Europa Universalis 4

I am Castle. I never formed spain. I do not know what the benefit of being spain is really other than a bit more territory.

What I would really like, if it were even possible is to make the empire if Ireland. Id even relocate to the new world, but I do not think you can move your home territory. Also England would just waste you at some point.

Seriously, give Portugal a go. It’s a great country for learning the ropes with, for the reasons KevinC gives. Castille puts too much on your plate when you don’t understand the systems. Portugal lets you focus on colonisation and trade, the history gives you a clear path to follow, and you can dip your toe into the other systems if you like.

My five cents: Play the Ottomans instead.
For a player that’s struggling with reading tooltips, ignores clear game messages and then is puzzled about the consequences they clearly stated and thar is generally a bit clueless about what to do and when, I think that’s a far better nation to play with. For centuries, the solution to basically every problem the Ottomans face is to send in the army.
You have plenty of time to get to terms with the basic systems and to settle in … and decide if you even want to bother with learning the other stuff.

@pg, I’m sure I will try the game again at some point. Other than a few things - the most important being the coalition mechanic - I was very happy with EU4 in principle. It’s just that those few things pushed the game into “why even bother” territory. But I’ll definately take at least one more look with some DLCs.


rezaf

So to back it up to the military bit, I’ll give you a brief primer DeepT.

-So at a basic level each combat phase has a die roll, 0-9, for each side. Naturally higher rolls allow you to do more damage, and take less.
-To this roll are modifiers. The most universal is terrain. Certain types of terrain will add a -1, -2 or -3 to the attacker. Hit up the wiki for a detailed breakdown, but attacking across rivers, naval landings, in forests, or in mountains are bad for the attacker. They are not insurmountable, but can be heavy (for example a -3 in mountains is huge, if at all possible always avoid attacking into mountains)
-The next modifier is for generals. Each general has 4 stats. Shock, Fire, Maneuver, and Siege. Leaders cancel each other out on each, so the modifier is the difference between generals.
-During combat Siege is irrelevant. Maneuver determines the terrain to a degree (I can explain in more detail if you’d like, but better maneuver means more advantageous terrain on attack or defense) and helps mitigate casualties I believe
-What you really want to focus on is Shock and Fire. A 6/5 Shock fire general can wipe the floor with a 1/2 general. So much so in fact that you need to be multiple tech levels (meaning at least one step more advanced for units) and likely a 2:1 or even 3:1 advantage to reliably win.

So what happens is your roll is added to any terrain modifiers, and the general modifier for that phase. So battle opens with the shock phase, you’re attacking into a forest (-2) and your general 1/3/3/1 is facing a 6/4/5/2 French general. You roll an 8, they roll a 1. So the combat is 8 + (-2) + 0 (your general is inferior, no combat bonus) = 6. France is 1 + 0 (terrain modifies attacker roll only) + 5 (6 fire - 1 fire) = 6. So the combat rolls are effectively a 6 vs 6. That means that combat losses will be roughly equal.

From there other factors modify the results. Discipline increases damage for any given roll, and can be huge. A country with 130% discipline vs 105% is going to win any battle at even strength. The units then come into play. If your units are more advanced they will do more damage. It’s why you see European units easily win 10:1 battles against tribal American units, their units are simply too strong to overcome. Since France and Castile are both Western tech group you don’t usually see the tech level have much effect, unless you are at a major tech break point like the 11/12 unit barrier.

So what happened is that you had a tech level advantage, but probably not one spreading a unit tech divide. France, with it’s natural army bonuses, and likely inclusion of military tech like Aristocracy (typically one of their first idea groups), has better generals and units that hit harder than their peers. Since you said you focused on colonies and economy your units, though tech advantaged, are man for man worse than France. This means that even though you had an advantage in army size (though if this is still early your army width limits probably prevents this from actually mattering much) his armies were better. Add in their likely better generals, and you’re not actually nearly as strong as you think.

Countries like Sweden, Brandenburg/Prussia, and France have national ideas that make their armies more effective. Coupled with their military idea focus and they are very deadly enemies to fight. Prussia in particular can punch way above their weight. As Prussia, with 3 military idea groups (Quality, Offensive and Defensive), the Prussian National ideas, and superior generals (6/5/6/3) I defended a forest with 20k men against a Russian army of 110k. I won, and handily, inflicting around 50k casualties to 10k for me. So be aware that manpower is a large factor, it is not the be all end all. Smaller armies can reliably beat larger ones if they take advantage of generals, terrain and discipline.

If you have any further questions about any specific mechanics I’ll gladly explain in more depth. I hope this helps!

That does explain some of what is going on. Any tips on economy? I have watched tutorials and stuff, but I am still not quite sure how to build an awesome economy. I may restart as portugal at some point. I just want to get a better idea of what I am doing first, although a more military focused country might be better. To bad I can’t play as a “new world” race that would be far from the crazy Europeans who go to war at the drop of a hat.

The economy whistles oh boy.

Ok I’ll be brief… well probably not, but I’ll try.

First off tax base. Each province has a tax base (you can see it in the top left corner of the province detail screen) which roughly determines your income. It’s not 1:1, but all you need to know is higher tax base = greater income. 1 tax base is roughly the equivalent of 1 gold per year, but it’s only a rough value.

So to build economy build up provinces. The church adds +1 tax base in a province, and is something worth building anywhere. Other buildings can increase tax by a %, those are generally best built in high tax base provinces. +20% of 8 base tax is better than +20% in 3 base tax, for obvious reasons. In general build starting with your most valuable provinces first, and expand out as monarch points and gold allow.

Prioritize gaining high base tax provinces. If in a war you can take a province that is also a trade hub, do that. They’re very valuable.

Buildings and base tax are longer term investments. They can be massively valuable over time, but the effects of any one are relatively small in the short run. A 1 base tax province isn’t ever going to provide much economic value, so buildings are mostly a waste there.

If you colonize focus on trying to get a colonial nation in a region (5+ colonies) rather than scattered colonies. 5 provinces forming one colonial nation will likely be more profitable for you than 15 scattered so that they are all directly controlled. It might seem counter intuitive, but the overseas penalty is SEVERE. You will almost always get more money from colonial nation tariffs than if they were directly taxed because of this penalty.

Finally trade. Countries can exert trade power at trade nodes. This is determined through provinces, several buildings increase trade power at the local node, and light ships. So find the most profitable trade nodes nearby and try and either collect trade, or forward trade, from there. If a trade node is in a province you control, really focus on trying to build up trade strength there. More buildings and such. Trade propagates power to connected nodes, but it’s complex and a post on it’s own. In general collect from your home node (done automatically) and have your merchants forward trade from the neighboring nodes, forming a chain. Forwarded trade increases it’s value, so play around with your merchants to observe the effects. Send a merchant next our to forward trade, and see how that impact your trade income at home. It’s pretty low risk to experiment, so please do until you get a grip with it.

Do not forget light ships. A fleet of light ships protecting trade at a node you are collecting from, or forwarding from, has a huge impact. In fact it’s not unusual for me to have >50% of my trade power in a node be ships. Put an admiral with the fleet if you can, he helps increase the fleets power.

Trade income is based off of what percentage of total trade power in a node is yours. If you have 10 power, but there is only 20 total, you get half. In a valuable node like Antwerp you might have 200 trade power, yet only get 1/3 of the trade value. Pay attention to who has how much power. If you have 13 power, and England has 240, your investment is going to be extremely high to get a pittance from a node. You are probably better off collecting elsewhere. Again play around with this. Just remember fleets only contribute to trade I you set them to protect trade at that node. Sitting in port at that node does nothing.

Just note that this is all pre Wealth of Nations (been busy since that dropped) so this might be out of date. That said it still should be roughly accurate enough to get you started, especially if you don’t have the DLC.

So build trade buildings in trade nodes that you own but is it beneficial to construct those buildings in provinces that reside near trade zones to boost your power?

Not really because what nation is rich enough to tech that fast early game then have enough admin points and cash left over to immediately upgrade? Plus temples and constables are not nearly as big a boost now in 1.6+. I’d say temples now do half what they used to and constables about one third income wise. It’s always better to use some admin points early to conquer a few provinces than save up for admin five (for temples/constables). If you’re using excess admin points to tech up early those same points could easily be used to expand which will make you stronger and richer. If you’re richer you can afford better advisors. If you’re stronger you can more likely attack rivals for power projection and the +1 monarch point bonus.

That might be one reason you’re having issues. If you don’t have alliances the AI probably views you as an easier target to attack. Alliances are a mix of reward and risk. If you ally a bunch of nations you’ll be much stronger overall but it’s also a risk because they might get involved in wars too. Generally the best ally for Castile/Spain is France early game since it secures your main European border (and France is a beast).

Coalitions are very manageable now, I hope they stay like this. If you go wild they can be problematic but as long as you allow some cool off time you can expand very quickly. This is the AE map from my game last night. I did not have any coalition wars called on me. Once I hit admin tech ten I can form Germany.

I get trade nodes, however, how does local trade power work as well as local production? Does local production increase the value that goes to the local trade node?

So if I had a local production of say 100 (I guess that would be in currency), and 50% of a trade node was collecting and then out of that, I had 50% of the collection power, then from the 100 production I would get 25 gold a turn?

If I increased local production by 10%, then I would get 27.5 gold?

Now lets say I had 10 trade power in a node. If my local trade power was increased by 1, would I then have 11 trade power in the node?

In general it’s best to focus on trade nodes that have a) high potential value b) you can heavily influence trade there. So, to use my Prussia/ Germany game for example, Lubeck is a trade node with high value, as was Antwerp. Choosing to build in either one was almost always a worthwhile option. I had significant holdings in both, and any increase would represent a decent value. I also had significant holdings in Novgorod, Baltic Sea, White Sea, and Wein (others too, but point is same). Now of those I had a near total domination in the Baltic, but would build to keep Denmark down, since it fed to my Lubeck port. Wein also fed to Lubeck, but was not worth pursuing. It had decent value, but was far too contested and represented a worse investment than elsewhere. Novgorod was 50/50 between me and Russia, but the value wasn’t that high. The White Sea I easily could have dominated, but it fed to the North Sea where Norwegian, English, Burgundian, and Dutch power was so high to make this lucrative node a poor investment.
So from that example Antwerp and Lubeck were top priority investments, the Baltic was an investment that ratcheted down as I destroyed Sweden, but still valuable, and the rest were either too poor or too contested to make the building investment pay off.

That’s not quite how it works. Trade nodes have local production (trade goods produced within that node’s region) and incoming trade. These two add together to create the total trade value in a node. From that you determine the total trade power, and what percentage is collecting and what percentage is forwarding. For ease I’ll use an example Baltic Sea.

Lets say that the Baltic Sea has 30 local production, and has 20 incoming from Novgorod and Krakow. This means the total trade value is 50. So in your example of increasing local production by 10% the total value would go from 50 to 53 (33+20).

Now for simplicity let’s pretend trade is only split 3 ways, Denmark, Sweden and Prussia. If you as Sweden have 50% of the trade power, and are collecting, Prussia and Denmark are both forwarding that means you would get 25 gold, and 25 gold is getting moved to Lubeck. If Prussia decides to collect at the Baltic Sea instead, with 30% of trade power, then you’d collect 25, Prussia would collect 15, and the remaining 10 gets forwarded to Lubeck by Denmark.

In your theoretical 10% local boost the numbers would be you collect 26.5, Prussia collects 15.9 and Denmark forwards 10.6.

Keep in mind the numbers are rough, forwarded trade does get some value added the farther it moves, so it’d be more like 11.7, but for now we ignore that.

In a trade node with multiple outlets, like the North Sea, trade still splits according to the same rules. So if England has 30 power at North Sea steering to London, Scotland has 10 doing the same, The Dutch have 30 forwarding to Antwerp, and Burgundy has 30 doing the same, then 40% of trade there goes to London and the remaining 60% to Antwerp (nobody is collecting there).

If England and the Netherlands go to war and the Dutch trade fleet is sunk, so now they have 0 power there but everything else is the same, then 42.8% (30/70) goes to Antwerp by Burgundy and 57.2% (30/70 England + 10/70 Scotland) goes to London.

Just remember that for nodes other than your home node your merchants are less efficient at collecting, so unless it’s a very rich node you can project a lot of power at, you’re usually better forwarding trade. Trade efficiency is essentially a multiplier for trade power so higher efficiency means you need less resources to get the same result. Overextension severely hampers your trade collection (to the point that at 100% or higher you get essentially nothing in trade outside your home node).

Be sure and turn off Lucky Nations.

As a new player you’ll find yourself hating any wars against Lucky Nations because of their military bonuses. These are provided to help keep “historic” nations on track but it also means you will literally always be inferior at equal tech and usually substantially inferior if Eastern tech. Even an Eastern tech power like Russia ends up with doom stacks you can’t beat with Luck on.

As a new player turn that option off and save yourself some pain and frustration.

If you’re playing Ironman (which is the only way I ever play this game), that’s not an option. Good advice for a new player, though.

Ironman is not a good idea for new players but I found the constant pause to autosave to be extremely annoying to the point where I stopped using it. Ironman is also pretty damn hard if you’re trying to just survive, not to mention win, as some off the wall power.

EU4 is actually an easier game than CK2 (IMO) since there seem fewer decisions to be made and they tend to be about rationally maximizing your opportunities. What the long term players enjoy after mastering the systems is turning those opportunities on their head and working against the grain; the land power becomes the naval colonizer or the colonizer becomes a land power. Factions like Byzantium are the standard “hard mode” options for people who like swimming history upstream.

Also, why aren’t the comet events tied to historic appearances of Haley’s? It just make sense.

Because Johan hates us Enidigm. Johan is a jerk like that.

Also quit looking at the sky you stupid peasants!

You can with Conquest of Paradise DLC. I’m very new to the game, but can offer one tip I learned the hard way. Do not hire an adviser in the beginning. They will suck up all your monthly income. At least the adviser I hired did.

There are 3 levels of advisor, and each costs more than the one before. +1’s are cheap, +3’s are for ultra-rich nations only.

Sure as a new player turn lucky nations off if you want. I love lucky nations in my games however as it provides somewhat of a challenge. Major lucky nations are usually the only nations that can give me any sort of fight. With good play you can easily outpace lucky nations even ones such as France, Russia, Ottomans, etc. Also remember that lucky nations isn’t always hurting the player, you can easily ally with a lucky nation and use them to do your bidding.

I also never use ironman anymore. The constant saves are super annoying with start/stops and easily make games take 10-20% longer (yes, even with a super fast SSD). Plus ironman isn’t immune to bugs, nothing is more annoying than an ironman bug in a game you’ve put hours into.

I actually think CK2 is easier than EU4. The reason for that is because EU4 is a bit simpler focused, more about combat, and the AI handles it better as a result. I think CK2 can just be ridiculous (assassinations, plots, executions, prison, etc) and far more random. Both games probably suffer from the same issues in multiplayer in that it’s far too easy to gang up on people and the games reward such play. I think prestige should be reworked to encourage “fair/honorable” wars and such in EU4. I’m not really sure why France stomping weak nations into the dust should get prestige. It should be the opposite if anything.

Plus ironman enables lucky nations which is the worst. THE. WORST. Although even in CK2 I don’t play with official ironman just because the monthly autosave annoys me too much too. EU4 has even more reason not to use official ironman though.

I’d also agree on CK2 being largely easier. It’s harder to learn, but once you know what you’re doing you have way more options to mess the computer up. Been playing an ironman viking game from the Old Gods start this past week and I’ve nearly formed the empire of Scandinavia and there are more people following Odin than catholic or orthodox Jesus. Even was beating up the Byzantine empire one on one until they used trickery to end the war prematurely. Only around 1040 now, thinking about importing this game into EU4 once I hit the time limit just because I haven’t done a max-blob Old Gods CK2 to EU4 campaign yet.

I don’t know why you guys don’t like lucky nations. I always play with it on unless I have AI bonuses on. The AI just can’t compete not because it’s dumb but because it’s usually inactive and not expanding. Lucky nations helps put a few strong major players in the game. You can always ally them too, use them or pit them against each other. Why do you guys like importing games from CK2->EU4->Vic2, etc? You’ll be so huge the micromanagement would be dreadful and the game completely breaks down and offers no challenges (other than rebel squashing). I usually quit most EU4 games around 1600-1700 for the same reason.

Now that I’ve played a decent selection of nations I’m a bit torn on the rival system. For some nations it works real well and seems usable. For others it seems pointless. A good example is Portugal, at the start of the game the only rivals you can pick are Morocco and Algiers. Yay, 100% core costs with wrong territory and religion! Even if you make significant progress against these rivals as Portugal you reward is then usually one of them is removed leaving you with only one possible rival choice. Rivals can also drop mid war which is absurd. Last night I was playing Venice in multiplayer had Bosnia as a rival, declared then mid war they were dropped as my rival! So instead of being able to get a healthy amount of PP boosting me to over +50 I got just +15? from starting the war.

Rebels remain beyond silly. They are stronger and never stop coming. Bosnia had a 5k standing army but in the decade after I annexed them (which I did by accident since I thought they were my rival!) I killed at least 60k rebels much more than Venice’s combined manpower and FL. Also if you vassal a rival you get no PP where as if you annex them you get loads. That seems an oversight. Perhaps you should get less to vassal a rival but no PP at all is ridiculous.

Also AE is going back up to normal next patch it looks like so if anyone really hates the AE/coalition mechanics this is the patch you want to be playing as they are probably at an all time low currently. There’s also a terrible bug where it’ll say allies will come to your war currently and then they break alliance with you instead! I tried to call Poland (with PU over Lithuania) in to fight Austria last night with a green check and they broke alliance fucking me over. Good times. I was able to re-ally them shortly after but by then I couldn’t call them into the war.