Europa Universalis IV

Administrative points are the most precious resource in the game. The diplomatic idea group is win for reducing core costs, a diplo, and +2 relations. You can annex/integrate countries faster via high diplomatic reputation (advisor, legitimacy, and ideas contribute). I rolled into India as Britain with the maxed expansion group (free CB) and 5 open diplomatic slots (cut off ties to the continent because france will curbstomp all allies except strong emperor/ottomans), got some military access, and then vassalized small countries that had a lot of cores due them by their neighbors. Then I cancelled the relevant military access and began wars to return cores to my vassals. After which my vassals owned some ~60% of India. I waited the 10 years while colonizing and using my diplomats to improve relations with my largest vassals, then I annexed 4 of them simultaneously in about 6 years. I cored the majority of India with minimal aggressive expansion and proceeded to rinse/repeat for smaller gains. At this point I need more merchants since I'm all alone out in the east. France/Portugal/Netherlands aren't here to help direct trade around the Cape.

Having a series of bad admin kings is the worst thing that can happen to you. It will fucking destroy you.

I'm still trying to figure out a way to get a CB on Swahili as protestant without colonizing next to them. They are sitting on a fat stack of gold (18k in the ledger) I want to take to grow my excess force limit navy. They're sunni, so exploration CB doesn't work, and they're not asian, so expansion CB doesn't work. I don't want to max the religious idea group, and their money isn't worth the stab hit for attacking without a CB. I tried guaranteeing Adal/Ethiopia, but they attack rarely enough without my guarantee and never with it.

I love portugal's colonization range making them skip brazil every fucking game. They colonize the caribbean, venezuela, argentina, etc. Never africa or brazil. Good thinking there Paradox. Oh and castille/france ALWAYS go for brazil because it's all they can get. Let's not give range to the people that colonized far away, let's give it to the guy that barely touched america because of the treaty of tordesilles.

I'm about fed up with the terrible behavior of the countries and am about to start tweaking shit. Portugal should have France's no-native attacks (they traded with the locals rather than going all Cortes on them) so they target highly dangerous/high tax spots in africa to go east to India/Indonesia asap. They should be the vanguard of Europe's exploration of the east, not the dominant force in the Caribbean and South/Central America. The only way to tolerate the game atm is to be England. Fuck the continent, fuck south america, fuck africa. India/North America and my sacred islands are all important.

Doing a game as Iroquois to try to mix things up. After almost 300 years I ahve finally westernised + switched to noble republic (which required me to invest in full economy ideas). IT was the most hellish thing to do in this game. I have a quarter of north america, britain france and spain have the rest. I have 3/4th of the carribeans and some of panama and africa. I'm making 140g from trade at the moment...

Is it just me or are Military Points worth much less than the other two? I struggle to keep up with Diplo/Admin tech but always a few years ahead on Military - though I think that I quite like this.

Chris_sl said:

Is it just me or are Military Points worth much less than the other two? I struggle to keep up with Diplo/Admin tech but always a few years ahead on Military - though I think that I quite like this.

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Yep, basicaly always over 1k needed for military making me pick military ideas fairly often, diplomacy a close 2nd unless I'm playing agressively and conquering a ton of provinces. As for admin, I'm always behind and bleeding points for it..

Some basic shit to try to bring the point system into balance. I'm editing the common\defines.lua

I upped leader costs and reduced stab costs. Since no leaders cost admin, this should help even things and make the diplo group less necessary for expansion (cores).

numbers in red were doubled, numbers in green were halved. I'll tweak more stuff as my dissatisfaction continues.


I'm not a fan of culture swaps, so I made that more expensive just because. Welsh are still around, basque are still around, sorbs/slovenes/slovaks are still around (not represented in vanilla). The french and german language unifications are much more new than the majority of the game and had a massive influence on cultural unity that didn't exist in this period.

I'm considering upping the base and/or idea merchant amount a bit. Everyone that participates adds value to the trade they're steering, so it just ends up making everyone richer with only the significant naval entities having a real effect on where the trade goes. And it's fun to play with merchants.

Something needs to be done about the HRE clusterfuck, portuguese mexico, the BBB, ethiopia/switzerland getting trucked, nords never taking greenland, holy war/DotF conflict, and the weird papal wars. I suspect Paradox will attempt to address the BBB/pope/CB stuff, but I doubt they view weird portuguese colonies and HRE genocide as issues. Portugal colonized Canada throughout most of EU3's history.

I'd really like to fix the turks converting the balkans too, but that probably require an event that puts a permanent province modifier on european provinces that reduces the local conversion chance in exchange for reduced revolt risk, and increased manpower and tax. This would represent the combination of the millet, devsirme, and jizya policies.

I've never experienced any cooldown whatsoever, and believe it to be a localization leftover from eu3. I can begin diplo-annexing someone days after completing another diplo-annexation. And yea, I went into that with my Britain invades India post before. 70% of the hinterland was absorbed from vassals I enlarged via core return wars (the asian CB is basically designed for this). And as I said before, diplo-annexation takes more or less time depending on your diplomatic reputation. I use "relation over time" to get my vassal army prepped for annexation then as they close in I grab any random statesman (+5 diplo rep) to annex more rapidly. That's 0.5 more progress per month. Many factors affect your reputation, and legitimacy is one of them...

The shit thing is that legitimacy is a BITCH to raise and diplo-annexations cost 10 legitimacy each. I'm basically trying to send my ruler off to die in unwinnable battles just to get the legitimacy boost. I'd say it's a bit too hard to raise. I'm probably going to improve the legitimacy over time from royal marriages on my end or mod in the legitimacy advisor, who went missing.

The trade steering bug is killing me. Playing as Russia, and every time my merchant sends my trade from Kiev to Krakow rather than Novgorod I want to punch a dev in the face. Kiev is the lifeline for my trade, it has over 100 gold incoming from the east, and 90% of that goes where my merchant says it goes, which randomly changes. The Samarkand node has a similar effect on my income when my merchant randomly starts sending everything to Persia rather than Astrakahn. I've got 130 light ships "protecting" trade for Novgorod which involves them entering and leaving port over and over.

How do you build a good economy in this game? I have been unable to get mine to be much better than breaking even, playing as Spain. What am I doing wrong?

Light ships, light ships, light ships. Control trade. As Spain you want to colonize all of Venezuela<->Mexico and nab other bits of theCaribbean trade node. Brazil and Africa are very optional. Anyone who controls those just benefits you, since they have to bring all of that money past Sevilla or the Caribbean anyway.You make sure all trade flows to Sevilla (Caribbean and Genoa are interesting for this) and then capture it all in Sevilla before it flows to Bordeaux. Whoever controls the Caribbean controls whether the new world money goes to Sevilla, Bordeaux, or the Chesapeake Bay and then to Bordeaux/London/North Sea. You control the Caribbean and control Sevilla and the northern countries lose out on a LOT of money.

DO NOT WASTE MERCHANTS COLLECTING AT HOME.At least, once you have viable alternatives to steer trade to home. They don't scale up much (at all?), and their influence steering trade is worth exponentially more. At game start Castille doesn't have many options, but as soon as you have access to Genoa/Caribbean, your merchants should be there.

During war you can task part or all of your light ship fleet with blockades of your opponents to improve your odds of victory, and light ships don't cost any diplo points to build unlike trade buildings.

Don't bother colonizing north of Florida at all. The Mississippi river basin has potential, but controlling historically Spanish provinces is more useful and limits your border friction/war fronts with other european powers. You can't send any of the Chesapeake trade to Sevilla, and you have a penalty to collecting money that enters the Bordeaux node because your capital is in Sevilla. Write off anything that goes past you. Focus your efforts upstream.

If you're not familiar with EU games, one mistake new people make is overspending on your military when you're not at war. Early on you should keep your land maintenance at around 10% or so unless you're concerned about an upcoming conflict. Be wary that when you raise your spending to 100% you'll still need a few months before you can use your forces on anything except complete primitives. A good way to lose a lot of warscore is sending low maintenance soldiers to the front lines in a european war.

In my Spain game I had a total of 10 big ships and 0 galleys on register the entire game. My force limit was maxed with light ships and my coasts were maxed on shipyards (+2 naval forcelimit). It shouldn't be possible to build shipyards in colonies because that gets pretty damn OP when you have diplo points to burn.


And then when you're making ridiculous bank off of the new world, you'll realize the ass that is the trade steering bug. Your merchants will randomly decide to steer trade to Chesapeake one day, and you won't realize why your economy is tanking until you notice.



TL;DR, Light ships, trade steering, low land maintenance = money.

P.S. If you want to cheat, wardec Mali/Native Americans/Swahili/etc. for gigantic sums of gold. This is a flaw that should be addressed by the devs soon. They don't spend their money like...at all. So the cherokee, for example, pull in like 300+ gold a year you can grab every truce period with 5 regiments. Mali takes a bit more work since the native americans get defensive penalties that Mali doesn't.

The trade sttering bugs happens whenever you conquer another province. So everytime you go to war and take ap rovince, go redo your merchants. Annoying but at least you dont have to randomly check every month

That's very good to know.

That's what I read in a couple threads, cant confirm 100%, but so far in my game it seems to hold true! Once you have 7 merchants with strategic placement and provinces to boost province outputs of the places you wanna funnel to your main node, this became a nightmarish bug real quick.

https://twitter.com/producerjohan

The producer's twitter, he's been using it to reveal adjustments to the internal build that will probably go live soonish. The most recent is this,

Wartaxes now only have benefits, but lasts for 2 years and cost 50 mil power. #eu4 1.2 patch.

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They also nerfed the +% multiplier from 20 to 5 for merchant steering. People were getting 10k ducats a month from trade with the proper use of steering.

Patch is online and seems great (and huge).
But some exploits are gone
I have to check if I can still faceroll Ottomans with orthodox fury!

Yea, the 1.2 patch is enormous. There are lots of "no shit?" changes in 1.2 like cardinals no longer increase papal influence which allowed early papal investors to become dominant. There are way too many good changes to cover all of it. It makes the game +gooder.
1.2 Changelog

Unfortunately, the hotfix also seems very necessary

Hotfix

Agraza_sl said:

- Border friction is now entierly dependant on how much basetax you border them with

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Does anyone know what it was before all of this? As it is now anyone you share a border with hates you based on the tax base of those provinces. Tax * 5 up to -200 relations that never adjusts unless you somehow get a smaller/poorer border... It's quite horrible even if you don't share a huge border in many cases especially in Europe.

Still haven't picked this up for budgetary reasons, but Paradox is terrific at producing excellent patches in reasonable timely fashion to just keep making a great game better. Stuff made by Paradox, if you're into it (definitely not for everyone games), is always high quality stuff.

Best thing is Ironman mode, avoid so many tedious reload
I rarely play Europeans nations but tried to play Lienster and was cool to form Ireland thank to my France/Danemark/Norway/Sweden/Portugal allies that kicked England when they came at me. Was glorious to see their combined fleet beating the British one!
And now I am head to head with Spain to become the main coloniser.