The EU4 edition of a phalanx on a mountain. They haven't yet dared attack into it yet, but they have been running around a lot with huge doom stacks, which leads to:



I think Commonwealth has at least been doing a ****load of fighting against Russia/Ottomans, but idk what the **** excuse France has. Running around and **** with 100+ stacks (yes, that happened) and all the attrition that goes with it has reduced them from ~80k army with 80k manpower behind it to what you see here. I think Spain's going to be joining them soon if this trend keeps up.

I bought Art of War last weekend and started a game as Timurids.

Seems like Paradox did their best to slow the game down. Some of these changes were before Art of War but this is basically the first time I've played since vanilla EU4.

- Truces last too long. Annex a country and you end up with a 15 year truce with everyone else in the war. This made expanding into India a pain in the ass since I'd generally be at war with 3-5 nations at a time.
- 10 years to replenish manpower. This definitely slows you down but I would think it has more effect of mid to late game when you are surrounded by monsters. Early on you can pick off the weak without worrying much about manpower.
- Claims lasting 25 years only and not being refreshed by war. Not as bad if you are just fabricating claims but if you inherit a bunch of claims it makes them far less valuable.
- There are probably others but these are the biggest.
- One change I like (or is at least beneficial) is no more cascading alliances.


So when I started as Timurids I immediately released Persia. This basically cut the Timurids in half. This created a monster vassal and got rid of the problems that usually come from playing a horde. One downside of this is that I basically ignored expanding west and 150 years later I will have a monster Ottomans on my doorstep stretching from basically Austria right to my Persian border and down through Egypt.

I mainly just focused on getting the Indian provinces I needed to form the Mughals.

Another mistake I made was switching governments too early away from Horde, which I did relatively quick. This slowed my expansion down and basically eliminated expanding north. 150 years later Russia will be colonizing to the Pacific. I should have at least waited until I had all the provinces I needed to form the Mughals.

Eventually I form the Mughals (it seemed to take me way too long, almost 100 years) and I get claims over the entire Indian subcontinent. At this point I happily begin fighting my Indian neighbors. And make another big mistake. Up until this point I had failed to notice that claims only lasted 25 years and not 50. I notice this while I am still fighting in northwestern India when I see all my claims will expire in 2 years. I also notice that based on the wars I have been fighting that going to war over a claim doesn't renew the 25 year period. Well **** I'm about to lose India. With a few months left before my claims run out I go to war with another country and annex them at a date later then the claim would have run out if I hadn't declared war. Immediately after they are annexed I lose the claims on the provinces I just annexed so I now have to pay full cost to core the provinces.

So basically I played no where near optimal (bordering on straight up bad) and I'm at 1590 with a much smaller Mughal Empire than I should be. I have a monster Ottomans on my doorstep who I hope continue to ignore me and I'm probably only a decade or two from Portugal getting into India. I'll probably continue playing this save until I can Westernize for the achievement to westernize a steppe horde.

------------------------------

I don't know how long this has been in the game but I notice the AI now just basically puts all its units into a doomstack to try and crush you. This is good and bad for the AI since before you could just take their armies out one by one and carpet siege them but of course now they are running across 16 supply provinces with a stack of 30k even in the relative early game.

Players + vassals map



Like i said, I'm much weaker than I look cause most of my land on that map is vassals .

Because you're all centered in Europe, Russia is going to crush if there isn't a huge alliance against him soon. Commonwealth should be looking to remove vodka right now while their power is high, probably with Scandinavia and the Horde. Once Russia starts taking high value Asian provinces it's GG.

AKA what always happens . Would be great to have a manchu player or something expanding west to block them but who wants to play SP in asia for 3 sessions? At least we have golden horde that will compete with them for central asia.

My Timurids->Mughals game. Kind of want to restart to see how I can do now that I have an actual idea what I should be doing.



Portugal and Castille both have provinces in South Africa.

I'm 9th in income, 4th in manpower and my treasury in 5x the country in #2.

Wow is that TO?

Indeed. And Sweden inherited Bohemia and Russia inherited Denmark. Oirat Horde has also gone HAM, they are the grey country to my northeast, not a big threat though.

Keep us posted on that MP game please, Nonfiction. It looks like a really good one.

I'm curious what Brandenburg's strategy has been so far?

Haven't been paying much attention to that part of the world but its been something like:
1) dec AI TO for Neumark, lose, forced to pay bunch of gold and war reparations
2 watch player Bohemia get wrecked by Poland and Austria while you are still crippled from the TO war and unable to join in due to no any army or money
3) watch player Bohemia conquer Neumark while you still have peace with TO
4) war Bohemia w/ Poland and Austria, receive Neumark + 1-2 other provinces idk, Bohemia now ded
5) Ally w/ Sweden against Hansa, big PVP war, conquer Pommerania

I guess he took a few random HRE minors too

Started a new Poland game. First time around I didn't realize that the way you get a PU with Lithuania is by having +1 stability before your regency ends and then enacting a decision, so I restart and do that.

TO is allied with Hungary and Sweden, and I'm allied with Sweden, so to get into a war with TO with Sweden on my side instead of theirs I declare on Hungary. The plan works but I failed to realize I was two military techs behind Hungary and TO and me and Lithuania get utterly destroyed in battle. I have to release Moldavia to get out of the war.

15 years pass while I wait for manpower to recover. My king dies and for unknown reasons (relations are +164??) Lithuania breaks away from the PU. They have a larger army than me and there's no way I can force it again. I'm too depressed to continue on in this game.

The only thing keeping me going is that it APPEARS that the death of Lithuania's monarch will restore the PU. His heir is listed as someone with the same name, age, and stats as my king. Please hold one time RNG.

eta: nope, they had another heir show up. ****, there's a few hours down the drain.

No world map yet, but played til 1518, though I had to leave early and missed the last ~20 years or so. We were up to iirc 17 ppl today.

The session saw the emergence of two major competing coalitions. France organized a large one against Austria consisting of Hansa, France, Burgundy, Venice, and numerous HRE minors, as Austria had generated a large amount of AE. However, a counter-coalition against France was also formed of Castile, Savoy, Austria, Brandenburg, England, and AI Portugal. A decade long standoff occurred while furious diplomacy behind the scenes saw England flipped to the pro-France Alliance while the Ottomans were bribed into the anti-French coalition. In 1492, tensions boiled over, and Castile declared war.

A map of the start of the war, with all combatants except England who joined immediately after this picture:



Castille began the war with 60,000 French troops sitting in the Pyrenees mountains. Expecting the French to invade, Castillan forces fell back and scorched the earth behind them. Initially, the French did invade, followed by the Burgundians and The Hansa, looking to knock Castile out of the war before turning on other coalition members. However, the Austrian and Savoyard led invasion of French Occitania eventually convinced the french to abandon their positions in a vain attempt to overrun the coalition sieges. Castillian troops marched northward and arrived just in time to join the epic battle of Languedoc, where French, Burgundian, and Hanseatic troops attacked the invasion force. Thanks to legendary Austrian general Clemens von Stark, the Coalition armies triumphed over the French alliance.



Retreating after the Battle of Languedoc, several French armies were overrun and destroyed. It was at this point that the French king, alarmed by the turn of events, asked for terms despite his allies being viciously opposed to peace. Preliminary terms were sent, but contemptuously rejected, leading to a resumption of the war.

In the east, Ottoman troops marched steadily into the Venetian Balkans as while a massive Ottoman fleet, joined by the large Iberian fleets, blockaded Venice. The Ottomans and Venetians largely countered each other, with neither playing a major part in the decisive theaters of the war. Venice wisely chose a policy of withdrawal from the Balkans, avoiding combat where possible. Soon, possibly prompted by French diplomacy (although maybe also acting on their own), Moscow + PLC warred the Golden Horde, an Ottoman ally. This forced the Ottomans to pull their navy and army back from Venetian territory to help their ally, largely knocking them out of the war, although not before they removed Venice as a threat.

Following several other failed attempts to break Coalition sieges, The French Alliance, evidently deciding that the battle for southern France had been lost, pushed eastward into Coalition member Brandenburg (who wisely preserved their army by retreating east through poland). Austria and Savoy responded by moving the bulk of their armies east as well while Italian vassals and Castillian forces spread out to siege as many french provinces as possible. When Brandenburg was mostly occupied, the French allies engaged Savoy's main army in Bohemia, believing it to be isolated. However, Austrian and Brandenburgian forces soon reinforced the brave army of Savoy, leading to another major battle. Despite being massively outnumbered, Clemens von Stark was once again able to win a decisive victory.




With the defeat in Austria, their armies shattered, half of France occupied, and venice almost completely occupied, the French Alliance finally surrendered to the Castillian Coalition.



All nations of the French Alliance, save England, were forced to give up lands and territories to the coalition. France lost its Iberian lands to Castille and Dauphine to Savoy. Venice lost several Balkan provinces to the Ottomans and ceded Brescia, a Milanese core, back to Milan. Burgundy released several HRE minors. Hansa too released several HRE minors and ceded 2 provinces to Brandenburg. In their separate war, Golden Horde sued for peace, being forced to release Crimea and cede border lands to Moscow. After three long years, there was peace.

@ goofy
Think your pu broke because your prestige was low when your king died and you had no heir.

I restarted as Timurids and I'm doing better but I ended up with maybe an even bigger Ottoman Empire. Still have 30 years to play until I'm at the same point as my first game and I'll post info/pictures then.

plagarism! imo

Mapmaker put dickbutts all over me and ottomans cause we kept demanding a map . Not shown: I have eastern Sicily. West sicily is Mamluks. AI savoy ended the session at war with siena and naples so the rest of italy should be mine and Italy formed ASAP. Colonial race looks like its heating up with 6 competitors so far.

lol

I just finished the book The Thirty Years War that Ratamahatta recommended earlier in the thread, thanks again, was a fantastic read. I guess this is next:

Any other suggestions from the history readers here? Is Churchill's series about WWII worth reading?

Think I previously recommended this one, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-Great-Powers/dp/0679720197
Just read The Guns of August due to 100 year anniversary of start of WW1, it was pretty amazing:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Guns-August-Pulitzer-Prize-Winning/dp/0345476093

Everything I have read in the Penguin History of Europe series has been top notch.

Hey guys, just started this game. I'm playing the Ottoman empire from the very beginning. I did the exploration as my first national idea, but my range is way too short to get to any colonies. Is there a way to increase that range so I can colonize the Americas/Carribean islands before 1490s. I'm at 1468 right now and have made Constatinople the capitol, and have reclaimed almost all of the cores and have conquered a few other provinces and made them cores as well.

Also I'm still very confused about trading and what the merchants do. I stopped collecting trade once I conquered Constatinople, but I don't know where/what to do with my other merchant. Should I be collecting or transferring trade power?

Exploration is not a commonly taken idea by the Ottomans, at least early on. You're going to be limited to Africa right now, I would try to get to the Sinai peninsula and get to the Horn from the east from conquering or getting the Indian Ocean islands, that should give you enough to slingshot to the Caribbean. You'll be later than the western Europeans though. The only thing else besides the idea that increases your range is to increase your diplomatic technology.

Nobody understands trade. I generally collect in the node that my capital is in, and forward from the most lucrative node that directs into my capital node.

My entire economic plan in every single EU3 and EU4 game I have ever played is to build a temple in my provinces.

Based on this:

For Ottomans, if you only have 2 merchants you want to transfer trade from Alexandria and Crimea. Aleppo is not as critical because it either goes to Alexandria or Constantinople, but if you have 3 merchants, also transfer from Aleppo. If you have 4+ merchants (aka you took trade ideas), also transfer from Astrakhan. If you are conquering your way into Europe/the Balkans, you will have a lot of provinces in Ragusa node, so maybe consider also collecting there if you have more than 2 merchants.

That's what I did, I transferred from Alexandria and another node that goes into Constantinople. I read somewhere that if your capitol is in the trade node you don't need to send a merchant to collect. Starting to really hate my first pick for exploration seeing that I can't do anything with it. Ughh. The first ship/explorer that I sent around the horn of Africa sank due to attrition.