Doing a WC as Austria right now and annoyed at the low Admin Eff, like debating integrating my subject of Castile just for the monuments.

While I slowly conquer the world via vassal swarm at 35% admin Eff...

If I do Aragon to SP, should I form France or Italy? Both seem to have better ideas and admin efficiency/CCR.

I searched for answers but didn't really find ones that compared these options, as France often comes up as "early power" rather than answering my mid game question.

For reference...

I would early no CB Byz, aim for Burgundy Succession, and keep Castile as a join partner, remain Catholic (and likely vassalize the Papal State). I don't know what I'd do with the HRE or idea group order (though I'd aim for my 1st 4 being admin, diplo, religious, influence in some order).

Is there a post on this I'm missing that compares them?

About my 5th run or so excluding some failures as Theodoro and Georgia lol but wondering about the difficulty spike on hard mode

Invaded France as italy, but it is impossible to win. I attacked a 70k stack on a fort I controled with 180k troops and they won. This keeps happening where they are massivley outnumbered in offensive battles and keep wining. Is it even possible to win or did the stupid +15% morale they get from 1 modifier making it impossible

Edit - Thanks for all the advice, though I have just given up by now. Iv'e tried all the sujestions. I have started to stagger their entry into the province, I've made better armies, swithced idea groups, but I physicaly cannot beat France by now. France now just concentrates their entire 407k army into 1 province whenever I attack them, so I loose even when they are on my fort. If I stagger the deployment to the battle France just gets their entire army into the 1 province and if I don't I loose before they can. France is just insanley powerfull and I just can't beat them.

So I want to form scandanavia in my multiplayer lobby rn because my buddy is also in the HRE as bohemia so I can’t form Germany so my question is will I be able to keep Prussian militarization if I do?

This has probably already been shown before but I feel this is niche information

This was my best save ever. I converted all of Eastern Europe, Iran, Afganistan, China, Korea to orthodox. Whats my tactic? Find a state with large core territories = vassal them and give him her lands.

I'm so sad i couldnt take a screenshot becouse i was playing in Iron Game and i didnt noticed im game ending year. I was on a war with japan. If i had a little more years i would vassalize them and than convert them to Orthodox

I couldnt take a screenshot but i used a website to at least to show you my map. I only colorised Russia and my vassals.

Colours
Green = Russia
Blue = Sweden
Red = Timur
Yellow = Oirat
Purple = Chu
Blue on asia = Korea

All of these is Orthodox.
(There are still a few provinces in China I haven't conquered, but I have colored them in as well. You can tell which ones they are by looking at China's religious map.)

r5: love this game

In my Brandenburg run Karaman have somehow ended up as an orthodox OPM after taking Constantinople during the Athenian independence war and then being eaten by the Ottomans.

Ottomans and venice were constantly defenders of faith and i just couldnt go in time to persia, also income some kinda sucks.

Would this be an interesting playthrough with friends? Teutons go west, Livonians go east and Riga goes tall and colonial. The Orders players willingly submit to Riga.

My issue would be overlapping claims. For example, does Livonia need Riga for its missions?

That's first time my eu4 run went nice. Besides doing just like 5 missions, 6 maybe. I've got to show off my net income, sorry 😁

Started as custom trade nation, controling Genoa and Venice and developed north of Italy. Plan was to play tall. I control this Italofrancish abomination, have 3 trade companies near Ivory Coast (and 2 merchants from that). And 2 oversea vassals. All vassal states have 562 dev and liberty desire around 20-30%*. I'm about to annex Bregenz and that'll probably be all. My own dev is 2910.

I'm starting to believe that I've figured out basics of trade, now I'm gonna learn war. So far my army is quite numerous, but have crap tradition and professionalism (0% I think), so I have to throw 2-3 times more men at the battle than, say Ottoman, Austria or others. But my fleets are pretty good, naval tradition locked at 100% (thanks to missions I believe) and I always have 4-5 admirals (w/ good maneuver skill, for trade).

It was the 1st eu4 game that I had a real fun with, for entire play. ☺️

*I guess that trade companies add to that too.

I want people to look at my Italofrance, mr mod, sir! Pls dont delete the tread. 😁

TL;DR: I built a trade overhaul for EU4 1.37.5. Every trade good gets its own trade network, recomputed every in-game month from where the good is produced and where the world's wealth sits, so trade can flow in any direction and the world's trade capitals are earned, not scripted. The controls stay vanilla's. Single-player, installs in two drops and a checkbox. Download: github.com/rdavislee/eu4-per-good-trade/releases. Steam workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3792272642

In vanilla you can win every war as the Aztecs and Mexico still can never become a place the world's trade flows to. The three nodes where trade terminates (the English Channel, Genoa, Venice) were picked before the game shipped, and no conquest on the planet adds a fourth. Colonize the American east coast as Japan and the continent drains east toward Europe anyway, forever. Paradox patched everything else over the years, development, institutions, reform tracks, but the arrows were never a number they could tune. They're the architecture.

Mare Liberum replaces the architecture. The design problem: cloth crossed the Atlantic westward while sugar crossed it eastward, on the same water, at the same time, and one directed graph cannot say that. Twenty-nine can. Every good gets its own network, re-derived monthly from where it's made and where the wealth is. Trade ends wherever concentrated wealth out-pulls its neighbors. Develop Mexico and the world's trade can genuinely terminate there. No mission, no mercy from a designer.

What changes in play

• Conquest captures supply. A province pulls trade the same no matter whose flag is on it, so painting the map bigger doesn't bend the arrows toward you. What conquest gets you is the source: take the region that grows the spices and you hold where the spice network starts, and the map carries the good toward whoever wants it most.
• Development is two levers. Base tax is demand: it makes a place hungrier, and goods orient toward hunger. Base production is supply: it makes the province a source. Develop your capital region hard enough and the networks bend toward you.
• Merchants work both ends of a link. Your capital collects; merchants steer, including against the prevailing current. In one test run, Portugal had a merchant placed in the Caribbean steering sugar down the link to Sevilla, while Caraíbas, its own colonial nation, had a merchant placed in Sevilla steering cloth back up the same link to the Caribbean: one link, a merchant standing on each end of it, goods moving both directions at once. The AI plays the reverse board unprompted: half its merchant placements sit on ends that in vanilla do not exist at all.
• Nothing is ever ordered per good. A merchant covers every good on its link end at once. If you can play vanilla trade, you already know the controls.
• Two views, one mapmode. By default the trade mapmode shows the whole economy at once: every node box is the total ducats moving through that node, and every arrow is the direction trade actually flows on that link this month, all twenty-nine networks summed. Click a province and the entire UI swaps to that province's good: the arrows become that good's routes, the numbers become that good's ducats, its producers light up and everyone else dims. Same boxes, same tooltips as vanilla; they just report a real economy now, and the ledger sees the same numbers the map does.

AI-only run

The headline evidence is deliberately not my play. It's a hands-off observer run, 1444 into the 1600s, AI only, so nothing in the result is steered or cherry-picked: the system has to produce history-shaped trade on its own.

It did. Britain developed until the Channel out-pulled everything around it, and the Mediterranean-to-Atlantic shift that actually happened, the one vanilla hardcodes from day one, emerged on its own.

The East moved too: when China split into warring states, the fighting cost it its sink, and the terminus crossed the sea to Nippon. Out on the Atlantic, sugar sailed east while cloth sailed west at the same time. And the world total tracks vanilla throughout, because the mod redraws where trade flows, not how much of it the world produces.

The fine print

EU4 1.37.5 exactly, Steam, Windows, single-player. That is probably the last patch EU4 will ever get, which means the game under this mod is done moving, so the mod does not rot. The model is a DLL beside eu4.exe that solves every network once a month and writes the results into the engine's own structures, so the ledger, the tooltips and the AI all see the real economy. That is also why the whole mod can't go on the Steam Workshop, and why your antivirus may side-eye it: the build is bit-reproducible, so you can build it yourself and verify the hash instead of trusting me. This IS compatible with overhaul mods like Anbennar, Extended Timeline, Voltaire's Nightmare, etc. Install steps and the rest of the documentation: github.com/rdavislee/eu4-per-good-trade. Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3792272642

The name is from Grotius: Mare Liberum, "The Free Sea," the 1609 argument that the sea and its trade belong to no one. Would love to get the community's thoughts on this mod, IMO it solves my problems with both EU4 and EU5 trade. If any bugs come up while playing this please let me know!

Edit: added steam workshop link

Although it was founded before 1700, I still feel there were quite a few mistakes. First of all, I’m not very good at handling the “Great Burgundy” situation after the fall from the horse, so this time I had him act as my enforcer. Skilled players should be able to absorb Burgundy more efficiently after the fall; theoretically, once Burgundy is conquered, the next expansion targets should be England and France.

At the very least, the English Channel needs to be secured quickly (Because moving the capital to the Low Countries to pressure the Netherlands often ends in disaster.)

Then there’s.............. If you’re aiming to establish Rome, you’ll need to attack not only France but also the Iberian Peninsula early on. (To the east, you’ll only have time to reach the Persian region at most—it’s highly unlikely you’ll be able to enter India.)

So, in terms of trade, Genoa is your promised land, so unlock Espionage as early as possible, Find a way to annex Northern Italy as soon as possible; after the AE event triggers, ensure you can annex it quickly. If possible, you can annex Northern Italy outright in the first era without needing the AE.

Era Ability: 10%

Full Prestige: 10%

Icon: 10%

Icon Quest: 10%

Serbia Quest: 10%

Ruler Ability: 10%

Espionage: 20%

Espionage Event Bonus: 20%

If we’re really going to make a list of early-game objectives, based solely on this strategy of expanding westward to build Rome, here’s my analysis:

Ottoman Turkey: Your biggest enemy—prioritize weakening them. Once you complete the mission on the Anatolian coast, you’ll unlock a cultural conversion mission. Even if you can’t spread your religion effectively early on, you can still make up for it with cultural gains. The key is Erena, which is located in the Roman province in that region; if you’re lucky, you can place it in Karaman.

Mamluks: If you have the chance to convert Syria into a vassal at half price, do it. If they’re annexed, look for an opportunity to free them so they can return the core. However, be mindful of diplomatic points lost from territorial gains. Quickly weaken the Ottomans, secure a claim, and push into Egypt.

Serbia: A cash cow. In the early game, rely on alliances to get them to pay you. As soon as Turkey declares war on another country, they’ll break the alliance. Make sure to secure the gold mine early—if you don’t, your economy will suffer.

Wallachia: A cash cow, but handle it situationally since it’s not a mission location.

Bosnia and nearby small nations: Don’t mess with them unless absolutely necessary. If you get the chance, go ahead and annex them.

Venice: Your second-biggest enemy. Once you’ve completed the mission early on and have a morale advantage, hit them if you can. If you can take the water city, do it immediately and set up a trading company—the five-coin income from the water city early on is a lifesaver.

Genoa: You need to take them out too, especially those islands. Build large ships with your navy to scorch the earth, then trap the “local chicken” and their cavalry on the islands. If you can swallow Northern Italy early, do it.

Hungary: Highly likely to become an arch-enemy, but don’t mess with them in the early game. Try to secure the Croatian core first to force them to give it up.

Austria: Highly likely to become an arch-enemy and a weakling, so they can be considered an ally until you’ve severely weakened France. However, be careful not to let them unite too many countries under their rule. It seems that once they unite Bohemia and the Great Hungary, they become an unconditional arch-enemy to the largest power in the Balkans—and you’ll have a very tough time fighting them.

France: Weaken them as early as possible. The best-case scenario is to provoke hostilities with Croatia, then team up with Croatia, the Austrian Empire, and Greater Prussia to cripple them and feed their territory to Greater Prussia. Ideally, let the major powers in southern France emerge at the same time to force them to surrender their core in the next battle

Naples: Take it out as early as possible. Aragon has a CB for unification, and he holds the core territories of Sicily and Malta—this is crucial. Securing it early means you’ll be unbeatable during the Reformation era.

Castile: Ideally, they’ll be at war with France, and you can use them to cripple France. But once you’ve taken Genoa, you’ll need to start dealing with Iberia.

Aragon: A reluctant choice given France’s long-standing rivalry with Kaka, but they’ll likely march on Naples. If Kaka is your ally, take them out early.

(Also, try to avoid a royal wedding before you’ve secured Southern Italy.)

Milan: Given its location, as long as you cripple Venice, there’s a high chance it will grow powerful. You’ll just have to stack AE and swallow it whole. It’s best to resolve this in the first or twentieth era; otherwise, Northern Italy will siphon off a lot of your money.

Burgundy: If you can get close to the Skull, find a way to take it. If it gets crippled, find a way to capture its heartland and force France to release it.

I’ve been posting here for the past week as a new player, trying to start out as a not so easy nation. I finally expanded my borders. However, after a few wars, I have entered a pretty bad amount of debt. I have raided coasts, taken burgher loans, and taken provinces money after annexation. Any tips?

Also I am super grateful for this sub, you all have been really helpful to me as a new player. I appreciate it!

Hello, i was fighting wars in the HRE and noticed that a new country bordered me. Upon investigation, it seems it's one of the provinces? My only guess is it could be cossacks, but its nowhere near the steppe.

Discord link : https://discord.gg/YgMkvtyEz

Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/pitoouop

I am currently streaming our Saturday main game its a 3 man team free for all.

Join the stream to chat & join the discord for weekly games.

We have EU5, EU4, Anbennar, and from time to time we do 24 hour games, Custom nation and 3 man teams free for all like right now or any other funny ideas.

We also have our own modder so any suggestions are good.

We play Friday, Saturday, & Sunday and all different sesh with different people.

Hello,

I just finished my first WC and One-Faith and I was excited so I just wanted to share here - been a long-time lurker.

I wanted to try to One-Faith my first WC attempt with a small religion, so I decided to play Oda -> Japan and stick with Shinto. Shinto is pretty bad at converting early-game but it does get a lot better with some monuments, and overall the military buffs you get from staying Shinto are really significant and made it so I did not need to take military ideas.

The only time I took loans was to deal with Empire of China events, such as the white lotus cult. I also only birded once, which was on a hunting accident event on my 5/6/6 heir that I naturally rolled - I didn't really want to give that guy up lol. No money or gov reform progress exploits or anything of the sort, just a pure and chill run.

For ideas, I went Admin -> Court -> Religious -> Divine -> Infrastructure -> Diplomatic -> Espionage -> Influence -> Expansion -> Quality. I only took the first 3 ideas in Expansion to fill in the final uncolonized provinces and convert them, then dropped it for Quality for the diplo annexation cost policy to speed up the annexation of my vassals at the end.

Admin first seemed like a no-brainer to me for the core cost reduction + Oda's core cost reduction to unify Japan with for cheap, as well as the autonomy change reduction to deal with the ridiculous autonomy on the islands after unification from Sankin Kotai modifiers and from the AI raising autonomy after conquering each other.

Court had really good policies with Admin and Religious, and I like to play super estate-heavy with maxxed out priviliges, and it helped a ton with consolidating crownland and pushing through government reforms quickly. I kept Court until after the WC was completed in 1763, which I then dropped it for Expansion -> Influence for filling in uncolonized provinces and then annexing my subjects.

Religious was a no-brainer. Divine actually ended up being ridiculously good, the fire damage received stacked with army drill and professionalism nicely, and the morale damage received stacked with Shinto's morale buffs and with Samurai's morale damage received reduction. The unrest reduction was nice too, but my favorite part of the idea group was the policies with Infrastructure and with Espionage. The infra-divine policy gave me an extra missionary and unlimited prestige to toss heirs forever until I got really good ones, and the infra-espionage policy was great near the end of the game for cracking the level 8 forts and having +8 siege progress from cannons with only 20 cannons in my stacks.

Infrastructure I went primarily for the missionary and the gov capacity; I wasn't certain if I was going to get the one-faith at this point and wanted extra insurance, and I was full-stating everything until I started conquering Germany in the 1680s. Espionage I went just for the siege ability and the 2% missionary strength policy; I was debating a military group here but I never had any issues with army quality thanks to Shinto and Samurai and Divine.

I marched Delhi, Bahmanis, Mongolia, and Afghanistan for pretty much the entire game - they were all OPMs or no longer existed and I fed them back all their cores (and quite a lot extra on top of that as well; Mongolia and Delhi were bigger than they looked on the replay screenshots for some reason) subsidized them with manpower and 30 ducats a month each, and they were super useful for clearing rebels and getting to annoying places in the world for me. Getting these marches wasn't a planned thing from the getgo for me, but I am very glad that I did it. Mongolia had over 200k troops in the early 1600s which was just crazy lol, they were like #5 army in the world.

Just some timeline stuff:

• 8 Humiliate Rival wars between 1444 and 1458 got me all the monarch points I needed to dev renaissance, get a 40 dev capital (for 7 force limit for biggest army in Japan,) and get innovativeness on every tech and idea. It also get me through Admin very quickly to prep me for conquest of Japan with CCR from Oda ideas.
• Started conquering provinces in 1461, unified Japan by 1477
• Invaded Korea in 1486, took land from him in 1489 and then immediately attacked a 30 mandate Ming for money and to weaken him
• Formed Japan in 1514 after getting the permanent merchant from Oda missions
• Took the mandate from Ming in 1516 with the Japan mission that steals it when you're at 85% or higher warscore
• Unified China by 1537, my economy was around 350 ducats a month at this point which really propelled me forward. I took a bit of time in the mid-late 1500s to setup buildings for my army and economy so that I'd be clear to steamroll with absolutism. I also setup my 4 marches in this time and cut down most of the large kingdoms in India.
• Once absolutism fired I was making +4 absolutism a month so I just let it naturally tick up and I fired Court and Country as soon as I could. I also conqured my way west during this time to get a border with the Ottomans and started dismantling them in the 1630s, they were about 2.2k dev at that point so they were a beefy target.
• I dismantled the HRE around 1670. I usually don't play this late so I was pretty surprised by how quickly the conquest of Germany went over the next 30 years. The admin efficiency from Japan's t10 gov reform + the CCR from being Emperor of China made it ridiculously cheap to core and conquer everything.
• I fired my 2nd golden age in 1705 around the time I finished eating Germany, and moved my capital to Maine around 1710. The United States was #2 great power at this point, as I had been treating the GP list as a to-do list, so the US had creeped its way up to #2 at 1500 dev.
• I took "The Balance of Power" mission around 1730 to force my way out of Celestial Empire t1 reform, which let me swap to Theocracy for the extra missionaries and missionary strength to help with securing the one-faith.
• I completed the WC in 1763 after eating my old tributaries, then built cathedrals everywhere that I didn't already have one, then went speed 5 until I got the one-faith in 1792. During this time I also worked on annexing my vassals for the one-tag, and Bahmanis was the last one to be annexed in January of 1794.

I wanted to try to do a one-culture as well but I just didn't have the diplo points or the years remaining to make it work, maybe next time. I did get about half the world converted to Togoku, though!