Bolivian-Peru merger

[VBigB]

So I believe both Argentina and Chile get an event at the start of the game where they can either support or attempt to stop this event.

I’ve tried 4 times to stop it as Argentina and only once managed to get strong enough to declare war just before the event would complete (I believe you have about 9 years). I did push into Bolivia initially but the war went south when the front split. And to get strong enough I had to completely concentrate on military at the expense of the rest of the economy.

I think I’ve given up with Argentina so I’m going to try Chile tonight. I’m wondering if it’s possible to quickly puppet Argentina at game start and if that would be a good strategy to help get the power to take on Bolivia within 9 years (given that puppets have to join your wars…I’ve never had a puppet so have no idea how well this would work in practice).

Has anyone done this and are there any tips?

[Thomas]

I played Argentina recently and found I was better off conquering my neighbours instead, letting them form the confederation. After building up an army you can then go for Peru-bolivia. It's not really a huge deal if they form it.

[VBigB]

Yeah I already did that as Chile in my first game with this latest patch (after a long hiatus from the games) so I’m specifically trying to prevent the confederation as a bit of a challenge.

In that game I ended up being the major power in South America. I think I finished in 1936 as #8 but I made a lot of mistakes in that run while re-learning the game.

[VBigB]

Well based on another thread and doing a bit of reading, I’m pretty sure what I was thinking about in my first post will not work. You can tell I’ve never used the mechanic before.

[VBigB]

Well turn out I was making this way harder than it needed to be. If you play nice with Bolivia at first and get them to +50 the progress bar stops moving giving me the time to build a little more military. Then to top it off I managed to sway Brazil on this go around so that made everything a non issue.

But annoying in this run Great Britain started colonising in the territory that Argentina usually has dibs on. I think because I destroyed them so no one had the claim anymore. I guess the goal will be to see if I can evict them before game end.

[LahnaMan]

I found that the best shot at stopping Bolivia and Peru from merging was by starting a war against them in 1836 and getting at least two other countries to join you. As Argentina, I managed this by getting Chile and Ecuador on your side and deploying my army on the Ecuadorian border while all of the Bolivian forces were in the south.

So far I haven't found a way to defeat Bolivia as Northern Peru.