oh adding onto my post- and manpower! as portugal i'm always whining that i have low manpower but lemme see what is manpower modifier of colonies it might still be worth it

What's this?

For every 5,000 natives you get an extra 1 tax base and 500 more manpower.

WOW 4k natives beat 4k of my troops in Rio De Oro and they routed to another zone where the natives finished them off

In the demo I sent an army to wipe out natives in every province I'd consider colonizing, that's a bad idea now?

And jesus I hope you were on minimum army maintenance or something, Portugal is not honored by your loss.

I just assumed that you couldn't kill natives cus every so and so often when you place troops in a colony you kill the natives over and over again when they attack the settlement but the number doesn't change... just now do I see that you can attack them but it costs military power? if so i'd rather just keep troops on the colony and let them protect it. Them boys dont got nothin better to do anyway.
and lol I was at 3/4 army maintenance

Started an Ayutthaya game briefly (Venice game is only for serious time, I ain't ****ing around in that one). Got an event somehow that gave me 400 monarch points of each kind (!!!!), took me halfway to mil 3 which is +0.5 land morale, once I got mil 3 took two provinces from Pegu though I'm kinda disappointed I didn't have to fight any battles to do it, they were already getting their ass kicked by Bengal.

But, one thing I noticed: they start off in an AWFUL position for trade. Their capital is in the Siam node, which only has outgoing trade, nothing's feeding into it. The money trade node nearby is Malacca, but I can't do **** to make money there because I get a huge penalty for trying to collect outside my capital, and what am I gonna do, dedicate a merchant to sending part of the trickle from Siam->Malacca back upstream for a pittance?

Short of capturing most provinces that trade in the Malacca node, or moving my capital to a province that trades there (who even knows when that option becomes available), there really isn't much I can do from a trade perspective I think to make any $$$.

spain bought my 300 pop colony that rolled grain for 120 and now i can offer to sell them the region right below that one for 280 and it only has 20 pop. you aren't smart spain...
if i sold it to them and it had really aggressive natives that could destroy it right away I would believe I found a sick exploit.

well it worked. just asked for military access then walked a stack of troops into the colony and the natives killed the troops and burned the colony to the ground but doing so crashed the game. maybe someone with a better computer can get away with it or maybe it was just a freak occurence I'll try it again tomorrow. one other thing- make sure to recall your colonist before you sell the colony or he's stuck there.

Natives will always attack you with the full population of the province whenever there's an uprising. Another way to read that 'native population' number is basically 'strength of native uprisings.'

You can give an Attack Natives command, costs some MMP. Your army will carry out some genocide, permanently lowering the population/uprising size. Possibly to 0 if your attack is strong enough.

I played a lot of Portugal in the demo and never attacked the natives. They're annoying, but easy to deal with by just leaving an army, and give some bonus when the colony is finished.

Sneak peak from the Brandenburg Saga:

Sounds like good goals IMO.

I don't think it's a very good spot to play overall, just a good place to learn the basics.

samsung khan RoRO!



(#2 in da WORLDDD)

It takes 3.5 minutes for my game to load to menu. Upgrading to SSD HD soon.

lol

For capital moving, actually this doesn't appear that hard:

I have the admin power so I went for it, and now kinda regret it (ironman, can't go back) just b/c short term it's probably a bad move - better to be the big fish in the small pond early on than a small fish in a big pond. Malacca has like 5x the value of Siam but that doesn't really benefit me........yet. I'm making more money by collecting in Siam (and taking the non-capital hit) than I am by forwarding from Siam to Malacca, which probably means it was an inefficient decision.

Once I eventually dominate Malacca, though, having my capital there will be a no-brainer. I guess I need to start planning out my takedowns of Malacca/Aceh/Brunei and building more light ships. Should prob try to strike Malacca while I have the early mil 3 timing.

New trade system is pretty awesome, it has me planning wars around it

heh so apparently cause I (burgundy) said ****off to making netherlands and instead went directly to gnawing on france, I get thrown all these events about losing 100% of any income from "dutch" lands.

My option? Get about 7 or 8 times revolts of 30k rebels, no big deal.

Mine takes forever too, and I have an SSD. It makes me feel like I'm back in the Spectrum 48k days.

I take it you can't offer to buy provinces from people?

I kind of want to start again, but I'm on 1570 and am the only one with colonies in North America. The problem is that I'm way behind on tech. I had the English 0-0-0 60 year long king from the start obviously, and now I have a 67 year old 2-1-0 queen. All I can really do right now is build up infrastructure and colonise places while old Europe gets annoyed with me.

On the other hand, I now get how colonising works and almost get how trade works (I spent ~100 years building up trade power in a node that was going 100% to the Dutch, I also had a merchant collecting from London when that happens anyway)

regarding balancing techs and national ideas since both take leader points.

in my england game, i had two national ideas, one diplo, one military, and i ran way over on admin pts. I was to the point where i was getting penalties for being multiple years ahead of time on admin tech. I think my base play will be to always stay as close to the ahead of time tech penalty as possible, but when i would take a penalty, instead get an idea. This would change if an idea would bring a crucial advancement.

I've been playing for 13 hours now and none of my achievements unlocked. How come? I am new to Steam.

same here, everytime i load a save it says save started by another player, achievements disabled. i'm not sure what this means. i assume i need to create a profile or something, but i dont know where to do that.

You only get achievements if you are playing on ironman mode

oh man changing a big country's religion is a huge way to kill them.

only the capital will be the new religion but the rest will have like triple the rebels and all kinds of ****. Just tried with austria, amazing lol.

(I should know, I switched to protestant before they all came and i only had 32% prot and ****ed my life)

From my ~30 hours of play so far (staycation op, lol goofy) it seems like the most optimal move for western europe non-colonizers is to go diplomatic idea 1st, then military, then maybe religious (if you are large and converting), then probably another military idea.

Reasons for this:
Admin seems like by far the most important stat, especially early on. You need admin tech 4 to get your first idea asap, then you still need admin to get subsequent ideas at 7 and 10. Plus you also need frequent large chunks of admin for boosting stability and for coring. Plus all of the tax buildings require a bit. Therefore imo admin idea early on is dumb because you have no admin to waste.

Diplomatic points by contrast don't have anywhere near as much use early on. Changing culture, reducing war exhaustion, and peace deals are the ones off the top of my head. Diplomacy also has some decent groups, trade being by far the best if you can make use of it, as +2 merchants and all those nice trade modifiers can bring in tons of income early game. Diplomatic very strong in some ways, meh in others, more diplomats/diplo rep/lower core creation/more relations is great, but the capstone is very subpar and rev/counter-rev seems pretty worthless. Naval extremely powerful for any naval country, with +1 morale off the bat and +100% forcelimits as the 3rd idea easily giving you naval superiority over anyone without naval idea. And obv the colonization stuff useful if you are rushing to do that.

You can't afford to initially fall behind in mil tech, as you need to get men at arms asap since they are massively better than the starting infantry. You also want to be getting all the little shock/morale/width/etc bonuses and especially the tactics bonuses. You start with .5 tactics and get +.25 at techs 4/6/7/8 which is an enormous increase. Tactics reduces the amount of damage your troops take in combat. Due to all these very important early techs, you can't afford to dump points in a mil idea early on, despite some fantastic initial bonuses in a few groups. However, mil doesn't have as many point sinks as admin, so you will eventually become ahead of time in tech. Luckily, that doesn't start to happen until you are close to getting admin 7 for your second idea, so once you go ahead of time in mil tech and are getting close to the idea, save up to the max, then when you get your 2nd idea pick defensive/offensive (which seem like the best early mil ideas), and get 1-2 ideas. After that, just keep getting techs when you are no longer ahead of time, otherwise when you get back ahead of time in tech get more ideas.

tl;dr: Diplomacy idea group--->mil idea group seems optimal, even though mil >>> diplomacy groups in general.

Not posting in EU3 thread since its effectively dead:

Death and Taxes Q:

whats up with regiment replenishing guys, its soooooooo slooooooooowwwww. basically make even-ish wars impossible with any kind of revolt risk in your provinces since it literally takes 12 months just to replenish your rebel fighting force

IMO you should take them all down and move your capital to Johor or something, any good Malay-culture city. Then try to change culture to Malay and set the next goal of forming the Malay nation.

You'll need a few big ships to take them on - Lights are bad in combat, and they all have a couple Bigs. The upside is that once you've dealt with the Muslims+Majaphatit, you can probably disband them to save maintenance costs (.5 ducat per month per big, yikes). Euros will probably have 3rd tier ships by the time they reach you past India, so it'll be difficult to compete with them at sea. AI Japan usually goes more for Korea, not sure what Ming does except for fail.

I mostly agree. Admin points are too valuable for getting cores and making buildings to spend seriously on an early idea until 3rd or 4th. Military tech gives great boosts just from raising it, so you'll want to keep up to compete, but eventually (around tech 8, I find) you'll be hitting the ahead of time penalty.

Someone did the math for the Demo, where tech cost 500 MMP, and you only needed 3.2 points/month to keep up perpetually as a Western nation. 600 point techs is 20% more so do that expansion - 3.84 MP/month. So a simple way of thinking is that just being in the western tech group and having a 1 point advisor will give you 4 MP/month, enough to keep up in tech. Your Monarch's stats are gravy, for getting ideas, making buildings, etc.

It's not that simple in practice because of costs, but only Admin has serious costs really - for Cores and Stability. Diplo and Military have less things to spend on, so more points for ideas (and less issue if you go over the leader limit and pay upkeep, for example).

In my Prussia game I went Diplomatic Ideas first for the many bonuses it gives (+1 Diplomat, cheaper cores, more relations and reputation). Then Econ, hoping to get the 2nd tier building discount early, and planned on Militay 3rd. But it took so ****ing long to get my 3rd idea unlocked from Admin tech that my Mil points maxed out twice and force me to take hugely ahead of time tech. I could have gotten more bonuses from my National ideas line unlocked early by taking Military 2nd to have the point dump, and some of them help me make/save money which is a similar end result as Econ.