Europa Universalis IV

You have 10k. If you can't afford mercs while being able to make that much money, I don't know what to tell you.

Heretic_Cata said:

You could choose your wars carefully and only engage in major battles when fighting a great power.

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That's the problem, It's mainly been France attacking me.

For every other battle and carpet sieging, there's vassals, let them waste their manpower in your wars of conquest of minor states !

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I sort of did this after the seventh reform, but otherwise I haven't had any vassals.
They were horrible in EU3

Also, avoiding provinces with low supply limit is essential. Also, countries with the Defense ideas are a major drain to manpower.
Btw you did great for your first game. I think i finished my 15th game and never came even close to a HRE (or any other state) that big. The reason might be why you constantly have manpower issues.
Did you start with Austria in your game ?

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I did start with Austria.

Double A said:

You have 10k. If you can't afford mercs while being able to make that much money, I don't know what to tell you.

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That's after uniting the empire. With regular Austria I for the most part lost money during wars, even with war taxes.

I've only played three games so far and I made the most money in my Pommerania game. I guess it's because Luebeck is a hilariously wonderful trade node. New World Navarra made most of its money from lost of taxes and the Caribbean trade node, which isn't an end node but I retained most of the money. Made more than enough to get by there too. And then Japan is just kind of alright with finances.

So yeah, I would guess that maybe you don't know how to optimize trade yet, which is perfectly understandable because the system is so damn obtuse. I should not have to actually move my merchants to see what my income transferring or collecting in a different node would be like.

Lohrenswald said:

I sort of did this after the seventh reform, but otherwise I haven't had any vassals.
They were horrible in EU3

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Vassals are essential in EU4 (those gained from diplomacy too!) - or at least they are according to how i play the game.
You can issue orders to your vassals and tell them how to behave in a war ever since the patch.

Lohrenswald said:

That's after uniting the empire. With regular Austria I for the most part lost money during wars, even with war taxes.

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From what i've seen, war taxes makes you loose money and manpower in the long run (because of exhaustion and unrest). I only use that in extreme conditions.
BTW, were you ever over your force limit ? IIRC in my game of Styria->Austria->HRE i remember having no money problems.

You mean ever since AoW. Which I don't have.

This is what happens when you enable Johan.

Also I'm pretty sure the only cost of war taxes is 50 sword mana.

Lohrenswald said:

Spoiler :

My first EU4 game excluding an abandoned run with France where I learned to prioritise technology. I might have done that innefficiently in this game, since I chose a lot of them ahead of time.
But I think the monarch point system is stupid. I can bearly build anything because I have to save points for technology and Ideas.
And coring, which seems to have absurdely hidh costs at times.

And the rival system is horrible. Since everyone needs three rivals, what happened is that I chose Castilla, France and the Ottomans, but Britain chose me, despise the fact that we could have common interest against France. And of all great powers to come together it was France and Castilla, which made them nearly impossible to defeat.

Also, casualties seem absurdely high, and it takes forever to replenish manpower, which really made the game less fun. Especially when your armies are replenishing and you have no manpower and an ally calls you to arms.

Also, religions:

Spoiler :

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Welcome to ahistorical and overpowered France simulator IV

How has France not been nerfed yet? I've only had EU4 since November, but I know that Baguette has been idiotically strong since launch. And the Burgundy inheritance event is just awful.

You can see in my screenshot that I'm number 2 in score.
You have one guess as to who number 1 is.

By the way I don't have Art of war, either. Or any other expansion.

Lohrenswald said:

That's after uniting the empire. With regular Austria I for the most part lost money during wars, even with war taxes.

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Hm. Sounds like actual history.

I'm playing version 1.9 and like to use "MEIOU & Taxes". Unfortunately, I cannot get its "Random New World" to work. I also play with "50 Loading screens" and "Better Terra Incognita".

I don't like colonial nations, but none of the mods to stop that seem to work.

Would you recommend accepting the liberte, egalite, fraternite event, or not?
The penalties regarding unrest and missionaries don't appeal to me, but technology cost is lowered, and it might be interesting.

Lohrenswald said:

Would you recommend accepting the liberte, egalite, fraternite event, or not?
The penalties regarding unrest and missionaries don't appeal to me, but technology cost is lowered, and it might be interesting.

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I did in EU3, but haven't had that event in EU4 yet. I suppose it depends on how advanced you are already. In EU3, you could always keep advancing in tech, even if the ahead-of-time-penalty became decades, since there was no limit on how much you can invest. In EU4, once the tech cost is more than your max monarch points, you've hit a wall. You can still invest them in more buildings, but only if you have the cash. Which may be the case late-game. So it would be situational for me, and less of a yes-please than in EU3.

IMO, the slow manpower regain is one of the most important changes in core gameplay in EU4 (and technically the last patch for EU3, 5.2). In EU3, you'd almost always have plenty of manpower even as a mid-sized country; in EU4 you often have to be careful even as a large country and manpower often (though not always) is a limiting factor in war. I was actually surprised in my most recent war that manpower was not even close to a limiting factor, but I had 350,000 to start with due to Quantity ideas and a large-scale armory-building programme.

EU4 in general, though, has a lot more nuance than EU3 or Civ. In EU3, once you got to a certain size, you pretty much could go do whatever you wanted as if it were Civ, provided you stayed under the infamy limit. EU4 does a lot better at making the grand strategy aspect last later in the game, but it does mean that you can't be at war all the time (although this does vary somewhat by patch; 1.6 in particular being war-friendly). Even my most recent war, where manpower was not an issue, was a reminder of the improved late-game balance versus EU3. As the Ottomans with my ally France, a war against Austria, Poland, Spain, and the Netherlands ended in a white peace, despite the first two having half-strength armies to start with. Civ lets you pick off civilizations one at a time; they actually make sensible and effective alliances fairly often in EU4.

And the losing money while at war part is intentional; one of the vanilla dev diaries specifically mentioned that it shouldn't always be possible to remain profitable while at war, and in Paradox's multiplayer sessions that usually wasn't the case. And it's true. In my last war, despite having a strong economy, I soon found myself facing losses every months with reinforcement costs of up to 75 ducats/month (and at the end, 140/month), and combined with raising new troops, took out 1500 or 2000 ducats' worth of loans. All while being under force limits. War ain't cheap anymore like when I had over 100,000 ducats to spare in EU3.

Also, that's an impressive Ethiopia. As well as HRE. At least from the political map, it looks like you were pretty successful for a second game.

I played further


Aragon and France are vassals, but I didn't manage to annex them in time.
I build the Kiel canal, And the Suez one was not far off.
I think I was able to do some of that vassal feeding thing. Egypt had only three provinces, I vassalised them and gave them back their cores from Ethiopa. Similar story with Epirus, which had cores on most of greece.

Never all that fun if you are such a big blob, no way anyone can stand up to a united HRE.

I had tons of fun after the uphill battle to get to the unification.
Also, if all the rest of Europe united, they could have defeated me. Such an allience couldn't occur without human players though, of course.

Lohrenswald said:

I had tons of fun after the uphill battle to get to the unification.
Also, if all the rest of Europe united, they could have defeated me. Such an allience couldn't occur without human players though, of course.

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Why not? In a Spain game, I was in a war with france, and was backed by england, portugal, austria, poland and denmark. France only had flanders on their side.

And yes, france won because the AI thinks it can go head to head with france its buffs on the battlefield... And I couldnt deploy my full troop number because I had to smash rebellions in India and Africa (rebellions the AI never has offcours when colonizing)

Lohrenswald said:

Also, if all the rest of Europe united, they could have defeated me. Such an allience couldn't occur without human players though, of course.

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That's easily done with a coalition of all your neighbors. That happens quite often.

Heretic_Cata said:

That's easily done with a coalition of all your neighbors. That happens quite often.

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Did they patch it so it's no longer "whenever you take over a basetax 1 province in Siberia"?

Civ'ed said:

Did they patch it so it's no longer "whenever you take over a basetax 1 province in Siberia"?

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Yea, i think it's good now. At one point in the patches, NO ONE entered into a coalition against you.
It's kinda strange Lohrenswald managed to get that big in Europe. But then again i don't remember eu4 vanilla much, and the game was made more to suit my playstyle in later patches (promotes slow&steady expansionism, against world conquest obsessions); and i only played my first 2 or 3 games in Europe.

Heretic_Cata said:

It's kinda strange Lohrenswald managed to get that big in Europe.

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I kind of lucked out and got a personal union with Hungary (I know that Austria has missions to enforce unions on Bohemia and Hungary, but they never fired). Aside from that and my many brawls with France (most of which I lost) I only waged about 4 wars to get land in Europe before uniting the Empire (after the unification things got somewhat easy, besides an initial war against France and Castilla). Waging wars on an almost shattered Poland and technologically inferior Osman empire wasn't particularely hard.

Bohemia and Prussia waged their own wars on Poland.