Apparently I can post it in my own thread, though.
I'm pretty pleased with this run, and am wondering what y'all think.
I've been playing EU4 for years, but usually I get bored and bail on all my games somewhere in the early 1700s. I always thought I could pull off a WC, though, and now I've finally done it, using a slightly convoluted strat that I'm pretty pleased with.
I've always thought Mongolia was one of the best WC nations, due to their bonuses to CCR, AE, and separatism. The fact that they start with a manpower bonus is also a nice boost for the pre-snowball period. The Mongol mission tree and the Mughals mission tree each give you a staggering amount of permanent claims, and the permanent rewards from Mongol missions don't go away when you tag switch. Hordes are great in early game, and the "No child can be khan!" event means you never have to deal with regencies, and the stat-generation for those rulers seems to be really good - it kept giving me 19-20 year old rulers with a 2+ in every stat, and constantly starting with young rulers saved me admin points from fewer stab hits. Hordes start to suck when you have to conquer lands that are mostly un-flat, but I was able to tag-switch before that got too bad.
Changing National Ideas is optional when you form a country, and most of the power of Mughals comes from their -25% CCR, and Mughal Diwan. Mongolia already has -25% CCR, and the AE/separatism bonuses Mongolia gets seem better than the rest of the Mughal ideas, so I did the back half of the run with Mongolian ideas and Mughal Diwan. Mughal Diwan gives a total of +450 governing capacity, and Celestial Empire gives another +300, which is enough that I could sustain a one-tag.
Outline of early run:
- Yellow Shamanism. Tolerance of Heathens will be clutch for pretty much the entire run.
- I gained independence from Oirat with the help of my good buddy, Ming. Ming was so selfless in this run and will always be remembered as our nation's best buddy. With their help, I took Qaraqorum, Zasagt, and Balikul. Balikul gave me a land border with Chagatai.
- Ally Uzbek as hard as possible.
- Eat some Korchin. I did the early portion of this run many times, and the worst was when Ming and I went to war with Korchin at the same time. I ate enough Korchin to get a land border with Haixi. Then I ate a few Haixi provinces, because they have Feudalism and that let me embrace it for about 350 gold.
- Haixi was allied to Udege. I declared them a co-belligerent, then vassalized them in a separate peace. I vassalized Udege in most of my runs, and in the ones I didn't, I took Yeren instead. I didn't want to build up too much power in the Girin trade node, which I couldn't collect from, so it was a decent place to put a vassal/march. (It took a while to have enough dev that I could usefully make them a march.) Also those wars were a nice source of free mana, since I took all the provinces for myself, razed them, and then granted the ashen wrecks to my vassal. (Ashen Rex is the name of my new metal band.)
- I ate a couple other Ming tributaries, where convenient, but this part of the game is mostly about waiting for Chagatai to annex Yarkand. They always do it, and it tanks their dip rep. The drop in dip rep plus the fact that I've made Uzbek think I'm the very best means that they won't honor the alliance when I declare on Chagatai. This is good, because otherwise that war would be way too expensive. On winning that war, I drilled through and took all the provinces from Balikul to Uzkend. This gives me a land border with Transoxiana, and a gold mine in Kuqa. It's a desert gold mine and so not cheap to develop, but it was a huge step towards not running a terrifying deficit at all times.
- Once Transoxiana breaks free of Timurids, declare on them, picking up Samarkand and its neighbors. Samarkand has a CoT, is on cheaper development terrain than anything else we have access to, and produces paper, which is some nice revenue. I made it the new capital (surprisingly historical for the Mongols) then developed Samarkand up to Renaissance, and then later, Colonialism. In both cases, it was such a huge chunk of my overall development that I was able to Embrace pretty quickly. Later, I got Printing Press by developing Qarshi. Qarshi gets the bonus from the level-3 CoT in Samarkand, and has cotton. It starts at 5 dev, which means you have to develop it a lot of times to spawn an institution, but that means that the discounts really stack up, and it only costs ~1400 MP to spawn.
- After a second war with Transoxiana, or with Timurids if they've eaten them, pick up all the other Uzbek-culture provinces. After developing Samarkand so much, it's not hard to culture switch to Uzbek. This lets us form Mughals later. Like a century from now. Planning is important.
- Somewhere around here is where (my dev + vassal Udege dev) >= 300, so I break tribute from Ming. The best version of this was when Ming and I both declared on Kham, and I sieged them down first. The AI won't peace out from that war for a long time, and so long as they're still in a war they won't demand I re-become their tributary. The EU4 AI doesn't seem to be able consider declaring on me while they're still in another war, so this trick let me rule out the possibility of an expensive war with not-yet-crippled Ming.
After this, the run gets a lot more freeform. I followed the Mongol mission tree around. I called up Best Buddy Ming every few years, and they were kind enough to send their paper tiger armies over, and then give me 3000 ducats and 110% OE worth of land, and in return I let them keep being the Emperor of China. This was definitely an act of friendship on my part and not a plan to trap them in a century-long Unguarded Nomadic Frontier disaster. Eventually, Ming gets weak enough that someone else takes the mandate from them, at which point they go into regular collapse, and I usually have to guarantee the new Emperor so I can take the mandate from them later. I took Confucian provinces from them (and Korea), and tried to maximize my Confucian province count while minimizing my Sunni province count. This involved repeatedly provoking Confucian zealots in North China, and also the incredibly-valuable Zoroastrian zealots in Yazd. Yazd was amazingly helpful, and once I realized how useful it was I made it a main strategic goal in all future runs: It's surrounded by Sunni land that I've got to take, so whatever random place those zealots wander to and convert, it's still useful to me.
I screwed around with Trade Companies a lot. The new TC system is weird, because TC regions and Subcontinents don't line up well, so I spent a lot of the game with the Mongol Mongolia Company, and with having a capital in Samarkand and TC regions a couple provinces away in Persia. I was never shy on merchants.
The Mongol mission tree has some permanent bonuses that are pretty good:
- +1 TTF
- +1 prestige
- -3 unrest
- -15% stability cost
- -15% province warscore cost
Completing Pax Mongolica takes a while, and I didn't actually switch religions / form Mughals until about 1600. Switching to Islam is easy, because we can do it by decision and gain a stability from doing it. The only catch is that you can't do it right after your ruler dies, because the decision requires legitimacy. All nations in EU4 *have* a Legitimacy score, even if they use a different mechanic like Horde Unity or Meritocracy, so if your ruler dies and the new one doesn't have a great claim, you have low legitimacy and you can't spend MP to boost it, and it sucks. Still, this conversion by decision is the easiest and cheapest religious conversion you'll ever get in EU4.
A wonderful thing about the lands covered by this mission tree is that they're almost-evenly distributed between religions. Orthodox, Sunni, Tengri, Confucian, and Shinto, with a fair sprinkling of Shia and Vajrayana, and of course Hindu. This is important, because conversion by decision or rebels always requires that something be your "dominant religion", which EU4 defines as present in the most provinces, ignoring development. Because things are spread so evenly, changing the dominant religion takes surprisingly little work for such a large empire. Sunni is always the plurality here, so converting to Islam is easy. Converting to Confucian after that is a little harder, but with planning it only takes a couple years before you can click "Accept Demands", but that re-enables you to take the Mandate.
You have to do it in that order because you can only become Mughals while Muslim, at peace, and not already the Emperor of China. So the order is Tengri Mongolia -> Sunni Mongolia -> Sunni Mughals -> Confucian Mughals -> Confucian Mughals Emperor of China. (Prior to 1.30, you could take the Unify Islam decision while at war, which meant you could declare for the Mandate of Heaven while Eastern/Pagan, convert to Islam by decision, then Unify Islam, then finish the war as the Muslim Emperor of China, with all the Caliphate bonuses. Or you could Unify just after that, which meant you were the Emperor of China, with Feudal Theocracy government, which was weird and made accumulating Mandate quite hard.) I considered trying to run over to Mexico and become Nahuatl, but that would have added a lot of time to my run, and I thought Confughals would be fun to try once. Confucian Harmonizing means you can't convert culture, but Mughal Diwan means you never have to, and picking up bonuses from culture groups *and* religion groups is fun!
From here, it all snowballs. Global Trade spawns in Persia, unless the colonizing powers are having a *really* good run. Mongolia, Administrative, Mughals/Hindustani, and Expand Palace Bureaucracy means that after 1610 or so, you're running at a base of
-70% CCR, which is so good that integrating vassals is usually more expensive than breaking vassalization and conquering them. By 1700, I'd cleared the fourth EoC reform and so had a base of
-80% CCR, combined with
70% admin efficiency due to the Deccan mission bonus. When converting to Confucian, the zealots weren't converting me fast enough, but it was so cheap/fast to release and later re-conquer Nogai that I did that rather than wait for rebels. Mughals + Emperor of China gives you +750 base governing capacity, which helps with a one-tag. Mongolia + Espionage + 100 Prestige means that you're generally at
-45% AE, which combined with the 75% CBs means coalition-dodging is pretty easy. It's -55% AE while you're Muslim, but that didn't last long. Mongolia + Humanist + Humanist-Offensive policy puts you at
-20 Years of Separatism. All the stacked-up modifiers means I spent most of my game at a base of
-15 National Unrest, which meant that I didn't see rebels in late game at all. In the final stages I was routinely taking 150%-200% OE, and I still never saw a single rebel spawn. The only downside of the unrest modifiers was that I had to
trucebreak my own vassal to trigger Court and Country. After that, the only time I even saw the yellow unrest flag in my top bar was when I was at 180% OE, and the +15 unrest event hit a province I'd just conquered which still had a tiny bit of separatism on it.
My last challenging war in the early 1600s was the first war with the Ottomans. The only way I pulled that one off was by outnumbering them *and* by fighting them during the window where I had miltech 15 and they didn't, which meant that I had 33% higher base morale than they did. The +10% morale from Mughal Japan was a nice boost too, and seems like the second-best cultural bonus from them, second only to the CCR bonus they get initially. Third is probably the 10% warscore discount from South Slavic, but I didn't get that until endgame.
During the brief period of being Mughals but not yet Emperor of China, I was in the Indian tech group, and so paid 50 reform progress to become a Plutocracy just long enough to start the idea group. Plutocracy gives me morale, unrest, goods produced, and manpower recovery, which is all pretty boss for one group. Plus it opens up the Plutocracy-Espionage policy which gives +33% manpower, which is nice both for actual warfare, and in the AI's "can a coalition take you down?" calculations.
The late part of the run is otherwise uninteresting. That many stacked bonuses meant that there were almost no challenges left, other than nibbling away at Europe without getting into expensive/lengthy wars with Austria. Somewhere around 1700, I launched some elaborate wars which let me vassalize Brandenburg, then feed them the provinces they needed to become Prussia. I've never played Prussia, but everyone always talks about them and I figured they'd be a nice march. They were wonderful, because their troops were so good that they were actually competent, and they did a great job running cleanup on all my European wars. This was really helpful a few years later, when I launched... what I think was five separate wars, all against non-HRE members, with at least one co-belligerent HRE member, which was what I had to do to occupy the eight capitals necessary to dismantle the HRE. That was complicated but seemed better than dealing with HRE bonuses and AE penalties and having to re-battle Austria every two years. Between Mongol bonuses, Mughal bonuses, and the Offensive group, I was routinely getting 6/6/x/x generals, which probably helped.
It's possible the late run would have been a little harder had I not gotten Talented and Ambitious Daughter *twice*, with an equally-good son in between. My last three rulers were all 16+-point monarchs, which was fabulously lucky even counting the admin bonus from the last Celestial Empire reform. Conquest completed on 20 September, 1787. While the game was running after that, while I surveyed my empire, I hit a GOLD RUSH!!! which gave me 60k gold which I didn't need, and which I didn't receive all of, because I hit the million-ducat cap.
Idea groups, in order:
Admininstrative
Espionage
Offensive (mostly for siege ability, but also for the Humanist policy)
Diplomatic
Plutocratic
Humanist
Quality
EU4: He who dies with the most stacked modifiers, wins.
