Oh, and when I have multiple armies in a province is there an easy way to cycle through them or select one of them or something? I constantly find myself clicking and dragging a square over the armies to select all of them and then hitting the "minus" icon around the ones I don't want to select, which is a PITA

Well, this is where I'm at right now (as Castille obv):



I kept getting Holy War CB's on all the Muslim countries in North Africa, so I just kept plowing through them. Finished off Morocco (mostly, it wouldn't let me annex even after I captured all their provinces cause they were too expensive? ...so I took most of their ****), Algiers, and Tunisia, next up is Tripoli, and I have a CB on the Ottomans too although I dunno if I'm brave enough to use it yet.

Pretty sure I'm still terrible at the game though, I'm neglecting everything that doesn't involve running over Africa.

btw, when you guys are writing about your games and you're like "oh xxx country won a war against yyy", are you paying closer attention to the messages in the lower right or something than I am?

Also, when you guys (I remember Daer doing this a lot) talk about vassalizing people, how do you convince them of the wisdom of that option? I can never get anyone to agree to vassalization until I've taken all their territories, at which point whatever CB I've used makes it cheaper to just annex anyway.

If you played Shaco last night I think I played with you.

The problem is you won't always get a good CB, so annexing is not always an option unless you want to eat something like 12 or 16 infamy, and in most games that's just too much...

drag your mouse over the province, which selects all the 1000 men armies in that province, press G to combine into mega-army

if you want to then split that army up, there is an icon at the top right corner to do so

also, expansion is largely capped by your Infamy. If its high everyone hates you and when you goes over the cap everyone gets a free 25% infamy CB on all your provinces, and high infamy affects things like papacy and HRE elections which I guess is the natural result of swallowing your neighbors. The infamy thing means you're better off launching into multiple wars at the same time, especially if country A is allied to country B that you're going to attack, if they come in as result of an alliance taking their provinces costs 4 infamy, whereas if you declare 2 simultaneous Holy Wars at A & B it only costs 1 infamy per province on both countries. Basically its a bit gamey, but you have to make sure you're taking provinces with the right CB.

It takes forever to siege at the beginning, I haven't figured out a better way than wiping out their army and then putting 1-2k stacks on all their provinces and waiting 1-2 years, which makes for pain-free war-exhaustion free conquest. Due to game design its better to leave a small nation with 2 provinces if you can't annex them straight away, since annexing single province minors equate to 2x infamy. Once you get the hang of it you can mess around with all the sue-for-peace options, like if you win a war against a huge empire but will go over the infamy cap you can make them release a sovereign nation (like if you beat Great Britain you can make them release Scotland which is then starts off in an alliance with perfect relations with you). If you're a smaller nation and need to survive/expand just ignore inflation and get yourself an army and expand. Going from 2 provinces to 4 is a pretty big deal.

I also have no idea how play to a trader nation, or why you'd ever want to. If you rule the entire world you have trading monopolies on everything, ldo.

When you declared war on Granada was the game still paused at the beginning? You generally want to declare a war then because everyone is generally unallied at that point (there are some beginning alliances). Of course sometimes after you unpause they still make allies who will get called into the war but generally not.

Also always pause the game at October 15, 1400 and look at what advisors just became available. You start only being able to select advisors born in your country but after one year all unhired advisors go to a general advisor pool and you can hire any of them. As far as other wars (Portugal and Aragon as far as Castille is concerned) be sure to pay close attention to who they are allied with, you don't want England or France coming to the Iberian peninsula to say hi.

Yeah Holy War is a great CB and generally you annex with it. A general Castille game is plowing through Northern Africa (good job there) and then colonization. Maybe a war with Aragon thrown in for fun.

Christians get Holy War CB against infidels that border them so you generally just annex rather than vassalize. Also say you have reconquest against another Christian country. You can take the provinces you have cores on for free but each other province will cost 4 infamy. Vassalizing the entire country will only costs 4 infamy. Vassalization general only works with countries up to 4 or 5 provinces big though.

Yeah if you want to Colonize you need to get Quest For the New World national idea. Then you have to hire Explorers and Conquistadors. Explorers reveal Sea provinces, set then as leader of a fleet like you assign generals. I believe your ships have to be in a friendly port to do this. Conquistadors reveal land. Build transports to carry troops and set the Conquistador as the general of them, then land them on the place you want to colonize and build a colony.

I was just paying more attention to it because I knew I was going to write about it. Usually I only pay attention to the top one (which is about wars) but sometimes I'll ignore all of them for years. Right Clicking on the icon of each row will clear them.

Go tell that to Hansa in our current MP game...

Anyway, apparently there is nobody interested in another MP game, so I'll start another SP campaign...

way too early right now, plus NFL later.

Just took an actual look at the map. Holy Golden Horde Batman!

I would just kill Tripoli and Morocco and then see if I could take out Portugal & Aragon. If your going to colonize focus on Portugal since they will be your main competition. Watch for who they are allied with and who their allies are allied with. Like if Portugal is allied with Milan but Milan is allied with Austria and France, Portugal might call in Milan and then Milan might call in France and Austria. If your strong enough everyone should dishonor a call to war from Portugal. Keep your army near your land force limit. Also your North African provinces probably have better troops (cavalry anyway) at this point so consider building them their.

Also see you had a question about sieging. Only infantry can seige so after destroying the enemy armies break up you army and have 2k infantry seige all the provinces at the same time. Also keep in mind that unless you want to annex or vassalize you don't need to occupy the entire nation to get concessions at peace (money, release vassals, release nations etc.).

As others said, you need QFTNW to explore. Unfortunately you can't get QFTNW with your first idea at govt 4, you need trade 7 to unlock QFTNW. So your 2 choices are to either wait until govt 11 for your 2nd idea (by which point you will have trade 7), or when you get trade 7 you can switch your first idea to QFTNW at a cost of -3 stability. Portugal actually doesn't need QFTNW to colonize azores or Madeira, it has nation-specific missions that allow it to discover those 2 islands, giving it a heard start on colonizing. However the AI is ******ed and most of the time you can easily get those islands before Portugal.

Holy war is a great CB because you get provinces so cheaply. However, you mentioned tech taking forever, and part of the problem is that all of those North African provinces that you took suck. They are wrong culture and wrong religion so you are getting little if any income from them and they are merely adding to your tech costs without contributing to your teching speed. Wrong religion, poor provinces also add a TON to your stability costs and should be avoided if possible. Eventually you can convert them to your religion and get them as cores which helps a bit, but the vast majority of those provinces are still terrible.

Morocco and Algiers actually have a few decent provinces worth taking like Oran, Tangiers, Ceuta, etc, that are like 4-5+ base tax and have some decent manpower, but a lot of the provinces are 1-2 base tax and ****ty trade goods. The best move (and what Ranok did as Portugal in our MP game) is to take the decent provinces and then vassalize the remainder, usually in a followup war. Vassals give you 1/2 their income but don't contribute to tech costs, so I usually tend to vassalize poor or wrong religion countries. Vassals also provide you with useful cannon fodder.

You don't really need to worry much about trade early on as Castille. Make sure to maintain 5 merchants to your CoT in Andalucia which you shouldn't have a problem with because you are Mercantile and get a bonus for competing in your own CoT. This will bring in a few extra monies a month, not much early on because your COT is relatively poor. As you colonize however, all of your colonies will trade through Andalucia and will make it huge, like 1200+, so you will start bringing in a lot of extra monies.

As say, Holland, you can be the richest country in the world by like 1410 without ever expanding. Trade is ridic powerful, it doesn't matter as much in SP because the AI never abuses trade and you can easily "win" the game because the AI generally sucks, but in multiplayer trade is massively important because you can't just conquer the world to get income. For example, Hansa (me) in the current game is making more from trade than several countries entire income

AFAIK you should be able to read it without paying. Delete your cookies and try again? Instead of following the link maybe google it, dunno if that makes a difference.

Thanks a lot for the help guys.

How do I know what the infamy cap is?

And yeah, the CB thing makes sense. The funny thing about my Holy War CBs though is that I didn't get one on Algiers until I plowed through Morocco, and it was only when I annexed them that I got one on Tunisia and Ottomans, and then blowing up Tunisia got me the HW CB on Tripoli. I guess that's what Daer explained.

Is there any big benefit from this that you receive, or is it just valuable to put the hurt on other world powers by making them weaker? Fighting a war against someone like GB just to be like "yeah bitch, let Scotland go free!" seems expensive.

Def not, I waited until I had an army raised so they wouldn't know what hit them.

I think I was a few days late on this, I started hiring advisors when I started getting tons of popups about getting $$ for other countries hiring my advisors away - at my current point in the game, all the available advisors either offer lowered monthly stability cost (lots of those available), or else there were two one-star dudes that did something else $$ related, can't remember. Is that cause the AI eats up all the advisors and these are the only crumbs I'm left with?

Yeah, I figured this out with Granada - I got Almeria and Granada for free, but taking Gibraltar cost me 4 infamy.

Would the limit on the size of countries you can vassalize explain why I couldn't make Morocco a vassal? Even when I occupied all their ****, it said they wouldn't accept a peace offer of vassalization. If I try again with their remaining two provinces when our current treaty expires, would that work?

How can I see what this is? I saw advisors that increase your land force limit but wasn't sure what they do.

And yeah, I've been building lots of charge cavalry in the former Granada provinces, they're awesome

- What are some guidelines for figuring out what provinces are worth taking and which aren't?
- How do I execute this in practice? Declare holy war on Morocco, sue for peace and take the provinces I want, wait 5 years for truce to expire, then occupy the rest of their **** and sue for vassalization?

Ok, thanks. I've been sending a couple merchants to Lubeck and Liguria since they have a lot of $$ (1k+) and Andalucia only has like 600 or so, is it better to just keep them all in Andalucia?

Hrm, I can read it by searching on google and reading their cached version, but no matter how I access it or what browser I use it tells me I have to register which costs $10

You see your infamy limit in the top info bar, if you hover over your current infamy. It's current / max.

You see your max land / naval limit in your military screen, where you can select your preferred units, in the lower side of the window. It show current / max too.

Ah, iirc my infamy limit is 60 (Very Easy ftw). I got a loooong way to go.

..

Mouseover the Infamy number up top.



Obviously don't fight them with the intention of freeing Scotland but If your in a war making the loser release a nation is probably the most damaging to them.


Yeah on October 15, 1400 all the AI nations will start hiring the available advisors so even after a couple days there will probably just be scraps left.


Its because there is a limit to how much you can take per war. In a war if You click on the icon for the war on the right side of the screen you will see a percentage. When you go to negogiate peace you will see percentages beside each province. The total percentages of the provinces you want to take can't (usually) be over the warscore %. When you occupy everything your at 100% but if the enemy is say a 6 province nation the provinces might be worth like 14%, 16%, 16%, 22%, 24%, 37% so you won't be able to take them all.




Basically click on each province and look at the taxes and trade value. Yeah that would work with Morocco. Large countries can take multiple wars. In the multiplayer game as Ottomans I had a mission to conquer Egypt. I could take each province for 1 infamy but Mamluks is like 25 provinces so it took 4 or 5 total wars to do it.

If you click on the ledger, which has a bunch of useful information, you can see how much it costs to send a merchant and your chances of successfully placing a merchant. If you have a low percentage to succeed not much point in sending a merchant.

Also keep in mind that even if you are below the Infamy limit you still suffer penalties. Each point of Infamy gives:

-1% to your merchant's compete chances
+1% to your stability cost

Nice! I was pretty confused about how that stuff works. Thanks a lot for the explanation, makes sense now.

I have a feeling I'm going to be hooked on this game.

Been doing this btw, that guide's really helpful, thanks JubilantMale.

If you are going to be hooked, let's play multiplayer...!

still some interesting spots to be had. India is still in one piece (for the moment).

Not for long. England, Castille and Myself will probably all have pieces carved out of it next session.

Haha, well I have to figure out how to play first

If anyone else is having the same issues as me, here are cache links for the beginning of that thread on somethingawful... (page 1 alone covers taking over Granada + Aragon as Castille with a lot of depth)

page 1
page 2
page 3
page 4
page 5
page 6

Sweden is available to play. My friend hasn't been able to resolve the graphics problem, even with a system restore a time when the game was working fine.. He can probably get his hands on another laptop in a few weeks but it will probably be far too late by then to get into the game.



England would be interested in arranging an agreement with Ottomans and/or Castille for the partitioning of India to avoid unnecessary conflict.