Already spent 20 hours finally doing the Granada achievement with new patch. Probably hardest achievement I've done aside from TTM. I'm happy to do some 2+2 MP, but not until summer.

How has it been 6 months since Rights of Man already? I need to catch up with the times. I tend to play EU4 nonstop for about a month and then shelve it for 3-4 months.

Empire of China mechanics are amazing. Much less onerous than HRE mechanics and make Ming, as should be the case historically,with some smart management here and there, viable as a regional overlord receiving tributes from pretty much every Asian country.

So, I just started a Byzantium campaign that began in a Great way.
After only two years I get a PU with Serbia and As Wallachia contested the throne, I get to vassalize them too, without even fighting.
So I noticed the Ottomans are out of manpower and I declare war upon them. Turns out Serbia and Wallachia don't even join the war. How is that possible? I know that disloyal subjects stay Passive in wars, but they aren't even Part of the war.

Anyone have thoughts on whether Rights of Man and Third Rome (weird that it's an "immersion pack" and not an expansion pack) are worth it? The Russian features sound kinda cool. The description for Rights of Man seems kinda all over the place in terms of the features it adds.

I noticed Mandate of Heaven is currently $10 at the Humble store.

Rights of Man is probably my favorite DLC. Mandate is worth $10 if you enjoy the game, it does a lot of nice quality of life updates too with diplomat manager. The Third Rome doesn't bring anything unless you want to play Russian region.

+1.

Mandate creates weird situations where it gets really hard to expand into Asia if an Asian country gets strong enough to basically tributary the entire continent. Still, overall, I think it tends to create more historically accurate scenarios where Asian countries have a chance to prosper.

Mandate is good for the ages alone

Rights of man is amazing, ruler personalities/leader traits is great, queen consorts and killing off bad heirs/rulers is incredible.

Great power mechanic is also pretty sweet, lets you see how you compete against the other big boys and rewards you for getting to be a great power yourself. Plus adds some new diplomatic actions that kind of let you have a sphere of influence and let you exert soft power.

You just need to become their tributary yourself, overlord doesn't get called to tributary vs tributary wars. It also means Ming doesn't expand at all, which is good.

Installed Mandate, Rights of Man, and Third Rome because why not, Paradox deserves my $$, and set out on a mission: to **** **** up with Russia. Started as Muscovy and got here after a hundred years or so:



Started out fighting Novgorod and eating up the small countries around me, but quickly and randomly Denmark (???) wound up fighting a war against Novgorod and taking several provinces of interest to me, including Novgorod itself which you need to form Russia. With Sweden as a junior partner Denmark was way too big to fight and I was unsuccessful at allying any countries worth a damn (I tried Poland but they never gave two ****s about fighting Denmark), so I waited until Sweden had some liberty desire and eventually they declared independence and we fought off Denmark. Naturally I occupied all the provinces I wanted and Sweden gave me none of them in the peace deal. Sigh. Denmark was easy pickings without Sweden though so after the truce I took Novgorod, integrated my vassals, formed Russia at tech 10 and went nuts making states since you get like 10 more instantly. Left Europe pretty much alone (I only just fought my first war against Poland/Lith and took out the bite that you see) and expanded east into Great Horde/Kazan (made them release Nogai, forgot that loses you all claims, oops)/the artist formerly known as Uzbek (Bukhara). Fighting Ming eventually is going to be a terror, I have the largest army in Europe at ~80k (nearest competitors are Ottomans at 64k, Spain 48k)...and then Ming has 180k, with a forcelimit of 270 (!!! mine is 130 and will only get up to 175 when I finish quantity ideas). So I guess Mandate made them kinda good? The age stuff is fun too, I barely got a golden era before the Age of Discovery expired by making a beeline for the closest Asia province I could find in Golden Horde in a war to get the "two continents" objective before it ended. Unfortunately Russia kinda blows in the Age of Colonialism.

Third Rome mechanics are fairly fun - it's cool to be able to claim states instead of provinces, the Russian-specific abilities are really nice for expanding wildly (basically every so often as you build up state power, you can decrease all rebel progress by 30% which is nice when there are 4 different separatist groups mad at me, you can decrease autonomy in all eligible provinces by 10% w/ no unrest issues, you can raise troops which seems like the least useful because lol needing more troops in Russia), then for Siberia you basically get free colonists as long as they border existing territory. I haven't really figured out the patriarch authority/metropolitan stuff and am kinda ignoring it. Should probably get religious ideas soon so I can mass convert all these Muslim provinces I'm taking, and will be useful to speed up religious wars against ~everyone I border. Will probably have a big war against Ottomans too since an event gave me a claim on the entire Pontic Steppe at some point.

Try to border Ming asap. The mandate decreases greatly for neighboring non-tributaries. At 0 mandate Ming takes extra 50% damage in combat

Just get patriarch authority to 100, the loss of tax or w/e is more than offset by the big manpower bonus and missionary % bonus.

I looked everywhere for something indicating what % of taxes are spent on having high patriarch authority - don't think the religion screen says it, didn't see anything in the economy screen either. This page also doesn't say.

In last patch the Orthodox was buffed by removing the tax loss at patriarchal authority. Now it is simply a question of if you want to spend it or not.

you also no longer get +1 colonist as part of Russian ideas

After a couple weeks of vacation, continued that game into the mid 1600s:



That's Ferrara doing surprisingly well south of Austria.

I'm bad at taking screenshots as I go, but a huge religious war popped off (not sure if I'd been part of one before) where the major powers were Austria, Commonwealth, Sweden, and Spain for the Catholics, and me, Ottomans, Bohemia, France (I think?), and England for the Protestants. We won, and Bohemia became HRE with Protestant becoming the official religion of the Empire. Weird. So Bohemia (who was my ally at that point) started getting scary powerful and allied with my rival Ottomans, so I switched up my alliances and allied with Persia and France. I waged a successful couple of wars against Commonwealth with a mission I got to take their Ruthenian provinces, but got a coalition against me at the end (was really annoyed about that - I had to either take the last couple provinces for the mission or wait an eternity for a truce) that Bohemia declared on me against Ottomans and France. That didn't go very well for us (France got dunked hard and I was worried about spending 20 years of manpower to try to win a war of attrition against two large countries) and I had to give up my vassalization of Tabrestan, who's doing fairly well south of the Caspian. Austria randomly got the rest of Commonwealth under PU. I allied Georgia and wound up having to defend them against Ottomans - I waited like a month to make sure Bohemia wasn't joining, and then OF ****ING COURSE after I join Ottomans call them in, that war also did not go that well for us. It wasn't terrible but I lost the important fort province of Podolia to Ottomans and lost a couple garbage vassals in Siberia that I quickly reconquered anyway.

After this I decided to take Ottomans more seriously and added Austria (who mostly failboated following the religious war) and Spain to my allies. I'm still allied with France but they're kind of garbage because they don't care about Bohemia or Ottomans (Spain luckily does due to their Italian provinces). I decided that my biggest problem is not having very safe ground to retreat to after losing battles or to form up for attacks, so I got serious about my border with them:



The Ottoman forts are all level 4, the one with Bohemia is level 6. If I understand ZoC rules correctly (which I may well not, **** is confusing sometimes) then neither of them should be able to invade deeper into my territory w/o taking forts down, since I have them every 3 provinces so everything is either in or adjacent to a fort province. This is in the Age of Absolutism where I quickly took the splendor ability (not sure what they're called?) that makes all forts bordering rivals 0 maintenance, so I'm super stoked about those costing me nothing. I also love the change that relieving a fort makes you the defender, forces attacks to be more strategic.

I fought Ming once after declaring on Korchin for a mission, and good lord is it boring to fight wars in Siberia where all your provinces are ~a month of travel apart. Then Ming sneaks troops through Oirat into central Siberia because I can only see like 5 provinces on screen without zooming out so far that armies become invisible and I have to ****ing chase them around. Anyway, that war went well (Ming has a terrifying large army but my tech allowed me to wipe their stacks fairly often) but these northern China provinces are all so ****ty, dunno if I want to spend a lot more time there. At the same time, don't really know where I want to go once I take Crimea/Ukraine/the Caucasus from Ottomans (with my fortified border and new allies, confident I can win now). Once you start expanding outside your culture group, does it really matter where you go? And when I'm super limited by the number of states I can make (I have 38 states, 24 territories, current max of 41 states) is it really that great/helpful to add tons more territorial cores with their 75% local autonomy?

So there I was, after my allies' truces with Ottomans finally expired, trying to figure out when the optimal time to start a war is. Waiting longer means my allies have more time to recover their depleted manpower following their wars, but also lets Ottomans recover theirs. And then something amazing and beautiful something made the decision for me:



OMG!



*drool*

Me, Austria, Spain, Persia, Georgia against Ottomans, Bohemia, Ferrara. Persia was pretty good at making a couple Ottoman stacks waste time sieging down their forts, Georgia was good at marching their one 20k stack to siege random European provinces and getting owned (I mostly like them for the defensive border they provide in the Caucasus); but, Austria did some good work, as did Spain once their army finally arrived on the scene after an eternity.

Then after a couple years of fighting, as I'm crushing every battle and we're winning...Austria WPs out? WTF? Wusses. I was planning to give them **** from Bohemia too, their loss. However, since that took a large chunk of my coalition's land forces away, I decided I should take a similar strategy and got Ferrara to give Venice back to Venice (who was otherwise a OPM on Crete, lol) and took a couple Polish provinces from Bohemia, basically leaving me/Spain heads up vs Ottomans to carpet siege their Crimean-area stuff:



Took all my claim in the peace deal along with some thank-yous for my buds:





GLORIOUS VICTORY INDEED

Not long after, Austria declared on Ferrara or something which pulled Ottomans and me in; I decided to repay Austria's earlier favor by carpet-sieging as much as I could, transferring no occupations to allies, and trying to get a 10% ws against war leader Ferrara (really hard to acquire WS as a non-leader) so that they'd be willing to offer concessions to me. Took two Wallachian provinces in that one.

To finish off last night I got whatever dip tech allows client states and the Imperialism CB, which (I forget, it's been awhile) I guess is just the "declare on everyone at any time and take all their ****" CB?

I finally bordered Ming and their mandate is down to 0 so maybe I'll just go take over China.

I have no idea what this game is, but this thread is fascinating to me for some reason. Solid writeups Goofy and others.

Greatest game of all time obv

If you liked goofy's writeups, posts 1567-1581 have some awesome multiplayer AARs and map porn

That was me at one point! Back in 2011 in the EU3 thread:

Side note, looking at the EU3 maps made me kinda nostalgic, they're quite pretty

I barely have enough time for Rocket League. I think this game is a little more intense than I have time for.

I still haven't fogotten how I got insta-attacked in our EU3 multiplayer game when I joined back in as France after an entire AI session.

Still salty. F U Austria.

The EU salt is the best salt

Updates: I dunked on Norway (who had eliminated Denmark and reduced Sweden to the tiny island of Bornholm) a couple times to take all their good provinces; expanding into the HRE was hard, as Bohemia (allied to Ottomans) was emperor and they would both join any wars I started there. But then Pomerania somehow formed Prussia (I guess I missed the part where they took a bunch of Baltic provinces that Austria inherited from Commonwealth?) and became HRE. Great news!

I set straight to work on ameliorating that condition.



Incredibly, Prussia was small enough for me to vassalize at this point, so for ~half the AE I would have taken to annex their ****, I got to just vassalize the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Sweet!

I think Oldenburg was next to take the crown, so with their weak asses being guardians of the Empire I went to town on nearby territories. Using my Norwegian provinces as a base for coring I went into Lubeck and set out to annex the Austrian Baltic:





Great Britain was allied to Austria and from results I'm guessing they spent most of their time on their navy:





And finally, the GLORIOUS day I inherited Prussia:





Yes thanks I know I took a screenshot, way to RUIN IT



1788. I've spent a lot of time dicking around in this game because fighting huge wars in the east for ****ty provinces while chasing Ming stacks around Siberia is not fun, and also I don't have any clear goals really. Maybe Ottomans and trying to unify Islam for my next game?