I finally figured out why I couldn't do Dar al-Islam achieve. I always thought the condition was to own all Muslim provinces.

Finally captured all Muslim provinces today with Yemen > Arabia. No achieve. Almost went insane scouring the map for that 1 Muslim province I missed somehow. Then I finally realized the condition was to make all the provinces I own Muslim. Since I wasn't going to try converting 200+ provinces, some of which had religious fervor, I restarted.

3 hours later as Ottomans, I got the achieve.

I felt like an idiot. lol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6J-NM3R-BI

^ start I am trying to use to get 3 mountains. Anyone with success with other strats?

Make ruler general. If he sucks, restart.
Build 2 transports, 1 cavalry, no CB-vassalize a minor in India or in Philippines. Madurai is the ideal vassal as they have ~10 dead cores.

Been perusing this thread and decided to check it out, but it's 40 bucks currently. that seems steep for a five year old game. I think I'll wait for a sale

Is 3 any good? They've got that for 15

Get 4 not 3, but wait for it to go on sale/at a cd-key website. After including the DLCs, you're spending way more than $40.

During sales the base game goes to 75% off and the DLC for 50% off so I'd just wait. Art of War and Common Sense are the most important DLCs.

I'd probably add Rights of Man to the list too. The ruler traits and consorts just make the game so much more fun.

Generally, the DLC you don't need are the following (I have them all though and all of them do add some content, but these are probably the worst value):

conquest of paradise
mare nostrum
third rome
rule britannia
res publica

These two are good, but fairly pricey:
Mandate of Heaven
Cradle of Civilization

Btw, would you guys be interested in trying out some multiplayer campaign. I have two friends who would be interested. Time would probably be evenings in Europe.

Yeah the chief negative I've seen in various reviews have nothing to do with the gameplay but rather that so many "essential" features require DLC purchases, driving up the cost substantially.

Thanks for the heads-up on 3, I'll skip it and wait for a sale, hopefully the summer sale includes it.

Quick googling shows a steam key for eu4 on sale on Kinguin.net for under $10 US. The DLC's are on sale for over 50% off also.

Maybe someone with experience buying from them can give you more info - wouldn't want you to buy the game from them, then find it was geo-locked to Russia or something.

It's encouraging that literally the only negative reviews about the game that I have seen revolve around cost. I don't recall seeing anything negative about the gameplay itself, other than in context of not being able to do this or that without DLC.

I also thought it was kind of weird the way a few reviews described it as "essential features are behind a PAY WALL." Wat the entire game is behind a PAY WALL for that matter.

For now it's on my wish list and I've always gotten e-mails when one of those items went on sale. I'll check out Kinguin.net tonight.

Pdox gets a lot of crap for the way they release the game and DLCs, but I don't really have a problem with it. I loved EU4 on release and thought it was already worth every penny, and it's weird for a review (which I guess would have to be written months/years after the game's release?) to be like "but I wanted to enjoy the Thirty Years' War mechanics without paying for The Art of War".

Plus ~every DLC release comes with a general gameplay patch that has non-DLC updates and changes. Multiple game systems have been overhauled since release and you don't necessarily need DLC to get those improvements.

I recommend going to isthereanydeal.com and setting watches on all the important DLCs people mentioned - it might not be immediately but they'll all go under $10 fairly often, I think.

Something that stood out negatively for me is that very little of the mechanics is explained in-game. Even after completing a full game I have only a vague idea how trading/merchants work. I don't think there is anything that explains army composition, eg. more than a certain number of cavallery is useless and that number depends on your tech and total army size.


I have played lots of strategy games including other Paradox titles. This one really requires you to do some research on the internet to figure out game mechanics.

To be fair EU4 also has so much more content than Civ games, for example, so explaining everything might just lead to information overload. But I agree, it would be helpful if there would be more ingame information about many things in the game.

For army, ideal composition depends on whether you want to save manpower or money. Full infantry line-up is generally the most cost effective for majority of the game as long as you don't over the force limit, but manpower and combat efficiency-wise you want your early armies to be X infantry and 2 cavalry and 1 artillery, post MIL level 16 you want X infantry, 0-2 cavalry and X artillery.

I have over 2000 hours into EU4 and can comfortably do WQs pretty reliably now and I am still finding random mechanics from time to time.

Namath - EU4 base game currently $10 (which is not an all-time low but basically as low as you'll regularly see it go on sale for) and most DLCs 50% off (generally a good deal - isthereanydeal.com says it's been more than a year since Art of War had any better ones, as an example) in the Paradox summer sale.

Heh, great example: I had no idea this existed until reading it just now

(with Art of War, when a province is sieged, you can turn the garrison of a fort into an army of infantry with size equal to the size of the garrison to fight the sieging army, and they'll go back to the garrison after the fight)

It is pretty useless mechanic, but it does have one use: when you want rebels to capture the fort asap (for example, with pretender rebels or revolutionary rebels), you can sortie to lose the siege quickly.

I figure if you have a tough fight against a big enemy stack and a high fort level (~8?), it could help to add those troops to the fight.

Also a member of the 2k hour club who is still finding stuff out.

Been playing a bit again doing some achievement hunting, Just finished Uncommonwealth (form commonwealth with Lithuania), first time playing Lithuania, and was a pretty fun game. Royal married Poland, when they get out of interregnum they have your dynasty, force PU with help from TO and Hungary, now its kind of like a standard Poland game, except Poland is richer than you (especially after it integrates vassals) and hates you since you forced PU. I had to keep spending points on developing Polish lands (which gives a huge decrease to liberty desire) which put me even further behind in tech. Which is annoying, since you start so far away from where institutions spawn. Also you are much poorer, trade is terrible, 1/2 your land is wrong religion, and it runs into the problem with lack of states.

The benefits over Poland though seem pretty nice. Can easily expand into Crimea and the steppe ASAP, and after giving the steppe to cossacks estate you can start spamming out the special cossack cavalry and get the +cav combat bonus. Can also switch to Orthodox which is a lot better than Catholic afaik, especially if you plan to go east and conquer all the Orthodox Rus. Plus with religious ideas you get deus vult cb against everything west of you for easy expansion.


Anyways in my game, AI Moscow was expanding like crazy as it usually does. Ottos also had a really fast start, went for Byz immediately which always is a huge early boost for them. Wound up losing an early war to them after they decced me for Theodoro, but they spent most of the war dunking Hungary so I gave them Theodoro for peace. Had planned to take TO and LO and move trade to Baltic, but realized I had to take out Moscow ASAP before they allied with Ottomans, which seems to always happen if Poland/Lith area is strong (and is dumb and ahistorical wtf EU4). Vassalized the remains of Novgorod and GH and then decced Moscow for their cores. It was a long and brutal war that I managed to end shortly before the Ottoman truce timer was up, preventing them from backstabbing me. Took the rest of the cores in a followup war and from there it got a little boring with Ottos as the only threat.

Stopped playing shortly after I formed Commonwealth at admin 10 and annexed Novgorod. Finally got pretty wealthy after taking Danzig and directing all trade from crimea/novgorod/kiev/krakow to the baltic sea. The polish unique age bonus of +33% goods produced was also a pretty big bump.

tl;dr lithuania stronk

Would totally be interested

The another cool thing you can do with lithuania is to unstate your Lithuanian states, then culture convert to byelorussian or the other one. Also convert to Ortho, and you can now become Principality, which gives you the Russian mechanics (Strelskys are pretty insane, free ~10k+ super troops every 10-15 years, scaling with your force limit). Now you are also correct culture to form Ruthenia, which makes you Tsardom and lets you keep the Russian abilities.

I'll try to remember let you know about the MP game.

All right, just ordered the whole ball of wax for $101 and change, downloading now.

Been nice knowing you, see you in three years

If you have everything, including Rule Britannia, England is a great country to learn the game with. Their missions are great and will basically make you get involved all over the world.

After my recent England game after finishing all their missions, this is 1750:



lol Russia failboating with no input from me.

3 Mountains done.

Just the first 100 years getting it going was difficult. Once I got half of spice islands colonized and got a foothold in southern India, it just became a standard WQ game.

England was always my favorite country to play, mostly because it is so weak on land in the late game vs. most of the likely superpowers that wars are still interesting. It is also arguably the only country where you will have to micromanage fleets to properly blockade your enemies (especially early on) to get yourself into advantageous fights.

That and All Hail Britannica and Americana.

I actually finished 3 mountains as well a couple days ago. True one tag with no vassals or colonial nations.