I thought about that but the numbers displayed at least appear to factor in ship maintenance when giving the "net" number.

AI is very hesitant to declare war unless it thinks it has a sizable advantage. The only bigger/stronger countries neighboring Venice are you, Austria, and Hungary. Hungary often hates Venice, but is usually allied with Austria, who often like Venice. Hungary also is surrounded by other powerful countries like Poland, Bohemia, you, Austria, so doesn't make sense for them to war Venice and leave themselves so vulnerable. This is also due to the AI heavily dogpiling neighbors and rivals that are suddenly weaker than them due to war losses. So, if you were to war Venice, sink most of their fleet, take a few islands, crush their armies etc, expect Milan to backstab them to try to get back its core.

also re: trade, depending on your rivals, its probably more valuable for you to pirate your rivals. You get monies, steal monies from them, and get power projection. For example, if Venice and Hungay are rivals, you could send privateers to Venice node and get power projection from privateering Hungary and Venice, while also generating some monies. Note that this also destroys relations with everyone collecting at that node, but if you are Ottomans they are all enemies or potential enemies anyways.

From the start of an Ottomans game - this shows what I was talking about with the mechanics. This screen shows that Ottomans has...
- 0 power from ships (so far)
- ~106 power from provinces in the node
- plus a bonus of 24% for trade power modifiers, giving them 120.9 total power in the node

As the popup shows, that's 55.9% of the total (I guess the 50% that shows on the trade view is an approximation?), which means Ottomans collects 5.95 ducats (the 9.96 total ducats * 0.559 for trade power %, plus modifiers) in that node.

The popup for adding ships seems right:



...but since this was the start of the game, and the following month (changes are only recalculated each month, fwiw) everything radically changed due to AI assigning fleets to places, I was too lazy to take new "before" screenshots. (my trade went down after assigning 3 ships, because everyone else assigned a bunch more of their ships to the node)

Okay so it seems that the bit that says "Total change will be +0.04 profit" is only true of no other countries send their own ships, then it gets modified ad hoc to some other profit, or loss, based on other countries making changes constantly? Mine was just staying the same I'm pretty sure (about to double check this since I'm between wars atm)

Yeah confirmed, my "Balance" is changing after I send the ships but only very slightly

1502, no idea wtf happened here, I'm playing elsewhere in the world:



Morocco won the opening Reconquista war against Portugal and Castile and then Castile and France managed to lose a war against Aragon and the Papal state, with some help from Austria.

Does Karaman share border or seazone with Cyprus? That's the only thing that matters.

Aragon starts with 2/4/6 Ruler so they often are one of the first countries to hit MIL 4 & 5. Perhaps combine that with Castilian civil war disaster and suddenly it is Aragon, Pope and Naples vs France who has worse tech.

Sounds like you vassalized them?

Yes, sea zone. I've since had no problem granting provinces to bordering (land, not sea) vassals, so maybe that was a weird one.

I just woke up an hour ago lol I kept just-one-more-thinging it until 6 AM fml happy what's left of Independence Day

I've been hunting pirates not stop but I've yet to actually catch one, and I still get raided by Knights constantly.

That's the first design decision I've seen that I've disagreed with, Protect Trade should cover pirates too imo.

I think although you still get raided, it is for much smaller amount. Nonetheless, just kill the Knights.

I think you are now truly a member of the GOAT game thread

Yeah when I'm playing EU4 my weekend sessions go until like 5am and from about 12:30 on I keep thinking to myself I should get up and get a drink but I'll do it after this war.

What's the best way to accomplish this, in terms of...
- accessing faraway places, and
- getting CBs in those places (or just no-CB people?)

As Ottomans, I don't yet have sea access to the Indian Ocean - should I make a beeline for the Hormuz area so I can start to spread over there?

My game right now, fwiw, 1538:



As mentioned, Syria/Imereti (blue blob in Caucasus)/Crimea/Serbia/Transylvania (white blob east of Hungary) are my vassals, just started integrating Syria.

Also while making this map I discovered that in addition to having France in a PU, Poland also has Muscovy. Someone needs to stop them, jesus. Protestantism is crushing in the HRE, Holland is emperor:



One of the weirder religious distributions I've ever seen - protestant Austria, catholic Scandinavia + Bohemia?

I'd do which ever is easier, burn through either mamluks or qara qoyunlu to get access to the indian ocean. Then you could always do a no-cb war against some little country on a coast to get a foothold. Then you can build up fighting the weaker Asian/African nations. Then you could rotate wars between the Middle East, India, Africa, Southeast Asia. In the meantime stay on the lookout for the opportunity to dogpile someone in Europe.

Religion is good for CBs if you are surrounded by other religions. It was my second idea and what I mainly used for wars early on.

When you hit Dip 23 and get Imperialism it gives you a CB against anyone you are bordering.

I usually just no CB. Gotta do it early while it's cheaper to just buy stability back if need be.

I rarely take the religion idea nowadays, mostly because it has gotten a lot easier and relatively cheaper to make claims on provinces (vassals will make claims on provinces you mark as interested). Unless I am playing a country with a lot of religious synergy (looking at you, Castille), I have found Humanist to be much more effective at keeping revolts down and income up.

I beeline for Europe pretty quick now. Getting through Alexandria is preferred (rich node) but in a couple games I ended up colony hopping around South Africa. After that, I try to get as much of Italy as I can.. This is mostly for tech. If you get too big in Asia away from the origins of the institutions, you'll always be behind in tech. Which isn't as big of a deal as it used to be but is still a significant handicap.

I always no CB an Irish minor as soon as I could core it. THis is because Great Britain is easy to conquer (AI is terrible at shipping troops and you can abuse the channel). I also have gotten in a habit of vassalizing Portugal as soon as it picks up exploration. It's actually pretty amazing to have Portugal colonize the New World on your behalf. WHen I integrate Portugal late game (1700s) I end up picking up a ton of merchants and basically got infinite ducats to throw infinite mercs at the front lines.

Heh my map looks a lot like goofy's, right around the same year too. Main difference is Tunis controls all of North Africa minus Morocco and the Mamluk territories and I'm allied with Tunis and have been sending gold and troops to prop them up, also did royal marriages and tech sharing. Mamluks are a much bigger threat to me than goofy so I figure when it's time to go to war with Mamluks I can get Tunis to attack them from the west. I also got some kind of event where I took the Crimea trade node and now they're my vassals except for a few provinces nearby. I'm close to making the Black Sea an Ottoman lake (can't do that atm because I'm allied with Poland and Lithuania somehow).

(Also Castile somehow managed to massively **** the bed so Aragon is the dominant power in Iberia with France bearing down on both.)

I've been taking care not to declare war without CB and I think it's hampering my expansion. Neighbors east and west are tied up in alliances to the point that I basically can't take on a small neighbor to the east without also getting the big boys like Muscovy and Transox on my ass. I just got the last Humanist idea so maybe it's time to get more aggressive and start ignoring CB.

I tend to be pretty persnickety about having a CB myself (probably no-CB like once a game). Am I doing it wrong?

Usually you can get at who you want to get at through attacking a weaker ally of theirs, separate peace out the real victim and break alliances, then go to town next time.

I generally avoid no-CB whenever possible (except WCs), unless there is no way to do it with a CB. In my latest game as Karaman I no-CB warred the Papal State so I could take Roma. Papal State was allied with Aragon (who had taken over the rest of Castile by now) and Milan. Since I didn't want to fight either of them, I waited until Aragon was fighting France and Milan was fighting Austria and then no-CBed the Papal State.

You can always fabricate a claim to get a CB on a neighbor.

I FINALLY took them out last night. It was a much bigger PITA than I would have thought. They're pissants, but they always seem to have several powerful friends willing to jump in and help them. It took 3 separate wars to take something like 5 provinces from them. Eventually I whittled them down to just Rhodes, then when our truce expired I wardecced them without bothering to check current alliances and whoops! they were allied with both Venice AND France. I suddenly found myself with French and Venetian troops all up in my grill, mostly French. They even managed to occupy a few of my Euro provinces including one right next to Constantinople. Despite only having like 5 provinces, Venice still had a MASSIVE navy (easily 3x mine in size) and were able to blockade like half my ports including Constantinople.

That's how I finally won it, sort of. Even though I took Rhodes in a year with few casualties, I couldn't get above 20% "war score" or whatever because Venice and France had lots of muscle. Eventually I guess AI France and Venice appealed to reason and decided it wasn't worth losing half their armies over Rhodes, so I started getting separate peace offers. France offered white peace and Venice followed shortly thereafter offering some coin along with giving up claims on a couple of my Euro provinces. Once they were out, Knights were done and I annexed them.

Speaking of Knights, this dude made them work. This is amazing to me:

It is actually against everyone, not just bordering countries.

I did the Knights achievement (form Jerusalem) a week ago, raiding is insanely powerful for small countries. It was pretty easy since I just no CB'd Irish minor and built up power base there.

Generally I don't think no cb is worth it, but there are few exceptions:

-no cb vassalize Byzantium to become defender against Ottomans so you get to call in all your allies vs them to cripple the early on

-no cb Irish minor and build power base there (makes bunch of tough achievements trivially easy)

-no cb kongo and/or west africans to quickly colonize Asia.

-no cb with Ryukyu to expand

Someone who knows something explain how to use this Court and Country disaster to my benefit (for ridiculous absolutism, which I gather is good to have).

It seems to be all the rage, so I’m trying it as England. So far it’s just a crap ton of rebels. I have nine more years of this junk?

In "dumb **** you never knew after 400 hours of EU4" - I always thought efficiency percentages were a base value, and not a modifier relative to 100%, i.e. I thought 8% production efficiency meant your production income was (total production * 0.08) when actually it's (total production * 1.08), so I was like "oh **** my economy's in trouble, looks like a 10% production efficiency advisor will totally turn things around for me"

*pay 200 ducats for +3 production efficiency guy*
*income goes up 3 ducats per month*
*swear loudly*


Also I didn't know trade power went upstream and how that works, and even after googling it I'm still not exactly sure how it works.

Like, the 3 nodes I'm dealing with are Constantinople (collecting), Aleppo (forwarding to Constantinople), Alexandria (forwarding to Constantinople). In Alexandria, I have some power from provinces in the area, and then 53 power "from traders downstream". I figured out, with help from the trade wiki page, that 53 is exactly 20% of my power in Constantinople from provinces - but I don't understand why Aleppo, which also sends to Alexandria, doesn't send any provincial power upstream in that direction (maybe it would if I didn't have a merchant there forwarding home?).

So, even after 400 hours with this game, some **** is still confusing.