EU2 is a great game for single player..
I've grown countries such as Rome, and Byzantium to most powerful in the neighborhood. Austria, France, Portugal are very easy to play no real challenge growing them.. Lost as England, Novgorod. China was a strange game.. I annexed everything west of India, colonized all of north Asia to Russia. It was HUGE. Now one of the many chinaware provinces had an income of 96> Just one province yet my research amounted to under 100 per year, everybody was zounds ahead me and I thought that was pretty unrealistic.
This is all Grand Campaign btw. Poland, Sweden were pretty easy. Denmark was rough in the beginning, everybody gets really mad if you annex Mecklenburgh... Which brings up another unrealistic- Denmark declaring war on (human)countries halfway around the world. I'm sure they're not using allied ports yet they send fleets all the way like to Rome. I tried to send some their way died of attrition rounding iberia.... They take a province and there's no way you can barter with them. They always seem to get a province in asia minor all of my games.
Anyway this is all on hardest level, I read in their forum that if you lower the difficulty the AI will not go into bankruptcy as much -wrong I tested it.
How about those spite treaties? One game I tried as Ireland. My goal was to take England. Many many years went by. I would've made some gains if my allies stopped making peace with them. Finally I got fed up with these supposed allies screwing me so I turned on scotland. Boom managed to occupy all of their provinces. Then they go and make peace with Rome, giving them all the provinces I occupied.. Just screwing me over one last time hehe.
Some strategies I use.. Year 1: disband 90% of the navy upkeep is way to much to pay so early in the game for 30 ships.
Let the AI attrition their armies to death, don't engage them, cut their line of supplies, etc.
when the AI has occupied some of your provinces offer them no tribute peace eventually they'll accept, I guess when they start getting war exhaustion. If the AI is occupying alot of your provinces turn the religious toleration slider all the way down for those provinces religions.. a few months will go by and -pouf- you have a psuedo army of rebels liberating the province.
OK I'm finished all this has been played with the original game on the disk. I hear that the patch makes the game much harder. I'm going to play my newly patched game right now...
So Morrowind and EU2 are my games right now. Maybe some Civ2 scenarios or Civ3 from time to time. I might even install Colonization again.
