first time player as china and i got bent over

[mengusfungus]

ok, i am looking for some advice. this was my first time playing EU2 and i got shafted. ok, some background info;

i played EU1 years ago and went around stomping everything as i recall, got boring very quick but i wanted to try EU2, specially cuz u can now play any nation so i was going to play the homeland. the goal is to take over the world as usual, or at least reverse history and smack up the europeans. i read a few things on the forum before so i knew of the insanity that would start in 1600.

i'm playing 1.07 on normal, yeah call me a wuss but its my first time playing man

ok i start the game up and i am seriously dissapointed. the imperial army of china has a measly 70k troops, Admiral zheng he commands a grand fleet of 3 low tech ships? and the capital province has a sparse 100k residents? and i was BEHIND the europeans in tech, researching level 1????? i wasnt aware that china suffered some sort of catastrophy that reduced us to stone age living in 1419. but anyway, i'm all for gameplay over history so i accept it

ok basically i start the game by investing heavy infra, start promoting bailiffs in all rich coastal provs, jack up tolerance for confucians and buddhists, and reduce maintenance to 50%. zheng he starts exploring the indies for wut in eu1 were some pretty rich colonization spots. i save up money for diplo, exchanging maps from tibet to portugal so i wouldnt have this isolation problem mentioned beforehand and so i can keep track of the europeans.

the capital is moved and then dai viet declares war, i withdraw out of war quickly cuz i need money to finance a big fleet to reach america before zheng he dies, he retired in the 1420's so i was in a hurry. with 19 ships, 1 survives to tell the tale, discovering baja. at least its a foothold

outward expansion, of course, that was the whole point of my game. spend next few years jacking up stability. oh btw, this whole time my inflation is near 0, living off yearly income only, so i think im in decent shape. serfs are freed, aristocracy ascends, and we go narrowminded, cuz confucians get 0 missionaries.

some unhappy peasants some obscurantists an exceptional year or two, etc. nothing too big. just sets my infra research back a lil bit.

starting in 1480's i start fighting, lots of cav (no assaults yet) storm manchuria and allied korea. take all my national provinces from both along w/ viazemki. finish korea off a short while later in their 1 province. easy cuz of perm cb against both.

then turning to the south and west, i attack and/or diploannex several countries, i forget names. tibet is gone dai viet champa taungu pegu ok basically all of indonesia except the malaysians i forget country name. i constantly try to vassalize bengal but it seems that nobody w/ a COT would ever agree to be diplovassalized.

in the meantime ive traded maps w/ the spanish (freaking incompetent ming monarchs and 1 diplo/year really sucks ass) and i can see the aztecs so i attack them immediately. qi jiguang manages to lead like a 15 sized army (attritioned away in the pacific) over a 3 times bigger aztec army. 2 wars and theyr annexed.

ok over the next century i basically do nothing except research and colonize madly. got a few conquistadors (NO explorers though, wtf?? im full naval and free trade) chinese proliferate like a virus in n america siberia and the indies. get scotera or somthin off east africa as a base for further expansions that way, get south india and hawaii as a ship transit point.

of course the random event slows u up once in a while but it aint too bad. i manage to convert a grand total of 1 aztec province in this time. did i mention that missionaries are expensive and useless? even on the "easy" pagan provinces? 30% and 2000d to convert tenochtitlan, forget it. im not into inflation.

and then i get into the 1600's w/ tons of gold income pouring in, lots of good commodities and like 500+ d/year in census staying at+3 stab. hustle a few refineries.

and then THA SHIET hits. manchu rebellion is ok, i hang on to everything by hustling mad cavalry. then freaking cult of white lotus. 10% revolt risk freaking everywhere. ive promoted legal councils madly before this happened. my tech is puny at land 9 naval 2 at this point. i lose... everything. everybody starts declaring independence and china is reduced to... where i started with in 1419, + most colonies. i lose ALL of borneo to brunei, some stuff to makassar, aztec empire to zapotec, most of south india to mysore and even a few cores to the newly independents. all of indonesia runs off, as does chagatai khanate territories that defected to me and tibet. 1644, Qing comes to power. long live the qing, more revolt risk. china declares independence, attacking ming provinces madly, forcevassalize china. in all i have not done ANYTHING but lose land up to the 1670's even though im PAST my support limit in cavalry!! and did i mention rebels demolish refineries? my hairline is receding rapidly. in hindsight i shouldve released some vassals but losing territory voluntarily is just something that never occured to me. finally i diploannex china.

from now on i do not dare touch dp sliders freaking stab costs 1.5 years per point and any stab below 2 carries revolt risk. a lil bit towards aristocracy and centralization, max narrowminded max naval max quality leaning on free serfs, max free trade. and i hate paying for stab cuz my military tech is falling badly behind everybody but russia. launch a few short wars to recover what i lost. annex zapotec and maya, vassalize dai viet and vientienne and makassar and korea, continue mad colonization. start annexing vassals (DAMN 1 diplo/year!!! y is kangxi so incompetent?? hes one of hte best emperors there ever was) tibet vientienne assam dai viet korea are all eliminated. and now its past 1700's and i'm STILL manchu, havent proclaimed chinese empire yet, so im stuck with Han and Cantonese but no manchu culture. and btw it seems i haven't been getting any events, not even random anymore. something is f'ed up but i keep playing.

the situation now, in 1730: game still seems to be bugged (or is it?) no jesuits, no china, no random events even. i have expanded to the west against khanates and indians and to the east against pagan americans. control everything from mexico to costa rica, with a little outlet to the east coast (everything else is dutch/english/spanish) w/ colonies up the middle to canada. all of siberia is settled, i have reached russia from the west. chagatai is finished as is uzbek, delhi will soon be vassalized. next move is to finish mughal empire. the damn south asian countries are still hanging around and i dont hav the diplomats or the stability to finish all the little bullshit 2 province kingdoms. continuing to pump arms/refineries/goods manufactories when money is avail

my tech is horrendous. 19/3/7/7. other majors, aka big ass white color covering the screen known as austria have like 26/25! and forget like brandenburg w/ freaking 30+ land tech. inflation is below 1% cuz of mayors, at least thats good. own 3 COT's, 2 of them officially big ass (tm). guangdong is still owned by damn portuguese. mysore and borneo are still alive with my damn Han cultured provinces (AND THEYR CONVERTING MY PEOPLE TOO) how come i cant convert nearly as successfully??!!!!

the pincers are surely closing on europe, but w/ no diplomats, manpower limit hit and nationalism and high stab cost and etc. shit i am stretched thin. ive met europeans from the west in n. america and from the east in russia and persia but like this at best i can expect to finish the game owning part of russia and most of middle east. im not yet ready to take out european settlements in the americas cuz of crappy tech and low manpower limit. considering that i dont even siege anymore just pour in infantry for assaulting im gonna need lots of manpower. cuz at this rate i can not stand low stab + war exhaustion cuz of massive revolts my low manpower army cant handle. just need to finish wars fast. and all these lvl3 high tech european fortresses?? forget it.

should i just forget china and play europe or am i just being a retarded newb?

[Arilou]

Rule number one: DON'T play China unless you are very, very good at it.

[Freiherr vStein]

You quite well for the first game ever playing China, you probably only need to improve your skills in rebel-hunting a bit. Sooner or later you should try a european country of course, but there is no specific reason to do that in the first game . 19/3/7/7 tech isn't that bad if you consider that you are narrowmined and in the China tech group and the difference between 19 and say 25 is minimal. 26 offers a CRT advantage though so that might be a small problem, but nothing that couldn't be overcome easily with good strategy or superior numbers. Since you are playing plain 1.07 you might consider recruiting all troops you are going to need in a war before you start it so you can take it easy with the war exhaustion. You need to be a bit more careful with your losses then.
For the Empire of China event you need to own the Hebei province and China must not exist.

[mengusfungus]

china definitely does not exist cuz i forcevassalized and annexed them in the 1670s. and i do own the capital, so yea im kinda confused.

rebel hunting? well i was getting 4-8 rebellions a month for 30 years so i was just like whatever and let the game run at max speed hands off got so sick of it. the govt fell 4 times. and sometimes even under rebel control it did not fall when i needed it to. considering i had an overseas empire everywhere it took a while to siege and bring all the rebel controlled provinces back.

thanks for any advice tho

[John F Nordlund]

Try Sweden they are my favorit country lots of leaders and events.

[Daniel A]

Just yesterday I concluded a GS as China on very hard / weakling.

Up to 1610 I had no special problems. Everything went OK. By then I believe I owned most of Asia East of Tibet/Bengal. I had taken no indian territory in NA but I had quite a lot of colonies. Max naval, max centralisation, a few steps narrowminded and very mercantilistic. Around 5 merchants in every COT.

I don't have a save left from then but in 1644 my tech was 21/5/6/6, inflation at 5% and monthly income around 400d. Manchu had just declared independence and thus my BB was down to 1.5. Stab cost was 2500d so that means around 6 months per stab step.

I guess you had much more BB. After a 1419 direct DOW on Manchu I only dowed with CB. Mostly I diploannexed. Considering the BB cost for military annexation of Aztek/Inca I did not want to do it with them and thus they kept their independence. I could have dowed them twiced perhaps and in the first one forceconverted them (I am not sure if you can do that as a confucian but that would have kept the BB for the annexation down but I would still have got a lot of BB for the DOW). It is difficult to get a CB against nations that lack the trade level for banning you from their COT!

Since BB value increases stab cost (at least on may 11 beta) it is important to keep BB low as long as possible.

Then I got the +10 RR is 1610 and another hit around 1622 which I lived thru. Rather boring play chasing rebs BTW. I don't think you ought to have problems with them at a RR of about 20%.

I am not sure when the change was made but in the beta the RR percentage is yearly instead of monthly. If you played with 20% RR per month I can imagine you were in deep shit. I do not want to try that

But then in 1644 I had a distaster event which put my RR at around 35%. I wrote a post about it in the general forum a week ago or so. Look it up for me details. Anyhow it meant I had no possibility to raise armies and before my empire collapsed I reloaded and did what I described in that thread. With the adjustment it was possible still to survive these last 20 years of RR hell.

After that it was plain sailing. Around 1720 I reached land 41 and built conscription centers all over so my manpower skyrocketed. Then I military vassalised Delhi, Bengal and Persia (getting CB trhu excessive merchants flow) and diploannexed Tibet and in 1748 I went over the BB threshold with about 3 million men ready (which was slightly less than 1.000.000 men above the supportable amount IIRC) and after 9 rounds (about 1805) it was only me left. After the diploannexations at the start of the BB war only Viyayanagar and Chagatai were independent nations East of the turks.

I am not sure what you did wrong. But if your revolt risk was monthly then I feel very deep for you. Can't have been fun. Otherwise China should be one of the easier nations to play. Great income from start. Zheng He from start and when you start to eliminate the free nations from the East towards the West there are fewer and fewer competitors in your COTs.

BTW, how come Guangdong was a COT? When I got the event of granting Portugal that province with a COT I naturally declined and kept all the trade in Shanghai.

-----

Of course, if you play on normal instead of Very Hard the BB question is not as important since there are no BB wars. But the stab cost and the success rate of diplovassalising is still a problem.

BTW, random explorers you only get after reaching naval tech level 11 (also trade must be at least level 3 and land at most level 3). As a matter of fact I researched naval tech much earlier than land tech. For three reasons

1) getting random explorers
2) being able to build shipyard and thus get +1 colonist
3) increase the speed of exploration

[hopi]

I also played china. You need to save before the rebel event. After 8 hours of straight play, sometimes the event will just not occure as it suppose to. You just need to reload and the event will kick in accordingly.

Also, the end of ming events are one of the complex event in EU2. There is 1 thread some where here that give analysis on the chain reaction of the events.

Moreover, it's better not to anex manchu at the beggining. I did reduce manchu to 1 capital province only. Also, it's beneficial to try to convert the buddish provinces to confucian to reduce stab cost.

[mengusfungus]

ok now im feeling my newbnicitiness keenly and it hurts. 21/5/6/6 in 1644? I wasnt even close (i was more like 9/2/6/6). and this was with aztec gold coming in beginning in early 1500's. my monthly income was around 370 i think, with all that gold even. i also had a lot of colonies, which means most of siberia (including the gold provinces) and most of the indies (sugar, spice, china, cotton) and plenty of america. i was full free trade not mercantilist. i sent traders to monopolize my own COT's which were shanghai, guangzhou (both quite rich, with 700-900+ value) and tenochtitlan.

so in effect, i have no idea how to play this game, at least not in comparison to u experts out there. i mean how the hell do you hustle 400/month w/o aztec gold and stuff?? promote bailiffs everywhere? convert like mad? (and conversion is freaking impossible it seems) i am missing something big here. and how do you get stab point in 6 months? preposterous, must be at full narrow and serf or something?

i dont know how the revoltrisk is actually calculated but like i said i was getting 4-8 revolts per month (spread between territories throughout siberia on the indies islands and throughout disjoint territories in america) and with army of all cav capped at manpower 200k or so before anybody even declared independence i couldnt chase them all down. damn me being a newb. btw the worst thing is when rebs take a fortress when spawning, wtf, ties up large # of troops and increased RR for a while in other provs.

i wish i could have CBs on all my neighbors... and what's excessive merchants flow? i need to somehow make dow's less costly.

and 1MIL manpower??? how???? in 1730 i only had manpower max of 230k ! how many conscript centers do u need to boost 800k manpower???!!

zheng he, massive attrition only managed to explore like i said 1 prov in america and a few in the indies. i traded maps to explore west. and yes chinese diplomacy is extroardinarily limited w/ 1 diplo/year its crazy. making diploannexing a bitch.

holy shit too many questions. i have no idea how u ppl come up w/ this shit and do so well. i thot i'd do pretty well in eu2 having played eu1 successfully in a GC or two, well i was wrong. it's official, i suck ass at eu2. i need an education

[mengusfungus]

oh and btw i don't know what version you were playing in. i was playing in 107. no clue (isn't that the pattern here) what differences there are

[Nikolai II]

Originally posted by mengusfungus
and how do you get stab point in 6 months? preposterous, must be at full narrow and serf or something?

Using beta you'll get a ten point bonus per _province_, in plain 1.07 you get a ten point bonus per _month_, so regaining stab is faster in beta (unless you are really small, not really an issue when you are China ).

And your BB increases your stab-costs, so you shouldn't do force-annexing unless the opponent is either pagan (goes for free) or non-diploannexable and a province you _really_ need at once.

Keep your BB below half threshold at all times and your stab-costs should be somewhat more sensible.

[Dustman]

I've gone bit different with China, 1.07 beta. No WC had in mind. So, max centralization, max innovativness, free trade and max naval got me to tech leader #1. I personally believe that colonization is boring and quite inefficient way to spend money, so when my stab cost raised bit (1+ year), I've stopped building colonies, only TPs. Still had ~3 colonist annually. Getting random CBs, got whole SE Asia under my foot but Indochina region.

1615 was an year to hate. Constant revolts, even on yearly basis, plus inability to build troops due to low stability in most provinces but capital kept me busy for quite some time. Released one vassal (Annam me think) to get rid of one Induist province. Got 2-3 random convertions and of course no missionaries with high innovativness. Put game aside due to late time and some revolt events in 1660s. Was ahead/equal of Europens in land/naval, don't remember exact figures. Infra and trade were 9 both, with 10th lvl in decade or so. With outward expansion China comes into Muslim tech group (0.8 latin tech speed), that even better due to rich provinces and Europeans inability to gain neibour bonus.

Got quite few CoTs, two in China proper, in Nippon, Malaca and Bengal. Waged a war vs. Portugal, got Macao back, along with some colonies (lost 30+ warships vs. ~60 Portugese), not that hard but needed to attack Tago.

Diplomatic issue. Only those who start Catholic have some additional diplomats. Catholics, CRC, Protestants and Reformists, to various degree. Since you've kicked out aristocracy, you've got diplomatic penalty to monarch skills and as result lower nuber of diplomats. Live with your decision. I had 2 diplomats yearly in general, unless my emperor was complete idiot, with balanced aristocracy/pluto settings.

[mengusfungus]

hmm ok i started a new game, this time moving out faster than before to secure early income. its 1450 and ive got my cores in manchuria, korea is dead, assam and taungu are vassalized, chagatai is dead and ive got half the timurid empire. its going ok except for... 33/35 reputation and 1.5 year stability... now my question still stands, how the hell do i make money??! i'm not gonna make any more annexations anytime soon for obvious reasons so taking out bengal/malakar/nippon for their CoT's is out of the question (anyway i do NOT have the massive navy/army to do that now, or ever). how in the world can you make so much money and tech up early? monopolize everything? (keep getting competed out) promote bailiffs? (very little benefit and revolt risk) convert madly? (im still leaning towards innovation cuz of event strategic decision so...) or did i mess up and i should have gone direct for the COT's ? (in which case how am i supposed to fight several naval wars - nippon and malakar have CoT's in their capital so i'd have to fight 2 wars each at least - in a short span of time?) OR was i right in my original game? tech up infra and stay small territorially, just build even more refineries than i did last time?

[Grosshaus]

Bailiffs must be promoted in every province no matter what nation you play. They give such a big boost to income, that the RR is acceptable. Only occasionally I wait after I've converted the province to easen fighting the rebels.

[mengusfungus]

really? what's the actual benefit specifically (some numbers would help)? and are they actually the more economic option over other methods of raising income mentioned before...

[Freiherr vStein]

You absolutely need TC in the 1.07b beta patches, but not in plain 1.07. There it's really a matter of preference. The way to make money is usually to focus on the economic techs exclusively early on and use your merchants as effective as possible (needs experience).

[mengusfungus]

i did tech up economic techs exclusively, still can't make as much money as som other players seem to be able to. also i heard somewhere that i shouldnt put budget sliders over 50%, what's that all about? my ledger also says trade income is like 10-% of total... i get the impression theyr not worth jack to a big production-oriented empire

[MarshalN]

First of all let me just say China is horribly modeled in this game. Right from the start it's a flawed country (tech far too low, etc etc etc, the list is endless). The events are also not really representative of what happened -- for example some of these rebellions are more localized than the game makes it. They should be province specific..... whereas now if you colonized at all as China pre 1600 you'll suffer for it because all of the colonies will go up in revolt.

That said.... I would really suggest you to learn the game playing as a major European country. It's much easier to learn that way and in the end you can play a satisfactory China game much faster than you can because China is one long, frustrating experience IMO.

[Avian073]

As china u can can get really freaken big. As them i conquered all of asia the siberia, and colonized into morroco by 1540. However the longer u play the worse it gets. Rebellions are insane for china. Even if u manage to keep your empire together, near the end u have +10% revolt risk for about 40years. THis will dismantle a religiously diverse nations and whenever u get big, getting any stab is near impossible. I always play as one of the minor powers in SE asia and colonize and trade like nuts to get $$. THough if u are that big, max free subjects helps since it gives a nice production boost.

[mengusfungus]

damn how do you manage to do that? it's not the fighting, it's the myriad mix of random tiny but bigger than 1 province powers, completely destroying your reputation (and thus stab) and stability directly when you declare war and annex. how's something like that even possible, having to fight at least 2 wars to conquer everyone. btw with crappy monarchs i doubt it's all diploannex.

[calcsam]

Originally posted by mengusfungus
damn how do you manage to do that? it's not the fighting, it's the myriad mix of random tiny but bigger than 1 province powers, completely destroying your reputation (and thus stab) and stability directly when you declare war and annex. how's something like that even possible, having to fight at least 2 wars to conquer everyone. btw with crappy monarchs i doubt it's all diploannex.

diploannexing works very well. Even the most crappy of monarchs can diplo-annex one-province minors because they are so weak.