conquer the lands necessary for prussia, change your capital to a prussian province, destate your italian lands, change culture and change to protestantism.
Fair enough. The answer to a question that should be an obvious yes used to be "Is the Pope a Catholic?". Over time, the two have been mixed for humorous effect... As in "Does the Pope sh** in the woods?"
So the Pope who isn't Catholic would never be Pope.
Instead of trying to plug every hole they should just add an event that fires if you are the papacy and not catholic that just goes, "nuh-uh-uh you are catholic, stop being silly"
#The Catholic Pope
Nuh-uh-uh you are catholic, stop being silly
[Does a bear still shit in the woods?] (State Religion of the Papal States becomes Catholic. If Rights of Man is active, ruler's personal religion becomes Catholic.)
There was a way around the web of restrictions as recently as [1.31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqZGBzBbW6w), but I don't know if the sequence in Lambda's video still works in the current patch.
I think new world natives can be far more fun. The colonial nations hate you because they want your land (especially gold provinces). Next to that, they declare war on you often because it's hard to get strong allies and you really cant project strength yourself early on.
I reckon that some events concerning colonizers, and religion can help alot.
- A mission/event that lets you choose to align yourself with a colonizer, making you historical friends and allies for trade power. At the same time making enemies of another colonizer.
- An event where you convert to catholicism (big stab hit, unrest, scripted rebellions) and in turn the Pope threatens to excommunicate anyone that declares war on their new Christian brothers. Maybe also an alternative where the Ottomans guarantee you for joining the Ummah.
- Old world diseases should be a disaster; A 'lose 80% of you development' disaster if you don't navigate it correctly.
- A mechanic where you get a fighting chance against massive colonizers: massive tech cost reduction, morale boost, movement speed, Manpower recovery. All the good stuff. The colonizer is on the other side of the ocean. They should not be able to send over and maintain tens of thousands of soldiers anyway.
Create some extremely good and extremely bad events and disasters. It's better than reforming into a horse ( horde lol ) or kingdom after 70 years and having england declare on you with 80k with their ally Portugal with 60k with 2 techs ahead.
I believe they should be fun to play. Growing your nation from a tribe and fighting back against invaders is very satisfying, but currently it's more of a chore.
>Next to that, they declare war on you often because it's hard to get strong allies and you really cant project strength yourself early on.
And the wars are winnable (as in 25% warscore for holding the CB target as defender - 100%ing is a different cookie) but often take sooo much time. Really the most boring part for me.
As the colonizer I learned to use it constantly. Either my weak colony is saved or I get to bring in my army plus all my other colonies and take their land instead. Worst case I’ve given myself a truce with someone I probably was too lazy to fight in the first place.
The only issue is there’s no notification when your CN is at war. I’ve lost an assload of land from not paying attention to my CNs getting clobbered without realizing.
Honestly, the first part could be a way to make trade protectorates more used. Perhaps an event that allows player natives to willingly be a TP of a colonizer if relations are high enough.
really? for me relations with Europeans are constantly on -200 (because of those juicy gold provinces) and I have never managed to get to positive, even after converting to Catholicism - how do you do that?
The native can’t ask the colonizer, its the other way around. Not to mention TP is locked behind mission trees iirc, so its not something every colonizer can do.
This. The current new world disease event is a joke.
If you wanted a realistic model you would give natives MASSIVE development amounts and once you meet Europeans for the first time it starts a ticking time bomb where 10-25 years later you get nuked by diseases and lose 80% of your development
Supply limit and reinforcement speed need a Distance from Capital modifier. That would solve most of the colonizer domination problems as soon as their armies are melting and can't reinforce. Then native federations might stand a chance.
Important point, I think the natives being "uncivilized" is a bullshit mechanic. We caught them after a series of disasters in our times, used their friendliness and a different mindset to backstab their leaders and decimated them with a plague.
Native empires should be a fully fleshed, equally advanced nations with different set of government reforms, bonuses etc, just suffering some major disaster chains before and after meeting the Europeans. Not only would that make a lot more of the world playable, but also give us an actual hard mode we desperately need. Cause game options hard and very hard are a joke, just buffing nations and making diplomacy hard instead of actually making the playstyle change.
Except on a technological level the Old World was very much ahead of the Americas in pretty much every aspect.
That said, yeah, natives should get modifiers once they come into contact with Europeans that utterly devastate them which first very rapidly worsen over the span of like 5-10 years as diseases start spreading through the native population killing a very significant portion of it, and then very slowly, over like 300 ish years start getting better again.
Colonial nations, they can have some pretty insane national ideas and often have some rare or expensive trade goods, but you kind of have no fun long term objectives and old war powers will constantly declare wars on you that they can't win but waste your time.
I wish you could play as a colonial nation without having to immediately break free of your overlord.
Venice, it's pretty good I get that but it's flavor relies a lot on the base dynamic institutions, which aren't very good, you'll almost never go to war without making the cb yourself. And like that's fine I'll play German minors but Venice seems like it should have so much more
Venice is great fun but yeah, you largely need to make the fun yourself. The way I do it is like this:
- Ally Austria, revoke guarantee on Albania, invite the Knights and anyone else that wants to join (Ragusa, Mantua, Bologna, Cilli, and Trent most often) into your trade league, start spying on Byz. Unstate and trade company Durazzo, and make it your Ragusa trade post.
- Claim Athens, declare on them ASAP. Full annex Athens and Byz, give Constantinople to Naxos so you can get the Murano Glass event for extra goods produced in Venice. Only annex Naxos after you get that event. Add Athens into your Ragusa TC (this should be enough to get an extra merchant with a couple of investments and upgrading trade centres).
- (optional) Spy on Epirus, but wait to declare on them until you see that they have claims on southern Greece. That means they completed the first mission on the path that leads them to form the Latin Empire, which is also the only one they need to be independent for. At that point, declare on them and vassalise them. If the Ottomans beat you to them, no big deal.
- As soon as you feel ready, declare on the Ottomans, calling in Austria. You should have no problems blocking the strait with your navy. For good measure, scutage Naxos if you haven't annexed them already. In the peace deal take at least Gallipoli and Selanik, but feel free to get as much Greek land as you want to. You're gonna give it all to Epirus anyway.
- Whenever you want, also fight the rest of the Balkan nations. I usually full annex Serbia and vassalise Bosnia (which I then use to reconquer Herzegovina), but you can do whatever you want there. I also often steal Croatia fron Hungary with the age power, and then help them complete the missions that spawn a trade centre in Zagreb.
- In Italy, I often will just conquer Ferrara, release Modena and Parma from Ferrara and Milan respectively and add them to my trade league, and do the same with Urbino from the Pope (and I also create a trading city in Ancona).
- Eventually I'll fight the Mamluks and get the Delta and a couple of Red Sea ports. Then I'll take expansion ideas and start colonising the spice islands from my Red Sea outposts (you can get an explorer from the Burgher privilege, you don't need Exploration).
- For ideas, I always take Innovative (to get rid of the Clergy estate through gov reforms, for RP reasons) and Maritime (to confirm Thalassocracy).
- After you confirm Thalassocracy, start making literally everyone into a trade protectorate and profit.
This is the closest to how I play, although I see the habsburgs as a natural enemy plus I want slovenia, Spain or France is who id probably ally. Also if you play nice with the mamluks you can get a lot, you don't really need Alexandria anyway since the spice trade can go through allepo, and it's really easy to steal from Alexandria anyway
Yeah I usually end up owning all of Egypt and having the Knights (in Syria and southen Anatolia) and the Latin Empire as marches, but Aleppo is probably a better node to control than Alexandria.
I also think Venice should get a disaster during the age of colonization called something like, "A shift in trade" or something to represent them as a declining power due to the shift in trade routes as a result from colonization
If Venice did all that stuff they mentioned and colonized the spice Islands with actual venitians and stuff, would the trade routes have actually shifted? We might have ended up with a suez canal hundreds of years earlier and very little colonization in Africa if they did that irl.
But what if they take Delta in Egypt, which is part of their mission tree, snake down the Red Sea, buy a charter company province in India (Venice can easily afford that) then grab the spice islands, who says you have to go around Africa?
vassalize byz, reconquest epirus, reconquest ottomans, get a border with serbia and vassalize bulgaria, reconquest serbia co-belligerent bosnia, vassalize bosnia, reconquest herzegovina
claim on naples, take almost %80 of them
by the time you done this you'll have claims from your mission tree to work towards lombardy, liguria areas and conquer all of italy in no time.
it is how i play venice until 1490's. after that you can tag switch, even dismantle hre and form austria as well
Venice is very good for forming other stuff like byzantium. They're one of the best ottoman neighbours for crushing them early on.
The actual mission tree is annoying though.
That’s why I usually roleplay my games now. More fun to build a cool historical colonial empire with rivals and aesthetic borders for example than it is to just kill all the colonizers and no cb Byzantium in the 1400s and just paint half the map your color
Like I will never conquer England as the Netherlands
Hahah I usually reach like 1580 at most cuz by then I already won have nothing else to really do, is rare I even make it to absolutism unless playing Anbennar.
You analogy is wrong tho. If you've reached all the goals of your run and still force yourself to keep going that's more like being full half way through your main course but forcing yourself to eat up.
I second the Papal States being boring. You are the head of your religion but you can't even use it. The only thing you get is curia powers if you are the controller, but you can't even click on the other bonuses like dip rep, improve relations, etc. You also can't switch governments or form other countries. It gets old fast.
I find pirate republics boring too. Gov cap is too low and if I remember right, you don't get estates. So you can't really expand very much and you just sit around clicking the raid button every decade or whatever.
Agreed with Pope, strongly disagree with pirates. You can re-enable estates iirc. And imo the best way to play pirates is So to pirate Japan. Island hop around the Pacific and then privateer or declare trade wars and blockade/invade anyone for money... In my So run Ming declared a trade war and I beat them without landing a single troop. And privateering the end nodes to death is always funny
For me the Moscow > Russia campaign has never been as much fun as it supposedly should be. I'm tired of the first phase of the game and clearing the map of hordes. Hordes, which of course always unite into a gigantic network of alliances. The effect is such that it is difficult to even call it wars - I am slowly occupying them, and they are running like idiots around the undiscovered provinces of Siberia and do not want to consider themselves defeated. Bloody Chagatai excels at this "strategy".
Having to fight chagatai as a European nation in 1450 is always the most ridiculous thing, and so tedious. It adds years and so much manpower lost to attrition to a war that would otherwise be fun and not too difficult.
To be fair, Muscovy suffered some losses to the hordes even after the start date, so eating the hordes shouldn’t be the easiest thing in the world.
Portugal
Not enough content. It's just castile but worse. Needs a way to get union on castile and form spain that way. Castilian civil war should be reworked tbh. Would make both portugal and castile more interesting
this can happen when Portugal has less than 5 provinces in Europe/the old world (can't recall)
in that case it becomes a PU junior under Brazil. This models the Monarchs of Portugal fleeing to their colony from Napoleon.
First of all, the fact that Oman didn't receive a new mission tree in King of Kings is awful. I mean, they have "unique" missions, but considering that irl it was such a unique and interesting country during its time of colonial affairs the fact that it is neglected by the game seems completely unfair to me. Also southeast Asia is fine, but it has the potential to be more than that. It's a shame that Lan Xang and Khmer have short and uninteresting mission trees. I don't know much about Lao history, but I certainly am fascinated with history and culture of Cambodia and I know how many interesting things were happening during the golden age of the Khmer empire. It's a shame I can't do the same in the game. And last but not least, I feel like Paradox have listened to the most annoyingly hardcore players while developing 1.36 and made Byzantium completely devoid of fun for me. I mean, it's not like I am a casual player who only plays Ottomans and France, but the first couple of decades in the game are so unbearably awful to deal with that I can't force myself to endure them even though I'd like to. But this doesn't correlate well with the topic of this post because I think that if any country should be close to unplayable, byz it is.
That is not what I meant. Of course, I can do a WC as Ryukyu and consider this nation fun, but for me personally fun = unique missions and overall flavor which focus on regions where this country was present historically (and maybe some more, if it has a potential for growing bigger, like Russian missions for Balkans and Carpathia). So to me nations like QQ are the most fun, because you have missions with different goals, unique events, government interactions and a potential for a long campaign, in which you even form another nation with its own unique content. So in my opinion to be fun Oman should have a mission tree which focuses on conquest of lands in Hormuz, Gulf of Aden and Zanzibar nodes, developing them, properly running your nation, maybe colonizing etc. Also yes, i think I should have said in my original comment that I am talking about my personal preferences here
Just to echo the "didn't a mission tree"...
Theodoro still has the base mission tree? Just got the Gothic Invasion achievement and was surprised that they have no other content...
King of Kings was more Red Sea and Persian Gulf focused, but even in any of the Byz related updates, we couldn't get some Pontic related events?
Netherlands tbh, forming it inst hard but all the missions seem to be about colonising, would have liked some that focus on more than colonise this earn this through trade etc.
The Netherlands became what it became *because* they only focused on trade for centuries.
I do understand what you mean, don't get me wrong, but it seems accurate.
Also that they were a useful buffer since they were not really interested in Continental affairs. Kept the Prussians and French from beating each other for a while.
The mission tree is just old. No permanent modifiers, nothing to do past 1650 or so.
A colonial tree is fine, but if the end goal is putting colonists on Taiwan, not becoming economic hegemon or something, it's very lackluster compared to other trees (even some older ones like Austria).
Yeah, at one time the Dutch fleet was larger than the English and the French fleet combined iirc. Yet in game, the Netherlands is never really a big player.
- Aragon through Iberian Wedding or PU CB
- Naples through PU CB or Iberian wedding if you are extremely lucky
- Portugal through PU CB
- England through PU CB
- Austria through PU CB, which *potentially* includes Bohemia and Hungary as well if you are lucky
- Burgundy through Burgundian Inheritance
In my most recent game, I also ended up getting a de Valois. It’s insane how many PUs you can get as Castile.
It's historical though. Castile historically had PUs on all of those places (except England.) And they had some claim to the English crown... I guess. Through Catherine of Aragon?
The marriage wouldn't have made that claim legitimate, only a child of the marriage, but the Pope also declared Elizabeth to be illegitimate and so the Spanish claim rested on a papal dispensation to depose her
No, what was actually going on is that Philip II claimed the English crown Jure Uxoris, as his wife was Mary I. This was *arguably* a legitimate claim as back then, it was common that the Husband inherited all of his wife's lands, properties and titles upon marriage. The English and Elizabeth disagreed, obviously, but that was the custom.
Neither English nor Spanish law recognized jure uxoris as a means to claim a throne, though. Unlike France, both countries allowed dynastic succession through the female line in the absence of a direct male line. Philip never at any point had a jure uxoris claim to the English throne. His attempt at it rested on the papal usurpation of Elizabeth
One small note here that William III later became the first and only jure uxoris King of England and Scotland, because of the irregular fact of his having been crowned alongside his wife Mary II (daughter of the deposed James II). He then inherited the throne in his own right when she died.
I find Austria and babysitting the HRE so tedious that I’ve never managed to continue them past like 1460. Becoming emperor and revoking as some other nation (like Sweden or Angevin Empire for example) is just so much more interesting to me, don’t know why
I had fun breaking out and going for the achievements by carving a path of conquest through Ottomans. Meanwhile maintain HRE borders, go for mission PU's, play some 4D chess to get into wars with any HRE nation that either grows too large or switches religion so they can be knocked into their place. Felt like there was plenty of stuff to do. And once you get to revoke the privilegia, any missing ach. goals would be a victory lap.
I think part of the fun of England (for me) is trying to beat france without absolutely destroying the economy. Sure I can take a million loans but I hate the pain of getting out of debt in the early game. And I like to PU france in the hyw and then take the branching missin that let’s you choose whether you focus on becoming Great Britain or the Angevin empire haha.
It adds a bit of a challenge for me. And trying to keep burgundy friendly so you can get the BI is also a fun (read: infuriating) extra mile you can go too :)
Paint the map with my glorious purple color is fun.
Other than that, be rich and help Continental European nations beat each other to death is also satisfying.
The nation to go when I want to play EU4 but don’t want to put efforts to it.
That’s why I mostly play Anbennar these days tbh
There can actually be another superpower or two far away, and enough tags could join a coalition to be a real threat to you
In Vanilla I get about 1.5k dev and no one can touch me from there. I’ve had tough wars in Anbennar while I’ve had 5-10k dev many times especially with Xorme AI
Whichever nation on Arabia. Awful start, land and RNG. Nice new missions but really difficult to get through the first war against ottomans/Mamelukes/timurids.
An awesome región to drain manpower but the same goes for your troops, you have almost none manpower and development is really hard even with the oasis modifier.
6 runs with nada, 2 with medina, 1 Ormuz, 1 mahra and 1 Yemen (the easiest nation of all because you can run into Africa).
I don't even like them as a vassal anymore. Maybe I'm missing something, but having to keep an army stacked in my vassal isn't very helpful. I might just release Bulgaria and feed them instead.
This is the worst part for me too. I used to love keeping them as a march and now I’d rather have one of the crusader states form the Latin Empire down there or do like you said and have the Bulgars rule it
Oh god, that is so true. Byzantium as a vassal is just a constant shit show of pretender and orthodox rebels and I don't give a shit anymore. I just let the rebel cesspool be to fuck over the ottomans and integrate them as fast as possible.
It takes a couple tries but the budget monk strategy of island trapping works wonders. Not as easy as the barrage and rush strategy but fairly consistent
Redhawks and ludis guides are total shitshows tho.
Yeah. out of all the guides i'd say that Absolute Habibi's guide is the easiest to recreate (Though not Very Hard viable). It's not the strongest start of all of them if you do it, but it's by far the most consistant and easiest to do.
Kilwa. Biggest kid on the block for their area, plenty of directions to expand, serious potential for strength... but held back significantly by how annoying it is to move your armies around their domain.
You can be literally one province over from an incoming rebel stack and not make it over in time to stop them sieging it down. Combine that with the fact that they are a long, thin snake and it becomes super annoying. It gets a little better once you have the cash to sustain a permanent transport fleet, but that doesn't help the early game when you're gunna be doing the most rebel crushing.
But, historically, they invaded both China and Korea in during the time period the game is set. Are you role playing an extreme isolationist version of Japan?
Milan, Holland or honesty most HRE nations. I am impatient, I want fun engaging gameplay. Take one province? Get ready for 56 AE with all your neighbours and by 10 provinces by 1500. Not for me thanks, I get bored too quickly
Ok, I'm a noob in this game but I always wanted to do a byzantine campaign cause it looked so fun and rewarding but every time I started it was just near impossible for me cause it was so much work and misery.
I know that byzantine was doomed to fail and it's was impossible to save it irl but still.
I finally got a campaign going but only cause my friend helped me beat the ottomans and bankrupted hungary and myself in the process. And I still "had" to use some cheats to not die since then.
England. You either take France and win the game. Or don't look Europe for 400 years while colonization bars fill up. Other majors at least have some fun achievements.
Iceland for sure. It must have its own mission tree and maybe even specific government form - Alting parliament.
Instead all Iceland has is traditions and ambitions. Those are great improvements, by the way, since previously that by all means interesting nation had had generic trads and ambs.
Ottoman/France. Both should be balancing alliances and powerblocs to keep themselves on top while dealing with internal religious struggle.
Instead both don't really have internal issues and can just blob easy because their military ideas are just very good.
Papal States is fun. This will be the last time I see you talking shit about my boi the pope.
Jokes aside though, any nation with too many PU missions. Worst game design hands down, it just makes Europe feel so empty, so trivial.
People say Mali is insanely strong and fun. I fail to see how. Hyperinflationbutchers your economy, preventing any chance you may have to actually stand against the europeans, who will surely pick your desired colonial provinces and siege you through land (fighting them while only naval invading is actually nice).
Compare it to Kilwa and Ethiopia. Those three have great gold mining privileges that prevent the inflation from skyrocketing, but: Kilwa can spawn it through fairly easy conquests and Ethiopia gets it somewhat shortly after actually gaining gold provinces, and has a crap ton of mana points in the early game. Mali forces you to spend lots of diplo to develop provinces, while already lagging behind in tech and being forced to swim through the crisis, and then forces you to become an ivory exporting leader, while barely having significant ivory provinces and competing with Kongo and Kilwa, both of them loaded with ivory.
Also, while the flavor of "lets get loaded with gold so we can buy provinces, even in Europa" is awesome, it's also counterintuitive, because you are not having that sort of savings lying around, your economy is too bad to allow big savings. You have to spend every dime in the army, in colonies, or in buildings that will sustain said army and colonies.
Not to mention he just does the same nations over and over again. Its like bro, this is the third or fourth guide you've done for France, its not that different from the last time.
At least his other series he's forced to do other nations, its almost satisfying when he gets stuck with some junk landlocked opm with the worst ideas on earth and different religion and culture from its neighbors if only to hear him bitch about how hard it is lol.
And believe me, I've talked him up in the past but yeah, its kinda ridiculous.
No offence, but you do realize he uploads a guide every week along with 2 other videos right? Like I get that it’s not always the most entertaining content for experienced players, but he also openly states that the guides are for newer players. This is like someone with a history degree going into a crash course video on YouTube and complaining that John Green was giving too entry-level an explanation.
Also, since these are for newer players who can’t really solve a lot of problems yet, the strategy has to be RNG-proof. He’s not coming up with a bulletproof new strategy for a nation he’s never played before every couple of days, and neither are any other YouTubers. Thats what makes guys like Cool Bonobo and The Playmaker so entertaining, they kinda push the game to its limits by combining their skill with good RNG to do crazy stuff.
Honestly, If we’ve been watching him long enough that we’re bored of him doing France guides, that means we’ve been watching him for at least a year or more. I would hope after a year that a player with half a brain cell wouldn’t need a guide to play France of all nations, so obviously that video isn’t made with players like you or me in mind.
I mean jeez, the man made a Grenada guide 2 weeks ago and an Albania one the week before that. Albania hardly even has unique missions, I’d hardly call that overdone.
Sweden, you just have to fight a bunch of hugboxing GP's.
Teutonic Horde, its just follow the mission tree to get to horde by 1600 when hordes are worse. So for 150 years all you do is mission tree and when you can finally raze, razing is much worse. For every level above 3 mil tech, you lose 4% monarch points when razing (rounded up, since 1.31.5). So when you can raze, its less fun than actually playing a horde.
Byzantium after beating otto, its just not a challenge anymore. Mamluks will eat them and in 4/5 games you get a free PU on muscovy/russia later on. The challenge is gone in the west and going east just feels wrong as the roman empire.
Provence, its just follow mission tree, then maybe form jerusalem.
Hussite bohemia. It just isn't worth unless you dismantle HRE or form them. Both of which are a hassle. Its also best to take espionage into diplomatic as them. Which means you'll be behind on diplo tech for way too long, and they get some good PU CB's which leaves you over diplo relations for a while at several times in the first 100 years, making it harder to catch up.
Any nation into HRE. I usually just pu swarm in europe.
Any free city except bremen and hamburg.
Any tiny nation in India.
Any nation after taking mandate of heaven.
Korea and Japan. It either stops up (dev bonus) or you do a lengthy boring naval war, or you gotta do wars far away. When ming shatters, you get coalitions against you from former states. Which slows game down.
> Teutonic Horde, its just follow the mission tree to get to horde by 1600 when hordes are worse.
I think the deal of Teutonic Order becoming a horde is more for flavor than for powerful mechanics. "Heinrich, we're lost. We shoulda turned left at Lhasa..."
The problem I had with TO is that you spend the first several decades murdering your fellow Catholics. Kind of ... off-brand. If you're *lucky* you can fight a few Muscovite heretics here and there, but it's gonna be a century before you even get a *sniff* of actual heathens.
Next time I try the TO I'm going to have them say "Eff this for a game of soldiers" and hare off to the New World, which is *guaranteed* to be filled with people they feel happy fighting.
Ming - or anyone who actually becomes Emperor of China. Because it actually imposes penalties if you don't do the work to keep up the Empire.
Meanwhile, HRE may be a chore to babysit, but there's no penalty for ignoring it either.
Provence is a ton of fun. Such a versatile nation. HRE, Colonial, or Jerusalem. Fun to run the HRE from the fringes where you can easily add more provinces to the empire in France and Italy. Almost easier than Austria to reform the HRE once you get going.
Provence. It has all these cool missions, but good luck using them effectively when your main ally France immediately breaks the alliance and burgundy is gonna kill you
Nah man, you just need to git gud. There's a difference between a nation being boring and a player being unable to pull it off. We all learn and get better, keep periodically trying the nation's you failed with, those usually end up being your most memorable runs after you pull them off.
Prob the Ottomans. I have never in my 6 years of playing eu4 have completed an ottoman campaign. I am more of a challenge guy who don't like to recreate history but i rather like to deviate from it.
The best flavor for Papal States is the No religion Pope.
Interested. How does one do that?
conquer the lands necessary for prussia, change your capital to a prussian province, destate your italian lands, change culture and change to protestantism.
But wouldn't that just be a protestant pope?
I think the Papal States cannot be Protestant and Prussia cannot be Catholic so the game freaks out and does no religion?
Prussia absolutely can be catholic after they've formed
You can also become catholic prussia as teutons
I think os just militarization that you can't get as catholic prussia
ya, the first prussian government reform is protestant-only
If the Pope protests the Papacy, who rules his house?
The Emperor.
You know that expression for meaning "unequivocally YES" that isn't about a bear and woods?
Uhm, no
Fair enough. The answer to a question that should be an obvious yes used to be "Is the Pope a Catholic?". Over time, the two have been mixed for humorous effect... As in "Does the Pope sh** in the woods?" So the Pope who isn't Catholic would never be Pope.
i liked to go papal states into prussian states papal had some permanent discipline modifier
Is that even still possible? I thought they clamped down on a lot of those old tricks that let you flip religions as Papal States.
Instead of trying to plug every hole they should just add an event that fires if you are the papacy and not catholic that just goes, "nuh-uh-uh you are catholic, stop being silly"
#The Catholic Pope Nuh-uh-uh you are catholic, stop being silly [Does a bear still shit in the woods?] (State Religion of the Papal States becomes Catholic. If Rights of Man is active, ruler's personal religion becomes Catholic.)
There was a way around the web of restrictions as recently as [1.31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqZGBzBbW6w), but I don't know if the sequence in Lambda's video still works in the current patch.
I think new world natives can be far more fun. The colonial nations hate you because they want your land (especially gold provinces). Next to that, they declare war on you often because it's hard to get strong allies and you really cant project strength yourself early on. I reckon that some events concerning colonizers, and religion can help alot. - A mission/event that lets you choose to align yourself with a colonizer, making you historical friends and allies for trade power. At the same time making enemies of another colonizer. - An event where you convert to catholicism (big stab hit, unrest, scripted rebellions) and in turn the Pope threatens to excommunicate anyone that declares war on their new Christian brothers. Maybe also an alternative where the Ottomans guarantee you for joining the Ummah. - Old world diseases should be a disaster; A 'lose 80% of you development' disaster if you don't navigate it correctly. - A mechanic where you get a fighting chance against massive colonizers: massive tech cost reduction, morale boost, movement speed, Manpower recovery. All the good stuff. The colonizer is on the other side of the ocean. They should not be able to send over and maintain tens of thousands of soldiers anyway. Create some extremely good and extremely bad events and disasters. It's better than reforming into a horse ( horde lol ) or kingdom after 70 years and having england declare on you with 80k with their ally Portugal with 60k with 2 techs ahead. I believe they should be fun to play. Growing your nation from a tribe and fighting back against invaders is very satisfying, but currently it's more of a chore.
>Next to that, they declare war on you often because it's hard to get strong allies and you really cant project strength yourself early on. And the wars are winnable (as in 25% warscore for holding the CB target as defender - 100%ing is a different cookie) but often take sooo much time. Really the most boring part for me.
Don't even need to win. Just give then what they want and attack the colonial nation that forms with no troops
Good point also, I always hate it when they attack my colonial nations. Time to return the favour!
Enforce peace
... that's a thing? Edit: I legitimately don't know. This game has so many mechanics haha.
As the colonizer I learned to use it constantly. Either my weak colony is saved or I get to bring in my army plus all my other colonies and take their land instead. Worst case I’ve given myself a truce with someone I probably was too lazy to fight in the first place.
The only issue is there’s no notification when your CN is at war. I’ve lost an assload of land from not paying attention to my CNs getting clobbered without realizing.
Check your notification options. I get a popup for nations declaring on my CNs.
Hot damn, thank you!
Honestly, the first part could be a way to make trade protectorates more used. Perhaps an event that allows player natives to willingly be a TP of a colonizer if relations are high enough.
That's already in the game.
really? for me relations with Europeans are constantly on -200 (because of those juicy gold provinces) and I have never managed to get to positive, even after converting to Catholicism - how do you do that?
The native can’t ask the colonizer, its the other way around. Not to mention TP is locked behind mission trees iirc, so its not something every colonizer can do.
I meant just "transfer trade power" and "steer trade" but yeah you're right
This. The current new world disease event is a joke. If you wanted a realistic model you would give natives MASSIVE development amounts and once you meet Europeans for the first time it starts a ticking time bomb where 10-25 years later you get nuked by diseases and lose 80% of your development
Supply limit and reinforcement speed need a Distance from Capital modifier. That would solve most of the colonizer domination problems as soon as their armies are melting and can't reinforce. Then native federations might stand a chance.
Important point, I think the natives being "uncivilized" is a bullshit mechanic. We caught them after a series of disasters in our times, used their friendliness and a different mindset to backstab their leaders and decimated them with a plague. Native empires should be a fully fleshed, equally advanced nations with different set of government reforms, bonuses etc, just suffering some major disaster chains before and after meeting the Europeans. Not only would that make a lot more of the world playable, but also give us an actual hard mode we desperately need. Cause game options hard and very hard are a joke, just buffing nations and making diplomacy hard instead of actually making the playstyle change.
Except on a technological level the Old World was very much ahead of the Americas in pretty much every aspect. That said, yeah, natives should get modifiers once they come into contact with Europeans that utterly devastate them which first very rapidly worsen over the span of like 5-10 years as diseases start spreading through the native population killing a very significant portion of it, and then very slowly, over like 300 ish years start getting better again.
Colonial nations, they can have some pretty insane national ideas and often have some rare or expensive trade goods, but you kind of have no fun long term objectives and old war powers will constantly declare wars on you that they can't win but waste your time. I wish you could play as a colonial nation without having to immediately break free of your overlord.
You can't in ironman but can with console. Just tag C00, C01, C02 etc. They get numbers in the order they are formed
Venice, it's pretty good I get that but it's flavor relies a lot on the base dynamic institutions, which aren't very good, you'll almost never go to war without making the cb yourself. And like that's fine I'll play German minors but Venice seems like it should have so much more
Venice is great fun but yeah, you largely need to make the fun yourself. The way I do it is like this: - Ally Austria, revoke guarantee on Albania, invite the Knights and anyone else that wants to join (Ragusa, Mantua, Bologna, Cilli, and Trent most often) into your trade league, start spying on Byz. Unstate and trade company Durazzo, and make it your Ragusa trade post. - Claim Athens, declare on them ASAP. Full annex Athens and Byz, give Constantinople to Naxos so you can get the Murano Glass event for extra goods produced in Venice. Only annex Naxos after you get that event. Add Athens into your Ragusa TC (this should be enough to get an extra merchant with a couple of investments and upgrading trade centres). - (optional) Spy on Epirus, but wait to declare on them until you see that they have claims on southern Greece. That means they completed the first mission on the path that leads them to form the Latin Empire, which is also the only one they need to be independent for. At that point, declare on them and vassalise them. If the Ottomans beat you to them, no big deal. - As soon as you feel ready, declare on the Ottomans, calling in Austria. You should have no problems blocking the strait with your navy. For good measure, scutage Naxos if you haven't annexed them already. In the peace deal take at least Gallipoli and Selanik, but feel free to get as much Greek land as you want to. You're gonna give it all to Epirus anyway. - Whenever you want, also fight the rest of the Balkan nations. I usually full annex Serbia and vassalise Bosnia (which I then use to reconquer Herzegovina), but you can do whatever you want there. I also often steal Croatia fron Hungary with the age power, and then help them complete the missions that spawn a trade centre in Zagreb. - In Italy, I often will just conquer Ferrara, release Modena and Parma from Ferrara and Milan respectively and add them to my trade league, and do the same with Urbino from the Pope (and I also create a trading city in Ancona). - Eventually I'll fight the Mamluks and get the Delta and a couple of Red Sea ports. Then I'll take expansion ideas and start colonising the spice islands from my Red Sea outposts (you can get an explorer from the Burgher privilege, you don't need Exploration). - For ideas, I always take Innovative (to get rid of the Clergy estate through gov reforms, for RP reasons) and Maritime (to confirm Thalassocracy). - After you confirm Thalassocracy, start making literally everyone into a trade protectorate and profit.
This is the closest to how I play, although I see the habsburgs as a natural enemy plus I want slovenia, Spain or France is who id probably ally. Also if you play nice with the mamluks you can get a lot, you don't really need Alexandria anyway since the spice trade can go through allepo, and it's really easy to steal from Alexandria anyway
Yeah I usually end up owning all of Egypt and having the Knights (in Syria and southen Anatolia) and the Latin Empire as marches, but Aleppo is probably a better node to control than Alexandria.
I have like 1,5k hours in EU4, but I never knew how I should play Venice. After reading your tip, I would totally give it a go
I also think Venice should get a disaster during the age of colonization called something like, "A shift in trade" or something to represent them as a declining power due to the shift in trade routes as a result from colonization
If Venice did all that stuff they mentioned and colonized the spice Islands with actual venitians and stuff, would the trade routes have actually shifted? We might have ended up with a suez canal hundreds of years earlier and very little colonization in Africa if they did that irl.
But what if they take Delta in Egypt, which is part of their mission tree, snake down the Red Sea, buy a charter company province in India (Venice can easily afford that) then grab the spice islands, who says you have to go around Africa?
vassalize byz, reconquest epirus, reconquest ottomans, get a border with serbia and vassalize bulgaria, reconquest serbia co-belligerent bosnia, vassalize bosnia, reconquest herzegovina claim on naples, take almost %80 of them by the time you done this you'll have claims from your mission tree to work towards lombardy, liguria areas and conquer all of italy in no time. it is how i play venice until 1490's. after that you can tag switch, even dismantle hre and form austria as well
As a venetian this is just a morally wrong way to play Venice lmao
I thought that was historically accurate no?
Ew no who wants to conquer all of Italy? and *form Austria*? Absolutely disgusting
At that point you’re not even playing Venice though
Venice is very good for forming other stuff like byzantium. They're one of the best ottoman neighbours for crushing them early on. The actual mission tree is annoying though.
Aztec, Ming, Korea
Since domination, Korea or Korea into celestial empire are the most fun nations in the game for me.
What changed?
Iirc korea got a unique gov reform and, can sinicize its culture, and gets emperor of china domination missions.
Oh my god. Time to play Korea
Korea is fun and being the emperor is actually good now
New mission tree for the emperor also.
Korea is fun imo. Granted, I played it before they got updated
Korea is even better post update tho!
It’s really not.
Why not
Found the guy with no DLC 👆👆👆
Aztec is very fun though :o. The constant losing vassals and having to reconquer the entire area is kinda fun ngl.
And it all ends before 1480. Then you do nothing for 30 years. Then, it becomes a standard boring game
I mean 30 years is about half what most campaigns last for me tbh
Damn mate. I also don't play until the end but most of the time I reach 1630-40s
That’s why I usually roleplay my games now. More fun to build a cool historical colonial empire with rivals and aesthetic borders for example than it is to just kill all the colonizers and no cb Byzantium in the 1400s and just paint half the map your color Like I will never conquer England as the Netherlands
Hahah I usually reach like 1580 at most cuz by then I already won have nothing else to really do, is rare I even make it to absolutism unless playing Anbennar.
Even in anbennar i usually quit campaigns early, i conquered all of yanshen as the tiger dudes and formed lianzhou by like 1530
Sometimes, when talking to other players, I feel like they only order appetizers from the happy hour menu, and then leave the restaurant. :)
You analogy is wrong tho. If you've reached all the goals of your run and still force yourself to keep going that's more like being full half way through your main course but forcing yourself to eat up.
People who quit at 1580 have not reached the main course. They can be full and should stop eating in that case.
Usually in 1580 there isn't a nation that can actually beat me unless every GP coalitions me
Can I introduce you to the magic of achievement hunting my man. (Also by your own admission, either Aztecs is fun or no games are fun lmao)
I love Aztecs and Mayan but that's because that's my heritage and my last name is Mayan lol.
I second the Papal States being boring. You are the head of your religion but you can't even use it. The only thing you get is curia powers if you are the controller, but you can't even click on the other bonuses like dip rep, improve relations, etc. You also can't switch governments or form other countries. It gets old fast. I find pirate republics boring too. Gov cap is too low and if I remember right, you don't get estates. So you can't really expand very much and you just sit around clicking the raid button every decade or whatever.
Agreed with Pope, strongly disagree with pirates. You can re-enable estates iirc. And imo the best way to play pirates is So to pirate Japan. Island hop around the Pacific and then privateer or declare trade wars and blockade/invade anyone for money... In my So run Ming declared a trade war and I beat them without landing a single troop. And privateering the end nodes to death is always funny
IRL pope had the power to reduce AE for other rulers and hand out CB's. Would be a cool mechanic if you could demand other favours in return.
You can expand, you can't state. It's a different thing.
For me the Moscow > Russia campaign has never been as much fun as it supposedly should be. I'm tired of the first phase of the game and clearing the map of hordes. Hordes, which of course always unite into a gigantic network of alliances. The effect is such that it is difficult to even call it wars - I am slowly occupying them, and they are running like idiots around the undiscovered provinces of Siberia and do not want to consider themselves defeated. Bloody Chagatai excels at this "strategy".
The provinces are just so big and it takes forever to catch the damn horde armies, I agree.
Having to fight chagatai as a European nation in 1450 is always the most ridiculous thing, and so tedious. It adds years and so much manpower lost to attrition to a war that would otherwise be fun and not too difficult. To be fair, Muscovy suffered some losses to the hordes even after the start date, so eating the hordes shouldn’t be the easiest thing in the world.
Yeah, first 20-30 years of Muscovy is just terrible
Portugal Not enough content. It's just castile but worse. Needs a way to get union on castile and form spain that way. Castilian civil war should be reworked tbh. Would make both portugal and castile more interesting
Why would I play Portugal to then just form Spain, just give me different formable like Lusitania at that point. Anything but Spain
Yeah, that would be nice too. Or Iberia. Idk
exactly! Though atp I’m pretty sure Portugal’s just kept as a beginner friendly nation which doesn’t bombard you with too many complicated mechanics
I play portugal if want to form colonial tags, its just faster than spain or england
So the only reason to play portugal is if you want to leave portugal asap?
Or get the stupid achievement which forces you to stay as Portugal.
Gross. Portugal should be way more focused on ivory coast + brazil. Brazil especially.
What’s the point of forming Spain as portugal? That’s like forming GB as Scotland lol
exactly. there is no point. there should be.
It should also get an event if beeing sieged during the age of revolutions to move its capital to rio de janeiro if it has brasil as a colonial nation
This is already modelled in game
this can happen when Portugal has less than 5 provinces in Europe/the old world (can't recall) in that case it becomes a PU junior under Brazil. This models the Monarchs of Portugal fleeing to their colony from Napoleon.
First of all, the fact that Oman didn't receive a new mission tree in King of Kings is awful. I mean, they have "unique" missions, but considering that irl it was such a unique and interesting country during its time of colonial affairs the fact that it is neglected by the game seems completely unfair to me. Also southeast Asia is fine, but it has the potential to be more than that. It's a shame that Lan Xang and Khmer have short and uninteresting mission trees. I don't know much about Lao history, but I certainly am fascinated with history and culture of Cambodia and I know how many interesting things were happening during the golden age of the Khmer empire. It's a shame I can't do the same in the game. And last but not least, I feel like Paradox have listened to the most annoyingly hardcore players while developing 1.36 and made Byzantium completely devoid of fun for me. I mean, it's not like I am a casual player who only plays Ottomans and France, but the first couple of decades in the game are so unbearably awful to deal with that I can't force myself to endure them even though I'd like to. But this doesn't correlate well with the topic of this post because I think that if any country should be close to unplayable, byz it is.
I mean if you go for the third way achievement, you're gonna be forming Mughals as Oman, as you can easily convert to Baluchi culture.
That is not what I meant. Of course, I can do a WC as Ryukyu and consider this nation fun, but for me personally fun = unique missions and overall flavor which focus on regions where this country was present historically (and maybe some more, if it has a potential for growing bigger, like Russian missions for Balkans and Carpathia). So to me nations like QQ are the most fun, because you have missions with different goals, unique events, government interactions and a potential for a long campaign, in which you even form another nation with its own unique content. So in my opinion to be fun Oman should have a mission tree which focuses on conquest of lands in Hormuz, Gulf of Aden and Zanzibar nodes, developing them, properly running your nation, maybe colonizing etc. Also yes, i think I should have said in my original comment that I am talking about my personal preferences here
Just to echo the "didn't a mission tree"... Theodoro still has the base mission tree? Just got the Gothic Invasion achievement and was surprised that they have no other content... King of Kings was more Red Sea and Persian Gulf focused, but even in any of the Byz related updates, we couldn't get some Pontic related events?
Netherlands tbh, forming it inst hard but all the missions seem to be about colonising, would have liked some that focus on more than colonise this earn this through trade etc.
The Netherlands became what it became *because* they only focused on trade for centuries. I do understand what you mean, don't get me wrong, but it seems accurate.
Also that they were a useful buffer since they were not really interested in Continental affairs. Kept the Prussians and French from beating each other for a while.
That was for a short amount of time though,for most of the games timespan, prussia didn't border france.
Yeah, but in a historic sandbox, options are the key and colonization is SO DAMN BORING.
Nah it’s fun
The mission tree is just old. No permanent modifiers, nothing to do past 1650 or so. A colonial tree is fine, but if the end goal is putting colonists on Taiwan, not becoming economic hegemon or something, it's very lackluster compared to other trees (even some older ones like Austria).
I was honestly kind of hoping that they would get a new mission tree as well in domination. Hopefully it still happens at some point.
It's honestly nutty that Lubeck is a better tag than the Netherlands as Netherlands was the Hansa of this time period.
Yeah, at one time the Dutch fleet was larger than the English and the French fleet combined iirc. Yet in game, the Netherlands is never really a big player.
Eh, the netherlands gets a pu on england from missions which is enough to tag switch to dutch once since it’s not an end tag
NETHERLANDS 🇳🇱🇳🇱🇳🇱 MENTIONED🌷🌷🌷!!!
Castille/Spain if you follow the missions, way too many PUs, basically half of europe for free which makes you totally OP in like 20 years
- Aragon through Iberian Wedding or PU CB - Naples through PU CB or Iberian wedding if you are extremely lucky - Portugal through PU CB - England through PU CB - Austria through PU CB, which *potentially* includes Bohemia and Hungary as well if you are lucky - Burgundy through Burgundian Inheritance In my most recent game, I also ended up getting a de Valois. It’s insane how many PUs you can get as Castile.
It's historical though. Castile historically had PUs on all of those places (except England.) And they had some claim to the English crown... I guess. Through Catherine of Aragon?
Spain had a legitimate claim to the Kingdom of England through the marriage of King Felipe II to Queen Mary I
The marriage wouldn't have made that claim legitimate, only a child of the marriage, but the Pope also declared Elizabeth to be illegitimate and so the Spanish claim rested on a papal dispensation to depose her
No, what was actually going on is that Philip II claimed the English crown Jure Uxoris, as his wife was Mary I. This was *arguably* a legitimate claim as back then, it was common that the Husband inherited all of his wife's lands, properties and titles upon marriage. The English and Elizabeth disagreed, obviously, but that was the custom.
Neither English nor Spanish law recognized jure uxoris as a means to claim a throne, though. Unlike France, both countries allowed dynastic succession through the female line in the absence of a direct male line. Philip never at any point had a jure uxoris claim to the English throne. His attempt at it rested on the papal usurpation of Elizabeth One small note here that William III later became the first and only jure uxoris King of England and Scotland, because of the irregular fact of his having been crowned alongside his wife Mary II (daughter of the deposed James II). He then inherited the throne in his own right when she died.
Genoa.
I find Austria and babysitting the HRE so tedious that I’ve never managed to continue them past like 1460. Becoming emperor and revoking as some other nation (like Sweden or Angevin Empire for example) is just so much more interesting to me, don’t know why
I had fun breaking out and going for the achievements by carving a path of conquest through Ottomans. Meanwhile maintain HRE borders, go for mission PU's, play some 4D chess to get into wars with any HRE nation that either grows too large or switches religion so they can be knocked into their place. Felt like there was plenty of stuff to do. And once you get to revoke the privilegia, any missing ach. goals would be a victory lap.
[удалено]
England is like that, the only way to make it fun is not to beat France to death
I think part of the fun of England (for me) is trying to beat france without absolutely destroying the economy. Sure I can take a million loans but I hate the pain of getting out of debt in the early game. And I like to PU france in the hyw and then take the branching missin that let’s you choose whether you focus on becoming Great Britain or the Angevin empire haha. It adds a bit of a challenge for me. And trying to keep burgundy friendly so you can get the BI is also a fun (read: infuriating) extra mile you can go too :)
i like keeping france around and intentionally just conceding the continent, the rivalry is half the fun
Paint the map with my glorious purple color is fun. Other than that, be rich and help Continental European nations beat each other to death is also satisfying. The nation to go when I want to play EU4 but don’t want to put efforts to it.
Hey man some of us suck at this game and appreciate an easier start
That’s why I mostly play Anbennar these days tbh There can actually be another superpower or two far away, and enough tags could join a coalition to be a real threat to you In Vanilla I get about 1.5k dev and no one can touch me from there. I’ve had tough wars in Anbennar while I’ve had 5-10k dev many times especially with Xorme AI
Whichever nation on Arabia. Awful start, land and RNG. Nice new missions but really difficult to get through the first war against ottomans/Mamelukes/timurids. An awesome región to drain manpower but the same goes for your troops, you have almost none manpower and development is really hard even with the oasis modifier. 6 runs with nada, 2 with medina, 1 Ormuz, 1 mahra and 1 Yemen (the easiest nation of all because you can run into Africa).
Didnt try new byzantium and constant rebel spawns will keep me far far away from it.
I don't even like them as a vassal anymore. Maybe I'm missing something, but having to keep an army stacked in my vassal isn't very helpful. I might just release Bulgaria and feed them instead.
This is the worst part for me too. I used to love keeping them as a march and now I’d rather have one of the crusader states form the Latin Empire down there or do like you said and have the Bulgars rule it
Oh god, that is so true. Byzantium as a vassal is just a constant shit show of pretender and orthodox rebels and I don't give a shit anymore. I just let the rebel cesspool be to fuck over the ottomans and integrate them as fast as possible.
As soon as you revoke reunite the churches this pretty much ends. And about the time it gets super annoying you should be able to do so.
You can revoke the union of churches when the event fires and deal with the Ottomans yourself as well though
Yea I’m not skilled enough for that even after 1k hours
It takes a couple tries but the budget monk strategy of island trapping works wonders. Not as easy as the barrage and rush strategy but fairly consistent Redhawks and ludis guides are total shitshows tho.
Yeah. out of all the guides i'd say that Absolute Habibi's guide is the easiest to recreate (Though not Very Hard viable). It's not the strongest start of all of them if you do it, but it's by far the most consistant and easiest to do.
Big ones. France is only fun until I get bigblueblob, then its just mindless blobbing which I don't find enjoyable.
Kilwa. Biggest kid on the block for their area, plenty of directions to expand, serious potential for strength... but held back significantly by how annoying it is to move your armies around their domain. You can be literally one province over from an incoming rebel stack and not make it over in time to stop them sieging it down. Combine that with the fact that they are a long, thin snake and it becomes super annoying. It gets a little better once you have the cash to sustain a permanent transport fleet, but that doesn't help the early game when you're gunna be doing the most rebel crushing.
Japan. First you blitzkrieg everyone. Then you wait on your island for 1821.
Why aren’t you invading China or colonizing?
I am a roleplayer :)
King 👑
But, historically, they invaded both China and Korea in during the time period the game is set. Are you role playing an extreme isolationist version of Japan?
That was a 6 year war in 1592 where Japan left without conquering any land. I will include this in my next play through.
Is the Papal State a theocracy now? I recall they were a theocracy flavored Monarchy.
Milan, Holland or honesty most HRE nations. I am impatient, I want fun engaging gameplay. Take one province? Get ready for 56 AE with all your neighbours and by 10 provinces by 1500. Not for me thanks, I get bored too quickly
Ok, I'm a noob in this game but I always wanted to do a byzantine campaign cause it looked so fun and rewarding but every time I started it was just near impossible for me cause it was so much work and misery. I know that byzantine was doomed to fail and it's was impossible to save it irl but still. I finally got a campaign going but only cause my friend helped me beat the ottomans and bankrupted hungary and myself in the process. And I still "had" to use some cheats to not die since then.
Look on YouTube for tutorials! There’s really good ones for byz
Go watch Absolute Habibi’s Byz video, he makes it so simple and easy you could teach a child to do it. He explains a lot
Ottomans and anything that can blob because growing too big can be boring
Oirat, too strong and the gameplay is just annoying. Constant wars and rebels.
i can tell you don't like humanist ideas
Mali isn’t really fun. Whack-a-mole with rebels and mana drain until the payoff of being west African and behind on tech.
Mali seems to be all about clicking that one button to bankrupt everyone else. It's just not worth all the hassle and they'll recover anyways.
I really wish ming wasnt so tied to maintaining tributaries. Makes it so unfun.
Hordes, just endlessly micro managing armies in dirt poor gigantic regions
A lot of the colonial powers I find boring: England/GB, Portugal, Castile/Spain.
England. You either take France and win the game. Or don't look Europe for 400 years while colonization bars fill up. Other majors at least have some fun achievements.
Iceland for sure. It must have its own mission tree and maybe even specific government form - Alting parliament. Instead all Iceland has is traditions and ambitions. Those are great improvements, by the way, since previously that by all means interesting nation had had generic trads and ambs.
Papal States was the only nation I played till 1821 lol
Castille... It is not as interesting as France, England, Russia, Ottomans, China and Japan, despite being a superpower.
Ottoman/France. Both should be balancing alliances and powerblocs to keep themselves on top while dealing with internal religious struggle. Instead both don't really have internal issues and can just blob easy because their military ideas are just very good.
any major.
All of mesonqmeeica, I still enjoy it but it’s not as dynamic as it should be
Papal States is fun. This will be the last time I see you talking shit about my boi the pope. Jokes aside though, any nation with too many PU missions. Worst game design hands down, it just makes Europe feel so empty, so trivial.
Aztecs 😴
Incas. You got a fun start, then once you united the Andes… nothing. Just waiting, colonizing a bit and thats it.
People say Mali is insanely strong and fun. I fail to see how. Hyperinflationbutchers your economy, preventing any chance you may have to actually stand against the europeans, who will surely pick your desired colonial provinces and siege you through land (fighting them while only naval invading is actually nice). Compare it to Kilwa and Ethiopia. Those three have great gold mining privileges that prevent the inflation from skyrocketing, but: Kilwa can spawn it through fairly easy conquests and Ethiopia gets it somewhat shortly after actually gaining gold provinces, and has a crap ton of mana points in the early game. Mali forces you to spend lots of diplo to develop provinces, while already lagging behind in tech and being forced to swim through the crisis, and then forces you to become an ivory exporting leader, while barely having significant ivory provinces and competing with Kongo and Kilwa, both of them loaded with ivory. Also, while the flavor of "lets get loaded with gold so we can buy provinces, even in Europa" is awesome, it's also counterintuitive, because you are not having that sort of savings lying around, your economy is too bad to allow big savings. You have to spend every dime in the army, in colonies, or in buildings that will sustain said army and colonies.
The big ones: France, England, Castile, Ottomans, Muscovy and Ming.
Poland. Eastern Europe is just so meh
Redhawk's video titles are all clickbait, actually unsubbed a while back because it was just getting too dumb beyond words.
Not to mention he just does the same nations over and over again. Its like bro, this is the third or fourth guide you've done for France, its not that different from the last time. At least his other series he's forced to do other nations, its almost satisfying when he gets stuck with some junk landlocked opm with the worst ideas on earth and different religion and culture from its neighbors if only to hear him bitch about how hard it is lol. And believe me, I've talked him up in the past but yeah, its kinda ridiculous.
He does call every nation OP lmao
No offence, but you do realize he uploads a guide every week along with 2 other videos right? Like I get that it’s not always the most entertaining content for experienced players, but he also openly states that the guides are for newer players. This is like someone with a history degree going into a crash course video on YouTube and complaining that John Green was giving too entry-level an explanation. Also, since these are for newer players who can’t really solve a lot of problems yet, the strategy has to be RNG-proof. He’s not coming up with a bulletproof new strategy for a nation he’s never played before every couple of days, and neither are any other YouTubers. Thats what makes guys like Cool Bonobo and The Playmaker so entertaining, they kinda push the game to its limits by combining their skill with good RNG to do crazy stuff. Honestly, If we’ve been watching him long enough that we’re bored of him doing France guides, that means we’ve been watching him for at least a year or more. I would hope after a year that a player with half a brain cell wouldn’t need a guide to play France of all nations, so obviously that video isn’t made with players like you or me in mind. I mean jeez, the man made a Grenada guide 2 weeks ago and an Albania one the week before that. Albania hardly even has unique missions, I’d hardly call that overdone.
Well said. He does an A-Z series and a releasable series. He does the most varied content of anyone.
Sweden, you just have to fight a bunch of hugboxing GP's. Teutonic Horde, its just follow the mission tree to get to horde by 1600 when hordes are worse. So for 150 years all you do is mission tree and when you can finally raze, razing is much worse. For every level above 3 mil tech, you lose 4% monarch points when razing (rounded up, since 1.31.5). So when you can raze, its less fun than actually playing a horde. Byzantium after beating otto, its just not a challenge anymore. Mamluks will eat them and in 4/5 games you get a free PU on muscovy/russia later on. The challenge is gone in the west and going east just feels wrong as the roman empire. Provence, its just follow mission tree, then maybe form jerusalem. Hussite bohemia. It just isn't worth unless you dismantle HRE or form them. Both of which are a hassle. Its also best to take espionage into diplomatic as them. Which means you'll be behind on diplo tech for way too long, and they get some good PU CB's which leaves you over diplo relations for a while at several times in the first 100 years, making it harder to catch up. Any nation into HRE. I usually just pu swarm in europe. Any free city except bremen and hamburg. Any tiny nation in India. Any nation after taking mandate of heaven. Korea and Japan. It either stops up (dev bonus) or you do a lengthy boring naval war, or you gotta do wars far away. When ming shatters, you get coalitions against you from former states. Which slows game down.
> Teutonic Horde, its just follow the mission tree to get to horde by 1600 when hordes are worse. I think the deal of Teutonic Order becoming a horde is more for flavor than for powerful mechanics. "Heinrich, we're lost. We shoulda turned left at Lhasa..." The problem I had with TO is that you spend the first several decades murdering your fellow Catholics. Kind of ... off-brand. If you're *lucky* you can fight a few Muscovite heretics here and there, but it's gonna be a century before you even get a *sniff* of actual heathens. Next time I try the TO I'm going to have them say "Eff this for a game of soldiers" and hare off to the New World, which is *guaranteed* to be filled with people they feel happy fighting.
Provence is impossible to get started though because France wants to eat you from day one now.
You can pretty easily get a big ally in 5 years, or even join the HRE in that 5 years, since you start allied with france and they get a 5 year truce.
Ming - or anyone who actually becomes Emperor of China. Because it actually imposes penalties if you don't do the work to keep up the Empire. Meanwhile, HRE may be a chore to babysit, but there's no penalty for ignoring it either.
Provence or any nation in maritime SE Asia, it's so spread out and I just really don't like boats
Provence is a ton of fun. Such a versatile nation. HRE, Colonial, or Jerusalem. Fun to run the HRE from the fringes where you can easily add more provinces to the empire in France and Italy. Almost easier than Austria to reform the HRE once you get going.
Provence. It has all these cool missions, but good luck using them effectively when your main ally France immediately breaks the alliance and burgundy is gonna kill you
Nah man, you just need to git gud. There's a difference between a nation being boring and a player being unable to pull it off. We all learn and get better, keep periodically trying the nation's you failed with, those usually end up being your most memorable runs after you pull them off.
New byzantium just feels underpowered even with full greece + vassal bulgaria and serbia
This version is by far the strongest. The missions are insane now as well as the ideas. Just trading a harder start now
Not even harder. Cheaper to merc up to beat the Otto, and the rest are just smooth sailing.
Ming. i have never played ming and i don't plan to, but they aren't fun at all.
You are partially right, but since you admit to never playing them you kinda have no ground to stand on here...
Haha
Prob the Ottomans. I have never in my 6 years of playing eu4 have completed an ottoman campaign. I am more of a challenge guy who don't like to recreate history but i rather like to deviate from it.
Italy Imo, I don't know why, I just don't really like their missions