warning, this is a different type of post than most of you are used to! it isn't a timeline yet, but when i write the After Action Reports for all 4 games (Crusader Kings, EU3, Victoria and Hearts of Iron 2) I might either post those here or I might make a timeline. It won't follow history and won't be scholarly by any means, because it is based off of a strategy game, but it should be entertaining!
so i am working on a personal mod for the game Victoria, which I might make available to download on the Paradox Plaza forums. I am going to give a little backstory to give you a sense of where I started and where i am going.
anyway, what is going on is that i started playing as the Count of Rennes for the game Crusader Kings, and after a series of brutal wars in which Duck Hoel crowned himself King of Brittany and continuously fought Scotland and Ireland and Norway for 30 years, I revolted against him and conquered Brittany after a 5 year campaign. Rennes county lost something like 30,000 men in these wars, including mercenaries and my own vassals i won in a series of defensive wars against france and a renegade Normandy.
After King Jafrez I (the former count d' Rennes and Duc d' Upper Brittany) died, his son Meogon Roazhon, was crowned King Meogon I. The queen mother, Hunydd Mathrafal from Wales, was charged with witchcraft and burned at the stake by the Church and Meogon became "skeptical" of the church. so, being that I am working on a grand AAR, i RP'd that this started a schism between Brittany and the Catholic Church, which didn't ever flare into outright heresy, but you never saw inquisitions on Bretagne soil, there were no "burning times" and no persecutions. Brittany became a refuge for persecuted people from all over Europe.
The Pope made me intervene in the first two crusades. The first crusade was nothing, i declared war and just sat there. The second crusade, however, was to Liberate Spain from the resurgent Moorish kingdoms, as they were at the French border, and strangely, the kingdom of Castille had relocated to territory formerly belonging to Wales, which was lost in a war against Castille and England.
Anyway, in this new crusade, Brittany ended up sweeping across northern spain, liberating a stretch from Algarve to Galicia, lifting the siege of Navarra, and freeing Barcelona. I stopped about midway through because i realized that the church was making my character become a monster. in game terms, i think i ended up killing something like 100,000 muslims in various battles back and forth.
My marshall was severely wounded in a battle for Burgos, and the Bretagne army was outnumbered 2 to 1, and we still beat them ... barely. I made peace, and then i spent the next 20 odd years rebuilding Spain.
Then, I basically made Brittany go isolationist. I renounced all of my alliance and diplomatic obligations and concentrated on trying to make the world a little bit better, since it was quite chaotic.
The muslims came and went, and were slowly driven back to their Granada core in Iberia, Spain was rebuilt and soon rebuked Brittany. Some of my characters became heretics, but i refused to let the church kill anyone else. One of the queens was even excommunicated for being a skeptic.
The game started getting some fatal errors in the late 1200's, so i stopped playing that file, but i just bumped it up to Europa Universalis 3. In EU3, i kept playing an enlightened nation, but France kept attacking me after 1500, when Brittany should have been pretty much absorbed in all but name, to France. Since they had the numerical advantage, all i could do was fight like hell, spend thousands of gold on mercenaries and try to buy a peace.
I managed to somehow colonize Newfoundland and Texas, but my texan colonies were taken by France in a war during the 1600s, and then in turn, taken by Spain shortly thereafter.
Being caught between Scylla and Charybdis (France and England) I realized I needed to court England to try to at least have a hope of doing anything more than surviving. I spent most of the 1600s and the early 1700s cozying up to England, and fighting alongside her, and basically being a good ally. France only attacked me two times in that 150 year period where England and I were close allies, and both of those times, she nearly lost Normandy to a combined Anglo-Bretagne invasion force, however our warscore just wasn't quite high enough to get anything more than token colonial holdings out of her.
We stayed out of the 30 years war, except when our mutual ally Friesland was attacked by Austria from Bremen and Hamburg. Anyway, that was a quick war and I was able to claim Bremen and Hamburg and turn them into vassals, but that relationship soured after 30 years or so to little more than scraps of paper. I had England to romance and use all my diplomats!
Then came the French Revolution. OH MY GOD. this was the hardest battle i had fought in these 2 games. Everyone piled on top of France for one thing or another ingame, but in AARland, it was the annihilation of the nobility and the ravages of the popular government that did it, as in OTL.
Where do the French hordes invade first? Holland or the Rhineland, both of whom declared war on France? NO, not at all. Instead, the French fight a defensive battle on their eastern front and they decide to go for Brittany. Nearly 40,000 soldiers attacked Rennes, where I had a measly 20,000 soldiers, and another 30,000 attacked Vannes, and they were up against 15,000. France had the morale and the manpower to win those battles. My capital was under siege and so was my second largest city. So i took the Portugal Option and my capital was moved to Newfoundland, i think in the AAR i am calling it New Bretagne (but in Bretagne, not English, lol). The entire court, and as many people as possible fled, while the army did a fighting retreat to Brest, and then to England and New Brittany.
Umm, yeah, so then there was a lot of fighting and dozens, and i mean dozens of sea battles. the french kept building ships, and England and I would just wipe them off the ocean. One of my fleets went from 12 vessels to 28 because I kept capturing soooo many (the admiral had a 5 or a 6 in maneuver i think!!). Eventually, France angered too many people and the war went south really fast, just like OTL. I think it was 1803 when she gave up the fight and stopped bothering people for a few years. I had liberated Brittany without any help (well not taking into consideration all those dead prussians and russians and austrians in the east, lol), because England was too busy fighting in Denmark and North America, lol, whatever. Silly AI.
anyway, so Brittany survived the first reign of Napoleon, but he came back. Almost as soon as the "truce" period ended in 1808 or 1809, he declared war on England again and this whole things started alllll over again. This time though, I had enough troops to fight back. France had suffered staggering losses in the first round and probably wasn't ready to fight again, but that didn't stop Napoleon. I ended up turning back three offensives aimed at Rennes and one at Vannes, and the French fleet never got past the English Channel or Quiberon Bay, thanks to the Bretagne Corsairs.
I ended up occupying Anjou, Normandy and the coastal provinces all the way up to Calais (again, no thanks to England, who was fighting in Holland and Belgium this time, lol, thanks ally!) But instead of demanding war and continuing the cycle of hatred, instead i just made sure the French renounced all claims to Brittany forevermore.
So now we come to Victoria. I have programmed Brittany into the game (VIP, not Vanilla Vicky, and I don't have Revolutions yet.) My nation is a bastion of 21st Century Libtardism (which i am so prooud of, in 1836). I am home to several thousand eastern european jews who escaped the pogroms, i am home to several thousand spanish and portugese jews fleeing the inquisition. i am home to irish who fled england's unmentioned dozen wars against Ireland in the 1600s and 1700s (i didn't mention them because even thought i "declared war", i didn't do a thing. it was total english aggression!). and i was very nice to the inuits on Newfoundland and in EU3 i had several trade agreements with them, so in Victoria, i allowed them to have a significant population and they were still pagan, as i had never sent a single missionary to the island in the course of EU3.
so now i am stuck, and this is where i come to you, AH.com boards.
since france no longer has any legitimate claim to Bretagne lands, what sort of events should i be writing for this game. what sort of things would happen to European history if there still was a Brittany on the scene. and not your normal brittany either, a significantly stronger than in OTL Brittany, although not nearly good enough to take on a great power.
how would this affect Napoleon III and the Franco-Prussian war? World War 1? What kind of things do you think would happen?
I hope this story was enjoyable in its extremely abbreviated, bastardized form. As soon as I get the first two games written down, I will post them here possibly, but that is a few weeks off at the least.
Thanks for all your help!