Where is the production overlay? I looked at all the map modes and didn’t see one. I think one thing that might be a cause is that I have had no real use for my military points and have just been upgrading my military tech which might have caused my maintenance to go up. I am not sure what to do about that.
As for tariffs, where do I set that? I have looked at all the panels and do not see a tariff setting anywhere.
Tariffs are set in the subjects tab. Upper right shield to open all the tabs, then it’s the last one.
Not sure what he means by production overlay (economic one?) but there’s lots of maps modes hidden in the lower right map under an arrow.
I went through all the map modes and I didn’t see anything that looked like it would tell me what the best kind of buildings to build would be.
My subjects tab doesn’t do anything. It says I do not have any subjects.
It’s not a map mode. It’s the button next to your country shield in the top left, and it’s where you should be doing all your unit/building production. If you click on a unit it shows where you can build it. If you switch over to the buildings tab, it shows you where you can build a given building, and what bonus you’ll get for doing so in each province.
Sounds like you don’t have enough colonies to have than form a colonial nation yet. Overseas colonies don’t provide much tax income but once they become a colonial nation you can raise their tariffs via the subjects tab and make some good money.
I have seen this tab, however, it still was not clear what would produce the most income. IE: Temples say +1 tax, yet when you build one you do not get +1 tax from the province.
Then there is production. I have one colony that produces gold, it says it does like 60 production on gold, yet I do not get 60 gold per month or year from it.
Does this colonial nation thing happen automatically or do you need to do something special?
Your actual income from a province is going to depend on a whole bunch of modifiers. To take one of the more obvious examples, overseas territories have no production income and greatly reduced income from tax - basically you’re reliant on tariffs from those provinces, and early game you don’t even get much of that for various reasons. There are also global “efficiency” modifiers for the various sources of income, which you can improve through ideas, governments, tech etc. I’d highly recommend reading through the Wiki for the economy here, or if you’d rather be playing, spend a lot of time looking at tooltips in each of your provinces to see what’s affecting income. All the modifiers are shown when you hover over the numbers.
As for the production overlay, I think you’re confusing the tab itself with the map overlay, which is what I was referring to. If you click on, say, a temple in the tab, the map changes to show you which provinces can build it (or have already built it). For the provinces that can build it, it shows you exactly what the change will be on the province itself. Now those don’t translate 1 for 1 into income because of the modifiers, but it does show you where it would be most efficient to put a given building.
Thanks.
Now something else has happened and yet again I am confused.
France has declared war on me. My military tech is superior to France.
I have stacks of units, that are at least 2x as big as Frances stacks with a decent composition of infantry, cavalry, and cannon. Yet each time I meet their armies, I get slaughtered. Once on attack and twice when I was seiging a province they sent a smaller army which annihilated my much larger army. All I can say, is WTF?!
A few ideas of what you can look into, just off the top of my head:
-Compare Generals, they make a huge difference. You can see their leader stats by hovering over their stack or on the after-battle report dialog thing.
-Were you on the offense or defense? Were there terrain penalties involved?
-What is your Army Tradition compared to theirs? (I believe you can see this in the Ledger)
-Your military tech was superior, but does France have a bunch of military Ideas that you lack? Quality, Offense, and Defense can make substantial differences in how well your armies perform.
-If this is early in the game, France has amazing generals from the 100 Years War. If this is later in the game, France tends to have high Army Tradition due to fighting a lot of large-scale wars. If they have enough ideas unlocked, they also get some very nice bonuses to their Army: A whopping 20% bonus to Morale and a 5% Discipline boost.
EDIT: Oh, and to answer your question about Colonies, colonial nations will form automatically when you have five (IIRC) colonies adjacent to each other in the same region. You’ll get a popup dialog allowing you to give the nation a custom name.
This game is so confusing… Now my country is a subject country. I have no idea how this happened and I can’t see that on my UI anywhere. I do have colonies and I can go to them and clearly see that on their info under diplomacy. Yet I go to my country under diplomacy and there is nothing about who I am subject of. Yet all these actions I want to take say I can’t because I am a subject country or a vassal.
Thank you for the tips but I have a question about the one quoted. Isn’t it best to admin tech up early to get the one that unlocks temples so you can get that nice tax boost?
Sounds like you’re the junior member of a Personal Union.
A Personal union.pngpersonal union is a form of diplomatic relationship where one monarch rules over two countries. It can be formed by having a royal marriage with a monarch who dies without an heir or if a monarch of the same dynasty dies with out an heir. It may also be formed by enforcing a claim through war or, in certain countries, through an event or decision. Once formed, it works similar to vassalage: the country leading the union (the senior partner) gains the throne and dominates the country who lost their monarch, (the junior partner).
The link contains info on how to break it, if that is indeed what your situation is. Hope that helps!
Yes, that is what is going on.
I am thinking that I should start over as a nation and focus on just the military aspects of the game instead of colonization. I really just wanted a peaceful rich country where everyone was happy. The idea was to get the money rolling in from colonies, but that has not worked out.
Maybe I should start with Castle again. I also have not made any alliances (after some with Portugal) because I was constantly getting sucked into wars. It was almost non-stop.
I don’t recall who you are playing now, could you remind me again? Portugal is typically my top pick for nation to play when I just want to peacefully colonize. Get a Royal Marriage and Alliance with Castile and then you’re pretty much left alone. Yes, you will get involved in their wars, but you can pretty much just ignore them for the most part. Spain makes quite a buffer between you and anyone else. :)
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.