Prussia in current version (1.16.2)

[Enyavar]

I love testing the expansion stability system, and prussia is a great example to show how it works.

Spoiler With current DoC, the basic recipe goes as follows: :

• Core area needs as many cities as possible, reaching out into the non-core area.
• Core area needs to get developed first, naturally. In this example I kept lots of forests so their production benefits would remain. More ideal at some later point would have been to replace them with towns (give you additional stability) or farmland (give you more food for the core cities. Each core town counts as one citizen in a city; so towns (which give you commerce as you know) are basically worth more than farmland until the very very late-game techs would make farms more effective with +5 Food farms vs. +2 Food+1 Citizen towns.
  
• Non-core area that gets managed by core cities should simply produce as much food as possible.
• Non-core areas not managed by the core should be minimized, and overly large cities avoided: Avoid having any farmland (resources are okay!) and windmills: mining and cottaging works better there. If your empire's expansion stability gets out of control, try to downsize the non-core cities dramatically. Carefully managed starvation is your tool there.

So this thread is just to point out how ridiculously overbuilt a Prussia can be if it gets properly managed core cities. For the sake of the first two city alone, I ran most of the time with Monarchy because nothing but garrisoned troops would keep those citizens happy, even long before these huuge amounts of food from late-game wonders rolled in.

Spoiler Kiel with Tsukiji Fish Market (italian rice) and Delta Works :

Hamburg and Lübeck really don't cut it. Kiel rocks.

If you spotted the suspicious +1 Food right on 1E of Kiel: That was a turtle event in the HRE period of the game. Worked great for me here.

Spoiler Königsberg with farmland :

Don't go with Memelland (one spot to the north, it results in less food)

Berlin, now, is just a fixture for Prussia. To maximize stability, Prussia should go with Danzig and Dresden (dropping Erfurt there), but that path makes winning the UHV impossible. So Berlin it is, similar to how Paris and Moskow are draining the stability score of France/Russia, but are required in the "correct" position anyway.

Spoiler The rest of the Reich cities aren't slouchy either. :

Make sure that Köln (Cologne) and Freiburg get all the farmland in France. For Erfurt and München (Munich), raze any pesky Austrian or North Italian cities that try to steal your food as well. To feed Munich here, it got the Wall Street and 10 Great Merchants. Hint: Capture the city with the Sophia Church early (in this game, it was in Belgrad), so that all merchants will give +1 Food. Then, delay the obsoletion tech for Great Merchantry (Social Contract for Saint Sophia; Measurement for San Marco) as long as possible. When those were obsoleted, I lost the main food source from merchant specialists and over 170 wealth per turn.

Those core cities I displayed here, are able to easily offset any stability issues you might run into, even when maintaining large productive cities in Britain, Scandinavia and especially in sweet Russia. Still, you may want to have all the non-core cities not focussed on food all that much. I made the fatal mistake of thoughtlessly clicking through some more conquests and ended up controlling South America and South Africa nearly completely and that brought me a domination victory in 1939, shortly before my inevitable UHV win. Arggh. Still, that whole sprawling empire would be kept stabilized through the food-heavy anchor cities in the core, and would have supported even more conquests quite easily. Instead of Africa and South America, I know I should have tackled America or India, for maximum profit.

Spoiler I found the Burj Dubai especially nice, but construction required three Great Engineers and was totally not worth it except for showing off. :

Note that it also runs counter my main argument for the thread, this fast-growing city (even in a historical non-core spot) is actually a destabilizer. But again, historical non-cores are much better than entirely foreign lands.

Spoiler And finally, wait for the Hindenburg catastrophe in 1940 to get happiness airports for reaaaally cheap. :

This event was just a cherry on the top.

But, for anyone interested in trying that very game:

Spoiler Here it is, my Prussian start with a carefully seeded HRE predecessor civilization is attached! :

The game is Monarch difficulty, Normal speed, from a 600 AD start. It plays extremely easily. You start right in the middle of the storm, with capturing and razing Vienna; then also capturing Rome, Neapolis, Kiev and Odessa. Then have some piece, before you're storming the world peace by peace.

Spain may cause some trouble regrettably, I would have preferred to have them as my ally.

Next, I go try Polish space win.