Not sure trade works like that. Last game I was building trade buildings all over because I was seeing marked increases to my province's production after they were done.

I think that the (absolute) production value of a province is based on 2 things, the amount of trade units produced and the value of that good. So when you increase the trade value of a good you also indirectly increase the production value of a province.

My philosophy is basically to spam production and trade everywhere in provinces with half decent trade goods. If you load up the save game for where we ended you'll see that Italy in general is ridiculously industrialized, probably more than any other country by far. That industrialization was what drove my economy the entire game.

Edit:

Ok, I opened up a game to check something and figured it out. The production value of a province is generated by taking the trade value of the good the province produces and multiplying it by the local PE (global PE + whatever +PE buildings you have).

So, any building that will increase the trade value of a province's good (aka, most trade buildings), will also indirectly increase the production value of a province.

Considering how little control you have over anything in EU3 it's mostly irrelevant honestly. Just take good provinces and build buildings in good provinces.

This game is sweet.
I've played two games.
First, was england. it was a disaster. I didn't know how to get my armies to board ships, i didn't know you actually had to select your casus belli. Awful disaster of a game. by like year two i had stability -3.

Game 2. much much greater success.
Read thru a link from earlier in this thread to a hug how do i play EU3 post on something awful forums. this really helped.

Using that post as a guide, i immediately moved all my investment to stability, and left it there until i got to +3. i hired some advisers, moved toward free trade (all my merchants left) recruited some troops, got rolling. I didn't know what to do with my diplomats (this creates a problem later)

Received the ireland conquest mission. EZPZ. I now understood you had to pick your casus belli, and ended the ireland conquest with single digit infamy and +3 stability. Worlds better the first go round.

Next I received the subjugate scottland mission. Problems. I clicked on Scottland, they are allied with Burgundy and a handful of smaller states, as well as have a guarantee from France. I built up some military, which obviously was not enough, declared war on Scottland, and was promptly trounced.

On to the issues at hand. I think a big mistake was not having my diplomats doing anything at the beginning. I obviously needed to get some allies for the war against scottland. probably my best bet would have been to try and ally with burgundy or france before they got all intertwined. Second, any recommendations on what I should have done after i realize i have no allies and scottland has anyone? This kind of ties into something i'm not clear on, how to take a country peacefully.

Obviously I can annex thru war, which basically just takes them into my country (Ireland)
I can make them a vassal thru war.

In the something awful beginner guide, he had a bunch of royal marriages and stuff. Can I take over a country that way? I think that might give me a claim to the throne casus belli, but that still doesn't really help me because I still go to war.

Thanks in advance.

If you have a royal marriage with a country, and they have succession issues (they'll show up in the list when you mouse over that icon at the top of your screen), and you have more prestige than them, you can put a claim on their throne (one of your diplomatic options). Once you do that, you get a "Force a personal union" casus belli on that country, which you can use to force them into a personal union under you. Then, every time your king dies, if your relations with that country are over 100, there's a chance you inherit their kingdom and that country instantly becomes yours. You get cores on any provinces that are of the same culture group as you (and if you're a member of the Holy Roman Empire, you also get cores on any imperial provinces you inherit that aren't of your culture group).

Doesn't help for vassalizing Scotland though.

another question for you guys- how do you find a country?

If they're an opm, their country name might also be the name of their province, so I usually try the "find province" button that looks like an arrow.
If they somehow got into a war with you, and you just need to know where to send your troops, you can first click on the war leader's coat of arms in the bottom right of the screen to open the war summary panel, then click on the mystery country's coat of arms.
Otherwise, just knowledge from experience.

goofy you would have loved the last expansion, HttT. I have no idea why or how they tweaked it in DW, but in HttT you would have random inheritances and succession wars all the time. Like, you wouldn't need to claim a throne, sometimes a ruler who you had a royal marriage with would just die without a heir and instead of a regency there would be a succession crisis between 2 of the countries they had royal marriages with (not sure how it was picked, maybe 2 strongest economies/manpower?). It was awesome and I miss it, added a ton to the atmosphere of the game when you would be playing say, Sweden, and get a pop up for the war of Bohemian succession between Poland and Austria or something (which you could then intervene in ldo).

I have never seen a succession war in 20+ games of DW

I've never played England but I imagine they start with a navy quite a bit stronger than France or Burgundy. Can't you just use your navy to keep invaders off your shores while you kill Scotland?

yes, absolutely. unless, hypothetically of course you unleash amazing levels of fail.

Just to give you an idea exactly how much fail would be required in this completely made up situation you would have to do the following:

decide for some god awful reason that you are going to defend calais.
split your trips 11k north to scotland, 15k to calais.
massively underestimate burgundys troop strength and somewhat underestimate scottlands.
once you land troops in calais, battle starts and you already have reinforements back in england queued up, so you aren't too worried that you are somewhat out numbered.
at this point you'd notice that you are outnumbered also in scottland.
so you realize you have to defeat scottland as priority #1, so all your reinforcements go to scottland, and you queue up another round to send to calais.
You are now in pretty bad shape in calais.
you see a burgundian ship to the east so you promptly send your entire ****ing 40 ship navy to kill it. Of course while this happens, france sneaks a handful of transports and lands 8k troops on ireland.
of course, there are so many fail decisions in this post, something something i can't even...

idk if I can make it this saturday, have a big group project due Monday and we're supposed to meet Saturday. Will see if I can make the meeting a bit later in the day, but no promises.

lol, don't goto war with Burgundy + France + Scotland in the first place, put that mission in the back shelf somewhere, I'd probably just cancel it fwiw because... you can get an even sicker mission to occupy Paris that gives you cores on all these French territories almost all the way to Iberia

if you have aggressive AI turned on, Burgundy and France will be at each other's throats soon if you can butter up Burgundy, so what I did was made a huge army, turned maintenance to 0% and waited

France always declares on me in my England games, you can counter by landing on Normandie when their military is occupied with wars vs Castille/Burgundy/whoever

in which case you take the place of France and England in the game after a while, which I figured was a bit unfair and so I stopped.

tl;dr version at top: Castille became colonial super power- I tried to stop them when an Aragon/ Castille war broke out. Got pretty lucky w/ the circumstances good load of ducats from event and a new national ideal for more manpower. I thought we'd win half way through but castille's manpower pool was too great and we got totally owned

dang it in my second portugal game Castille was running away with the ball in 1530 started in 1492 they had Mayans territory parts of Aztec, about half of the Caribbean and like 12 states worth of South US territory lol I was slowly getting stronger with small chunks of N. and mid Africa near Fernando Po and was starting on S. America mostly trying to take over trade centers at the time but can't believe Castille was so dominating. I think I had too much fear of inflation and getting loans which made me not take on more than 3 colonies at once and too much peaceful trading and building buildings makes me see Castille's strategy of just 100% colonial focus as a superior strat than the slow flowering bloom policy I was undertaking.

Aragon who was also my ally ended up giving me a call to arms so I had to decide take a stand against Castille right there or pile on Aragon's ass. They were kinda stagnant, only had Sicily and a few African colonies but they had about 30k troops stationed in Europe against 4-5 armies of 15k Castillians. Without help and even with a load of help, Aragon was toast. By way of some miracle or I think amazing game design, they gave me a random event good for 800 ducats. Also sweeet I got a 4th national ideal and after a minute of consideration I picked conscripts and I sad what the hell, I'll try to help out. Tried to rush the conquest in Africa I was undertaking at the time, scrambled to consolidate my navies which luckily where all near the same place. The last thing I wanted was to get any of them picked off if I lost any ships I might lose 3/4 of my army to the Atlantic Ocean haha. So Aragon had 1 big army, Castille immediately began sieging one of my southern provinces, with a 17k army. I immediately frantically set up all provinces to create soldiers but unfortunately it takes a while to bring all my guys- I ended up scrambling forth a 24k man army with a new general and beat down their sieging army. Cool. The 14k or so troops I had in Africa finally arrived to bolster the cracking Aragon front. We had another smashing victory. Finally after the first few months of nothing but losses we were starting to turn it around and had more troops on the Iberian peninsula than the enemy. I sent new recruits to siege the enemy Northern provinces while I allowed my armies to rest. Unfortunately I ran out of my 31k manpower reserves and castille didn't.

The war culminated in an attack against Aragon deep in the heart of Castille. I realized they would not stand a chance as they were being pincered by a force 2x their strength. I rushed my somewhat rested army and threw everyone I had. Some 70 thousand brave men fought in the exotic province of Castilla da Vieja. On the line was what could practially been the fate of the entire world on those fields. Half of them never made it out alive. We lost what I consider a pyrric victory- though they lost more troops than us being more tired than they our joint forces were eventually routed. Afterwards we just could no longer amass a threatening force. Their much higher manpower modifier allowed them to rebuild while we could only lick wounds that would not heal. At this point, the hearts and minds of our people and troops were no longer the same. They were beaten down, the scars of war had taken its toll on their psyches and since I had pulled all troops from the overseas holdings Castille systematically took everything. Not sure if they sent anyone home from their colonies or just used all their troops to wreck my colonies but we eventually got ground down and Castille eventually stomped every single one of our provinces refusing any and all negotiation attempts lol. Castille's king issued a royal decree: All Portuguese that have born arms in the backstab against their nation were to die. We were to become a lesson to the world. My 16 regiment exhausted conquistador/ general supearmy fought its glorious last stand defending Lisbon to the death against a 41 stack of Spanish doom. Oh well it was fun though.

What time gmt will it be on Saturday and how long the session? I need to plan my day

Daer really not playing? Lame

starts at 11AM EST, runs however long we go. Usually no later than 4.

About what year will we get to in first session?

look back at the first AARs. Probably not more than 1415 is my guess.

In before Timurids collapses by itself in this one session.

AI Timurids does fine now, at least for the first 50 years or so. I've played 2 games as Ottomans, 1 as Byzantium, 2 as indian nations->Hindustan and they survived fine in all of them.

I'm sure AI Timurids will post though and let us know how it goes.

last game we got through 1428 in the 1st session, even tho there were multiple sync's and restarts.

We do have more people in this one tho...

still very newb to this game...
so i took partugal and have no idea what to do.
It doesn't seem there is anything to do with them except sit there for like 25 years.
Attacking Africa is just useless. I read a country guide off the wiki, and it basically rushes for colonies. But I think its outdated because you need trade tech 7 before you can get QFTNW.
so is this a case of i'm executing something wrong, or do i have a fundamental misunderstanding?

grab an explorer or two and go colonise the new world

Nope, portugal is incredibly boring to start off. Try being one of the major powers like Castille or France for your first few games

Will try to get my Saturday thing scheduled for 4 EST, which would mean I have to go at 3:30. If that doesn't work I'll just sit this game out and be available as a sub.

Portugal is very boring. You can attack Africa if you want, there are 5-6 decent provinces there like Melilla, Ceuta, Tangiers, Oran, etc with 5+ tax and/or decent trade goods. Those provinces also give the added bonus of letting you build shock 3 muslim cav, but they will slow down your tech rate. Then move your sliders towards free trade and start trading all over, rush trade 7 and get qftnw and then afk colonize.