Part 7: Getting a Foothold in Egypt

Part 7: Getting a Foothold in Egypt



I wanted to give a quick example of how the other mapmodes can be useful. Switching to the religion mapmode shows us that most of our North African provinces have successfully converted to Catholicism (yellow). The remaining ones are still in the process of being converted, indicated by green (Sunni) with yellow dashes through them.



There are a couple of research milestones that we are quickly approaching. Workshops will be available soon, and we can choose a second national idea at Government Tech 9. I set our production investment slider to maximum for now so we can get access to workshops as soon as possible.



Another slider move becomes available and I move us towards Free Trade once more. We're only 1 tick away from maximum Free Trade, but we are not going to spend our next slider move there. Instead:



We have a national decision that we'll be able to enact soon which provides a free slider move towards Free Trade plus some other nice bonuses. The stability cost modifier is a downside, but its overshadowed by the benefits of this decision. We don't meet the requirements to enact this decision yet, but we will do it as soon as possible.



We have some army tradition built up from previous fighting and accomplishing missions, so I use some of it to recruit some new generals. We're going to need to deploy several armies to fight the Mamlukes. I make sure that every army I plan on sending into the war has a general assigned to lead it.




I'm going to want to deploy all of my troops into the battle quickly, but I can only transport one of my armies at a time with my current navy. Instead of making the trip all the way back to Iberia or Sicily to pick up each army, I sign some military access agreements with the small crusader state of Cyprus and the kingdom of Crete. I can drop my armies off there and then ferry them to Egypt at relatively the same time. I also have military access with The Knights, another small crusader state on Rhodes.



My armies are loaded up one after another and sent over to Cyprus, Crete, and Rhodes to prepare for the invasion.



The ledger worries me somewhat. The Mamluks have a huge army. In every war we've had up to this point I've been able to commit nearly my entire army to the fight relatively quickly, but I'd be careless not to leave troops behind at home when going this far away. That means I need to split my forces up more than before, and I won't have such a numerical advantage.



Burgundy goes to war with every country they can think of and then asks for our help. We join the war, naturally. After all, we don't necessarily need to send troops into battle. If Burgundy is winning decisively on their own, we can just sit back and collect war taxes.



Workshops become available! I'll be building them in every province that we own on Iberia. You may build workshops in oversea provinces eventually (in order to get to counting houses for them), but there are other buildings that should be higher priority there. If you check some of our provinces that are across the sea in North Africa and hover over their tax value, it may say something about them being Distant, Overseas provinces with big tax penalties. The priority to build level 1 or 2 production buildings in those provinces is far lower. Focus on building max tier trade buildings, level 1 docks, or churches everywhere before coming back to production buildings in those oversea provinces.



With Production Tech 8 researched, its time to work on Government Tech. I might actually focus in Government Tech until 11. At 9 we get our second idea, at 10 we get access to a wonderful decision that we can enact in our capital, and at 11 we would get a third national idea.



Burgundy is having little to no trouble picking on its neighbors.



The Hansa sneaks a fleet all the way around from Northern Europe and lands a small force in Malta. Our navy pursues and destroys theirs, then our troops in Sicily are transported over to destroy the Hanseatic army in Malta.



Holland falls to Burgundy next, and becomes a vassal state of Burgundy.



Finally, a good random event. I've been wanting to move towards Plutocracy, but haven't had the chance with all of our slider moves going into Free Trade first. Not only do we get a desirable slider move out of this, but also a big pile of ducats to spend on workshops.



Sweden joins the war against Burgundy and lands some troops in Kent to help The Hansa occupy it. Our navy picks up one of our unoccupied armies in Iberia and then races up to the English Channel where it meets and sinks an entire Swedish fleet.



Our troops land in Kent and break the siege there. I want to get things rolling against the Mamluks, so instead of waiting a siege out I aggressively assault Kent until it is freed from occupation.



With the Hanseatic and Swedish fleets destroyed, I focus my attention back on getting our own war started. Our fleet heads back to the Sea of Crete and begins picking up our armies to land in Egypt.



War is declared on the Mamluks, but I don't call all of our allies in automatically. Instead, I just invite our vassals. I don't want Portugal or Burgundy to poach a province in a region that I plan to engulf for myself.



I hoped that the Mamluks' war with the Timurids and some other horde would keep them too busy to meet me with full force, but I was wrong. I still don't have access to spies since I haven't been able to move into plutocracy yet, so I was unable to see where their armies were before I landed. It becomes immediately apparent that 3 armies isn't going to be enough, so I go pick up the army from Sicily that I had left there to guard against nationalist rebels as reinforcements.



Over 20 enemy regiments are chased down and annihilated by my 3 maneuver general who is consistently able to beat retreating enemies to wherever they are headed, forcing them to suffer the terrain penalty of being an attacker. My armies are getting beaten down though. I control no areas yet where I can retreat to replenish troops and the supply limits everywhere are horrendous.



We keep coming under attack by fresh armies and are forced to break sieges in other provinces to rush in reinforcements. This was about the time that I was worried I may have to beg Morocco for military access so my armies could just flee west into the desert to avoid being wiped out.



Finally, some of our sieges break through enemy defenses. Those occupied enemy provinces have enough of a supply limit that we can actually replenish our armies and not suffer attrition. France smells blood in the water and goes to war with the Mamluks as well, seizing provinces right where I was planning to and avoiding fighting any of the roaming Mamluk armies. This does not make me very happy.



My manpower has been significantly drained by this war. I've been losing soldiers faster than manpower can return and our war exhaustion reached as high as 5 or 6. A random even popped up basically allowing me to either spend a little money to ease the suffering of veteran's families or ignore them and gain manpower. I pay to ease their suffering and it subtracts a bit of war exhaustion.



Government Tech 9 is obtained, and we are allowed to select another idea. All of the ideas I listed back when we picked military drill are still very good contenders, but there is one in particular that we can get now which wasn't available yet during our first pick.



Quest for the New World will allow us to recruit explorers and conquistadors. These leaders can take armies and navies into unexplored regions - terra incognita - and chart them so that they can be traversed by more common travelers and colonized. This is our second idea.



I also enact a religious decision that is available to us as Spain, but wasn't available to Castille. The Spanish Inquisition will make our missionaries even more effective at converting the new land we're about to seize.



With several workshops springing up and all of those rich Aragonese provinces cored and under our control, we get so much census tax with war taxes enabled that I don't need to have the treasury slider turned up at all during wartime.



The war with the Mamluks was extremely bloody and I find an end to it for now. Alexandria is an extremely valuable province since it is home to a CoT. In addition to Alexandria. I also nabbed the Nile Delta province and Jerusalem. These were all high warscore provinces. The next war will be much easier since we have bases of operation directly on their soil and they are deprived of 3 rich provinces worth of wealth and manpower. Missionaries are sent out immediately to each of the provinces and I leave 3 armies behind in the region to prepare for the next war.



Owning the historically important province of Judea with the city of Jerusalem grants us bonus missionaries and prestige every year.



That mission to kick Austria out of Italy is dropped, and we get a new mission to discover new lands in unexplored areas. This is a mission we'll work on.



On the leaders tab we can now recruit explorers and conquistadors. An explorer is recruited to chart the seas and I split 3 carracks off from our navy to create an expeditionary fleet.



The explorer is assigned to our expeditionary navy, and I set them on a patrol path to bounce back and forth between these 2 sea zones. Every time a navy with an explorer enters a sea zone that borders terra incognita, such as these islands, they have a chance to chart it and uncover the fog of war from it. I simply let him bounce back and forth here until he discovers both islands.



Madeira is actually uncovered right away, so I click on it to bring up its window and click on the "Send" button to send a colonist agent there. Sending the colonist will cost 20 ducats, it will take him 60 days to arrive, and his chance of successfully starting a colony there is 99%.



Our explorer discovers the Canary Islands after traveling back and forth a few times and we send a colonist there right away.



The colonist that we sent to Madeira is successful and establishes a Spanish colony there with 100 people. We could send another colonist if we wanted to, and when he arrives the population of the colony would increase by another 100. Even if we don't send another colonist ourselves, colonies will grow by around 50, plus or minus modifiers each year. If there are aggressive natives in the same province as our colony, there's the chance that they will attack it and kill our colonists. If they kill all of our colonists, the province will revert to its original status and become uninhabited (well, except for the natives). Every colony that we own will cost us. We need to pay colonial upkeep each month for every colony that we have. Once a colony reaches a population of 1000, it is no longer considered a colony and needs no further maintenance. At this point, they behave as any other city.



Our explorer heads out to uncover The Azores.



He is successful and a colonist is sent there.



France makes peace with the Mamluks and cozies right up next to me in Egypt. Do they have to border me wherever I go? Once they gain ownership of the province, I gain a "Colonialism" CB against France to seize it from them. I'm tempted to make use of that, seize their land in Egypt, and shatter their country into vassal states for Burgundy to eat.



Once these colonies grow and become cities, we will have some fantastic bases in the Atlantic that will act as stepping stones to more distant colonization.