Naive question about Austria

[Philippe]

I started playing Austria in the Grand Campaign, mostly so I could avoid wars and try to get the hang of how the economic system worked.

About two years in I was having intermittent problems with inflation, but had pretty much built most of the rail net that I wanted, and had built up a few other industries, some of which came as a surprise.

I really didn't want to invest in northern Italy because of hindsight, but surprised myself when I found myself pouring money into silk production.

The next surprise was the textile industry. I got sick and tired of factories shutting down and buying production materials on the open market seemed too expensive and unreliable, so I invested in dye production in Wiesbaden and Magdeburg, planted cotton in the hills above Trieste, and learned to love sheep.

Somewhere along the way I started building furniture factories instead of manufacturing plants, and soon found myself running out of wood. Next thing I knew I was chopping down every tree in Transylvania.

And then the Crimean war broke out.

Now I wasn't following it very closely since I had (mentally at least) adopted a policy of armed neutrality. I had just started fortifying the northern approaches to Bohemia in preparation for what I knew would be an eventual German invasion (hindsight again) when Schwarzenburg died. It was no big deal at first, since he wasn't running things, I was. But then I noticed that there were these Russian armies wandering all over my country without benefit of a declaration of war.

At first I thought I was seeing things, especially when I noticed that one of them seemed to be vacationing in Dubrovnik -- no idea how he got that far south that fast. My next reaction was to remember that there had been a history of Russian interventions into Hungary in the late forties, and perhaps this was just another one of those. The Russians didn't seem to be taking control of anything, but they were obnoxiously green.

Next I asked myself if perhaps I had done something wrong, like forgetting to break off my treaty obligations with Russian the moment the Crimean War broke out.

So a little belatedly I went to the foreign ministry and cancelled the defensive alliance.

My question is this: should any of this be happening? Russia should have its hands full with the Crimean War, and shouldn't be looking for weird ways to invade Bosnia (which I think is what they're doing). Can they really just waltz across the border like that without asking my permission, or is it my fault because I didn't realize I was supposed to do something when the war broke out?

I don't recall getting prompted to react to what was going on in the big world. I can adjust to the concept of always reading the fine print every turn and being proactive. But is this really the way things are supposed to be?

[SonOfAGhost]

Well, a diversified economy is a good thing.

Russia being able to go through your territory while defensive pact was in place is allowed and makes sense. Choosing to do so...not so much, but that's their problem not yours

The lack of prompt when the war started with a treaty in force is only 1/2 surprising.

On the one hand, historically Turkey was the country that declared war on Russia and thus you should have been asked to join.

On the other hand, they did so because Russia had already occupied some of their territory and thus, being the instigators, shouldn't really be in a position to invoke a defensive, rather than alliance, treaty.

Other than not wanting to watch them walk harmlessly around your territory, there probably was no real reason to cancel the treaty since it couldn't have drawn you into a non-defensive war.