Europa Universalis IV

[Higher Game]

Bankruptcy means you aren't fighting wars which means you aren't making ducats from wars. It's silly to go bankrupt. It's also silly to pay for high level advisors then screw your mana by going to -100 in all mana types. Even assuming you only lose 600 mana from going bankrupt that will cost you 1800 ducats in upgrading an advisor from level 1 to level 2 to make back, and even worse if you are upgrading from level 2 to level 3. In the meantime you could have fought a war to show strength which both fucks your competition's strength, lets you take war reps from their allies, and gives you 100/100/100 mana, equivalent to around a thousand ducats at least.

You absolutely don't need to full core things. It usually doesn't even help you early game. Conquered land is going to be ~50% autonomy anyway and you will have only a little autonomy decrease (or a slight increase over time) thanks to 5% crownland, meaning stated half-cored land is producing about the same or only a little less than full cored land. The only reason to full core lands would be if you spammed reduce autonomy in all lands, which does work but is kind of annoying since constant rebels. In exchange for keeping half cores you pay 1/4th the GC cost which allows you to blob pretty much endlessly. The only things to full core early game are gold mines (which are also worth reducing autonomy on and devving to 10) and if you run out of things to spend admin on.

EDIT: Almost forgot, great trick you can do with the half-cored state thing. Whenever you get an institution you can unstate all that land to easily and cheaply embrace, then restate the next month and go right back to 50% autonomy. There's also the government reform that reduces the autonomy floor by 10% (and some other stuff like the state house and economic ideas).

I did a fresh Muscovy start after the latest patch and so far it's 1476, I have 536 development, and I took 36/43 loans for 10008 gold to help me build 24 farm estates, for all of my provinces that can take one. And this was a pretty bad start due to an independent Lithuania that allied Novgorod. I'll make some workshops and churches too and if I cut it too close then I'll sell some land or debase the currency (and if you are truly desperate you can sell a province or two) if I can't make it 10 years due to some random expense.

There's no possible war worth the manpower (or at all) that can crank out 10k+ gold by this point in the game. And I'm a single war plus annexing Perm and Pskov from hitting the GC limit anyway and I would probably already be there if I had gotten a border friction CB on Lithuania. So it really looks like nothing beats factory spam and a quick bankruptcy to gear up long term wealth.

Ok now I'm bankrupt and taking 31 gold a month in 1488 (lol) albeit with no army maintenance but I'll be loaded up for any war I want in just a few years.

 

[Average Manatee]

farm estates

rofl you're not supposed to build those they are AI traps.

You've also wasted 15 years of time and tons of mana. If you were going to take loans for anything it should have been to spam mercs and keep blobbing.

 

[fantadomat]

Fuck,just played some kaiserreich as russia.....and they fucked up the tree lol. What the fuck happened. A year ago the tree was great and interesting,also the internal problems were great and hard,there was even a civil war. Really felt like playing a nation in troubled times,and shitting on germany felt great once you bounced back. Now it is boring,generic and generally meh. Before there was like 20ish focusses about expansion,now they are like tow or three. It is shame how much they had fucked up.

 

[Higher Game]

rofl you're not supposed to build those they are AI traps.

You've also wasted 15 years of time and tons of mana. If you were going to take loans for anything it should have been to spam mercs and keep blobbing.

Farm estates are the strongest manufactories because of how early they can be built. Plantations and especially mills are the real AI traps because by then any good player will have level 5 advisors at all times. And the bankruptcy itself is just 5 years and before then you just have to make sure not to stress manpower too hard or let anyone interrupt the manufactory building too much to avoid the third inflation hit. Or spending slightly too much gold and needing to resort to corruption or selling a dud province or two to make it to the end. I always underestimate how much more additional debt you can take after 5 years when the buildings are done and I ended up upgrading the Kremlin to level 2 with the excess just before going bankrupt.

 

[M. AQVILA]

I spent thousands of hours in this game before deciding it's a cookie clicker with map+armies and now I hate myself.

And yet I keep returning to it. If only Paradox wasn't such a terrible company.

 

[Riddler]

Bankruptcy means you aren't fighting wars which means you aren't making ducats from wars. It's silly to go bankrupt. It's also silly to pay for high level advisors then screw your mana by going to -100 in all mana types. Even assuming you only lose 600 mana from going bankrupt that will cost you 1800 ducats in upgrading an advisor from level 1 to level 2 to make back, and even worse if you are upgrading from level 2 to level 3. In the meantime you could have fought a war to show strength which both fucks your competition's strength, lets you take war reps from their allies, and gives you 100/100/100 mana, equivalent to around a thousand ducats at least.

You absolutely don't need to full core things. It usually doesn't even help you early game. Conquered land is going to be ~50% autonomy anyway and you will have only a little autonomy decrease (or a slight increase over time) thanks to 5% crownland, meaning stated half-cored land is producing about the same or only a little less than full cored land. The only reason to full core lands would be if you spammed reduce autonomy in all lands, which does work but is kind of annoying since constant rebels. In exchange for keeping half cores you pay 1/4th the GC cost which allows you to blob pretty much endlessly. The only things to full core early game are gold mines (which are also worth reducing autonomy on and devving to 10) and if you run out of things to spend admin on.

EDIT: Almost forgot, great trick you can do with the half-cored state thing. Whenever you get an institution you can unstate all that land to easily and cheaply embrace, then restate the next month and go right back to 50% autonomy. There's also the government reform that reduces the autonomy floor by 10% (and some other stuff like the state house and economic ideas).

I did a fresh Muscovy start after the latest patch and so far it's 1476, I have 536 development, and I took 36/43 loans for 10008 gold to help me build 24 farm estates, for all of my provinces that can take one. And this was a pretty bad start due to an independent Lithuania that allied Novgorod. I'll make some workshops and churches too and if I cut it too close then I'll sell some land or debase the currency (and if you are truly desperate you can sell a province or two) if I can't make it 10 years due to some random expense.

There's no possible war worth the manpower (or at all) that can crank out 10k+ gold by this point in the game. And I'm a single war plus annexing Perm and Pskov from hitting the GC limit anyway and I would probably already be there if I had gotten a border friction CB on Lithuania. So it really looks like nothing beats factory spam and a quick bankruptcy to gear up long term wealth.

Ok now I'm bankrupt and taking 31 gold a month in 1488 (lol) albeit with no army maintenance but I'll be loaded up for any war I want in just a few years.

Why does long-term wealth matter at all though? You have more than enough resources with Muscovy just to go hard from the start of the game without ever really pausing.

I did a quick trial run and by 1475 i had almost 700 dev, no loans, 500 in the bank, no coalition against me and if i stop garrisoning my forts i even run a surplus. What am i supposed to do with all the extra resources? I've never had a real shortage and i will only get more from here on out.
I did this at constant 5 speed and while i'm experienced with the game i dont believe I'm in any way an expert. Muscovy starts without any enemies that can stand against it unless it intentionally provokes them and can easily avoid coalitions by alliances. Perhaps things are different if one plays at very hard.

 

[Average Manatee]

It's pretty much impossible to get in a situation where you need more than 5ish loans if you play a major on normal difficulty. And most of those situations involve random events stealing your money.

 

[Zariusz]

MEIOU and Taxes 3.0 will enter open alpha two weeks from now and its going to be available on version 1.30.6.

 

[Kem0sabe]

MEIOU and Taxes 3.0 will enter open alpha two weeks from now and its going to be available on version 1.30.6.

The final version will probably be release only in 2023 at the rate they are going. This shit better be good

 

[Higher Game]

Why does long-term wealth matter at all though? You have more than enough resources with Muscovy just to go hard from the start of the game without ever really pausing.

Ottomans can get 200k-250k in size by the 1550's if you ally them to roll over everyone else. Level 5 advisors and an army that can face them when needed are very expensive. You'll want to fight them for their great projects at some point after maxing out the advisors and other great projects of the world.

 

[Riddler]

Why does long-term wealth matter at all though? You have more than enough resources with Muscovy just to go hard from the start of the game without ever really pausing.

Ottomans can get 200k-250k in size by the 1550's if you ally them to roll over everyone else. Level 5 advisors and an army that can face them when needed are very expensive. You'll want to fight them for their great projects at some point after maxing out the advisors and other great projects of the world.

Oh, no! What will the big bad Otto do to me come 1550?!

Come on man.

 

[Higher Game]

Oh, no! What will the big bad Otto do to me come 1550?!

Come on man.

You're using the great power list to cover up that you don't have Bratsberg. You didn't take all the Ottoman projects, either. No trading companies in the Tunis/Morocco/Mali pipeline. Are you playing without Leviathan or other DLC's?

Yes you avoided the uber-Ottomans but at the expense of the size and positions you could have had.

Here's my Russia, 2177 development score albeit 20 years later. Ottomans have a 216k peacetime army and they would still slow me down if I faced them now, but I won't because India and America are the better targets. I actually only went bankrupt once in this game, the farm estate one, and already had level 5 advisors by tech 11 anyway thanks to a couple high mana rulers that let me blitz through Africa. But normally a tech 11 bankruptcy is good stuff.

 

[Average Manatee]

I get that giving bad meme advice is your thing Higher Game but you need to stop.

 

[Average Manatee]

Decided to try some muslims. Random nation picked Shirvan for me. It's 1547 now and my tech costs look like this:

= -61.6% tech costs. Bear in mind this is all without me doing anything. I haven't taken innovative ideas or done anything special to reduce tech cost, all I did was take 1 idea group from each mana type, go max piety and take advantage of dhimmi.

It's actually kind of broken how easy it is to get innovativeness as a Muslim since you only need to pay about +20-40% tech cost for it normally. This means you regularly get innovativeness on tech for ~400-500 mana while everyone else has to pay 800 for it...

 

[Higher Game]

Muslims need lots of 1 province minors to snake around so they can oscillate between piety and mysticism as fast as possible, lots of "punching bag" nations kept around for the prestige too. I don't like them because it makes for ugly maps.

And those are some seriously cheap advisors there. You going for Chaul soon?

 

[Average Manatee]

There's no reason to go mysticism, it's a waste of time.

Advisor cost is normal?

Not going for anything because the game is over and not worth continuing. Should have started in VH, normal is a joke and every AI I fight goes bankrupt after a single war.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i must have played the best patches and the luckiest games because on normal i've seen ai bankrupt TWICE in my whole europa universalis career. through 3 and 4.

 

[Riddler]

The AI bankrupts all the time on 1.30 and 1.31.

All it takes is a loss in a war, possibly combined with earlier lending for embracing an institution.

 

[XenomorphII]

It has been like that for quite some time now it feels like. Don't remember when it first became a common thing, but now if you ally a major and try to take them to war they won't due to debt. I don't even understand how they fall so far in debt either. Feel like I catch the top powers always between 5 to 10k in debt now. Doesn't seem as bad in Anbennar, which is about all I play this game for now.

 

[Average Manatee]

The AI stays in wars way too long in general. For AI vs. AI the winner takes a really long time to actually win the war, costing a lot of money, while the loser has half their land occupied and is continually throwing troops into the meat grinder rather than give up. The loser also often loses 2k-5k in cash in the peace deal. For Player vs. AI wars the AI when bigger thinks it "should" win and just continually spams units out that are easier and easier to kill as the player starts making progress, then when out of manpower the AI starts hiring excessively expensive mercs that get stackwiped easily.

It's not so much that the AI will bankrupt as much as it is that the AI sits around almost-bankrupt and massively curtails its army to try to avoid it. The AIs don't literally bankrupt in all my wars but majors sitting around with 10k debt or minors with 2k that they'll never clear is almost worse.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Just wanted to preserve this evidence of current PDX' ability for the ages:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/236850/view/2887360777094419215

A special shoutout to @Tempscire, whose reverse engineering of AI army behavior is somehow easier to understand than the code itself. We implemented his suggestion for terrain evaluation as-is, and changed how combat width is considered, albeit not as he suggested for technical reasons. Unfortunately he has many other good suggestions that will not be implemented at this point.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

The AI stays in wars way too long in general.

I wonder if this happens due to the fact recruiting armies is so cheap and fast in EU, in general?

One thing I liked in good ol' Magna Mundi is that it took a decent bunch of time to recruit units (most of the time, I think it was 200 days?), so if you thoroughly demolish the enemy army, it's gone for almost a year. You could use that time to siege, prepare your own reinforcements if need be, or get ready to intercept the reinforcements when they came out.

The Attrition-intensive warfare was also interesting, in that it was actually possible to deploy a defensive strategy of Scorched Earth attrition while preparing your attack. Unlike in EUIV where the Ottomans can march a 150k man army in the Sahara Desert.

EUIV does seem to have manpower harder to come by in general, tho. But with cheap and fast unit making, the AI can simply thrown shit down at its rivals to absurd levels.

 

[Higher Game]

I wonder if this happens due to the fact recruiting armies is so cheap and fast in EU, in general?

One thing I liked in good ol' Magna Mundi is that it took a decent bunch of time to recruit units (most of the time, I think it was 200 days?), so if you thoroughly demolish the enemy army, it's gone for almost a year. You could use that time to siege, prepare your own reinforcements if need be, or get ready to intercept the reinforcements when they came out.

The Attrition-intensive warfare was also interesting, in that it was actually possible to deploy a defensive strategy of Scorched Earth attrition while preparing your attack. Unlike in EUIV where the Ottomans can march a 150k man army in the Sahara Desert.

EUIV does seem to have manpower harder to come by in general, tho. But with cheap and fast unit making, the AI can simply thrown shit down at its rivals to absurd levels.

Well you do need 60 professionalism to get manpower back from constantly disbanding and recruiting as needed to save money. And this only works well when you have plenty of expansion opportunities around the world against weak nations where drilled armies would be overkill. Really good drilled armies take a long time to make, actually.

 

[Higher Game]

Russia stronk. Normally 3000 stated and cored development is a good goal by this point (and yes the GC limit can handle it with the right buildings) but I chose espionage ideas third instead of aristocratic ideas, and this ultimately means less diplomatic power for annexation but more total size because you can much more easily conquer entire subcontinents thanks to the -20% AE reduction and feed some massive vassals. All this was aided from that single bankruptcy in the beginning for farm estates. The long term payback was obvious.

With aristocracy I would have slowed down in Central Asia and instead spread out more into Indonesia and Japan, but fuck naval combat.

 

[Riddler]

So i was playing a game as Mantua and things were going really good. Ahead in all tech, maxed out innovation (inno on all tech and on all ideas), expanded well, great allies, got the emperorship and blazing through reforms but perhaps most importantly I had the Burgundian inheritance lined up and had been juicing up burgundy all game, only first Charles just refuses to die and lives to 82... Well, that's ok right? More time to juice ip burgundy?

Then the inheritance doesn't fire, at all. Noone gets it and now Marie's fat ass somehow sits on the throne of a monster burgundy.

Fuck me