Make the Maldives Great Again: A Maldives AAR #1 (Europa Universalis IV)

Hello again Steem folk.

Today I have for you another EU4 AAR. This one is very near and dear to my heart because I started it long ago and chronicled it on Imgur and Reddit, but never quite finished uploading the final two chapters.So I want to crunch it all down into condensed chapters for Steemit so that the world can finally see how great the Maldives really can be. You can find my original AAR here: http://imgur.com/gallery/3OLFw

There are eighteen episodes and I have yet to upload the final two to make twenty, but feel free to check it out. I've decided to move on to doing my AARs on Steemit rather than waste more time with the former project.

One thing I forgot to mention previously is in regards to the oceans all being black. This is due to me disabling the games water rendering in order to improve the performance of my game. I have an older low-end laptop and this almost tripled my game speed.

The Nation:

The Maldives is arguably one of the most difficult nations in EU4 to play as due to them being an island nation off the coast of India. When I first started working on this campaign, I had done many Google searches to see if I could find any decent playthroughs with the Maldives, but I was unable to find any at the time. I believe there is one now, but the only other one is my very own. Most of the discussions I found on the Maldives went along the lines of "the Maldives is unplayable," "the Maldives is the most difficult nation," "I'm so impatient."

Hence, I chose to do an Ironman campaign as the Maldives just to see what I could make of them. When I started this campaign, I had less than 1000 hours of playtime under my belt, much less than my Knights AAR, which was, in fact, inspired by this AAR.

The Maldives is comprised of a series of atolls southwest of the southern tip of modern day India. As such, it is an island nation in the game much like the Knights. The Maldives' little island chain is very poor and mostly useless to the untrained eye, but I love a challenge.

So, let's do it.

The Highlights:

Here is the final map save of the campaign. The Maldivian Empire is the red that you see stretching from the Middle East to the Chinese region, as well as from East Africa to Australia/New Zealand, which I colonized and turned into the colonial nation of Maldivia. I may not have conquered the world, but I went from a tiny, useless island nation to the #1 great power of the world and the largest empire on Earth.

Here is Ironman proof for any doubters.

My initial goal in this run had been to capture the province of Venad in order to give me a foothold on the Indian mainland. As you can see, I was able to take it with the help of my allies in the region. Once I had Venad, I could choose my rivals. I considered moving my capital here, but realized Vijayanagar (big yellow blob) might not take kindly to my aggressive expansion.

My suspicions proved to be correct when Vijayanagar declared war on me to take Venad for themselves. With my army wiped out almost immediately, I ceded the province in order to stave them off from my capital. As the war raged, however, a stack of Hindu rebels that originated in Venad moved to my capital and I had no army to fight them with. They took the Maldives, which caused me to be force converted from Sunni to Hindu. This proved to actually be quite beneficial throughout the campaign.

After my failed attempt at entering the Indian mainland, I decided it would be best to take on some colonial ideas and begin colonizing the islands around me. Some of these islands held great resources such as sugar and were great for my pathetic economy. In addition, I began to build a military in order to invade my next target, the island of Madagascar. Held by primitives, I felt that I could safely launch an amphibious assault and establish my presence in the region.

After three wars, the first of which was grueling and bloody, I had conquered the entire Madagascar island. During the wars, I spent time colonizing islands further east toward the as of yet undiscovered land of Australia. With my economy booming and my army at its strongest, I began to look for other opportunities for expansion.

Once my people made landfall in the gigantic island of Australia, I knew i must claim these lands for the Maldivian Empire. And so, the colonization kicked into full swing.

While scouting, my people brought me reports of a nation to the north, Gujarat. Gujarat had recently been weakened by war and were technologically behind us. In case of emergency, we call in our now ally Vijayanagar to aid is in battle with the promise of land. We do not have a "casus belli," or a justification for war, so we lose some stability, but the Maldivian Empire hungers for glory.

The war is successful and the Maldives has established itself on the Indian mainland.

With the morale of our armies high from a successful war, we launch yet another amphibious assault, this time on the nation of Makua in Africa. They bring in their friend Mutapa, but both are weak and technologically inferior.

The war is over fairly quickly as our armies crush the African armies handedly. The Maldives is established in East Africa.

Now that our truce has expired with Gujarat, we finish what we started, all the while continuing colonization of Australia, who have grown enough to become a colonial nation. We dub them Maldivia.

With that ends my first installment of Make the Maldives Great Again. I hope that you've enjoyed reading and that maybe you're inspired to go out and do an AAR of your own.

I'll see you all again for the next episode. Please feel free to comment and leave some advice, or discussion. I'd love to hear from all of you.