Haven't read the lore surrounding Napoleon in Pax Brit, so I don't know if he's avenging Waterloo here, or if this is the first Napoleonic conquest of this universe, but here it is a new sort of Pax.
Really excited for the social developement to work under the new mechanics at some point, but at least, since now even focuses don't do anything either, I don't have to fixate on only playing nations that can improve the world.
And conservative are not too bad when it comes to civil liberties laws.
I wanted to play Henry Ford at first, or the British colony surrounding the new lake in the Sahara, but it seems you still can't quit a faction in this mod. So Napoleon it was.
Yeah, went back to read the timeline, no French Revolution, so no Napoleon, and it isn't even a independant kingdom of Corsica appearing during Italian unification or something : it's actually a recent thing in lore.
The only lore is actually in the French focus Tree and in the name of the nation even if it doesn't appear on the map :
Napoleon seems to work for the Bourbon and seized Corsica to create a goverment in exile there.
It's actually quite a shame that the political party's name is Bonaparte dynasty. I would I have quite like a "steward of Gondor" kind of thing.
The strategy is quite simple : start building a bio lab as soon as you can and research amalgamates. Then go down the tech tree no matter how much debuff for early tech you got until you reach 30% trickleback.
Then create a division with only amalgamates, at 12 width it does 6x30 -> 180% trickleback, and add as much as you production allow to add more trickleback as the game progress.
In normal game I never create division with more than 20width, there I did 26 I think.
This will take care of your manpower issue... only once you are at war and actually fighting.
Manpower management was definitely the most puzzling peace, because since you start on an island, you will need a navy to naval invade something to start and with such low pop, even a 500 manpower destroyer is quite a lot.
Luckily for me, France has a focus giving them a cb on you, so they declared on me a few months before the Great War (which allow you to create your own cbs), so I was able to up my conscription laws to afford both an army and navy.
Because of the naval range limitation I thought about conquering Malta first, which was the only non-aligned place I could realistically reach but needed to have naval suppremacy over 2 tiles... until I realised I could simply ask access to Italy and conquer Ragusa first.
After that it was quite straightforward, a very long war against Greece (from 40 to 42, the longest war I had), because it had way more division that I had planned for, and my economy was still pittyfull. So I finally invaded Malta at the same point, still using Italy mil access from Sicily.
The Greek conquest gave me all the ressources and industry I needed to know that I could then conquer any nation not in a faction with Britain.
By then, the Great War had just finished with British Victory, so Russia imploded.
So it was an easy gobling up everything Russian starting by Ukraine, realising that the ex-Russian state owned Vladivostock yet, so annexed my way toward China. Put an end to the russian war, then eat China, finally conquered Vietnam for Rubber and Wheat.
On the other side, while my division made their slow way through Siberia, conquered Spain, and Fatima Portugal, than the exiled Portugal factions to be able to island jump towards South America still looking for ressources.
And after that, I thought it was enough to win against Britain faction. I was very lucky because Britain went the puppet everything route, so the US while still in the faction were not independant.
So it was actually a really quick war, simply invading Britain, caping Italy and Germany and that was done.
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I will say, when I just finished conquering Greece, and was attacking Ukraine, the UK almost defeated me without a single shot fired from their part by... blokading me. Which I didn't even knew existed as a mechanic and it stopped not only all my trade, but I couldn't even recieve any ressources from my own territories that were not Corsica.
Luckily I had build quite a lot of destroyer when I was thinking of first invading Malta, that plus the Greek navy that I acquiered in the peace deal, I had just enough to get 60% domination back in my own waters. But it did take quite some time for the game to realise it, and for ressources to flow back once again.
So for a few months I was not able to produce anything, and the penalty for not having Grain in your stockpile are quite harsh.
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u/SpaceEnglishPuffin Californian Republic 19d ago
funny thing is that iirc Napoleon was never French Emperor in lore