1841

Excellent, thanks Craig!

1842

You can also assault the fort if you have a huge numerical superiority, which is probably what the real Ottomans would have done in Albania (I have no actual idea).

1843

Beaten to it, but the tldr of Craig’s post is leaders, cannons (preferably 6) and blockading. Assaulting is generally a bad idea unless you really need to take it quickly and/or the garrison has already been severely weakened in numbers or morale. But if you’re swimming in manpower, go for it.

1844

Don’t worry, I have comments about the system mechanics set to forced march with a maneuver 6 leader. They’ll beat most people out there ;)

1845

I feel like with every started and stopped game I play, I learn a little bit more (and hey, 0 to 29 hours played in a week!)

Today’s lesson: Autonomy. As I understand it, one of the early effects of autonomy is that it basically skims dollars off your province earnings–with high autonomy, it simulates local leaders skimming their share off the top before they render unto Caesar. Or Kaiser. So if I’m understanding it decently, if you can manage the unrest, you want that autonomy to drift down–or be actioned down–to 0, representing a more centralized economy.

What else am I missing on this autonomy mechanic? (Which I guess is fairly new.)

1846

You’ve basically got it, triggercut. Effectively, autonomy is how much self-rule you allow the province. The higher autonomy the less they chafe under your rule, but that also comes with a reduction in what you get out of the province (tax, production, trade power, manpower, you name it).

When you initially take a province, local unrest can be quite high, especially if the populace is a different religion/culture. There will also be a high amount of unrest caused by Nationalism, which goes down over the course of ~20 years or so. Because of this, I will often raise the autonomy of a recently conquered province in order to reduce the rebellions I have to deal with. This buys me some time while nationalism fades away and my missions go to work.

There is a pretty lengthy cooldown when you raise or lower autonomy, so you can’t raise autonomy while you convert the province and then immediately lower it back down or anything like that. Autonomy lowers slowly over time (-0.05 per month, I think) but only while at peace. You can manually lower autonomy (if not on cooldown), but that gives additional unrest penalty in addition to having more from reduced autonomy. Frequent and prolonged wars which cause your autonomy to remain high, which can have an impact on your economy if you have a lot of conquered provinces with high autonomy.

The more advanced government types (such as the new monarchy type you can select at Admin Tech 12) improves your ability to reduce Autonomy naturally, which doesn’t piss off the populace like manually lowering autonomy does. I don’t recall if this additional autonomy reduction is also only at peace or if it happens at war as well (I think it’s the latter but I’d have to double check. Either way, it’s damn nice). I usually switch to this government type as soon as possible for this reason.

1847

Ah, cool. I hadn’t realized that about the Tech 12 Monarchy. That’s the Administrative Monarchy, right?

1848

I think that’s the one. All government types past that point provide additional autonomy reductions, they generally go up in effectiveness as tech progresses.

1849

Nationalism generally lasts 30 years. 15 unrest modifier, which decreases at the turn of each calendar year by 0.5. Can be reduced by 10 years with the 4th Humanist idea (Indirect Rule), by 5 years with Constitutional monarchy or Administrative republic governments and some national ideas.
Base autonomy reduction is 0.10 per month while at peace. I also don’t know how the better governments work in regard to this, but would guess also at peace only. Diploannexing a vassal also raises autonomy to 75%, so you’ll have to decide if annexing a vassal is worth more than leaving him alive and letting him help you with troops. :-)
You can check http://www.eu4wiki.com/Nationalism for more info (a bit into the page, where unrest modifiers are listed).

1850

Sooo, dev diary #2 goes into great detail about the Nation Designer. Personally, I think it sounds very interesting, especially for me since I already have hundreds of hours into the game. I think it’ll allow me to play around with some cool “what if” style scenarios.

Based on a new difficulty setting specifically for custom nations, you have a budget of points you have to spend between all kinds of things: your government, national ideas, the age and skill of your starting leader and heir (a 0/0/0 leader is a handicap that will get you bonus points while a 6/6/6 20 year old is more expensive than a similarly blessed 60 year old leader), the provinces you start with, the tax and manpower of said provinces, tech group, you name it.

Costs for choices can vary. Playing as a Western tech group in Europe doesn’t cost any points but playing one in Asia or the New World is quite expensive. You pay additional costs for specialization as well, so 20% morale is much more expensive than 10 or 15 percent. Also, if you focus all of your national ideas in one area (such as military), the costs of those also increase.

According to the dev diary, the point budget is intended to be able to create a lower-end major power, not another BBB. These settings can all be tweaked, though. There’s a Custom Nation difficulty setting that will increase or decrease the point budget and the values are also moddable.

There’s also some new game modes:

Normal: The map is populated by historical nations, and Custom Nations are available.
Historical: The map is populated by historical nations, and Custom Nations are disabled.
Custom: The map is empty asides from player-designed Custom Nations, and all nations start with a colonist.
Random: The map is empty asides from player-designed Custom Nations in the lobby, but once play is started it is populated with randomly generated states that use the historical tags and names.

There’s also a couple custom Province modes you can select. Aside from the default historical, you can play with Random or Flat province values. In Random, the base tax of the world stays the same but individual province values are randomized, based on terrain and climate. Flat means that every province has the same tax/manpower value.

All in all, it sounds a lot more robust than I was expecting. Every now and then I like to play a “what if” game and that usually necessitates me creating a custom mod, which is time consuming. This might do nicely when I feel like mixing things up!

1851

Is there a way to make it so all nations start with 1 province? Sort of like a small nation free for all to see who can rise to the top?

1852

Not that I saw. Custom and Random modes both offer part of what you’re asking for to some degree, but not the whole shebang.

1853

It looks very nice however unless they fix the military AI (land and naval) I’m not that hyped for it. All it’ll end up doing is making an already easy game easier. Example of what I’m talking about:

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?832279-Will-the-military-AI-get-fixed-in-1.10

The AI is seriously way worse than it used to be in war. Especially since I’m used to playing with the AI that makes far fewer mistakes from previous patches. I was hoping an Expansion called Art of War would even have military AI improvements but it’s actually gotten worse.

1854

I don’t think it will make it harder or easier, it just depends on what you do with it. I wan’t to make a militaristic Shinto Ulm in the middle of the HRE and see how long I can survive. :)

Agree with you that some weird AI bugs have crept in, hopefully they get worked on. I think a factor is that the AI guy, Wiz, is lead of the entire EU4 project these days. Probably leads to less time devoted strictly to AI work.

1855

The nation designer looks a million times better than the rather pathetic Crusader Kings 2 Ruler Designer and customizer.

There’s a bunch of mods for EU3, CK2 and EU4 that do this. They tend to be called “shattered” or something like that. e.g. this one, but I’ve never used it so no idea if it’s what you need.

1856

Ahh, interesting. Thanks!

1857

I’ve been jonesing for a few weeks to load up EU4 again, but I’ve had practically no game time for a month (as in about 2 hours total over that span). Finally got a few hours over the weekend, and made my first foray into an ironman game, also the first time since Res Publica I’ve played too.

So I chose easy mode, and by that I mean the Ottomans. As much as I like a challenge like forming Germany from Brandenburg, or Italy from Naples (some of my most fun experiences) I didn’t feel like trying that with such limited time. Also for trying after about 6 months of some pretty big changes.

I’ll get a screenshot up today I think, but man are the Ottomans fun. I’d never tried them before, or really any of the Muslim nations, despite having over 400 hours in the series. 20 years in and I’m already planning how to invade Italy. My ultimate goal: The Sultan of Rum. My initial conquests have been about as expected, Byzantium is gone, all of Anatolia is mine (a few minors are there, but as my vassals that are currently getting annexed). Basically the obvious goals of taking all Ottoman cores was finished within about 10 years, and right now I am in the process of punching Syrian cores out of the Mamluks, the Syrians being my newest vassal along with Georgia. Defender of the faith has helped me rapidly expand while converting all regions. First idea group was religious. As I am planning on taking my party into Italy and Russia (Georgia is step one of this) the holy war casus belli is nice.

It is interesting how much balance has changed, and the mechanical tweaks have altered what I’ve done though. Autonomy is a big one. As I’ve been playing fairly aggressive, though I will have to rest soon to replenish manpower, the Balkan provinces still have fairly high autonomy. I’ve not been hurting financially from that, but certainly it has put a damper on my military by throttling recruitment.

The other system I’ve been paying more attention to is religious authority. Perhaps my experiences in Europe meant it was rarely an issue, but playing a holy warrior Ottomans means it has been important to keep it high early. Beat up Karamon? We’ll make up for it by beating up Orthodox Serbia. Now that I’ve converted all provinces so far, I’ll perhaps let it slide. Still I don’t remember ever making decisions, especially war decisions, with this in mind much.

Basically it seems that so far ironman hasn’t been as big of a deal as I had built up in my mind. So far no major problems. Granted I’ve been on the desktop, and not the Surface where I’ve played EUIV the most. Don’t think I’d ever try ironman there, too much delay on controls.

1858

The Ottomans are my favorite. Their starting situation just leaves them with so many ridiculous options available, it’s a country I can play over and over and over and take very different approaches every time.

I also like how their military units peak early so I’m tempted to attack Europe then, but after tech 12 they fall into a big slump. Do I press my military advantage early and take European territory while I can? Doing so will mean early gains, but as I hit that big unit slump after tech 12, there’s still going to be a whole lot of angry Western powers looking to reclaim land. If instead I spend the early game conquering vast swaths of territory in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Persia, I will have a mighty nation that might be able to offset those mid-game blues… but all the Western powers will be at full strength!

Just a very fun game. They’re not hardmode or anything, but playing Ottomans sure is entertaining, full of action, and open to an enormous number of possibilities.

1859

Ha, yeah they do. Right now I want to do all of the things too. On top of Sultan of Rum I do have one side challenge I want to try, to succeed where Suleiman failed in 1529. I want to take Vienna. I’ve been doing a lot in Anatolia and the Levant, but that is mostly to consolidate cores and poke my rivals. Right now I’ve got 65 years to get to that goal, and we’ll see. Having almost exclusively played western tech group nations I am a bit worried about what happens once the Ottoman units start to fall behind. Right now I’m matching in tech, but I’m considering intentionally falling behind in non military tech, basically powering through ideas once I get admin 7, so I can westernize.

Definitely see why you like them. I’ve tended to play as smaller nations, this is about the only time I’ve ever played as one of the ‘reccomended’ nation starts. As fun as it can be to build a minor HRE nation to a juggernaut, sometimes its nice to start as the steamroller.

1860

YMMV, but I’ve found that Westernization typically isn’t worth it in most cases for the Ottomans. I don’t tend to have trouble keeping up with tech and ideas with them for a few reasons. For starters, their tech group is 125%, which puts them only 5% behind the Eastern group. Unlike Eastern, they have more ways of managing that. While I usually start out as Pious for the morale, I end up pushing my Piety as low as possible which results in a 10% tech boost. Now they only have a 15% penalty! If you luck out and get a high ADM ruler, you also get an additional 5% tech boost during his reign.

I also like taking the following Idea groups with them:

Humanism: Culture acceptance + tolerance scales extremely well with Ottoman ideas. Accepted cultures galore, a stable empire, and never have to worry about what religion a province is. It caps off with that sweet -10% Idea cost.

Administrative: 25% cheaper cores stacks with the 33% cheaper cores in Ottoman ideas, saves enormous amounts of admin points. The cheap and plentiful mercs are very useful to conserve manpower in the frequent wars and it caps off with a 10% ADM cost reduction. So now I have 10% better tech via lack of Piety, 10% better ADM tech from Administrative, and provinces are costing pennies on the dollar to core.

Aristocratic: I used to not like this group, but I love it now. So, Ottoman cavalry already kicks ass, so we add even better cavalry here and make them cheaper. Then we get a solid Manpower boost, which Ottomans can always use. An extra Diplomat is always useful since I’m annexing vassals and fabricating claims non-stop. Then it caps off with 10% less MIL tech cost and an extra leader, both crucial to the Ottomans. Fighting on multiple different continents at once and not being able to ignore navy means I never have enough generals and admirals.

Those are usually 3 Ideas I take early (not in the order listed) and with that… I never even get a chance to Westernize. I’m always ahead on techs and have enough to spare for Policies and the like. When I have tried Westernizing, it’s rarely been worth the opportunity cost: I can either Westernize too late where I have massive base tax and there’s not enough time to make up the enormous amount of MP required to Westernize, or I tank my tech a bit, Westernize early, but compromise my window where I have a large Unit Type advantage over other tech groups.

Anyway, that’s just my experience, but as you well know there’s hardly one right way to play any nation (one of the things I love about the game). I’d love to hear how your Westernization/Religious route goes, maybe I can learn a thing or three. :)