No oil yet - a succession game

[Athalcor]

Hello and welcome to this V2 DoD succession AAR! We will be playing as the Emirate of Nejd, hoping to achieve...something, changing players each decade. I have already played the first ten years and now it is @Ben Kerman's turn. If you are interested to take part, write it here and you will be added to the list (I hope that we can get at least three more people ). Btw, we are using 3.04 with latest DoD, checksum ONNP.

1. Athalcor
2. Ben Kerman
3. Plank of Wood
4. ???

 

[Idhrendur]

I don't have enough time to be responsive with succession games, but they're great fun. I'll be watching!

 

[Athalcor]

I don't have enough time to be responsive with succession games, but they're great fun. I'll be watching!

Hey, it is only ten years . Surely you couldn't handle that?

 

[Athalcor]

Beginning is always rough. Too bad your country enters mid-game in 1938

OK, the game begins. To be honest, even as I load it up, I am still in doubt whether Nejd is anything more than a filler tag for the region not to look like vanilla V2 Africa.

Nejd starts as one of the worst-off countries in the world with population of about 100k; furthermore, being primitive with feudal government and literacy of 1 %, the civilising process is slow as a crawl. In the opposite direction. On the other hand, it has cores basically on the whole Arab Peninsula and beyond, leaving a lot of space to expand to. There are also several neat decisions that give the player a list of objectives for him to strive to fulfil:

- annex all other Arab Peninsula countries: Hedjaz (protected by the Ottoman Empire), Yemen (strong in its own right), Oman (in the Spanish sphere), Abu Dhabi and Al Haasa. The last two have not been successful in being meaningful enough to warrant a strong guardian and thus they will experience the Bedouin charge first
- after taking Hedjaz, usurp the title of Caliph from the Ottoman hands
- reclaim remaining cores and proclaim ourselves the sole rulers of Arabia
- take over remaining Arab countries and form the Arab Union.

How many centuries do we have to do this, again? Well...I guess there is no time to waste, then.



Our first target is Al Haasa, simply because it is our neighbour. As our army moves into their territory, I disband one of the regiments since we are at 5/4. In retrospect, that is a huge mistake because
- it is an infantry regiment, being much stronger than anything Nejd is capable of producing
- it will soon turn out that Nejd is actually incapable of producing *any* new regiments.

Oh well.



Since the war is super uneventful as my forces tactically avoid enemy and occupy his territory before the Haasalese army takes Riyadh, I will rather show the rather fast victory of the Janissaries in the Ottoman Empire. It will be interesting to see if they manage to consolidate the country and minimise the territorial losses - a strong Ottoman Empire might become a roadblock in the (very distant) future.



Al Haasa falls in October, increasing our population to whooping 160k and since Abu Dhabi has so far failed to find an ally (which could change quickly), it is next in line.

Furthermore, note that we are basically at zero money, unable to afford anything and yet not bankrupting. I wonder if the bankruptcy protection is something from vanilla or if it is a mod thing.



Situation as of February, 1837. One could even go as far as calling the conflict outright 'booring!'. What is more interesting that even though the Janissaries successfully rotated the Ottoman flag ninety degrees to the left, they are still maintaining an alliance with Hedjaz. Rather inconvenient, I would say.



Look, something is happening!



Awww.



Losing the closest thing to an army Abu Dhabi had means that they surrender their independence in February, 1838, allowing me to showcase one of the several decisions Nejd has at its disposal - take_nejd_desert_title. My hope is that with all the prestige we will be gaining from claiming large swaths of sand will help us economically since I vaguely remember that prestige has something to do with buying from the world market. Maybe.

Disclaimer: I have no actual knowledge of the V2 economy system.



Woot! Our name is getting really big. Despite that, we are still below 200k of population and the Sublime Porte, even after losing to the Safavid Empire, seems to hold on a worryingly large territory.

Re-reading the above text, this actually looks like a poorly written AAR on the Ottoman Empire with an occasional reassurance that there is still nothing interesting going on in the Arab deserts.



Come to think of it, as we are basically commanding Bedouin tribes, shouldn't we have some cavalry units? I will try to remedy that deficiency and queue up a cavalry regiment in Bahrain instead of the other option - a regiment of irregulars. This preference is actually purely academical since we are unable to gather any of the resources needed to assemble the unit. I could order a fully equipped battalion of stormtroopers and the effect would be the same.

By the way, did I mention that not only we cannot order new regiments, we also cannot replenish those already existing? That adds another rather, well, interesting, layer of difficulty to this playthrough. I wonder what the next player in line will do if I effectively erase all of our army (we are down from 12,000 to 8,888).

If not anything else, this AAR will showcase the need for sustainable utilisation of non-renewable resources.

In other news, in June, 1838:



I would really like to dramatize the inevitable follow-up conflict but basically it is 'us vs attrition and time'...



...meaning that two years and 3,000 men later, Hedjaz surrenders. That grants us the control of Mecca and Medina! Too bad this is not Crusader Kings.



You know the old saying: 'If your franchise does not have a Defender of the True Faith button, invent it.'

But what will the Ottomans say? And more importantly, can I trick you into believing there is a cliffhanger?

 

[Attalus]

I will follow it of course although don't expect me to play, I don't want to corrupt the save because I made a few modifications I forgot to include in the latest download

 

[Athalcor]

I will follow it of course although don't expect me to play, I don't want to corrupt the save because I made a few modifications I forgot to include in the latest download

You can still download the older version . The thing is that we are running out of possible people to play, making this all a bit awkward

 

[Plank of Wood]

Swiggity swuppity, sign me uppity

 

[Ben Kerman]

You can still download the older version . The thing is that we are running out of possible people to play, making this all a bit awkward

We could just go through the succession again if too few people sign up to fill the full 100 years.

Btw, prestige matters for buying from the world market because it increases your rank, which is what determines the order of access.

 

[Athalcor]

We could just go through the succession again if too few people sign up to fill the full 100 years.

Well, I did not really count on ten people joining, but with less than five it is a bit anticlimactic .

Btw, prestige matters for buying from the world market because it increases your rank, which is what determines the order of access.

So I remember it correctly after all! Not that it helped match with the Nejdi resource problems, though.

 

[Athalcor]

A lot of things happen. Not in Nejd, though



The Sublime Porte, having much greater issues at hand, does the sensible thing and renounces their Caliphate, allowing us proclaim the reborn Arabian Caliphate! Cool. I hoped there are some tangible perks attached to that title, though.



The first thing the Caliphate does is entering in an alliance with our (much more powerful) neighbour Iraq. Because I am a man with a plan, you know.

Also note that we are #8 in prestige. And yet we are unable to buy anything from the world market.

Anyway, what should we do now? As it stands, we have two potential targets - Oman and Yemen. Oman is a partially westernised nation, meaning that they are roughly a half a millennium ahead of us in tech development and they are also in Spanish sphere. That for me sounds like a no-go. Yemen, on the other side of the peninsula, fields an army of 18k and has an alliance with the Funj Sultanate (not meaning much) but also with Oman...that is another 9k men. We really should think about this a bit -



Whoops.


(pictured: our non-existent army and the supplementary Iraqi armies happy to answer the call of the Caliph)

I guess, it is time for the plan to kick in. Well, to be fair, it is nothing super sophisticate: we will just sit back and hope that Iraq wins the war for us. By the way, the fact Iraq willingly joins the war on our side means that we also effectively break the annoying Omani-Iraqi alliance.



By June, everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.



To clarify, Yemeni forces advance unchecked because, well, there must have been some sort of a logistics failure because otherwise I cannot explain WHY IS THE IRAQI ARMY STUCK IN THE DESERT, DOING NOTHING.



At least in the other theatre things go smoothly with Iraq crushing Omani opposition in Dubai.

By August I desperately quit and restart the game, which somehow resets the Iraqi behaviour, making them somehow realise they actually have one army to spare. This leads to their occupation of Sana'a and culminates in the battle of Abha in January, basically ending the Yemeni campaign.



Meanwhile, I have managed to lose about 1,000 men to attrition.

In February, 1842, Oman accepts white peace offer from Iraq (they unsurprisingly became the war leader upon calling). During the elapsed one year and a half, the Sublime Porte got overrun by liberals, then they got couped by the janissaries and the resulting regime got overrun by liberals, again.



June sees Kurdistan jumping on an opportunity and attacking the undefended Sultanate of Iraq. That has the unpleasant side effect of Iraqi armies leaving the front, causing us to bear the whole burden of sieging remaining Yemeni provinces.



By December, we get this memo. To be honest, it is understandable that it has taken so long for Yemen to understand they are going to lose - in their position, I would have trouble believing that the invasion by a loose Bedouin tribe coalition without any army whatsoever will cause their downfall as well.



In accordance to our tradition of being an AAR about Nejd and wishing to report actually interesting events, here is brief on recent happenings in the Ottoman Empire, err, Sublime Porte, I mean Turkey.

In other news, Venice crushes the Greek revolt and takes a spot in the sun as a Great Power at the expense of Spain - meaning that poor Oman is left with only Yemen as ally. And that is not much, to be honest.



In January, 1844...yes, guess what: taking control of a country with only about 2,000 men (sorry, Ben Kerman ) is lengthy! Anyway, in January, 1844, Egypt enters alliance with Iraq. Being a gray eminence by nature, I figure out it could be a good idea to ally Egypt and thus start improving relations with them. Thinking of it, wow, so many new options! We could probably even use them to annex the Funj Sultanate!



Next month, we finally get to the first reform. For some unfathomable reason, I choose a military reform, regretting it immediately. Oh well. But hey, at least we can train dragoons now. Hypothetically.

(How to train your dragoon. No! I mean, sorry, I promised myself I won't do this thing with random pictures anymore, it won't happen again. I would also like to mention that resisting puns with des(s)erts is pretty damn hard)

Still in February, we take the last Yemeni province and Iraq promptly annexes them. To Nejd, I mean. That also allows us to take_yemenit_desert_title, resulting in



Cool, ha? This victory, bringing us from 300k population to 500k and from 6 theoretical regiments to 12, comes at the cost of leaving us without any army to speak of. Iraq also loses its war with Kurdistan but that is none of my business.

With the truce with Oman lasting till 1847, I have officially run out of things to do. In 1845 I enter an alliance with Egypt, creating a Mesopotamian triangle of power (it is more of a line, really).

But then, the game somehow decides to award me in April:



I mean, wow, this has never happened to me before! I am somehow surprised that the guys in Al-Urdan decided to join Nejd but I guess the whole Arabian Caliphate thing was successful in at least some respect.

This makes Nejd look like this (I took another desert in the process):



I leave it up to you to consider whether my decade has been reasonable because looking at some of the choices I have made, aside of territorial expansion, I would say my gameplay has been pretty abysmal.

And I guess the fitting end to this session is this picture:

 

[stnylan]

I can't partake in the succession, but will follow. Interesting, as they say.