Taking on England as Scotland is doable, but you have to absolutely do everything right. Even if they have half their troops in Normandy/ Gascogny/Calais, once they are wiped out by France all the reinforcements will be built on the Island and thrown at you. France won‘t be able to help you because of England‘s naval domination.
I wouldn‘t recommend it to beginners.
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I think I may start a Japan run especially if Mandate of Heaven has been nuked
oh totally. england is tons of fun, play as england a bunch before you try scotland
England is probably the best for history buffs, seems like they just put more into them than any single nation. You even get Liz the First! I had Tudor rulers to the end of the game after her and not a bad one in the lot
I’m doing an Scotland run right now, if you rush military 4 you get it well before England and can beat them with a smaller army if you wait for them to siege your forts and attack with the terrain advantage
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Pretty much any country that got its own expansion (Rule Britannia, Third Rome, The Golden Century, Mandate of Heaven, Cradle of Civilization) has crazy deep events.
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A lot of you probably don’t realize it (I only found this out recently) but as long as you don’t get 100% influence with an estate and trigger a disaster there’s no good reason to not pump them up and then demand mana. You get 150 mana every 20 years if their influence is >75% I think… so every 20 years use a bunch of their interactions to boost their influence up as high as you can and then create delicious mana. Any country with a strong ruler on normal has a good chance at getting 6 points of innovative by getting all the level 4 techs first… and that has a real tendency to snowball ldo.
Doing this into Innovative is something I’ve been playing around with lately, and I gotta say… it’s not bad. Full 100 innovative is a 10 percent drop on all power costs. Combine that with the tech cost and idea cost reductions in innovative and you basically stay ahead the whole game… which is very definitely worth something since you’ll hit 100 innovative (and no longer have to prioritize being ahead) around 1600.
Once you get absolutism you can blob completely out of control using this strat since keeping up on tech/ideas becomes hilariously cheap.
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my war machine is kind of slowing down and I’m feeling the pains of expansion. Rebellions popping up all over the place. Even my vassalized nation is being kind of a pain in the dick right now.
So I guess I gotta slow down? when expanding - do you just go for annexing/coring everything as the ideal option? When is it better to vassalize? I want to own all of this shit someday so my thinking is I always prefer annexing but it’s expensive.
I’ve taken over most of AQ/QQ. Tried to faceroll venice but its allies kind of stopped me dead in my tracks by putting 3-4k stacks all over my fucking nation and being obnoxious. Then a 40k stack (!) of rebels from hungary invaded and I just wiped them and decided the war was getting too expensive with my own rebellions knocking at my door as well, sued for a few hundred ducats, and decided to come back later.
I guess I go north of the black sea now but I imagine all my neighbors are quite sick of me, we’ll see how long this lasts. It’s only 1480.
I also can’t figure out how to tell what technologies/idea trees the other nations have. Is it in the ledger somewhere?
Should be in the top of the diplo screen. There’s a little idea icon that shows their ideas… and I think it shows at least their military tech level. Honestly at this point I barely think about the interface… it gets that way after 1000+ hours lol.
Probably in the ledger somewhere too.
Techs are on page six of the ledger:
https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Ledger
I think ideas aren‘t, but the number of ideas is on the diplo screen. I think if you hover over it you even get the idea groups (not at home, so can‘t verify)
https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Country_interface
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An underrated part of the Administrative idea group, particularly for newer players, are the bonuses to merc cost and maintenance. I would take full advantage of those as you’re expanding, you will save yourself a lot of manpower and maintenance costs. -25% merc cost is YUGE. Just don’t forget to dismiss your mercs at the end of your wars. I’d also stop after the third idea in that group, the rest of those ideas aren’t that beneficial til later on. And one is just bad (Bookkeeping). Mana is your most precious commodity early on and you want to have as much available as possible (like if you need to use it to pacify unruly subjects)
Best move is to vassalize a country that has a lot of cores held by other countries. You can take back a lot of cores for very little AE and cost, and your vassal will love you for returning cores. This makes even more sense when the provinces are wrong religion and wrong culture, as your vassal will be able to make better use of them than you.
Persia and Timurids are amazing to do this with; you can likely release a small Persia, which has a ton of cores, and Tims often collapse down to a small minor ripe for vassalization
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is there an easy way (a mapmode would be nice) to see what cores a country possesses?
Diplomatic map mode, click on a country and it shows all its cores and claims
For countries that currently do not exist, I’m not sure if there is any mapmode, I think you need to click on individual provinces and check
thanks guys
doing an ironman castille run. Castille early game is pretty boring - I’m basically just fast forwarding until I get exploration ideas. I conquered granada as soon as my truce expired, but then ally portugal declared war on basically all of northern africa and I got dragged into that shit. The dismal ruler and heir (I tried to kill the heir off by making him a general, but no dice - now he’s ruler with no heirs) will hopefully fire off the iberian wedding soon. Aragon’s ruler is 70 and has a female heir, so the failson should fire that event because my ruler died. I’ve forged royal marriages with like 4 nations but no heirs yet. Not sure what that means for this playthrough but I feel like I’m running bad - I’ve had 3 -1 stability events.
my longterm plan is to just fast forward and then play the colonization game and ignore europe.
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I streamed for like 2 and a half hours my iron man castille run, but now I want to play again and I can’t find my save anywhere. Someone halp. I click “resume” from the main screen and it just picks up from my ottoman run.
edit: found it but it was way harder than it should have been. This game has one of the worst interfaces I’ve ever seen in a game.
I’ve had almost no time to devote to gaming, what with the Superbowl and the Six Nations rugby cup (go Wales!) and the Hakuho sumo cup. I have been watching Quill’s youtube series that BS recommended. It’s annoying that I have to watch hours of youtubes just to understand some of the core gameplay mechanics.
Anyway, starting off as Portugal. Based on what people have said in this thread, I’m ditching my alliance with England because I don’t see what it does for me. Also sending diplomats to boost my relations with Castile and Il Papa.
I have a possession in North Africa that seems lucrative but extremely tenuous, as it is surrounded by Moors. Seems like defending it would be a boondoggle. My game plan is to just cut bait and let the Moors take it and maybe when Castille does the Reconquista I might take it back. I want to focus on beating up central Africa and Sri Lanka and much later taking over Brazil, like the historical Portuguese did. I am totally defunding my military and navy and moving barques into Gibraltar to boost my trade power.
It’s clear that trade and colonialism is how I win this, but also the trade mechanics are extremely complicated so I need to learn more about that. It is obvious that Castille and I are going to be best buddies but also we are in the same trade region thingy so I have to screw them out of as much trade as possible.
A cool thing is that I have an explorer (the game is extremely bad at letting you know this! You have to fuck around and push all kinds of buttons to see it!) so I have a big edge when it comes to exploring Africa and stealing their shit.
To be continued…
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If you are allied to Castile or another big country, Morocco will most likely not attack you over Ceuta.
Don‘t start attacking Morocco on your own, unless you can get Castile into the war. Their vessel swarm and their mountain forts are going to crush you otherwise.
As Portugal checking diplo relationships will be important for your early strategy: Aragon not having rivaled you gives you an alternative to Castile: ally Aragon and when your yellow neighbor has gone to war with (most likely) Morocco, Tunis and Granada, wait until their Army has crossed to Africa and then promise Argon territory and stab Castile in the back. Taking Sevilla is great for trade power and having a smaller Castile/ bigger Aragon will make the Iberian Wedding mostly meaningless.
If Aragon hates your guts, abuse Castile as Support for attacking North Africa (don‘t take too many provinces to avoid rebellions)
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Being an ally of Aragon seems crazy to me. Like, Castle is my meat shield, I need to be good friends with them or I’m fucked afaict. Agree I def have to marry some daughters off to Casile ASAP, like you say.