Victoria 2

Great Britain has spheres scattered all over the map so odds are they’ll come in conflict with Russia depending on the directions Russia tries to expand. I don’t know whehter they’re explicitly geared to come into conflict.

And so begins the enlightened rule of the Ottoman Empire but easytarget. Time to buckle up and enjoy the ride.

Sometimes it is more like “Who doesn’t Great Britain come into conflict with?”, especially after the Heart of Darkness expansion added the Crises mechanic. When you have territories and spheres of influence all over the globe there are plenty of potential flashpoints.

I haven’t played Vicky 2 as much as other Paradox titles, but do enjoy the AARs and streams. There is a good streamer on Twitch, Dridlicious, that usually starts as some small tag with the goal of becoming #1 great power. Sometimes with clean borders, but can also have some bordergore when viewers dictate CB target.
He was playing Mosquito Kingdom this weekend, but ran into a HFM bug that allowed Nicaragua to annex them by decision and crash the game.

Well, turns out it didn’t take much for me to get the urge to boot up the game again for yet another playthrough. So far Vicky 2 still as good as ever in my eyes, maybe I’ll join in on the AAR fun.

The more the merrier! What nation are you contemplating leading to glory and fame?

Good question, just been dabbling around with the USA so far to re-familiarize myself with some of the mechanics. Most of this stuff is like riding a bicycle again, but it helps refresh my understanding and memory of the game’s finer points.

Currently tempted to pick one of the Secondary Powers and try to turn them into a Great Power; a list including Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Sardinia-Piedmont, Mexico and Brazil in 1836. Alternatively, Russia and Austria provide interesting options as Great Powers, whilst I could also try to reverse Spain’s slow demise as a great power for a similar style of challenge.

Do dueling Ottomans!

-Tom

Update from the front, Tunis and Egypt as expected answered the call and quickly moved in to help secure the regions of Tripoli.

Last remaining Tripoli resistance taken out by the Egypitians:

The Ottoman army helped speed the process and by latter part of 1836 the conquest was complete:


No new resources of any consequence were obtained unfortunately.

As for developments on the diplomatic front to round out 1836. By Christmas Santa showed up with some coal in our stocking and maybe a gift of our own making.

First the coal. The Russians are on the move. The intel below shows they invaded Caucasia on their southern border and created a sphere of Armenia, both of which now border our north eastern border. The question on everyone’s mind is: is that where they stop? We don’t have the army or manpower to take on the bear.

Also troubling, the July paper had this in it, looks like the French and the Russians are becoming fast friends:

An effort is underway to contain this, the Ottoman diplomats have been instructed to improve relations with Great Britain in particular at any cost, and hedge that bet by also working on Prussia and Austria. One of them better pay off so we’re not left the solitary sick man of Europe.

So, what’s the good news diplomatically? Well, let’s just say you take what you can get. In an effort to forestall Greece becoming a problem diplomats have been working the last several months to fabricate the basis for declaring war with them with an eye towards pulling them into the Ottoman sphere of influence (at the point of a gun). It’s for their own good really. Here’s the status report from diplomatic team working on it:

And it just so happens the rising military star General Omar Vrioni is on the border with 27,000 men and the old school merciless General Abdi Pasha with 30,000, the Greek ambassador has been assured this is merely a military exercise:

And one last bit of news, heard from Great Britain they are drifting further apart from France, as are we. Could this change the minds of the British about an alliance who have thus far rebuffed us? Only time will tell.

Ah yes, Russia doing what Russia likes to do best. Aggressively expanding, or exerting their Sphere of Influence, in the Caucasus.

Some GamersGate keys can be registered on Steam. I was able to do it for some of my games a while ago - I can’t remember which.

I thought I tried this for Victoria 2 and it didn’t work. A shame, since I would love to have this on Steam rather than go through the manual download and patching process of Gamersgate. First world problems, I know.

I think I’m done with my Sardinia-Piedmont game. The Italian Unification requirements/decisions are pretty opaque to me in HPM and being squished between France and Austria is no fun. The limits on alliances between Great Powers meant as soon as I became one I couldn’t manage getting one of the other big boys to ally with me. Not sure if the key is staying a secondary power until later on or what. The decision to demand the rest of Northern Italy from Austria requires either being in France’s sphere or being allied with them, which makes me think I need to stay a secondary power since allying with France as a great power was impossible.

That does sound like a bit of a squeeze play.

I expect bad things are on the horizon for the Ottomans as well in the not too distant future, all it will take is a crisis where everyone chooses a side for me to get squeezed. And I doubt very much Russia is going to stay allied with us, the benefits are all to Ottomans and not the Russians.

If at some point we can get an alliance with another great besides Russia I’m jumping at it, because I’m betting our long term survival will depend on it.

Did you turn on early crises in your game? My understanding is in default HPM the crisis feature doesn’t get enabled until after 1870. If not, that may get you enough time to right the ship before a crisis turns against you.

I saw a bunch of options loaded in decisions early on, I wasn’t sure what to do with them and just left them to pop when and if they do. Hopefully my choices were the default and I get no crises till 1870!

Guess I’m going to find out.

Latest news from the front (1837):

Upon completion of casus belli to sphere Greece the Ottomans declared and promptly marched in and began occupying regions to compel agreement to our terms.

And while we’re deeply suspicious of our Ally Russia given their recent occupation efforts at our border, we reached out diplomatically to enlist their support in the war and were genuinely surprised they not only agreed but rather swiftly sent troops to help in the effort (as did Wallachia):

This had an upside and a downside, as is the case with most things. The upside is we got a large army to speed occupation and presumably kept other majors from joining in on the Greek side and causing mischief, but the downside (while minor) this made Russia the controlling party in the negotiation for peace terms. This raised concerns as to what terms they would accept and we were simply left hoping we’d get what we set out for.

The paper carried news of our war:

And fortunately our concerns about what Russia would accept for peace were unfounded as we got exactly what we started the war for:

And the paper followed up with more news when Greece surrendered and became an Ottoman Sphere!

The Ottoman diplomats are continuing to work and as yet succeed in recruiting a major power into an alliance, the foreign ministry is beginning to question whether being an ally with Russia is the impediment.

Also on the home-front, growing concerns about literacy, our focus on it so far has moved the needle very little from 7.1% to 7.7% in a year and a half, pretty dismal. One can only wonder long term what happens militarily if we fall behind technologically…

With Russia being a Great Power your alliance with them is quite possibly being an impediment to sealing an alliance with another of the Great Powers. I am not as familiar with HPM as the base game but with Heart of Darkness, if I remember corectly, the game tries to limit how many Great Powers fellow Great Powers are allied with until reaching the era of The Great War (World War 1).

1838 News, Queen Victoria crowned:

Concerns over the presence of French troops near Tunis led to a diplomatic effort focused on bringing Algeria next door into the Ottoman sphere of influence and mid year met with success:

Whether this brings us into potential conflict with France down the road remains to be seen. The possibility was made more likely by the hotly debated decision to end the Russian alliance, the wisdom of which was still more hotly debated when almost immediately France and Russia allied. No one in the foreign office was sacked over this, yet…

Speaking of questionable competence, it took our scientists 2 and a half years to complete our first research:

We immediately asked them to dive into medicine to help with our military supply lines.

Egypt who had proved a reliable puppet up to now, suddenly was not and a crisis is now upon us:

The Ottoman Empire if it’s to hope to remain an empire had no choice but to declare and begin the Egyptian conquest. The November 1840 paper makes mention of it as well:

The generals are given their orders, the populace mobilized and war it is, initial intel form the front lines shows the following:

We still have more than half of Egyptian territory to capture to press home the conquest, we’ve enlisted our allies Algeria, Ha’il and Tunis to help. !841 saw a lot of casualties

We continued work on the diplomatic even during the war and brought near by Persia into our sphere of influence, here is a current map:

By the latter part of 1842 our armies are pretty depleted and on foreign soil so reinforcements are difficult, so we greeted with open arms the news Prussia not only offered to join the war but allied with us as well. While this isn’t the hoped for Great Britain alliance we’d been working on, it is still a Great Power alliance w/ a formidable land army nation and we’ll happily take it!

On a less happy note, our armies have been bled dry in the Egyptian Campaign resulting in our ranking slipping to 8th, we need to press this war home and complete the Egyptian conquest so we can rebuild our army and insure we don’t drop out of Great Power status!

Ah yes, now the real fun begins! Time to hopefully put those plucky Egyptians back in their rightful place as servants to the Ottoman Empire.

Update from the Egyptian Campaign.

The war dragged on far longer than we would have hoped. Here is status as of late 1844:

The Egyptians offered to resume their role as a puppet was declined in the belief if we continued to press the war and take more regions an option for annexation would come up:

In the midst of the war the French no doubt sensing vulnerability pounced on Algeria who requested our help but we were forced to decline as our resources are fully committed in Egypt:

And since the news in 1844 was going badly it wasn’t surprising to get some more in the form of a potato blight that decimated our agricultural production:

By 1845 war exhaustion led us to conclude that conquering further regions in Egypt was apparently not going to produce a diplomatic outcome of annexation as the only offers repeatedly made by Egypt was to resume puppet status which we reluctantly agreed to and below is the current map status of the empire as a result (Mid year 1845):

After 5 long years the Oriental Crisis is resolved, sort of, but the price has been high and what we’ve got to show for it is nothing more than what we began with.

From a RGO and manpower standpoint the desire had been annexation of Egypt however it looks like that was never in the cards to begin with because you can’t annex puppets.

The Ottoman army and diplomatic corp are left wondering was there a path forward that would have resulted in annexation?