Part 3: Update 3 (Sept 1837 - Feb 1844): Local Conflict, Growth, and the Elections of 1840

Our budget settings are growing our treasury, which is good. We're up to 14,000 now. We'll need much more than this in order to start actually industrializing, but I'd want to get a few industry-related technologies and raise our literacy to at least around 30% before doing so, anyway. Pops with at least 30% literacy will promote into craftsmen (factory workers) much, much easier than at any point before 30%.



Our literacy has increased a bit, but we still have a tremendous amount of work to do here.



We're still a secondary power, but our position is pretty tenuous. Since our industry is non-existent and our military is actually quite small and weakened, we're pretty much relying on our prestige to keep us propped up here for now.



Our armies have been worn thin by the war with Bolivia. Several of our regiments are now from undermanned pops which can no longer properly support the regiments. We'll have to see if we can do something to promote a little soldier pop growth in the near future.



A random event pops up and offers us a couple of choices on how to deal with it. In this case, we're given the opportunity to either institute a school curriculum which would promote Brazilian culture in non-accepted pops, or to leave it alone. Doing this would give us a pittance of research points, but also give us a daily research point penalty for several years. It also claims to increase assimilation rate, but I would have to say that I've never seen an assimilation bonus from an event like this actually tip the scales and start assimilating a culture which wasn't assimilating already. We don't really need this, and I'd rather not reduce our daily gain for 4 years, so I choose 'Never mind'.



Our military spending slider is moved up from 50% to 100%. Hopefully, this will help bolster some of our depleted soldier pops. Setting national foci for soldiers would be even better, but I want to keep working on bureaucrats for a bit longer.



Chile almost immediately gets into another war, and again they call for us to join them. I'd actually prefer to focus on some domestic issues for a while, and I'm trying to give our military a chance to recover anyway. I decline to help Chile this time.



Another event happens to us. A military officer in Bahia has spoken out against slavery, raising the militancy of all slave pops there.



We can look at the slave pops in Bahia from the population screen. Sure enough, they've skyrocketed to 8.56 militancy. The red and black flag tells us what kind of rebel group they would be a part of if they were to rise up: Reactionaries. That's actually kind of odd, because Reactionaries are completely opposed to passing reforms, and ending slavery would definitely be reform.



We can see potential rebels on the movement tab of the Politics window, too. This rebel faction is actually still in a state of organizing, and isn't in any danger of rising up right now. Changes in policy or in our population's militancy can cause this faction to either grow in strength and volatility, or weaken and eventually die out.



Our bureaucrat population is getting pretty good as we near the 1840s. We don't necessarily need to promote bureaucrats all the way to 100%. Just getting close is good enough. Our 100% funding of administration on the budget screen will take care of the rest over time. I'd like to try and replenish some of our soldier pops before beginning on clergy, so I take a look at our highest population states. Rio already has over 4% soldiers, which is a pretty decent amount.



Bahia is only around 1.2% soldiers, though. We could stand to raise that to at least 3%, if not higher.



The soldier promotion foci are set in Bahia and Minas Gerais, our second and third most populated states.



Another event gives us the chance to gain a large amount of liberal support in our upper house. Extra liberal support in the upper house may allow us to pass a political reform, and would really like to end slavery.



That was a big boost to liberal support in the upper house, but it wasn't quite enough. We're getting close, though. We only need a majority of support in the upper house to pass a reform, and currently we have around 43% of ours willing to act. Notice how all of our liberal upper house is willing to support a political reform, while only a small amount of conservatives are. Generally, liberals will always want to pass political reforms, socialists will always want to pass social reforms, and conservatives will only want to pass reforms if there's a large outcry for them.



Unfortunately, our upper house is rearranged and we lose a large portion of the liberal support that we just got. Every year on January 1st, the composition of the upper house is rearranged to more closely match the political demographics of our voters. Think of it as mid-term elections.



Our NFs set to promote soldier growth are really taking their time for some reason, and I don't particularly feel like waiting any longer before working on our clergy. We can revisit our manpower problems after our education issue is tackled.



Our two foci are switched to promote clergy in Rio and Bahia.



On January 1, 1840 our first major election takes place. In Constitutional Monarchies, such as Prussian Constitutionalism and HM's Government (which is what we have), our people get to vote for the party to lead our upper house every 4 years. We have the ability to override their choice and just place whatever party we want in power, which we've already done once, but doing this too much will eventually build up a great deal of unrest in our population. The voting lasts for 6 months, and during this time we will receive a series of events that allows us to gradually shift the ideologies of our pops. This allows us to somewhat steer our people towards a certain party in the long term.



On July 1, the voting will conclude and we'll see whether our Partido Liberal remains in power, or if another party is elected to replace them.



Shortly after the election starts, we receive an event that looks like this. This event allows us to bolster support for a specific issue in one of our states. In this case, the event allows us to give a slight boost to support for any of the economic policies. I'd prefer for our liberal party to stay in power if we can help it, since they have that protectionist trade policy which lets us set high tariffs. This event doesn't have anything to do with trade policy, but what we could do is bolster support for Interventionism, which is the economic policy that our liberal party adheres to. If I can't directly influence our pops towards protectionism, I'll just try to steer them towards sharing every other political view of the party that has protectionism.



Another event. This time, it's a debate over citizenship policy. I choose raise support for Residency since that matches with our liberal party's platform.



This time, the event allows us to only affect our pop's view towards the 'Full Citizenship' issue. Every option for this event will raise support for full citizenship to some degree. Since I want to steer towards Residency for now in order to keep our liberal party in power, I choose to raise it as little as possible: 5%.



The election is over, and my strategy didn't really bear fruit during this election. Conservatives win in a landslide.



Research into Ideological Thought completes, giving us an additional national focus to use. I place our third NF in our third highest population state to promote clergy along with our other foci.



Back in the Culture tab of the Technology window, I choose to research Idealism next. The technologies in this Philosophy column are all geared towards increasing our daily research points. We'll need all the help we can get to keep up with the more advanced, more literate major powers.



With our conservative party back in power, we are once again prevented from setting high tariffs.



We've built up enough of a treasury by 1840 though that this isn't exactly the end of the world. Our treasury is actually holding steady. In fact, I'm going to use some of that treasury that we've built up on a few building projects:



The only naval base that we have is in our capital province of Rio. Each state can have 1 naval base, regardless of how many coastal provinces it has. Naval bases are important for both our military score and for colonization. We have a capacity called 'Colonial Points' which is determined by our number naval bases and their current levels. Higher level naval bases also contribute more points towards our naval unit caps, allowing us to field more and larger vessels. Having a powerful navy can contribute a large amount of military score to a nation, raising its overall ranking.

Whether or not we decide to try and colonize, we're going to want some naval bases in order to field a strong navy in the future. To that end, I queue up one naval base to be constructed in each of our coastal states.



We can see all of our constructions queued up in the outlier. They are still sitting idle for now with 1080 days until completion. Construction will not begin on them until each project has collected the required materials for building to begin. It shows how many materials are still needed when hovering over an entry on the outlier. So far, this one has collected a bit of timber and .20 units of machine parts. These materials will be collected automatically through the AI's management of our stockpiles.



Another thing that I turn my attention to is our undermanned armies. Even after a few years, our armies are still suffering from undermanned brigades because some of our soldier pops have never recovered to above 1000 size. There is a yellow skull icon at the top of the army panel which will disband the regiments in that army. Next to it, there's a red skull icon which will disband only the regiments in that army which come from undersized pops. I do this for both of our armies, leaving us only with 2 standing regiments of infantry.



On our military tab, I queue up one regiment from each of our remaining 6 soldier pops: 2 more infantry, 3 artillery, and 1 cavalry. This will give us an army that will automatically array itself on the battlefield as a line of 4 infantry units in front, 3 artillery behind them providing support, and a unit of cavalry attemping to flank from the sides. The cavalry also has a stat called recon, which helps us occupy provinces more quickly.

I still plan to go into a little deeper detail on army compositions and unit types, but our military capacity is still so poor that it's hard for me to demonstrate it right now. I plan to get around to it once we have access to more unit types and once it's easier for us to field more sizable armies.



Our new single army should be far more effective than our previous two smaller armies, though. With the artillery backing up our infantry, we'll be focusing our fire on a smaller, narrow front instead of spreading it out along a wide one.



Now that we have a real army again, I take a look at what unclaimed Brazilian core provinces are still out there. Diplomatic map mode shows us that Paraguay has one. Bolivia is shaded in dark blue because we have a truce with them.



Declaring war for unclaimed core provinces is simple. Normally, you need to justify a war against another nation, which takes time and costs infamy. In the case of core provinces, we'll always have a just cause to take them back whenever we want to. We can open diplomacy with Paraguay quickly by clicking anywhere in their territory on the map, and then clicking on their circular flag icon. Once in diplomacy with them, we click Declare War, then choose the reason: Acquire Core, and then pick the specific core: Paraguayan Mato Grosso. Then, we can hit Proceed and go into battle.



Our army takes losses to attrition while in enemy territory. This is indicated by the tiny skull icon in the lower right of our army's icon. But, our size and the presence of a recon unit makes our occupation of the province much faster than before. The faster we can get in and out, the fewer total losses we'll suffer. Paraguay sends a small force into our territory, but our mobilized forces will be able to gather and move on them before they make any real progress.



It doesn't take long before the majority of Paraguay is occupied. Argentina actually came into the war on the side of Paraguay, but their armies were not seen at any point during this war. Eventually, they negotiate on behalf of the defeated Paraguay and offer us terms, which we accept.



Our research into Idealism completes, and our daily research points receive a healthy boost.



For our next research goal, we go back to the Social Thought column on the culture tab. Positivism will further increase our literacy gain, and with the research boost from Idealism we'll receive it even sooner.



As time passes we begin to receive inventions from our previously researched technologies. These are welcome bonuses, and they neither cost us anything, or require any input from us..



Meanwhile, our nation's average militancy is slowly ticking upwards. I had predicted in an earlier update that I thought it would go down, but I was wrong! I think that the issue of slavery is causing the majority of this militancy, and I suspect that if we manage to outlaw it, we'll see a decrease.



There is one good effect from the rise in militancy: it is encouraging our conservative upper house to take action. There was a screenshot from earlier in this update where only 10% of our conservative upper house was willing to vote to outlaw slavery, but now with the rising militancy and consciousness in our nation we have 20% of the conservative upper house supporting reform.



Our research of Positivism concludes in early 1844. Back to the Technology window we go:



I could go down to the next tech in social thought to increase our literacy gain even more, but there's something else I want to work towards first. We're going to need to get Basic Chemistry in the Chemistry and Electricity column of the Industry tab. The only thing that Basic Chemistry provides us with is the ability to construct fertilizer factories, but that's not the reason I'm getting it. We want Basic Chemistry because of the technology that comes immediately after it: Medicine.



Medicine, along with the rest of the technologies in this column all provide an increase to our Supply Limits. What this means is that we can support larger armies in our own territory without having them suffer losses to attrition. However, the main reason I want to get Medicine as soon as possible is because of the three potential inventions that I've indicated in boxes. Getting these 3 inventions would provide us with a total +0.06% to our population growth in all of our provinces. This doesn't sound like much, but take a look at what our current population growth is:



Rio's population growth is only +0.05% per month. Getting those 3 inventions as soon as possible will more than double our normal population growth. Population is extremely important. We need it to gather from our RGOs, to fill our treasury from taxation, to work in our factories and to fight in our armies.