So I just downloaded the demo and bought the game. I have never played an EU game before. I've got maybe 1000 hours in Civilisations, and maybe 1000 hours in similar space games (master of orion etc). Is that relevant? What should I do to figure out how EU4 works?

Yessss, we got another one!

It's kind of relevant. The general stuff you do is the same as Civilization - make army, build buildings, research tech, make ca$$$$h, fight people. The manner in which all that plays out is a bit more complex in most areas though.

For starters - it's an RTS that plays like a turn-based game, since you control the clock/game speed at all times, so you'll often pause to work out some diplomacy or manage some economic stuff, run at speed 1 or 2 during wars to manage your troops as best as possible, then turn it up to speed 5 and zoom through a few years when you're recovering and there isn't much going on.

I noticed the demo has tutorials, maybe start there and let us know how confused you are on a scale of 1-10 after doing that (I haven't done them, dunno how good they are).

Some systems, like trade (which may be simpler now, but it was confusing as hell in EU3) take awhile to understand, but the nice thing about the game is that you don't have to understand everything when you start out - you can completely ignore the trade system and still play the game normally, and when you have a handle on other aspects of the game and are ready to tackle it, you can learn how trade works and make some extra $$ that you weren't before.

Austria probably the easiest country to start with in the demo, since you'll spend the whole time destroying people in wars. When the game bugs you about picking a mission one of them will probably be "kick ____'s ass" and you can choose that to get a casus belli on them (just cause for war - without a CB on a country, your stability takes a hit to declare war on them, and 99% of the time that's really bad and you shouldn't do it). Additionally, when you look at the diplomatic map mode and click your country, you'll see some provinces that have dashed green lines over them - those are provinces that are considered "core provinces" to your country (i.e. you have a historical/cultural/etc right to own them), and you will always have a CB against countries that own core provinces of yours to take them back. Just be careful about your manpower

(it's one of the #s in the info bar at the top left - how manpower works is that as your armies suffer losses, they're replenished by men from the manpower pool at the rate of maybe 1k per month (hover over manpower number to see more info), and then your manpower pool regenerates at the rate of about 1/120th of the total amount per month. When your manpower runs out, those troops you lose in battle aren't getting replenished anytime soon)

(this is just one of the many fun systems you'll learn to master )

Thanks for the explanation, the upstream/downstream + forwarding stuff seems pretty simple.

Doing some testing though, seems like maybe having merchants collecting instead of forwarding is better unless you dominate that trade node. Example, as Venice:

I have a merchant in Venice making 2.37 ducats. I recalled my merchants from Alexandria and Ragusa to reduce variables for simplicity so they're not forwarding anything to Venice.

Ragusa has 2.52 trade value. I send a merchant there to collect from trade (not to forward). He predicably has **** for trade power (5.3) and brings home 0.35 ducats to my bank account each month.

I recall him and send him back, this time to forward trade. He forwards 0.55 per month to Venice, but I only get a piece of that - my income in Venice goes up to 2.68 (gain of 0.31 over my previous income in Venice, meaning it's actually slightly better in that instance to have him collect instead of forward).

With the dude in Ragusa still forwarding to Venice, I now start my light ships patrolling around Venice to increase my trade power. My income in Venice shoots up to 3.60, and when I remove my guy in Ragusa (so they stop forwarding), it drops to 3.20, meaning I was making 0.40 off the forwarding - so once my trade power in Venice gets high enough, I'm taking a big enough piece of the forwarding $$ that it makes more sense to forward than to collect. But obviously if I was playing, say, any country other than Venice with its capital in the Venice trade node, it seems it would be smarter to collect in Ragusa rather than forward, because my trade power in Venice would be way lower and I'd be getting a smaller piece of what's forwarded than my guy would collect on his own.

I would say I'm a bit dissapointed at the moment, I don't feel the monarch points system works that great, and I don't agree with just how much easier CB's, core's and religion stuff is.

What's easier about religion? Unless it's like "oh yeah this province will be converted in 2 years nbd" every time (maybe it does, I haven't checked) all it's doing is being more transparent - in EU3 you'd frequently have ~10% chance of converting a province each year, which would take an average of 6-7 years to convert, but it was super random and might happen in a month, might happen in 20 years. Random mechanics like that weren't that fun.

I imagine the envoy system means you're able to convert less provinces at the same time in EU4 as EU3.

I hope everybody is gonna put Lucky nations to either None or Random .

Random could be hilarious.

Money was often a limiting factor with converting, it's not anymore. It's been way faster for me too, shortest was at 17 months but mostly around 21. Even in the middle of the reformation I think it's 101 months to convert a province with the debuff on. I don't have any NI's that affect it either I think.

Yikes, that's pretty ugly. In EU3 wouldn't you usually have negative chance to reform a province after the reformation hit? lol!

Starting as Ottomans, it says it would take 5.5 years to convert my high-tax Orthodox provinces (w/ Greek accepted culture):



A slightly lower tax province with non-accepted culture wouldn't even convert without this Sheikh ul-Islam bonus (whatever that is) that I imagine is Ottoman-specific:



Seems like it isn't necessarily TOO easy for Muslims.

eta: wait, the math on the last province doesn't add up, wtf? 4 + 1 + 0.1 - 5 is 0.1, not 0.9...maybe that's a minimum??

In typical pdox fashion, noticing a lot of random buggy things in the demo. Had an issue yesterday where the hotkeys for changing mapmodes stopped working, and in my current game in the diplo map mode, no matter which country I click it still outlines my unheld claims/cores instead of those of the country I clicked.

But Nonfiction, I just got this mission, which is probably the reason for your unfortunate luck at the hands of the Ottomans:



eta: adding more bugs as I see them
- sometimes army stack has a bigger number underneath it than the # of regiments in the stack, which makes 0 sense
- got into a state where until I manually brought up the province view, selecting an army that was sieging wouldn't bring up the siege panel in bottom left

so where do you see the individual province's population?

and so I see that the ai's still blindly do your bidding and win your wars for you and then you can take all the spoils and they still don't care.

Too easy...but then again I have been trying w/ the two easiest nations.

There are just a few weird things with how the MP's work. If I'm playing England I'm going to be completely starved for driplo MP's, as trade, colonization and Naval ideas all need diplo points, but I'm going to be overflowing with Military points, most likely leading to me having the highest military tech in the game, while having almost obsolete ships. You mentioned randomness too, randomness is HUGE in EU4, because your rulers stats have such an enormous effect on your nation. You don't have that much effect on the points, and they are so important. The advisors are the only way you can effect them, and they are quite expensive for the first half of the game. There should be more trade offs and influence about what types of points you get.

So playing as Portugal in the demo, my second mission is "gain an Italian province". How do I tell which provinces are Italian? Do the islands count? Do I get a cassus belli for accepting the mission?

It might or might not give you a CB, I'm not sure. You can go to the region mapmode to see what qualifies as Italian.

Gotcha, thanks. Looks like no CB but never mind.

I just played as Portugal and no, that mission doesn't give you a CB or claim or anything. As such it seems like a really ****ing stupid mission. "Hey, you can lose 2 stability to declare war on someone with no CB, take some provinces with full diplo power cost + overextension, but at least we'll give you 10 prestige at the end!" How about no, ****wads.

For objectives that have to do with regions, there's a region mapmode that will tell you what regions a given province is in when you hover the mouse over it - so, for the Italian one, anything that's in Italy would qualify. Sometimes they're more specific (when I started colonizing I got a mission whose objective was to own any province in "The Thirteen Colonies" region, aka USA east coast), and sometimes they're as general as "anywhere in Italy" which I believe includes Sicily, prob Sardinia too.

Playing as Portugal in the demo it seems like the core-buying process makes colonial range kinda stupid. Remember how in EU3, once you took a new world province (either from the natives or making a colony), it still took 50 years before it cored and you could get the benefit of your colonial range extending all the way from that point? Well, yeah, now you can core a province for SUPER cheap (like, 5-10 admin power cheap) within like 3 years of your first new world colony finishing. I plopped my first colony in NE Brazil (Cape Verde was my nearest core), then cored it, which gave me enough range to expand up to Martinique in the Caribbean and almost to Uruguay to the south, and once those colonies finished (and I got trade 7 extending colonial range even farther) I could colonize pretty much anywhere I wanted.

Also, idk if this was just missing from the demo or if something about gameplay is changed, but the rampant religion-related CBs (holy war, colonialism against natives) seem to be gone? As Ottomans I didn't get any out-of-the-ordinary CBs against Christians, and as Portugal I had literally one CB the entire game (against Morocco for an early mission to take Casablanca - nothing against Muslims, or Cherokee/Aztec/Inca).

So I played the demo for a couple hours yesterday, some good some bad.

Having a choice between multiple missions is just awesome. This needed to be done so bad. EU3 was extremely frustrating when you would decide you wanted to conquer someone, and the next mission would be to improve relations with them.

Eliminating cultural tradition was a huge improvement. I always thought just constantly burning magistrates for tradition was a lousy mechanic in EU3.

Trade. The overhaul is interesting. I'm not sure how i like it, as i dont fully understand it yet. Have to take a look thru the wiki

Leader points system. Agree with the comment above. Playing Portugal, both the national idea lines I need, exploration and expansion, are in the diplo category. So I'm going to blowing thru diplo points much quicker than admin or military. Not sure how this is going to play out.

In general, i think the interface is better.

I think diplomatically this game is going to be much much deeper than EU3. The rival, coalition thing looks very interesting.

Colonization seems to work a little better.

Ok, no invasion of Italy, the game crashed.

Agreed, I'm not sure how I feel about having naval under diplo at all, but that really would mean changing a lot of the game around. Maybe they could move colonization to admin since the admin tree is pretty subpar overall anyways. With trade, naval, and colonization all under diplo we are actually looking at a situation where Russia or Ottomans might have a bigger, stronger fleet than England, since Russia and Ottomans don't need colonization and probably don't necessarily need trade. This would lead to Russia/Ottomans having maxed naval ideas before england as well as probably having better ship tech due to not having to dump points in 3 ideas.

Similarly, England/Portygal is probably going to have the best land tech in the world because they aren't initially investing in mil ideas. Doesn't really make any sense.

Also hate that monarch points are called monarch points because we already have manpower and multiplayer for MP .

Coring, changing religion, and especially changing culture are all way too fast and/or cheap and I expect big increases in the release version or in early patches.

The counterpoint to EU4 colonizing is that its still more realistic than EU3 style "bombard every coastal province with 1 colonist to secure everything before opponents." Here, your colonizing range can quickly get increased due to rapid coring, but you are still only colonizing a few provinces at a time which lets other colonizers get a piece instead of portugal/spain taking everything before other people even get a chance.

You need to get the religious ideas group, it's the first tech in there.

am I the only one who was only using monarch points to crush rebels and up stability? Seemed to work amazingly, i guess thats one way to play but you lose out on technology and other bonuses in the long term?

i tried typing a long thing, and it just became a mess. so here is just a question.
how do i decide where to send merchants and where to have my fleets protect trade?

hypothetical.
portugal, hub is seville.
~4 other trade nodes feed seville, seville feeds bordeaux.
i have 1 merchant collecting in seville.
i have my trade power feeding from Maruetian Coast and somewhere else into seville.
1 have 1 unused merchant.