100% World Dom - Sun-Baked Steel

[eschelar]

Well it has been a few years, but I got the itch and a few months ago, I got a new laptop. I also had a chance to sort out my steam account and on the last Chinese New Year promotion, spent about 150 bucks on Steam with 75-90% off titles. Yum. Included was ETW, all the DLC packs, NTW and more...

So I thought I'd give it a go with my 100% world dom with a handicap. I was going to do "Cold Hard Steel", which has no gunpowder units of any sort, but I chose Maratha and quickly discovered why that won't work out as I hoped. Generals are gunpowder units. Also, many of the units I thought were available to the Maratha are not actually available, leaving them with just two melee units and a bunch of cav. Because of this, I am allowing myself to keep the gunpowder units from the beginning of the game, but not to recruit any. They may replenish in the field, but no more units of those types will be recruited. I believe it was 3 units of Hindu Musketeers and 3 units of Bargir Infantry. Might have been one more of musketeers, but I've only got 3 left.

So I've made a "soft" handicap, where I am restricting myself to no gunpowder units can be trained for combat. I got to 1746 and started entering Europe and discovered that I also cannot recruit any melee units *anywhere* in Europe. So I will be bringing melee units from North America and India, but due to the huge amount of time required to do this (not to mention the upkeep costs), I have also started to recruit mob units simply as placeholders. They will not be allowed to fight (not that they are much use in a fight anyhow), but they will be used as non-combat pawns on the campaign map and as police forces to help keep the order. If combat is entered with a mob unit, they will be moved to the edges of the combat zone and if all other units fail, they will be instructed to flee.

I'm calling this "sun-baked steel" as a handicap. Which is pretty meaningless overall, but it is what it is. Difficulty is VH/VH and there are no naval restrictions.

Fascinating to use this as an introduction to an updated game. There are *MANY* updates and the game experience is significantly different from the first two speed campaigns (I do not use map travel exploits and limit myself to 5 "lifelines" cheeze type moves for the entire campaign - and these are restricted to responses to illogical behavior by the AI).

Some of the fun things include - dramatically more lively diplomacy (yeah, you can trade a lot more with tech and such with other nations than before... but your friends will still declare war on you just to liven things up - I have declared war on a single nation so far... and about 60% are at war with me), naval invasions work now! Yum! and trade theater nodes can now be attacked properly. The game also seems to be very aware of how to wage an economic war. In previous games, I would typically have 30-50,000 income per turn by 1730, but while I do have a potential of around 25,000 (net) per turn right now, I've collected less than half that for 80% of the last 40 turns. Much of my campaign has seen me making do with 3000-5000/turn and the game seems to try very hard to keep my income in that range via raiding and blockading.

There are still bugs a-plenty though. I cannot put agents on boats, they disappear altogether. France declared war on me from Carnatica with 6 units and suddenly sent a 6 unit army of the same composition against Hyderabad - no naval dropoff and no other way for them to recruit 6 units in Carnatica in a single turn. Persia had an entire fleet of ships (with a significant army on board, headed for *any* of my ports) turn invisible and the ships could not be interacted with in any way unless they entered a circle of influence and I had the opportunity to intercept. VH/VH naval battles seem ridiculously skewed for morale. Taking more than 30% damage makes even my admiral's ships surrender, even when I have massive superiority. I've lost a battle with 6 ships (adm. 3rd, 4ths, galleons) on 2 damaged pirate galleons and been sent packing. Sweden currently has 3 stacks of armies in the stockholm area, split into individual units and for the past 6 turns has been taking 20-30 minutes per turn to try to figure out for each unit if they should walk 6 steps north, 3 steps east or simply sit still.

Also, capitol buildings no longer count as their true value. Before, I could take Musovy with the Winter Palace and it had all the benefits of a fully advanced capitol. Now it acts as a simple 4-tier capitol building. In previous games, Muscovy was worth 8-11k/turn. In this game, it is worth around 2500/turn.

It also seems like the game "cheats" at various points. I tend to have valuable generals "die" of natural causes just as they are heading to battle (which instead of killing the general and leaving a unit, now destroys the entire unit). I'd put this down to the actions of agents, except replaying the end turn for whatever reason shows that this is the game event, because *someone* always dies of natural causes, either a general or a minister. And rakes can't kill government ministers... If the game does this, I will usually accept it, unless it's especially "cheaty" and it's really obvious that the nation doesn't have rakes in the area.

As can be expected, most of the early game was devoted to taking and building up India. I then moved on to North America and am currently driving into Europe via Russia.

The most difficult part of it is bringing infantry around the map. I can recruit 2 chevron Hindu Warriors in Bijapur, 1 chevron in Mysore and Gujarat. But it takes 4-5 turns to get them anywhere useful in Europe. I can recruit Sikh Warriors in Hindustan and Punjab. But it takes an additional 3 turns to get them to a port, then 4-5 turns to get them anywhere useful. That means that the cost of each troop is three times higher than initial training cost due to upkeep for as many as 9 turns.

I have found it fascinating to see how this changes my strategies and logistics and how it relates to current affairs in Europe. For example, my strategy must include a swift and brutal invasion of Great Britain (currently at peace, but with two large armies on two large fleets, each too strong for me to handle sitting off the coast of the US - which I own, but cannot afford to patrol). I will need to bring huge stacks of Indians via boat to GB and pounce very, very quickly.

The greatest challenge will be Europe of course, which is positively riddled with many, many stacks of advanced military forces by France and Spain, who have each expanded to ridiculous size and strength. France (at war) has something like 13 full stacks, fully developed artillery techs (which are very difficult to overcome with armies of melee and cavalry - even worse if you cannot train melee units in Europe) and massive naval fleets. Spain (at peace and trading, but for how long?) is a bit behind tech-wise and has less stacks, but is still formidable, with significant holdings in Europe and massive holdings in South America. Mexico is currently the highest earning capital city, raking in something like 8k/turn.

The Maratha Navy takes a long time to develop compared to the European nations and I've resorted to capturing galleons... tough business given the clairvoyant pirate fleets, constant raiding and near-0 income for much of the game.

good fun. I'll keep y'all posted and give you a bit of a rough timeline.

[eschelar]

As can be expected, the first priority was to clean India and get a solid foundation. I remember India as some of the most lucrative land in the game, with 7 to 9 thousand a turn from some of the better spots... Not anymore it seems. 3k per turn is about as good as most places can get. I might get Hindustan north of 5k at some point...

It has been important to capitalize on using wealthy towns to increase value, tossing out schools in nature as soon as possible. malwa, hyderabad and Bengal have all been good alternatives due to a large number of towns that have low value which allow for more happiness buildings. Persia too.

Martha tech is rather poor and in spite of surprisingly lively tech trading, it has been a real challenge to keep up, especially with the navy. I wasn't able to start tangling with pirates until around 1730, by which point in my previous campaigns as UP and Prussia, I had nearly captured the globe. I believe government type is a significant factor here.

In fact, when great Britain launched my first ever naval invasion, I came close to losing my capital, which would have switched to Hyderabad and might have been a better choice. Bijapur is one of the worst home regions in the game. Perhaps after the Netherlands...

Fighting the mughals was rough since their melee infantry is always better than mine. Islamic swordsman, and boy do those dervishes ever run fast.

[eschelar]

Lol. Just had a peach of a battle. Poland threw 9 pandours, two horse arty and two provincial cav at me. I had 7 Hindu warriors, one camel, two Sipahi and another pair of Sipahi as backup that couldn't quite reach as it was their second turn after recruitment in muscovy. Damned Pandours were hidden...

Ran the initial set of Sipahi and camel against their left flank with the provincial cav and arty, and the reinforcements on the right. The pandours freaked out and ran to reposition... Smashed through the handouts with the cav and pummeled the arty. Then handouts were all in the middle, so i charged my EVERYONE on their front. They never got there. The pandours morale broke and one unit of camel and four Sipahi had made the entire lot of them flee. Mop up was fun. One unit of Sipahi had 175 kills and 6 losses.

It has taken me a long time to get funds available for Sipahi. That's some sweet sweet payoff. Poland keeps finding stacks of armies from who knows where, so I was worried. A lot less worried now. Looking forward to seeing how 9 units of Sipahi do with 10 units of Hindu warriors... I have reinforcements coming from bijapur... In about 7 turns........ The following set of reinforcements will be fun. 3 chevron Hindu musketeers, 9 at a time... Yeehaw.
Pretty wild how the ai can get away with firing dozens of rounds again and again through their own units without a single loss to friendly fire...

After watching a 3/4 stack kill 80% of a huge pirate army with reinforcements of 120 men each, then have the whole thing go south and losing my entire army for no particular reason, this was a nice change.

The pirates will pay. Soon.

[Alwyn]

Your Sun-Baked Steel concept sounds like a very challenging way to play the game. It sounds like you are enjoying reporting on what is happening. I wonder if you would be interested in writing an After Action Report on this campaign, or another, in the sub-forum of the Writers' Study for After Action Reports for ETW? AARs are often written in the style of a novel, but they don't have to be - an AAR can simply be a report on what happened in a campaign, as you are doing here.

I like the idea of using a self-imposed limit to make the game more challenging. For me, to some extent, writing an AAR can lead to such limits, because they can be part of role-playing your campaign. Limits can relate to the personality traits of characters such as your national leader or general. For example, in my Venice AAR, General Defendi (a hot-tempered, inexperienced general) fought the Battle of Ravenna without waiting for reinforcements (led by General Assemani) to join his army - so General Assemani's force arrived late, as reinforcements, rather than being in the army from the start.

You mentioned that you are playing on VH/VH - presumably because you want a very challenging campaign - and that you are disappointed with the imbalance between the morale of your units and the morale of the enemy, especially in sea battles. I wonder if you are using a mod to improve the battle AI (to make battles more challenging, without the artificial morale imbalances that are imposed by higher battle difficulty levels)? I have been using Bran's Empire Battle AI mod recently and am impressed with the results.

[eschelar]

Thanks. I will try to fill in details as I have time, but life keeps me pretty busy now compared to when I was playing a lot a few years ago.

I am the guy who did the UP rush campaign ending in the early 1740s and Prussia in 1738, but schedule corruption broke that just as I had a handful left to go.

Those were also really fun but fairly easy because I was using an earlier version prior to naval invasions and trade nodes working properly... Plus I had multi stack armies with elite soldiers and hardcore artillery when most of my enemies were still in mid game...

My intent before was to try a "cold hard steel", maybe playing Russia, but too many bugs, not enough time...

Really happy with the new changes. The game feels fresh and it is the first time I have played a campaign where I really got my teeth into rakes / Thugees as well as the first campaign where I have genuinely felt on the edge of collapse for almost the entire time. I am just past 1750 now and the financial side of things is phenomenally risky. If I get blockaded, I go bankrupt with 20 to 30k in the hole. If I get raided by a significant naval force, I go anywhere between 3k per turn to bankrupt at negative 7 to 15k. Russia did that to me and it was nearly disastrous. It was just after great Britain had dropped three stacks in North America and lost half of it in one turn. I actually don't like that. Doesn't make sense to me that two full stack fleets can sit on a trade route off the coast of France and deprive me of 80% of my trade income as maratha. Insanity. But above all, it has been very challenging.

Monarchy is also one of the harder styles to play for this with huge happiness penalties and slow tech. It will movably be 1760 before I can get first rates into the water... And at this point, there is only a handful of seconds around the globe... Took me 45 years to get naval supremacy. Yowch!

Speaking of which, grumpy with the ai. Money is super tight right now with wild massive shifts in power going on in central Europe. Popped a single sloop out of a port and fought it with my third rate. Captured the ship with zero guns lost... Just after it surrendered, the status changed to sinking for a quarter of a second and the battle ended.

I thought it bugged out, so I tried again. Down one gun, same thing. I haven't seen this happen before. I focused only on one side and kept hull above 50%, down three guns, no ship captured.

Tried again, down 5 guns, ahip surrendered. After I fired a volley of round, I switched to chain. No ship for salvage.

Tried again. Ended up losing 12 guns to a sloop and fired almost exclusively chain shot and grape. Yeeeeeesh.



I might do more of something creative with the russian campaign. I have played everything vanilla, but I would actually like to try mughal later. Might be more fun, especially with their archer cav. Martha units are rather limited. And units I can recruit for use in Europe currently include: sipahis. That is all. Not being able to recruit any ground infantry in Europe is exceptionally difficult to handle.I had to allow myself to recruit mob for garrison only, which is reasonable.

Combining all of that plus heavy handicap and vhvh and a time factor has been very rewarding. I currently expect to finish around 1760, but I feel like it might go longer. Some really big enemies yet to trounce.

[eschelar]

1756 and immediately after I took out Russia, France asked for trade. Two turns later, Prussia was snuffed out and I was working on building up to mash my ally Austria into my fold the hard way... They were at war with France and getting shredded. France was making strong headway and had taken everything up to Hanover, with about 6 stacks of very nice units and three serious fleets.
Instead of sweeping Austria, which they were in perfect position to do.... They declared war on me... Sharing just one border at Hanover... On my turn, took Paris, Flanders, Hanover. Next turn took Holland and cleaned up their messy edges in the med sea and north America.

Stuff I have never seen them do before:
That kept trying to run their troops into the sea in Moldova... No idea why. They ran back in when I got there, leaving a quarter stack outside the capital. Since vh/vh gives such a ridiculous boost to defenses, I always try to attack the troops outside of the city. I attacked them and the entire stack of reinforced armies immediately retreated from the battlefield. I won easily of course, (1500 of my men vs 500 of theirs plus 1100 garrisoned reinforcements), but the 1100 reinforcements escaped unscathed, running well beyond a normal turns movement way behind my front lines towards undefended regions...

My understanding of how that works is that you can do this if you *win* the combat, but not if you lose... Also, I have never seen them run like that before. Annoying.

I also watched a unit of 2/113 line infantry kill almost 35 men out of two experienced Hindu warrior units after a third unit had been sent packing... On the ground inside Holland with fortifications and I had 2700 men to attack 770.

I also watched France rout an entire section of 1200 Hindu warriors with the last three line infantry after a single lucky shot killed the general. Unbelievable. Watching 7 120/120 Hindu warrior units flee the field in the face of just a handful of guys... Backed up by more than 1400 more men on their way...

Zero margin for error on some of these battles... So often, the ai manages to kill the general as first blood from weak cav, even while the general unit simply fails to fire a single shot... I have seen the ai fire cannon into a hillside, the round shot ricochet up and spins over, into the general unit and kill him... At max range...

I guess it makes the wins just a bit sweeter

[eschelar]

Well that was fun. Took a bit of time and I haven't had much time for gaming lately, but there you have it. 1775 Summer - 137 regions owned.

Took Sweden in one turn, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Poof. Before the DoW on Sweden, I was making 24k/turn from trade with them and only netting around 50k/turn with my rather crippling upkeep. Ottomans lasted about 4 turns due to their expansion into inaccessible areas and rebellions cropping up in Rumelia.

Easily the biggest challenge in the campaign was taking on Europe with no ability to recruit infantry of any sort anywhere in Europe.

Because I had so many armies to tangle with the Ottomans, I ended up with 13 stacks for re-organization (Ottomans had about 22 regions prior to this and Barbary States had grown a bit too, so I needed all of that to fight them).

Interestingly, the final battles used large quantities of lower quality troops to take the heat. Fighting 1.5-2 stacks of modern European troops goes a lot better if you send in a big infantry-heavy stack of meat-shields first. And I'm always surprised at how well the native warriors manage.

Two primary stack configurations:
1 gen, 3 war elephants, 3 heavy cav, 1-2 native bowman, 3-5 native warriors + 3 chevron Hindu warriors.
1 gen, 3-5 heavy cav (and maybe 1-2 light cav if I need to do cleanup), 3 native bowman, the rest Hindu warriors, maybe a couple of meat-shields if possible.

Unfortunately, throughout Europe there weren't even any places I could get meat-shields. A few times I actually tore down Military Encampment government buildings and recruited those lovely Musselim mobs with 150 men.

If I could do it again, I would definitely use those a *lot* more and enforce the restriction for garrison units as well. I only discovered that I could recruit those by accident, and it was pretty late in the game already. Prior to that, I had been relying on armed mob and very low count units for policing due to low upkeep cost. I've even got a 1 unit Silladar in a few different spots... hehe 7 upkeep.

There were a few unavoidable battles where my police garrison was attacked and a few of those mob units got sucked into a battle as reinforcements. It was a bit "cheaty".

I managed to keep Tarabai II alive through the campaign and I kind of liked that I had a female head of state for two generations, both of which were strongly war-like and both of which were adhering to this "puritan melee" style. I poked around for a bit with Alwyn's idea to write a bit of a Novel style account, and I did take notes on several generals and pivotal battles, but work is ramping up for busy time and I just don't think I can get around to it. The story I was playing about with was to do with the Maratha history and rebellions that occurred in real history and creating an alternate version with my own events. Perhaps something tragic occurred that caused Tarabai to disavow gunpowder for combat, which was carried on by her daughter. I was considering for a bit to use the Dahomey Amazons as the exception there as a form of "guard unit", and with their really unusual stats, which make them really quite interesting, but I decided not to.

This time around, I didn't do the cheeze type play with selling territories back to the computer for quick cash... mostly because it didn't work... hehe

So yeah, took around double the time that it normally does and I enjoyed that I never really felt like any of the battles became super-easy (like they did when I started getting strong artillery. Given the odd way that the BAI behaves, it was often possible to get more than 10:1 kill ratios just by switching to carcass or quicklime and pouring it on to the center of a fortified city. Yawn. I think it improved my battle skills as well and I broke some bad habits too.

I strongly encourage everyone to give it a try.

Now I need to find a new challenge.

I looked at the Warpath campaigns, but they look monumentally dull given that each faction only has two interesting units and the natives are stuck in the Americas... Need to find more information out about a good mod that allows solid and varied play as the Native Americans... In Warpath, they actually have a few really decent archer units too! Too bad they screwed up the range.

Hope you enjoyed my little challenge.

Sun-Baked Steel - Completed.

[divilly]

Perhaps, you could try playing as some European faction, but relying solely on irregular infantry troops? It would be interesting. No cavalry, no cannons, just those stupid pandours you've mentioned. You could also explore other spots too. Limiting trade partners, setting deadlines to eliminate factions, destroying all schools, sticking to certain type of ship throughout the whole campaign (fifth rates, maybe)

[eschelar]

The problem with that is it is very boring. I am not specifically looking for difficult, I am looking for challenging and interesting. There are many units in the game that get overlooked, but are quite interesting. The dahomey Amazons are an example. Same number of bodies in the unit, but longer range than normal line. Some very interesting battles could erupt.

Also, I like the idea of strong melee units. The native warriors are cool, so are the swordsmen of the East. Archery is intriguing as well. My own family lineage has transducers, so they too are intriguing. There is nothing interesting about pandours.

I have a theme for this playthrough which holds it together that could have some validity outside of the game. I don't see that idea when restricting game mechanics.

[divilly]

Then your options are pretty limited. Personally, I'd say that irregular troops still stand as a challenge, because you will actually have to do a lot of micromanagement to defeat enemy regular infantry. You just won't be able to send berserkers en masse as you do with melee troops.

[eschelar]

Oh I don't disagree. I'm sure it would be hard. I just don't think I'd find any way to make it interesting enough to persist through to the end. I tend to do the vast majority of my naval expansion with 4th and 3rd rate ships anyhow (and capture as many galleons as possible by preying hard on the pirates). In my current endgame, I've got something like 30 galleons and 12 fluyts. *All* of them have been used extensively in many battles - lots of galleons with 3 and 4 chevrons and I've got a third rate "Impregnable" with 6 chevrons.

My previous playthrough for 100% World Dom (Vanilla, old CAI) was really quick compared. This one was quite a slog. What made it fun though was that the massive tension I felt on the early game with Prussia, continued right up through the 1750's as I struggled with atrocious naval strength.

I do like the idea of using "minority" units and I've taken some of your idea into what I hope will be my next actual playthrough.

I'm trying to build a mod with minor factions enabled and Warpath units recruitable as well. I'm hoping to use only minority units to create a Global domination, uniting the Native factions through the Americas and adding in units like Sepoys, Dahomeys, Afghans and such. No Line infantry, but if there are any special units (Ecosses), they would be fair game. Undecided about Grenadiers, probably not. Not sure about the ideas for cav... I am not familiar with the details of those mods though, so I'm not sure that it would work exactly the way that I would like it to.

I believe that by playing Quebec (or Mexico or Colombia), I would be able to have the navies of the modern factions and be able to move my other forces around as well.

[poa]

i just got a flashback to the unpatched version, playing as mughal the only infantry available was farmers with fork sticks, which resulted in armies gravitating as much towards cavalry as the hordes in their days