I think I can probably handle their navy, yeah. I’ll probably have to scrap some of my transports (or even frigates) for the big ships.
I’m more worried about my various colonies and vassals getting hammered. There’s no way Vinland or Nova Scotia could hang on, so they’d just sit there being occupied, and I’d probably lose my African holdings to a separatist uprising.
How can I get my liberty desire up? I really can’t imagine doing this when France isn’t already at war.
I love reading about other people playing EU4 as much as I like playing EU4… and i really like playing EU4
Increase your power relative to theirs, so building up development and forcelimits. From the wiki:
Does this mean province development (tax base, production, manpower)? But my precious monarch points…!
Yep, it’s a ratio of what your province development is vs what theirs is. Since you can’t declare war and expand that way, you may need to build up through internal development. Look to expand your forcelimits as well. This will naturally occur by raising development, but you also want to build Regiment Camps everywhere you can. You want to field as large an army as possible compared to France. Looking like you can go toe-to-toe with The Man will make the people agitate for freedom and push the liberty desire up.
Second try for Norwegian Wood. Staying Catholic and stopping Reformation as Norway proved to be too much for me as I had trouble attracting strong allies. I restarted and flipped Protestant this time. Had to no-CB an OPM elector to force them Protestant to start league war. I was able to DoW Austria on day one of league war when it was just me vs them. After declaring Protestant as the one true faith, it was still a slog to get enough authority to revoke around 1659. I am not sure I will have enough time to complete now. The new world should be easy as I ate England already for authority and Portugal is under my PU, so just need to really deal with Spain. Ming imploded and Ottomans mostly focused on eating Hungary. Russia is big, but is rarely a challenge.
Wow. That’s so far beyond what I could imagine doing.
In my current game, I’ve taken Denmark and have conquered (or annexed) the entire Baltic coast, most of the British Isles (England still exists… barely), and am about to start eating my way down into the HRE. I own extensive colonies in the Americas (including all the gold mines), Australia, and Trading companies in Africa, India and the Islands. Trade pretty much flows to Lubeck now (via the Carribean). I have powerful vassals in Novgorod and Gelre, while Bavaria and the Palatinate (both of my dynasty) are major allies in the HRE. And I don’t think I’ve done anything particularly exploit-wise (monthly profits is only at about 100 ducats - could probably have got it a lot higher if I min-maxed properly).
This is where I usually hit the wall in EU. At this point, there isn’t much left to do but eat away at the world (should probably let Spain grow and colonize, so I can gobble up more of their colonies rather than have to do all the colonizing myself), and see how much of it I can conquer before the remaining 150ish years of the game are done. I usually quit, though - there’s just not much interesting to do, and too much microing at this point in the game.
Sounds like the perfect time to end the campaign and start a new one.
Yeah, I just wish there was more going on at this level of the game. Time-wise, the game is just entering one of the most dynamic and pivotal periods of European history. Game-wise, that period is always the first 100 years.
I only started the hard achievements last year after putting in close to 1500 hours before that. Not Florryworry level of time, but enough to handle the harder starts.
There’s always the option to not start in 1444 :)
This game is a huge time sink. I am nearing 4200 hours, but have put the game on hold for a bit waiting for the next update/expansion. Thankfully, the rest of my backlog is the beneficiary.
Blasphemy!
Time for some honest talk: has anyone here actually started a campaign that wasn’t in 1444? I think I did once for an achievement where you had to start in a future bookmark, but that is all.
Not since EU III
I have not. A developer commented once that their metrics show very few people play on anything but 1444, which is why they’ve moved away from the idea of doing date bookmarks in their newer games. It’s a lot of developer time to set those up and barely anyone uses them.
Yeah pretty much works nicely with my own preferences. HoI IV is always the 1936 start, CK2 was either the default start or the age of vikings. I thought the Charlie start time just made the game too long and uninteresting, and EUIV is always 1444.
Later start dates do not work well and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’ve played a couple of later start dates right on release, especially with pre-order American Dream pack being all about starting as a colony in a later start date. But with the very first expansion pack (conquest of paradise) later start dates became broken: all those Native American tribes got new mechanics that don’t care about dates, as in 1776 start gives them the same ideas and tech and even buildings as 1444. Later additions had the same problems: development doesn’t ever change, same for every other new mechanic. If you start 1 day before the French revolution you’d expect disaster to tick or to have many loans and negative stability. Nothing like that. I think in Art of War they’ve added some content for 30 years war so this start date probably has some special stuff, but other than that those other starts feel barren.
And it’s kinda sad. CK2 managed to make mechanics work for any date. Even when it generates most of the characters it makes for interesting situations. So I’d kinda want EU5 and later Paradox games to be like Victoria 2 or Imperator Rome - focused on a single start date, maybe add others later. It seems too hard to support all the mechanics. Even if I:R seems like it wouldn’t be hard to keep interesting on any start date.
To me, the problem with the game in that respect is that there is not much difference other than the starting positions of the states. It’s one of the weaknesses of the series IMO - 1444 vs 1700 doesn’t matter; you’re still fundamentally playing the same mechanics just with different starting positions. E.g., war changed fundamentally during those 250+ years, but combat remains the same fundamentally attrition-based siege-fest. Society turned from feudal to enlightenment, but you don’t interact with your estates - or foreign nations - differently as a result. In game terms, start date is just a number.
Contrast with for example the Imperialism games which - albeit not very historical - have very distinct periods to the gameplay; i.e., play during the end game has some distinct differences from the early game.