Europa Universalis IV

[thesecret1]

MEIOU and Taxes 3.0 is soon going to enter beta, its going to have 10-25% performance update, code was cleaned so now it lost like 175mb compared to the last alpha.

Citation needed on the "soon" part But yes, it should do that, as well as add all the missing privileges (urban, clergy, and tribal). Also civil wars are a thing in the latest alpha, where instead of just spawning rebels, it actually creates a new country that gets some of your provinces (based on local power of the faction fighting against you) that's at war with you, with provinces flipping to you or them as soon as they're sieged down.

 

[Axioms]

MEIOU and Taxes 3.0 is soon going to enter beta, its going to have 10-25% performance update, code was cleaned so now it lost like 175mb compared to the last alpha.

Citation needed on the "soon" part But yes, it should do that, as well as add all the missing privileges (urban, clergy, and tribal). Also civil wars are a thing in the latest alpha, where instead of just spawning rebels, it actually creates a new country that gets some of your provinces (based on local power of the faction fighting against you) that's at war with you, with provinces flipping to you or them as soon as they're sieged down.

Man fucking M&T saves EU4 so hard for the bittervets. Almost as insane as the stuff Stik and Tobbzn due to make CK3 not dogshit. I'm not worried about Paradox as competition but Stik just made a mod that has like 45% of the key features of the Conspiracy system in Axioms for CK3. Basically you can now promise shit to people to engage in stuff like coups on their liege and there is a "planning phase" for war. After these psycho modders are done CK3 could potentially have the diplomatic potential of EU4.

 

[Mikeal]

 

[Axioms]

Yeah Angevin ideas are OP as hell. 10 years on PUs? Wtf? +15% GC? Bullshit.

 

[Average Manatee]

I wouldn't consider either of those modifiers to be particularly important.

If you're playing tall you want prussia/russia-tier military quality or quantity bonuses and -dev cost. If you're playing wide you want -coring cost, -WS cost, -AE, stuff like that.

All of the majors seem to be getting stupidly, ridiculously OP buffs elsewhere though, like England being able to choose what their colonies produce (including gold), Russia getting massive buffs from serfdom, and other bs.

 

[Axioms]

I wouldn't consider either of those modifiers to be particularly important.

If you're playing tall you want prussia/russia-tier military quality or quantity bonuses and -dev cost. If you're playing wide you want -coring cost, -WS cost, -AE, stuff like that.

All of the majors seem to be getting stupidly, ridiculously OP buffs elsewhere though, like England being able to choose what their colonies produce (including gold), Russia getting massive buffs from serfdom, and other bs.

They've also got coring, infantry combat(admittedly a mediocre bonus), and discipline. Improve relations and a massive manpower boost are also big.

They are on the same tier as Ottomans now. Discipline, Core Cost, swap cav for inf combat ability. And Ottomans have trash ideas like tax modifier and trade power. And the ultimate trash ability, -10% war exhaustion reduction cost. I remember the old days of Kebab -33% core cost. Now their 20% is lower than some nations. Every Angevin idea is good except maybe legitimacy. At least they don't have trash like -10% ship cost like Ottomans.

 

[Delterius]

Is owning Britain+France really playing tall nowadays? EU4's changed a lot since my time.

 

[Lady Error]

Portugal is probably my favorite feel-good choice. Starts out kind of smallish, but sits in a corner where nobody bothers it, can “peacefully“ expand into North Africa and is one of the first to start colonizing.

 

[thesecret1]

Portugal is probably my favorite feel-good choice. Starts out kind of smallish, but sits in a corner where nobody bothers it, can “peacefully“ expand into North Africa and is one of the first to start colonizing.

I avoid playing colonial nations most of the time because colonizing shit is insanely boring. Literally just a waiting game with like 3 events popping up again and again here and there.

 

[Average Manatee]

Is owning Britain+France really playing tall nowadays? EU4's changed a lot since my time.

You can conquer most, possibly all of France in a single war post-1630 or so. And for England I think its assume that the Angevin path involves winning the PU war, so you've basically accomplished that by 1450 or so.

By "playing tall" I mostly mean multiplayer where you have to focus on military and developing/internal optimization.

I wouldn't consider either of those modifiers to be particularly important.

If you're playing tall you want prussia/russia-tier military quality or quantity bonuses and -dev cost. If you're playing wide you want -coring cost, -WS cost, -AE, stuff like that.

All of the majors seem to be getting stupidly, ridiculously OP buffs elsewhere though, like England being able to choose what their colonies produce (including gold), Russia getting massive buffs from serfdom, and other bs.

They've also got coring, infantry combat(admittedly a mediocre bonus), and discipline. Improve relations and a massive manpower boost are also big.

They are on the same tier as Ottomans now. Discipline, Core Cost, swap cav for inf combat ability. And Ottomans have trash ideas like tax modifier and trade power. And the ultimate trash ability, -10% war exhaustion reduction cost. I remember the old days of Kebab -33% core cost. Now their 20% is lower than some nations. Every Angevin idea is good except maybe legitimacy. At least they don't have trash like -10% ship cost like Ottomans.

I mean they are good, but the reason Ottomans are strong is:

- 33% forcelimit and 20% manpower recovery. Both some of the rarer and more powerful effects, especially after quantity ideas were nerfed.
- +3 tolerance of heathens basically negating all religious penalties and saving you from taking Humanist ideas if you are trying to conquer the world.
- Constant almost guaranteed amazing rulers of 5/5/5 or so average.

Also if you want to remember insanity, old days EU4 Ottomans had +300% manpower while at war with heathens.

That said, where modern Paradox tends to hide the overpowered stuff is all in either missions, special government types, or decisions/events. Like the Ottoman guaranteed amazing heirs and other government benefits. Upcoming Russia for example gets shit like:

Bear in mind that Russia is already one of the strongest tags to be in the game, next to Ottomans and Prussia...

 

[Delterius]

By "playing tall" I mostly mean multiplayer where you have to focus on military and developing/internal optimization.

Ah I get it now. Yeah I think people have what 10 million soldiers per tag in MP sessions? Groovy. I'm way too lazy for that crap.

 

[Average Manatee]

By "playing tall" I mostly mean multiplayer where you have to focus on military and developing/internal optimization.

Ah I get it now. Yeah I think people have what 10 million soldiers per tag in MP sessions? Groovy. I'm way too lazy for that crap.

Never actually played an MP game to the end date, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a late game Russia-sized nation to have at least 3-5M. Even AI Ottomans nowadays reaches 1M troops and they aren't min-maxing buildings and development at all.

You can do this as an actually small country in single player, ending up with a 250k army as Netherlands or something, but its just boring to wait around like that. There's also a pretty harsh soft cap to development past 20 per province, and especially past 30, so you'll kind of reach that cap very early if you aren't an already big nation.

 

[Axioms]

In my current Ottomans game, where I made some whoopsies cause I hadn't played for a ton of patches/dlc and didn't have some of the biggest power creep DLC, I became military hegemon with 0 military ideas in 1640 or so. With all the monuments and other more recent DLC bullshit I imagine you could get military hegemon in like 1500 if you wanted. And that isn't counting HRE emperor bullshit.

In the last 100 years I'd expect to see people cracking like 10mil troops easy with Ottomans.

 

[Axioms]

Portugal is probably my favorite feel-good choice. Starts out kind of smallish, but sits in a corner where nobody bothers it, can “peacefully“ expand into North Africa and is one of the first to start colonizing.

Portugal is OP as hell with their unique era ability.

 

[Average Manatee]

Portugal is OP as hell with their unique era ability.

wat

Even if we assume that you have +50 settler growth from 1444 to 1500, and you run two colonies the whole time, that's 56x50x2 = 5,600 extra settlers. 5.6 more provinces your CN gets.

 

[Lady Error]

Portugal is probably my favorite feel-good choice. Starts out kind of smallish, but sits in a corner where nobody bothers it, can “peacefully“ expand into North Africa and is one of the first to start colonizing.

I avoid playing colonial nations most of the time because colonizing shit is insanely boring. Literally just a waiting game with like 3 events popping up again and again here and there.

Colonizing is a step towards more conquest far away and making insane amounts of money with trade routes.

 

[Lady Error]

So if I steer lots of money towards the Sevilla node, I basically gift half of it to Spain, right? Other than the arms race with buildings, upgrading trade centers and using ships in that node, is there anything else that helps? Other than backstabbing Spain at some point?

 

[Delterius]

So if I steer lots of money towards the Sevilla node, I basically gift half of it to Spain, right? Other than the arms race with buildings, upgrading trade centers and using ships in that node, is there anything else that helps? Other than backstabbing Spain at some point?

You can definitely get the larger share from Sevilla even if you only own Portugal and the rif provinces. Of course just conquering Spain is always better, but there's a question as to wether Spain is also helping by colonizing the stuff you don't care about and pulling stuff towards the node themselves.

That said I do like playing portugal and moving to Brazil at one point, turning the euro provinces into trade company zones.

 

[Average Manatee]

You can embargo them and raise mercantilism. Doing the latter with direct mana is insanely wasteful but doing it with privileges that give +1-3 mercantilism every so often is OK (it's not a great plan but if you specifically want to avoid conquering spain its fine). You will suffer a trade efficiency penalty if you embargo without them being a rival but that can be worth it.

 

[Riddler]

I wouldn't consider either of those modifiers to be particularly important.

If you're playing tall you want prussia/russia-tier military quality or quantity bonuses and -dev cost. If you're playing wide you want -coring cost, -WS cost, -AE, stuff like that.

All of the majors seem to be getting stupidly, ridiculously OP buffs elsewhere though, like England being able to choose what their colonies produce (including gold), Russia getting massive buffs from serfdom, and other bs.

They've also got coring, infantry combat(admittedly a mediocre bonus), and discipline. Improve relations and a massive manpower boost are also big.

They are on the same tier as Ottomans now. Discipline, Core Cost, swap cav for inf combat ability. And Ottomans have trash ideas like tax modifier and trade power. And the ultimate trash ability, -10% war exhaustion reduction cost. I remember the old days of Kebab -33% core cost. Now their 20% is lower than some nations. Every Angevin idea is good except maybe legitimacy. At least they don't have trash like -10% ship cost like Ottomans.

That is after controlling both France and Britain. This is kind of the equivalent of forming Italy, which has even better modifiers.

 

[Lady Error]

Another question: How do you get higher “colonist success“ percentages? It seems that colonizing high development places gives a lower sucess percentage or is it also based on how far away the colony is from the capital?

 

[Axioms]

I wouldn't consider either of those modifiers to be particularly important.

If you're playing tall you want prussia/russia-tier military quality or quantity bonuses and -dev cost. If you're playing wide you want -coring cost, -WS cost, -AE, stuff like that.

All of the majors seem to be getting stupidly, ridiculously OP buffs elsewhere though, like England being able to choose what their colonies produce (including gold), Russia getting massive buffs from serfdom, and other bs.

They've also got coring, infantry combat(admittedly a mediocre bonus), and discipline. Improve relations and a massive manpower boost are also big.

They are on the same tier as Ottomans now. Discipline, Core Cost, swap cav for inf combat ability. And Ottomans have trash ideas like tax modifier and trade power. And the ultimate trash ability, -10% war exhaustion reduction cost. I remember the old days of Kebab -33% core cost. Now their 20% is lower than some nations. Every Angevin idea is good except maybe legitimacy. At least they don't have trash like -10% ship cost like Ottomans.

That is after controlling both France and Britain. This is kind of the equivalent of forming Italy, which has even better modifiers.

Italy has a lot more dead ideas as well as several identical ideas that are slightly better. I prefer Legitimacy over Prestige in ideas so Angevin wins that one. Italy has Stab Cost and Fort Defense which are both trash.

Of their remaining different ideas Angevin has Discipline and Separatism and +1 Parliament issues while Italy has Galley Cost and Galley Combat Ability plus Global Trade Power. Much rather be Angevin here.

They've both got +15% National Tax Modifier.

Italy gets +5% more CCC and ICA in their respective ideas sure. They also have +33% vs +20% on National Manpower Modifier. Italy has +50% Improve Relations vs +30% for Angevin. So they certainly win by having 4 higher value identical modifiers. But then we finally get to +50% Heir Chance and -10 Years Of PU Integration. And +15% GC modifier which is very good. Since England probably pushes for Economic Hegemon their GC value is insane. Of course Military Hegemon is strong as hell but still.

Once you literally possess Mare Nostrum, as opposed to just the Italian idea, Gally bonuses don't matter. The cost modifier is always 100% useless but you don't even care about the combat modifier after you control the whole Med. So functionally Italy has 3 dead ideas by the mid game.

Roman Ideas are objectively superior to Italian ones anyways.

 

[Delterius]

am i the only person who thinks its kinda dumb to have stuff like 'hey i formed rome as france now i have roman ideas such as The Legions'

its like my extremely successful country decided to forgo what it is, put on a toga and joined a cargo cult

if i formed 'rome' as 'byzantium' i'd make a point of wearing those byzantine ideas until endgame

 

[Average Manatee]

Italy gets +5% more CCC and ICA in their respective ideas sure. They also have +33% vs +20% on National Manpower Modifier. Italy has +50% Improve Relations vs +30% for Angevin. So they certainly win by having 4 higher value identical modifiers.

these are 4 of the best modifiers in the game.

But then we finally get to +50% Heir Chance and -10 Years Of PU Integration. And +15% GC modifier which is very good. Since England probably pushes for Economic Hegemon their GC value is insane. Of course Military Hegemon is strong as hell but still.

+50% heir chance is fairly irrelevant. -10 years PU integration is trash, what matters is the integration cost, often you don't even integrate immediately because you are waiting for discounts that make it cheaper. GC is a pretty weak bonus since you can reduce trade companies and territories to -99% GC. If you're a hegemon you don't care about GC, you've already won the game anyway.

am i the only person who thinks its kinda dumb to have stuff like 'hey i formed rome as france now i have roman ideas such as The Legions'

its like my extremely successful country decided to forgo what it is, put on a toga and joined a cargo cult

if i formed 'rome' as 'byzantium' i'd make a point of wearing those byzantine ideas until endgame

NIs were stupid from the beginning but its adding random made up bonuses to nations is what players call "flavor" nowadays.

 

[Axioms]

Italy gets +5% more CCC and ICA in their respective ideas sure. They also have +33% vs +20% on National Manpower Modifier. Italy has +50% Improve Relations vs +30% for Angevin. So they certainly win by having 4 higher value identical modifiers.

these are 4 of the best modifiers in the game.

But then we finally get to +50% Heir Chance and -10 Years Of PU Integration. And +15% GC modifier which is very good. Since England probably pushes for Economic Hegemon their GC value is insane. Of course Military Hegemon is strong as hell but still.

+50% heir chance is fairly irrelevant. -10 years PU integration is trash, what matters is the integration cost, often you don't even integrate immediately because you are waiting for discounts that make it cheaper. GC is a pretty weak bonus since you can reduce trade companies and territories to -99% GC. If you're a hegemon you don't care about GC, you've already won the game anyway.

am i the only person who thinks its kinda dumb to have stuff like 'hey i formed rome as france now i have roman ideas such as The Legions'

its like my extremely successful country decided to forgo what it is, put on a toga and joined a cargo cult

if i formed 'rome' as 'byzantium' i'd make a point of wearing those byzantine ideas until endgame

NIs were stupid from the beginning but its adding random made up bonuses to nations is what players call "flavor" nowadays.

Sure if you just min-max the incredibly dumb as shit trade company mechanics you can do anything. For people who don't do that the GC bonus is strong. I mean why even play a game where you aren't the HRE Emperor with RTP by 1460? Who needs TCs when you have unlimited vassals with double the forcelimit/mp contributions from being princes *and* vassals and you just pop the final button at the end of the game to achieve a one tag? There's always some much more bullshit exploit because PDox gonna PDox.

NIs and MTs are perfectly good mechanics because EU4 is an idle clicker with a map. The goal of the game is to minmax myriad modifiers to get ridiculous results. Ironically it has the best diplomacy and intrigue of any Paradox game but this is primarily because it accepts what it is an doesn't pretend to be something more prestigious and so the game mechanics are pretty cohesive.

It sounds like many of you want a pre-industrial map and menu simulation which is legit but that is not what EU4 is.