There is an event to end that war that gives you the territories down to Palestine. Not sure what the triggers are. In my Ottoman game I had several Great Powers join my side in that war so it was a cakewalk.
I guess the way this one played out that didn’t happen, I ground this war to the very end taking every single territory and never got more than repeated offers for puppet, no annexation. It was nice to have Prussia on side keeping I assume other greats from joining in on the fun. But in the end I was disappointed by only getting the puppet status back.
Well that is going to make things interesting for the Ottoman Empire.
What a time for the Egypt AI to choose the low percentage event option. If I remember rightly, usually you get to annex Ottoman cores held by Egypt via an event that can fire if the Egyptians are losing the war. Only problem is Egypt has a small chance of being stubborn and choosing the other option in the event that determines whether the Ottoman annexation event fires.
Yeah, and the amusing part about is I was stubborn and refused the puppet offers thrown at me a dozen times and continued grabbing regions until I had every single one only to end with the same outcome: puppet.
I thought if I took them all the option for annexation would come up, never did.
Such are the fortunes of war, and speaking of that, my army is decimated. Which isn’t terribly surprising, I ran an extended war in the desert where supply lines were all red. Now I’m left wondering how long or even if I can rebuild the army in HPM Vic2?
This is why I enjoy this one. You make decisions and flow with the outcomes and because there are enough variables in play your fate is neither preordained nor entirely under your control.
Dispatches from the Ottoman Empire:
The troops hadn’t even gotten back from Egypt before we received news Persia had tossed our ambassador out of the country and put the Ottoman embassy under siege:
This is not the sort of public humiliation a Great Power tolerates and we promptly declared on Persia, our allies Prussia and Egypt joined in the campaign to bring Persia to heel, and fortunately Prussia in particular agreed as they still had forces in the region:
The Generals wanted to add the war demand of making Persia a puppet rather than bringing them back into our sphere of influence, the diplomatic core were gun shy about expanding our demands after just coming off the disappointing Egyptian campaign and pointed out this could very well prove a good way to increase the empires infamy and leave us with nothing to show for it because the peace terms would be negotiated by Prussia as lead and not the Ottomans. Why risk further humiliation?!
The Monarchy took the path of caution and worked to quickly subdue Persia and not surprisingly Prussia accepted Persian peace terms in December 1846:
The military is muttering a great deal now about the constant bleeding out with nothing but status quo to show for it. Is it the fate of the empire to simply tread water and slowly bleed out?
As if to immediately answer that very question, Bohtan the neighbor of Persia revolted having not learned the lesson from Egypt and Persia. So the new year of 1847 starts with yet another rebellion:
Prussia has grown weary of the constant requests for aid one after another and declines to join, hardly surprising. The Ottoman army, or at this point what’s left of it, will have to bring Bohtan back in the empire alone:
So we mobilized as irregulars are at present the only resource available to us, and finished the campaign as quickly as possible which we did:
The good piece of news here is these were viewed as core to the Ottoman Empire and treated as conquest, the peace brought Bohtan fully into the empire! As we close out 1847 we’ll take what good news we can get and celebrate!
Huzzah, finally the direct holdings on the empire grow!
Makes up for having to settle for returns to the status quo elsewhere. Now hopefully the army gets a chance to get some much needed R&R in, the last thing they need is even more fighting if Prussia ain’t up for joining in.
Last dispatches for the day incoming…
May 1848
The constant state of war has at least for the time being abated. With half a million in the bank we set about running a deficit to do some guns and butter, get the people fed and happy while recruiting a new army at the same time. And since we’ve no factories, we invested in two of them in our sphere of influence allies (factories by proxy as it were):
August 1848, old news has come back to haunt us yet again in the form of a final resolution to a crisis we had believed resolved, the Oriental Crisis came back for one last hurrah forcing us to make a decision whether to annex Egypt once and for all, we chose to do so:
Here is the new current map of the Ottoman Empire:
This came at a cost, inexplicably Prussia terminated our alliance and Russia became a good deal more hostile while Egypt we’ve been warned by the embassy there is a hot bed of militants and we should expect trouble.
While this of course means our diplomats need to go earn their keep again and get back on the hunt for a Great Power ally, the upside is huge. The Ottoman Empire over night nearly doubled it’s population from 5.5M to 8.92M. This catapulted the Ottoman Empire just behind France in 4th for population, this means greater production capacity and just as importantly a greatly increased military recruitment capability.
As if to remind the diplomatic corp of the need to get on with the business of a new alliance, the news at the end of the year is something we’re seeing all too often, Russia expanding again:
And on our northern border the Austrians are on the move declaring on Hungary earlier in the year with what looks to be plans of annexation:
Will they succeed only time will tell.
January 1849
It was good to be King, but all good things come to an end, the new year brings news that the Ottoman Empire has adopted a Limited Constitutional Monarchy, elections to be held mid year:
The last bit of news from the new year is the possibility of alliance. Our man in Austria is telling us they’re willing to form an alliance. The question on the table is should we or do we hold out for a more powerful Great Power? It makes a certain amount of sense, they’re already on our border and if they succeed in annexing Hungary will be bordering still more of our empire. It would make a clean front against potential Russian encroachment and a buffer against a direct land war in Europe.
We’re mulling it over, here are the stats of the Great Powers we’re reviewing:
Oh, interesting. I was wondering if that event might fire, I don’t remember the triggers so had no idea if we might see it or not. Once again making all those manpower losses sustained trying to trigger an annexation of Egypt in the first war a painful learning lesson.
It will be interesting to see whether you accept Austria’s diplomatic offer. Could certainly be a mutually beneficial agreement at this time.
How hard would it be to industrialise the western part of what is now Turkey.?
I’m leaning towards it, but figured I’d save at that point and give it a think. I’ve improved relations with Great Britain as much as you can and get no indication of movement, so I may have to go with the bird in hand.
I’m definitely going to industrialize anywhere I can and get rail roads in (don’t have tech for either right now). The problem I’m going to continually run into is I’m running a country of dummies. For comparison purposes, USA starts in 1836 already at 40% literacy, I’ve spent 15 years focusing on increasing it and I’m at whopping 10%.
Haha. If you wanna be dumb, you better be tough.
Why learn to make that which you can forcefully claim through military action. Let everyone else be smart for you, haha. Seriously though, educating the nation is going to be a serious long-term task for the Ottomans.
Gotta have those Clerks!
My solution for kickstarting industrialization in my Ottoman game was to change ruling party to the Reactionary and build some starter factories myself. Having a factory in the state is a big boost to capitalist promotion. That was easy for me to do since I did it before allowing any elections, in this easytarget’s case, people are going to get a bit upset if he overrides the elected government.
In HPM, child labor has a big hit on education efficiency. Getting rid of that and getting a government education system in place seem to be about as important as actually going down the research path that boosts education efficiency. I’m up to 1915 in my game and have gotten literacy up to 80+%. Had I gotten child labor reforms in place sooner I’d be over 90%.
I think I’m going to play this one to the end and am hoping to post some screenshots of where things end up. My focus has been on trying to fix the internal issues within the empire rather than trying to expand much. In fact, I released some puppet states in the Balkans very early on to avoid issues there. Interesting things that have happened:
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Austria went through a rough patch when Hungary declared independence. Mix of rebellions and some Great Power help(I think from Prussia) helped Hungary win the war. Austria very quickly lost Great Power status. I took Hungary into my sphere as fast as I could and they’ve been excellent allies the entire game. They’ve since taken additional states from Austria. At one point Austria was completely overrun with rebellions over the course of about 5 years and at the end had its government overthrown 3 times in less than 12 months. I’ve had to be careful about letting Hungary take too much of Austria as they’ve been hovering right around #9 and #10.
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Russia similarly ran into major rebellion trouble in the early to mid game and fell to secondary power status for a couple of decades after they also had their government overthrown multiple times.
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I didn’t see it happen, but the CSA retained their independence. After the Civil War was over Mexico even came in and reclaimed Texas. However, a later war returned Texas to the CSA. It seems as though the event that ends the war took away all of the US cores on any CSA territories, so no further war has happened between the USA and the CSA, including the odd CSA exclave of South Dakota.
I’ll have to see about fixing that. I may also as suggested above resort to brute force too.
Yeah, think my ship as sailed on this, I’m in bed with some form of democracy it looks like, for good or bad.
Good timing on playing the same nation! Interesting to see how differently they play out.
One other thing I haven’t been able to figure out with HPM is how to get any cultural assimilation as the Ottomans. You start the game with a couple of big modifiers that hurt assimilation but boost your tax efficiency. Even with those gone I’ve had zero assimilation.
Always interesting seeing multiple people play as the same nation and seeing how they uniquely handle events and circumstances.
Feb 1849
Well, we slept on the decision to ally with Austria and came to the conclusion it was the best path forward, made the offer and it was accepted. Upon the signing of the alliance they provided intel of the annexation war effort with Hungary, here it is:
Looks like they’ve got superior numbers in country moving the process along nicely.
The alliance was apparently not viewed as good news by the Russians and two days after the signing they’ve already started bad mouthing us to the Hungarians:
May 1849
While we continue the rebuilding phase of our professional army the foreign office has been instructed to turn it’s focus towards the small nations to the south and southeast of Egypt and see what they can accomplish with words rather than bullets:
The military for it’s part is willing to bide their time while they rebuild, but once that’s completed all bets are off as they’ll likely start clamoring for fields of glory once again.
July 1849
The first elections are held, conservatives are in power:
The semi-constitutional monarchy looks forward to meeting demands for reform in a semi fashion.
Jan 1850
Military rebuild is essentially complete. We’ll need to start plans on where to direct them, lest they get restless and begin causing mischief. The elections changed nothing in terms of the upper house, conservatives still in control.
The really good news for the end the year is the capitalists have finally seen there way clear to begin investing in factories!!
And because the Monarchy is anxious to make quick head way industrializing we’ve more than met the capitalists half way thru investments so speed the process along!
Feb 1850
The Austrians have completed their annexation conquest of Hungary! Since we’re in alliance, once we’ve spent some effort insuring is on firm footing, this is good news for us both:
Combined we’re militarily almost on par with Russia, and should it prove necessary the military believes in a defensive engagement our combined arms would likely prove sufficient.
June 1850
Read in the paper the Greeks are worried about our strength and fear military intervention, our diplomats who have been working to shore up relations are puzzled as they felt they were making progress?!
2nd half of 1850
We’ll go ahead and name it for what it is: infrastructure year! We started the year with zero factories and closed it out with seven! Heavy state investment accelerated the pace of industrialization as the monarchy knows all too well we’re playing catch up to the other majors!
As can be painfully seen in this intel on the relative strengths of the top 8 Great Powers, the Ottoman Industrial power is, well, pathetic:
But we’re on the road to fixing it!
The decision that awaits us: where to focus the military next. One thought of course is to let them take over from the diplomats as they’d threatened to do a year and a half ago. In their eyes the foreign office has had long enough to show progress and so far all they’ve to show for themselves are regional wars between those nations resulting in chaos and diminished populations.
Sounds like some fun times ahead for the military. Though, the whole country will be busy really, ain’t no brakes on the industrialization train.
I’m most worried by research and technology, it’s quite slow going and gives every indication of staying that way for awhile yet.