The idea with Irish is that you get really easy war (vs 1-province minor with 4k-5k troops) and then you can similarly eat the rest of Ireland without much trouble at all. That's ~100 development in single culture (I recommend making it accepted culture, it is one of the larger single groups you can get early). Just as importantly, this gives you easy expansion direction. England (and Scotland if they break alliance with France) is generally weak and you should be able to beat it with some extra mercenaries even if Naples does nothing. Abuse the strait, leave some troops like 7k there, wait enemy to start moving and lock movement, move rest of your troops there, enjoy enemy's -2/-3 rolls.

(vs England you might want to eventually take single continental provinces in south and north so you can release Normandy and Gascony so that you can reconquest CB vs France.)

By expanding to Britain, you can avoid too much AE. It will also eventually let you attack Norway and Denmark.

I think the no CB irish is one of the best ways to do a lot of achievement, for example the ones where you start as a minor next to Ottomans. Exile to Ireland.

What's your first idea group with Aragon? I could see trade, diplomatic, naval all being good.

Depends what you want to do in the game, but trade and naval are pretty bad idea groups. The usual 1st group is Diplo, Exploration or Influence with 2nd one being Administrative. Other "acceptable", but not ideal groups early are Economic, Religious and all non-Naval military ideas.

lol, I guess that's just another way I suck at this game. Picked Naval first, envisioning a war with Venice that hasn't happened yet. This game is going much better:





It's 1516 and I'm about a third of the way through integrating Castile (est. to finish 1535). I wound up getting a queen consort pretty early so Iberian Wedding fired fast. I opened with a no-CB war against Byz and vassalized them (which also gave me Athens, kind of annoying to have an extra relation on that), integrated Athens and gave them to Byz. I've been waiting forever for the right time to be able to declare war on Venice to feed Corfu/Naxos/Crete to Byz, who claimed them, but at various times Ottomans has been guaranteeing Venice or they've been allied with people I haven't wanted to fight.

I took a province from Tunis in an easy war, then fought a war against Tlemcen and Morocco for my/Castilian claims there that was way harder than I expected (gave Castile Melilla and GTFO'd) and I think my manpower has been between 0% and 50% basically ever since then. Fought another one or two easy wars against Tunis to take more of their coastline, no CBed an Irish minor and fought a few more wars there to take like 6/10 provinces (in a rare event I haven't seen before, Sligo sold me one unsolicited for 200 gold...thanks?). England had been failboating hard so they had no allies and not much of a navy or army to speak of, so I took Cornwall (was independent and was able to claim it from Ireland) and then finished off the southern 3 provinces of England. In between all that, I'd gotten tons of claims in the Italy area and found spots where I could take Siena unopposed, then Corsica and whatever province is west of Genoa from Genoa.

Been slowing down on wars due to super low manpower, which is snowballing a little in giving me a hard time dealing with rebels. It also sucks to have to shuttle armies between lengths as distant as Italy and Ireland.

And then, something a bit weird happened...



uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh



Yeah that totally makes sense. How do I forfeit the HRE crown? These morons are gonna call me into all their wars and I do not give a ****. IT'S A TARP

Just ignore the call to arms and lose the imperial power. Consider this your 20 or 30 year or whatever window to take some Italian/German lands.

Alternatively, vassalize some electors and make yourself perma emperor. Even without reforms, it's good to be emperor of HRE just for the bonuses.

Being emperor is great news for you. You only get call to arms if a nation outside HRE attacks a member and you should be strong enough so that no one wants to fight against you = you rarely get called to defend. After you integrate/inherit Naples, you can actually add their provinces and all your Iberian provinces to HRE which should give you ~50 IA so you can pass a reform. (you can add province if it is neighboring to a HRE province in land in same sea zone). Your HRE actually looks to be in quite good shape, very few provinces are owned by outsiders.

(I'm not 100% sure, but in the peace deal you might be able to release Athens at the same time.)

There is also an achievement for being Emperor as Spain.

Why this, btw? These ideas give you...
- -25% merc cost, -25% merc maintenance, +25% available mercs - so, you need to be building lots of mercenaries to take advantage of these
- -25% core creation cost, -10% admin tech cost - definitely nice
- +1 advisor - meh
- -1 interest - who needs loans?
- +5 states - nice for large empires

Is the idea with this group that you go merc heavy and take out lots of loans to finance it? I usually spend early $$ on spamming as many churches/workshops/barracks as I can.

lol damn it, I wish someone told me this happens at admin tech 10



I have already spent 1600 diplo power on trying to integrate Castile

core creation and admin tech cost alone will save you thousands of admin points which are by far the most valuable monarch point

Mercs being cheaper is insane given how much more expensive they are now. Money is always easier to come by than manpower.

+States also really strong unless you are purposefully going tall instead of wide

I decided I'm a fan of being emperor as soon as I noticed the effect on my forcelimits and manpower. Formed Spain, integrated Naples, waged some more wars, country now looks like this:



Added the rest of Ireland and one province in Scotland, fed Byz a few Aegean provinces from Venice (sadly Ottomans was fighting them at the same time and took like 3 more provinces I could have fed to Byz/Naples), took Urbino/Arezzo after Florence made the mistake of releasing the former and taking the latter from Papal State, then took Lucca and Genoa and Provence's coastline (which finally gave me enough development to upgrade to empire).

I'm waiting to add everything to the HRE until I deal with all these heretic princes so my IA will actually be of use. I forget, how do I get CBs on heretics in the empire to force all their religions? There's like 27 heretic princes right now, it's absurd.

The most important idea of administrative is the core cost reduction. Not only does it save you ton of ADM, it also makes coring faster. Rest of the group is meh, but I usually complete it before getting ADM tech level 8 since completing the group gives you -24% discount on all future ADM tech.

To deal with heretics:

- Fabricate regular conquest casus belli, use force religion peace option
- AFTER religious league war has fires, you can demand member to convert
- Religious group finisher also gives easy CB

Generally you can always find a way to fabricate on an ally of your target even if you can't fabricate on your target directly. You can easily call in 5-10 enemy minors and separate peace everyone of them, forcing them to convert. If the religious center is in their capital, it will be automatically be removed when you force convert them. If the centers are part of larger countries, you might want to take just that specific province and convert it yourself asap.

Update on the above game, 1693:



And this shows the parts that are mine:



I never got to effectively do much in the HRE - eventually lost it when I had a female heir (6/3/3, would rather stick with her than disinherit, my rulers have been generally ****ty) but it was that stage of the game where there are too many large protestant nations to have any chance of getting IA. I converted a few but then you have ones like Brandenburg that you have to split into like 5 countries before you can even convert in <100WS.

So anyway, finished conquering Scotland to take all of Britain; since Denmark integrated Norway, I released Norway (core on Orkney) and got some Norwegian provinces back from Denmark via reconquest. Invaded Cyprus and gave it to Byz, but Byz's cores in Ottomans expired before I ever got the sack to war them so they're kinda a waste now, I should probably just integrate them. Similar to the Norway thing, I released + vassalized Mamluks from Tunisia so I can hopefully feed them cores in Ottomans.

And then I managed to get France into a PU when they somehow had a ~70 year old king with no heir. After getting the Nationalism CB from dip tech I attacked Portugal, it's incredible how many colonies you can take in a peace deal for nearly no WS. If you look at Spanish Brazil in the map (it's labeled twice for some reason, both the labels in what you think is Brazil are Spanish Brazil), over half of it used to be Portuguese Brazil, and my little outpost in Florida came from that war as well. France is a huge colonial power also.

Upcoming wars will be...
- Austria (allied w/ Russia + several smaller HRE nations)
- Ottomans (formerly allied with France, now pretty isolated diplomatically after my PU)
- Portugal round 2 (take all their stuff in NA)

Any other ideas?

What I learned after few years of playing is that if you take country's all non-colony provinces, you will also get all their colonies for free. So although colonies have low WS cost, it is often better to take the mainland holdings.

Just pass Pragmatic Sanctions to deal with the female heir. Of course, sometimes there just isn't a way to do it.

Wow, bahmanis almost unified india, never really see that.

Like, if I annex a colonial overlord, I become the the owner of all their colonies? Portugal has enough random provinces in random places (like, a few isolated provinces in inland Africa surrounded by Ashanti or Mali) that annexing them would be a PITA but that's good to know for the future.

I've done Pragmatic Sanction as Austria but didn't see an option to do it as Spain. Oh well.

Yeah. You need EVERYTHING that is owned by "Portugal", so it might require some American provinces too that hasn't formed into colonial nation yet. Last time I did that I had to reload 4 times since I always kept forgetting to take some random island middle of nowhere in the peace deal, first time missing #1 but getting #2 and #3, 2nd time missing #2 and getting #1 and #3...

1728.







I worked with Brandenburg to beat up on Austria but we might have done too good of a job; Ottomans has now taken all of modern-day Austria through like 3 separate wars and has reached terror status. They have the 3rd largest army in the world (I'm #2) and are allied with Ming, the largest. I picked up Russia as an ally (#4). Ottomans/Ming/Russia are all low on manpower at the moment while I'm ~full at 150k, and my golden era runs out in 5 years (beat: Ottomans just started theirs 25ish years ago) so the time to strike is now but I imagine it will be a difficult war. I have Poland and Brandenburg as allies too but they're both in debt and don't want to join a war, and as great powers I can't pay off their debt - if I just gift them gold, will they pay off debt with it? Russia's fort situation is garbage on their Ottoman border so I don't think I can use my navy that effectively to block an Ottoman invasion of Europe, even while holding Constantinople. I haven't gone hard on military ideas (just defensive/offensive at the moment) so I worry Ottomans will probably have me outgunned.

I picked up the rest of Portugal's colonial holdings, took some from the Netherlands, integrated Byzantium/Norway to make relations slots for more alliances, but mostly I'm just thinking about the Ottoman problem looking ahead.

You probably have to DOW an ally of Ottomans/Ming so you get to fight vs 1 at time and force them to break the alliance in peace deal.

I haven't looked at Ming but Ottomans' only other ally is Tunis - fighting them is certainly an option, with the downside that none of my allies would join in that war so it would be me vs Ottomans straight up.

development seems like a fiddly mess

I had 90 hours played on Eu4, 85 of those just being on vanilla, so playing with all the DLC I basically need to relearn everything.

For my first game I started as Ottomans and just ****ed around doing the usual Ottoman things, eating everything small around me and ****ing up the Mamluks. Very first change I noticed was before I even unpaused the game, you have to wait a month before you can declare war, wtf. After a dozen or so hours playing to refresh the basics I decided to move on.

My second (and current) game I decided to make a custom nation. I set the options to Random New World, Random Nations, and Random Tax & Manpower in provinces. I made a 7-8 province country in central Italy and started. One thing I wish is that it named the random nations after their regional counterparts. The only options are using randomly generated names (which sucks) or historical names (but with no regard for region).

Loading up the map I see that directly to the north of me is the one province Holy Roman Emperor with a 21k army. During the one month forced peace he reduces his army to 6k and I immediately war and annex him because lol **** the Emperor.

I decide I'm going to focus on colonizing, despite not picking anything colonization related when I created my nation. While I'm waiting on that to get started I go to work conquering the rest of the Italian peninsula, which is generally made up of poor provinces. I also grab Sicily, Malta, and Baleares while I start working my way west along the northern Mediterranean coast. First actual goal is to get the eastern Atlantic islands, all three of which are owned by Shan. Shan is allied with some forgotten nation which covers the southern Iberian peninsula who I have a Trade Embargo CB against so I go to war and take all three islands and the forgotten country.

At this point while waiting for explorers to do their thing I get in several wars with HRE members and the Emperor. I turned Protestant at the first chance I got and converted all my provinces. Eventually I discover the New World. It is comprised of a North and South continent, the south is Mayan religion and nations, while the North is Naive American tribes.

Around this point I'm basically just on cruise control not doing anything when I get a pop-up telling me I have been elected Holy Roman Emperor. WTF. I check and the HRE consists of ~25 members and two electors, both of which are Protestant. As the largest Protestant nation I guess they figured I'd be a good choice for Emperor despite the fact of having no provinces in the HRE and everyone in the HRE hating my ****ing guts due to the constant wars. Also all the Catholics hate my guts because I've annexed the OPM Papal States twice.

So I say **** it I might as well get a refresher in the HRE as well. I proceed to add all my provinces to the HRE and start forcing some OPMs to switch to Protestant and make them electors. This continues for a long time and I go about passing reforms and get up to Revoke the Privilegia. I ****ed up a little bit here because about 8 nations refused so they leave the HRE but I get claims on them. So I have 25 years to get all my claims back so I set out on a series of wars to reclaim them and instead of annexing like I should have I make most of them vassals and annex the rest. I'm at the end of 25 years in a war with the largest former HRE member, I annex everything I can and then I almost break from overextension. My overextension was 198% and I start getting 32k stacks of rebels popping everywhere. The next bit was basically just trying to squash rebels while I cored everything.

About 5 years ago I finally got all the rebels under control and am now basically unstoppable. I field a 204k army while my vassals field an additional 300k. Currently the next largest army is 64k.

In the New World on the southern continent I've basically had to expand myself as my colonial nations are doing jack ****. On the northern continent my colonial nations are blood thirsty savages always at war. Only other two countries to make it to the New World are Scotland and Fez.

I'm going to keep playing for a while just to see how big I can grow. My strategy is to start wars and let my vassals do everything, then annex as much as I can and repeat.

Current Maps:

The end of my Aragon/Spain Consulate of the Sea game. I wound up declaring war on Tunis to pull in Ottomans 1 on 1 and get them to drop their alliance with Ming, and that went pretty well, Persia and I want to say Brandenburg helped me out here:



I was expecting a terrifying Ottoman army but I actually had higher morale than them, even after my golden age expired, so I felt good about future wars against them. I wiped out their entire navy in this war as well and they would never again be a strong naval power.

And then, something unexpected happened:



LOL! They had a beastmode Prussia-like army too. So that's nice. I didn't even claim throne or anything, I think we just had an alliance/RM and then this happened?

v2 of warring Ottomans went very, very well:



After that nothing terribly exciting happened - I diplo-vassalized Hungary and took back some of their cores then annexed them, did a number on Poland/Lithuania, then spent 2 years fighting millions of rebels (turns out having ~180% overextension is...not a great idea? How on earth do people conquer the world, like, ever? Overextension is such a brutal mechanic) until 1821 hit. My empire:

The trick is taking ~200% WS, then giving bit over half of it to few vassals while at the same time integrating another vassals. You will likely have 5-7 vassals around the world so you can at the same time have about 700 WS coring. WC is especially trivial (although tedious) as HRE that has revoked, as you can just feed everything to your vassals and then eventually integrate them for free with one click.

That's why admin + influence is often regarded as best ideas for WC, influence gives -25% diplo-annexing and they together unlock a policy that gives another -20%. That also reduced the time to annex by 45%, which is just as important as the diplo point discount.

Is there a way to get out of this?
my damiyo are involved in a war and neither has enough troops to siege so they've been at it for 20 years. I can't release vassal because they are damiyo and I'm too strong for anyone to consider independence.

My Byzantium game 10 secs before I restored the Roman Empire and got the Mare Nostrum achievement: