Pindicator Attempts The Three Mountains - a Europa Univeralis 4 Showcase

[haphazard1]

Positive cash flow? What is this madness?

Thanks for the update.

[pindicator]

Part Fourteen: Things Fall Apart
1569 to 1578







It would have been nice if I had stopped there. Big trip coming up, conquering all of China, hitting the big goal of forming Yuan. That would have been a nice high note to leave it on until I come back next week. Only it was too nice: I was excited that everything was coming together and I wanted to see the new country in action. Let's conquer into Central Asia a bit or maybe take out Korea and Japan first!




There's a nice menu in the game that lists EVERY modifier currently affecting your country. Here we have Coring Cost Reduction sitting at 60%. I'm drunk on power now, I'm going to enact the Expand Palace Bureacracy decree and push it up to 70%. Isn't the Mandate below 50? Nah, we are fine!




See, we are still gaining Mandate. It's a slow process because I just destroyed all my states and lost all my Prosperity, but that will come back over time.




Sometimes this game has too many calculations to keep track of, and those can lag behind a month or two. Remember how we had just gotten into the black in the last month? This is the reading from the very next game day - all I did was reopen the game which let the game actually catch up on all the calculations. How did we swing a difference of 60 ducats/month? At the time it was a mystery to me, but I figured it had to do with having all my states recently destroyed and recreated.

What I didn't remember was that low Mandate really can hit your economy hard. And it was about to get lower. Because I was about to make my next crucial mistake (I've hinted at a few of them in the last update): I was about to go to war with Ming again.




Same actors as last time: myself vs Ming, Dai Viet, and Bengal, except Ming is weaker than ever and Shun is also in a war to take land from Ming. I do the same strategy: aim to knock Dai Viet out early and only go for a partial conquest of Ming so I don't have to worry about sieging down Bengal forts. Annoyingly, my fort at Yunnan fell almost instantly to the Dai Viet- I'm not sure if that was a consequence of having low Mandate or just an unlucky dice roll.

One thing to note about my mandate levels is that at 25 Mandate I'm currently taking +25% Shock Damage and +25% Fire Damage, but I'm still much stronger than the Southeast Asian forces. I catch a few regiments south of Kham and eliminate their armies, so I manage to convince myself that all is well.




Then after knocking Dai Viet out of the war I take most of Ming, and let Shun have the rest. Once my truce with Shun is up I'll finish that piece off. Except I didn't realize how big of a mistake I was making here.

Instead I could only see how the Ottomans were invading the Timurids. I needed to get into Central Asia before the Ottomans took it for themselves! So immediately up next was war with Chagatai

That's when the bad events hit. -5 Mandate from one, -10 from another. Soon I'm in the single digits, but I press on anyway because I'm still frankly stronger than Chagatai. I take out 10k in loans and start burning through it.




Now I'm losing over 70 ducats/month. What is going on?!? What I didn't realize then was that I should have been looking closer at the income. Compare my Production, Trade, and Gold with the last screenshot and you'll see that I'm taking in far less. Because low Mandate also affects my goods produced - a little detail I had forgotten! I was taking a 43% penalty to my goods production at 7 Mandate and it was killing the economy.




And worse: now I was activey losing Mandate each month. Why? Because I added that Ming territory. Remember I stated all of China - the new lands I added from Ming were part of those states, and I was not thinking about the devastation that came with adding them in immediately after the war. So those Ming lands were now acting like a dead weight pulling my Mandate down, at least until the devastation went away. I was losing 0.22 Mandate/month from Devastation. And the lower the Mandate goes, the more my National unrest climbs, which in turn spawns more rebels, which occupy more provinces in revolts and increase the devastation levels: it is a vicious cycle.

How to get rid of the devastation? Forts and development. But above all else, time. If I sit tight for 30-50 years, I'm sure I could right the ship, slowly build up my Mandate, and then pay off the loans that I inevitably will have to take to keep paying for everything. (Or I could go bankrupt and really fall apart.)

By 1577 I am down to just 1100 ducats of the 10k I took out in loans and the economy is nowhere closer to being fixed. So I tried the one last card I felt I had. I went to war:




But Korean troops are far better than the Asian troops I had been fighting so far. Also, my units were now taking +45% increased damage instead of +25%. The results were ... not great




Quite the Pyrrhic victory: over 70% of my army killed. My manpower recovery wasn't fast enough to let me chase Korea and they were able to have free reign among the countryside. More provinces falling, more devastation building, more Mandate lost.

I quit with this wonderful event:




I'm about to lose all my tributaries and send my Mandate into an even deeper death spiral.


So yeah, I think this run is a fail. I had a lot going for me, but clearly it's been too long since I've played in China and I had forgotten a lot about what to do with the Mandate of Heaven mechanics. I'll give some thought to what went wrong and how to fix it, but right now I think there were 3 big issues:

1. Taking the second Reform right before culture switching and destroying my prosperity / knee-capping my ability to quickly grow Mandate back.
2. Stating China before I had dealt with devastation & separatist rebels in those provinces
3. Adding more devastation by stating areas that were part of Ming and incorporating Ming's devastation into the state.

I will say that the Mandate is just plain annoying and if there's a way I think I can destroy it and run with Tonalli mechanics as Yuan instead then that is what I'm leaning towards right now. It's 5% less CCR overall, but a lot less downside. And I still hit the 90% cap with a permanent claim. But, if I still plan on ending as a Mongol Empire horde then I will lose Tonalli at that point and the 20% CCR whether I have the Mandate or not.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

oh no, disaster!

But it seems like you learned a lot and will be able to come back strong in the next attempt. Can avoid some of the Yuan mistakes, be smarter about the Kongo phase, etc. The early years went really well, too.

[haphazard1]

Ouch! Things spiralled hard, and the negative effects really fed on one another.

Thanks for the update, and for this entire thread. It has been a really interesting read for someone who has never played the game.

[pindicator]

On the bright side I can focus more on the gameplay and less on the explaining game mechanics when I start the retry

[Mjmd]

Not sure if you would want to, but do you have a save from before you switched into being China.

[luddite]

Taking over china seems like quite the trap... big discounts to lots of juicy provinces with the mandate, but really punishing mechanics if anything goes wrong.

Is there any way to give up the mandate, or just let someone else claim it?

[pindicator]

I'm playing in Ironman mode in order to earn the achievement, which means no save loads and it auto-saves every 3 months. There are ways to get around it - most notably if you force close the program it doesn't save before quitting - but I'm trying for the honest playthrough.

With the mandate, it is possible to destroy it. If you completely annex the country that has the Mandate of Heaven without actively taking it for yourself (it's listed as something you can take in the peace deal menu) then the Mandate is destroyed. This has me tempted because of the downsides but also because taking on the Mandate of Heaven changes my government type and makes me give up the Tonalli mechanics. Also, I thought I needed the Mandate to form Yuan, but I can also form the country if the Mandate has been destroyed and I'm an Empire-rank nation (at least 1000 total development). That's only 5% less CCR from the Tonalli mechanic than with the Mandate.

Still, that's a lot of provinces in China that you get for "free" by taking the Mandate.

[Lewwyn]

Ahhhhh! A Chinese death spiral! Classic dynasty rise and fall, pretty historically accurate actually.

Good that you’ve learned more, I haven’t gotten into these games because of just how complicated the mechanics are... happy to watch you do it though.

[luddite]

For what it's worth, I hope you're not too discouraged by this. I know it really sucks to face a setback in a game like this. But at least from my view as a casual spectator, it's a lot more interesting to see someone try and come back from a disaster than it is to see a world conquest. I liked how EU4 seems set up to allow players to lose wars and still survive, so it's a shame that everyone seems to play as powergamers trying to optimize everything.