Then again, it is not like aristocrats were awful generals on average. They still had much better education than common folk and most aristocratic families had long military history, often initially earning the title with blood. Of course, meritocracy would have increased the leadership a lot.

One thing I've noticed in my current France game, taking Exploration early, is that it's been much easier to establish footholds around the world to prepare for WC. In the mid-late 1500s I'm colonizing Indonesia and have circumnavigated the globe and have basically the entire world within my colonial range, and I can start doing the conquest-around-the-world thing a lot faster (while being able to fabricate claims, plus France has a mission to get a permament claim on eastern India). Contrast that to my Ottomans game, without Exploration, where I don't think I had any New World land until maybe the late 1600s (taking it from Norway) and a very restricted ability to expand around the world pre-Imperialism.

Granted, a big bonus of Exploration w/ France is taking the New World before my opponents do - I have Treaty of Tordesillas claims on the Caribbean, Eastern America, Louisiana, and Mexico, whereas w/ Ottomans you really can't stop Europeans from dominating the New World.

It is fine to stay at admin 2 for a while. I do like to complete it asap for the tech reduction (and addition tech reduction from ideas) though.

Defensive ideas is bad. Generally you want your WC ideas to be like this:

Influence/Diplo-Admin/Religious-Admin/Religious-Diplo/Influence/Explo-Diplo/Humanist-Influence/Diplo/Military-Military-Military.

Basically you want Diplomatic group idea first as so that you hit Admin 7, where you can then take admin idea.

True; on the other hand I am close enough to just beat up Portugal (and perhaps force vassalize before too long) if I want to, and that maybe is a good start.

Defensive ideas group is okay as one of the later military ideas due to attrition reduction and +1 army tradition but I rather take quantity most of the time for +manpower and +force limit as a late game military idea.

I almost always start with influence or exploration (depending on country) as first idea mostly because the first few diplo tech levels are practically useless while first few mil techs are crucial and first few adm techs very useful

Am I bad at this game for thinking +15% morale is one of the highlights of Defensive?

It's been a long time since I played a colonial game so I quickly came to regret taking exploration first as France - with the new (I think?) exploration system, which the interwebz tell me came from El Dorado DLC, you can't manually explore into terra incognita anymore, you send your explorers on missions to explore a certain region, and they'll only go a certain distance (not sure exactly what governs it but it seems to be a bit ahead of colonial range). So, as I unlocked exploration ideas, I couldn't quite explore to the New World until my colonial range started to catch up around dip tech ~7. I would probably have been better off taking a more immediately beneficial group first, and exploration second.

Portugal might be an exception to that since they start with forward bases for colonizing.

Yeah, I'm going to confess that I don't get the hate on the defensive ideas. Is it that you think that's a poor choice of military idea, or that you just think taking any military idea at all early is a bad choice?

Because I'm in a spot where, had I not taken an idea group, I'd be ridiculously ahead of time on military tech (as it is, I've completed the idea group, and am still like +60% for the next tech), and farther behind on one of the others.

I'm pretty sure the idea group itself is amazing for the most part. Army tradition is good (better generals = very good thing); 15% morale of armies enough said. Land leader maneuver is handy for tracking down stacks that are trying to run away, and for attrition purposes (handy for Ottomans running around in deserts). Land maintenance cheaper is always good (not a huge benefit, but every bit helps; granted this would be better if it were 10% instead of 5%). Fort defense and fort maintenance are meh (10% fort maintenance is actually decent as a far flung Ottomans, though I could consider deleting a few more forts than I have, but... army tradition is good). Reinforce speed sucks. Land attrition -25% is QUITE nice.

Quantity is fine and I may take it a bit later, but 1) economy can't really support 50% more troops; 2) I'm at manpower cap anyway, 3) I already have the second biggest army in the world behind Ming, so yeah.


That said, having realized there's a policy for ANOTHER -20% diplo annexation cost from Admin + Influence, I'm going to have to do that next.

imo, manpower is a weapon in your war arsenal just like tech or ideas. You might be at the cap now but sometimes the most effective way to win a war against another great power is to have more than your opponents and literally grind them down to 0.

I think there's calculation involved in this, and you probably have to annex 2+ vassals at once in order for this to pay off. Since policies have to remain in place for 10 years and I think this one costs 1 admin point per month, you're trading 120 admin points (at least - that's assuming you remember to turn it off exactly 10 yrs later) for whatever diplo point benefit this might realize (for just one vassal at a cost of, say, 500 points, you're only saving 100, hence needing multiple annexations).

Think it depended a lot on timing/luck too, in that respect. Sometimes you get Randyll Tarley, sometimes you get Samwell.

good point, though I know Algiers is like 800 right now (lol berber clay) so it would pay off even without the others. And yes, I'd plan to double dip Algiers and Haasa when I do it next. Tripoli can hold the crap African lands for a while, I don't care except for it's taking up a costly diplo slot -- which makes it even more worth just annexing ASAP. I've got Baluchistan to work with, I plan to pop Catalonia soon enough... TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING.

This sounds very cool!

I finally found out last night what happens when rebels succeed in taking over a country. Oirat had rebels pop up at a really inopportune time right after a massive war when they were fairly depleted. Then they lost their ruler and the heir was a weakling. Mere days after that, I got the message popup that "rebels have taken over Oirat, they have no choice but to accept rebel demands" or something along those lines. Not that much was really different after that...the "rebels" simply became "Oirat" and the rebel troops became Oirat troops and life went on. The only noticeable differencse to me was that they broke off diplo relations with me (we had a royal marriage) and Mongolia stopped being their vassal, which allowed me to moonwalk in and conquer Mongolia with around 20k troops.

+15% morale is good but I read +army tradition and +discipline are better by the mid or late 1600s (Prussian Army>>> France mid late game because of army tradition and +20% infantry).

I can see that -- but early on that 15% is huge (and is leading to stackwipe city a lot).

And of course, the first idea is the +1 army tradition ; Prussia is awesome thanks to the +0.5 they get as a national idea...

which has led to good generals early on, which accentuates the stackwiping (or the enemy running away, which is even better!).

The foraging + maneuver is subtler but does wonders for manpower, which can be problematic early on -- at least for me haha. I was blessed with like three events that gave me about 10k total manpower at times I really needed it; otherwise I'd have been in a bit of trouble. Not serious trouble, obviously, but certainly inconvenienced.

I just dont' see myself getting defensive early.

I just think getting military idea early is very bad, as the admin/influence ideas save you so much mana in the long run. Generally you should be only fighting wars you can win in the first place.

One of the main issues with Defensive is that morale is pretty bad late game: you don't necessarily want your armies fighting to last man.

My military ideas by preference:

Quality-Quantity-Offensive

The only military idea I take early is Aristocratic/Plutocratic, and only when I'm not going for WC, as they are kinda like non-military ideas.

What do you mean? It occurred to me that maybe I don't totally understand how morale works, but the wiki seems to indicate that morale damage depends on the attacking unit's maximum morale, so I would think that higher morale would lead to more stackwipes? And that seems important?

I mean that for example if you are in some big battle you are losing bc opponent has better troops, you'd rather have your troops end the fighting asap instead of fighting for 2 weeks more to prevent further casualties. High morale leads to higher casualties on both sides which sucks both for manpower but perhaps more importantly, greatly increasing war exhaustion. In late game I think the only way to get stackwiped with larger armies is if you field some melee only army vs melee&artillery-army.

Morale is still bonus, not a drawback for late game, but it is very marginal benefit. I'd probably rather take 1% discipline than 15% morale late game.

Is there a trick to circumnavigating the globe that will prevent my ships from dying along the way?

Have enough provinces/fleet basing rights around the world.

If you're in some big battle you're losing, you should just manually retreat ASAP anyway. In that case, the amount of morale doesn't quite matter, except insofar as it prevents YOU from getting stackwiped.

Of course, morale helps you win some of the battles you'd otherwise lose, too.

I'm not saying that I'd trade morale percent-for-percent for discipline -- that would be nuts -- but 1% discipline for 15% morale is equally nuts to me.

Its not so much that defensive is bad, its just not great for a WC. Stuff like offensive (better leaders, disc, siege, force limit) or quantity (infinite men, force limit, mp recovery) lets you constantly war on every border. Also not sure if mentioned but the defensive policies are pretty bad whereas the offensive and quality ones are insane. Economic/Offensive has 10% arty combat bonus, Economic/Quality has 5% discipline, Innovative/Offensive has +10% siege and +1 leader siege pip, Innovative/Quality has +20% infantry combat bonus.

However, the morale bonus from defensive is the single biggest bonus you can get for early wars, and given how EU4 is all about early snowballing, if you have defensive and your opponent is a similar size and doesn't, you crush. That is balanced by the fact that as others said, early mil tech is massively more valuable than any ideas, since almost every level gives tactics, morale, new troop types, +shock, etc.

I still think offensive/quality/quantity are better ideas most of the time than defensive, but for example, in my current game (Prestor John run as Ethiopia), I went exploration->defensive->economic and it has worked great. Attrition was a killer so defensive has helped with that and the morale bonus and better generals let me dunk the Mamluks and cut off the Ottomans before they could take Egypt. Plus in theory once I start fighting the Ottomans, the extra attrition will be helpful in sapping their manpower.

Well french revolution is massively more interesting than the english civil war anyways imo.

The more recent episodes on the 1848 revolutions also are a great analogy to current USA politics, and part of the reason why they had him on Chapo imo. Tl;dr at the end of the day liberals only want minor reforms and not a revolution to change the social and economic system (as they have too much to lose), so they betray the left/radicals and get crushed by forces of reaction from the right.

bleh I thought that might be the answer

Scenario: You want to wardec Country A, who is allied with B and C. You click Declare War, and it takes you to that screen where it shows your allies and A’s. There’s a red X next to B and C, indicating that if you wardec A you’ll be fighting them and only them. So you do it, and then you’re at war with A, B and C.

Does this happen to you guys? I spent about 7.5 years longer taking A than I should have because of that, when I otherwise never would have even declared had I known B and C would come along.

It puts me on monkey tilt every time.

That's kind of weird, honestly, and no it doesn't really happen to me.


Totally unrelated question: So I have a decision to convert to Sikhism. Is that good? Do I want that?

"All Sikh nations receive:
+10% Morale of armies
−10% Military technology cost"

vs. the Sunni "you can have 10% more cav ratio, and 100% heir chance"

So, that seems insanely useful (yes, I know, morale isn't great meow chow).

I think I'm just going to make a save at this point and try it out and see how I like it...

(edit: hmm, instant drop to 50% religious unity, with really slow conversions. Never mind. It's probably a better bet if I was going religious at some point for Deus Vult on the world, but I'm not planning that soon.)