After getting the Aztec goldmines I got the mission to conquer Alsace. Again. Alsace is my vassal, but since they have chosen to follow some obscure christian faith I cannot annex them. But I'm fed up with this mission, since I already cancelled it 3 times. So, annex Alsace it is.

So I break my vassalage of Alsace and send them an insult, so I can declare war without getting a stability drop. Alsace has some troops and a level 2 fort, they don't even have allies although they are guaranteed by some HRE nations. There's still the HRE, which is Bohemia now, stretching as far as Ukraine. But that means that their troops are likely to be far away, and besides that I'm not scared of them anyway because from the ledger I gather that my army is much larger than theirs. But then I notice that England is the protector of whatever faith it is that is currently en mode in that part of the world... and I was looking to hamstring England anyway.

So, time to do some scouting. Where is their fleet? Conveniently sailing towards the Channel. Where are their troops? Can't see much through the fog of war, but I see that Cornwall and Wales are occupied by rebels. I suppose that if you let rebels capture multiple provinces close to your capital, you don't have many troops nearby. I see that they have 18k next to my aztec provinces, but I can handle that. Their other troops are in English north africa I guess. Here we go, rape Alsace, send an army to the wrong side of the channel and sack London. I let my faithful vassals have some r&r in the english countryside, while I discover a third of the remaining troops in Ireland. I land a token force in English North Africa, and I find an 18k stack surpressing nationalist revolts. I ship my expeditionary 21k from Ireland to the desert, and barely win. Fighting in the desert is apparently harder than I thought. Anyway, I don't need to annihilate them now, as I still have that colonialism CB...

Oh, after annexing Alsace I finally get a nice mission: subjugate Milan. Milan has the two provinces I carved out of Styria for them, and they refused to be my vassals. Ungrateful dogs.

Can you post some pics for us? Would love to see how the French empire looks

I will post pictures, I've made a lot of savegames specifically for that purpose. I'll have to fix the forum restrictions for .bmp first though, then I can post the world map images that EUIII can generate. Brilliant feature, it's something that civ should've had. There's a lot more in EUIII that "civ should've had", like the ledger.

Would love to see the pictures but why do you plan to use .bmp? Better convert them to something more portable like .jpg or .png.

My thoughts exactly.

That's because the game creates .bmp pics :)

That´s why it is better to convert them. :D Open them in M$ Paint and save as .jpg or .png file. The quality will be nearly the same but the size much smaller.

[mischief]

Yes, but why would I look for additional work when I'm already too lazy to upload images without converting them?

Because:
and you´re probably even more too lazy to sort that out bro ;)