Are you planning to keep all 3 of our mercenary companies in the city? Because I wasn't. And three mercenary policies halfway across the sea doesn't help if Trell decides to start a riot or take over some of our ships by force or just cooperate with an invader to open the gates.
So you want to leave all three of our merc companies inntrelli for the next several centuries? By far the largest problem with taking Trelli is that once they stablilise they have no reason to stay loyal to s, and many to try to break away. This won't change until they see themselves as Ymaryn, which even with multiple Influence Subordinate actions( which will be absolutely necessary, and I have zero confidence whatsoever in the thread actually doing) will take 20+ turns to actually complete. Trell would be an incredible prize if we could keep it, but we simply have too many problems to deal with right now, and other prizes like the lowlands that no one is willing to actually put in the effort to exploit.
I want to keep our Mercs there immediately after we seize the city. After that, we can reassign them and occasionally rotate them though. We'll have the Red, Dragon and (for lack of a better name) Iron banners available and only one needs to be there at any one time.
I honestly think that the banners would be situated for best effect if one was situated in Trelli to defend us from the Med, one in Western Wall to protect us from the Nomads, and one in the Thunder Twins in order to watch the Mountain Horse.
They can be moved, but that would give us the best response time to any actual assaults.
And my point is that our Naval simple isn't high enough, the Trelli sat on the Naval Stat since before we met them and then had near endless Wealth engine going on by trading between us and the Khet, to the point that they started hiring countless Merc. companies just to conquer stuff,
So you can't honestly expect me to believe that despite all this they decided to stay at Navy 2
I honestly expect that despite imploding the Trelli will still have part to their Navy and expect that this Navy will definitly be way above Navy 2
The Trelli's navy has currently deserted. All of their soldiers were mercs and the Trelli ran out of money to pay them. Even then, we don't necessarily need Navy. We're looking to take Trelli in a single decapitation strike that gives us the city. Once we have that, we can effectively control access through the Trelli Straits. It's necessary if we want to keep the pirates on the outside of our empire instead of giving them leave to hit all of our delicate internals.
And that counteracts my arguement how ?
Ah right it doesn't, it fact it jus tpoint out the naval superiority that the Pirates currently have with their hero, which will be the deciding factor for the war so many want to start
Breaking and running is not even close to naval superiority. I don't know where you've gotten this assumption. All the Pirate King did was allow the pirates to cut their loses and not be immediately destroyed.
No I'm not ignoring it, I'm just aware of the fact that we didn't win either, due to our low navy
And that is my whole point, this won't be a defensive war where we can just ignore the other guy until he goes away, no we need to win here and for that we actually need to reach the city, which has a real chance of not happening due our navy not being strong enought to get our warriors to the Trelli in the first place
Our navy could have gotten our army to Trelli before we even had a naval score. That was an option before we went into the 1st war. We were just foolish enough that we decided to save the slaves and then get bogged down in a massive land war over rough terrain.
No the point is that they could flee in first place because they matched our Navy
And for a war like that, our Navy will be the most deciding stat and I find him woefully low for what people actually want to archieve here against real Naval powers
It's virtually impossible to force a naval engagement, especially in this era. We're basically planning to appear on the horizon one day and have invaded the city within an hour. The Trelli are going to get no warning. If they're prepared for us, that means that whatever soldiers they do have are not out in the countryside fighting bandits and desperately trying to save the slaves which grow all of Trelli's food and serve as their most lucrative export.
This is also why having a minor power (Freehills) taking over Trell is best for us. Truth of the matter is, we don't really care who hold the strait as long as they aren't assholes to us, and the pragmatic perspective is that a lesser polity just can't afford to antagonize us like that.
Anyone who takes over Trelli will not be a minor power for much longer. They would get access to a stat drip equal all of our trade plus the Khemetri's. They might be minor now, but they would balloon very quickly over time.
Fingers crossed.
