AbsintheRed
Deity
Thanks for the detailed feedback!I love RFCE. I have been playing it for 2 solid months.
Got around to Scotland this week. Thought it would be fun to "replace" William (analogous to the Burgundian French, Cordobans, etc). Scotland was hard - limited cities spots, little land, and poor land (moor, etc). Every other game I can guide my nation to the top and this time not so much. At least the mercs are good.Spoiler merc :![]()
Maybe Scotland was intended in-game to maintain their Auld Alliance (until they need to take Bretagne) and not rocket to the top.
Others have commented on the forts requirement for UHV #1. It did feel like workers were doing idle tasks. But I learned - others correct me - a salt mine on the Isle of Man doesn't give salt but a fort did put it into my available resources. Forts did shave off a few turns for boats to cross.
Mainly though, the Auld Alliance is a super tough UHV, as others mentioned.
From start to 1560 you have 210 turns.
Assuming France doesn't collapse (and I was lucky, I had the biggest France in-game I've ever seen, conquering Burgundy, northern Germany, parts of Spain/Aragon), you have
2 points max good relations and 1 OB x 210 = 630 points.
Defensive pacts only are around for ~75 turns of the allotted time = 150 more points
Moreover, you can't sign a defensive pact in general because "your land is too far away". I had to conquer London (red stability zone) to get some tiles by France-proper.
Even if you have 9 resources traded, that is 3 ppt = 600 points.
(in general you can trade sheep, barley, honey, copper to France, for hopefully 4 of their resources in return, but note the barley, honey, copper will be your only sources).
So this 1380 points, best case.
Which means you need 1120 points from mutual wars, or 2 ppt for that, so you need 560 turns of mutual war. You will get some of that from England, in general this means you have to be at mutual war with at least 2.5 civilizations for the entire game from spawn to 1560.
With 100 turns to go to UHV #2 I was at 671 (I had mutual wars with Norway, England, Denmark) solely for the purpose of appeasing France.
I didn't want to repeat this, and facing certain failure, I resorted to WB to bring France in to war against everyone I declared on, submitted here for a chuckle.
Spoiler france :
![]()
![]()
Perhaps the next version (I realize RFCE 1.5 is just out) could center on net relationship points added per turn. E.g. above I have a +13 with France (still seemingly low after giving them resources, gold, etc). But +2/turn for good relations is maybe not enough, and we can reward the player for bumping this ratio up to cement the alliance. Some discussions focus on 1000 or 1500 which I think is more reasonable (especially consider in most games I have played France has collapsed).
Thanks again for RFCE
It's always great to read about people playing and enjoying the mod this much!

Will get into updating some of the UHVs soon enough, there are already quite a few things that came up in the past few months.
The Auld Alliance will definitely be improved in some form.
Even though 1.5 has just been released, I will have quite some modding time during the second half of June and July, so there will be a huge number of changes in the next couple months too!
It's a bug if the Quarry improvement didn't connect the island to your trade network.But I learned - others correct me - a salt mine on the Isle of Man doesn't give salt but a fort did put it into my available resources. Forts did shave off a few turns for boats to cross.
Actually I recently added a similar function to Realim Invictus, and I'm pretty sure it works there correctly.
Will test it out, I'm curious what went wrong here.