In late game, yes. Early on it’s like 4 cavalry and enough infantry to try to fill combat width, and like 1-2 cannons if you must but cannons aren’t good for much other than sieges when you first get them.

I think I may try Ming next game and just go straight at Rusher right away and try to marginalize them early. You can't really tell it from that map but they're 80% of my troubles with how large they are plus all the interwoven alliances. If I'd taken them on 250 years ago I'm sure I'd be much further along. But for a couple of border skirmishes involving other allies I have not really fought them at all and they've grown massively as a result.

Weirdly, when Lithuania was still around I was allied with them for well over 100 years but never once got called by them into one of their wars when Russia/Bohemia and Brandenburg were swallowing it up.

In the late game the infantry and cavalry are about equally strong, but cavalry costs 2.5x much. If you have to have some cavalry bonuses, they are still worth using (for example, Poland has +33% Cavalry combat ability and gets 20% more from Cossacks estate), but even then infantry is likely more cost-effective money-wise.

The borders of that brandenburg are giving me cancer

Brandenburg would own all of Bohemia by now but for Bohemia being Russia's vassal. They forged that alliance over a hundred years ago and it's still going strong. I'll never break it because I have way too many frontiers to defend even at max army size and manpower, not to mention Austria is allied with Russia...so it would mean fighting Russia, Bohemia, Austria and whoever the **** else in the HRE.

Brandenburg just recently finished off Poland after conquering Lithuania which is how they reached the Black Sea (and my doorstep).

It irritates me that I'm not going to be able to finish all my missions. I'm blocked from like 3 of them because I've never managed to have more than 1 vassal (Crimea) and I have to complete the mission where you have at least 2 vassals in order to unlock the ones below it. I'm also not going to be able to conquer Arabia because of those Persian/Bahmani alliances, so that's at least one more I can never achieve. All I've got left are the Africa ones so I guess I'll spend the rest of my game trying for those. I'll probably get the rest of Tunis and Katsina this evening (got about half of each last night) plus maybe Morocco if all goes smoothly.

At one point it looked like Morocco was going to be a major player. There are only 3 Castile provinces left at this point in Iberia and that's mostly because of Morocco (Morocco took them initially, then later lost them to France and Aragon). Now Portugal is coming at them from their colonies to the south plus Aragon is in their grill and I'll supply the chaser, hopefully.

You can release vassals from land you own in the bottom right corner of your country's diplomacy screen. Just release some 1-province countries.

durr thanks bro! knocked out 3 quick ones there

I will blame not knowing this for me not conquering the world

man Great Britain is so worthless this game. I got like 50% of Tunis and 90% of Morocco and not three days after that ends they call me into that same war against those same countries in S Africa. I can't not accept without screwing myself, but I'm a) back to 0 manpower and b) eleventy million miles from the war zone. I need to be rebuilding for a final big push but instead I've got to carry "Great" Britain yet again fml

I didn't *quite* get there last night, still have a few more Morocco and Tunis provinces left. Unfortunately a chunk of Morocco was claimed by Portugal so there's no way I'll get all of Africa before time runs out.

An underrated (by me) mechanic that I wish I had used from day 1 is the Infiltrate Administration action. I assumed until last night that it was not very useful. I have never been more wrong. Knowing where (for example) Russia has their blobs positioned is extremely useful information to have when planning tactics. I used it on Russia and they had their armies all blobbing either the extreme east or west parts at that point. I could have cut the country in half without losing a single regiment.

It also would have been helpful to have used it prior to declaring war to ensure they're not coming through your back door and taking half your provinces in areas where you have no troops, which happened to me numerous times. It's probably less beneficial against small nations than the likes of Russia or Ottomans.

It only unlock Diplo level 30. I don't think I've ever used it.

Hmm I didn't know that. I didn't go for Diplomacy ideas fwiw. Maybe it wasn't available to me before now idk

I'm not sure what happened but Brandenburg and Austria went from being allied with Russia to being at war with them! I just took Morocco and am feverishly moving into position to pigpile Russia so with 11 yrs left I'll finally take on my biggest rival. That means no Tunis takeover though

This is going ... quite well. Nepal and Min, my dual marches, are expanding -- though Nepal never has an army because their finances are somehow worse than mine.

Finally have the potential coalition members (this means "everyone I'm in physical contact with, plus everyone else in northeast Asia) on a bit of a cycle of pain so they can't all get together. Now to get the economy straightened out and work off that 99% overextension (which I need another 400 admin points to fully get rid of)...

There should be a service where you pay people to just micromanage the peace periods, IMO.

Does Transoxiana blob in every game? Seems ahistorical as Wikipedia doesn't even recognize them as some kind of historical kingdom and they start out as a vassal of Timurids.

You unlock it with Diplomatic tech level 30. (You unlock all spy networks actions as you tech up the diplomatic tech. My favorite, "Study technology", unlocks level 9. It is passive effect that gives up to -10% tech cost with 100 Spy network if the country has the tech you are about to unlock already researched. Good way to save some monarch points with diplomats.

Well they start out the strongest of the Timurid vassals and don't have any natural enemies until Russia shows up. Timurid vassals revolt most of the time and eat their master since they liberty desire is 90-100% after the 67 year ruler (Shah Rukh) dies. I think in real life it was large part of the Timurid mainland, but the land was split between successors. The ruler of Transoxiana is son of Shah Rukh, who few years later perished in civil war after Shah's death. The other Timurid vassals don't seem to have been real kingdoms either, instead they are simply the names of the regions.

So basically there shouldn't be any vassals as everything was part of Timurid empire, but vassals makes it much easier to represent the eventual civil war.

Historically Uzbeks conquered Transoxiana area 50 year later after Timurids weakened.

DW's posts make me want to try a Far East nation next game. I'm just worried I'll **** it up because noob (and I'm still kind of gimpy when it comes to naval stuff).

Probably a scorching take but I think there needs to be a slower speed setting than the slowest one available. In extreme late game there's just too damned much to manage, especially with Ottomans where the borders are so far apart and armies scattered and wars/uprisings on multiple fronts. Plus now that I'm almost at the end and despite the many MANY hours I've put in, it still feels like it went rather quickly in hindsight.

I play everything at speed 3 and make liberal use of the space bar.

Speed 5 + liberal space bar for me, but I run this on a potato laptop.

Since the rework in that area that changed Tims it happens a lot, since Tims fail cascade a lot more often. If not Transox its Uzbek or even Oirat that can blob all over that central Asian area, although I've seen some massive Tims as well

Far east is pretty boring imo. Ming is the only big bad guy, but if you border them or are anywhere near them you can just become a tributary and ignore them while killing all their other tributaries. Plus with how trade works, you can never be an end point of trade, and realistically want to go colonize South Africa and funnel all asian trade there, which makes no sense. Uniting Japan is fun cause its kind of a mini-game on that island, and then afterwards you can go colonize and such, but its not really challenging. The only really fun east-asian game I've played was as a Manchurian horde where I united the hordes, conquered Korea, and then dunked Ming and formed Qing (which also nets you a bunch of achievements).

Indian area is a lot more fun imo but we are getting an upcoming expansion for that area so might not be worth playing it yet. But india has multiple major, medium, and minor powers that have achievements (and are fun), and a bunch of formable nations. Timurids/Delhi-->Mughals, Vijay-->Hindustan/Bharat, Bhamanis, Orissa, Bengal, all a bunch of relatively different games. Plus india is crazy rich and you can dominate trade by controlling Malacca.

Actually i have to say that Manchuria game was really fun mainly because stack wiping huge ming stacks with all-cav armies is really satisfying. Might be a bit difficult for your second game though.

Far east (well, Indonesia) is kind of linear for a while, but that might be good for learning some things too, notably naval invasions, some trade stuff, that sort of thing. Plus you're at least highly defensible; as bad as you might consider yourself at naval stuff, I assure you the AI is worse!

Would you be interested in a bit of a step-by-step for the first few years to get things started?

I saw on Twitter the other day some guy saying he was about to go live on Twitch playing EU4.

I can't think of a game I'd rather play more, yet rather watch someone else play less, than this game. Unless it's someone walking his viewers through all of his moves as a tutorial, which might be very helpful. Sitting and watching someone click through menus with the game paused seems like stuff reserved for Purgatory.

Some of the videos (not streams, but prepackaged Youtube ones) are useful for picking things up and/or enjoying. Arumba does some good ones.