It doesn't have too but it's largely unnecessary. I think 90% of my games end before 1650. I can only recall 4 games after 1700; two WCs, my recent England game (only because I needed to wait that long to complete a mission to get the achievement), and one where I started at a post 1700 start date.

I would think there would be diminishing returns both in-game and wrt the overall experience because new research, troops, buildings etc still stop at 1821.

Now I'm reading this entire thread to ensure I don't keep asking questions that have already been answered

Keep in mind that a lot of systems have been overhauled/changed throughout the life of the game, both in DLC and patches. Don't be shy about asking questions, I don't think anyone here is bothered by them (I'm happy to help).

When you asked about Venice I went back to see if my posts about a Venice game I played years ago (when the game first came out) would have anything helpful - they didn't, but it was kinda funny seeing screenshots of the game and comparing them to screenshots now, due to how much the map in many parts of the world has changed and gotten more detailed. Like, after playing in the Balkans last night w/ Ottomans and looking at a screenshot from version 1.0 in my Venice game, it's almost unrecognizable.

Probably better just to ask questions, the game has changed so much that earlier information is probably outdated and old tutorials mostly useless.

The eu4 wiki is good since it is kept mostly up to date.

Yeah that's a really solid wiki. I really like how they use in-game icons so you see on there what you see in the game you're in, and the icons are clickable back to the text that explains them.

Encountered a strange bug(?) last night. I'm trying to consolidate Anatolia so I declare war on Candar, which holds two provinces in the northern part, one of which is a core of mine. Ramazan owns one province, and they're allied with Candar, so of course they jump in as well.

I win easily of course and get to 100% totes victory, name my own terms, etc. I sue for peace, and of course they give me everything I'm asking for, but then the provinces which were supposed to go to me stay the same color! They still control them, though their armies aren't home and mine are still sitting there. WTF? I had to reload 4 times. On the fourth reload, rather than dictating terms I tell the AI to suggest terms. Then I modified the terms to be more harsh (gold + all three territories) and then I got the territories.

Has this happened to anyone else? Did I do something wrong?

Venice is actually a relatively tough (though one of my favorite) country to play. No obvious avenues of expansion and a lot of powerful countries that want a piece of you.

Republican mechanics can limit expansion but the near guarantee of good leaders is a pretty big deal and I usually keep the Republic even as I expand into an empire but a lot of players prefer to just convert to a monarchy.

Venice is also marginally interesting as a viable leader of a trade league. That said, trade leagues aren't that interesting now because countries just don't stay single province for long. You'd have to basically engage in some kind of RP game to create/protect trade league members that will probably be more helpful annexed into your empire.

I decided to attack Albania after taking Constantinople because the Wiki suggested that was one of the first areas I should attack. The wiki stated: "The early targets should be Albania (before Venice takes its core here)." But Venice already has a core here when the game starts so idk what they're talking about. I was able to easily roflstomp on land, but Venice's navy completely wiped the floor with mine. It wasn't even close. I lost nearly every ship. Anyway I reloaded and didn't attack Albania next time.

Venice seems like it's really good if AI controls it but would be difficult for a human to play just because it's surrounded and everyone wants a piece of it like you stated.

The strategy guides in the wiki are often outdated as they refer to conditions that have changed with recent updates.

AI is horrendous at Venice because AI failboats at shipping troops.

Another thing in the game I'm in that seems counterintuitive is that Venice ISN'T getting attacked by anyone else, at all. In fact they've allied with most of my neighbors to the west, except Byzantium which is OK I guess, though I'd rather fight Byzantium for the rest of Greece than Venice at this point. They've also got a bunch of different nations joining their Trade League so they must be swimming in cash right now. (Though they have one less after last night because Ramazan was part of it.)

Screenshots? Sounds weird.

Dumb question but did you advance the clock after submitting the peace deal? Stuff doesn't change until the day after.

Yeah a lot of the country specific strats on the EU4 wiki are outdated because you use to be able to declare wars on day 1 of the game. So for example Ottomans could just declare war on the surrounding minor countries on day 1 before they could make alliances.

Updates in my game: I think I'm too bad to do WC. I like relaxing between wars and have a hard time keeping the gas pedal on.

It's 1530ish and...
- I have Syria, Imereti, Crimea, Transylvania, and Serbia as vassals - think I need to start integrating some of these (Imereti has all the Orthodox land in the caucasus). Is there any particular rule for when vassals are big enough you should integrate them instead of feeding them bigger?
- Krain is a center of reformation so Austria is an early Protestant nation, lol
- Hungary and Poland got into a succession war over France. Hungary got devastated, which allowed me to swoop in and feed Serbia a little and release + diplovassalize Transylvania, but Poland with junior partner France is kind of terrifying
- I have admin and influence ideas, now getting quantity so my army can get blobbier

Something to do in a WC is to try to spread out geographically quickly so you can declare wars one after the other without worrying about AE.

In my Ryukyu WC I basically focused on Colonization at the beginning and repeatedly colonized a single province at max colonial distance and repeated. Relatively quickly I could declare wars all over the world constantly without getting too high AE for coalitions to form. In my Ryukyu game I had zero coalition wars declared on me.

In my England game while trying to dismantle the HRE I was vassalizing electors but the emperor kept revoking their electorate status and granting new electors so I waited untlt eh entire HRE was in a coalition against me (and no one else was part of it) and declared war. I had -500 AE with most of the HRE.

EDIT: My ideas (not sure on exact order but something like this): Exploration, Religious, Administrative, Influence, Diplomatic, Humanist

Then in the late game I switched to Quantity so I could get the 1 Million Manpower achievement and Trade to see how high I could get my income.

Yeah I wish I had screenshots. I plan on posting some tonight related to trade though since I have questions and feel like I should have an advanced engineering degree to ever understand trade at all.

Particularly, I'm trying to figure out why the money it says I should be netting from Protecting Trade doesn't seem to be increasing my income at all + it seems like you get diminishing returns on larger fleets that are set to Protect Trade. I've scoured the wiki plus Reddit and I can't find an answer.

As far as not expanding fast enough once you do it goes quickly. In my Ryukyu game by like 1630 I still had England, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Ottomans (although they didn't blob as much as usual), Ming, and most of India basically untouched. At that point I was getting worried I wouldn't be able to do it but I quickly took out the Ottomans and started taking chunks out of England, Russia, and Ming.

France was actually the first European country I attacked. My colonial range had moved across the pacific and through North America and when I could finally reveal the European coastline France was in the middle of being tag teamed by England and Castile so I immediately declared war and took a couple provinces.

~1680 you get diplo tech 22 and the imperialism causus belli. Up until that point it's about building a power and economic base with beach heads on every continent so you can wage constant wars once you get Dip 22.

Trade 101:

The game has dozens of trade nodes in specific locations, which all connect to each other in predefined ways that you can see when you open the trade map. Trade nodes can receive trade (in ducats) from zero or more other nodes and send trade (in ducats) to zero or more other nodes - in practice, most nodes will both send and receive trade (I know Venice and I think Antwerp are end nodes, meaning they only receive - maybe Genoa too? The trade map changes occasionally).

The way you get yourself some of those sweet ducats is with trade power. You get power in individual nodes in a couple ways:
- Owning provinces in a trade node will give you power in that trade node. I think mercantilism increases the power generated by provinces, as does building marketplaces in provinces (when you open the quick build menu for marketplaces, the +X.XX figure shows how much more power you'll get in that node for building a marketplace).
- Having light ships doing "protect trade" for a particular node will add to your power in that node.

What ultimately matters is not the absolute value of your power in a node, but the percentage of the total trade power in a node that belongs to you. That's why you observed diminishing marginal returns on adding more ships to your trade fleet - the more ships you add, the closer you can get to 100%, but because each ship adds more total trade power to the node, you'll never quite get there and it's not practical to try.

So, each trade node will have a certain amount of ducats in value, which is a sum of
- the trade that node receives from other nodes, and
- the trade generated by provinces in that node

Then, that number of ducats is divvied up between the countries who have power in that node, according to the percentage of the node's power each country has. For example, say the Alexandria trade node has 10 ducats, and 100 total trade power - Mamluks has 60, I (Ottomans) have 40. That means Mamluks, with 60% of the node's power, control 6 ducats, and I control 4.

However, that doesn't mean 4 ducats goes straight to my bank account. You only collect from trade in specific places:
- you automatically (without a merchant) collect from trade in the node where your capital is (it's possible to, later in the game, designate a trade capital which is different than your main capital, if there are strategic reasons for wanting to collect from a different node than the node where your capital resides)
- you can designate merchants to collect from trade in other nodes, but this is generally a bad idea because there's a penalty for collecting outside your capital node

Since Alexandria is the Mamluks' home node, they'll collect their 6 ducats there, and their income will basically be 6 * (trade efficiency %).

But the other thing merchants do, which is what you'll mostly use them for, is to forward trade. So, that 4 ducats you control in Alexandria - since one of the nodes Alexandria sends trade to is Constantinople, you'll send a merchant to Alexandria and tell him to forward to Constantinople (by opening the trade map and clicking the button along the path from Alexandria to Constantinople). Now, that 4 ducats you control will be added to the value in the Constantinople node, where you're collecting from trade and making all your $$.

So, what you'll want to do is:
- identify nodes that can forward trade to your home node
- amass power in those nodes where you can place forwarding merchants to send as much value as possible to your home node
- make $$$

In the early game, as Ottomans, you might have merchants just in places like Alexandria/Aleppo/Crimea, which send directly to Constantinople - but as the game progresses, your empire grows, and you get more merchants, you might wind up building sophisticated forwarding chains to send trade from faraway places like Africa/Asia through several nodes all the way back home, especially since those places are where the big money is in trade. (and the new world, for European colonizers, but as Ottomans you won't really be getting a piece of that)

Thanks for that post, some good info there.

This is where I'm getting lost. Let me see if I can explain without visual aids (though I know I probably won't be able to, if not I'll post screenshots later):

Say you have 10 light ships (Barques? the ones that are used for Protect Trade) in a "fleet," and you want to assign those ships to Protect Trade. When you give it that "mission," another screen opens up. Listed on that screen are the different trade areas you can protect. If you hover over the Send buttons for the different areas, it gives you a bunch of numbers, but at the bottom it tells you how much you are gaining by protecting a particular area. Different areas have different values, from 0.00 on up.

I'm looking at the different areas and it shows that I will net 0.77 if I send 1 (and only 1) ship to protect Ragusa. So I can do that by splitting them up into one-ship "fleets," or I can send all 10 in a single fleet. When I choose to send just one, I get the +0.77 number cited above. However, when I send all 10, I don't get 10 x 0.77, I get some number less than 10 x 0.77. That's why I'm wondering if there are diminishing returns when sending fleets of a size > 1 ship to Protect Trade. It appears as though it does based on your explanation above.

Furthermore, my income, even when factoring in the cost to upkeep the ship, does NOT seem to be going up by the "0.77" the tooltip says it should. In fact, I noticed last night that it wasn't increasing at all, making it seem like I'm wasting my time even doing it.

Meanwhile, when I Protect Trade for Istanbul or whatever, which is where I have the most trade power, it doesn't appear to give me any additional benefit. But based on your post above that seems impossible.

I guess a deeper question might be whether or not I'm even reading that number correctly, or if that number is even supposed to translate to ducats? Maybe it's just a raw number that does not factor in current % trade power (seems unlikely) or increased % trade power (maybe?).

I know this is confusing, it would make perfect sense if I could show you what I'm talking about.

I really think I'm just reading the numbers incorrectly based on your post.

That's actually a great example. Ragusa is a total waste of your time. iirc, it forwards trade to Venice, but since
- you collect in your home node (Constantinople), and
- Ragusa doesn't forward to Constantinople
...your trade power there does ~nothing for you. You'd have to assign a merchant to Ragusa to collect from trade there, but that merchant is probably better utilized by forwarding from somewhere else to Constantinople.

So, that explains why your income is unaffected by anything you do in Ragusa. I'm not sure about the tooltip thing that shows up in the list of where you can send your fleet, but one thing that might help make things clearer is...
- go to the trade map and click the node you're sending ships to, screenshot it before you send ships there
- send some ships to protect trade there, wait for the node info screen to update, screenshot again
- send some more ships, wait for the node info screen to update, screenshot again

That should give enough info for me to explain what's going on.

Re: Istanbul/Constantinople - it's possible that, by having so many of the provinces in that area, your trade power is already so dominating in that node that adding more ships doesn't give much of a benefit. I'd still expect it to give some, but because of the diminishing marginal returns thing when you already dominate a particular node, it might not be very large.

Again, screenshots might help.

1) you may be unprofitable when factoring in ship maintenance costs.

2) you do get SOME benefit from sending trade “against the tide” so to speak, but it’s pretty minimal (like 10% IIRC).

I'll do screenshots tonight, or make a video if I can get my mic to work.

To get to that screen I'm talking about, you just click on a light ship, click on the bottom left button in the list of buttons on the righthand side of the window (I think it's "Missions" or "Send on Mission" or something like that), click "Protect Trade" and it then brings up a list of all the trade nodes. You can then mouse over the Send buttons for each node and it will then display a bunch of (apparently incorrect, or at least misleading) numbers heh

It occurred to me that the numbers might be off because I'm paused when I'm doing all this **** but even after you unpause those numbers do not update afaict