After a couple weeks of vacation, continued that game into the mid 1600s:
That's Ferrara doing surprisingly well south of Austria.
I'm bad at taking screenshots as I go, but a huge religious war popped off (not sure if I'd been part of one before) where the major powers were Austria, Commonwealth, Sweden, and Spain for the Catholics, and me, Ottomans, Bohemia, France (I think?), and England for the Protestants. We won, and Bohemia became HRE with Protestant becoming the official religion of the Empire. Weird. So Bohemia (who was my ally at that point) started getting scary powerful and allied with my rival Ottomans, so I switched up my alliances and allied with Persia and France. I waged a successful couple of wars against Commonwealth with a mission I got to take their Ruthenian provinces, but got a coalition against me at the end (was really annoyed about that - I had to either take the last couple provinces for the mission or wait an eternity for a truce) that Bohemia declared on me against Ottomans and France. That didn't go very well for us (France got dunked hard and I was worried about spending 20 years of manpower to try to win a war of attrition against two large countries) and I had to give up my vassalization of Tabrestan, who's doing fairly well south of the Caspian. Austria randomly got the rest of Commonwealth under PU. I allied Georgia and wound up having to defend them against Ottomans - I waited like a month to make sure Bohemia wasn't joining, and then OF ****ING COURSE after I join Ottomans call them in, that war also did not go that well for us. It wasn't terrible but I lost the important fort province of Podolia to Ottomans and lost a couple garbage vassals in Siberia that I quickly reconquered anyway.
After this I decided to take Ottomans more seriously and added Austria (who mostly failboated following the religious war) and Spain to my allies. I'm still allied with France but they're kind of garbage because they don't care about Bohemia or Ottomans (Spain luckily does due to their Italian provinces). I decided that my biggest problem is not having very safe ground to retreat to after losing battles or to form up for attacks, so I got serious about my border with them:
The Ottoman forts are all level 4, the one with Bohemia is level 6. If I understand ZoC rules correctly (which I may well not, **** is confusing sometimes) then neither of them should be able to invade deeper into my territory w/o taking forts down, since I have them every 3 provinces so everything is either in or adjacent to a fort province. This is in the Age of Absolutism where I quickly took the splendor ability (not sure what they're called?) that makes all forts bordering rivals 0 maintenance, so I'm super stoked about those costing me nothing. I also love the change that relieving a fort makes you the defender, forces attacks to be more strategic.
I fought Ming once after declaring on Korchin for a mission, and good lord is it boring to fight wars in Siberia where all your provinces are ~a month of travel apart. Then Ming sneaks troops through Oirat into central Siberia because I can only see like 5 provinces on screen without zooming out so far that armies become invisible and I have to ****ing chase them around. Anyway, that war went well (Ming has a terrifying large army but my tech allowed me to wipe their stacks fairly often) but these northern China provinces are all so ****ty, dunno if I want to spend a lot more time there. At the same time, don't really know where I want to go once I take Crimea/Ukraine/the Caucasus from Ottomans (with my fortified border and new allies, confident I can win now). Once you start expanding outside your culture group, does it really matter where you go? And when I'm super limited by the number of states I can make (I have 38 states, 24 territories, current max of 41 states) is it really that great/helpful to add tons more territorial cores with their 75% local autonomy?
Last edited by goofyballer; 10-04-2017 at 04:48 AM.