decentralized to more closely match vanilla Vicky 3.

It’s a fun little split between Maui, Oahu, and Hawaii. We’ll see how things play out there.

I did enable the Victoria Tweaks Mod with this. Based on initial startup it seems to not be causing any trouble with the conversion so we’ll roll with that as I like the way it changes some of the game dynamics.

[CraigM]

Out of curiosity who is #1, and what about the conversion for Soquotra didn’t you like?

[abrandt]

Marathas is a deserved #1 and I’ll share the rest of the initial rankings once we going. I think it’s a pretty interesting setup. But first I need to figure out how to add/change cities so that Aden is not our capital!

Anyway, I would have preferred our rank be a little lower to start so that we had more of a hill to climb. But Marathas being right next door could be enough to keep us challenged. Especially with how spread out our holdings are.

[abrandt]

Alright, we’ll just have to deal with our misplaced capital. I can’t make heads or tails of how to do it in the Map Editor and I can’t find any sort of guide online for doing it.

[DefinitelyNotADisqus]

I like the distant Soqotran holdings in Kamchatka and Alaska. Excited to see what chaos awaits us in the next hundred years.

[abrandt]

Alright, let’s get things underway. And by underway I may mostly be messing around with our initial setup to see what kind of trouble we’re in.

But first, the promised world rankings

I’m rooting for Bjarmia and their cool longship flag.

Our standard of living is terrible, so that’s fun. And digging in a bit, it looks like the wealth gap is gigantic. It’s not good to be poor in Soqotra

Looking through the census data, it looks like our real problems lie in places like Borneo. That’s millions of unemployed labors with a SoL of 1. We need to get these people jobs.

We have high literacy, at least.

And our laws look pretty progressive for 1836, all things considered.

We have a ton of excess Bureaucracy to start(I hope it lasts) so we might as well try to pass some form of healthcare to get access to that Institution. The only one we can try right now is Charity Hospitals, so we’ll get that moving.

Speaking of Institutions, here’s where we stand. No wonder we’re so literate.

As far as the government goes, our King(the Timolid dynasty is over 2000 years old!) is part of the Devout interest group. The Devout IG is by far the strongest at game start with a pretty large spread after that. I think we can work with this, although we’ll have to be careful to make sure we can keep up government legitimacy. I’m just happy the Landowners aren’t excessively powerful.

Looking at our initial economic setup, we’ve got some factories, but this feels pretty light on heavy industry. Going to start with some Construction Sectors to help us construct stuff faster, but we’ll need to address the industrial resource base soon too.

Our grain production almost entirely comes from subsistence farms too. Not great for our large population.

And 9 logging camps is nowhere near enough to support our rather sizeable paper industry, let alone construction needs on top of that.

Not entirely sure what to prioritize. I want it all! In the end I queue up some rice and wheat farms for after our construction sectors finish. We’ll move on to industry after we feed the people.

One thing I appreciate the converter did was create Trade Company nations from provinces I had assigned to my trade companies in EU4.

With that it’s gotten late and I haven’t even unpaused! Next time we’ll actually move time forward. We’ll need to remember to address diplomacy too.