In my Portugal game, I destroyed Castille, PU'd Naples and vassalized Aragon. The latter didn't take that in stride now I realize I have 750 (SEVEN FIDDY!!!) aggressive expansion negative opinion modifier (wasn't aware of that problem ... That means I can annex in 250 years if I' m lucky.

Also Tuscany is coming after me since I am "dishonorable scum". Only problem is they are in a coalition against me with Uber-France. For real, France is just broken ...

Sounds like you have to africa/america then

Ok, first let me say this game is awesome. I really, really wanted to get into EU3 but it just seemed to buggy and difficult to just jump in. This game is easier, tho still very complex.

Couple of questions: any good strategies for making money? As Castille, I've managed to conquer most of the Iberian Peninsula, expanded into Morocco and have four different colonies in the Caribbean in 1592. No idea if that's good or bad...

Just about every time I get some semblance of cash, I get this "National Bank is lending to idiots" or something like that, and I lose like 200, 300, 500 ducats!! WTF is this?!?! Any way to mitigate it? I picked Economy as my first idea. In retrospect, probably should have went with something else because I don't see much gain. If I'm supposed to be 'smarter' in economy, then why the **** am I always having issues with my national bank?

Also trade. Can somebody PLEASE explain the deal with transferring trade power to nodes? I don't understand it.

I'll shut up now. I love this game.

For the National Bank in Trouble thing, I'm not positive exactly how the game's scripting works but I see this in the events:

It looks like that's triggered by a pulse that fires every 5 years that will basically just fire a random event related to your idea groups. By that logic, you shouldn't be getting this event all that often, since there are 10 other events that can happen from economic ideas:

not to mention that you probably have other idea groups too by 1592. If you're getting the same bad event a lot, I imagine you're just running bad.

For trade, see this post: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=244

That helped me a lot, let us know what questions you have after reading it.

Cliffs:
- trade power in a node lets you control a proportional amount of that node's trade - i.e. if you have 20 trade power in a node with 150 total (the sum of every nation's trade power who's trading there), you control 13% of the trade
- with a merchant, you can either collect from trade (turn it into $$) or transfer trade power (move that trade downstream to another node)
- collecting has an 80% penalty if it's done anywhere outside the trade node that your capital province is in, so your strategy should basically be to transfer as much trade as possible to your home node and collect it there
- you get trade power from...
a.) having provinces in that node (see trade map to see what provinces go with what node)
b.) having light ships protecting your trade in a node

Example: VENICE



Here we can see the bulk of my trading. I have merchants in Alexandria (forwarding to Venice), Crimea (forwarding to Constantinople), Constantinople (forwarding to Ragusa), Ragusa (forwarding to Venice), and Venice (collecting dat $$$). Also have one offscreen in Genoa, collecting there (with the 80% penalty ) since I don't really have better options for him.

I'm doing pretty serious work in Constantinople, helping to transfer about 2/3 of the value of the trade node out of there. I dominate Ragusa and send tons of $$ to my home of Venice, and control about 1/3 of the trade in Alexandria which I'm sending directly to Venice.

How am I doing this? Let's take a look!



In Alexandria, I have a small amount of trade power from provinces (Cyprus, Crete) and a slightly larger amount of trade power from a small group of light ships. This gives me the most power in the node, but as it's fairly crowded I have about 1/3 of the total trade power. The node isn't super rich, so I'm choosing to devote most of my light ships to other nodes. However, a long-term goal of mine over the next 100 years or so will be to make Alexandria a bigger priority, since it takes in trade from the Gulf of Aden which has connections to India and East Asia, and if I can use my fleet to start taking control of that whole trade route and direct it to Venice I'll be drowning in ducatzzz.

Constantinople has the Ottomans with tons of power, from both deploying light ships and having most of the provinces that trade in that node. I have only one province (Naxos), but deploy about 40 light ships to get myself on equal footing with them.

I have 20-25 ships in Ragusa, which gives me total domination over that node and allows me to forward the vast majority of trade there to Venice.

And of course, in Venice, you can see in the first screenshot I have 221 power in the node, which is about 80% of the total power there and lets me collect almost all the monies. I have no ships in Venice; it's all from the provinces in that node that I own, and from having lots of buildings (marketplaces, trade depots, canals, road networks) in those provinces which all boost the amount of trade power that those provinces will give me in the node they belong to.

Very good explanation, thanks.

One of the interesting problems is figuring out how to most optimally deploy your light ships. For example, take Constantinople, where the Ottomans have ~250 power. Let's assume that they're the only player in that node (ignoring me), and let's say that each ship I deploy gives me 5 trade power there. How much money is each ship making me?



As we can see, sending the first 3 ships is a huge value, but the more I send the less value I'm getting from each ship. With several different nodes in play, and taking into account that, for example, not all of the money I get from Constantinople goes to me (it goes to Ragusa, which I'm only pulling ~80% of the trade from), it's fun to figure out how to most optimally deploy my fleet.

Maybe I'll write a computer program to solve trade efficiency when I'm not working 70 hours a week anymore (aka in November). Seems like you could use a greedy algorithm and just keep stashing ships wherever they give you the greatest marginal utility at each step of the way.

Random complaint of the day: seems like forming nations kind of blows in EU4? Like, when you form Italy, you get claims (not cores, motha****in CLAIMS) on the entire Italian region. So, to actually take those claims, you still need to accrue the same aggressive expansion/overextension penalties as you would to do any kind of ordinary conquering and spend lots of administrative points on coring. Aside from the culture union bonus for countries like Spain or Italy or Scandinavia (does Russia get that too?), idk what the benefit really is besides saving you some time fabricating claims.

Well, for some nations forming a country gives you a new idea set, I know Italy and the Netherlands have different ideas, and at least in the case of the netherlands the ideas are vastly better than any country you could use to form it. Netherlands also gets the Dutch Republic, which is similarly awesome.

I guess for some Italian nations that might be cool. For Venice, switching to Italian ideas would be a significant step backwards.

Yeah I remember somebody telling me that the Italian idea set was pretty bad

Even worse is if you convert to italy as venice, you become a monarchy so you lose your merchant republic bonuses

three words

ironman.
timurids.
westernisation.

three more words

watch out ottomans.

So if you load a manually saved game, achievements are disabled? Do I have that right?

Also thanks for all the tips from the vets.

Achievements are disabled unless you choose to play ironman, that's what the bit about saved games means.

So I was out of town for corporate training retreat the week after EU launched and have not followed what's been going on too much (been reading bits and pieces of the thread).

When is the MP game? Can I join?

This time around, I cannot play weekends. Would have to be weeknights, Eastern US time.

Discoveries of a naval path to India finally trickled down to me, so I did some work on this front:



This has added wayyyyyyyy more value to Alexandria than was there before, so I adjusted my fleets a bit to get more power there and less in Constantinople:



So, Venice is now $$$$$$$. I think my next step is to go Expansion ideas and start colonies around SE Asia (starting with the Maldives) to use as a base of operations for taking over the Asia -> Europe trade routes.

But at the very end of my session, a surprise appeared:

The AI having maneuver generals is so deeply, deeply frustrating. I'm Moscow, I kill Lithuania's stack and it retreats about 5000 miles away. I chase, it gets there a week before me and is able to shatter retreat again another 5000 miles. I lose manpower and he barely does.

Blocking the Bosporus still OP:



The peace deal recreates Byzantium...



FOR ME TO POOP ON



Got expansion idea group unlocked + my first colonist working away in the Maldives, ghana build shipyards errywhere to jack my naval forcelimits way up and have my trade fleet hit the Indian Ocean!

This game would be perfect, except.......

The AI has no idea how to war. Lithuania, Sweden, Denmark, Kazan, and someone else go alliance against me (Muscovy) and start a war. My vassals, who are completely and utterly worthless join in on my side, but at the start of the war, I'm outnumbered about 55k to 25k.

Managed to get the War Score to +20% before getting a White Peace deal done. AI could have easily rolled me, but seems to have no concept of pushing a front line while executing sieges behind, opting instead to post 25k troops in a single country siege while I maneuver around and take 5 countries with 2k troops in each country. Easy game.

It simply can't be very hard to program a better military AI, can it?

It probably is, or else they would have done it. Controlling troops may be limited enough in scope that there are generalized game theory-esque solutions for how the AI could take better advantage of outnumbering their opponent, but you have to remember that programming algorithms for problems that the human brain finds readily apparent solutions for can be VERY difficult depending on the problem.

I would hope that 1 on 1 it would fight better, but the fact that their 55k troops are spread all over the place certainly doesn't make the AI's job in your war easier.

The AI's ability to wage large scale war is definitely a big problem.

I am really not a fan, at all, of how easy it is to core/convert new provinces now either. I've always felt conversion/core in EU/Vicky were too difficult to the point it wasn't really a sandbox game (empires are confined, more or less, by predefined scripts) but 10 years to core and convert a new province just feels OP to me. I'm also not a big fan of coring before converting. It seems to me, historically, people convert (culturally and usually religiously) before a land becomes "core."

But then Great Britain recruited tons of soldiers out of India so I don't know.

Coring speed seems fine to me. You can't just run over and take everything in sight, and you get limited by coalitions.

Maybe costs could be rebalanced a bit, but the ability to manipulate mechanics effectively with monarch points is wonderful. In EU3, you cored things by sitting around and waiting, which makes it an effective constraint on expansion, but not a fun thing to play with. In EU4, you have to decide whether to use ADM for stability or cores or tech or ideas, which is a fun strategic decision.