Carving up horde armies left and right and then getting my **** pushed in by rebels. Seems about right

Seriously how in the actual **** can rebel armies be 3x as powerful as the regulars I just conquered???

I think they are often based on your tech... so if you were crushing underpowered noobs, the rebels can be a comparative problem.

just raise autonomy in everything you conquer

Well, the rebels have been building up a huge rebellion for last 5-10 years by the time they rebel. Basically if you want, you can make it so no rebellions really ever happen. Just increase autonomy at newly conquered provinces, have high stability and take Humanist ideas.

Thanks for the tips. I've blown my Military wad doing Harsh Treatment but it's only stemmed the tide briefly. My manpower is 0 ldo and I'm maxed out in mercs and I can't even Slacken because I don't have 5 AP (in fact I have 0 at the moment). So I'm going to have to reconquer a bunch of provinces I took easily the first time around. Meanwhile Oil Rat keeps getting more and more allies meaning anyone else I try to conquer I get to fight those guys too. So much for a carebear Ming run

(and it's not even 1465 yet)

Good news is my jerkoff 1/1/1 ruler died on the way back to his home planet, I have his successor in as general in hopes that his not really better 1/1/2 ass dies in battle. I've spammed a bunch of royal marriages so hopefully I get an heir soon who doesn't suck.

Okay third time's a charm heh

I disabled Common Sense on the advice of the guy on Reddit whose success I was attempting to replicate:

https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comment...guide_to_ming/

While it's true that having Common Sense disabled decreases coring costs, it also removes the ability to pour development into a province to helps speed up innovativeness. Without it I'm stuck in feudal hell for the foreseeable future and **** that noise. I'm finding that the CCR you get from not having it is more than offset by the penalties.

IDK how that guy did it so easily but I did basically everything he did and was nowhere near conquering the hordes by 1470, not sure I'd have gotten there even by 1550 with all the unrest and whatnot.

Europe before I revoke.


World after forming HRE. IA went up shockingly fast because almost everyone converted and I had the 25% IA bonus from winning the league war. HRE was also almost constantly at internal peace so I was getting something like .4/month after modifiers. I think I had 3-4 reforms to pass before revoking the privligia in 1645. If you haven't tried a HRE game, with the 2nd to last reform (revoking) you get the entire HRE vassalized, which gives you a ridic income boost and an INSANE vassal swarm of literally hundreds of free divisions. Really fun declaring war on someone and never even participating because your hordes of vassals just murder everything. The dutch also had the 2nd largest fleet in the world with something like 40 heavies which was nice because I had basically no navy.

After i inherited everyone I was something like 250 divisions over force limit, pretty lol. I got the HRE and max absolutism achievements. I alt-f4ed after forming the HRE and getting the achievement because having the vassal swarm is a lot better and more fun. Might keep playing and pick up a few other achievements.

Bonus: literally no idea how this happened but Akerhaus is somehow the highest developed province in the world. More development than Constantinople, Paris, London, Rome, Milan, etc.

Just an embarrassing performance by Ottomans and Ming there. LOL Timurids still a thing in 1660.

Isn't there some kind of "participation" penalty for being part of a war but doing very little of the fighting? Or does that not apply to vassals?

It only applies to allies if you try to take more provinces in a peace than you "deserve" when they expect to get some for helping.

I pretty much never implement the last reform until it's time to finish the game. There is really just no reason to.

Question about increasing province development: basically, when and where should I?

1. if you really got nowhere to expand and is full on monarch points
2. to dump 600 points to start an institution
3. develop low dev or trade center provinces with no development penalty.

4. gold mines (OP OP OP)

In the first age I will also usually dev up a province (usually capital) to get the age bonus

If I have extra stuff to spend I'll usually go to the development quick build tab and sort by province effect - so for admin, for example, you can sort your provinces by where raising base tax will have the greatest impact and pick one of the higher ones with a low development cost

Sweet, thanks!

So it's 1505 and I poured enough development into Nanjing (to get Renaissance) and Bejing (to get to Colonialism). I've hamstrung myself MP wise though. Is it even worth it to get those institutions as early as possible? It felt right at the time but if anything I'm behind my neighbors in other tech.

Never played ming cause it looks like a snoozefest but does it really matter? You should have like 5x more troops and wealth compared to all your neighbors (who should all be tributaries).

Imo tho no its not worth getting institutions ASAP. Don't forget that you spawning an institution also makes it spread to everyone around you, who get to capitalize on your dumping dev points while they are using theirs to tech. I'd probably spawn renaissance once your tech costs start getting high enough (+30% maybe?). You could also just take exploration as a first idea and island hop to alaska for a chance to spawn colonialism. West coast of north america node and mexico node both can be routed to Asia anyways.

Yeah I've done something wrong, at least as far as that guy's walk through goes. I'll post screens tonight but my results have varied.

It's getting harder and harder to get tributaries, the ones who will accept it at this point are weak and about to be taken over already by one of my other tributaries. I broke my alliance with Oirat to take advantage of them while they were in a war with 3 nations to their west, only to get cockblocked by the 5-year truce (really think that mechanic sucks) and now they've settled their differences so it was all for naught. I just got my second colony on Taiwan after dumping points into Exploration. I went Humanities on the first idea set because despite my best efforts, I was spending FAR more time crushing rebellions than invading other countries. Not sure how I'll get WC at this point, I'm just trying to do as much as I can do before time runs out.

Also it's really stupid that I can sail right up to the shore of another country but still have terra incognita

Plus in some hilarity, at one point neither I nor Yeren had cannons, but the rebel peasants uprising in Yeren (and crossing their border to attack me) somehow had cannons.

Okay I think I FINALLY get it. Last night I colonized some distant-ish islands or parts of islands. Once you do that, it removes the distance penalty for non-tributaries in that area, which makes it easier to make them tributaries. I went from 17 tributaries to 28 in one evening by doing this.

Seems like the pro move is to grab Exploration straight away and start making colonies asap and spread your tributary seed that way. Though again, Humanism is also important because on my first run I spent more time putting down rebels than anything else.

Yeah I didn't really think of this before doing it, but looking at the institutions map I see exactly what you mean. Scrubs are making themselves great again based on my ingenuity. **** those guys.

If I wasn't ~80 years in I'd start over, knowing what I know now. I still may.

In the long run you do want to spawn the institutions asap though, especially as someone powerful like Ming. After all, you are planning to conquer the whole world, so not developing the institutions makes you fall behind against European powers. You don't want to be fighting in Mexico against Spain when they have MIL tech 15 and you have 11.

Ming can also probably conquer its way to north, no CB the Kamchadals and just jump to Alaska that way. Otherwise you spend ~20 years or so on islands.