Europa Universalis IV

Araysar said:

I only got the Holy Horde government by 1702 or so.

I like the HH play mechanics but feels like it takes too long to get there to really get full use out of it.

But thats just might be my pretty conservative play style. I dont fight multiple wars on multiple fronts and I dont ride -3 stability like Furry does lol

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Yeah, if you really prioritize getting the missions and don't get some shitty alliances to deal with, it's amazing to get earlier. Later on it's more a nice to have.

On my restart campaign I think I got HH in the mid 1550s... much, much earlier than before. I do fight multiple wars often, but still almost never take over 100 OE, so it's not balls to the walls like some WC are.

I have 5000 more dev in this second campaign in 1720 than I did in my first campaign at 1729, so that really shows off what a difference getting it earlier can make (especially when you consider I got that 5k more dev when way more provinces have been razed).

This was my first time playing a horde and it will be difficult not to have that mechanic in the future.

Furry said:

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Speaking of disasters, it seems the time of revolution has come! This is a new disaster for me.

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To me, the Revolution sucks balls, especially if you don't want to go revolutionary. If you go revolutionary it has some nice bonuses, but it's still a pain in the ass. You'll end up getting 25 unrest if you're maxed at absolutism so even with a ton of great modifiers, if you have any OE, you're probably going to have unrest even in your core home provinces. I just wish it was easier to combat.

First long compaign at 1729:



Vs second long campaign at 1722:




Bengal, QQ, Kong, Sunda and two HRE nations are my vassals, as well.

One thing that was underwhelming was the colonial nations. I thought I was going to have some epic battles between me and Spain/Portugal until I realized you can basically attack any of the colonial nations without their overlord joining in.

One thing I did much better this campaign was managing my finances, especially on my trade and use of trade companies. Trade companies are amazing and I basically didn't use them much in my first campaign.

Araysar said:

Yeah I read about it and figured that much. So if you're a European, these things are great in Malaccas, Caribbean, Chesapeake Bay, etc. trade nodes. I just dont know how to min/max them. Do you put all the provinces into the trade company, or just the big trade ones, whats good to build, what isnt, and all the other stuff. Ive been playing a lot of blob campaigns for past few months: Mughals, Teutons, etc. but I should probably go back and try to play a tall campaign again just to experiment with more economic mechanics that I am unfamiliar with. I also suck at the diplomatic aspect, for example I never PU'd anyone and have no idea how to.

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Unless the game gifts you a PU through an event/national tree reward, you must first get your dynasty as the ruler of a country. This occurs if a ruler dies with no heir of his own and you have a royal marriage with them and you have the highest prestige of all nations that have a royal marriage with said nation. Once you have your dynasty on the throne, then once again, the ruler must die with no heir. At that point one of two things will happen. If you are the only Great Power with a royal marriage, you will automatically get a PU. If there is at least one other Great Power with a royal marriage, you will enter into a succession war with them. The winner will get the PU.

Next EU4 DLC set to release April 18.

Araysar said:

Yeah I read about it and figured that much. So if you're a European, these things are great in Malaccas, Caribbean, Chesapeake Bay, etc. trade nodes. I just dont know how to min/max them. Do you put all the provinces into the trade company, or just the big trade ones, whats good to build, what isnt, and all the other stuff. Ive been playing a lot of blob campaigns for past few months: Mughals, Teutons, etc. but I should probably go back and try to play a tall campaign again just to experiment with more economic mechanics that I am unfamiliar with. I also suck at the diplomatic aspect, for example I never PU'd anyone and have no idea how to.

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So there's some tradeoffs involved with them. They use 25% more governing capacity than just a regular territorial core so that's why I'd advise against wholesale TCing of everything you can, especially if you're blobbing.

In general, they'll initially act like territorial cores except for the trade power, which won't have penalties. So a common strategy, taking into account that concern, is TCing the centers of trade in a trade region. Usually, if you get those and/or get them to level two, that's enough to get 51% trade power in a node, which grants you a merchant.

For the TC upgrades, it's important to note that the first two options in each three building chain only affects TC charter provinces (so you have to account for that when deciding whether building one is worthwhile at the time). They are quite powerful such that if, for example, your entire TC charter was set as TC, you would get bonuses almost equivalent to what a fully cored state would look like -- with much less GC. Obviously that costs money, but money is usually more easy to come by than admin mana. The third building in each of the building chains actually affects the whole TC charter (or entire country depending on effect), so you could potentially have stated areas in a TC charter that have 0% autonomy but also benefit from the charter wide bonuses. In general, though, you don't really want to have states in a TC charter because there's more value in using less governing capacity but having most of the value (IF you have bought the appropriate buildings). You can also only have one final building in each charter (so you have to chose one of the five possible). I like the Governor's General Mansion the best in most cases, since it decreases autonomy for the TC charter.

So, maybe to tldr that, TC your CoTs and other high trade power nodes until you get 51% power for the merchant. When you have more money and available GC, build the buildings and TC any of the other developed provinces in that charter to maximize value.

Oh, one thing to note that trade regions and trading company charters are not a 1:1 equivalence. There will often be charters that overlap different trade regions, which can provide for some some complex hijinx.

As for merchants, you really just need to look at the trade flows from other nodes that come into your home node. Keep in mind, you automatically collect in your home trade node, so there's no reason to have a merchant collecting there. When you place a merchant in an upstream trade node, they'll direct the flow to your node based on how much of that node you control. Also importantly, for every upstream node you get a 10% bonus so you can essentially make money out of nothing. You also want to be very careful about manually collecting because doing so removes the trade steering bonus, which can amount to a rather large penalty, so anywhere you collect better be very high value for you based on the trade going through and your control of it (and in that case, a lot of times it would make more sense to just move the home trade node). A situation where having a manual collect might make sense might be if your trade node is somewhere in Eastern Europe but you have a bunch of new world colonies -- almost all of that trade power won't get back to you because it's going to the end nodes in western Europe. So collecting in the Caribbean may actually net you more money in that situation.

At least, that's my basic understanding of things. After groking all of this, I doubled my income in roughly a year after fixing my trade nodes and curating my TC provinces.

Araysar said:

Did you play your 2nd long campaign as Holy Horde and then somehow switched to Commonwealth or did you play as Poland from beginning?

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Yeah, I was Teutonic Order to the end of the mission tree so I could be a horde. Then I culture shifted to a Mongol culture (Qirat in this case) and formed Jerusalem. This allowed me to get both the Jerusalem and Mongol missions trees (they literally mash up inside your mission tree window in a weird way) and I was still able to remain a Holy Horde. I then culture shifted back to Polish (but just barely, as I had Lithuania at almost the same percentage) and formed Poland eventually. I then culture shifted to Lithuania and was then able to form the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth. I formed the LPC instead of the PLC because they actually have different national ideas and the LPC is way better IMO. Mind you, this process occurred over a long period and wasn't just done back to back or anything.

BTW, culture shifting is a thing where you state/destate and/or change culture enough that a culture is at least 50% and you can then change that to the primary culture. That can allow you to form other tags and there are some tags that only have a generic mission tree (like Jerusalem) so it actually resets missions and gives you missions from that other culture. It can be tricky to manage because obviously unstating a state costs you manpower/money/admin points, but I think it was very helpful for me.

People do this to get useful things from other tags, usually permanent bonuses (the Mongol mission tree had permanent 15% war score reduction and -3 unrest, so that's why I went for it). Plus, it's a lot more claims and other bonuses from doing all the extra missions.

On a side note, the revolution passed in my game without me having to address it at all. All the other countries where the revolution happened they defeated it so after something like 30 years it disappeared.

This is the first time it's ever not been a pain in the ass but I think that's largely because I built a very high tolerance of true faith so the 25 unrest from revolution still wasn't enough to start forming rebellions.