I had 90 hours played on Eu4, 85 of those just being on vanilla, so playing with all the DLC I basically need to relearn everything.
For my first game I started as Ottomans and just ****ed around doing the usual Ottoman things, eating everything small around me and ****ing up the Mamluks. Very first change I noticed was before I even unpaused the game, you have to wait a month before you can declare war, wtf. After a dozen or so hours playing to refresh the basics I decided to move on.
My second (and current) game I decided to make a custom nation. I set the options to Random New World, Random Nations, and Random Tax & Manpower in provinces. I made a 7-8 province country in central Italy and started. One thing I wish is that it named the random nations after their regional counterparts. The only options are using randomly generated names (which sucks) or historical names (but with no regard for region).
Loading up the map I see that directly to the north of me is the one province Holy Roman Emperor with a 21k army. During the one month forced peace he reduces his army to 6k and I immediately war and annex him because lol **** the Emperor.
I decide I'm going to focus on colonizing, despite not picking anything colonization related when I created my nation. While I'm waiting on that to get started I go to work conquering the rest of the Italian peninsula, which is generally made up of poor provinces. I also grab Sicily, Malta, and Baleares while I start working my way west along the northern Mediterranean coast. First actual goal is to get the eastern Atlantic islands, all three of which are owned by Shan. Shan is allied with some forgotten nation which covers the southern Iberian peninsula who I have a Trade Embargo CB against so I go to war and take all three islands and the forgotten country.
At this point while waiting for explorers to do their thing I get in several wars with HRE members and the Emperor. I turned Protestant at the first chance I got and converted all my provinces. Eventually I discover the New World. It is comprised of a North and South continent, the south is Mayan religion and nations, while the North is Naive American tribes.
Around this point I'm basically just on cruise control not doing anything when I get a pop-up telling me I have been elected Holy Roman Emperor. WTF. I check and the HRE consists of ~25 members and two electors, both of which are Protestant. As the largest Protestant nation I guess they figured I'd be a good choice for Emperor despite the fact of having no provinces in the HRE and everyone in the HRE hating my ****ing guts due to the constant wars. Also all the Catholics hate my guts because I've annexed the OPM Papal States twice.
So I say **** it I might as well get a refresher in the HRE as well. I proceed to add all my provinces to the HRE and start forcing some OPMs to switch to Protestant and make them electors. This continues for a long time and I go about passing reforms and get up to Revoke the Privilegia. I ****ed up a little bit here because about 8 nations refused so they leave the HRE but I get claims on them. So I have 25 years to get all my claims back so I set out on a series of wars to reclaim them and instead of annexing like I should have I make most of them vassals and annex the rest. I'm at the end of 25 years in a war with the largest former HRE member, I annex everything I can and then I almost break from overextension. My overextension was 198% and I start getting 32k stacks of rebels popping everywhere. The next bit was basically just trying to squash rebels while I cored everything.
About 5 years ago I finally got all the rebels under control and am now basically unstoppable. I field a 204k army while my vassals field an additional 300k. Currently the next largest army is 64k.
In the New World on the southern continent I've basically had to expand myself as my colonial nations are doing jack ****. On the northern continent my colonial nations are blood thirsty savages always at war. Only other two countries to make it to the New World are Scotland and Fez.
I'm going to keep playing for a while just to see how big I can grow. My strategy is to start wars and let my vassals do everything, then annex as much as I can and repeat.
Current Maps:
Last edited by Daer; 11-13-2017 at 08:05 PM.