Here’s a comparison of the current/new map coming in 1.25.
Geez, in addition to all the UK changes, the subdivision of provinces makes it look like England’s really been expanding on the continent!
Janissaries, are you ready to die? Be careful with the Winged Hussars.
Ok, I intend to finally wrap this campaign up. My first with hardcore mode on, and used as an achievement run.
So far I knocked 21 out. Naturally many of them were the pretty plain ones, but they are the reason I have kept this campaign alive. Now I have 4 achievements I wish to hit, other than the play until 1821 one. In order of difficulty, here they are:
Trade Hegemon: have cores in Aden, Hormoz, and Malaca as a European nation. I’ll come back to this, as it is trivially easy. Declare war on Brunei from my vassal Pegu, take it, get achievment. I’ll do this very soon.
The Rising Sun: own and core all of Japan as European nation. I’m most the way there, and can probably do it now. It’ll be interesting if it is one war, or two, but I have to act fast. My previous incursions drove them into coalition hell. Ouichi is an ally of Japan, their only allies, and they joined the coalition immediately on peace. So, without being in position, I declared on Japan and sent two transport fleets from India. If I can take them this war, done deal. Just attack Ainu for the remaining two provinces. If not? It could get messy.
A Pile of Gold: have 10 gold provinces. I have 7. Annexing Muscovy gets me 4. Tlemencen and Ming have one each on my border. Or I could just declare war on Kilwa, and their spanish allies.
Yeah, I’ll take that one. Bonus I’m already staged in the area.
Finally, the one that I decided to try and do all in one go in 100 years
India. I waited too long, and Hindustan consolidated. Normally this would be out of reach at this point… but it’s not. I think. I just punched a 95 peace from them via Golden Horde, also for one more gold province, but I have peace until 1800.
However Brunei is their ally, and our truce is up. This also drags in Ming. So, uh, that’s fun. However I planned for this, last war with ming I took two sea provinces bordering their capital. Step one of fast serial conquests: have direct access to enemy capital. Take that in the first few months, the war is half over. By carefully juggling alliance chains I think I should be able to get 3-4 more good wars on them. But I have to be fast, and I have to be careful. If I draw the ire of this
I get sucked into a quagmire that will sink my chances. It’s not that I can’t win that war. It’s just that coalition wars are soooo exhausting. No separate peace, gotta pop them all. So alliance abuse it is. Just gotta keep the Golden Horde and Brunei out of coalitions. Separate peace Hindustan as fast as possible, and try and get war weariniess high enough that they split. I think 3 wars can take it all, but to get 3 I am short on time.
It’ll be close.
EDIT: and the hardest part? That one province I hilighted. Stupid Portugal. double stupid Portugal for being a french Personal Union.
You best be posting the conclusion of that campaign, @CraigM! :)
There’s a new dev diary up discussing another free feature in the next update: a revamped mission system.
And in honor of Craig’s Ottoman run, here’s a screenshot of the Ottoman Empire’s mission screen (click to expand the full image):
Focus trees? In my EU4?
Great change - missions were one of the holdover mechanics from EU3 days that sorely needed a rework.
But how can I milk the Religious Unity mission now? Nothing beat getting 50 monarch points every time you won a war because now you have new provinces to convert.
That said, I think I can dig that change. looks like it helps when the RNG is a jerk. That said I wonder if some of the generic missions are gone now, likewise recurring ones. After you complete the general course there are generic missions that simply repopulate, such as conquer x neighboring province. I wonder if, once the tree is done, is that it?
Anyhow campaign wrap close. 1800 rolls around, and it looks like this
So my two big goals? Complete India in 20 years, and conquer Japan. Unfortunately my Trade Hegemon one bugged out, and I didn’t get it despite meeting requirements. Ah well. Anyhow declaring war on Golden Horde shortly after, to circumvent peace timers, and I blitz India. Two years and I get a 93 warscore peace deal.
I also luck into one other thing, a regency for France. It is short, I notice with only 8 months before it ends, but I have a chance to do something good now. See that bit of Portugal in India? Well that’s France now. They inherit it in 1802. Regency ends November 1802. So I do the obvious…
I declare war
Also on Japan. That should give me the Rising Sun. Nothing exciting there, it’s a quick rush and done.
But don’t settle! France been a thorn all game. The fact they crumble, and within a year I have sacked Paris means nothing, they must be destroyed!
So, as 1810 rolls close, I finish annexing Muscovy. Which gives me 4 more gold provinces, tada! Pile of Gold achievment.
The state of things…
Hindustan may be a problem. I took all the coasts, there’s not much left, but the reality is… I think its two wars to take them. And most of their allies have gone. Probably the only way to do it is eat the stability hit and declare war now.
ABOUT GODDAMN TIME!
In the end I did have to break truces. Twice. To take all of India. I probably could have gotten by with one, but the problem was the Gobi provinces. They didn’t count towards my goal, but the Ming wanted them, and occupied them, but couldn’t access the capital so the war sat stalled for years. So doing a single full annexation was out of the cards, without declaring war on Ming.
Which I could have, I just didn’t feel like it.
But, in the end, I got it.
So I just cruised to 1820, right?
Not quite. I had two more things to do, for kicks. One was be able to walk troops from one end of the map, to the other. So sorry Lan Xang. Pegu had cores on you that made it possible.
In case you ever wondered how long it takes to walk from Signapore to the chin of Portugal.
And one last achievement for the hell of it. I wasn’t close, but if you see my treasury…
500 heavy ships and no loans. I started in late 1816 with 204 light ships, but with so. many. sea provinces. Basically set every ship yard from Beira to Bengal building heavy ships. When you own the entire Mediterranean, Black, Red, Arabian, and Bengal seas it doesn’t take long to crack out 300 ships, about a year and a half to be precise. Now it would drain my treasure at the rate of 350 ducats per month at full maintenance, but I could afford it, and I could also afford to drop maintenance down to 1/2. Because, as you see, nobody can step to that. Even if I wanted.
The last thing I did was take the last floating cores for my vassals Nogai and Uzbek.
And so there ends the epic saga. Good lord that took forever. But all said 26 achievements (plus another three bugged ones I did get that didn’t pop. Build army to max, Trade Hegemon, and the one for total casualties in one war). Plus I managed, with 3 months to spare, to max all tech.
All said a pretty rousing success.
Bravo!
That is so awesome to see the campaign conclusion after all this time! Way to stick with it, that had to feel good!
And I feel like I need to take a shot or something to celebrate opting out of the beta branches. :) Woohoo!
Yeah, it is both exciting and sad to see it done after 2.5 years.
But mostly exciting ;)
So after having taken a week shy of 3 years to finish my last campaign, I’m debating what one to do next. Something… less crazy than go everywhere Ottomans. So help me pick a next start.
I don’t have Mandate of Heaven or newer, so will avoid Russia, the Middle East, and China.
So here are the possible options I’m eyeing:
It’s all Greek to Me - Form Greece and own a few provinces with Greek letter sounding names. Would probably do this as a culture shifting Serbia, to combo with Lazarus. Shift to Greek, conquer Balkans, form Greece, then get outliers.
Big Blue Blob. In my nearly 1000 hours in EU series I’ve never played as France. Would push hard for this, then go for Better than Napoleon. Pick up any other incidental French ones on the way.
One Night In Paris. I’ve also never played England. There are a bunch of English adjacent achievments, but this is the ultimate goal.
Or a distant fourth, Naples. One of my favorites from EU 3 was forming Italy as Naples, but Great Power, Carthago Delendo Est, and forming Italy seem like less… interesting?
Anyone played any of those options, and have opinions? @KevinC
I am considering playing EU 4 again for the first time in a while as well. Last time was Hungary in a MP game, I think. I sort of want to try the Hanseatic states, but starting as a single province seems very stressful.
Maybe you could try Napoli and unite Italy? I got steamrolled by the HRE the times I tried that so I’d love some tips.
Last time I tried was in EU 3, so a very different starting position. So I’m not sure I could provide much help there.
Generally speaking anything you can do to weaken the Ottomans? Do that. I pushed across to Greece, and took advantage of fleets to block the Bosphorus, to allow my numerically smaller armies to avoid full fights. This was because moving north into HRE territory is hard. Take unaligned states as you can. I also pushed into Fez early, but this was in the old 50 years to core system, to allow colonizing.
Basically the play was feed off the Balkans by keeping Ottomans weak and out of Europe, then push north once you can engage Austria on two fronts. But this may no longer work with the new start, as the Ottomans are much more solidly in Europe now.
Another option would push across into Tunis, and then across to Egypt. Basically to form Italy you need to be strong enough to take on Austria, and to do that requires either big allies, or more power.
Big Blue Blob is fun but also stressful, lots of restarts if you aren’t progressing at the right pace. There’s a few different ways to do it, you just need to manager your AE.
I’ve been playing a Prussia game just to faceroll with Space Marines. I stayed out of the religious leagues and HRE became Protestant and I ended up elector. Now trying to pass all HRE reforms. My morale has been as high as 8.5 or something, and the Ottomans are at like 5.4 so it’s trivial to fight them, it’s more a question of patience.
Next game for me will probably be another attempt at Switzerlake.
There’s an event that fires in the 1500s that removes northern Italian states from the HRE.
In my current Naples game, I had to restart 7 or 8 times to get a game where Aragon didn’t ally with France/Austria so that I could successfully launch independence.
I had castille initially support my independence and after that allied with France, Ottomans and Castille.
I’ve taken all of Aragon’s non-mainland possessions, Rhodes and Naxos, I vassalised Bosnia and have fed it around 10 former Serbian and Hungarian provinces while taking the coastal provinces (Lika, Dalmatia, Ragusa). I’ve pushed northward in Italy as far as Ferrara.
Unfortunately France rivalled me about 20 years in limiting my northward expansions, Tunis has been allied with a very strong Mameluks since the beginning (and the Ottomans have joined in the alliance) so I’ve been limited in expansions opportunities while managing AE.
The Ottomans have been a solid ally so I’d rather not start taking their land (I generally try to reward loyalty even if the bloody AI has a tendency to go from a 200 year ally with 150 relationship to rival because there’s no-one else to rival). Austria and Poland have replaced Castille and France as my allies, and I like to keep a strong Austria-as-emperor as the only feasible opponent to a blobbing France.
I’ll keep feeding Hungarian provinces to Bosnia and finish my annexation of non-empire Italian provinces and after that re-evaluate alliances and expansion. If it looks like going nowhere, I’ll just end the game after finishing Italy and becoming a major power.
What I always have found fascinating about the Ottomans is the fact that they were so resilient. Just look at how bad it got in 1402 when the Timurids kicked them in the teeth. About 50+ years later they would finally put an end to the Byzantine thorn in their Bosphorus.
I’m not an achievement hunter, so I’m absolutely useless in providing feedback on those. :) That being said, out of the options you listed, here are my thoughts!
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It’s all Greek to Me: That sounds fun! The only drawback would be that you’d be playing in the same backyard you just wrapped up in your Ottoman game. But given the length of the campaign and the continent-spanning empire you created, perhaps that doesn’t matter!
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Big Blue Blob / One Night In Paris: Both could be fun, but if it matters to you that region should be reworked and even more interesting in a couple months. Might be more fun to pursue it then?
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Naples sounds fun. You’d have to find a way to wrench yourself free from Aragon and deal with your Papal State neighbor. Other than Italy itself, you’re hemmed in by some serious powers, so you’d need to get strong enough to look like an attractive destination for an alliance for them. One thing that might make Naples fun is with expansion much more limited than the Ottomans, you could play around a lot with the Development system and go Tall vs Wide to reach your goals.