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When this is all over, I wonder if Lord Thanas will grow bored of the Pax Romana and deliberately piss off his colonies for fun?

Borgholio wrote:When this is all over, I wonder if Lord Thanas will grow bored of the Pax Romana and deliberately piss off his colonies for fun?

Of course. Once all the other proper nations are conquered, the colonies must be integrated fully into the Empire. All humanity must be made subject to the single, legitimate Roman government.

The Vortex Empire wrote:

Borgholio wrote:When this is all over, I wonder if Lord Thanas will grow bored of the Pax Romana and deliberately piss off his colonies for fun?

Of course. Once all the other proper nations are conquered, the colonies must be integrated fully into the Empire. All humanity must be made subject to the single, legitimate Roman government.

And then.... To the stars!

The Vortex Empire wrote:

Borgholio wrote:When this is all over, I wonder if Lord Thanas will grow bored of the Pax Romana and deliberately piss off his colonies for fun?

Of course. Once all the other proper nations are conquered, the colonies must be integrated fully into the Empire. All humanity must be made subject to the single, legitimate Roman government.

That sadly won't work due to game mechanics, as any colonial nation you conquer then immediately gets released as a new colonial nation. Not worth my time.

Will crush them though if they resist taxation or demand independence.

Too bad there is no way to port it to a new Victoria game. It would be nice to see this game last all the way till the 20th century.

ray245 wrote:Too bad there is no way to port it to a new Victoria game. It would be nice to see this game last all the way till the 20th century.

There is a Vic convertor actually, though it's not an official Paradox one. There's also a Vic to Darkest Hour convertor, for even longer games.

This game would be awesome to see continue, but it would be very boring in Vic really. It'd be a lot of rebel stomping and economics really, IMO.

I have to say as a long time lurker I really like the amount of research and detail that has went into this LP. I'd be game for a new Victoria game after this as well.

I'd also be down for a second expansion of the game, but only if Thanas wants to of course. From the sounds of it, it sounds like a very different play style.
The Great War was awesome, as ever

Will the real Son of Heaven please stand up?


News arrived from the New World that our colony of Brazil was in huge trouble. Apparently they had settled close to an indigenous nation, which had taken that as an immediate declaration of war. The stupid Brazilian colonial army had a) managed to have 50% of the troops away in the North in a dick-waving exercise with Roman Colombia and b) lost the other half against the indigenous horde.

Now the colony of Porot Seguro had been overrun and conquered by the indigenous nation of Tupiniquim and our colonists subjected to all kinds of insults and injuries. This clearly would not do.

One can only imagine the thoughts the native leaders had when a fleet of 300 ships arrived within three months and disgorged four legions, aka 112.000 very pissed off, battle-hardened veterans. Presumably they were similar to "I have made a terrible mistake".

"Oh shit, run away"

The war ended with the complete conquest of the offending nation. Let that be a warning to others.

Speaking of others....

Yes, it is that time again. Ming time.

Initial fighting was harder than expected...

But give the Romans favourable terrain...


And they'll deliver.


We took half of their allies....

...and half of Ming itself.


With the war over, several of our citizens were eager to get someplace else...and we knew where to steer them to.

Meanwhile, we increased our innovative ideas.


Argentine asked us to support their independence. We declined, for we had other plans for them and it wasn't worth fighting a war over such meagre gains.

Instead, we assembled forces on the Egyptian border, which had been unchanged for over 500 years now.

But the decades of fighting among the southern powers had made them weak and in need for some superior order restoring peace....

Which we were all too happy to provide.

Soon, we invaded the South with 280k soldiers in total. I wish I could say there were any interesting battles, but there were not. Mires put up very little of a fight and mustered a total of 30 soldiers split all over the place. Within a year, we had taken over most of their very poor, almost deserted provinces.


Yep, a lot of land, but almost all worthless and not even causing so much overextension.

This left us free to directly continue this effort by attacking the next nation.

Again, very easy victory. We took all the orange and brown territories on the previous map.


As we did not have to spend much on making these provinces core (seriously, most went for under 20 adm points) we had a lot of suplus adm points which we used to increase our innovative ideas.


Good, you go on debating.

Meanwhile, it was time to deal with Eastsaxe.

...and that is where I fucked up. Sorry guys, I completely forgot to take pictures of this war. It was a pretty good war too, with most of the battles being fought by the respective colonial nations. UGH. What happened was that in the end Rome took all of the Eastsaxon territories in England except for Essex, but left the colonies intact. Again, my apologies for this mistake. By the time I noticed it it was too late as I had already played for several more years.

(continued below)

(continued from above)


Hindustan was nice enough to take care of Jaunpur, which meant we could focus on Bengal....

...and Malacca. Notice our great military buildup in these two picture. A total of 28 legions - A Grande Armée of 784.000 troops.

It was time to put them to use.

Initial victories were quickly won...

....and the african colonies of Malacca were put under siege after the Roman Fleet caught their Navy unawares.


In Bengal, the enemy decided to attack one legion besieging a city...


Unfortunately for them, a second legion was already marching to the aid of the defenders.


Bardas III Thanas himself led the attack on the enemy main army, which was beaten...

...and surrendered to a legion that had suffered much and was on the way back to be replenished.


In Malacca, the enemy armies had been chased all the way to Sumatra.

It was defeated.

After all of Bengal had fallen...


Rome took all of the remaining Burmese and Shan territories from Bengal.


Malacca soon was ready to make peace.

And what a peace it was, forcing them to surrender all of their territory and colonies except for two Madagascan colonies, two provinces in Sumatra and two in Malacca. All of STRAYA and New Zealand now belonged to our colonial nation Roman Australia, may they be happy with the wildlife there.

While waiting for overextension to die down, we did the usual - increasing our tech and ideas.

Uhhh....game, you do realize that Rome has had professional officers for over 1800 years now, right? Right?

This administrative efficiency boost is really good, allowing us to rule over larger territories with less effort.
We had to pick a new idea:

Yeah, so we can't pick another administrative idea, diplomatic ideas are not worth it, so....let's go offensive.

Meh. Who cares.

[mg]http://i.imgur.com/Cn1k19v.png[/img]
"Wine in my chambers, milady?"
What, did the church really think we, with our parentage and well-known appetite for the opposite sex, would restrict this? Nah.

A few more months...


"They say the infantry is the Augusta of the battlefield. Well, that might be true, but artillery is the Augustus. And you know what the Augustus does to the Augusta." - Unnamed Roman artillerymen, right before being sentenced to getting 250 lashes and a transfer to Siberia for disrespecting the honour of the Augusta.

While our legions were marching back from Malacca, it was decided that now was the right time to do some cleanup.




Uh.....game, you do know that Roman officers always led from the front, right? Right? Oh, C'MON.

(to be continued below)

(continued from above)


Hooray. Our Line has bred straight and true, producing another great leader.

What is tradition for a newly-crowned Emperor?

Going Minging, of course.

From: The Conquest of Roman China, by Iacomus Clavellus, Mediolanum 1964 (later filmed as the Conquest of Heaven):
"Many words have been used to describe the Roman legions in China at this point. The Ming population called them locusts, for they had a habit of arriving every decade, carrying off the crops and whatever else they could find while being so numerous any defence was pointless. The Roman press called them the "Great Army of the east." The Soldiers themselves called themselves legionnaires, the successors to those led by such great leaders as Caesar, Trajan and Belisarios Thanas. To this, Leon VII was looking to add his name."

The Northern Ming Army was crushed in two battles.

The Main Ming Army tried to resist, but broke and half a month later,

the Emperor himself surrendered to the Legio I Italica.

The locusts had swarmed, now they were burying in.
On


The Empire of Ming, the most numerous enemy Rome had ever known, surrendered.
Subsequent historians have argued that it had fallen much earlier, for over two-thirds of all ethnic Ming were already Roman citizens. But on December 19th, 1780, the last legitimate Emperor of Ming fell before the knees of the Emperor, kissed his feet and asked for clemency for himself and his family. This was granted, the Emperor being sent to an estate in Gaul to live out his days under Imperial supervision, whereas his kin and children were taken to the Imperial palace to serve the Empire. Since that time, the only Emperor in China has had the name Thanas, the Ming dynasty going the way of the Abbasids and others before.

In the court meanwhile, an intrigue was going on.

This proved to be the correct decision, for this happened within the year:


On the way back to Rome, The Emperor decided to annex Assam.

This was done.


All males were required to be ready for enlistment. Uhhh...game, this has already been the case in Rome for 2500 years. What is this and what am I paying you for? Could it be that the Military complex is just a bottomless pit of money gone wrong? Nah, can't be.


Oh hey. She will make a great diplomat for us.


Rome is so glorious she doesn't even need to convert people, they convert by themselves.

We spent the next years sending out missionaries and reducing overextension.

Meanwhile, in Nubia and Ethiopia, one of the warring nations had finally managed to conquer the remaining small states and become a great unified nation.

This also made them a big juicy target.

I'm starting to think I have gone about this the wrong way.

Why bash my head against the eastern powers when I can conquer the south and so much territory with so little effort?


This might be worth supporting...wait, are you kidding me?

So the choices are massive unrest and loss of money vs a minor loss in prestige. Yeah, no way I am chosing the first one. I'd have to be a colossal idiot to do so.

And the prestige can be easily gotten back. By conquering other nations.

BTW, if everybody is Roman, everybody is already equal and a brother to each other. So....just make everybody Roman.

I wish I could be more excited about this, but honestly, 99% of Aztecs were already living in Roman Mexico, so this isn't a great deal. Hey, no more human sacrifices though, so that is a bonus.

Time for more ideas.

Oh yeah, first one of those that is actually useful.

Let us take a look at the Empire.

The Roman Empire, ruler of the world except for those few remaining nations.

In Malacca, people knew that the Roman legions were massing again and doomsday prophets caused massive rebellions.

And in India, the local rulers nervously enquired about the state of their defences.

Africa - still not ours. Yet.

In South America, Peru became a massive colonial nation and expanded rapidly.

As did the USA in North America, doubling their size since the last update.

(End of this update)

Going Minging, of course.

I'm so glad I wasn't drinking anything when I read that.

At this rate the empire needs to shift their capital to somewhere more central with the emperor fighting in the east and the south.

Amazing progress... It was as if someone had been littering States across proper Roman soil, and the Legions were just dutifully picking up the trash as they passed by.

How long does the game run? Still into the 1820ies? Or further?

ray245 wrote:At this rate the empire needs to shift their capital to somewhere more central with the emperor fighting in the east and the south.

Why? It is nearly fully centralized, with a lot of bureaucracy. However, the empire will have a solution to the distances problem....soonish.

LaCroix wrote:Amazing progress... It was as if someone had been littering States across proper Roman soil, and the Legions were just dutifully picking up the trash as they passed by.

How long does the game run? Still into the 1820ies? Or further?

1821.

Skywalker_T-65 wrote:

ray245 wrote:Too bad there is no way to port it to a new Victoria game. It would be nice to see this game last all the way till the 20th century.

There is a Vic convertor actually, though it's not an official Paradox one. There's also a Vic to Darkest Hour convertor, for even longer games.

This game would be awesome to see continue, but it would be very boring in Vic really. It'd be a lot of rebel stomping and economics really, IMO.

I'm afraid that with me not annexing all the different natives the conversion might prove to be difficult as I don't think the converter can convert that many natives. Nevermind the cultures I carried over from the CK2/HIP mod game.

That Colonial nation between the USA and Roman Canada.... It's Roman East... what? America? I can't make the third name out.

Steve wrote:That Colonial nation between the USA and Roman Canada.... It's Roman East... what? America? I can't make the third name out.

Roman East America it is.

Thanas wrote:

Skywalker_T-65 wrote:

ray245 wrote:Too bad there is no way to port it to a new Victoria game. It would be nice to see this game last all the way till the 20th century.

There is a Vic convertor actually, though it's not an official Paradox one. There's also a Vic to Darkest Hour convertor, for even longer games.

This game would be awesome to see continue, but it would be very boring in Vic really. It'd be a lot of rebel stomping and economics really, IMO.

I'm afraid that with me not annexing all the different natives the conversion might prove to be difficult as I don't think the converter can convert that many natives. Nevermind the cultures I carried over from the CK2/HIP mod game.

Maybe, I've never converted a CKII-EUIV game before. I know that there were issues with the new Chinese cultures at one point, with most ending up as 'noculture'. They fixed that though, so...it should work.

But I'm not someone who works on it, so who knows?

The Downfall of an Empire

It was time to deal with Eastsaxe. The traiterous USA, which only owed their existence to the blood spilled by the legions on their behalf, had gone and allied themselves to Eastsaxe. Traiterous bastards. (Cue comparisons to USA and France, though the USA in OTL wasn't that backstabby). You know how to deal with a backstab? Stab them back into the chest, of course. Then smile and enslave their families. It is the Roman Way.


Again, Eastsaxe tried to send a fleet from their African holdings. Again, they were intercepted....

...and utterly destroyed.


A few months later, we had sent our East Asian fleet and it had successfully conquered all of the African Jewish holdings. However, the fleet had been sent now to attack Alaska and we had a lot of troops sitting around doing nothing. Hmm...but there are rich tribal lands to the west. Well...

Time for a quick adventure, boys.

This was rather easy.

However, the real war was being fought in the colonies, where ours proved surpreme. I wish I could show you more, but basically our Colonies of the Caribbean and Mexico went HAM at anybody, especially Mexico which sent out over 100k troops into the USA. (Cue frantic wailing from Southerners about MEXICANS CONQUERING THE USA), whereas the main army of the USA tried to invade our Northeast America but was checked by our colonies there and CANADA (Cue further wailing).

We took all the green from the USA and reduced them to one small nation of three provinces.

In Canada, the Eastsaxon armies made a desperate last stand against the forces of Roman Canada:


Clearly the colonial militia is not comparable to the legions, but they bleed well and get the job done.
(For comparison, Roman troop numbers have higher figures in every category, by at least 10% or more).


The state of the war after the last battle in Canada. I shall say that it is a satisfactory state of being.

To the victor go the spoils, which in this case were all the Colonies in North America:

and all the colonies in South America:

and all the land in Africa:


Eastsaxe was reduced to one province, their capital of Essex.
Sadly we missed 2% warscore to fully annex them.


Meanwhile, in our new Asian lands:

We shall build proper dykes.

We increased our offensive ideas:


And a few years later, we researched the final infantry troop type:

This choice was no choice. After all, what better modern version of the well-drilled legionnaires than that of the Prussian soldier who was drilled to react to everything?


A resounding meh to booth, only useful to feed our massive population and industrialize quicker.


Well, okay, two settlements - let them fight it out. Competition it is.

Fine, as responsible emperors we will build another fort to protect our settlers.


In the new World, colonial nations were formed. Like Alaska...

...and California.

(see pic above for extent of territory)

Roman Lousiana got most of the former USA territories, while the rest was ceded to Roman North America to counterbalance Mexico. Meanwhile, Roman La Plata got Argentine and Roman Colombia former Eastsaxon colombia.


Hey another offensive idea the Romans had since over 2000 years. Yay. I realize it is due to game mechanics, but still this is kinda funny, you got to admit. I just wonder how this will go if it gets introduced to the legions: "You guys are now engineers." "Yeah, we were that since 2000 years ago." "Hey, no worries, be happy and enjoy your shiny new emblems." "..."



(to be continued below)

(continued from above)

Given how we had little to integrate, we immediately could go on to conquer other lands.

The prime candidates were once again Malacca and Bengal.


Like locusts, our legions once again swarmed forth.


This time, were not content to let the enemy come to us. No, we wanted to test our new drill infantry.

Thus, two legions were sent to attack the Bengali main army.

(Compare our figures against that of the Colonial militia and you'll see why I am certain we will win in any war with them - that and the massive numerical advantage of course).


The Bengali army tried to evacuate, but ran into another legion and surrendered.

The Bengali fleet did not have a better fate.

Again, we took half of Bengal...

...and all of Malacca.

During these wars, we increased our offensive ideas:



Meanwhile, in South America, Peru was encroaching more and more on our colonies:

And it had also formed a competitor to Roman California with the colonial nation of Oregon in North America.

It was time to rescue whatever Incas remained and add them to our own.

This is a good illustration of how the war went - the colonials did the dieing and then were rescued by the arrival of legions.

Oregon was easily overrun.

Mexico and Colombia overrun almost all of Northern Peru by themselves, but neglected to take out the Main Peruvian Army. This of course led to us having to play a ton of chess with them to prevent the Peruvians from crushing the small colonial siege forces.

Finally, we cornered them and brought them to battle.

Yeah, just look at the troop numbers. Largely well-trained professionals against colonial militias.

As this battle was happening in the mountains, we however could not bring the full legions to bear. Instead, what happened was that both artillery pounded away at small gorges and canyons, where lines of men stood and died. However, we had more men, for we could always count on our colonial militia to do the dieing.

The colonials inflated the bodycount a bit, but the end result was the same.

Overextension does not matter as colonial nations get released anyway. So we grabbed as much as we could, which was a lot:



We managed to fill out the offensive ideas, thus completing all our idea groups.

It was time for a new policy. Knowing that the greatest enemy by now would be colonial fortresses and Indian castles, modern siege weapons seemed to be very useful.

From "The lifelines of the Empire", by Georg Breusing, Bremen 2000:
"Now, more than 180 years after the establishment of the Universal Empire, it is more than proper to look at the way the two great lifelines of the Empire were constructed. While there were roads stretching all the way from Rome to Korea, those roads proved to be too long for proper trade and messages. Thus, most cargo would be taken by ship to Arabia/Sinai, then transported overland and then shipped from the great ports of the Levante and Northern Egypt to Europe. This was little unchanged - except in volume - from the way transport had happened for over 2500 years. However, with the need to transport more and more goods to Europe for the blossoming manufacture sector and vice versa, these transport routes soon proved to be too small and the Roman economy was seriously hampered by that. Things had gotten so clogged that even the secondary routes over Azov and the Crimea were overloaded, especially with the sheer mass of slaves and conquered people being resettled in Europe. A similar problem persisted in America, where trade between our American colonies and the Asian provinces was hampered by the slow overland route of Mexico and Columbia."

"It was thus decided that the Roman Empire would undertake two massive projects. Each project was influenced by the Saxon Kiel Canal and it was from that region where engineers and builders were drawn."

"Two massive canals were to be constructed, one in Suez, the other in Panama. And thus the Empire was spared almost certain collapse and was finally, with the dawn of industrialization, able to unlock its full potential."


Of course it is true. We sent our best Germans to build it after all.

Meanwhile, our Asian provinces made a great contribution to the Empire:


Let us take a look at the Empire she was going to help us to govern:


Not much left.


Colonial Peru was released and went on to undertake the giant task of converting the Jewish to the true faith.
So it turns out Peru was a much more competent enemy than Eastsaxe after all.

Also, Suez and Panama canals. Yay. The answer to an overextending empire.

If you rampage through North America, you might be able to get a WC done before the timer runs out. I'm guessing it's about 1785 or so right now?

whereas the main army of the USA tried to invade our Northeast America but was checked by our colonies there and CANADA (Cue further wailing)

Hey that's what happened IRL anyways. We traditionally never did very well vs the Canadians.

Hold on, did the USA fight for independence from Eastsaxe and then ally with them against you, after you'd helped them? That's impressively silly.

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Hold on, did the USA fight for independence from Eastsaxe and then ally with them against you, after you'd helped them? That's impressively silly.

Surprised?

Hail the resurgent Roman Empire, master and rightful ruler of the world!

Eternal_Freedom wrote: Hold on, did the USA fight for independence from Eastsaxe and then ally with them against you, after you'd helped them? That's impressively silly.

'Muricans gonna 'Murica, even in an alternate timeline with over a thousand years' worth of divergence