how to annex big country ?

[Adri]

Simple question; with the 100 point warscore limitation, how do you annex entire country at once ? took me 3 different war to finish carthage... does having a claim on each province help ?

[Marcos_DS]

You usually don't annex a big country at once. That said, the bellicose diplomatic stance reduces warscore cost (as well as some inventions), and claimed provinces also cost less warscore and AE. So with enough claims and warscore reduction (tech/stance), you can conquer quite big chunks of the bigger empires.

[curtadamsCA]

Claimed provinces help, but you need a lot of claims to make a difference on a really big country, and they are expensive. To some extent the limit protects you because if you over-annex you will eventually get a civil war and once you've annexed it there's no easy way to get rid of it.

[Dray Prescot]

Back when I was playing EU(1 to 4), I would try to break up my target (that is to big to be conquered in ONE War) into several disconnected pieces, and hope that he will be unable to fight effectively the Civil Wars that come in the future (because I will not let his troops cross my territory). This will make my future Wars against the target easier, and force him to lose manpower fighting lots of close battles and sieges against the Civil War. Also try to take the crucial provinces in the first war, such as iron, wood, and horse production sources and/or ports.

[Captain_Narol]

You can annex a big country smaller than you by forcing it into the status of Client State.

However it will hate you for many years before you can integrating it.

Also, if the cumulated pop of all your angry vassals + any disloyal provinces of yours is over 20% , they will start a civil war for independance just a few years after you submitted them, so in that case it's not worth.

I did that mistake with Rome as I vassalized Carthage, they were weighting 21.1% of my total population (vassal included) so there was nothing I could do to prevent the civil war.

I would have just needed 300 more Pop to avoid that, but there was no way I could get them in time by the moment I realized and made the calculations...

So I'm reloading my last save before the peace deal and this time I will just take half their land and then take my time to make sure the new provinces gets loyal before I subdue the rest of Carthage again !

[curtadamsCA]

Originally posted by Captain_Narol:

You can annex a big country smaller than you by forcing it into the status of Client State.

Doesn't that take forever? I think the base is 0.25 pop per month, +0.05 per diplo bonus. As Carthage I'm integrating a medium client state (Emporia) and I think it's going to take about 30 years. Even a large chunk of Carthage could take past the end of the game.

Also, it looks like the original estimate is an underestimate. All my integrations take longer than the initial estimate. I think maybe it doesn't account for population growth, and if that's true integrating a large state might be essentially impossible.

[Captain_Narol]

Yes,it takes very long for big states if you want to use the "integrate" option.

My plan anyway was to keep Carthage and Macedonia as buffer puppet states after subduing them, but I will have to get bigger in pop first if I don't want them to rebel !

If only the game was lasting more than 276 years... (I know, it's easy to change in the files)