Generally, I think you want your Golden Age asap as EU4 is very snowbally game. The one spot where it Golden Age does bring additional value is the Court and Country disaster which lowers your Absolutism cap, so it might be hard to reach the desired 65 Absolutism to "win" the disaster. I guess later on you will also have 3-5 stat advisors so you have more mana per year than in early game, so the -10% power cost saves more mana later on.

I never used my Golden Age and now it's gone, I was saving it for later

Last "completed" campaign, doing This is Persia achievement:


Europe:



Also current game doing the Hungary achievement, Savoy got the Burgundian inheritance which I haven't seen in ~2k hours of playtime:

This is my fear as well. I just hit the 1620s last night and feel like I should be much further along than I am. I'll post map later but I'm in a rough spot right now:

-I've never dealt with Mamluks so they still control Alexandria and have moved south to contend for Ethiopia + the Arabian peninsula. They're so spread out that it's going to be a yuge pita to conquer them without them sneaking around the Caucasus and back-dooring me from the north, where I'm weakest

-Persia has been slowly conquered by three main powers, all three are allied with each other, and all are hostile to me. The only good thing happening there is that "Nogai" exists north of there and they're Sunni and like me so they keep them in check, otherwise I'd have to deal with them AND Mamluks all at once. Due to this consolidation in Persia + my idiocy in not dealing with Mamluks 100 years ago I still do not have access to Persian Gulf/Red Sea/Indian ocean and all the trade that comes with it. On top of all that, Armenians (true to history) do NOT like us Turks and they're making life annoyingly difficult in that area (would probably be much worse but for Humanism)

-Russia formed and Russia is my rival. They're massive and have a ton of troops and are seriously hindering expansion northward beyond the Crimea and Caucasus areas. It's already looking like I'm not going to be able to take out Russia this game or, if I do, it will be at the expense of basically the entire rest of my empire.

-Europe is a freaking mess. Bohemia (also a rival) is a major player and they happened to be at war with Croatia when I declared, so they snagged two of those territories so if I want them I'll have to go to war with Bohemia which will also mean war with half of Europe due to all the interwoven alliances they're in. Venice owns Corfu and Crete, so I need those 4 provinces to control all of the Balkans but to do that it'll mean war with like 2/3 of Europe. Every step further into Europe seems to raise AE and I've had two coalitions against me already because of it. Also, I've been allied with Tunis most of the game, they keep trying to take out Aragon, which they can't do, and I keep getting dragged into it. Two wars so far, two white peaces. Papal States are allied with Aragon and they have most of Italy now and a crap-ton of troops.

I'll do well and probably wind up #1 of the great powers like I've been for the past 100+ years or so but I don't see how I'm gonna take over the world at this point

Also France is my third rival but I have no idea why, I've yet to fight them in a single battle or to even go to war against one of their allies.

ETA: Also it hasn't helped that my last two leaders have been weak (for Ottomans) and have personality disorders. I wish I had known that making an heir a general removes him from the chance of taking over when dad dies.

That Persia thing Nonfiction did impresses me given all the religious strife in that part of the world, well done!

"It's Always Sunni in Transylvania" would be a great event name I think I'll write the devs and suggest it for a future xpac

I don't think anyone ever has in their first game

That's not correct btw, making leaders into generals will shorten their lifespan on average but heirs will still take the throne even if they're generals.

Maybe it was some kind of glitch then. I had a good ruler and an even better heir, it was like my second heir I think? Anyway I made him a general after it first gave me the option of doing so. Then my leader died of dysentery (seriously) and the game passed right over the good general/heir and gave the throne to Ottoman Ramsey Bolton without even warning me. Then I looked at my list of generals and the good heir wasn't even listed as a general anymore.

It tilts me way more than it should that no one who does EU4 videos knows how to pronounce Genoa

Are you sure your heir didn't die at some point without you noticing? There are also events that can replace your heir (I've had a lot of them as Ottomans), but you usually have to choose it as an option.

If you want to declare war on Bohemia usually it is easier to declare war on a smaller country (especially easy if they are HRE) and have Bohemia join instead of declaring on Bohemia directly, to avoid Bohemia's usually more powerful allies.

The same applies to Venice above. See if they have a small ally to declare on instead or someone they are guaranteeing.

Also depending on if your target/allies are in an other war their allies might not come anyway. In one of my games the Papal State was allied with Milan and a monster Aragon. But they were in a war with France and Aragon had a couple of its provinces occupied. When I declared war on the Papal State both Milan and Aragon declined to join because of penalties from being in another war, having occupied provinces, and I think there might have been a third penalty from war exhaustion.

Positive. I immediately reloaded (lol ironman) once Ramsey got the nod and both my existing leader and the good heir/general reappeared. Admittedly, it's possible that the heir died independently of the ruler and I just didn't notice, in which case please delete this entire line of posting heh.

(The heir did in fact die on the battlefield of some other illness, so I wound up with Ramsey anyway)

Would I still be able to take provinces belonging to Bohemia in that scenario? Every other time I've been part of a war like that, when it ends I can never seem to keep other belligerents' provinces because it's above the war score or whatever.

When you start the war, there's a checkbox about if you want to make their allies a target of the war. Say that Venice is allied with Bohemia and you want to attack Venice, that means:
- if you don't check Bohemia's box: Bohemia can't bring their allies to the war, and you can take their provinces, but they'll cost twice as much (I think "cost" is in war score, maybe monarch power too)
- if you do check Bohemia's box: you can take Bohemia's provinces at normal cost, but they can bring all their allies into the war (you probably don't want that)

So, if you're having war score issues against other allies in the war, that's probably why. It's designed so that you can chip away a small amount of another country's territory indirectly by getting them into a war via their allies, but you can't take a serious chunk of them without fighting against all their alliances.

Thanks for the tip, I don't think I've ever paid any attention to those checkboxes before ugh

Just last night I got dragged into that war between Tunis and Aragon, I almost immediately occupied all of Austria who joined on the side of Aragon, only to be forced to give them all back once Austria made a separate peace with Tunis.

Speaking of annoying alliances... I'll post a screenshot later when I get home, but:

So my Majapahit game finally got rolling well; it's circa 1500 and I have all the islands nailed down, have 99.9% of the provinces in the Malacca trade node and have moved the capital there, and have a decent chunk of Vietnam/Cambodia (basically everything east of Ayuthhaya) as well as grabbing the southern tip of India fueled by a no-CB war. I've also got the first two exploration ideas (enough to get explorers and a colonist).

Then I ran into an alliance of Bahmanis (roughly 2/3 of India already) and Ming. Because of course. They declared on me and I basically instantly decided that releasing my two vassals (Ternate, holding Tidore for me) and Champa (most of the Vietnamese coast), who were disloyal anyway (had ~ 75% liberty desire) rather than fight outnumbered 3-1.

So, I could use some ideas on how to break that alliance up sometime in the next 11-12 years in order to make this a really good run.

Also make sure you are doing peace deals with each nation individually.

Against Great Nations it might be better to use the first couple wars to make them release nations rather than taking a few provinces, depending on your aggressive expansion in the area.

Something else to do is if there is a coalition against you, ally someone in the area of the coalition. That way they will call you to war and you can keep fighting in the area to keep the countries weaker. In my Ryukyu game I had a few coalitions against me in Europe but I was allied with Tuscany. With me as an ally they obviously wanted to swing their dick around and kept calling me into wars which I used to keep the HRE countries relatively broken up.

A way to manage coalitions is to keep good relations with the biggest countries in the coalition or likely to join a coalition. A country won't join a coalition against you if they have a positive opinion of you no matter your AE with them. A country will also leave a coalition if you get their opinion of you to +50. Whenever a coalition would start forming in Europe I'd try to keep Austria and Spain's opinion of me high enough so they wouldn't join it.

Another tip with coalitions is that if you receive an insult from some no name OPM in the HRE then that little ****er is going to start a coalition war against you next month.

When you do have a coalition war declared on you try to hit 40% warscore as soon as possible and white peace out. Alternatively if you can blitz a bunch of warscore it is better to declare war on the coalition. They will white peace out for much less than 40% warscore.

Also in a WC once you reach a point where no one is declaring wars on you anymore delete all your forts to boost your income.

Yeah I've gotta do that. I have forts in most of my Balkan provinces given how intense the fighting was there and that's obviously far too many. For a while I was just snap building forts in every province I conquered but I had the presence of mind to stop doing that at least. Even mothballed they cost a lot.

So, apparently I have no need for concern. Ming un-rivaled me after the surrender. And then, my suicide run was rewarded:



So uh, yeah. I should be in okay shape (at least on even-ish footing with the Europeans, at least for a while...)

Very nice!

How do you take a screen shot without the controls showing?

Either F10 or F11. One of those will do the world map, the other will do a screenshot.

The pic above was just a control + print screen, paste into Paint, vamos