Inactive Let's Play EU3 Mare Apertum - Life and Unlife of Vlad Dracula

[Hellraiser]

It's the time of the Thin LPs!

Nah, it's time of trying another feat.

Soon.

Commie African Union in Kaiserreich Darkest hour? Oh this one will be good. What is the LARPing excuse for Idi Amin and Gafdaffi forming it before one of them is born and the when the other is just a kid? They use time travel? Djinn? Shut up I'm doing it for the lulz there is no LARP excuse? Nevermind, just noticed the LP got posted.

 

[Goliath]

Because in the Serbia LP I ended with only 22 Government tech in 1820(also due to inflation from being forced to wage one war after another without end and fund it) and equally terribly backwards in several other fields, I made some significant changes compared to standard Mare Apertum to augment my enjoyment of it. If you think it is "cheating" or unbalanced and broken, I don't care, deal with it:

1) Advisor tech bonuses were changed to reduction of tech costs rather than a fixed investment to make their research bonuses useful for more than wealthy One-province minors and small countries. Remember that this and #2 will help the AI not getting behind in tech even more than the player, specially Lucky Nations, while reducing that stupid trend of OPMs being always ahead in every tech. The maximum of these modifiers is a reduction in 2% research costs for each skill level of an advisor for those who gave the highest investments. These bonuses range from 0.5% cost reduction per skill level to 2%

2) Under the same idea, the ADM and MIL skills of monarchs benefits to stability and research also come in the form of cost modifiers rather than direct investment, starting from 1% reduction at the lowest 3 skill for ADM and 0.5% in military research cost for 3 skill in MIL, up to 7% in civilian and 3.5% in military research costs for a 9/9/9 awesome ruler.

I like these changes and I will seriously consider integrating them into the next release. Could you send me the modified files / upload them somewhere?

3) The Cabinet NI also provides the same bonuses to faster coring and Administrative efficiency as Humanist tolerance. Like Bureaucracy, it requires at least a one point of centralization in the sliders to get the bonus to 10% instead of 5%. The reason I did this is that otherwise it would be by and far the weakest NI after Scientific revolution*.

The direct effects of cabinet are relatively weak yes but this is balanced by the fact that cabinet can be used to unlock multiple advanced ideas. Just sayin'

4) FRAMED! will only happen to really fuck up, because it is only triggered at the point it would get past the infamy limit, rather than randomly at any time in the stupid way it originally was implemented. Its odds of happening were modified to be more like a bell curve that rises dramatically when one is almost touching the limit, but is ridiculously longer to happen otherwise. Disabling the event altogether like I did before was tempting, but now, without the extra infamy of mandatory REMOVE KEBAB* to balance its absence, I decided to keep it. Yet, it is unlikely to happen unless I really push badboy very close to the limit and eschew all espionage NIs, for their benefit to delay it from happening was also far more significantly improved(MTTH is doubled by each of them).

Magna Mundi/Mare Apertum is not Total War. I mean, remove it for all I care but FRAMED! is an essential part of the game design which is meant to discourage and punish historically implausible crazy warmongering.

Really, people who want to conquer the world as Maya or something should play Vanilla EU3, that's the silly map painter.

I should go back and try out some EU3 mods...

How much does Mare Apertum change things up?

Completely different game. Mare Apertum is my personal variant of the famous Magna Mundi mod and while MM uses the EU3 engine it is really a very different kind of game. I don't even like vanilla EU3 . Vanilla EU3 is a map painter (war game) with little else going on. MM has detailed systems for everything from religion to colonial economics. I usually spend 90% of my games doing nothing but micromanaging the economy, religion, colonization, diplomacy etc..

 

[Goliath]

Game is always crashing because of a stupid HRE event or something.

There is only one known crash bug in Mare Apertum. Look at the Mare Apertum thread over at the official Paradox forums. I have posted a workaround there. Unfortunately I just cannot locate the source of this problem..

 

[Cassidy]

There is only one known crash bug in Mare Apertum. Look at the Mare Apertum thread over at the official Paradox forums. I have posted a workaround there. Unfortunately I just cannot locate the source of this problem..

I just needed a pretext to cancel this. All the fluff writing was just too taxing to post and I started to realize this would end looking almost exactly like the Serbia AAR, fluff aside.

Magna Mundi/Mare Apertum is not Total War. I mean, remove it for all I care but FRAMED! is an essential part of the game design which is meant to discourage and punish historically implausible crazy warmongering.

Let's say that those changes involve the FRAMED! event triggering only when it will certainly push the infamy beyond the limit no matter how good the DIP skill of the ruler, rather than having a chance of happening even with only 1.02 infamy(which is just stupid), in addition to making the Espionage related NIs more important, and making its odds of happening more of a bell curve. It was an attempt to make it less random, and at the same time, more effective because it only can happen when it'll definitively throw the player into badboy wars.

Plus, what is there to do in this game that involves considerable involvement of the player other than warmongering? Looking at the treasury raising slowly every year, moving sliders and appointing new advisors once in a while and popping rebel moles? Without warfare, simple as it is, Europa Universalis III would be almost a screensaver.

I like these changes and I will seriously consider integrating them into the next release. Could you send me the modified files / upload them somewhere?

Wallachia was lagging behind the Ottomans because of it(and the vast Ottoman Empire having a large pool of competent advisors too), which means the super hard countries(as in: any minor neighboring kebab) will be even more insanely difficult to play with than before.

Sent a PM with a link.

 

[Goliath]

Plus, what is there to do in this game that involves considerable involvement of the player other than warmongering?

I should do an economy focused Let's Play building a filthy rich Portuguese colonial empire, but I don't have the time and energy.

Just one example, you have noticed the advanced building system right? There are a hell lot of buildings and you have to decide what to build where and when - unlike in Vanilla EU3 money is scarce and you won't have enough to just build everything, everywhere. Seriously, have you looked at how expensive some of the top level buildings are? What their requirements are? You might also want to do some math about whether minting / a loan to build this or that building right now instead of in some years will pay off in the end. There are also required buildings, you must plan ahead to avoid the bad events about unhappy traders etc. One of the first things I do when starting a new game is to plan which provinces should be the "urban hubs" which provide the surrounding provinces with the required trade and naval buildings. You have multiple things to consider, some provinces have many adjacent provinces and are thus ideal for this, however, you want those buildings in high value provinces because their effect is relative to the base values of the province, they are also cumulative and thus provinces with a port are preferable i.e. you can build trade and naval buildings in the same province, oh and the higher level buildings require a certain population size thus you must be careful about that too. It's not nuclear science but I find stuff like that entertaining.

Or when I spend public money like Obama on crack early to milk those rare sugar provinces in Europe for all they are worth. Note that sugar is a high value trade good in Europe at the beginning but that the price will collapse later on once all those sugar plantations in Brazil are up. Which brings me to the colonial staple port. You can't really control it but it's always exciting to wait for the message about what trade good a new colony will produce while you wait for that Xth resource of type Y you need to build the staple port. And once you finally have the required resources, the required money, and colony size (that takes a while, with lots of random "Oh yeah!" and "Oh fuck!" moments on the way and more micromanagement) and you can finally build it it's "OMG look at that income! I am rich! Muhuahuhuah!". Then there is all the interaction with natives, pirates, micromanaging religion, the settling of nomads, trade, tribal consolidation, modernization, etc. Seriously, there is so much to do that I have barely time for war. You can still mostly ignore all this stuff and focus on warmongering.. but that means you will be much poorer, more backwards, and less stable than you could be.

Without warfare, simple as it is, Europa Universalis III would be almost a screensaver.

I said myself that vanilla EU3 is a map painter. MM is not. Again, as I said, it actively discourages such stuff.

Sent a PM with a link.

Thanks!

 

[Major_Blackhart]

An interesting LP/