FWIW, I like the country building aspect and not so much the smaller more precarious countries (read being vassalized). I will often go to an old save if things go very poorly.

Scotland or Sweden are good choices to start for me. With Sweden quickly colonize the boardering places until you do not have a colonization upkeep (look at the provodence it should tell you, get >1000 settlers). When Scotland, try to start the historical event that gives you a large rebellion force. You can beat the British if you try and use your early armies judiciously.

Don't pick a small country or you will be randomly demolished. I don't suggest the middle of several enemies either. Aragon Castile Naples anything in the Germany or Greece areas fit this description imo.

Tactically do not make many allies. Your allies will call you to arms and if you don't respond they will drop you. Only make allies with countries who are aligned against your major threat. You never know, your enemy could make enemies with a strong country and they will do much of the work for you. If they call you to arms, you have to respond. Turn off merchant autosend or save 100 gold budget cushoin. If you don't the autosend will bankrupt you and ninja force you to make new loans. Don't over inflate, >8% will be very hard to pull out of.

Pick your starting goverment investments wisely, you will buy the central bank if you get too many loans early. Catholics have +1 colonist which saves a government upgrade. Non-catholics will often have to invest a government for more colonistts. You are unlikely to reach higher than a 9 government so the upgrades past that are not not worth considering imo.

Don't be afriad to ditch a government upgrade later if it not helpful. Army tradition is very hard to earn unless you are **** kicking around the world. When you buy a general your army tradition is lowered, as well as when you buy various retainers that are military based. If you have a low army tradition do not try to raise it or it will be a waste. Concentrate your money on prestige and staying out of trouble. If you start a war you can't finish them pay off your enemies to settle the war.

Personally, I find the best slider strategy is to specialize either way. 5 Quantity will produce powerful large armies. 5 Quality will produce high moral/leadership units that are also very strong. A middle of quality/quantity will suck at both. Spies are great, and so is compete chance, but either of them is more powerful then neither of them. Make your choice and live with it.

If you are a miltary based country, be less afraid of spawning rebels or starting fights with smaller neighbors. Be careful with who you start a fight with. If they have a large ally you might get beat down. One large power will never stand a good chance versus two large countries. However, you need to keep your generals in a fight. Each battle gives you army Tradition and you leak more tradition than any retainer can get you. Even with military tradition retainer and a army focused slider, you will probably still leak a small amount of military tradition each years. You can only keep a >10% army tradition if you keep fighting battles. I hear war taxes are imbalanced, but I personally try not to abuse them.

Leave a small 1 army force behind after you battle. 1 army will capture a providence slower, but it is better to keep your main army fighting enemies and rebels. If you can get a large number of spies and bank account, those are quite powerful too. Generally larger countries spawn larger rebels, so it is a great way to try to turn an imbalanced fight you are losing. Don't let your allies get sacked either, or you are likely next. After the initial expansion of the game, you can often overtake your ally and force some sort of vassalation, but you should expand together first until you dominate your enemies and gain power together.

- I hope this is just advice for noobs, cause this isn't that true once you know what you're doing
- What's Castille doing in this list? They're possibly the easiest country to play for a new player. Scotland seems hard too since the British will spend the whole game trying to take your **** and they're not an easy adversary.

Austria is also v powerful despite being surrounded by enemies, Holland/Hansa are popular choices in multiplayer as they become insanely strong economically (the only sweat for Holland is whether or not Burgundy eats their lunch early on when they're trying to form the Netherlands, iirc).

Just my take.. maybe a leak..

Because you are certainly going to be an enemy of whoever succeeds in France. Before this you will have some years fighting Morocco (who you outclass) but after this period I find 'France' a very tough enemy. The Ottomans are also very strong and have access to S Europe via Mediterranean, as well as Casus Belli via your Catholic Heritage and war with Morocco.

As Scotland Britain is certainly a strong enemy early. If you get the jump on Britain early or match allies properly you can easily get a lead versus them. Once you are close to evenly matched evenly you get many many bonus armies (like 3+ 16000-17000 person armies) and can easily take them. Once you dominate the UK you can easily expand without threat from futher enemies. Maybe Denmark or one of those guys will try to bully you.

Personally I don't like to fight with France from here. You can handle Castille but Burgandy/Aragon/Brittany will turn you to mincemeat. France doesn't have the same problems with the Ottomans, and other than some border skirmishes with Naples et al, they can fight a more or less 1 front war. While Castille will have 2 enemies or randomly get attacked by two enemies at the same time..

I don't like to start fights I can't finish. N Europe is relatively isolated from the trouble spots. There are less place to colonize but that game play comes in late in the game anyway. Just don't get pulled into the Wars in France or Scandinavia. Those places are death traps and if you do not pick allies carefully, things will quickly spin out of control.

If you are Sweden stay out of the conflicts between norvood hansa etc. You need to concentrate on taking Scandinavia and it is the only thing important to you in the first 200 years.

Castille is one of the easiest countries in the game to play.

Before I started with the linked tutorial, I was going with the ottomans. They should be powerhouses in that time frame.

Yeah Castille, France, Austria, & Ottomans are all very powerful and probably the easiest countries to play.

As Castille you don't really have to fight France. You get missions to expand into Italy at some point (with corezzz), all of northern Africa is yours to take what you wish, and by the time all that is done you can start setting your eyes towards the New World. If France winds up wanting to fight you the Pyrenees give you an extremely defensible position and your navy ****s on theirs; you might not take territory from France, but they shouldn't be able to take any from you.

Yeah Castille is 1 of the superpowers, even AI Castille usually winds up a superpower even if they never form Spain. Its actually super annoying seeing AI Castille never taking Aragon but owning all of North Africa and parts of Arabia and Turkey. I've never played them because too easy but iirc you get a mission to get aragon in a personal union, when you inherit them you get free cores and get a decision to become spain which grants you some bonuses like +2 centralization, and some free tax. It also makes you a sexier color of yellow which is invaluable in your further map painting endeavors.

After that you can easily absorb Portugal which is same culture group, has some very nice provinces (high tax, wine, good manpower), and removes your only early competitor for colonies. Only problem is AI Portugal will occasionally ally with France, in which case you need to wait it out because you likely are too weak to fight both, especially as a new played. But a lot of the time they ally with England who have no chance of stopping you before you 100% occupy Portugal. In fact killing Portugal before it colonises means you could technically ignore Europe for the rest of the game and still win since you can easily get the entire Caribbean, South America, and Aztecs. But no reason to ignore Europe since you get missions giving free cores on Italy and Italy is like the best area in the game for ridic tax + trade goods + manpower + free universities.

If you maintain high relations with France (or even an alliance) you are basically invulnerable because no one else can stop you. Hell once you unite Iberia you can even dunk France if they aren't fully unified by that point.

Excited for EU4 and procrastinating at work so gonna ramble on about some stuff, including Ottoman strategy and some multiplayer theory. Probably standard stuff for the EU3 multi vets but might help some new people and hopefully we get enough new people in EU4 that we can have EPIC 15+ people games, so probably some useful information .

I'm not sure I would include Ottomans as a superpower, sure in SP anything goes but in MP they can be tough as seen in our last MP game. With a good start they can be a superpower but its not guaranteed like Castille/France/Austria. Their stability costs are abysmal due to tons of poor, wrong culture, wrong religion provinces, combined with jizya decision which is enacted from the start which gives even more stab costs. They also obv have worse tech than Europe but thats made up with much better units until like land 18+. Also have to deal with Timurids to the east and Mamluks to the south which you are guaranteed to be fighting unlike say Austria who if they don't battle Bohemia is relatively safe.

Easily the best Ottoman strategy (for multiplayer at least) is to go ahistorical and basically ignore Europe. The Balkans are terrible provinces for the most part, poor, wrong culture, wrong religion, bad goods, bad manpower. This increases your already terrible stab and tech costs. The first decent provinces you can get expanding to the North and West are in the Ukraine, Italy, or Austria, and with a player Austria, Muscowy/Novgorod, and someone in Italy, those will be highly contested and lead to numerous costly wars. Best move is to simply vassalize the Balkan minors instead of annexing them, as they give you a useful buffer, some free troops, and give you some small amount of income without the accompanying increased tech and stab costs. They are also useful chips in peace deals if your European neighbors get jealous and decide to invade, as they cost you nothing to give away. The Middle East sucks too for the most part, but there are some decent provinces and they are at least same culture group and same religion.

If Timurids collapse on their own (or are crushed by you and then collapse ) you can vassalize the crappy Mideast minors and beeline to Persia and then India. Persia is wrong culture and religion but with max narrowminded you have plenty of missionaries and Persia has enough high tax provinces that you will gain Persian as an accepted culture. Besides that Persia has a ton of high tax, good trade good, high manpower provinces, and from there you can invade India, which is again wrong culture but extremely rich provinces in tax/goods/manpower. Let Europeans fight for Europe and spend years waiting for a return on their investment in their American colonies, peaceful OttoMANS will have the largest manpower in the game and the highest base tax. Even though with max narrowminded you will never westernize, your units are stronger until like the 1600s and we never make it that far anyways.

In most of the multi games we have played there hasn't been an Indian player (or if there was one, he was pretty weak/unsuccessful), which means India has been one of the most highly contested areas due to its wealth. Usually 1 or more colonizers rushes to get there (taking Ceylon/Sri Lanka first), but they have trouble projecting enough forces to take a lot of it early on as sending troops to India makes them weak in Europe. This means that a successful Ottomans can take most if not all of Northern and Western India at a minimum uncontested. IIRC the most epic of the multiplayer games in EU3 had an India divided in 3 between Ottomans/Spain/Milan which led to a huge Indian front in the eventual game ending world wars.

Edit: just found the final world map, basically this is what I'm blabbering on about, this is optimal Ottoman strategy. God this game was epic, which we had somehow finished and then converted to Victoria 2 .

I love playing Ottomans.

MORE MAP PORN

Unsuccessful Ottomans (think it was 1st time multiplayer for whoever was playing them, maybe Cornboy?):


SORRY MUGHALBRO HOW COULD I FORGET

Also bonus points for Hindustan

Yeah, that was me, definitely agree I played poorly. I had a ton of trouble with the Timurids that game, to be honest.

Also agree they seem to be a lot of fun - plenty of options for an intelligent player. That was not me!

I wish you guys played vicky 2, mp would be p solid

July preorder bonus is for the Byzantine Empire: adds events and unit models

Less than a month!!

From the other thread:

It looks like Mazovia, Lithuania, and I think Moldavia are all vassals/in unions with Poland (you can tell by the Poland-colored outline around them), so Poland's power basically extends through all those countries.

France starts off similarly - despite France appearing to be very fragmented, it has many vassal states like Orleans, Berry, and Auvergne when the game starts.

Also, power and size are not necessarily correlated - most of Lithuania's provinces are probably dirt poor and kinda ****ty, Hungary's position is pretty similar. Meanwhile Burgundy has one of the strongest positions in the game in that map cause dem low countries are RICH (though they'll be fighting with France like all the time). Venice too, looks like they have some very nice Italian provinces that Aquileia/Milan had in EU3 (which started in 1399 by the final expansion, EU4 starts in 1444 but eventually expansions will push it back earlier).

I want to see a full world map.

Good thread to read: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...FORE-POSTING!&

get hype

Presenting: Music that makes me want to play EU4

EU3 starting map for comparison:


Big changes/thoughts comparing the maps:
TO starts with Neumark, poor Brandenberg.
Livonian Knights (I'm guessing?) have 4-5 provinces that were TO provinces in Estonia area.
Venice STRONG, lol Milan
Burgundy is a monster now that it starts with the lowlands, and is connected due to owning Bar. Looks like the strongest country?
Likewise, France is much weaker, England starts with Normandy and Burgundy looks like it is stronger than France at start.
Hungary actually looks decently strong, no independent Transylvania means another 2-3 same culture provinces. Still poor obv but can likely field a decentish army.
Russia area is going to be much more interesting with the lack of the GH
Spain gonna also be interesting, Aragon is a legit power now with it starting with Sicily and Sardinia. Italy divided into Aragonese south and Venitian north plz.

I've never played this series, is it anything like total war?

If you guys like reading about European history, I would recommend this book about Thirty Years War.

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...is-our-mission

Ironman mode + cloud saves = WIN. I'll prob try it once, get frustrated, never play it again, but knowing it's there makes me feel safer when I go to sleep at night.

I don't think Burgundy has Bar in the new map, colors look sliiiiightly different. But yeah playing France looks like a solid challenge from this starting point.

btw, I think Naples starts in a union under Aragon, making their position even more intriguing.

Yeah on closer look you are right, Bar is a different color.

I wonder what India looks like.

Getting tilted now. Dying for this game so much, why can't I just forget about it for the next 3 weeks.