Russia is actually a good option. It's a time honored tradition for European alliances to form in a checkerboard fashion to threaten two front wars.

The AI will also get a lot of troops stuck in Russia taking over ****ty lands for little war score.

Any ideas why I lost 2 missionaries? I had 3 going non stop and a few wars later I'm down to 1. My papal influence is pretty high. Can't figure it out.

I figured out a solution to my France problem. I just say yes when they invite me to join their wars and let my vassals and CNs do all the fighting. I've got like 50 favors now, and I'll be cashing them in at Aragon's expense.

That's probably bad somehow but idgaf.

So I'm Crimea at the start. I start by marrying/allying kazan and nobai, and building claims on golden horde, theodoro and genoa. Kazan starts a war with great horde as soon as he can so i get enough war score to take bahmut before kazan ends the war, because its going very poorly for the horde 1v3. I probably could have gotten the next province on the way to ryazan but I didn't want to get too greedy and I was already ready to fight Theodoro and vassalize their only ally Trebizond. I've played this start 4 or 5 times and Kazan likes to negotiate peaces that don't give me any territory. I was able to do conquer theodoro and vassalize trebizond pretty quickly. Unfortunately after a very long war both kazan and nobai got upto my border with great horde agreeing to peace treaty for all but 2 of the great horde's provinces.

And then... Moscovy and about 4 other nations declare war on Kazan and quickly wipe out kazan's army. So whats my play here? White peace for whatever Moscovy wants? Ignore the war and hope they never to Crimea? I had a healthy 15 stack and Moscovy was losing small fights here and there, but they had about 40 units total and I can't see a realistic way to win this fight. Whats our play 2p2?

Pretty much. You have to ally and do a lot to keep in the good graces of Muscovy or just start fighting them early because Muscovy's missions give it lots of permanent claims on Horde provinces, including some provinces Crimea starts with.

Realistically fighting Muscovy is probably easier because you have to fight Poland/Lithuania or Ottomans to expand otherwise.

A typical Crimea start is basically rapid expansion into Horde lands and then ally an European power (Poland/Lithuania) when you get a chance.

At this point white peace out ASAP if you can. Are you able to occupy Moscow? If not, it may be better to just give money and peace out before they start occupying you. It's actually not that bad to drag out the war if they aren't wrecking your armies and provinces yet since it would get you a longer truce and more time to expand. Once you're strong enough to rival Muscovy you should be able to ally another rival that can give you a chance at fighting Russia. Still, peacing out early so you can keep expanding is probably better.

This is just the nature of playing smaller nations. You either have to find ways to lose with minimal costs or get used to restarting a lot.

Well, France finally got too big for its britches. They dropped to #7 of the great powers and lost Floride and French Canada along the way. Oddest thing was that we were allied, they were fighting half of Europe as usual ldo including Aragon and I decided to use that opportunity to take back some Iberian provinces since I'd been ignoring it in favor of colonization and attacking small nations near my colonies, plus expanding into California and Alaska. I wardecced Aragon and less than a week later France broke our alliance (lol). They were still at war with Aragon et al so it made taking Iberia much easier, I also wound up taking what had been Naples but was Aragon now. Anyway after that, France got devastated and even wound up fighting her former colonies.

It's now 1688 and the United States have formed from what was Floride, weirdly right next to "Thirteen Colonies" controlled still by GB.

Pro tip I just realized and will try very soon: if you get diplomatic ideas and the splendor power 50% war score cost to transfer subjects, you can transfer all of Sweden if you 100% war score Denmark.

How does that work exactly, transferring subjects?

In peace deal you can select vassal of the enemy to become your vassal (if the war score cost is under 100%). Basically if you are England, it would say
"[Swedish Flag] English Vassal 88% 200 DIP" or something like that.

Ohhhh nice, damn I wish I'd known about that before this run.

Does that work for colonial nations too? Might finally convince me to invade the British Isles (GB is in the process of overrunning North America in my current game).

Were you defender of the faith, and now you're not?

Counter-reformation gives you +2 missionaries for a while

I think nonfiction's explanation is what happened to me

It must have been that because I didn't actually do anything to get the +2 missionaries and I started out with 1. I had dropped from 3 to 1 before I even picked Religious ideas, which apparently only gives 1 additional missionary. Is Humanism strictly superior to Religious? I read on reddit somewhere that Religious was nerfed at some point before I got the game.

Just got through counter revolution, boy was that a pita. I don't know if I'd have done it without Castile as an ally (I've fed them a bunch of their cores back that I got from Aragon). They're damn near as strong as I am in the new world, they've basically cockblocked any further expansion in NA along with GB.

Ah, yes, counter reformation is the winner. You'd think I'd have known that what with messing around in an Austria game.

Religious used to be super awesome, I think the holy war CB that you now get at the very end was like the second idea and it was semi-broken. I think it's getting indirectly nerfed again in the upcoming patch with how conversions will have to be in states (long story, go read the internets).

That said, I think religious ideas still have their places -- if you're surrounded by other religions (say you're Ethiopia and nobody else in the world is Coptic), or if you want to squish a reformation before it gets too hairy by force-converting the countries with reformation centers, it's still quite nice.

I got religious in my 3 mountains run because the CB was super useful with Hinduism as my state religion. I never pick up religious anymore as a European power.

I also did religious in my Three Mountains game for the CB as well as the missionary. I did One Faith in the same game and went Catholic to be able to get the most missionaries, I had 7 going for a century plus.

oh yeah, I picked up religious for my one faith with Castille a long time ago too.

One of the biggest reasons for me to ditch religious is with the state/territories system.
Converting territorial provinces with minimum 75% autonomy is just not that useful.

Is there a cliffs version of why they feel the need to make this change? It seems like addressing a problem that doesn't really exist iyam

making it harder to blob basically

I don't see why either

EU3 went through the same thing. As people got better at exploiting game mechanics and expansion packs led to power creep of ideas and events, world conquests (even by Ryuku) got too easy and Paradox just wants to reign some of the power creep in.

As the game stands, once you expand enough to afford a standing army kept at 100% maintenance, only AE and monarch points limit your expansion and people have gotten really good at managing those.

I think Paradox is slowly tuning down stuff like Humanist and Religious in hopes of bringing rebels and instability back into the equation. As it stands, religious bonuses, especially if you work with a country with +missionary and +missionary strength, religious ideas means you can basically convert everything you acquire (except the richest provinces and provinces with fervor). WIth some countries, religious gives enough +missionary strength to allow you to just bypass some stuff (converting provinces with religious fervor often means you can just stamp out the reformation for example)

Humanist doesn't even bother with all that. It's just like yeah, I'll tolerate all you heathens and heretics. With -2 unrest on top of that, you just have to raise autonomy and new provinces are rebel free right away if you have high legitimacy and positive stability.
With humanist,
+0 or -1 even for heathens,
-2 from humanist idea,
-1 or -2 from positive stability,
-2 from 100% legitimacy/Republican tradition
+0 from Very little religious unity problem due to tolerance increasing unity.
+10 from separatism
+2 from non-accepted culture
-10 from increased autonomy
+5 from 100% overextension

Notice increased autonomy cancels out the +10 from separatism and the -2 unrest cancels out non-accepted culture. This leaves you with +5% from 100% overextension to deal with. -2 from legitimacy/republican tradition and -1 from +1 stability already get you to just 2% unrest. You can handle this just by stationing some troops in the new provinces or even just ignore it in most cases (because the +10 from separatism is going down every year so chances are unrest goes to 0 before rebels spawn). The downside is for very aggressive players that will often run over 100% overextension (stability hit events) and/or low legitimacy/tradition, humanist just doesn't do enough to counter unrest and you'll end up with rebels all over the place.

With religious, tolerance is so high you can treat your people like **** and get away with it.

TLDR: Religious makes you the borg, assimilating everyone and turning everyone into mindless fanatics. Humanist makes you the Federation, incorporating everyone but everyone will turn on you if things go south.

PS: They need to fix AI's inability to transport troops overseas. That weakness alone is what's making some "impossible" countries viable (Albania and Byzantium vs. Ottomans come to mind, Ryuku too)

That would be good; I have a feeling it's a tough nut to crack.

Since I am already complaining, I think the tributary system needs an overhaul.

It manages to both artificially prevent Euros from invading Asia (this is historically inaccurate, Ming didn't protect its tributaries usually) and artificially box Ming in since AI doesn't (if it does, it's rarely) invade tributaries. This creates a dumb situation where the Asian map is way more stable than it should be in most games unless the player actively messes with Ming.

In few games I played where AI Ming picks up exploration, I've had to deal with the insane problem of having to deal with Ming just to take a few colonial provinces from frigging Creek. Ming+Exploration = basically every small country becomes Ming tributary and that's just dumb.

Also in something like a WC it makes taking out Ming trivial. You can take out Ming in a few years by just declaring war on a different tributary after each war is over.