Other than the fact that he mispronounces country names quill18's videos have been top notch and have helped me a ton. I just started his series on his Lubeck play through yesterday, though it's several xpacs behind now.

Well...we COULD have taken over Russia



But these assmegs made peace and left me high and dry so I had to withdraw

Alright boys, first game is in the books!



Score was 9377, whatever that means

Here's the final map. Really disappointed I couldn't take all of Arabia and Persia but Bahmanis stayed allied to those guys for like 200 years so I just couldn't get there. ETA if I had it to do over I'd definitely move on Poland and Lithuania way early before Russia et al knock them out.



Ming stayed the Ming. Bohemia of course suvived because Russia (who probably really won this round). France really petered out like a hundred years ago, they had a few colonies but I was disappointed in the lack of EFFORT. I don't think anyone but Austria ever held HRE emperor title.

Brandenburg had a good round I guess. They conquered a big chunk of HRE




No idea which nation to play next, I really wanna try an HRE country but I don't think I'm ready. Probably just wuss out and go Ming or Russia (or maybe just play France the way god intended).

The game appears to still be running why is that?

Bradenburg is a very popular and actually pretty easy HRE option. It has LOADS of missions to expand into historical Prussian lands and it's pretty easy to ally with Poland, which will help win just about any war you get launch. Early 40-50 years is really boring since you're mostly waiting for AE to wind down and gold to build up a bit. Once you got Pomeranian lands though, you should have plenty of options. Scandinavia and/or Poland tend to be weak by this point due to internal strife and Russian/Ottoman wars.

Danzig is really an important and rich province but unless you got another ally (Austria/Bohemia probably) that can deter Poland from fighting you (better yet, help you beat Poland), it's probably easier to take weakened Baltic states and let Poland do most of the fighting.

You could also just take one HRE province/vassal at a time. It may look slower but HRE provinces are rich and of the same culture group so you get good returns on investment. Just make sure you don't get unlawful territory returns (vassalize and then diplo annex, ally Austria, or just be in a war with or against Austria)

If you want to try colonial game, play Spain or England next game. Russia is fun, but Ming is really boring. If you want to play in Asia, play some Japanese Daimyo. Hosokawa is probably the easiest.

ally poland, fabricate on neumark, dec teutonic order and offer land to poland. Take neumark, let poland fight TO + allies (hopefully didnt also ally hungary), give poland something like kulm that you don't need. Missions give claims on pommerania, so dunk them if possible (although they likely have a few allies and might be too much for you at this point). You need to take their easternmost province(s) though for a land connection to danzig. Prepare to dec TO again immediately after truce is over so Poland can't do it first. Call Poland in again, this time take Danzig + konigsberg (needed for prussia afaik). Give poland whatever.

After that, try to ally with Austria/Denmark/Someone besides Poland, because they will likely eventually turn hostile.

You can also get a free personal union over ansbach at the start of the game by royal marriage->claim throne, but if that war isn't fast enough Poland will declare on TO before you can, so not sure if its worth it.

So one thing I should have noticed in my game is that the Mamluks of all people have already started colonizing my way. I may have to repatriate a few islands... of course they allied to Bengal for some reason. Which may actually be a good opportunity to run up some war score maybe?

There is actually 100% firing event that when your initial heir becomes your ruler, you get free PU over Ansbach or can decline for small game-lasting bonus.

Once I ended what turned out to be my last war with Mamluks, when Mushasha or whatever it's called rat****ed me by wardeccing them and then taking half of Arabia (which I was never able to get from them), I assumed Mamluks were out of the game. Like 25 years later, I see that they still control a single island somewhere near Indonesia, many many many leagues from where they started. AFAIK they were still in existence when my game "ended" (the calendar is still moving for some reason). I consider it a personal failure that they made it to end game.

The calendar will keep going, and you can basically keep playing if you want, but score stops, achievements stop, cool timed events stop.

So, it may not have been smart, but Ming popped up from rebels in another country, and I had a claim on one of those provinces. So I decided to go force vassalize them, because I mean honestly how could I not?

1600 update because I know you all care deeply:



Still have Min and Nepal as marches, and the aforementioned Ming as a (forced, and unhappy at the moment) vassal. Plus Australia, of course. I've mostly cleaned up the interior borders the last few years (Khmer will take a couple more wars, but they have no alliances so lol them).

Mamluks keep on colonizing near me, which I've decided is a wonderful thing; it's free real estate basically as long as they stay allied with Bengal.

Hey dawg, we all love maps in this thread.

General question: how do you deal with the tech gap as an eastern nation? The last time I had to deal with that, "westernization" was still a process (I guess institutions are what replaced it?).

So far? By mostly fighting against other Eastern nations with the same problem. Seriously, there's no great solution; I think one sensible plan is to make sure to try to luckbox Colonization (I failed at getting it this game, even though I was eligible) -- if you can get that you'll be on a much more even footing for a while.

My military tech is on par with my neighbors (it's well behind say England, but I'm not anywhere near them so who cares), and that's all that matters as far as I'm concerned right now. (I did finally get diplo tech 6 recently! Also I took out a few loans to finally be able to get Renaissance.(

In theory you can develop the hell out of a province to get an institution to develop there (and spread therefrom), but I haven't tried that.

Westernization doesn't exist anymore. Most countries start at 0% tech penalty, some institutions simply spread slowly to rest of the world. You can, however, develop all institutions yourself so you stay at parity with EU for the whole game.

Most of the institutions start in Europe or has conditions that basically force them to start in Europe but yeah, you can dump development points and force it to start in a province. After that, it spreads really fast.

Still, it's way cheaper long term to just fight your way into Europe, preferably into Italy.

After lots of reading here & on reddit, it looks like Ming is a consensus easy ride so I made that my second run. I’m doing it Ironman since it’s supposedly easy, but I’m finding myself paralyzed with fear and unwilling to unpause the game lest everything explodes so I’m only sixteen days into the game since last night heh.

It looks like Harmonization makes missionaries unnecessary, no?

I love ironman, I used to save scum way too much in EU3 and it made the game way less fun. You just have to think through your actions more before you do them and be less reckless with troop stacks, you'll be fine.

I did save scum once recently in my Ottomans game (I think I'm never going to finish it because I've concluded I can't conquer the world in the 80 years remaining so thinking about it makes me feel like a failure) when my 26 year old 4/5/6 king died OUT OF NOWHERE (event text said "a choking accident"), and this 0/1/0 guy replaces him and I had nfi who he was because my king had no heir when he died.

So I said **** that, ctrl+alt+del, kill game. That was NOT COOL. Then I reloaded and he's still alive to this day!

Haha that's actually hilarious lol.

To elaborate:

After this screenshot, I annexed Multan and Mewar (the small brown country between Multan and Vijay) and took ~a third of Vijay, in the same war. But it took, like, 8 years, I think it's 1444 now. So if it takes me 8 years to do that, then extrapolating, there's no way I can take the rest of the world in 80, especially when the wars I have ahead of me (GB who has France in PU, Spain, Russia, Ming) are going to be way more difficult than the ones I've fought up to this point.

I know WC is supposed to have 90% of the work happening after 1680 but I think I slouched too much before that point:

At this point in time, where I got imperialism:
- I had never fought Transox, when I should have been beelining through them to get to Chagatai to start tanking Ming's mandate way before this point (I think in this screenshot is when I first bordered them)
- After taking most of Hormuz, I let their remnants stick around for decades longer than I should have for no particular reason, blocking eastward expansion
- I never decced on Spain or their allies (would have been important to try to weaken them earlier)
- I never decced on Russia or their allies (would have been important to try to weaken them earlier)
- I never decced on Portugal or their allies (them holding Morocco for forever set up a significant roadblock in my African expansion)
- while there was definitely a careful dance of trying to keep AE from getting too high in the HRE, I never decced on Bohemia (emerged as dominant power there) or their allies - my northwest expansion stopped decades earlier than it should have

So for those reasons, I think this game is basically toast and next time around, I need to suck it up and fight the wars I'm scared to fight way earlier. Any other fun, stupidly powerful WC countries? I wouldn't even mind trying this with Ottomans again, they're super fun, but maybe I should mix it up. I don't think I've ever played a full France game out, maybe it's time (though, does bordering Spain/HRE/GB make early expansion prohibitive?).

Sorry I tried to play this a long time ago and recently started the other day again (never completed a full game even) but I was wondering how vassalization works? I get that they basically are their own nation and I don't get penalties or w/e and they support me and give me stuff right? What's the best way to go about doing this?

How long should I wait between wars to avoid exhaustion and unrest etc?

Vassalization:
- they remain "independent" but you control their foreign policy, in that they can't declare war on anyone (except you, if they want to try to become independent, but usually you can keep them happy by improving relation), automatically join you in war, and others can only attack them by attacking you
- they also contribute some tax money
- after they're your subject for 10 years and they have a +190 opinion of you, you can annex them - this is referred to as "diploannexing". It costs some number of diplo points (based on their development I think) and requires a diplomat to spend however many months are needed (typically a few years? more or less depending on size of vassal) contributing 5-10 diplo points per month towards that total

Getting vassals:
- you can force a nation to become your vassal in peace deals, assuming the sum total of their provinces cost under 100% war score (this is "force vassalizing")
- if you're big and another country is small you can offer that they become your vassal in the diplomacy screen (this is "diplovassalizing"), you can hover over the icon (and the checkmark or X showing if they'd accept/reject) to see what the factors are that contribute to that decision
- if there are countries that don't exist who have cores on your provinces (for example, say they were annexed in the past), you can release those countries as vassals (via the diplomacy screen, hit the bottom right button to go to "my country" and then that button turns into "release vassals") and they will take control of the provinces they have cores on

Vassals can sometimes be preferable to annexation because:
- to eventually annex them, you spend diplo points instead of admin points
- you can feed (transfer control to) vassals other provinces that they border, either by giving them provinces in peace deals or granting control in the subjects screen, and your vassal will spend their admin points coring the province for you in advance of you (likely) annexing them later

You can spend points (forget if admin or diplo) to reduce war exhaustion between wars, and increasing stability (if you can swing it) will help with unrest. Typically, unrest dies down once you core a province, but you can get humanist ideas too (and the advisor guy who reduces unrest) for some extra oomph.

However, when thinking about how often to wage war, there are other factors I'd imagine are more important to consider:

1. Manpower - when you get into trouble with manpower, you can be seriously ****ed for a long time if you aren't careful. When MP starts running on fumes and your armies are aren't able to fully replenish from your reserves (because you don't have any), it affects everything - you can't fight other armies very easily knowing that any troops you lose are gone for a long time, you can't clear rebels as well, army maintenance becomes more expensive, it's bad. I think MP takes 10 years to fully recover from zero, so stay aware of where your manpower is at (relative to its max value, you can hover over it to see) and if it's super low, take a breather from fighting for a few years at least. As soon as barracks become available, I usually start cranking them out in the provinces where they'll have the largest effect specifically to prevent manpower issues in the future.

2. Aggressive Expansion - Coalition map mode is helpful for this. I forget the exact rules but if there are a lot of countries who have an aggressive expansion modifier worse (more negative) than -50 against you, they might join a coalition, and having a coalition of powerful countries declare war on you is not fun (plus it limits your ability to fight the coalition members). When you take provinces or vassalize someone, AE tends to pile up in that specific geographic area, so keep an eye on which countries hate you due to recent expansion in that area and try to lay off them for a bit (unless they're small ****ty countries you're not worried about). When signing peace deals, look out for the icon in the lower right that indicates the deal might result in coalitions forming and consider whether you'd be scared of that coalition.

Ming question: Ming is allied with Russia.

Any time I go to declare war on a country that's a tributary of Ming, the war dec screen says "they are allied with Russia, and they are a tributary of Ming, who will protect them".

None of these countries are allied with Russia; that's clearly there because Ming is allied with Russia. What isn't clear is whether or not this is like attacking into the HRE, where the emperor is automatically added as a co-belligerent, because the war dec screen doesn't show Ming or Russia in the lower left (where allied countries would usually appear and show whether they'd join or not).

So, uh, can Ming call Russia to these wars? Seems pretty important. And if they can, holy **** is it annoying that the screen won't tell me if they'll join or not.