Before Enlightenment

I'm continuing to love my current Europa Universalis IV game, continuing as Prussia into the late 1600s. It's had a very different rhythm from my Portugal game, with much more warfare and a stronger European focus. As I head into the endgame they are growing more similar, as I'm now leading (conquered) subjects in the New World and fighting various wars in Africa and India to control trade. It remains to be seen if I'll see this game all the way through, but so far I'm having a blast.

As I expand, the "clockface" organization from my previous posts doesn't make as much sense, but I'll try doing something similar. Let's start off with Persia and India. For a while my influence extended to the shores of the Black Sea, as the edge of Europe and as far as the HRE can expand. My last post ended around the time of my first war against the Mughals, who are mutual foes with my allies the Mamluks. The Mughals at one time had the (geographical) largest empire in the world, stretching across a vast territory; but it seems like they were badly overextended, and there would be times I would check on their status and see that they're defending against five separate wars.

Part of my motivation was to soft-block the Mamluks from extending into Persia and India, and that's kind of worked. We thrashed the Mughals and I had a ton of war-score to spend, but they also had an enormous empire, and I ended up taking a very snaky chain of provinces rather than clean borders, prioritizing Centers of Trade and Great Projects, and secondarily coastal provinces and strategic chokepoints. After this kind of evisceration it's nearly impossible for an AI power to recover, and I'm sure that's contributed to their ongoing woes.

Dealing with the conquered lands was slightly more tricky than usual due to the sheer distances involved. If a revolt broke out, it could take a year to march troops over from Prague to deal with it. I think this is the first part in this campaign where I've started to maintain permanent standing armies in distant territories. I know they'll eventually be used in future wars, and in the meantime they can drill and put down revolts.

In general I've been having an easier time with unrest in this game than in the Portugal game, thanks to taking Humanist ideas, so it's pretty rare for me to worry about revolts, but when they do happen (so far only once or twice since Absolutism) they can erupt all over and be a pain. I think I ran into trouble when I had high Overextension plus lots of Separatism (both from big conquering sprees) along with unusually low Legitimacy, which in turn decreased Tolerance. Now that my Legitimacy is high again I haven't run into problems, even when actively converting recently-conquered provinces.

Apologies for the tangent / stream-of-consciousness, but while I'm talking about Legitimacy: One thing that initially annoyed me after Revoking the Privilegia was the endless stream of Royal Marriage proposals I received from my new vassals. At the start of each new play session I would dismiss or decline literally dozens of them. After a while, though, I started to wonder: why not? Why shouldn't I be loved?

When you accept (or initiate, more on that later) a RM proposal, there's an immediate hit to your Legitimacy, either -2 or -5 depending on the partner's own Legitimacy and Prestige. But then there's an ongoing monthly benefit for as long as the ruler lives: a big but not usually important boost to New Heir Change, a mildly important boost to Improve Relations, and a tiny but very helpful boost to Legitimacy. So after some time the marriage will "pay for itself" in Legitimacy, either about 2 or 4 years, and after that you'll get surplus Legitimacy.

Legitimacy is kind of interesting, in that there's a hard cap at 100 and any surplus value is wasted. It usually isn't terribly hard to get it to 100 and keep it at 100, so I'd been loathe to marry down from it. But if you get a lot of Royal Marriages (which usually isn't an option, except for the Emperor of a Revoked HRE, who doesn't use Diplomatic Relationship slots for vassal relations), then you can get pretty significant ticking monthly Legitimacy, so when it does drop (due to an event or a bad Heir or something), it will bounce back pretty quickly. Keeping Legitimacy high helps a lot with Unrest, and also gives Max Absolutism and a few other things.

The higher Improve Relations is nice. It isn't communicated very clearly in-game, but Aggressive Expansion's decay is largely driven by your passive Improve Relations modifier, so keeping that high will cause AE to melt away before coalitions can form.

Finally, while you don't often need the New Heir Chance, it did embolden me to disinherit a thoroughly average heir. The very next day I got a new heir, a better heir! Let's hear it for my harem of concubines!

So being in this situation of tons of Royal Marriages (I currently have over 80) is nice, but getting there was rough. Legitimacy has a hard cap of 100 and also a hard floor of 0, so once you get down there, there's no penalty to entering into additional marriages. So I went through a long stretch of accepting literally every proposal from my vassals. In less than a year I was all married up and started ticking up in my Legitimacy. I had planned this around the time that my Empress-Regent was about to step down and the new Emperor Heir would take the throne; but as I learned to my chagrin, you can't Abdicate while you have low Legitimacy, which I would think would be the whole point! I think I ended up burning some Military Mana on Strengthen Government just so I could get back over 50 Legitimacy and switch over. Abdicating gives a -20 Legitimacy hit, so my heir took the throne at 80 instead of 100; but again, thanks to all the active Marriages, I was able to get back up 100 before too long.

 

 

Oh, and finally a note on timing: you can either send or receive marriage proposals. The marriage lasts for as long as the person who sends the proposal. So, from the player's perspective, and marriages you initiated will end when your monarch dies, and marriages you accepted will end when the other monarch dies. So, if you want to keep your marriages high, you definitely want to receive and not initiate. This lets you maintain Legitimacy at nearly 100 indefinitely: periodically other rulers will die, then you'll receive an invitation, your Legitimacy will drop to 98 or 95 but will be back up at 100 before long. Going in the other direction,  you'd need to re-marry all 80+ rulers when your ruler dies, which means wading back through the Low Legitimacy morass again.

Final (phew!) observation: at least in my game, I don't seem to ever receive royal marriage proposals from my vassals while we're at war. I do receive marriage proposals from other nations, both in the HRE and outside it, whether at war or not. So lately, after wrapping up a war, I'll usually go for at least a month or so of peace to catch up on any pending proposals before kicking off my next war.

I can't believe I wrote all that in the middle of writing about war against the Mughals!

After the Mughals, I hit Gujarat next. I was now moving into Sunni territory, which is tricky: the Mamluks are my very good friends, and they're also allied to many large Sunni nations, and they're often the Defender of the Sunni Faith, so I definitely don't want to break that alliance (at least, not yet!). But fortunately this is usually pretty easy to work around: I can just declare any other war I want, invite the Mamluks in as war allies with my stock of 100 Favors, and then declare on the original target. A red "X" will appear in the war interface showing that the Mamluks won't honor the call to arms since they're already fighting on my side in another war. Humorously, sometimes I can even call them into that war on my side - I haven't thoroughly tested this, I think it works if they received the Call to Arms from their Defender of the Faith role, but not if they are allied to the war target.

Gujarat was an easier war than the Mughals; they were also large and powerful, but not nearly as vast and sprawling, so we could do a few more focused wars without chasing them all over the globe. I think that it's a bad sign when my HRE minions have time to get all the war to a war in Asia and meaningfully contribute.

As with the Mughals, I prioritized trade provinces and Great Projects, but also strategic positioning of borders: in particular, I wanted to get good borders on my next target, Vijayanagar, so I could Fabricate Claims on them. Having taken Espionage and Aristocratic Idea Groups, I can take claims on multiple large areas of provinces in a very short amount of time. I've been leaning heavily on the Conquest Casus Belli for most of my recent wars: I think the new Imperialism CB may technically be better since the War Score Cost is low, but what's great about Conquest is that you pay 0 Diplomatic mana for any province you have a claim on. This is especially great against wealthy European powers like Spain, but is handy everywhere.

Once my rebellions were under control, I declared on Vijayanagar. They had managed to consolidate pretty much the entire Indian subcontinent, which was pretty impressive; in my previous Portugal game there was much more of a partition. I was pretty shocked at how much territory I could take from them in a single war: I ended up taking the entire Indian coast, as well as most inland provinces with Centers of Trade and some other "pathways" through the north under the Himalayas. I now could walk from Lisbon to Bengal.

In my last post I'd mentioned making use of the Charter Trade Company diplomatic option to buy provinces for expansion. That was really helpful for these Gujarat and Vijayanagar wars, as I could fabricate claims around those provinces to help me maximize my future wars. So far I haven't operated in East Asia; I do periodically Fabricate there as well so I have claims ready to go, but I'm not ready for military action there yet.

My next big target will be Bengal, but right now that's looking like a really tricky war. They're allied with Wu, who are the current Emperors of China and have been doing surprisingly well. They're also allied with Malacca, which is allied with the Mamluks; Malacca is the most powerful regional player in the East Indies, we've butted heads a few times there around my Trade Company provinces. Overall this game is lagging far behind Portugal in my East Indies approach, by this point I had totally dominated that area and monopolized production of Cloves, but currently I just have a couple of tenuous footholds and am blocked from easy expansions by powerful webs of alliances. Which isn't a huge deal just yet, just something I may eventually deal with.

Phew! Moving along the clock dial:

I've been getting more active in Africa. The most important action took place nearly a century ago when I took control of the Ivory Coast from France and Denmark, letting me drive most of the world's trade to the English Channel and away from Spain, Portugal and France. Since then I've made a few attempts at breaking into Mali (who are allied with Denmark) but have not yet succeeded. Mali has a huge army, is up to date on tech, have high-level forts, and most of their territory is Terra Incognita so movement in there would be incredibly slow. They also have strong local alliances, so making them a co-belligerant will pull in Air, Yao and others. I usually C-B them intending to take territory, but end up fighting defensively on the Ivory Coast, eventually defeating their armies but unable to take land from them. Maybe next time!

Spain colonized most of South Africa, and I was able to take that from them - more on that later. This is one of the more satisfying parts of the game, as whoever owns the Cape of Good Hope province automatically dominates that Trade Node and will get a free Merchant, which they can use elsewhere since trade from here only flows to the Ivory Coast.

Between Mali and the Cape, I fought a war against Kongo. I already dominated the Ivory Coast but they did have a few Centers of Trade that I wanted for completeness sake, plus they have a nice Monument in Mambuka. This was a relatively straightforward war, with the mildly interesting wrinkle that Kongo was the one Catholic nation in Africa. I focused on taking their provinces, but in the future I may try and turn them Protestant.

The war I just won before starting this post was primarily against Zimbabwe, but pulled in Mombasa and Mahafaly as co-belligerents and Aljuraan as a non-co-belligerent. This war was all about trade. I already have a pretty good route to move trade from India through Astrakhan to Crimea to Kiev and on into my totally-dominated European funnel to the English Channel. Most siphoning happens in Aden, Aleppo and Basra, where the Mamluks dominate. This war for the east cost of Africa should give me very strong control of the Zanzibar trade node, which may help in drawing some other trade away from the Aden path to Alexandria. Once trade hits the Cape of Good Hope I have a straight shot through Ivory Coast to the Channel. Unlike in my Portugal game I'm not routing everything through this, it will mostly be local trade.

Moving on from Africa back to Europe: My main focus lately has been conquering the colonizers. Spain is the biggest priority as a long-term #2 power and the biggest colonial overlord, but Portugal is a lot smaller, and very shortly before my Zimbabwe war I managed to conquer Portugal. I think this only took two wars, thanks to my Administrative Efficiency and multiple nice war score cost reductions.

During my first war against Portugal, I was reminded that there's a huge malus to accept a treaty that would result in the war leader's complete annexation. This is especially painful against colonizers, since even if the mother country is fully occupied, you'd need to siege down like two whole continents to make them accept. The "trick" is to declare on one of their allies and make the colonizer a co-belligerent, since the ally won't have the malus for sacrificing their friend.

But I'd been too successful in isolating Portugal and they didn't have any allies left after Spain annexed Guanmar in a previous war. Fortunately, Portugal was the Defender of the Faith. Unfortunately, I'd also been too effective in stamping out Catholicism in Europe. The only independent Catholic states left were the Papal States, who I had a truce with, and Spain, who I also had a truce with and who Portugal hated and wouldn't defend. I ended up getting around this by declaring on the remnants of France, who had fallen into a Personal Union under Brittany, a landlocked OPM in the HRE. I couldn't declare on Brittany itself due to Perpetual Peace in the HRE, but somehow declaring on their junior subject worked.

 

 

Once I was finally able to get into the war, it ended pretty quickly, as Portugal was already exhausted from its previous Spanish war. I took their few remaining inland Maghreb provinces and the rest of Portugal proper, and a single token province from France, but the real prizes were the beefy colonies of Brazil, Rio de la Plata, Mexico and California, which now joined by former English colonies.

 

Now that Town Halls are available I don't really need to worry about Governing Capacity any more, but I've been giving provinces to my HRE vassals when it makes sense. My general priority is:

1. I'll keep provinces with a culture I already accept.
2. I'll keep provinces with Great Projects that I can use (either immediately or after accepting a culture).
3. I'll keep non-European provinces with a Center of Trade or an Estuary. I'll convert these to Protestantism and then give them to Trade Companies.
4. European provinces with a culture I don't accept will go to an adjacent vassal Prince.
5. Provinces that are outside Europe but adjacent to a Prince will get fed to them. I've now "snaked" states like Perm and Astrakhan far east to Siberia, and others like Provence and Catalonia across the Mediterranean to North Africa.
6. Provinces that are outside Europe and far from any HRE princes are kept by me as regular (non-Trade Company) territories. Once I build a Town Hall they're basically free to govern.

One little administrative trick: after winning a war, I'll often get a big chunk of territory, and I might want to keep one or two provinces inside it while giving the rest away. You can start to Core all the territories as long as you own everything that's in range and contiguous to your borders. But, once you give away border provinces, those interior ones won't be considered "adjacent" and you'll need to wait for your vassals to finish coring before you can start to core yours. So you should click the "Core" button for everything you want to keep before transferring provinces you want to get rid of.

I've also been fighting Spain, and those wars have been going well. Spain is stronger than Portugal, both in Europe and the New World, but the Vassal Swarm is incredibly strong, and the Mamluks have been happy to help me out too. In the first war I took all their islands other than a couple like Galapagos that I didn't have range for. Over successive wars I've taken their remaining Pacific holdings, the North African coast, and so on. This has been another great phase of expanding the HRE. In one war, I'll take a single province from Spain that has a core for, say, Leon, and another single province with a core for Catalonia, and so on. I'll core those provinces, convert them to Protestantism, add to the HRE, and then release them as a OPM vassal. They automatically join the HRE as a vassal prince. The UI will say that they release with the Catholic religion, because most of their cores are still in Catholic land; but in my experience they'll almost immediately convert to Protestantism, probably because their one owned province is Protestant. In the next war, I'll fight a Reconquest war, and will be able to take all of the remaining Leonese, Aragonese, Catalonian, etc. provinces. This leaves extra War Score, and my Spy Network will have given me a ton of claims to use to take more lands. Even the ones I take for myself I'll end up giving away as described above; this is a lot cheaper, since I have much more Admin Efficiency and stuff, so I'm better off taking the province and giving it than transferring the occupation and giving directly in the peace deal.

 

 

I think I have one more big war to fight against Spain before finally defeating them and taking their New World colonies, which will put me firmly in control of four continents. I think I'll be able to do that before worrying about their colonies revolting.

 

 

I fought a bit more against Denmark, they're very diminished now and I'll probably be able to add them to the HRE before long. I missed the opportunity to release Norway as a vassal since Norway has a core on a Great Project I already took for myself and want to keep, so instead Friesberg, Mecklenberg and other states have gotten to rule much of Scandinavia.

Muscovy is also a shell of its former self, and as noted above I've granted most of their lands to my far-east-European vassals. I kind of messed up after the last war and their capital ended up in Asia, so I just fought a war to take those Asian provinces and force Muscovy back into Europe. They'll eventually become part of the HRE.

I'm at the point now where money is meaningless. I'll hit 1 million Ducats in the bank before long. I still focus on trade when planning my strategy, which is largely from habit but also helps starve potential enemies and hopefully make future conquests easier. I'm also getting near 1 million maximum Manpower as well. For well over a century I've been throwing bodies into Great Projects to speed their completion. I haven't built anywhere near my Force Limit yet and haven't felt the need until now because the Vassal Swarm can crush anything near Europe and my main armies can handle the stuff outside. However, if I do start a war in China I'll probably need to raise some more serious armies for that... probably still nowhere near my Force Limit, but more than I've had to date.

Let's see, I think that's it! I'm coming up on Enlightenment, and will finally be able to start making use of all the Coal provinces I've been acquiring. I need to refresh my memory on the Revolution mechanic. In my Portugal game I hadn't gotten very involved in European expansion outside of Iberia, until the Revolution started in... I think France? I remember that being an exciting war but the details are fuzzy for me. Anyways, I don't think there are any European powers in my game who could become the Revolution Target. It would be interesting if it happened to the Mamluks or Wu or something. I think there might be some benefit to spawning the Revolution in my own borders so I can more easily crush it, but I'm not sure yet if I want to go down that path.

 

 

I'm also not sure exactly what I'm doing in this game. Earlier I had vaguely thought of forming Rome, which would probably still be doable, but very expensive to annex all the necessary vassals and would require many wars against my faithful allies the Mamluks. Trying for a World Conquest also sounds tempting, but I imagine that could get really tedious. As before, I'll keep playing this game until it isn't fun any more. Fortunately, so far it's still really fun!

The City? Walls???

I eagerly look forward to each new Haruki Murakami book, but in the last few years they've ceased to be day-one events for me. I have really fond memories of midnight release parties at Green Apple Books, mingling with other literature fans as we nibbled on Japanese sweets and played trivia games while waiting for the latest novel to officially go on sale. Part of that was disrupted by the pandemic, and I've also felt a bit underwhelmed by the last couple of books from him. I still like them, but it's hard to keep that magic going after so many years.

 

That said, "The City and Its Uncertain Walls" is my favorite Murakami book in a while, probably since 1Q84.

MINI SPOILERS

Which is kind of interesting. A recent gripe I had with "Men Without Women" was that after reading Murakami for long enough, the tropes get to be a bit too noticeable. Passive male protagonist: check. Missing persons and/or things: check. Cooking spaghetti: check. Earlobes: check. Wells: check. Moons: check. Inscrutable women: check. And so on. Things that seem especially magical and otherworldly the first time you read them start to feel cliche after a while.

The writing in TCaIUW felt especially engaging and compelling. Which is especially funny after my complaints about repeating tropes, since by the second chapter or so I was going "Wait a minute... haven't I read this book before?!" It was super-duper-familiar, and not just in a deja vu sort of way, but I was positive I'd read it before. The protagonist was in a town filled with unicorns, worked in a library reading dreams, there was a high wall around the town, he'd been separated from his shadow... I knew that I'd read all this before. It didn't take too long to click into place: this was one of the two alternating stories of "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World", one of my favorite novels.

In Hard-Boiled, the novel alternated between two seemingly unconnected stories. The "noir" story had a great detective character, very sardonic and brash, whose investigations lead him literally underground, where he encounters the INKlings (Intra-Nocturnal Kappa). The "fantasy" story was the one I was reading now, with the town with the unicorns and a high wall and a shadow and stuff. It was very unclear how, or even if, the stories tied together: was the detective the man's shadow? Were the INKlings connected to the unicorns?

TCaIUW starts off with a similarly alternating structure, but this time, the linkage is very clear. The first story - let's call it the "real world" - is narrated from the first person to the second person. The narrator/protagonist is a nameless boy, 16 years old at the start, who has fallen in love with a 15 year old girl. We learn that these two teenagers, in their romantic but chaste relationship, came up with the city together: based on dreams from the girl and conversations between the two of them, they invent the many details of this otherworldly city. Much later, the girl gives a confession: the "real" her actually lives in that imaginary city, and the version of her on Earth is just her shadow. In this novel, the "fantasy" part occurs when the boy, now grown up, somehow manages to cross over into that city, seeking the great love of his life.

There's a lot of great fracturing over the course of the story. The division between the man and his shadow is really poignant. He is sort of able to reconnect with the girl from his youth, but this version of her has no memory of anything outside of the town, and definitely no feelings towards him. Near the end of the "fantasy" portion the main rejoins his shadow and they prepare to escape, but at the last moment the man decides to stay behind in the town while his shadow leaves. And yet, despite choosing to stay, he wakes up again back in the real world, reunited with his (now mute) shadow.

This leads into a really nice passage where the man quits his job working for a publishing company and moves to a small rural town to be a librarian. There are more odd characters here and mysteries that are gradually revealed, bringing more of a supernatural element into the real world. Some of the most startling moments in the book occur when something from the fantasy/dream world appears in the real world, like seeing that the old head librarian casts no shadow, and wears a watch without any hands, and receiving a highly detailed map of the walled city from an autistic boy.

MEGA SPOILERS

The fracturing continues. The boy M** disappears, crossing over into the fantasy world. The man is bitten in his ear during a dream, and subsequently the narrative shifts back into the fantasy world, where the man is once again, but without any memory of his time back on earth. He sees the same autistic boy, but does not recognize him at all. This leads me to wonder: maybe the man didn't return to Earth after all. Maybe it was only his shadow that did. But his shadow thought he was the real man.

This is a vaguely disquieting thought, which is why I particularly appreciated that Murakami addressed it. In one earlier conversation with Mr. Koyasu:

"Sometimes I just don't understand myself," I admitted honestly. "Maybe I've lost sight of me. I don't have a sense that I'm living this life as myself, as the real me. Sometimes I think I'm merely a shadow. When I feel that way, I get this restless feeling, like I'm simply tracing an outline of myself, cleverly pretending to be me."

"The real self and his shadow are essentially two sides of the same coin," Mr. Koyasu said in a quiet voice. "Depending on the circumstances, they can change roles. That's how people can overcome troubles and survive. And tracing something and pretending to be something are very important sometimes. It's nothing to be concerned about. Because the person here right now is indeed you."

There's so much to unpack here! I don't think Murakami really goes in for allegory, but my mind immediately goes towards trauma in the second paragraph here. When someone goes through a traumatic experience, they often need to dissociate, locking away their "real self" and inhabiting the body of a "shadow self" to survive a terrible experience. If the trauma is long-lasting, they may continue acting as the "shadow" for a long long time, to the point where it becomes unclear where the trauma self starts and the real self ends.

But the second half of that paragraph is really powerful as well. You are you: the things you are experiencing moment to moment, the decisions you make, those are your reality and all you need to focus on. It's easy to get lost in a dizzying haze of what-ifs and second-guesses, and we should instead focus on the present moment. We are who we are.

And, of course, that leads me to remembering Kurt Vonnegut's epigraph in Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Our shadow may not seem real, but actions we take as the shadow are our real actions: we can't hide behind the shadow as an excuse.

END SPOILERS

There's a lot more I'd like to write about but don't have much to say: some really great female characters in the second half of the book (an increasing strength of Murakami's over the years), terrific dreams, subdued humor.

I was surprised to have the novel end with an Afterword; as Murakami writes, he has never included an afterword before, but felt that this book deserved one. He lays out the timeline: he originally wrote "The City and Its Uncertain Walls" way back in 1980 as a novella, back when he was running a jazz bar in Tokyo and experimenting as a writer. It was really meaningful to him, but he felt there was something more to do with it. After the initial success of his first two books, he pulled out TCaIUW and built on it, with the idea of a "double feature" that plays two stories off each other before eventually merging, which eventually became Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Then, forty years later, he like most other people was quarantined at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. He had long wanted to revisit TCaIUW, and now as a mature author in his 70s he felt he could do it a justice that he couldn't in his 30s. So he went back to that story, crafting it again. He thought he was done after Part 1 but sat on it for a while, and realized that the story continued into Parts 2 and 3.

Knowing all that makes it even lovelier. I think of a jazz artist riffing on a familiar tune, of a classical composer varying a theme, of a master artist making the superior version of a painting. I want to re-read Hard-Boiled again and see just how similar they are - the main specific thing jumping out at me is that, at least in my memory, in the older book the dreams are contained in unicorn skulls, while in the newer book they are contained in eggs. I love the idea of the walled town as a sort of crossroads between multiple stories - it probably isn't that, but I like that idea! In any case, this has been a deeply satisfying book from one of the great masters.

Sammy Sosa

I wanted to give a (hopefully) very brief update on my continuing tentative forays into the world of Treasury inflation-protected bonds.

As noted in my previous post, my tentative plan going forward is to start participating in new auctions of 10-year TIPS to start building out a ladder. I haven't yet started the second part of my plan, but I also want to start buying 20-year-out TIPS on the secondary market. Over the next decade or so, I hope to be able to fund my eventual retirement through age 70, when I would start collecting Social Security. This is a modification to my previous plan of maintaining a mix of stock and bond index funds and selling those down in retirement. (I'm definitely not planning to exit stocks, but my current thinking is that stocks would be for "wants" expenses like vacations, new vehicles, etc., while TIPS would cover my "needs" expenses like housing, food, insurance and utilities.)

I've set myself a few recurring Google Calendar reminders to check for TIPS auctions. The exact schedule changes from year to year, but usually occurs within the same general timeframe. The most definitive source seems to be this PDF; this page is easier to scan but only lists auctions for the coming week or so. I'm looking specifically for TIPS, and have gotten better at quickly locating them as opposed to other types of bonds.

Once an auction is announced, there is a relatively short window of about a week to act. My go-to site for an auction preview is tipswatch.com. For me, this really isn't a go-vs-no-go decision, but is interesting to learn some more about what to expect.

For actually bidding on the auction, I log onto my brokerage and navigate through to the section for buying individual treasuries. Again, it takes a little searching to find the TIPS offerings. The brokerage site will clearly indicate when an auction is available for a given term.

I've been talking about "bidding", but for an individual investor like me, it isn't really a competitive bid. The way it works is, large institutional investors will submit "competitive bids" for how much interest they would demand in exchange for their money. Once all those bids are submitted, the Treasury sorts them from the lowest interest rate (what the Treasury would prefer to pay) to the highest interest rate (what investors would prefer to receive). They find the "clearing rate" at which they can sell all the bonds they want to with that rate or lower. Then all the competitive bidders who paid that amount or less, along with all the non-competitive bidders like me, can buy the TIPS (or other Treasury) at that clearing rate. It's kind of like a more benign version of The Prisoner's Dilemma. Each bidder is incentivized to put in the lowest bid possible, since they'll still get the higher rate that's agreed on and won't miss out. But if everyone bids low, then the Treasury is able to clear the auction for less, and investors end up earning less than they would if everyone bid higher.

As a non-competitive bidder, I indicate how many TIPS I want. If you buy them at the official Treasury Direct web site (don't do this!), you can request in increments of $100; for brokerages, the minimum is $1000. One thing that's a little confusing is that the actual amount you pay may end up being either higher or lower than $1000 per TIPS. For a new auction like the one that happened this month, there won't be much of a spread; for a reissue, there may be more of a premium or a discount.

As it turns out, this was a pretty good first original auction to participate in. It ended up with a real yield of 2.243%, the highest result in 16 years. TIPS are more about protecting value than growing wealth, but growth is always good!

This purchase works differently from the types of transactions I'm used to. Typically in the brokerage you'll need to have funds already available in your account, then you put in the order for the trade, then the funds are locked and the actual transaction happens within a day or two. With TIPS, you put in the bid but don't know the exact cost until after the auction ends, then you have over a week to make sure you have enough funds in your account for the settlement.

I think I'm all set on TIPS auctions for 2025 now. I may move ahead with looking for a 2045-maturity TIPS later this year. I definitely want to buy more I-Bonds, too. I've set up a series of Google Calendar reminders for those as well. I-Bonds will work a little differently for me: you can buy those directly from the Treasury at any time, unlike new issue TIPS that have very narrow windows. I-Bond fixed interest rates reset twice in the year, on May 1 and November 1. In April I'll start to monitor TipsWatch (and maybe a few other sources) to see if people think the fixed rates are likely heading up or down (based on recent TIPS auction results). If it seems like rates are heading down or steady, I'll buy in April; otherwise, I'll wait until October, and then decide whether to buy in October or November.

I do slightly regret not investing in I-Bonds before now. They really do seem like a perfect vehicle, flexible and tax-efficient and with a lot of great features, but you are limited in how many you can buy each year and I wish I'd started accumulating them before now. But in the years when I could have bought them they were yielding basically 0% fixed, so I probably wasn't alone in ignoring them.

So, overall I'm feeling pleased with how things are going: I have two whole rungs in my ladder now, yay! I do have to say that TIPS aren't feeling quite as rock-solid as they were when I began seriously considering them last year: as one specific example, there's a no-longer-implausible possibility that the new administration will try to cook the books by claiming that inflation is significantly lower than it actually is. TIPS probably still would do okay in that scenario. People with maturing TIPS could be hit by it, but would still keep accumulated adjustments from the years with valid data; and if, say, we get crooked inflation stats from 2025-2028, I would hope that the numbers would catch up in 2029 to the actual values. But who knows, we're in largely uncharted territory here. My current feeling is that TIPS are riskier now than they were before, but still the least risky option available to me other than the portfolio of canned food and ammunition. (Which historically has underperformed even a 100% bond portfolio by quite a lot!)

Buy the Sky and Sell the Sky

I recently picked up the somewhat-pretentiously-titled book "Investing in US Financial History". I think I heard about it from a Bogleheads conference video discussion between, hm, I think William Bernstein and someone else. The book came up in passing and each person was visibly delighted that the other had read it. Bernstein has recently become one of my favorite writers, both on finance and other topics, so that was all the recommendation I needed to grab it.

 

This book is, astonishingly, the first book to ever cover the financial history of the United States. There are lots of books on particular financial episodes, like the Great Depression or the Great Financial Crash, and lots of general books on history that include high-level summaries of financial events but don't dive deeply into underlying causes. "House of Morgan" felt kind of similar, but IiUSFH starts roughly 60 years earlier, carries us through the present day (so about 30 years past the end of HoM), and is broader, looking at other players in banking and how the system as a whole works. The closest equivalent may be "Goliath", and there's a lot of overlap between them, but IiUSFH feels more informative to me.

The author Mark Higgins presents the thesis that economic history tends to repeat itself - not exactly, and not always, but most things that have happened recently are extremely similar to things that also happened in the distant past. It's important for everyone to be familiar with history so they can be prepared for coming crises (and presumably future opportunities; the book also covers periods of high growth and prosperity, but the most vivid passages relate to turmoil and disaster). Higgins is a professional money manager, and claims to mostly be writing for the benefit of other money managers, but also to public servants and individual investors (that's me!). He makes his case pretty convincingly, highlighting episodes in the past that we don't talk about very often but were even more devastating than, say, the 2008 or 2020 downturns were.

While looking throughout history, he has noticed some trends (but not laws - like Piketty, he places a strong emphasis on human agency and notes how specific choices lead to specific outcomes). If a new crisis happens shortly after the previous one, the response tends to be quicker and more effective than if we've gone through a long time without problems. He describes being surprised at how swiftly the economy recovered after the 2020 COVID-19 crisis; but looking back, that makes sense, since the lessons of the 2008 crash were so recent and so the Federal Reserve and other institutions had a game plan ready to go. He also notices that when a crisis happens, the public and the media usually look for a scapegoat to blame; but the crisis is almost always caused by flaws in the system itself, such as bad rules or improper incentives. And the solution to a crisis is often counter-intuitive. Recessions in the 1800s were especially severe because leaders took common-sense solutions to them, like tightening credit after excessive credit causes a crisis. It's taken a lot of experience, empirical data, and learning the hard way what the actual solutions are to these problems. Finally, he's noticed that the response to one crisis often plants the seeds for the next crisis. For example, in the Great Depression it was mostly smaller community banks that failed while larger national banks weathered the storm rather well, so there was an implicit assumption that "bigger is better" and an encouragement for smaller banks to roll into bigger banks; but that paved the way for the "too big to fail" mega-banks that took down the economy in the Great Financial Crisis.

Stepping back a bit - as you may have noticed, I've been reading a lot of books related to finance and economics lately. I think I'm starting to approach being (gasp) widely-read. That's pretty cool! I'm increasingly finding slightly varied perspectives on familiar topics and events, and able to see where some details are being elided, or add more nuance to what I thought I knew. I feel like I've moved a bit beyond The Guy Who's Only Read Thomas Piketty and going "I get a real Piketty vibe out of this".

One of the (many!) striking things I remember from Capital in the 21st Century is Piketty's data-driven look at the returns of university endowments. He shows how the three largest endowments (Harvard, Yale and Princeton) have the highest rates of return; and then the performance steadily decreases in tandem with the size of the endowment. Piketty's point is that the elite institutions have access to investments that are unavailable to regular people, like venture capital, private equity, unlisted stocks, mineral exploration, and so on. These wealthy institutions and wealthy individuals also have access to highly-paid and talented money managers who can utilize those investments, thus consistently beating market averages. So it's interesting that Higgins, who is a professional institutional investor, looks deeply into the Yale endowment in particular and institutional investing in general. From Higgins' data, which extends a good decade past Cit21C, most institutions have under-performed the market. The only exception is Yale, but he thinks this is because Yale was unusually blessed by particularly talented money managers, who created a culture of academic curiosity and rigor built around a very-long-term outlook. The Yale investors have shared their process publicly, but also state that in most cases people should just use cheap index funds. Higgins thinks that other institutions have seen Yale's success and assumed that it's due to their access to exotic investments; but when you get off the beaten path, it is extremely hard to make good choices, and most people are not as good as Yale's managers.

So, anyways, I feel like I now have a bit of a conversation going on in my head between John Bogle, Thomas Piketty and Mark Higgins, and that's pretty cool! Some other ideas I'd toss in there are that we've had a monster 15-year run in the S&P 500, which considerably raises the baseline for what index investors have been getting; it would be interesting to revisit this topic after the next market crash. It's intriguing to think that Bogle may have been right all along, and even the wealthiest people are subject to the relentless rules of humble arithmetic.

If I were to place all the econ books I've read on a continuum with "least favorable regarding Pierpont Morgan" to the left and "most favorable regard Pierpont Morgan" to the right, this book would be on the far right end of the scale, even beyond "House of Morgan". IiUSFH has the most complimentary and heroic portrayal of the man I've read to date. He benefits by drawing a strong contrast with contemporaries like Fisk and Gould who dominated the stock market immediately before him. Higgins emphasizes how Morgan always behaved ethically and put his clients' needs first. Pierpont definitely made money, but only in the process of making others money, not solely in his own interest like the stock jobbers.

But, again in the theme of being widely read, I now know quite a few things Higgins doesn't mention here. One of the most germane is probably that Pierpont had almost nothing to do with the stock market. He was a towering figure on Wall Street, but only in the world of merchant banking, bonds and loans. Higgins mentions the market crisis of 1907, but not the terrific anecdote of Pierpont needing to ask at what time the exchange opened - neither he nor his firm did business there. So it wasn't so much that Pierpont was a more highly evolved form of Gould, they were swimming in different lakes. Which doesn't take away from the admiration at Pierpont's actions - if anything, it enhances it, since he wasn't directly impacted by the market crash, but he realized the threat to the broader economy and seemingly acted out of a sense of noblesse oblige.

I read IiUSFH immediately after reading "A People's History of American Empire", a sort of abridged, updated and illustrated version of "A People's History of the United States." I wasn't planning to write up that book, but I might. In the meantime, I'll note that Pierpont has only a brief but a fully devastating appearance there, surrounded by other Gilded Age plutocrats. And even details like the Pecora Hearings get shaded in many different ways. Stoller practically pumps his fist in the air and cheers on the little guys taking on the Money Trust, breaking up the self-dealing oligopoly. Chernow spends many pages on the hearings, covering the circus-like spectacle of the proceedings, shows how well Pierpont comported himself compared to others. And for Higgins the hearings are a tragic conclusion, as an ungrateful nation turned on the man who saved them from a far greater disaster.

While all of the various books I've read have had varying perspectives on Pierpont Morgan and the Morgan bank(s), it's funny that literally every single book I've read touching on financial history makes it clear that National City Bank (today's Citibank) has always been uniquely awful and dangerous, even by the low standards of national Wall Street retail banks.

Still more varying perspectives: everyone seems to agree that World War 2 was largely caused by economics, and ties in with the Great Depression immediately preceding it, but authors tend to stress their own preferred topics or hobby horses in identifying specific accelerants. Piketty looks largely at the social and political instability caused by extreme inequality, such as the massive suffering within Germany under hyperinflation, as well as the relative economic power of France versus Germany in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles. Stoller looks at monopolies: he sees large industrial cartels like IG Farben in Germany enabling the consolidation of political and economic power, bundling everything up so it can be wielded to the particular aims of a dictator. Stoller quotes FDR's views that American-style small businesses help protect democracy and inoculate against fascism, keeping things small-scale and local.

Higgins takes a comprehensive view of WW2. He looks at the Treaty of Versaille and makes a particular note of exactly why it caused hyperinflation: Germany had a massive debt denominated in a foreign currency, which led to an "inflationary depression", which is something we in the US have been fortunate to have never experienced. But he doesn't look at these sort of economic ideas in a vacuum. He also notes the humiliation of surrendering German territory and factories to France. He takes a surprisingly deep look into Hitler as well: Hitler was an ignorant oaf, who would have had evil ideas no matter what, but was able to seize power due to the disorder and discontent fed by the economic collapse. Higgins also looks straight at the evil of antisemitism and the Holocaust: he noes how a Jewish assassin murdered the German ambassador to France, and Hitler's Germany retaliated by holding all Jewish people responsible for this crime: burning synagogues, killing innocent Jewish people, destroying their homes and neighborhoods. Hitler led the drumbeat of hatred for a people that ultimately culminated in the Holocaust. Like Piketty, Higgins is mostly concerned about the extreme social consequences of bad economics. The worst case isn't some billionaire getting too much money, it's societal collapse and the emergence of something far darker and more dangerous.

Earlier in the book, Higgins also looks at the American Civil War. He prefaces this section by saying that of course slavery was immoral and the human dimension of suffering can't be expressed in economic statistics. That said, in his own review of contemporary writings, it seems that at the time the overwhelming cause of the Civil War was westward expansion of slavery, which in turn was largely economic. The Southern economy was built around slave-driven agriculture, while the Northern economy had transitioned to a proto-industrial one organized around liberates labor. Southerners "needed" to keep slaves for their plantations to be sufficiently profitable, and also much of their wealth was in human bodies.

This aligns with Piketty's "Capital & Ideology" comparison of emancipation in the UK and France compared to the US. In the former, the state reimbursed slaveholders for "taking" their "legal" property, while in the US, the value of that property was so high that reimbursement wasn't a feasible option.

This isn't the main point, but I am reminded of Chernow's description of George Washington's disenchantment with slavery, which also came down to largely economic terms. In Washington's experience, freedmen would work harder and more ingeniously in pursuit of higher pay, while slaves would work the bare minimum to escape the whip, so slaves were far less productive and also required much more oversight. But, a lot changed between the late 18th century in Washington's time and the mid-19th century in Lincoln's time. I'm not an expert in this, but my understanding is that the invention of the cotton gin reshaped the cotton-growing market to make slave labor much more lucrative, and that in turn may have helped harden the political opinions from the Revolutionary-era sense that slavery was a dying institution to the later extreme views on racial superiority.

Overall, I really love the moral dimension of Higgins' writing. He gets fairly deep into the weeds of the technical aspects of finance, and I think I tend to associate a financial focus with moral relativism, but Higgins is much more aligned with someone like John Bogle: they both have a strong sense of civic responsibility and a strong belief in service and professionalism over self-interest. I think both Bogle and Higgins have written admiringly of the early incarnation of Merrill Lynch, which was incredibly scrupulous in its dealings and rebuilt shattered trust in securities after the chaos of the 1920s and misery of the 1930s.

In some ways reading this book reminded me of my first experience reading William Bernstein's "The Birth of Plenty," where the first part of the book is a full-throated defense of capitalism and economic growth, and then the authors make it abundantly clear that unfettered capitalism leads to inequality and misery, and they promote more socialism as a way to improve social outcomes. Higgins definitely lands more to the right of Piketty, but maybe a bit to the left of Bernstein.

I did have some more criticisms nearing the end of the book, while generally agreeing or at least sympathizing with his point of view:

Some of the data presentation felt misleading. He shares a chart from the St. Louis Fed which argues that federal tax receipts as a share of GDP have actually remained pretty consistent over the last 80 years. This is immediately preceded by a graph showing the large rise in medicare and medicaid expenditures. But the spending graph is given in nominal dollars, while the income graph is given as a share of GDP, so they aren't directly comparable at all. Furthermore, if you zoom in on the federal tax receipts graph, I think it actually tells a pretty powerful story. In 2000, at the end of the Clinton administration, federal tax revenue was 20% of GDP; by the end of the Bush administration, it had steadily diminished to 15%. That's a drop of 25%, which feels really significant! And that's huge context for the political discussions about what we can afford (wars, tax cuts) and what we can't (health care, infrastructure).

The federal tax receipts graph also downplays the range by extending its Y axis from 0% to 25%, making the variations between 15% and 20% seem minor. Immediately to the right is a chart that's meant to show the significant rise in annual GDP growth over two periods. Just eyeballing it, it looks like in the 1980s growth was twice as much as in the 1970s. But again that's misleading, because here the Y axis extends from 3.05% to 3.35%. If this graph also went from 0% to say 4% like the last graph, we would think that the difference was insignificant.

 

Anyways - these are items that I just kind of poked at since they didn't match my prior convictions. There's likely plenty of other data that I just nodded at and accepted since they matched my beliefs.

Another thing I mulled over was the trade deficit, which was very much in the news while I was reading this book. As Higgins mentions, one unusual aspect of the recovery after the recessions of the early 1980s through today is that our trade deficits have continued to grow. Historically, the US typically had trade deficits during recessions and switched back to trade surpluses in recoveries. Higgins has some thoughts about why we've maintained trade deficits during growth periods: we are privileged to (currently) have the US dollar as the global reserve currency, so there's no limit to how many foreigners are willing to hold dollars (when they wouldn't want to indefinitely grow their holdings of, say, rubles). We've also shifted from an economy based around physical production of agricultural and industrial products into one based on technology and services.

This makes me think of the accounting shenanigans that have accompanied technology in recent decades. As one example, shortly before Google went public, they transferred their IP to a subsidiary located in Bermuda. As part of annual operations, Google in the US will "pay" their subsidiary in Bermuda for the rights to use Google IP. This results in Google showing little or no profit in the US, and a very large profit in Bermuda. Since Bermuda's corporate tax rate is 0%, Google ends up paying no tax. Now, I'm not totally sure how that situation will roll up into Higgins' chart, but I think that it would show up as a negative contributor to the US trade deficit, since Google is sending more dollars out of the US than are coming in. But the on-the-ground reality is that Google is employing engineers in the US, not in Bermuda; its operations are all based in the US; its stock trades on the US exchanges, and the profits realized by Google are mostly collected by US investors and not Bermuda investors. So... I dunno. I think that at least some (I don't know how much) of the trade deficit is the result of tax evasion which has been enabled by the liberalization of capital flows, more so than the actual reality of America as net producers vs. net consumers.

Anyways, as an aside I've really been enjoying Paul Krugman's writing on his recently revived substack. Many recent articles on the trade deficit, mocking the nonsense assertions that a trade deficit means subsidizing the exporting partner. One recent article looks at the trade deficit with China in particular. One of Krugman's arguments is that, when a country is doing well, it attracts more foreign investment, which by definition means a trade deficit. I'm not an expert in this field, but I've really been enjoying learning more about it, both fundamentals and the areas of policy disagreement.

I don't think Higgins should have gotten at any of this trade deficit stuff in the book - like with JP Morgan, he's giving an impressively broad view of history, there are a million rabbit holes he could go down, and I'm grateful to him for inspiring these thoughts, not disappointed in him not writing a 2000-page-long book.

The second-to-the-last section of the book covers the Great Financial Crash. This is probably the best explanation I've read of it yet, building on what I already knew and adding a lot more technical detail. This chapter reinforces several of Higgins' main theses. Bubbles are created when money is too freely available and investors become irrational, with roughly a 20-year expiration from the previous bubble. Bubbles are often caused by periods of transition when false ideas become widely accepted: for example, in the 2000s it was taken as gospel that there had never been a national decline in real estate values (even though that had been the primary cause of recessions in the 1820s and 1840s). It can be hard to see a bubble while it's forming because each player only sees their own immediate situation, which usually seems rational to them: it's only when you zoom out and see how the system as a whole is working where the bubble becomes obvious. In the case of the GFC, mortgage originators weren't concerned because they were immediately selling mortgages and didn't need to keep them on the books; mortgage resellers weren't concerned because they were slicing up and reselling mortgages; and investors weren't concerned because they trusted the rating agencies saying that the CDOs were high-grade low-risk investments.

In the aftermath of a crisis, we tend to focus on the actions of specific individuals or groups, but the crisis is usually the inevitable result of structural flaws in our system. If those underlying flaws aren't addressed, they'll recur in a future crisis; and often times the correction of one crisis will inadvertently plant seeds for the next crisis. One very obscure example: part of the banking reforms of the 1930s was a little-discussed "Section Q" that capped interest rates on bank accounts to something like 5-7%. The goal was to keep banks from aggressively acquiring additional deposits to expand the money supply. But for decades the market rate for interest was well below that so nobody noticed or cared. Once inflation hit in the 70s, money markets were created to dodge that regulation. But that ended up creating another "shadow banking system" similar to that which produced the Great Depression: MMFs looked and acted like bank savings accounts, but didn't have FDIC insurance, and thus were always vulnerable to bank runs. The real structural weakness behind the GFC was the shadow banking system; without it, the failure of subprime mortgages would have only impacted a part of the market and not threatened the whole economy.

This book is very contemporary, continuing through the COVID-19 pandemic and into the recovery. Kind of the last thing he touches on is inflation, which was spiking at the time of publication. Once again there's a strong overlap with Krugman here. The big economic debate of the last several years has been whether high inflation was "transitory," caused by supply chain disruptions, or "secular," caused by high wages. Those have very different policy prescriptions, since the former you can mostly just wait out, while the latter requires aggressive monetary tightening and higher unemployment. Higgins observes that there is active debate on the subject and we won't know for some time what the situation is, but he does observe that the post-COVID-19 inflation looks an awful lot like the post-Spanish-Flu inflation. In that case, World War I had ended and the influenza was abating, so there was a lot of pent-up demand for deferred services and goods; but the economy had been running on a war footing for some years and it took time to transition back to manufacturing civilian goods. Too many dollars chasing too few goods is what causes inflation. Likewise, with COVID-19, there was a lot of pent-up demand from the lockdown; people were then eager to spend, but less stuff was being produced due to illnesses and restrictions, and supply chains were jacked up (remember Ever Given?), leading to a spike in prices. So while Higgins doesn't definitively come down on the side of Team Transitory, he does see this scenario as being much more like 1919 than like the 1970s, when inflation became persistent and ingrained due to political bullying of the Federal Reserve.

And again, that's the main thesis of this book: history is important and has a lot to teach us! Almost nothing that happens is completely new. Looking to the past can help us understand the present and possible futures, both in preparing for risks and choosing the most effective solution for a given problem. And while things definitely aren't perfect, it does seem like as a country we've gradually come to learn our lessons, and can solve big problems before they turn into even worse problems. Alexander Hamilton, who Higgins reveres, was spectacularly effective, but downplayed his own genius, claiming that he just knew stuff because he read so much. I think that's what Higgins wants: people (especially leaders, but really all people) to read widely, understand all the different ways things can be, and be able to think critically about things.

Rushin' into Prussian

It may seem like I'm blogging a lot about EU4 lately. It has definitely been my go-to pasttime of the last several months. As much as I'm writing about it, I've been playing it way more, and by the time I remember to write a post I've already forgotten much of what happened since my last check-in. That said:

I think my last post ended around 1630 or so, after I had completed the Court & Country disaster and revoked the Privilegia. I'm now up to the mid 1660s or so. A lot has happened! The most obvious is yet another re-formation, completing my earliest vague goal of converting from Bohemia into Prussia with a detour through Saxony.

I'd been eligible to form Prussia for a while, as I was Protestant and had strong control over the northeast German coast. While double-checking requirements, though, I was dismayed to see that being Prussia would impose a harsh -50% penalty to my Governing Capacity. I'd been hovering near the top end of the cap for most of the game, and while being a little over it isn't too bad, remaining way over it for a long time would be brutal. So I soldiered on as Saxony for a while longer. During this time I doubled down on building Courthouses and State Houses: not just in my high-dev provinces, but literally everywhere. I ended up taking L'etat C'est Moi for a big +250 GC boost, paired that with some Estate Privileges for another +100, and pulled the trigger. That put me just a bit over capacity, and once I leveled up Admin Tech some more, I was back under the cap again. Phew!

So why Prussia? I haven't played as them before, but they seem to be the single most popular nation to play as in EU4, mostly due to their unique Militarization feature and unrivaled combat ability. The term "Prussian Space Marines" gets written a lot in the forums I frequent. They get big boosts to morale, damage and defense, but the rarest and most valuable perk is probably their high Discipline. Since converting, I've won multiple battles against equally advanced enemies with a 2:1 numerical advantage over me, simply because my guys just keep fighting and don't give up.

 

The reduced Governing Capacity makes a lot of sense for balance reasons, but seems very silly otherwise, since the whole purpose of Prussia (both historically and in the game) is to aggressively expand. I'm now very secure in Europe with nearly all minor nations under my suzerainty and the large nations not a threat. One of my first big goals was to expand into the New World: not by colonizing myself or conquering those lands, but by taking over the colonial powers. My first target was England. I had earlier gotten a foothold on the island while gunning for Global Trade, and subsequently expanded the Holy Roman Empire over all of Ireland and Cornwall. Scotland and England have fortunately been locked into a cycle of mutual destruction so Great Britain could never form.

As is always the case in EU4, it took multiple wars to accomplish my goals. In the first war I took most of England's Centers of Trade, all of its random islands and directly-owned New World territories, and broke any troublesome treaties. In the second war I took all of its coastal provinces, leaving them with York and several inland provinces around the midlands. I was a bit nervous that their North American holdings (Newfoundland, Louisiana, Cascadia, and Mexico) would break free, but fortunately they didn't: the relatively early year probably helped, as may have the much stronger and more threatening position of the Spanish colonies. In the third and final war I conquered all of their remaining provinces relatively quickly. Unfortunately, I couldn't actually end the war: there's a huge negative reason for accepting a treaty that would result in the complete annexation of a country. Their colonial powers weren't a threat, but still had most of their territory and armies, so the overall numbers weren't as favorable as they should have been. I was hoping that the ticking war score would put me over the limit, but I think that the "would result in complete annexation" value is dynamic and will always require 100-101% war score.

In this case, I had to fall back on the 5-year rule that I had relied on during World War Zero in my previous Portugal game: after a war has been going for 5 years, if one war leader is fully occupied and doesn't occupy any other territories (including provinces conquered by its vassals or allies), then it will capitulate and will accept any demand of up to 100% war score. In retrospect, I should have done what online strategists advise: in this scenario, it's best to declare on an ally of the colonizer, make the colonizer a co-belligerant, and eventually sign the peace with the war leader instead of separate-peacing. The war leader won't have the "complete annexation" malus, so it's much easier to get to this (assuming you can do well in the war against the alliance).

So far things have been relatively chill. As is usually the case, England owns most of the northern part of the New World, while Spain and Portugal have the central and lower bits. France didn't make it as a New World colonial power in this game (more on France later); Denmark and Scotland had some attempts of their own in the north but didn't get their colonies off the ground. Newfoundland is pretty large and came to me with something like 70-80% Liberty Desire, Louisiana is mid-sized and has around 60%, Cascadia and Mexico are tiny and loyal. I used some of my Subject Interactions like Support Loyalists and Send Officers to help improve our relations for a pittance in ducats, and have gradually been feeding them excess Prestige. But I also force-converted everyone to Protestant, so it will be a while until the whole setup is fully stable. Once I finally got some of them to be loyal I could start recruiting forces in their region. I'm planning to keep an army in the New World for any future conflicts. Nobody seems to have a Fort over level 1 so I can go light on the Artillery compared to my Old World armies. Unlike in my Portugal game I'm currently not getting very involved in my colonial nations' politics, leaving them to declare and fight their own wars without interference from me.

Hm, thinking about how to structure this post, I actually kind of liked my last post's clockwise spin, so I'll continue that structure here.

Moving from 10:00 to 12:00 - as I noted in my last post, after subjugating the HRE minors and forcing them to transfer trade power to me, one of the few remaining flies in my ointment was Denmark's presence in Lubeck. I finally had over 50% control, but they had most of the remainder, and as one of the final stops on the way to the English Channel that was a lot of money being diverted. This was an emotionally difficult war as Denmark had always been friendly to me, but militarily it wasn't too challenging. The main issue was the bottlenecks of getting past the forts into Denmark proper, dealing with islands in the straits, and handling the vast land in Finland and Sweden. The outcome was never in doubt, but the war dragged on longer than sheer numbers would have suggested because it took so long to siege down forts one by one.

 

 

I followed my normal practice of finishing the way by taking all Centers of Trade and any usable Great Projects. This resulted in quite a few non-contiguous territories for me; ordinarily I would balk at that, but as the provinces are all Protestant already I didn't need to worry about unrest like normal. The culture isn't ideal; in this game, my normal European strategy has been to take direct ownership of provinces in the Germanic culture group or other cultures I've accepted (the main ones being Greek, Francien and English). For other provinces, I'll try and give them to an HRE vassal of mine: even if they don't already accept the culture, they have plenty of unused culture slots. Ordinarily I would want to directly own Centers of Trade, but since I can take 100% of my vassals' trade power, I'll go ahead and give those to vassals too. The only things I want to keep for myself are Great Projects. What I really wanted to do here was to release Norway as an HRE Vassal, but I didn't have a way to do that without also giving up some Great Projects. I was able to give the peninsular provinces to HRE princes, but nobody could take land in Scandinavia proper. Definitely not the end of the world, I'm just spending some extra Governing Capacity on land that I can't use to its fullest potential.

 

 

One I had control of Lubeck, I was finally able to return to collecting trade in a single location. I moved my Trading Capital to the English Channel and switched everyone else to transfer trade, focusing on steering in nodes that could potentially branch into Venice or Genoa. This led to yet another skyrocketing of my trade income. This isn't entirely due to trade, but I'm now clearing between 1500-2000 ducats a month (without mothballing any forts or reducing army maintenance).

Continuing on to 3 o'clock: I've been fighting periodic wars against Muscovy for much of the game. They aren't a threat any more; they're still very large, with dev and even more with number of provinces, but much of their land is now non-contiguous and they only have trade influence in the very poor Girin node. Fighting them is no longer a big priority for me since I can reach beyond them and have the provinces I most care about. But there has been a common dynamic where I'll release some Orthodox nations from them, wait for the truce to expire, and then find that those nations have become allies or vassals of Muscovy, forcing me to fight yet another war to release them and another truce wait until I can force them into the HRE. This is all just kind of a background process so not a big deal. In my most recent fight, I allied, hm, I think Rustov or something, got our relations high, and then vassalized them. I hadn't realized that they were already at war against Muscovy who were trying to take them back for the second or third time. I immediately became the war leader. I wasn't prepared for this fight, but that's totally fine: the Vassal Swarm immediately sprang into action, and I could march some armies over from Central Europe before too long. We quickly got up to ~75% war score or so; going much higher than that against Muscovy is a huge pain because of how they retreat to the furthest reaches of Siberia, so I peaced out relatively early, releasing still more nascent Christian nations and taking a Gold province and a few other provinces of minor strategic interest.

The second-biggest war since my last post was a big war against the Mughals. They had been one of the bigger Great Powers and rivals with my allies the Mamluks so a confrontation was inevitable. One of the few Prussian missions I hadn't already completed required being the greatest trade power in Canton, and as I complained about previously reaching the Orient as a Germanic nation is daunting. I'd been eyeing Africa, where I'd need to take land from like five or six different nations to reach the Red Sea, and how was I going to even get CB on all those countries? But taking a fresh look at the map, I reasoned that it might be easier and faster to punch through Persia instead, connecting my Ukrainian land to Kazakhstan and on down to the Persian Gulf. This would require a greater total number of territories, but the Mughals had everything I needed, so I could potentially do it in one war.

I've been leaning heavily on the Mamluks during this stretch of time. I seem to always have 100 Favors banked with them and they're always down to join all the wars I care about. So far we haven't really come into any conflict, they're mostly focused on consolidating their power in the Middle-east and Africa. Lately I've been intentionally bringing them into wars even if I don't really need them, honestly to keep them in debt and with low manpower to keep them from growing too much. There have been a few times that they have called me to arms for an offensive war; my MO has been to accept, then completely ignore the war, then leave for a white peace (or sometimes even taking a province or two) after a year.

One challenge in the war against the Mamluks, like earlier wars against Muscovy, was the fog of war. I haven't taken Exploration ideas in this game, and have only very slowly gotten insight to coastal provinces and almost nothing in the interior of Asia. So while fighting a war, I'm also spending a lot of time scouting land to prepare for the following war.

At the end of the Mughal war, I was able to take the land bridge I wanted to connect Kazakhstan to the Persian Gulf. Thanks to my Absolutism, Administrative Efficiency and Protestant Justified Conflicts, I'm now able to take some pretty large chunks of land particularly when fighting heretics and heathens, which is pretty much everyone other than Denmark. So in addition to my land bridge, I was able to snake out and grab a lot of Centers of Trade as well as multiple Great Projects, including the excellent Bam Citadel.

As in my Portugal game, now that I'm expanding outside of Europe my normal approach is to core all provinces, then for Centers of Trade I'll prioritize converting to my state religion before adding to a Trade Company. This does mean dealing with higher Unrest for a while, since you don't get the immediate "Tolerance" benefit of being in a Trade Company; but over the long run it's better since you'll get the "Tolerance of the True Faith" instead. Since I took Humanist ideas instead of Religious in this game I haven't had to worry about rebellions nearly as often as I did in the Portugal game.

A pleasant surprise was just how long it took me to core everything. In previous wars against Muscovy I'd taken some deep tranches of territory, then had to core nearer provinces before I could start coring further ones, resulting in a 3x-4x longer period of being overextended. Because of that I'd shifted to only taking provinces that directly bordered me or a coast. With the Mughals I needed to take like 14 provinces in a row, though, so I wasn't gonna fight 14 wars for that. But I ended up being able to core them all at the same time after all, hooray! I'm now trying to remember why I had that problem with Muscovy earlier; it may have been due to me also granting provinces to Lithuania or other vassals of mine, you can core on the other side of a vassal but it may require you to have cores on the near side completed first.

Finally I had cores on the other side of Africa, hooray! Unfortunately I still didn't have the trading range to reach Canton, boo. I had done a similar mission in China earlier as Portugal and knew that the key would be to just get close enough to be able to place a merchant in the node, and then send enough Light Ships to Protect Trade; you don't actually need to conquer land in the node to beat the mission. But I would need to conquer land to get close enough to the node. Or would I?????

As it turns out, I could just buy my way to success. I don't think I've ever used this option before, but there's a diplomatic economic option called "Charter Company". You can use this on any nation located on a different continent from you that's at peace, and can straight-up buy a province from them. The costs scale up based on various factors: the bigger a share of their total dev the requested province is, the number of provinces you have nearby, etc. So in practice there's a soft cap that makes it hard to buy more than 1-2 provinces from a given nation, and they usually won't be willing to part with a province containing a Great Project at any price. But it's still insanely useful, as you can leapfrog forward to get range that could take decades of war to achieve. The cost is pricey - most of the provinces I buy cost around 4k-7k ducats - but again, at this stage in the game I'm netting over 1.5k ducats/month and this is one of the best money sinks I've found.

So I unrolled my bankroll and started buyin'. Ideally you'll Improve Relations with countries in advance as they're more likely to accept and the price will be cheaper, but if you're in a rush even countries that dislike you will make a sale for a premium. You can't buy provinces from nations that are at war, so don't wait around too long. I focused on buying provinces with Centers of Trade, ideally further east and decently far from any other provinces I had. In a matter of a week or so I had expanded from the Persian Gulf all the way around India to Indonesia and the Spice Islands, as well as the south coast of China! Fun fun fun. (Since these provinces are automatically added to your Trade Company you unfortunately can't easily convert their religion, but the unrest isn't anything to be concerned about, and hey, I'm not going to complain about a core that didn't cost me any Monarch Points!)

I did get to complete that Canton mission, which is part of a chain that also involves founding the Emden Company (which required me to annex East Frisia as it's a rare mission that requires directly owning a province without allowing a non-tributary subject), and also related to another one to construct the Kiel Canal. I think I've now finished just about all of the Prussian Missions, except for one that requires Enlightenment and another that requires having a Rival.

 

 

My single biggest war of this period has been the one against Spain, the #2 Great Power and my erstwhile ally. I had declared myself the Economic Hegemon after consolidating trade over Europe, which adds a big malus to every non-subject relationship. The Mamluks were willing to stick with me, but Spain was not. I spent several years fabricating claims on them while waiting for our truce to expire. Spain is huge in my game: besides Iberia they also have Sardinia, Sicily and the southern 2/3 of Italy. Oh, and they're the biggest colonizer in the New World and have numerous island colonies throughout the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

 

 

This was a very fun fight, a smaller-scale version of World War Zero. Much of the action took place in North America, where my disloyal ex-English subjects were forced into defending their territory against the huge might of the Spanish colonies. My own force here was just around 22k or so, enough to win any single engagement but no match for the consolidated forces of the colonies - oh, and of Spain proper, since as usual Spain had most of its army on the other side of the planet. I ended up focusing around the Cascadia region, sieging down Pacifico del Norte and keeping the capitals of English Cascadia and English Mexico free. The Spanish armies focused on Newfoundland, which was fine.

The Mamluks were busy fighting QQ for the first part of the war and so didn't contribute much, but I couldn't blame them, since I'd bailed on the QQ war after a year. Somewhat like the Denmark war, there were major chokepoints along the Italian peninsula, so even though the HRE vassal swarm had a big numerical advantage our progress was relatively slow.

Fighting in Iberia was more fun. I'd accelerated the timeline for kicking off this war once I saw that Spain and Portugal were already fighting one another. Portugal was Defender of the Faith, and I wasn't sure if they would defend Spain, but definitely not if they were already fighting! I forget what the proximate reason for this war was, but I think it was a New World colonial conflict that had pulled in the overlords. The Spanish side was a lot larger, but Portugal was making big gains, including occupying much of western Iberia.

The rest of us poured in through Catalonia. Portugal won the race to siege down Madrid, but I think that's OK; there's a -5 penalty to peace acceptance from controlling your own capital, but I don't think it matters if the capital is held by an enemy in your particular war or any other war.

I was able to start getting ticking warscore early from a province in northern Italy, and left most of Naples for my vassals to sop up while I focused on taking Mediterranean islands and things. As with most of these wars against large powers, I didn't want to struggle all the way up to 100% warscore, so I peaced out once we had Iberia and Italy and the other easily-reachable lands under control, which I think was around 50% warscore. Once again I focused my demands on taking islands, which gave me an even more significant expansion of my range; thanks to my spending spree with trade companies, I was able to reach all the way to Nan Madoll. I was more cautious about taking land in Europe proper. I took a single province in Catalonia; my plan is to convert it to Protestantism, add it to the HRE once I can extend the HRE out there, and then release that as a vassal and subsequently feed most of the remainder of Spain proper to it. Likewise, I took the northernmost province of Naples, and plan to do the same strategy with that. I had claims on much of central Italy and around Avignon. I'm holding on to some of these for their Great Projects, others I'm giving to vassals in the area.

 

 

Spain is much more powerful than England ever was, and it would take a lot more wars to take them down, but it's still my long-term hope to get to take their New World colonies as well. And probably eventually Portugal's as well, but that's still a ways off.

The last country on the clock, at 8 o'clock, is France! I've been fighting them a lot over the centuries. I win every war and they keep getting a bit weaker and weaker, but they've held together better than my other punching bags. This one was a 1-2 combo of France and Venice. For once I wasn't attacking France for its own land: rather, I wanted the Ivory Coast, which they dominate, so I can steer more of that trade from Seville to the English Channel. While the remaining French lands in France don't interest me much, the global French empire is tempting.

Separately, my other erstwhile ally Venice has been significantly diminished, but remains a thorn in my side. I dearly want to push them into the HRE, and I also want to reclaim the eastern Mediterranean islands they hold. Venice no longer has their powerful alliances of the past, but they were guaranteed by France, so I would need to take them both down in the same fight. This go-round was a lot easier since my navy now outnumbered theirs. I blockaded their Italian provinces while my HRE vassals and my own armies sieged down their forts, then we sailed east. I had hoped to take their islands in the previous war, but had been thwarted since I hadn't conquered their fort in Rhodes. This time around they had all of their remaining troops, a healthy 34k, waiting on the island...... of Crete. I snickered, parked my heavy ships outside Crete and brought my cannons to Rhodes, thankful that I wouldn't need to worry about a naval assault.

The most important action of the war was happening a continent away, though. I had previously staged a sizeable stack of 40k troops in my lone province in Africa that I had previously taken from Denmark. France controlled the entire Gulf of Guinea coast from modern-day Liberia through Gabon. Their own army was just around 30k and no match for my well-drilled Prussians. This ended up being a bit more cat-and-mouse than I had expected: after ambushing them early on, they fled inland to Mali, but later came back and wiped out my small 2k stacks I'd left behind to siege the coast while my main force was sieging Benin. I left a token presence on the Benin fort and raced back to pummel them again, eventually driving them down to their war allies in Kilwa. A combined French/Kilwa assault might have managed to dislodge me, but they never joined up, and I was able to fully occupy all of the French African lands.

The fight in France proper was more of a joke. Their small army hid behind their remaining zones-of-control while we invaded them from three directions. They were able to get off a few successful snipes against smaller stacks, but ended up being utterly annihilated.

I had to be extra-careful in timing the end of this war. France was the war target and Venice the co-belligerant, and I definitely wanted to separate-peace Venice to get maximum territory and minimum truce time from them. But much of the land I was planning to take from Venice and France was earmarked for my HRE vassals to take over or for new subjects I planned to manually release. Since I was still coring land from Muscovy and the Mughals, Venice alone would put me well over 100% Overextension, but I wouldn't be able to transfer territory until I was at peace. So I had to wait until I was at a good stopping point for both wars early in a month, peace them out back-to-back, and immediately set about granting provinces.

This ended up being a kind of inverted mirror of my normal war-ending process, where I'm picking and choosing which provinces to take from a victor: now, I was picking and choosing which provinces to surrender to a vassal. As noted above, my general preference is to grant provinces whose culture I don't accept to a vassal. The range for this is pretty short, though: the vassal needs to share a land border or be within a single sea zone to take the province. I ended up needing to hold on to some provinces I was hoping to ditch, notably the poorer Mediterranean islands. As a result, I ended up also needing to grant a couple of wealthy Francien provinces to my vassals in order to bring my Overextension below 100%. Overextension events are nasty, there is a lot of stuff you can tank for a while in this game (inflation, governing capacity, loans, stability), but overextension is a strict no-go for me.

 

 

So, that's it for my wars!

Internally, the HRE remains at peace and continues growing. I'm now up to something like 105 Princes in the Empire. A nifty pseudo-exploit I read about online is that you can revoke the reform to revoke the Privilegia, and then take the reform again, which will re-vassalize any princes you've added (forced) into the empire since the original Revoke. I did that once, and it was great, but since then I haven't been able to re-revoke revoking the Privilegia. The tooltip says that an emperor can only revoke a single Reform in their lifetime, even though I'm on an entire new Emperor now, so that seems like a mild bug. But I have found that some of my new HRE princes are willing to accept diplomatic vassalization. I have huge diplomatic reputation from a wide variety of sources, and some additional bonuses from my Idea Groups like Espionage. The princes I can't diplo-vassalize are the ones whose cores I own, which gives an insurmountable -1000 to acceptance. But anyways, most princes are under my vassalage now, with a few random exceptions like Crimea and the Great Horde; I hope to eventually be able to revoke and retake the reform again, but in the meantime we're definitely continuing to grow stronger all the time.

For my next goals, I'm going to continue expanding. I do eventually want to take down Spain and take their colonies; their European lands of Spain, Italy and northern Africa don't feed into the English Channel and so aren't very valuable, but I do really want their colonies, and especially control over the Caribbean. There are also some very valuable Great Projects in Spain that I'd like to own. It will take many wars to take them down.

I'm also gradually making my way east. I have footholds pretty much everywhere now, and will probably follow the standard process of consolidating trade nodes.

Over the long term, I may eventually go to war against the Mamluks, but that's been a very low priority for me. If I do turn against them, I'll probably increase my friendly relations with Ethiopia into a full alliance.

I'm undecided on whether to remain as Prussia or not. They are the strongest military power in the game, but at my size I don't really need to have the strongest units, I can easily outspend and outlevy anyone else. I would like to form Germany, but it looks like I can't do that as the HRE Emperor, and being the HRE Emperor is just way too much fun. I could take the final reform and turn into the Holy Roman Empire, but that also seems way less fun than leading the Vassal Swarm. I'm vaguely mulling over forming the Roman Empire; that would definitely require me conquering the Mamluks, and also integrating most of my southern vassals, but could be really fun. If I'm still playing in 1820, I might do these things and also consolidate the HRE just for any achievements.