MEIOU&Taxes 2.0 Brittany AAR/Mod Showcase -- Part 7: Actually Part 8

So, a recap for those uninterested in history but interested in a historical game (=people who didn't read the prologue like the lazy "tldr" losers they are): Brittany starts at civil war. One faction is house Montfort, headed by John, and the other is house Blois, headed by Charles the Bearded. Both have strong claims to the ducal crown and are duking it out. French help the Blois and English help the Montfort.

Nah I'm just pulling your leg mate

M&T got patched to 2.01 and when taking these screens I wasn't sure if it's safe-compatible so I played as Blois to show off new features and changes. First such addition I'll be covering will be new national ideas.

Also note how there's a new ideas chart, which addresses the complaints I had for it. Except now it doesn't show the technology requirements for locked idea groups. In general in this patch they fixed some things and ruined other things. Good work.

All idea groups are now color coded and have fancy images taken from historical art. How many paintings can you recognize? If it's less than three stop reading this AAR and go to a museum or something, uncultured plebian.

National ideas have been completely revamped. Now, instead of a protestant nation that has sacked Rome twice unlocking a NI called "We're fervent catholics and haters of heresy", the ideas represent the history and traditions of your nation and are thus unlocked within the first 50 years. Also, traditions and ambitions are gone and only six of the ideas have an effect.

The first idea is always representing the familial system of your country. And as you can see, the idea itself isn't giving an effect but the primary culture is. Of course, soon after the release of the patch people complained that the whole system is turning cultural stereotypes into a mechanic and some almost called the modders "racist liars".*

God I love the internet.

The mechanic actually makes sense as families were very important before industrialization ruined literally everything (prolonging life expectancy isn't an improvement as life is suffering ergo longer lives lead to more suffering) (although sliced bread is pretty nice so I guess it's not entirely negative). Wikipedia summarizes it nicely in a sentence: "The pre-industrial family had many functions including food production, landholding, regulation of inheritance, reproduction, socialization and education of its members. External roles allowed for participation in religion and politics. Social status was also strictly connected to one's family." Pretty neat and often overlooked aspect of history.

*some arguments were valid, such as a sceptical "sauce plz" (which any respectable history nerd asks ASAP) but the creator of the system threw a bit of a hissy fit instead of providing sources

Now I'm going to write the patch notes in the style of /u/AsaTJ, although because I'm not a professional writer like him it's gonna be shit like the rest of the AAR. At the same time you can take a look at the new ideas of Brittany. I like them a lot. Having read a bunch about Breton history for this AAR, I think they're fitting.

Patch 2.01 (incl. the hotfix)
-Buffed the French because why not
-Reenabled a perfectly functional and logical vanilla mechanic of demanding unlawful territory that was disabled for god knows what reason
-the buggy province of Tortosa was replaced with two buggy provinces of Groningen and Ommeladen
-Great Salt Lake no longer a lake, Varnen and Vättern (some of the largest lakes in Europe) no longer nameless ponds.

-French Grand Masters of monastic orders in the Mediterranean no longer start speaking Greek all of a sudden
-Legitimacy, Devotion, Horde_Unity and Republican tradition.
-Yes that was word for word a listed change in the patch and no I don't know what it means
-Tropical paradise islands in the Indian ocean are no longer uncolonizable hellish wastes

-Failed to fix broken unrest system
-Native americans are now always raped by plagues
-Cilicia is now Cilician
-France no longer forms Lotharingia no longer forms France no longer forms Lotharingia no longer forms France no longer forms Lotharingia no longer forms France...

-France can no longer blob in HRE while it's busy with the Hundred Years' War
-England can still blob in Ireland while it's busy with the Hundred Years' War
-Muscovy no longer railroaded to form Russia
-Ottomans still railroaded to form the Turkish Empire

-Vengeful trait no longer turns you into Napoleon
-Colonies can now colonize
-Historical unpronounceable names for more provinces

-Friesland is now Proto-communist
-Fixed AI being a hippy in the first century
-One african province no longer trades with Alaskan natives

Remember that time I got confused about who the ruler of Aquitaine was? Me neither, most of my writing is pretty forgettable. Well anyways they fixed that and Aquitaine is now a mix of a march and a junior PU partner. RIP clone of English King, you won't be missed.

-Fixed the lack of disgusting bordergore in the Baltics
-Removed Moldavia as it is a fictional country
-Just kidding, Moldavia has just been reduced to a OPM and sometimes Moldavian revolters conquer half of the White Horde even though there are no Moldavian cores anywhere

-Rome now controls regions it historically had little control over
-Still haven't added a mountain pass between Epirus and Thessaly so good luck getting to your westernmost provinces if you're Roman

-Completely revamped Ethiopia (genuinely pretty cool change as Ethiopia is best african country so no joke this time)

Want to play a Jewish nation? You can.

Those religion effects though...
>Trade Efficiency: +10%
>Interest Per Annum: -2.00
>Merchants: +1
>Diplomatic Reputation: -1.00

Oy vey, all the stereotypes are in

Here you can see the effects of your primary culture. As you can see they're more substantial than in the NI tooltip. Pretty neat bonuses, esp. Trade steering and Diplo tech. They really want me to colonize as Brittany, don't they.

After taking the previous screens I tried loading up an autosave, afraid it might crash or get corrupted as the patch is NOT save compatible. Miraculously, it worked perfectly fine as you can see here!

Well... mostly fine. Had to fix this with some console commands.

Also estates menu now has fancy colored buttons! Although if you click a button it is no longer highlighted. Why does the dev team keep breaking things by adding things?

Duke John cracks his knuckles and prepares to fix the economy which he broke by trying to fix it via war. First order of the day is reducing inflation. Won't be easy to do in a time of weak decentralized governments without central banks, and more so, in a time when the term "inflation" did not even exist.

The ability to reduce inflation in EU4 is pretty ahistorical, now that I think about it.

Not sure if I've mentioned this but in M&T you reduce inflation by 1% each time you click instead of 2%.

Unfortunately, Brittany doesn't get all its national ideas unlocked after porting to the new patch. I'll have to unlock them somehow.

After the lengthy war, many people in Brittany are tired of sending men to the army and paying additional taxes and think the whole affair was ultimately pointless. We'll be at peace for a while again.

More problems with using an old save for the new patch appear: France suddenly builds a dozen paved road networks all over the place, presumably for free. I had to cheat to destroy them as they're pretty powerful and expensive.

Be warned if you consider continuing your campaign in the new patch. It might break your save. DON'T DO THIS AT HOME.

Oh, yay, one of my favourite events.

As John is growing older and more senile and his legitimacy is being questioned more and more, greater nobles are taking advantage of it. Especially the noble houses of Rohan and Leon: the former has a commander in the military and the latter has the Duke's wife.

Note that the numbers are randomized every time. Sometimes it's cheap and easy to revoke a privilege, at other times it's be a pain in the ass. This time it'd be a minor pain to revoke the privilege. However...

...the loyalty of Greater Nobles is dangerously low. If I revoke this privilege, they'll be pissed in a major way.

Besides, John is a coward so he wouldn't dare to do anything that would anger the nobles, or his dominating wife. So, for example, he grants a meaningless but fancy title to Gilles as a recognition of his service to the crown at his request.

Brest has grown enough (no breast expansion jokes please) to have one full urban pop, without my intervention. This is kind of odd as the province only has a commune hall giving 0.5 urban gravity. Maybe it's another bug caused by the update? Eh, whatever, I won't complain about free trade power.

Also, the Food Information Tab mod has not yet been updated, so I can't show much detailed province data anymore.

Many farmsteads and towns in Constentin were looted bare or burned down during the war, which is reflected in its local wealth.

There aren't many things more satisfying in this mod than checking the local wealth of enemy provinces after a war, especially if you've strongly encouraged looting and the victim was filthy rich.

The CE of Aunis has updated...

...but we still can't core the province as it has unrest. The unrest is lowering quickly, though, and we also have our army reducing unrest a little in the province.

There's enough money in the treasury to pay off one loan from the merchant banks of Genoa. But we remain in debt to the French Jewish bankers.

Ah, there we go, we can begin to core Aunis. It's dirt cheap but takes a looong time: 10 years, in fact. M&T developers hate blobbers with a passion.

The slow process of integrating the county begins. The local nobles and peasants don't really care about who they bow to, as long as they treat them nicely and don't tax them too much. Recognizing John as their rightful Count and Duke is one thing, however: adapting local laws to fit those of the rest of Brittany and replacing old Aquitainian officials is another.

Because I'm not behind in tech, I might as well see what happens with the National Ideas once an idea is unlocked.

Looks like I'll have to unlock NIs one by one even if I should already have most of them. I was hoping more than one would be unlocked and the NIs would "catch up", so to say, but alas.

I do wonder why Bretons are classified as having a liberal family system. Now I'd like to see khardinal's sources as well.

WOOAAH WOOOAHHH WOAHWOAHWOAHWOAH *flies towards the camera*

oh god did i just make a reference to that cancerous crash bandicoot meme what the fuck is wrong with m

+23 loyalty is freaking huge. Had I known this was coming, I would've revoked that privilege with only roleplay-related hesitation. There's also lots of free stability points.

Any complaints about "waaah the loyalty of my estates just plummeted suddenly waaah this mechanic sucks" are invalid because this can also happen.

John's heir Jane is silver-tongued and thus has gained the favour of many nobles. She's an eloquent speaker, a devout catholic and knows exactly what strings to pull. Charles would've been proud. As a result, nobles are more eager to support her father John.

While Jane is holding a banquet for the nobles John plans to suck more money out of pockets. He notices how Saint-Malo still holds an ancient privilege of tax exemption, rubs his hands together and smiles as he can already imagine the sound of clinking coins.

I further my plan of demoting greater nobles to privilege-free lesser nobles. Might as well do it as it's peace time and I have stability to spare.

The locals aren't too happy about their autonomy being trampled on. While the justification that the Duke needed money to pay back debts convinced many that the reforms were necessary, some thought revoking their traditional tax exemption permanently was a bit too extreme.

Fun fact of the day: during WW2, the historic walled city of Saint-Malo was almost totally destroyed by American shelling, napalm and bombing as well as British naval gunfire. Next time someone says the Allies were purely the good guys, start off by telling them this, then move on to other more horrible things. Like how Mussolini eliminated the Sicilian mafia but they were reborn during the allied occupation.

The noise raised at the meeting of the Estates was quite impressive, especially if you consider that megaphones didn't exist at the time. This sparked an extensive discussion about whether or not the Duke had the right to do what he did, which in turn hurt the stability that had only recently improved.

Nice, I got harshly punished for not invading France and taking my cores. Well excuse me for not playing as the beardless Montfort scum.

John keeps looking for new ways to cut corners and hires some peasants to stare at castle walls all day and report if a crack appears. While at first it seemed like an idea of a kook it ended up reducing maintenance costs a little.

Every nation gets a bonus idea which is exactly like a normal idea except weaker. Not sure why they call it a "bonus" idea. If +2,5% sailors is a bonus then HOI4 is a good game.

This one is actually kind of fitting as Bretons originally migrated from Britain over the sea and have a lot of coastline.

Wait, "Welsh Ideas Advance"? What?

A mine deposit has been found in Aunis, but because there the salt isn't mined but reclaimed from marshes (image for proof: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Marais_salants_ile_de_Re.jpg) instead I'm not sure what this could represent. Maybe the salt reclamation activities were just expanded or some shit.

Yes, I take immersion this seriously when I'm playing detailed strategy/simulation games. My biggest complaint about Dwarf Fortress isn't the graphics, it's the fact that farms are unrealistically productive.

Either way it makes the province wealthier. Mineral tooltips have a number that shows how many "units" of it are produced. 9 is quite a lot. This number drops over time as deposits run out but can increase randomly, like just now. Note how Aunis makes more money from production than taxes.

Funnily enough salt is more valuable than gold in M&T, as salt has a larger trade value than it and the bonus tax from gold is pretty tiny. Don't worry, I've already whined about it in the forums so you don't have to.

As unrest in Aunis has dropped a lot I withdraw my army from there and also remove Gilles from the army, as having him in it increases his chance to die. The more you know.

Gilles made some money in the war. Not much, but enough to afford a decent retirement. But he won't retire yet as he's now responsible for leading the local garrison in Nantes. The previous commander had died while leading his men to sally out against the Portugese and Sicilians.

hey look a new "holy" "roman" "emperor"

he's not even german but slavic

charlemagne is spinning in his tomb

I didn't pay the last remaining loan in time and it has been renewed. The Jewish bankers John loaned the money from are thankfully patient.

Surprisingly the banking institution is spreading in northern Brittany, albeit pretty slowly. It'll fully spread by 1450s. We'll get banking sooner than I thought, thanks to Pays de Caux (north of Normandie) having it.

The new Emperor wastes no time and enacts a reform. One reason why the reformation happens so early in M&T is that a later reformation would allow the Emperor to enact many more reforms.

Oh hey I'll get to show off Demiansky's cool canals! I didn't mention them before because I wanted to have a bit of a surprise, and didn't show them earlier because they simply didn't fucking work for some reason. Now, after turning the game off and on again, it finally works.

People complained about not being directly able to affect FE and innate fertility, so canals were added by popular request. You can build them via the development button, the same button that can build roads, forts and capitols.

Provinces with rivers (or more specifically, the has_river value, which can appear in provinces without visible rivers or crossing penalties) can have canals. They're really fucking expensive so ideally you build them in lowly populated provinces with the help of manpower, estates, local wealth and paper mana. In return you get quite big bonuses to FE, Innate fertility and famine resistance.

Now people can complain about something else.

The devastation of the war has led to witch hunts in Aquitaine. Bordeaux had fallen to invaders and "witches" took most of the blame. They were accused of assisting the enemy and poisoning the water supply with their evil magicks so the garrison had to surrender sooner. Local authorities said that only those women (and some men) that did not weigh more than ducks should be burned alive. Of course, piles of twenty stuffed ducks were used in the weighing. Some people really wanted to get rid of annoying neighbours.

Fun fact: vast majority of witch hunts occurred during the "New age" or "Renaissance" or "early modern period" or "the age of the birth of modern nation-states" or "the shit centuries". The """Dark Ages""" in general weren't as dark in comparison to what followed.

hey look the pope is dead and we got a new pope. maybe if you elected younger popes you wouldn't need to replace them all the time.

The King of Naples retains control of the Papacy and thus has much influence over all of Christendom.

The new pious Pope (who isn't called Pius for some reason) soon calls for a chuch council to once again try to make the church a little bit less shit as reformation desire keeps climbing higher and higher. John, of course, doesn't give a crap and is getting pretty tired of these constant councils that never accomplish anything.

And then he gets a cold and dies.

DING DONG THE BASTARD IS DEAD

A fitting end for him, I'd say.

John the Wastrel is succeeded by Jane, his daughter. She, however, is more similar to her half-grandmother Mathilde than him. She babysitted her when John was too busy being a Duke.

The new heir apparent is Francois, a grandchild of one of Charles' sons.

She decides to hold a truly magnificent celebration after her coronation in Rennes to mark the end of John's controversial reign, mostly because she needs to gain the respect of people. While many nobles like her, many more doubt her as she is a woman. Women shouldn't be rulers as they're lesser than men. Afterall, Eve was created from the rib of Adam.

She will need to work hard to prove them wrong.

Also the message says "the duchess is dead", hehe, turns out John was a crossdresser the whole time

Because Jane is a woman, a bastard of Anne of Leon claims to be the rightful heir to the throne and begins to gather support.

"THE PRETENDER HAS RAISED AN ARMY AND IS MARCHING FOR THE CAPITAL MI LORD"
"Oh nevermind he's gonna do it later when he's ready"

Many events that in vanilla spawn rebels just give unrest modifiers in M&T. I don't understand why they had to make the game more boring by nerfing rebels. I like to fight the occasional large rebel army. Now you barely ever see them as unrest is broken.

The pretender's name is Sulio of Malestroit (Malestroit is a small town north of Nantes) and he won't be doing anything because there's no unrest in Saint Malo.

Sigh.

Like Charles, Jane is a Catholic spelled with a capital letter. Unlike with John, I will now focus on gaining Piety (even if secularism gives a better bonus -- roleplaying comes first).

The King of Castile immediately wants to arrange a marriage between the houses of Trastamara and Blois. While the legitimacy hit is pretty bad, I still press accept as I need all the yearly legitimacy bonuses I can get, as it is dropping currently.

A marriage is also arranged with the house of de Valois. And so Jane gets a husband: Louis of Bar, a relative of the duke of Bar (who in turn is a close relative of the King of France), the same man who heroically led the defence of the duchy during the war. The marriage is purely political, however, as the two aren't too fond of each other. Louis is a cynical war-veteran who refuses to ever lose an argument.

Meanwhile in the south the King of Naples decides to reclaim Sicily, now that it has been fully annexed by the crown of Aragon. The King of Castile comes to his ally's aid.

Several months into her reign, Jane decides to establish monastic schools in the many monasteries of Brittany. Mostly to prove her piety instead of helping to educate the nobility (a pure roleplay choice as the decision increases piety. Not sure if it has any other effects).

The King of France comes of age and is crowned in a great coronation. He shows much promise and like Jane is administratively minded.

As Marseille is besieged, the fleets of Venice and Aragon engage in a major sea battle, which the former eventually wins.

Because Naples has cores on all of Sicily, they can get the provinces for free via war dynamism. And because the armies of Castile and Aragon can't pass through northern Italy without a million requests for military access, they will be able to take Sicily without much trouble.

I should point out that military access is pretty hard to get now, as you need positive relations with the target country. Can make some wars a real pain especially because there's so many tiny countries all over the place.

We should've gotten a new religious head so the "controversial religious head" effects would go away and stop draining my legitimacy, but the event didn't do anything for some fucking reason.

Jane's reign is off to a good start, as she makes some good policy changes like reverting some of John's policies. She puts the money gained into the treasury not because she is greedy but because Jews are and want their money back.

One policy change included the cessation of centralizing the state. The bureaucracy was too tiny for additional centralization to have much effect anyways, and amassing any more power to the crown and its chanceries any more would cross the line and piss off the nobles.

In other words, we've reached our centralization cap of 40. Here are all the effects of our current level of centralization. The worst penalty is longer stability increase interval, but the others are perfectly manageable.

During the continuation of the Hundred Years' War there were many, many sieges which drove the development of firearms. One new innovation was the bombard, which saw some use in the war but which became more widespread afterwards.

Near the end of 1410 Jane finally paid back his father's debts and made Brittany a debt-free country.

Now we can finally start spending money on sensible things.

Gilles perished while training the garrison of Nantes to shoot with their handguns. Some rumours circulate that it was not an accident but an assasination and that a guardsman was bribed to shoot his leader, but they are debunked when it is revealed they weren't using dangerous ammunition during the exercise and that one handgun simply exploded, killing both Gilles and the guardsman practicing with it.

New innovations are seldom safe. RIP Gilles, you won't be missed. Too bad you weren't able to retire peacefully.

Palermo slowly drifts to Neapolitan control. The Iberians are unable to do much as they're busy besieging Provence and their enemy controls the sea.

Side-by-side comparison of Palermo before and after the siege reveals the following:
-it lost its Jewish and Orthodox minorities
-it lost its urban trade good, cloth, at least for a while
-it lost at least half of its substantial local wealth
-it lost some Farming Efficiency
-it lost its status as an archbishopric
Amazingly, it didn't lose a single urban pop, just one rural pop.

We can rival Aragon. Might as well, right?

Jane donated money to charity and funded the repairs of the cathedral of Rennes. This way she gained more respect and was recognized by the Pope as the rightful ruler of Brittany.

With this handy decision you can convert gold into legitimacy with a decent exchange rate.

More and more of Sicily falls under Neapolitan control. But Sardinia doesn't have Neapolitan cores so Naples won't get them for free.

Having occupied and pillaged Provence, the armies of Castile and Aragon just lie down and sunbathe. Not much they can do as Naples controls the seas and is blockading the Catalonian coast.

Like all politicians Jane has to state her opinion on some policies and ideas. But unlike a modern politician, who has to have an opinion on economy, migration, public services, taxation etc., a medieval politician mostly had to have an opinion on religious things, like whether Jesus was nailed to a cross with three or four nails.

Jane, to the dismay of the Pope, became a supporter of the conciliarist movement. Mostly because she wanted to reduce the authority of Rome which would allow far-flung rulers like Brittany have a say in the matters of the church. She did not oppose the Church, she wanted to be more involved with it.

Kind of like a certain man named Martin Luther wanted to fix the church, not splinter it into a dozen pieces.

The winds of reformation are beginning to blow harder.

We get some free legitimacy and a cheap theologian. Sweet.

what a shocking surprise and a plot-twist

A breton bishop named Gwenneg (sheesh, what a language. no wonder bretons speak french nowadays), also a supporter of conciliarism, offered his services to Jane for half the price. She gladly accepted.

Advisors have two effects now instead of one.

We've fallen behind in admin tech and need to catch up. Also, it'd be neat to fill admin ideas at some point. Hence why I hired the theologian.

OH FUCK LOOK WHO'S BACK AGAIN

Mildly disappointed, to be honest. I was hoping for a famine.

r/ShitParadoxFansSay

I wanted to show off famine mechanics, but for some reason there hasn't been a single famine in Europe for at least 50 years, not even in Finland which in previous games was Famine Central.

Plague appeared in Lisbon...

...and Bursa. The former is a threat, but thankfully the icon is only red and not black.

In the next part: Plague Episode III: Revenge of the Rats

Thanks for watching, remember to like, comment and subscribe *brofists screen*