Morgoth, on 28 August 2013 - 07:02 AM, said:
Pray that that Mameluks decide to expand north rather than east and west. In my Morocco game The Mamluks, With aid from Austria, forced the Ottomans to release the Byzantines. I think they were as surprised as I was.
Haha did they survive very long?
The year is 1458 now and I've got most of Greece and the Balkans (bar two provinces in Bulgaria and the ever-elusive Ottoman capital in Greece), as well as all of the islands and Trebizond (Mamluks made Venice give me Crete after they crushed their invasion of Cyprus, and funded rebels handed me Naxos, Rhodes and Corfu). I've been having a mixed time of it since surviving the first ten years though. Serbia tried to drag me into a war with Bosnia and Hungary, which I was forced to decline because my truce with the Ottomans was expiring and I didn't have the manpower to take Hungary in a war. In retrospect I should have accepted and then peace'd out immediately because Serbia broke their alliance with me and lost two provinces to Bosnia and Hungary. Not being allied to anybody, the Ottomans then pounced and took the rest of Serbia. Damn you Ironman!
Managed to ally myself with Hungary who seemed to be enough of a threat to keep the Ottomans from declaring war on me. During that time I was able to build up my navy to more than match theirs and my army almost equal them. In the meantime the Ottomans were expanding into Armenia and her ally Crimea had gotten a coastal foothold in Moldavia, giving Crimea (and thus her ally the Ottomans) direct military access to my provinces, voiding the Bosphorus strategy. My ally Hungary then decided she wanted a piece of my vassal Wallachia, which forced me to fight Hungary to a standstill, which severely sapped my manpower. The Mameluks then surprisingly approached me with an alliance offer, which I accepted. Probably about a week later they then dragged me into a war with the Ottomans, which would be fantastic normally, but the Mameluk AI seems incapable of besieging anything and is happy to just swan around in Anatolia while the Ottomans march through Crimea to attack me. I haven't seen the Mameluks even go near the Ottomans, and the latter seem oddly fixated on me only, even though I'm not the aggressor. I've held them off because their stacks have had to march separately, but a 25k stack of Bulgarian nationalists spawned on top of my army as I was marching through a province and all but destroyed it. Now I have literally no manpower left and am thinking of peaceing out (warscore 8% [mainly due to blockades]) because Crimea have finished off their war in Georgia and have turned their eyes towards me now.
Now that I've written it out, it's actually been mostly bad from '54 onwards.
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
Si hoc adfixum in obice legere potes, et liberaliter educatus et nimis propinquus ades.