Ahh what a great game, haven't played it for a few months. I had various troubles with it though. I played as France, unified it, swallowed up the British Isles and fair chunks of Scandinavia and some stuff in the Iberian peninsula, and colonised much of North and South America. Usually I like to get a country involved with 10 enemies at once and then grab lots of chunks from it (Russia).
But I had some problems with this, see I was the Catholic defender of the faith. But as time progresses this became outdated and my provinces kept repeatedly switching faith, over and over, which is expensive to put down when you have a big empire...and as defender of the faith I couldn't change back...
Annoying thing is, I had to reformat my computer and lost all that hard earned data...might reinstall it and get the expansion pack too.
I've noticed that once you reach a certain size of empire, things sort of start to crumble around you, unless you're a very good player with the right kind of government and advisors and etc. Which seems reasonable to me, I never liked how once you crossed a certain level in Hearts of Iron, you could basically conquer the world..
Also, I have screenshots of a couple games I'm playing. They are huge, sorry.
First, the Golden Horde. I did a bit of reading before deciding to play as them - basically, the three major surviving Mongol kingdoms in Russia (GH, Kazan and Crimea) fought among each other until they were supplanted by either Muscovy or the Ottomans, historically. I wanted to unify the three tribal groups and then try and reconquer Russia. Here's my progress..
So, things have gone pretty successfully. Kazan is gone, and I've won successive wars against Muscovy lately. (For reference, the one brown province next to independent Ryazan and surrounded by my armies is Moscow.) Unfortunately, the tribal government group sucks at administrating a country this large, and I have revolts ever week, it seems like. I'm nearly bankrupt from having to support all these armies. I need a decade or so to stabilizer, but I keep getting grudge match fights from the Muscovites. Still, I have enough territory right now that I should be able to settle and stabilize for a while. How do you change government from one type to another, anyways? My options seem to be limited to Tribal Federation, Tribal Democracy, and Tribal Despotism.
Next is Italy (formerly Venice). This is the first serious EU3 game I played, and it's still only like halfway over.
I started playing as Venice, and immediately began making war on my neighbors
, with the eventual goal of unifying Italy. This was accomplished (minus Sicily) around 1525, with the help of troops from Austria occasionally. Austria has been one of my strongest allies, and the only thing that has kept me from being crushed by the evil Burgundy-France alliance. You can't really see it in this screenshot, but Burgundy absorbed Switzerland early and has been allied with France nearly the whole game, making them an almost unstoppable duo.
My Italy has been a lot more stable and financially successful than my Golden horde, as you can see. Right now my army is returning from helping Austria with a war against Poland. Also, as you can see, Lithuania controls all of Russia, the Caucasus, and most of Turkey for some reason.
And Italy controls the Holy Land. I was bored, so I went on crusade and converted the heretics.
PS - please do continue your AAR, Iamwinterborn. I've always wanted to try Germany.
