800% Increase In Income Exploit.

[TheMeInTeam]

Which was to subsidize them 10 ducats until they started a colony and then cancel the subsidy?

Correct. You can generally cancel it as soon as the game lets you contact that nation again; they've generally already sent the colonist.

 

[Qoff]

The real tragedy in this thread is that Zardnaar uses Photobucket.

Damn, where is the like button?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

This is almost certainly an artifact of me only playing SP, but I almost always fill the front line with all/nearly all mercs unless I have 200k+ manpower. It's not more cost effective, but it saves the trouble of managing attrition almost completely and leads to a neat trick. (I do keep one organic stack, usually.)

When the enemy is beaten, I can take all the merc infantry (usually 4x32) and combine them into a huge siege assault stack. Fun fact: if you have (5x fort level) worth of infantry and a 5/5 or better general, you can assault forts with essentially no losses. Sieging France down takes about a year, regardless of fort level.

I just tried this. Picked Kazan at start. Consoled in a bunch of events to give myself 100 trad, rolled a 6/6 general with a few points in siege. Handed myself military tech 12 and gobs of money to afford 27 regiments of infantry. One I put the 6/6 general on, the other I put no leader at all. I assaulted Muscovy's fort 2 provinces.

I see no difference at all. The 6/6 even happened to fail one assault. Casualties taken were similar. If leader pips make a difference, it's not something you'll notice by eyeballing it, as 6/6/2/2 is about as strong as you'll see; if this is a significant factor you'd expect very different outcomes but I'm not seeing it.

Probably, you're just winning your assaults due to sheer force of #'s. General doesn't seem to matter. Of course, having a 5/5 general is pretty useful to actually being able to win the fights in the first place.