Murat
Posts: 803
Joined: 9/17/2003
From: South Carolina
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So I broke down and upgraded to the Emperor's Edition. The tutorials are excellent and it is almost worth the $60 just to hear Palatinate mispronounced 
Being partly insane and having a love for Napoleonic France and revolutionary chaos, I chose to start my first game in 1792 as France.
It is a 23 year game, advanced economy, highest glory wins, everything else standard. Sure I am wussing out playing it at the normal setting but I do not know what I am doing and I imagine the computer will not make the errors I will so, while I expect to overcome the damage I will do to myself and eventually win, I did not want to end my first game in a crushing defeat in the cold winter of 1792-3. 
Only now that I am in September did I actually think of making an AAR so I will bring you up to speed with what I did for June July and August. June, 1792 is the first turn and in advanced economy one must get their finances in order.
I meticulously went through each province and worked on maximizing my returns. In any province I was building I set 20% to development to speed things up. A strong economy will feed a strong army which will feed my win. I chose to build farms in: Auverge, Franche Comte, Languedoc, Lyonnais, Poitou; banks in: Burgundy and Dauphiny and a court improvement in Orleanais since the tutorial said that level 5 courts help prevent waste. Not an issue right now since I only have 20 provinces but that 1 court will let me get 31 and no other province had 4 to start from what I saw. My economy seems to be heavily agricultural so the farms should help production and of course the banks will send me more money, which I thought I had an abundance of from reading other AARs but it never hurts to have money, especially since I then moved on to the trade screen.
I also meticulously went through my trading partners and learned that Poland, Sweden and Turkey all liked me OK along with some of the North African minor powers, Denmark, Portugal, Switzerland and one of the German states that was not worth trading with. Believing I was blessed with a money surplus I traded cash for raw materials, trading with most of the Swedish provinces, some Turkish provinces, some Polish provinces, 1 Danish province, 1 Portuguese province and 1 Swiss province. I also have the belief that trade leads to better relations and since I cannot trade with Austria/Prussia due to their agression on the poor French constitutional monarchy  , I resolved to try and trade with Britain, Russia, and Spain as well. Britain it turns out wants a LOT of money to trade with me so I decided they were not worth it and allocated their trade spot to Spain so Spain had 2, Russia 1.
I finished up on the main economy screen by leaving everything where it was except draft age went 18-41 to provide the most highest morale troops (kept moving until I discovered this), training to 16 months, again for morale, and draft size to 2 to make up for the longer training and the smaller pool of cannon fodder, err...noble French recruits.
Military matters came next. After much moving around I put a merchant off the coast of Venice, one in the Irish Sea, one in the North Sea off Scotland and one off Copenhagen. This gave me the max spot in the Med, 2 of the 4 spots around England (who seems to produce the most trade value but who also had a huge fleet in the Channel so I figured they wanted that spot and I let them have the spot by Portsmouth too in the hopes they might ignore the 2 I picked since I do not want to share my spots) and Copenhagen because it was that or Stockholm and Stockholm was farther away. I moved a fleet each to the Irish Sea and the North Sea to protect my merchants in my most valuable spots. Copenhagen is doomed if any enemies show and I think the Venetians are too weak to attack me in the Med. The Med seems to be poor in trade anyway and I do not expect a lot of people to be trying for those spots. Along those lines I stripped my Med fleet of everything except 1 1st/2nd ship of the line and 17 3rds, moving everything else towards Brest, soon to be my main naval base, except for 2 frigates to guard the southern coast of France from pirates. My own pirates I moved to Normandy to await targets of opportunity away from any big fleet but in a good trade zone.
I decided that I was going to have 1 large army and 2 decoys (I start with 3 Armies and a Corps) so I moved everything except the 4 infantry without special skills to Paris, to become the Armee du Nord, renamed the Corps the Imperial Cavalry, put Montesque in charge of it with Kellerman leading the overall Armee and hoped that defeats were not a sure path to the guilloitine since DuMoriez is my only back up good leader who can lead an army. He took 2 of those infantry and went to the Armee du Centre which I promptly renamed the Sans Culottes. Its former leader is Lafayette and while, being an American, I am a huge fan of the General, he apparently is not a huge fan of this revolution because he is not really putting his skills up for use (he has low ratings). I move him and the other 2 infantry down to Provence to make up the Armee du Sud (formerly the Armee du Midi). If I get another leader I am toying with the idea of putting my best leader with the fleet and attempting to actually win the naval war so no one has to be reprimanded. 
Finally I get my diplomatic action (I only have 1) and use it to ask Spain for an alliance. I can't read the chart but one really likes the other while they in turn are none to excited about the first. I am hoping it is they that really like me because despite the grumpy face I would actually like Spain, especially if we were allies. I have 3 diplomats: Talleyrand who appears to be awesom so I sned him into Germany on a Goodwill mission to make every nation around him like me more, Dumoriez who is a solid diplomat and seems well suited to pressure peace so I will use him for this purpose against Prussia to try and get them out of the war. and St. Croix who seems best at kicking other diplomat's butts so I send him over to Picardy to watch for Brits.
So that was June, 1792.
< Message edited by Murat -- 10/22/2011 12:38:21 AM >
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Printable Version
Let Them Eat Cake solo 1792 France AAR - 
So we will try to throw another 120 out of treasury at the usurous rate of 25% because as you can see on the chart below, we hate England (reading acrss from my name is how they feel about me, reading down is how I feel about them). On the diplomacy front it should be noted that only Talleyrand is actually doing his job. St. Croix was shifted over to lowering Austrian morale which he is barely doing and DuMoriez has yet to make Prussia pay to stay at war. Perhaps I can get my Danish friends to help me finish off these 2 Austrian provinces on my border. The farms are finally rolling in and I have decided to try and keep producing things as long as I have the resources to and hope to get a firm economy underway without getting run over by the Allies militarily. I have moved into 3d place now, I guess thanks to Denmark. 
And as you can see from the very bottom, I have some good production finally going but my money is very low. I am going to stop here for the night, maybe just stop, this is a long process and way more fun in a PBEM setting because others add to it, but maybe I will pick it up for another year. 
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