How do I explore? I have colonial ventures and quest for the new world, but can't look anywhere...

Edit: aha, I make a new leader (thanks to roger mainfield on skype)

Admin points is the only way to increase stability, right?

I tried to stay at stab 3 at all times but would always send armies after rebels.

One thing of note is that if you have a small stab cost and bank up a lot of admin power, violating truces is viable now that you can just click "boost stability" five times and ta da, no problem!

But yeah, as Portugal I was constantly at the top of land tech because I had literally nothing else to spend mil power on. Which is totally stupid, in EU3 you got land tech faster because you wanted it and prioritized it at the expense of everything else, not because you were like "well gee whiz looks like I don't have a choice but to have better land armies than every other country in the world."

Philly: merchants should generally be forwarding from other nodes to Seville, you should prob ignore Bordeaux since going upstream has a big penalty involved.

Sciolist: need an explorer leading a naval unit before you can send ships into uncharted zones, and a conquistador leading an army before they go into uncharted land. Be careful about naval attrition, your ships will take damage in open ocean over time, you'll prob have to turn back halfway across the Atlantic or so to keep from losing your ship and explorer (highlighting a ship shows its condition in % as well as the current attrition it takes in an orange/red number, having a ship in port repairs it).

An explorer won't necessarily reveal all land surrounding it the first time you enter a sea province, but every time you re-enter the province it had a chance to reveal any unrevealed land, so once you have a nearby colony (so your ship doesn't die so far from a safe harbor) you can patrol your explorer back and forth between Caribbean provinces to reveal all the islands there.

iirc, Caribbean colonies >> Brazil >> other S. America areas >> southern Latin America >> American South (dat cotton) >> eastern USA.

Agree with ignoring Bordeaux. I did a test with putting a merchant in Bordeaux, and it changed from like .61 upstream to .59 upstream.

So it still comes back down to where should i put him. with no merchants i have the following
Mauretian Coast: 7.5 to seville
somewhere else: 3.4 to seville
somewhere else: nothing
somewhere else: nothing
So I'm assuming i would put him in mauretian steering trade, but i dont know that for sure

Now to clarify one other thing, trade routes are fixed correct? like if i have these trade routes, i cant put a merchant in china and create a trade route from seville to china.
So a large trade empire would be something like india to cape to african coast to seville

Well you won't have the best land armies, because NI's make the points more efficient, however you will be really close despite not thinking about it or prioritizing at all, which seems lame to me.

I love funneling money into the ennemy's rebel army.

It feels so dirty and yet so disturbingly real.

Could you do that in eu3?

nope, you needed a spy for that and it was a % of success

Since I just played an Ottoman Eu3 game I don't think I'm going to start out with them in Eu4. I think I'll take a look at the achievements when the game is released and see if there is anything interesting to do. Either that or play someone in Germany, besides Austria and probably Bohemia. Brandenburg, Pommerania, or Bavaria probably. Anything other than Ironman is for women and children.

Read EU3 vs EU4, the manual, strategy guide, and reading the compendium now, I'll play through the tutorial tonight, and then finally tomorrow is Eu4 time.

Hype

One thing to note about trade is that you need trade power to really do anything. Trade power comes from a.) holding provinces that belong to that trade node b.) having light ships protecting your trade in that node. So if you send a merchant to Bordeaux, but you have no provinces in Bordeaux and no light ships patrolling your trade there, yeah, he won't do much.

I don't know if this is the optimal play yet, but what I've been doing is putting my merchants where they have the greatest potential to pull in value for me. The Mauritanian Coast node is a poor place to do that, since (in my Portugal game last night) the node had 0 value (this is the bottom of the two numbers that shows up on a node in the trade map, the top one being your trade power in that node) - all of the incoming + local trade was already being directed forward to Sevilla, without me having a merchant or assigning any ships there or anything. Therefore, having a merchant or light ships there will do nothing for you, because the best possible scenario for you (100% of the value of that node is being forwarded to a node you control) is already happening.

As such, I put my merchant + my light ships in Genoa, where there was ~2.5 ducats of value (incoming + local - outgoing = the "value", or amount that stays in the node), which was the most of any node that goes to Sevilla, and allowed me to pull a nice 1.2 ducats or so into Sevilla as a result.

I also put a couple light ships into Ivory Coast to get some trade power to forward the value there along to Mauritanian Coast (which is FREEEEE MONEY since 100% of M. Coast is already going to Sevilla).

What do you mean about NIs? Like, nations that invest in land ideas will be able to buy the land tech more cheaply than me so they'll stay even? Or the land NIs make their inferior tech still fight better than mine?

Like, by the end of the demo as Portugal, I had Landsknechten Infantry, which is some pretty stronk ****. In EU3 MP games having Landsknechten before your opponents = lol you don't lose wars ever. I was pretty close to having enough MP (had maybe 650, needed 800 because of the "8 years ahead of time +80%" penalty) for mil tech 11 as well.

Go go Ryukyu WC

lololol Jihad is hilarious. How are "conquer the world "and "conquer the world as Ryukyu" in the same category?! That's, like, "pretty hard" versus "perhaps five people that purchase EU4 will ever accomplish this".

Depends on a few factors, what nodes go into Seville, how rich are those nodes, and how many countries are competing in those nodes?

I'm not sure how u should divide your fleets since you aren't going to be able to completely dominate seville due to the presense of spain, but really you want to have a bunch of light ships in seville, and then a 2nd fleet where you have your other merchant forwarding trade in order to increase your trade power there (and thus increase the amount being sent onwards to seville). It also seems like its better to forward trade from sea nodes as opposed to from landlocked ones (like say, wien), as you can't send trade fleets to wien so you are stuck with the tiny trade power generated from your merchant. Of course the counterpoint to that is other countries can also send trade fleets to compete with you, unlike land nodes.

Example, last demo game I tried was as Hansa who get ridic trade bonuses, both from unique NIs (+15% on trade range and +10% Trade Steering, +10% trade power, +1 merchant) and from being a merchant republic ( innate bonuses of +1 Merchant, +10% Global Trade Power, +5% Trade Efficiency). Due to all those bonuses as well as spamming light ships I was easily able to outcompete Denmark in Lubeck and gain the lions share of trade. I had a merchant fowarding trade in baltic and sent a 2nd fleet there, and then had another merchant forwarding trade from novgorod to the baltic and yet another trade fleet there. I had another merchant forwarding from Frankfurt, as the other sea node, North Sea, was very poor, i had no provinces in the node, and I couldn't afford to send more ships there, so I would have had low trade power in a low value node.

I think he means the individual countries NIs. For example Brandenberg. Even if you keep even or are slightly ahead, their army is most likely going to be stronger then a Nation whose ideas are tailored to trade or colonization.

With ahead of time penalties and neighbor bonuses, you are only going to be like 2-3 techs ahead of land based powers as portugal. Meanwhile those land based powers, if they are spending MP on mil ideas, will have sweet stuff you dont have. From the first few ideas in offensive/defensive/quality/quanitity you can get +1 leader shock, +25% manpower, +.5 morale, +1 land tradition, etc. Even if you reach new troop types a few years earlier, you aren't going to have such a massive advantage as in EU3 since they will be fielding larger, better led, better morale armies. By unlocking ideas instead of tech you also get the double bonus of also unlocking your unique national ideas, which can add additional advantages.

Edit: That said, there are obv some major bonuses from having the techs over the NIs, better troop types certainly, but also certain breakpoint techs are still around, like land 8 gives +tactics, other techs give more combat width or shock/fire to troops. Overall though its not gonna be like eu3 where if you get land 10 or w/e it was for landsknect, or land 21 for latin caracole, or land 18 for tactics + new troops, you destroy everyone until they catch up in tech because your units are literally 3x+ as good as theirs.

Larger countries core province much more slowly, as each non-overseas province you own will increase coring times by 5%.

Was this in EU3? Could explain why you guys feel like its super fast early on.

There was a hilarious EU3 world conquest with ryuku, which was obv extremely gamey. it went something like inherit ming>move capital next to horde>let some type of horde rebels occupy your capital>collapse into a horde>conquer the world.

Here it is!


I do wonder how it will be done in EU4, if at all.

edit: kirby, cores took fifty years to happen unless you got it instantly as mission reward or inherited someone in your culture group. didnt matter what size you were.

In Eu3 a province cored after you controlled it for 50 years, didn't matter if you were a OPM conquering your second province or had 100 provinces. For colonies you had to wait until it was fully colonized and then wait another 50 years.

Ok, so I won't beat Brandenburg in a war anytime soon as Portugal, though at those points where I have troop tech advantages, I imagine they can't beat me soundly either.

But what about, say, Spain?

So the first Spanish NI will cause their troops to fight a little better, but aside from that, unless Spain selects land NIs as a group (which, maybe they will, maybe they won't, they certainly have reasons to pursue religious, or naval, or exploration), they're not gonna get those bonuses, and they'll probably be slightly behind me on mil tech since they're gonna be busier fighting wars and will need their mil power for generals more than me. So, cool, now Portugal has a better land army than ****ing Spain.

Basically, it seems like it's gonna be really, really difficult for any one nation to fall behind in military, because everyone gets mil points and everyone has to spend them. Maybe you spend them on tech, maybe you spend them on ideas, but either way it's a given that you'll be improving your land army over time, whereas in EU3 it was an actual tradeoff (if you rush dat trade 5 for QFTNW, guess what, your army sucks for a bit! And that's a good thing).

And then Spain wafflecrushes you with its much larger army.

I like Diplomatic and Espionnage ideas .

They go really well together, or so it seems.

Ok, here's a better situation: England plays out like Portugal focusing on navy/exploration, except they have way more manpower and can actually field a decent army, and now they can rush QFTNW to colonize USA#1 while also spending their mil points that they give 0 ****s about on good enough tech that they can simultaneously hold their own against France in the Hundred Years War.

Tradeoffs? England don't need no tradeoffs.

France ain't scary till that third NI.

French Language in All Courts: Allows relations with 2 additional countries without upkeep.

what does that mean? Havent read about upkeep on the wiki yet

I'm not sure either, but I guess you can only maintain so many relationships with other countries at once up to a certain limit? I had some situations where I tried offering alliances and their reason was "no" with a -1000 factor of "we can't afford any more relations".

On a lighter note: Albania beta AAR

Welp, finished reading the wiki .

my body is ready.

The only mention of upkeep ive found is here:

Uses of Monarchs Power

Monarch abilities are converted into points that are used for actions. There are high cost actions like: capital movement, technology advancements & idea selection; medium costs actions like: core creation, stability increases & inflation reduction; and low cost actions like: assaulting a fort or building construction. There are also upkeep costs for on going things like having military leaders and diplomatic deals.

I guess two more diplomatic deals dont have a cost?... Anyways...