Europa Universalis IV

If you want to WC, being the shogun is by far the best method of doing it. All of the hordes are strong contenders too. Razing everything to the ground helps a lot. With euro countries, you have to be smart about releasing vassals and using their cores to reconquer as often as possible. Any country can WC if you have the time to play extremely aggressive and handle constant disasters and -3 stability. Another important thing is using no cb and truce breaking wars smartly. They give awful AE penalties, but it can often be worth it to gain extremely strategic territory early, like Constantinople or an outpost province to give you an expanded range for colonization or new war time expansion. I often like to no CB into Ireland early just because of how fast it can fall and how annoying Britain is if you can’t get there by land.

The year is 1700. Ottomans have been ejected from europe, Greece, kazan, and the mamluks are all my loyal vassals. Pretty much all of the holy roman empire that is left has the hatred of a 1000 suns for the glorious habsburg Kingdom. I think it's time for me to absorb the last two rebelious electors, and then vanquish the emperor (spain), so I can finally dismiss this ancient relic and reclaim my title as an empire, and not some petty 'elector'.

Goal wise, I need to squash the revolution when it forms to get the 5% admin permanently, then I can form germany and get their permanent 5% admin. One of the strangest things about this run has been how chill its been in terms of Overextension. My Tuetons game I was running 150%+ overextension almost the entire game, having rebels everywhere constantly while getting every disaster known to man. This game I've rarely gone over 50%, and only once over 100%. I've made most of my gains through diplo-annexation.

Reached out and touched India. Got yarkand, nogai and punjab as vassals on the way. About to full annex Brabant with no admin points, so gonna be a few years of close to 300% OE. I'm gonna be clicking through a lot of separatist sentiment spam I guess. I need to finish off retaking the rest of the mamluks land so I can finally integrate them. Apparently my Kilwa in africa is a super power. They even spawned the enlightenment, lol.

Army quality is important. Sent a little 32k squad to relieve a fort that was being sieged by 42k. As soon as the battle starts another 45 or so k more pop out of the fog of war. I said ripperino to my guy, and figured he'd get stack wiped, since my morale is close to 9 even with a Craven leader. Apparently Fredreich had other plans. He got the province named after him.

Playing a kilwa game on my steam deck at work exploration + expansion just to see if I could cuck out europe from SE asia. It's the late 1480s and I've already colonized all of south africa and have money overflowing everywhere. Super powerful african country to try with all the people who mentioned playing in africa earlier. My at home game atm is England. Planned on having a calm game where I murder all the native americans. Game had other plans. Got the PU over burgundy early, whom I only allied cause I wanted to steal iceland from Denmark. From there, followed the mission tree and assimilated scotland, got the PU over france, and randomly got a chance to PU a healthy looking Brandenburg.

I allied absolutely everyone I could and went over relations limit to do it, because claiming Brandenburg's throne got me a coalition of all of the HRE. Luckily my Austria has a case of the downs, so I think I'll be okay, but this coalition has 200k soldiers already. My previous game I tried sweden, and I was just prohibitively poor. Muscovy kicked my nuts in. Stealing the gems provinces from the teutons needs to be a higher priority I think. I learned my lesson and stole one as England. Poland isn't my friend any more.

My playing style is war - house keeping - economic/military upgrades - war again

So over time I put together a checklist I quickly run through after every war

Let me know how your looks compared to mine, would love to learn new tips:

1. Core provinces / and if possible create new states
2. Assign autonomy reduction edicts to all new states, these edicts basically stay for the next few decades
3. Reduce autonomy in all provinces where possible
4. Call Diet to get the 5% loyalty boost and a new mission
5. Seize crown land if possible (I do this regularly every few years, goal is to have 95%-100% of all land be crown land in first 200 years
6. Put all armies back into drill mode
7. Build courthouse or town hall in every province to reduce autonomy (either one gets you +1 free building slot, so it doesnt waste a building slot. I only do this when I got plenty of money)
8. Build new ships (replenishing losses from the war)
9. Build land units (if needed)
10. Make sure all gold provinces are at 10 dev to maximize cash flow (sometimes you capture a gold province in a war and dont even realize it)
11. Upgrade all buildings if needed. if im struggling with manpower, i upgrade manpower buildings. same thing with sailor power, or manufacturing. if money is not an issue, I upgrade everything.

I pretty much do the same thing.

Life's looking good in the british empire. Was trying to chill, but Castile was supporting independence for france. Can't have none of that. Took all their colonies and my claims, and lots of sweet money. Castile is now locked out of colonizing for at least a few dozen years, lmao. Then I got the event to instantly inherent burgundy and this beautiful heir within a month of each other. No loans, so I'll just eat the lost money until my colony finishes.

Can I move my capital to america and form the united states, or do you have to release them? Never tried.

Zajeer said:

Yeah that's generally how you want to play, and then your cycle times between war/peace get shorter and shorter as you scale (assuming you're going for a conquest type of game).

If/once you stack up enough CCR modifier, you can be at war almost indefinitely. Once you get CCR so coring is less than 10 months you can almost ignore over-extension, and be at war indefinitely - since you can core faster than rebels can spawn

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Yeah thats the problem im running into as Mughals. Money, man power, etc is a non issue. I have hundreds of 3 decker ships, 1.3M standing army and another 1.7M in manpower reserve which is at 100% almost all the time, and my monthly net income is 1500 ducats. But the coring still takes 2-3 years so i sit around playing whackamole with rebels until my overextension is below 50%. I'm in the 1780s right now, so the ship has sailed buit will definitely try to correct that in the next playthrough.

They just released a new China patch where they redid everything including the mission tree, so Im thinking of giving China whirl after my Mughal run.

So far I have played Portugal, Castile, mughals and Russia through 1820

What country should I try next? I'm thinking UK, Ming China or Riga

Zajeer said:

Florence is pretty awesome if you wanna try a tall game - you just slowly build up to form Italy, but mostly get all of your provinces to 40 dev. Your wars will mostly be to help your allies, and to weaken rivals/future enemies like the Ottomans. Alternatively you use your troops as Codiettieri (mercs for hire) and help out in some foreign wars.

Late game you can also restore the Roman empire.

There's a couple of good playthroughs on YouTube for Florence

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Sounds fun. One part of EU4 I don't like is the actual war fighting aspect. And that really goes for the other Paradox games I played like Stellaris. By the time you get to mid late game it's a chore to do any fighting because it's all management of army compositions, supply limits to limit attrition and chasing little 2 unit regiment enemy "armies" that sneaks in somewhere past your lines and starts sieging down your provinces that don't have forts.

I hear Victoria 3 is much more economics focused and I'll probably play that next and then come back to playing a tall game in EU4 with Florence or something

Chris said:

Tried Ruthenia to trigger Araysar but all the tutorials with these janky starts are either lucky or broken by the newest version. So you are meant to sabotage Lithuania then release Kiev as vassal to play, but no matter what I do they still join a PU with Poland and now you are fighting Poland which the guides don't mention.

So playing Korea instead without a guide other than how to start the first year since I needed to learn what all these estate powers are.

It's going amazing, played the hordes off against each other to get their "third Korea" lands, now they all hate me but are weak while Mongolia is left as an ally. Went tall and spawned reinessance. Japan formed without the southern island so jumped in and crushed them as a foothold, surprisingly I seem to have enough troops (48) to take the whole lot so that's next once I beef up my navy. It's about 1480. With Japan I should be able to take on Ming.

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Serves you right

How do you play tall in EU4 anyways? Im assuming its just dumping your monarch points into province development, maxing out buildings, trade companies and edicts?