I hope you guys forgive me if my final report will be, like the few last ones, quite laconic. As promised, the final 18 years consisted mostly of warfare.
Soon after starting the game I signed two separate peace deals - Occitania didn't give up too much (I don't remember what exactly I asked for, and didn't take a screenie of it!
), I just wanted to get rid of them. The other deal was with Swabia, against which our allies were doing extremely well. Byzantium ended up with Lombardia, while Hansa with Emilia.
A year later our vassal Free Provinces was attacked by the Irish. All we had to do was embark a large army on our main fleet (which I had to rebuild in the course of the next ten years, the number of warships fell to 13 if I remember correctly), and disembark it into Dublin. Thanks to the 100-something cannons, the sieges proceeded swiftly and surely. Not really knowing what to demand from Eire, we took the western part of the island, and a few colonies for our allies - actually, one of the first peace deals they suggested.
Next year was spent preparing large armies (on the whole, around 200'000 people). About half of them was put on the southeastern border of Byzantium, another half - on the Black Sea coast, ready to reinforce the Levantine front. Another army was waiting off the shore of Samaria, ready to assault the fortress there (one of the few that were below Large level).
The gathered forces proved to be far less than enough against the Muslims. What you can see below is what I had to do every single year of that war. In the picture below it you can see exactly, why it was so - the armies of the Caliph were a match for ours in terms of LT, and despite equal morale, they were able to kill off huge numbers of our soldiers with few own casualties - that due to us being unable to operate with armies bigger than 50'000 men at once, due to attrition problems (God damn those deserts!).
Although in 1808 the Caliphate was at war with most of Europe, our fighting against them wasn't any easier. In 1809 Byzantium peaced out of the war, taking Trabzon and Aleppo for themselves. After another 3 years of very intense fighting, we ended up taking this offer:
The war wasn't taking us anywhere. However, we got access to the immensely rich CoT in Baghdad (almost 2'000!)!
1811 brought the DoW of Bavaria+Hungary against the Hanse. Skane and Free Provinces dishonored the call, and I did the same - I felt unready to fight two large wars on two different fronts. The downside of this was, obviously, the loss of Byzantium and Skane as allies. However, once at peace against the Caliphate, and with huge forces at our disposal, we transported the Levantine army to Istria (Hanseatic territory, besieged by Bavaria; Salzburg and Steiermark had already been taken by them). The rest of our forces, stationed in Ukraine, were directed towards Hungarian-Byzantine borders. We declared war on Hungary and Bavaria (CB provided by the centuries-old Magyar embargo). As you can see, the Byzantines were doing pretty well against the Magyars, while the Hanse was a total collapse on all fronts. What we did was help them retake what had been occupied by the Germans and attack them from the north and the south (allies weren't called to the war, so our Baltic provinces were safe) - the former in Saxony through Pomerania, the latter in Bayern through Salzburg.
The location of the battle seen here made me smile. Were it 8 years earlier, it would be a perfect coincidence
.
The war ended with this - didn't see any reason to take provinces from them. The Byzantines made the idiotic mistake of signing peace with Bavaria instead of with Hungary - despite their huge gains against the latter, they had to pay Bavaria 375 ducats in indemnities.
1817 brought us another DoW - guess who it was this time?
Unfortunately, I was so busy with the war (and another one that broke a year later, against Eire; they both ended in 1820) that I forgot to take screenshots. Almost all fighting took place in North America and the Caribbean. I decided to disregard other fronts almost entirely (most of the fighting in NA was done by the Free Provinces, for which they were amply rewarded), and concentrate on Maya, in order to unlock the Guantanamo CoT. The final peace deal gave Free Provinces Massachussetts and this:
And that's about it, folks. Following post contains some game-ending screenies (I have the No Time Limit Patch installed, so no 'you won' screenies
).
